Part 33

From that state of struggle many a victor emerges with honourable scars, but deep. Famous and significant is the story of the physiognomist who detected in the features of Socrates the traces of that fiery temper which for the most part he kept in severe control, but which, when it did break loose, is described by those who witnessed it as absolutely terrible, overleaping both in act and language every barrier of the ordinary decorum of Grecian manners. Le Clerc’s _éloge_ of John Locke includes the remark that if he had any defect, it was the being somewhat passionate; “but he had got the better of it by reason, and it was very seldom that it did him or any one else any harm.” Of Rudolf of Hapsburg we are told that he was by nature warm and choleric, but that as he advanced in years he corrected this defect. To some of his friends, expressing their wonder that since his elevation to the imperial dignity he had restrained the vehemence of his temper, the founder of the House of Austria replied, “I have often repented of being passionate, never of being mild and humane.” One of Cromwell’s biographers reports his “temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of it kept down for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had.” The admirable Frederick Borromeo was admired for a placability, a sweetness of manner nearly imperturbable, which, however, as Manzoni reminds us, was not natural to the devout prelate, but was the effect of continual combat against a quick and hasty disposition. Lord Clarendon more than once in his autobiography, plumes himself on having mastered and “suppressed that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.” “They who knew the great infirmity of his whole family, which abounded in passion, used to say he had much extinguished the unruliness of that fire.” Lord Macaulay turns to the advantage of his favourite chancellor the assertion of his detractors, that the disposition of the great Somers was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he was really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his voice was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. His brilliant advocate is fain to accept this reproach as the highest of all eulogies. Again: Sir Archibald Alison assures us of Sir Robert Peel, that he was by nature afflicted with a most violent temper, and that so extreme were his paroxysms of anger, when a young man, that he used, while they were coming on, to shut himself up alone till the dark fit was over. “By degrees, however, he obtained the mastery of this infirmity, and this at length so effectually that he passed with the world, at a distance, as a man of a singularly cold and phlegmatic temperament.” Lady Holland reports her distinguished father to have been naturally choleric,—prefacing the statement by a reflection, that, although it is not the part of a daughter to reveal faults, yet a fault nobly repaired, or repented of, adds to the respect and interest which a character inspires. By her showing, then, Mr. Sydney Smith was by nature quick and hasty, but always struggled against the failing, and made many regulations to avoid exciting any such emotions; and when he did give way, it often excited his biographer’s admiration to see him gradually subduing his chafed spirit, and to observe his dissatisfaction with himself till he had humbled himself and made his peace, it mattered not with whom, groom or child. “He could not bear the reproaches of his own heart.” So Mr. Henry Rogers observes of Locke, and his success, by dint of “immense pains” taken, in subjugating his choleric propensity, that his anxiety for its complete subjugation appears in his never being so angry with another as he always was with himself—for being angry. Those who are conversant with the journal and letters of Dr. Chalmers, may remember how often that good man takes himself to task for infirmities of temper, and how strenuously he resolves to strive to keep down every tendency to irritation when in company, to “try to maintain a vigorous contest with this unfortunate peculiarity of my temper,” to “school down every irritable feeling;” and how remorsefully he records such instances as getting “into a violent passion with Sandy,” and getting “ruffled with Jane,” in a manner and to a degree “quite unchristian.” Passages abound such as, “Now is the time for reflecting on the evils of intemperate passion;” “erred egregiously this evening in venting my indignation;” “I may at least ward off the assaults of anger;” “erred in betraying my anger to my servant and wife;” “constant visitations of indignancy; this exceedingly wrong: there is not a greater foe to spirituality than wrath.” “O my God, deliver me from all rancour and much irritableness,”[41] etc., etc. “Here,” to apply the lines of Wordsworth’s son-in-law,—

“Here was a temper less by nature tuned Than harmonized by discipline to rule, And by religion sanctified to peace.”

The pen is too truly said to be a fruitful source of regrets to some of us, in regard of the outbreaks of temper we allow it to put on paper; and never is the sting sharper, says one essayist, than when we realize that our imprudence is in black and white, beyond our reach, irrevocable. “We send off our letter, to repent sometimes how bitterly!” _Litera scripta manet._ Hence the advice of another, never to write in anger, or, at any rate, to keep your letter till you are cool. We are recommended, when indignant at any one’s conduct, to write a letter couched in the strongest terms possible, as satirical and cutting as we can make it, and having done this, to direct, seal, and put it in our desk for a few hours, then read it for our own satisfaction, and tear it up. Another popular authority, earnestly deprecating angry letters, lays down as a rule to be observed throughout the letter-writing world, that no angry letter be posted till four and twenty hours shall have elapsed since it was written. “We all know how absurd is that other rule, of saying the alphabet when you are angry. Trash! Sit down and write your letter; write it with all the venom in your power; spit out your spleen at the fullest; it will do you good: you think you have been injured; say all that you can say with all your poisoned eloquence, and gratify yourself by reading it while your temper is still hot. Then put it in your desk, and, as a matter of course, burn it before breakfast the following morning. Believe me that you will then have a double gratification.” _Loquitur_ the perhaps most widely read, and without a perhaps the most prolific, writer of the day.

When Cœur-de-Lion, in Scott’s “Talisman,” incensed and mortified at the Templar’s tactics, yet foresaw the penalty of giving way to his headlong resentment, with a strong effort he remained silent till he had repeated a pater noster, that being the course which “his confessor had enjoined him to pursue when anger was likely to obtain dominion over him.” The familiar “count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram,” in one of Mr. Dickens’ later stories is but another practical application of the selfsame text.

Gibbon adds to his account of the public penance inflicted by Ambrose on Theodosius, for the massacre of Thessalonica, this remark: “and the edict which interposes a salutary interval of thirty days between the sentence and the execution, may be accepted as the worthy fruits of his [the emperor’s] repentance.” For it was by a hasty resolve that Theodosius swore in his wrath to expiate the blood of his lieutenant, Botheric, by the blood of a guilty people; his fiery and choleric temper being impatient of the dilatory forms of a judicial inquiry. In hot haste he despatched the messengers of death; but attempted, when it was too late, to prevent the execution of his own orders. Avenging furiously in haste, he had to repent at leisure; and he did repent.

It is impossible, perhaps, observed Dean Swift, for the best and wisest among us to keep so constant a guard upon our temper but that we may at some time or other lie open to the strokes of fortune. Incensed on one occasion, “it was natural for me to have immediate recourse to my pen and ink; but before I would offer to make use of them, I resolved deliberately to tell over a hundred; and when I came to the end of that sum, I found it more advisable to defer drawing up my intended remonstrance till I had slept soundly on my resentments.” We are told of the celebrated Macklin, that although so particular in drilling the performers at rehearsals, he was scrupulous in keeping his temper down, the irritability of which he knew too well; and that on one occasion he interposed an hour by his stop-watch, all retiring together from the stage to the green-room, at the end of which time all were in good humour again, and the rehearsal was resumed. “When the evil effects of hasty anger approach, the consequences of which may be irretrievable,”—thus moralizes a fellow-craftsman, John O’Keeffe,—“it would be no harm if all of us could suppress our own feelings, even for Macklin’s green-room hour.” His mighty master, Shakspeare, would have supplied him with a precedent, in the case of good Duke Humphrey, who says as he re-enters,—

“Now, lords, my choler being overblown With walking once about the quadrangle, I come to talk of commonwealth affairs.”

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s secretary, Mr. Nixon, on his own showing, could not refrain from blurting out just what he felt at the moment, when differences arose between the two. This used to vex Sir Thomas, who however would say nothing till the next day, and then, when the secretary thought that the whole matter had passed off (having perhaps received great kindness in the meantime), the remonstrance would come out, “What a silly fellow you were, Nixon, to put yourself in such a passion yesterday! If I had spoken then, we should most probably have parted. Make it a rule never to speak when you are in a passion, but wait till the next day.” And we are assured that, if at any time he happened to transgress this rule himself, he was seriously vexed and grieved, and could not rest till he had in some way made amends for his want of self-restraint.

Molière’s Arnolphe propounds the prophylactic rule with emphasis and discretion:

“Un certain Grec disait à l’empereur Auguste, Comme une instruction utile autant que juste, Que lorsqu’une aventure en colére nous met, Nous devons, avant tout, dire nôtre alphabet, Afin que dans ce temps la bile se tempère, Et qu’on ne fasse rien que l’on ne doive faire.”

_EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW._

HOSEA vi. 3.

By the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell on Ephraim and on Judah, that their goodness was as a morning cloud, and that as the early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words of Dante:

“... The will in man Bears goodly blossoms; but its ruddy promise Is, by the dripping of perpetual rain, Made mere abortion: faith and innocence Are met with but in babes; each taking leave Ere cheeks with down are sprinkled.”

Adam Smith observes, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiment,” that, in the eye of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy. “It ought to do so,” he adds. “Everything may be expected, or at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be either expected or hoped from the old man.” It is regretful, remorseful eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,—

“O little souls! as pure and white And crystalline as rays of light Direct from heaven, their source divine; Refracted through the mist of years, How red my setting sun appears, How lurid looks this soul of mine!”

Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the “Pleasures of Memory,” and with direct reference to that poem, “In looking back, the only days I earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was ‘girt with growing infancy,’ and read in the eyes and the smiles of my children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness, such as this world can never fulfil.” A more vigorous poet than Samuel Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of young motherhood, when the wife—

“Blest into mother, in the innocent look, Or even the piping cry of lips that brook No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook She sees her little bud put forth its leaves— What may the fruits be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s.”

The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell’s story hails in her child a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. “And _her_ mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children.”

Juvenal asks, “what morn’s so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy, and fraud.” The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child: _dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer_. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting in its refreshing redolence of promise—“_qui ne nous fait que des promesses_.” Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second birthday:

“Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour, Sweet is the sun’s first radiance, sweet the year, In the spring’s early promise, sweet the flower, Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear— But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind, That beams with new quick thoughts, yet undefined, That tell of what is now and what may be. O may the God who taught us that, like thee, We should be pure and spotless, bless thee still; Lay on thy infant head His hand, to free Thine heart from sin, and form thee to His will, Cleanse thee from aught that’s evil or defiled, And keep thee as thou art, my darling child.”

