Why wept Elisha in the presence of Hazael, when that envoy from the sick
king of Syria courted the man of God, in his sovereign’s behalf, with
a consignment of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels’ burden?
Courteous and gentle was Benhadad’s messenger who came to inquire of
the Lord of Elisha, if the royal Syrian should recover of the disease
which had brought him so low. Why wept the prophet, when his prophecy
had been uttered, ominously vague? “Go, say unto him [Benhadad], Thou
mayest certainly recover. Howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall
certainly die.” And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was
ashamed.
“And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know
the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds
wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword,
and wilt dash their children,” etc. And Hazael said, “But what! is thy
servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?”
Yet Hazael went home, and on the very morrow commenced his justification
of the seer’s previsionary tears, by spreading a thick wet cloth on the
face of his master, so that Benhadad, who else would have recovered,
died, and Hazael reigned in his stead.
Well might the man of God weep, nor could anything be more natural,
or at least naturally assumed, than the shuddering repudiation, the
deprecating protest, of the envoy that now was, the king—and dog—that
to-morrow should be.
“Lui-même, à son portrait forcé de rendre hommage,
Il frémira d’horreur devant sa propre image.”
The man who is weak, observes Miss Lee in the “Canterbury Tales,”
is always in danger of becoming a villain; and she exemplifies this
liability in the instance of Villars, who, by indulging a passion
calculated to enfeeble his understanding and corrupt his heart, is
soon to be found touching that point which his high tone of romantic
refinement had once induced him to believe it impossible he should
even approach. But he protests too much who strenuously protests, with
protestation heaped on protestation, against any such possible lapse and
collapse on his part; and there are cases of this kind, of which one may
say with Molière—
“Que c’est être à demi ce que l’on vient de dire,
Que de vouloir jurer qu’on ne le sera pas.”
Martial is in the right in answering the inquiry of Priscus, how would
he live if he became rich and great all at once, with another query, Who
can say beforehand what his future conduct will be? _Quemquam posse putas
mores narrare futuros?_ If Priscus were to become a lion, what sort of
one would he turn out to be? Perhaps like Hazael, a dog.
In sight of a corpse suspended to a tree, the “miserable remnant of a
wretch that was hanged there for murder,” Robert, in one of Tobin’s
dramas, protests to his mother that, robber though he be, _he_ is no
murderer; she replies:—
“You are a robber;
And he who robs, by sharp resistance pressed,
Will end the deed in blood: ’twas so with him;
He once possessed a soul quick as your own
To mercy, and would quake, as you do now,
At the bare apprehension of the act
That has consigned him to yon blasted tree.”
Dr. Hamilton somewhere adverts to a sort of gambling in our large
cities which does not look particularly repulsive—not being carried on
in “hells,” and pleading the sanction of some titled names; the results,
however, of which are hanging like a millstone round the neck of many
a once promising young man; while, to say nothing of those whom it
has reduced to beggary or blackguardism, numbers of its victims must
be sought in the Portland hulks or Dartmoor prison. “They went to the
race-course, or, without going there, they laid wagers on horses, and
sooner or later they lost more than they could pay, and in dread of
dishonour they took means to get the money at the very suggestion of
which, once upon a time, they would indignantly have exclaimed, ‘Is thy
servant a dog?’ and after a few miserable makeshifts, only adding sin to
sin, there came detection and ruin and disgrace.” It is of the riotous
living of prodigal sons that the same preacher is treating, when he
shows, in his graphic way, how speedily riot, whether coarse or refined,
wastes the reveller’s substance—not only sapping the constitution, and
softening the brain, and shattering the nerves, and enfeebling the
mind, but exhausting the estate, and soon bringing the spendthrift to
poverty. And, as the discourser goes on to say, if the passion still
urges, and the fear of God has departed, wild methods will be used to
meet the demand and assuage the frantic craving. “Keepsakes will be sold
or pledged, to part with which would, once upon a time, have looked like
sacrilege.” Perhaps money will be taken from the till, and so on and on,
or rather downwards and downwards, deeper and deeper, till the lowest
deep is sounded, and darkness is the burier of the dead.
It has been remarked by one of the most reflective of our popular
authors, that there is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first
turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the
change, for this reason—that the second wrong presents itself to him
in the guise of the only practicable right. “The action which before
commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh
untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked
at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which
all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of
textures very much alike.” Europe, it is suggestively added, adjusts
itself to a _fait accompli_; and so does an individual character—until
the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution.
Recording the appointment of Bonaparte to succeed Scherer in command of
the French forces on Genoese territory, Southey observes that although
the former had given indications of his military talents at Toulon, and
of his remorseless nature at Paris, “the extent either of his ability
or his wickedness was at this time known to none, and perhaps not even
suspected by himself.” Of all the lessons derived from the history
of human passion, says Lavalette, the most important is the utter
impossibility which even the best men will always experience of stopping,
if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they
were perpetrated, the crimes of the first French Revolution, he goes on
to surmise, could have been portrayed to those who committed them, “even
Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror.” Men, in the case
suggested, are seduced at first by plausible theories, which their heated
imaginations represent as beneficial and easy of execution: “they advance
unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till
sensibility is destroyed by the habitual spectacle of guilt, and the most
savage atrocities come to be dignified by the name of state policy.”
