The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years; but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing: many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a memento mori,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter, whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven.
Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue:—
So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, They come—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response, “She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.—To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”...
In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,—
To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,—
While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity, replies,—
Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio:
Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man:—
Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,—
One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night:
Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to him,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of illustration.
Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists:
It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. “A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow: to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.
Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.
“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.”
“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”
The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.
J’ai vécu—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow—nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain—that he quotes the vers charmants made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards:—
“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when, on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.
Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s
(who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able to promise himself a morrow:
When Archias, the polemarch at Thebes, dissolved in wine and pleasure, received from his pontifical namesake at Athens a full and particular account by letter of the conspiracy of Pelopidas and the exiles, who were even then counting the minutes ere they struck the blow,—although the messenger expressly urged his excellency to read the missive forthwith, as the contents were of instant import, Archias only smiled a tipsy smile, and said, “Business to-morrow.” Then he put the unopened letter under the bolster of his couch, and resumed his colloquy with his host, Philidias, who was in the plot, and who was taking good care to ply the polemarch with wine. Business to-morrow. To-morrow as he purposed! Oh, never should sun that morrow see.
Si hodie non es paratus, quo modo cras eris? Cras est dies incertus: et qui scis si crastinum habebis? To-morrow, in this its prospective, procrastinating sense, is denounced by Mr. Sala, with all due asperity, as a wretched, cowardly, idiotic subterfuge and apology—a “suicidal delusion and pitfall.” Yes, to-morrow I will begin to learn Syro-Chaldaic (we overhear him saying): I will read the novel of the day to-day. To-morrow I will dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water. To-day I will ask the chef at the club to send me up a pretty little dinner, not forgetting that irresistible choufleur au gratin, and bid the butler bring me that curious pommard with the iron-grey seal. To-morrow I will finish my magnum opus, my “Treatise on the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes in their relation to Human Wisdom and Knowledge.” To-day flippant rubbish or frothy egotism shall flow from my pen. To-morrow I will pay my tailor. To-day I will order a new coat. In fine: “To-morrow I will atone for the wrong, and pray for strength to continue in the right. To-day I will follow my devices, and listen to the promptings of the world, the flesh, and the devil. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”
For many years, the late Alfred de Vigny continued slowly amassing poetical materials, though publishing nothing, and murmuring always, like André Chenier,—
The morrow has come, wrote the Journal des Débats, in recording his death, and his artist hands are cold in the grave.
Says the Cordelier to the condemned Thief in Mat Prior’s derry-down ballad,—
But what says the Thief in reply?
But Prior will supply us with more than one study of the subject. Here is a variation, for instance, in matter, manner, and metre:—
The gaming allusion of the first stanza reminds us of the picture of a certain devotee at the roulette table at Hombourg, who kept his seat—tranquil, immovable, vigilant,—the Napoleon of roulette; in whose victorious progress Marengos and Austerlitzes succeeded each other, as if Moscow and the Beresina were phantoms—as if to-morrow would never come. To-morrow; ay, that dread to-morrow that comes to all: the fateful Demain of Victor:
Yes, to-morrow is the coarse deal, with its ten sacks, that forms the framework of the throne, as to-day is its velvet and gilding.
And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret: “To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative, that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could foretell the events of to-morrow?
So thought Sunderland, in that “agony of terror,” almost over-wrought or over-coloured, perhaps, by Macaulay, which impelled him to resign office, in a sort of frenzied haste. He had asked some of his friends to come to his house that he might consult them; they came at the appointed time, but found that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he should soon be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not the gold key which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where it was. “At Kensington,” answered Sunderland. They found that he had tendered his resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle, accepted. They blamed his haste, and told him that since he had summoned them to advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the morrow. “To-morrow,” he exclaimed “would have ruined me. To-night has saved me.”
A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant):
They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought, when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though he makes to-morrow come fast enough, one per diem,—and go quite as fast as it came:
Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to the primus inter poetas for poetical verification of their view. Says the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s chamber, at the hour they name:
But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too, that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor, writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow—that to her never was, but always was to be.
Why, and how, To-morrow never comes, might be discussed in a strain of transcendental metaphysics. Mr. Carlyle, in a memorable chapter headed Natural Supernaturalism, expounds in his mystic suggestive way the philosophic thesis, that Time and Space are but creations of God,—with whom as it is a universal Here, so it is an everlasting Now. And as regards Man: is the Past annihilated, or only past? is the Future non-extant, or only future? “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, and the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.”
It is but a glance the strongest eye can take, in that direction. But even a glance may secure a glimpse of things which filmy, unpurged, downlooking eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—for they seem to involve unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To-morrow thou hast never seen; to thee it has never come. But it shall come. And it that shall come, will come; and will not tarry. Wait the great teacher, Death. Cras iterabimus æquor: to-morrow we shall be sounding our dim and perilous way across the dark waters of that fathomless sea. If the prospect appals, happy he that can adapt to his own hopes, in serenest confidence, yet eager anticipation,—as he speculates on what a day, and the Better Land, may bring forth: To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new.