Part 12

“But the next day, even the common people, as well as their betters, appeared in their usual state of indifference. They drank, they swore, they lied, they cheated, they quarrelled, they murdered. In short, the world went on in the old channel.”

To apply what Butler says of “saints” in his application of the word, as a cant term then of political significance:

“For saints in peace degenerate, And dwindle down to reprobate; ... And though they’ve tricks to cast their sins, As easy as serpents do their skins, That in a while grow out again, In peace they turn mere carnal men; And from the most refined of saints As naturally turn miscreants,[15] As barnacles turn solan geese I’ th’ islands of the Orcades.”

That is a fine stroke of nature, in the Knight’s Tale (from Chaucer), where Dryden makes Arcite resolve, only when and not until moribund, to avow the wrong he has done to Palamon, and own his fear of repeating it should he recover:

“When ’twas declared all hope of life was past, Conscience (that of all physic works the last) Caused him to send for Emily in haste. With her, at his desire, came Palamon;”

to whom Arcite owns the faithless part he has played, and desires forgiveness, but at the same time makes this frank avowal:—

“And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong, I should return to justify my wrong; For while my former flames remain within, Repentance is but want of power to sin.”

Mr. Tennyson pictures for us a similar instance in Sir Lancelot:

“Yet the great knight in his mid-sickness made Full many a holy vow and pure resolve. These, as but born of sickness, could not live; For when the blood ran lustier in him again, Full often the sweet image of one face, Making a treacherous quiet in his heart, Dispersed his resolution like a cloud.”

Treating of missions in Abyssinia in the sixteenth century, Gibbon relates how, in a moment of terror, the emperor promised to reconcile himself and his subjects to the Catholic faith. “But the vows,” adds the historian, “which pain had extorted, were forsworn on the return of health.” Swift again, in his history of England,—for the Dean of St. Patrick wrote one—tells how William Rufus fell dangerously sick at Gloucester, on his return from Scotland, and being moved by the fears of dying, began to discover great marks of repentance, with many promises of amendment and retribution. “But as it is the disposition of men who derive their vices from their complexions, that their passions usually beat strong and weak with their pulses, so it fared with this prince, who, upon recovery of his health, soon forgot the vows he had made in his sickness, relapsing with greater violence into the same irregularities,” etc.

Michael Germain—who, however, is allowed to have looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French encyclopédiste—makes merry, as one of Mabillon’s Italian expedition (in 1685), at the expense of that indolent and hypochondriacal Pope (so Sir James Stephen calls him), Innocent XI. “If I should attempt,” writes this French Benedictine, “to give you an exact account of the health of his Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.’ At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical.... The worst of it is, that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like other great sinners;” like Louis XV., for instance, at the commencement of whose last illness Mr. Carlyle so vividly depicts the consternation of the infamous Du Barry, lest she should have to take flight, as her predecessors had been constrained to do when the Well-beloved (Bien-aimé) had been sick before. “Should the Most Christian King die, or even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas! had not the fair, haughty Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that fever scene at Metz, long since; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background. Pompadour, too, when Damiens wounded Royalty ‘slightly, under the fifth rib,’ ... had to pack, and be in readiness; yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned.” His Most Christian Majesty was of no distant kin with that profligate viscount in Mr. Thackeray’s story, who used to recount misdeeds “with rueful remorse when he was ill, for the fear of death set him instantly repenting; and with shrieks of laughter when he was well, his lordship having a very great sense of humour.” Of the same kindred comes the same author’s Miss Crawley, as we see her ill with fright, in her lonely, loveless old age. When in health and good spirits, this venerable inhabitant of Vanity Fair, we are assured, had as free notions about religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire; but “when illness overtook her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.” Nor be forgotten, as a scion of the same stock, that puffy, pursy, pusillanimous creature, Jos. Sedley, of whom we read that, in the course of his voyage home from Bengal, he disappeared in a panic during a two-days’ gale, and remained in his cot reading a religious tract left on board by a missionary’s wife; while, “for common reading he had brought a stock of novels and plays,” to which of course he would return with all the more zest and devotion when the perils of the gale were past.

Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of “wholesome discipline” than to the deadly sickness. He says, “The well-known proverb, ‘The devil was sick,’ etc., shows how generally it has been observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief, is, that it is so much easier to _recall_ exactly the sensations felt when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again, as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much affects the mind along with the body.”

And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a “poem” to the subject; and a greater poet—if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning

“Of seamen’s fates, and the loud tempests raise The waters, and repentance for past sinning In all who o’er the great deep take their ways: They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don’t; Because, if drown’d, they can’t—if spar’d, they won’t.”

