Chapter V: Part 5

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.

Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a “practical suggestion” as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the interest of humanity, “the honour of the dead should be abolished,” and all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones contained in them may “supply to plants the power of creating fresh men”?

It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey’s letters from the East that mention is made of the writer’s seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people busily engaged in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one’s skeleton for thousands of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a _gigot_ that consists in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.

That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints, of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new ramparts. “Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”

Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his bones for jewels? But _telle est la vie_—or rather, in such a connection, _la mort_.

The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare’s anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact of Swift’s larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the purloiner in America,—of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about Pope’s skull,—and of Mathews’s thigh-bone circulating from house to house.

Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes _post mortem_ with the text with which we started, of Jezebel’s scattered remains on the face of the field, we call to mind Ben Jonson’s description (only too historically true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; “these fingers, and these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart....

“The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus,
And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world,
Now torn and scatter’d, as he needs no grave;
Each little dust covers a little part;
So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried.”

“_CONSIDER THE LILIES._”

ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.

Vulgar utilitarianism—for there is a vulgar and shallow phase of it, as well as a scientific and a misrepresented one—can surely find little to its fancy (but then it has no fancy) the invitation, or monition, even though uttered in the Sermon on the Mount, of “Consider the lilies.” Why consider them, it would fain object, seeing that they toil not, neither do they spin? But that is the very reason for considering them. They are clothed from above with surpassing beauty, without taking thought for themselves; so clothed, not for utilitarian ends, except in the large sense that the _dulce_ too is _utile_, that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever; and _that_ is undeniably to be of some “use” in the world.

Herein lies the simple answer to the query in the laureate’s poem,—

“Oh, to what uses shall we put the wildweed flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose?
But any man that walks the mead, in bud, or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead, a meaning suited to his mind.”

And liberal applications lie in art as nature. The Warwickshire justice tells Shakspeare, after hearing him recite his stanzas on a sweetbriar, “Thou mightest have added some moral about life and beauty: poets never handle roses without one.” But then Justice Shallow is the critic. The author of the “Citation and Examination” in which the criticism is uttered, has an imaginary dialogue between Vittoria Colonna and Michel Angelo—the former of whom defines the difference betwixt poetry and all other arts, all other kinds of composition, to be this: in them, utility comes before delight; in this, delight before utility. Buonarotti submits that in some pleasing poems there is nothing whatsoever of the useful. But Vittoria thinks he is mistaken: an obvious moral is indeed a heavy protuberance, which injures the gracefulness of a poem; but there is wisdom of one kind or other, she alleges, in every sentence of a really good composition, and it produces its effect in various ways. “The beautiful in itself is useful by awakening our finer sensibilities, which it must be our own fault if we do not often carry with us into action.” Leigh Hunt, in his “Song of the Flowers,” makes them exult in the fact, by their mere existence demonstrated, that heaven loves colour; that great Nature clearly joys in red and green: “What sweet thoughts she thinks of violets, and pinks, and a thousand flashing hues, made solely to be seen:”

“Uselessness divinest
Of a use the finest
Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use;
Travellers weary eyed
Bless us far and wide;
Unto sick and prison’d thoughts we give sudden truce;
Not a poor town window
Loves its sickliest planting,
But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylon’s whole vaunting.”

So again Mr. Procter apostrophizes Nature in his “Song of the Snowdrop,” as having surely sent it forth alone to the cold and sullen season, like a thought at random thrown,—“sent it thus for some grave reason.

“If ’twere but to pierce the mind
With a single gentle thought,
Who shall deem thee hard or blind,
Who, that thou hast vainly wrought?”

Bishop Copleston, in his plea for a free cultivation of the poetic faculty, contends that its being entirely neglected must prove an irreparable injury to young minds—losing as they do that intellectual charm from which life borrows its loveliest graces: hence he takes exception to Locke’s expression, that educators should beware of making “anything a boy’s business but downright virtue.” Surely, argues his critic, the improvement of the faculties which God has implanted in us is itself a virtue: our attention may be given in undue measure to one, and so may violate that just harmony without which nothing is virtuous, nothing lovely. The faculty itself, which the philosopher seems to condemn, the divine claims to be one of the kindest gifts of heaven. And why, then, it is asked, should man be niggardly where Providence has been bountiful? “Why should he think scorn of that pleasant land, and undervalue those fair possessions, which were not thought beneath the care of the Almighty?” In the garden of Eden, we are reminded, was made to grow, not only what was good for food, but every tree also that was pleasant to the sight: and in that garden man was placed, to keep it, and to dress it.

It is, as Isaac Taylor remarks, by her diversities,—her gay adornments, her copious fund of forms, and her sportive freaks of shape and colour, that Nature allures the eye of man, while she draws him on toward the more arduous, but more noble pursuit of her hidden analogies. An insensible process goes on, the effect of which is gradually to invest general truths with a sort of majesty, as well as beauty; so that, at length, this new charm is found to prevail over the graces and attractions of the exterior diversity of things.

Even philosophy, however, has been said to teach us that nature scatters the lavish beauties of form and colour not always with a utilitarian purpose; or rather, that beauty—merely to display beauty—is often, as in birds and flowers and shells and crystals, the object of material organization. “There is no special use in the metallic lustre on the plumage of the humming-bird, and tropical blossoms blaze for the mere sake of being splendid.” Yet is it owned to be noticeable that only in the lower ranks of the kingdom of being is nature lavish of beauty for the mere sake of the beautiful; and that as we advance upward in the scale of created things, a certain severity and reserve seem to grow upon nature itself.

Shenstone—a now all but forgotten poet—in a now quite forgotten ode, asserts, as in duty bound, the uses beyond use of Nature’s fancy work:

“Search but the garden or the wood,
Let yon admired carnation own
Not all was meant for raiment, or for food,
Not all for needful use alone;
There while the seeds of future blossoms dwell,
’Tis colour’d for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.

“Why knows the nightingale to sing?
Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice?
Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing?
For sustenance alone? for use?
For preservation?”...

An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were between the lines:

“This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone,
Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone;
How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings
Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.”

The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity. But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin; and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with merely blooming.

We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for the glories of His creation.”

It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in his “Salathiel,” pleading for the _right_ of beauty to have a natural power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs. Browning’s last poems—

“What if God has set her here
Less for action than for Being?—
For the eye and for the ear.

“Just to show what beauty may,
Just to prove what music can.”

_A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE._

1 CORINTHIANS vii. 31.

The apostle would have his brethren so to use this world, as not abusing it; and for this reason, that “the fashion of this world passeth away.” In the original the phrase runs: παράγει γὰρ τὸ ΣΧΗΜΑ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου. The expression is said by Grotius and others to be borrowed from the theatre, and to refer to the scene-shifting of the stage. Life here below has verily its histrionic aspects; the fashion of it passeth away much as do the scene-painter’s creations, the stage-carpenter’s framework, the spectacular effects and dissolving views, nay the very actors themselves. For, all the world is in some sense a stage, and all the men and women merely players—

“They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Considering his own profession, the figure is one that must often have crossed and occupied Shakspeare’s mind—at once so keenly observing and so profoundly meditative. Not that he harps much upon it, so much as might, perhaps, have been expected, in his plays. Still he does now and then recur to the histrionic metaphor. And it is in his graver mood, not his lighter, that he does so; in sober sadness, not with gibing glee. As where Lear, in the extremity of his distraction, intent on preaching to Gloster, takes for his text the wail of infancy, crying, the first time that it smells the air: for

“When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”

Or again, as where Antonio, the care-fraught merchant of Venice, assured by a friend that he is looking far from well, indeed “marvellously changed,” and remonstrated with for not taking life more easily, replies:

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.”

_Mundus universus exercet histrioniam_,—the saw is Petronius Arbiter’s. There is an obverse reading, by some other old Eminent Hand: _Totum mundum agit histrio_. If all the world’s a play, so again there’s not in all the world a character the player won’t act. Lucretius had the stage simile of life in his mind’s eye, when he said of those who hide certain of their doings, _vitæ post-scenia celant_,—the _post-scenium_ being what we call “behind the scenes,” where the actors dress and “make up” for their parts. And what says a distich in the Greek Anthology:

“Σκηνὴ πᾶς ὁ βίος, καὶ παίγνιον· ἢ μάθε παίζειν,
Τὴν σπουδὴν μεταθεὶς, ἢ φέρε τὰς ὀδύνας.”

“Life is a stage, a play: so learn thy part,
All cares removed, or rend with grief thy heart.”

Sir Thomas Browne professes, in his large utterance and stately style: “The world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.” To the same effect, though not in the same spirit, Wordsworth’s recluse avows himself tired

“Of the ostentatious world a swelling stage
With empty actions and vain passions stuffed.”

When both Swift and Bolingbroke had closed the tenth lustre of their years, his cynical lordship wrote from Brussels to the cynical dean, that he thought it high time to determine how they should “play the last act of the farce. Might not my life,” adds accomplished St. John, “be entitled much more properly a what-d’ye-call-it than a farce? Some comedy, a great deal of tragedy, and the whole interspersed with scenes of Harlequin, Scaramouch, and Dr. Baloardo.” Accomplished St. John was always, and to the last an accomplished actor. As for Dr. Swift, he expanded the histrionic similitude of life into some eighteen stanzas on the puppet show—which record how wit, “the life of man to represent, and turn it all to ridicule, did once a puppet show invent, where the chief actor is a fool”—and of which, perhaps, the gravest runs thus:

“This fleeting scene is but a stage
Where various images appear;
In different parts of youth and age,
Alike the prince and peasant share.”

Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza how like human life is to a play. One takes the part of a ruffian, another of a liar, a third of a merchant, a fourth of a soldier. This man is for the occasion the lover; that man is the judicious friend. At last the play is ended. Each takes off the clothes which belong to his part, and the players remain equal. So it is in the comedy of this world, says Don Quixote. There are emperors and popes, and all the characters that can be introduced into a play; but it is played out, death takes away the outward trappings which made them seem to differ, and they remain equal in the tomb.

Where, is the author of the Complaint’s complaining query, or querulous plaint,

“Where, the prime actors of the last year’s scene;
Their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume?”

It is a trite topic, indeed, with Dr. Young,—that of “Life’s gay stage, one inch above the grave,” whereon those strut and fret their hour, that shall soon be seen no more for ever. All, merely players.

“Each, in his turn, some tragic story tells,
With now and then a wretched farce between.”

Dr. Maginn takes note of the frequency with which Lucian compares life to a theatrical procession, in which magnificent parts are assigned to some, who pass before the eyes of the spectators clothed in costly garments, and bedecked with glittering jewels; but, the moment the show is over, are reduced to their original nothingness, no longer kings and heroes, but poor players whose hour has been strutted out.

No wonder that the master Showman of Vanity Fair should pen an _envoi_ after this fashion:

“The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter’s bell:
A moment yet the actor stops,
And looks around, to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task;
And when he’s laughed and said his say,
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that’s anything but gay.”

Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life, in their _belles lettres_, of whatever date. And in point of fact the figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of _théâtre_ and _comédie_. He was an accomplished actor from first to last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the _belle comédie_ that was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another _habituée_ behind the scenes, and herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes the world as _une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs_.

Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and women are merely players, motley’s your only wear.

Of another _spirituel_, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period, Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore years composed a complete masquerade; for

“this man in his time play’d many parts,”

and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude, facility, and zest.

Such another actor, with a difference, was Voltaire. As Voltaire himself said of the Duchess of Maine, “Elle aimera la comédie jusqu’au dernier moment, et, quand elle sera malade, je vous conseille de lui administrer quelque belle pièce,” etc., etc.,—so of the mocking philosopher of Ferney, playing his many parts, it has been said, that he had a genius for transformations, having always more than one _rôle_ to play in the comedy of life—which diversity of _rôles_ jumped with his humour, and just hit the mobile preferences of a man who so early in his existence turned player. The life of Voltaire is a comedy, says Sainte-Beuve: his correspondence with D’Alembert shows us the coulisses and background—and lets us in to damaging and disenchanting revelations behind the scenes. Elsewhere he may be seen to fret and strut his hour upon the stage, carefully made up, and all in point device costume; but here we have him in undress, and by dusty daylight, and off his guard.

_Tous les comédiens ne sont pas du théâtre_, is rightly reckoned one of the prettiest _provérbes_ of M. Théodore Leclerc. In the Proverbe which bears that pregnant title, a nephew incidentally tells his uncle, “Vous qui êtes un homme du monde, vous appelez cela l’esprit du monde; moi qui suis un comédien, j’appelle cela de la comédie. C’est toujours la même chose, sous un nom différent.” The salon and the stage are on a level. To be a real man of the world, is to be an actor of the first class.

M. Scribe puts the proverb as a practical epigram into the mouth of old Michonnet, when trying to soothe and inspirit his pet pupil for the stage: “Calme toi et étudie; ... il y a dans le monde de plus grands comédiens que nous!”

Indeed, according to Chamfort, there is no choice in the matter; every man, however wise and unsophisticated and open-hearted, must, sooner or later, turn actor, on this great stage of fools. For, “la fortune et le costume qui l’entourent font de la vie une représentation au milieu de laquelle il faut qu’à la longue l’homme le plus honnête devienne comédien malgré lui.” We are all actors and actresses, says one of Miss Eden’s characters, and “none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all day long.” Not that every one plays just the part he or she would have chosen. The distribution of _rôles_ would seem often to make this a mad world, my masters.

“Le monde, à mon avis, est comme un grand théâtre,
Où chacun en public, l’un par l’autre abusé,
Souvent à ce qu’il est, joue un rôle opposé.”

This, one might almost paraphrase in the words of John Webster’s wobegone Duchess Mariana:

“I account this world a tedious theatre,
For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will.”

By way of introducing his elaborate narrative of Darnley’s fate, Mr. Froude tells us of Mary Stuart, that on the political stage she was “a great actress. The ‘woman’ had a drama of her own going on behind the scenes; the theatre caught fire; the mock heroics of the Catholic crusade burnt into ashes; and a tremendous domestic tragedy was revealed before the astonished eyes of Europe.” And later again, describing Mary’s caressing wiles to beguile and tranquilise her doomed husband, on the eve of the catastrophe, the same historian employs the same histrionic figure: “Mary Stuart was an admirable actress; rarely, perhaps, on the world’s stage has there been a more skilful player.” But the part, he adds, was a difficult one; she had still some natural compunction; and the performance was not quite perfect.

Most of our business is farce, writes old Montaigne: _Mundus universus exercet histrioniam_ (which the old French essayist’s old English translator renders, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”). We must play our part well, he adds, but withal as the part of a borrowed personage; we must not make a real essence of a mask and outward appearance, etc. So it is one of Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries,” “de vitâ humanâ,” that our whole life is like a play—wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. In one of his comedies, rare Ben makes a sham inn-keeper, taking his ease in his own inn, and following his own fancies there, “imagine all the world’s a play:—

“The state, and men’s affairs, all passages
Of life, to spring new scenes; come in, go out,
And shift, and vanish.... I have got
A seat to sit at ease here, in mine inn,
To see the comedy; and laugh, and chuck
At the variety and throng of humours
And dispositions, that come justling in
And out still, as they one drove hence another.”

For every man, in the play of this world, says pious Master Feltham, is not only an actor, but is a spectator, too: “At the beginning (that is, in his youth) it promises so much that he is loth to leave it; when it grows towards the middle (the act of virility), then he sees the scenes grow thick, and fill, and would gladly understand the end: but, when that draws near, and he finds what it will be, he is then content to depart and leave his room to others.”

Fielding’s philosopher asks if the actor is esteemed happier to whose lot it falls to play the principal part, than he who plays the lowest? and yet the drama may run twenty nights together, and so outlast our lives; but at the best, says he, “life is only a little longer drama; and the business of the great stage is consequently a little more serious than that which is performed at the theatre-royal.”

“If the world be, indeed, as ’twas said, but a stage,
The dress only is changed ’twixt the acts of an age.
From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue
With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue
Of passionate antics that move through the play,
With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.”

An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Pheræ, who reigned in Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars, Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba, enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in _Exeunt omnes_!

In Charles the Sixth’s ordinance, authorising the players of the “Mysteries of the Passion” (towards the close of the fourteenth century), that poor crazed monarch’ styles them his “loved and dear co-mates.” And what could be juster? Michelet asks. “A hapless actor himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his co-mates’—saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His people went to see in him the Passion of royalty.”

Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness—it being the height of their ambition to be “beside themselves:”—to-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes, till their very thoughts are not their own. “They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them.... The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest.”

Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically to the same purport. “All men have beene of his occupation,” writes the ill-starred knight of a good actor; “and indeed, what hee doth fainedly, that doe others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers others.

“And why not players strut in courtiers’ clothes?
For these are actors, too, as well as those.”

Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):

“Even kings but play, and when their part is done,
Some other, worse or better, mount the throne.”

As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists, and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men, we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands us not. “It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true relations to society. The spirit of music unseals my eyes, and I see behind the footlights a true court, real heroes, lofty inspirations; while the wretched dolts who flaunt in the boxes upon velvet couches are the real actors. In truth, the world is a comedy; and we must play our parts in it with gravity and decorum, though conscious of the hollow pageant which compasses us on every side.” And Godolphin pronounces life to differ from the play only in this—that it has no plot, all being vague, desultory, unconnected, till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.

All this is in Mr. Carlyle’s vein—of the _Sartor Resartus_ date at least; or as when he depicted the family vagaries of Mirabeaudom, which produced “such astonishing comico-tragical French farces”—with the eight chaotic volumes of family correspondence, wherein the various personages speak their dialogue, unfold their farce-tragedy: “Seen or half seen, it is a stage; as the whole world is. What with personages, what with destinies, no stranger house-drama [than that of the Mirabeau family] was enacting on the earth at that time.” The same figure Mr. Carlyle elsewhere applies to our own revolution times, in the century before: “Such is the drama of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors _not_ in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity, instruction, and fear.”

* * * * *

ACT WELL YOUR PART:—there all the _moral_ lies. Though the world _be_ histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself.”

It has been sadly and severely said of the Emperor Augustus, who was loved by no one, that if, at the moment of his death, he desired his friends to dismiss him from this world by the common expression of scenical applause (_vos plaudite!_), in that valedictory injunction he expressed inadvertently the true value of his own long life, which, in strict candour, may be pronounced one continued series of histrionic efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to selfish ends.

_L’honnête homme_, writes an epigrammatic thinker, _joue son rôle le mieux qu’il peut sans songer à la galerie_.

Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar, endeavour to act the beggar’s part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his to choose what that shall be.

Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine? As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his representation, and the peasant is often applauded where the monarch is hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants, and assign to each his due, in his own proper character.

Since the life of man is likened to a scene, “I had rather,” writes John Milton, “that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices.”

And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes—_Io anche_—

“And I
Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave.”

The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the “Characteristics”—is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully—or, to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books’ sake—“and made our _Exit_ cheerfully, and as became us.”

It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full force of the statement, “God is no respecter of _persons_,” from the fact that “person” does not mean for us now all that it once meant. “Person,” from “persona,” the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by natural transfer the part or _rôle_ in the play which each sustains, as πρόσωπον is in Greek. “In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play Dives, another Lazarus. This ‘person’ God, for whom the question is not _what_ ‘person’ each sustains, but _how_ he sustains it, does not regard.”

_PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE._

EXODUS vii.-x., _passim_.

His land of Egypt covered with frogs, Pharaoh was urgent with Moses and Aaron to “intreat the Lord” for him, and with conciliatory proposals in favour of the children of Israel. The plague of the frogs abated accordingly, Pharaoh hardened his heart as soon as he saw that there was respite. So with the plague of flies that came in grievous swarms into the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants’ houses, and into all the land of Egypt, so that the land was corrupted by reason of the flies; again Pharaoh besought Hebrew intercession, and pledged himself to acts of clemency; and again no sooner was the plague removed, than Pharaoh hardened his heart at that time also, neither would he let the people go. Plague after plague ensued—the murrain of beasts, the plague of boils and blains, and the plague of hail and fire; and so grievous was the last—smiting all that was in the field, both man and beast, as well as every herb and tree—that Pharaoh once more importuned Moses and Aaron, confessing his sins, imploring forgiveness, and promising amendment. Once and again he was heard and answered. “And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart ... neither would he let the children of Israel go.” The plague of locusts, destroying all that the hail had left, made him call for the Hebrew brothers again in hottest haste,—entreating forgiveness “only this once,” and deliverance “from this death only.” But the mighty west wind that swept away the ravagers had no sooner ceased to blow, than the hardening process again set in, and the tyrant revelled as of yore in his accustomed tyranny. How many more plagues might have been added to the ten—decade upon decade—with the like result, each facile amendment merging in a more and more facile relapse, it is superfluous to guess.

We read in Homer, as versified by Pope, that—

“The weakest atheist-wretch all heaven defies,
But shrinks and shudders when the thunder flies.”

So Boileau satirises the “intrepid” scoffer, who puts off believing in God until fever prostrates him; who is almost as quick as the lightning to lift up his hands to heaven when the lightning glares across it, but laughs at poor feeble humanity as soon as the atmosphere is cleared and the storm quite spent:

“Attend pour croire en Dieu que la fiévre le presse;
Et, toujours dans l’orage au ciel levant les mains,
Dès que l’air est calmé, rit des faibles humains.”

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes in one of her vivacious letters a stormy passage she has just made from Calais to Dover, and diverts herself not a little, as her ladyship’s manner is, at the distress of a fellow-passenger, in alternations of anxiety as to being lost herself and losing her smuggled head-dress. “She was an English lady that I had met at Calais, who desired me to let her go over with me in my cabin. She had brought a fine point-head, which she was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers. When the wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell very heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care of her head-dress;” and the alternative exclamations of the distracted creature are liberally specified by Lady Mary; who then adds: “This easy transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”

Lord Lytton, in one of his fictions, comments on the instinct, as he calls it, of that capricious and fluctuating conscience, belonging to weak minds, “which remains still and drooping and lifeless as a flag on a mast-head during the calm of prosperity, but flutters and flaps and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves.” And an example to the purpose is given in the case of a selfish uncle, whose orphan nephews are all but coldly discarded until his own son is _in extremis_. “Mr. Beaufort ... thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the Mortons, during the danger of his own son. So far indeed from his anxiety for Arthur monopolising his care, it only sharpened his charity towards the orphans; for many a man becomes devout and good when he fancies he has an _immediate_ interest in appeasing Providence.” Such a man, in such a case, becomes at any rate lavish of promises, which perhaps at the moment he even intends to keep. But how are promises of this kind usually kept? Much after the manner predicated of Bajazet, by Acomat, in the French tragedy; a vaguely worded intimation, but definite enough in its scope: only let the pressure that extorts the promise be withdrawn, and gone will be the value of the promise too:

“Promettez: affranchi du péril qui vous presse,
Vous verrez de quel poids sera votre promesse.”

Pope would consign such trifles light as air to the lunar sphere,

“Where broken vows and death-bed alms are found,
And lovers’ hearts with ends of ribbon bound,
The courtier’s promises, the sick man’s prayers.”

Why do these last make so slight an impression on by-standers? Mr. Whitehead says because it is not a living but a dying man that speaks; and a dying man who wants to live. “It is fear that cries out in agony, not penitence that prays.” Fielding, in his masterpiece, moralises on the truism that be men ever so much alarmed and frightened when apprehending themselves in danger of dying, yet no sooner are they cleared from this apprehension, than even the fears of it are erased from their minds. It is much later in the same story, that the “hero’s” avowed resolution, at a crisis in his fortunes, to sin no more, lest a worse thing happen unto him, is ridiculed by a cynical acquaintance, as the effect merely of low spirits, and confinement—with the quotation of “some witticisms about the devil when he was sick.” The epigram in question is a favourite allusion with novelists and moralists of all sorts and sizes. There is a border freebooter of Scott’s, who, having recovered from a severe illness, thanks to the medical skill of the Black Dwarf, greets his benefactor, on horseback, all in bandit array, as soon as convalescent. “So,” said the dwarf, “rapine and murder once more on horseback!” “On horseback?” said the bandit; “ay, ay, Elshie, your leech-craft has set me on the bonnie bay again.” “And all those promises of amendment which you made during your illness forgotten?” continued Elshender. “All clear away, with the water-saps and panada,” returned the unabashed convalescent. “Ye ken, Elshie, for they say ye are weel acquent wi’ the gentleman,

“‘When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be;
When the devil was well, the devil a monk was he.’”

For it is not every vow taken in a panic, to become a monk if spared, that is kept as Luther’s was—“devil” though the anti-Lutherans of his day might account and call him. Young Martin saw one of his friends struck dead by his side, by a stroke of lightning, in 1505; and the sight moved him to utter on the instant a vow to St. Anne that he would become a monk if he were himself spared. “The danger passed over, but he did not seek to elude an engagement wrung from him in terror. He solicited no dispensation from his vow.” Brother Martin _ipso facto_ approved himself no member of the fraternity of what Le Sage calls _vous autres, messieurs les diables_, in a passage that indirectly bears upon our theme, for it refers to the proverbial worthlessness of promises coming from that quarter: “Voilà de belles promesses, répliqua l’Ecolier; mais vous autres, messieurs les diables, on vous accuse de n’être pas fort réligieux à tenir ce que vous promettez.” The epigram runs, if not rhymes, as well in Latin as in English:

“Ægrotat dæmon, monachus tunc esse volebat;
Dæmon convaluit, dæmon ut ante fuit.”

Referring to proverbs of this kind it is that Archbishop Trench says, that sometimes an adage, without changing its shape altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations be slightly modified—the modifications, slight as they often are, being not the less eminently characteristic. “Thus in English we say, _The river past, and God forgotten_, to express with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by His help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards have the proverb too; but it is with them: _The river past, the saint forgotten_: the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder depth of ingratitude: _The peril passed, the saint mocked_.” Men indulge in doubts of a Supreme Being, says La Bruyère, when they are lusty and strong; but with sickness comes belief, such as it is. “L’on doute de Dieu dans une pleine santé.... Quand on devient malade, et que l’hydropisie est formée ... l’on croit en Dieu.” Believes? As to that, the devils believe, and tremble. But how when the dropsy is relieved and the trembling fit over? Dr. Johnson once adverted in conversation with Seward and Boswell to the evil life he led until sickness wrought a reformation, which, in his case, had been lasting. Mr. Seward thereupon observed: “One should think that sickness, and the view of death, would make more men religious.” But Johnson replied to this: “Sir, they do not know how to go about it; they have not the first notion. A man who has never had religion before, no more grows religious when he is sick than a man who has never learnt figures can count when he has need of calculation.”[14] It is to be observed that the doctor claimed for himself a previous regard for religion in quite early life; for some years it had, to use his own phrase, “dropped out of his mind,” but “sickness brought it back,” and he hoped he had never lost it since.

It is an old, old story, that of the generation which tempted God in the desert, whose days He therefore consumed in vanity, and their years in trouble. When He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned, and inquired early after God. But it was only to start aside again, like a broken bow.

“Tamen ad mores natura recurrit
Damnatos, fixa et mutari nescia.”

“When men in health against physicians rail,”

says Crabbe,

“They should consider that their nerves may fail;
Nay, when the world can nothing more produce,
The priest, the insulted priest, may have his use.”

There is a passage in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters that reads like a paraphrase and expansion of this: “Quand le médecin est auprès de mon lit, le confesseur me trouve à son avantage. Je sais bien empêcher la religion de m’affliger quand je me porte bien; mais je lui permets de me consoler quand je suis malade: lorsque je n’ai plus rien à espérer d’un côté, la religion se présente, et me gagne,” etc. Plutarch tells us of Tullus Hostilius, that he exulted in irreligious opinions while in health, but was frightened into superstition when taken ill. To this passage, one of Plutarch’s translators, Dr. Langhorne, appends a footnote, about none being so superstitious in distress as those who, in their prosperity, have laughed at religion; and cites as an instance the famous Canon Vossius, who was “no less remarkable for the greatness of his fears, than he was for the littleness of his faith.” Cowper would cite to the same purpose a more distinguished example:

“The Frenchman first in literary fame;
Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same.
...
The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew
_Bon-mots_ to gall the Christian and the Jew:
An infidel when well, but what when sick?
Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick.”

Swift gives a satirical narrative of “what passed in London during the general consternation of all ranks and degrees of mankind” on account of the predicted destruction of the world by a comet, on a given day. Friday was the declared day; and during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, public bewilderment and terror are described as extreme—the churches crowded, and thousands praying in the public streets. At length Friday came. But as the day wore on, popular fears began to abate, then lessened every hour; “at night they were almost extinct, till the total darkness that hitherto used to terrify, now comforted every freethinker and atheist. Great numbers went together to the taverns, bespoke suppers, and broke up whole hogsheads for joy. The subject of all wit and conversation was to ridicule the prophecy and rally each other. All the quality and gentry were perfectly ashamed, nay, some utterly disowned that they had manifested any signs of religion.

“But the next day, even the common people, as well as their betters, appeared in their usual state of indifference. They drank, they swore, they lied, they cheated, they quarrelled, they murdered. In short, the world went on in the old channel.”

To apply what Butler says of “saints” in his application of the word, as a cant term then of political significance:

“For saints in peace degenerate,
And dwindle down to reprobate; ...
And though they’ve tricks to cast their sins,
As easy as serpents do their skins,
That in a while grow out again,
In peace they turn mere carnal men;
And from the most refined of saints
As naturally turn miscreants,[15]
As barnacles turn solan geese
I’ th’ islands of the Orcades.”

That is a fine stroke of nature, in the Knight’s Tale (from Chaucer), where Dryden makes Arcite resolve, only when and not until moribund, to avow the wrong he has done to Palamon, and own his fear of repeating it should he recover:

“When ’twas declared all hope of life was past,
Conscience (that of all physic works the last)
Caused him to send for Emily in haste.
With her, at his desire, came Palamon;”

to whom Arcite owns the faithless part he has played, and desires forgiveness, but at the same time makes this frank avowal:—

“And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong,
I should return to justify my wrong;
For while my former flames remain within,
Repentance is but want of power to sin.”

Mr. Tennyson pictures for us a similar instance in Sir Lancelot: