Let me up, you damned saw-bones!
W. S. Simcox: The Death-rattle.
Miss Linthorpe died about three weeks later. I suppose even the most selfish of us can look back at one or two really “good deeds” they have put in during the course of their lives; and I must say I think the old lady died the happier for my attendance at her bedside. I found, when I reached her house in Sloane Gardens, that they had called in a young doctor, passionately interested in mind-curing, whose method chiefly consisted of sitting in her room for an hour or so at a time, not talking to her much, but just, as he said, “keeping up her vitality.” The first words she whispered to me as I bent down to kiss her were, “My dear, do get rid of that death’s-head; he depresses me beyond words.” I managed somehow to dispose of him, and as he shut the door behind him—not gently but with a loud bang, no doubt by way of keeping up her vitality—my aunt actually fumbled at the side of her bed and brought out her familiar lorgnettes; then, fixing his imaginary figure with that devastating stare of hers, “Why do I have to pay to be attended by a man who hasn’t even got the sense to see that I’m dying, when I can see it for myself? I suppose he thinks death is some kind of sexual abnormality. Now, my dear, I want you to be very kind, and call in Dr. Matheson—Hodges will give you the address. He’s a rotten doctor, I believe, but I’d sooner be killed off by one of my own generation. One gets these fads, you know.”
So Miss Linthorpe had the services of her old, comfortable doctor: nor was she less exacting in the case of her solicitor; nor, I need hardly say, in the case of her clergyman. He had to come from a church several parishes off: “It’s a dingy sort of hole, and the services there always send me to sleep; but they’ve no stunts there, if you understand what I mean; they don’t turn out in fresh clothes every week, or make up the service as they go along.” I doubt if he did much for her, and indeed she confided to me that she would look a pretty sort of fool in heaven if all he said was true. But she got her way, and she could bear anything as long as she got her way. It was the same clergyman who attended her coffin to the grave-side, and read the funeral service. “When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality” ... it was part of a dead world we laid to rest at the West Drayton cemetery, but you felt that there, if indeed she was anywhere, her old prejudices would be more respected, and her odd ways less out of place.
It touched me profoundly, and at the same time took me seriously aback, when I found that the old lady had left me her sole heir. She had also, quite at the end of her life, entrusted to her solicitor a sealed packet which was to be delivered to me personally, or failing that to be destroyed unread. I do not know what strange freak induced my aunt to plunge suddenly into authorship; but the envelope proved to contain nothing more than her reflections on life, with a few general bits of advice which she offered to me on the strength of it. I have it before me as I type (Miss Linthorpe to her dying day would never use a typewriter): a few extracts, which I do not hesitate to print, will show the general character of it.
My dear Opal,
When you grow old (as you probably will, for my family are long-lived, and the Winterheads are a healthy stock, because they think so little), you will have passed through an experience which now lies a good long way back in my life, but which will perhaps come to you later. I mean the moment when one drops out of the movement that goes on in one’s generation: it is just like dropping out of a competition, the same mixture of disappointment and relief. You will find that you have suddenly stood still, when you had no idea that you had been moving, like getting off one of these murderous moving platforms when you’re not thinking. You will have turned from a competitor in life into a spectator, and your first thought will be that everything round you changes, and changes very rapidly. But this, since it is not a very original thought, you will probably keep to yourself.
The next thing you will notice is that the change is of two kinds: there is a change which is involuntary on mankind’s part, and a change which is deliberate. All the progress of science, whether practical or speculative, is involuntary. We shall not go back to horses, nor to candles, nor to sewing-machines. And although all the theories of all these silly scientists are not (thank God!) eternal, but appear to go round in cycles, so that I am old enough to remember the days when they thought consumption was not infectious (or do I mean contagious?) and that there was no such person as Homer, yet it’s only fair to say that they do learn from their mistakes; they go up blind alleys, but they have the decency to blaze the trail behind them, so that their posterity shan’t make just the same kind of fools of themselves. And I suppose it’s true that as our scientific apparatus gets better, we come to depend on it more and grow physically inferior in consequence—I can say this with some pride, since I am sixty-nine and haven’t a tooth in my head that God didn’t put there.[[2]] But nobody is going to avoid all that, and I never heard that anybody except Ruskin thought you could.
The lie you will find people telling all around you—and telling it without realizing that it is a lie, which makes it so much worse, as Plato says—is that the great movements of the human mind, whether in the arts or in politics or in morals or in religion, are similarly part of an irresistible progress; so that you could never go back on our present attitude of mind about (say) marriage any more than you could go back to sewing-machines. The truth is, of course, that the great movements of the human mind are just fashions. The reason why you don’t admire Whistler is just the same as the reason why you don’t wear elastic-sided boots. And it’s so with bigger things than that; generally it’s a catchword that starts the whole thing—look at Evolution! Look at what a bogy it was to our fathers’—I mean, to my father’s—generation: how all the clergymen went about thinking the world was coming to an end and wondering where their next collection was coming from: and all the dons tried to work evolution into their subjects, and pretend that they had detected it there long before they ever heard of Darwin, and the politicians—oh, Lord! And now where is it? It outlived crinolines, which it never deserved to, but it hasn’t outlived jumpers. You’ll see, it’ll be just the same with this relativity nonsense every one is talking about. They’re fashions, these things; it isn’t that any one person sits down and says, “Now, let’s all think like this”: it’s a collective impetus, as that bore Canon Dives would say. You’ll live through it.
I wish I knew what it all meant. But I think this: I think it is the result of man being born immortal, and thinking (like an ass) that he has only this world to satisfy his immortal instinct with. Despairing of immortality in this world, and forgetting it in the next, he makes the human race the immortal unit, and so endows it with life. And, because he has been told that life means growth, he cannot be happy until he believes that the world in which he lives is growing, from something to something else. That is human vanity’s favourite dogma, and there is no atom of proof for it. Everything we know about history and natural history shows that there is a kind of progress in the world which is a progress from the less to the more complicated, from the less to the more organized: nothing suggests, except to our vanity, that there is a progress from the worse to the better—and what other kind of progress would any sensible person give a tinker’s curse for? That’s it, I believe. Sweating away on the treadmill, humanity fancies that it is mountaineering, and that the dawn is just going to show above the next slope. There’s an epigram for you. Let me finish now, before I spoil it....