Chapter IX: Part 9

Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Gloster’s death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,—

“O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:
My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul
Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey’s life!
If my suspèct be false, forgive me, God;
For judgment only doth belong to Thee!”

It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.

Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to _be_ the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s _forbear_. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:—

“And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?
But, in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him.”

Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.

No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. “This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.... Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself.” In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation,[19] that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; “for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him.”

The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. “Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings—so complicated are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men.” If judge at all we dare, and do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth’s counsel:—

“From all rash censure be the mind kept free;
He only judges right who weighs, compares,
And, in the sternest sentence which his voice
Pronounces, ne’er abandons Charity.”

Well and wisely said La Bruyère, that “La règle de Descartes, qui ne veut pas que l’on décide sur les moindres vérités avant qu’elles soient connues clairement et distinctement, est assez belle et assez juste pour devoir s’étendu au jugement que l’on fait des personnes.” Real character, as William Hazlitt says, is not one thing, but a thousand things: actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature. “The dull stupor under which we labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see in passing, or at a distance.”

“Well—after all—
What know we of the secret of a man?
His nerves were wrong. What ails us; who are sound,
That we should mimic this raw fool, the world,
Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites,
As ruthless as a baby with a worm,
As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows
To pity—more from ignorance than will.”

Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, “In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?” Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs, how many tears—who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone?[20]

The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s earlier fictions proposes in an opening chapter to give a sketch of his character. But he sensibly refrains from the execution of a too ambitious plan. For, “what man can say: I will sound the depth of my own vices and measure the height of my own virtues; and be as good as his word? We can neither know nor judge ourselves—others may judge, but cannot know us—God alone judges and knows too.”

“Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it.”

Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances, and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian.

When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests that

“These are things we cannot judge
On earth.”

And how then, demands the old man,—

“And how then shall we judge each other,
Who are all earth?”

Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott, quoting Keble’s lines,—

“Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”

declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_, on the whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed before him.

Men who see _into_ their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see _through_ them find something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold universe.

The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest, an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say, “Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved. And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who, as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,—

... “Who may understand
Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown?
He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.”

_Qualis vita, finis ita_, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave, and thinks the common English verdict is right as well as charitable, which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and responsibility is gone. “No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities, said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ The writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which to do so:—

“‘Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour;
And leaving, with meekness,
Her soul to her Saviour.’”

A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,” presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and “doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on damnatory sentences _de mortuis_, even when there remains nought to show—

... “save a life misspent,—
And soul—but who shall answer where it went?
’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they
Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way,
Unless those bullies of eternal pains
Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.”

More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on the obscure crime of a great criminal:—

“At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
_But in a tongue no man could understand_;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”

Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment.

The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance, the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men, is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane. “Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the crane.

“Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the comments we were uttering really did apply.”

Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality. No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff, immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of.

In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other, and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on them.”

In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry, will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown about by Idleness.

There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere—

“Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,”

—but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that, my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not of his wants:—

“I will not say
What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how
The happy idleness of that sweet morn
With all its lovely images, was changed
To serious musing and to self-reproach.
Nor did we fail to see within ourselves
What need there is to be reserved in speech,
And temper all our thoughts with charity.
—Therefore, unwilling to forget that day,
My friend, myself, and she who then received
The same admonishment, have called the place
By a memorial name, uncouth indeed
As e’er by mariner was given to bay
Or foreland on a new-discovered coast;
And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.”[21]

Forbear to judge: for how pitifully little is the all we really know one of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked—even admitting the remark to be a truism—that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. “Every one is a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences, trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly by impalpable and mysterious barriers.” And yet how ready each “weak unknowing hand” to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems to be Heaven’s foe.

Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, “it is, after all, nothing more than the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the keenest human eye is able to detect.” It is in a subsequent portion of the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and evil; and Divine justice to be lenient, because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion, impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies.[22]

In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith, differs from his own, the author of the “Caxton Essays” is impressive on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging, has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like man himself, erring and human, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now, argues the essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective faith. “For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.”

If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to humanity.“[23] It is much the same humane thought which underlies Pelayo’s apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous prince would and did

... “cherish in his heart the constant thought
Something was yet untold, which, being known,
Would palliate his offence, and make the fall
Of one till then so excellently good,
Less monstrous, less revolting to belief,
More to be pitied, more to be forgiven.”

As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.

Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours’ eyes?

Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.

An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another?

“Oh what are we,
Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit
In judgment man on man! and what were we,
If the All-merciful should mete to us
With the same rigorous measure wherewithal
Sinner to sinner metes!”

No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann’s, the path of propriety was difficult to find—still more difficult to keep. “Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse.” A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, “to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.” So, again, in the same author’s review of the life and writings of Werner—who, always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us. For “there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them.” Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. “He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men’s.” Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively but negatively,—less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle’s doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the _ratio_ of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. “This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!” Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. “Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know _how_ blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”

To a very different style of sinners the same judgment—rather the same refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France’s reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so greedily her own children. “For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April 1794] stript of its _bonnet rouge_ [and a traveller by tumbril to Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death _were_ ‘an eternal sleep’? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I.”

Once more: “Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?” is the historian’s deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically strong,—who dies, confessedly a _very_ great sinner, early in 1733. Who shall judge him?

“Hereafter?—And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book
To find his failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors!”

Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his _esprit de corps_ was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”

In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a “double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?”

In Mr. Thackeray’s instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question—for some years a main support of the _National Review_—recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men’s real motives of action.[24]

_PART-KNOWLEDGE._

1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.

“We know in part,” said the apostle; who, therefore, prophesied in part; always with the assurance that when that which is perfect is come, then shall that which is in part be done away. Meanwhile, we see through a glass darkly, through a medium obscurely—“now I know in part.”

If so it was with him that once was caught up into the third heavens, much more with his readers. For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing. “Behold, God is great, and we know Him not.” At the height of our knowledge we can but fall back upon the old saying, “Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him!” And when we consider the heavens, the work of His hands; the moon and the stars, which He hath ordained; the earth beneath, the ocean round about, the waters under the earth, the pent-up fires within it,—verily He is a God that hideth Himself still, and that revealeth but a portion of His work, clouds and darkness covering the rest. His thoughts are very deep; and what is man that he should know them, or the son of man that he should find them out unto perfection? From the topmost pinnacles attained by science he can see but the utmost part of them, and cannot see them all.

Locke argues the intellectual and sensible world to be in this perfectly alike: that the part which we see of them holds no proportion with what we see not; and that whatsoever we can reach with our eyes, or our thoughts, of either of them, is but a point, almost nothing, in comparison with the rest. Shall he whose birth, maturity, and age, as Beattie has it, scarce fill the circle of one summer day—shall the poor gnat conclude nature in collapse because of a passing cloud, not transparent to the insect’s vision?

“One part, one little part, we dimly scan
Through the dark medium of life’s feverish dream;
Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan,
If but that little part incongruous seem.
Nor is that part perhaps what mortals deem;
Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise.
Oh then renounce that impious self-esteem,
That aims to trace the secrets of the skies;
For thou art but of dust: be humble and be wise.”

Freethinking Lord Shaftesbury begins a section of his “Characteristics” with the remark, that when we reflect on any ordinary frame or constitution, either of art or nature, and consider how hard it is to give the least account of a particular _part_ without a competent knowledge of the _whole_, we need not wonder to find ourselves at a loss in many things relating to the constitution and frame of the universe. Elsewhere he suggestively observes, that in an infinity of things mutually relative, a mind which sees not infinitely, can see nothing fully; “and since each particular has relation to all in general, it can know no perfect or true relation of anything in a world not perfectly and fully known.” And supposing the case of an ignorant landsman presuming to question the details of a ship’s rigging, his lordship breaks out into the apostrophe, “O my friend, let us not thus betray our ignorance, but consider where we are, and in what a universe. Think of the many parts of the vast machine in which we have so little insight, and of which it is impossible we should know the ends and uses; when instead of seeing to the highest pennons, we see only some lower deck, and are in this dark case of flesh, confined even to the hold and meanest station of the vessel.” There is Mrs. Browning’s usual energy of diction in the exclamation,

“Ay, we are forced, so pent,
To judge the whole too partially, confound
Conclusions. Is there any common phrase
Significant, when the adverb’s heard alone,
The verb being absent, and the pronoun out?
But we, distracted in the roar of life,
Still insolently at God’s adverb snatch,
And bruit against Him that His thought is void,
His meaning hopeless.”

The same good Providence, as Madame de Sévigné writes, that governs all, shall one day unravel all; we poor mortals being, in the meanwhile, so many all but stone-blind and utterly ignorant lookers-on. We suffer, as the author of “Thorndale” says—there is no doubt about that—and we naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony; but the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life, should be taken from some calm, impersonal point of view. “We should command the widest horizon possible. Of the great whole of humanity we see but a little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights only of the picture, sometimes only on the shadows. How very dark those shadows seem! Yet if we could embrace in our view the whole of the picture, perhaps the very darkest shadows might be recognised as effective or inevitable portions of a grand harmonious whole.” How closes Thomson his poem of “The Seasons,” drear Winter then his cue?—with the memorable lines:—

“Ye good distress’d!
Ye noble few! who here unbending stand
Beneath life’s pressure, yet bear up awhile;
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deemed evil, is no more:
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded spring encircle all.”

The theme of our part knowledge, so strictly cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, is one to which Thomson repeatedly recurs. For instance, in an earlier book:—

“But here the cloud,
So wills Eternal Providence, sits deep.
Enough for us to know that this dark state,
In wayward passions lost, and vain pursuits,
This infancy of being, cannot prove
The final issue of the works of God,
By boundless love and perfect wisdom form’d
And ever rising with the rising mind.”

Again, with emphasis and discretion (as Polonius says), he puts the query—

“Shall little haughty ignorance pronounce
His works unwise, of which the smallest part
Exceeds the narrow vision of her mind?
As if upon a full proportioned dome,
On swelling columns heaved, the pride of art,
A critic-fly, whose feeble ray scarce spreads
An inch around, with blind presumption bold,
Should dare to tax the structure of the whole.”

Horace Walpole makes use of a similar figure in one of his three or four thousand published letters: “We are poor silly animals: we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons, and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one annual revolution of them.”

“Earth’s number-scale is near us set;
The total God alone can see;
But each some fraction.”[25]

Addison, in one of his essays, comments on the body of an animal as an object comparatively adequate to our senses, it being a particular part of Providence that lies within a narrow compass, so that the eye is able to command it, and by successive inquiries to search into all its parts. Could the body of the whole earth, he goes on to say, or indeed the whole universe, be thus subjected to the examination of our senses, were it not too big and disproportioned for our inquiries, too unwieldy for the management of the eye and hand, “there is no question but it would appear to us as curious and well-contrived a frame as that of a human body. We should see the same concatenation and subserviency, the same necessity and usefulness, the same beauty and harmony, in all and every of its parts, as what we discover in the body of every single animal.” To adopt an illustration of Fénélon’s to the same purpose: imagine the letters of a sentence to be so enormous in size, that a man could only make out one of them at a time; in that case he could not read, that is, collect the letters together and discover the sense of them in combination. So it is, argues the benign prelate, with the _grands traits_ of Providence in the conduct of the world at large during the lapse of centuries. It is only the whole that is intelligible, and the whole is too vast to be scrutinised near at hand. Each event in the process of ages is like a separate letter or sign, which is too large for our petty organs, and which is without a meaning when taken apart from the rest. A more vigorous philosopher than the gentle Fénélon compares the universe to a picture, the beauty of which is then alone perceptible when the true stand-point of perspective is taken. There are certain inventions in perspective, or certain beautiful designs, he says, which look all confusion until you either inspect them from the right point of view, or make use of some kind of glass or mirror as the medium of observation. In the same manner the apparent deformities of our fractional side-views, resolve themselves into harmonious unity when the eye is directed aright.

Dr. Johnson was in an unwontedly placid and benignant frame of mind, by Boswell’s account, when the two stood together, one serene autumn night, in Dr. Taylor’s garden, and the sage delivered himself, in meditative mood, of this noteworthy surmise: “Sir,” said he, “I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually.” Be that as it may, few could have been found more ready than the melancholic Johnson to agree that meanwhile, until the day star arise and the shadows flee away,

“The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate,
Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors:
Our understanding traces them in vain,
Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search;
Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
Nor where the regular confusion ends.”

It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble: “Be it enough for us to know, that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned.” He would have his correspondent bear in mind that the epithet “very good” is a necessary adjunct to “very great;” and that is sufficient. The inference is self-evident, that under the sway of the Being who combines in himself those two qualities—the _très-bon_ and the _très-grand_—all the evils we either suffer or witness must needs be acts of justice or means of reformation equally indispensable. In the declared love of God to man, M. de Maistre found a general solution of all the enigmas that can offend (_scandaliser_, in the New Testament sense of putting a stumbling-block in the way of) our ignorance. “Fixed to one little point of time and space, we are insane enough to refer all to this point; and in so doing we are at once blameworthy and absurd.” If De Maistre’s collation of the _très-bon_ with the _très-grand_ resembles the lines of Drummond’s hymn beginning,

“O King, whose greatness none can comprehend,
Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend,”

so is the scope of his argument at one with what follows:

“Here, where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of Thy might,
Still owly-eyed when staring on Thy light.”

What we call this life of men on earth, as Mr. Browning’s island-poet has it, is, as he finds much reason to conceive,

“Intended to be viewed eventually
As a great whole, not analysed to parts,
But each part having reference to all.”[26]

Pope’s well-worked line is of perpetual application,

“’Tis but a part we see, and not the whole.”

So is the avowal of the present laureate:

“I see in part
That all, as in some work of art,
Is toil co-operant to an end.”

To us, as Sir Benjamin Brodie remarks, in one of his psychological discussions, the universe presents itself as an assemblage of heterogeneous phenomena, some of which we can reduce to laws of limited operation, while others stand by themselves, bearing no evident relation to anything besides. We may well, he thinks, suppose that there are in the universe beings of a superior intelligence, and possessed of a greater range of observation, who are sufficiently “behind the scenes” to be able to contemplate all the immense variety of material phenomena as the result of one great general law. Their standpoint may enable them to see a Cosmos, a world of order, where to lower intelligences Chaos alone is discernible, a world comparatively without form and void, with darkness upon the face of its deep. And as with the physical, so with the metaphysical. As with the material, so with the moral.

“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand
Of God’s will in the worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad perplexèd minors....

“We murmur—‘Where is any certain tune
Of measured music, in such notes as these?’—
But angels leaning from their golden seat,
Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed[27] cadences,—
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper—Sweet.”[28]

_RULING THE WAVES._

PSALM cxiv. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.

When Israel went out of Egypt, it was under the guidance of One whose hand being mighty to save, the sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven back. “What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?” The trembling was at the presence of Him who hath placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. The commotion, the fleeing, the driving back, was at the bidding of Him who, and who alone, can say to the sea, Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.

The men of Galilee marvelled when, at the storm that once arose on their sea, and the ship was in jeopardy, there arose One who rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. What manner of man was this, that even the winds and the sea obeyed Him?

What manner of man? Be it legend or history, the story of royal Cnut on the seashore, forbidding, at his flatterers’ instigation, or by his own desire to rebuke their folly—forbidding the farther approach of the incoming tide, is pregnant with instruction on this head. The royal Dane might be a man of men, but the surging waves were not obedient unto his voice. King though he was, the tide was responseless as deaf adder to any charming of his, charmed he never so wisely, enjoined he never so straitly. What manner of man, then, but the Son of man? What manner of king but the King of kings?

The Dane might have enforced the lesson on his parasites by such a strain as that of a defeated monarch in Shakspeare:—

“Farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread, like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends:—subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?”

A king, that is, in _their_ sense of right Divine, and Divine extent. So with poor, mad, discrowned Lear, drenched in that terrible storm on the heath, and remembering soft speeches of cozening courtiership, only of yesterday too. “When the rain came to wet me, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” Mark, again, from the opening scene of the “Tempest,” the rough, blunt, uncivil words with which the boatswain cuts short the addresses of his royal passengers:—

“Hence! What care these roarers [the waves] for the name of
king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not.

“_Gonzalo._ Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.

“_Boatswain._ None that I love more than myself. You are a
counsellor; if you can command these elements to a silence,
and work the peace of the present [instant], we will not hand
a rope more: use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks
you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin
for the mischance of the hour, if so it hap. Cheerily, good
hearts.—Out of our way, I say!”

Of Antiochus Epiphanes, and his pride that had a fall, it is written in the book of Maccabees: “And thus he that a little afore thought he _might command the waves of the sea_ (so proud was he beyond the condition of man), and weigh the high mountains in a balance, was now cast on the ground.”

An elder king than Cnut, and not a wiser, not only lashed the winds that blew contrary to his will, but bound the sea with fetters, after a sort:

“Ipsum compedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigæum.”

Much good it did him: witness his return from his great expedition, in a poor skiff, wind-tossed across waves red with the blood of his slaughtered host, _cruentis fluctibus_. The stars in their courses once fought against Sisera, and the fettered waves were little more propitious to speed the fortunes of Xerxes. He might have spared his chains. At any rate he lost his army. Archdeacon Hare practically applied the extravagance of the Great King, as they of Persia were styled, in designating the present (or, rather, what was to him the present) as an age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet themselves try to fling their chains over the ever-rolling, irrepressible ocean of thought; nay, they will scoop out a mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, he goes on to say, and make it ripple and bubble, and spout up prettily into the air, and then fancy that they are taming the Atlantic; which, however, keeps advancing upon them, until it sweeps them away with their toys.

It is edifying to read in the Diary of Mr. Pepys how, one July afternoon, soon after the king had come back to enjoy his own again, that gentleman went upon the river, but had to put ashore and shelter himself from the rain that rained so hard; during which time came by the king in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the queen: “But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.”

Instructive, too, is the tenor of the legend of King Robert of Sicily, which has been so attractively treated in prose by Leigh Hunt, in his Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and in verse by Professor Longfellow, in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. There we read how the king with his nobles proudly sat at vespers, on St. John’s Eve, and heard the priests chant the Magnificat:—

“And, as he listened, o’er and o’er again
Repeated, like a burden or refrain,
He caught the words, ‘_Deposuit potentes_
_De sede, et exaltavit humiles_;’
And slowly lifting up his kingly head,
He to a learned clerk beside him said,
‘What mean these words?’ The clerk made answer meet,
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted them of low degree.’
Thereat King Robert muttered scornfully,
’Tis well that such seditious words are sung
Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue;
For unto priests and people be it known
There is no power can push me from my throne!’”

The sequel teaches him a different lesson, which he learns by (and lays to) heart.

In those days, however, if any order of men might, or did, claim authority over such turbulent subject-matter as the sea, it was not kings, but priests. Ecclesiastical history relates the calamitous visitation of earthquake and inundations by which Epidaurus must once, and for ever, have been overwhelmed, had not the prudent citizens placed St. Hilarion, an Egyptian monk, on the beach. “He made the sign of the cross; the mountain-wave stopped, bowed, and returned.” One’s respect for the great qualities of the fearless Akbah, traversing the wilds of Africa, and at length penetrating to the verge of the Atlantic, is not lessened by what Gibbon relates of him:—that his career, though not his zeal, being checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean, Akbah spurred his horse into the waves, and raising his eyes to heaven, exclaimed with the tone of a fanatic, “Great God, if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of Thy holy name.” And the picture reminds us of another, some eight centuries later, when Constantinople was besieged and taken by Mahomet II., who, while his ships were engaged against those of the Genoese, sat on horseback on the beach, to encourage by voice and presence the valour of the faithful: “The passions of his soul, and even the gestures of his body, seemed to imitate the action of the combatants; and, as if he had been the lord of nature, he spurred his horse with a fearless and impotent effort into the sea.” Sir Archibald Alison moralises on the spectacle of Napoleon, in 1804, reviewing, or intending to review, the naval force by which he designed to crush the British power: the flotilla being tempest-tost when it hove in sight, and several vessels stranded—an event “destined to teach the French Emperor, like Canute the Dane, that there were bounds to his power, and that his might was limited to the element on which his army stood.” The sea—_c’est autre chose_.