Part 13

In the Journal to Stella, Swift hails with cordiality—for the Dean could be cordial on occasion—the appreciation in polite English circles, by ministers and scholars, of Parnell the poet: “Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily; and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed for anything in Ireland makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.” In no unlike spirit and style writes Horace Walpole to Marshal Conway, then travelling abroad: “The honours you have received, though I have so little taste for such things myself, gave me great satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in _not_ being a prophet in one’s own country, when one is almost received like Mohammed in every other. To be an idol at home is no assured touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions, but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules Farnese may lose their temples, but never lose their estimation, by travelling.” In another letter we have Walpole exclaiming, “But adieu, retrospect! it is as idle as prophecy, the characteristic of which is never to be believed where alone it could be useful, _i.e._, in its own country.” And once more, in a later epistle, commenting on the darksome aspect of the times: “That the scene grows very serious there is no doubt; nor do I assume vanity from having possessed the spirit of prophecy—a most useless talent, as predictions never serve as warnings. We know prophets are not honoured in their own country: where then should they be honoured? where they are not known? where probably they never are heard of?” But such notes of interrogation might be multiplied _ad libitum_.

It is to a professedly common-place philosopher we owe the remark, that while there are families in which there exists a preposterous over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several members, there are other families in which there exists a depressing and unreasonable under-estimate of the same. He speaks to his knowledge of such a thing as a family in which certain boys during their early education had it ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest, stupidest, and most ignorant boys in the world; which boys had no sooner gone to a great public school than like rockets they went up forthwith to the top of their classes, and never lost their places there, and afterwards at the university distinguished themselves pre-eminently in honours: “It will not surprise people who know much of human nature, to be told that through this brilliant career of school and college work the home belief in their idleness and ignorance continued unchanged, and that hardly at its end was the toil-worn senior wrangler regarded as other than an idle and useless blockhead.” The writer adds an example of his knowledge of a successful author—to be identified of course by _some_ readers, whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of it, that his writings were anything but “contemptible and discreditable trash.”

The subject is renewed in the ensuing section, on the text of a prophet’s non-acceptance in his own country.

_THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._

ST. LUKE iv. 24.

It was with the emphasis of a “Verily I say unto you,” that our Lord prefaced the assurance that no prophet is accepted in his own country. The speaker spoke from bitter experience. For neither did His brethren believe in Him. It was when He was come into His own country, and taught in their synagogues with a wisdom that astonished them, and wrought mighty works of a kind that bewildered them, that His own countrymen set about asking if this was not the carpenter’s son? was not His mother the well-known Mary? were not James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, His brethren? and His sisters, were they not all near at hand, and known as such? Whence then had this—οὗτος (indefinitely contemptuous)—all these attributes? And they were offended, scandalized, they found a stumbling-block in the condition of Him and His. A double answer was vouchsafed them: the significant restriction of wonder working, for He did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief; and the more direct reply, in so many words, that a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.

Montaigne adverts to this man, or that, having been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor his servant has ever seen anything remarkable: “Few men have been admired by their own domestics”—a sentence to which point and popularity have been given by the epigrammatic form of it, due to Marshal Catinat. “No one,” Montaigne continues, “has been a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own country, as the experience of history shows. It is the same in matters of no consequence.... In my country of Gascony they look upon it as very droll to see me in print. The farther off I am read from my own home, the better I am esteemed; I am fain to purchase printers in Guienne,—elsewhere they purchase me.” Ben Jonson takes note of the greater reverence paid to things remote or strange to us, than to much better, if these be nearer, and fall under our sense. “Men, and almost all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and greater. And where our original is known, we are the less confident; among strangers we trust fortune.” Lord Evandale, in Scott’s “Old Mortality,” discerns at once the “extraordinary qualities” of Henry Morton, which had escaped the notice of his kinsfolk and friends: “You have not been long in learning all his extraordinary qualities, my lord,” says old Major Bellenden. “I, who have known him from boyhood, could, before this affair, have said much of his good principles and good nature; but as to his high talents”—further on _that_ head deponent saith not. The opinions of relatives as to a man’s power, Dr. Wendell Holmes declares to be very commonly of little value; not so much because they sometimes over-rate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; as because, on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. _Vile habetur quod domi est_, Seneca tersely says.

