Part 21

Mr. Carlyle made a picturesque application of the royal Dane’s injunction to the waves, in his survey of the advancing tide of the French Revolution—grim host marching on, the black-browed Marseillese in the van, with hum and murmur, far-heard; like the ocean-tide, “drawn up, as if by Luna and Influences, from the great deep of waters, they roll gleaming on; no king, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back.” To quite another effect is Judge Haliburton’s application of the incident, in his panegyric on the capabilities of the Southampton docks. It was here, he says, that Cnut sat in his arm-chair, to show his courtiers (after he gave up drinking and murder) that though he was a mighty prince, he could not control the sea. “Well, what Canute could not do, your dock company has accomplished. It has actually said to the sea, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther:’ and the waves have obeyed the mandate.”

By poetical licence a Cornish poet of the present day ascribes to his rock-bound coast a _ne plus ultra_ control over an ever-aggressive sea: he pictures the embattled advance of the waves, and their discomfiture and retreat:

“They come—they mount—they charge in vain. Thus far, incalculable main; No more! Thine hosts have not o’erthrown The lichen on the barrier stone. Have the rocks faith that thus they stand, Unmoved, a grim and stately band, And look, like warriors tried and brave, Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?”

One, and one alone, is veritably the ruler of the waves. When the floods are risen, when the floods have lift up their voice, and lift up their waves, to Him only it pertaineth to still their tumultuous clamour, and to level their aspiring crests. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. “O Lord God of hosts, who is like unto Thee?... Thou rulest the raging of the sea: Thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise.”

With a moral application we conclude, borrowed from one whose was ever the pen of a ready writer to point a moral. Some dream, says Cowper, that

... “they can silence when they will The storm of passion, and say, ‘Peace, be still:’ But ‘Thus far and no farther,’ when addressed To the wild wave, or wilder human breast, Implies authority that never can, That never ought to be the lot of man.”

_IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES._

1 SAMUEL xxvi. 8-25.

Soundly the stalwart king of Israel slept within the trench, while David and Abishai gazed on him by stealth in the night-watches—his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster, and Abner and the people lying round about him. Abishai was for smiting him with the spear at once, promising that once should be quite enough. Could David hesitate? Was it not a special Providence? Had not God delivered his enemy into his hand? Let but David give the word, the look, the nod, and Abishai would at one fell swoop send Saul to his account, with all his imperfections on his head. “Now, therefore, let me smite him, I pray thee, with the spear, even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the second time.” But David was inflexible in repudiating the regicide. Not for him was it to stretch forth a hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul slept on, and the shadow of death passed away. Unaware of the peril that had approached him, his awaking was an ordinary awaking. But, to convict the watchers of unwatchfulness, if not to convince the king of a narrow escape and a generous foe, David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul’s bolster; and he and his companion gat them away unperceived—for no man saw it, nor knew it, neither awaked; for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from the Lord was fallen upon them. Anon David roused the host with the story of that narrow escape, charging Abner with criminal neglect worthy of death. And as he recited the story, Saul was touched; and there was emotion in his voice and in his words when he felt what the peril had been, and knew whom he had to thank for its harmless issue.

Had we eyes sharp enough, observes Cowper in a letter to Hayley, we should see the arrows of death flying in all directions, and account it a wonder that we and our friends escape them but a single day. Many years previously the poet had written to the same effect to Unwin,—that could we see at a glance of the eye what is passing every day upon all the roads in the kingdom, we should indeed find reason to be thankful for journeys performed in safety, and for deliverance from dangers we are not perhaps even permitted to see. “When in some of the high southern latitudes, and in a dark tempestuous night, a flash of lightning discovered to Captain Cook a vessel which glanced along close by his side, and which but for the lightning he must have run foul of, both the danger and the transient light that showed it were undoubtedly designed,” as Cowper is devoutly convinced, “to convey to him this wholesome instruction, that a particular Providence attended him, and that he was not only preserved from evils of which he had notice, but from many more of which he had no information or even the least suspicion.” It is noticeable, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that a danger which approaches, but wheels away—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. “The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, becomes invested with an attraction of horror for all who hear the story.” In another of his books, and the most celebrated of them all, the same impassioned master of English prose, recites the thoughts that arose within him, at a crisis in his youthful life, on the suggestive opening of that beautiful collect, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!” in which the great shadows of night are made symbolically significant—those great powers, night and darkness, that belong to aboriginal chaos, being made representative of the perils that, unseen, continually menace poor afflicted human nature. “With deepest sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness,—perils that I seemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of darkness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing.” As Marcello has it, in Beddoes’ tragedy,

“Each minute of man’s safety he does walk A bridge, no thicker than his frozen breath, O’er a precipitous and craggy danger Yawning to death!”

With admirable subtlety and suggestiveness, Mr. Hawthorne illustrates this subject in that _fantasiestück_ of his, called “David Swan.” A young man of that name falls asleep on the roadside, of a summer’s day, and _we_ see, what he sees not, nor dreams of happening to him, a series of incidents that go near to alter the current of his being, and very near, in one instance, to stop altogether its earthly course. When he awakes from that sound sleep, and hies him cheerily homeward, he knows not, nor ever will know, in this world at least, that while he slumbered, all in one brief hour, wealth was all but made over to him by one heirless passer-by, and death all but dealt him by two reckless ruffians. They were interrupted, and left him, and he never was to know of the narrow escape. The moral of the fantasy is, that sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. And the moralist’s query ensues, Does it not argue a superintending Providence, that while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually athwart our path, there should still be regularity enough in mortal life to render foresight even partially available?

The moral of “David Swan” is implicitly conveyed in that passage in “Waverley” which relates Colonel Gardiner’s unconscious escape from the raised and pointed weapon of the Highlander, Callum Beg. An incident that appeals to his superstition makes the intending slayer drop his piece; and “Colonel Gardiner,” we read, “unconscious of the danger he had escaped, turned his horse round, and rode slowly back to the front of his regiment.”

So with Mrs. Hilyard, in “Salem Chapel,” on the evening of the secret interview upon the chapel steps. A hidden witness there is of that interview, who, however, sees not the gesture of her companion which bodes, and almost involves, a fatal, a murderous issue. “But even Mrs. Hilyard herself never knew how near, how very near, she was at that moment to the unseen world.”

Or glance, again, at the Azteca, in Southey’s “Madoc,” gliding like a snake to where Caradoc lay sleeping—all unconscious of peril, as happy, and happily unconscious, David Swan:—

“Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved. The Azteca stood over him; he knew His victim, and the power of vengeance gave Malignant joy. Once hast thou ’scaped my arm; But what shall save thee now? the Tiger thought, Exulting, and he raised his spear to strike. That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp The gale of morning passed, and swept its strings Into so sweet a harmony, that sure It seemed no earthly tune. The savage man Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round; No human hand is near:—and hark! again The aërial music swells and dies away. Then first the heart of Tialala felt fear: He thought that some protecting spirit watched Beside the stranger, and, abashed, withdrew.”

To Cremona went together, in seeming amity, the Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII., and there an incident had nearly taken place, which, as the historian of Latin Christianity says, might, by preventing the Council of Constance, have changed the fortunes of the world. Gabrino Fondoli, who from podestâ had become tyrant of Cremona, “entertained his distinguished guests with sumptuous hospitality. He led them up the lofty tower to survey the rich and spacious plains of Lombardy. On his deathbed Fondoli confessed the sin, of which he deeply repented, that he resisted the temptation, and had not hurled pope and emperor down, and so secured himself an immortal name.” Pope and emperor on the tower-top were as little inclined to suspect how closely the shadow of death was then and there overshadowing them, as they would have been able to comprehend the ultimate repentance of the intending murderer, not for having intended murder, but for having not carried his intention out.

It is one of Young’s night thoughts that “the farthest from the fear, are often nearest to the stroke of fate.” Often the stroke menaces them unawares, but after all is not dealt; and to the last they are unaware that on such a day, and at such a minute, there was but a step between them and death.

_Quid quisque vitet_, says Horace, _nunquam homini satis cautum est, in horas_. The ignorance of what is impending is bliss, in a certain sense. Just as

“The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold, Unmoved may the blade of the butcher behold; They dream not—ah, happier they!—that the knife, Though uplifted, can menace their innocent life. It falls;—the frail thread of their being is riven; They dread not, suspect not, the blow till ’tis given.”

_Mais qu’il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas_, is the wish of some in regard even of escaped peril.

Scott vividly illustrates in “Rokeby” the position of unconscious and therefore unconcerned borderers on the grave; it is where Bertram creeps on hands and knees through the spreading birch and hazels, and takes aim at Redmond, and twice Matilda comes between the carabine and Redmond’s breast, “just ere the spring his finger pressed;” and the interruption of Guy Denzil’s approach makes the ruffian retire, _rê infectâ_:

“They whom dark Bertram, in his wrath, Doomed to captivity or death, Their thoughts to one sad subject lent, Saw not nor heard the ambushment. Heedless and unconcerned they sate, While on the very verge of fate; Heedless and unconcerned remained, When Heaven the murderer’s arm restrained; As ships drift darkling down the tide, Nor see the shelves o’er which they glide.”

_NO LEISURE._

ST. MARK vi. 31.

That must have been a busy time with the apostles, careful and troubled about many things, cumbered with much serving, worn with many anxieties, and kept in unrest by continual demands on their services, when the Divine Master—knowing their frame and remembering that they were dust—bade them come by themselves “apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had _no leisure_ so much as to eat.”

Our own age has been rightly described as one of stimulus and high pressure: we live as it were our lives out fast; effect is everything; results produced at once; something to show, and something that may _tell_. “The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men’s curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.” Or as an eminent reviewer puts it—writing to the same effect as the eminent divine just quoted—without grudging to contemporary productions the applause which they receive, or the interest which they excite, thoughtful minds cannot see them with complacency obscuring by their brilliance, or perhaps their “glare,” the more temperate and wholesome light of the elder classics of our land. “At no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose ever been more needful, if the literature of the present century be to take its place among its great antecessors.” For want of repose our prose is declared on the same authority to be growing turgid, our verse empty or inflated; and as a good cooling regimen is required to correct these exorbitances, nothing would rejoice our censor more than to be assured, on the credit of sound publishers’ statistics, that the number of new books was diminishing, while that of re-editions of old books was on the increase. Dr. Arnold, we are told, once preached a sermon to the boys at Rugby against taking in the monthly numbers of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by way of protest against systematic and uninterrupted excitement. “Society keeps up as much excitement as it can. It wants its new number of something to appear incessantly. There is no rest or repose, and one subject of thought succeeds another faster than wave succeeds wave.” A rather ironical apology for dull sermons sets up at least this plea in their behalf: that so easy is it for a man who lives in such a society never to be alone with himself, that a compulsory half-hour of quietude at a wakeful time of the day, in a place which recalls to him the most solemn thoughts, is no slight advantage.

La Bruyère, two centuries ago, complained of French society in his day, that there was no getting any one to abide quietly at home, and there in patience possess his soul, and make sure to himself that he had one. All was hurry and flurry. Not to be excitedly busy was to be idle. But that the philosopher denied. A wise man turns his leisure to account. He is not idle who devotes his leisure to tranquil meditation, and converse and reading. Rather is this a species of work—at any rate a means for working with fresh energy and better effect when the working hour comes round again. There is such a thing as what Wordsworth wisely calls a wise passiveness.

