friendly with Count von Neipperg, whom she morganatically married after
Napoleon’s death. Although he heard of her infidelity, he forgave her,
and mentioned her affectionately in his will, thereby showing, to
borrow a famous phrase of Gibbon about Belisarius, “Either less or
more than the character of a man.”
For nine days before he died he lay unconscious and babbled in
delirium. On the morning of May 5, 1821, Montholon thought he heard
the words “_France ... armée ... tête d’armée._” The dying Emperor
thrust Montholon from his side, struggled out of bed, and staggered
towards the window. Montholon overpowered him and put him back to bed,
where he lay silent and motionless till he died the same evening. The
man who had fought about sixty pitched battles, all of which he had
won, I believe, but two--who had caused the deaths of three millions
of his own men and untold millions of his enemies--died as peacefully
in his bed as any humble labourer. What dim memories passed through
his clouded brain as he tried to say “head of the army”? A great
tropical storm was threatening Longwood. Did he recall the famous “sun
of Austerlitz” beneath whose rays the _grande armée_ had elevated its
idolized head to the highest pitch of earthly glory? Who can follow the
queer paths taken by associated ideas in the human brain?
Benvenuto Cellini
No one can read Benvenuto’s extraordinary autobiography without being
reminded of the even more extraordinary diary of Mr. Pepys. But there
is one very great difference. Cellini dictated his memoirs to a little
boy for the world at large, and did not profess to tell the whole
truth--rather those things which came into his mind readily in his old
age; but Pepys wrote for himself in secret cypher in his own study, and
the reason of his writing has never yet been guessed. Why did he set
down all his most private affairs? And when they became too disgraceful
even for Mr. Pepys’s conscience, why did he set them down in a mongrel
mixture of French and Spanish? Can we find a hint in the fact that he
left a key to the cypher behind him? Did he really wish his Diary to
remain unreadable for ever? Was it really a quaint and beastly vanity
that moved him?
But Cellini wrote _per medium_ of a little boy amanuensis while he
himself worked, and possibly he may have deliberately omitted some
facts too shameful for the ears of that _puer ingenuus_; though I
have my doubts about this theory. He frankly depicts himself as a
cynical and forth-right fellow always ready to brawl; untroubled by
conventional ideas either of art or of morality; ready to call a spade
a spade or any number of adjectived shovels that came instantly to
his mind. If it be great writing to express one’s meaning tersely,
directly, and positively, then Cellini’s is the greatest of writing,
though we have to be thankful that it is in a foreign language. The
best translation is probably that of John Addington Symonds--a cheaper
and excellent edition is published in the _Everyman Library_--and
nobody who wishes to write precisely as he thinks can afford to go
without studying this remarkable book. And having studied it he will
probably come to the conclusion that there are other things in writing
than merely to express oneself directly. There is such a thing as
beauty of thought as well as beauty of expression; and probably he will
end by wondering what is that thing which we call beauty? Is it only
Truth, as even such a master of Beauty as Keats seems to have thought?
Why is one line of the _Grecian Urn_ more beautiful than all the blood
and thunder of Benvenuto?
Cellini says that he caught the “French evil”--i.e. syphilis--when he
was a young man; he certainly did his best to catch it. His symptoms
were abnormal, and the doctors assured him that his disease was not
the “French evil.” However, he knew better, and assumed a treatment
of his own, consisting of _lignum vitæ_ and a holiday shooting in the
marshes. Here he probably caught malaria, of which he cured himself
with guaiacum. We know now that, alas, syphilis cannot be cured by
such means; and the fact that he lived to old age seems to show that
there was something wrong with his diagnosis. I have known plenty of
syphilitics who have reached extreme old age, but they had not been
cured by _lignum vitæ_ and a holiday; it was mercury that had cured
them, taken early and often, over long periods. I very much doubt
whether he ever had the “French evil” at all.
[Illustration: [_Photo, Brogi._
PERSEUS AND THE GORGON’S HEAD.
Statue by Benvenuto Cellini (Florence, Loggia de’ Lanzi).]
But apart from this and from his amazing revelations of quarrelling and
loose living, the autobiography is worth reading for its remarkable
description of the casting of his great statue of Perseus, which now
stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi at Florence hard by the Uffizi. By the
time the book had reached so far the little boy had long wearied of the
job of secretary, and the old man had buckled down to the labour of
writing with his own hand. I dare swear that he wrote this particular
section at one breath, so to speak; the torrent of words, poured forth
in wild excitement, carry the reader away with the frenzy of the writer
as Benvenuto recalls the greatest hours of his life. Nowhere is such an
instance of the terrible labour pains of a true artist as his offspring
comes to birth.
