Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  The old believing, not without some reason to be sure, that too much comfort is a sort of disease. That too much ease and safety can soften a man’s soul just as they weaken the strength of his limbs. I have seen some men whom comfort, idleness, and sloth hastened to corruption of both spirit and flesh.

  But I find small virtue in suffering. To bear it like a man, when there is no other choice, has some virtue. Suffering and pain you will know while you live. But to call these things the fountain of virtue is folly.

  I never knew a soldier worth his pay who would march if he could ride a horse or find place on a baggage wagon.

  I never knew a mariner worth stale beer who did not prefer calm anchorage in a safe harbor to the pitch and roll of a running sea.

  Desire for ease only is not so much effeminate in a man as it is a lunatic folly.

  I have felt too much pain and have known enough common misery to believe there is any virtue in going forth in search of more suffering than it is our lot to endure.…

  In my springtime the world was all on fire, burning with change. No spot of it untouched. All singed, crisped, scarred by flames.

  And not all changes were for the good of all. As the plowman makes wounds in the earth with his plow, behind his pair of straining oxen, so with change overturning, even for the sake of new planting, there comes injury and suffering.

  Men rendered masterless, jobless, even as others found themselves growing fat with prosperity. The number always growing, it seemed, of the dispossessed, the lost, the hopeless poor. And not only the old who had aged together with their crafts and ways, but the young and able as well. Their lives wasted. The wine of youth turned to vinegar before they had tasted it.

  What can be said in answer? Especially by those at whose gates these beggars and paupers, swallowing their pride to appease the wolves of hunger, flocked like shabby fowl, crowded like packs of mangy curs to wait for crumbs and leavings? Paupers and beggars and, with them, mingling like goats in a flock of dirty sheep, true rogues and rascals, confirmed vagabonds. Who prey upon them and each other, living or dead.

  God knows these ragged crows and scroyles are hard to love.

  God alone can love them all.

  Our Lord Jesus Christ once told a rich man, who came to ask him, that he must give all of his substance to the poor, becoming most poor himself, if he wished to do some work in his lifetime in order to attain eternal life. And nothing less is commanded by the New Law.

  But I do believe our Lord and Savior, being the one and only perfect Man, possessed also the perfection of human wit. Knowing full well it is far easier for a fisherman to leave his nets than for a rich man to leave his invisible, subtle nets of need.

  Measured against the law all have failed, differing only in degree. None can be blameless.

  Yet our work is in this world, no matter how the heart may long for home. And here and now we can offer only the inconsequential mitigation and extenuation (meaning less than nothing against the law) that we have not with malice and intent prospered upon the misery of others.

  By which I would claim, and nothing more than that, that by a general rule we did much more than we might have done. More by far than ever in earlier times. More indeed than we might have wished to or intended, had not the Queen herself prodded us toward the custom of charity.

  By her example, then, and to seek her favor, men dispensed with some of their largesse, if only in extravagant gestures to satisfy their self-importance.

  I make no brief, can argue no case for the sufferings of my times or these times when the poor suffer still. When you look about you, you see suffering and misery aplenty. You will meet your share of beggars and rogues. But, even as you credit the reports of your senses, do not forget to temper that news with the judgment of your imagination.

  Consider this, my son: That this imaginary English country yeoman, like his fellows of towns and cities, has in the time of one reign, come to live as well and better than many who lorded it over his grandfather.

  Let him now learn to look to his conscience and see to the needs of others, never forgetting that it was but a short time ago, as time of this world can be measured, when he would have been called most fortunate to keep himself clothed and fed from one day to the next.

  There is another accusation against us. It is said that we spent our wealth and blood in wars, that it required the new King to make peace. Of the second proposition, time to come will tell the story and judge the King’s wisdom. Of the first part, I cannot deny it. I would be the hypocrite to do so, having spent time in the wars myself and having counseled war more often than peace.

  I would remind you that while all of Europe raged and bled, Christians butchering Christians in the name of Christ, England declared itself for Christian peace at home. We were never once free of the overbrimming of that strife, it is true. And Englishmen, Catholic and Puritan alike, died here on account of faith. But still, somehow, we rode out that storm secure and dry while others drowned in their own blood.

  One reason was that there were men, and myself among them, who went and fought the wars. Peace at home was purchased by blood abroad.

  Many a good man never returned. And many returned with their wounds. And you shall see these to this day, scarred, maimed, half-crazed, in every town and village.

  When you see this, you will justly wonder how rulers could be so coldly cruel as to send men out to die or, worse, to live on like crippled dogs. You will judge, but try not to judge too harshly.

  The rulers, Queen, Council, lords and captains, all who led, suffered too. The Queen was in no way dissembling when she spoke to her last Parliament, saying: “To be a King and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it,”

  To rule well is to be wholly single-minded.

  I have always envied the man who found one single role and played it, clung and grew to it like a barnacle on a ship.

  Princes are given the greatest possibility to become the office they are invested with. But all who hold office and title, at some expense of liberty, gain another sort of liberty—to be what they seem. Simplified, they have occasion to do well or ill and to be judged by their actions. Purified, they have occasions to be happy.

  I might call Lord Burghley such a one, though I cannot know if he was ever happy. There is small happiness in the management of great affairs, though there may be pleasure in the craft of it, joy in enterprises which can be judged successful.

  Perhaps the purity I think of resides outside of all these affairs. Follows a mathematic law whereby as the worldly weight of the vocation diminishes, the possibility for happiness increases.

  Who knows?

  I know I have envied the plowman, the pikeman, the turnspit servant, envied their simplicity. But not wished that life for myself.

  I have envied craftsmen the joy of their skills—jeweler, gunsmith, woodworker, weaver, painter, sculptor, builder, miner, boatswain, charcoal burner, secretary, scribblers of stage plays, ballads and broadsides and fictions, tailor, fisherman, forester, gardner, wheelwright and cartwright and so forth and so on. Each with a craft worthy of a lifetime’s labor. And there are always some in these crafts who earn a share of the world’s rewards.

  But though I could admire their skill, and envy the virtue of all work well done, I was too impatient with myself and the world ever to imagine myself in the blue coat and flat cap of a prentice.

  I confess to some envy of the squire and his country life, tuned to the time and seasons of the English year.

  But even when that was possible, when your mother and I were settled, for good and all it seemed, at Sherbourne, I was too restless in spirit to keep still. I admired the pleasures of peace, but in truth I was not made for them. Peace was always tedious to me.

  I think in other circumstances I might have been a scholar. If you go to Oxford, which by affection I prefer to Cambridge, you will see that for the scholars, if not for the restless young
, there can be a wedding of tranquillity with adventure. For adventures of the mind are sometimes wider, farther, more lonely, and dangerous than all of Drake’s voyages.

  But most scholars prefer comfort to the risk of voyaging. Most seem content to gloss and emend, to write the commentary and chronicle of dead men’s adventures, and to look askance at the living.

  Though I have had the courage to stand and fight in a skirmish and to sail across a sea, I think I could not have learned the courage to contend with fierce ideas or against the powers of ancient authority.

  I felt then, too (and feel now), that so much of our learning was wasted, altogether inexpedient. Even what they called the new learning was dusty to me, divorced from the world beyond the walls of Oxford.

  It was a scheme of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and myself, once, to found a truly new kind of college in London, rebelliously devoted to practical affairs.

  Some of this has changed in my lifetime, but not so that you will notice it.

  I grant the universities a purpose I could not then concede. They are the preservers of other men’s fruits and flowers. This first of all. They change little as the world changes, and they move to a slower time.

  I lacked the courage and the patience to be a scholar, though I loved books and learning as much as many.

  Most of all I admired and envied the men of law from the Inns of Court. For there the best of the contemplative life of a scholar could be joined to action. And of all the great judges and lawyers of my time I hold Edward Coke most in admiration, if not esteem.

  But when I came to Middle Temple, it seemed too late and to no purpose to study the law.

  I could never have imagined, in wildest dream, I should one day have to contend with Coke.

  My son, I had no true craft, no honest vocation.

  Who lacks a true vocation is left to play the jack of all suits.

  I have possessed much wealth and lost much. And with wealth it has been my pleasure and privilege to hold, if not to keep, many beautiful things. Yet, except for pleasures I may have deprived others, I cannot mourn the loss. It was given to me. Time has reclaimed most of it. I owned many things, but I was never owned by them.

  For wealth is neither a degree nor a condition. It is a sense of plenty which can be found, in measure, between extremes. The beggar, who finds a purse of coins when he had none, is a wealthy man.

  Health is much the same, though more precious by far.

  An old man calls good health that day when his tribe of pains afflicts him least.

  But all this, a compound of tendentious worldly wisdom and the habit of aphorism, cannot tell you of the delight of being alive and close to the center of those times.

  Out of the mud and ashes and excrement of war, I walked, all unwitting, into a chamber where the walls and ceilings burned with beauty. Where the ripe-pear-colored bodies of gods and heroes (from the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, from ancient and imaginary England) floated weightless and timeless as if in adoration. Kings and noblemen stared down, forever brilliant in oil on cloth and wood; where each and every hanging, carpet, polished piece of joinery was at once a celebration of itself and the virtuosity of its maker; where gentlemen and ladies seemed flowers, angels clad in flowers, jewels for dew, as they moved in leisurely service of the Queen; who was moon and sun, source and goal of all brightness; where every object no matter what its purpose, no matter if it had no purpose save pleasure, was so wrought and shining, so ingenious, it seemed that nothing there could be real, that all was a dream.

  I woke from a nightmare into a new dream. When I looked into mirrors I saw the sad face of a stranger I need not believe in any more. He was not I, and I rejoiced to be free of him. To have died, as it were, and been raised again, bodiless, into a cunning paradise, fulfillment of lost dreams of conquest and the glow of gold dug from the tombs of ancient peoples. I was now a conquistador for certain. I walked light-footed, light-hearted, light-headed, fearless as Achilles. For had I not died, given up the ghost once and for all, to be so chosen? Now I was immortal.

  And so it seemed until time reclaimed us from dreaming, each alone, not with a weapon of gold or silver gilt, but with a scythe, rust-ridden, but sharp as a surgeon’s knife.…

  I have been indifferent to my own wealth, for it has never seemed my own. I have been careless when I should have been prudent. But since it has been so, I can affirm I loved and love still all that multiplicity of things which were contrived for use, for brave decoration, for comfort and solace.

  When I returned to London to live and make my way, fresh from my seasons of hell, I thought myself free-spirited, scornful of all the things of this world.

  I remember I went once to the Hall of Barber-Surgeons just to see their anatomy there; a skyleton they called it, a man’s bones hanging from a hook. I embraced and greeted this fellow as a brother. They thought I was drunk on sack.

  I imagined then that, together with the last dregs of my innocence, I had lost a large part of my wits and most of my soul. But I had kept five senses. And though I scorned the world as the easiest thing to lose, the world laid claims upon me again through beauty.

  I came to Court like a beggar on a feast day. Contemptuous, I was soon drunk on new wine. And I acknowledge that in that drunkenness, I might seem to have not only forgotten all I had painfully learned, but also to have lost sight of the truth that all things, and especially those most rare and beautiful, fall into ruin more swiftly than any man can believe.

  So much, the greater part, of the wonders of those times, being perilously fragile, has already been lost, has crumbled away, becoming now no more than the memory of something which may never have been. New wonders rise up to replace them.

  There lies the satiric touch to my chronicle, that I was permitted to live long enough to waken even from a dream of Paradise and find myself not immortal, but an old man.

  Now your days are like a new-printed book where you may idly read, perusing first pages and words, slow and careful, unfamiliar with language and grammar. Yet always with the itch of impatience; for the book, a folio, is large and heavy in your hands and you fear you shall never have time to finish or learn much of its contents.

  Yet should you, in good or ill fortune, live long, you will find an opposite condition to plague you. Old, and your days, each day a page, will flutter past, even in your hands will shuffle like cards, intermittent flashes, the pages blown away like fallen leaves. And like fallen leaves—once in spring as green as faith and signs of forever—your days and all the things you have seen and known and loved will not, mercifully, die until you die. They shall turn and flame yellow and red, splendid in their chiefest decay; then shrivel, wrinkle, turning brown as rust, fragile as ancient lace or parchment, and blow with each idle gust of wind, until you, rich or poor, in sickness or in health, will stand as empty-armed, empty-handed as a lone winter tree, naked to weather, joining your voice in the universal music of the trees, stiff groans and whispered unintelligible sighs.

  All things, even the stones of palaces, fall to age and weariness and ruin.

  Strip away all outward things and every man is the same raw creature, a beast as pale and dirty as a pulled root. A root full of hungers and fears, most hairy and hungry at the forked crotch where all separate lusts are joined together as in a wedding of rivers.

  I knew this by heart, being old before my time. But I was unprepared for what I had not yet imagined.

  Pleasure can undo a man as easy as suffering.

  Even good Spenser’s Red Cross Knight was powerfully dazzled by the Bower of Bliss.

  Once drunk with admiration for the marvelous, we cannot be ruled by reason.

  I have written of this in my History:

  “But what examples have ever moved us? what persuasions reformed us or what threatenings made us afraid? We behold other men’s tragedies played before us. We hear what is promised and threatened. But the world’s bright glory has put out the eyes of our minds. And these betraying l
ights (with which we only see) do neither look up toward termless joys nor down toward endless sorrows until we neither know nor can look for anything else at the world’s hands.”

  Yet I would not play a Puritan, then or now. It is true we must mourn our sinful, fallen estates. Without mourning we should be either too comfortable to leave this world when our time comes or too stiff-necked in suffering to yearn for a better condition.

  Yet we are also required, it is our bounden duty, to rejoice at the good news of our salvation. To make a joyful noise in the name of our Redeemer. Isaiah has written that the oil of joy is for mourning. When God Himself restored all things double to Job, that signified the restoration of joy in the Creation.

  God was not pleased by the sufferings of his servant Job, but rather by his faith.

  We have been given beauty, and the power to make beautiful things from what we have been given, not that we should love these things alone, but that we should love them as the signs and figures of imperishable Beauty.

  God has given us the sensual music of this world, not to enchant us, but that we may imagine the celestial harmony which is beyond the limits of mortal hearing.

  He has given us dancing that we may feel in our flesh a likeness to the dancing of heaven.

  A man is free to take these signs as he is able. He can imagine invisible harmony by the sensible concord of music. Or he can choose to be a deaf ass seated at a harp.

  He can dance in joy. Or he can dance the oldest dance of flesh—which is death.

  He can wear jewels for their cost and glitter. Or can wear them in full knowledge that they likewise betoken virtues: gold as the sign of wisdom; emerald for faith; sapphire shining for hope; and the red ruby is the color of charity; the topaz represents good works, etc., etc., etc.

  To Puritans and Jesuits I say, God makes his residence neither in Rome nor Geneva, but in the hearts of all living men, and shines in all things of the world and in the world.

  To condemn the beauty of the visible world is to deny the beauty of the invisible. Such denial is death.