this, the one-hundred-and forty-fifth year of the Republic, is that
of keeping the minnesingers of the land from filling his magazine
with lugubrious dithyrambs to, on and against somatic death. Of
spiritual death, of course, not many of them ever sing. Most of them,
in fact, deny its existence in plain terms; they are all sure of the
immortality of the soul, and in particular they are absolutely sure of
the immortality of their own souls, and of those of their best girls.
In this department the most they ever allow to the materialism of the
herds that lie bogged in prose is such a benefit of the half doubt as
one finds in Christina Rossetti's "When I am Dead." But when it comes
to somatic death, the plain brutal death of coroners' inquests and
vital statistics, their optimism vanishes, and, try as they may, they
can't get around the harsh fact that on such and such a day, often
appallingly near, each and every one of us will heave a last sigh, roll
his eyes despairingly, turn his face to the wall and then suddenly
change from a proud and highly complex mammal, made in the image of
God, to a mere inert aggregate of disintegrating colloids, made in the
image of a stale cabbage.
The inevitability of it seems to fascinate them. They write about
it more than they write about anything else save love. Every day my
editorial desk is burdened with their manuscripts--poems in which the
poet serves notice that, when his time comes, he will die bravely
and even a bit insolently; poems in which he warns his mistress that
he will wait for her on the roof of the cosmos and keep his harp in
tune; poems in which he asks her grandly to forget him, and, above
all, to avoid torturing herself by vain repining at his grave; poems
in which he directs his heirs and assigns to bury him in some lonely,
romantic spot, where the whippoorwills sing; poems in which he hints
that he will not rest easily if Philistines are permitted to begaud his
last anchorage with _couronnes des perles;_ poems in which he speaks
jauntily of making a rendez-vous with death, as if death were a wench;
poems in which--
But there is no need to rehearse the varieties. If you read the
strophes that are strung along the bottoms of magazine pages you are
familiar with all of them; even in the great moral periodical that I
help to edit, despite my own excessive watchfulness and Dr. Nathan's
general theory that both death and poetry are nuisances and in bad
taste, they have appeared multitudinously, no doubt to the disgust of
the _intelligentsia._ As I say, it is almost impossible to keep the
minnesingers off the subject. When my negro flops the morning bale
of poetry manuscripts upon my desk and I pull up my chair to have at
them, I always make a bet with myself that, of the first dozen, at
least seven will deal with death--and it is so long since I lost that
I don't remember it. Periodically I send out a circular to all the
recognized poets of the land, begging them in the name of God to be
less mortuary, but it never does any good. More, I doubt that it ever
will--or any other sort of appeal. Take away death and love and you
would rob poets of both their liver and their lights; what would remain
would be little more than a feeble gurgle in an illimitable void. For
the business of poetry, remember, is to set up a sweet denial of the
harsh facts that confront all of us--to soothe us in our agonies with
emollient words--in brief, to lie sonorously and reassuringly. Well,
what is the worst curse of life? Answer: the abominable magnetism
that draws unlikes and incompatibles into delirious and intolerable
conjunction--the kinetic over-stimulation called love. And what is the
next worst? Answer: the fear of death. No wonder the poets give so
much attention to both! No other foe of human peace and happiness is
one-half so potent, and hence none other offers such opportunities to
poetry, and, in fact, to all art. A sonnet designed to ease the dread
of bankruptcy, even if done by a great master, would be banal, for
that dread is itself banal, and so is bankruptcy. The same may be said
of the old fear of hell, now no more. There was a day when this latter
raged in the breast of nearly every man--and in that day the poets
produced antidotes that were very fine poems. But to-day only the elect
and anointed of God fear hell, and so there is no more production of
sound poetry in that department.
As I have hinted, I tire of reading so much necrotic verse in
manuscript, and wish heartily that the poets would cease to assault
me with it. In prose, curiously enough, one observes a corresponding
shortage. True enough, the short story of commerce shows a good
many murders and suicides, and not less than eight times a day I am
made privy to the agonies of a widower or widow who, on searching
the papers of his wife or her husband immediately after her or his
death, discovers that she or he had a lover or a mistress. But I
speak of serious prose: not of trade balderdash. Go to any public
library and look under "Death: Human" in the card index, and you will
be surprised to find how few books there are on the subject. Worse,
nearly all the few are by psychical researchers who regard death as
a mere removal from one world to another or by New Thoughters who
appear to believe that it is little more than a sort of illusion.
Once, seeking to find out what death was physiologically--that is,
to find out just what happened when a man died--I put in a solid
week without result. There seemed to be nothing whatever on the
subject even in the medical libraries. Finally, after much weariness,
I found what I was looking for in Dr. George W. Crile's "Man: An
Adaptive Mechanism"--incidentally, a very solid and original work,
much less heard of than it ought to be. Crile said that death was
acidosis--that it was caused by the failure of the organism to maintain
the alkalinity necessary to its normal functioning--and in the absence
of any proofs or even arguments to the contrary I accepted his notion
forthwith and have held to it ever since. I thus think of death as
a sort of deleterious fermentation, like that which goes on in a
bottle of Château Margaux when it becomes corked. Life is a struggle,
not against sin, not against the Money Power, not against malicious
animal magnetism, but against hydrogen ions. The healthy man is one
in whom those ions, as they are dissociated by cellular activity, are
immediately fixed by alkaline bases. The sick man is one in whom the
process has begun to lag, with the hydrogen ions getting ahead. The
dying man is one in whom it is all over save the charges of fraud.
But here I get into chemical physics, and not only run afoul of
revelation but also reveal, perhaps, a degree of ignorance verging
upon intellectual coma. The thing I started out to do was to call
attention to the only full-length and first-rate treatise on death that
I have ever encountered or heard of, to wit, "Aspects of Death and
Correlated Aspects of Life," by Dr. F. Parkes Weber, a fat, hefty and
extremely interesting tome, the fruit of truly stupendous erudition.
What Dr. Weber has attempted is to bring together in one volume all
that has been said or thought about death since the time of the first
human records, not only by poets, priests and philosophers, but also
by painters, engravers, soldiers, monarchs and the populace generally.
The author, I take it, is primarily a numismatist, and he apparently
began his work with a collection of inscriptions on coins and medals.
But as it stands it covers a vastly wider area. One traces, in chapter
after chapter, the ebb and flow of human ideas upon the subject, of
the human attitude to the last and greatest mystery of them all--the
notion of it as a mere transition to a higher plane of life, the notion
of it as a benign panacea for all human suffering, the notion of it
as an incentive to this or that way of living, the notion of it as
an impenetrable enigma, inevitable and inexplicable. Few of us quite
realize how much the contemplation of death has colored human thought
throughout the ages. There have been times when it almost shut out all
other concerns; there has never been a time when it has not bulked
enormously in the racial consciousness. Well, what Dr. Weber does in
his book is to detach and set forth the salient ideas that have emerged
from all that consideration and discussion--to isolate the chief
theories of death, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, scientific
and mystical, sound and absurd.
The material thus digested is appallingly copious. If the learned
author had confined himself to printed books alone, he would have faced
a labor fit for a new Hercules. But in addition to books he has given
his attention to prints, to medals, to paintings, to engraved gems
and to monumental inscriptions. His authorities range from St. John
on what is to happen at the Day of Judgment to Sir William Osier on
what happens upon the normal human death-bed, and from Socrates on the
relation of death to philosophy to Havelock Ellis on the effects of
Christian ideas of death upon the mediæval temperament. The one field
that Dr. Weber has overlooked is that of music, a somewhat serious
omission. It is hard to think of a great composer who never wrote a
funeral march, or a requiem, or at least a sad song to some departed
love. Even old Papa Haydn had moments when he ceased to be merry, and
let his thought turn stealthily upon the doom ahead. To me, at all
events, the slow movement of the Military Symphony is the saddest of
music--an elegy, I take it, on some young fellow who went out in the
incomprehensible wars of those times and got himself horribly killed
in a far place. The trumpet blasts towards the end fling themselves
over his hasty grave in a remote cabbage field; one hears, before and
after them, the honest weeping of his comrades into their wine-pots. In
truth, the shadow of death hangs over all the music of Haydn, despite
its lightheartedness. Life was gay in those last days of the Holy
Roman Empire, but it was also precarious. If the Turks were not at the
gate, then there was a peasant rising somewhere in the hinterland, or
a pestilence swept the land. Beethoven, a generation later, growled
at death surlily, but Haydn faced it like a gentleman. The romantic
movement brought a sentimentalization of the tragedy; it became a sort
of orgy. Whenever Wagner dealt with death he treated it as if it were
some sort of gaudy tournament--a thing less dreadful than ecstatic.
