Part 29

The autobiographer in a modern work of fiction, having occasion to acknowledge, after being thrust amongst strangers to sicken, and all but die, that among strangers he received as much sympathy and kindness as he should have done among his own people, and in his father’s house,—characterizes this sort of confession as one which people are apt to make as a reflection upon their relations, “whereas it disgraces only themselves.” It is a case of rare misfortune, he contends, when we are not loved by our nearest of kin, in proportion as we desire and deserve to excite affection. Nevertheless, there is a too ample _consensus_ of authorities whose testimony affirms, and confirms, the often slight and slender tenure of mere family ties, as such. “None of your family parties for me,” quoth one of Justice Haliburton’s shrewd spokesmen; “connections at best are poor friends, and commonly bitter enemies. If you want nothing, go to them, and you are sure to get it; if you are in want of any assistance, go to a stranger friend you have _made for yourself_, and that’s the boy that has a heart and a hand for you.” The Earl of Dudley, Bishop Copleston’s correspondent, in one of his always interesting letters to that prelate, adverting to the death of an uncle who had never taken the smallest interest in him, or showed him the smallest kindness, makes the avowal: “And, though I flatter myself that there is no person more capable of returning affection than myself, yet I fairly own that I am wholly unable to bestow it quite gratuitously even upon a near relation.” Richardson harps on this note again and again in his history of Clarissa. How much more binding and tender, that young lady writes—and the writing comes of bitter experience—are the ties of pure friendship and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature! And her chief correspondent, in commenting on the terms of a kinsman’s assurance, that he will not see Clarissa “imposed on either by friend or foe,”—interposes the verbal amendment: “By _relation_ or foe, should he not have said? For a friend will not impose upon a friend.” Elsewhere the same writer has to put the home-question: “Would you side with a false brother against a true friend? A brother may not be a friend; but a friend will be always a brother.”

It was one of the aphorisms—or call them paradoxes—of M. de Stendhal (Henri Beyle) that our next of kin are our natural enemies when we enter the world; the simple matter of fact being, as an Edinburgh reviewer alleges, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his family. Mr. Froude has depicted in Edward Fowler a young man who in his dealings with every one except with his own family, was frank, generous, and unselfish; and whose affections, naturally very strong, finding themselves forced out of their proper channel, poured themselves out on any one that happened to attract him. A few kind words from his father, now and then, implying real sympathy and inviting confidence, might, we are given to understand, have averted in this case, as in so many others, a bitter result of estrangement and desolation. Perhaps, as Mr. Disraeli somewhere intimates, with all their anxiety and opportunities for observation, the parent and tutor are rarely skilful in discovering the character of their child or charge. “Custom blunts the fineness of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early, are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one bewildering association.” Strange, exclaims Hamilton Aïde, how little we often know of those who are next us in the battle-ranks through this long march of life! Our daily familiar life, as George Eliot has remarked, is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good. “Strangers yet,” as Lord Houghton has it:—

“After childhood’s winning ways, After care, and blame, and praise, Counsel asked, and wisdom given, After mutual prayers to heaven, Child and parent scarce regret When they part—are strangers yet.”

Or as Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same relative truth, too absolutely true:—

“Kindred are oft but kin by name, Our thoughts they never knew.”

_MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE._

ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.

The rich man was getting richer to his heart’s content. So plentiful was the produce of his land, that he must needs enlarge his premises. There was not room enough in his barns for those golden harvests; the barns must be pulled down, and greater ones built, wherein to bestow all his fruits and his goods. Happy man he accounted himself that day; happy in a prosperous present, happier still in a promising future. A future of happiness not less prolonged than assured. So he would say to his soul that day, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” That day he said it. Fool! that night his soul was required of him.

Woe was denounced by one of old on another of the Dives family, who said, “I will build me a wide house, and large chambers,” and who cut him out windows, and ceiled his house with cedar, and painted it with vermilion. “Shalt thou reign because thou closest thyself in cedar?” Man’s sanguine and sure “I will”—how little of the future tense there sometimes is about it after all!

“Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus; et sepulchri Immemor, struis domos.”

In Homer we see from his tall ship the king of men descend, there fondly thinking the gods conclude his toil, where, in fact, awaits him murder most foul and most unnatural. In Homeric figure—

“So, whilst he feeds luxurious in the stall, The sovereign of the herd is doomed to fall.”

Bitterly the shade of Atrides repeats his tragic story to Odysseus, telling how, “Alas! he hoped, the toils of war o’ercome, to meet soft quiet and repose at home. Delusive hope!” for at home the hand was already upraised to smite him.

The Turkish prince, Alp Arslan, dying of Joseph’s dagger-stroke, bequeathed an admonition to the pride of kings, which Gibbon has preserved. “Yesterday, as from an eminence I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet; and I said in my heart, ‘Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors.’ These armies are no longer mine; and in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin.” The inscription on his tomb invited those who had seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, to meditate on its present burial in the dust.