Chateaubriand, again, more than a century afterwards, complained—not indeed of Frenchmen alone, but of all men—that all was done helter-skelter and in haste, post-haste; that amid this din and distraction of coming and going there was no leisure so much as to eat; or that if men did set about a meal, there was no such thing as sitting down to it, but it was eaten by them with their loins girded, their shoes on their feet, and their staff in their hand—eaten in haste, as was the Jewish passover.

The most eminent political economist of our day owns himself to be “not charmed” with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on one another’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The town, complains one of the most thoughtful and influential of latter-day divines,—the town, with its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has spread over the country, and there is no country, scarcely home. “To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becoming a vocable of past ages.” He echoes Wordsworth’s lament that

“Plain living and high thinking are no more;”

and in another place he declares our want to be the vision of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillise us in the midst of artificial tastes, and the draught of a purer spring to cool the flame of our excited life. It is many years ago since the most genial of essayists avowed his preference for “coaching it,” and could have been well content to live upon the road, in those roomy antiques, instead of getting on at the present rate, and being impatient to arrive at some town, only perhaps to be equally restless when arrived there. Not that he was insensible to the pleasure of driving fast—stirring the blood as it does, and giving a sense of power; but he complained that everything was getting a little too hasty and business-like, “as though we were to be eternally getting on, and never realizing anything but fidget and money—the means instead of the end.” A distinction is duly recognised between haste and hurry—hurry adding to rapidity the element of painful confusion; but in the case of ordinary people, as Dr. Boyd observes, haste generally implies hurry, and very strenuously he dilates on “what a horrible thing” it must be to go through life in a hurry. The self-styled country parson made a name (“letters four do make that name”) by his “Recreations.” And he has since then maintained its popularity by a series of “Leisure Hours.” In his essay concerning Hurry and Leisure he avows his utter contempt for the idler—the loafer, as Yankees term him—who never does anything, whose idle hands are always in his idle pockets, and who is always sauntering to and fro. Leisure, we are reminded, is the intermission of labour—the blink of idleness in the life of a hard-working man; and it is only in the case of such a man that leisure is allowed to be dignified, commendable, or enjoyable. “But to him it is all these, and more. Let us not be ever driving on. The machinery, physical and mental, will not stand it.” Only in leisure, it is further contended, will the human mind yield many of its best products. Calm views, sound thoughts, healthful feelings, do not originate in a hurry or a fever.

It was in wistful remembrance of the silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, as recorded by the Seer of Patmos, that Mrs. Browning penned a sonnet which expressed a prayer, suggestive in its earnestness and of wide application,

“Vouchsafe us such a half-hour’s hush alone, In compensation for our stormy years!”

Never to be forgotten amid the tranquillising sweets of leisure hours, with healing on their wings, is the serene solemnity of that silent half-hour.

Professor Longfellow, in one of his earliest works, proclaimed to his countrymen as the great want of the national character, that of the “dignity of repose.” “We seem,” he said, “to live in the midst of a battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life, it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main.” The following stanza is so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the style of the same author—the author of the “Psalm of Life”—that few readers might have hesitated to attribute it to him, were it not known to be from one of the “Palm Leaves” of Lord Houghton, who, a quarter of a century ago, as Richard Monckton Milnes, after contrasting the din, and stir, and turmoil of the West with the reposeful air of the East, counselled the poet of the West to wander eastward now and then:

“There the calm of life comparing With his Europe’s busy fate, Let him gladly homeward faring, Learn to labour and to wait.”

It is perhaps the most gifted of American writers of fiction to whom we owe the avowal, that were he to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in his embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be that the great want which mankind labours under at this present period is—sleep. The world, he urges, should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take a prolonged nap. It has gone distracted, on his showing, through a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This he declares to be the only method of getting rid of old delusions and of avoiding new ones—of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. “Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.” Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.

To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which they make in “plain living”—how they practically shorten the days of a man?