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.
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,
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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,
and of such was Byron. And he knew it. Not more alive to this philosophy was Cowper himself, when he pictured men
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:
One great amusement of the household in the Castle of Indolence, on the testimony of its poet-laureate, was,
If, with Churchill, we stand as
In other verses, and another measure, the same poet justifies his use of the expression “whatever shadows we pursue,” by the interpolated comment,
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
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:”
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!”
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:
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: