Chapter VII: Part 7

And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been—

_B._ “A king?

_A._ A _man_! what else,
King, emperor, tyrant, shah, would matter not.
He would have been—a name; such as of old
Grew into gods!

_B._ And so he died?

_A._ He died.”

Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;
Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan.”

Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, “amusing himself,” as the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense—with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. The “Spectator” could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s life. “One is so certain of the man’s having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it.” The man—a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the stanzas that are most to the purpose:—

“Once in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe’er thy lot be cast,
That man resembled thee.

...

“He suffered,—but his pangs are o’er;
Enjoy’d,—but his delights are fled;
Had friends,—his friends are now no more;
And foes,—his foes are dead.

...

“He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encounter’d all that troubles thee:
He was—whatever thou hast been;
He is—what thou shalt be.

...

“The annals of the human race,
Their ruins, since the world began,
Of him, afford no other trace
Than this,—THERE LIVED A MAN!”

There lived a man—lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured—enjoyed the common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. AND HE DIED. Old Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer:—

“Yit ither ne lyvede never man, he seyde,
In al this world, that some tyme he ne deyde.”

A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance, in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact, the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, “Martin est mort,”—Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and, farther on again, “Charles, maire du palais, est mort.” Martin was an unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that “tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces premiers chroniqueurs.” “We must all go, that is certain,” writes Mrs. Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, “and ’tis the only thing that _is_ certain. Καὶ ἀπεθανε ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend Hippocrates.” All the physician’s cases have the same terminal affix, AND HE DIED. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts it in his fine poem of “Saul,”

“But the licence of age has its limit; thou diest at last.”

We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is commemorated in Milman’s “Latin Christianity,” that the ardour of youth had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death. That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot, struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but working in and walking by faith, not sight.

Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been themselves immortal.

Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of preservation—by Gibbon, for example—of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this,—“that one thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as elsewhere.” Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all.”[16] Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature was the imagination of his own decease. And Commines relates how physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, “pour lui allonger la vie. Toutefois le tout n’y fasoit rien; et falloit qu’il passât par là où les autres ont passés.” And he died. All stories have the same ending.

“The Frenchman first in literary fame;
Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same,
With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied,
Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily—and died.”

That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom “one fine line,” Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” tells his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton’s critic, bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s utterance:—

“O! mortal folke, you may beholde and see
Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight.
The end of joye and prosperitie
Is death at last thorough his course and might.
After the day there cometh the dark night,
For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to evensong—”

“Ringeth,” says Mrs. Browning, “in our ear with a soft and solemn music, to which the soul is prodigal of echoes.”

What—asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations, discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone, of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many; but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,—and these are of them in the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out generation after generation of civic worthies: “So with the tomb of the old Master of the Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked out.” To quote Chaucer again:

“That is to seyn, in youthe or elles in age,
He moot ben deed, the kyng as schal a page.”

Cranmer’s transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the end—the strain subsiding into a minor key—by the unwelcome but inevitable reflection, “But she must die.” So muses and moralises Talbot again, in another of the historical plays:

“But kings and mightiest potentates must die;
For that’s the end of human misery.”

And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is nothing left him but his body’s length, exclaims, as one that at last feels it feelingly,

“Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”

And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork,

“Even so must I run on, and even so stop.”

In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian’s trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when _he_ thus addresses the frivolous fair of his day: “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most High.... But, O gods of flesh and blood, O gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall fall to the ground, _veruntamen sicut homines moriemini_.” This is in Tertullian’s description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty. Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir Joshua Reynolds’s picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached, _Et in Arcadiâ ego_. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: “_He_ saw it yesterday, and said at once, ‘Oh, there is a tombstone in the background. Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’” The thought is said to have been borrowed from Poussin—where some gay revellers stumble over a death’s head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ _ego_.

Memorable at Saladin’s banquet to Richard and his peers—ever memorable among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, “the banner of Death, with this impressive inscription—‘Saladin, King of Kings—Saladin, Victor of Victors—Saladin must Die.’”

Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the British monarch, to whom he is addressing his _carmen seculare_ for the year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh:

“But a relentless destiny
Urges all that e’er was born:
Snatch’d from her arms, Britannia once must mourn
The demi-god; the earthly half must die.”

For as Master Matthew puts it in another ode:—

“Alike must every state and every age
Sustain the universal tyrant’s rage;
For neither William’s power nor Mary’s charms
Could, or repel, or pacify his arms.
...
Wisdom and eloquence in vain would plead
One moment’s respite for the learned head:
Judges of writings and of men have died
(Mæcenas, Sackville, Socrates, and Hyde);
And in their various turns their sons must tread
Those gloomy journeys which their sires have led.

“The ancient sage, who did so long maintain
That bodies die, but souls return again,
With all the births and deaths he had in store
Went out Pythagoras, and came no more.
And modern Asgill,[17] whose capricious thought
Is yet with stores of wilder notions fraught,
Too soon convinced, shall yield that fleeting breath
Which played so idly with the darts of death.”

The truism appears to have been a favourite theme with Prior, who expatiates upon it in a variety of keys. Here is one other specimen from his stores, in octosyllabic metre:—

“All must obey the general doom,
Down from Alcides to Tom Thumb.
Grim Pluto will not be withstood
By force or craft. Tall Robin Hood,
As well as Little John, is dead—
(You see how deeply I am read).”

Does not Cervantes begin the last chapter of his great work with the reflection that, as all human things, especially the lives of men, are transitory, ever advancing to their decline and final termination, so “Don Quixote was favoured by no privilege of exemption from the common fate,” for the period of his dissolution came when he least thought of it—and he died.

Death’s final conquest is the subject of a fine poem of James Shirley’s; the piece by which he is, in every sense, best remembered. How death lays his icy hands on kings, is there told with pitiless candour; and the merry monarch, _par excellence_, Charles the Second, is said to have greatly admired the poetry, if not the candour, of Shirley’s strain. Early or late, all stoop to fate; that is the trite topic. But the moral is noble, and nobly expressed. The poet reminds laurelled victors that the garlands are withering on their brow, and that soon upon death’s purple altar shall the “victor victim” bleed:—

“All heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

The first verse only of George Herbert’s “Virtue” is familiar to men; all four have a music and a meaning of their own:—

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

“Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

“Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.”

_AN ULTRA-PROTESTER._

ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 33-35, 69-75.

To have written it ultra-Protestant, would mislead into an expectation of polemical matter, offensive to Orangeism, and entirely alien from the purpose. For who is the hyper-protester, not to write it ultra-Protestant, of whom we speak? None other than St. Peter. Nominally the first Pope. But let that pass. Whether technically an ultra-Protestant or not,—let that pass too. It is with his surplusage of protestations, vehemently asserted, and anon ignominiously ignored, that we are at present concerned. Though all men, all, should be offended because of Christ, should stumble and fall because of Him, yet would he never be offended, never stumble, never lose his footing, firm as a rock, firm as his own name, Peter, Cephas; a rock on which the Church was to be built. The protest of the apostle won no meed of thanks and assurance of conviction from his Lord. He who needed not that any should testify of man, for He knew what was in man—and knew what was wanting in _this_ man,—waved aside, as absolutely worthless, the perfervid protestations of the impulsive son of Jonas. Thrice should Peter deny Him before dawn of another day. Deny Him? Had it come to that? The protester must become ultra in his protests. “Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee!” It would be beside the mark here to take into account the other _voces et præterea nihil_, echoing the same thing—protested notes at the best—for likewise also said all the disciples. Peter is their representative man, and ours.

Gertrude’s comment in “Hamlet,” on the accumulated asseverations of the stage-queen, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” has passed into a proverb. “The more vehemently they assert, the less credit they obtain for sincerity,” observes Hartley Coleridge, of some examples of impulsive womankind. Racine’s Bérénice turns the tables on Titus in this regard, when she tells him,

“Hé quoi! vous me jurez une éternelle ardeur,
Et vous me la jurez avec cette froideur!
Pourquoi même du ciel attester la puissance?
Faut-il par des serments vaincre ma défiance?
Mon cœur ne prétend point, seigneur, vous démentir;
Et je vous en croirai sur un simple soupir.”

How fulsome and hollow, exclaims Marcus Antoninus, does that man look who cries, “I’m resolved to deal clearly with you.” Hark you, friend, the philosophic emperor addresses him, “what need of all this flourish? let your actions speak.” Mr. Disraeli, in his earliest book, has an eloquent paragraph on “that eagerness of protestation which,” in the man charged with criminality, “is a sure sign of crime.” There is as much of overacting one’s part on the great stage of life, as on the mimic boards; and that with graver issues and a drearier fate.

* * * * *

When the subtle and ambitious John of Gischala, pursuing his own dark course, as it is traced in the “History of the Jews,” joined outwardly the party of Ananus, and was active beyond others in council and camp, he yet kept up a secret correspondence with the Zealots, to whom he betrayed all the movements of the assailants. “To conceal this secret he redoubled his assiduities, and became so extravagant in his protestations of fidelity to Ananus and his party, that he completely over-acted his part, and incurred suspicion.” His intended dupes began gradually, and none too soon, to look with a jealous eye on their too obsequious, most obedient, and most devoted servant.

Describing the ten dreary years during which (A.D. 1198-1208), with but short intervals of truce, Germany was abandoned to all the horrors of civil war, Dean Milman observes that “the repeated protestations” of Pope Innocent III., that _he_ was not the cause of these fatal discords, betray the fact that he was accused of the guilt, and that he had to wrestle with his own conscience to acquit himself of the charge. Sir Thomas Overbury suggestively avers that

“He that says oft that he is not in love,
By repetition doth himself disprove.”

Hawthorne remarks that Italian asseverations of any questionable fact, though uttered with rare earnestness of manner, never vouch for themselves as coming from any depth, like roots drawn out of the substance of the soul, with some of the soil clinging to them. Their energy expends itself in exclamation. The vaulting ambition of their hyperboles overleaps itself, and falls on the other side. Swift refers to oaths in the mouth of a gamester, as ever most used as their truth is most questioned.

“’Tis not the many oaths that make the truth,
But the plain single vow, that is vowed true,”

says Shakspeare’s Diana of Florence. And though from Shakspeare to Wolcot is a descent indeed, Peter Pindar is for once quotable when he writes,

“Truth needs not, John, the eloquence of oaths,
Not more so than a decent suit of clothes
Requires of broad gold lace the expensive glare,
That makes the linsey-woolsey million stare;
Besides, a proverb, suited to my wish,
Declares that swearing never catches fish.”

That scapegrace guardian of George Canning’s boyhood, Mr. Reddish, is said to have been significantly fond, on quite trivial occasions, of making affidavits,—“the refuge of base and vulgar minds,” Robert Bell calls them,—as if he, Reddish, felt that his word was not to be believed. Cowper is caustic in his application of St. Paul’s statement, that oaths terminate all strife, for “some men have surely then a peaceful life!” he infers, in lines that go on to tell how

“Asseveration blustering in your face
Makes contradiction such a hopeless case;
In every tale they tell, or false or true,
Well-known, or such as no man ever knew,
They fix attention, heedless of your pain,
With oaths like rivets forced into the brain;
And e’en when sober truth prevails throughout,
They swear it, till affirmance breeds a doubt.”

The imprecation of Corneille’s Dorante, _Que le foudre à vos yeux m’écrase si je mens!_ only evokes from Clarice the contemptuous rebuff, _Un menteur_ [which, and more than which, emphatically, Dorante is, for he is _Le Menteur_,] _est toujours prodigue de serments_. So again Racine’s Theseus: _Toujours les scélérats ont recours au parjure_,—when Hippolytus begins to call heaven, and earth, and universal nature to witness, etc. So, too, Chamont, in Otway’s tragedy: “When a man talks of love, with caution trust him; but if he swears, he’ll certainly deceive thee.” Indeed, as Owen Feltham has it, wherever there is too much profession, there is cause for suspicion. “Reality cares not to be tricked out with too taking an outside; and deceit, when she intends to cozen, studies disguise. Least of all should we be taken with swearing asseverations. Truth needs not the varnish of an oath to make her plainness credited.” Fielding’s Pettifogger, on a certain occasion, calling to mind that he had not been sworn, as he usually was, before he gave his evidence, “now bound what he had declared with so many oaths and imprecations, that the landlady’s ears were shocked, and she put a stop to his swearing, by assuring him of her belief,” inconsiderately enough, as the manner of the man might have proved. Scott’s Jorworth, when heaping asseveration on asseveration, is cut short by the honest Fleming he is striving to mislead: “Stop, good Jorworth; thou heapest thine oaths too thickly on each other, for me to value them to the right estimate; that which is so lightly pledged, is sometimes thought not worth redeeming.” So again Monkbarns tells the gaberlunzie, after hearing his story of the adept, “I am strongly disposed to believe that you have spoken the truth, the rather, that you have not made any of those obtestations of the superior powers, which I observe you and your comrades always make use of when you mean to deceive folks.” The author of “London Labour and the London Poor,” recounts the redundance of “Glory be to God! it’s the thruth I’m telling of you, sir,” etc., etc.; which he had to hear from Irish mendicity, or mendacity, or both. “The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting,” the Cicero of Jonson’s “Catiline” says.

Take up any ordinary history, and you are but too sure to come across examples enough and to spare, of people who did protest too much, and did not keep their word. Glance at Alison’s big book, and on one page you read, of Napper Tandy, for instance, “But the conduct of this leader was far from keeping pace with these vehement protestations; for no sooner did he hear of the reverse sustained by the French corps which had landed in Killala Bay, than he re-embarked on board the French brig _Anacreon_, and got safe across the channel.” On another we have Tippoo Saib striving to disarm the suspicions of the British Government by “professions of eternal gratitude and attachment,” and considerably overacting his part. On another we have Napoleon bidding Marmont “spare no protestations of assistance to Turkey;” and himself assuring the Turkish ambassador that, “his right hand was not more inseparable from his left, than the Sultan Selim should ever be to him;” in consequence of which protestations, Turkey threw herself into the breach against both Russia and England, only to find the imperial ultra-protester, within one little month from the protestations, arranging for the immediate partition, with the Czar, of the Turkish dominions. Look, again, at Benjamin Constant, launching his vehement philippic against Napoleon, in the _Journal des Débats_ on the eve of the Emperor’s return from Elba, and declaring, “Never will I crawl, like a base deserter from power to power. Under Louis XVIII. we enjoy a representative government. Under Bonaparte we endured a government of Mamelukes. He is an Attila, a Gengis Khan!” And then we read how, a few days after this fulmination, Constant, the _in_constant, became a councillor of state under this Attila, an active supporter of this Gengis Khan. Another ground of indictment against Napoleon is found by Alison in the eagerness of his protestations to Russia, that he had no way connived at the election of Bernadotte to the throne of Sweden, when next vacant. “The extreme anxiety which Napoleon evinced for some time afterwards to convince the court of St. Petersburg that he had taken no concern in this election, only renders it the more probable that he was in reality at the bottom of the transaction.” The asseverations commenced by the younger Pennyboy, in Jonson’s “Staple of News,” are declined and dismissed, by the elder, who knows their worth, with this summary and suggestive caution:

“No vows, no promises; too much protestation
Makes that suspected oft, we would persuade.”

_FLEETING SHADOWS._

JOB xiv. 2.

As man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; as he is said to come forth like a flower, only to be cut down, so is it further said of him, that “he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” His days are like a shadow that declineth. He himself is gone as a shadow that fleeteth away. For man is vanity, his days are as a shadow, saith the psalmist. And the preacher, whose text is vanity of vanities, all is vanity, finds vexation of spirit in meditations on man, all the days of whose vain life he spendeth as a shadow.

_What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!_ The exclamation was that of a great statesman, amid the excitement and the contests of public life, when there reached him news of the sudden death of a fellow-candidate and colleague. Shadow-hunted shadows. The pursued and the pursuers—the game and the sportsmen—shadows all. Burke’s exclamation was often in the mind of the late Sir James Graham, and, towards the close of his life, not unfrequently on his lips.

“Ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο, πλὴν
Εἰδωλ’, ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν, ἤ κούφην ΣΚΙΑΝ.”

_O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane!_ Men were ever of old, and they are found to be now, the willing victims of illusion in all stages of life: children, youths, adults, and old men, all, as Emerson puts it, are led by one bauble or another. “There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe.” For instance, the intellectual man requires a fine bait, while the sots are easily amused. “But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.” Shadows before, and shadows behind, and all fleeting. False glozing pleasures, to adopt George Herbert’s diction, are the shadowy lure,

... “casks of happiness,
Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroider’d lies, nothing between two dishes,—
These are the pleasures here.”

Marcus Antoninus, in his “Meditations,” harps on the note of shadow-hunting or shadow-hunted shadows. You will soon be reduced to ashes and a skeleton, he keeps telling himself; and even if you leave a name,—what is a name? what is in a name? _Vox et præterea nihil._ The shadows you, a shade, pursue, are miserably shadowy. The prizes of life are, he says, so paltry, that to scuffle for them is ridiculous, and puts him in mind of a set of puppies snarling for a bone, or of the contests of children for a toy. Wherever he looks, the wide world over, and in whatever age of its history, he sees abundance of people very busy, and big with their projects, who presently drop off, and moulder to dust and ashes. The freshest laurels wither apace, and the echoes of Fame are soon silenced. The “insect youth” that people the air and make it murmurous with busy life,—is not their close resemblance to the children of men one of poetry’s common-places?

“To Contemplation’s sober eye,
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.

“Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours drest;
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.”

Having asked to be told her fortune by the Wise Wight of Mucklestane Moor, Miss Ildeston, in Scott’s story, is told by the cynical recluse, that it is a simple one; an endless chase through life after follies not worth catching, and when caught, successively thrown away—a chase, pursued from the days of tottering infancy to those of old age upon his crutches. “Toys and merry-making in childhood—love and its absurdities in youth—spadille and basto in age, shall succeed each other as objects of pursuit: flowers and butterflies in spring,—butterflies and thistledown in summer,—withered leaves in autumn and winter—all pursued, all caught, all flung aside.” _Que vont elles faire de si grand matin_, Cleopas asks his demon-guide, concerning _ces personnes_ whose early rising and eager bustle have caught and fixed his attention. “Ce que vous souhaitez de savoir, reprit le Démon, est une chose digne d’être observée. Vous allez voir un tableau des soins, des mouvements, des peines que les pauvres mortels se donnent pendant cette vie, pour remplir, le plus agréablement qu’il leur est possible, ce petit éspace qui est entre leur naissance et leur mort.” _Telle est la vie_, as most of us live it.

“Dream after dream ensues,
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed,”

writes William Cowper. Not at all in the same measure or manner, but pretty much to the same effect, writes the picturesque poet of Bells and Pomegranates:

“It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again,—
So the chase take up one’s life, that’s all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope drops to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark
I shape me—ever removed.”

There is much that is suggestive in the Abbé Gerbet’s discoursings in the Catacombs at Rome. “Ce dernier calque de l’homme,” he says, in what has been called a commentary on Bossuet’s _mot_, that the corpse of a man becomes a _je ne sais quoi_, for which there is no name in any language—“cette forme si vague, si effacée, à peine empreinte sur une poussière à peu près impalpable, volatile, presque transparente, d’un blanc mat et incertain, est ce qui donne le mieux quelque idée de ce que les anciens appelaient une _ombre_. Cette forme est plus frêle que l’aile d’un papillon, plus prompte à s’evanouir que la goutte de rosée suspendue à un brin d’herbe au soleil; un peu d’air agité par votre main, un souffle, un son deviennent ici des agents puissants qui peuvent anéantir en une seconde ce que dix-sept siècles, peut-être, de destruction ont épargné. Voyez,—vous venez de respirer, et la forme a disparu. Voilà la fin de l’histoire de l’homme en ce monde.” What shadows we are! Ashes to ashes ends, even in Westminster Abbey, man’s noblest story, and dust to dust concludes his noblest song.

“O death all-eloquent! you only prove
What dust we doat on, when ’tis man we love.”

Hawthorne’s Gervayse Hastings is a type and symbol, when he describes himself as depressed by a haunting perception of unreality; as one to whom all things, all persons, are like shadows flickering on the wall. “Neither have I myself any real existence,” he says, “but am a shadow like the rest.” And the end—not to say the moral—of his story may serve to remind us of the Abbé Gerbet’s words. Gervayse Hastings is seated with other guests at a feast—of very odd fellows—over whom is suspended the skeleton of the oddest of all, the founder of the feast. As the speaker ceased his confession of shadowy experiences, “it so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry bones fell together in a heap.... The attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived on turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on the wall.” The woe of this old man was, that to him the world to come was all shadow too.

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck expresses her belief that in youth and middle age there is often a real conviction of the transitory nature of the most established temporal things, but that in old age it is not merely a conviction, but a vivid palpable reality, and that the eternal mountains do then indeed appear near at hand; while all the campaign around seems faded into shadowy distance; and she inclines to say, like the monk, who for forty years had exhibited the picture of the Last Supper, that he had seen so many pass away, that himself and those he spoke to seemed a shadow, while the blessed institution of the Holy Supper stood before him alone a reality. But many are the young hearts that feel as Margaret Hale felt, in Mrs. Gaskell’s story, when to her life seemed a vain show, so unsubstantial, and flickering, and fleeting, and when “it was as if from some aërial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!’”

_Le tems même sera detruit_, as La Bruyère says: “ce n’est qu’un point dans les espaces immenses de l’éternité, et il sera effacé. Il y a de légères et frivoles circonstances du tems, qui ne sont pas stables, qui passent, et que j’appelle des modes, la grandeur, la faveur, les richesses, la puissance, l’autorité, l’indépendance, le plaisir, les joies, la superfluité. Que deviendront ces modes, quand le tems même aura disparu? La vertu seule, si peu à la mode, va au-delà des tems.”

“Between two worlds life hovers like a star
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge:
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of empire heave but like some passing waves.”

So writes Byron in the poem that contains perhaps his grandest and most powerful strains, interspersed among his wittiest and most wicked ones. If ever man was haunted by the conviction that we are shadows all, and that shadows are our pursuit, it was he. But with him there was nothing of a “saving faith” in this. As Shakspeare’s Prince of Arragon reads on the scroll at Belmont,

“Some there be that shadows kiss;
Such have but a shadow’s bliss;”

and of such was Byron. And he knew it. Not more alive to this philosophy was Cowper himself, when he pictured men

“For threescore years employed with ceaseless care
In catching smoke and feeding upon air;”

or when he pointed with this moral his lines on the felled poplars that once lent him a shade, beneath which he had so often been charmed by the blackbird’s sweet flowing ditty:

“’Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.”

One great amusement of the household in the Castle of Indolence, on the testimony of its poet-laureate, was,

“In a huge crystal magic globe to spy,
Still as you turned it, all things that do pass
Upon this ant-hill earth; where constantly
Of idly busy men the restless fry
Run bustling to and fro with foolish haste,
In search of pleasures vain that from them fly,
Or which, obtained, the caitiffs do not taste.”

If, with Churchill, we stand as

“Spectators only on this bustling stage,
We see what vain designs mankind engage:
Vice after vice with ardour they pursue,
And one old folly brings forth twenty new....
Squirrels for nuts contend, and, wrong or right,
For the world’s empire, kings, ambitious, fight.
What odds?—to us ’tis all the selfsame thing,
A nut, a world, a squirrel, and a king.”

In other verses, and another measure, the same poet justifies his use of the expression “whatever shadows we pursue,” by the interpolated comment,

“For our pursuits, be what they will,
Are little more than shadows still;
Too swift they fly, too swift and strong,
For man to catch or hold them long.”

Of world-wide application is what Bernardin de Saint-Pierre said of himself, by way of private interpretation: “Toutes mes idées ne sont que des ombres de la nature, recueillies par une autre ombre.” Goldsmith was not altogether in sport when he made Croaker in the comedy pronounce life to be, at the greatest and best, but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over; while Honeywood assents—Good-natured Man that he is—with a ready “Very true, sir; nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence, but the folly of our pursuits.” For Goldsmith was in sad earnest when he wrote of himself as one

“Impelled with steps unceasing to pursue
Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view
That like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies.”

Shadow-hunted shadows is the very text for Mr. Carlyle. World’s memory is very whimsical now and then, he says, in recording the forgotten exploits of Johann, King of Bohemia, “all which have proved voiceless in the World’s memory; while the casual Shadow of a Feather he once more has proved vocal there.” And a whole chapter is devoted to, and entitled, a Kaiser hunting Shadows,—Kaiser Karl with his Pragmatic Sanction to wit, and similar projects, aims, or hobbies, more or less shadowy and unsubstantial, all. “There was another vast Shadow, or confused high-piled continent of shadows, to which our poor Kaiser held with his customary tenacity. To procure adherences and assurances to this dear Pragmatic Sanction, was even more than the shadow of the Spanish crown,” the one grand business of his life henceforth. “Shadow of Pragmatic Sanction, shadow of the Spanish crown,—it was such shadow-huntings of the Kaiser in Vienna” that thwarted the Prussian Double-marriage. Another object which Kaiser Karl pursued with some diligence, and which “likewise proved a shadow,” was his Ostend East India Company, which gave much disturbance to mankind. “This was the third grand shadow which the Kaiser chased, shaking all the world, poor crank world, as he strode after it.” Foiled in this, as in another and another chase, no wonder he grew more and more saturnine, and “addicted to solid taciturn field-sports. His Political ‘Perforce Hunt (_Parforce Jagd_),’ with so many two-footed terriers, and legationary beagles, distressing all the world by their baying and their burrowing, had proved to be of Shadows; and melted into thin air, to a very singular degree!” Many chapters later Mr. Carlyle recurs to his picture of the “Kaiser in his Shadow-hunt, coursing the Pragmatic Sanction chiefly, as he has done these twenty years past”—and so begins a chapter entitled, by a mixed metaphor, “Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt has caught Fire”—by contact, namely, with inflammable Poland. And a subsequent chapter details the damages the poor Kaiser had to pay for meddling in Polish elections,—“for galloping thither in chase of Shadows.... This may be considered as the consummation of the Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt; or at least its igniting and exploding point.... Shadow-hunt is now all gone to Pragmatic Sanction, as it were: that is now the one thing left in Nature for a Kaiser; and that he will love, and chase, as the summary of all things.” From this point we see him go steadily down, and at a rapid rate,—getting into disastrous Turkish wars, “with as little preparation for War or Fact as a life-long Hunt of _Shadows_ presupposes.”

Or let us take our stand, with the same philosopher, in that _Œil-de-Bœuf_, in the Versailles Palace Gallery—through which what figures have passed, and vanished! “Figures? Men? They are fast-fleeting Shadows; fast chasing each other: it is not a Palace, but a Caravansera.”

Macaulay has his Sermon in a Churchyard. To that spot the homilist invites all and sundry, and he takes his standpoint for his text. Come to this school of his, he bids us, with the promise that there we shall learn, “in one short hour of placid thought, a stoicism more deep, more stern, than ever Zeno’s porch hath taught:”

“The plots and feats of those that press
To seize on titles, wealth, or power,
Shall seem to thee a game of chess,
Devised to pass a tedious hour.
What matters it to him who fights
For shows of unsubstantial good,
Whether his kings, and queens, and knights,
Be things of flesh, or things of wood?

“We check and take, exult, and fret;
Our plans extend, our passions rise,
Till in our ardour we forget
How worthless is the victor’s prize.
Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night:
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we play the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?”

This may remind us of Mrs. Battle’s apology for whist, or of the concluding sentence in a characteristic confession by Benjamin Constant—who, by the way, had said of himself in a previous letter, _Je passerai comme une OMBRE sur la terre entre le malheur et l’ennui_—he records his _sentiment profond et_ (like his name) _constant_ of the shortness of life—a sentiment, he says, so deep and so constant that it makes the pen or the book drop from his hand whenever he takes to study: “Nous n’avons pas plus de motifs pour acquérir de la gloire, pour conquérir un empire ou pour faire un bon livre, que n’en avons pour faire une promenade ou une partie de whist.” Even so utterly different a man in creed and character as Joseph de Maistre could exclaim, “Ah! le vilain monde! j’ai toujours dit qu’il ne pourrait aller si nous avions le sens commun.... C’est nôtre folie qui fait tout aller.” Else when we see—especially when death brings home to us, strikes home to us—what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue, “en vérité chacun se coucherait et daignerait à peine s’habiller.” _N’importe! tout marche et c’est assez._ And readers of M. de Tocqueville’s letters will remember how often that philosophic writer confides to his correspondents his conviction that there is no one thing in the world capable of fixing and satisfying him. He had attained a success unhoped for at the beginning of his career, but was far from happy. Often, in imagination, he would fancy himself at the summit of human greatness; and when there, the conviction would force itself irrepressibly upon him, that the same painful sensations would follow him to that sublime altitude.

Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? muses the master showman of Vanity Fair. Failing? Where is the great harm? “Psha! These things appear as nought, when Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them!”

“Dust are our frames; and, gilded dust, our pride
Looks only for a moment whole and sound;
Like that long-buried body of the king,
Found lying with his urns and ornaments,
Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,
Slipt into ashes and was found no more.”

