Part 16

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.”

So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and having the melancholy office to close _his_.” And to his “dear little niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a very long day may _he_ close _your_ eyes, not as I have done those of your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be his inheritance.”

Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian; for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end. Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who

... “beheld aghast, With Wilfrid all his projects pass, All turn’d and centred on his son, On Wilfrid all—and he was gone. ‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”

Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last representative of his race. Southey observes that _Pauli in domo præter se nemo superest_, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician, he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling.

Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man.

Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a sire.

“The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented Digby, sunk thee to the grave?

“Tell me, if virtue made the son expire, Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?”

Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön:

“Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs Of all his labours, and a life of cares. Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years, And leaves the father unavailing tears. To strangers now descends his heapy store, The race forgotten, and the name no more.”

Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step? “It is thy father, O Morar!” dead and gone Morar: “the father of no son but thee.... Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead—low their pillow of dust.” This flies sure to the old man’s heart, says Schiller’s Illo of the elder Piccolomini,

... “He has his whole life long Fretted and toil’d to raise his ancient house From a count’s title to the name of prince; And now must seek a grave for his only son.”

Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son, Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young prince who alone survived of all her very many children.

Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician, ’Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay. Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says _que sa destinée tranchée avant l’heure a pourtant été complète, si un père octogénaire ne lui survivait_.

“I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young,”

wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, all whose children have gone before her, she is so old.

The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of Bishop Percy, “after a life in the main prosperous and happy,” commenced with the loss of an only son.

Lord Kenyon died in 1802, “sorrow-stricken by the loss of his eldest son, after having accumulated a fortune of £300,000.” Lord Stowell lost his son, aged forty-two, about two months only before he too fell on death. Sprengel, the very learned German physician, never recovered the stroke of his son’s loss. Cuvier’s four children all died before him. “Write ye this man childless:” many a man of genius has felt his heart sink and his strength fail under that blighting sentence. In his sixty-seventh year we find Moore writing, “The last of our five children is now gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in the world.” How Mr. Hallam was successively bereaved of sons so rich in promise, if not in performance, is too well known.

There is a seeming affectation of literary paternity in what Chateaubriand writes of the death of Byron,—as though it were Terah and Haran, with a difference. “I preceded him in life; he preceded me in death. He was summoned before his time. My number came before his, and yet his was drawn first from the urn. It was Childe Harold who ought to have remained.”

_THE MOTE AND THE BEAM._

ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.

As easy is it to discern the mote in a brother’s eye as to discern the face of the sky. Hypocrite is the term by which the facile discerner in either case is divinely stigmatised; in the one instance, because with all his discernment he cannot read the signs of the times; in the other, because with all his insight and microscopic nicety of perception, and exceptionally developed faculty of vision, he yet considers not the beam that is in his own eye.

With our Lord’s words concerning the mote and the beam, Archbishop Trench bids us compare the Chinese proverb, “Sweep away the snow from thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour’s tiles.” The Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: “οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἀν μὴ παῤ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ δέοντα.” “Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive those of others,” is a Latin adage: “Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est homo, in alienis perspicax.” “Is it never your way to look at yourself when you are abusing another?” is a question in Plautus: “Non soles respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri?” Cicero pronounces it to be of the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one’s own: “Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum.” Horace shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not take offence at his own protuberances, will “ignore” that friend’s warts:

“Qui, ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum, Postulat, ignoscat verrucis illius.”

And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,

“Quum tua pervideas oculis male lippus inunctis, Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum,” etc.

The query Plautus puts, “How is it that no man tries to search into himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before him?” is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our backs,

“Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit;”

the other, heavy with our neighbour’s faults, hung in front,

“Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.”