Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
wantonly? Be the blood Scotch or English, French or Italian, a
drummer's or a buffoon's, it carries a soul upon its stream; and every
soul has many places to touch at, and much business to perform, before
it reaches its ultimate destination. Abolish the power of Charles;
extinguish not his virtues. Whatever is worthy to be loved for
anything is worthy to be preserved. A wise and dispassionate
legislator, if any such should arise among men, will not condemn to
death him who has done, or is likely to do, more service than injury
to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects to ours, and
their business is never with virtues or with hopes.
_Cromwell._ Walter! Walter! we laugh at speculators.
_Noble._ Many indeed are ready enough to laugh at speculators, because
many profit, or expect to profit, by established and widening abuses.
Speculations toward evil lose their name by adoption; speculations
towards good are for ever speculations, and he who hath proposed them
is a chimerical and silly creature. Among the matters under this
denomination I never find a cruel project, I never find an oppressive
or unjust one: how happens it?
_Cromwell._ Proportions should exist in all things. Sovereigns are
paid higher than others for their office; they should therefore be
punished more severely for abusing it, even if the consequences of
this abuse were in nothing more grievous or extensive. We cannot clap
them in the stocks conveniently, nor whip them at the market-place.
Where there is a crown there must be an axe: I would keep it there
only.
_Noble._ Lop off the rotten, press out the poisonous, preserve the
rest; let it suffice to have given this memorable example of national
power and justice.
_Cromwell._ Justice is perfect; an attribute of God: we must not
trifle with it.
_Noble._ Should we be less merciful to our fellow-creatures than to
our domestic animals? Before we deliver them to be killed, we weigh
their services against their inconveniences. On the foundation of
policy, when we have no better, let us erect the trophies of humanity:
let us consider that, educated in the same manner and situated in the
same position, we ourselves might have acted as reprovably. Abolish
that for ever which must else for ever generate abuses; and attribute
the faults of the man to the office, not the faults of the office to
the man.
_Cromwell._ I have no bowels for hypocrisy, and I abominate and detest
kingship.
_Noble._ I abominate and detest hangmanship; but in certain stages of
society both are necessary. Let them go together; we want neither now.
_Cromwell._ Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose
their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the
dust or into the furnace. I must do my duty; I must accomplish what is
commanded me; I must not be turned aside. I am loath to be cast into
the furnace or the dust; but God's will be done! Prithee, Wat, since
thou readest, as I see, the books of philosophers, didst thou ever
hear of Digby's remedies by sympathy?
_Noble._ Yes, formerly.
_Cromwell._ Well, now, I protest, I do believe there is something in
them. To cure my headache, I must breathe a vein in the neck of
Charles.
_Noble._ Oliver, Oliver! others are wittiest over wine, thou over
blood: cold-hearted, cruel man.
_Cromwell._ Why, dost thou verily think me so, Walter? Perhaps thou
art right in the main: but He alone who fashioned me in my mother's
womb, and who sees things deeper than we do, knows that.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] Ludlow, a most humane and temperate man, signed the death-warrant
of Charles, for violating the constitution he had sworn to defend, for
depriving the subject of property, liberty, limbs, and life
unlawfully. In equity he could do no otherwise; and to equity was the
only appeal, since the laws of the land had been erased by the king
himself.
LORD BROOKE AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Lord Brooke is less known than the personage with whom
he converses, and upon whose friendship he had the
virtue and good sense to found his chief distinction.
On his monument at Warwick, written by himself, we
read that he was servant of Queen Elizabeth,
counsellor of King James and friend of Sir Philip
Sidney. His style is stiff, but his sentiments are
sound and manly.
_Brooke._ I come again unto the woods and unto the wilds of Penshurst,
whither my heart and the friend of my heart have long invited me.
_Sidney._ Welcome, welcome! And now, Greville, seat yourself under
this oak; since if you had hungered or thirsted from your journey, you
would have renewed the alacrity of your old servants in the hall.
_Brooke._ In truth I did; for no otherwise the good household would
have it. The birds met me first, affrightened by the tossing up of
caps; and by these harbingers I knew who were coming. When my palfrey
eyed them askance for their clamorousness, and shrank somewhat back,
they quarrelled with him almost before they saluted me, and asked him
many pert questions. What a pleasant spot, Sidney, have you chosen
here for meditation! A solitude is the audience-chamber of God. Few
days in our year are like this; there is a fresh pleasure in every
fresh posture of the limbs, in every turn the eye takes.
Youth! credulous of happiness, throw down
Upon this turf thy wallet--stored and swoln
With morrow-morns, bird-eggs, and bladders burst--
That tires thee with its wagging to and fro:
Thou too wouldst breathe more freely for it, Age!
Who lackest heart to laugh at life's deceit.
It sometimes requires a stout push, and sometimes a sudden resistance,
in the wisest men, not to become for a moment the most foolish. What
have I done? I have fairly challenged you, so much my master.
_Sidney._ You have warmed me: I must cool a little and watch my
opportunity. So now, Greville, return you to your invitations, and I
will clear the ground for the company; for Youth, for Age, and
whatever comes between, with kindred and dependencies. Verily we need
no taunts like those in your verses: here we have few vices, and
consequently few repinings. I take especial care that my young
labourers and farmers shall never be idle, and I supply them with bows
and arrows, with bowls and ninepins, for their Sunday evening,[6]
lest they drink and quarrel. In church they are taught to love God;
after church they are practised to love their neighbour: for business
on workdays keeps them apart and scattered, and on market-days they
are prone to a rivalry bordering on malice, as competitors for custom.
Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes
them good. We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for
prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment:
the course is then over; the wheel turns round but once; while the
reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.
_Brooke._ You reason justly and you act rightly. Piety--warm, soft,
and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace--is made callous
and inactive by kneeling too much: her vitality faints under rigorous
and wearisome observances. A forced match between a man and his
religion sours his temper, and leaves a barren bed.
_Sidney._ Desire of lucre, the worst and most general country vice,
arises here from the necessity of looking to small gains; it is,
however, but the tartar that encrusts economy.
_Brooke._ Oh that anything so monstrous should exist in this profusion
and prodigality of blessings! The herbs, elastic with health, seem to
partake of sensitive and animated life, and to feel under my hand the
benediction I would bestow on them. What a hum of satisfaction in
God's creatures! How is it, Sidney, the smallest do seem the happiest?
_Sidney._ Compensation for their weaknesses and their fears;
compensation for the shortness of their existence. Their spirits mount
upon the sunbeam above the eagle; and they have more enjoyment in
their one summer than the elephant in his century.
_Brooke._ Are not also the little and lowly in our species the most
happy?
_Sidney._ I would not willingly try nor over-curiously examine it. We,
Greville, are happy in these parks and forests: we were happy in my
close winter-walk of box and laurustine. In our earlier days did we
not emboss our bosoms with the daffodils, and shake them almost unto
shedding with our transport? Ay, my friend, there is a greater
difference, both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year,
than in the conditions of men: yet the healthy pass through the
seasons, from the clement to the inclement, not only unreluctantly
but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best
begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of
life, excepting that alone which ought reasonably to allure us most,
as opening to us the _Via Sacra_, along which we move in triumph to
our eternal country. We may in some measure frame our minds for the
reception of happiness, for more or for less; we should, however, well
consider to what port we are steering in search of it, and that even
in the richest its quantity is but too exhaustible. There is a
sickliness in the firmest of us, which induceth us to change our side,
though reposing ever so softly: yet, wittingly or unwittingly, we turn
again soon into our old position.
God hath granted unto both of us hearts easily contented, hearts
fitted for every station, because fitted for every duty. What appears
the dullest may contribute most to our genius; what is most gloomy may
soften the seeds and relax the fibres of gaiety. We enjoy the
solemnity of the spreading oak above us: perhaps we owe to it in part
the mood of our minds at this instant; perhaps an inanimate thing
supplies me, while I am speaking, with whatever I possess of
animation. Do you imagine that any contest of shepherds can afford
them the same pleasure as I receive from the description of it; or
that even in their loves, however innocent and faithful, they are so
free from anxiety as I am while I celebrate them? The exertion of
intellectual power, of fancy and imagination, keeps from us greatly
more than their wretchedness, and affords us greatly more than their
enjoyment. We are motes in the midst of generations: we have our
sunbeams to circuit and climb. Look at the summits of the trees around
us, how they move, and the loftiest the most: nothing is at rest
within the compass of our view, except the grey moss on the
park-pales. Let it eat away the dead oak, but let it not be compared
with the living one.
Poets are in general prone to melancholy; yet the most plaintive ditty
hath imparted a fuller joy, and of longer duration, to its composer,
than the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian. A bottle of wine
bringeth as much pleasure as the acquisition of a kingdom, and not
unlike it in kind: the senses in both cases are confused and
perverted.
_Brooke._ Merciful Heaven! and for the fruition of an hour's
drunkenness, from which they must awaken with heaviness, pain, and
terror, men consume a whole crop of their kind at one harvest home.
Shame upon those light ones who carol at the feast of blood! and worse
upon those graver ones who nail upon their escutcheon the name of
great! Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked. God sometimes
sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the
chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration. Only
some cause like unto that which is now scattering the mental fog of
the Netherlands, and is preparing them for the fruits of freedom, can
justify us in drawing the sword abroad.
_Sidney._ And only the accomplishment of our purpose can permit us