_SLEEP AND DEATH._

ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.

To His disciples our Lord spoke of His friend, and theirs, “our friend, Lazarus,” as sleeping; intimating at the same time His intention of going on to Bethany, that He might awaken him out of sleep. “Then said His disciples, Lord, if he sleep he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus spake of his death; but they thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”

The affinity of sleep to death is familiarly recognised in the Old Testament as in the New; indeed, in universal literature of whatever age, sacred and profane. Bathsheba anticipates the day, only too near at hand, when her lord the king “shall sleep with his fathers.” Daniel foretells the awaking of many that sleep in the dust of the earth. The psalmist utters a deprecation lest he sleep the sleep of death. Jesus declared the sick maiden to be not dead, but sleeping; and was laughed to scorn by those who _knew_ that she was dead. Them that sleep in Jesus, saith the apostle, will God bring with Him. We shall not all sleep, he says elsewhere, but we shall all be changed.

Homer personifies a dualism of “Sleep and Death, two twins of wingèd race, of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace;” and he makes the friends of Sarpedon “his sacred corse bequeath to the soft arms of silent Sleep and Death.” He pictures Aphrodite speeding to Lemnos o’er the rolling deep, to “seek the cave of Death’s half-brother, Sleep.” The dying Gorgias, we are told, being in a slumber, and asked how he did, answered, “Pretty well; only Sleep is commending me to the charge of his brother.” Samuel Daniel apostrophizes “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, brother to Death, in silent darkness born;” and so too, Beaumont and Fletcher apostrophize him in almost the selfsame words. So again their contemporary, John Webster, “O thou soft natural Death, that art joint twin to sweetest slumber!” Cowley’s ode _in memoriam_ of William Harvey, begins with sombre commemoration of a dismal and a fearful night, “when sleep, death’s image, left his troubled breast, by something liker death possest.” And the last verse of Denham’s “Song to Morpheus” identifies the twins,—practically makes a hendiadys of them, as grammarians might call it:

“Sleep, that is thy best repast, Yet of death it bears a taste, And both are the same thing at last.”

Warton’s Latin epigram on sleep, as _certissima mortis imago_, has been Englished by Wolcot with a beauty and felicity pronounced by critics to be worthy of the original:

“Come, gentle sleep! attend thy votary’s prayer; And, though death’s image to my couch repair, How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie, And, without dying, O how sweet to die!”

Shelley’s opening of “Queen Mab” is a stock quotation: “How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! one pale as yonder waning moon, with lips of lurid blue; the other rosy as the morn when, throned on ocean’s wave, it blushes o’er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!” But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? “Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin.” But this is selecting such an aspect of mortality as comes not within the poet’s purview. Prosaical in every fibre is Sancho Panza meant to be; yet in his famous invocation of blessings on the invention, or rather on the inventor, of sleep, which, quoth he, “covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak”—for Sancho has his poetical moods and tenses after all—he goes on to recognise the affinity which poetry so freely asserts: “It [sleep] has only one fault, as I have heard say, which is, that it looks like death: for between the sleeper and the corpse there is but little to choose.” Shakspeare’s Iachimo calls sleep the “ape of death.” To die, to sleep,—muses Hamlet,—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to, were a consummation devoutly to be wished. “Thy best of rest is sleep,” soliloquizes the duke in “Measure for Measure,”

“And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear’st Thy death, which is no more.”

A couplet of Butler’s, in a description of nightfall, tells how

... “sleep the wearied world relieved, By counterfeiting death revived.”

A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater: “ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.” Sir Thomas Overbury calls sleep, death’s picture drawn to the life, or the twilight of life and death. “In sleep we kindly shake death by the hand; but when we are awaked, we will not know him.” With the closing clause of this sentence compare the closing lines in the following picture by Byron, of man o’erlaboured with his being’s strife, shrinking to “that sweet forgetfulness of life” which sleep induces:

“There lie love’s feverish hope and cunning’s guile, Hate’s working brain, and lull’d ambition’s wile; O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave, And quench’d existence crouches in a grave. What better name may slumber’s bed become? Night’s sepulchre, the universal home, Where weakness, strength, vice, virtue, sunk supine, Alike in naked helplessness recline; Glad for awhile to heave unconscious breath, Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death, And shun, though day but dawn on ills increast, That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”

We term sleep a death, writes Sir Thomas Browne, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. “It is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death.” And then the golden-tongued physician—in his _Religio Medici_—goes on to say that, in fine, so like death seemed to him sleep, that he dare not trust it without his prayers, and a half adieu to the world; and taking his farewell “in a colloquy with God,” that is set in the key of the Evening Hymn, where we pray to be taught to dread the grave as little as our bed. So, in verses of his own weaving, this consummate master of stately rhetorical prose, beseeches God to make his sleep a holy trance:

“Sleep is a death;—O make me try By sleeping, what it is to die! And as gently lay my head On my grave, as now my bed. Howe’er I rest, great God, let me Awake again at last with Thee. And thus assured, behold I lie Securely, or to wake or die. These are my drowsy days; in vain I do now wake to sleep again: O come that hour when I shall never Sleep again, but wake for ever!

