“Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,
But he must die to-morrow?
_Prov._ None, sir; none.”
One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of
that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient
designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on
reaching home, is to become his guest to-night:
“_Lady M._ And when goes hence?
_Macb._ To-morrow,—as he purposes.
_Lady M._ O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!”
Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth
to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan,
had come blood-stained to _him_,—on the far-reaching capacities of
so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of
illustration.
Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following
expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion
in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of
artists:
“I listened to their honest chat;
Said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be
Plod, plod along the featureless sands
And coasting miles and miles of sea.’
Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide
We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’
Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet.’
‘To-morrow,’ said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way;
‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Then life stood still at blessed noon,
I, only I, had passed away:
‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried:
I was of yesterday.”
It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very
hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and
dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the
receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty
retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery.
“A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained
unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it
were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it
feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution,
and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow:
to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was
required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.
Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office
thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily
in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that
his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his
dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This
venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.
“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman,
“being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store
for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for
unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally
escape me.”
“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of
Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father
into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will
doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect,
he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”
The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical
response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the
floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in
chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of
the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist,
been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of
that gaudy insect.
_J’ai vécu_—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those
who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of
Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril,
when no one could reckon on a morrow—_nul ne pouvait se promettre un
lendemain_—that he quotes the _vers charmants_ made in 1708 by Maucroix,
then fourscore and upwards:—
“Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi!
Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne:
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.”
“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the
Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of
them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The
favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues
of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very
bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a
slowly-sinking star:
“We struggle with our fate,
While health, power, glory, from their height decline,
Depressed; and then extinguished; and our state,
In this, how different, lost Star, from thine,
That no to-morrow shall our beams restore!”
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor
Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when,
on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister
to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with
Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded
to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he
was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen
from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell,
he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell
down dead.
Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of
scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with
ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s
Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora Di superi?
(who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now
is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able
to promise himself a morrow:
Nemo tam divos habuit faventes,
Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.
When Archias, the polemarch at Thebes, dissolved in wine and pleasure,
received from his pontifical namesake at Athens a full and particular
account by letter of the conspiracy of Pelopidas and the exiles, who were
even then counting the minutes ere they struck the blow,—although the
messenger expressly urged his excellency to read the missive forthwith,
as the contents were of instant import, Archias only smiled a tipsy
smile, and said, “Business to-morrow.” Then he put the unopened letter
under the bolster of his couch, and resumed his colloquy with his host,
Philidias, who was in the plot, and who was taking good care to ply the
polemarch with wine. Business to-morrow. To-morrow as he purposed! Oh,
never should sun that morrow see.
_Si hodie non es paratus, quo modo cras eris? CRAS est dies incertus:
et qui scis si crastinum habebis_? To-morrow, in this its prospective,
procrastinating sense, is denounced by Mr. Sala, with all due asperity,
as a wretched, cowardly, idiotic subterfuge and apology—a “suicidal
delusion and pitfall.” Yes, to-morrow I will begin to learn Syro-Chaldaic
(we overhear him saying): I will read the novel of the day to-day.
To-morrow I will dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water. To-day I
will ask the _chef_ at the club to send me up a pretty little dinner,
not forgetting that irresistible _choufleur au gratin_, and bid the
butler bring me that curious pommard with the iron-grey seal. To-morrow
I will finish my _magnum opus_, my “Treatise on the Books of Job and
Ecclesiastes in their relation to Human Wisdom and Knowledge.” To-day
flippant rubbish or frothy egotism shall flow from my pen. To-morrow I
will pay my tailor. To-day I will order a new coat. In fine: “To-morrow I
will atone for the wrong, and pray for strength to continue in the right.
To-day I will follow my devices, and listen to the promptings of the
world, the flesh, and the devil. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”
For many years, the late Alfred de Vigny continued slowly amassing
poetical materials, though publishing nothing, and murmuring always, like
André Chenier,—
“Rien n’est fait aujourd’hui, tout sera fait _demain_.”
The morrow has come, wrote the _Journal des Débats_, in recording his
death, and his artist hands are cold in the grave.
Says the Cordelier to the condemned Thief in Mat Prior’s derry-down
ballad,—
“Courage, friend; to-day is your period of sorrow;
And things will go better, believe me, to-morrow.”
But what says the Thief in reply?
