Soundly the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David
and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches—his spear stuck
in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about
him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that
once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special
Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David
give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop
send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. “Now,
therefore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the
earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time.” But David was
inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch
forth a hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul slept on, and the
shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached
him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers
of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a
generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul’s
bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived—for no man
saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because
a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the
host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal
neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched;
and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the
peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.
Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we
should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account
it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day.
Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to
Unwin,—that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every
day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason
to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance
from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. “When in some of
the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash
of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along
close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run
foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were
undoubtedly designed,” as Cowper is devoutly convinced, “to convey to
him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended
him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had
notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the
least suspicion.” It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that
a danger which approaches, but wheels away—which threatens, but finally
forbears to strike—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect
than the danger which accomplishes its mission. “The Alpine precipice,
down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention;
but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed
unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin
on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for
all who hear the story.” In another of his books, and the most celebrated
of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the
thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the
suggestive opening of that beautiful collect, “Lighten our darkness,
we beseech thee, O Lord!” in which the great shadows of night are made
symbolically significant—those great powers, night and darkness, that
belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that,
unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. “With deepest
sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness,—perils
that I seemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding
around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of
darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from
temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing.” As Marcello has it,
in Beddoes’ tragedy,
“Each minute of man’s safety he does walk
A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath,
O’er a precipitous and craggy danger
Yawning to death!”
With admirable subtlety and suggestiveness, Mr. Hawthorne illustrates
this subject in that _fantasiestück_ of his, called “David Swan.” A young
man of that name falls asleep on the roadside, of a summer’s day, and
_we_ see, what he sees not, nor dreams of happening to him, a series of
incidents that go near to alter the current of his being, and very near,
in one instance, to stop altogether its earthly course. When he awakes
from that sound sleep, and hies him cheerily homeward, he knows not,
nor ever will know, in this world at least, that while he slumbered, all
in one brief hour, wealth was all but made over to him by one heirless
passer-by, and death all but dealt him by two reckless ruffians. They
were interrupted, and left him, and he never was to know of the narrow
escape. The moral of the fantasy is, that sleeping or waking, we hear
not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. And the
moralist’s query ensues, Does it not argue a superintending Providence,
that while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually
athwart our path, there should still be regularity enough in mortal life
to render foresight even partially available?
The moral of “David Swan” is implicitly conveyed in that passage in
“Waverley” which relates Colonel Gardiner’s unconscious escape from the
raised and pointed weapon of the Highlander, Callum Beg. An incident
that appeals to his superstition makes the intending slayer drop his
piece; and “Colonel Gardiner,” we read, “unconscious of the danger he had
escaped, turned his horse round, and rode slowly back to the front of his
regiment.”
So with Mrs. Hilyard, in “Salem Chapel,” on the evening of the secret
interview upon the chapel steps. A hidden witness there is of that
interview, who, however, sees not the gesture of her companion which
bodes, and almost involves, a fatal, a murderous issue. “But even Mrs.
Hilyard herself never knew how near, how very near, she was at that
moment to the unseen world.”
Or glance, again, at the Azteca, in Southey’s “Madoc,” gliding like a
snake to where Caradoc lay sleeping—all unconscious of peril, as happy,
and happily unconscious, David Swan:—
“Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams
Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved.
The Azteca stood over him; he knew
His victim, and the power of vengeance gave
Malignant joy. Once hast thou ’scaped my arm;
But what shall save thee now? the Tiger thought,
Exulting, and he raised his spear to strike.
That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp
The gale of morning passed, and swept its strings
Into so sweet a harmony, that sure
It seemed no earthly tune. The savage man
Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round;
No human hand is near:—and hark! again
The aërial music swells and dies away.
Then first the heart of Tialala felt fear:
He thought that some protecting spirit watched
Beside the stranger, and, abashed, withdrew.”
To Cremona went together, in seeming amity, the Emperor Sigismund and
Pope John XXIII., and there an incident had nearly taken place, which,
as the historian of Latin Christianity says, might, by preventing the
Council of Constance, have changed the fortunes of the world. Gabrino
Fondoli, who from podestâ had become tyrant of Cremona, “entertained his
distinguished guests with sumptuous hospitality. He led them up the lofty
tower to survey the rich and spacious plains of Lombardy. On his deathbed
Fondoli confessed the sin, of which he deeply repented, that he resisted
the temptation, and had not hurled pope and emperor down, and so secured
himself an immortal name.” Pope and emperor on the tower-top were as
little inclined to suspect how closely the shadow of death was then and
there overshadowing them, as they would have been able to comprehend the
ultimate repentance of the intending murderer, not for having intended
murder, but for having not carried his intention out.
It is one of Young’s night thoughts that “the farthest from the fear,
are often nearest to the stroke of fate.” Often the stroke menaces them
unawares, but after all is not dealt; and to the last they are unaware
that on such a day, and at such a minute, there was but a step between
them and death.
_Quid quisque vitet_, says Horace, _nunquam homini satis cautum est, in
horas_. The ignorance of what is impending is bliss, in a certain sense.
Just as
“The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold,
Unmoved may the blade of the butcher behold;
They dream not—ah, happier they!—that the knife,
Though uplifted, can menace their innocent life.
It falls;—the frail thread of their being is riven;
They dread not, suspect not, the blow till ’tis given.”
_Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas_, is the wish of some in
regard even of escaped peril.
Scott vividly illustrates in “Rokeby” the position of unconscious and
therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps
on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim
at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond’s
breast, “just ere the spring his finger pressed;” and the interruption of
Guy Denzil’s approach makes the ruffian retire, _rê infectâ_:
“They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath,
Doomed to captivity or death,
Their thoughts to one sad subject lent,
Saw not nor heard the ambushment.
Heedless and unconcerned they sate,
While on the very verge of fate;
Heedless and unconcerned remained,
When Heaven the murderer’s arm restrained;
As ships drift darkling down the tide,
Nor see the shelves o’er which they glide.”
_NO LEISURE._
ST. MARK vi. 31.
That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled
about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties,
and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the
Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were
dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a
while; for there were many coming and going, and they had _no leisure_ so
much as to eat.”
Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high
pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything;
results produced at once; something to show, and something that may
_tell_. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that
stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an
eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine
just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause
which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds
cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or
perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the
elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress
of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the
present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For
want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing
turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen
is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our
censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’
statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of
re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told,
once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly
numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and
uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can.
It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no
rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than
wave succeeds wave.” A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up
at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who
lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory
half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which
recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage.
La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day,
that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in
patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All
was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that
the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is
not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and converse
and reading. Rather is this a species of work—at any rate a means for
working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes
round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise
passiveness.
Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained—not
indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done
helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and
distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat;
or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting
down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes
on their feet, and their staff in their hand—eaten in haste, as was the
Jewish passover.
The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be “not
charmed” with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the
normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the
trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another’s heels,
which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable
lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of
the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most
thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its
fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has
spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. “To men
who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the
year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages.” He echoes
Wordsworth’s lament that
“Plain living and high thinking are no more;”
and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer
and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes,
and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life.
It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his
preference for “coaching it,” and could have been well content to live
upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the
present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps
to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible
to the pleasure of driving fast—stirring the blood as it does, and
giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a
little too hasty and business-like, “as though we were to be eternally
getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money—the means
instead of the end.” A distinction is duly recognised between haste and
hurry—hurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but
in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally
implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on “what a horrible thing”
it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson
made a name (“letters four do make that name”) by his “Recreations.”
And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of
“Leisure Hours.” In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows
his utter contempt for the idler—the loafer, as Yankees term him—who
never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets,
and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded,
is the intermission of labour—the blink of idleness in the life of a
hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure
is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. “But to him it
is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery,
physical and mental, will not stand it.” Only in leisure, it is further
contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm
views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or
a fever.
It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space
of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning
penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness
and of wide application,
“Vouchsafe us such a half-hour’s hush alone,
In compensation for our stormy years!”
Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours,
with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent
half-hour.
Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his
countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the
“dignity of repose.” “We seem,” he said, “to live in the midst of a
battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets
of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing
of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is
difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions
seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main.” The
following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed
in the style of the same author—the author of the “Psalm of Life”—that
few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not
known to be from one of the “Palm Leaves” of Lord Houghton, who, a
quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting
the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the
East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:
“There the calm of life comparing
With his Europe’s busy fate,
Let him gladly homeward faring,
Learn to labour and to wait.”
It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we
owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do,
and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be
that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period
is—sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first
convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted,
on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally
wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it
now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things
once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be
the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new
ones—of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the
single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost
in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion
of the heart that now afflict the universe. “Stimulants, the only mode
of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but
heighten the delirium.” Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes
for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it
may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.
To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against
tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now
enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not
to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind
scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the
earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other
rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look
on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition
of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon
steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which
they make in “plain living”—how they practically shorten the days of a
man?
The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere
observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend
to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth
of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And
whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to
constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than
they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social
beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure—the cultivation of
which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us—says
of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time for a
calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it
is “apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery,
and can be justified only by necessity.” The very repose of leisure is
accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment—it being
one of the most communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there
are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in
whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom
one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is
produced by a good night’s rest. And this writer contends that to afford
such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account
than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not
duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that
lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of
spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures,
indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one
leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon
“The hour of rest is gone,
And urgent voices round them cry,
‘Ho, lingerer, hasten on!’
“And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,
A moment’s rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?”
Nay something better and more abiding than that.
