Part 8

... “for those that here in dust Must cheerful toil out their appointed years.”

In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues, it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what hearts seared or broken—“who of woman born could bear the sight and live? But ’tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes.” Looking back upon a certain year’s accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale “wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time!” And yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very endurable—small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. Margaret Hale does but exemplify in prose what Home’s Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse:

“Had some good angel oped to me the book Of Providence, and let me read my life, My heart had broke when I beheld the sum Of ills which one by one I have endured.”

Whereupon the lady’s faithful Anna remarks:

“That God, whose ministers good angels are, Hath shut the book, in mercy to mankind.”

Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. “I have somewhere read,” says Caleb Williams, “that Heaven in mercy hides from us the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord with this assertion.” And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds, that this once at least he should have been saved from insupportable labour and indescribable anguish, could he have foreseen what was then impending.—Sometimes the natural complaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand in John Webster’s tragedy:

“Oh, most imperfect light of human reason, That mak’st us so unhappy to foresee What we can least prevent!”

Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this:

“Then did I see how that presentient shroud Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud. Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint. And the struck spirit utterly would faint, Hurl’d from full joy.”

To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. The knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms, and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His disciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto Jeremy before it was besieged.” Holy George Herbert is scarcely more quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose:

“Only the present is thy part and fee. And happy thou, If, though thou didst not beat thy future brow, Thou couldst well see What present things required of thee.

They ask enough; why shouldst thou further go? Raise not the mud Of future depths, but drink the clear and good. Dig not for woe In times to come; for it will grow.

Man and the present fit; if he _provide_ He breaks the square. This hour is mine: if for the next I care, I grow too wide, And do crusade upon death’s side:

For death each hour environs and surrounds. He that would know And care for future chances, cannot go Unto those grounds, But thro’ a churchyard which them bounds.”

The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one’s death may be treated religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains to condemned-cell criminals; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair on account of the suddenness of the summons, “but rather to feel this comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with them, lay under the same sentence of certain death, _they_ only had the advantage of knowing the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them.” But how does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect, in his so-called “Vision about Prevision”? The seer, or foreseer, in that _fantasiestück_, when asked, concerning those who consult him as to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of their death—that they may duly prepare for it? answers, “That least of all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end; they won’t let us unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution.... They prefer having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage, and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe.” Well, but the seer himself: he at any rate is above that weakness: he at any rate has inquired into the secret of his end? “For what purpose?” is his reply: is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned cell? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to die just that day month? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very circumstance, in fact die before them? and yet are not these accounted happy in comparison, because they know it not?

“E’en the great shadow, Death, lost half its gloom In kind oblivion of impending doom,”

says one philosophical poet. Another, and a greater, in a poem on presentiments, has this among many stanzas addressed to them:

“’Tis said, that warnings ye dispense, Emboldened by a keener sense; That men have lived for whom, With dread precision, ye made clear The hour that in a distant year Should knell them to the tomb. Unwelcome insight!”⸺

_that_ is the comment, that the note of exclamation, with which Wordsworth commences the stanza next ensuing. When death has invaded the quiet rectory in Miss Tytler’s Huguenot story, we have each servant mysteriously and fanatically delivering her experience in the matter of corpse-candles, death-spells, death-watches, etc., so that one might have learned for all one’s life afterwards to look on one’s death as a dark fate, haunting and hovering over one’s own person and those of beloved friends, from which there is no escape, not even by prayer and fasting; might have learned to “look out for it in dim prognostications, to watch for it, and anticipate its cruel blows in incipient madness.—‘Our Bibles say we know not the day nor the hour,’ said Grand’mère; ‘but He knows—that is enough.’” One of La Bruyère’s _pensées sur la mort_ is, that “ce qu’il y a de certain dans la mort, est un peu adouci par ce qui est incertain: c’est un indéfini dans le tems, qui tient quelque chose de l’infini, et de ce qu’on appelle éternité.” Byron indeed utters the remonstrant query,

“Ah! why do darkening shades conceal The hour when man must cease to be?”