Consider, for example, the _Char-Freitag_ music in "Parsifal"--death
music for the most memorable death in the history of the world. Surely
no one hearing it for the first time, without previous warning, would
guess that it had to do with anything so gruesome as a crucifixion.
On the contrary, I have a notion that the average auditor would guess
that it was a musical setting for some lamentable fornication between a
Bayreuth baritone seven feet in height and a German soprano weighing at
least three hundred pounds.
But if Dr. Weber thus neglects music, he at least gives full measure
in all other departments. His book, in fact, is encyclopædic; he
almost exhausts the subject. One idea, however, I do not find in it:
the conception of death as the last and worst of all the practical
jokes played upon poor mortals by the gods. That idea apparently
never occurred to the Greeks, who thought of almost everything, but
nevertheless it has an ingratiating plausibility. The hardest thing
about death is not that men die tragically, but that most of them die
ridiculously. If it were possible for all of us to make our exits at
great moments, swiftly, cleanly, decorously, and in fine attitudes,
then the experience would be something to face heroically and with
high and beautiful words. But we commonly go off in no such gorgeous,
poetical way. Instead, we die in raucous prose--of arterio-sclerosis,
of diabetes, of toxemia, of a noisome perforation in the ileo-caecal
region, of carcinoma of the liver. The abominable acidosis of Dr. Crile
sneaks upon us, gradually paralyzing the adrenals, flabbergasting the
thyroid, crippling the poor old liver, and throwing its fog upon the
brain. Thus the ontogenetic process is recapitulated in reverse order,
and we pass into the mental obscurity of infancy, and then into the
blank unconsciousness of the prenatal state, and finally into the
condition of undifferentiated protoplasm. A man does not die quickly
and brilliantly, like a lightning stroke; he passes out by inches,
hesitatingly and, one may almost add, gingerly. It is hard to say just
when he is fully dead. Long after his heart has ceased to beat and
his lungs have ceased to swell him up with the vanity of his species,
there are remote and obscure parts of him that still live on, quite
unconcerned about the central catastrophe. Dr. Alexis Carrel has cut
them out and kept them alive for months. The hair keeps on growing
for a long while. Every time another one of the corpses of Barbarossa
or King James I is examined it is found that the hair is longer than
it was the last time. No doubt there are many parts of the body, and
perhaps even whole organs, which wonder what it is all about when they
find that they are on the way to the crematory. Burn a man's mortal
remains, and you inevitably burn a good portion of him alive, and no
doubt that portion sends alarmed messages to the unconscious brain,
like dissected tissue under anæsthesia, and the resultant shock brings
the deceased before the hierarchy of heaven in a state of collapse,
with his face white, sweat bespangling his forehead and a great thirst
upon him. It would not be pulling the nose of reason to argue that many
a cremated Sunday-school super-intendent thus confronting the ultimate
tribunal in the aspect of a man taken with the goods, has been put down
as suffering from an uneasy conscience when what actually ailed him
was simply surgical shock. The cosmic process is not only incurably
idiotic; it is also indecently unjust.
