Easter-Day

( Christmas Eve and Easter Day : Florence, 1850.) The poem is a dialogue. The first speaker exclaims, “How very hard it is to be a Christian!” and says the difficulty does not so much consist in living up to the Christ-ideal,—hard enough, by the very terms, but hard to realise it with the moderate succe with which we realise the ordinary aims of life. Of course the aim is greater, consequently the required effort harder: may it not be God’s intention that the difficulty of being a Christian should seem unduly great? “Of course the chief difficulty is belief,” says the second speaker: “once thoroughly believe, the rest is simple. Prove to me that the least command of God is really and truly God’s command, and martyrdom itself is easy.” Joint the finite into the infinite life, and fix yourself safely inside, no doubt all external things you would safely despise. The second speaker says, “But faith may be God’s touchstone: God does not reward us with heaven because we see the sun shining, nor crown a man victor because he draws his breath duly. If you would have faith exist at all, there must perforce be some uncertainty with it. We love or hate people because either they do or do not believe in us. But the Creator’s reign, we are apt to think, should be based on exacter laws: we desire God should geometrise.” The first speaker says, “You would grow as a tree, stand as a rock, soar up like fire, be above faith. But creation groans, and out of its pains we have to make our music.” The second speaker replies, “I confe a scientific faith is absurd; the end which it was meant to serve would be lost if faith were certainty. We may grant that, but may we not require at least probability? We do not hang a curtain flat along a wall; we prefer it to hang in folds from point to point. We would not mind the gaps and intervals, if at point and point we could pin our life upon God. It would be no hardship then to renounce the world. There are men who live merely to collect beetles, giving up all the pleasures of life to make a completer collection than has been hitherto formed. Another set lives to collect snuff-boxes, or in learning to play che blindfold. It would not be hard to renounce the world if we had as much certainty as these hermits obtain in their pleasures to inspire them in renouncing the vanities of life. Of course, as some will say, there is evidence enough of a sort: as is your turn of mind, so is your search—you will find just what you look for, and so you get your Christian evidences in a sense; you may comfort yourself in having found a scrap of papyrus in a mummy-case which declares there really was a living Moses, and you may even get over the difficulty of Jonah and the whale by turning the whale into an island or a rock and set your faith to clap her wings and crow accordingly. You may do better: you may make the human heart the minister of truth, and prove by its wants and needs and hopes and fears how aptly the creeds meet these: “You wanted to believe; your pains Are crowned—you do!” If once in the believing mood, the renunciation of pleasures adds a spice to life. Do you say that the Eternal became incarnate— “Only to give our joys a zest, And prove our sorrows for the best?” The believing man is convinced that to be a Christian the world’s gain is to be accounted lo , and he asks the sceptic what he counsels in that case? The answer is, he would take the safe side—deny himself. The believer does not relish the idea of renouncing life for the sake of death. The collectors of curiosities at least had something for their pains, and the believer gets—well, hope! The sceptic claims that he lives in trusting ease. “Yes,” says the believer, “blind hopes wherewith to flavour life—that is all;” and he proceeds to relate an incident which happened in his life one Easter night, three years ago. He was cro ing the common near the chapel (spoken of in Christmas Eve ), when he fell to musing on what was his personal relationship to Christianity, how it would be with him were he to fall dead that moment—would he lie faithful or faithle ? It was always so with him from childhood; he always desired to know the worst of everything. “Common-sense” told him he had nothing to fear: if he were not a Christian, who was? All at once he had this vision. “Burn it!” was written in lines of fire acro the sky; the dome of heaven was one vast rack of ripples, infinite and black; the whole earth was lit with the flames of the Judgment Day. In a moment he realised that he stood before the seat of Judgment, choosing the world—his naked choice, with all the disguises of old and all his trifling with conscience stripped away. A Voice beside him spoke:— “Life is done, Time ends, Eternity’s begun, And thou art judged for evermore.” The Christ stood before him, told him that, as he had deliberately chosen the world, the finite life in opposition to God, it should be his:— “’Tis thine For ever—take it!” For the world he had lived, for the things of time and sense he had fought and sighed; the ideal life, the truth of God, the best and noblest things, had interested him noway. His sentence, his awful doom—which at first he was so far from realising that he was thrilled with pleasure at the words—was that he should take and for ever keep the partial beauty for which he had struggled. Wedded for ever to the gro material life, in that he imagined he saw his highest happine ! “Mine—the World?” he cried, in transport. “Yes,” said the awful Judge: “if you are satisfied with one rose, thrown to you over the Eden-barrier which excludes you from its glory—take it!” Our greatest punishment would be the gratification of our lowest aims. “All the world!” and the sense of infinite po e ion of all the beauty of earth, from fern leaf to Alpine heights, brought the warmth to the man’s heart and extinguished the terror inspired by the Judgment-seat of God. And the great Judge saw the thought, told him he was welcome so to rate the mere hangings of the vestibule of the Palace of the Supreme; and in the scorn of the awful gift the man read his error, and asked for Art in place of Nature. And that, too, was conceded: he should obtain the one form the sculptors laboured to abstract, the one face the painters tried to draw, the perfection in their soul which these only hinted at. But “very good” as God pronounced earth to be, earth can only serve earth’s ends; its completene transferred to a future state would be the dreariest deficiency. The good, tried once, were bad retried. Then the judged man, seeing the World and the World of Art insufficient to satisfy his new condition, cried in anguish, “Mind is best—I will seize mind—forego the rest!” And again it was answered to him that all the best of mind on earth—the intuition, the grasps of gue , the efforts of the finite to comprehend the infinite, the gleams of heaven which come to sting with hunger for the full light of God, the inspiration of poetry, the truth hidden in fable,—all these were God’s part, and in no wise to be considered as inherent to the mind of man. Losing God, he loses His inspirations; bereft of them in the world he had chosen, mind would not avail to light the cloud he had entered. And the bleeding spirit of the humbled man prays for love alone. And God said, “Is this thy final choice: Love is best? ’Tis somewhat late! Love was all about thee, curled in its mightine around all thou hadst to do with. Take the show of love for the name’s sake; but remember Who created thee to love, died for love of thee, and thou didst refuse to believe the story, on the ground that the love was too much.” Cowering deprecatingly, the man, who now saw the whole truth of God, cried, “Thou Love of God! Let me not know that all is lost! Let me go on hoping to reach one eve the Better Land!” And the man awoke, and rejoiced that he was not left apart in God’s contempt; thanking God that it is hard to be a Christian, and that he is not condemned to earth and ease for ever. Notes. —Stanza iv., “ In all Gods acts (as Plato cries He doth) He should geometrise ”: see Plutarch, Symposiacs , viii. 2. “Diogenianas began and said, ‘Let us admit Plato to the conference, and inquire upon what account he says—supposing it to be his sentence—that God always plays the geometer .’ I said: ‘This sentence was not plainly set down in any of his books; yet there are good arguments that it is his, and it is very much like his expre ion.’ Tyndares presently subjoined: ‘He praises geometry as a science that takes off men from sensible objects, and makes them apply themselves to the intelligible and Eternal Nature, the contemplation of which is the end of philosophy, as a view of the mysteries of initiation into holy rites.’” vi., “ My list of coleoptera ”: in entomology, an order of insects having four wings—the beetle tribe. “ A Grignon with the Regent’s crest ”: Grignon was a famous snuff-box maker, and his name was used for the fashionable boxes. vii., “ Jonah’s whale ”: The latest theory is that the great deity of Nineveh was a “fish-god.” Mr. Tylor considers the story to be a solar myth. Madame Blavatsky says ( Isis Unveiled , vol. ii., p. 258), “‘Big Fish’ is Cetus, the latinised form of Keto— κητω , and Keto is Dagon, Poseidon.” She suggests that Jonah simply went into the cell within the body of Dagon, the fish-god. Orpheus , the mythical poet, whose mother was the Muse Calliope. His song could move the rocks and tame wild beasts (see Eurydice to Orpheus ). Dionysius Zagrias. Zagreus was a name given to Dionysus by the Orphic poets. The conception of the Winter-Dionysus originated in Crete: sacrifice was offered to him at Delphi on the shortest day. This is quite evidently one of the myths of winter. xii., Æschylus : “ the giving men blind hopes .” In the Pro me the us Chained of Æschylus the chorus of ocean nymphs ask Pro me the us— “ Chor. But had th’ offence no further aggravation? Pro. I hid from men the foresight of their fate. Chor. What couldst thou find to remedy that ill? Pro. I sent blind Hope t’ inhabit in their hearts. Chor. A ble ing hast thou given to mortal man.” Morley’s Plays of Æschylus , p. 18. xiv., “ The kingcraft of the Lucomons ”: Heads of ancient Etruscan families, and combining both priest and patriarch. The kings were drawn from them. (Dr. Furnivall.) Fourier’s scheme : Fourierism was the system of Charles Fourier, a French man, who recommended the reorganisation of society into small communities living in common. xx., “ Flesh refine to nerve ”: this is a remarkable instance of the poet’s scientific apprehension of the proce of nerve formation five years before Herbert Spencer speculated on the evolution of the nervous system. (See my Browning’s Me age to his Time : “Browning as a Scientific Poet.”) xxvi., Buonarrotti == Michael Angelo.