But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on “Short
Cuts,” that if a thing is to be done at all, “then ’twere well it were
done quickly,” admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said
to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim
in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it
for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable
and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one
sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the
ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor’s dramatic poem declares in the storm
and stress of his career,
“We have not time to mourn,”
“The worse for us!” is his good counsellor’s rejoinder:
“_He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend._
_Eternity mourns that._ ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turn’d out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
Yet such the barrenness of busy life!
From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up
To reach the naked’st pinnacle of all,
While Magnanimity, absolved from toil,
Reposes self-included at the base.”
_A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT._
PROVERBS xxiii. 2.
King Solomon’s discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to
put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be
advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the
matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a
ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him;
and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man’s dainties, for
they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well
to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of
a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of
swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and
might beneficially be a standing order for all times.
Adam Smith, in his “Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” calls it “indecent”
to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain
situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being
in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them;
and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions
not only natural, but unavoidable, yet “always indecent; and to eat
voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.” There
is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and
we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man
given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth, himself a gourmand, and, which
is different, an enormous eater, liked to see a dinner guest disposing
wholesale of the royal cates, if only by way of keeping himself in
countenance, while achieving the like result. Royalty has, indeed, again
and again been addicted to surfeiting, and sometimes of a memorably
fatal sort. Alexander Jannæus died of gluttony, during the siege of
Ragaba. Soliman, the seventh khalif of the race of the Ommiyades, died
of a surfeit at Chalcis, in Syria, while preparing to lead an army to
Constantinople.[29] Of the emperor Jovian, we read in Gibbon, that one
night, at the obscure town Dadastana, after indulging himself with a
redundant supper, he retired to rest, and was next morning found dead
in his bed—an event ascribed by some, though not by all, to the quality
of the mushrooms, _plus_ the quantity of wine, which he had swallowed
in the evening. The same historian rather more than suspects that the
mortal disease of Athanaric the Goth “was contracted amidst the pleasures
of the imperial banquets,” by Theodosius provided. Pope Benedict XI.
is said to have died of a surfeit of fruit—some beautiful fresh figs,
of which he was very fond, being offered to him in a silver basin by a
veiled novice, as if from the abbess of the convent of St. Petronilla,
in Perugia: “The pope, not suspecting a gift from such a hand, ate them
eagerly, and without having them previously tasted.” That he died of
poison, few in that age, as Milman says, would venture to doubt, but
the poisoning power of arrears of undigested food has never been quite
rated at its full value. The same hesitation between fruit surfeit and
poison, obtains in the case of King John, whose death, by one account
due to the fatal drug administered by a Cistercian monk, by another is
attributed to an intemperate indulgence at supper in fruit and new cider.
The Emperor Frederick III. contracted his last illness, some say, by a
surfeit of melons. And is there not, in the case of our Henry I., what
has been called that tale of royal excess so concisely and pathetically
told in nursery history? “He never smiled again, and died of a surfeit of
lampreys.” The _regicide_ lampreys, Moore calls them in one place; and
in another, after citing Hume’s remark on them, as “a food which always
agreed better with his [Henry’s] palate than his constitution,” a dish so
indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine
no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines
than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same
squib-writer has a cruel simile, “just as honest King Stephen his beaver
might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off.” To a surfeit
of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist.
The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De
Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim
of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil.
When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching,
he removed to Baiæ, where, “in spite of the prescriptions [or
proscriptions?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according
to his pleasure.” The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are
exceptionally notorious. Of that “little, spare, aguish, peevish,
supper-eating” sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the
more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death,
“this warrior full of courage and sage speculation,” could not resist the
customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably
result in a nightmare, “turning his bed into a nest of monsters.” So
with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: “All medical skill was
in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus
of the hottest spices.” Mr. Tennyson’s dying Northern Farmer is only too
true a type of his kind:—
“What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the yaäle?
Doctor’s a’tottler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle;
I weänt breäk rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an’ gin I mun doy I mun doy.”
Swift is giving Pope a significant and not uncalled-for hint, when he
writes to express his uneasiness at ever hearing of the poet’s being
out to dinner: “For the least transgression of yours, if it be only two
bits and one sup more than your stint, is a great debauch; for which
you certainly pay more than those sots who are carried dead drunk to
bed.” An entry in Mrs. Trench’s diary begins, “Dined at the Duke of
Queensberry’s. He is very ill—has a violent cough, but _will_ eat an
immense dinner, and then complains of a _digestion pénible_.” Another
of his quality has been described as taking all sorts of pains to get
a little enjoyment which must produce for him a world of misery. “One
of his passions which he _will_ not resist, is for a particular dish,
pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night
into Tartarus.” Mr. Thackeray’s moribund old Madame Bernstein _will_ have
her supper luxurious, “nor could any injunction of ours or the doctor’s
teach her abstinence.” The Sir Miles St. John of another popular fiction
does himself to death after the same manner: “He would have his own
way; and he contrived to coax or to force his doctor into an authority
on his side.” For doctors are not all of the kind that Sancho Panza had
to deal with when governor of Barataria. _The Doctor_ cites the case of
an eminent member of “the faculty,” who could never refrain from eating
toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint
which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an
age by no means advanced. Another he relates, of a physician who, at an
autumnal dessert never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his
hands upon, while candidly acknowledging what indigestible and hurtful
things they were.
Not a doctor apparently of medicine, but (_proh pudor!_) of divinity, was
that Cambridge don of whose end Gray makes memorable mention, as having
gone to his grave with five fine mackarel (large and full of roe) in his
inside. “He ate them all off at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on
Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones.
He had not been hearty all the week; but after this sixth fish he never
held up his head more.” Like Milton’s Eve, in one sense at least:—
“Greedily he ingorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death.”
Dr. Johnson’s friend, Thrale, is a noteworthy example, or warning, of the
man of appetite, who _will not_ restrain it; will not put a knife to his
throat, but prefers sending a full laden fork in that direction. His wife
describes his natural disposition to conviviality as degenerating into
a preternatural desire for food. “No one could control his appetite.”
“Burney and I and Queeney tease him every meal he eats, and Mrs. Montagu
is quite serious with him; but what _can_ one do? He will eat, I think;
and if he does eat, I know he will not live.” The lampreys that were one
too many for Henry the king, were one too many for Thrale the brewer. He
begged some of an old friend, and the old friend complied, despite the
frowns and negative signals of the ladies of the house—whom following
out of the room, the too compliant visitor thus made his apology to Mrs.
Thrale, “I understand you, Madam, but _must_ disobey. A friend I have
known thirty-six years shall not ask a favour of me in his last stage
of life and be refused. What difference can it make?” Tears stood in
_his_ eyes, and Mrs. Thrale’s own—_les larmes dans la voix_—prevented
all reply. What difference did it make? That day was Mr. Thrale’s last.
The tone of the apology reminds us of General Paoli’s answer to Boswell,
when whispering his fear lest Johnson, very aged and very ailing, might
be hurt by the amount and variety of what he was despatching at the
general’s table, “where he loved to dine.” Boswell begged Paoli not to
press him. Why urge a too willing horse? “Alas!” said the host, “see
how very ill he looks: he can live but a very short time. Would you
refuse a slight gratification to a man under sentence of death?” And the
general cited approvingly the “humane custom” in Italy, by which those
in Johnson’s position were indulged with having whatever they liked
best to eat and drink, even with expensive delicacies. A parallel case
we have in Sir Walter Scott, during his melancholy sojourn in Italy, as
Sir W. Gell describes his dining at a Roman palace, and his own fears
lest, from the hospitality of the Torlonia family, and “with servants on
all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome,”
Sir Walter might be induced to eat more than was safe for his malady.
“Colonel Blair, who sat next him, was requested to take care that this
should not happen. Whenever I observed him, however, Sir Walter appeared
always to be eating; while the duchess, who had discovered the nature of
the office imposed on the colonel, was by no means satisfied, and after
dinner observed that it was an odd sort of friendship which consisted in
starving one’s neighbour to death, when he had a good appetite, and there
was dinner enough.”
The selfish club-man _par excellence_ has been depicted as earthing
himself from pursuit in the sanctuary of his club, there to eat his fill
unmolested, with no remonstrant at hand to remind him of the gout when
enjoying his turtle, or to talk of cupping when the glass of champagne is
at his lips. “There he may eat his asparagus _tout à l’huile_—there he
may pepper his cream-tart,” and none to say him nay. Drawn with pitiless
realism from the life is Acton Bell (Anne Brontè)’s picture of the dying
master of Wildfell Hall, whose extreme dread of death, when and while it
seems imminent, renders easy his wife’s task of curbing his unruly greed,
but who becomes intractable as the danger to dear life seems receding.
“I watch and restrain him,” she writes, “as well as I can, and often get
bitterly abused for my rigid severity; and sometimes he contrives to
elude my vigilance, and sometimes acts in opposition to my will.” William
Collins, the painter, notes in his diary a certain “dinner at C⸺’s,”
where he “sat next to H⸺, who took some highly seasoned omelet. I asked
him how he could venture on such stuff; he said he could not resist it,
though he knew how much he should suffer from it. He took a great deal
of wine, to overcome the effects of the omelet, and assured me he should
be ill for four days after such a dinner, and that he always suffered in
the same way after dining with C⸺! How absurd such weakness appears, and
yet how common it is!” George Herbert’s counsel is never out of date,
any more than King Solomon’s, in the matter of putting a knife to one’s
throat, if edacious and a diner-out:—
“Look to thy mouth: diseases enter there....
... Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.
Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit;
Then say withal, Earth to earth I commit.”
_HAZAEL’S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF._