CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.
SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE.
_Intendale chi può; che non è stretto Alcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole._
ORLANDO INNAMORATO.
Among the lost works of antiquity, there are few poems which I should so much rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. Landor has said of him that he and Pindar wrote nothing bad; that his characteristics were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an assiduous accuracy of description. “If I were to mention,” he adds “what I fancy would give an English reader the best idea of his manner, I should say, the book of Ruth.”
One species of composition wherein he excelled was that which the Dutch in their straight-forward way call _Lykzangen_ or _Lykdichten_, but for which we have no appropriate name,—poems in commemoration of the dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found in the poetry of all countries, and this might be expected, threnodial being as natural as amatory verse; and as the characteristic of the latter is passion with little reflection, that of the former is, as naturally, to be at the same time passionate and thoughtful.
Our own language was rich in such poems during the Elizabethan age, and that which followed it. Of foreign poets none has in this department exceeded Chiabrera.
There is a passage among the fragments of Simonides which is called by his old editor consolatory, _παρηγορικόν_: but were it not for the authority of Seneca, who undoubtedly was acquainted with the whole poem, I should not easily be persuaded that so thoughtful, so pensive, so moralizing a poet would, in any mood of mind have recommended such consolation:
_Τοῦ μὲν θανόντος οὐκ ἄν ἐνθυμοίμεθα, Εἴ τι φρονοῖμεν, πλεῖον ἡμέρας μιᾶς·_
let us not call to mind the dead, if we think of him at all, more than a single day. Indeed I am not certain from what Seneca says, whether the poet was speaking in his own, or in an assumed character, nor whether he spoke seriously or satirically; or I cannot but suspect that the passage would appear very differently, if we saw it in its place. Malherbe gives the same sort of advice in his consolation to M. du Périer upon the death of a daughter.
_Ne te lasse donc plus d'inutiles complaintes; Mais sage à l'avenir, Aime une ombre comme ombre, et des cendres éteintes Eteins le souvenir;_
such a feeling is much more in character with a Frenchman than with Simonides.
Seneca himself, Stoic though he was, gave no such advice, but accounted the remembrance of his departed friends among his solemn delights, not looking upon them as lost: “_mihi amicorum defunctorum cogitatio dulcis ac blanda est; habui enim illos, tanquam amissurus; amissi tanquam habeam._”
My venerable friend was not hardened by a profession, which has too often the effect of blunting the feelings, even if it does not harden the heart. His disposition and his happy education preserved him from that injury; and as his religion taught him that death was not in itself an evil,—that for him, and for those who believed with him, it had no sting,—the subject was as familiar to his meditations as to his professional practice. A speculation which Jeremy Taylor, without insisting on it, offers to the consideration of inquisitive and modest persons, appeared to him far more probable than the common opinion which Milton expresses when he says that the fruit of the Forbidden Tree brought death into the world. That, the Bishop argues, “which _would have been_, had there been no sin, and that which _remains_ when the sin or guiltiness is gone, is not properly the punishment of the sin. But dissolution of the soul and body should have been, if Adam had not sinned; for the world would have been too little to have entertained those myriads of men, which must, in all reason, have been born from that blessing of ‘Increase and multiply,’ which was given at the first creation: and to have confined mankind to the pleasures of this world, in case he had not fallen, would have been a punishment of his innocence: but however, it _might have been_, though God had not been angry, and _shall still be_, even when the sin is taken off. The proper consequent of this will be, that when the Apostle says ‘Death came in by Sin,’ and that ‘Death is the wages of Sin,’ he primarily and literally means the solemnities, and causes, and infelicities, and untimeliness of temporal death; and not merely the dissolution, which is directly no evil, but an inlet to a better state.”
As our friend agreed in this opinion with Bishop Taylor; and moreover as he read in Scriptures that Enoch and Elijah had been translated from this world without tasting of death; and as he deemed it probable at least, that St. John, the beloved disciple, had been favoured with a like exemption from the common lot, he thought that Asgill had been hardly dealt with in being expelled from Parliament for his “Argument,” that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life, revealed in the Scriptures, man might be translated from hence, without passing through death. The opinion Dr. Dove thought, might be enthusiastic, the reasoning wild, the conclusion untenable, and the manner of the book indecorous, or irreverent. But he had learnt that much, which appears irreverent, and in reality is so, has not been irreverently intended; and the opinion, although groundless, seemed to him any thing rather than profane.
But the exemptions which are recorded in the Bible could not, in his judgement be considered as showing what would have been the common lot if our first parents had preserved their obedience. This he opined would more probably have been euthanasy than translation; death, not preceded by infirmity and decay, but as welcome, and perhaps as voluntary as sleep.
Or possibly the transition from a corporeal to a spiritual,—or more accurately in our imperfect language,—from an earthly to a celestial state of being, might have been produced by some developement, some formal mutation as visible, (adverting to a favourite fancy of his own) as that which in the butterfly was made by the ancients their emblem of immortality. Bishop Van Mildert shews us upon scriptural authority that “the degree of perfection at which we may arrive has no definite limits, but is to go on increasing as long as this state of probation continues.” So in the paradisiacal, and possibly in the millennial state, he thought, that with such an intellectual and moral improvement, a corresponding organic evolution might keep pace; and that as the child expands into man, so man might mature into Angel.