Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

We read of those who tempted God in the desert, that He gave them their request, and sent leanness withal into their soul. So they did eat meat and were well filled, for He gave them their own desire; but while their meat was yet in their mouths, His wrath came upon them and slew the fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel.

A latter-day poetess, almost masculine in genius, as in out-spoken vigour of diction, tells us that—

and sometimes poison in the gift. Well therefore may the authoress of these lines, which in their original import are scarcely applicable to our theme, make a distressed soul utter a petition that certainly is so:—

Ne mihi contingant quæ volo, sed quæ sunt utilia: the aspiration has been accepted as an adage, worthy of all acceptation, and of acceptation by all.

To Shakspeare for an illustration. Pompey, not the Great, is anxious for Divine sanction to speed his ambitious resolves to a prosperous issue. If the great gods be just, he assumes, they will assist the deeds of justest men,—and therefore himself, as pre-eminently entitled to that designation. He is impatient, too, for this manifest favour from above; and sage Menecrates takes occasion not only to check his impatience in particular, but to give him a salutary warning on the subject in general:

Xenophon tells us of Socrates, that when he prayed, his petition was only this—that the gods would give to him those things that were good; which he did, forasmuch as they alone knew what was good for man. “But he who should ask for gold or silver, or increase of dominion, acted not, in his opinion, more wisely than one who should pray for the opportunity to fight, or game, or anything of the like nature; the consequence of which, being altogether doubtful, might turn, for aught he knew, not a little to his disadvantage.” For,

There is a Greek prayer by an unknown poet, but highly commended by the most illustrious of Socrates’ disciples: that sovran Jove would grant his subjects good, whether they pray for it or not; and avert from them evil, even though they pray for it.

And it is to Plato’s dialogue upon prayer that we owe the instructions imparted by Socrates to Alcibiades, upon which Addison has founded a paper in the Spectator. In that dialogue we read how Socrates met Alcibiades going to his devotions, and observing his eyes to be fixed upon the ground with great seriousness and attention—for even that fastest of fast young men could, it seems, be slow enough to say his prayers—told him that he had reason to be thoughtful upon that occasion, since it was possible for a man to bring down evil upon himself by his own supplications, and that those things which the gods sent him in answer to his petitions might turn to his destruction. This, says he, may not only happen when a man prays for what is mischievous in its own nature, as Œdipus implored the gods to sow dissension between his sons; but when he prays for what he believes would be for his good, and against what he believes would be to his detriment. This the philosopher shows must necessarily happen among us, since most men are blinded with ignorance, prejudice, or passion, which hinder them from seeing what things are really eligible for them. And all this, as his manner is, the philosopher teaches by examples.

It seems allowed that Juvenal took the cue of his tenth Satire, as well as Persius of his second, from the Dialogue of Plato aforesaid.

Or, as Englished by Mr. Owen of Warrington:

The Crassi, Pompeii, and the like, are represented as ruined by the assent of Heaven to their ambitious prayers—

Naples to Pompey a kind fever gave, to hide his honours in a welcome grave (the poetry of Parson Owen may pardonably be printed as prose). But public prayers arise: the gods allow the health requested by the erring vow: by Rome’s and his cross fate that grave he fled, and lived—to lose his honours and his head.

Juvenal crowds his satire with cases in point, historical and mythological, political and domestic. The sum of the discourse is this: that man should allow the higher powers themselves to determine what may be of advantage to him, and suitable to his real wants,—he being dearer to them than to himself:

Montaigne bethinks him that a foremost proof of our imbecility is, that we cannot, by our own wish and desire, find out what we want. “What plan, how happily soe’er begun, That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?” And he repeats the old-world story of King Midas, who prayed to the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; and so it was: his bread became gold, his wine gold, the feathers of his bed, his under-clothing and his over-coats, gold all: “so that he found himself overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with a boon so intolerable, that he was fain to unpray his prayers.” In another essay Le Sieur Michel tells how severely the gods punished the wicked prayers of Œdipus, in granting them. “He had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms: and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word. We should not pray that all things fall out as our will would have them, but that our will should subserve what is just and right.” Owen Feltham records his having observed that what we either desire or fear doth seldom happen—something we think not of, for the most part intervening. How infinitely we should perplex ourselves, he exclaims, if we could obtain whatever we might wish for! “Do we not often desire that, which we afterwards see would be our confusion?... Man could not be more miserable, than if left to choose for himself.... Nothing brings destruction on him sooner, than when he presumes to part the empire with God.” As Aricie warns Theseus in the French tragedy:

And two scenes later Theseus is himself sufficiently of the same mind to exclaim:

And afterwards again he utters the tristful line:

So in a subsequent passage:

Madame de Sévigné, in one of her letters to Bussy, moralizes on the superior wisdom of Heaven’s disposal to man’s proposal; and adds: “C’est ainsi que nous marchons en aveugles, ne sachant où nous allons, prenant pour mauvais ce qui est bon, prenant pour bon ce qui est mauvais, et toujours dans une entière ignorance.” The optative mood of yesterday, a past tense, is changed in the present tense of to-day for deprecation and regret.

In one of his many onslaughts against conventionalism, Mr. Emerson says that what we ask daily is to be conventional. “Supply, most kind gods! this defect in my dress, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring; supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them.” But the wise gods, according to this essayist, reply, “No, we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman,”—a Fifth-Avenue landlord, or a West-End householder, not being Mr. Emerson’s ideal of the highest style of man. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, he adds, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of human life.—With Mr. Carlyle, we will not complain, therefore, of Dante’s miseries; who, had all gone right with him, as he wished it, might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,—in which case, the world had wanted one of the most notable works ever spoken or sung. “Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no Divina Comedia to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.”

Visions, and hopes, and prospects, writes Horace Walpole, are pretty playthings for boys. “It is folly to vex one’s self for what cannot last very long. Indeed, what can, even when one is young? Corydon firmly believes he shall be wretched for ever if he does not marry Phyllis. That misery can but last till she has lost her bloom. His eternal woe would vanish if her nose grew red. How often do our griefs become our comforts! I know what I wish to-day; not at all what I shall wish to-morrow. Sixty says, You did not wish for me, yet you would like to keep me. Sixty is in the right; and I have not a word more to say.” The Strawberry Hill esquire was himself turning the shady side of sixty when he thus wrote. Of quite another school was that gentle and good Q. Q., as she styled herself, once popular, now almost forgotten, who thus moralized her song:

Chateaubriand’s most sentimental of melancholy-mad heroes, overwhelmed, as he flatters himself, with imaginary sufferings, offers up a prayer for some real calamity to overtake him; and, to his cost, is taken at his word. “Dans mon délire, j’avais été jusqu’à désirer d’éprouver un malheur, pour avoir du moins un objet réel de souffrance: épouvantable souhait, que Dieu dans sa colère, a trop exaucé!” It is but the Christian (yet not too Christian) expression of the old pagan poet’s gloomy verse: magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis.

There is a sonnet of Filicaja’s, of which a good deal is made by Richardson in his History of Sir Charles Grandison,—the concluding lines being an impressive vindication of the ways of Providence to man: Provvidenza alta infinita, if it sometimes denies the favours we implore, denies in kindness; and seeming to deny a blessing, grants one in that very refusal: o negar finge, e nel negar concede.

William Collins the painter—a loving and lovable man as well as refined artist—in one of his letters home expresses his “decided opinion, that if the Almighty were to give us everything for which we feel desirous, we should as often find it necessary to pray to Him to take away as to grant new favours.” And he refers to thousands of cases that he could bring forward in proof of his assertion.

It amounts to a sort of refrain in the melodious rhythm of that fragmentary prose-poem of De Quincey’s, “The Daughter of Lebanon,”—the admonition of the prophet to the lovely woman in the Damascus market-place: “Ask what thou wilt—great or small—and through me thou shalt receive it from God. But, my child, ask not amiss. For God is able out of thy own evil asking to weave snares for thy footing. And oftentimes to the lambs whom He loves, He gives by seeming to refuse; gives in some better sense, or” (and here the prophet’s voice swelled into the power of anthems) “in some far happier world.” And when the sun is declining to the west on the thirtieth day, the prophet iterates the strain of old: “Lady of Lebanon, the day is already come, and the hour is coming, in which my covenant must be fulfilled with thee. Wilt thou, therefore, being now wiser in thy thoughts, suffer God, thy new Father, to give by seeming to refuse; to give in some better sense, or in some far happier world?” But the daughter of Lebanon sorrowed at these words; she yearned after her native hills, and the sweet twin-born sister with whom from infant days hand-in-hand she had wandered amongst the everlasting cedars. The delirium of fever, and approaching death, are next described; and again the evangelist sits down by her bedside, and rebukes the clouds that trouble her vision, and bids them stand no more between that dying Magdalen and the forests of Lebanon. Anon, we read how the blue sky parted to the right and to the left, laying bare the infinite revelations that can be made visible only to dying eyes; and how, as the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty visions, she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as if in gratulation to herself, the one countenance for which she hungered and thirsted. “The twin-sister, that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died of grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Immediately in rapture she soared upwards from her couch; immediately in weakness she fell back; and being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms around his neck; whilst he breathed into her ear his final whisper, ‘Wilt thou now suffer that God should give by seeming to refuse?’—‘Oh yes—yes—yes,’ was the fervent answer from the daughter of Lebanon.” Hitherto she had known not what to ask for as she ought. Hitherto her asking had been amiss: she had asked for she knew not what. But now her vision was purged. Now she had the second-sight that could pierce through and beyond the night-side of nature, and gaze on the land that is very far off. Hitherto she had, at the best, seen through a glass darkly; but now, it might be said, face to face. So that she knew what to ask for, now.

Chactas, the blind old sachem in Chateaubriand’s Wertherian romance, is made to bring that once enthusiastically admired story to an end by relating a parable to his woe-fraught young listener. It tells how the Meschacebé, soon after leaving its source among the hills, began to feel weary of being a simple brook; and so asked for snows from the mountains, water from the torrents, rain from the tempests; until, its petitions granted, it burst its bounds, and ravaged its hitherto delightsome banks. At first the proud stream exulted in its force; but seeing ere long that it carried desolation in its flow, that its progress was now doomed to solitude, and that its waters were for ever turbid, it came to regret the humble bed hollowed out for it by nature,—the birds, the flowers, the trees, and the brooks, hitherto the modest companions of its tranquil course.

The moral of the myth of Tithonus is one for all time. Mr. Tennyson has pointed it for ours. He shows us in Tithonus a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream the ever silent spaces of the East; and from this grey shadow, once a man, the wailing utterance of a sad story comes:—