Part 5

The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will, when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together, while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief, conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he made for other. “For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his wickedness shall fall on his own pate.” Owen Feltham delights to recall, from the stores of ancient and mediæval story, how Bagoas, a Persian nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by Darius, and forced to drink poison himself; how Diomedes, as we have already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules made food; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer’s mistake of the bottle, took the draught himself, “and so died by the same engine which he himself had appointed to kill another”—a sort of enginery glanced at in Ben Jonson:—

“I have you in a purse-net, Good master Picklock, with your worming brain, And wriggling engine-head”

too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, “but God made a hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant’s neck, and he could never rid himself of it.” The fourth book of Southey’s “Thalaba” closes with a shriek from Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains:

“What, wretch, and hast thou raised The rushing terrors of the wilderness, To fall on thine own head? Death! death! inevitable death! Driven by the breath of God, A column of the desert met his way.”

Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, “a yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in the righteous judgment of God.” Many and many

“stories have been told of men whose lives Were infamous, and so their end. I mean That the red murderer has himself been murdered; The traitor struck with treason; he who let The orphan perish came himself to want: Thus justice and great God have ordered it! So that the scene of evil has been turned Against the actor; pain paid back with pain; And poison given for poison.”

Prescott’s narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale; that “by one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans of the wisest, the column which the minister had so artfully raised for his support served only to crush him.” _Sæpe intereunt aliis meditantes necem_; and that by the very means mediated.

“For ’tis the sport, to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard,”

says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows, by a certain mischance, might

“have reverted to my bow again, And not where I had aimed them;”

and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled bowman a mischief. That king’s fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus punished, and owns it:—

“_Osric._ How is’t, Laertes?

_Laertes._ Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric; I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”

And so is the king himself; and he, Laertes testifies,—

“is justly served: It is a poison tempered by himself”

for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what Horatio calls

“Accidental judgments, casual slaughters, And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on the inventors’ heads.”

_TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE._

ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.

With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself:

“Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est Oderit curare.”

David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like, as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us to-morrow,—by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to grieve before he need, is one of Seneca’s sententious sayings: _Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est_. One of Mrs. Gore’s women of the world—who might probably be counted by the hundred—is sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. “I hate,” she says, “to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me, or direct my telescope towards a coming storm.” And herein was she wise, if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. “Leave future occurrences to their uncertainties,” writes the fine old physician, Religiosus Medicus, “think that which is present thy own; and, since ’tis easier to foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity.” Shakspeare’s noble Roman, at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man enough to utter the aspiration:

“O, that a man might know The end of this day’s business, ere it come!”

But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that prospective yearning, with the reflection,

“But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.”

Swift opens his Birthday Address to Stella with the assurance,

“This day, whate’er the fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me: This day, then, let us not be told, That you are sick and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills; To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff.”

For once, however, it is only in the opening verses that the dean is jocose; and he soon turns aside from his strain of levity to bid Stella accept some serious lines “from not the gravest of divines.” Schleiermacher, in one of his rather gushing letters,—for he, too, though nothing of a Swift, and though of real weight in divinity, was not in all senses the gravest of divines,—implores his “dearest Jette” not to look so much into the future. He cannot beg this too earnestly and too often, he says,—so depressed is Jette apt to be by anticipation of things to come, and from a perverse habit of condensing advent difficulties. “It is easy to see through _one_ pane of glass, but through ten placed one upon another we cannot see. Does this prove that each one is not transparent? or are we ever called upon to look through more than one at a time? Double panes we only have recourse to for warmth; and just so it is with life. We have but to live _one_ moment at a time. Keep each one isolated, and you will easily see your way through them.” So again writes good Frederick Perthes to his wife, whose fearful and hopeful longings, he tells her, are indeed guarantees for the great future beyond the grave, but whom he urges to bear in mind that a vigorous grasp of the present is our duty so long as we are upon earth. It is the present moment, he reminds her, that supplies the energy and decision that fit us for life; retrospect brings sadness, and the dark future excites fears, so that we should be crippled in our exertions were we not to lay a vigorous grasp upon the present. And

“Labour with what zeal you will, Something still remains undone; Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun.

By the bedside, on the stair, At the threshold, near the gates, With its menace or its prayer, Like a mendicant it waits;

Waits, and will not go away; Waits, and will not be gainsaid: By the cares of yesterday Each to-day is heavier made;

Till at length the burden seems Greater than our strength can bear; Heavy as the weight of dreams Pressing on us everywhere.

And we stand from day to day, Like the dwarfs of times gone by, Who, as Northern legends say, On their shoulders held the sky.”

Quite exceptional is the temperament impersonated by Wordsworth in one who seemed a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows.

Longfellow has his midnight reflection on To-morrow; himself a watcher and contemplative, his little ones asleep: and thus the _pensées_ end:

“To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest, Who cries to me, ‘Remember Barmecide, And tremble to be happy with the rest.’ And I make answer, ‘I am satisfied; I dare not ask; I know not what is best; God hath already said what shall betide.’”

