I
There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on
the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it
beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the engine
and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles
are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of families, door beyond door,
like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison
turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the
hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven
with my memory of the place. I here made friends with a plain old
gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one
eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild heart
flying; and once—she possibly remembers—the wise Eugenia followed me to
that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the
tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid. But for the
most part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on
the names of the forgotten. Name after name, and to each the
conventional attributions and the idle dates: a regiment of the unknown
that had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled with the illusions of
youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old
mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom
my fancy had received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid
countenance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining
fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of
phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind us something
more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying epitaphs; and the
thing left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call the
immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion.
Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath that “circular idea,” was
fainter than a dream; and when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and
beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged philosopher
melted like a raindrop in the sea.
And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David
Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah’s
dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own
nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and
gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see
himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own for one
among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street, and to
divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he
will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet
whiff of chloroform—for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of
others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine
self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man’s
life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious
thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so
wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still
idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The
parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely
and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a
moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of
that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the
bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.
Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his
ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should
have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr.
Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day
is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count _Moll Flanders_,
ay, or _The Country Wife_, more wholesome and more pious diet than these
guide-books to consistent egoism.
But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.
And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I
began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was
weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was
dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to
see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and
modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally
from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have
observed two working-women with a baby halting by a grave; there was
something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the
other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles
under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I
overheard their judgment on that wonder. “Eh! what extravagance!” To a
youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and pregnant
saying appeared merely base.
My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red
evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral,
told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his
labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey; and
in a true Sexton’s Calendar, how the species varied with the season of
the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others
whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung
about them, but sophisticated and dis-bloomed. They had engagements to
keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with
man-kind’s clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was
no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on
spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well
to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide
the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and
dates. It would be “in fifty-twa” that such a tomb was last opened for
“Miss Jemimy.” It was thus they spoke of their past patients—familiarly
but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a
servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright
table, or run at the bell’s summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside
the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our
race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch
savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he attributed
insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet
that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from
the Scotch. The “goodman delver,” reckoning up his years of office,
might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among
sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author
his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves; but the
grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different
from human if his solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a broad
mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city
clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends
of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries,
falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them;
and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul,
in the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to be
his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he
piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old
grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister was
summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the church-yard;
and through a bull’s-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay
dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie
was, I think, a Moderate: ’tis certain, at least, that he took a very
Roman view of deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had
lived beyond man’s natural years, that his life had been easy and
reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his
care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and
follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out; then he raised
himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the
window to the scene of his life-long labours. “Doctor,” he said, “I ha’e
laid three hunner and fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His
wull,” indicating Heaven, “I would ha’e likit weel to ha’e made out the
fower hunner.” But it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had
now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to gird
and carry him.
II
I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground
of all youth’s suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave,
is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he
sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is
all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire
unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to
be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and
tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus,
is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by-and-by his truant
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers.
Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a
doom peculiar to himself, whether fate’s crowning injustice or his own
last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a power that
wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking
and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.
The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of our
vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we
begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us
and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others,
and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in
with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf
the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that
at the last, when such a pin falls out—when there vanishes in the least
breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for
our supply—when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces
of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those
clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory
and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our
life.
III
One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of us
labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most
serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint thoughts.
Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman,
jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and
attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop
to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we loved his
notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at
my father’s table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both
hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most
influential life.
The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,
I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow
of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity
and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend. He
would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane; and by a
misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can still
see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets, _Là ci
darem la mano_ on his lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following
vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high
seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his
self-respect, miserably went down.
From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore,
bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had
deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there
was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body
he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation;
of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that
city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone,
seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still
grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still
joying in his friend’s successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier
music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which
he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily
evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without
complaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, urbane and
with the will to smile.
The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the
tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself;
when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of
none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct
of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he
never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed
with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that
this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a
whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him,
red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our
princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely counsel;
and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were
reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disembosomed: a man, by
his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of his gifts; his whole
city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer.
Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there, so gentle,
patient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so
swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if
the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that
lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to
ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who condescended; but once
ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men,
finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder
against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends
to share the bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest
and passed sentence: _mene_, _mene_; and condemned himself to smiling
silence. He had given trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and
foregone the right to murmur.
Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength;
but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had
betrayed him—“for our strength is weakness”—he began to blossom and bring
forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown
down before the great deliverer. We
“In the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him,
Christ receive him!”
IV
If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the
irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these
foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the
difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the
heroes of defeat.
I see the indifferent pass before my friend’s last resting-place; pause,
with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A
pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and
an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a
reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example;
and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the
dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of
humiliation;—of whom Bunyan wrote that, “Though Christian had the hard
hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in
former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and
have in this place found the words of life.”