The great statue does more than represent Perseus; it represents the
wild and headlong mind of Benvenuto himself. Perseus stands in triumph
with the Gorgon’s head in one hand and a sword in the other. You can
buy paper-knives modelled on this sword for five lire in Florence
to-day. The gladness and youthful joy of Perseus are even more striking
than those of Verrochio’s David in the Bargello just near at hand.
Verrochio has modelled a young rascal of a Jew who is clearly saying:
“Alone I did it; and very nice too!” Never was boyish triumph better
portrayed. But Benvenuto’s Perseus is a great young man who has done
something very worthy, and knows that it is worthy. He has begun to
amputate the head very carefully with a neat circular incision round
the neck; then, his rage or his fear of the basilisk glance getting the
better of him, he has set his foot against the Gorgon’s shoulder and
tugged at the head violently until the grisly thing has come away in
his hand, tearing through the soft parts of the neck and wrenching the
great vessels from the heart.
As is well known, opportunities for performing decapitation upon a
Gorgon are few; apart from the rarity of the monster there is always
the risk lest the surgeon may be frozen stiff in the midst of the
operation; and it becomes still more difficult when it has to be
performed in the Fourth Dimension through a looking-glass. We have
the authority of _The Mikado_ that self-decapitation is a difficult,
not to say painful, operation, and Benvenuto could not have practised
his method before a shaving-mirror, because he had a bushy beard,
though some of us have inadvertently tried in our extreme youth before
we have learned the advisability of using safety razors. Anyhow,
Benvenuto’s Perseus is a very realistic, violent, and wonderful piece
of sculpture; if he had done nothing else he would have still been one
of the greatest artists in the world. My own misfortune was in going
to Florence before I had seriously read his autobiography; I wish to
warn others lest that misfortune should befall them. Read Cellini’s
autobiography--_then_, go to Florence! You will see how the author of
the autobiography was the only man who could possibly have done the
Perseus; how, in modelling the old pre-hellenic demigod, he was really
modelling his own subconscious mind.
Death
When William Dunbar sang, “Timor mortis perturbat me,” he but expressed
the most universal of human--perhaps of animate--feelings. It is no
shame to fear death; the fear appears to be a necessary condition of
our existence. The shame begins when we allow that fear to influence
us in the performance of our duty. But why should we fear death at
all? It is hardly an explanation to say that the fear of death is
implanted in living things lest the individual should be too easily
slain and thereby the species become extinct. Who implanted it? And
why is it so necessary that that individual should survive? Why is it
necessary that the species should survive? And so on--to name only a
few of the unanswerable questions that crowd upon us whenever we sit
down to muse upon that problem which every living thing must some
time have a chance of solving. The question of death is inextricably
bound up with the interpretation of innumerable abstract nouns, such
as truth, justice, good, evil, and many more, which all religions make
some effort to interpret. Philosophy attempts it by the light of man’s
reason; religion by a light from some extra-human source; but all alike
represent the struggles of earnest men to solve the insoluble.
Nor is it possible to obtain help from the great men of the past,
because not one of them knew any more about death than you do yourself.
Socrates, in Plato’s _Phædo_, Sir Thomas Browne in the _Religio Medici_
and the _Hydriotaphia_, Shakespeare in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ and many
other plays, St. Paul in various epistles, all tried to console us
for the fact that we must die; the revolt against that inevitable end
of beauty and ugliness, charm and horror, love and hate, is the most
persistent note in literature; and there are few men who go through
life without permitting themselves to wonder, “What is going to happen
to me? Why should I have to die? What will my wife and children do
after me? How is it possible that the world will go on, and apparently
go on just the same as now, for ages after an important thing like
me is shovelled away into a hole in the ground?” I suppose you have
dreamed with a start of horror a dream in which you revisit the world,
and looking for your own house and children, find them going along
happily and apparently prosperous, the milkman coming as usual, a woman
in the form of your wife ordering meals and supervising household
affairs, the tax-gatherer calling--let us hope a little less often
than when you were alive--the trams running and the ferry-boats packed
as usual, and the sun shining, the rain falling sometimes, Members of
Parliament bawling foolishly over nothing--all these things happening
as usual; but you look around to see anybody resembling that beautiful
and god-like creature whom you remember as yourself, and wheresoever
you look he is not there. Where is he? How can the world possibly go
on without him? Is it really going on, or is it nothing more than
an incredible dream? And why are you so shocked and horror-stricken
by this dream? You could hardly be more shocked if you saw you wife
toiling in a garret for the minimum wage, or your children running
about barefoot selling newspapers. The shocking fact is not that you
have left them penniless, but that you have had to leave them at all.
