Part 31

Frederick Robertson glowingly expatiates on the glory of womanhood, as surely one which, if woman rightly comprehended her place on earth, might enable her to accept its apparent humiliation unrepiningly; the glory, as he defines it, of unsensualizing coarse and common things, sensual things, the objects of mere sense, meat and drink and household cares, elevating them by the spirit in which she ministers them, into something transfigured and sublime. “The humblest mother of a poor family, who is cumbered with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she is too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love’s sake in household work, needs no emancipation in God’s sight. It is the prerogative and the glory of her womanhood to consecrate the meanest things by a ministry which is not for self.” What hundreds and thousands of female invalids have felt, and almost in the same words said, with Lucy Aikin, when enfeebled with age and other ailments, “The thought which sits heavy on my mind is that of my own inutility. Alas! what important end of existence do I fulfil? To whom is it of any real consequence whether or not I continue to fill a place in the world? I hope that involuntary uselessness will not be imputed, and that we may say, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’” A fellow-worker of the same sex, but made of sterner stuff, in the dedication of a book written in illness, tells her friend, “You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity and usefulness.” And she goes on to say how ridiculous, if it were not shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of having followed the instincts of her nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of such divinely appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and directed by Him who framed and actuated her. To apply the words of Aurora Leigh:—

... “Though we fail indeed,— You, I, a score of such weak-workers,—He Fails never. If He cannot work by us, He will work over us. Does He want a man, Much less a woman, think you? Every time The star winks there, so many souls are born, Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm: We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars, Impatient that we’re nothing.”

So Mrs. Browning. And pitched in the self-same key is this stanza of her husband’s:—

“All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly He trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last nor first.”

Wordsworth is eloquently suggestive in those prefatory lines of his, which weave a moral and infer a solace, from the fact, that the stars pre-eminent in magnitude, and they that from the zenith dart their beams, are yet of no diviner origin, no purer essence, than the one he watched from Rydal Mount, burning like an untended watch-fire on the ridge of some dark hill-top; or than those which seem

“Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps, Among the branches of the leafless trees; All are the undying offspring of one Sire. Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, Shine, poet, in thy place, and be content.”

If we weave a yard of tape in all humility, says Emerson, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see that it was “no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.” Without number, as Archdeacon Hare puts it, are the sutlers and pioneers, the engineers and artisans, who attend the march of intellect; many of them busied in building and fitting up and painting and emblazoning the chariot; others in lessening the friction of the wheels; while others move forward in detachments, and level the way it is to pass over, and cut down the obstacles which would impede its progress. And these too, he proceeds to say, “have their reward. If so be they labour diligently in their calling, not only will they enjoy that calm contentment which diligence in the lowliest task never fails to win; not only will the sweat of their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of the rest that follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they come in for a share of the glory; even as the meanest soldier who fought at Marathon or at Leipsic became a sharer in the glory of those saving days.” Remember, with Owen Meredith,—

“Remember, every man God made Is different: has some deed to do, Some work to work. Be undismay’d Though thine be humble: do it too.”

An elder teacher would qualify the Remember by a Do not forget, that “it matters infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_.” If we cannot pursue a trade or a science—says a memorable voice from a sick-room,—if we cannot keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary; “we can cherish a sweet and holy temper; we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body; we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above, could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life.”

To all those possible conditions, so manifold in their potentialities, the doctrine applies. The membership is a constant quantity. _Nil me officit unquam_, says Horace, _Ditior hic, aut est quia doctior; est locus uni Cuique suus_. And we have Shakspeare’s word for it, that nought so vile upon the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give; and though he is speaking of stones and the like, are there not sermons in stones, as well as good in everything?

Holy George Herbert shall furnish us with a versicle to the purpose. As ever, he is looking upwards when he says,—

“Indeed the world’s Thy book Where all things have their leaf assign’d: Yet a meek look Hath interlined. Thy board is full, yet humble guests Find nests.”

But more pertinent, and less quaintly obscure, is that stanza from another little lyric of his, in which the Country Parson exalts the exalting power of a simple trust in God and devotion to His service:

“A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine.”

_THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER._

PROVERBS xv. 1.

While it is the effect, if not the end and aim, of grievous words to stir up anger,—“a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Though “the wrath of a king is as messengers of death, a wise man will pacify it.” “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”

When the men of Ephraim, enraged at Gideon’s failing to invoke their aid when he went to fight with the Midianites, chided with him sharply, his soft answer was of instant avail to turn away their wrath. What had he done now in comparison of them? the champion deferentially exclaimed; and what was he able to do in comparison of them? Was not the mere gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the entire vintage of Abi-ezer? “Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.” What threatened to be a very bone of contention,—well, so soft a tongue as that of Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, breaketh the bone.

Discussing Lord Aberdeen’s settlement of the vexed question of the right of search, in 1843, the historian of Europe observes that never was there a truer maxim than that it requires the consent of two persons to make a quarrel; a soft word, a seasonable explanation, often turns aside wrath, and sometimes prevents the most serious wars that threaten to devastate the world. Æsop Smith says he never knew a downright quarrel yet, where two people were not in the wrong; “drop your battledore, and the shuttlecock will fall. ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath.’ No doubt it does, in nine cases out of ten,”—but not quite always, this authority affirms; there being some unreasonable quarrellers, who will batter the peacemaker when he drops his battledore. But as a rule, and on the authority of an older and still more widely recognised maker of proverbs, the mere fact of yielding pacifieth great offences.

The historian of the conquest of Peru tells us how Gasca was assailed by reproaches and invectives which, however, had no power to disturb his equanimity; he patiently listened, and replied to all in the mild tone of expostulation best calculated to turn away wrath. “By this victory over himself,” says Garcilasso, “he acquired more real glory, than by all his victories over his foes.” As Spenser has it,—

“Words well-disposed Have secret power t’ appease inflamèd rage.”

Sir Matthew Hale’s celebrated letter of advice includes this counsel,—if a person be passionate, and give you ill language, rather to pity him than be moved to anger. We shall find, the pious judge asserts, that silence, or very gentle words, are the most exquisite revenge for reproaches; they will either cure the distemper in the angry man, and make him sorry for his passion, or they will be a severe reproof and punishment to him. “But at any rate,” adds Sir Matthew, “they will preserve your innocence, give you the deserved reputation of wisdom and moderation, and keep up the serenity and composure of your mind. Passion and anger make a man unfit for everything that becomes him as a man or as a Christian.”

The fact is, maintains the author of “The Gentle Life,” all hard words are a mistake: most of our quarrels arise from a total misunderstanding of each other; and at any rate, hard words will not mend the matter. One might as well, he says, try to mend glass windows by pelting them with stones. Soft words, on the other hand, fall like a healing balm on the hearts of all. “Such power,” in the words of one who loved to be written, if not to write himself, Leontius, “such power has the least shadow of a pleasant speech, to do away an ill-feeling of the moment, in the complacency it produces, both in the giver and receiver.” To apply, again, a passage from Spenser, descriptive of a damsel’s success in deterring two doughty knights from mortal encounter, so effective was her speech to

... “calm the sea of their tempestuous spite: Such power have pleasing words! Such is the might Of courteous clemency in gentle heart!”

We are all of us fond of gentle words, once more to quote an _ex titulo_ authority on all that concerns gentle living; and he denies the truth of the common rough proverb, “Soft words butter no parsnips,” which is shown to be, after all, an apologetic proverb, meaning that the hearer is tickled with the politeness, albeit real satisfaction is not yet made. “Soft words do butter parsnips; and many an oily fellow, whose talent, industry, and conscientiousness are small, owes his position and advancement in life to the soft words which drop continually from his mouth.” The soft answer that avails to dispel wrath, comes of practised patience; and when patience has its perfect work, it works miracles, as detailed by that fine old forgotten poet, Decker:—

“It is the greatest enemy to law That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs, And so chains up lawyers and women’s tongues; ... And last of all, to end a household strife, It is the honey ’gainst a waspish wife.”

This reminds us of a passage in “The Gordian Knot,” where the gentle laying of a husband’s hand in an irritated wife’s, or _vice versâ_, is recommended (by example) as a good plan to adopt in conjugal discussions when differences arise. The tongue, says our author, is very proud, abominably proud and sulky, and often refuses to say what the heart desires should be said; but the fingers know their duty, and are ready to convey an apologetic or forgiving pressure, which, he makes bold to assert, “will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, if the parties love one another.”

The greatest, widest, deepest of all observers of human nature puts into the mouth of one of the sagest of kings this counsel to a younger son, in respect to his bearing towards the elder:—

... “Blunt not his love; ... For he is gracious, if he be observed;[39] Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he’s flint: As humorous as winter, and as sudden As flaws[40] congealed in the spring of day. His temper, therefore, must be well observed: Chide him for faults, and do it reverently, When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth: But being moody, give him line and scope; Till that his passions, like a whale on ground, Confound themselves with working.”

In a later one, again, of his noble series of English history plays—indeed the latest—Shakspeare makes a ducal politician, astute in practical psychology as well as in politics, utter this apophthegm, of his own coinage:—

“Anger is like A full-hot horse, who being allowed his way, Self-mettle tires him.”

_A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS._

ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.