Edmund Burke, in early life, was not happy at home—there being none among the household on Arran Quay to sympathise with his dreams and his aspirations. “He might think himself a genius,” says one of his many biographers, “but it was not to be expected that his own relations should yet think him one.” Describing his position and influence in Lord Rockingham’s administration, Mr. Macknight observes that it is, after all, a man’s own relations who generally look with the least confidence on his long wrestle with adversity, and are most astonished when the tide turns, and a great victory succeeds to what had seemed to them a mere hopeless toil. “To some of the Irish Nagles on the Blackwater, the news that Edmund had been taken into the confidence of the great Whig Lord Rockingham, ... must have seemed as extraordinary as it did to Joseph’s brethren that he should have become so great a man in hostile Egypt.”

_Son pays le crut fou_, says La Fontaine, of a Greek sage; _mais quoi! aucun n’est prophète chez soi_. Of Joan of Arc, and her early mental struggles, a French historian writes: “It behoves her to find in the bosom of her family someone who would believe in her: this was the most difficult part of all.” Non-recognition, disparagement, cold obstruction. Societies and families, as Goethe says, behave in the same way to their dearest members, towns to their worthiest citizens. Consuelo advising Anzoleto to quit Venice, reminds him that “no person is a prophet in his own country. This is a bad place for one who has been seen running about in rags, and where any one may come to say of you, ‘I was his protector, I saw his hidden talent, it was I who recommended him and procured his advance.’” Descartes had to support with philosophic patience the scorn of his family, impatient of a philosopher in it. Jean Bodin, neglected and slighted in his own land, exulted in the welcome accorded to his books in the English Universities, which printed as well as prized them: “il n’est pas rare que nous ayons besoin d’apprendre des étrangers ce que valent nos compatriotes,” observes M. Léon Feugère.

Every rule has its exceptions, and most proverbs too. The case of St. Catharine, of Sienna, is cited by a Protestant biographer as “an exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own country.” The biographer of Edward Irving, recounting with enthusiasm the details of his reception in Annandale in 1828, adds that “for once the proverb seems to have failed. He had honour in his own country, where gentle and simple flocked to hear him,”—neighbouring ministers shutting up their kirks on the Sunday when he preached, and going the “long Sabbath-day’s journey” across the Annandale moors to hear him, along with their people. La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager admirers, but at home, of no account at all; _petit dans son domestique et aux yeux de ses proches_: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet in his own house and country, who enjoys a _vogue_ that is confined to his immediate surroundings, and who _s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole_. But exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it; and the rule as to a prophet’s home acceptance is held to be only confirmed, not disproved, by here and there a stray example in history to the contrary; such as Arnold, of Brescia, being rescued from captivity by some of those partisan nobles of Campania by whom he was honoured as a prophet: “Tanquam _prophetam in terrâ suâ_ cum omni honore habebant.” Or, as the experience, highly exceptional, of young Bernard of Clairvaux, the “strange and irresistible force” of whose character, as the historian of Latin Christianity describes it, enthralled his brothers one after another, and at length his sister. Off to the monastery of Clairvaux they trooped, a complete monastic brotherhood. The youngest boy lingered a short time with his aged father, and then joined the rest. “Even the father died a monk of Clairvaux in the arms of Bernard.” But it was not, we are duly reminded, on his own kindred alone that Bernard wrought with this commanding power. “When he was to preach, wives hurried away their husbands, mothers withdrew their sons, friends their friends, from the resistless magic of his eloquence.” And those that went—what went they out into the wilderness to hear? A prophet? Yea, and almost more than a prophet, by the verdict of his own country and of his father’s house.

_DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE._

PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22 sq.

We read of those who tempted God in the desert, that He gave them their request, and sent leanness withal into their soul. So they did eat meat and were well filled, for He gave them their own desire; but while their meat was yet in their mouths, His wrath came upon them and slew the fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel.

A latter-day poetess, almost masculine in genius, as in out-spoken vigour of diction, tells us that—

“God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,— A gauntlet with a gift in’t,”

and sometimes poison in the gift. Well therefore may the authoress of these lines, which in their original import are scarcely applicable to our theme, make a distressed soul utter a petition that certainly is so:—

... “’tis written in the Book, He heareth the young ravens when they cry; And yet they cry for carrion. O my God,— And we, who make excuses for the rest, We do it in our measure. Then I knelt, And dropped my head upon the pavement too, And prayed, since I was foolish in desire Like other creatures, craving offal-food, That He would stop His ears to what I said, And listen only to the run and beat Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood....”

_Ne mihi contingant quæ volo, sed quæ sunt utilia_: the aspiration has been accepted as an adage, worthy of all acceptation, and of acceptation by all.

“Mais, sans cesse ignorants de nos propres besoins, Nous demandons au ciel ce qu’il nous faut le moins.”

To Shakspeare for an illustration. Pompey, not the Great, is anxious for Divine sanction to speed his ambitious resolves to a prosperous issue. If the great gods be just, he assumes, they will assist the deeds of justest men,—and therefore himself, as pre-eminently entitled to that designation. He is impatient, too, for this manifest favour from above; and sage Menecrates takes occasion not only to check his impatience in particular, but to give him a salutary warning on the subject in general:

... “We, ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers Deny us for our good; so find we profit By losing of our prayers.”

Xenophon tells us of Socrates, that when he prayed, his petition was only this—that the gods would give to him those things that were good; which he did, forasmuch as they alone knew what was good for man. “But he who should ask for gold or silver, or increase of dominion, acted not, in his opinion, more wisely than one who should pray for the opportunity to fight, or game, or anything of the like nature; the consequence of which, being altogether doubtful, might turn, for aught he knew, not a little to his disadvantage.” For,

... “why, alas! do mortal men in vain Of fortune, fate, or Providence complain? God gives us what He knows our wants require, And better things than those that we desire: Some pray for riches; riches they obtain; But, watched by robbers, for their wealth are slain; Some pray from prison to be freed; and come, When guilty of their vows, to fall at home; Murdered by those they trusted with their life, A favoured servant, or a bosom wife. Such dear-bought blessings happen every day, Because we know not for what things we pray.”

There is a Greek prayer by an unknown poet, but highly commended by the most illustrious of Socrates’ disciples: that sovran Jove would grant his subjects good, whether they pray for it or not; and avert from them evil, even though they pray for it.

Ζεῦ βασιλεῦ, τὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ καὶ εὐχομένοις καὶ ἀνεύκτοις Ἄμμι δίδου· τὰ δὲ δεινὰ καὶ εὐχομένὀις, ἀπαλέξοις.

And it is to Plato’s dialogue upon prayer that we owe the instructions imparted by Socrates to Alcibiades, upon which Addison has founded a paper in the _Spectator_. In that dialogue we read how Socrates met Alcibiades going to his devotions, and observing his eyes to be fixed upon the ground with great seriousness and attention—for even that fastest of fast young men could, it seems, be slow enough to say his prayers—told him that he had reason to be thoughtful upon that occasion, since it was possible for a man to bring down evil upon himself by his own supplications, and that those things which the gods sent him in answer to his petitions might turn to his destruction. This, says he, may not only happen when a man prays for what is mischievous in its own nature, as Œdipus implored the gods to sow dissension between his sons; but when he prays for what he believes would be for his good, and against what he believes would be to his detriment. This the philosopher shows must necessarily happen among us, since most men are blinded with ignorance, prejudice, or passion, which hinder them from seeing what things are really eligible for them. And all this, as his manner is, the philosopher teaches by examples.

It seems allowed that Juvenal took the cue of his tenth Satire, as well as Persius of his second, from the Dialogue of Plato aforesaid.

“Evertêre domos totas, optantibus ipsis, Dii faciles. Nocitura togâ, nocitura petuntur Militiâ.”

Or, as Englished by Mr. Owen of Warrington:

“Th’ indulgent gods whole houses have o’erthrown At men’s own prayer;—the fatal choice their own. In war we ask but woes; in peace but woes,” etc.

The Crassi, Pompeii, and the like, are represented as ruined by the assent of Heaven to their ambitious prayers—

“Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita _malignis_.”

Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose his honours and his head.

... “Sed multæ urbes, et publica vota Vicerunt. Igitur fortuna ipsius, et urbis, Servatum victo caput abstulit.”

Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this: that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer to them than to himself:

“Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris: Nam pro jocundis aptissima quæque dabunt Dii. Carior est illis homo quàm sibi.”

Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan, how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?” And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves, he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?... Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself.... Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy:

“Craignez, seigneur, craignez que le ciel rigoureux Ne vous haïsse assez pour exaucer vos vœux.”

And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to exclaim:

“Ne précipite point tes funestes bienfaits, Neptune! j’aime mieux n’être exaucé jamais.”

And afterwards again he utters the tristful line:

“Inexorables dieux! qui m’avez trop servi.”

So in a subsequent passage:

“Je hais jusqu’aux soins dont m’honorent les dieux: Et je m’en vais pleurer leurs faveurs meurtrières, Sans plus les fatiguer d’inutiles prières. Quoi qu’ils fissent pour moi, leur funeste bonté Ne me saurait payer de ce qu’ils m’ont ôté.”

Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and regret.

In one of his many onslaughts against conventionalism, Mr. Emerson says that what we ask daily is to be conventional. “Supply, most kind gods! this defect in my dress, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring; supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them.” But the wise gods, according to this essayist, reply, “No, we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman,”—a Fifth-Avenue landlord, or a West-End householder, not being Mr. Emerson’s ideal of the highest style of man. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, he adds, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of human life.—With Mr. Carlyle, we will not complain, therefore, of Dante’s miseries; who, had all gone right with him, as he wished it, might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,—in which case, the world had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung. “Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Comedia_ to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.”

Visions, and hopes, and prospects, writes Horace Walpole, are pretty playthings for boys. “It is folly to vex one’s self for what cannot last very long. Indeed, what can, even when one is young? Corydon firmly believes he shall be wretched for ever if he does not marry Phyllis. That misery can but last till she has lost her bloom. His eternal woe would vanish if her nose grew red. How often do our griefs become our comforts! I know what I wish to-day; not at all what I shall wish to-morrow. Sixty says, You did not wish for _me_, yet you would like to keep me. Sixty is in the right; and I have not a word more to say.” The Strawberry Hill esquire was himself turning the shady side of sixty when he thus wrote. Of quite another school was that gentle and good Q. Q., as she styled herself, once popular, now almost forgotten, who thus moralized her song:

“How false is found, as on in life we go, Our early estimate of bliss or woe! —Some sparkling joy attracts us, that we fain Would sell a precious birthright to obtain: There all our hopes of happiness are placed, Life looks without it like a joyless waste; No good is prized, no comfort sought beside, Prayers, tears implore, and will not be denied: Heaven pitying hears th’ intemperate, rude appeal, And suits its answer to our truest weal. The self-sought idol, if at last bestow’d, Proves, what our wilfulness required—a goad. Ne’er, but as needful chastisement, is given The wish thus forced and torn and storm’d from Heaven; But if withheld, in pity, from our prayer, We rave, awhile, of torment and despair.... Meantime, Heaven bears the grievous wrong, and waits In patient pity till the storm abates ... Deigning, perhaps, to show the mourner soon, ’Twas special mercy that denied the boon.”