“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.”