NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS.
Psalm xxiii. 4.
No good thing will He, from whom cometh every good gift, withhold from them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a very present help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the shadow of death—darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath companionship as well as hope in his death. He who can say, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one that will not let them want. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”
Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public. People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.[42] With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all its noise and excitement, “and, what would be still worse, exposed to receive all visits; for the French, you know,” he writes to Conway, “are never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and love to hide myself when I am dying”—which refers to his periodical, and prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. “If,” says the author of “Life in the Sick-room,” “I could not trust my friends to save me from involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.” Wordsworth’s Marmaduke exclaims,—
Special note has been taken of the exceptional characteristic in the altogether exceptional career of the prophet Elijah, that, in his last hour, when he was on his way to a strange and unprecedented departure from this world—when the whirlwind and flame chariot were ready, he asked for no human companionship. “The bravest men are pardoned if one lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the last, and they desire a human eye resting on them—a human hand in theirs—a human presence. But Elijah would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest of his lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator alone.” One hears of such preferences now and then, in oddly constituted natures. Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to his sister-in-law, appears to indicate a disposition of this kind as prevalent in his father’s family. “Poor aunt Curle,” he tells her, “died like a Roman, or rather like one of the Sandy-Knowe bairns, the most stoical race I ever knew. She turned every one out of the room, and drew her last breath alone. So did my uncle, Captain Robert Scott, and several others of that family.” Affectation was so inherent in Chateaubriand’s confessions and professions, that one knows not how far genuine may have been his plea for what he calls the “necessity of isolation,” and its advantages in death as in life. “Any hand is good enough to reach us the glass of water that we call for in the fever of death. Ah! may that hand not be too dear to us!” The “necessity of isolation” reminds us of Keble’s query:—
And that again reminds us, with a difference—the difference between Madame de Staël and the sweet singer of the “Christian Year,”—of Corinne on her death-bed, saying to Castel Forte: “But for you, I should die alone. There is no help for such a moment; friends can but follow us to the brink; there begin thoughts too deep, too troublous, to be confided.” Mon sort est de mourir seul, writes Rousseau’s bereaved Solitaire; et la seule Providence me fermera les yeux. Scott was not of mere imagination all compact when he made Edie Ochiltree say, in the cave that forms the old mendicant’s favourite retreat, “I hae had mony a thought, that when I found myself auld and forfairn, and no able to enjoy God’s blessed air ony langer, I wad e’en streek mysell out here, and abide my removal, like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into some bush or bracken.” Montaigne says that, might he have his choice, he thought he should like best to die out of his own house, and away from his own people. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, on the seventh day of his last illness, admitted none but his unworthy son (Commodus) to his chamber, and after a few words dismissed him, “covered his head for sleep, and”—in Dean Merivale’s words—“passed away alone and untended.” Epigrammatic historians love to tell of Catherine the Great, who had reigned over five hundred and forty towns, over forty-two governments, over a multitude of isles of the sea from Kamschatka to Japan, and over eighty millions of slaves, that she died alone, entirely alone, without a single slave at hand to support her drooping head. The picture is meant to be sensational, and as written in French and for the French, it may be telling enough. It tells, for instance, upon such a nature as Madame Sophie Gay, who used to promise her friends to come and die among them, when it was her turn and her time; adding, in her very French style, “Je ne veux pas que cette demoiselle”—meaning la mort—“me trouve seule.” Upon others, the grand climax of supreme solitude fails of effect. “It has always been my wish,” writes Southey, for example, “to die far from my friends, to crawl like a dog into some corner and expire unseen. I would neither give nor receive unavailing pain.” When death overtook St. Francis Xavier, he was on board of a vessel bound for Siam, and at his own request he was removed to the shore, that he might die with the greater composure. Stretched on the naked beach, with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains—thus Sir James Stephen describes his last moments—he contended alone with the agonies of the fever which wasted his vital power. “It was an agony and a solitude for which the happiest of the sons of men might well have exchanged the dearest society, and the purest of the joys of life.... It was a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace and consolation, visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the now unclouded eye of faith; and audible to the dying martyr through the yielding bars of his mortal prison-house, in strains of exulting joy till then unheard and unimagined.”
Mr. de Quincey has finely said of solitude, that, although it may be silent as light, it is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. “All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God’s presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations.” King and priest, we are further reminded, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which this author describes as in this world appalling or fascinating a child’s heart,[43] is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to pass: reflex of one solitude—prefiguration of another.
Crabbe says of man that, feeling his weakness, it is his habit to run to society, to numbers,—
Among the pangs which belong to death is emphatically reckoned by F. W. Robertson, in his sermon on Victory over it, the sensation of loneliness which attaches to that transit through the valley of shadows. Have we ever, he asks, seen a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper emigrants to a distant colony? for that is keenly suggestive of the desolation which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried excursion. He dilates on all beyond the seas being to the ignorant poor man a strange land—away from the helps and friendships and companionships of life, scarcely knowing what is before him; and it is in such a moment, when a man stands upon a deck, taking his last look of his fatherland, that there comes upon him what the preacher calls “a sensation new, strange, and inexpressibly miserable—the feeling of being alone in the world. Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is but a feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness of death. We die alone. We go on our dark mysterious journey for the first time in all our existence, without one to accompany us. Friends are beside our bed, they must stay behind. Grant that a Christian has something like familiarity with the Most High, that breaks this solitary feeling; but what is it with the mass of men? It is a question full of loneliness to them.” Says the elder Humboldt (Wilhelm), in one of his letters: “However many companions a man may have in the active sympathising world, he must ever make the journey which leads across the boundaries of earthly things alone; no one may accompany him.” Not but that in some moods, and in some sense, this contemplative philosopher might have assented to the protest of Paul Flemming, that had we spiritual organs, to see and hear things now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the air thronged with the departing souls of that vast multitude which every moment dies. For, “truly the soul departs not alone on its last journey, but spirits of its kind attend it, when not ministering angels; and they go in families to the unknown land. Neither in life nor in death are we alone.” But then as we have not the spiritual organs in question, the fact of conscious isolation in articulo mortis is not affected; and their character, after all, pertains rather to spiritualism than to spirituality.
A latter-day Christian lyrist expatiates on the sense of loneliness one has at midnight, in the dread calmness of the dark,—or again, on pathless hills, when the sun is set, and the ear listens in vain for some social sound from afar. But,—
Je mourrai seul. Pascal’s words are continually cited, though only to be forgotten. Mrs. Browning feelingly and earnestly expands into a sonnet what she entitles “A Thought for a Lonely Death-bed. Inscribed to my friend E. C.”
One can hardly quit this subject without recalling the awful significance of a cry that once expressed, if one may say it, inexpressible anguish,—anguish indescribable, incommunicable,—“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!” Penultimate words, these were; and appalling in their suggestiveness of uttermost desolation. But not the last words of all. He was not alone, consciously not alone, at the very last. Later than these, and triumphant over these—however subdued and serene the triumph—came those other words, Divinely calm, as became the Speaker,—“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” And it was when He had this said, that He gave up the ghost.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Wave your hand; the motion which has apparently ceased is taken up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, etc., and so by direct and re-acting waves, continually comminuted, but never destroyed.”—Grove’s Correlation of Physical Forces.
[2] The Candidate, Lord Sandwich.
[3] See on the scope of the words ἐπιθυμῶν χορτασθῆναι (St. Luke xvi. 21), Analecta Theologica (Rev. W. Trollope’s) in loc.
[4] Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath:
[5] Plentiful illustrations might be drawn from Plutarch to the same effect. There is Mutius Scævola, for instance, addressing Porsenna: “Your threatenings I regarded not, but am subdued by your generosity.” There is Porsenna himself, who, as Publicola found, could not be quelled by dint of arms, but whom he converted into a friend to Rome, by “the gentle arts of persuasion.” There is young Alexander, afterwards to be, or to be called, the Great, whose astute father saw that he did not easily submit to authority, because he would not be forced to anything, but that he might be led to his duty by the gentler hand of reason; and therefore, as a wise father, who knew his own son, Philip took the method of persuasion rather than of command.
What Plutarch says of the gentler hand of reason, reminds us of Swift’s account of the Houyhnhnms, that “they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised or exhorted.” And by the way, Swift remarks in a letter on England’s harsh rule over the Irish, “Supposing even the size of a native’s understanding just equal to that of a dog or a horse, I have often seen these two animals civilized by rewards at least as much as by punishments.”
But to return to Plutarch. There is his Flaminius, again, whose appointment to the command in the war with Macedon, he calls very fortunate for Rome, since what was required was “a general who did not want to do everything by force and violence, but rather by gentleness and persuasion.” As Claudian says, Peragit tranquilla potestas quad violenta nequit.
Fear, observes Adam Smith, is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. “To attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humours, and to confirm them in an opposition which more gentle usage perhaps might easily induce them, either to soften, or to lay aside altogether.”
[6] The history of Latin Christianity supplies abundant examples, more or less pertinent. Columban and his disciples are characterized as having had little of the gentle and winning perseverance of missionaries: they had been accustomed to dictate to trembling sovereigns; and their haughty and violent demeanour provoked the pagans, instead of weaning them from their idolatries (iii. 106). So of Boniface (v. 167): it was in the tone of a master that he commanded the world to peace, a tone which provoked resistance. “It was not by persuasive influence, which might lull the conflicting passions of men, and enlighten them as to their real interests.” Contrast with these the temper and policy of Pope Eugenius III. (iii. 407), whose “skilful and well-timed use of means more becoming the head of Christendom than arms and excommunications, wrought wonders in his favour;” and who, by his gentleness and charity, gradually supplanted the senate in the attachment of the Roman people: “the fierce and intractable people were yielding to this gentler influence.” On a later page we come across the able portraiture of our Henry II., as drawn by a churchman who was warning Becket as to the formidable adversary he had undertaken to oppose: “He will sometimes be softened by humility and patience, but will never submit to compulsion,” etc. Ariste a raison when he counsels Geronte, in Gresset’s “Le Méchant,” as the bien plus sage course of dealing with a difficult subject,
[7] “Such access as Protestantism has gained to the minds of the Catholics in Ireland, it owes, not to the thunders of any missionary Boanerges, but to men like the [late] Archbishop of Dublin [Whately], and the Dean of Elphin, who have taken a very different course, and presented Protestant Christianity to their neighbours in a very different form.”—Saturday Review, xi. 71.
[8] Gently soothing.
[9] Another type of mind, deficient in the higher attributes of independence, is often feverishly eager to sink its sense of individual responsibility by seeking what is called “rest in the Church.” Dr. Bungener represents his Julian, when committed to the Bastile, as rather rejoicing at than terrified by the despotism of the hand laid upon him; and in the same way, on taking holy orders, he, being “subdued in heart, enslaved in mind, tired of being his own master, only to create his own torments,” flatters himself that he gives the Church complete power over his faculties at the same time that he gives her plenary power over his actions.
To the baser sort, remarks Sir James Stephen, no yoke is so galling as that of self control, no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. “With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many the abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice.”
One of our acutest essayists on social subjects comments on the readiness of a man to exult in the fact that he has done something which he cannot undo, and has pledged himself to a course from which he cannot draw back, as more commonly the sign of a weak than of a strong nature. “The comfort of plunging right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody who has been accustomed to stand shivering and irresolute on the bank.” When a person of this sort, it is justly observed, has brought himself to take the plunge, his exultation and fearlessness are wonderful: the knowledge that the Rubicon is crossed, and the die cast, seems to relieve him from the necessity of further resolution. “He has set in motion a machine which will of itself wind off results and consequences for him without more ado on his own part; and this is an order of release from the demands of circumstances upon his will, for which he cannot be too thankful.”
[10] When at Bologna he used to visit the Campo Santo, the sexton of which was a favourite of his, and the “beautiful and innocent face” of whose daughter of fifteen, he used to contrast with the skulls that peopled several cells there—and particularly with that of one skull dated 1766, “which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most lovely features of Bologna—noble and rich.”
[11] Not to be forgotten, however, is the suggestive rejoinder of Mercury, that Menippus would have been as easily fooled as the rest of them, had he but seen, not that grinning skull, but the living face that once concealed it.
[12] In the book called “God’s Acre; or, Historical Notices relating to Churchyards,” there is a loathsome story of a Mr. Thompson, of Worcester, who baited his angling-hook with part of the corrupted form of King John, and carried the fish he caught with it in triumph through the streets.
[13] “Et puisque le monde n’est qu’une comédie, il faut prendre la queue lapin et l’épée de bois comme les autres.”—Lettres de Chaulieu, ed. 1850.
[14] Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” April 29, 1783.
[15] In the etymological sense, now practically obsolete, of misbeliever.
[16] Perhaps a better version of perhaps the same story is that of the young Dauphin exclaiming to his right reverend preceptor, when some book mentioned a king as having died, “Quoi donc, les rois meurent-ils?” “Quelquefois, monseigneur,” was the reply—ironical, or parasitical, as may be.
[17] John Asgill distinguished himself by maintaining in a treatise now forgotten, that death is no natural necessity, and that to escape it is within the range of the humanly practicable. But Asgill’s biography, like every other, has for a last page the inevitable “And he died.”
[18] That is, “Let thy spirit (goste), not thy appetite, lead thee.” In St. Peter’s words, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.”
[19] St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with this judgment and sentence.
[20] “Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as ours.”—Rogers’s Italy.
[21] The friends spoken of were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800.
[22] On the “false humility” which shrinks from all censure or reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text “judge not, that ye be not judged,”—as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,—see Sir Henry Taylor’s essay on Humility and Independence in his valuable “Notes from Life.” The man of true humility, we are there taught, will come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but praying to have “a right judgment in all things;” and whilst exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature of which he is himself part and parcel. (See “Notes from Life” (1847), pp. 46, sqq.)
[23] Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere surmises, some of us might find “our shade of brown to be very dark.”—The Bertrams, chap. xix.
[24] The avoidance of moral estimate, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life. (See “W. C. Roscoe’s Essays,” vol. ii., p. 308.)
[25] Owen Meredith: “The Artist.”
[26] “Cleon,” by Robert Browning.
[27] Completed. Finis coronat opus. Children and fools, it has been observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the sense to make out what the artist is designing. “The whole of this world that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault with Providence.”—Archbishop Whately.
[28] Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Perplexed Music.”
[29] He is said to have emptied two baskets of figs and of eggs, which he swallowed alternately, and the repast was concluded with marrow and sugar. In one of his pilgrimages to Mecca, Soliman is asserted to have eaten, at a single meal, seventy pomegranates, a kid, six fowls, and a huge quantity of the grapes of Tayaf. “If,” says Gibbon, “the bill of fare be correct, we must admire the appetite rather than the luxury of the sovereign of Asia.”—Hist. Rom. Empire, ch. lii.
[30] A broken-down old schoolmaster bore witness to Dr. Chalmers’ modus operandi. “Many a pound-note has the doctor given me, and he always did the thing as if he were afraid that any person should see him. May God reward him!”—Hanna’s “Life of Chalmers,” chap. i.
[31] The case of St. Peter was expressly within the preacher’s view. “It is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit that this is possible; yet no one knowing human nature from men and not from books, will deny that this might befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter was both; yet this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question was put directly, ‘This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth?’ Then a prevarication—a lie: and yet another.”—Sermon on the Restoration of the Erring.
[32] Froude, “History of Reign of Elizabeth,” vol. ii., pp. 126, 215, 226, 277, 278.
[33] Mr. Thackeray incidentally opposes the quasi-apologists for smuggling on the ground that it is a complicated tissue of lying. In his very last and unfinished work, he makes a good old rector allow that to run an anker of brandy may seem no monstrous crime; but when men engage in these lawless ventures, who knows how far the evil will go? “I buy ten kegs of brandy from a French fishing-boat, I land it under a lie on the coast, I send it inland ever so far, and all my consignees lie and swindle. I land it, and lie to the revenue officer. Under a lie (that is, a mutual secrecy), I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at Maidstone, say.... My landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and conspiracy add murder. Do you suppose men engaged in lying every day will scruple about a false oath in a witness-box? Crime engenders crime, sir.”—Denis Duval, chap. vii.
[34] From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and aphorisms to the purpose. “It’s a sair judgment on a man,” says Ratcliffe, in the “Heart of Mid-Lothian,” “when he has once gane sae far wrang as I hae dune”—the present thief-taker being in fact an ex-thief—that never a bit “he can be honest, try’t whilk way he will.” The career of Effie Deans, anon Lady Staunton, in the same story, is a practical sermon on the same text. “I drag on,” she owns, “the life of a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel.” Her sister, on perusing the letter which contains these confessions, is impressed with such an instance of the staggering condition of those who have risen to distinction by undue arts, and the “outworks and bulwarks of fiction and falsehood, by which they are under the necessity of surrounding and defending their precarious advantages.”
Then again there is old Caleb Balderstone, querulous at being what he calls “forced” to imperil his soul “wi’ telling ae lee after another faster than I can count them,”—and elsewhere at the “cost” of “telling twenty daily lees to a wheen idle chaps and queans, and, what’s waur, without gaining credence.”
And for another instance we have the titular Earl of Etherington, in “St. Ronan’s Well,” in the position as of a spider when he perceives that his deceitful web is threatened with danger, and sits balanced in the centre, watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to defend. “Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance which never fails to wait on those, who, abandoning the ‘fair play of the world,’ endeavour to work out their purposes by a process of deception and intrigue.”
In one of Mr. Disraeli’s earlier fictions, there is a young man whose frankness is proverbial, but who finds himself involved in a course of prevarication—due effect being given to its preliminary process, though “only the commencement of the system of degrading deception which awaited him.”
But perhaps the most direct and forcible illustration of the subject in modern fiction, is to be found in the “White Lies” of Mr. Charles Reade, a work the title of which declares its didactic scope. Rose Beaurépaire in an unguarded moment equivocates, or tells a white lie, and thereby hangs the tale. Soon we have her bitterly bewailing the imbroglio in which she has involved herself and others, and the necessity of fresh fibs to maintain the meaning and credit of the first. “There is no end to it,” she sobs despairingly. “It is like a spider’s web: every struggle to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to bind me.” In the next chapter a significant paragraph intimates, “This was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning.” And the penultimate chapter opens with a notice anew of the “fatal entanglement” into which two high-minded sisters had been led, through yielding to a natural foible: the desire, namely, to hide everything painful from those they loved, even at the expense of truth. The author lays stress on the inextricable complications due to their “amiable dishonesty,” and he importunes the reader to take notice that after the first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them on against their will. It was no small part, he insists, of all their misery, that they longed to get back to truth and could not.
[35] In apposition, or opposition, to which, note the bidding and the demur in Talfourd’s tragedy of “Ion”:—
[36] Deut. xiii. 6. Observe too the seeming climax,—ascending from “thy brother, the son of thy mother,” through the successive stages of “thy son, thy daughter,” and “the wife of thy bosom,” to “thy friend, which is as thine own soul.” As though
[37] “If our friends appear to look upon us with little interest, if our arrival is seen without pleasure, and our departure without regret, instead of charging them with a deficiency of feeling, we should turn our scrutiny upon ourselves.”—Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, v. i.
[38] Hartley Coleridge, Sonnets.
[39] That is, if attention be shown him.
[40] Gusts of wind.
[41] See Hanna’s Life of Chalmers, Journal of 1810 and of 1825-6, passim.
[42] “See the well-known print of Mazarin’s death-bed, surrounded by ladies at cards. According to Grimm, the Maréchale de Luxembourg and two of her friends played at loto by that of Madame du Deffand till she expired. But at that time the proceeding was at least thought singular.”—“Historical Studies,” by Herman Merivale.
[43] “God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, ... God holds with children ‘communion undisturbed.’”—“Autobiographic Sketches,” by Thomas de Quincey, i. 24.