The professed cynic, remarks an essayist on the theme of Occasional Cynicism, has reached the delightful conclusion that “the whole thing,” by which he means life and all its interests, is a sheer mistake and piece of confusion. And as it presents itself to the grander and loftier type of mind, this difficulty is held by the same writer to be the “starting-point of all systems of religion and philosophy, of which it is the object to show either that aims exist before men’s eyes that are solid realities worth pursuing, and not mere shadows, or else that even shadows are better worth pursuing in some one way than in all others.”

Jeffrey’s earlier letters abound in almost cynical reflections on the folly of ambition and the “ridiculous self-importance” implied in “heroic toils.” The whole game of life seemed to him a little childish, “and the puppets that strut and look lofty very nearly as ridiculous as those that value themselves on their airs and graces—poor little bits of rattling timber—to be jostled in a bag as soon as the curtain drops.” “God help us! it is a foolish little thing this human life at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions,” etc. We are, as a modern poet of name and promise puts it, for ever at hide-and-seek with our souls:

... “Not in Hades alone
Doth Sisyphus roll, ever frustrate, the stone,
Do the Danaïds ply, ever vainly, the sieve.
Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give.”

When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable, exclaims David Hume, seem all our pursuits of happiness! And even if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, he goes on to say, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects, when we consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by which laws and learning, books and governments, are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter. If such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions, does it not, asks the essayist, thereby counterwork the artifice of nature, by which we are “happily deceived into an opinion that human life is of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us from the paths of action and virtue into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure?” The Chinese have been pointed to, by a moral philosopher, to point his moral, which is, the desolating tendency of secularism—they having learnt practically, as well as theoretically, to think of themselves as mere transitory beings, who have no future life to expect, and no present Providence to reverence or fear; and the result he takes to be, that they are the meanest, the most deceitful, and one of the most vicious nations in the world—a people who literally sit in darkness, and whose lives are passed in the shadow of death. “In all the world there is no more terrible or instructive example of the practical results of looking upon men as mere passing shadows, who have no superior and no hereafter.” Once succeed, this writer argues, in persuading men that they are mere passing phenomena, possessing no more distinctive qualities than the successive waves of the sea, and the consequence is inevitable. “They will cease—gradually, imperceptibly, and with all sorts of moral, and perhaps religious, reflections on their lips—to care for what is great, permanent, and noble, and they will become, in the fullest sense of the words, beasts that perish.”

Many men, says Archdeacon Hare, spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. And one of his companion guessers at truth remarks, that instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

If a man be a reality, says John Sterling, no empty vision in the dreaming soul of nature, but inwardly substantial and personal, that which he most earnestly desires, which best satisfies his whole being, must be real too. And here is a parallel passage from a later writer:

“Yes, this life is the war of the False and the True,
Yet this life is a truth, though so complex to view
That its latent veracity few of us find....
Ay, the world but a frivolous phantasm seems,
And mankind in the mass but as motes in sunbeams;
But when Fate, from the midst of this frivolous nature,
Selects for her purpose some frail human creature,
And the Angel of Sorrow, outstretching a wan
Forefinger to mark him, strikes down from the man
The false life that hid him, the man’s self appears
A solemn reality: Him the dread spheres
Of heaven and hell with their forces dispute,
And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute,
Light scoffer, vain trifler! Through all thou discernest
A Greater than thou is at work, and in earnest;
And he who dares trifle with man, trifles too
With man’s awful Maker.”...

_HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT._

GENESIS xi. 28.

There is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces, in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of Abraham,—that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.”

It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order, when we see parents performing the last office to their children: we feel it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should perform these sad duties for children. “Haran should have followed Terah, and not Terah Haran.”

A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of a father’s love, goes on to say of the tie, the _lien_, which unites devoted parent to endeared child, “Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant.” A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his case an isolated one—when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father’s love, and a mother’s, stronger than death:

“Humbly we bow to Fate’s decree;
Yet had we hoped that Time should see
Thee mourn for us, not us for thee.”

_Les funérailles des fils_, says another French author, _sont toujours contre la nature quand les parents y assistant_. How often Edmund Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him “so gently from life,” and being sent, he adds, “to follow those who in course ought to have followed me.” In his famous letter to the Duke of Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: “I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors.” Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim:

“If in the child the father’s image lies,
Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived?
Thou wast not to this end from me derived.
If children predecease progenitors,
We are their offspring, and they none of ours.”