In the morning joy cometh as usual, and you go cheerfully about your
work, which simply consists of postponing the day of somebody else’s
death as long as you can. For a little time perhaps you will take
particular note of the facts which accompany the act of death; then
you will resign yourself to the inevitable, and continue doggedly to
wage an endless battle in which you must inevitably lose, assured of
nothing but that some day you too will lie pallid, your jaw dropped,
your chest not moving, your face horribly inert; and that somebody will
come and wash your body and tie up your jaw and put pennies on your
eyes and wrap you in cerements and lift you into a long box; and that
large men will put the box on their shoulders and lump you into a big
vehicle with black horses, and another man will ironically shout Paul’s
words, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
And in the club some man will take your seat at lunch, and the others
will say you were a decent sort of fellow and will not joke loudly for
a whole meal-time. And ten years hence who will remember you? Your wife
and children, of course--if they too have not also been carried away
in long boxes; a few men who look upon you with a kindly patronage as
one who has fallen in the fight and cannot compete with them now; but
otherwise? Your hospital appointments have long been filled up by men
who cannot, you think, do your work half so well as you used to do it;
your car is long ago turned into scrap-iron; your little dog, which
used to yelp so joyously when you got home tired at night and kicked
him out of the way, is long dead and buried under your favourite
rose-bush; your library, which was your joy for so many years, has long
been sold at about one-tenth of what it cost you; and, except for the
woman who was foolish enough to love and marry you and the children
whom the good creature brought into the world to carry on your name,
you are as though you had never been. Why should this be? And why are
you so terrified at the prospect?
During the past few years we have had ample experience of death, for
there are few families in Australia, and I suppose in England, France,
Germany, Italy, Russia, and Europe generally, which have not lost some
beloved member; yet we are no nearer solving the mystery than we were
before. We know no more about it than did Socrates or Homer. The only
thing that is beginning to haunt the minds of many men is whether those
gallant boys who died in the war were not better off than the men who
survived. At least they know the worst, if there be anything to know;
and have no longer to fear cancer and paralysis and the other diseases
of later life. Many men have written in a consolatory vein about old
age, but the consolants have in no way answered the dictum that if by
reason of strength our years exceed threescore and ten, yet is our
strength but labour and sorrow. No doctor who has seen an old man with
an enlarged prostate and a septic kidney therefrom, or with cancer of
the tongue, can refrain from wishing that that man had died twenty
years sooner, because however bad the fate in store for him it can
hardly be worse than what he suffers here on earth. And possibly there
are worse things on earth even than cancer of the tongue; possibly
cancer of the bladder is the most atrocious, or right-sided hemiplegia
with its aphasia and deadly depression of soul. Young men do not suffer
from these things; and no one can attend a man so afflicted without
wishing that the patient had died happily by a bullet in Gallipoli
before his time came so to suffer. Yet as a man grows older, though the
likelihood of his death becomes more and more with every passing year,
his clinging to bare life, however painful and terrible that life may
be, becomes more intense. The young hardly seem to fear death; that is
a fear almost confined to the aged. How otherwise can we explain the
extraordinary heroism shown by the boys of every army during the late
war? I watched many beautiful and gallant boys, volunteers mark you,
march down the streets of Sydney on their way to a quarrel which nobody
understood--not even the German Kaiser who started it; and when my own
turn came to go I patched up many thousands who had been shattered: the
one impression made upon me was the utter vileness and beastliness of
war, and the glorious courage of the boys in the line. Before the order
went forth forbidding the use of Liston’s long splint in the advanced
dressing stations, men with shattered lower limbs used to be brought in
with their feet turned back to front. High-explosive shells would tear
away half the front of a man’s abdomen; men would be maimed horribly
for life, and life would never be the same again for them. Yet none
seemed to complain. I know that our own boys simply accepted it all as
the inevitable consequence of war, and from what I saw of the English
and French their attitude of mind was much the same. The courage of the
boys was amazing. I am very sure that if the average age of the armies
had been sixty instead of under thirty, Amiens would never have been
saved or Fort Douaumont recovered, nor would the Germans have fought so
heroically as we must admit they did. Old men feel death approaching
them, and they fear it. We all know that our old patients are far more
nervous about death than the young. I remember a girl who had sarcoma
of the thigh, which recurred after amputation, and I had to send
her to a home for the dying. She did not seem very much perturbed. I
suppose the proper thing to say would be that she was conscious of her
salvation and had nothing to fear; but the truth was that she was a
young rake who had committed nearly every crime possible to the female
sex, and she died as peacefully and happily as any young member of the
Church I ever knew. But who is so terrified as the old woman who trips
on a rough edge of the carpet and fractures her thigh-bone? How she
clings to life! What terrors attend her last few weeks on earth, till
merciful pneumonia comes to send her to endless sleep!
I do not remember to have noticed any of that ecstasy which we are
told should attend the dying of the saved. Generally, so far as I
have observed, the dying man falls asleep some hours or days before
he actually dies, and does not wake again. His breathing becomes more
and more feeble; his heart beats more irregularly and feebly, and
finally it does not resume; there comes a moment when his face alters
indescribably and his jaw drops; one touches his eyes and they do
not respond; one holds a mirror to his mouth and it is not dulled;
his wife, kneeling by the bedside, suddenly perceives that she is a
widow, and cries inconsolably; one turns away sore and grieved and
defeated; and that is all about it! There is no more heroism nor pain
nor agony in dying than in falling asleep every night. Whether a man
has been a good man or a bad does not seem to make any difference. I
have seldom seen a death-agony, nor heard a death-rattle that could
be distinguished from a commonplace snore. Possibly the muscles may
become wanting in oxygenation for some time before actual death, and
thrown into convulsive movements like the dance of the highwayman
at Tyburn while he was dying of strangulation, and these convulsive
movements might be looked upon as a death-agony; but I am quite sure
that the patient never feels them. To do so would require that the
sense of self-location would persist, but what evidence we have is
that that is one of the first senses to depart. Possibly the dying man
may have some sensation such as we have all gone through while falling
asleep--that feeling as though we are falling, which is supposed to
be a survival from the days when we were apes; possibly there may be
some giddiness such as attends the going under an anæsthetic, and is
doubtless to be attributed to the same loss of power of self-location;
but the impression that has been forced upon me whenever I have seen
any struggling has been that the movements were quite involuntary,
purposeless, and meaningless. And anything like an agony or a
death-rattle is rare. Far more often the man simply falls asleep, and
it may be as difficult to decide when life passes into death as it is
to decide when consciousness passes into sleep.
Nor have I ever heard any genuine last words such as we read in books.
I doubt if they ever occur. At the actual time of death the man’s body
is far too busy with its dying for his mind to formulate any ideas.
The nearest approach to a “last word” that I ever remember was when a
very old and brilliant man, who, after a lifetime spent in the service
of Australia, lay dying, full of years and honour, from suppression of
urine that followed some weeks after an operation on his prostate. It
was early in the war, and Austria, with her usual folly, was acting
egregiously. The nurse was trying to rouse the old man by reading to
him the war news. He suddenly sat up, and a flash of intelligence came
over his face. “Pah--Austria with her idiot Archdukes--that was what
Bismarck said, wasn’t it?” Then he fell back, and went to sleep; nor
could the visits of his family and the injections of saline solution
into his veins rouse him again from his torpor. He lay unconscious for
nearly a week. That is the only instance of the “ruling passion strong
in death” that I remember. He had always hated Bismarck and despised
the Austrians, and for one brief moment hatred and contempt awakened
his clouded brain. And Napoleon said, “_Tête d’armée_.”
There is no need, so far as we can tell, to fear the actual dying.
Death is no more to be feared than his twin-brother Sleep, as the
very ancient Greeks of Homer surmised; it is _what comes after_ that
many people fear. “To sleep--perchance to dream” nightmares? Well, I
do not know what other people feel when they dream, but for myself I
am fortunate enough to know, even in the midst of the most horrible
nightmare, that it is all a dream; and I dare say that this is a
privilege common to many people. The blessed sleep that comes to tired
man in the early morning, with which cometh joy, is well worth going
through nightmare to attain; and I think I am not speaking wildly in
claiming that most men pass the happiest portions of their lives in
that early morning sleep. One of the horrors of neurasthenia is that
early morning sleep is often denied to the patient.