“This is the dormitive I take to bedward; I need no other laudanum than this to make me sleep; after which I close my eyes in security, content to take leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.”

George Herbert says, that—

“When boys go first to bed, They step into their voluntary graves; Sleep binds them fast; only their breath Makes them not dead. Successive nights, like rolling waves, Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.”

Ye children, does death ever alarm you? asks the venerable pastor in Tegner’s _Children of the Lord’s Supper_: “Death is the brother of Love, twin-brother is he, and is only more austere to behold.” Shakspeare’s nobleman is gazing with disgust on a sottish sleeper, when he exclaims, “Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!” That image, as embodied in the form of a little child, has often inspired poets to strains of tender admiration. Malaspina, in one of Landor’s unacted (not to say, with almost equal truth, unread) plays thus contemplates, and apostrophizes, such an image:—

“And still thou sleepest, my sweet babe! Is death Like sleep? Ah, who then, who would fear to die? How beautiful is all serenity! Sleep, a child’s sleep, oh how far more serene, And oh, how far more beautiful than any! Whether we breathe so gently, or breathe not, Slight is the difference.”

More familiar to every one in the least conversant with current literature—not ephemeral in its currency, or running so fast as to be, like that which decayeth and waxeth old, ready to vanish away—is Mrs. Browning’s poem on a sleeping child—tired out with playing, and slumbering on the floor; the latter portion alone of which may here find room:—

“And God knows, who sees us twain, child at childish leisure, I am near as tired of pain, as you seem of pleasure;— Very soon, too, by His grace gently wrapt around me, Shall I show as calm a face, shall I sleep as soundly! Differing in this, that you clasp your playthings sleeping, While my hand shall drop the few given to my keeping. Differing in this, that I sleeping shall be colder, And in waking presently, brighter to beholder. Differing in this beside (sleeper, have you heard me? Do you move, and open wide eyes of wonder toward me?)— That while you I thus recall from your sleep,—I solely,— Me from mine an angel shall, with reveille holy!”

_ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH._

1 SAMUEL xvii. 28.

When the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; _that_ is become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets, so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what sterling stuff there was in the stripling. _Why_ had Jesse’s youngest son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the wilderness? Eliab’s anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath himself for the youth,—for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father’s sheep at Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to Eliab or his brethren was it given to foresee in that fresh-coloured shepherd boy the present slayer of Goliath of Gath, and the bosom friend of princely Jonathan, and the paulo-post-future king of Israel, Israel’s sweetest singer, and the man after God’s own heart.

* * * * *

The adage about unrecognised worth, on the part of kinsfolk and neighbours, the proverb of the prophet without honour in his own country and in his father’s house—has its parallel passage in the _Hercules Furens_ of Euripides—

... “οὑ γὰρ ἐσθ’ ὅπου Εσθλόν τι δράσας μάρτυρ’ ἂν λάβοις πάτραν.”

Plutarch adopts it in his treatise on Exile, where he says that you very rarely find a wise man taken for such in his own country: “τῶν φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι κεκηδευμένους.”

The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed, by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country, and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι ὁ βίος.”

As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household. Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed aspires to be the prophet of his _tribe_.” But in effect the “false” prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes, portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle, and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their country because those who were born their equals could not endure to see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!” a heathen admirer is made to exclaim: “it seems as if it were decreed by a public edict that no one shall receive from them any gift beyond a certain value; and that if they do receive it they shall be permitted to return the gods no thanks for it in their native city.” There are towns so barbarous, remarks Boccaccio, in Landor’s “Pentameron,” that they must be informed by strangers of their own great man when they happen to have produced one; and would then detract from his merits, that they might not exhibit their awkwardness in doing him honour, or their shame in withholding it.

Charles IX., on a progress through Provence, sent for Nostradamus, and finding in what slight respect he was held by his countrymen, made a point of publicly declaring, with right royal emphasis, that he should take as a slight to himself the slighting of that philosopher.