“Shall little haughty ignorance pronounce
His works unwise, of which the smallest part
Exceeds the narrow vision of her mind?
As if upon a full proportioned dome,
On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art,
A critic-fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads
An inch around, with blind presumption bold,
Should dare to tax the structure of the whole.”
Horace Walpole makes use of a similar figure in one of his three or four
thousand published letters: “We are poor silly animals: we live for an
instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a
butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons, and what
creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one annual
revolution of them.”
“Earth’s number-scale is near us set;
The total God alone can see;
But each some fraction.”[25]
Addison, in one of his essays, comments on the body of an animal as an
object comparatively adequate to our senses, it being a particular part
of Providence that lies within a narrow compass, so that the eye is able
to command it, and by successive inquiries to search into all its parts.
Could the body of the whole earth, he goes on to say, or indeed the whole
universe, be thus subjected to the examination of our senses, were it
not too big and disproportioned for our inquiries, too unwieldy for the
management of the eye and hand, “there is no question but it would appear
to us as curious and well-contrived a frame as that of a human body. We
should see the same concatenation and subserviency, the same necessity
and usefulness, the same beauty and harmony, in all and every of its
parts, as what we discover in the body of every single animal.” To adopt
an illustration of Fénélon’s to the same purpose: imagine the letters
of a sentence to be so enormous in size, that a man could only make out
one of them at a time; in that case he could not read, that is, collect
the letters together and discover the sense of them in combination. So
it is, argues the benign prelate, with the _grands traits_ of Providence
in the conduct of the world at large during the lapse of centuries. It
is only the whole that is intelligible, and the whole is too vast to
be scrutinised near at hand. Each event in the process of ages is like
a separate letter or sign, which is too large for our petty organs,
and which is without a meaning when taken apart from the rest. A more
vigorous philosopher than the gentle Fénélon compares the universe to
a picture, the beauty of which is then alone perceptible when the true
stand-point of perspective is taken. There are certain inventions in
perspective, or certain beautiful designs, he says, which look all
confusion until you either inspect them from the right point of view, or
make use of some kind of glass or mirror as the medium of observation. In
the same manner the apparent deformities of our fractional side-views,
resolve themselves into harmonious unity when the eye is directed aright.
Dr. Johnson was in an unwontedly placid and benignant frame of mind, by
Boswell’s account, when the two stood together, one serene autumn night,
in Dr. Taylor’s garden, and the sage delivered himself, in meditative
mood, of this noteworthy surmise: “Sir,” said he, “I do not imagine that
all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the
ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually.” Be that as it
may, few could have been found more ready than the melancholic Johnson to
agree that meanwhile, until the day star arise and the shadows flee away,
“The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate,
Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors:
Our understanding traces them in vain,
Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;
Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
Nor where the regular confusion ends.”
It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness
that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph
de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble: “Be it enough for us to know,
that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become
acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and
the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned.” He would
have his correspondent bear in mind that the epithet “very good” is a
necessary adjunct to “very great;” and that is sufficient. The inference
is self-evident, that under the sway of the Being who combines in himself
those two qualities—the _très-bon_ and the _très-grand_—all the evils
we either suffer or witness must needs be acts of justice or means of
reformation equally indispensable. In the declared love of God to man, M.
de Maistre found a general solution of all the enigmas that can offend
(_scandaliser_, in the New Testament sense of putting a stumbling-block
in the way of) our ignorance. “Fixed to one little point of time and
space, we are insane enough to refer all to this point; and in so doing
we are at once blameworthy and absurd.” If De Maistre’s collation of the
_très-bon_ with the _très-grand_ resembles the lines of Drummond’s hymn
beginning,
“O King, whose greatness none can comprehend,
Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend,”
so is the scope of his argument at one with what follows:
“Here, where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of Thy might,
Still owly-eyed when staring on Thy light.”
What we call this life of men on earth, as Mr. Browning’s island-poet has
it, is, as he finds much reason to conceive,
“Intended to be viewed eventually
As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all.”[26]
Pope’s well-worked line is of perpetual application,
“’Tis but a part we see, and not the whole.”
So is the avowal of the present laureate:
“I see in part
That all, as in some work of art,
Is toil co-operant to an end.”
