It is still very difficult to discover where the bad people are buried.
The cemeteries are still symbolically white with monuments to the
departed. Shylock and Ralph Nickleby are still, upon their tombstones,
the most respected of deceased citizens. Here lies Clytemnestra, a model
of the wifely virtues, whom an inconsolable spouse deplores. Beneath
this marble, in the tranquil hope of a joyful resurrection, repose the
remains of Iago, who kept the noiseless tenor of his way. Beyond sleeps
Solomon, most faithful of husbands; and under this turf of buttercups
and daisies lie Paris and Lovelace, _arcades ambo_, too early lost. 'Tis
pathetic to reflect how much worthier is the world under-ground than
that which still cumbers its surface; and if we, whose lives are
indifferent honest, had only had the good fortune to die a century ago,
our memories would by this time have been upon our tombstones a very
odor of sanctity to the sense of the age which knows us, perhaps, but
too well.
In one of his terrible inscriptions suggested for the monuments of the
Georges, Thackeray says, "He left an example for youth and for age to
avoid. He never did well by man or by woman." Has there been only one
such George in the world? And if more, and in every age, in what
cemetery have you found their epitaphs? Catiline was a fascinating and
accomplished man. He had many followers, and if his political views and
projects were open to differences of opinion, he was certainly
well-mannered. Has there been but one Catiline in history? Or is he
confined wholly to a public sphere? Cicero described him as "a corrupter
of youth," and no one has denied it. Where is Catiline buried? If you
sought his grave by that epitaph, where would you find it? Is there no
corrupter of youth now? Have there been none within the last century?
None, if you may trust the epitaphs. How long will you abuse our
patience, O Catiline, and be annually buried, like Cato the Censor, with
crosses of white camellias laid upon your coffin, and wreaths of
immortelles hung upon the weeping effigy of Virtue which guards your
sleep?
But because a man was brutal and coarse and cruel in his life, must we
needs insist upon it when he is gone? When Mawworm leaves us, must we
write upon his grave, he lying below defenceless, "_Hic jacet_ a
hypocrite"? When old Sathanas departs to a sphere of light and truth,
shall we carve upon his monument, "Father of lies"? Is it manly? Shall
we have no mercy? Do we really know any man; and shall charity be
forgotten? To be human is to be frail; and is not the fact that we must
die at all, of which the grave is proof, itself sufficient comment upon
our weakness? Here lies Colonel Newcome--tender, generous, noble,
child-like heart! Shall we add that he was credulous and ignorant? Dear
Uncle Toby is in the next grave. Shall we shout in marble, "_Siste,
viator_, contemplate his foibles"? Sacred to the memory of Samuel
Pickwick. Is the inscription incomplete if we do not chisel beneath it,
"A wind-bag pricked by Death"?
Epitaphs are written more forcibly than upon tombstones. When old
Silenus dies, and the white camellias and the lilies-of-the-valley and
the rose-buds are strewn upon his bier, and the "universally lamented"
is cut upon the monument, the satire is pathetic, but it is slight. But
when the bloated old debauchee is cautiously and forgivingly praised in
the papers, and everybody solemnly pretends not to know what everybody
knows that everybody else does know, it is a sign not of charity, but of
public demoralization. Catiline corrupts youth by his example. Then his
own offences bring him to a sudden end, and the newspapers speak of him
so deprecatingly, so gingerly, that as a good man being dead yet
speaketh, so a bad man being dead yet corrupteth. His evil influence is
not suffered to perish with him, but it is cherished and extended and
confirmed, and his death, like his life, demoralizes.
Dick Turpin no longer rides in jack-boots upon Hounslow Heath, stopping
my Lord Bishop and the Right Honorable the Earl of Garter; and no longer
stands at the dock, the hero of St. Giles's; and goes no longer to the
gallows in a blaze of glory, with a huge nosegay in his button-hole.
Richard Turpin is a very different fellow in his costume of to-day, but
he is the same Dick of the jack-boots and the heath, this vulgar robber
who smirks and is called smart. He drives a fine equipage, and lives
luxuriously, and keeps a harem, and frequents Wall Street, and beats
everybody in the game of making money, and spending it profusely and
splendidly. He dazzles the eyes of the widow's son, and bewilders his
mind. The boy sees the money with which Richard surrounds himself by
means which honorable men despise. He hears him called good-humoredly a
great rascal, and sees that he buys judges, and steals vast properties,
and procures laws to protect him. The boy hears that all men are
fallible, and that some men are no worse than other men, and that money
is a fine thing, and honor and truth and respect and all the rest of it
are very well, but see what power, what pleasure, what luxury Turpin
commands! Then the poor boy rushes for the same prizes, and fails, and
ends in disgrace, the jail, suicide. And Dick Turpin tosses a hundred
dollars to the boy's mother, and a generous press exclaims, "Not a model
man, perhaps; but what noble generosity! The friend of the widow and the
orphan! When he dies, how many poor homes will be darkened with grief!"
Yes, and the hundred dollars probably pays the widow for her boy.
It is not difficult to be generous with the money of others. A year ago
it was announced that Greed had given forty or fifty thousand dollars to
the poor. "There," said the admirers of Turpin, "you may say what you
will of Greed. He, too, is not a polished man; he is not a scholar nor a
dainty gentleman; but he is one of the people; he is large-hearted and
generous. Who else has given fifty thousand dollars to the poor?" Yes,
and who else has stolen five millions? The politest gentlemen of the
highway were notoriously gallant. The Marquis of Goutytoe they compelled
to descend from his carriage, and sent the trudging market-woman home in
it. They eased the pockets of the Spanish ambassador, and threw a
doubloon to the leper hiding behind the hedge. It was a cheap
munificence. So was Greed's. It was not _his_ fifty thousand dollars,
the giving of which caused such a burst of good feeling, and the
exclamation, "There now!" It was only a little of the millions that were
not his. He gave it to the poor dwellers in tenement-houses, and it was
said that there was no wretched hovel to which he did not send a load of
coal or a barrel of flour during the winter months. But he took them
first from those wretched dens. Somebody paid the taxes that he stole,
and it is the poor who at last pay taxes. Where be the bad people
buried? When Turpin dies, we have Greed's opinion of him and his ways
gravely paraded in a newspaper. Madame Brinvilliers's opinion of
Lucrezia Borgia would be edifying reading!
Shall we have no charity, then? and when a man lies dead and
defenceless, shall not warfare cease? Warfare may cease; but should
death condone all offences? The malignant lover who denounced his rival
to the Inquisition, and in the very moment of his rival's death by fire
himself fell dead--shall we write over him, _De mortuis?_ Shall we
Romans, whose sons he corrupted, go dumb and sorrowing behind the corpse
of Catiline? When a bad man dies, let us say that he was bad. Although
he was very rich and very splendid, shall we remember only that he gave
in charity one quarter of one per cent. upon the amount of his thefts?
The Italian brigand chief, when his band had slaughtered the travellers,
said, "There are twelve of us, and we will share equally; but the first
equal share shall be for the mother of God." When we tell his story,
shall we see only that share?
CHRISTENDOM vs. CHRISTIANITY.
IT is remarkable that what is called the practical sense
of Christendom virtually rejects the Christian ideals as impracticable.
Its highest ideal is obedience to the Divine will, and its instinct,
therefore, should represent the religious man as the perfection of
vigorous manhood. The more manly, the finer the bloom of health, the
sounder the body for the sound and purified mind, the truer and more
satisfactory the type, the more symmetrically revealed the Christian
man. This is the simple and natural ideal among living men of unthwarted
and normal Christian excellence.
But so little is this the fact that the oldest traditions of Christian
art depict the founder of Christianity Himself not as a blooming man,
not as a figure of the inward and outward health that proceeds
inevitably from complete and absolute conformity to the Divine will, but
as a wan and wasted personality plainly worsted by the world. This
conception extends to the constant and organized control of the Church,
and the general feeling of Christendom regards the ministers of its
religion either as official personages or as excluded from actual
knowledge of life; not masters of the arena, but professionally unfit to
cope with the world.
It may, indeed, be said that the traditions of Christian art show a
misapprehension of the essential character of the Christian faith. But
however that may be, it is certainly true that these traditions do not
misrepresent the general conception of Christianity which is professed
by those who practically reject its ideals. Here goes Solomon Gunnybags
to Christian worship on Sunday morning. He "abashiates" himself in his
pew, and his confession that he is a miserable sinner is so sonorous and
impressive that the hearer sighs sympathetically with Solomon's
consciousness of the enormous burden of wrong-doing that he carries.
Now what is Solomon doing in his pew? He is solemnly professing
confidence in and reverence for certain principles of faith and conduct,
not only as lofty in themselves, but as absolutely essential to his
soul's salvation. Then, unless the whole universe is a farce, and
religion and the soul impostures, they are the most practical and
practicable of all possible principles, because otherwise the soul's
salvation could not be made by beneficent Omnipotence dependent upon
fidelity to them. But if some attendant spirit should say to Solomon
Gunnybags, as he walks home with the happy consciousness of duty done,
"Solomon, the golden rule and the Christian religion forbid you to
'unload' upon David the stock that you believe to be very shaky," he
would unquestionably feel, if he did not say: "Stuff! Every man for
himself. Of course Christianity is an excellent thing, but it doesn't
mean that." Gunnybags does not expressly repudiate Christian principle
as unpractical; he only believes it to be so.
The fundamental doctrine of the Christian life is love. The Christian
millennium is peace. But it is Christendom that maintains the vast
standing armies; and when the International Peace Congress meets in
London and proposes disarmament, the good-natured reply of Christendom
is, "Well--yes--perhaps--some time," with a smile of amused incredulity,
as when a child seriously asks for the moon. Yet this is Christendom,
and the Christian principles are entirely familiar, and every Sunday and
saint's day in all the Christian churches we protest that the practice
of them is essential to our soul's salvation. Then we wipe our eyes, and
smile kindly upon any one who really insists that we should offer the
other cheek, and forgive seventy times seven. Oh no, we say; that is an
eccentric view. No man in this world--that is, in Christendom--can
afford to allow himself to be imposed upon. If we don't look out for
number one, who will take charge of that precious numeral?
So it is that on some bright July day, looking in imagination upon the
respectable Universal Peace Congress in the Hôtel Métropole in London,
and hearing the Bishop of Durham offer a resolution for international
arbitration, and denouncing the folly, the waste, the woe and wickedness
and wrong of war, we hear also, not the immediate and instinctive assent
of Christendom, but its wistful prayer and half-despairing hope that
some time Christianity may be found to be practicable, and something
more than a pretty dream. Yet is there anything more certain than that
the Christendom which actually rejects the Christian ideals and
principles as impracticable, denounces most savagely those who
practically illustrate them, even if they theoretically reject them?
The moral of this little sermon is altogether Christian, for it is
charity. Since Christendom is in practice so universally unchristian,
and holds its own fundamental principles in such practical contempt,
every member of that vast fraternity should be very modest in judging
others. Could there be a more radically unchristian figure in human
history than Torquemada? If Christianity be what it declares itself to
be, the least throb of sound Christian feeling in his bosom would have
held his hand. The Inquisition, the fierceness of sects, the religious
wars, offensive wars of any kind, are possible only among Christians who
hold Christianity to be impracticable.
Yet when the Easy Chair saw a gentle lady going to morning prayers on a
happy saint's day, and heard through the open window the murmuring music
of the promise when two or three are gathered together, and marked
during all the day and in daily conduct the unselfishness, the sympathy,
the courtesy, the kindly care of old and young, the faithful doing of
duty, the nameless charm of lofty character, the Christian ideal was no
longer the mirage of an unreached and unattainable oasis in the desert;
it was already come down to earth; it was here, a little heaven below.