Part 23

A clerical essayist on “Future Years,” “can well believe,” he tells us, “that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to _that_!” “Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame.” And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be an aggravation in that view—to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it—_that_ being the worst of all.

Hazael stands out in large type, black letter type, or red letter, if you will—the hue of blood—a degraded instance of the degrading power of guilt—a warning of the stealthy yet swift aggression of criminal impulse, or criminal policy, seducing, subduing, and transforming its subjects,—

“Till creatures born, For good (whose hearts kind Pity nursed) Will act the direst crimes they cursed But yester-morn.”

_THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT._

ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.

To some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” The atmosphere is of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret, as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy.

Yet are there, and ever will be, those—else had this earth of ours lost the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?—who—

“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”

The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit, Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as Virgil’s Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: _Et se cupit ante videri._ Another of Chamfort’s cynical _maximes et pensées_ runs thus: “Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, _Si cadens adoraveris me_.” Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the right hand’s largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon’s famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV know what were his designs against the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme of action; “but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left.” And the vulgar mean the commonalty, the many, the _polloi_. The doer of good, therefore, who does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is treated in literature and life as what is called a “character.” Goldsmith makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him unobserved. “He had, however,” writes the Chinese citizen of the world, “no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.” And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know “what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett, again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving, retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did:

“Yet was thy liberality discreet, Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat; And though in act unwearied, _secret still_, As in some solitude the summer rill Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green, And cheers the drooping flowers, _unheard_, _unseen_.”

When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees; but “he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall.” Free gifts by stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron’s; of whom, for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland’s death, the poet reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant [Byron a sponsor!—but let that pass]; and that after the “christening” he inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house. Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him “un de ces dieux bienfaiteurs de l’humanité, mais qui n’en partagent point la tendresse.” Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only the hand was opened behind his own back: _il sut être bienveillant en secret_. Amid James Watt’s donations in aid of sound and useful learning, testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted; but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better “had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the frost.” “Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth;[30] but nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind in general.” The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John Newton: “Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever, and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: “I shall probably never see him,” writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide of benefactions; but “he will always have a niche in the museum of my reverential remembrance.” Even without _that_, the Unknown had his reward.

“Charity ever Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet In the receiver.”

_TO-MORROW._

ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.

The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years; but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing: many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a _memento mori_,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter, whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven.

Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue:—

“TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.”

So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, _They come_—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response, “She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.—_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow._”...

In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,—

... “Here will I lie to-night; [_Soldiers begin to set up the King’s tent._ But where to-morrow?—Well, all’s one for that.”

To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,—

“To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men Must ’bide the touch.”

While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity, replies,—

“Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in; I’ll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel, Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.”

Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio:

“Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, It would be thus with him;—he must die to-morrow.

_Isab._ To-morrow! O, that’s sudden! Spare, him, spare him; He’s not prepared for death.”

Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man:—

“Look, here’s the warrant, Claudio, for thy death: ’Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow Thou must be made immortal.”

Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,—

“Have you no countermand for Claudio yet, But he must die to-morrow?

_Prov._ None, sir; none.”

One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night:

“_Lady M._ And when goes hence?

_Macb._ To-morrow,—as he purposes.

_Lady M._ O, never Shall sun that morrow see!”

Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to _him_,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of illustration.

Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists:

“I listened to their honest chat; Said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be Plod, plod along the featureless sands And coasting miles and miles of sea.’ Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’ Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like To-day, but much more sweet.’ ‘To-morrow,’ said they, strong with hope, And dwelt upon the pleasant way; ‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all, While no one spoke of yesterday. Then life stood still at blessed noon, I, only I, had passed away: ‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried: I was of yesterday.”

It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. “A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow: to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.

Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.

“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.”

“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”

The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.

_J’ai vécu_—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow—_nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain_—that he quotes the _vers charmants_ made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards:—

“Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi! Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne: Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi, Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.”

“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star:

“We struggle with our fate, While health, power, glory, from their height decline, Depressed; and then extinguished; and our state, In this, how different, lost Star, from thine, That no to-morrow shall our beams restore!”

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when, on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s

Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ Tempora Di superi?

(who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able to promise himself a morrow:

Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.

When Archias, the polemarch at Thebes, dissolved in wine and pleasure, received from his pontifical namesake at Athens a full and particular account by letter of the conspiracy of Pelopidas and the exiles, who were even then counting the minutes ere they struck the blow,—although the messenger expressly urged his excellency to read the missive forthwith, as the contents were of instant import, Archias only smiled a tipsy smile, and said, “Business to-morrow.” Then he put the unopened letter under the bolster of his couch, and resumed his colloquy with his host, Philidias, who was in the plot, and who was taking good care to ply the polemarch with wine. Business to-morrow. To-morrow as he purposed! Oh, never should sun that morrow see.

_Si hodie non es paratus, quo modo cras eris? CRAS est dies incertus: et qui scis si crastinum habebis_? To-morrow, in this its prospective, procrastinating sense, is denounced by Mr. Sala, with all due asperity, as a wretched, cowardly, idiotic subterfuge and apology—a “suicidal delusion and pitfall.” Yes, to-morrow I will begin to learn Syro-Chaldaic (we overhear him saying): I will read the novel of the day to-day. To-morrow I will dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water. To-day I will ask the _chef_ at the club to send me up a pretty little dinner, not forgetting that irresistible _choufleur au gratin_, and bid the butler bring me that curious pommard with the iron-grey seal. To-morrow I will finish my _magnum opus_, my “Treatise on the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes in their relation to Human Wisdom and Knowledge.” To-day flippant rubbish or frothy egotism shall flow from my pen. To-morrow I will pay my tailor. To-day I will order a new coat. In fine: “To-morrow I will atone for the wrong, and pray for strength to continue in the right. To-day I will follow my devices, and listen to the promptings of the world, the flesh, and the devil. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”

For many years, the late Alfred de Vigny continued slowly amassing poetical materials, though publishing nothing, and murmuring always, like André Chenier,—

“Rien n’est fait aujourd’hui, tout sera fait _demain_.”

The morrow has come, wrote the _Journal des Débats_, in recording his death, and his artist hands are cold in the grave.

Says the Cordelier to the condemned Thief in Mat Prior’s derry-down ballad,—

“Courage, friend; to-day is your period of sorrow; And things will go better, believe me, to-morrow.”

But what says the Thief in reply?

“To-morrow? our hero replied in a fright: He that’s hanged before noon, ought to think of to-night.”

But Prior will supply us with more than one study of the subject. Here is a variation, for instance, in matter, manner, and metre:—

“The hoary fool, who many days Has struggled with continued sorrow, Renews his hope, and blindly lays The desperate bet upon to-morrow.

“To-morrow comes; ’tis noon, ’tis night; This day like all the former flies: Yet on he runs, to seek delight To-morrow, till to-night he dies.”

The gaming allusion of the first stanza reminds us of the picture of a certain devotee at the _roulette_ table at Hombourg, who kept his seat—tranquil, immovable, vigilant,—the Napoleon of _roulette_; in whose victorious progress Marengos and Austerlitzes succeeded each other, as if Moscow and the Beresina were phantoms—as if to-morrow would never come. To-morrow; ay, that dread to-morrow that comes to all: the fateful _Demain_ of Victor:

“Demain est la sapin du trône, Aujourd’hui c’en est le velours.”

Yes, to-morrow is the coarse deal, with its ten sacks, that forms the framework of the throne, as to-day is its velvet and gilding.

“Demain c’est le coursier qui s’abat plein d’écume; Demain, O conquérant, c’est Moscou qui s’allume La nuit comme un flambeau: C’est not’ vieille garde qui jonche au lointain la plaine, Demain c’est Waterloo! Demain c’est Ste. Helène! Demain c’est le tombeau!”

And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret: “To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative, that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could foretell the events of to-morrow?