To us, as Sir Benjamin Brodie remarks, in one of his psychological
discussions, the universe presents itself as an assemblage of
heterogeneous phenomena, some of which we can reduce to laws of limited
operation, while others stand by themselves, bearing no evident relation
to anything besides. We may well, he thinks, suppose that there are
in the universe beings of a superior intelligence, and possessed of a
greater range of observation, who are sufficiently “behind the scenes” to
be able to contemplate all the immense variety of material phenomena as
the result of one great general law. Their standpoint may enable them
to see a Cosmos, a world of order, where to lower intelligences Chaos
alone is discernible, a world comparatively without form and void, with
darkness upon the face of its deep. And as with the physical, so with the
metaphysical. As with the material, so with the moral.
“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand
Of God’s will in the worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad perplexèd minors....
“We murmur—‘Where is any certain tune
Of measured music, in such notes as these?’—
But angels leaning from their golden seat,
Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed[27] cadences,—
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper—Sweet.”[28]
_RULING THE WAVES._
PSALM cxiv. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.
When Israel went out of Egypt, it was under the guidance of One whose
hand being mighty to save, the sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven
back. “What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that
thou wast driven back?” The trembling was at the presence of Him who hath
placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it
cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can
they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. The
commotion, the fleeing, the driving back, was at the bidding of Him
who, and who alone, can say to the sea, Thus far shalt thou come, and no
farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.
The men of Galilee marvelled when, at the storm that once arose on their
sea, and the ship was in jeopardy, there arose One who rebuked the winds
and the sea; and there was a great calm. What manner of man was this,
that even the winds and the sea obeyed Him?
What manner of man? Be it legend or history, the story of royal Cnut
on the seashore, forbidding, at his flatterers’ instigation, or by his
own desire to rebuke their folly—forbidding the farther approach of the
incoming tide, is pregnant with instruction on this head. The royal Dane
might be a man of men, but the surging waves were not obedient unto his
voice. King though he was, the tide was responseless as deaf adder to
any charming of his, charmed he never so wisely, enjoined he never so
straitly. What manner of man, then, but the Son of man? What manner of
king but the King of kings?
The Dane might have enforced the lesson on his parasites by such a strain
as that of a defeated monarch in Shakspeare:—
“Farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends:—subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?”
A king, that is, in _their_ sense of right Divine, and Divine extent.
So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm
on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership,
only of yesterday too. “When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to
make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there
I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their
words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.”
Mark, again, from the opening scene of the “Tempest,” the rough, blunt,
uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his
royal passengers:—
“Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of
king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not.
“_Gonzalo._ Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
“_Boatswain._ None that I love more than myself. You are a
counsellor; if you can command these elements to a silence,
and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand
a rope more: use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks
you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin
for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good
hearts.—Out of our way, I say!”
Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in
the book of Maccabees: “And thus he that a little afore thought he _might
command the waves of the sea_ (so proud was he beyond the condition of
man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the
ground.”
An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that
blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort:
“Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum.”
Much good it did him: witness his return from his great expedition,
in a poor skiff, wind-tossed across waves red with the blood of his
slaughtered host, _cruentis fluctibus_. The stars in their courses
once fought against Sisera, and the fettered waves were little more
propitious to speed the fortunes of Xerxes. He might have spared his
chains. At any rate he lost his army. Archdeacon Hare practically applied
the extravagance of the Great King, as they of Persia were styled, in
designating the present (or, rather, what was to him the present) as an
age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet themselves try to
fling their chains over the ever-rolling, irrepressible ocean of thought;
nay, they will scoop out a mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, he goes
on to say, and make it ripple and bubble, and spout up prettily into the
air, and then fancy that they are taming the Atlantic; which, however,
keeps advancing upon them, until it sweeps them away with their toys.
It is edifying to read in the Diary of Mr. Pepys how, one July afternoon,
soon after the king had come back to enjoy his own again, that gentleman
went upon the river, but had to put ashore and shelter himself from the
rain that rained so hard; during which time came by the king in his
barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the queen: “But methought it
lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the
rain.”
Instructive, too, is the tenor of the legend of King Robert of Sicily,
which has been so attractively treated in prose by Leigh Hunt, in his
Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and in verse by Professor Longfellow, in
his Tales of a Wayside Inn. There we read how the king with his nobles
proudly sat at vespers, on St. John’s Eve, and heard the priests chant
the Magnificat:—
“And, as he listened, o’er and o’er again
Repeated, like a burden or refrain,
He caught the words, ‘_Deposuit potentes_
_De sede, et exaltavit humiles_;’
And slowly lifting up his kingly head,
He to a learned clerk beside him said,
‘What mean these words?’ The clerk made answer meet,
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted them of low degree.’
Thereat King Robert muttered scornfully,
’Tis well that such seditious words are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue;
For unto priests and people be it known
There is no power can push me from my throne!’”