The preacher, whose text was Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, pictures in one section of his homily a man who has lived many years, “so that the days of his years be many,” but whose soul is not filled with good, but aches rather with a gnawing sense of emptiness, so that his many years, gloomy as they have been, are all too few. “Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?” What more tedious than such a twice-told tale of years? Yet, to look back upon, how fleet their transit, how imperceptible their lapse, how petty the sum of them! That tale is soon told, even if told twice.

The days of our life are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; nor do the fourscore seem longer to the retrospective reviewer than do to the sexagenarian his sixty years, or to the septuagenarian his threescore and ten. The most popular of contemporary authors describes a man of seventy-eight, of whom a loveless, sad-hearted questioner asks whether his seventy-eight years would not be seventy-eight heavy curses, if he could say to himself, as the questioner can, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by.” The Royal Preacher would apply context as well as text to such a retrospect, with an “I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known anything: this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good.”

The same questioner, already cited, asks the same old man if his childhood seems far off,—if the days when he sat at his mother’s knee seem days of very long ago? To which the experience of threescore and eighteen years gives this reply: “Twenty years back, yes: at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.” But he is not one to feel and say with the French cynic, “Mais enfin la vie se passe, et mourir après s’être amusé ou s’être ennuyé dix ou vingt ans, c’est la même chose.” He has not so learned life, and the meaning of life, and its purpose, and its end.

Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. _Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus._ Looked forward to, it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,—

“Short as in retrospect the journey seems, It seemed not always short; the rugged path, And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn, Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”

But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king’s clock,—

“Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!”

(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?” The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.

Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.

Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. _Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque brevissima vitæ Portio._ And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, _obrepit non intellecta senectus_. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,—

“Old Time whose haste no mortal spares, Uncalled, unheeded, unawares, Brought him on his eightieth year.”

We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

In one of his letters to his old friend Mrs. Hughes, Southey commences a paragraph with the truism, “The last twenty years, to you and me, are but as yesterday;” and he adds, that if we could but bring ourselves to feel, as truly as we know, that the next twenty years are but as to-morrow, that feeling, with a trust in God’s mercy, would be sufficient consolation under all sorrows. Half a year later we find him writing to her in the same strain: “It seems but as yesterday when I look back twenty, thirty, forty, and even more years; the end, therefore, of my mortal term would seem but as to-morrow if it were rightly looked on to. A little while, and we shall be young again, beyond all power of time and change, with those whom we love, and to continue with them for ever and ever.” Madame de Sévigné utters her pure French hélas! over the like retrospect of twenty years: “Hélas! est-il possible qu’il y ait vingt-un ans? il me esembleque ce fut l’année passée; mais je juge, par le peu que m’a duré ce temps, ce que me paraîtront les années qui viendront encore.” Home, straight home to every heart comes the homely moral of the bard addressing the busy, curious, thirsty fly he freely welcomed to his cup, and whose little life he compared with his longer yet little own:—

“Both alike are mine and thine, Hastening quick to their decline: Thine’s a summer, mine no more, Though repeated to threescore; Threescore summers, when they’re gone, Will appear as short as one.”

If for threescore we read fourscore, it would not mar the metre, or the rhyme or reason.

Man is never so deluded as when he dreams of his own duration, says Cowper; and he goes on to cite Jacob’s retrospective reviewal of years elapsed: “The answer of the old patriarch to Pharaoh may be adapted by every man at the close of the longest life. ‘Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.’ Whether we look back from fifty or from twice fifty, the past equally appears a dream; and we can only be said truly to have lived while we have been profitably employed.” And as the sovereign lady of French letter-writers has her Hélas! so one of the princes among English letter-writers has his Alas! to utter on this trite topic, “Alas, then, making the necessary deductions, how short is life!” Though the life be made up of a thousand years twice told, the tale is told so soon, and the teller seems to himself but as a dreamer, and his little life is rounded with a sleep; like as a dream when one awaketh.

The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is taken to intimate that the difference between a so-called long and a short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this aphorism, among his Meditations: “When frankincense is thrown upon the altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of time is of no moment.” The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not momentous. Do not all go to one place?

But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,—

“They will appear like moments when he soars Beyond those sunbreaks.”

DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF.

DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37.

Not the least impressive of the afflictions denounced against a disloyal people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say, “Would God it were even!” and at even, “Would God it were morning!” There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, “When shall I arise, and the night be gone?” and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent, but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair. And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a boon that, however, it fails to bring.

A stanza in one of Shakspeare’s poems contains an example to the purpose:—

“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow, And time doth weary time with her complaining: She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow; And both she thinks too long with her remaining: Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining. Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps; And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps.”

And thus runs one of Landor’s imitations from the Greek, of an address to Hesperus:—

“I have beheld thee in the morning hour, A solitary star, with thankless eyes, Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise When sleep all night had wandered from my bower.”