For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.”
Prevision and imagination, as Rousseau says, multiply the evils of our lot: “Pour moi,” he professes—however the profession may have squared with the practice—“j’ai beau savoir que je soufrirai demain, il me suffit de ne pas souffrir aujourd’hui pour être tranquille.” It is certainly a frenzy, quoth old Montaigne, to go now and whip yourself, because it may so fall out that fortune may one day decree you a whipping, and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you will stand in need of it at Christmas. It was one of Madame de Sévigné’s maxims in life to “regarder l’avenir comme une obscurité, dont il peut arriver des biens et des clartés à quoi l’on ne s’attend pas.” Milton’s Adam laments the mournful privilege of “visions ill foreseen.” Better had he lived ignorant of future! so had borne his part of evil only, each day’s lot enough to bear. So again, in Milton’s Masque, the elder brother bids the younger be not over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain evils:
“For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?”
And once more, Milton himself, in one of those Sonnets which stand in the like relation of merit to his great epic that Shakspeare’s do to his great dramas, admonishes his scholar, Cyriack Skinner, that heaven disproves the care,
“though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”
“Melancholy commonly flies to the future for its aliment,” says Sydney Smith, “and it must be encountered,” he adds, “by diminishing the range of our views.” The great remedy for melancholy, he insists in another place, is to “take short views of life.” Are you happy now? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all? For “every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.” One of his correspondents he emphatically counsels to dispel that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. “We know nothing of to-morrow, our business is to be good and happy to day.” In effect, like Maucroix,