The sequel teaches him a different lesson, which he learns by (and lays
to) heart.
In those days, however, if any order of men might, or did, claim
authority over such turbulent subject-matter as the sea, it was not
kings, but priests. Ecclesiastical history relates the calamitous
visitation of earthquake and inundations by which Epidaurus must once,
and for ever, have been overwhelmed, had not the prudent citizens placed
St. Hilarion, an Egyptian monk, on the beach. “He made the sign of the
cross; the mountain-wave stopped, bowed, and returned.” One’s respect
for the great qualities of the fearless Akbah, traversing the wilds of
Africa, and at length penetrating to the verge of the Atlantic, is not
lessened by what Gibbon relates of him:—that his career, though not his
zeal, being checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean, Akbah spurred
his horse into the waves, and raising his eyes to heaven, exclaimed
with the tone of a fanatic, “Great God, if my course were not stopped
by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West,
preaching the unity of Thy holy name.” And the picture reminds us of
another, some eight centuries later, when Constantinople was besieged and
taken by Mahomet II., who, while his ships were engaged against those of
the Genoese, sat on horseback on the beach, to encourage by voice and
presence the valour of the faithful: “The passions of his soul, and even
the gestures of his body, seemed to imitate the action of the combatants;
and, as if he had been the lord of nature, he spurred his horse with
a fearless and impotent effort into the sea.” Sir Archibald Alison
moralises on the spectacle of Napoleon, in 1804, reviewing, or intending
to review, the naval force by which he designed to crush the British
power: the flotilla being tempest-tost when it hove in sight, and several
vessels stranded—an event “destined to teach the French Emperor, like
Canute the Dane, that there were bounds to his power, and that his might
was limited to the element on which his army stood.” The sea—_c’est autre
chose_.
It is of Tiberius, absolute master of the vastest, richest empire ever
seen under the sun, that an eminent French preacher is treating when
he says that an adulatory senator kept repeating to him in every tone
and accent that his authority was without bounds. Tiberius would fain
have believed the assurance, if the illusion had been possible,—if
he had not felt himself at every instant _heurté contre une barrière
infranchissable_. The emperor’s flatterers had forgotten, for one thing,
to secure a peremptory decree against the inconvenient limitation called
time. His days were numbered. And in vain Tiberius essayed to trick and
elude death, and dissembled with himself as to the stubborn fact of its
resistless advance.
Kings, great nobles, and the like, as a popular essayist observes, have
been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if
things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming
even at wind and rain, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, for
insubordination and disrespect of persons. A popular novelist, again,
having to describe a fashionable wedding in the country on a portentously
wet and stormy day, makes the Lisford beadle, “who was a sound Tory of
the old school,” almost wonder that the heavens themselves should be
audacious enough to wet the uncovered head of the lord of Jocelyn’s Rock.
“But it went on raining nevertheless.” It was in no such spirit that John
Bunyan once was all but resolved on putting to the test the reality of
his faith, by commanding some water puddles to be dry.
Mr. Carlyle made a picturesque application of the royal Dane’s injunction
to the waves, in his survey of the advancing tide of the French
Revolution—grim host marching on, the black-browed Marseillese in the
van, with hum and murmur, far-heard; like the ocean-tide, “drawn up,
as if by Luna and Influences, from the great deep of waters, they roll
gleaming on; no king, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back.” To quite
another effect is Judge Haliburton’s application of the incident, in his
panegyric on the capabilities of the Southampton docks. It was here, he
says, that Cnut sat in his arm-chair, to show his courtiers (after he
gave up drinking and murder) that though he was a mighty prince, he could
not control the sea. “Well, what Canute could not do, your dock company
has accomplished. It has actually said to the sea, ‘Thus far shalt thou
go, and no farther:’ and the waves have obeyed the mandate.”
By poetical licence a Cornish poet of the present day ascribes to his
rock-bound coast a _ne plus ultra_ control over an ever-aggressive sea:
he pictures the embattled advance of the waves, and their discomfiture
and retreat:
“They come—they mount—they charge in vain.
Thus far, incalculable main;
No more! Thine hosts have not o’erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone.
Have the rocks faith that thus they stand,
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?”
One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods
are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their
waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and
to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage
horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. “O Lord God of
hosts, who is like unto Thee?... Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou
stillest the waves thereof when they arise.”
With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever
the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that
... “they can silence when they will
The storm of passion, and say, ‘Peace, be still:’
But ‘Thus far and no farther,’ when addressed
To the wild wave, or wilder human breast,
Implies authority that never can,
That never ought to be the lot of man.”
_IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES._