“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
And time doth weary time with her complaining:
She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow;
And both she thinks too long with her remaining:
Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining.
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps;
And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps.”
And thus runs one of Landor’s imitations from the Greek, of an address to
Hesperus:—
“I have beheld thee in the morning hour,
A solitary star, with thankless eyes,
Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise
When sleep all night had wandered from my bower.”
One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against
Byron’s Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her
sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done.
Crabbe’s Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that
sombre career,—
“Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled,
And wept his woes upon a restless bed;
Retiring late, at early hour to rise,
With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes;
If sleep one moment closed the dismal view,
Fancy her terrors built upon the true;
And night and day had their alternate woes,
That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.”
The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake
night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the
first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came,
longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we
read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest
sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant
over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her
uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit
she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and
unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims
Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure
of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous
night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half
the night repeating, Must she die?
“And now to right she turned, and now to left,
And found no ease in turning or in rest”—
like one of those depicted by Keble—
“... who darkling and alone,
Would wish the weary night were gone,
Though dawning morn should only show
The secret of their unknown woe.”
Shelley sings of the desire “of the night for the morrow” when expressing
the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray
vividly depicts the state of mind of one who—
“... starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning—
To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning.”
Of Mrs. Gaskell’s Jemima we read, that “the night, the sleepless night,
was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day;
and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick
for the solitude of night.” So with Shenstone’s Jessie:—
“Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry,
When will the morn’s once pleasing scenes return?
Yet what can morn’s returning ray supply,
But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?”
_BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST._
PROVERBS xx. 14.
Considering what goes to make up a proverb, it would be strange if,
in the book of Proverbs, part though it be of holy writ, there should
be no touches of the humorous, however restrained and dignified its
manifestation. Shrewd insight into character, finding expression
in phrases of homely vigour, or tranquil irony, or two-edged
sarcasm,—without much of this, what were a book of proverbs? Assuredly
the collected proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, are
not careful to eschew a touch of humour when the subject invites, or
allows of, not to say requires it. Such a subject we have, and such a
touch of the jocose, in a verse which sets forth so tersely the tactics
of traffickers and bargain-makers; how the bidder depreciates the wares
he is bidding for, until they are his; and how he alters his tone then,
and brags at once of their superior worth, and of his own superior skill
in effecting a purchase. He haggles, and beats them down, and pooh-poohs
them, as all but unsaleable, while yet they are on sale; but so soon as
the bargain is struck, he goes on his way rejoicing, and perhaps calls
his kinsfolk and acquaintance together, to rejoice with him, for he has
bought dirt cheap what was worth its weight in gold. “It is naught, it is
naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”
The Paris of “Troilus and Cressida” compliments, or, as may be, upbraids
a subtle Greek with his dexterity in this line of policy:—
“Fair Diomede, you do as chapmen do,
Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy.”
In measure with the intending buyer’s dispraise, is kept up by the
would-be seller a song of praise. As Horace has it, _Laudat venales
qui vult extrudere merces_; and the laudation is apt to be in inverse
proportion to the intrinsic worth of his wares. Good wine may need no
bush; but bad wine, on that showing, may need one as big as a tree; and
the wine merchant is equal to the occasion.
A. K. H. B. has said of men in towns, aware of the value of time, that
by long experience they are assured of the uselessness of trying to
overreach a neighbour in a bargain, because he is so sharp that they
will not succeed. But in agricultural districts such practical essayists
in the art of overreaching are declared to be common enough and to
spare; and it is one of the Recreations of the Country Parson aforenamed
(initially at least) to mark out in detail the course which these
bargain-makers are alleged invariably to follow. “If they wish to buy a
cow or rent a field, they begin by declaring with frequency and vehemence
that they don’t want the thing,—that in fact they would rather not have
it,—that it would be inconvenient for them to become possessors of it.
They then go on to say that still, if they can get it at a fair price,
they may be induced to think of it. They next declare that the cow is
the very worst that ever was seen, and that very few men would have such
a creature in their possession.” And so on,—till the strenuous haggler,
after wasting two hours, telling sixty-five lies, and stamping himself
as a cheat, ends the negotiation, without taking anything at all by his
petty trickery, so complicated and so clumsy withal in its convolutions.
