“... I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death.”
Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant
my soul in my ears to hear you.” _Je t’écoute sans cligner la paupière_,
exclaims Marillac, in “Gerfaut,” _dût ta narration durer sept jours et
sept nuits_. “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand
ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the
extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and
wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his
hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable
of the harrowing news,—listening “as if his whole being were resolved
into that one sense of hearing.” That reads like a literal translation of
Balzac’s description of one whose whole _vie se concentra dans le seul
sens de l’ouïe_. On another page he is not forgetful of _certains hommes_
who _se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre_. None so deaf
as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care
to. The familiar narrative of “Eyes and No Eyes” might easily have its
pendent and parallel, point by point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one
to be called _Ears and No Ears_.
It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from
abroad, rapturous with gazing on his “favourite Titian,” declares that
one “might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such
a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee!” exclaims Macbeth, when
summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’
cave. Just as one of Plato’s epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand
eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his
life:
εἴθε γενοίμην
Οὐρανὸς, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν ἐίς δὲ βλέπω.
Horace uses the expressive phrase, _bibit aure_, in one of his
odes—literally, “drink in with the ear”—a phrase admired by the
commentators for its lyric boldness. “I was all fixed to listen,” says
Dante, in the tenth gulf of _l’Inferno_. “O speak your counsel now,
for Saturn’s ear is all a-hungered,” entreats the Titan, in Keats’s
_Hyperion_. D’Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is
described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears,
stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells
how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living
men could not have listened. “Will you listen?” asks a prince in the same
story; and is answered, “Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or
death to me, and then ask if I will listen.”
When Falstaff asks the prince, “Dost thou hear me, Hal?” “Ay, and mark
thee too,” is the reply; and that there is a difference between hearing
and marking, between lending one ear and giving both, Falstaff knew as
well as most men. And could practise what he knew, if occasion prompted.
Witness his wilful deafness when taken to task by the Lord Chief
Justice. “Boy, tell him I’m deaf,” he bids his page say. So, “You must
speak louder, my master’s deaf,” says the boy. “I am sure he is, to the
hearing of anything good,” rejoins the Chief Justice. And when, anon,
his lordship taxes the incorrigible knight with being deaf to what he
is saying, Sir John assures him, with that consummate assurance of his,
that he hears him very well: “Rather, an’t please you, it is the disease
of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.”
Quite capable is that witty profligate of entering into the import of
each phrase in the collect on the Holy Scriptures, which prays that we
may in such wise hear them, as to mark and learn, and inwardly digest
them.
A late divine, treating of “animal men” in the “animal” sense of St.
Paul, as those who cannot discern spiritual things, but are absorbed in
animalism as their being’s end and aim, affirmed that unavailing as it
seems to be to talk to them of religion, it avails no more talking of
poetry, and art, or speculative science, or the nobler things of the
soul: “How can such men discern the things of the Spirit? They understand
Tennyson as little as they understand St. Paul.” Having ears they hear
not anything so far away as the music of the spheres. Of _that_, and such
as that, the animal man might say, by self-application of a couplet of
Cowper’s,
“For which, alas! my destiny severe,
Though ears she gave me two, gave me no ear.”
_NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS._
PSALM xxiii. 4.
No good thing will He, from whom cometh every good gift, withhold from
them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His
presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a _very_ present
help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the
shadow of death—darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must
die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout
mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath
companionship as well as hope in his death. He who can say, The Lord is
my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range
of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the
grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good
Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one
that will not let them want. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod
and Thy staff they comfort me.”
Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of
humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest
trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in
their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public.
People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as
Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to
be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young
beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in
appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who
might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a
whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could
no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.[42]
With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite
Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all
its noise and excitement, “and, what would be still worse, exposed to
receive all visits; for the French, you know,” he writes to Conway, “are
never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and
love to hide myself when I am dying”—which refers to his periodical, and
prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. “If,” says the author of
“Life in the Sick-room,” “I could not trust my friends to save me from
involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole
in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest
hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.”
Wordsworth’s Marmaduke exclaims,—
“Give me a reason why the wisest thing
That the earth knows shall never choose to die,
But some one must be near to count his groans.
The wounded deer retires to solitude,
And dies in solitude: all things but man,
All die in solitude.”
Special note has been taken of the exceptional characteristic in the
altogether exceptional career of the prophet Elijah, that, in his last
hour, when he was on his way to a strange and unprecedented departure
from this world—when the whirlwind and flame chariot were ready, he
asked for no human companionship. “The bravest men are pardoned if one
lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the last, and
they desire a human eye resting on them—a human hand in theirs—a human
presence. But Elijah would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest
of his lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator alone.”
One hears of such preferences now and then, in oddly constituted natures.
Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to his sister-in-law, appears to indicate
a disposition of this kind as prevalent in his father’s family. “Poor
aunt Curle,” he tells her, “died like a Roman, or rather like one of the
Sandy-Knowe bairns, the most stoical race I ever knew. She turned every
one out of the room, and drew her last breath alone. So did my uncle,
Captain Robert Scott, and several others of that family.” Affectation
was so inherent in Chateaubriand’s confessions and professions, that
one knows not how far genuine may have been his plea for what he calls
the “necessity of isolation,” and its advantages in death as in life.
“Any hand is good enough to reach us the glass of water that we call for
in the fever of death. Ah! may that hand not be too dear to us!” The
“necessity of isolation” reminds us of Keble’s query:—
“Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will’d, we die,
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh?”
And that again reminds us, with a difference—the difference between
Madame de Staël and the sweet singer of the “Christian Year,”—of Corinne
on her death-bed, saying to Castel Forte: “But for you, I should die
alone. There is no help for such a moment; friends can but follow us to
the brink; there begin thoughts too deep, too troublous, to be confided.”
_Mon sort est de mourir seul_, writes Rousseau’s bereaved Solitaire;
_et la seule Providence me fermera les yeux_. Scott was not of mere
imagination all compact when he made Edie Ochiltree say, in the cave that
forms the old mendicant’s favourite retreat, “I hae had mony a thought,
that when I found myself auld and forfairn, and no able to enjoy God’s
blessed air ony langer, I wad e’en streek mysell out here, and abide my
removal, like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into
some bush or bracken.” Montaigne says that, might he have his choice,
he thought he should like best to die out of his own house, and away
from his own people. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, on the seventh day
of his last illness, admitted none but his unworthy son (Commodus) to
his chamber, and after a few words dismissed him, “covered his head for
sleep, and”—in Dean Merivale’s words—“passed away alone and untended.”
Epigrammatic historians love to tell of Catherine the Great, who had
reigned over five hundred and forty towns, over forty-two governments,
over a multitude of isles of the sea from Kamschatka to Japan, and over
eighty millions of slaves, that she died alone, entirely alone, without
a single slave at hand to support her drooping head. The picture is
meant to be sensational, and as written in French and for the French,
it may be telling enough. It tells, for instance, upon such a nature as
Madame Sophie Gay, who used to promise her friends to come and die among
them, when it was her turn and her time; adding, in her very French
style, “Je ne veux pas que cette demoiselle”—meaning _la mort_—“me
trouve seule.” Upon others, the grand climax of supreme solitude fails
of effect. “It has always been my wish,” writes Southey, for example,
“to die far from my friends, to crawl like a dog into some corner and
expire unseen. I would neither give nor receive unavailing pain.” When
death overtook St. Francis Xavier, he was on board of a vessel bound
for Siam, and at his own request he was removed to the shore, that he
might die with the greater composure. Stretched on the naked beach,
with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains—thus Sir
James Stephen describes his last moments—he contended alone with the
agonies of the fever which wasted his vital power. “It was an agony and
a solitude for which the happiest of the sons of men might well have
exchanged the dearest society, and the purest of the joys of life.... It
was a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace and consolation,
visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the now unclouded eye
of faith; and audible to the dying martyr through the yielding bars of
his mortal prison-house, in strains of exulting joy till then unheard and
unimagined.”
“Thou must go forth alone, my soul, thou must go forth alone,—
To other scenes, to other worlds, that mortal hath not known,
Thou must go forth alone, my soul, to tread the narrow vale;
But He, whose word is sure, hath said His comforts shall not fail.
His rod and staff shall comfort thee across the dreary road,
Till thou shalt join the blessed ones, in Heaven’s serene abode.”
Mr. de Quincey has finely said of solitude, that, although it may be
silent as light, it is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. “All men come into this world _alone_;
all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God’s
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand,
nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations.” King and priest, we are further reminded, warrior and
maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries
alone. The solitude, therefore, which this author describes as in this
world appalling or fascinating a child’s heart,[43] is but the echo of a
far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and of another
solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_ to pass: reflex of one
solitude—prefiguration of another.
Crabbe says of man that, feeling his weakness, it is his habit to run to
society, to numbers,—
“Himself to strengthen, or himself to shun;
But though to this our weakness may be prone,
Let’s learn to live, for we must die, alone.”
Among the pangs which belong to death is emphatically reckoned by F. W.
Robertson, in his sermon on Victory over it, the sensation of loneliness
which attaches to that transit through the valley of shadows. Have we
ever, he asks, seen a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper
emigrants to a distant colony? for that is keenly suggestive of the
desolation which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried
excursion. He dilates on all beyond the seas being to the ignorant poor
man a strange land—away from the helps and friendships and companionships
of life, scarcely knowing what is before him; and it is in such a moment,
when a man stands upon a deck, taking his last look of his fatherland,
that there comes upon him what the preacher calls “a sensation new,
strange, and inexpressibly miserable—the feeling of being alone in the
world. Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is but a
feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness of death. We die
alone. We go on our dark mysterious journey for the first time in all our
existence, without one to accompany us. Friends are beside our bed, they
must stay behind. Grant that a Christian has something like familiarity
with the Most High, _that_ breaks this solitary feeling; but what is
it with the mass of men? It is a question full of loneliness to them.”
Says the elder Humboldt (Wilhelm), in one of his letters: “However many
companions a man may have in the active sympathising world, he must ever
make the journey which leads across the boundaries of earthly things
alone; no one may accompany him.” Not but that in some moods, and in some
sense, this contemplative philosopher might have assented to the protest
of Paul Flemming, that had we spiritual organs, to see and hear things
now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the air thronged with
the departing souls of that vast multitude which every moment dies. For,
“truly the soul departs not alone on its last journey, but spirits of its
kind attend it, when not ministering angels; and they go in families to
the unknown land. Neither in life nor in death are we alone.” But then
as we have _not_ the spiritual organs in question, the fact of conscious
isolation _in articulo mortis_ is not affected; and their character,
after all, pertains rather to spiritualism than to spirituality.
A latter-day Christian lyrist expatiates on the sense of loneliness one
has at midnight, in the dread calmness of the dark,—or again, on pathless
hills, when the sun is set, and the ear listens in vain for some social
sound from afar. But,—
“If this be solitude, while life retains her healthful tone,
How shall I feel when, faint with pain,—I die alone?
“Of all the happy things that live in ocean, earth, or air,
Not one with kindred sympathy my lonely lot shall share.
My friend shall vainly scan the glance that speaks no language now;
My dog shall lick the languid hand that falters on his brow:
But none shall venture forth with me, to meet the dread unknown,
And I between two living worlds—must die alone!”
_Je mourrai seul._ Pascal’s words are continually cited, though only to
be forgotten. Mrs. Browning feelingly and earnestly expands into a sonnet
what she entitles “A Thought for a Lonely Death-bed. Inscribed to my
friend E. C.”
“If God compel thee to this destiny,
To die alone,—with none beside thy bed
To ruffle round with sobs thy last word said,
And mark with tears the pulses ebb from thee,—
Then pray alone—‘O Christ, come tenderly!
By Thy forsaken Sonship in the red
Drear wine-press,—by the wilderness outspread,—
And the lone garden where Thine agony
Fell bloody from Thy brow,—by all of those
Permitted desolations, comfort mine!
No earthly friend being near me, interpose
No deathly angel ’twixt my face and Thine,
But stoop Thyself to gather my life’s rose,
And smile away my mortal to Divine.’”
One can hardly quit this subject without recalling the awful significance
of a cry that once expressed, if one may say it, inexpressible
anguish,—anguish indescribable, incommunicable,—“My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me!” Penultimate words, these were; and appalling in their
suggestiveness of uttermost desolation. But not the last words of all. He
was not alone, consciously not alone, at the very last. Later than these,
and triumphant over these—however subdued and serene the triumph—came
those other words, Divinely calm, as became the Speaker,—“Father, into
Thy hands I commend my spirit.” And it was when He had _this_ said, that
He gave up the ghost.