“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;