It is hard upon youth to see its rosy morning overcast by the shadow; but it has many hours yet to look forward to before noon, and can afford to wait for brighter weather. Far more cruelly does age feel the withdrawal of that light it had trusted in to cheer its declining day; a light it can never hope to welcome again, because long ere the shadow shall be withdrawn from the chilled and weary frame, its sun will have gone down for ever into the ocean of eternity.
People talk a great deal about that physical impossibility which they are pleased to term “a broken heart”; and the sufferer who claims their sympathy under such an abnormal affliction is invariably a young person of the gentler sex. I have no doubt in my own mind, nevertheless, that a severe blow to the fortunes, the self-esteem, the health or the affections, is far more severely felt after forty than before thirty; and yet who ever heard of an elderly gentleman breaking his heart? Any thing else you please—his word, his head, his waistcoat-strings, or even his neck, but his heart! Why, the assumption is ludicrous. If you consult the statistics of suicide, however, you will be surprised to find in how many instances this most reckless of crimes is committed by persons of mature age, though it is strange that those whose span in the course of nature is likely to be so short should think it worth while to curtail it with their own hand. There is another shadow, too, which, apart from all finer feelings of the heart or intellect, has a pernicious effect on our interests and welfare. It is cast by our own opaque substances when we persist in an inconvenient attitude, commonly called “standing in our own light.” Parents and guardians, those who have the care of young people, generally are well aware of its irritating persistency and disagreeable consequences. It is provoking to find all your efforts thwarted by the very person on whose behalf they are made. After much trouble, and the eating of more dirt than you can digest in comfort, you obtain for a lad a high stool in a counting-house, an appointment to the Indian army, or a berth in a Chinese merchantman, fondly hoping that in one way or another he is provided for, and off your hands at last. But after a while behold him back again, like a consignment of damaged goods! He has been too fast for the clerkship, too idle for the army, not sober enough for the sea. With a fine chance and everything in his favour, he “stood in his own light,” and must abide by the gloom he has himself made. Or perhaps, though this is a rarer case, because women’s perceptions of their own interest are usually very keen, it is your Blanche, or your Rose, or your Violet who thus disappoints the magnificent expectations you have founded on her beauty, her youth, her eyes, her figure, and her general fascinations. The peer with his unencumbered estate and his own personal advantages would have proposed to a certainty, was only waiting for an opportunity—he told his sister so—when that last ten minutes at croquet with Tom, those half-dozen extra rounds in the cotillon with Harry, scared this shy bird from the decoy, and he went off to Melton in disgust. Rose, Blanche, or Violet “stood in her own light,” and must be content for the rest of her career to burn tallow instead of wax.
The shadows, however, which ladies preserve for their own private annoyance cast surprisingly little gloom over their pretty persons while they are before the world. A new dress, a coming ball, a race-meeting, or a picnic, are sufficient to dispel them at a moment’s notice; and though doubtless when these palliatives are exhausted, when they put their candles out at night, the darkness gathers all the thicker for its lucid interval of distraction, it is always something to have got rid of it even for an hour.
That women feel very keenly, nobody who knows anything about them can doubt. That they feel very deeply is a different question altogether. In some rare instances they may indeed be found, when the light they love is quenched, to sit by preference in darkness for evermore; but as a general rule the feminine organisation is thoroughly appreciative of the present, somewhat forgetful of the past, and exceedingly reckless of the future.
For both sexes, however, there must in their course through life be shadows deep in proportion to the brilliancy of the sunshine in which they bask. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God,” says Job, “and shall we not receive evil?” thereby condensing into one pithy sentence perhaps the profoundest system of philosophy ever yet submitted to mankind. The evil always seems to us greater than the good, the shadows more universal than the sunshine; but with how little reason we need only reflect for a moment to satisfy ourselves. There is a gleam in which we often fondly hope to dispel our shadows, delusive as the “will-o’-the-wisp,” a light “that never yet was seen on sea or shore,” which is cruelly apt to lure us on reefs and quicksands, to guide us only to eventual shipwreck; but there is also a glimmer, faint and feeble here, yet capable of dispelling the darkest shadows that ever cross our path, which if we will only follow it truthfully and persistently for a very brief journey, shall cheer us heartily and guide us steadfastly till it widens and brightens into the glory of eternal day.
CHAPTER XII
GUINEVERE
Amongst all the works of our great poet, works in which criticism, searching diligently for flaws, discovers every day new beauties, surely this noble poem is the very crown and masterpiece.
Compared even with the productions of his own genius, Guinevere always seems to me like a statue in the midst of oil-paintings. So lofty is it in conception, so grand in treatment, so fair, so noble, so elevating, and yet so real. As the Californian digger in his “prospect” washes, and sifts, and searches, till from a mass of rubbish and impurities he separates the nugget of virgin ore, so from the lavish confusion of rich material to be found in that collection of early romance called La Morte d’Arthur, the Laureate has wrought out a poem precious in its own intrinsic merit as the purest metal that was ever beaten into a crown of gold. One other has been over the same ground before him, the great magician who with a wave of his wand has created for us gleaming blade and glittering hauberk, mail and plate, and managed steeds caparisoned, lances shivered to the grasp, sweet pale faces looking down on the mimic war beneath, and all the pomp, panoply, and prestige of an ideal chivalry, when
“The champions, armed in martial sort,
Have thronged into the list,