Part 9

“How sad a sight is human happiness To those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour! —Know, smiler! at thy peril thou art pleased: Thy pleasure is the promise of thy pain.”

This is the state of man, by the experience of Shakspeare’s Wolsey: to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, and bears his blushing honours thick upon him. He is exceeding glad, even as the prophet of his gourd; but a worm is preparing, or if not, a frost; and next day, or at latest

“The third day, comes a frost, a killing frost; And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls.”

The worm may speed in its mission, or otherwise; but the fulfilment of its mission is only a question of time. There is a

... “little rift within the lute, That by-and-by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all.

“The little rift within the lover’s lute Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That, rotting onward slowly moulders all.”

Slowly, sometimes, but surely. Not so slowly as surely.

Remembering both the “foolish pride” of Jonah in his gourd, and his “impious discontentment” at the decree which smote it, which of us but might, for ourselves, do worse than adopt the words and the spirit of one verse at least of Pope’s Universal Prayer,

“Save me alike from foolish pride And impious discontent At aught Thy wisdom hath denied, Or aught Thy bounty lent.”

_SELF-PRAISE._

PROVERBS xxvii. 2.

“Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips.” Our English adage, “Self-praise is no recommendation,” has its analogue in the Latin: _Laus in proprio ore sordescit_—“A man’s own laudation of himself is unseemly.” Another bit of good old Latin admonition is, to enlarge rather upon the praises of one’s friends, than upon one’s own: _Amicorum, magis quàm tuam ipsius laudem, prædica_; which seems to be, however, but a literal transcript of the second line in a couplet from the Greek Anthology:

Ὑπὲρ σεαυροῦ μὴ φράσης ἐγκώμια· Φίλων ἔπαινον μᾶλλον ἢ σαυτοῦ λέγε.

Syrus, again, utters the caution, “That whoso praiseth himself will soon find some one to laugh at him”—_Qui seipsum laudat, cito derisorem inveniet_. It was Æsop’s derisive counsel to an unreadable author, who did all his own praising and puffing, and therefore did it well—well, at least, in quantity, if not in quality—to stick by all manner of means to that home-brewed system; for it was the poor creature’s only chance of ever tasting the sweets of praise at all.

“Ego, quod te laudas, vehementer probo, Namque hoc ab alio nunquam continget tibi.”

In one of the wordy encounters between Shakspeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, the lady imputes signal unwisdom to the signor, when she tells him “There’s not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself.” Benedick scouts this as an old, old apophthegm, quite out of date; for, says he, “if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow weeps.” And how long is _that_? Why, an hour in clamour (the bell), and (the widow) a quarter in rheum. Therefore, he infers, “it is most expedient for the wise to be the trumpeter of his own virtues, as I am to myself. So much for praising myself (who, I myself will bear witness, is praiseworthy).” Shakspeare often expatiates, with dramatic diversities of phase and aspect, of character and incident, upon this worldly-wise theme, by the worldly-wise held worthy of all acceptation, of every man his own trumpeter. To a few examples out of these many we may recur anon.

Swift is writing after his own humour when he says, in the work he seems to have admired the most of his voluminous _opera omnia_, but to which some refer as the distinct cause of his never getting a bishopric—“That as for the liberty he has thought fit to take of praising himself upon some occasions or none, he is sure it will need no excuse, if a multitude of great examples be allowed sufficient authority; for it is to be noted,” he goes on to say, that praise was originally a pension paid by the world; but the moderns, finding the trouble and charge too great in collecting it, “have lately bought out the fee simple; since which time the right of presentation is wholly in ourselves.” But it is in the simpler states and stages of society, according to a latter-day essayist on social subjects, that the man who values himself highly has little scruple in confessing as much. “Savages have no more reticence in parading their good points than peacocks.” North American Indians, and the like, sublimely ignore any such courses of conduct as that, Not he that approveth himself is commended. Their faith and practice run counter to this kind of self-discipline. Chateaubriand gives an example of the style of chant in which a jubilant warrior, Sioux or Iroquois, proclaims his doughty prestige:—“Brave and renowned were my forefathers. My grandsire was the wisdom of his tribe, and the thunder of war. My father was a pine-tree in strength. My great-grandmother gave birth to five men of war; my grandmother was alone worth a council of sachems; my mother makes first-rate soup. As for myself, I am stronger and wiser than all my ancestors.” Later Americans, _not_ of the redskin family, are charged with a scarcely inferior knack of extolling themselves in all the simplicity of an ignorance which knows nothing higher or better, and with being frankly astonished at their own successes. Among them, it is alleged by caustic Cis-atlantic criticism, nobody is thought the worse of for praising himself; whereas among ourselves, “the practice is out of date; a man cannot here puff himself off with impunity—without in fact, being taken for a fool; and therefore, if he have ordinary sagacity, he will keep within bounds.” But not the less, it is allowed, must the thought of the heart find some outlet; men draw wide distinctions between pride and vanity, but both have at least this in common, that they like to feel and be acknowledged “first;” and both, it is added, “agree in the instinct to gain their end by a side-wind—to boast themselves by implication, if circumstances will not permit the more agreeable incense of positive praise and adulation.”

Plutarch does not blame Cato (the elder) for perpetually boasting and exalting himself, although the old censor somewhere pronounces it absurd for a man either to praise or to disparage himself. But Plutarch _does_ “think the man who is often praising himself, not so complete in virtue as the modest man, who does not even want others to praise him.” He takes frequent note of the habit of self-commendation in some of his heroes, and of the absence of it in others. Cato, “who was never sparing in his own praises, and thought boasting a natural attendant on great actions,” was nothing like so grievous an offender in this respect, to Plutarch’s thinking, as Cicero, whose writings, says he, “were so interlarded with encomiums on himself that, although his style was elegant and delightful, his discourses were disgusting and nauseous to the reader; for the blemish stuck to him like an incurable disease.” Comparing this greatest of Roman orators with the greatest of the Greek, Plutarch observes of their respective writings, that Demosthenes, when he touches on his own praise does it with an inoffensive delicacy, never, indeed, giving way to it at all unless he has some important matter in view; whereas Cicero, habitually and systematically, “speaks in such high terms of himself that it is plain he had a most intemperate vanity.” Modern critics not a few, German, English, and French, have made the most—not to say made the best—of this foible of Cicero’s. In particular, Mr. de Quincey makes merry over it, without mercy, at the father of his country’s expense.

Isaac Barrow points the moral of the text which these heterogeneous annotations are meant to illustrate, with a special warning against Cicero’s infirmity. “If a man have worthy qualities and do great deeds, let them speak for him,” urges that masterly divine; they will of themselves extort commendation; his silence about them, his seeming to neglect them, will enhance their worth in the opinion of men. “Prating about them, obtruding them upon men, will mar their credit, inducing men to think them done, not out of love to virtue, but for a vain-glorious design. Thus did Cicero, thus have many others, blasted the glory of their virtuous deeds.” It is quaintly said by Owen Feltham, that whoso makes boast of the good he truly has, obscures much of his own worth, in drawing it up by so unseemly a bucket as his own tongue. “Though the vaunts be true, they do but awaken scoffs; and instead of a clapping hand, they find a look of scorn.” When a soldier bragged too much of a great scar in his forehead, he was asked by Augustus if he did not get it when he turned his back on the enemy. So, “If I have done anything well”—this is one of Feltham’s “Resolves,”—“I will never think it worth while to tell the world of it.”

“O sir, to such as boasting show their scars, A mock is due,”

says Shakspeare’s Troilus to Ulysses—modest, valiant Trojan, to shrewd, circumspect Greek. So another Trojan to another Greek, in the same play—which Coleridge reckoned almost the most wonderful of Shakspeare’s all—Æneas, namely, to Agamemnon; or rather, indeed, Æneas to himself, in Agamemnon’s hearing:—

... “But peace, Æneas, Peace Trojan; lay thy finger on thy lips! The worthiness of praise disdains his worth, If that the praised himself bring the praise forth: But what the repining enemy commends, That breath fame follows; that praise, sole pure, transcends.”

And in yet another scene, Agamemnon, King of Men, pithily and pointedly tells that stalwart dullard—big, blustering, boisterous Ajax—who, for the life of him, cannot see the pith or point of it, that “whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.” Ajax suspects not the general to mean that _he_, son of Telamon, is his own praise, his own chronicle.

One more excerpt from our myriad-minded poet:—“Then we wound our modesty, and make foul the clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we publish them.” The wise saw drops from the sententious lips of the sage old steward of the Countess of Roussillon in what is probably as little read and slightly relished as any of Shakspeare’s plays.

* * * * *

Years ago there used to perambulate the streets of London, a prodigy of a hat, some seven feet high, the trade-mark advertisement of a hatter in the Strand. This gigantic puff Mr. Carlyle once made the text for some characteristic strictures on the puffery of the age. Every man his own trumpeter: that he alleged was, to an alarming extent, the accepted rule. “Make loudest possible proclamation of your hat.” Against which doctrine our strenuous _censor morum_ objected, that nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings; but, on the contrary, forbids all men to make such. There is not, he contends, a man, or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellences, and prowesses, and supremacy in his craft. His inmost heart says to him, “Leave thy friends to speak of these: if possible, thy enemies to speak of these; but at all events, thy friends.”

_PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, & EXPOSED SKULL._

2 KINGS ix. 30, 35.

Jezebel’s painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas in the “Vision of Sin:”

“You are bones, and what of that? Every face, however full, Padded round with flesh and fat, Is but modell’d on a skull.

“Death is king, and Vivat Rex! Tread a measure on the stones, Madam—if I know your sex From the fashion of your bones.”

Byron muses on a skull[10] from among scattered heaps, as now a shattered cell which even the worm disdains; he ponders on its broken arch, its ruined wall, its chambers desolate, and portals foul; yet,

... “this was once Ambition’s airy hall, The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul: Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole, The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit And Passion’s host, that never brook’d control.”

It is Yorick’s skull that Hamlet is apostrophizing when he says, “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to _this_ favour she must come.” _Tôt ou tard_, as _le bon réligieux_ in “Atala” reminds his fair young listener, _quelle qu’eût été votre felicité, ce beau visage se fút changé en cette figure uniforme que le sépulcre donne à la famille d’Adam_. The good king Réné had painted on the walls of one of the rooms in the Celestine monastery at Avignon, a skeleton—it was that of a once surpassing beauty who had won his heart. How would the moral have lost its point had the head of the skeleton been replaced, like that in the painter’s room in the Strada Vecchia of Rome, so graphically described in “Dutch Pictures,” by a mask, or cardboard “dummy” of a superlatively inane cast of beauty—the blue eyes and symmetrical lips (curved into an unmeaning and eternal simper), the pink cheeks, and silken doll’s tresses, “contrasting strangely with the terribly matter-of-fact bones and ligaments beneath—the moral to my lady’s looking-glass.” Gwillim, the Pursuivant, as quoted, not approvingly, in Southey’s “Doctor,” counsels all gentlewomen that are proud of their beauty to consider that they “carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin, which one day will be loathsome to be looked on.” The old French poet Villon, _aux charniers des Innocents_, speculates in a manner that to one critic recalls the graveyard scene in “Hamlet,” on the destiny of _corps féminin, qui tant est tendre, poli, suave, gracieux_—for how can he help his thoughts running thitherward “quand il considère ces têtes entassées en ces charniers”? Who, indeed, as Keats once asked,

“Who hath not loiter’d in a green churchyard, And let his spirit, like a demon mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death has marr’d, And filling it once more with human soul?”

In such a spot Blair lingers, to apostrophize beauty, as a pretty plaything, a dear deceit, which the grave discredits. The charms expunged, the roses faded, and the lilies soiled, what has beauty more to boast of? Will the lovers of it flock round it now, to gaze and do it homage?

“Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid, While, surfeited upon thy damask cheek, The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes roll’d, Riots unscared. For this was all thy caution? For this thy painful labours at the glass, T’ improve those charms, and keep them in repair, For which the spoiler thanks thee not?”

So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, muses in Death’s cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the “unfashionable worm,” respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow and the cheek’s bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast—on what? “No matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,—it is his dinner-time.” The final residuum of such repasts becomes an unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a tone and to a tune like this:

“Did she live yesterday, or ages back? What colour were the eyes when bright and waking? And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black, Poor little head! that long has done with aching?”

Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that of Helen. “Was it for this,”[11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull, and not its delicate covering.

Where, asks the author of “Esmond,” are those jewels now that beamed under Cleopatra’s forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr. Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once covered that ghastly yellow framework. “They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones.” And has not Macaulay his “Sermon in a Churchyard”? wherein one practical improvement of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus:—

“Dost thou beneath the smile or frown Of some vain woman bend thy knee? Here take thy stand, and trample down Things that were once as fair as she. Here rave of her ten thousand graces, Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin, While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin.”

_THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD._

2 KINGS ix. 37.

In the portion of Jezreel—by a retributive local coincidence—were to lie the mangled remains of Jezebel—what the dogs should leave of her. “And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.” _This_, Jezebel? how could _this_ be identified with the superb wife and superior of the king of Israel, as she was in her prime of life and pride of place? or even with the faded form of her that, newly a widow, but energetic and manœuvring to the last, and defiant in her fall, painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at the window as Jehu entered in at the gate? Imperious Jezebel, thrice puissant and insatiably presuming, transformed into a heap of bone dust—reduced to her lowest terms as mere organic matter—resolved into just so much manure upon the face of the field.

“Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that the earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”

So muses and speculates Hamlet, on the theme of “to what base uses we may return, Horatio,” when his imagination traces the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole. ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so, Horatio may object. Not a jot, is Hamlet’s answer to the objection; for look you, Alexander died, was buried, was resolved into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam. “And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?” _Quod erat demonstrandum._

The Prince of Denmark was in the like mood when, in other company, he talked, to the same purpose, of how a man may fish with the worm[12] that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

Well may Juvenal bid the meditative moralist, _expende Annibalem_, and expound the text that _Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum corpuscula_. But it needs a Shakspeare to reduce these to their lowest terms, in the style of Hamlet with imperious Cæsar,—a _reductis ad absurdum_ indeed.

Sydney Smith somewhere girds at the idea of doctrinaire legislators making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades, “and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to brocoli, and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus.” Hawthorne once designed a symbolical tale of a young man being slain and buried in the flower garden of his betrothed, and the earth levelled over him. That particular spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers, produces them of admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume; and thus the classic fantasy is realized, of dead people transformed to flowers.

Sir Thomas Browne—how pregnant his hints are!—touches on Mummy as having become merchandize: Mizraim curing wounds, and Pharaoh being sold for balsams.

The heroic dust, as Chateaubriand calls it, of the heart of Duguesclin, stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded up by a glazier to mix his paints. So again we read of the slaughtered hosts during the retreat from Moscow: “Some industrial companies have transported themselves into the desert with their furnaces and their caldrons; the bones have been converted into animal black; whether it come from the dog or from the man, the varnish is equally valuable, and is as brilliant when drawn from obscurity as from glory.” Cornelia Knight mentions a Parmese canon, who one day, while the French were in occupation of Piacenza, found the church in possession of three surgeons, or surgeons’ mates, of that army, “busily skinning” the dead body of a French soldier. “Horrified at the sight, he asked the meaning of this ghastly proceeding, and was told that some scientific men had discovered that the human skin made excellent leather,” and that it had been therefore ordered that all dead bodies should be skinned, for the purpose of providing boots and shoes for the soldiers. Ziska’s skin-deep drum-destiny was at least a seeming nobler, if not essentially a more useful one.

Xenophon makes his pattern-prince desirous of having his body turned to beneficial uses after death, by being incorporated with mother earth; positively enjoining his sons not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but to bury it in the ground as soon as the life was gone out of it. Little would trouble him the anticipated contingency of such a _peut-être_ as Burns surmises, in the case of a recently deceased acquaintance—like Xenophon, a sportsman to the core:—

“There low he lies, in lasting rest; Perhaps, upon his mould’ring breast Some spitefu’ moorfowl bigs her nest, To hatch and breed.”

Cyrus, like the essentially practical statesman in Mrs. Gore’s tale, would presumably have detected no irony in Hamlet’s assignment of purpose to the ashes of imperious Cæsar: “It seemed a relief to his mind that emperors, when turned to clay, could be turned to account.” No more objection to that, than to such a circumstance as “The Traveller” deplores, that

... “in those domes where Cæsar once bore sway, Defaced by time, and tottering in decay, There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”

Have we not heard Liebig indignantly complain of our importing immense quantities of bones from abroad, thereby draining the fair foreign fields of their very life-blood—scouring as we are said to do foreign battle-plains, that the bony reliques of warriors who fought a good fight in their day, may now be of further avail to make our bread? An English satirist of German sentimentalism pictures a contemplative young Teuton, at dinner time, pausing over his _sauer kraut_, as he calls to mind that the churchyard wherein his ancestor was decently deposited, has been converted into a kitchen garden; and the conviction flashes upon him that what was a distinguished man is now on the table in the form of cabbage.