But his sigh was little in the spirit of the Psalmist’s prayer to be made to know his end, and the measure of his days, what it was.

_BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD._

ST. LUKE ix. 34.

To the three favoured apostles it was granted by their Master to be eye-witnesses of His majesty, when they were with Him on the holy mount. They saw the fashion of His countenance altered, and His raiment become white and glistering. They saw with Him in glory Moses, whose burial-place no man knew, and Elijah, who was translated that he should not see death. And Peter said it was good to be there, and he desired to make that mount of transfiguration a dwelling-place, and to prolong the splendours of that beatific vision. Three tabernacles he proposed to rear, in that eager impetuosity which so often marked his character; at present scarcely knowing what he said, but conscious of a privileged apocalypse, and deprecating its speedy withdrawal. But “while he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them; and they feared as they entered into the cloud.”

So it was again at a later day, and upon another mount, when the risen Master was asked by His assembled apostles would He at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? Brief was the reply, and no sooner uttered than, while they beheld—gazed wistfully, hopingly, longingly, on the Presence they had so lately lost, and were now eager to retain—while they beheld, “He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”

* * * * *

The overshadowing cloud to mar the sunshine is one of the commonest of common-places in man’s experience. Perpetually being verified in prosaic reality, all too real, is the poet’s image—

“Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom, A ghostly shadow flitted,”

_Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid._ The very exuberance of human happiness tends to suggest its opposite.

Gibbon felt simply as a man when he felt what he has described in a memorable passage relating to his sense of gratified triumph at the conclusion of his _magnum opus_. It was between the hours of eleven and twelve, he records, on a calm night in June, that he wrote the last lines of his last page in a summer-house in his garden at Lausanne. After laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history the life of the historian must be short and precarious.” It is the common lot. It is but another reading of the complaint in Prior’s pastorals—

“Yet thus beloved, thus loving to excess, Yet thus receiving and returning bliss, In this great moment, in this golden Now, ... A melancholy tear afflicts my eye, And my heart labours with a sudden sigh; Invading fears repel my coward joy, And ills foreseen the present bliss destroy.”

Or as elsewhere the same poet gloomily exclaims, and fruitlessly supplicates—

“O impotent estate of human life, Where hope and fear maintain eternal strife! Where fleeting joy does lasting doubt inspire, And most we question what we most desire! Amongst Thy various gifts, great Heaven, bestow Our cup of love unmixed; forbear to throw Bitter ingredients in; nor pall the draught With nauseous grief.”

Hardly can it be called, though the author of “The Ring and the Book” does call it,—

... “strange how, even when most secure In our domestic peace, a certain dim And flitting shade can sadden all; it seems A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning, A sense of something wanting, incomplete.”

A thought comes over us sometimes in our career of pleasure, Lord Lytton remarks, or in the exultation of our ambitious pursuits, a thought comes over us like a cloud, that around us and about us Death, Shame, Crime, Despair, are busy at their work. He tells us what he has read somewhere of an enchanted land where the inmates walked along voluptuous gardens, and built palaces, and heard music, and made merry; while around and within the land were deep caverns, where the gnomes and the fiends dwelt; and ever and anon their groans and laughter, and the sounds of their unutterable toils or ghastly revels, travelled to the upper air, mixing in an awful strangeness with the summer festivity and buoyant occupation of those above. And this he claims to be a picture of human life.

Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, exclaims Mr. Carlyle; and he tells us what it is, “the shadow of ourselves.”

At a seeming crisis of assured prosperity the heroine of a French _roman_ is made to exclaim, “The future is all our own—the radiant future, without cloud or obstacle, pure in the immensity of its horizon, and extending beyond the reach of sight.” But while she thus speaks her features suddenly assume an expression of touching melancholy, as she adds, in a voice of profound emotion, “And yet—at this very hour—so many unfortunate creatures are suffering pain!” So with the young hero in one of Mr. Hannay’s fictions: “In that moment he felt that he had attained a new stage of life; yet, an instant’s reaction seized him, as in every fruition through one’s progress in time comes that curious moment’s speck, the touch of an unseen hand, that seems to tell you, ‘Too much joy is not for you here.’ It passed away, having just dashed his triumph as it always does.” At a later stage in this adventurer’s career the ebb of his spirits is made the text of a paragraph comparing them to a ship in the tropics, where a light wind comes, and dies again, and leaves you becalmed, or the horizon blackens suddenly and death seems impending in the unhealthy air. “Few things are more touching than that peculiar melancholy which sometimes comes over one in theatres or at feasts, and reminds us of the dark element in nature and the heart ... which chills the philosopher and the pleasure-taker.... When the light southerner of old got a glimpse of it he called for his lyre and his garlands; but roses will not charm it away from the deep heart of the child of the Teuton, and he sees its awful shadow trembling in the wine.” The English Opium-eater somewhere professes to derive from the spectacle of dancing, where the motion is continuous and the music not of a trivial character but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, “the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatever.” Wordsworth is treating of presentiments when he says that—

“The laughter of the Christmas hearth With sighs of self-exhausted mirth They feelingly reprove.”

And of such is Currer Bell too treating in a passage that tells of the writer’s fancy budding fresh and her heart basking in sunshine; only these feelings “were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle. The breathing of that beast of prey was in my ear always.” Ἐξ ἡδονῆς γὰρ φύεται τὸ δυστυχεῖν.

“Who knows what that low sullen murmur means, The river’s fall sends up to blast life’s fairest scenes?”

The happiest, as Pope’s Homer has it, “taste not happiness sincere, but find the cordial draught is dashed with care.” What biography of successful ambition but has its parallel passage to one in Prescott’s history of the conqueror of Peru: “Amidst this burst of adulation the cup of joy commended to Pizarro’s lips had one drop of bitterness in it that gave its flavour to all the rest”! As M. Ampére’s Cleopatra owns,—

“Oui, parmi les plaisirs, la joie et les festins, Je médite du sort les arrêts incertains.”

How apt, at a bright banquet, is the thought of death to flash across the mind, is trite among the truisms of experience. It was at Belshazzar’s feast, while they drank wine out of the golden vessels of the temple, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone, when the revelry was at its height and the revellers at their best, that in the same hour there came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astounded. In Hawthorne’s allegory of the Maypole at Merry Mount, the lord and lady of the May are abruptly overcome with a shadow of sadness, just when the minstrelsy of pipe, cittern, and viola is pealing forth in such a mirthful cadence that the boughs of the maypole quiver to the sound; and just then too, as if a spell had loosened them, down comes a little shower of withering roseleaves from the maypole. There is sometimes, says Fielding, a little speck of black in the brightest and gayest colours of fortune, which contaminates and deadens the whole.

“In every joy there lurks An impulse of decay; With silent speed it works, While all without is gay:”

—with silent speed, like the worm at Jonah’s gourd. “Fleurs, vous aussi,” so Béranger apostrophizes them,

... “vous avez vos souffrances. Le ver est là; le vent peut accourir.”

_Le ver_, as the worm prepared for Jonah’s gourd; _le vent_, as the vehement east wind to wither Jonah’s strength.

“While blooming love assures us golden fruit, Some inborn poison taints the secret root; Soon fall the flowers of joy.”

But Jonah’s gourd must have a section apart.

_THE SPREADING GOURD AND THE SPEEDING WORM._

JONAH iv. 6-8.

As Elijah the Tishbite sat down in the wilderness under a juniper-tree, heavy-hearted, and fleeing for his life from the grasp of Jezebel, yet requesting for himself that he might die; as he said, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life,” yet anon found rest and refreshment under the juniper-tree, and did eat and drink, and lay down again, and went in the strength of that rest and that meat, forty days and forty nights, unto Horeb the mount of God; so Jonah the son of Amittai, displeased exceedingly, and very angry, prayed in bitterness the same prayer, “O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.” Did he well to be angry? Did Elijah well to despair? Under a juniper-tree Elijah recovered strength, took heart, and became of good courage. For Jonah there was preparing a gourd. A gourd; and a worm to make short work of the gourd.

Jonah left the city in wrath, and made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city—the city which he had doomed and God had spared. Under the burning sun he awaited the judgment of Nineveh. “And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.

“But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.”

And when the sun arose, there arose too another thing of God’s preparing. As He had prepared the gourd, and prepared the worm to smite the gourd, so, at sunrise, “God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die.” And not only so, but again expressed the wish, with the old bitterness and even increasing wrath. Did he well to be angry for the gourd? “I do well to be angry, even unto death,” he exclaimed. The gourd was so gladdening a creation, it made even that morose spirit exceeding glad. But scarcely had he time to congratulate himself on this relief, in complacent assurance of its continuance, when the sheltering gourd was eaten to the heart by a speeding worm, and what came up in a night, perished in a night; and this also was vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit.

A perverse fate seems to lie in wait for man,

“And though he in a fertile climate dwell, Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy, Yet throw such charges of vexation on’t, As it may lose some colour.”

In the words of another of Shakspeare’s dramas, “joy cannot show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness.” _Inter delicias semper aliquid sævi nos strangulat_, says the Latin adage; the _aliquid sævi_ answering to the _aliquid amari_ of Lucretius, _quod in ipsis floribus angat_; or again to the _aliquid solliciti_ of Ovid,

... “Nulla est sincera voluptas; Sollicitique aliquid lætis intervenit.”

Why, Byron asks himself, in his diary (at Ravenna), why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure, does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what _is_—a retrospect of the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? Mrs. Browning has penned a suggestive sonnet to which the title is superscribed of Pain in Pleasure:

“A thought lay like a flower upon my heart, And drew around it other thoughts like bees For multitude and thirst of sweetnesses,— Whereat rejoicing, I desired the art Of the Greek whistler, who to wharf and mart Could lure those insect swarms from orange-trees, That I might hive me with such thoughts, and please My soul so, always. Foolish counterpart Of a weak man’s vain wishes! While I spake, The thought I called a flower, grew nettle-rough— The thoughts called bees, stung me to festering, Oh, entertain (cried reason, as she woke,) Your best and gladdest thoughts but long enough, And they will all prove sad enough to sting.”

As Shakspeare words it in one of _his_ sonnets,

“Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud,”

and every gourd has its worm. So again Cowper:

“Here every drop of honey hides a sting; Worms wind themselves into our sweetest flowers.”

On the same text moralizes the meditative sire of the Cid, in Corneille’s tragedy:

“Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse: Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse; Toujours quelques soucis en ces événements Troublent la pureté de nos contentements.”

_Semper amari aliquid._ It is like Johnson’s reflections on his first transports at Ranelagh. When first he entered those festive gardens, it gave, he tells Boswell, an expansion and gay sensation to his mind, such as he never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he reviewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to the doctor’s heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle but was afraid to go home and think; that “the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone.” Boswell approves the reflection as “experimentally just,” and appends a commonplace of his own, upon the feeling of langour, which succeeds the animation of gaiety, being itself a very severe pain.

It was in the mid hey-day of military triumph that Paulus Æmilius astonished his encircling admirers by, first, a prolonged silence, and next, a sombre homily on the vicissitudes of fortune, and of human affairs. What time for confidence can there be to man, he asked, when in the very instant of victory he must necessarily dread the power of fortune, and the very joy of success must be mingled with anxiety—_aliquid solliciti_—from a reflection on the course of unsparing fate, which humbles one man to-day, and to-morrow another! Gladdening is the gourd, with its pleasant promise of protection against the arrow that flieth by day from a burning sun; but only him can it make, like Jonah, exceeding glad, who knows not, or makes a point of forgetting, what a worm can do, between a setting and a rising sun.

The night thoughts of man in general are one with the Night Thoughts of Young in particular, when he exclaims,