I think we are all pretty well conscious of this, some of us perhaps painfully so. And what we are painfully aware of we always try to conceal. Byron, despite his genius, was always thinking of his club-foot. So are we always voluntarily or involuntarily, thinking of our savagery. It will out, still, as I say, we do try to keep it in. We do most faithfully pretend we are civilised, though we know we never shall be; not in this planet. The thing is manifestly impossible. The attraction of sex, the love of fighting, the thirst of conquest, the greed of power: these things are savage elements, like wind and fire and lightning; they make up life, and so long as life is ours, so long shall we be savages at heart—savages in our grandest passions as well as in our meanest. That is why I am disposed to think the doctrines of Christianity unsuited to the world, because they are so directly opposed to natural instinct. However, this is a point I am quite unfitted to argue upon, being of no creed myself, and very much of a savage to boot. Personally, I would not give a fig for a man who had nothing of the savage about him. I have met the kind of fellow often, especially among the literary set. "Not that I intend to imply," as the G. O. M. sayeth, "that under certain circumstances, and given certain conditions," the literary set cannot be savage—they can be, and are, but it is a savagery that is mere palaver, and never comes to honest fisticuffs. The "literary set" are physically timorous, and not fond of firearms or manly sports; effeminacy and dyspepsia mark these gifted creatures for their own. They have "nerves," have the bookish folk, like fine ladies, and with the "nerves" spite and petulance go as a matter of course. Real, bonâ-fide, fierce savagery is infinitely preferable to the puling whine or the cynical snarl of little poets and "society" philosophers; and the company of a bluff soldier who has "faced fire" is preferable to that of a dozen magazine editors.
Gathering my domino closer about me, I gaze steadily over the circling noisy throng that whirls before me, and I think of wild tribes and famished hordes scurrying fiercely along through clouds of sand over miles of desert, and I see very little difference between the "cultured" crowd and the hungry "barbarians." Desert, or the road called Custom; sand or dust in the eyes of moral perception—they come to very much the same thing in the end. Can it be possible that the present century is "helping on" civilisation? I don't believe it any more than I believe that the wretches who flung themselves under the car of Juggernaut went straight to heaven. The most curious and awful part of the whole spectacle to me is to realise that all this movement, clamour, and confusion, should be doomed to end in sudden silence by and by; such silence, that not a sound from any one of these now living noisy tongues will stir it by so much as a curse or a groan.
Yes, my friends; deny it if you will that we are all savages (I expect you to deny it because I assert it, and you would not be human if you did not contradict me), you will hardly refuse to admit that we are all skeletons. Our flesh makes our savagery. Our clothes make our morality. But reduced to our primal selves, we are plain Bones. And in honest, unadorned Bones, to be positive to the utmost degree of positivism, we invariably discover ourselves grinning. At what? Ah, who shall say! Unless it be at our own exquisite fooling with fate, which, truth to tell, is very exquisite indeed. And, however serious we may look in the flesh, we must remember our own death's-head is always laughing at us.
Death's-heads are jolly companions. Some of my friends are fond of wearing imitation ones to remind them of the wide perpetual smile they carry behind their own fleshly covering. One or two charming ladies I know carry jewelled death's-heads on their watch-chains, and play with them in a sufficiently gruesome manner. Lady Dorothy Nevill, she of shrewd Walpole wit and keen intelligence, wears a conspicuous ornament given her by our own amiable Prince of Wales—a red coral or cornelian death's-head, with a couple of diamonds in the eye-sockets. I wonder what Albert Edward was thinking about when he made the lady this valuable present, and whether the line, "To this complexion must we come at last," occurred at all to his memory. Lady Dorothy herself is particularly fond of the suggestive bauble; she perceives and appreciates as much as I do the delicate irony of a skull's smile.
And it really needs a good deal of intelligence to understand death's-heads. A duke I know, of the best possible ducal brand, annoys me exceedingly by his lack of perception in this regard. The handle of his walking-stick is an ivory skull, and he is always sucking it. The effect of this act is indescribable. He seems to be mouthing the dried and polished cranium of an ancestor. I meet him frequently in the "row," or Snobs' Parade, where gilded youth goes to stare at gilded age, by which phrase I mean that the foot-passengers are mostly young and lissom of limb, while the fine carriages frequently contain naught but the dried and desolate fragments of old age, or the painted and bedizened wrecks of youth. It is really quite curious to note how few pretty or even genial-looking persons are seen in the vehicles that crowd the Row during a "season." Max O'Rell declares that the entire show is like Tussaud's wax-work taken out for an airing, but I have never seen any one so good-looking or so clear-complexioned as wax-work in a carriage. On foot, yes; there are any number of pretty women and tolerably well set-up men to be met with strolling about under the trees, and it is precisely for this reason that whenever I go to the Park I walk instead of driving, as I prefer pretty women to ugly ones.
And thus by preamble and general tedium I have come leisurely round to the point I wished to arrive at, which is the narration of a singular dream I once had; a vision which fell upon me, not in the "silence of the night," but in the glaring heat of a midsummer afternoon while I was seated on a penny chair in the middle of the Row. I had just exchanged the usual greetings with my kindly young idiot friend the duke (sucking the ivory skull on his cane as usual) and he had gone on his way blandly grinning. I had shaken hands with a couple of vagrant journalists. I had saluted a few charming women, chatted for ten minutes with Lord Salisbury, and had imparted to a dear paunchy diplomat the secret of stewing prawns in wine—a dish which I assure you, on the faith of a true gourmet, is excellent. I had studied the back of a massively fat woman's dress for several seconds, trying to puzzle out the ways and means by which it got fastened over so much rebellious flesh. Fatigued with these exertions, and lulled by the monotonous noise of the rolling wheels of the carriages going to and fro, I fell into a sort of semi-conscious doze, in which I was perfectly aware of my surroundings, though more than half asleep. And "a change came o'er the spirit" of the scene—a change which might have alarmed unphilosophic people, but which to one like myself, who am surprised at nothing, merely transformed a dull and ordinary spectacle into a deeply interesting one. A curious white light pervaded the atmosphere and tinged the overhanging foliage with a sickly shade of green, the yellow sunshine took upon itself a jaundiced hue, and lo! all suddenly and straightway the "row" was stripped of its "too, too solid flesh" and appeared as too, too truthful Bones. Bones were the fashion of the hour—skulls the order of the day. Clothes were worn, of course, for decency's sake, clothes, too, of the very newest fashion and cut; but flesh was discarded as superfluous. And so the most elegant Paris "creations" in the way of lace parasols shaded the sun from the delicate female death's-heads; skeleton steeds in gorgeous trappings worked their ribs bravely, guided along by skeleton coachmen superb in plush and wigs well powdered; and dear antiquated Lady Doldrums, as she turned her eye-sockets to right and left with a pleasant leer, seemed to be more cheerful than she had been for many a long day. She still wore her favourite style of youthful hat, pinched artistically about the brim and turned up with artificial roses, but these handsomely-made French flowers now nodded quite waggishly against her bare jaws, knowing there was no longer any painted flesh there to eclipse their colour. Yes, Lady Doldrums was herself at last—the terrible strain of pretending to be young was over, and the only coquetterie she practised in her honest condition of Bones, was the wielding of a fan in her grisly sticks of fingers, not for heat's sake—no, merely to keep away the flies. And the wonderful crowd thickened every moment—bones, bones, nothing but bones;—they multiplied by scores, and I began to find out a few of my dear society friends by the armorial bearings on their carriages. I could guess nothing by their faces, as these were nearly all alike, and there was no variety of expression. True, there were short jaws and long, high foreheads and low, wide skulls and narrow, but I was unable to guide myself entirely by these hints. I found out Randolph Churchill, though, in a minute, but then his head is of a curious shape one does not easily forget. I should know his skull anywhere as thoroughly as the gravedigger in Hamlet knew Yorick's. He looked very cool and comfortable in his bones, I thought. So did the delightful danseuse who followed close behind him in a high-wheeled trap, with the smartest little skeleton "tiger" possible to conceive, pranked out in livery, an impudent little top-hat perched jauntily on his impudent little half-grown skull, while as for the exquisite "dancing-girl" herself, good heavens! her bones were positively fascinating! The wind whistled in and out them with a breezy amorousness—and then her smile was more than usually perfect owing to the admirable set of false teeth which were so dexterously screwed into her jaw. It would take years of mouldering away to loosen those teeth, and the mouldering had evidently not yet begun. She wore a wig too—a bronze-red wig in beauteous curl—and upon my soul, she looked almost as well arrayed in bones as in her usual heavily enamelled flesh. Very different was the aspect of the toothless old bundle that came after, seated in a springy victoria, and wrapped in rich rugs to the chin. His skeleton steeds pranced nobly, his skeleton coachman sat stiffly upright, his skeleton footman preserved the accustomed dignified cross-armed attitude, but he himself, poor wretch, rolled uneasily from side to side, till it seemed that his yellow skull would sever itself from the spinal attachment and fall incontinently into his own shaking claws. I recognised him by the showy monogram on his carriage-rug; he was the rich proprietor of several newspapers, the "impresario" of several music-halls, and the dotard lover of several ballet-girls. After him came a "four-in-hand," a marvellous sight to see with its skeleton team, its "lordly" skeleton driver, and its "select" party of skeleton "professional beauties" on top. It made quite a white glare as it passed in the sickly sun, and scattered a good deal of bone-dust from its wheels. Quite close to me there were a couple of skeletons engaged in love dallyings of the most ethereal description. The one, a female, was seated in a victoria, sheltering the top of her skull (on which a fashionable bonnet was perched) with a black lace parasol lined in crimson—a tint which flung a rouge-like reflection on her fleshless but still sensually-shaped jaws. The other, a man, clothed in "afternoon visiting" costume, leaned tenderly towards her over the park-railing, proferring for her acceptance a spray of white lilies which he had taken from his button-hole, and which he held affectionately between his dry bone fingers. Anything more sublimely chaste, yet "realistic," can never be imagined. The way their two skulls nodded and grinned at each other was intensely edifying—it was a case of purely "spiritual" love and platonic desire, in which the wicked flesh had no existing part. And one of the most remarkable features of the whole pageant was the intense stillness which pervaded the movements of the elegant bony throng of "rank, beauty, and fashion." Not a leaf on the trees rustled, not a joint in any distinguished skeleton cracked. Two skeleton policemen kept order, and the crowd itself kept silence. The skeleton horses rubbed against each other in the press, but not a bone clattered, and not a wheel grated. As noiselessly as mist or rolling cloud, the white-ribbed, motley-clothed multitude moved on; the foot-passengers were skeletons also, and 'Arry, turning empty eye-sockets about, looked quite as "noble" as my lord the duke in his barouche, somewhat more so in fact, though wearing shabbier clothes. A delightful equality ruled the scene—a true "fraternity," fulfilling some of the socialistic ideas to the letter. For once the "row" had cast off hypocrisy, and appeared in its absolutely real aspect—everybody had found out everybody else—there was no polite lie possible; frank Bones declared themselves as Bones, and nothing more. Moreover, each skeleton was so like its neighbour skeleton that there were really no differences left to argue about. The famous beauty, Lady N., could no longer scowl at her rival, the Duchess of L., because they looked precisely similar, save for a trifling difference in length of jaw, and also for the more impressive fact that one wore blue and the other grey. The bones were the same in each "fair" composition, and as bones, the two ladies were, or seemed to be, amiable enough—it was only the wretched flesh that had made them quarrelsome. And of all things, the chief thing that was truly beautiful to witness was the universal smile that beamed through the vast assemblage. Never had the "row" presented itself to broad daylight with such a sincerely unaffected, all-pervading Grin! From end to end the grin prevailed—horses, dogs, and men—there was not one serious exception. Into the air, into the very sky, the wide, perpetual, toothy smile appeared to stretch itself out illimitably, everlastingly: like a grim satire carved in letters of white bone, it seemed to inscribe itself upon the blue of heaven; a mockery, a savagery, a protest, a curse, and a sneer in one, it spread itself in ghastly dumb mirth to the very edge of the far horizon, till I, watching it, could stand the death's-head jollity no longer. Starting in my chair, I uttered a smothered cry, and awoke. A friendly hand fell on my shoulder—a pair of friendly eyes twinkled good-humouredly into mine. "Hullo! Were you asleep?" And there beside me stood Labby—the genial Labby—with "Truth" glittering all over him. Should I tell him of my queer vision, I thought, as I took his arm and strolled away in his ever-delightful company? No. Why should I bother him with the question of honest Bones versus dishonest Flesh? He was (and is) already too busy exposing Shams.
V.
HOW NAMES ARE SUPERIOR TO PERSONS.