SOME ALLUSION TO, AND SOME USE OF THE FIGURE OF SPEECH CALLED
PARENTHESIS.
_J'ecrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre, et non pas peut-être dans une
confusion sans dessein; c'est le veritable ordre, et qui marquera
toujours mon objet par le desordre même._
Pascal.
Gentle reader,—and if gentle, good reader,—and if good, patient
reader; for if not gentle, then not good; and if not good, then not
gentle; and neither good nor gentle, if not patient;—dear reader, who
art happily for thyself all three, it is, I know, not less with thy
good will than with my own, that I proceed with this part of my
subject. _Quelle matiére que je traite avec vous, c'est toujours un
plaisir pour moi._[1] You will say to me “amuse yourself (and me) in
your own way; ride your own round-about, so you do but come to the
right point at last.”[2] To that point you are well assured that all
my round-abouts tend; and my care must be to eschew the error of that
author, engineer, statesman, or adventurer of any kind,
Which of a weak and niggardly projection,
Doth like a miser spoil his coat with scanting
A little cloth.[3]
[Footnote 1: MADAME DE MAINTENON.]
[Footnote 2: CUMBERLAND.]
[Footnote 3: SHAKESPEAR.]
Lady Hester Stanhope had an English Physician with her in Syria who,
if he be living, can bear testimony that her Ladyship did not commit
this fault, when she superintended the cutting out of his scarlet
galligaskins. Neither will I commit it.
You indeed, dear reader, would express no displeasure if, instead of
proceeding in the straight line of my purpose, I should sometimes find
it expedient to retrograde; or, borrowing a word of barbarous Latin
coined in the musician's mint, _cancrizare_, which may be rendered to
crab-grade. For as Roger North says, when, at the commencement of his
incomparable account of his brother the Lord Keeper's life, he
confesses that it would be hard to lead a thread in good order of time
through it—“there are many and various incidents to be remembered,
which will interfere, and make it necessary to step back sometimes,
and then again forwards;—and in this manner I hope to evacuate my mind
of every matter and thing I know and can remember materially
concerning him. And if some things are set down which many may think
too trivial, let it be considered that the smallest incidents are
often as useful to be known, though not so diverting, as the greater,
and profit must always share with entertainment.”
I am not however side-ling toward my object crab-like; still less am I
starting back from it, like a lobster, whose spring upon any alarm is
stern-foremost: nor am I going I know not where, like the three
Princes Zoile, Bariandel and Lyriamandre, when, having taken leave of
Olivier King of England, to go in search of Rosicler, they took ship
at London _sans dessein d'aller plustôt en un lieu qu'en un autre_.
Nor like the more famous Prince Don Florisel and Don Falanges, when
having gone on board a small vessel, _y mandada por ellos en lo alto
de la mar meter, hazen con los marineros que no hagan otro camino mas
de aquel que la nao movido por la fuerza de los ayres, quisiesse
hazer, queriendo yr a buscar con la aventura lo que a ella hallar se
permitia segun la poca certinidad que para la demanda podian llevar._
I should say falsely were I to say with Petrarch,
_Vommene in guiza d'orbo senza luce,
Che non sa ove si vada, e pur si parte._
But I may say with the Doctor's name-sake Daniel de Bosola in
Webster's tragedy,[4] “I look no higher than I can reach: they are the
gods that must ride on winged horses. A lawyer's mule, of a slow pace,
will both suit my disposition and business: for mark me, when a man's
mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both
tire.”—Moreover
———This I hold
A secret worth its weight in gold
To those who write as I write now,
Not to mind where they go, or how,
Thro' ditch, thro' bog, o'er hedge and stile,
Make it but worth the reader's while,
And keep a passage fair and plain
Always to bring him back again.[5]
[Footnote 4: DUCHESS OF MALFI.]
[Footnote 5: CHURCHILL.]
“You may run from major to minor,” says Mrs. Bray in one of her
letters to Dr. Southey, “and through a thousand changes, so long as
you fall into the subject at last, and bring back the ear to the right
key at the close.”
Where we are at this present reading, the attentive reader cannot but
know; and if the careless one has lost himself, it is his fault, not
mine. We are in the parenthesis between the Doctor's courtship and his
marriage. Life has been called a parenthesis between our birth and
death; the history of the human race is but a parenthesis between two
cataclasms of the globe which it inhabits; time itself only a
parenthesis in eternity. The interval here, as might be expected after
so summary a wooing, was not long; no settlements being required, and
little preparation. But it is not equally necessary for me to fix the
chapter, as it was for them to fix the day.
Montaigne tells us that he liked better to forge his mind than to
furnish it. I have a great liking for old Michel, Seigneur de
Montaigne, which the well-read reader may have perceived;—who indeed
has ever made his acquaintance without liking him? I have moreover
some sympathies with him; but upon this point we differ. It is more
agreeable to me to furnish than to forge,—intellectually speaking, to
lay in than to lay out;—to eat than to digest. There is however
(following the last similitude) an intermediate process enjoyed by the
flocks and herds, but denied to Aldermen; that process affords so apt
a metaphor for an operation of the mind, that the word denoting it has
passed into common parlance in its metaphorical acceptation, and its
original meaning is not always known to those who use it.
