Shadows On The Wall
by F.W. Boreham

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

The figures that float across these pages are like shadows dancing on the wall. They show that life is crowded with realities and flooded with radiance, for without substance and sunshine there can be no shadows.

FRANK W. BOREHAM

Armadale, Melbourne, Easter 1922

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THE GLORY BOX

I HAVE never seen a glory-box. I know nothing of its size, of its shape, of its design, nor of the timbers usually employed in its construction. As to its contents, I should regard it as a sacrilege to hazard a conjecture. I hear young ladies talking of their glory-boxes; but they never by any chance exhibit one. I have looked into upholsterers’ windows in the hope of seeing several types displayed; but have met with unvarying disappointment. I have searched the advertising columns of the newspapers. Everything on earth seems to be for sale—except a glory-box! And, more strangely still, everything on earth seems to be wanted—but a glory-box! Even the dictionary declines to help me. Yet, after all, my ignorance of my subject need not deter me from writing about it. I shall therefore hesitate no longer.

The glory-box is the symbol of all those things by means of which we cast a halo of romance about the brows of futurity. It is an extraordinary knack we mortals have. Although, in common with ourselves, the beasts of the field have eyes in their faces, they cannot see in front of them. Like the hare with the hounds at her heels, they can see behind; memory serves them well; bygones never become bygones; animals possess an uncanny facility for cherishing the recollection of any kindness or cruelty shown them. They can see around; no eyes are more sharp than theirs in detecting the tiniest objects on the horizon and in reading their significance. But they cannot see ahead. Or, if they do, they see but a short distance ahead. A dog may dread the blow that he knows he has deserved, or he may wag his tail in prospect of the reward that he is conscious of having earned; but that is as far as it goes. Generally speaking, they live in one world and we live in another. They live in To-day and we live in To-morrow. Among these poor relatives of ours there is nothing of that wistful anticipation in which we humans so often lose ourselves. Their hearts do not build their nests, as ours do, in the shelter of the years unborn. The blackbird in my appletree and the thrush upon my lawn sing me the most exquisite songs; but they always sing of the springtime that has just arrived or of the summer all around them. They never, never sing of next year’s roses. Tennyson has a lovely little poem in which he imagines all the wild things of the woods listening to the song that the poet is singing. They are captivated, enthralled, enchanted. They sit spellbound as they drink it in. ‘I have sung many songs,’ says the nightingale, ‘but never a one so gay!’ And then the reason breaks upon the bird. The melody of the poet is so much more blithe than his own because he is singing, not of the things that are, but of the things that shall be. His vision is beyond. He is thridding the labyrinth of the future. His soul in passing down the avenue of the years that are yet to be.

The glory-box represents our genius for piercing the veil that conceals the good time coming. Man invariably sees things through the golden haze of futurity. In the slender sapling he sees the spreading oak; in the mottled egg he sees the soaring bird; in the wrinkled seed he sees the fullblown flower. To himself he is always the tadpole of an archangel. He sings the songs of the etemities. His To-day may be a pauper; what does it matter? His To-morrow will be a prince! Look at this young man and maiden! He is off to the office and she trips away to her workroom. For both of them the day’s routine will be extremely prosaic, extremely monotonous, and extremely commonplace. They will go the same old round and discharge the same old duties. Yet he strides off to the office with an elastic step, whistling gaily as he goes; and she, as she takes to the familiar road, almost dances to the song her lips are crooning. And why? It is because a golden secret is shining in their faces. They are dreaming rainbow-tinted dreams. There is a glory-box! The glory-box is the symbol of life’s greatest expectations.

Of really great expectations, life holds but three. There are others, of course, just as there are innumerable summits in a range of mountains; but three sky-piercing peaks break from the rest and dwarf all others into comparative insignificance. Other expectations—expectations of power or place or wealth—come only to certain ranks and certain classes. Some are too low to cherish such hopes; others are already too high to care about them. But there are three sublime expectations that come, and that come with equal force, to all kinds and conditions of men. They mean no more to the prince than to the peasant; they mean no more to the peasant than to the prince. The first is the great expectation to which I have already referred; the expectation that sweethearts cherish; the expectation to which the glory-box immediately points; the expectation of marriage. Is there anything more delightful than to watch a young couple who have recently become engaged? There is a sense in which the engagement makes no difference; they felt that they belonged to each other before their troth was actually plighted, or the engagement would never have been made. And yet, on the other hand, there is a sense in which the engagement makes all the difference. Yesterday there was a shadow of shyness, a suspicion of embarrassment, when, in the presence of others, they were thrown together. To-day they appropriate each other with a proud and pleasing confidence; they are even gratified rather than confused when other eyes are on them. When with her lady friends she loves to show an exaggerated and almost matronly interest in all kinds of household and domestic affairs; he, in the presence of other gentlemen, displays pleasure when the conversation turns to architecture, horticulture, and similar themes. A few days ago a reference to a glory-box would have provoked a blaze of blushes; to-day it is mentioned almost as a matter of course. Each feels in secret that life has become strangely but sweetly loaded; the soul is weighted by a solemn but beautiful responsibility.

It is a burden; but it is a burden that, like ballast, lends a new poise and a new dignity to every phase of conduct and behaviour. For both of them life has been transfigured by a great and golden expectation. The second of the three I must resolutely decline to mention. Some years ago, at Hobart, I officiated at the wedding of a young couple to whom we were all very much attached. To our great regret they were leaving the district to make their home in a provincial town in Victoria. Quite recently I was invited to lecture in the neighbourhood in which they settled. I accepted the invitation, and, a few days later, received a letter from the bride of seven years since, insisting on my staying at her home during my visit to the town. Again, I accepted; and, in due time, the evening arrived. My former bridegroom met me at the railway station. I could see that he was excited. His eyes were sparkling; his nerves were tingling; his blood was dancing. So dull-witted and unimaginative are we men that I was stupid enough to fancy, for the first moment or two, that his delight arose from the pleasure of meeting an Old friend! But I was swiftly disillusioned. Whilst ‘a cab was being engaged, and a few minor details arranged, my friend took my arm and walked with me up and down the platform. And then, in a burst of confidence, he told me a wonderful secret. I use
the explosive word advisedly; it was a burst of confidence. It simply oozed from him; he could not have kept it to save his life. For the next two or three days I was their happy guest. Of course, we never discussed their secret, never even referred to it. Yet it was always there. It sang to us at every meal, so that it almost drowned our voices when we talked on commonplace topics. My host and hostess were enthusiastic temperance workers; but, if champagne had flowed freely round their table, we could scarcely have felt a livelier sense of exhilaration.

On the last morning of my stay, I led them in family worship and made overt allusion to the secret that had flooded the home with such unutterable gladness. When we rose from our knees, I noticed tears in both their eyes. And I noticed something else. I noticed that life stands transfigured at every turn by its great expectations. The third of the three is the radiant expectation of immortality. It attends us all through life’ and grows upon us towards the close. We feel that we are greater than the universe; the eternal harmonies are for ever echoing through our souls; however lovely life may be, we feel that there is more, immensely more, to follow. And, later on, when friends depart and frailties multiply, expectation becomes very wistful and the dread of death is swallowed up in the hope of life eternal. By these great expectations—these and a thousand smaller ones—we men are made. With a few expectations life is princely; without them it is poor as poverty.

The man who teaches us to expect something of life makes life sublime. If ever I am appointed a Police Magistrate—I have no reason to suppose that such a dignity awaits me—I shall administer justice on principles peculiarly my own. I shall be very lenient with fortune-tellers. At least I shall deal gently with those fortune-tellers who assure their delighted patrons that all the stars are favourable and all the indications propitious. And I shall vindicate the majesty of the law by visiting its most extreme penalties on the heads of those wretched prognosticators who depress their victims by muttering dark and terrifying forebodings. In The Light in the Clearing—a book which the author asks us to regard as history rather than fiction—Irving Bacheller describes the effect upon the life of his hero of a prediction uttered by Roving Kate, the Silent Woman.

‘I see her now,’ he says, writing after the lapse of many years, ‘I see her dark figure standing against the sunlight. I was afraid of her, she looked so wild and ragged. I regarded her as a dead but undeparted spirit belonging to another world. What a singular eloquence in her pose and in her gestures and in her silence!’ The old woman looked at him, her blue eyes searching him through and through. Then ‘slowly her right hand rose above her head with its index finger extended. She lowered it. It rose again with two bony fingers outstretched, and descended as before. She repeated this gesture until her four thin fingers had been spread in the air above her. How it thrilled me! Something jumped to life in my soul at the call of her moving hand. I passed a new gate of my imagination; and, if I have a way of my own in telling things, it began at that moment.’ The old woman sat down on the grass and scrawled out her prediction.

‘I hear guns; I hear many voices. His name is in them. He shall be strong. The powers of darkness shall fear him; he shall be a lawmaker and the friend of many people; great men shall bow to his judgment and he shall-——’

The sentence was never finished; but, as far as the prophecy went, it all came true. But the question is : Why did it all come true? Could the ragged woman read the future? Of course not. She simply gave the sensitive, imaginative boy something to expect, something to live up to. He began to struggle towards the goal that she had proposed for him. Morning, noon, and night, he repeated the words to himself and vowed that they should be fulfilled. When he was half-way to destiny, he tells us, he felt Old Kate still at work in his soul. ‘I was trying,’ he says, significantly, ‘to put truth into the prophecy!’ Exactly! The old woman’s mysterious airs, her weird silence, and her impressive gestures were all just so much hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo.

Her pretensions to second sight were all nonsense. Yet she was a benefactor, a public benefactor, for all that. For she fired the fancy of the boy with a great expectation; and that great expectation made a man of him. The dazzling genius of Horatio Nelson was never displayed to greater advantage than in his immortal signal at Trafalgar. ‘Mr. Pasco,’ he said, as he stepped on to the poop of the Victory and addressed the signal-lieutenant, ‘Mr. Pasco, I wish to give a fillip to the whole fieet.’ And how did he compass his end? He did it by presenting every man with a great expectation! ‘England expects that every man this day will do his duty!’ ‘England expects!’ At the first Of those two words, every sailor in the fleet saw, in sudden fancy, the old home circle; at the second he saw a look of fond and wistful expectancy mantle those familiar features; and he vowed that their hope should not be disappointed. The strategy that tore to shreds the naval aspirations of Napoleon was masterly; but the psychological insight that dictated that famous signal was more astonishing still. ‘It was the great Lord Shaftesbury that made a new man of me,’ exclaimed Edward Maynard at a testimony-meeting in the East End of London. ‘And it wasn’t by a sermon or a lecture or anything like that,’ he went on. ‘It was when I came out of prison for the nineteenth time. I sort of took it for granted that I’d have to go to the bad and that I should soon be back for my twentieth term; but Lord Shaftesbury walked up to me and shook hands and said, “Ah, Maynard, we’ll make a man of you yet !” I felt that he really expected me to turn out well, and I pulled myself together that very day. That was forty-three years ago come Michaelmas, and I’ve never seen the inside of a cell since !’

It is always those who expect most from us who draw the best out of us. Who has not admired the skilful and delicate turn which Jesus gave to that memorable conversation in the course of which he warned Peter of the sifting that awaited him. He foresaw the temptation and the tragedy; but he added: ‘but, when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.’ It was like pointing to a light on the far side of the dark valley; it was a promise of a cloudless morning after a stormy night. Even when Peter went out and wept bitterly, there was a song singing itself over and over again in the depths of his stricken soul. ‘When thou art converted . . . strengthen thy brethren!’ What did it mean? It meant that his Master had foreseen the fall with all its. baseness and its treachery—‘thou shalt deny me thrice.’ But it meant also that his Master, knowing the very, very worst, had yet confidently anticipated the dawning of a day in which the coward should be the bravest of the brave and in which the weakling should be the fortifier of all the apostolic band. It was by means of a sublime expectation that Peter was led from the depths of shame to a life of service and a martyr’s crown.
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