I, alas! have
long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved
mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as the King
of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the
word 'love' really means. I have never been a reader of philosophy,
but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been
preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death--about the
final beneficence of Death--that 'reasonable moderator and equipoise
of justice,' as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise of justice
indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as these most have
known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I
understand it. The Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where
does Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show
this temper of acquiescence? All his impeachments of Death have the
deep ring of personal feeling--dramatist though he was. But, what I
am going to ask you is, How shall the modern materialist, who you
think is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to
follow--how shall he confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck
down? When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the
parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the
hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what
your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation
which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard
beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile.
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