When the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the
company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one
another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also
among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also
among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; _that_ is
become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets,
so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his
eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his
heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what
sterling stuff there was in the stripling. _Why_ had Jesse’s youngest
son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the
wilderness? Eliab’s anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous
and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath
himself for the youth,—for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair
countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley
of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of
battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father’s sheep at
Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He
had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to
Eliab or his brethren was it given to foresee in that fresh-coloured
shepherd boy the present slayer of Goliath of Gath, and the bosom friend
of princely Jonathan, and the paulo-post-future king of Israel, Israel’s
sweetest singer, and the man after God’s own heart.
* * * * *
The adage about unrecognised worth, on the part of kinsfolk and
neighbours, the proverb of the prophet without honour in his own country
and in his father’s house—has its parallel passage in the _Hercules
Furens_ of Euripides—
... “οὑ γὰρ ἐσθ’ ὅπου
Εσθλόν τι δράσας μάρτυρ’ ἂν λάβοις πάτραν.”
Plutarch adopts it in his treatise on Exile, where he says that you
very rarely find a wise man taken for such in his own country: “τῶν
φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι
κεκηδευμένους.”
The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy
from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a
man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that
assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed,
by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the
result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country,
and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant
and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom
springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast
and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι
τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι
ὁ βίος.”
As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says
Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since
he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with
his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after
recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household.
Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three
years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and
of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the
prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu
Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed
aspires to be the prophet of his _tribe_.” But in effect the “false”
prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own
house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally
expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of
truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is
actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes,
portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all
its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the
hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the
subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of
us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts
in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand
familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often
it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we
can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of
the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle,
and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may
diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of
his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their
country because those who were born their equals could not endure to
see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!”
a heathen admirer is made to exclaim: “it seems as if it were decreed
by a public edict that no one shall receive from them any gift beyond a
certain value; and that if they do receive it they shall be permitted to
return the gods no thanks for it in their native city.” There are towns
so barbarous, remarks Boccaccio, in Landor’s “Pentameron,” that they must
be informed by strangers of their own great man when they happen to have
produced one; and would then detract from his merits, that they might
not exhibit their awkwardness in doing him honour, or their shame in
withholding it.
Charles IX., on a progress through Provence, sent for Nostradamus, and
finding in what slight respect he was held by his countrymen, made a
point of publicly declaring, with right royal emphasis, that he should
take as a slight to himself the slighting of that philosopher.
In the Journal to Stella, Swift hails with cordiality—for the Dean could
be cordial on occasion—the appreciation in polite English circles, by
ministers and scholars, of Parnell the poet: “Lord Bolingbroke likes
Parnell mightily; and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed
for anything in Ireland makes his way here with a little friendly
forwarding.” In no unlike spirit and style writes Horace Walpole to
Marshal Conway, then travelling abroad: “The honours you have received,
though I have so little taste for such things myself, gave me great
satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in
_not_ being a prophet in one’s own country, when one is almost received
like Mohammed in every other. To be an idol at home is no assured
touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions,
but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules
Farnese may lose their temples, but never lose their estimation, by
travelling.” In another letter we have Walpole exclaiming, “But adieu,
retrospect! it is as idle as prophecy, the characteristic of which is
never to be believed where alone it could be useful, _i.e._, in its
own country.” And once more, in a later epistle, commenting on the
darksome aspect of the times: “That the scene grows very serious there
is no doubt; nor do I assume vanity from having possessed the spirit of
prophecy—a most useless talent, as predictions never serve as warnings.
We know prophets are not honoured in their own country: where then should
they be honoured? where they are not known? where probably they never
are heard of?” But such notes of interrogation might be multiplied _ad
libitum_.
It is to a professedly common-place philosopher we owe the remark,
that while there are families in which there exists a preposterous
over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several members,
there are other families in which there exists a depressing and
unreasonable under-estimate of the same. He speaks to his knowledge
of such a thing as a family in which certain boys during their early
education had it ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest,
stupidest, and most ignorant boys in the world; which boys had no sooner
gone to a great public school than like rockets they went up forthwith
to the top of their classes, and never lost their places there, and
afterwards at the university distinguished themselves pre-eminently in
honours: “It will not surprise people who know much of human nature, to
be told that through this brilliant career of school and college work the
home belief in their idleness and ignorance continued unchanged, and that
hardly at its end was the toil-worn senior wrangler regarded as other
than an idle and useless blockhead.” The writer adds an example of his
knowledge of a successful author—to be identified of course by _some_
readers, whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of
it, that his writings were anything but “contemptible and discreditable
trash.”
The subject is renewed in the ensuing section, on the text of a prophet’s
non-acceptance in his own country.
_THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._
ST. LUKE iv. 24.
It was with the emphasis of a “Verily I say unto you,” that our Lord
prefaced the assurance that no prophet is accepted in his own country.
The speaker spoke from bitter experience. For neither did His brethren
believe in Him. It was when He was come into His own country, and taught
in their synagogues with a wisdom that astonished them, and wrought
mighty works of a kind that bewildered them, that His own countrymen set
about asking if this was not the carpenter’s son? was not His mother the
well-known Mary? were not James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, His
brethren? and His sisters, were they not all near at hand, and known
as such? Whence then had this—οὗτος (indefinitely contemptuous)—all
these attributes? And they were offended, scandalized, they found a
stumbling-block in the condition of Him and His. A double answer was
vouchsafed them: the significant restriction of wonder working, for He
did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief; and the more
direct reply, in so many words, that a prophet is not without honour,
save in his own country, and in his own house.
Montaigne adverts to this man, or that, having been a miracle to the
world, in whom neither his wife nor his servant has ever seen anything
remarkable: “Few men have been admired by their own domestics”—a sentence
to which point and popularity have been given by the epigrammatic
form of it, due to Marshal Catinat. “No one,” Montaigne continues,
“has been a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own
country, as the experience of history shows. It is the same in matters
of no consequence.... In my country of Gascony they look upon it as
very droll to see me in print. The farther off I am read from my own
home, the better I am esteemed; I am fain to purchase printers in
Guienne,—elsewhere they purchase me.” Ben Jonson takes note of the
greater reverence paid to things remote or strange to us, than to much
better, if these be nearer, and fall under our sense. “Men, and almost
all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the
farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and
greater. And where our original is known, we are the less confident;
among strangers we trust fortune.” Lord Evandale, in Scott’s “Old
Mortality,” discerns at once the “extraordinary qualities” of Henry
Morton, which had escaped the notice of his kinsfolk and friends: “You
have not been long in learning all his extraordinary qualities, my lord,”
says old Major Bellenden. “I, who have known him from boyhood, could,
before this affair, have said much of his good principles and good
nature; but as to his high talents”—further on _that_ head deponent saith
not. The opinions of relatives as to a man’s power, Dr. Wendell Holmes
declares to be very commonly of little value; not so much because they
sometimes over-rate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; as
because, on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those
whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. _Vile
habetur quod domi est_, Seneca tersely says.
Edmund Burke, in early life, was not happy at home—there being none
among the household on Arran Quay to sympathise with his dreams and
his aspirations. “He might think himself a genius,” says one of his
many biographers, “but it was not to be expected that his own relations
should yet think him one.” Describing his position and influence in Lord
Rockingham’s administration, Mr. Macknight observes that it is, after
all, a man’s own relations who generally look with the least confidence
on his long wrestle with adversity, and are most astonished when the tide
turns, and a great victory succeeds to what had seemed to them a mere
hopeless toil. “To some of the Irish Nagles on the Blackwater, the news
that Edmund had been taken into the confidence of the great Whig Lord
Rockingham, ... must have seemed as extraordinary as it did to Joseph’s
brethren that he should have become so great a man in hostile Egypt.”
_Son pays le crut fou_, says La Fontaine, of a Greek sage; _mais quoi!
aucun n’est prophète chez soi_. Of Joan of Arc, and her early mental
struggles, a French historian writes: “It behoves her to find in the
bosom of her family someone who would believe in her: this was the most
difficult part of all.” Non-recognition, disparagement, cold obstruction.
