Part 10

Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a “practical suggestion” as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the interest of humanity, “the honour of the dead should be abolished,” and all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones contained in them may “supply to plants the power of creating fresh men”?

It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey’s letters from the East that mention is made of the writer’s seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people busily engaged in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one’s skeleton for thousands of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a _gigot_ that consists in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.

That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints, of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new ramparts. “Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”

Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his bones for jewels? But _telle est la vie_—or rather, in such a connection, _la mort_.

The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare’s anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact of Swift’s larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the purloiner in America,—of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about Pope’s skull,—and of Mathews’s thigh-bone circulating from house to house.

Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes _post mortem_ with the text with which we started, of Jezebel’s scattered remains on the face of the field, we call to mind Ben Jonson’s description (only too historically true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; “these fingers, and these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart....

“The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus, And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world, Now torn and scatter’d, as he needs no grave; Each little dust covers a little part; So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried.”

“_CONSIDER THE LILIES._”

ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.

Vulgar utilitarianism—for there is a vulgar and shallow phase of it, as well as a scientific and a misrepresented one—can surely find little to its fancy (but then it has no fancy) the invitation, or monition, even though uttered in the Sermon on the Mount, of “Consider the lilies.” Why consider them, it would fain object, seeing that they toil not, neither do they spin? But that is the very reason for considering them. They are clothed from above with surpassing beauty, without taking thought for themselves; so clothed, not for utilitarian ends, except in the large sense that the _dulce_ too is _utile_, that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever; and _that_ is undeniably to be of some “use” in the world.

Herein lies the simple answer to the query in the laureate’s poem,—

“Oh, to what uses shall we put the wildweed flower that simply blows? And is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose? But any man that walks the mead, in bud, or blade, or bloom, may find, According as his humours lead, a meaning suited to his mind.”

And liberal applications lie in art as nature. The Warwickshire justice tells Shakspeare, after hearing him recite his stanzas on a sweetbriar, “Thou mightest have added some moral about life and beauty: poets never handle roses without one.” But then Justice Shallow is the critic. The author of the “Citation and Examination” in which the criticism is uttered, has an imaginary dialogue between Vittoria Colonna and Michel Angelo—the former of whom defines the difference betwixt poetry and all other arts, all other kinds of composition, to be this: in them, utility comes before delight; in this, delight before utility. Buonarotti submits that in some pleasing poems there is nothing whatsoever of the useful. But Vittoria thinks he is mistaken: an obvious moral is indeed a heavy protuberance, which injures the gracefulness of a poem; but there is wisdom of one kind or other, she alleges, in every sentence of a really good composition, and it produces its effect in various ways. “The beautiful in itself is useful by awakening our finer sensibilities, which it must be our own fault if we do not often carry with us into action.” Leigh Hunt, in his “Song of the Flowers,” makes them exult in the fact, by their mere existence demonstrated, that heaven loves colour; that great Nature clearly joys in red and green: “What sweet thoughts she thinks of violets, and pinks, and a thousand flashing hues, made solely to be seen:”

“Uselessness divinest Of a use the finest Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use; Travellers weary eyed Bless us far and wide; Unto sick and prison’d thoughts we give sudden truce; Not a poor town window Loves its sickliest planting, But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylon’s whole vaunting.”

So again Mr. Procter apostrophizes Nature in his “Song of the Snowdrop,” as having surely sent it forth alone to the cold and sullen season, like a thought at random thrown,—“sent it thus for some grave reason.

“If ’twere but to pierce the mind With a single gentle thought, Who shall deem thee hard or blind, Who, that thou hast vainly wrought?”

Bishop Copleston, in his plea for a free cultivation of the poetic faculty, contends that its being entirely neglected must prove an irreparable injury to young minds—losing as they do that intellectual charm from which life borrows its loveliest graces: hence he takes exception to Locke’s expression, that educators should beware of making “anything a boy’s business but downright virtue.” Surely, argues his critic, the improvement of the faculties which God has implanted in us is itself a virtue: our attention may be given in undue measure to one, and so may violate that just harmony without which nothing is virtuous, nothing lovely. The faculty itself, which the philosopher seems to condemn, the divine claims to be one of the kindest gifts of heaven. And why, then, it is asked, should man be niggardly where Providence has been bountiful? “Why should he think scorn of that pleasant land, and undervalue those fair possessions, which were not thought beneath the care of the Almighty?” In the garden of Eden, we are reminded, was made to grow, not only what was good for food, but every tree also that was pleasant to the sight: and in that garden man was placed, to keep it, and to dress it.

