“AND HE DIED.”
Genesis v. passim.
Well known is Addison’s reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church, who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died;—immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which had not regard to another.
What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?
So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one:—
And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning,
And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been—
Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,
Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, “amusing himself,” as the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense—with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. The “Spectator” could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arranged, of inevitable facts in a man’s life. “One is so certain of the man’s having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it.” The man—a man—any man—every man. It is the common lot. And we know what James Montgomery has made of the Common Lot. Here are two or three of the stanzas that are most to the purpose:—
There lived a man—lived, and loved, and learned, and laboured—enjoyed the common joys of his kind, endured the common sufferings. And he died. Old Egeus mooted a veritable truism when moralizing thus, in Chaucer:—
A French historian comments on this characteristic of old cloister chronicles, that the obscurest event of the cloister holds in them as conspicuous a place as the greatest revolutions in history. For instance, in a chronicle cited by him of the year of grace 732, which produced the battle of Poictiers, whereby Charles Martel arrested the vast invasion of Islamism, not a line is vouchsafed to that event. In fact, the year is passed over without notice, as containing nothing really deserving of notice. But beside a date expressly given, we read, “Martin est mort,”—Martin being an unknown monk of the Abbey of Corvey; and, farther on again, “Charles, maire du palais, est mort.” Martin was an unknown monk, and he died. Charles Martel was mayor of the palace, and the conqueror at Poictiers, and he died. Well remarks M. Demogeot, that “tous les hommes deviennent egaux devant la secheresse laconique de ces premiers chroniqueurs.” “We must all go, that is certain,” writes Mrs. Piozzi to Sir James Fellows, “and ’tis the only thing that is certain. Καὶ ἀπεθανε ends all the cases Dr. James quotes from your old friend Hippocrates.” All the physician’s cases have the same terminal affix, And he died. Very long-lived some of them may be; but, as Mr. Browning puts it in his fine poem of “Saul,”
We are told of St. Anschar, whose missionary career in Sweden is commemorated in Milman’s “Latin Christianity,” that the ardour of youth had begun to relax his strict austerity of monastic discipline, when all at once the world was startled by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death. That the mighty sovran of so many kingdoms must suffer the common lot, struck young Anschar as something beyond the common; and from that hour he lived in the world as not of it, and bore on his way through it as verily a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, with serious work to do, but working in and walking by faith, not sight.
Marcus Antoninus, in his self-communings, bids himself consider how many physicians are dead that used to value themselves upon the cure of their patients, and how many astrologers who thought themselves great men by foretelling the deaths of others; how many warriors, who had knocked out the brains of thousands upon thousands; and how many tyrants who managed the power of life and death with as much rigour as if they had been themselves immortal.
Among the pointed sayings that have been thought worthy of preservation—by Gibbon, for example—of Hormisdas, a fugitive prince of Persia, who was at Rome in the fourth century, is this,—“that one thing only had displeased him, to find that men died at Rome as well as elsewhere.” Courtiers have avowed themselves shocked at the non-exception of royalty from the universal doom. A courtly preacher, who had announced the unconditional fact that we are all mortal, is said to have checked himself, on remembering that royalty was present, and to have qualified the assertion by the circumspect salvo, “At least, nearly all.”[16] Lewis the Eleventh was too shrewd a man to give heed to such courtly suggestions; otherwise, if ever there were prince that would fain have believed the fiction, it was he, so abhorrent to his shuddering nature was the imagination of his own decease. And Commines relates how physicians combined their remedies with the sacred objects produced from the sanctuary to avert the dread decree, “pour lui allonger la vie. Toutefois le tout n’y fasoit rien; et falloit qu’il passât par là où les autres ont passés.” And he died. All stories have the same ending.
That very old poet, Stephen Hawes, for discovering in whom “one fine line,” Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” tells his own life-story quite to an end, including the particulars of his funeral and epitaph. A finer critic than Warton, or than Warton’s critic, bids those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s utterance:—
“Ringeth,” says Mrs. Browning, “in our ear with a soft and solemn music, to which the soul is prodigal of echoes.”
What—asks the most meditative of Roman emperors, in his Meditations, discussing with himself the ultimate fate, often reluctantly undergone, of certain long-lived persons—what are they more than those who went off in their infancy? What is become of Cæcilianus, Fabius, Julianus, and Lepidus? Their heads are all laid somewhere. They buried a great many; but at last they came to be buried themselves. Mr. Dickens, as well as Hervey, has his meditations among the tombs,—and these are of them in the little hemmed-in churchyards of the city—these, over an old tree at the church window, with no room for its branches, that has seen out generation after generation of civic worthies: “So with the tomb of the old Master of the Company, on which it drips. His son restored it, and died; his daughter restored it, and died; and then he had been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name cracked out.” To quote Chaucer again:
Cranmer’s transported prevision, in Shakspeare, of the grand future that awaited the infant princess Elizabeth, is dashed with sadness towards the end—the strain subsiding into a minor key—by the unwelcome but inevitable reflection, “But she must die.” So muses and moralises Talbot again, in another of the historical plays:
And Warwick, in another of them, finding that, of all his lands, is nothing left him but his body’s length, exclaims, as one that at last feels it feelingly,
And once more in yet another of them, when King John dies, and Salisbury witnessing the death, exclaims, “But now a king—now thus!” the prince who is to succeed takes home the lesson to himself, and confesses, in diction borrowed from the mere machinery of clockwork,
In exhibiting to Odysseus in the shades below a group of the fairest and most famous of women, Homer has been supposed by some of his commentators to have designed a lecture on mortality to the whole sex. Tertullian’s trumpet is blown with no uncertain sound when he thus addresses the frivolous fair of his day: “I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most High.... But, O gods of flesh and blood, O gods of earth and dust, ye shall die like men, and all your glory shall fall to the ground, veruntamen sicut homines moriemini.” This is in Tertullian’s description of the vain and prodigal and exacting beauty. Suggestive in its way is an anecdote related by Mrs. Thrale about Sir Joshua Reynolds’s picture of two fashionable belles, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Bouverie, attired as two shepherdesses, and with this motto attached, Et in Arcadiâ ego. What could that mean? is Dr. Johnson said to have asked. Reynolds replied that the king could have told him: “He saw it yesterday, and said at once, ‘Oh, there is a tombstone in the background. Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’” The thought is said to have been borrowed from Poussin—where some gay revellers stumble over a death’s head, with a scroll proceeding from its mouth, saying, Et in Arcadiâ ego.
Memorable at Saladin’s banquet to Richard and his peers—ever memorable among the banners and pennons, the trophies of battles won and kingdoms overthrown, is the long lance displaying a shroud, “the banner of Death, with this impressive inscription—‘Saladin, King of Kings—Saladin, Victor of Victors—Saladin must Die.’”
Poet Prior laments with courtly distress the inflexible fact that the British monarch, to whom he is addressing his carmen seculare for the year of grace MDCC., must go the way of all flesh:
For as Master Matthew puts it in another ode:—
The truism appears to have been a favourite theme with Prior, who expatiates upon it in a variety of keys. Here is one other specimen from his stores, in octosyllabic metre:—
Does not Cervantes begin the last chapter of his great work with the reflection that, as all human things, especially the lives of men, are transitory, ever advancing to their decline and final termination, so “Don Quixote was favoured by no privilege of exemption from the common fate,” for the period of his dissolution came when he least thought of it—and he died.
Death’s final conquest is the subject of a fine poem of James Shirley’s; the piece by which he is, in every sense, best remembered. How death lays his icy hands on kings, is there told with pitiless candour; and the merry monarch, par excellence, Charles the Second, is said to have greatly admired the poetry, if not the candour, of Shirley’s strain. Early or late, all stoop to fate; that is the trite topic. But the moral is noble, and nobly expressed. The poet reminds laurelled victors that the garlands are withering on their brow, and that soon upon death’s purple altar shall the “victor victim” bleed:—
The first verse only of George Herbert’s “Virtue” is familiar to men; all four have a music and a meaning of their own:—