Chapter III: Part 3

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.”

A story is told of Farinelli, the famous singer, being sent for express to Madrid, to try the effect of his magical voice on the king of Spain, who was then buried in the profoundest melancholy—proof against every appeal to exertion, living without signs of life in a darkened chamber, the unresisting prey of dejection beyond relief. But relief came with Farinelli. The vocalist was desired by the physicians to sing in an outer room, which for a day or two he did, without any apparent effect upon the royal patient. But at length it was noticed that the king seemed partially roused from his stupor, and became an evident listener; next day tears were seen starting from his eyes; the day after he ordered the door of his chamber to be left open; and at last “the perturbed spirit entirely left our modern Saul, and the medicinal voice of Farinelli effected what no other medicine could.” Well known in modern verse is the poet’s picture of a despairing sufferer, whom nought avails to move until—

“At last a slave bethought her of a harp:
The harper came, and tuned his instrument;
At the first notes, irregular and sharp,
On him her flashing eyes a moment bent,
Then to the wall she turned as if to warp
Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart re-sent.
...
Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall
In time to his old tune ...
... And in a gushing stream
The tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain,
Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.”

Nor be forgotten the impressive instance of Schiller’s Wallenstein, in his hour of darkness, tranquillised by Thekla’s voice and lute:—

“Come here, my girl. Seat thee by me,
For there is a good spirit on thy lips.
Thy mother praised to me thy ready skill;
She says a voice of melody dwells in thee,
Which doth enchant the soul. Now such a voice
Will drive away from me the evil demon
That beats his black wings close above my head.”

William Godwin makes his savage Tyrell amenable to well warbled melody. Readers of Scott will remember how a frenzied Highlander is soothed into self restraint by the minstrelsy of Annot Lyle. Goethe makes the first bar of an air by Gretchen suffice to lull the sorrows of young Werter, who protests that “instantly the gloom and madness which hang over me are dispersed, and I breathe freely again.” Another Charlotte—our English Richardson’s—is less successful in her manipulation of medicinal melody, when essaying to subdue an angry spirit by the spells of song: “I go to my harpsichord; music enrages him. He is worse than Saul; for Saul could be gloomily pleased with the music even of the man he hated,” But this is antedating Saul’s aversion; in those days Saul loved David greatly.

Dr. Croly, in an eloquent paragraph of his elaborate eastern romance, records how carefully music, “of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature,” was studied by the Jewish priesthood, and with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. “How often,” exclaims Salathiel, “have my fiercest perturbations sunk, at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judæa! How often, when my brain was burning, and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmony of harp and horn, blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel!”

It is characteristic, as Herr Kohl observes, of music-loving Bohemia, that in the lunatic asylum of its capital, music should be considered one of the chief aids and appliances for the improvement of the patients. In addition to the garden concerts, in which all assist who can, there is chamber music—quartets, trios, etc.,—every morning and evening in the wards; and a musical director takes high rank in the official staff of the establishment.

Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, mother of the Regent, describes in one of her letters a Madame de Persillie, well born and well bred, but a dangerous lunatic; who however, if you could but slip a guitar into her hand when the fury-fit came on, would become calm again as soon as she began to play. “I pity her greatly,” writes the good-natured duchess (whose homely German nature never became properly assimilated to the French court); “she was very fond of me, and used to address me as _Mon aimable_; but whenever she came to see me I always had a guitar quite ready for her.” It was but common prudence to be thus prepared for the worst; and when the worst came to the worst, then a guitar was best.

Schleiermacher exclaims in one of his letters, “Surely, if there was any good in Saul’s innermost soul it must have been an _adagio_ that exorcised the evil spirit.” The evil spirit in question is introduced by name, Malzah, in a recent Canadian drama, and is made to avow the accomplished fact of exorcism in the following strain:—

“Music, music hath its sway:
Music’s order I obey,
I have unwound myself at sound
From off Saul’s heart, where coiled I lay.”

Which snaky or serpentine similitude is akin to a passage in Mr. Browning’s “Paracelsus”—distant as the kinship between the two poems may be in other respects:

“My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch;
Like some dank snake that force may not expel,
Which glideth out to music sweet and low.”

Again and again in Shakspeare is the remedial agency of music resorted to by afflicted royalty. At one time it is Queen Katharine, fading and heartsore, who bids one of her women cease working, and sing—

“Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles;
Sing, and disperse them if thou canst.”

And the singer’s theme is how “in sweet music is such art, killing care and grief at heart.” At another time it is dying Harry IV., who prays his attendants, as they bear him to an inner room—

“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends!
Unless some dull[8] and favourable hand
Will whisper music to my weary spirit.”

And once more, we have Lear’s physician prescribing music for the safer awakening of the distraught old man from that long sleep which was only not his last.

_FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS._

ROMANS vi. 20.

In being, and so long as they continued, slaves of sin (δοῦλοι τής ἁμαρτίας), the recipients of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans are forcibly described by him as having been, _ipso facto_, free from righteousness (ἐλεύθεροι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). But what fruit had they in the freedom of which they were now ashamed?

“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”

They knew that to whom men yield themselves servants to obey, his servants they are to whom they are obedient, whether of sin unto death, or of loyal service unto righteousness. There is a freedom from righteousness, which is servitude to sin; and there is that service of God which, though a service, or rather because a service, is perfect freedom.

Gray, in the best known of his odes (best known by heart) devises this expressive phrase,

“Constraint, that sweetens liberty.”

It refers to schoolboys, enjoying all the more their playground freedom for the previous and succeeding restraints and constraints of the schoolroom. All work and no play makes a dull boy; but so does all play and no work. In this sense, as in so many others, does the paradox hold good that half is more than the whole (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός), and even a schoolboy can find by experience that a half holiday may be more than a whole one.

Wordsworth sounds the depths of this philosophy in his magnificent Ode to Duty. He is fatigued by freedom; he would be no longer the sport of every random gust; he would no longer stray in smooth walks, but would serve Duty more strictly if he might:—

“Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
_I supplicate for thy control_;
But in the quietness of thought:
_Me this uncharted freedom tires_;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.”

Whose service is perfect freedom—that is God’s service only. The true character of that service (in Greek Testament phrase, _slavery_) is aptly indicated by St. Paul to the Ephesians, where he speaks of _with good will doing service_—μετ’ εὐνοίας ΔΟΥΛΕΥΟΝΤΕΣ, ὡς τῷ Κυρίῳ καὶ οὐκ ἀνθρώποις. The law of the Spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death, that the righteousness of spiritual law may be fulfilled in those who sometime were free from righteousness. Freedom from righteousness is, in fact, identical with that bondage of corruption from which they are delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God. He that is so called, being free, is yet Christ’s servant, δοῦλος. And, as a servant, whatsoever he doeth he is to do heartily, as to the Lord, and not to men—τῷ γὰρ Κυρίῳ Χριστῷ ΔΟΥΛΕΥΕΙ. Goethe’s biographer tells us how he would assert, against the encyclopedists, that “whatever frees the intellect, without at the same time giving us command over ourselves, is pernicious;” or would utter one of his profound and pregnant γνῶμαι such as _Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben_, i.e., only within the circle of law can there be true freedom. “We are not free when we acknowledge no higher power, but when we acknowledge it, and in reverence raise ourselves by proving that a Higher lives in us.” We may wrest to our purpose the lines of Schiller, in _Wallensteins Tod_:

“Nay, let it not afflict you that your power
Is circumscribed. Much liberty, much error!
The narrow path of duty is securest.”

Liberty of will is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the motion of a magnetic needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be fixed in the beloved point: “it wavers as long as it is free, and is at rest when it can choose no more.” What is liberty? asks M. Jules Simon; and answers, The power of doing or not doing. But, he proceeds to inquire, can this liberty exist independent of law?—_cette liberté peut-elle subsister sans règle?_ Nay, liberty without rule, or law, so far from ennobling him who possesses it, degrades him. Liberty is not given to us to withdraw us from the authority of law, but that we may obey it in recognising its great First Cause. Unrestrained liberty is our ruin; liberty subjected to law, and that an immovable law, is the instrument and the token of our true greatness. Wordsworth philosophically affirms that “all men may find cause, when life is at a weary pause, and they have panted up the hill of duty with reluctant will,” to

“Be thankful, even though tired and faint,
For the rich bounties of constraint;
Whence oft invigorating transports flow,
That choice lacked courage to bestow.”

The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Brontè declare, in reference to the “exact punctuality and obedience to the laws of time and place” enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could tell the value of this control in after life: “with their impulsive natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external laws.” In the last of her own fictions—and, though unfinished, the ripest and best—Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who, when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that “such decisions _ab extra_ are sometimes a wonderful relief to those whose habit has been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else;” and that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de Vigny, in one of his highly finished _historiettes_, speculates on the nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility in other hands; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience, which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for performing their military service; and licence or inactivity, however acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. “I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” says Wamba to himself, when suddenly freed from sharing the captivity of his master; “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” So Elia, in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long holiday has no holiday henceforth; where he expatiates on the sight of “busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing by—the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from it.” Many an individual experience can put its own private interpretation on the averment of one of Rousseau’s correspondents—_Ce lien si redouté me delivre d’une servitude beaucoup plus redoubtable_.

Of significant application again is De Quincey’s denial of the truth of Lessing’s æsthetical assertion, that the sense of necessary and absolute limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary, he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and therefore realizing) the sense of freedom: “the freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.” So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be freed to some extent from “the weight of too much liberty.” Shakspeare, he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point:—

“In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”

The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when the decision of the presbytery against him removed him from the range of their control, so that, “notwithstanding all his independence, the profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful necessities.” He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free of restraint—“that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings.”[9] Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards obedience to a Father which is in heaven, “mechanical” obedience may not be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is the privilege of the child.

“For obedience is nobler than freedom. What’s free?
The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea.
The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells,
In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells.”

The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with a fresh set of variations.

_THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM._

ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.

It is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered the wearing of Christ’s yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether heavy or light? Not so. Christ’s yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose. Being made free from sin, men become the servants—servitors, slaves even, δοῦλοι, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and becoming servants, δοῦλοι, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and rabbis; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual service—that we should serve (δουλεύειν) in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

Keble says of men, in the “Christian Year,” that,

“Freely they own, or heedless prove,
The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.”

The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls “unchartered freedom,” as revelled in by those who ignore a holy and happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane. True, that, as Cowper has it,

“’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,
Is evil.”

But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which monarchs cannot grant: “’Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven,” “and held by charter;” “a clean escape from tyrannizing lust.” “Grace makes the slave a freeman;” for “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.” Byron was drawing on his own bitter experience when he wrote the lines,

“Lord of himself—that heritage of woe,
That fearful empire which the human breast
But holds to rob the heart within of rest.”

Imlac, the sage, describes, in “Rasselas” the placid flow of life enjoyed by a devout brotherhood, whose “time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour,” and the constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a Divine sanction, and promissory of “an ampler ether, a diviner air” to come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply, the breath of life.

Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. _La liberté n’est pas oisiveté_, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is: “C’est le choix de travail et de l’exercice: être libre, en un mot, n’est pas ne rien faire, c’est être seul arbitre de ce qu’on fait, ou de ce qu’on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté!” But how much worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or implicit, of _ce que c’est la liberté_!

There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her. “But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will, and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude by the consciousness of freedom.” Fain would he be in those dear bonds again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare’s minor poems, he

“In her fillet still would bide,
And, true to bondage, would not break from thence.”

Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the “Tempest,”

“All corners else o’ the earth
Let liberty make use of; space enough
Have I in such a prison.”

In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who

“Disdains control, and yet can be
Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”

So the sculptor in Hawthorne’s tale of “Transformation,” intent on winning winsome Hilda for his own, “would try if it were possible to take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom there than in all the world besides.” “I have read somewhere,” says a simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton’s fictions, “that the slave is gay in his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares no more for the dance under the palm-tree.” Don Alphonse, in Madame de Rémusat’s “Lettres Espagnoles,” writes to his sister an account of the courtiers’ embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. “L’improvisation en tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté. Il faut que je confesse que nous n’avons su que faire de la nôtre.” The moral of the fable may be read in Landor’s lines, supposed to be indited by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not

“That we would gladly fly again
To gloomy wood or windy plain.
Certain we are we ne’er should find
A care so provident, so kind....
O may you prove, as well as we,
That e’en in Athens there may be
A sweeter thing than liberty.”

Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The Chevalier de la Faye, in his “Apology” for the supposed difficulties of rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being “distinguishable among his fellow-captives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,”) suggests an ingenious parallel to the _jets d’eau_ that ornament the gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses which have been thus Englished by Father Prout:—

“From the rhyme’s restrictive rigour
Thought derives its impulse oft,
Genius draws new strength and vigour,
Fancy springs and shoots aloft.
So, in leaden conduits pent,
Mounts the liquid element,
By pressure forced to climb:
And he who feared the rule’s restraint
Finds but a friendly ministrant
In Reason’s helpmate, Rhyme.”

Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patmore’s lines on those who

“Live by law, not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.”

They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an “except these bonds,” but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but wings; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing. They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare’s “King John,” and by the same river metaphor,

“Leaving their rankness and irregular course,
Stoop low within those bounds they had o’erlook’d,
And calmly run on in obedience.”

What they are no longer free to do, is to do ill. And that freedom is as perfect servitude as the service of God is perfect freedom. In fine, and in the words (but expanding the meaning) of one of Samuel Butler’s metrical reflections:—

“Law does not put the least restraint
Upon our freedom, but maintain’t;
Or if it does, ’tis for our good,
To give us freer latitude;
For wholesome laws preserve us free
By stinting of our liberty.”

_THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY._

PROVERBS xvii. 28.

It is written among the Proverbs of Solomon, that “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise.” Even the fool that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. The wise king declares in another place, that a fool’s mouth is his destruction, and that his lips are the snare of his soul. Let him keep his mouth closed, and his folly is an unknown quantity; out of sight, out of mind. Let him keep his lips shut, and wisdom shall be imputed unto him. Of him lookers-on will say, a discreet man that. For they are only lookers-on, not listeners. To listen would break the spell. As it is, they are apt to count him as deep as he is still. Do not still waters run deep?

Sir Thomas Browne—himself a silent man, but no fool; quite the other way—bids us, in one of his stately sentences, think not silence the wisdom of fools; but if rightly timed, the honour of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity, and speak not out of the abundance, but the well-weighed thoughts of the heart. “Such silence may be eloquence, and speak thy worth above the power of words.” Would the author of “Vulgar Errors,” however, have sanctioned for one moment the reference of the proverb on reticent foolishness to that limbo? On the contrary, the drift of his argument is wholly in favour of the proverb; for, if the silence of the wise is wisdom, as he contends, much more is a tongue-tied condition expedient in the fool.

_Stultitiam dissimulare non potes nisi taciturnitate_, says the Latin adage: there is no way to conceal folly but by holding your tongue.

There is something at once of pathos and almost of humorous reproach, in the appeal of the Man of Uz, in his extremity, to his too didactic and complacently dogmatical friends: “Oh that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom.”

Montaigne exclaims, “To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanour procured the credit of prudence and capacity!” Note the counsel of Carlo to Sogliardo, in one of Ben Jonson’s heaviest comedies: “When anything is propounded above your capacity, smile at it, make two or three faces, and ’tis excellent; they’ll think you’ve travelled; though you argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse in nothing but laughter, ’twill pass.” Elsewhere rare Ben cites approvingly the “witty saying,” about one who was taken for a great and weighty man so long as he held his peace: “This man might have been a counsellor of state, till he spoke; but having spoken, not the beadle of the ward.” Denouncing in his strong dialect the vapid verbiage of shallow praters, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, “Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison!” Michelet says of the Spanish grandees of Charles the Fifth’s time, that the haughty silence they maintained, scarce deigning even a syllable of reply, served them admirably to conceal their dearth of ideas. Silence and imperturbability, according to the author of “The Gentle Life,” are the two requisites for a man to get on in the world.

If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—there is a third, contends Nello, the barber of Florence, and that is ignorance, when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head. Charles Lamb shrewdly observes that a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in a mixed company; everybody being so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_, he adds, there is no shuffling; the truth will out.

The Abbé de Choisy hugged himself on the success of a discreet silence during his residence in Batavia, where he had special reasons to beware of committing, and of exposing, himself. “Often when I utter not a word, they suppose it is because I don’t choose to talk; whereas the real motive for my silence is a profound ignorance, such as it is best to keep concealed from the gaze of mortals.” Molière’s sprightly chevalier, Dorante, counsels a fatuous marquis not to talk of what he knows nothing at all about—bidding him hope that in virtue of a scrupulously observed silence, he and the like of him may haply come to be regarded as clever fellows. “Et songez qu’en ne disant mot, on croira peut-être que vous êtes d’habiles gens.” A story is told of Zeuxis, how he reproved a certain Megabyzus, high priest of great Diana of the Ephesians, who discoursed of pictures in the painter’s studio with so reckless an audacity of ignorance, that the very lads who were grinding colours there could not refrain from giggling; whereupon quoth Zeuxis to his too-eloquent friend, “As long as you kept from talking, you were the admiration of these boys, who were all wonder at your rich attire, and the number of your servants; but now that you have ventured to expatiate upon the arts, of which you know simply nothing, they are laughing at you outright.” Plutarch tells the same story of Apelles. Again to draw upon Molière: a fool who keeps his folly tongue-tied, is not to be distinguished from a savant who hold his peace:

“Un sot qui ne dit mot ne se distingue pas
D’un savant qui se tait.”

Not to be distinguished, possibly, from a savant who talks, and talks to the purpose too.

There are two opposite ways, on Washington Irving’s showing, by which some men get into notice—one by talking a vast deal and thinking a little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, he says, many a vapouring, superficial pretender acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a vacant dunder-pate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom. Silent, quiet people, as Miss Jewsbury incidentally remarks, have a charmed mystery about them which gives them a great advantage over more demonstrative mortals; “nobody knows exactly what they think, nor the impression made on them by anything; all within them has the prestige of an oracle; the extent of what they indicate is unknown; and what little is uttered goes so far.” The best, perhaps, as well as the best-known of all stories illustrative of our theme, is that of Coleridge admiring a certain dinner-guest, so impregnable in his sublime reserve, so inexorably proof against every temptation to join in the table-talk, such a model (in appearance) of dignified superiority—until there was carried in that unlucky dish of apple-dumplings, the very first glance at which roused Sir Oracle to the enthusiastic outburst, “Them are the jockeys for me!” Goldsmith had, long before, recorded a somewhat parallel passage of disenchantment. His travelled Chinese, Lien Chi Altangi, is present at a dinner-party of dignitaries and dons in whose company and from whose converse he expects to find a feast of reason as well as turtle, and a flow of soul as well as claret. Their silence before dinner is served, rather puzzles and disappoints the eager expectant; who, however, accounts for and excuses it by the reflection, that men of wisdom are ever slow of speech, and deliver nothing unadvisedly. “Silence,” says Confucius, “is a friend that will never betray.” The dons and dignitaries were now by the mandarin’s surmise, inventing maxims, or hard sayings, for their mutual instruction, when some one should think proper to begin. “My curiosity was now wrought up to the highest pitch; I impatiently looked round to see if any were going to interrupt the mighty pause; when at last one of the company declared that there was a sow in his neighbourhood that farrowed fifteen pigs at a litter.” Broken at once was the spell, and disillusion was the Chinaman’s doom.

Pope, being satirist of the first class, as well as poet of (say) the second, took care, in his imitative stanzas on Silence, not to be all sentiment and rhapsodical rapture on that subject. Hence, one or his stanzas begins, “Silence, the knave’s repute;” and another declares Dulness to be her bosom-friend:

“And in thy bosom lurks in Thought’s disguise;
Thou varnisher of fools, and cheat of all the wise.”

The moral of one of Gay’s fables is to the purpose—that one, namely, in which a young dog, ignorant of game, gives tongue as lustily as if he knew all about it, and gets well lashed for his pains. To the astounded puppy’s remonstrance the whip-bearing huntsman replies:—

“Had not thy forward noisy tongue
Proclaim’d thee always in the wrong,
Thou might’st have mingled with the rest,
And ne’er thy foolish nose confess’d;
But fools, to talking ever prone,
Are sure to make their follies known.”

So a French satirist of the last century bids _le sot_ remember, that by simply holding his tongue, he will acquire not a little respect—hopeless as the reminder in such a case may be; for you might as well counsel the coward not to tremble, as the fool not to expose himself in words, words, words:

“Souvenez-vous qu’un sot doit garder le silence,
Il serait respecté beaucoup plus qu’il ne pense;
Mais vouloir le contraindre à ne jamais parler,
C’est, sans espoir, défendre au poltron ne trembler.”

Could it but be enforced, the one injunction to be laid upon the fool might be condensed into an applied line from Molière, where Orgon bids Dorine hold her tongue, and regard that as a standing order:—

“Taisez-vous. C’est le mot qu’il vous faut toujours dire.”

All silent people, Lord Lytton affirms, can seem conventionally elegant. And he tells the story of a groom married to a rich lady, and in consequent trepidation as to the probability of being ridiculed by the guests in his new home and her old one, to whom an Oxford clergyman gave this bit of advice: “Wear a black coat, and hold your tongue.” The groom took the hint, and, we are assured, was always considered the most gentlemanly man in the county. Elsewhere, again, the same author relates his meeting with a diplomatist of weighty name, a stock example of political success, but of whom he could make nothing whatever, except indeed that he was a preposterous numskull. When, therefore, the Prime Minister, some days later, spoke to our author of this “superior man,” he got for a reply, “Well, I don’t think much of him. I spent the other day with him, and found him insufferably dull.” “Indeed!” said the minister, with something of horror in his tone; “why then, I see how it is. Lord ⸺ has been positively talking to you!” Had he but altogether held his peace, it had been his wisdom.

According to La Bruyère, everything tells in favour of the man who talks but little; the presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in point of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is that he is very superior indeed. His comparative freedom from folly is positively presumed to exist in the superlative degree. In another place the same observant philosopher describes in his best style the sort of people who, by a grand talent for silence, win golden opinions from all sorts of men; they look wise, and now and then enforce and re-enforce the look by a timely shrug of the shoulders, or significant shake of the head; but the assumed depth of wisdom don’t really go two inches down; scratch the surface, and you come to the bottom at once.

For, as Shakspeare has it,

“There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond;
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit.
...
O, my Antonio, I do know of those,
That therefore only are reputed wise,
For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would⸺”

_not_ be reputed wise, but the uttermost opposite, whatever that may be called.

_PENAL PREVISION._

1 SAMUEL xxvii. 19, 20.

Why had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the dead, by the midnight agency of the “wise woman” of Endor? Because he would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit he had rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. “Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel.” The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children. The tree of foreknowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise; but it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the venturesome profane.

Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his posterity, Milton’s Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the exclamation,

“O visions ill foreseen! Better had I
Lived ignorant of future! so had borne
My part of evil only, each day’s lot
Enough to bear.”

Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope? And yet,

“With eager search to dart the soul,
Curiously vain, from pole to pole,
And from the planets’ wandering spheres
To extort the number of our years,
And whether all those years shall flow
Serenely smooth, and free from woe,
Or rude misfortune shall deform
Our life with one continual storm;
Or if the scene shall motley be
Alternate joy and misery,—
Is a desire which, more or less,
All men feel, though few confess.”

So at least affirms the author of the “Rosciad,”—who in another of his writings puts the query:

“Tell me, philosopher, is it a crime
To pry into the secret womb of time;
Or, born in ignorance, must we despair
To reach events, and read the future there?”

Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more advantage than the knowledge of them: _certe ignoratio futurorum malorum utilior est quam scientia_. And Horace, in a celebrated passage:

“Prudens futuri temporis exitum
Caliginosâ nocte premit Deus:
Ridetque, si mortalis ultra
Fas trepidat.”...

_Caliginosa nox_ forms a thick black curtain.

“What hangs behind that curtain?—would’st thou learn?
If thou art wise, thou would’st not.”

A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it as her friend Miss Howe’s: a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and disappointment. “How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he can do! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well as the beginning of his projects! He would have nothing left but to sit down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.” The warrior in Mr. Roscoe’s tragedy argues judiciously when he says,

“What is’t to me, that I should vex my soul
In dim forebodings of what is to be?
It is enough I know, and ache to know,
What on this bridge of time I have to do,
Not overlook the abysm till my head fail.”

Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched about it by anticipation. “O my fortune,” prays Agrippina, in one of Jonson’s Roman tragedies, “let it be sudden thou preparest against me; strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to come!”