It is, as Isaac Taylor remarks, by her diversities,—her gay adornments, her copious fund of forms, and her sportive freaks of shape and colour, that Nature allures the eye of man, while she draws him on toward the more arduous, but more noble pursuit of her hidden analogies. An insensible process goes on, the effect of which is gradually to invest general truths with a sort of majesty, as well as beauty; so that, at length, this new charm is found to prevail over the graces and attractions of the exterior diversity of things.

Even philosophy, however, has been said to teach us that nature scatters the lavish beauties of form and colour not always with a utilitarian purpose; or rather, that beauty—merely to display beauty—is often, as in birds and flowers and shells and crystals, the object of material organization. “There is no special use in the metallic lustre on the plumage of the humming-bird, and tropical blossoms blaze for the mere sake of being splendid.” Yet is it owned to be noticeable that only in the lower ranks of the kingdom of being is nature lavish of beauty for the mere sake of the beautiful; and that as we advance upward in the scale of created things, a certain severity and reserve seem to grow upon nature itself.

Shenstone—a now all but forgotten poet—in a now quite forgotten ode, asserts, as in duty bound, the uses beyond use of Nature’s fancy work:

“Search but the garden or the wood, Let yon admired carnation own Not all was meant for raiment, or for food, Not all for needful use alone; There while the seeds of future blossoms dwell, ’Tis colour’d for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.

“Why knows the nightingale to sing? Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice? Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing? For sustenance alone? for use? For preservation?”...

An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were between the lines:

“This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone, Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone; How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.”

The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity. But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin; and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with merely blooming.

We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for the glories of His creation.”

It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in his “Salathiel,” pleading for the _right_ of beauty to have a natural power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs. Browning’s last poems—

“What if God has set her here Less for action than for Being?— For the eye and for the ear.

“Just to show what beauty may, Just to prove what music can.”

_A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE._

1 CORINTHIANS vii. 31.

The apostle would have his brethren so to use this world, as not abusing it; and for this reason, that “the fashion of this world passeth away.” In the original the phrase runs: παράγει γὰρ τὸ ΣΧΗΜΑ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου. The expression is said by Grotius and others to be borrowed from the theatre, and to refer to the scene-shifting of the stage. Life here below has verily its histrionic aspects; the fashion of it passeth away much as do the scene-painter’s creations, the stage-carpenter’s framework, the spectacular effects and dissolving views, nay the very actors themselves. For, all the world is in some sense a stage, and all the men and women merely players—

“They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”

Considering his own profession, the figure is one that must often have crossed and occupied Shakspeare’s mind—at once so keenly observing and so profoundly meditative. Not that he harps much upon it, so much as might, perhaps, have been expected, in his plays. Still he does now and then recur to the histrionic metaphor. And it is in his graver mood, not his lighter, that he does so; in sober sadness, not with gibing glee. As where Lear, in the extremity of his distraction, intent on preaching to Gloster, takes for his text the wail of infancy, crying, the first time that it smells the air: for

“When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools.”

Or again, as where Antonio, the care-fraught merchant of Venice, assured by a friend that he is looking far from well, indeed “marvellously changed,” and remonstrated with for not taking life more easily, replies:

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.”

_Mundus universus exercet histrioniam_,—the saw is Petronius Arbiter’s. There is an obverse reading, by some other old Eminent Hand: _Totum mundum agit histrio_. If all the world’s a play, so again there’s not in all the world a character the player won’t act. Lucretius had the stage simile of life in his mind’s eye, when he said of those who hide certain of their doings, _vitæ post-scenia celant_,—the _post-scenium_ being what we call “behind the scenes,” where the actors dress and “make up” for their parts. And what says a distich in the Greek Anthology:

“Σκηνὴ πᾶς ὁ βίος, καὶ παίγνιον· ἢ μάθε παίζειν, Τὴν σπουδὴν μεταθεὶς, ἢ φέρε τὰς ὀδύνας.”

“Life is a stage, a play: so learn thy part, All cares removed, or rend with grief thy heart.”

Sir Thomas Browne professes, in his large utterance and stately style: “The world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.” To the same effect, though not in the same spirit, Wordsworth’s recluse avows himself tired

“Of the ostentatious world a swelling stage With empty actions and vain passions stuffed.”

When both Swift and Bolingbroke had closed the tenth lustre of their years, his cynical lordship wrote from Brussels to the cynical dean, that he thought it high time to determine how they should “play the last act of the farce. Might not my life,” adds accomplished St. John, “be entitled much more properly a what-d’ye-call-it than a farce? Some comedy, a great deal of tragedy, and the whole interspersed with scenes of Harlequin, Scaramouch, and Dr. Baloardo.” Accomplished St. John was always, and to the last an accomplished actor. As for Dr. Swift, he expanded the histrionic similitude of life into some eighteen stanzas on the puppet show—which record how wit, “the life of man to represent, and turn it all to ridicule, did once a puppet show invent, where the chief actor is a fool”—and of which, perhaps, the gravest runs thus:

“This fleeting scene is but a stage Where various images appear; In different parts of youth and age, Alike the prince and peasant share.”

Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza how like human life is to a play. One takes the part of a ruffian, another of a liar, a third of a merchant, a fourth of a soldier. This man is for the occasion the lover; that man is the judicious friend. At last the play is ended. Each takes off the clothes which belong to his part, and the players remain equal. So it is in the comedy of this world, says Don Quixote. There are emperors and popes, and all the characters that can be introduced into a play; but it is played out, death takes away the outward trappings which made them seem to differ, and they remain equal in the tomb.

Where, is the author of the Complaint’s complaining query, or querulous plaint,

“Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene; Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?”

It is a trite topic, indeed, with Dr. Young,—that of “Life’s gay stage, one inch above the grave,” whereon those strut and fret their hour, that shall soon be seen no more for ever. All, merely players.

“Each, in his turn, some tragic story tells, With now and then a wretched farce between.”

Dr. Maginn takes note of the frequency with which Lucian compares life to a theatrical procession, in which magnificent parts are assigned to some, who pass before the eyes of the spectators clothed in costly garments, and bedecked with glittering jewels; but, the moment the show is over, are reduced to their original nothingness, no longer kings and heroes, but poor players whose hour has been strutted out.

No wonder that the master Showman of Vanity Fair should pen an _envoi_ after this fashion:

“The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter’s bell: A moment yet the actor stops, And looks around, to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task; And when he’s laughed and said his say, He shows, as he removes the mask, A face that’s anything but gay.”

Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life, in their _belles lettres_, of whatever date. And in point of fact the figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of _théâtre_ and _comédie_. He was an accomplished actor from first to last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the _belle comédie_ that was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another _habituée_ behind the scenes, and herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes the world as _une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs_.

Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and women are merely players, motley’s your only wear.

Of another _spirituel_, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period, Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore years composed a complete masquerade; for

“this man in his time play’d many parts,”

and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude, facility, and zest.

Such another actor, with a difference, was Voltaire. As Voltaire himself said of the Duchess of Maine, “Elle aimera la comédie jusqu’au dernier moment, et, quand elle sera malade, je vous conseille de lui administrer quelque belle pièce,” etc., etc.,—so of the mocking philosopher of Ferney, playing his many parts, it has been said, that he had a genius for transformations, having always more than one _rôle_ to play in the comedy of life—which diversity of _rôles_ jumped with his humour, and just hit the mobile preferences of a man who so early in his existence turned player. The life of Voltaire is a comedy, says Sainte-Beuve: his correspondence with D’Alembert shows us the coulisses and background—and lets us in to damaging and disenchanting revelations behind the scenes. Elsewhere he may be seen to fret and strut his hour upon the stage, carefully made up, and all in point device costume; but here we have him in undress, and by dusty daylight, and off his guard.

_Tous les comédiens ne sont pas du théâtre_, is rightly reckoned one of the prettiest _provérbes_ of M. Théodore Leclerc. In the Proverbe which bears that pregnant title, a nephew incidentally tells his uncle, “Vous qui êtes un homme du monde, vous appelez cela l’esprit du monde; moi qui suis un comédien, j’appelle cela de la comédie. C’est toujours la même chose, sous un nom différent.” The salon and the stage are on a level. To be a real man of the world, is to be an actor of the first class.

M. Scribe puts the proverb as a practical epigram into the mouth of old Michonnet, when trying to soothe and inspirit his pet pupil for the stage: “Calme toi et étudie; ... il y a dans le monde de plus grands comédiens que nous!”

Indeed, according to Chamfort, there is no choice in the matter; every man, however wise and unsophisticated and open-hearted, must, sooner or later, turn actor, on this great stage of fools. For, “la fortune et le costume qui l’entourent font de la vie une représentation au milieu de laquelle il faut qu’à la longue l’homme le plus honnête devienne comédien malgré lui.” We are all actors and actresses, says one of Miss Eden’s characters, and “none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all day long.” Not that every one plays just the part he or she would have chosen. The distribution of _rôles_ would seem often to make this a mad world, my masters.

“Le monde, à mon avis, est comme un grand théâtre, Où chacun en public, l’un par l’autre abusé, Souvent à ce qu’il est, joue un rôle opposé.”

This, one might almost paraphrase in the words of John Webster’s wobegone Duchess Mariana:

“I account this world a tedious theatre, For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will.”