Michelet moralises with trenchant irony on the fate which overtook our Henry V. on French soil. It is to the “Dance of Death” he refers in the exclamation, “What sport for death, what a malicious pastime to have brought the victorious Harry within a month’s reach of the crown of France! After a life of unremitting toil for that end, he wanted but one little month added to his existence to be the survivor of Charles VI.... No! not a month, not a day more was to be his.”

Splendid was that festival at Cæsarea at which Herod Agrippa, in the pomp and pride of power, entered the theatre in a robe of silver, which glittered, says the historian, with the morning rays of the sun, so as to dazzle the eyes of the assembly, and excite general admiration. Some of his flatterers set up the shout, “A present god!” Agrippa did not repress the impious adulation which spread through the theatre. At that moment he looked up, and saw an owl perched over his head on a rope, and Agrippa had been forewarned that when next he saw that bird, “at the height of his fortune,” he would die within five days. The fatal omen, according to Josephus, pierced the heart of the king, who, with deep melancholy, exclaimed, “Your god will soon suffer the common lot of mortality.” He was immediately struck, in the language of the sacred volume, by an angel. Seized with violent pains, he was carried to his palace, lingered five days in extreme agony, being “eaten of worms,” and so died.

Fielding forcibly presents a certain sanguine projector, lusty and strong, in the heyday of middle age, who reckons confidently on becoming heir to the estate of a senior of immense wealth, and has all his plans elaborately prepared for his disposal of the same. Nothing is wanting to enable him to enter upon the immediate execution of these plans, but the death of the elder man, in calculating which he has studied every book extant that treats of the value of lives, reversions, etc.; from all which he has satisfied himself, that as he has every day a chance of this happening, so has he more an even chance of its happening before long. “But while the captain was one day busied in deep contemplations of this kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as most unseasonable, accidents happened to him. The utmost malice of fortune could, indeed, have contrived nothing so cruel, so _mal-à-propos_, so absolutely destructive to all his schemes.” It was, that just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by the other’s death, he himself was cut off by an apoplexy. As Léontine complains in “Heraclius,”—

“Et lorsque le hasard me flatte avec excès, Tout mon dessein avorte au milieu du succès.”

It was just when Kleber was beginning to reap the fruits of his intrepidity and discretion, that he was cut off by the obscure assassin, Souliman. One is reminded of Thomson on the massacre of the bees,—

“At evening snatched, Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night, And fixed o’er sulphur; while not dreaming ill, The happy people in their waxen cells, Sat tending public cares, and planning schemes Of temperance, for winter poor,” etc.

A tory historian, recording the close of the parliamentary session in July 1827, takes occasion to observe that Mr. Canning now saw every wish of his heart gratified, having raised himself to the highest position in the State, and being looked up to in every part of the world as the protector of the oppressed and the advocate of freedom. In the prime of life, “his sway in Parliament was unbounded, and he might hope for a long career of fame, fortune, and usefulness.” _Vanitas vanitatum!_ The hand of fate was already upon him, and he was to be suddenly snatched from the scene of his glory, at the very moment when he seemed to have attained the summit of earthly felicity. Even, however, when death is not concerned, as in his memorable case, in the sudden and final collapse of a great career, and the abrupt extinction of exuberant promise, how often is Cowper’s picture realized, where—

“Runs the mountainous and craggy ridge That tempts ambition. On the summit, see, The seals of office glitter in his eyes; He climbs, he pants, he grasps them. At his heels, Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends, And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down, And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”

The picture is, in some sort, and for moral uses, a pendent to that by another poet, of those who are pushing hard up hill the cumbrous load of life; just as they trust to gain the farthest steep, and put an end to strife,—

“Down thunders back the stone with mighty sweep, And hurls their labours to the valley deep, For ever vain.”

But this is diverging farther and farther from the direct import of our theme. More to the purpose is the same poet’s description of Celadon assuring his betrothed of perfect safety, and triumphantly asserting her absolute immunity from the perils of the storm, and as exultingly inferring his own, from his relationship to her; when,—

“From his void embrace, Mysterious heaven! that moment to the ground, A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.”

Some innocents, as Cleopatra has it, escape not the thunderbolt. Innocence, as well as iniquity, may know something of that breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.

The loving friends of Charlotte Brontè, after her marriage, are described by one among them as catching occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling to them who stood outside, of the gladness within; and they said among themselves, “After a long and a hard struggle—after many cares and bitter sorrows—she is tasting happiness now.” Remembering her trials, they were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. “But God’s ways are not as our ways,” Mrs. Gaskell adds. Just as Currer Bell’s happiness seemed beginning, and her goodness ripening, came fever, delirium, death. Mrs. Gaskell’s own career was similarly cut short, just when she was finishing, but ere yet she had finished, the completest and ablest of her works; just when public recognition of her merits was growing earnest as well as general. It is the old, old story. For what, as the old ballad says,—

“is this worldys bliss, That changeth as the moon! My summer’s day in lusty May Is darked before the noon.”

_GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST._

DANIEL iv. 29-33.

Walking in the palace of his kingdom of Babylon—that Babylon of which the foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged and adorned as to make it one of the world’s wonders—Nebuchadnezzar the king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee.” And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws,—is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole province of that same Babylon the Great?

The royal builder’s boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent self-glorification was in the king’s mouth, the sentence of bestial doom went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing flocks and herds.

The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men. Verifications of it—varying, of course, in kind, and still more in degree—are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a castle in the air.

“... The engineer Who lays the last stone of his sea-built tower, It cost him years and years of toil to raise,— And, smiling at it, tells the wind and waves To roar and whistle now—but, in a night, Beholds the tempest sporting in its place— May look aghast.”

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand, and displayed the golden vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple at Jerusalem, and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed to death. “John XXI.,” writes Dean Milman, “was contemplating with too great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at that instant the avenging roof came down on his head.” The catastrophe was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff. Nebuchadnezzar’s boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar’s doom. The mention of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.

The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that “while the empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker had eaten deepest into its heart.” Ruin was at hand. The hour was come, and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.

Significantly opens a fifth act—for a fifth act is the last—of Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus,” with the joyous exultations of that prosperous upstart, in the confidence of power: “Swell, swell, my joys,” he exclaims,—

“I did not live till now; this my first hour; Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power. ... My roof receives me not; ’tis air I tread; And, at each step, I feel my advanced head Knock out a star in heaven!”

and so forth, with other hyperboles of frantic arrogance. His soliloquy is interrupted by messengers of ill news. Destruction dogs his path; and very soon the magniloquent braggart has to subdue his tone, and his cue is then to upbraid the higher powers whom alone he recognises:—

“If you will, Destinies, that after all, I faint now ere I touch my period, You are but cruel.”

Of constant recurrence among the commonplaces of biography are such “buts,” inopportune and inevitable, as Cicero’s biographer prefixes to a critical paragraph: “But while all things were proceeding very prosperously in his favour, and nothing seemed wanting to crown his success, ... all his hopes and fortunes were blasted at once, by an unhappy rencounter with his old enemy Clodius.”

There is a popular historical fiction in which we see the Cardinal Alberoni musing on the greatness he has achieved for Spain and for himself, only to find himself overtaken by ruin and disgrace. The rope which he has twisted so carefully, proves to be of sand. In another we see a successful adventurer at the culminating point of his success. There seems nothing wanting to him in “that supreme moment,” as the phrase goes. He is in “a tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy.” “This glory and grandeur” repay a thousand-fold his patient endeavours and strenuous schemings. But at this very moment a dark shadow overlays the sunshine on his pathway; and we look on a changed countenance—“no longer full of triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale” at a sudden but very present and very pressing sense of impending disaster. _Fortuna vitrea est, tum cum splendet frangitur._

At the opening of the twelfth century all was prosperity with the Emperor Henry IV.; his turbulent and agitated life seemed, in the words of Dean Milman, “as if it would close in an august and peaceful end.” But, as an after page in the history of Latin Christianity is prompt to prove, this most secure and splendid period in the life of Henry was one calm and brilliant hour of evening before a night of utter gloom.

Columbus had just welcomed tranquillity in exchange for the troubles and dangers of his island, when intelligence arrived of the discovery of a large tract of country rich in mines. He now anticipated the prosperous prosecution of his favourite enterprise, and was exultant at the turn of the tide. “How illusive were his hopes!” exclaims his biographer. “At this moment events were maturing which were to overwhelm him with distress, strip him of his honour, and render him comparatively a wreck for the remainder of his days.” Who, the chronicler of the conquest of Granada may well ask, who can tell when to rejoice in this fluctuating world? “Every wave of prosperity has its reacting surge, and we are often overwhelmed by the very billow on which we thought to be wafted into the haven of our hopes.” _Et subito casu, quæ valuere, ruunt._

Olivarez was requested by his royal master to resign, just at the moment when the death of Richelieu (1643) opened to him an almost royal road, it might seem, to success.

“O momentary grace of mortal men, Which we more hunt for than the grace of God! Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks, Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, Ready, with every nod, to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep.”

Such is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Hastings feels it. And this is the state of man, as Shakspeare’s Wolsey finds it: to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, and next day comes a frost, a killing frost, and,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his goodness is a ripening,—nips his root, and then he falls. Shakspeare’s Belarius again, will furnish us with another text, of practical application:—

“... Then was I as a tree, Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night, A storm, or robbery, call it what you will, Shook down my yellow hangings, nay, my leaves, And left me bare to weather.”

And as with the pride and pomp and circumstance of life, so with life itself. Typical for all time is the fate of Lycidas:—

“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind fury with the abhorrèd shears, And slits the thin-spun life.”

_INVOCATION AND INACTION._

EXODUS xiv. 15.

With the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do? They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and merely look on. For “the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk.

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