Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/336

310 farthest consequence is not of a remoteness comparable to that of the first cause. This was probably preparing in the breast of some cave-dwelling ancestor, who thought his wickedness a fine thing, and cherished it; but the most immediate descendant of the modern misdoer knows that it is not a fine thing, and makes haste to put it away from him. Again the preparation is out of proportion to the thing done.

It was once thought (and no doubt still is thought by many serious people) that life should be a long preparation for death. The notion was much dwelt upon by the unlettered muse who inspired the epitaphs addressed to the rustic moralist. He was challenged to reflect upon the shortness of his span, and reminded that as he was now so the dead had been, and warned that he would soon be like them. The inference from the premises was unquestionable, and yet that the whole of life should be made a preparation for death seems in the light of later suns a monstrously disproportionate thing. Life is not so long as art, but it is pretty long in most cases; there are days of it, hours of it, that are apparently interminable; but death at the longest is very short. It would be very wasteful, therefore, to make life a preparation for death, and it must always have been so, unless the fact is that in spite of instruction, life was never made a preparation for death. We are always getting ready to live, to live wisely, to live rightly, to live cleanly like gentlemen, or at least decently; and we are not getting ready to die. Our notion of living is something very different from the actuality, at least as we see it in other people; and there are chances that, in our preparations for living ideally, we may spend the whole, or nearly the whole of life. This is to be avoided, if possible, though we do not mean that an ideal of life should not be cherished. But the preparation for the ideal life must not be suffered to consume almost the whole of the life that is not ideal. The best way would probably be to begin living ideally very early, and this is the course that we would urge upon the reader. We have never tried it ourselves, but we are convinced it is at any rate the only means of defeating the order of things against which we are protesting.

The like conviction will have grown upon such of our readers as have grown in years and the experience the years bring. These will join us in noting with amusement not unmixed with apprehension the long deliberation, if it is not rather hesitation, of young people in very vital matters. From our sad vantage we regard with pensive smiles their over-secure delays in making love, for instance. With what protracted preparation of the emotions do they approach that very brief business what doubts of themselves and of one another, what absurd scruples, what needless fears, what manifold perturbations of uncertain quality! Then suddenly, at last, the love is made, and over in an instant. Or, does not the youthful reader consent to this? Does he or she insist that when it is made it is only just begun? That it is the one earthly thing whose consequence is infinitely remoter than its cause, and prolongs itself through eternity? So, we must own, they have been taught by the poets and the romancers, who may possibly have as much right to their opinions as the sages and philosophers. There are certain eventualities which seem to contradict them; but we will not rashly side with these. You will allow that even the love which ends in marriage does not always end with it; but that there are now and then wedded pairs who keep on being lovers; and whose experience reverses the law by which the preparation for the thing exceeds in length of time the thing prepared for. They do not always strike the spectator as the wisest of their kind. A quiet acquiescence in the accomplished fact, an attitude of patience, a decent indifference, has been held to be rather more ideal than anything like an impassioned tenderness in even comparatively young married lovers. But we do not understand that the question here is a question of wisdom. It is a question of fact, which is a very different thing.

The longing of the heart is for a life of results. In all things it is not so much going to Europe as getting there, which we desire; and yet the accomplished fact is notoriously uninteresting. What we want is a swifter succession of eventuations, but we are fated to an existence in which they arrive slowly, and in a form