Shadows

( Originally Published 1922 )

WE are shadows all and shadows we pursue. This business of life which we make-believe to take so earnestly, —what is it but a moth-chase or the play of grotesques in a child's magic lantern? A sudden helter-skelter of light and shade, a comic jumble of figures thrown for a moment on the screen, and then,—darkness!

Children of the shadow, to that Shadow we return at last; but the very essence of our life is fluid, evanishing always. The minute, the day, the hour, the year,—who can lay hands on them?—and yet in our humorous fashion we speak of these as fixed and stable things, subject to our control. Meantime and all time, dream delivers us unto dream, while life lends to its most tangible aspects something shadowy and spectral, as the vapors clothe the horizon with mystery. The things we call realities, in our vain phrase, that enter most deeply into the warp of our lives, these are also dream-stuff, kindred of the Shadow. Our consciousness, from which we dare to apprehend immortality, can only look backward into the realm of dream and shadow, or forward into the realm of shadow and dream. I am at this moment more stricken at the heart with the sorrow of a song that my mother crooned to me, a child, in the firelight many years ago, than with all the griefs I have since known. Shadows, all shadows! With my house full of romping, laughing children, there falls now upon my heart the tiny shadow of a lost babe—and I beat helpless hands against the iron mystery of death.

But the living, too, are shadows, not less pitiable than they whom death has taken from our sight. Nay, it is more sad to be the shadow of a shadow than to clasp the final darkness.

Tell me, O dear love, where now is the face that once showed me all the heaven I cared to know, the form that made the rapture of my youth, the spell which filled my breast with delicious pain, the lips whose touch so coy, so rarely gained, was honey and myrrh and wine? Oh, say not that she, too, is of the Shadow !

Nay, she is here at thy side and has never left thee, but is in all things the same—look again! Alas! this is not the face that charmed my youth, this is not the form that filled my dreams—and her eyes were clear as the well-springs of Paradise. But oh, for pity of it, let not my poor love know that her dear enrapturing self, with our precious dream in which we drew down heaven to earth, is gone forever into the Shadow.

We are shadows all, living ghosts, so slight of memory and consciousness that we seem to die many deaths ere the final one. This illusion. we name life is intermittent—hardly can we recall what happened day before yesterday. Even the great events of life (as we phrase them) do but feebly stamp our weak consciousness. By a fiction which everyone knows to be false, we make a pretence of feeling much and deeply. 'Tis a handsome compliment to our common nature, but the truth is we rarely feel—our substance is too thin and ghost-like.

As shadows we fly by each other and are never really in contact. This is the profound deception of love, the pathos of the human tragedy. The forms we would clasp make them-selves thin air; we strain at a vacuum and a shade—aye, in the most sacred embraces of love we hold—nothing ! Less hard is it to scale the walls of heaven than to compass our desire. But now at last we are to be satisfied, to have our fill of this dear presence which spells for us the yearning and mystery of love :—alas! in the very rapture of possession we feel the eternal cheat.

Yet while we lament ever that we can not lay hands on those we love, shadows that we are, no more sure are we of ourselves. This shadow of me eludes even myself as I am eluded by the shadows of others in the great phantasmal show around me. I know this shadow of me, volatile, uncertain, ever escaping from under the hand, and if I were not so busy chasing my own shadow -the evanescent Me—I should have more leisure for hunting other moths and shadows. The old Greeks figured this change and fugacity in the mythic Proteus ; but they missed the deeper sense of it.

There was a shadow of me last year that I had some cause of quarrel with and we parted unkindly. Where is it ?—gone forever. Wiser now, I would gladly make peace with that shadow—it meant honestly, I must confess, though often it sinned and blundered—but never more will it. walk the earth. Other shadows of me have likewise escaped, leaving similar accounts unsettled (they never do put their affairs in order)—not to be settled now, I dare say, until the Great Audit.

I would not care to recall all those shadows of myself, even had I the power, as I would not wish to live my life over again without leave to change it (he is a fool or a liar who says otherwise). But I may confess a weakness for One that vanished long ago, leaving me too soon: a shadow of youthful hope and high purpose that could do much to refresh this jaded heart, dared I but look upon it. Oh, kind Master of the Show, grant me once more to see that shadow on the screen! Unworthy as I am, let me look on it again and strive to gather new hope from its imperishable store. I know it dreamed of a holier love than I have realized; of nobler aims than I have had strength to reach; of crowns and triumphs that I shall never claim. It believed only in good (God knows!) and since it left me, without any cause that I can remember, I have known much evil. Yet it is still the essential Ale, soul of my soul, and so must it be through the eternities. I can not be separated from that Brightness, that Innocency, that Hopefulness which once I was—call it back for but an instant to give peace to my soul !