It is a pleasure to see the quiet full contentment which is manifested
both in the posture and look of animals when they are chewing the cud.
The nearest approach which humanity makes toward a similar state of
feeling, seems to be in smoking, when the smoker has any intellectual
cud on which to chew. But ruminating is no wholesome habit for man,
who, if he be good for any thing, is born as surely to action as to
trouble;—it is akin to the habit of indulging in day dreams, which is
to be eschewed by every one who tenders his or her own welfare.
There is however a time for every thing. And though neither the Doctor
nor Deborah had thought of each other in the relation of husband and
wife, before the proposal was made, and the silent assent given, they
could not chuse but ruminate upon the future as well as the past,
during the parenthesis that ensued. And though both parties
deliberately approved of what had been suddenly determined, the
parenthesis was an uneasy time for both.
The commentators tell us that readers have found some difficulty in
understanding what was Shakespear's meaning when he made Macbeth say
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.
Johnson says he never found them agreeing upon it. Most persons
however are agreed in thinking, that when anything disagreeable must
be done, the sooner it is done the better. Who but a child ever holds
a dose of physic in his hand,—rhubarb to wit,—or Epsom salts—delaying
as long as possible to take the nauseous draught? Who ever, when he is
ready for the plunge, stands lingering upon the side of the river, or
the brink of the cold bath?—Who that has entered a shower-bath and
closed the door, ever hesitates for a moment to pull the string? It
was upon a false notion of humanity that the House of Commons
proceeded, when it prolonged the interval between the sentence of a
murderer and the execution. The merciful course in all cases would be,
that execution should follow upon the sentence with the least possible
delay.
“Heaven help the man, says a goodnatured and comely reader who has a
ring on the fourth finger of her left hand,—Heaven help the man! Does
he compare marriage to hanging, to a dose of physic, and to a plunge
over head and ears in cold water?” No madam, not he: he makes no such
unseemly comparisons. He only means to say that when any great change
is about to take place in our circumstances and way of life,—any thing
that is looked on to with anxiety and restlessness, any thing that
occasions a yeasty sensation about the pericardium,—every one who is
in that state wishes that the stage of fermentation were past,—that
the transition were over.
I have said that little preparation was needed for a marriage which
gave little employment to the upholsterers, less to the dress-makers,
and none to the lawyers. Yet there was something to be done. Some part
of the furniture was to be furbished, some to be renewed, and some to
be added. The house required papering and painting, and would not be
comfortably habitable while the smell of the paint overpowered or
mingled with the odour of the shop. Here then was a cause of
unavoidable delay; and time which is necessarily employed, may be said
to be well employed, though it may not be upon the business which we
have most at heart. If there be an impatient reader, that is to say an
unreasonable one, who complains that instead of passing rapidly over
this interval or parenthesis (as aforesaid), I proceed in such a
manner with the relation, that many of my chapters are as
parenthetical as the Euterpe of Herodotus, which whole book as the
present Bishop Butler used to say, is one long parenthesis, and the
longest that ever was written;—if, I say, there be so censorious a
reader, I shall neither contradict him, nor defend myself, nor yet
plead guilty to the fault of which he accuses me. But I will tell him
what passed on a certain occasion, between Doctor, afterwards
Archbishop, Sharp, when he was Rector of St. Giles's, and the Lord
Chancellor Jefferies.
In the year 1686 Dr. Sharp preached a sermon wherein he drew some
conclusions against the Church of Rome, to show the vanity of her
pretensions in engrossing the name of Catholic to herself. The sermon
was complained of to James II, and the Lord Chancellor Jefferies was
directed to send for the preacher, and acquaint him with the King's
displeasure. Dr. Sharp accordingly waited upon his Lordship with the
notes of his sermon, and read it over to him. “Whether,” says his son,
“the Doctor did this for his own justification, and to satisfy his
Lordship that he had been misrepresented, or whether my Lord ordered
him to bring his sermon and repeat it before him, is not certain; but
the latter seems most probable: because Dr. Sharp afterwards
understood that his Lordship's design in sending for him and
discoursing with him, was, that he might tell the King that he had
reprimanded the Doctor, and that he was sorry for having given
occasion of offence to his Majesty, hoping by this means to release
Dr. Sharp from any further trouble. However it was, his Lordship took
upon him, while the Doctor was reading over his sermon, to chide him
for several passages which the Doctor thought gave no occasion for
chiding; and he desired his Lordship when he objected to these less
obnoxious passages, to be patient, for there was a great deal worse
yet to come.”
The sermon nevertheless was a good sermon, as temperate as it was
properly timed, and the circumstance was as important in English
history, as the anecdote is pertinent in this place. For that sermon
gave rise to the Ecclesiastical Commission, which, in its
consequences, produced, within two years, the Revolution.