But here I become medico-legal. What I had in mind when I began was
this: that the human tendency to make death dramatic and heroic has
little excuse in the facts. No doubt you remember the scene in the
last act of "Hedda Gabler," in which Dr. Brack comes in with the
news of Lövborg's suicide. Hedda immediately thinks of him putting
the pistol to his temple and dying instantly and magnificently. The
picture fills her with romantic delight. When Brack tells her that the
shot was actually through the breast she is disappointed, but soon
begins to romanticise even _that._ "The breast," she says, "is also a
good place.... There is something beautiful in this!" A bit later she
recurs to the charming theme, "In the breast--ah!" Then Brack tells
her the plain truth--in the original, thus: _"Nej,--det traf ham i
underlivet!"..._ Edmund Gosse, in his first English translation of the
play, made the sentence: "No--it struck him in the abdomen." In the
last edition William Archer makes it "No--in the bowels!" Abdomen is
nearer to _underlivet_ than bowels, but belly would probably render the
meaning better than either. What Brack wants to convey to Hedda is the
news that Lövborg's death was not romantic in the least--that he went
to a brothel, shot himself, not through the cerebrum or the heart, but
through the duodenum or perhaps the jejunum, and is at the moment of
report awaiting autopsy at the Christiania _Allgemeine-krankenhaus._
The shock floors her, but it is a shock that all of us must learn
to bear. Men upon whom we lavish our veneration reduce it to an
absurdity at the end by dying of chronic cystitis, or by choking upon
marshmallows or dill pickles, or as the result of getting cut by dirty
barbers. Women whom we place upon pedestals worthy of the holy saints
come down at last with mastoid abscesses or die obscenely of hiccoughs.
And we ourselves? Let us not have too much hope. The chances are that,
if we go to war, eager to leap superbly at the cannon's mouth, we'll be
finished on the way by an ingrowing toenail or by being run over by an
army truck driven by a former Greek bus-boy and loaded with imitation
Swiss cheeses made in Oneida, N. Y. And that if we die in our beds, it
will be of measles or albuminuria.
The aforesaid Crile, in one of his smaller books, "A Mechanistic View
of War and Peace," has a good deal to say about death in war, and in
particular, about the disparity between the glorious and inspiring
passing imagined by the young soldier and the messy finish that is
normally in store for him. He shows two pictures of war, the one ideal
and the other real. The former is the familiar print, "The Spirit of
'76," with the three patriots springing grandly to the attack, one of
them with a neat and romantic bandage around his head--apparently,
to judge by his liveliness, to cover a wound no worse than an average
bee-sting. The latter picture is what the movie folks call a close-up
of a French soldier who was struck just below the mouth by a German
one-pounder shell--a soldier suddenly converted into the hideous
simulacrum of a cruller. What one notices especially is the curious
expression upon what remains of his face--an expression of the utmost
surprise and indignation. No doubt he marched off to the front firmly
convinced that, if he died at all, it would be at the climax of some
heroic charge, up to his knees in blood and with his bayonet run clear
through a Bavarian at least four feet in diameter. He imagined the
clean bullet through the heart, the stately last gesture, the final
words: "Thérèse! Sophie! Olympe! Marie! Suzette! Odette! Denise!
Julie!... France!" Go to the book and see what he got.... Dr. Crile,
whose experience of war has soured him against it, argues that the best
way to abolish it would be to prohibit such romantic prints as "The
Spirit of '76" and substitute therefor a series of actual photographs
of dead and wounded men. The plan is plainly of merit. But it would
be expensive. Imagine a war getting on its legs before the conversion
of the populace had become complete.. Think of the huge herds of
spy-chasers, letter-openers, pacifist-hounds, burlesons and other such
operators that it would take to track down and confiscate all those
pictures!...
Even so, the vulgar horror of death would remain, for, as Ellen La
Motte well says in her little book, "The Backwash of War," the finish
of a civilian in a luxurious hospital, with trained nurses fluttering
over him and his pastor whooping and heaving for him at the foot of his
bed, is often quite as terrible as any form of exitus witnessed in war.
It is, in fact, always an unpleasant business. Let the poets disguise
it all they may and the theologians obscure the issue with promises of
post-mortem felicity, the plain truth remains that it gives one pause
to reflect that, on some day not far away, one must yield supinely to
acidosis, sink into the mental darkness of an idiot, and so suffer a
withdrawal from these engaging scenes. "No. 8," says the nurse in faded
pink, tripping down the corridor with a hooch of rye for the diabetic
in No. 2, "has just passed out." "Which is No. 8?" asks the new nurse.
"The one whose wife wore that awful hat this afternoon?" ... But all
the authorities, it is pleasant to know, report that the final scene
is placid enough. Dr. Weber quotes many of them. The dying man doesn't
struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he
succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His will power vanishes.
He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.
VII. THE ALLIED ARTS
I
_On Music-Lovers_
Of all forms of the uplift, perhaps the most futile is that which
addresses itself to educating the proletariat in music. The theory
behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating passion, and that
if the great masses of the plain people could be inoculated with it
they would cease to herd into the moving-picture theaters, or to
listen to Socialists, or to beat their wives and children. The defect
in this theory lies in the fact that such a taste, granting it to be
elevating, simply cannot be implanted. Either it is born in a man or
it is not born in him. If it is, then he will get gratification for it
at whatever cost--he will hear music if hell freezes over. But if it
isn't, then no amount of education will ever change him--he will remain
stone deaf until the last sad scene on the gallows.
No child who has this congenital taste ever has to be urged or tempted
or taught to love music. It takes to tone inevitably and irresistibly;
nothing can restrain it. What is more, it always tries to _make_ music,
for the delight in sounds is invariably accompanied by a great desire
to make them. I have never encountered an exception to this rule. All
genuine music-lovers try to make music. They may do it badly, and
even absurdly, but nevertheless they do it. Any man who pretends to
a delight in the tone-art and yet has never learned the scale of G
major--any and every such man is a fraud. The opera-houses of the world
are crowded with such liars. You will even find hundreds of them in the
concert-halls, though here the suffering they have to undergo to keep
up their pretense is almost too much for them to bear. Many of them,
true enough, deceive themselves. They are honest in the sense that they
credit their own buncombe. But it is buncombe none the less.
Music, of course, has room for philanthropy. The cost of giving an
orchestral concert is so great that ordinary music-lovers could not
often pay for it. Here the way is open for rich backers, most of whom
have no more ear for music than so many Chinamen. Nearly all the opera
of the world is so supported. A few rich cads pay the bills, their
wives posture obscenely in the boxes, and the genuine music-lovers
upstairs and down enjoy the more or less harmonious flow of sound. But
this business doesn't _make_ music-lovers. It merely gives pleasure to
music-lovers who already exist. In twenty-five years, I am sure, the
Metropolitan Opera Company hasn't converted a single music-lover. On
the contrary, it has probably disgusted and alienated many thousands of
faint-hearted quasi-music-lovers, _i. e.,_ persons with no more than
the most nebulous taste for music--so nebulous that one or two evenings
of tremendous gargling by fat tenors was enough to kill it altogether.
In the United States the number of genuine music-lovers is probably
very low. There are whole states, _e. g.,_ Alabama, Arkansas and Idaho,
in which it would be difficult to muster a hundred. In New York, I
venture, not more than one person in every thousand of the population
deserves to be counted. The rest are, to all intents and purposes,
tone-deaf. They can not only sit through the infernal din made by the
current jazz-bands; they actually like it. This is precisely as if they
preferred the works of The Duchess to those of Thomas Hardy, or the
paintings of the men who make covers for popular novels to those of El
Greco. Such persons inhabit the sewers of the bozart. No conceivable
education could rid them of their native ignobility of soul. They are
born unspeakable and incurable.
2.
Opera
Opera, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty, must inevitably
appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only because it presents aural beauty
in a frame of purely visual gaudiness, with overtones of the grossest
sexual provocation. The most successful opera singers of the female
sex, at least in America, are not those whom the majority of auditors
admire most as singers but those whom the majority of male spectators
desire most as mistresses. Opera is chiefly supported in all countries
by the same sort of wealthy sensualists who also support musical
comedy. One finds in the directors' room the traditional stock company
of the stage-door alley. Such vermin, of course, pose in the newspapers
as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art; they exhibit
themselves at every performance; one hears of their grand doings,
through their press agents, almost every day. But one has merely to
observe the sort of opera they think is good to get the measure of
their actual artistic discrimination.