Brave Men and Women Part 20

PLEASURE AFTER PAIN--PAIN AFTER PLEASURE.

Our illusions commence in the cradle, and end only in the grave. We have all great expectations. Our ducks are ever to be geese, our geese swans; and we can not bear the truth when it comes upon us. Hence our disappointments; hence Solomon cried out that all was vanity, that he had tried every thing, each pleasure, each beauty, and found it very empty. People, he writes, should be taught by my example; they can not go beyond me--"What can he do that comes after the king?"

It is very doubtful whether, to an untried or a young man, the warnings of Solomon, or the outpourings of that griefful prophet whose name now pa.s.ses for a lamentation, have done much good. Hope balances caution, and "springs eternal in the human breast." The old man fails, but the young constantly fancies he shall succeed. "Solomon," he cries, "did not know every thing;" but in a few years his own disappointments tell him how true the king's words are, and he cherishes the experience he has bought. But experience does not serve him in every case; it has been said that it is simply like the stern-lights of a ship, which lighten the path she has pa.s.sed over, but not that which she is about to traverse. To know one's self is the hardest lesson we can learn. Few of us ever realize our true position; few see that they are like Bunyan's hero in the midst of Vanity Fair, and that all about them are snares, illusions, painted shows, real troubles, and true miseries, many trials and few enjoyments.

Perhaps the bitterest feelings in our life are those which we experience, when boys and girls, at the failures of our friendships and our loves. We have heard of false friends; we have read of deceit in books; but we know nothing about it, and we hardly believe what we hear.

Our friend is to be true as steel. He is always to like us, and we him.

He is a second Damon, we a Pythias. We remember the fond old stories of celebrated friendships; how one shared his fortune, another gave his life. Our friend is just of that sort; he is n.o.ble, true, grand, heroic.

Of course, he is wonderfully generous. We talk of him; he will praise us. The whole people around, who laugh at the sudden warmth, we regard as old fogies, who do not understand life half as well as we do. But by and by our friend vanishes; the image which we thought was gold we find made of mere clay. We grow melancholy; we are fond of reading Byron's poetry; the sun is not nearly so bright nor the sky so blue as it used to be. We sing, with the n.o.ble poet--

"My days are in the yellow leaf, The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone.!"

We cease to believe in friendship; we quote old saws, and fancy ourselves cruelly used. We think ourselves philosophic martyrs, when the simple truth is, that we are disappointed.

The major part of the misery in marriage arises from the false estimate which we make of married happiness. A young man, who is a pure and good one, when he starts in life is very apt to fancy all women angels. He loves and venerates his mother; he believes her better, purer far, than his father, because his school-days have taught him practically what men are; but he does not yet know what women are. His sisters are angels too, and the wife he is about to marry, the best, the purest woman in the world, also an angel, of course. Marriage soon opens his eyes. It would be out of the course of nature for every body to secure an angel; and the young husband finds that he has married a woman of the ordinary pattern--not a whit better on the whole than man; perhaps worse, because weaker. The high-flown sentiment is all gone, the romantic ideas fade down to the light of common day. "The bloom of young desire, the purple light of love," as Milton writes in one of the most beautiful lines ever penned, too often pa.s.s away as well, and a future of misery is opened up on the basis of disappointment. After all, the difficulty to be got over is this--how is mankind to be taught to take a just estimate of things?

Is it possible to put old heads upon young shoulders? Is not youth a perpetual state of intoxication? Is not every thing better and brighter far then than in middle life? These are the questions to be solved, and once solved we shall be happy; we shall have learnt the great lesson, that whatever is, is ordained by a great and wise power, and that we are therewith to be content.

A kindly consideration for others is the best method in the world to adopt, to ease off our own troubles; and this consideration is to be cultivated very easily. There is not one of those who will take up this book who is perfectly happy, and not one who does not fancy that he or she might be very much better off. Perhaps ten out of every dozen have been disappointed in life. They are not precisely what they should be.

The wise poor man, in spite of his wisdom, envies the rich fool; and the fool--if he has any appreciation--envies the wisdom of the other. One is too tall, the other is too short; ill-health plagues a third, and a bad wife a fourth; and so on. Yet there is not one of the sorrows or troubles that we have but might be reasoned away. The short man can not add a cubit to his stature; but he may think, after all, that many great heroes have been short, and that it is the mind, not the form, that makes the man. Napoleon the Great, who had high-heeled boots, and was, to be sure, hardly a giant in stature, once looked at a picture of Alexander, by David. "Ah!" said he, taking snuff, with a pleased air, "Alexander was shorter than I." The hero last mentioned is he who cried because he had no more worlds to conquer, and who never thought of conquering himself. But if Alexander were disappointed about another world, his courtiers were much more so because they were not Alexanders.

But the world would not have cared for a surplus of them; one was enough. Conquerers are very pleasant fellows, no doubt, and are disappointed and sulky because they can not gain more battles; but we poor frogs in the world are quite satisfied with one King Stork.

If we look at a disappointment as a lesson, we soon take the sting out of it. A spider will teach us that. He is watching for a fly, and away the nimble fellow flies. The spider upon this runs round his net to see whether there be any holes, and to mend them. When doing so, he comes upon an old body of one of his victims, and he commences again on it, with a pious e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of "Better luck next time." So one of the greatest and wisest missionaries whom we have ever had, tried, when a boy, to climb a tree. He fell down, and broke his leg. Seriously lamed, he went on crutches for six months, and at the end of that time quietly set about climbing the tree again, and succeeded. He had, in truth, a reserve fund of good-humor and sound sense, saw where he failed, and conquered it. His disappointment was worth twenty dozen successes to him, and to the world too. It is a good rule, also, never to make too sure of any thing, and never to put too high a price on it. Every thing is worth doing well; every thing, presuming you like it, is worth having. The girl you fall in love with may be silly and ill-favored; but what of that? she is your love. "'Tis a poor fancy of mine own to like that which none other man will have," says the fool Touchstone; but he speaks like a wise man. He is wiser than the melancholy Jacques in the same play, who calls all people fools, and mopes about preaching wise saws. If our young men were as wise, there would not be half the ill-a.s.sorted marriages in the world, and there would be fewer single women. If they only chose by sense or fancy, or because they saw some good quality in a girl--if they were not all captivated by the face alone, every Jill would have her Jack, and pair off happily, like the lovers in a comedy. But it is not so. We can not live without illusions; we can not, therefore, subsist without disappointments. They, too, follow each other as the night the day, the shade the sunshine; they are as inseparable as life and death.

The difference of our conditions alone places a variety in these illusions; perhaps the lowest of us have the brightest, just as Cinderella, sitting amongst the coals, dreamed of the ball and beautiful prince as well as her sisters. "Bare and grim to tears," says Emerson, "is the lot of the children I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and would talk of 'the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.' Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country.

Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion." Happy is it that they are so. These fancies and illusions bring forth the inevitable disappointments, but they carry life on with a swing. If every hovel-born child had sat down at his doorstep, and taken true stock of himself, and had said, "I am a poor miserable child, weak in health, without knowledge, with little help, and can not do much," we should have wanted many a hero. We should have had no Stephenson, no Faraday, no Arkwright, and no Watt. Our railways would have been unbuilt, and the Atlantic Ocean would have been unbridged by steam. But hope, as phrenologists tells us, lies above caution, and has dangerous and active neighbors--wit, imagination, language, ideality--so the poor cottage is hung round with fancies, and the man exists to help his fellows. He may fail; but others take up his tangled thread, and unravel it, and carry on the great business of life.

The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and disappointments, who takes them just for what they are--lessons, and perhaps blessings in disguise--is the true hero. He is like a strong swimmer; the waves dash over him, but he is never submerged. We can not help applauding and admiring such a man; and the world, good-natured and wise in its verdict, cheers him when he gains the goal. There may be brutality in the sport, but there can be no question as to the merit, when the smaller prizefighter, who receives again and again his adversary's knockdown blow, again gets up and is ready for the fray. Old General Blucher was not a lucky general. He was beaten almost every time he ventured to battle; but in an incredible s.p.a.ce of time he had gathered together his routed army, and was as formidable as before. The Germans liked the bold old fellow, and called, and still call him, Marshal Forwards. He had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl. To our minds, the best of all these heroes is Robert Hall, the preacher, who, after falling on the ground in paroxysms of pain, would rise with a smile, and say, "I suffered much, but I did not cry out, did I? did I cry out?" Beautiful is this heroism. Nature, base enough under some aspects, rises into grandeur in such an example, and shoots upwards to an Alpine height of pure air and cloudless sunshine; the bold, n.o.ble, and kindly nature of the man, struggling against pain, and asking, in an apologetic tone, "Did I cry out?" whilst his lips were white with anguish, and his tongue, bitten through in the paroxysm, was red with blood!

There is a companion picture of ineffaceable grandeur to this in Plato's "Phoedo," where Socrates, who has been unchained simply that he may prepare for death, sits upon his bed, and, rubbing his leg gently where the iron had galled it, begins, not a complaint against fate, or his judges, or the misery of present death, but a grateful little reflection. "What an unaccountable thing, my friends, that seems to be which men call pleasure; and how wonderful it is related to that which appears to be its contrary--pain, in that they will not both be present to a man at the same time; yet if any one pursues and attains the one, he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both united together from one head." Surely true philosophy, if we may call so serene a state of mind by that hackneyed word, never reached, unaided, a purer height!

There is one thing certain, which contains a poor comfort, but a strong one--a poor one, because it reduces us all to the same level--it is this: we may be sure that not one of us is without disappointment. The footman is as badly off as his master, and the master as the footman.

The courtier is disappointed of his place, and the minister of his ambition. Cardinal Wolsey lectures his secretary Cromwell, and tells him of his disappointed ambition; but Cromwell had his troubles as well.

Henry the Eighth, the king who broke them both, might have put up the same prayer; and the pope, who was a thorn in Harry's side, no doubt had a peck of disappointments of his own. Nature not only abhors a vacuum, but she utterly repudiates an entirely successful man. There probably never lived one yet to whom the morning did not bring some disaster, the evening some repulse. John Hunter, the greatest, most successful surgeon, the genius, the wonder, the admired of all, upon whose words they whose lives had been spent in science hung, said, as he went to his last lecture, "If I quarrel with any one to-night, it will kill me." An obstinate surgeon of the old school denied one of his a.s.sertions, and called him a liar. It was enough. Hunter was carried into the next room, and died. He had for years suffered from a diseased heart, and was quite conscious of his fate. That was his disappointment. Happy are they who, in this world of trial, meet their disappointments in their youth, not in their old age; then let them come and welcome, not too thick to render us morose, but like Spring mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin, but will let the plant live; and let us rely upon it, that the best men (and women, too) are those who have been early disappointed.

XXV.

THE THREE KINGS.

AN OLD STORY IN A NEW LIGHT.

Gaspar, a king and shepherd, Alone at the door of his tent, Thus mused, his eyes uplifted And fixed on the firmament:

"Is it a dream, this vision That haunts me day and night, This beautiful manifestation Of some eternal delight?

G.o.d set me to watching and waiting Long years and years ago, Waiting and watching for something My heart could not forego.

I caught the hope of the nations, The desire of the common heart, Which grew to an expectation That would not from me depart.

My soul was filled with hunger Deeper than I can tell, The while I watched for the shining Of the Star in Israel.

O Star, to arise in Jacob!

I cried as my heart grew bold; O Star, to arise in Jacob, By prophecy seen of old!

For the sight of Thee I am dying, For the joy of Thy Beautiful Face!

Of Thy coming give me a token, Grant me this favor and grace!

At length there came an answer Flaming the desolate year, A revelation of beauty, A more than mortal cheer;

For afar in the kindly heavens The blessed token I saw!

And now my life is transfigured, And lost in a nameless awe.

In a nameless awe I wander, As one with a joy untold, Too great for his own defining, Too great for him to withhold.

But deep in my heart is the secret, And in yonder beckoning Star, And I must wait for the telling Until I can hasten afar,--

Until I can find in travel A heart akin to mine, That day and night is adoring And imploring beauty divine.

And so I will share the gladness Which G.o.d intends for the world; And so will I lift the banner, To remain forever unfurled."

Hardly had Gaspar ended The musing he loved so well, When he heard the dreamy tinkle Of a distant camel-bell.

He set his tent in order; He brought forth of his best, After the Arab custom, To welcome the coming guest.

Who is this eager stranger Dismounted so soon at the door?

A king from another kingdom, Who has traveled the desert o'er,

In search of the same communion That Gaspar was longing for.

And before of food he tasted, Thus spake King Melchior:

"O Gaspar, G.o.d hath sent me In the light of a peaceful Star, To tell thee, my royal brother, What my sweet communings are.

My life has been hid with Nature For many a quiet year, And in the hearts of my people, Whose love hath cast out fear.

And I have been a dweller With G.o.d, who is everywhere, On earth, in the stars, the Spirit Sublimest, calmest, most fair.

Among his mediators And messengers of rest, Which fill the earth and the heavens, The stars I reckoned the best.

To the stars I gave my study, I watched them rise and set, And heard the music of silence My soul can not forget;--

The music that seemed prophetic Of the reign of peace to come, When men shall live as lovers In the quiet of one dear home.