Of which I sang one song that will not die.
Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but
behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
immortality.
Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after
I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on
an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
“Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of
me comes but once in centuries.”
Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on
slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room
will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if
ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he
said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor
Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he
said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true,
suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--
_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk
last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
object of the noblest minds in all ages._
We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull
cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
“Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It
creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
[Illustration: 0134]
An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
and a salvo of artillery.
There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
of the poem in which he poured out his creed--
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small.