It is in his estimate of the real merits of English horses, that
Fuller discreetly observes, in meting out temperate but cordial praise
of their good points, “And whilst the seller praiseth them too much,
the buyer too little, the indifferent stander-by will give them their
due commendation.” What was true of horseflesh and its breeders and
purchasers, in old Fuller’s day holds good still. Type of a large class
is that manœuvring major in a popular fiction, of whom, and of his,
“bargains” in the stable—mostly sedate, elderly animals—we read, that
certainly, if the animals could have spoken, they would have expressed
their surprise at the difference in the language used by the major when a
buyer and when a seller; for while, as a buyer, he made them out to be,
like Gil Blas’ mule, all faults, as a seller he suddenly came round to
believe in them as paragons of perfection.
Leigh Hunt records as his experience of the Italians at home, that to
cheat you through thick and thin was the universal endeavour—so that a
perpetual warfare was inevitable, in which you were obliged to fight in
self-defence. “If you paid anybody what he asked you, it never entered
into his imagination that you did it from anything but folly. You were
pronounced a _minchione_ (a ninny), one of their greatest terms of
reproach. On the other hand, if you battled well through the bargain,
a perversion of the natural principle of self-defence led to a feeling
of respect for you.” Dispute might increase, it is added; the man might
grin, stare, threaten; might pour out torrents of argument and of
“injured innocence,” as they always do; but be firm, and he went away
equally angry and admiring. “Did anybody condescend to take them in,
the admiration as well as the anger was still in proportion, like that
of the gallant knights of old when they were beaten in single combat.”
Such chaffering, or “prigging,” as Burns calls it (in his satiric touch
at town councillors waddling down the street, in all the pomp of ignorant
conceit,—
“Men wha grew wise prigging owre hops and raisins),”
such haggling, and stickling, and demurring, and deferring, are too truly
said to distinguish the British system of arranging settlements—in which,
embodying completely the Oriental theory of marriage, a woman is dealt
with “as a valuable security, to be exchanged for due consideration.”
A marriage conducted according to the approved principles is therefore
“a matter of sharp, close bargaining. No sooner is the romantic part
of it over, than it is surrendered to the lawyers, who proceed to
chaffer over it and cheapen their adversary’s claim, as they might do
if they were purchasing a cow.” A self-styled Oriental student of the
modern Syrians, in a book bearing that title, graphically sketches
a representative bargaining scene in a café at Damascus, between a
Christian indigo-dealer, in Beyrout costume, and a Jewish dyer; the
former pretending to feel insulted at being offered so low a price, and
the latter pretending to get into a passion at having his time taken
up with a fruitless negotiation. Captain Marryat’s Travels in North
America supply a plurality of parallel passages; now of two misses
“swopping” bonnets, with an assumed indifference and a suppressed ardour
almost ridiculous enough to verge on the sublime; and now of a couple
of Down-Easters, whittling all the while they are bargaining, and doing
both with all their might and main. Fiction-writers who make a study
of character and manners are fond of introducing scenes of this kind.
Scott’s Antiquary chuckles over his feats in cheapening old curiosities,
and delights to tell how often he has stood haggling on a halfpenny,
lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer’s first price, he should
be led to suspect the value Mr. Oldbuck sets upon the article: “And then,
Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration,
and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is
trembling with pleasure!” The bargaining match with Maggie, the Fairport
fishwife, is one of the gems of the story. Mr. Charles Reade offers a
racy pendant in his trafficking encounter between Christie Johnstone,
the pride of Newhaven, and the four Irish merchants who have agreed to
work together, and to make a show of competition, the better to keep
the price down within bounds, but who are no match for woman’s wit and
woman’s tongue, as exercised by Christie. The author of “Doctor Jacob”
depicts in Herr Schmidt a rosy, round man, with eyes that were never in
tune with his mouth; the former being sharp, Jewish, and speculative;
the latter, supine, commercial, and conservative: “He made use of his
eyes when he bought, and of his mouth when he sold, giving his customers
to understand that he was the easiest going man in the world, only
desirous of small profits, and by no means miserable if a gold watch or
any other article went for half its value.” Canon Kingsley enlivens the
adventures of “Hereward” with a certain Dick Hammerhand, the richest man
in Walcheren, who tries to overreach the hero, and fails to his cost; one
stage of the transaction taking this turn: “The less anxious the stranger
seemed to buy, the more anxious grew Dick to sell; but he concealed his
anxiety, and let the stranger turn away, thanking him for his drink,” but
anon renewing the treaty with as much semblance of disregard as he could
put on. The author of “The Gayworthys” works up a clever bit of homely
chaffering between Mrs. Vorse and Widow Horke the strawberry-dealer.
And we find ourselves between a couple of horse-dealers again in “Silas
Marner:” “Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse,
and Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many
human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both
considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied
ironically, [to the other’s boast of a recent high bid,] ‘I wonder at
that now, I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard of a man who
didn’t want to sell his horse, getting a bid of half as much again as
the horse was worth,’” etc. Trust Bryce to boast of that horse, and of
that bargain, so soon as he is gone his way, the horse his, and the
bargain made. It must be a distorted type of human nature that resembles
the discontented man of Theophrastus, who, after taking a great deal
of pains to beat down the price of a slave, and after he has paid his
money for him,—instead of boasting, breaks out into the grumble, “I am
sure thou art good for nothing, or I should not have had thee so cheap.”
A companion picture, in its way, but with the difference between an
inveterate grumbler and an impenetrable oaf, is that by Plautus of a fool
with an old grange to sell, of which property he advertises the singular
attractions to draw buyers to bid and buy. Nothing ever thrived on it, he
says; no owner of it ever died in his bed; the trees were all blasted;
the swine died of the measles, the cattle of the murrain, the sheep
of the rot; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or goose.
_Hospitium fuit calamitatis._ It is naught, it is naught, saith the
buyer? No, the seller, in this case.
_GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES._
HOSEA vii. 9.
Among the reminders and remonstrances which it was the mission of the
prophet, the son of Beeri, in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah, to deliver
to Ephraim, there was this significant passage, expressive of a reckless
people’s unconscious decline, whose lapses were taken account of on high,
and Ephraim knew it not—“Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet
he knoweth not.”
Who, asks Hartley Coleridge, ever saw their first gray hairs, or marked
the crow feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a
momentaneous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that
youth is fled for ever? “None but the blessed few that, having dedicated
their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal
blossoms a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near.” Gray
hairs, in an advancing stage of the plural number, may be here and there
upon us before we know of it. But the actual discovery of the first is a
bit of an epoch in one’s life; and if one exclaims Eureka! it is hardly
in the most jubilant of tones or the most exultant of tempers.
Falstaff was surprised into a full purpose of amendment of life when he
lighted on the first white hair on his chin; but only to keep on renewing
the purpose weekly, long after chin and head, too, must have been covered
with silver or snow.
With some the humour is to pass off the discovery in seeming glee; and
perhaps it is the saturnine, melancholy temperament that is likeliest to
do this. For instance, Gerbier relates of Charles the First, that one
morning “as the King was combing his head, he found a white hair, which
he sent to the Queen in merriment. Henrietta Maria immediately wrote
back that Don Carlos would cause many more to come up before the Emperor
gave up the Palatinate.” Had the King not been himself combing his head
on this not too auspicious occasion, the probability is, as courts and
courtiers go, that his first white hair would not thus have been allowed
to attract and invite attention. A courtly dresser would have been
shocked to reveal what he saw, and would have kept the secret with _ex
officio_ conscientiousness. Many and many are the uncrowned heads upon
which gray hairs are gathering here and there—a familiar sight enough to
overseeing (and not overlooking) attendants or friends, but by the owners
themselves unsuspected as yet. Mrs. Browning lets Aurora Leigh espy one
such straggler, which even the neat-handed maid-in-waiting overlooks, at
Lady Waldemar’s toilet:—
“Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil
Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich
Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair,
A single one,—I saw it; otherwise
The woman looked immortal.”
It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist
pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious,
sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is
the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to
come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length.
“Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being
will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look
backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little
children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and
gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on
the same trite theme:—
“Some there were took fond delight,
Sporting with these tresses bright,
To enring with living gold
Fingers now beneath the mould
(Woe is me!) grown icy cold.
...
Now again a shining streak
’Gins the dusky cloud to break;—
Here and there a glittering thread
Lights the ringlets, dark and dead—
Glittering light!—but pale and cold—
Glittering thread!—but _not_ of _gold_.
Silent warning! silvery streak!
Not unheeded dost thou speak.
Not with feelings light and vain,
Not with fond, regretful pain,
Look I on the token sent
To declare the day far spent.”
Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly
enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless
cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two
marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so
little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.”
Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted
is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She
got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked
at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown
tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of
the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later
stage:—
“One day, as the lady saw her youth
Depart, and the silver thread that streaked
Her hair, and, worn by the serpent’s tooth,
The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked—
She wondered who the woman was,
So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked.”
Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large
constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no
idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men
of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak
alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled
there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase,
old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: _obrepit non
intellecta senectus_. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age
is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand
with Juvenal, almost word for word: _non intelligitur quando obrepit
senectus_. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age,
beguiling as it wears away: _labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas_;
and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless
years we grow older till we grow old: _Tempora labuntur, tacitisque
senescimus annis_. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting
it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us.
Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning
how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting
his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line
of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: _Rien n’est pénible à
démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose
vienne du dehors et coupe court_.
There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will
Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his
topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall
tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who
has to own of himself—
“For I had hope, by something rare,
To prove myself a poet;
But, while I plan, and plan, my hair
Is gray before I know it.”
_RESTRAINED ANGER._
PROVERBS xvi. 32.
“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth
his spirit than he that taketh a city.” To be ruled by one’s angry spirit
is cruel bondage indeed, for that taskmaster never spares the lash. To
rule or to be ruled,—that is the question.
“Ira furor brevis est: animum rege; qui, nisi paret,
Imperat: hunc frenis, hunc tu compesce catenâ.”
Marcus Antoninus, in his Meditations, calls rage and resentment marks of
an unmanly disposition; mildness and temper being not only more humane,
but, he contends, more masculine too. And the philosophic emperor wrote
and spoke as one of, what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls, those
“... milder natures, and more free,
Whom an unblamed serenity
Hath freed from passions, and the state
Of struggle these necessitate.”
From that state of struggle many a victor emerges with honourable scars,
but deep. Famous and significant is the story of the physiognomist who
detected in the features of Socrates the traces of that fiery temper
which for the most part he kept in severe control, but which, when it
did break loose, is described by those who witnessed it as absolutely
terrible, overleaping both in act and language every barrier of the
ordinary decorum of Grecian manners. Le Clerc’s _éloge_ of John Locke
includes the remark that if he had any defect, it was the being somewhat
passionate; “but he had got the better of it by reason, and it was very
seldom that it did him or any one else any harm.” Of Rudolf of Hapsburg
we are told that he was by nature warm and choleric, but that as he
advanced in years he corrected this defect. To some of his friends,
expressing their wonder that since his elevation to the imperial dignity
he had restrained the vehemence of his temper, the founder of the House
of Austria replied, “I have often repented of being passionate, never
of being mild and humane.” One of Cromwell’s biographers reports his
“temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of it kept down for the most
part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had.” The admirable
Frederick Borromeo was admired for a placability, a sweetness of manner
nearly imperturbable, which, however, as Manzoni reminds us, was not
natural to the devout prelate, but was the effect of continual combat
against a quick and hasty disposition. Lord Clarendon more than once in
his autobiography, plumes himself on having mastered and “suppressed
that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.”
“They who knew the great infirmity of his whole family, which abounded
in passion, used to say he had much extinguished the unruliness of that
fire.” Lord Macaulay turns to the advantage of his favourite chancellor
the assertion of his detractors, that the disposition of the great
Somers was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he
was really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his
voice was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was
almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. His brilliant advocate is fain to
accept this reproach as the highest of all eulogies. Again: Sir Archibald
Alison assures us of Sir Robert Peel, that he was by nature afflicted
with a most violent temper, and that so extreme were his paroxysms of
anger, when a young man, that he used, while they were coming on, to shut
himself up alone till the dark fit was over. “By degrees, however, he
obtained the mastery of this infirmity, and this at length so effectually
that he passed with the world, at a distance, as a man of a singularly
cold and phlegmatic temperament.” Lady Holland reports her distinguished
father to have been naturally choleric,—prefacing the statement by a
reflection, that, although it is not the part of a daughter to reveal
faults, yet a fault nobly repaired, or repented of, adds to the respect
and interest which a character inspires. By her showing, then, Mr. Sydney
Smith was by nature quick and hasty, but always struggled against the
failing, and made many regulations to avoid exciting any such emotions;
and when he did give way, it often excited his biographer’s admiration
to see him gradually subduing his chafed spirit, and to observe his
dissatisfaction with himself till he had humbled himself and made his
peace, it mattered not with whom, groom or child. “He could not bear the
reproaches of his own heart.” So Mr. Henry Rogers observes of Locke,
and his success, by dint of “immense pains” taken, in subjugating his
choleric propensity, that his anxiety for its complete subjugation
appears in his never being so angry with another as he always was with
himself—for being angry. Those who are conversant with the journal and
letters of Dr. Chalmers, may remember how often that good man takes
himself to task for infirmities of temper, and how strenuously he
resolves to strive to keep down every tendency to irritation when in
company, to “try to maintain a vigorous contest with this unfortunate
peculiarity of my temper,” to “school down every irritable feeling;” and
how remorsefully he records such instances as getting “into a violent
passion with Sandy,” and getting “ruffled with Jane,” in a manner and to
a degree “quite unchristian.” Passages abound such as, “Now is the time
for reflecting on the evils of intemperate passion;” “erred egregiously
this evening in venting my indignation;” “I may at least ward off the
assaults of anger;” “erred in betraying my anger to my servant and wife;”
“constant visitations of indignancy; this exceedingly wrong: there is not
a greater foe to spirituality than wrath.” “O my God, deliver me from
all rancour and much irritableness,”[41] etc., etc. “Here,” to apply the
lines of Wordsworth’s son-in-law,—
“Here was a temper less by nature tuned
Than harmonized by discipline to rule,
And by religion sanctified to peace.”
The pen is too truly said to be a fruitful source of regrets to some of
us, in regard of the outbreaks of temper we allow it to put on paper; and
never is the sting sharper, says one essayist, than when we realize that
our imprudence is in black and white, beyond our reach, irrevocable. “We
send off our letter, to repent sometimes how bitterly!” _Litera scripta
manet._ Hence the advice of another, never to write in anger, or, at
any rate, to keep your letter till you are cool. We are recommended,
when indignant at any one’s conduct, to write a letter couched in the
strongest terms possible, as satirical and cutting as we can make it,
and having done this, to direct, seal, and put it in our desk for a few
hours, then read it for our own satisfaction, and tear it up. Another
popular authority, earnestly deprecating angry letters, lays down as a
rule to be observed throughout the letter-writing world, that no angry
letter be posted till four and twenty hours shall have elapsed since it
was written. “We all know how absurd is that other rule, of saying the
alphabet when you are angry. Trash! Sit down and write your letter; write
it with all the venom in your power; spit out your spleen at the fullest;
it will do you good: you think you have been injured; say all that you
can say with all your poisoned eloquence, and gratify yourself by reading
it while your temper is still hot. Then put it in your desk, and, as a
matter of course, burn it before breakfast the following morning. Believe
me that you will then have a double gratification.” _Loquitur_ the
perhaps most widely read, and without a perhaps the most prolific, writer
of the day.
When Cœur-de-Lion, in Scott’s “Talisman,” incensed and mortified at the
Templar’s tactics, yet foresaw the penalty of giving way to his headlong
resentment, with a strong effort he remained silent till he had repeated
a pater noster, that being the course which “his confessor had enjoined
him to pursue when anger was likely to obtain dominion over him.” The
familiar “count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram,” in one of Mr. Dickens’
later stories is but another practical application of the selfsame text.
Gibbon adds to his account of the public penance inflicted by Ambrose on
Theodosius, for the massacre of Thessalonica, this remark: “and the edict
which interposes a salutary interval of thirty days between the sentence
and the execution, may be accepted as the worthy fruits of his [the
emperor’s] repentance.” For it was by a hasty resolve that Theodosius
swore in his wrath to expiate the blood of his lieutenant, Botheric,
by the blood of a guilty people; his fiery and choleric temper being
impatient of the dilatory forms of a judicial inquiry. In hot haste he
despatched the messengers of death; but attempted, when it was too late,
to prevent the execution of his own orders. Avenging furiously in haste,
he had to repent at leisure; and he did repent.
It is impossible, perhaps, observed Dean Swift, for the best and wisest
among us to keep so constant a guard upon our temper but that we may
at some time or other lie open to the strokes of fortune. Incensed on
one occasion, “it was natural for me to have immediate recourse to my
pen and ink; but before I would offer to make use of them, I resolved
deliberately to tell over a hundred; and when I came to the end of
that sum, I found it more advisable to defer drawing up my intended
remonstrance till I had slept soundly on my resentments.” We are told
of the celebrated Macklin, that although so particular in drilling the
performers at rehearsals, he was scrupulous in keeping his temper down,
the irritability of which he knew too well; and that on one occasion he
interposed an hour by his stop-watch, all retiring together from the
stage to the green-room, at the end of which time all were in good humour
again, and the rehearsal was resumed. “When the evil effects of hasty
anger approach, the consequences of which may be irretrievable,”—thus
moralizes a fellow-craftsman, John O’Keeffe,—“it would be no harm if all
of us could suppress our own feelings, even for Macklin’s green-room
hour.” His mighty master, Shakspeare, would have supplied him with a
precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,—
“Now, lords, my choler being overblown
With walking once about the quadrangle,
I come to talk of commonwealth affairs.”
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s secretary, Mr. Nixon, on his own showing,
could not refrain from blurting out just what he felt at the moment,
when differences arose between the two. This used to vex Sir Thomas,
who however would say nothing till the next day, and then, when the
secretary thought that the whole matter had passed off (having perhaps
received great kindness in the meantime), the remonstrance would come
out, “What a silly fellow you were, Nixon, to put yourself in such a
passion yesterday! If I had spoken then, we should most probably have
parted. Make it a rule never to speak when you are in a passion, but wait
till the next day.” And we are assured that, if at any time he happened
to transgress this rule himself, he was seriously vexed and grieved,
and could not rest till he had in some way made amends for his want of
self-restraint.
Molière’s Arnolphe propounds the prophylactic rule with emphasis and
discretion:
“Un certain Grec disait à l’empereur Auguste,
Comme une instruction utile autant que juste,
Que lorsqu’une aventure en colére nous met,
Nous devons, avant tout, dire nôtre alphabet,
Afin que dans ce temps la bile se tempère,
Et qu’on ne fasse rien que l’on ne doive faire.”
_EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW._
HOSEA vi. 3.
By the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell on Ephraim and
on Judah, that their goodness was as a morning cloud, and that as the
early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but
the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words
of Dante:
“... The will in man
Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise
Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain,
Made mere abortion: faith and innocence
Are met with but in babes; each taking leave
Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled.”
Adam Smith observes, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiment,” that, in the eye
of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old
man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal
sympathy. “It ought to do so,” he adds. “Everything may be expected, or
at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be
either expected or hoped from the old man.” It is regretful, remorseful
eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and
forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,—
“O little souls! as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light
Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,
How red my setting sun appears,
How lurid looks this soul of mine!”
Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the “Pleasures of Memory,” and with
direct reference to that poem, “In looking back, the only days I
earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was
‘girt with growing infancy,’ and read in the eyes and the smiles of my
children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness,
such as this world can never fulfil.” A more vigorous poet than Samuel
Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of
young motherhood, when the wife—
“Blest into mother, in the innocent look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives
Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves—
What may the fruits be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s.”
The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell’s story hails in her child a new,
pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early
passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting
sin by ever watchful and most tender care. “And _her_ mother had thought
the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray
to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians
for their little children.”
Juvenal asks, “what morn’s so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy,
and fraud.” The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid
urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child: _dissimiles
hic vir, et ille puer_. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of
each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting
in its refreshing redolence of promise—“_qui ne nous fait que des
promesses_.” Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet
addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second
birthday:
“Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour,
Sweet is the sun’s first radiance, sweet the year,
In the spring’s early promise, sweet the flower,
Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear—
But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me
Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind,
That beams with new quick thoughts, yet undefined,
That tell of what is now and what may be.
O may the God who taught us that, like thee,
We should be pure and spotless, bless thee still;
Lay on thy infant head His hand, to free
Thine heart from sin, and form thee to His will,
Cleanse thee from aught that’s evil or defiled,
And keep thee as thou art, my darling child.”
George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other
sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in
Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew
side by side with the ripening peach—impossible to be fulfilled when
the golden gates had been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image
of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it “chafes
and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too
often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining.” Elia, the essay
writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies
of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that
“other me,” there, in the background,—he must take leave to cherish the
remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, he protests,
to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child
of some other house, and not _his_ father’s son. “I know how it shrank
from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou
changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a
weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what
have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!”
Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are
indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory
faces in the dame school:—
“Even now sagacious foresight points to show
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo,
Or bard sublime, if bard may e’er be so,
As Milton, Shakspeare, names that ne’er shall die!”
So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations
(as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed
by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may
ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing
like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie’s
lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in
contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood:—
“Ah! many a lightly sportive child,
Who hath like thee our wits beguiled,
To dull and sober manhood grown,
With strange recoil our hearts disown.”
_Il y a en chacun de nous_, writes Sainte-Beuve, _un être primitif,
idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais
que l’homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt_. Mr. Kingsley, in a
touching reflection—literally reflection, looking back—on the “long
lost might-have been,” adverts to that personal idea which every soul
brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the
face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted,
and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Dr. Caird has said of the
birthday of the worst of men, that although it ushered a new agent of
evil into existence, and was a day fraught with more disastrous results
to the world than the day in which the pestilence began to creep over
the nations, or the blight to fasten on the food of man, or any other
physical evil to enter on a career of world-wide devastation,—yet might
this day, when the vilest of humanity first saw the light, be in some
aspects of it regarded as better (despite Solomon’s text) than the day
of his death. “For, to take only one view of it, when life commenced,
the problem of good or evil, to which death has brought so terrible a
solution, was, in his case, as yet unsolved. The page of human history
which he was to write was yet unwritten, and to that day belonged,
at all events, the advantage of the uncertainty whether it was to be
blurred and blotted, or written fair and clean.” Life, even in the most
unfavourable circumstances, it is urged, has ever some faint gleams of
hope to brighten its outset. The preacher owns that the simplicity, the
tenderness, the unconscious refinement that more or less characterize
infancy, even among the lowest and rudest, soon indeed pass away,
and give place to the coarseness of an unideal, if not the animal
repulsiveness of a sensual or sinful life. But he insists that at least
at the beginning, for a little while, there is something in the seeming
innocency, the brightness, the unworldliness, the unworn freshness of
childhood, that gives hope room to work. Is there not, he asks, for every
child, not in the dreams of parental fondness only, but in reality,
and in God’s idea, the possibility of a noble future? “The history of
each new-born soul is surely in God’s plan and intention a bright and
blessed one. For the vilest miscreant that was ever hounded out of life
in dishonour and wretchedness, there was, in the mind of the All-Good, a
Divine ideal, a glorious possibility of excellence, which might have been
made a reality.” The most hardened ruffian, the most obdurate criminal,
the most impenetrable reprobate, was once a child.
If it be a philosophical truth that the child is father of the man—all
that is now broadly emblazoned in the man having been once latent—seen
or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child; it is not therefore true
universally, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that all which pre-exists in
the child finds its development in the man. “Rudiments and tendencies,
which _might_ have found, sometimes by accident, _do_ not find, sometimes
under the killing frost of counter forces, _cannot_ find, their natural
evolution.” Most of what he has, the grown-up man is shown to inherit
from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon
the whole of his natural inheritance. Childhood has been passionately
apostrophized as
“... thou vindication
Of God—thou living witness against all men
Who have been babes—thou everlasting promise
Which no man keeps!”
_EARS TO HEAR._
ST. LUKE viii. 8.
“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” These words cried Jesus,
at the close of His parable of the Sower. And He went on to say that
to some, to the many, He spake in parables, that seeing they might
not see—not having eyes to see; and that hearing they might not
understand—not having ears to hear in the Gospel sense. Nor in the
Old Testament sense; for these very words are cited from Isaiah; in
Deuteronomy too we read of those to whom the Lord hath not given ears to
hear; and in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of those who have ears to hear,
and hear not. One apostle laments the destiny of those to whom God hath
given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that
they should not hear. And to another was entrusted the appeal, “He that
hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” For
only the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. The unwise is like the deaf
adder that stoppeth her ear. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the
Lord hath made even both of them.
Give but interest in the theme, and the listener’s ear fulfils its
natural function, that of hearing. “Mine ears hast Thou opened.”
Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all ear. Milton
pictures a time—
“when, Adam first of men,
To first of women, Eve thus moving speech,
Turn’d him, all ear.”