An Essay without End.
To some reader, perhaps, an essay without end may appear odd, and opposed to the regular order of things; but if he will kindly imagine the line written on his gravestone—and it is an epitaph which my own ghost would regard with particular satisfaction—he will at once see that it is by no means singular. And whatever propriety there may be in its application to human life, extends to any process of thought; for thought, like life, is essential, without beginning and without end.
It is this which makes abstract reflection so unsatisfying. An abstract thought is a sort of disembodied spirit; and when matched with its kind, the result is generally a progeny of ghosts and chimeras—numerous, but incapable. In fact, we do not often get so much as that out of it. Abstract thought generally travels backward. Childless itself, it goes upon its own pedigree; and as that becomes mysterious in proportion as it is remote, we soon find ourselves in a company of shadows, too vast to contemplate and too subtle for apprehension.
Again it is with thought as it is with life (I should say “soul,” if the word had not been hackneyed out of all endurance—but then the poets have exhausted nature)—it must be married to something material before you can hope to get good fruit from it—capable of continuing the species. Luckily, anything will do. It seems to have been foreseen from the creation that thought would scarcely prove prolific, unless it might be kindled at every sense and by every object in the world. Experience more than proves the justness of that foresight, and thus we have sermons in stones. By a bountiful provision, the human mind is capable of immediate and fruitful alliance with a bough, a brook, a cloud—all that the eye may see or the ear echo. It may be observed, too, that just as Sir Cassian Creme strengthens the blood of his ancient and delicate house by an alliance with his dairy-woman, so a cultivated mind may produce more vigorous progeny by intimacy with an atom than with any long-descended speculation on the Soul, say. Coleridge’s method of thinking is much to the purpose, and what came of it as a whole?
For amusement’s sake, let us carry theory into practice. Let us try what course of reflection we may get by contemplating the first natural object that comes to hand. The field is wide enough: there is Parnassus, and there is Holborn Hill. But there are too many squatters on the former eminence already, perhaps; and besides, a kind of Bedlam is said to have arisen about the base of it lately, beyond which few adventurers are known to proceed. Our aspirations are humble—we may choose the lesser hill.
“Alas, then!” says the dear reader, “we are to have some antiquarian reflections. Better Parnassus and Bedlam!”—Fear not. Providence, which has otherwise been very good to me, gave me a Protestant mind; and while therein exists no disposition to adore St. Botolph’s toes, or to worship St. Pancras’s well-preserved tibia, I am equally unenthusiastic about Pope’s nightcap, I don’t care a fig for Queen Anne’s farthings, and I would not go round the corner to behold the site of the Chelsea bunhouse. There is little, after all, in bricks, bones, and the coffins of men; but a glimpse into the lives of men, or into the eyes of nature—that is another thing.
The one may always be had in London, the other never could be had, were it not for Holborn Hill. Circumstances permitting, every city ought to be built on a hill; for reasons of morality, and therefore for reasons of state. No doubt, there is a certain agreeable monotony in levels, gentle gradients, and a perspicuous network of streets; they may even impose a wholesome contrast upon the minds of well-to-do citizens, who go “out of town.” But what of the ill-to-do citizen, who never leaves its walls? Not only do the bare hard streets present to him no natural thing, but with strait lines of brick on every side, a stony plane at his feet, and a flat dull roof over all, he gets no hint of a natural thing; and all that is artificial in him is hardened and encouraged. But suppose the city streets wind up and down and round about a hill? Then by no devices of brick or stone can you keep out the country. Then Nature defies your macadamization and your chimney stacks; it is impossible to forget her, or to escape her religious gaze.
When did it occur to any ordinary person walking Bond Street, that once there had been turf there, and a running about of beetles? On the other hand, what man of any kind looks over the little Fleet valley to where Holborn Hill rises on the other side, without wondering how the houses came there—without feeling that they are only another sort of tents, pitched upon the earth for a time? “They, too, have to be struck,” says he, “and there is everywhere wandering away!”
The result is, then, that he hits upon a reflection, which is, I do not say profound, but at the bottom of all profundity, so far as we have plumbed it. This reflection is to be found in the sap, fibre, and fruit of all morality, all law, philosophy, and religion. There is nothing like it to move the hearts of men; the heart it cannot move belongs to an atheist (which creature, and not the ape, as some have supposed, is the link between brutes and men), the heart which it has not moved, to one quite unawakened. For instance, those who fill the gaols; the society of thieves; the scum of the population, as it is termed, fermenting in alleys and poisoning the state. We have reformatories for the young of this breed, whom we endeavour to reclaim by reading, writing, and arithmetic—attendance at chapel, and book-keeping by double entry. But when you have put the young reprobate through all these exercises, you have only succeeded in making gravel walks in a wilderness; and though from those trim avenues you may scatter good seed enough, it perishes on the soil, or withers in a tangle of weeds. After all our labour and seed-scattering, we still complain that it is so hard to reach the heart. Now here we have the best means of touching it, perhaps. Let there be found some Professor of Time and Eternity, skilled to show how the world goes—and is going: who should exhibit, as in a wizard’s glass, the unending procession of human life. The Roman in his pride, a hundred million Romans in their pride—all perished; millions of elegant Greeks, with their elegant wives and mistresses, all perished; Attila’s thundering hosts riding off the scene—vanished: the clatter of their spears, the fury of their eyes, the tossing of their shaggy hair, the cloud of thoughts that moved upon their faces—they and all that belonged to them.
Not that these personages make the most affecting groups in the series of dissolving views which illustrate the history of the world. I would rather confine myself to Holborn Hill, were I professor, in a penitentiary, of Time and Eternity; and between the period when it lay solitary in the moonlight, clothed with grass, crowned with trees, bitterns booming by the river below, while some wild mother lay under the branches singing to her baby in a tongue dead as herself now—from that time to the present there has been a very pretty striking of tents and wandering away. Quite enough for any professor’s purpose. Quite enough, if impressed upon an ignorant vicious heart, to prepare it for a better—certainly for a more responsible life. Your young reprobate will never perceive his relations to his Creator, till he has discovered the relations of mankind to creation, and his own place among mankind. You desire him to contemplate the Future: he cannot do it till he is shown the Past.
There is a Scripture text apropos of this, which I have longed many a day to sermonize upon, but we are far enough from Holborn Hill already; and apart from moral and mental considerations, it is a sufficient reason for building cities in hilly places, if the hard-worked, captive people are thus kept in remembrance of the country, and its peace and health. This is a luxury as well as a good; delight to the senses, as well as medicine for the mind. Some of us love nature with a large and personal love. I am sure I do, for one. Thinking of her, immured in London as I am, I think also of that prisoner in the Bastille, who prayed Monseigneur for “some tidings of my poor wife, were it only her name upon a card.” Were I a prisoner long, I should pray not only for that, but for some tidings of my mistress Nature, were it only her name in a leaf. And whereas some of us who have sweethearts go prowling about the dear one’s house, searching through the walls for her, so at favourable opportunities I search for my mistress through the bricks and stones of Holborn Hill. In the noon of a midsummer day, with the roar of carts, waggons, Atlas and other omnibusses rattling in my ears, with that little bill of Timmins’s on my mind, how have I seen it clad in green, the stream running in the hollow, and white dandelion tufts floating in the air. There a grasshopper chirped; a bee hummed, going his way; and countless small creatures, burrowing in the grass, buzzed and whirred like a company of small cotton-spinners with all their looms at work. Practically, there is no standing timber within several miles of the place; but if I have not seen trees where an alamode beef business is supposed to be carried on, I am blind. I have seen trees, and heard the blackbird whistle.
There is much significance, under the circumstances, in hearing the blackbird whistle. It is a proof that to me there was perfect silence. The peculiarity of this animal is, that he makes silence. The more he whistles, the more still is all nature beside. It is not difficult to imagine him a sort of fugleman, herald, or black rod, going between earth and heaven in the interest of either. Take a case: an evening in autumn. About six o’clock there comes a shower of rain, a bountiful shower, all in shilling drops. The earth drinks and drinks, holding its breath; while the trees make a pleasant noise, their leaves kissing each other for joy. Presently the rain ceases. Drops fall one by one, lazily, from the satisfied boughs, and sink to the roots of the grass, lying there in store. Then the blackbird, already on duty in his favourite tree, sounds his bugle-note. “Attention!” sings he to the winds big and little; “the earth will return thanks.” Whereupon there is a stillness deep as—no, not as death, but a silence so profound that it seems as if it were itself the secret of life, that profoundest thing. This your own poor carcase appears to recognize. The little life therein—not more than a quart pot full—knows the presence of the great ocean from which it was taken, and yearns. It stirs in its earthen vessel; you feel it moving in your very fingers; you may almost hear your right hand calling to the left, “I live! I live!” Silence proclaimed, thanksgiving begins. There is a sensation of the sound of ten thousand voices, and the swinging of ten thousand censers; besides the audible singing of birds, the humming of beetles, and the noise of small things which praise the Lord by rubbing their legs together.
This bird seems to take another important part in the scheme of nature, worth mentioning.
Everybody—everybody at least who has watched by a sick-bed—knows that days have their appointed time, and die as well as men. There is one awful minute in the twenty-four hours when the day palpably expires, and then there is a reach of utter vacancy, of coldness and darkness; and then a new day is born, and earth, reassured, throbs again. This is not a fancy; or if so, is it from fancy that so many people die in this awful hour (“between the night and the morning,” nurses call it), or that sick men grow paler, fainter, more insensible? I think not. To appearance they are plainly washed down by the ebbing night, and plainly stranded so near the verge of death that its waters wash over them. Now, in five minutes, the sick man is floated away and is gone; or the new day comes, snatches him to its bosom, and bears him back to us; and we know that he will live. I hope I shall die between the night and the morning, so peacefully do we drift away then. But ah! blessed Morning, I am not ungrateful. That long-legged daughter of mine, aged eight at present, did you not bring her back to me in your mysterious way? At half-past two, we said, “Gone!” and began to howl. Three minutes afterward, a breath swept over her limbs; five minutes afterward there was a blush like a reflected light upon her face; seven minutes, and whose eyes but hers should open, bright and pure as two blue stars? We had studied those stars; and read at a glance that our little one had again entered the House of Life.
Our baby’s dying and her new birth is an exact type of the death and birth of the day. One description serves for both. As she sank away, fainting and cold, so night expires. This takes place at various times, according to the season; but generally about two o’clock in the morning in these latitudes. If you happen to be watching or working within doors, you may note the time by a coldness and shuddering in your limbs, and by the sudden waning of the fire, in spite of your best efforts to keep it bright and cheerful. Then a wind—generally not a very gentle one—sweeps through the streets—once: it does not return, but hurries straight on, leaving all calm behind it: that is the breath that passed over the child. Now a blush suffuses the East, and then open the violet eyes of the day, bright and pure as if there were no death in the world, nor sin. All which the blackbird seems to announce to the natural world below. The wind we spoke of warns him; whereupon he takes his head from under his wing, and keeps a steady look-out toward the East. As soon as the glory of the morning appears, he sings his soldierly song; as soon as he sings, smaller fowl wake and listen, and peep about quietly; when—there comes the day overhead, sailing in the topmost air, in the golden boat with the purple sails. And the little winds that blow in the sails—here come they, swooping over the meadows, scudding along hedgerows, bounding into the big trees, and away to fill those purple sails again, not only with a wind, but with a hundred perfumes, and airs heavy with the echoes of a hundred songs.[25]
I wish I were a poet; you should have a description of all this in verses, and welcome. But if I were a musician! Let us see what we should do as musicians. First, you should hear the distant sound of a bugle, which sound should float away: that is one of the heralds of the morning, flying southward. Then another should issue from the eastern gates; and now the grand reveillé should grow, sweep past your ears (like the wind aforesaid), and go on, dying as it goes. When as it dies, my stringed instruments come in. These to the left of the orchestra break into a soft slow movement, the music swaying drowsily from side to side, as it were, with a noise like the rustling of boughs. It must not be much of a noise, however, for my stringed instruments to the right have begun the very song of the morning. The bows tremble upon the strings, like the limbs of a dancer, who, a-tiptoe, prepares to bound into her ecstacy of motion. Away! The song soars into the air as if it had the wings of a kite. Here swooping, there swooping, wheeling upward, falling suddenly, checked, poised for a moment on quivering wings, and again away. It is waltz time, and you hear the Hours dancing to it. Then the horns. Their melody overflows into the air richly, like honey of Hybla; it wafts down in lazy gusts, like the scent of the thyme from that hill. So my stringed instruments to the left cease rustling, listen a little while, catch the music of those others, and follow it. Now for the rising of the lark! Henceforward it is a chorus, and he is the leader thereof. Heaven and earth agree to follow him. I have a part for the brooks—their notes drop, drop, drop, like his: for the woods—they sob like him. At length, nothing remains but to blow the hautboys; and just as the chorus arrives at its fulness, they come maundering in. They have a sweet old blundering “cow-song” to themselves—a silly thing, made of the echoes of all pastoral sounds. There’s a warbling waggoner in it, and his team jingling their bells. There’s a shepherd driving his flock from the fold, bleating; and the lowing of cattle.—Down falls the lark like a stone: it is time he looked for grubs. Then the hautboys go out, gradually; for the waggoner is far on his road to market; sheep cease to bleat and cattle to low, one by one; they are on their grazing ground, and the business of the day is begun. Last of all, the heavenly music sweeps away to waken more westering lands, over the Atlantic and its whitening sails.
And to think this goes on every day, and every day has been repeated for a thousand years! Generally, though, we don’t like to think about that, as Mr. Kingsley has remarked, among others; for when he wrote, “Is it not a grand thought, the silence and permanence of nature amid the perpetual noise and flux of human life!—a grand thought, that one generation goeth and another cometh, and the earth abideth for ever?” he also meant, “Isn’t it a melancholy thought?” For my part, I believe this reflection to be the fount of all that melancholy which is in man. I speak in the broadest sense, meaning that whereas whenever you find a man you find a melancholy animal, this is the secret of his melancholy. The thought is so common and so old; it has afflicted so many men in so many generations with a sort of philosophical sadness, that it comes down to us like an hereditary disease, of which we have lost the origin, and almost the consciousness. It is an universal disposition to melancholy madness, in short. Savages who run wild in woods are not less liable to its influence than we who walk in civilized Pall Mall. On the contrary, a savage of any brains at all is the most melancholy creature in the world. Not Donizetti, nor Mendelssohn, nor Beethoven himself ever composed such sad songs as are drummed on tom-toms, or piped through reeds, or chanted on the prairies and lagoons of savage land. No music was ever conceived within the walls of a city so profoundly touching as that which Irish pipers and British harpers made before an arch was built in England. Now this bears out our supposition; for the savage with the tom-tom, the piper with his pipe, the harper with his harp, lived always in sight of nature. Their little fussy lives and noisy works were ever in contrast with its silence and permanence; change and decay with the constant seasons and the everlasting hills. Who cannot understand the red man’s reverence for inanimate nature read by this light—especially his reverence for the setting sun? For the night cometh, reminding him of his own little candle of an existence, while he knows that the great orb has risen upon a hundred generations of hunters, and will rise upon a hundred more. As for him and his works, his knife will be buried with him, and there an end of him and his works.
And we Europeans to-day are in the same case with regard to the silence and permanence of Nature, contrasted with the perpetual flux and noise of human life. Who thinks of his death without thinking of it? who thinks of it without thinking of his death? Mother, whose thoughts dwell about her baby in churchyard lying; Mary, of sister Margaret who died last year, or of John who was lost at sea, say first and last—“There the sea rolls, ever as ever; and rages and smiles, and surges and sighs just the same; and were you and I and the whole world to be drowned to-day, and all the brave ships to go down with standing sails, to-morrow there would not be a drop the more in the ocean, nor on its surface a smile the less. Doesn’t the rain rain upon my baby’s grave, and the sun shine upon it, as indifferent as if there were neither babies nor mothers in the world?” Why, this strain is to be found in all the poetry that ever was written. Walter Mapes may be quoted, with his, “I propose to end my days in a tavern drinking,” but his and all such songs merely result from a wild effort to divorce this “grand thought” from the mind.
But we need not go to America for a red Indian, nor afield to the hills for illustration; that is to be found in the impression produced on many thoughtful minds by the contemplation of social life in any two periods. We behold Sir Richard Steele boozing unto maudlinness in purple velvet and a laced hat; Captain Mohock raging through Fleet Street with a drawn rapier; reprobate old duchesses and the damsels who were to be our grandmothers sitting in the same pew, and then looking about us, say—“Here we are again!—the duchess on the settee, Mohock lounging against the mantelpiece, Dick Steele hiccuping on the stairs in a white neckcloth. There they go through the little comedy of life, in ruffles and paste buckles; here go we in swallow-tails and patent leathers. Mohock married, and was henpecked: young Sanglant is to be married to-morrow. The duchess being dead, one of those demure little damsels takes up the tradition, and certain changes of costume having been accomplished, becomes another wicked old woman; and so it goes on. They die, and we die; and meanwhile the world goes steadily round. There is sowing and reaping, and there are select parties, and green peas in their season, and oh! this twopenny life!”
Mind you, I have other ideas. What is all this melancholy, at bottom, but stupidity and ingratitude? Are we miserable because He who made all beautiful things preserves them to us for ever? True, He has set bounds to intellect, and to aspirations which, when they are most largely achieved, do not always work for pure and useful ends; true, He does not permit us to become too impious in our pride by giving eternity to the Parthenons and telegraphs that we make such a noise about; but, all that is really good, and beautiful, and profitable for man, is everlastingly his. The lovely world that Adam beheld is not only the same to-day, it is created and given to us anew every day. What have we said about morning, which is born again (for us, for little ones, the ignorant, the blind, who could not see at all yesterday) three hundred and sixty-five times in a year—every time as fresh, and new, and innocent as that which first dawned over Eden? Now, considering how much iniquity and blindness all the nights have fallen upon, I must think this a bountiful arrangement, and one which need not make us unhappy. I love to think the air I breathe through my open window is the same that wandered through Paradise before our first mother breathed; that the primroses which grow to-day in our dear old woods are such as decked the bank on which she slept before sin and death came into the world; and that our children shall find them, neither better nor worse, when our names are clean forgotten. And is it nothing that if we have all death, we have all youth?—brand-new affections and emotions—a mind itself a new and separate creation, as much as is any one star among the rest? In the heavens there is a tract of light called the Milky Way, which to the common eye appears no more than a luminous cloud. But astronomers tell us that this vast river of light is a universe, in which individual stars are so many that they are like the sands on the shore. We cannot see each grain of sand here on Brighton beach, we cannot see the separate stars of the Milky Way, nor its suns and great planets, with all our appliances; and yet each of those orbs has its path, rolling along on its own business—a world. On learning which we are bewildered with astonishment and awe. But here below is another shifting cloud, called “the human race.” Thousands of years it has swept over the earth in great tracts, coming and going. And this vast quicksand is made up of millions and millions of individual I’s, each a man, a separate, distinct creation; each travelling its path, which none other can travel; each bearing its own life, which is no other’s—a world. I think this ought to strike us with as much awe as that other creation. I think we ought to be filled with as much gratitude for our own planetary being as astonishment at the spectacle of any Milky Way whatever. And I only wish that we, the human race, shone in the eyes of heaven with the light of virtue like another Milky Way.
Created, then, so purely of ourselves, this is the result with regard to the natural world about us: that with our own feelings and affections, we discover, each for himself, all the glory of the universe. And therefore is nature eternal, unchangeable—that all men may know the whole goodness of God. Whose eyes but mine first saw the sun set? Some old Chaldean, some dweller in drowned Atlantis, imagined the feelings of Adam when he first saw the sun go down; ever since when, this poetical imagining has been going about the world, and people have envied Adam that one grandest chance of getting a “sensation.” Why, the Chaldean was Adam! I’m Adam! The sun was created with me, with you; and by and by, when we had got over the morning of infancy, we sat on a wall, in a field, on a hill, at our own little bedroom window, and our childish eyes being by that time opened, we saw the sun go down for the first time.
Nor are these pleasures and advantages confined to the external world, to the sensations it inspires, or the influence it exerts upon us. No human passion, no emotion, the fiercest or the tenderest, comes to us at second hand. The experience and observation of a thousand years, all the metaphysical, and poetical, and dramatic books that ever were written, cannot add a jot to the duration or intensity of any emotion of ours. They may exercise it, but they cannot form it, nor instruct it; nor, were they fifty times as many and as profound, could they dwarf it. It lies in our hearts an original creation, complete, alone: like my life and yours. Now see how this arrangement works. When, dear madam, your little Billy was born, all that wondering delight, that awful tremor of joy, which possessed the heart of the first mother, was yours. You may have seen a piece of sculpture called the First Cradle. There sits Eve, brooding over her two boys, rocking them backward and forward in her arms and on her knees—wondering, awe-full, breathless with joy, drowned in a new flood of love. “Ah!” says the tender, child-loving female spectator, “what would not one give to have been that first mother, to have made with one’s arms the first cradle!” Ignorant soul! One would think, to hear her talk, that the gifts of heaven grow threadbare by course of time, and that in 1860 we have only the rags thereof! Don’t believe it, for there is another side to the question! If the gifts and rewards of heaven are paid in new coin, minted for you, with your effigies stamped upon it, so are the punishments. The flight of Cain when Abel was killed—Bill Sykes’s was every way as terrible; and any incipient poisoner who may happen to read this page may assure himself, that his new and improved process of murder—whatever advantages it may otherwise offer—is not specific against the torments of him who first shed blood: no, nor against any one of them.