There is never, observes Madame d’Arblay, in her diary, such a superfluity of actual happiness as to make it either rational or justifiable to feed upon _expected_ misery. “That portion of philosophy which belongs to making the most of the present day, grows upon me strongly; and, as I have suffered infinitely from its neglect, it is what I most encourage, and, indeed, require.” Kindly ordained, she takes it, is the concealment of

“the day of sorrow; And enough is the present tense of toil— For this world, to all, is a stiffish soil— And the mind flies back with a glad recoil From the debts not due till to-morrow.”

It is one of Scott’s young heroes who opens a letter of troublous tidings with the confession that, until now, he had rarely known what it was to sustain a moment’s real sorrow; what he called such was, he now felt assured, only the weariness of mind which, having nothing actually present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the future—disregarding the Scriptural monition that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Is there, Armstrong asks,

“an evil worse than fear itself? And what avails it that indulgent Heaven From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come, If we, ingenious to torment ourselves, Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own? Enjoy the present; nor, with needless cares Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb, Appal the surest hours that life bestows: Serene, and master of yourself, prepare For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”

Prevision and imagination, as Rousseau says, multiply the evils of our lot: “_Pour moi_,” he professes—however the profession may have squared with the practice—“_j’ai beau savoir que je soufrirai demain, il me suffit de ne pas souffrir aujourd’hui pour être tranquille_.” It is certainly a frenzy, quoth old Montaigne, to go now and whip yourself, because it may so fall out that fortune may one day decree you a whipping, and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you will stand in need of it at Christmas. It was one of Madame de Sévigné’s maxims in life to “regarder l’avenir comme une obscurité, dont il peut arriver des biens et des clartés à quoi l’on ne s’attend pas.” Milton’s Adam laments the mournful privilege of “visions ill foreseen.” Better had he lived ignorant of future! so had borne his part of evil only, each day’s lot enough to bear. So again, in Milton’s Masque, the elder brother bids the younger be not over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain evils:

“For grant they be so, while they rest unknown, What need a man forestall his date of grief, And run to meet what he would most avoid?”

And once more, Milton himself, in one of those Sonnets which stand in the like relation of merit to his great epic that Shakspeare’s do to his great dramas, admonishes his scholar, Cyriack Skinner, that heaven disproves the care,

“though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”

“Melancholy commonly flies to the future for its aliment,” says Sydney Smith, “and it must be encountered,” he adds, “by diminishing the range of our views.” The great remedy for melancholy, he insists in another place, is to “take short views of life.” Are you happy now? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all? For “every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.” One of his correspondents he emphatically counsels to dispel that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. “We know nothing of to-morrow, our business is to be good and happy to day.” In effect, like Maucroix,

“Il rit de ces prudents qui, par trop de sagesse, S’en vont dans l’avenir chercher de la tristesse Et des soucis cuisants.”

Once and again in his autobiography does the most influential, perhaps, of French philosophers avow his resolve _á vivre désormais au jour la journée_, to take short views of life, and regard distant objects as at once illusive and elusory. “Usons de chaque jour sans trop de prévoyance du lendemain,” says another. And it was an old French poet, fourscore and upwards, who in 1700 wrote the four verses which since then have been often cited:

“Chaque jour est un bien que du ciel je reçois, Je jouis aujourd’hui de celui qu’il me donne; Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’a moi, Et celui de demain n’appartient a personne.”

Dr. Boyd recognises as sound philosophy in Sydney Smith, the advising us, whether physically or morally, to “take short views.” One of his illustrations to the purpose is, that it would knock you up at once if, when the railway carriage moved out of the station at Edinburgh, you began to trace in your mind’s eye the whole route to London. Never do that, he says; think first of Dunbar, then of Newcastle, then of York, and, putting the thing thus, you will get over the distance without fatigue of mind. What little child, he asks, would have heart to begin the alphabet, if, before he did so, you put clearly before him all the school and college work of which it is the beginning? “The poor little thing would knock up at once, wearied out by your want of skill in putting things. And so it is that Providence, kindly and gradually putting things, whiles us onward, still keeping hope and heart, through the trials and cares of life.” Every dog has its day, quaintly observes A. H. K. B. on another occasion; but the day of the rational dog is overclouded in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creatures; it is overclouded by the anticipation of the coming day which will not be his. And the essayist reminds us accordingly how “that great though morbid man, John Foster,” could not heartily enjoy the summer weather, for thinking how every sunny day that shone upon him was a downward step towards the winter gloom—each indication that the season was advancing, though only to greater beauty, filling him with a sort of forecast regret. “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say, “I have seen a buttercup.” And we know, of course, adds his critic, “that in his case there was nothing like affectation; it was only that, unhappily for himself, the bent of his mind was so onward-looking, that he saw only a premonition of December in the roses of June.” Waife, in Lord Lytton’s story, checks his grandchild’s query when, happy, and unaccustomed to happiness, and therefore distrusting its continuance, she wistfully exclaims, “It cannot last, can it?” “’Tis no use in this life, my dear,” Waife tells her, “no use at all disturbing present happiness by asking, ‘Can it last?’ To-day is man’s, to-morrow his Maker’s.” Life being a succession of stages, urges another practical philosopher, we should think of one stage at a time. Most people, he judiciously reminds us, can bear one day’s evil; what breaks men down is the trying to bear on one day the evil of two days, twenty days, a hundred days. “We can bear a day of pain, followed by a night of pain, and that again by a day of pain, and thus onward. But we can bear each day and night of pain, only by taking each by itself. We can break each rod, but not the bundle.” And the sufferer, in real great suffering, is well described as turning to the wall in blank despair, when he looks too far on. To cite another illustration of A. K. H. B.’s, we should, for certain purposes, look not at the entire chain, but at each successive link of it; we know, of course, that each link will be succeeded by the next; but we should think of them one at a time.

Do not say, _wait the end_, is a maxim of Paul Louis Courier’s, who declares that, saving the respect due to the ancients, nothing is more false than that rule. “The evil of to-morrow shall never deprive me of the good of to-day,” is one of the brilliant Frenchman’s resolves. Another brilliant but highly bilious Frenchman testifies from observation and experience to the necessity, in the long run, of living from day to day, without indulgence either in unavailing regrets or anxious forecast, “on s’aperçoit qu’il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin éponger la vie à mésure qu’elle s’écoule.” But it may too truly be said of this philosopher that he wrote, and lived, as one having no hope, and without God in the world.

Horace was in his placid _Il Penseroso_ mood when he counselled the acceptance of each new-born day as possibly one’s last, and appropriating it accordingly:

“Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras, Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum: Grata superveniet quæ non sperabitur hora.”

We might suggest suggestive parallels by the score, as this from a play of Leigh Hunt’s,

“One day—could you not try one day and then Enjoy or fear another as it suited? Ay, one—one—one. Try but one day, and then Trust me if one day would not give you strength,”

for morrows in store. Or this, from a poem of Owen Meredith’s:

“Be quiet! Take things as they come; Each hour will draw out some surprise. With blessing let the days go home: Thou shalt have thanks from evening skies.”

_MEDICAMENTAL MUSIC._

1 SAMUEL xvi. 23.

In the days when Saul loved David greatly, and found comfort in the constant presence of his favourite, it sometimes “came to pass that when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.”

That there is something more than ordinary in music, Bishop Beveridge, in his “Private Thoughts,” infers from this fact—that David made use of the harp for driving away the evil spirit from Saul, as well as for bringing the good spirit upon himself. The gentle prelate therefore recognises in music a sort of secret and charming power, such as naturally dispels “those black humours which the evil spirit is apt to brood upon,” and such too as composes the mind into a more regular, sweet, and docile disposition, thereby rendering it “the fitter for the Holy Spirit to work upon, the more susceptive of Divine grace, and more faithful messenger to convey truth to the understanding.” And he cites his personal experience—_experto crede_—in favour of this view.

Anatomizing melancholy, old Burton adds to the instance of David that of Elisha, who when he was troubled by importunate kings, called for a minstrel, “and when he played, the hand of the Lord came upon him.” Of course the erudite anatomist heaps up corroborative instances of all kinds and ages, mythological, classical, mediæval; and he quotes many of those obscure and obsolete authorities whom it has been the cheap policy of many a bookmaker to cite from Burton’s _thesaurus_ second-hand.

Spenser opens a canto of his “Faerie Queene” with a tribute to the powers of minstrelsy as exercised by Orpheus,—

“Or such as that celestial psalmist was, That when the wicked fiend his lord tormented, With heavenly notes, that did all others pass, The outrage of his furious fit relented.”

Or again, to quote a parallel passage from a later poet of the didactic school, whom, perhaps simply because he (Dr. Armstrong) was didactic, some people think as essentially prosy as Spenser is on all sides allowed to be quintessentially poetical:—

“Such was the bard, whose heavenly strains of old Appeased the fiend of melancholy Saul.”

Buretti declares music to have the power of so affecting the whole nervous system as to give sensible ease in a large variety of disorders, and in some cases a radical cure. Particularly he instances sciatica as capable of being relieved by this agency. Theophrastus is mentioned by Pliny as recommending it for the hip gout; and there are references on record by old Cato and Varro to the same effect. Æsculapius figures in Pindar as healing acute disorders with soothing songs.

“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels diseases, softens every pain, Subdues the rage of poison and of plague: And hence the wise of ancient days adored One power of Physic, Melody, and Song.”

Over Luther, as Sir James Stephen has remarked, there brooded a constitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sadness, but more often giving birth to dreams so wild that, if vivified by the imagination of Dante, they might have passed into visions as awful and majestic as those of the “Inferno.” Various were the spells to which Luther had recourse, to cast out the demons that haunted him; and of these remedial agencies the most potent perhaps was music. “He had ascertained and taught that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than light itself; for music (he says), while it chases away the evil suggestions, effectually baffles the wiles of the tempter. His lute, and hand, and voice, accompanying his own solemn melodies, were therefore raised to repel the vehement aggressions of the enemy of mankind.”