George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach—impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it “chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining.” Elia, the essay writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that “other me,” there, in the background,—he must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, he protests, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not _his_ father’s son. “I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!”

Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory faces in the dame school:—

“Even now sagacious foresight points to show A little bench of heedless bishops here, And there a chancellor in embryo, Or bard sublime, if bard may e’er be so, As Milton, Shakspeare, names that ne’er shall die!”

So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie’s lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood:—

“Ah! many a lightly sportive child, Who hath like thee our wits beguiled, To dull and sober manhood grown, With strange recoil our hearts disown.”

_Il y a en chacun de nous_, writes Sainte-Beuve, _un être primitif, idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais que l’homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt_. Mr. Kingsley, in a touching reflection—literally reflection, looking back—on the “long lost might-have been,” adverts to that personal idea which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Dr. Caird has said of the birthday of the worst of men, that although it ushered a new agent of evil into existence, and was a day fraught with more disastrous results to the world than the day in which the pestilence began to creep over the nations, or the blight to fasten on the food of man, or any other physical evil to enter on a career of world-wide devastation,—yet might this day, when the vilest of humanity first saw the light, be in some aspects of it regarded as better (despite Solomon’s text) than the day of his death. “For, to take only one view of it, when life commenced, the problem of good or evil, to which death has brought so terrible a solution, was, in his case, as yet unsolved. The page of human history which he was to write was yet unwritten, and to that day belonged, at all events, the advantage of the uncertainty whether it was to be blurred and blotted, or written fair and clean.” Life, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, it is urged, has ever some faint gleams of hope to brighten its outset. The preacher owns that the simplicity, the tenderness, the unconscious refinement that more or less characterize infancy, even among the lowest and rudest, soon indeed pass away, and give place to the coarseness of an unideal, if not the animal repulsiveness of a sensual or sinful life. But he insists that at least at the beginning, for a little while, there is something in the seeming innocency, the brightness, the unworldliness, the unworn freshness of childhood, that gives hope room to work. Is there not, he asks, for every child, not in the dreams of parental fondness only, but in reality, and in God’s idea, the possibility of a noble future? “The history of each new-born soul is surely in God’s plan and intention a bright and blessed one. For the vilest miscreant that was ever hounded out of life in dishonour and wretchedness, there was, in the mind of the All-Good, a Divine ideal, a glorious possibility of excellence, which might have been made a reality.” The most hardened ruffian, the most obdurate criminal, the most impenetrable reprobate, was once a child.

If it be a philosophical truth that the child is father of the man—all that is now broadly emblazoned in the man having been once latent—seen or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child; it is not therefore true universally, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that all which pre-exists in the child finds its development in the man. “Rudiments and tendencies, which _might_ have found, sometimes by accident, _do_ not find, sometimes under the killing frost of counter forces, _cannot_ find, their natural evolution.” Most of what he has, the grown-up man is shown to inherit from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance. Childhood has been passionately apostrophized as

“... thou vindication Of God—thou living witness against all men Who have been babes—thou everlasting promise Which no man keeps!”

_EARS TO HEAR._

ST. LUKE viii. 8.

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” These words cried Jesus, at the close of His parable of the Sower. And He went on to say that to some, to the many, He spake in parables, that seeing they might not see—not having eyes to see; and that hearing they might not understand—not having ears to hear in the Gospel sense. Nor in the Old Testament sense; for these very words are cited from Isaiah; in Deuteronomy too we read of those to whom the Lord hath not given ears to hear; and in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of those who have ears to hear, and hear not. One apostle laments the destiny of those to whom God hath given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear. And to another was entrusted the appeal, “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” For only the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. The unwise is like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them.

Give but interest in the theme, and the listener’s ear fulfils its natural function, that of hearing. “Mine ears hast Thou opened.” Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all ear. Milton pictures a time—

“when, Adam first of men, To first of women, Eve thus moving speech, Turn’d him, all ear.”

So again the attendant spirit in his “Comus”:—

“... I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.”

Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant my soul in my ears to hear you.” _Je t’écoute sans cligner la paupière_, exclaims Marillac, in “Gerfaut,” _dût ta narration durer sept jours et sept nuits_. “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of the harrowing news,—listening “as if his whole being were resolved into that one sense of hearing.” That reads like a literal translation of Balzac’s description of one whose whole _vie se concentra dans le seul sens de l’ouïe_. On another page he is not forgetful of _certains hommes_ who _se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre_. None so deaf as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care to. The familiar narrative of “Eyes and No Eyes” might easily have its pendent and parallel, point by point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one to be called _Ears and No Ears_.

It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from abroad, rapturous with gazing on his “favourite Titian,” declares that one “might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee!” exclaims Macbeth, when summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’ cave. Just as one of Plato’s epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his life:

εἴθε γενοίμην Οὐρανὸς, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν ἐίς δὲ βλέπω.