The world, and the spirit of the world, observes Sir Fowell Buxton in
one of his letters, are very insidious; “and more than once I have
seen a person who, as a youth, was single-eyed and single-hearted, and
who, to any one who supposed he might glide into laxity of zeal, would
have said, ‘Am I a dog?’ in maturer age become, if not a lover of the
vices of the world, at least a tolerator of its vanities.” But as M. de
Sainte-Beuve sententiously puts it, in one of his maxims after the manner
of La Rochefoucauld, “La plupart des défauts qui éclatent dans la seconde
moitié de la vie existaient en nous tout formés bien auparavant; mais
ils étaient masqués, en quelque sorte, par la pudeur de la jeunesse.”
The faults of after-life were there, and only the modest reserve and
self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes
less regard for others, and the cover is taken off.
A clerical essayist on “Future Years,” “can well believe,” he tells us,
“that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he
will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken
before coming to _that_!” “Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad
enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed
sin and shame.” And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be
an aggravation in that view—to think that by the time you have reached
that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to
it—_that_ being the worst of all.
Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if
you will—the hue of blood—a degraded instance of the degrading power of
guilt—a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse,
or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects,—
“Till creatures born,
For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed)
Will act the direst crimes they cursed
But yester-morn.”
_THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT._
ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.
To some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on
a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: “But when thou doest alms,
let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” The atmosphere is
of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before
us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have
glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their
reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret,
as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand
the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a
practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy.
Yet are there, and ever will be, those—else had this earth of ours lost
the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?—who—
“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit,
Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed
of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as
Virgil’s Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: _Et se cupit
ante videri._ Another of Chamfort’s cynical _maximes et pensées_ runs
thus: “Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, _Si cadens
adoraveris me_.” Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They
have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the
right hand’s largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon’s
famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV know what were his designs against
the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme
of action; “but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would
cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left.” And the vulgar mean
the commonalty, the many, the _polloi_. The doer of good, therefore, who
does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is
treated in literature and life as what is called a “character.” Goldsmith
makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is
open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed
tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for
aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him
unobserved. “He had, however,” writes the Chinese citizen of the world,
“no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of
ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.”
And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know
“what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take
such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and
thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett,
again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving,
retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the
objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted
this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of
ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such
an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this
humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of
virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and
was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that
frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions
upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be
affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a
portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did:
“Yet was thy liberality discreet,
Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat;
And though in act unwearied, _secret still_,
As in some solitude the summer rill
Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green,
And cheers the drooping flowers, _unheard_, _unseen_.”
When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a
disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so
catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely
figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was
not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is
said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees;
but “he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall.” Free gifts by
stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron’s; of whom,
for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland’s death, the poet
reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant
[Byron a sponsor!—but let that pass]; and that after the “christening” he
inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious
a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house.
Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from
those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less
than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him “un de ces dieux
bienfaiteurs de l’humanité, mais qui n’en partagent point la tendresse.”
Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only
the hand was opened behind his own back: _il sut être bienveillant en
secret_. Amid James Watt’s donations in aid of sound and useful learning,
testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true
religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted;
but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name
should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy
with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells
Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor
to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better
“had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few
poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the
frost.” “Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth;[30] but
nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind
in general.” The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with
a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner
of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John
Newton: “Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good
and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever,
and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: “I
shall probably never see him,” writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide
of benefactions; but “he will always have a niche in the museum of my
reverential remembrance.” Even without _that_, the Unknown had his reward.
“Charity ever
Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet
In the receiver.”
_TO-MORROW._
ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.
The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his
foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years;
but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease;
eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing:
many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored
with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same
easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the
worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or
to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and
buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the
morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a
little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow,
for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is
called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is
that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he
sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a _memento
mori_,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is
at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter,
whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves
with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass,
which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven.
Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes
trippingly off the tongue:—
“TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”
So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is
still, _They come_—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one
of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors;
and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response,
“She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a
word.—_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow._”...
In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction,
pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,—
... “Here will I lie to-night;
[_Soldiers begin to set up the King’s tent._
But where to-morrow?—Well, all’s one for that.”
To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on
a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on
the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,—
“To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day
Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men
Must ’bide the touch.”
While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it,
intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears
together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then,
if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life;
and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a
wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates
and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs
and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for
instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who,
with affected levity, replies,—
“Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in;
I’ll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel,
Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.”
Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an
execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio:
“Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,
It would be thus with him;—he must die to-morrow.
_Isab._ To-morrow! O, that’s sudden! Spare, him, spare him;
He’s not prepared for death.”
Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed
man:—
“Look, here’s the warrant, Claudio, for thy death:
’Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow
Thou must be made immortal.”