Societies and families, as Goethe says, behave in the same way to their
dearest members, towns to their worthiest citizens. Consuelo advising
Anzoleto to quit Venice, reminds him that “no person is a prophet in his
own country. This is a bad place for one who has been seen running about
in rags, and where any one may come to say of you, ‘I was his protector,
I saw his hidden talent, it was I who recommended him and procured his
advance.’” Descartes had to support with philosophic patience the scorn
of his family, impatient of a philosopher in it. Jean Bodin, neglected
and slighted in his own land, exulted in the welcome accorded to his
books in the English Universities, which printed as well as prized them:
“il n’est pas rare que nous ayons besoin d’apprendre des étrangers ce que
valent nos compatriotes,” observes M. Léon Feugère.
Every rule has its exceptions, and most proverbs too. The case of
St. Catharine, of Sienna, is cited by a Protestant biographer as “an
exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own
country.” The biographer of Edward Irving, recounting with enthusiasm the
details of his reception in Annandale in 1828, adds that “for once the
proverb seems to have failed. He had honour in his own country, where
gentle and simple flocked to hear him,”—neighbouring ministers shutting
up their kirks on the Sunday when he preached, and going the “long
Sabbath-day’s journey” across the Annandale moors to hear him, along with
their people. La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by
the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager
admirers, but at home, of no account at all; _petit dans son domestique
et aux yeux de ses proches_: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet
in his own house and country, who enjoys a _vogue_ that is confined to
his immediate surroundings, and who _s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et
singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole_. But
exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it; and the
rule as to a prophet’s home acceptance is held to be only confirmed, not
disproved, by here and there a stray example in history to the contrary;
such as Arnold, of Brescia, being rescued from captivity by some of
those partisan nobles of Campania by whom he was honoured as a prophet:
“Tanquam _prophetam in terrâ suâ_ cum omni honore habebant.” Or, as
the experience, highly exceptional, of young Bernard of Clairvaux, the
“strange and irresistible force” of whose character, as the historian
of Latin Christianity describes it, enthralled his brothers one after
another, and at length his sister. Off to the monastery of Clairvaux they
trooped, a complete monastic brotherhood. The youngest boy lingered a
short time with his aged father, and then joined the rest. “Even the
father died a monk of Clairvaux in the arms of Bernard.” But it was not,
we are duly reminded, on his own kindred alone that Bernard wrought with
this commanding power. “When he was to preach, wives hurried away their
husbands, mothers withdrew their sons, friends their friends, from the
resistless magic of his eloquence.” And those that went—what went they
out into the wilderness to hear? A prophet? Yea, and almost more than a
prophet, by the verdict of his own country and of his father’s house.
_DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE._
PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22 sq.
We read of those who tempted God in the desert, that He gave them their
request, and sent leanness withal into their soul. So they did eat meat
and were well filled, for He gave them their own desire; but while their
meat was yet in their mouths, His wrath came upon them and slew the
fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel.
A latter-day poetess, almost masculine in genius, as in out-spoken vigour
of diction, tells us that—
“God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,—
A gauntlet with a gift in’t,”
and sometimes poison in the gift. Well therefore may the authoress of
these lines, which in their original import are scarcely applicable to
our theme, make a distressed soul utter a petition that certainly is so:—
... “’tis written in the Book,
He heareth the young ravens when they cry;
And yet they cry for carrion. O my God,—
And we, who make excuses for the rest,
We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,
And dropped my head upon the pavement too,
And prayed, since I was foolish in desire
Like other creatures, craving offal-food,
That He would stop His ears to what I said,
And listen only to the run and beat
Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood....”
_Ne mihi contingant quæ volo, sed quæ sunt utilia_: the aspiration has
been accepted as an adage, worthy of all acceptation, and of acceptation
by all.
“Mais, sans cesse ignorants de nos propres besoins,
Nous demandons au ciel ce qu’il nous faut le moins.”
To Shakspeare for an illustration. Pompey, not the Great, is anxious for
Divine sanction to speed his ambitious resolves to a prosperous issue.
If the great gods be just, he assumes, they will assist the deeds of
justest men,—and therefore himself, as pre-eminently entitled to that
designation. He is impatient, too, for this manifest favour from above;
and sage Menecrates takes occasion not only to check his impatience in
particular, but to give him a salutary warning on the subject in general:
... “We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.”
Xenophon tells us of Socrates, that when he prayed, his petition was only
this—that the gods would give to him those things that were good; which
he did, forasmuch as they alone knew what was good for man. “But he who
should ask for gold or silver, or increase of dominion, acted not, in
his opinion, more wisely than one who should pray for the opportunity to
fight, or game, or anything of the like nature; the consequence of which,
being altogether doubtful, might turn, for aught he knew, not a little to
his disadvantage.” For,
... “why, alas! do mortal men in vain
Of fortune, fate, or Providence complain?
God gives us what He knows our wants require,
And better things than those that we desire:
Some pray for riches; riches they obtain;
But, watched by robbers, for their wealth are slain;
Some pray from prison to be freed; and come,
When guilty of their vows, to fall at home;
Murdered by those they trusted with their life,
A favoured servant, or a bosom wife.
Such dear-bought blessings happen every day,
Because we know not for what things we pray.”
There is a Greek prayer by an unknown poet, but highly commended by the
most illustrious of Socrates’ disciples: that sovran Jove would grant his
subjects good, whether they pray for it or not; and avert from them evil,
even though they pray for it.
Ζεῦ βασιλεῦ, τὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ καὶ εὐχομένοις καὶ ἀνεύκτοις
Ἄμμι δίδου· τὰ δὲ δεινὰ καὶ εὐχομένὀις, ἀπαλέξοις.
And it is to Plato’s dialogue upon prayer that we owe the instructions
imparted by Socrates to Alcibiades, upon which Addison has founded a
paper in the _Spectator_. In that dialogue we read how Socrates met
Alcibiades going to his devotions, and observing his eyes to be fixed
upon the ground with great seriousness and attention—for even that
fastest of fast young men could, it seems, be slow enough to say his
prayers—told him that he had reason to be thoughtful upon that occasion,
since it was possible for a man to bring down evil upon himself by his
own supplications, and that those things which the gods sent him in
answer to his petitions might turn to his destruction. This, says he,
may not only happen when a man prays for what is mischievous in its
own nature, as Œdipus implored the gods to sow dissension between his
sons; but when he prays for what he believes would be for his good, and
against what he believes would be to his detriment. This the philosopher
shows must necessarily happen among us, since most men are blinded with
ignorance, prejudice, or passion, which hinder them from seeing what
things are really eligible for them. And all this, as his manner is, the
philosopher teaches by examples.
It seems allowed that Juvenal took the cue of his tenth Satire, as well
as Persius of his second, from the Dialogue of Plato aforesaid.
“Evertêre domos totas, optantibus ipsis,
Dii faciles. Nocitura togâ, nocitura petuntur
Militiâ.”
Or, as Englished by Mr. Owen of Warrington:
“Th’ indulgent gods whole houses have o’erthrown
At men’s own prayer;—the fatal choice their own.
In war we ask but woes; in peace but woes,” etc.
The Crassi, Pompeii, and the like, are represented as ruined by the
assent of Heaven to their ambitious prayers—
“Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita _malignis_.”
Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome
grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But
public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring
vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose
his honours and his head.
... “Sed multæ urbes, et publica vota
Vicerunt. Igitur fortuna ipsius, et urbis,
Servatum victo caput abstulit.”
Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and
mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this:
that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may
be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer
to them than to himself:
“Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid
Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris:
Nam pro jocundis aptissima quæque dabunt Dii.
Carior est illis homo quàm sibi.”
Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that
we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan,
how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?”
And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods
that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread
became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing
and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with
the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that
he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel
tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in
granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves
determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as
to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall
out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what
is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we
either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for
the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves,
he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not
often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?...
Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself....
Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part
the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy:
“Craignez, seigneur, craignez que le ciel rigoureux
Ne vous haïsse assez pour exaucer vos vœux.”
And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to
exclaim:
“Ne précipite point tes funestes bienfaits,
Neptune! j’aime mieux n’être exaucé jamais.”
And afterwards again he utters the tristful line:
“Inexorables dieux! qui m’avez trop servi.”
So in a subsequent passage:
“Je hais jusqu’aux soins dont m’honorent les dieux:
Et je m’en vais pleurer leurs faveurs meurtrières,
Sans plus les fatiguer d’inutiles prières.
Quoi qu’ils fissent pour moi, leur funeste bonté
Ne me saurait payer de ce qu’ils m’ont ôté.”
Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the
superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est
ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant
pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et
toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a
past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and
regret.
In one of his many onslaughts against conventionalism, Mr. Emerson says
that what we ask daily is to be conventional. “Supply, most kind gods!
this defect in my dress, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a
little out of the ring; supply it, and let me be like the rest whom
I admire, and on good terms with them.” But the wise gods, according
to this essayist, reply, “No, we have better things for thee. By
humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity,
learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman,”—a
Fifth-Avenue landlord, or a West-End householder, not being Mr. Emerson’s
ideal of the highest style of man. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, he
adds, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and
know the realities of human life.—With Mr. Carlyle, we will not complain,
therefore, of Dante’s miseries; who, had all gone right with him, as he
wished it, might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they call it,
of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,—in which case, the world
had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung. “Florence
would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Comedia_ to hear! We will
complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and
he, struggling like a man towards death and crucifixion, could not help
fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more
than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.”
Visions, and hopes, and prospects, writes Horace Walpole, are pretty
playthings for boys. “It is folly to vex one’s self for what cannot last
very long. Indeed, what can, even when one is young? Corydon firmly
believes he shall be wretched for ever if he does not marry Phyllis.
That misery can but last till she has lost her bloom. His eternal woe
would vanish if her nose grew red. How often do our griefs become our
comforts! I know what I wish to-day; not at all what I shall wish
to-morrow. Sixty says, You did not wish for _me_, yet you would like
to keep me. Sixty is in the right; and I have not a word more to say.”
The Strawberry Hill esquire was himself turning the shady side of sixty
when he thus wrote. Of quite another school was that gentle and good Q.
Q., as she styled herself, once popular, now almost forgotten, who thus
moralized her song:
“How false is found, as on in life we go,
Our early estimate of bliss or woe!
—Some sparkling joy attracts us, that we fain
Would sell a precious birthright to obtain:
There all our hopes of happiness are placed,
Life looks without it like a joyless waste;
No good is prized, no comfort sought beside,
Prayers, tears implore, and will not be denied:
Heaven pitying hears th’ intemperate, rude appeal,
And suits its answer to our truest weal.
The self-sought idol, if at last bestow’d,
Proves, what our wilfulness required—a goad.
Ne’er, but as needful chastisement, is given
The wish thus forced and torn and storm’d from Heaven;
But if withheld, in pity, from our prayer,
We rave, awhile, of torment and despair....
Meantime, Heaven bears the grievous wrong, and waits
In patient pity till the storm abates ...
Deigning, perhaps, to show the mourner soon,
’Twas special mercy that denied the boon.”
Chateaubriand’s most sentimental of melancholy-mad heroes, overwhelmed,
as he flatters himself, with imaginary sufferings, offers up a prayer
for some real calamity to overtake him; and, to his cost, is taken at
his word. “Dans mon délire, j’avais été jusqu’à désirer d’éprouver un
malheur, pour avoir du moins un objet réel de souffrance: épouvantable
souhait, que Dieu dans sa colère, a trop exaucé!” It is but the Christian
(yet not too Christian) expression of the old pagan poet’s gloomy verse:
_magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis_.
There is a sonnet of Filicaja’s, of which a good deal is made by
Richardson in his History of Sir Charles Grandison,—the concluding
lines being an impressive vindication of the ways of Providence to man:
_Provvidenza alta infinita_, if it sometimes denies the favours we
implore, denies in kindness; and seeming to deny a blessing, grants one
in that very refusal: _o negar finge, e nel negar concede_.
William Collins the painter—a loving and lovable man as well as refined
artist—in one of his letters home expresses his “decided opinion, that if
the Almighty were to give us everything for which we feel desirous, we
should as often find it necessary to pray to Him to take away as to grant
new favours.” And he refers to thousands of cases that he could bring
forward in proof of his assertion.
It amounts to a sort of refrain in the melodious rhythm of that
fragmentary prose-poem of De Quincey’s, “The Daughter of Lebanon,”—the
admonition of the prophet to the lovely woman in the Damascus
market-place: “Ask what thou wilt—great or small—and through me thou
shalt receive it from God. But, my child, ask not amiss. For God is
able out of thy own evil asking to weave snares for thy footing. And
oftentimes to the lambs whom He loves, He gives by seeming to refuse;
gives in some better sense, or” (and here the prophet’s voice swelled
into the power of anthems) “in some far happier world.” And when the
sun is declining to the west on the thirtieth day, the prophet iterates
the strain of old: “Lady of Lebanon, the day is already come, and the
hour is coming, in which my covenant must be fulfilled with thee. Wilt
thou, therefore, being now wiser in thy thoughts, suffer God, thy new
Father, to give by seeming to refuse; to give in some better sense, or
in some far happier world?” But the daughter of Lebanon sorrowed at
these words; she yearned after her native hills, and the sweet twin-born
sister with whom from infant days hand-in-hand she had wandered amongst
the everlasting cedars. The delirium of fever, and approaching death,
are next described; and again the evangelist sits down by her bedside,
and rebukes the clouds that trouble her vision, and bids them stand
no more between that dying Magdalen and the forests of Lebanon. Anon,
we read how the blue sky parted to the right and to the left, laying
bare the infinite revelations that can be made visible only to dying
eyes; and how, as the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty visions,
she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as if in gratulation to
herself, the one countenance for which she hungered and thirsted. “The
twin-sister, that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died of
grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Immediately in rapture she
soared upwards from her couch; immediately in weakness she fell back;
and being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms around his neck;
whilst he breathed into her ear his final whisper, ‘Wilt thou now suffer
that God should give by seeming to refuse?’—‘Oh yes—yes—yes,’ was the
fervent answer from the daughter of Lebanon.” Hitherto she had known not
what to ask for as she ought. Hitherto her asking had been amiss: she had
asked for she knew not what. But now her vision was purged. Now she had
the second-sight that could pierce through and beyond the night-side of
nature, and gaze on the land that is very far off. Hitherto she had, at
the best, seen through a glass darkly; but now, it might be said, face to
face. So that she knew what to ask for, now.
Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand’s Wertherian romance,
is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by
relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the
Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel
weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains,
water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions
granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks.
At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that
it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to
solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the
humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,—the birds, the flowers, the
trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil
course.
The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has
pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a white-haired shadow
roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East; and from this
grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes:—
“I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes....
... Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pass, as is most meet for all?
...
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The gods themselves cannot recal their gifts.’”
“_AND HE DIED._”
GENESIS v. _passim_.
Well known is Addison’s reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church,
who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam
lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the
days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all
the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he
died;—immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from
the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which
had not regard to another.
What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?
“Dead!—Man’s ‘I was,’ by God’s ‘I am’—
All hero-worship comes to that.
High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat
As a gravestone. Bring your _Jacet jam_—
The epitaph’s an epigram.”
So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same
trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a
successful one:—
“And then—he died. Behold before ye
Humanity’s poor sum and story;
Life—death—and all that is of glory.”
And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the
stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and
vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered
with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning,
“But—he died! and he was buried
In his tomb of sculptured stone,” etc.
And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched
the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one
who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic
reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never
actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would
have been—
_B._ “A king?
_A._ A _man_! what else,
King, emperor, tyrant, shah, would matter not.
He would have been—a name; such as of old
Grew into gods!
_B._ And so he died?
_A._ He died.”
Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in
his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or
ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has
been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without
any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or
to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most
musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;
Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan.”
Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an
afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering
in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, “amusing himself,” as
the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense—with the tombstones
and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the
dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that
he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of
his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common
to all mankind. The “Spectator” could not but look upon these registers
of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the
departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they
were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened
his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that
nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed
roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s
life. “One is so certain of the man’s having been born, and also of his
having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it.”
The man—a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what
James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the
stanzas that are most to the purpose:—
“Once in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe’er thy lot be cast,
That man resembled thee.
...
“He suffered,—but his pangs are o’er;
Enjoy’d,—but his delights are fled;
Had friends,—his friends are now no more;
And foes,—his foes are dead.
...
“He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encounter’d all that troubles thee:
He was—whatever thou hast been;
He is—what thou shalt be.
...
“The annals of the human race,
Their ruins, since the world began,
Of him, afford no other trace
Than this,—THERE LIVED A MAN!”
There lived a man—lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured—enjoyed the
common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old
Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer:—
“Yit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde,
In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde.”
A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister
chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as
conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance,
in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced
the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast
invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact,
the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really
deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, “Martin
est mort,”—Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and,
farther on again, “Charles, maire du palais, est mort.” Martin was an
unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and
the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that
“tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces
premiers chroniqueurs.” “We must all go, that is certain,” writes Mrs.
Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, “and ’tis the only thing that _is_ certain.
Καὶ ἀπεθανε ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend
Hippocrates.” All the physician’s cases have the same terminal affix, AND
HE DIED. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts
it in his fine poem of “Saul,”
“But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last.”
We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is
commemorated in Milman’s “Latin Christianity,” that the ardour of youth
had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all
at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death.
That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot,
struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour
he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as
verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but
working in and walking by faith, not sight.
Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many
physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their
patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by
foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out
the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed
the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been
themselves immortal.
Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of
preservation—by Gibbon, for example—of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince
of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this,—“that one
thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as
elsewhere.” Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception
of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced
the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked
himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified
the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all.”[16]
Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly
suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have
believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature
was the imagination of his own decease. And Commines relates how
physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from
the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, “pour lui allonger la vie.
Toutefois le tout n’y fasoit rien; et falloit qu’il passât par là où les
autres ont passés.” And he died. All stories have the same ending.
“The Frenchman first in literary fame;
Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same,
With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied,
Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily—and died.”
That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom “one fine
line,” Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” tells
his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his
funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton’s critic,
bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s
utterance:—
“O! mortal folke, you may beholde and see
Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight.
The end of joye and prosperitie
Is death at last thorough his course and might.
After the day there cometh the dark night,
For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to evensong—”
“Ringeth,” says Mrs. Browning, “in our ear with a soft and solemn music,
to which the soul is prodigal of echoes.”
What—asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations,
discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone,
of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off
in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and
Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many;
but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as
Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,—and these are of them in
the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree
at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out
generation after generation of civic worthies: “So with the tomb of the
old Master of the Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and
died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered
long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked
out.” To quote Chaucer again:
“That is to seyn, in youthe or elles in age,
He moot ben deed, the kyng as schal a page.”
Cranmer’s transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that
awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the
end—the strain subsiding into a minor key—by the unwelcome but inevitable
reflection, “But she must die.” So muses and moralises Talbot again, in
another of the historical plays:
“But kings and mightiest potentates must die;
For that’s the end of human misery.”
And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is
nothing left him but his body’s length, exclaims, as one that at last
feels it feelingly,
“Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”
And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury
witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who
is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction
borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork,
“Even so must I run on, and even so stop.”
In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and
most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators
to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian’s
trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when _he_ thus addresses the
frivolous fair of his day: “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all
the children of the Most High.... But, O gods of flesh and blood, O
gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall
fall to the ground, _veruntamen sicut homines moriemini_.” This is in
Tertullian’s description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty.
Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs.
Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached,
_Et in Arcadiâ ego_. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have
asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: “_He_ saw it
yesterday, and said at once, ‘Oh, there is a tombstone in the background.
Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’” The thought is said to have been
borrowed from Poussin—where some gay revellers stumble over a death’s
head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ
_ego_.
Memorable at Saladin’s banquet to Richard and his peers—ever memorable
among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms
overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, “the banner of Death,
with this impressive inscription—‘Saladin, King of Kings—Saladin, Victor
of Victors—Saladin must Die.’”
Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the
British monarch, to whom he is addressing his _carmen seculare_ for the
year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh:
“But a relentless destiny
Urges all that e’er was born:
Snatch’d from her arms, Britannia once must mourn
The demi-god; the earthly half must die.”