“To-morrow? our hero replied in a fright:
He that’s hanged before noon, ought to think of to-night.”
But Prior will supply us with more than one study of the subject. Here is
a variation, for instance, in matter, manner, and metre:—
“The hoary fool, who many days
Has struggled with continued sorrow,
Renews his hope, and blindly lays
The desperate bet upon to-morrow.
“To-morrow comes; ’tis noon, ’tis night;
This day like all the former flies:
Yet on he runs, to seek delight
To-morrow, till to-night he dies.”
The gaming allusion of the first stanza reminds us of the picture of
a certain devotee at the _roulette_ table at Hombourg, who kept his
seat—tranquil, immovable, vigilant,—the Napoleon of _roulette_; in whose
victorious progress Marengos and Austerlitzes succeeded each other, as
if Moscow and the Beresina were phantoms—as if to-morrow would never
come. To-morrow; ay, that dread to-morrow that comes to all: the fateful
_Demain_ of Victor:
“Demain est la sapin du trône,
Aujourd’hui c’en est le velours.”
Yes, to-morrow is the coarse deal, with its ten sacks, that forms the
framework of the throne, as to-day is its velvet and gilding.
“Demain c’est le coursier qui s’abat plein d’écume;
Demain, O conquérant, c’est Moscou qui s’allume
La nuit comme un flambeau:
C’est not’ vieille garde qui jonche au lointain la plaine,
Demain c’est Waterloo! Demain c’est Ste. Helène!
Demain c’est le tombeau!”
And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite
phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope
of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at
five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost
him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be
spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret:
“To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands
could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In
another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian
cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they
would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative,
that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could
foretell the events of to-morrow?
So thought Sunderland, in that “agony of terror,” almost over-wrought
or over-coloured, perhaps, by Macaulay, which impelled him to resign
office, in a sort of frenzied haste. He had asked some of his friends to
come to his house that he might consult them; they came at the appointed
time, but found that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he
should soon be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not
the gold key which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where
it was. “At Kensington,” answered Sunderland. They found that he had
tendered his resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle,
accepted. They blamed his haste, and told him that since he had summoned
them to advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the
morrow. “To-morrow,” he exclaimed “would have ruined me. To-night has
saved me.”
A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture
of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like
the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the
assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant):
... “Credula vitam
Spes fovet, ac melius cras fore semper ait.”
They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the
golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought,
when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing
quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει
τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though _he_ makes
to-morrow come fast enough, one _per diem_,—and go quite as fast as it
came:
... “Cum lux altera venit,
Jam cras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud cras
Egerit hys annos.”
Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix
by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to
the _primus inter poetas_ for poetical verification of their view. Says
the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which
is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it
is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s
chamber, at the hour they name:
“_Warwick._ Many good morrows to your majesty.
_K. Hen._ Is it good morrow, lords?
_War._ ’Tis one o’clock, and past.
_K. Hen._ Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.”
But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too,
that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the
touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose
affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and
who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old
friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a
scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness
of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment
she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all
seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her
future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor,
writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is
not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” _To-morrow, and to-morrow, and
to-morrow_—that to her never was, but always was to be.
Why, and how, To-morrow never comes, might be discussed in a strain of
transcendental metaphysics. Mr. Carlyle, in a memorable chapter headed
Natural Supernaturalism, expounds in his mystic suggestive way the
philosophic thesis, that Time and Space are but creations of God,—with
whom as it is a universal HERE, so it is an everlasting Now. And as
regards Man: is the Past annihilated, or only past? is the Future
non-extant, or only future? “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, and the
curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both _are_.
Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.”
It is but a glance the strongest eye can take, in that direction. But
even a glance may secure a glimpse of things which filmy, unpurged,
downlooking eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—for they seem to involve
unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To-morrow
thou hast never seen; to thee it has never come. But it shall come.
And it that shall come, will come; and will not tarry. Wait the great
teacher, Death. _CRAS iterabimus æquor_: to-morrow we shall be sounding
our dim and perilous way across the dark waters of that fathomless sea.
If the prospect appals, happy he that can adapt to his own hopes, in
serenest confidence, yet eager anticipation,—as he speculates on what a
day, and the Better Land, may bring forth: To-morrow, to fresh woods and
pastures new.
_THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER._