Though thou the waters warp,
Thy tooth is not so sharp
As friend remembered not!"
Those lines are hackneyed until every poetaster can quote them or parody them at will; but very few readers consider that the bitter verse summarises a whole literature. From Homer to Tennyson the ugly tune has been played on all strings; and mankind have such a vivid perception of the truth uttered by the satirists, that they read the whole story with gusto whenever it is put into a fresh form—and each man thinks that he at least is not one of those for whom the poet's lash is meant. Novel, essay, poem, play, and sermon—all recur with steady persistence to one ancient topic; and yet men try their best to bring themselves low, as they might if Job, Shakspere, Congreve, and Tennyson had never written at all, and as though no warnings were being actually enacted all round, as on a stage.
Sometimes I wonder whether the majority of men ever really try to conceive what it is to be down until their fate is upon them. I can hardly think it. It has been well said that all of us know we shall die, but none of us believe it. The idea of the dark plunge is unfamiliar to the healthy imagination; and the majority of our race go on as if the great change were only a fable devised by foolish poets to scare children. I believe that, if all men were vouchsafed a sudden comprehension of the real meaning of death, sin would cease. Furthermore, I am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable population would take thought for the morrow—drink-shops would be closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine idler would be unknown. Not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed weaklings—the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down—with mingled compassion and dismay. I have found in such cases that the miserable mortals never knew to what they were coming; and the most notable feature in their attitude was the wild and almost tearful surprise with which they regarded the conduct of their friends. The pictures of these forlorn wastrels people a certain corner of the mind, and one can make the ragged brigade start out in lines of deadly and lurid fire at a moment's warning, until there is a whole Inferno before one. But I shall speak no more at present of the degraded ones; I wish to gain a thought of pity for those who are blameless; and I want to stir up the blameless ones, who are generally ignorant creatures, so that they may exercise a little of the wisdom of the serpent in time. Be it remembered that, although the ruined and blameless man is not subjected to such moral scorn as falls to the lot of the wastrel, the practical consequences of being down are much the same for him as for the victim of sloth or sin. He feels the pinch of physical misery, and, however lofty his spirit may be, it can never be lofty enough to relieve the gnawing pains of bodily privation. Moreover, he will meet with persecution just as if he were a villain or a cheat, and that too from men who know that he is honest. The hard lawyer will pursue him as a stoat pursues a hare; and, if he asks for time or mercy, the iron answer will be, "We have nothing to do with your private affairs; business is business, and our client's interests must not suffer merely because you are a well-meaning man." Even our dear Walter Scott, the soul of honour, one of the purest and brightest of all the spirits that make our joy, the gallant struggler—even that delight of the world was hounded to death by a firm of bill-discounters at the very time when he was breaking his gallant heart in the effort to retrieve disaster. No! The world is pitiful so far as its kindest hearts are concerned, but the army of commonplace people are all pitiless. See what follows when a man goes "down." Suppose that he invests in bank shares. The directors are all men of substance, and most of them are even lights of religion; the leading spirit attends the same church as our investor, and he is a light of sanctity—so pure of heart is he, that he will not so much as look at Monday's newspapers, because their production entailed Sabbath labour. Indeed, one wonders how such a man could bring himself to eat or sleep on Sunday, because his food must be carried up for him, and, I presume, his bed must be made. All the directors are free in their gifts to churches and chapels—for that is part of a wise director's policy—and all of them live sumptuously. But surely our investor should guess that all this lavish expenditure must come out of somebody's pocket; and surely he has skill enough to analyse a balance-sheet! The good soul goes on trusting, until one fine morning he wakes up and finds that his means of subsistence are gone. Then comes the bitter ordeal; his friends are grieved, the public are enraged, the sanctified men go to gaol, and the investor faces an altered world. His oldest friend says, "Well, Tom, it's a bitter bad business, and if a hundred is of any use to you, it is at your service; but you know, with my family," &c. The unhappy defrauded fellow finds it hard to get work of any sort; begins to show those pathetic signs of privation which are so easily read by the careful observer; hat, boots, coat, grow shabby; the knees seem to have a pathetic bend. Friends are not unkind, but they have their own burdens to bear, and if he inflicts his company and his sorrows too much on any one of them, he is apt to receive a hint—probably from a woman—that his presence can be spared; so the downward road trends towards utter deprivation, and then to extinction. A young man may recover from almost any blow that does not affect his character; and this was strikingly proved in the case of that brilliant man of science, R.A. Proctor, who was afterwards stricken out of life untimely. He lost his fortune in the crash of Overend and Gurney's company, and he immediately forgot his luxurious habits and turned to work with blithe courage. How he worked only those who knew him can tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved such bewildering success as he did. But a man who is on the downward slope of life cannot fare like the lamented Proctor; he must endure the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire torture of being down.
And the harmless widows who are suddenly robbed of their protector. Ah, how some of them are made to suffer! Little Amelia Sedley, in "Vanity Fair," has her sufferings and indignities painted by a master-hand, and there is not a line thickened or darkened overmuch. The miserable tale of the cheap lodgings, and the insults which the poor girl had flung at her because, in the passion of her love, she spent trifling sums on her boy—how actual it all seems! The widow who may have held her head high in her days of prosperity, soon receives lessons from women: they call it teaching her what is her proper place. Those good and discreet ladies have a notion that their conduct is full of propriety and discretion and sound sense; but how they make their sisters suffer—ah, how they make the poor things suffer! I believe that, if any improvident man could see, in a keenly vivid dream, a vision of his wife's future after his death, he would stint himself of anything rather than run the risk of having to reflect on his death-bed that he had failed to do his best for those who loved him. Women sometimes out of pure wantonness try to exasperate a man so that he falls into courses which bring his end swiftly. Could those foolish ones only see their own fate when the doom of being down in the world came upon them, they would strain every nerve in their bodies so that their husband's life and powers of work might be spared to the last possible hour.
What can the man do who is down? Frankly, nothing, unless his strength holds. I advise such a one never to seek for help from any one but himself, and never to try for any of the employments which are supposed to be "easy." Cool neglect, insulting compassion, lying promises, evasive and complimentary nothings—these will be his portion. If he cannot perform any skilled labour, let him run the risk of seeming degraded; and, if he has to push a trade in matches or flowers, let him rather do that than bear the more or less kindly flouts which meet the supplicant. To all who are young and strong I would say, "Live to-day as though to-morrow you might be ruined—or dead."
ILL-ASSORTED MARRIAGES.
The people who joke and talk lightly about marriage do not seem to have the faintest rational conception of the awful nature of the subject. Awful it is; and, as serious men go through life, they become more and more impressed with the momentous results which depend on the choice made by a man or woman. A lad of nineteen lightly engages himself; he knows nothing of the gloom, the terror, the sordid horror of the fate that lies before him; and the unhappy girl is equally ignorant. In fourteen years the actual substance of that young fellow's very body is twice completely changed; he is a man utterly different from the boy who contracted the marriage; there is not a muscle or a thought in common between the boy and the man—yet the man takes all the consequences of the boy's act. Supposing that the pair are well matched, life goes on happily enough for them; but, alas, if the man or the woman has to wake up and face the ghastly results of a mistake, then there is a tragedy of the direst order! Let us suppose that the lad is cultured and ambitious, and that he is attracted at first by a rosy face or pretty figure only; supposing that he is thus early bound to a vulgar commonplace woman, the consequences when the woman happens to have a powerful will and an unscrupulous tongue are almost too dreadful to be pictured in words.