The trees, even the humblest plants, we know struggle upward to the light; surely they should be helped-all difficulties and disorders should be incentives to the divine shaping spirit of man.
Yet Whitman praised death, "beneficent death." "Hateful death!" I cry. I hate it, as Goethe hated it, at least for the choice and master spirits. Who will make good the loss? It is irreparable for me. Death!
I prefer Browning's word here to Whitman's; it's truer. Death he calls "The Arch-fear;" I often think of it as an ocean; in the great flood another wave sinks and nothing is changed-except to the wave and the other waves near at hand!
With death before him, how any thinking man can believe in an omnipotent and beneficent God, I cannot imagine. I am not thinking now of cruelty, though it is the primary law of His creation, but simply of death that comes to all of us, no matter whether we have lived nobly or vilely. How easy it would have been for a benevolent deity to give a second life of youthful vigor to every man or woman who had lived in the main to the highest in him, and how such a reward would have quickened virtue and discouraged vice and made of man's life a sacred progress to all the heights. But as it is, death comes! And even before death, his dread heralds, decaying strength, failing faculties, loss of memory and of joy, the sunlight even drained of warmth.
And we children of an hour quarrel and dispute and show greed and envy while the days shorten to the inevitable end. How could Whitman praise death!
But after all, what does death matter? It is hideous and terrible, if you will; but few can tell when the curtain will fall and the play for them be finished.
And meanwhile one's work remains. A, B, and C look at it and shrug indifferent shoulders and the years pass and one seems forgotten. Suddenly, some one comes who is interested. "Strange," he says, "how did this work escape praise?" And he begins to praise it, and others follow him, wondering where this new teacher should be placed.
Sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare, the recognition has to wait three hundred years. What matter? It was a century before anyone dreamed of placing Heine with Goethe: what do the years matter? Sooner or later we are judged by our peers and the judgment is unchangeable. I wait for my peers, welcoming them.
"He has written naughty passages," says one, and my friend replies, "so did Shakespeare in 'Hamlet' and with less provocation." "His life is the fullest ever lived," says my disciple, and they all realize that a supreme word has been spoken and that such a man is among the great forever.