“A little
fire Burns up A great Deal
of Corn.”—Old proverb.
Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at
Fawley with a calm which was deeper in its gloom than
it had been before. The experiment of return
to the social world had failed. The resolutions
which had induced the experiment were finally renounced.
Five years nearer to death, and the last hope that
had flitted across the narrowing passage to the grave,
fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and
trodden out by his own foot.
It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect
his objects with posterity—to regard eminence
in the Present but as a beacon-height from which to
pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the
Past. All his early ambition, sacrificing pleasure
to toil, had placed its goal at a distance, remote
from the huzzas of bystanders; and Ambition halted
now, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line
would perish with himself—himself, who
had so vaunted its restoration in the land! His
genius was childless also—it would leave
behind it no offspring of the brain. By toil
he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved
a splendid reputation. But the reputation was
as perishable as the wealth. Let a half-century
pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to speak
of the successful lawyer the applauded orator, save
traditional anecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous
memoirs—perhaps, at most, quotations of
eloquent sentences lavished on forgotten cases and
obsolete debates—shreds and fragments of
a great intellect, which another half-century would
sink without a bubble into the depths of Time.
He had enacted no laws—he had administered
no state—he had composed no books.
Like the figure on a clock, which adorns the case
and has no connection with the movement, he, so prominent
an or nament to time, had no part in its works.
Removed, the eye would miss him for a while; but a
nation’s literature or history was the same,
whether with him or without. Some with a tithe
of his abilities have the luck to fasten their names
to things that endure; they have been responsible
for measures they did not not invent, and which, for
good or evil, influence long generations. They
have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse,
a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages,
as a shell that survives a deluge. But the orator,
whose effects are immediate—who enthralls
his audience in proportion as he nicks the hour—who,
were he speaking like Burke what, apart from the subject-matter,
closet students would praise, must, like Burke, thin
his audience, and exchange present oratorical success
for ultimate intellectual renown—a man,
in short, whose oratory is emphatically that of the
debater is, like an actor, rewarded with a loud
applause and a complete oblivion. Waife on the
village stage might win applause no less loud, followed
by oblivion not more complete.
