"The Literature of Death"

The Literature of Death
The Speaker, March 16, 1901


Flowers of The Cave. Edited by Laurie Magnus and Cecil Headlam. Blackwood

The book which appears under the somewhat mystical and allusive title of Flowers of the Cave has not, as might be supposed at the first glance, any connection either with geology or botany.

It is a collection of extracts upon death, very ably and thoughtfully compiled by Mr. Laurie Magnus and Mr. Cecil Headlam. But it is almost too comprehensive a project to publish an anthology on death. It is rather like publishing an anthology on Man, in which should be included "The Man for wisdom's various arts renowned;" "There was a little man and he had a little gun;" "Man wants but little here below;" "He was a man, take him for all in all;" "There was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise;" "What is man, that thou carest for him?" and the whole text of "The Descent of Man." Death is about as universal in literature as in human existence, and is infinitely more respectfully treated. If we tore the cover off The Golden Treasury, and substituted the title Flowers of the Cave, we should hardly find seven poems, we suspect, which did not contain some allusion to the subject of the mortal end. Death is involved in the discussion of any conceivable human subject. It is merely the full stop at the end of the word "life."

In an unpretentious, but singularly able preface, the editors demur to the notion that the treatment of such a subject is necessarily very depressing; as they point out, the loftiest, and, we may add, the most lighthearted men of genius have faced it without a thought of it prostrating them. But though we fully applaud the editors for including all the various points of view from which this tremendous subject has been considered, no one could expect the poems and passages which they print to be uniformly or even generally of a character to elevate either the spirits or the soul. Death has called forth in literature not only much cheerfulness and dignity, much chivalrous hope and more chivalrous hopelessness, but also much panic, much paltry philosophy, much of dismal asceticism and more dismal frivolity, much of the self-indulgence of gloom and much of the gloom of self-indulgence.

On the one hand, the scheme of the work admits all the great poems which gather round the conception of eternal life, such as Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," which is, by the way, a magnificent example of the right way to sing about a common subject. Many realists, Wordsworth himself included, fell often into that futile realistic spirit which merely shows that a common thing is common. The higher realism shows that a common thing is uncommonly uncommon, and that all the trumpets of poetic style are not too sublime for its celebration. The case of idealism or truth to the soul, against realism, or truth to the tongue, might be tried on the issue of Wordsworth alone. He wrote two poems upon the idea of a child's conviction of a life beyond death. When he was writing what, in his view, the child actually said, he wrote "We are Seven." When he was writing in his own language what the child meant, he wrote the "Ode on the Intimations."

But just as there is the white side of the philosophy of death, as shown in Wordsworth's Ode, so there is the dark side also. There are poems rightly included in this volume, and adorning any volume in the literary sense, of which we should say without hesitation that they are baser than the foulest epigram of Catullus.

Most people know Bacon's vigorous pessimistic poem in this volume, which begins:-

"The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span."

and which concludes:-

"What then remains but that we still should cry
For being born; or being born, to die."

The poem is expressed in terms common enough in philosophy and religion, and to many its Vanitas Vanitatum will have a dignified and pious sound. To us, we must confess, this poem is the only one of the literary works of Bacon in which we see the Bacon of history, the Bacon who betrayed Essex, the Bacon who cringed to Buckingham, the shuffler, the coward and the snob.

In order to see how misleading are titles and philosophical descriptions in dealing with moral atmosphere, we need only compare Bacon's poem with the exquisite and even more famous lyric of Shirley, beginning "The glories of our blood and state," which is also in this book. Here there is, in a sense, a Vanitas Vanitatum attitude, but as different from the querulous cleverness of Bacon as a rich twilight from a yellow fog. Shirley's melancholy is not for the ugliness of things, but for their beauty; it is that delicate and golden melancholy which is only possible to men with a great power of enjoyment. And because his sadness is a fullblooded and generous sadness, because it is a sadness over the goodness of things, he escapes in the last lines, like Thackeray, out of satire into a healthy and humble claim for happiness, in two of the most perfect lines in the language:-

"Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

The poem might be a motto for The Newcomes.

These two forms of melancholy pretty well cover the mass of extracts on the melancholy view of death. Melancholy, in the sound old Miltonic sense, had nothing to do with pessimism. Sorrow, indeed, is always the opposite of pessimism; for sorrow is based on the value of something, pessimism on the value of nothing. Men have never believed genuinely in that idle and fluent philosophy (a theme for the devil's copybooks) which declares that earthly things are worthless because they are fleeting. Men do not fling their cigars into the fire at the thought that they will only last fifteen minutes, or shoot their favourite aunts through the head on the reflection that they can only live fifteen years. Nor is it from such thankless railing at this world that men have gained the best hopes for another. It is strange that sages and saints should have sought so often to prove the splendour of the house from the darkness of its porch. If we could really believe in the meanness of the meanest dust-bin, there would be no reason for not believing in the utter meanness of the stars. Surely it is far more credible that death is precisely the breakdown of our mortal powers of praise: that when we cease to wonder we die; that we have to be dipped once more in darkness, before we can see the sun once more.