“No,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not expect my name to be
shouted in brass on the frieze of Miss Helen Gould’s ‘Temple of Fame.’”
The Timorous Reporter ventured to inquire if that was because he had
the misfortune to be alive.
“That is a disqualification that time will remove,” answered the
Melancholy Author. “The ground of my hope is different: I shall cause
to be inscribed upon my tombstone the lines following:
Good friends, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To grieve the soul that’s gone to—where?
Blest be the man that spares my fame,
And curst be he that flaunts my name!
“The lines are admirable and extremely original,” said the Timorous
Reporter. “May I ask if your reluctance to have your name emblazoned
in the Temple is due to disesteem of the methods and results of
selection, or to that innate modesty which serves to distinguish you
from the violet?”
“To neither. It is due to my consciousness of the futility of all
attempts to perpetuate an individual fame. When I die my fame will die
with me. It is mine no longer than I live to bear it. When there is no
nominative there can be no possessive.
“For illustration, you speak of Shakspeare’s fame. But there is no
Shakspeare. The fame that you speak of is not ‘his’; it is ours—yours,
mine and John Smith’s. To call it ‘his’—why, sir, that is as if one
should concede the ownership of property to a vacuum. The dead are
poor—they have nothing. Our mental confusion in this matter is no doubt
largely due to our imperfect grammar: we have not enough cases in our
declension; or, rather, there are not enough names for the cases that
we have. In the phrase ‘a horse’s tail’ we say rightly that ‘horse’s’
is in the possessive case: the animal really possesses—owns—the tail.
But in the phrase ‘a horse’s price’ there is no possessive, for the
horse does not own the price: there should be another name for the
case. When dead, the horse does not own even the tail. It is the
same with ‘Shakspeare’s fame’: while he lived the phrase contained a
possessive case; now it is something different—merely what the Latin
calls a genitive. Our name for it misleads the unenlightened and makes
them think of a dead man as owning things. One of my ambitions, I may
add, is to bring English grammar into conformity with fact, promoting
thereby every moral, intellectual and material interest of the race!”
The Timorous Reporter summoned the courage to rouse him from ecstatic
contemplation of the glory of his great reform by directing his
disobedient attention to the fact that the Latin grammar, also,
is defective, in that its genitive case is not supplemented by a
possessive; yet the Romans appear to have had a pretty definite
conception of “mine” and “thine,” albeit the latter was less lucidly
apprehended than the former, and held a humbler place in the national
conscience. Deigning to ignore the argument, the Melancholy Author
resumed his discourse:
“Posthumous fame being what it is—if nothing can be said to be
something—the desire to attain it is comic. It seems the invention of
a humorist, this ambition to attach to your name (and equally to that
of every person bearing it, or to bear it hereafter) something that
you will not know that you have attached to it. You labor for a result
which you are to be forever unaware that you have brought about—for a
personal gratification which you know that you are eternally forbidden
to enjoy: if the gods ever laugh, do they not laugh at that?”
To signify his sense of the humor of the situation, the Melancholy
Author fashioned the visage of him to so poignant a degree of visible
dejection as might have affected an open tomb with envy and despair.
“Some time,” he continued, “the earth, her spinning retarded by the
sun’s tidal action, will turn on her axis only once a year, presenting
always the same side to the sun, as Venus does now, and as the moon
does to the earth. That side will be unthinkably hot; the other, dark
and unthinkably cold. Of man and his works nothing will remain. Later,
the sun’s light and fire exhausted, he and all his attendant planets
and their satellites will whirl, as dead invisible bulks, through the
black reaches of space to some inconceivable doom. Suppose that then
a man who died to-day—or yesterday in Assyria—should be miraculously
revived. He would think that he had waked from a sleep of an instant’s
duration. What to him would seem to have been the advantage of what
he once knew as ‘fame’—sometimes as ‘immortality’? Would he not smile
to learn that his name had once evoked sentiments of admiration and
respect—that it had been carved in stone or cast in metal to adorn a
Temple of Fame? And when again, and finally, put to death for nothing,
would not his last squeak and gurgle carry an aborted jest?
“My boy,” continued the Melancholy Author, suffering a look of
compassion to defile the dread solemnity of his aspect, “I perceive
that I have put the matter too strongly for you. You are not at home in
the fields of space; you are disconcerted by the dirge of the spheres.
Let us get back to earth as we have the happiness to know it. I will
read you the concluding lines of a poem by an obscure pessimist, on the
brevity of time and the futility of memorial structures:
Then build your mausoleum if you must,
And creep into it with a perfect trust;
But in the twinkling of an eye the plow
Shall pass without obstruction through your dust.
Another movement of the pendulum
And, lo! the desert-haunting wolf shall come
And, seated on the spot, howl all the night
O’er rotting cities, desolate and dumb.”
Delighted with his ruse of binding an unresisting auditor by passing
off his own poetry as that of another, the Melancholy Author fell into
a sea-green stupor, and the Timorous Reporter, edging himself quietly
through the door of opportunity, departed that life.