340 'PLERUMQUE GRATÆ DIVITIBUS VICES? 66 Plerumque gratæ divitibus vices, Sollicitam explicuere frontem." Which has been freely Englished: "Changes have often pleased the great; Of healthy food and cleanly dressed Or purple wrought in Tyrian looms, Have smoothed a wrinkled brow and calmed a ruffled breast." Mr. Pepys in his Diary took particular notice of the fact that, in the memorable May of 1660, "the King and the two Dukes," before landing in merry England, to enjoy their own again, "did eat their breakfast, and there being set some ship's diet before them, only to show them the manner of the ship's diet, they did eat of nothing else but pease and pork, and boiled beef.” Every man Jack in the fleet must have felt flattered at this august election of junk. Some three years later we find the Diarist at Chelsea, with the Earl of Sandwich "all alone with one joynt of meat at dinner, and mightily extolling the goodness of his diet." Another twelvemonth, and we light on Mr. Pepys's own proper personal confession, "To dinner with my wife, to a good hog's harslet, a piece of meat I love, but have not eat of I think these seven years." Yet a lustrum, as time is told, and we revert to junk at sea. "The boatswain of the ship did bring us out of the kettle a piece of hot salt beef, and some brown bread and brandy; and there we did make a little meal, but so good as I never would desire to eat better meat while I live, only I would have cleaner dishes." Mr. Pepys was too familiar with the literature of his day, and too well acquainted with the writings of Dryden, as well as with the man, not to have read, and HEART RESPONSIVE TO HEART. 341 having read to cordially agree with, a passage in Glorious John's prologue to All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, accepted now as incomparably the best of his plays : 66 The rich, when tired with daily feasts, For change, become their next poor tenant's guests; XXXI. HEART RESPONSIVE TO HEART. PROVERBS xvii. 19. ARIOUS are the interpretations put upon the VARIO proverb, "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man ;" and of these some are unsatisfactory enough. Castalio understands by it, that as a man may know what kind of face he hath, if he will look into the water; so may he know what kind of man he is, if he will examine his conscience. Bishop Patrick's exegesis of the passage seems nearer the mark: "A man may see himself, while he looks upon other men, as well as know other men by considering his own inclinations." It is proposed, however, in this place, to take the verse in the sense of the ready response of heart to heart in a matter of common feeling, the direct answer of heart to heart in respect of natural emotion. What comes straight from one heart goes straight to another. Deep calleth unto deep. And the call is at once heard, and heeded, and answered. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. Not that the famous line to that effect in Troilus and Cressida really has the meaning that is commonly foisted upon it; for, 342 ONE TOUCH OF NATURE. as a discerning critic long ago pointed out, the line in question has nothing whatever to do with a general bonhomie arising from the successful touch of a universally responsive chord; it says only that all men. have a touch of family resemblance, and the following lines point out that this touch is the love and worship of novelty and change. In the Introductory Discourse to her elaborately designed series of Plays on the Passions, Miss Baillie expatiates on the fact, that from the strong sympathy felt by most creatures, but the human above all, for others of their kind, nothing has become so much an object of man's curiosity as man himself; every person who is not deficient in intellect being more or less occupied in tracing among the individuals he converses with, the varieties of understanding and temper which constitute the characters of men, and receiving great pleasure from every stroke of nature that points out to him those varieties. "In a work abounding with the marvellous and unnatural, if the author has anyhow stumbled upon an unsophisticated genuine stroke of nature, we shall immediately perceive and be delighted with it, though we are foolish enough to admire, at the same time, all the nonsense with which it is surrounded." In novels, those works, she contends, which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular. Into whatever scenes the novelist may conduct us, what objects soever he may present to our view, still is our attention most sensibly awake to every touch faithful to nature; still are we upon the watch for everything that speaks to us of ourselves. In the "fair field of what is properly called poetry," in the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor, and HEART RESPONSIVE TO HEART. 343 allegory, among heroes and nymphs, "amidst all this decoration and ornament, all this loftiness and refinement, let one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion, genuine and true to nature, be introduced, and it will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, while the false and unnatural around it fade away upon every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." One may apply the words of Emerson : "It is only to these simple strokes that the highest power belongs,-when a weak hand touches, point by point, the eternal beams and rafters on which the whole structure of Nature and society is laid." The genius which commands our applause, says Dr. Thomas Brown, is still the genius of a man: we see our common nature reflected, though with a beauty of which we were not sensible before; ceasing to recognize spontaneously our common nature, we feel for the work in question “that coldness which it is impossible for us not to feel with respect to everything which is absolutely foreign." A perusal of Mr. Swinburne's Tragedies left on Professor Lowell an impression of a world of shadows, inhabited by less substantial things than that nether realm in Homer where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its longings and regrets. But, "there are some touches of nature in the mother's memories of Althæa,* so sweetly pathetic that they go as right to the heart as they came from it, and are neither Greek nor English, but broadly human." As the pathetic, observes Wordsworth in one of his Prefaces, participates of an “animal’ sensation, it might seem that, if the springs of this emotion were genuine, all men, possessed of competent knowledge of the facts and circumstances, would be instantaneously affected; and, doubtless, he adds, "in * Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. 344 TEARS INFECTIOUS. the works of every true poet will be found passages of that species of excellence which is proved by effects immediate and universal." Every true poet has more or less command over the rock whence waters rush out-more or less mastery of the key that opes the fount of sympathetic tears. Tears are notably infectious. The great poets all know that Andromache, after parting with Hector, seeks her own palace, to weep there; and "through all her train the soft infection" runs. Achilles weeps at Priam's pleading; and "th' infectious softness through the heroes" runs again, as Mr. Pope words it. Helen, in "pomp of grief” appears, and bewails her desolateness, with sorrow-streaming eye: "Distressful beauty melts each stander-by; on all around th' infectious sorrow grows." Homeric in simplicity at least are such old chroniclers as Villehardouin, in whose pages we so often meet with such passages as this: “Et alors, les six députés pleurant beaucoup, le doge et tous les autres commencèrent à pleurer de la pitié qu'ils en eurent." Prospero, with all his self-command, cannot refrain from tears when the greybeard counsellor from Naples, one honest man saved in the Tempest, is seen to shed some : "Holy Gonzalo, honourable man, Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine, Sigismunda's maids, in Dryden's adaptation from Boccaccio, as, bewildered, they gazed on their weéping mistress, "by infection wept." In his adaptation from Chaucer, when the "stern Athenian prince" dooms Palamon and Arcite, "dumb sorrow seized the standersby: "The queen, above the rest, by nature good, Through the bright quire the infectious virtue ran." |