Chapter VI: Part 6

“Yet the great knight in his mid-sickness made
Full many a holy vow and pure resolve.
These, as but born of sickness, could not live;
For when the blood ran lustier in him again,
Full often the sweet image of one face,
Making a treacherous quiet in his heart,
Dispersed his resolution like a cloud.”

Treating of missions in Abyssinia in the sixteenth century, Gibbon relates how, in a moment of terror, the emperor promised to reconcile himself and his subjects to the Catholic faith. “But the vows,” adds the historian, “which pain had extorted, were forsworn on the return of health.” Swift again, in his history of England,—for the Dean of St. Patrick wrote one—tells how William Rufus fell dangerously sick at Gloucester, on his return from Scotland, and being moved by the fears of dying, began to discover great marks of repentance, with many promises of amendment and retribution. “But as it is the disposition of men who derive their vices from their complexions, that their passions usually beat strong and weak with their pulses, so it fared with this prince, who, upon recovery of his health, soon forgot the vows he had made in his sickness, relapsing with greater violence into the same irregularities,” etc.

Michael Germain—who, however, is allowed to have looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French encyclopédiste—makes merry, as one of Mabillon’s Italian expedition (in 1685), at the expense of that indolent and hypochondriacal Pope (so Sir James Stephen calls him), Innocent XI. “If I should attempt,” writes this French Benedictine, “to give you an exact account of the health of his Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.’ At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical.... The worst of it is, that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like other great sinners;” like Louis XV., for instance, at the commencement of whose last illness Mr. Carlyle so vividly depicts the consternation of the infamous Du Barry, lest she should have to take flight, as her predecessors had been constrained to do when the Well-beloved (Bien-aimé) had been sick before. “Should the Most Christian King die, or even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas! had not the fair, haughty Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that fever scene at Metz, long since; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background. Pompadour, too, when Damiens wounded Royalty ‘slightly, under the fifth rib,’ ... had to pack, and be in readiness; yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned.” His Most Christian Majesty was of no distant kin with that profligate viscount in Mr. Thackeray’s story, who used to recount misdeeds “with rueful remorse when he was ill, for the fear of death set him instantly repenting; and with shrieks of laughter when he was well, his lordship having a very great sense of humour.” Of the same kindred comes the same author’s Miss Crawley, as we see her ill with fright, in her lonely, loveless old age. When in health and good spirits, this venerable inhabitant of Vanity Fair, we are assured, had as free notions about religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire; but “when illness overtook her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.” Nor be forgotten, as a scion of the same stock, that puffy, pursy, pusillanimous creature, Jos. Sedley, of whom we read that, in the course of his voyage home from Bengal, he disappeared in a panic during a two-days’ gale, and remained in his cot reading a religious tract left on board by a missionary’s wife; while, “for common reading he had brought a stock of novels and plays,” to which of course he would return with all the more zest and devotion when the perils of the gale were past.

Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of “wholesome discipline” than to the deadly sickness. He says, “The well-known proverb, ‘The devil was sick,’ etc., shows how generally it has been observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief, is, that it is so much easier to _recall_ exactly the sensations felt when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again, as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much affects the mind along with the body.”

And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a “poem” to the subject; and a greater poet—if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning

“Of seamen’s fates, and the loud tempests raise
The waters, and repentance for past sinning
In all who o’er the great deep take their ways:
They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don’t;
Because, if drown’d, they can’t—if spar’d, they won’t.”

_SLEEP AND DEATH._

ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.

To His disciples our Lord spoke of His friend, and theirs, “our friend, Lazarus,” as sleeping; intimating at the same time His intention of going on to Bethany, that He might awaken him out of sleep. “Then said His disciples, Lord, if he sleep he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus spake of his death; but they thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”

The affinity of sleep to death is familiarly recognised in the Old Testament as in the New; indeed, in universal literature of whatever age, sacred and profane. Bathsheba anticipates the day, only too near at hand, when her lord the king “shall sleep with his fathers.” Daniel foretells the awaking of many that sleep in the dust of the earth. The psalmist utters a deprecation lest he sleep the sleep of death. Jesus declared the sick maiden to be not dead, but sleeping; and was laughed to scorn by those who _knew_ that she was dead. Them that sleep in Jesus, saith the apostle, will God bring with Him. We shall not all sleep, he says elsewhere, but we shall all be changed.

Homer personifies a dualism of “Sleep and Death, two twins of wingèd race, of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace;” and he makes the friends of Sarpedon “his sacred corse bequeath to the soft arms of silent Sleep and Death.” He pictures Aphrodite speeding to Lemnos o’er the rolling deep, to “seek the cave of Death’s half-brother, Sleep.” The dying Gorgias, we are told, being in a slumber, and asked how he did, answered, “Pretty well; only Sleep is commending me to the charge of his brother.” Samuel Daniel apostrophizes “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, brother to Death, in silent darkness born;” and so too, Beaumont and Fletcher apostrophize him in almost the selfsame words. So again their contemporary, John Webster, “O thou soft natural Death, that art joint twin to sweetest slumber!” Cowley’s ode _in memoriam_ of William Harvey, begins with sombre commemoration of a dismal and a fearful night, “when sleep, death’s image, left his troubled breast, by something liker death possest.” And the last verse of Denham’s “Song to Morpheus” identifies the twins,—practically makes a hendiadys of them, as grammarians might call it:

“Sleep, that is thy best repast,
Yet of death it bears a taste,
And both are the same thing at last.”

Warton’s Latin epigram on sleep, as _certissima mortis imago_, has been Englished by Wolcot with a beauty and felicity pronounced by critics to be worthy of the original:

“Come, gentle sleep! attend thy votary’s prayer;
And, though death’s image to my couch repair,
How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie,
And, without dying, O how sweet to die!”

Shelley’s opening of “Queen Mab” is a stock quotation: “How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! one pale as yonder waning moon, with lips of lurid blue; the other rosy as the morn when, throned on ocean’s wave, it blushes o’er the world: yet both so passing wonderful!” But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? “Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin.” But this is selecting such an aspect of mortality as comes not within the poet’s purview. Prosaical in every fibre is Sancho Panza meant to be; yet in his famous invocation of blessings on the invention, or rather on the inventor, of sleep, which, quoth he, “covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak”—for Sancho has his poetical moods and tenses after all—he goes on to recognise the affinity which poetry so freely asserts: “It [sleep] has only one fault, as I have heard say, which is, that it looks like death: for between the sleeper and the corpse there is but little to choose.” Shakspeare’s Iachimo calls sleep the “ape of death.” To die, to sleep,—muses Hamlet,—no more; and, by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to, were a consummation devoutly to be wished. “Thy best of rest is sleep,” soliloquizes the duke in “Measure for Measure,”

“And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more.”

A couplet of Butler’s, in a description of nightfall, tells how

... “sleep the wearied world relieved,
By counterfeiting death revived.”

A Greek proverb designates sleep “the minor mysteries of death”—in allusion to the lesser Eleusinian mysteries as compared with the greater: “ὕπος τὰ μικρὰ τοῦ θανάτου μυστήρια.” Sir Thomas Overbury calls sleep, death’s picture drawn to the life, or the twilight of life and death. “In sleep we kindly shake death by the hand; but when we are awaked, we will not know him.” With the closing clause of this sentence compare the closing lines in the following picture by Byron, of man o’erlaboured with his being’s strife, shrinking to “that sweet forgetfulness of life” which sleep induces:

“There lie love’s feverish hope and cunning’s guile,
Hate’s working brain, and lull’d ambition’s wile;
O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave,
And quench’d existence crouches in a grave.
What better name may slumber’s bed become?
Night’s sepulchre, the universal home,
Where weakness, strength, vice, virtue, sunk supine,
Alike in naked helplessness recline;
Glad for awhile to heave unconscious breath,
Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death,
And shun, though day but dawn on ills increast,
That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”

We term sleep a death, writes Sir Thomas Browne, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. “It is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily; a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death.” And then the golden-tongued physician—in his _Religio Medici_—goes on to say that, in fine, so like death seemed to him sleep, that he dare not trust it without his prayers, and a half adieu to the world; and taking his farewell “in a colloquy with God,” that is set in the key of the Evening Hymn, where we pray to be taught to dread the grave as little as our bed. So, in verses of his own weaving, this consummate master of stately rhetorical prose, beseeches God to make his sleep a holy trance:

“Sleep is a death;—O make me try
By sleeping, what it is to die!
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe’er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.
These are my drowsy days; in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:
O come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever!

“This is the dormitive I take to bedward; I need no other laudanum than this to make me sleep; after which I close my eyes in security, content to take leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.”

George Herbert says, that—

“When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves;
Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
Makes them not dead.
Successive nights, like rolling waves,
Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.”

Ye children, does death ever alarm you? asks the venerable pastor in Tegner’s _Children of the Lord’s Supper_: “Death is the brother of Love, twin-brother is he, and is only more austere to behold.” Shakspeare’s nobleman is gazing with disgust on a sottish sleeper, when he exclaims, “Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!” That image, as embodied in the form of a little child, has often inspired poets to strains of tender admiration. Malaspina, in one of Landor’s unacted (not to say, with almost equal truth, unread) plays thus contemplates, and apostrophizes, such an image:—

“And still thou sleepest, my sweet babe! Is death
Like sleep? Ah, who then, who would fear to die?
How beautiful is all serenity!
Sleep, a child’s sleep, oh how far more serene,
And oh, how far more beautiful than any!
Whether we breathe so gently, or breathe not,
Slight is the difference.”

More familiar to every one in the least conversant with current literature—not ephemeral in its currency, or running so fast as to be, like that which decayeth and waxeth old, ready to vanish away—is Mrs. Browning’s poem on a sleeping child—tired out with playing, and slumbering on the floor; the latter portion alone of which may here find room:—

“And God knows, who sees us twain, child at childish leisure,
I am near as tired of pain, as you seem of pleasure;—
Very soon, too, by His grace gently wrapt around me,
Shall I show as calm a face, shall I sleep as soundly!
Differing in this, that you clasp your playthings sleeping,
While my hand shall drop the few given to my keeping.
Differing in this, that I sleeping shall be colder,
And in waking presently, brighter to beholder.
Differing in this beside (sleeper, have you heard me?
Do you move, and open wide eyes of wonder toward me?)—
That while you I thus recall from your sleep,—I solely,—
Me from mine an angel shall, with reveille holy!”

_ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH._

1 SAMUEL xvii. 28.

When the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; _that_ is become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets, so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what sterling stuff there was in the stripling. _Why_ had Jesse’s youngest son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the wilderness? Eliab’s anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath himself for the youth,—for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father’s sheep at Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to Eliab or his brethren was it given to foresee in that fresh-coloured shepherd boy the present slayer of Goliath of Gath, and the bosom friend of princely Jonathan, and the paulo-post-future king of Israel, Israel’s sweetest singer, and the man after God’s own heart.

* * * * *

The adage about unrecognised worth, on the part of kinsfolk and neighbours, the proverb of the prophet without honour in his own country and in his father’s house—has its parallel passage in the _Hercules Furens_ of Euripides—

... “οὑ γὰρ ἐσθ’ ὅπου
Εσθλόν τι δράσας μάρτυρ’ ἂν λάβοις πάτραν.”

Plutarch adopts it in his treatise on Exile, where he says that you very rarely find a wise man taken for such in his own country: “τῶν φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι κεκηδευμένους.”

The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed, by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country, and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι ὁ βίος.”

As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household. Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed aspires to be the prophet of his _tribe_.” But in effect the “false” prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes, portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle, and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their country because those who were born their equals could not endure to see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!” a heathen admirer is made to exclaim: “it seems as if it were decreed by a public edict that no one shall receive from them any gift beyond a certain value; and that if they do receive it they shall be permitted to return the gods no thanks for it in their native city.” There are towns so barbarous, remarks Boccaccio, in Landor’s “Pentameron,” that they must be informed by strangers of their own great man when they happen to have produced one; and would then detract from his merits, that they might not exhibit their awkwardness in doing him honour, or their shame in withholding it.

Charles IX., on a progress through Provence, sent for Nostradamus, and finding in what slight respect he was held by his countrymen, made a point of publicly declaring, with right royal emphasis, that he should take as a slight to himself the slighting of that philosopher.

In the Journal to Stella, Swift hails with cordiality—for the Dean could be cordial on occasion—the appreciation in polite English circles, by ministers and scholars, of Parnell the poet: “Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily; and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed for anything in Ireland makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.” In no unlike spirit and style writes Horace Walpole to Marshal Conway, then travelling abroad: “The honours you have received, though I have so little taste for such things myself, gave me great satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in _not_ being a prophet in one’s own country, when one is almost received like Mohammed in every other. To be an idol at home is no assured touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions, but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules Farnese may lose their temples, but never lose their estimation, by travelling.” In another letter we have Walpole exclaiming, “But adieu, retrospect! it is as idle as prophecy, the characteristic of which is never to be believed where alone it could be useful, _i.e._, in its own country.” And once more, in a later epistle, commenting on the darksome aspect of the times: “That the scene grows very serious there is no doubt; nor do I assume vanity from having possessed the spirit of prophecy—a most useless talent, as predictions never serve as warnings. We know prophets are not honoured in their own country: where then should they be honoured? where they are not known? where probably they never are heard of?” But such notes of interrogation might be multiplied _ad libitum_.

It is to a professedly common-place philosopher we owe the remark, that while there are families in which there exists a preposterous over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several members, there are other families in which there exists a depressing and unreasonable under-estimate of the same. He speaks to his knowledge of such a thing as a family in which certain boys during their early education had it ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest, stupidest, and most ignorant boys in the world; which boys had no sooner gone to a great public school than like rockets they went up forthwith to the top of their classes, and never lost their places there, and afterwards at the university distinguished themselves pre-eminently in honours: “It will not surprise people who know much of human nature, to be told that through this brilliant career of school and college work the home belief in their idleness and ignorance continued unchanged, and that hardly at its end was the toil-worn senior wrangler regarded as other than an idle and useless blockhead.” The writer adds an example of his knowledge of a successful author—to be identified of course by _some_ readers, whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of it, that his writings were anything but “contemptible and discreditable trash.”

The subject is renewed in the ensuing section, on the text of a prophet’s non-acceptance in his own country.

_THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._

ST. LUKE iv. 24.

It was with the emphasis of a “Verily I say unto you,” that our Lord prefaced the assurance that no prophet is accepted in his own country. The speaker spoke from bitter experience. For neither did His brethren believe in Him. It was when He was come into His own country, and taught in their synagogues with a wisdom that astonished them, and wrought mighty works of a kind that bewildered them, that His own countrymen set about asking if this was not the carpenter’s son? was not His mother the well-known Mary? were not James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, His brethren? and His sisters, were they not all near at hand, and known as such? Whence then had this—οὗτος (indefinitely contemptuous)—all these attributes? And they were offended, scandalized, they found a stumbling-block in the condition of Him and His. A double answer was vouchsafed them: the significant restriction of wonder working, for He did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief; and the more direct reply, in so many words, that a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.

Montaigne adverts to this man, or that, having been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor his servant has ever seen anything remarkable: “Few men have been admired by their own domestics”—a sentence to which point and popularity have been given by the epigrammatic form of it, due to Marshal Catinat. “No one,” Montaigne continues, “has been a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own country, as the experience of history shows. It is the same in matters of no consequence.... In my country of Gascony they look upon it as very droll to see me in print. The farther off I am read from my own home, the better I am esteemed; I am fain to purchase printers in Guienne,—elsewhere they purchase me.” Ben Jonson takes note of the greater reverence paid to things remote or strange to us, than to much better, if these be nearer, and fall under our sense. “Men, and almost all sorts of creatures, have their reputation by distance. Rivers, the farther they run, and more from their spring, the broader they are, and greater. And where our original is known, we are the less confident; among strangers we trust fortune.” Lord Evandale, in Scott’s “Old Mortality,” discerns at once the “extraordinary qualities” of Henry Morton, which had escaped the notice of his kinsfolk and friends: “You have not been long in learning all his extraordinary qualities, my lord,” says old Major Bellenden. “I, who have known him from boyhood, could, before this affair, have said much of his good principles and good nature; but as to his high talents”—further on _that_ head deponent saith not. The opinions of relatives as to a man’s power, Dr. Wendell Holmes declares to be very commonly of little value; not so much because they sometimes over-rate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; as because, on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. _Vile habetur quod domi est_, Seneca tersely says.

Edmund Burke, in early life, was not happy at home—there being none among the household on Arran Quay to sympathise with his dreams and his aspirations. “He might think himself a genius,” says one of his many biographers, “but it was not to be expected that his own relations should yet think him one.” Describing his position and influence in Lord Rockingham’s administration, Mr. Macknight observes that it is, after all, a man’s own relations who generally look with the least confidence on his long wrestle with adversity, and are most astonished when the tide turns, and a great victory succeeds to what had seemed to them a mere hopeless toil. “To some of the Irish Nagles on the Blackwater, the news that Edmund had been taken into the confidence of the great Whig Lord Rockingham, ... must have seemed as extraordinary as it did to Joseph’s brethren that he should have become so great a man in hostile Egypt.”

_Son pays le crut fou_, says La Fontaine, of a Greek sage; _mais quoi! aucun n’est prophète chez soi_. Of Joan of Arc, and her early mental struggles, a French historian writes: “It behoves her to find in the bosom of her family someone who would believe in her: this was the most difficult part of all.” Non-recognition, disparagement, cold obstruction. Societies and families, as Goethe says, behave in the same way to their dearest members, towns to their worthiest citizens. Consuelo advising Anzoleto to quit Venice, reminds him that “no person is a prophet in his own country. This is a bad place for one who has been seen running about in rags, and where any one may come to say of you, ‘I was his protector, I saw his hidden talent, it was I who recommended him and procured his advance.’” Descartes had to support with philosophic patience the scorn of his family, impatient of a philosopher in it. Jean Bodin, neglected and slighted in his own land, exulted in the welcome accorded to his books in the English Universities, which printed as well as prized them: “il n’est pas rare que nous ayons besoin d’apprendre des étrangers ce que valent nos compatriotes,” observes M. Léon Feugère.

Every rule has its exceptions, and most proverbs too. The case of St. Catharine, of Sienna, is cited by a Protestant biographer as “an exception to the rule that excludes a prophet from honour in his own country.” The biographer of Edward Irving, recounting with enthusiasm the details of his reception in Annandale in 1828, adds that “for once the proverb seems to have failed. He had honour in his own country, where gentle and simple flocked to hear him,”—neighbouring ministers shutting up their kirks on the Sunday when he preached, and going the “long Sabbath-day’s journey” across the Annandale moors to hear him, along with their people. La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager admirers, but at home, of no account at all; _petit dans son domestique et aux yeux de ses proches_: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet in his own house and country, who enjoys a _vogue_ that is confined to his immediate surroundings, and who _s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole_. But exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it; and the rule as to a prophet’s home acceptance is held to be only confirmed, not disproved, by here and there a stray example in history to the contrary; such as Arnold, of Brescia, being rescued from captivity by some of those partisan nobles of Campania by whom he was honoured as a prophet: “Tanquam _prophetam in terrâ suâ_ cum omni honore habebant.” Or, as the experience, highly exceptional, of young Bernard of Clairvaux, the “strange and irresistible force” of whose character, as the historian of Latin Christianity describes it, enthralled his brothers one after another, and at length his sister. Off to the monastery of Clairvaux they trooped, a complete monastic brotherhood. The youngest boy lingered a short time with his aged father, and then joined the rest. “Even the father died a monk of Clairvaux in the arms of Bernard.” But it was not, we are duly reminded, on his own kindred alone that Bernard wrought with this commanding power. “When he was to preach, wives hurried away their husbands, mothers withdrew their sons, friends their friends, from the resistless magic of his eloquence.” And those that went—what went they out into the wilderness to hear? A prophet? Yea, and almost more than a prophet, by the verdict of his own country and of his father’s house.

_DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE._

PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22 sq.

We read of those who tempted God in the desert, that He gave them their request, and sent leanness withal into their soul. So they did eat meat and were well filled, for He gave them their own desire; but while their meat was yet in their mouths, His wrath came upon them and slew the fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel.

A latter-day poetess, almost masculine in genius, as in out-spoken vigour of diction, tells us that—

“God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,—
A gauntlet with a gift in’t,”

and sometimes poison in the gift. Well therefore may the authoress of these lines, which in their original import are scarcely applicable to our theme, make a distressed soul utter a petition that certainly is so:—

... “’tis written in the Book,
He heareth the young ravens when they cry;
And yet they cry for carrion. O my God,—
And we, who make excuses for the rest,
We do it in our measure. Then I knelt,
And dropped my head upon the pavement too,
And prayed, since I was foolish in desire
Like other creatures, craving offal-food,
That He would stop His ears to what I said,
And listen only to the run and beat
Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood....”

_Ne mihi contingant quæ volo, sed quæ sunt utilia_: the aspiration has been accepted as an adage, worthy of all acceptation, and of acceptation by all.

“Mais, sans cesse ignorants de nos propres besoins,
Nous demandons au ciel ce qu’il nous faut le moins.”

To Shakspeare for an illustration. Pompey, not the Great, is anxious for Divine sanction to speed his ambitious resolves to a prosperous issue. If the great gods be just, he assumes, they will assist the deeds of justest men,—and therefore himself, as pre-eminently entitled to that designation. He is impatient, too, for this manifest favour from above; and sage Menecrates takes occasion not only to check his impatience in particular, but to give him a salutary warning on the subject in general:

... “We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.”

Xenophon tells us of Socrates, that when he prayed, his petition was only this—that the gods would give to him those things that were good; which he did, forasmuch as they alone knew what was good for man. “But he who should ask for gold or silver, or increase of dominion, acted not, in his opinion, more wisely than one who should pray for the opportunity to fight, or game, or anything of the like nature; the consequence of which, being altogether doubtful, might turn, for aught he knew, not a little to his disadvantage.” For,

... “why, alas! do mortal men in vain
Of fortune, fate, or Providence complain?
God gives us what He knows our wants require,
And better things than those that we desire:
Some pray for riches; riches they obtain;
But, watched by robbers, for their wealth are slain;
Some pray from prison to be freed; and come,
When guilty of their vows, to fall at home;
Murdered by those they trusted with their life,
A favoured servant, or a bosom wife.
Such dear-bought blessings happen every day,
Because we know not for what things we pray.”

There is a Greek prayer by an unknown poet, but highly commended by the most illustrious of Socrates’ disciples: that sovran Jove would grant his subjects good, whether they pray for it or not; and avert from them evil, even though they pray for it.

Ζεῦ βασιλεῦ, τὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ καὶ εὐχομένοις καὶ ἀνεύκτοις
Ἄμμι δίδου· τὰ δὲ δεινὰ καὶ εὐχομένὀις, ἀπαλέξοις.

And it is to Plato’s dialogue upon prayer that we owe the instructions imparted by Socrates to Alcibiades, upon which Addison has founded a paper in the _Spectator_. In that dialogue we read how Socrates met Alcibiades going to his devotions, and observing his eyes to be fixed upon the ground with great seriousness and attention—for even that fastest of fast young men could, it seems, be slow enough to say his prayers—told him that he had reason to be thoughtful upon that occasion, since it was possible for a man to bring down evil upon himself by his own supplications, and that those things which the gods sent him in answer to his petitions might turn to his destruction. This, says he, may not only happen when a man prays for what is mischievous in its own nature, as Œdipus implored the gods to sow dissension between his sons; but when he prays for what he believes would be for his good, and against what he believes would be to his detriment. This the philosopher shows must necessarily happen among us, since most men are blinded with ignorance, prejudice, or passion, which hinder them from seeing what things are really eligible for them. And all this, as his manner is, the philosopher teaches by examples.

It seems allowed that Juvenal took the cue of his tenth Satire, as well as Persius of his second, from the Dialogue of Plato aforesaid.

“Evertêre domos totas, optantibus ipsis,
Dii faciles. Nocitura togâ, nocitura petuntur
Militiâ.”

Or, as Englished by Mr. Owen of Warrington:

“Th’ indulgent gods whole houses have o’erthrown
At men’s own prayer;—the fatal choice their own.
In war we ask but woes; in peace but woes,” etc.

The Crassi, Pompeii, and the like, are represented as ruined by the assent of Heaven to their ambitious prayers—

“Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita _malignis_.”

Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose his honours and his head.

... “Sed multæ urbes, et publica vota
Vicerunt. Igitur fortuna ipsius, et urbis,
Servatum victo caput abstulit.”

Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this: that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer to them than to himself:

“Permittes ipsis expendere Numinibus quid
Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris:
Nam pro jocundis aptissima quæque dabunt Dii.
Carior est illis homo quàm sibi.”

Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan, how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?” And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves, he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?... Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself.... Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy:

“Craignez, seigneur, craignez que le ciel rigoureux
Ne vous haïsse assez pour exaucer vos vœux.”

And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to exclaim:

“Ne précipite point tes funestes bienfaits,
Neptune! j’aime mieux n’être exaucé jamais.”

And afterwards again he utters the tristful line:

“Inexorables dieux! qui m’avez trop servi.”

So in a subsequent passage:

“Je hais jusqu’aux soins dont m’honorent les dieux:
Et je m’en vais pleurer leurs faveurs meurtrières,
Sans plus les fatiguer d’inutiles prières.
Quoi qu’ils fissent pour moi, leur funeste bonté
Ne me saurait payer de ce qu’ils m’ont ôté.”

Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and regret.

In one of his many onslaughts against conventionalism, Mr. Emerson says that what we ask daily is to be conventional. “Supply, most kind gods! this defect in my dress, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring; supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them.” But the wise gods, according to this essayist, reply, “No, we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman,”—a Fifth-Avenue landlord, or a West-End householder, not being Mr. Emerson’s ideal of the highest style of man. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, he adds, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of human life.—With Mr. Carlyle, we will not complain, therefore, of Dante’s miseries; who, had all gone right with him, as he wished it, might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,—in which case, the world had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung. “Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Comedia_ to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.”

Visions, and hopes, and prospects, writes Horace Walpole, are pretty playthings for boys. “It is folly to vex one’s self for what cannot last very long. Indeed, what can, even when one is young? Corydon firmly believes he shall be wretched for ever if he does not marry Phyllis. That misery can but last till she has lost her bloom. His eternal woe would vanish if her nose grew red. How often do our griefs become our comforts! I know what I wish to-day; not at all what I shall wish to-morrow. Sixty says, You did not wish for _me_, yet you would like to keep me. Sixty is in the right; and I have not a word more to say.” The Strawberry Hill esquire was himself turning the shady side of sixty when he thus wrote. Of quite another school was that gentle and good Q. Q., as she styled herself, once popular, now almost forgotten, who thus moralized her song:

“How false is found, as on in life we go,
Our early estimate of bliss or woe!
—Some sparkling joy attracts us, that we fain
Would sell a precious birthright to obtain:
There all our hopes of happiness are placed,
Life looks without it like a joyless waste;
No good is prized, no comfort sought beside,
Prayers, tears implore, and will not be denied:
Heaven pitying hears th’ intemperate, rude appeal,
And suits its answer to our truest weal.
The self-sought idol, if at last bestow’d,
Proves, what our wilfulness required—a goad.
Ne’er, but as needful chastisement, is given
The wish thus forced and torn and storm’d from Heaven;
But if withheld, in pity, from our prayer,
We rave, awhile, of torment and despair....
Meantime, Heaven bears the grievous wrong, and waits
In patient pity till the storm abates ...
Deigning, perhaps, to show the mourner soon,
’Twas special mercy that denied the boon.”

Chateaubriand’s most sentimental of melancholy-mad heroes, overwhelmed, as he flatters himself, with imaginary sufferings, offers up a prayer for some real calamity to overtake him; and, to his cost, is taken at his word. “Dans mon délire, j’avais été jusqu’à désirer d’éprouver un malheur, pour avoir du moins un objet réel de souffrance: épouvantable souhait, que Dieu dans sa colère, a trop exaucé!” It is but the Christian (yet not too Christian) expression of the old pagan poet’s gloomy verse: _magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis_.

There is a sonnet of Filicaja’s, of which a good deal is made by Richardson in his History of Sir Charles Grandison,—the concluding lines being an impressive vindication of the ways of Providence to man: _Provvidenza alta infinita_, if it sometimes denies the favours we implore, denies in kindness; and seeming to deny a blessing, grants one in that very refusal: _o negar finge, e nel negar concede_.

William Collins the painter—a loving and lovable man as well as refined artist—in one of his letters home expresses his “decided opinion, that if the Almighty were to give us everything for which we feel desirous, we should as often find it necessary to pray to Him to take away as to grant new favours.” And he refers to thousands of cases that he could bring forward in proof of his assertion.

It amounts to a sort of refrain in the melodious rhythm of that fragmentary prose-poem of De Quincey’s, “The Daughter of Lebanon,”—the admonition of the prophet to the lovely woman in the Damascus market-place: “Ask what thou wilt—great or small—and through me thou shalt receive it from God. But, my child, ask not amiss. For God is able out of thy own evil asking to weave snares for thy footing. And oftentimes to the lambs whom He loves, He gives by seeming to refuse; gives in some better sense, or” (and here the prophet’s voice swelled into the power of anthems) “in some far happier world.” And when the sun is declining to the west on the thirtieth day, the prophet iterates the strain of old: “Lady of Lebanon, the day is already come, and the hour is coming, in which my covenant must be fulfilled with thee. Wilt thou, therefore, being now wiser in thy thoughts, suffer God, thy new Father, to give by seeming to refuse; to give in some better sense, or in some far happier world?” But the daughter of Lebanon sorrowed at these words; she yearned after her native hills, and the sweet twin-born sister with whom from infant days hand-in-hand she had wandered amongst the everlasting cedars. The delirium of fever, and approaching death, are next described; and again the evangelist sits down by her bedside, and rebukes the clouds that trouble her vision, and bids them stand no more between that dying Magdalen and the forests of Lebanon. Anon, we read how the blue sky parted to the right and to the left, laying bare the infinite revelations that can be made visible only to dying eyes; and how, as the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty visions, she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as if in gratulation to herself, the one countenance for which she hungered and thirsted. “The twin-sister, that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died of grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Immediately in rapture she soared upwards from her couch; immediately in weakness she fell back; and being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms around his neck; whilst he breathed into her ear his final whisper, ‘Wilt thou now suffer that God should give by seeming to refuse?’—‘Oh yes—yes—yes,’ was the fervent answer from the daughter of Lebanon.” Hitherto she had known not what to ask for as she ought. Hitherto her asking had been amiss: she had asked for she knew not what. But now her vision was purged. Now she had the second-sight that could pierce through and beyond the night-side of nature, and gaze on the land that is very far off. Hitherto she had, at the best, seen through a glass darkly; but now, it might be said, face to face. So that she knew what to ask for, now.

Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand’s Wertherian romance, is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains, water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks. At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,—the birds, the flowers, the trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil course.

The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East; and from this grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes:—

“I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes....
... Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pass, as is most meet for all?
...
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The gods themselves cannot recal their gifts.’”

“_AND HE DIED._”

GENESIS v. _passim_.

Well known is Addison’s reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church, who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died;—immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which had not regard to another.

What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?

“Dead!—Man’s ‘I was,’ by God’s ‘I am’—
All hero-worship comes to that.
High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat
As a gravestone. Bring your _Jacet jam_—
The epitaph’s an epigram.”

So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one:—

“And then—he died. Behold before ye
Humanity’s poor sum and story;
Life—death—and all that is of glory.”

And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning,

“But—he died! and he was buried
In his tomb of sculptured stone,” etc.