Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various

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And the onward view of such people in such circumstances is generally a
very vague one. It is only now and then that there comes the startling
clearness of prospect so well set forth by Mansie Wauch. Yet sometimes,
when such a vivid view comes, it remains for days, and is a painful
companion of your solitude. Don't you remember, clerical reader of
thirty-two, having seen a good deal of an old parson, rather sour in
aspect, rather shabby-looking, sadly pinched for means, and with powers
dwarfed by the sore struggle with the world to maintain his family and
to keep up a respectable appearance upon his limited resources; perhaps
with his mind made petty and his temper spoiled by the little worries,
the petty malignant tattle and gossip and occasional insolence of a
little backbiting village? and don't you remember how for days you felt
haunted by a sort of nightmare that there was what you would be, if you
lived so long? Yes; you know how there have been times when for ten days
together that jarring thought would intrude, whenever your mind was
disengaged from work; and sometimes, when you went to bed, that thought
kept you awake for hours. You knew the impression was morbid, and you
were angry with yourself for your silliness; but you could not drive it
away.

It makes a great difference in the prospect of Future Years, if you are
one of those people who, even after middle age, may still make a great
rise in life. This will prolong the restlessness which in others is
sobered down at forty: it will extend the period during which you will
every now and then have brief seasons of feverish anxiety, hope, and
fear, followed by longer stretches of blank disappointment. And it will
afford the opportunity of experiencing a vividly new sensation, and of
turning over a quite new leaf, after most people have settled to the
jog-trot at which the remainder of the pilgrimage is to be covered. A
clergyman of the Church of England may be made a bishop, and exchange a
quiet rectory for a palace. No doubt the increase of responsibility is
to a conscientious man almost appalling; but surely the rise in life
is great. There you are, one of four-and-twenty, selected out of near
twenty thousand. It is possible, indeed, that you may feel more reason
for shame than for elation at the thought. A barrister unknown to fame,
but of respectable standing, may be made a judge. Such a man may even,
if he gets into the groove, be gradually pushed on till he reaches an
eminence which probably surprises himself as much as any one else. A
good speaker in Parliament may at sixty or seventy be made a Cabinet
Minister. And we can all imagine what indescribable pride and elation
must in such cases possess the wife and daughters of the man who has
attained this decided step in advance. I can say sincerely that I never
saw human beings walk with so airy tread, and evince so fussily their
sense of a greatness more than mortal, as the wife and the daughter of
an amiable but not able bishop I knew in my youth, when they came to
church on the Sunday morning on which the good man preached for the
first time in his lawn sleeves. Their heads were turned for the time;
but they gradually came right again, as the ladies became accustomed to
the summits of human affairs. Let it be said for the bishop himself,
that there was not a vestige of that sense of elevation about him. He
looked perfectly modest and unaffected. His dress was remarkably ill put
on, and his sleeves stuck out in the most awkward fashion ever assumed
by drapery. I suppose that sometimes these rises in life come very
unexpectedly. I have heard of a man who, when he received a letter from
the Prime Minister of the day offering him a place of great dignity,
thought the letter was a hoax, and did not notice it for several days.
You could not certainly infer from his modesty what has proved to be the
fact, that he has filled his place admirably well. The possibility of
such material changes must no doubt tend to prolong the interest in
life, which is ready to flag as years go on. But perhaps with the
majority of men the level is found before middle age, and no very great
worldly change awaits them. The path stretches on, with its ups and
downs; and they only hope for strength for the day. But in such men's
lot of humble duty and quiet content there remains room for many fears.
All human beings who are as well off as they can ever be, and so who
have little room for hope, seem to be liable to the invasion of great
fear as they look into the future. It seems to be so with kings, and
with great nobles. Many such have lived in a nervous dread of change,
and have ever been watching the signs of the times with apprehensive
eyes. Nothing that can happen can well make such better; and so they
suffer from the vague foreboding of something which will make them
worse. And the same law reaches to those in whom hope is narrowed down,
not by the limit of grand possibility, but of little,--not by the fact
that they have got all that mortal can get, but by the fact that they
have got the little which is all that Providence seems to intend to give
to _them_. And, indeed, there is something that is almost awful, when
your affairs are all going happily, when your mind is clear and equal
to its work, when your bodily health is unbroken, when your home is
pleasant, when your income is ample, when your children are healthy and
merry and hopeful,--in looking on to Future Years. The more happy
you are, the more there is of awe in the thought how frail are the
foundations of your earthly happiness,--what havoc may be made of them
by the chances of even a single day. It is no wonder that the solemnity
and awfulness of the Future have been felt so much, that the languages
of Northern Europe have, as I dare say you know, no word which expresses
the essential notion of Futurity. You think, perhaps, of _shall_
and _will_. Well, these words have come now to convey the notion of
Futurity; but they do so only in a secondary fashion. Look to their
etymology, and you will see that they _imply_ Futurity, but do not
_express_ it. _I shall_ do such a thing means _I am bound to do it, I am
under an obligation to do it. I will_ do such a thing means _I intend to
do it. It is my present purpose to do it_. Of course, if you are under
an obligation to do anything, or if it be your intention to do anything,
the probability is that the thing will be done; but the Northern family
of languages ventures no nearer than _that_ towards the expression of
the bare, awful idea of Future Time. It was no wonder that Mr. Croaker
was able to east a gloom upon the gayest circle, and the happiest
conjuncture of circumstances, by wishing that all might be as well that
day six months. Six months! What might that time not do? Perhaps you
have not read a little poem of Barry Cornwall's, the idea of which must
come home to the heart of most of us:--

"Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently,--as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream.
Humble voyagers are we,
Husband, wife, and children three;--
One is lost,--an angel, fled
To the azure overhead.

"Touch us gently, Time!
We've not proud nor soaring wings:
_Our_ ambition, our content,
Lies in simple things.
Humble voyagers are we,
O'er life's dim, unsounded sea,
Seeking only some calm clime:--
Touch us gently, gentle Time!"

I know that sometimes, my friend, you will not have much sleep, if, when
you lay your head on your pillow, you begin to think how much depends
upon your health and life. You have reached now that time at which you
value life and health not so much for their service to yourself, as for
their needfulness to others. There is a petition familiar to me in this
Scotch country, where people make their prayers for themselves, which
seems to me to possess great solemnity and force, when we think of
all that is implied in it. It is, _Spare useful lives!_ One life, the
slender line of blood passing into and passing out of one human heart,
may decide the question, whether wife and children shall grow up
affluent, refined, happy, yes, and _good_, or be reduced to hard
straits, with all the manifold evils which grow of poverty in the case
of those who have been reduced to it after knowing other things. You
often think, I doubt not, in quiet hours, what would become of your
children, if you were gone. You have done, I trust, what you can to care
for them, even from your grave: you think sometimes of a poetical figure
of speech amid the dry technical phrases of English law: you know what
is meant by the law of _Mortmain_; and you like to think that even your
_dead hand_ may be felt to be kindly intermeddling yet in the affairs of
those who were your dearest: that some little sum, slender, perhaps, but
as liberal as you could make it, may come in periodically when it is
wanted, and seem like the gift of a thoughtful heart and a kindly hand
which are far away. Yes, cut down your present income to any extent,
that you may make some provision for your children after you are dead.
You do not wish that they should have the saddest of all reasons for
taking care of you, and trying to lengthen out your life. But even after
you have done everything which your small means permit, you will still
think, with an anxious heart, of the possibilities of Future Years. A
man or woman who has children has very strong reason for wishing to live
as long as may be, and has no right to trifle with health or life.
And sometimes, looking out into days to come, you think of the little
things, hitherto so free from man's heritage of care, as they may some
day be. You see them shabby, and early anxious: can _that_ be the little
boy's rosy face, now so pale and thin? You see them in a poor room, in
which you recognize your study-chairs with the hair coming out of the
cushions, and a carpet which you remember now threadbare and in holes.

It is no wonder at all that people are so anxious about money. Money
means every desirable material thing on earth, and the manifold
immaterial things which come of material possessions. Poverty is the
most comprehensive earthly evil; all conceivable evils, temporal,
spiritual, and eternal, may come of _that_. Of course, great temptations
attend its opposite; and the wise man's prayer will be what it was long
ago,--"Give me neither poverty nor riches." But let us have no nonsense
talked about money being of no consequence. The want of it has made many
a father and mother tremble at the prospect of being taken from their
children; the want of it has embittered many a parent's dying hours.
You hear selfish persons talking vaguely about faith. You find such
heartless persons jauntily spending all they get on themselves, and then
leaving their poor children to beggary, with the miserable pretext that
they are doing all this through their abundant trust in God. Now this is
not faith; it is insolent presumption. It is exactly as if a man should
jump from the top of St. Paul's, and say that he had faith that the
Almighty would keep him from being dashed to pieces on the pavement.
There is a high authority as to such cases,--"Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God." If God had promised that people should never fall into
the miseries of penury under any circumstances, it would be faith to
trust that promise, however unlikely of fulfilment it might seem in any
particular case. But God has made no such promise; and if you leave your
children without provision, you have no right to expect that they
shall not suffer the natural consequences of your heartlessness and
thoughtlessness. True faith lies in your doing everything you possibly
can, and _then_ humbly trusting in God. And if, after you have done your
very best, you must still go, with but a blank outlook for those you
leave, why, _then_ you may trust them to the Husband of the widow and
Father of the fatherless. Faith, as regards such matters, means firm
belief that God will do all He has promised to do, however difficult or
unlikely. But some people seem to think that faith means firm belief
that God will do whatever they think would suit them, however
unreasonable, and however flatly in the face of all the established laws
of His government.

We all have it in our power to make ourselves miserable, if we look
far into Future Years and calculate their probabilities of evil, and
steadily anticipate the worst. It is not expedient to calculate too far
ahead. Of course, the right way in this, as in other things, is
the middle way: we are not to run either into the extreme of
over-carefulness and anxiety on the one hand, or of recklessness and
imprudence on the other. But as mention has been made of faith, it may
safely be said that we are forgetful of that rational trust in God which
is at once our duty and our inestimable privilege, if we are always
looking out into the future, and vexing ourselves with endless fears as
to how things are to go then. There is no divine promise, that, if a
reckless blockhead leaves his children to starve, they shall not starve.
And a certain inspired volume speaks with extreme severity of the man
who fails to provide for them of his own house. But there is a divine
promise which says to the humble Christian,--"As thy days, so shall thy
strength be." If your affairs are going on fairly now, be thankful,
and try to do your duty, and to do your best, as a Christian man and a
prudent man, and then leave the rest to God. Your children are about
you; no doubt they may die, and it is fit enough that you should not
forget the fragility of your most prized possessions; it is fit enough
that you should sometimes sit by the fire and look at the merry faces
and listen to the little voices, and think what it would be to lose
them. But it is not needful, or rational, or Christian-like, to be
always brooding on that thought. And when they grow up, it may be hard
to provide for them. The little thing that is sitting on your knee may
before many years be alone in life, thousands of miles from you and from
his early home, an insignificant item in the bitter price which Britain
pays for her Indian Empire. It is even possible, though you hardly for a
moment admit _that_ thought, that the child may turn out a heartless
and wicked man, and prove your shame and heartbreak: all wicked and
heartless men have been the children of somebody; and many of them,
doubtless, the children of those who surmised the future as little as
Eve did when she smiled upon the infant Cain. And the fireside by which
you sit, now merry and noisy enough, may grow lonely,--lonely with the
second loneliness, not the hopeful solitude of youth looking forward,
but the desponding loneliness of age looking back. And it is so with
everything else. Your health may break down. Some fearful accident may
befall you. The readers of the magazine may cease to care for your
articles. People may get tired of your sermons. People may stop buying
your books, your wine, your groceries, your milk and cream. Younger
men may take away your legal business. Yet how often these fears prove
utterly groundless! It was good and wise advice, given by one who had
managed, with a cheerful and hopeful spirit, to pass through many trying
and anxious years, to "take short views":--not to vex and worry yourself
by planning too far ahead. And a wiser than the wise and cheerful Sydney
Smith had anticipated his philosophy. You remember Who said, "Take no
thought"--that is, no over-anxious and over-careful thought--"for the
morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."
Did you ever sail over a blue summer sea towards a mountainous coast,
frowning, sullen, gloomy: and have you not seen the gloom retire before
you as you advanced; the hills, grim in the distance, stretch into sunny
slopes when you neared them; and the waters smile in cheerful light,
that looked so black when they were far away? And who is there that has
not seen the parallel in actual life? We have all known the anticipated
ills of life--the danger that looked so big, the duty that looked so
arduous, the entanglement that we could not see our way through--prove
to have been nothing more than spectres on the far horizon; and when
at length we reached them, all their difficulty had vanished into air,
leaving us to think what fools we had been for having so needlessly
conjured up phantoms to disturb our quiet. Yes, there is no doubt of
it, a very great part of all we suffer in this world is from the
apprehension of things that never come. I remember well how a dear
friend, whom I (and many more) lately lost, told me many times of his
fears as to what he would do in a certain contingency which both he
and I thought was quite sure to come sooner or later. I know that the
anticipation of it caused him some of the most anxious hours of a very
anxious, though useful and honored life. How vain his fears proved! He
was taken from this world before what he had dreaded had cast its most
distant shadow. Well, let me try to discard the notion which has been
sometimes worrying me of late, that perhaps I have written nearly as
many essays as any one will care to read. Don't let any of us give way
to fears which may prove to have been entirely groundless.

And then, if we are really spared to see those trials we sometimes
think of, and which it is right that we should sometimes think of, the
strength for them will come at the time. They will not look nearly so
black, and we shall be enabled to bear them bravely. There is in human
nature a marvellous power of accommodation to circumstances. We can
gradually make up our mind to almost anything. If this were a sermon
instead of an essay, I should explain my theory of how this comes to
be. I see in all this something beyond the mere natural instinct of
acquiescence in what is inevitable; something beyond the benevolent law
in the human mind, that it shall adapt itself to whatever circumstances
it may be placed in; something beyond the doing of the gentle comforter
Time. Yes, it is wonderful what people can go through, wonderful what
people can get reconciled to. I dare say my friend Smith, when his hair
began to fall off, made frantic efforts to keep it on. I have no doubt
he anxiously tried all the vile concoctions which quackery advertises in
the newspapers, for the advantage of those who wish for luxuriant locks.
I dare say for a while it really weighed upon his mind, and disturbed
his quiet, that he was getting bald. But now he has quite reconciled
himself to his lot; and with a head smooth and sheeny as the egg of
the ostrich, Smith goes on through life, and feels no pang at the
remembrance of the ambrosial curls of his youth. Most young people,
I dare say, think it will be a dreadful thing to grow old: a girl of
eighteen thinks it must be an awful sensation to be thirty. Believe me,
not at all. You are brought to it bit by bit; and when you reach the
spot, you rather like the view. And it is so with graver things. We grow
able to do and to bear that which it is needful that we should do and
bear. As is the day, so the strength proves to be. And you have heard
people tell you truly, that they have been enabled to bear what they
never thought they could have come through with their reason or their
life. I have no fear for the Christian man, so he keeps to the path of
duty. Straining up the steep hill, his heart will grow stout in just
proportion to its steepness. Yes, and if the call to martyrdom came, I
should not despair of finding men who would show themselves equal to it,
even in this commonplace age, and among people who wear Highland cloaks
and knickerbockers. The martyr's strength would come with the martyr's
day. It is because there is no call for it now, that people look so
little like it.

It is very difficult, in this world, to strongly enforce a truth,
without seeming to push it into an extreme. You are very apt, in
avoiding one error, to run into the opposite error; forgetting that
truth and right lie generally between two extremes. And in agreeing with
Sydney Smith, as to the wisdom and the duty of "taking short views," let
us take care of appearing to approve the doings of those foolish and
unprincipled people who will keep no outlook into the future time at
all. A bee, you know, cannot see more than a single inch before it; and
there are many men, and perhaps more women, who appear, as regards their
domestic concerns, to be very much of bees: not bees in the respect of
being busy; but bees in the respect of being blind. You see this in all
ranks of life. You see it in the artisan, earning good wages, yet with
every prospect of being weeks out of work next summer or winter, who yet
will not be persuaded to lay by a little in preparation for a rainy day.
You see it in the country gentleman, who, having five thousand a year;
spends ten thousand a year; resolutely shutting his eyes to the certain
and not very remote consequences. You see it in the man who walks into a
shop and buys a lot of things which he has not the money to pay for,
in the vague hope that something will turn up. It is a comparatively
thoughtful and anxious class of men who systematically overcloud the
present by anticipations of the future. The more usual thing is to
sacrifice the future to the present; to grasp at what in the way of
present gratification or gain can be got, with very little thought of
the consequences. You see silly women, the wives of men whose families
are mainly dependent on their lives, constantly urging on their husbands
to extravagances which eat up the little provision which might have been
made for themselves and their children when he is gone who earned their
bread. There is no sadder sight, I think, than that which is not a very
uncommon sight, the careworn, anxious husband, laboring beyond his
strength, often sorrowfully calculating how he may make the ends to
meet, denying himself in every way; and the extravagant idiot of a wife,
bedizened with jewelry and arrayed in velvet and lace, who tosses away
his hard earnings in reckless extravagance; in entertainments which
he cannot afford, given to people who do not care a rush for him; in
preposterous dress; in absurd furniture; in needless men-servants; in
green-grocers above measure; in resolute aping of the way of living of
people with twice or three times the means. It is sad to see all the
forethought, prudence, and moderation of the wedded pair confined to one
of them. You would say that it will not be any solid consolation to the
widow, when the husband is fairly worried into his grave at last,--when
his daughters have to go out as governesses, and she has to let
lodgings,--to reflect that while he lived they never failed to have
Champagne at his dinner-parties; and that they had three men to wait at
table on such occasions, while Mr. Smith, next door, had never more than
one and a maidservant. If such idiotic women would but look forward, and
consider how all this must end! If the professional man spends all he
earns, what remains when the supply is cut off; when the toiling head
and hand can toil no more? Ah, a little of the economy and management
which must perforce be practised after _that_ might have tended
powerfully to put off the evil day. Sometimes the husband is merely the
careworn drudge who provides what the wife squanders. Have you not known
such a thing as that a man should be laboring under an Indian sun, and
cutting down every personal expense to the last shilling, that he might
send a liberal allowance to his wife in England; while she meanwhile
was recklessly spending twice what was thus sent her; running up
overwhelming accounts, dashing about to public balls, paying for a
bouquet what cost the poor fellow far away much thought to save,
giving costly entertainments at home, filling her house with idle and
empty-headed scapegraces, carrying on scandalous flirtations; till
it becomes a happy thing, if the certain ruin she is bringing on her
husband's head is cut short by the needful interference of Sir Cresswell
Cresswell? There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe
the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker. And even where things are
not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains
the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year
determinedly act in various respects as if they had as many thousands.
The dinner given by a man with eight hundred a year, in certain regions
of the earth which I could easily point out, is, as regards food, wine,
and attendance, precisely the same as the dinner given by another man
who has five thousand a year. When will this end? When will people
see its silliness? In truth, you do not really, as things are in this
country, make many people better off by adding a little or a good deal
to their yearly income. For in all probability they were living up to
the very extremity of their means before they got the addition; and in
all probability the first thing they do, on getting the addition, is so
far to increase their establishment and their expense that it is just
as hard a struggle as ever to make the ends meet. It would not be a
pleasant arrangement, that a man who was to be carried across the
straits from England to France should be fixed on a board so weighted
that his mouth and nostrils should be at the level of the water, thus
that he should be struggling for life, and barely escaping drowning
all the way. Yet hosts of people, whom no one proposes to put under
restraint, do as regards their income and expenditure a precisely
analogous thing. They deliberately weight themselves to that degree that
their heads are barely above water, and that any unforeseen emergency
dips their heads under. They rent a house a good deal dearer than they
can justly afford; and they have servants more and more expensive than
they ought; and by many such things they make sure that their progress
through life shall be a drowning struggle: while, if they would
rationally resolve and manfully confess that they cannot afford to have
things as richer folk have them, and arrange their way of living in
accordance with what they can afford, they would enjoy the feeling of
ease and comfort; they would not be ever on the wretched stretch on
which they are now, nor keeping up the hollow appearance of what is
not the fact. But there are folk who make it a point of honor never to
admit, that, in doing or not doing anything, they are actuated for an
instant by so despicable a consideration as the question whether or not
they can afford it. And who shall reckon up the brains which this social
calamity has driven into disease, or the early paralytic shocks which it
has brought on?

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