Friday, May 29,. 1925.
The Daily Nebraskan Literary Supplement
Page Three.
not leave wooden monuments as symbols of
an immaterial and more permanent sub
stance. When a person is dead, there is something
inexpressibly pathetic in a cheap tombstone.
It is a confession of earthly poverty, of hav
failed to get on, which does not seem fair
when the person is no longer there, to keep
up a brave show of gentility. Far over in
an obscure corner of the cemetery stood the
home-made tombstone of an old man. Some
one had cast cement in the shape of a small
church-window, and painted the rough
pebbly surface with white. Many rains had
cracked the impermanent stuff, and washed
the paint down in uneven streaks. Had some
friend made it for him, or had the penniless
old fellow cast it for himself before he died?
Whoever made the stone, it was some one
unskilled in lettering who had printed his
short and simple annals on the painted
cement. " B. F. ERWAY " the letters
started bravely enough, with painstaking
and awkward carefulness; "BORN DEC.
12, 1842" here they were not quite so
well-formed, and some of them sloped down
hill; " DIED JULY 11, 1908 " on the last
line the words were frankly too close to
gether, and the letters scratched on with sad
irregularity.
Are lots cheaper near the edge of the cem
etery, or did some proud and sensitive souls,
like Propertius, prefer remote tombs far
from the crowd?
Di faciant, mea ne terra locit ossa frequenti
Qua faeit adsiduo tramite fulgua iter,
Post mortem tumuli sic inflamantur amantum
Ale tegat arborea devia terra coma,
Aut humer ignotae cumulis vallatus harenae
Non iuvat in media nomen havere via.
Prop. Ill, 16, 25.
For myself, I do not see that it matters
either way; but if a choice of the tombstone'3
location had to be made, mine should be with
all the others. If it is necessary to return
to dust, there is something consoling in Ad
dison's thought of " the innumerable multi
tudes of people confused together under the
pavement . . . men and women, friends and
enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and
prebendaries .... crumbled against one an
other and blended in the same common
mass; beauty, strength, and youth, with
old-age, weakness, and deformity, lying un
distinguished in the same promiscuous heap
of matter." Yes, I should, with Tibullus,
ask my tomb to be placed in celebri fronte.
Another monument set apart on a little
hill, and shadowed by a drooping willow
tree; had what seemed to-me the most per
fect epitaph in the cemetery.
MOTHER
Lavinia
Wife of Rev. Wm. F. Smith
Bom Dec 5, 1810
Died Nov. 13, 1892
"She hath done what she conld"
There it was ,a life epitomized in six
words. Can you not see this gaunt, right
eous woman, Lavinia Smith? She was a
"good woman," the strict and dutiful
mother of a large family, eminently faith
ful in her duties as the minister's wife, one
of the " mothers in Israel." I am sure Rev.
Smith did not intend that we should read
in the Biblical quotation a hint of sadness, a
suggestion that Lavinia Smith, in her stern
devotion to piety, had .neglected the lovely
little expressions of human affection to one's
family. But there stands the epitaph tell
ing more than her husband meant: "She
hath done what she could."
In almost every case-the epitaphs which
revealed much concerning the departed per
sons were Biblical quotations. Any one not
sure of his ability to compose a suitable
epitaph wise to select a quotation from
the classics or the Bible. What a happy gam
there is in permanence and beauty, what a
superiority and dignity is transferred to the
frail skeleton below, when the stone bears
immortal words! On other tombstones I
saw many incongruous abbreviations, but
not a word was ever changed in a Biblical
quotation. " Laura dau of J. M. Godfrey
there might be, but no one dared to write
" Suffer the little children to come unto me "
in anything but its completeness. Why do
not these words seem trite? They have been
repeated oftener than other once worthy
phrases now gone to the Never Never Land
of Worn-Out Words. " Her eyes as stars of
twilight fair " was original at the beginning
of the nineteenth century; it is only now, in
the twentieth, after eyes have been likened
to stars so many times, that the figure has
come to be called trite. Why is it, then,
that some combinations of words are never
called hackneyed, but seem rather to gain
in value, with the years? "We are such
stuff as dreams are made of and our little
life is rounded with a sleep." . . . . " Love
suffereth long, and is kind." Some sentences
are like organ-notes. They cannot be said
too many times.
Before leaving the grave-yard, I noted,
with astonishment mounting to horror, a
number of inscriptions like the following:
STONEBRAKER
Geo. F. Victoria L.
Born June 10, 1851 Born Oct. 22, 1860
Died Nov. 28, 1911 Died
Old Mrs. Stonebraker, the energetic old
lady on Chestnut Street, always to be seen at
every church service and public gathering!
Mrs. Stonebraker, her inscription engraved,
waiting to die. Or, if not waiting,
at least resigned to the realization that death
would come. Do all older people, then, admit
that they will die? ... . Yes, I too philoso
phize in generalizations, " Death has to come
to everyone ;" and in the background of con
sciousness is the vague realization of its in
evitability for me. But oh, do we not think,
each one of us, that somehow we shall escape
this thing of death? Do we not feel the
impossibility of not being keenly and ting
lingly alive? When one reaches the point of
preparing his epitaph and tombstone, then
life has indeed become for him only a " per
manent possibility of sensation."
But the most unified and striking impres
sion one receives from a cemetery is, I be
lieve, the prevalence of resignation in the
epitaphs, of restraint" in the expression of
the grief. None of them say fully the des
pair and sorrow the persons felt. Some
times the resignation is superhuman, and
terrible. " He hath called his own." " The
Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away
Blessed be the name of the Lord."
The most sorrowful of the inscriptions
never express the passionate mourning, the
burning sense of injustice one often hears
expressed before and after the funerals by
the most devout Christians, the most earn
est believers in the Resurrection story. " I
can't understand. She was only a baby.
She had never done anything wrong."
The cry is as old as Lear's to Cordelia:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?
On the grave-stones, nothing of this. The
unseemly crying out atFate, the devastating
tears and protests are accomplished at home.
Convention must mask the grief, and on the
smooth surfaces of the tombstones they cut
the peaceful epitaphs, " Requiescat." . . . .
" Farewell."
Dickens and the Childlike Mind
(Continued from Page One)
up readers will sniff at the sentimentality
which surrounds these poor chaps, but
where's the harm in that kind of sentimen
tality? But to depart from these distressing
themes, even as' Dickens himself does, sud
denly .without warning, there must be good
things to eat in novels. Christmas dinners,
holiday feasts of all descriptions, picnics, all
make'toothsome reading, with their pictures
of hearty English viands, meat pies, and
plum pudd.ngs ablaze in brandy and holly.
And sh! there must be good things to
drink, too; wassail, and megus, and port,
claret, and sherry, and hot pineapple rum
with sugar in it, as the .reverend Mr. Stig
gens consumed it in the bar of the Marquis
of Granby. No matter if people do enjoy
their eating and drinking; no matter if Mr.
Pickwick does like the punch wisely but too
well, and does end up in some inexplicable
manner at the Pound, in a wheelbarrow. So
much the merrier.
There must be utterly ridiculous situa
tions, too, like Mr. Pickwick's in the spinster
lady's bedroom by mistake, with his night
cap tied on in a very hard knot, so that he
can't get it off, ma'am, embarrassing though
it is to be addressing a lady in one's night
cap. Or like Mr. Winkle's, deplorable situa
tion when the door blew to, and his subse
quent flight from the house. Or like Mr.
Fledgeby's painful condition when little
Jenny Wren found the black pepper as well
as the vinegar and brown paper, and ap
plied all three with a judicious hand. Situa
tions like these abound in Dickens.
I need not pretend, however, that even
the childlike mind reads Dickens solidly and
indiscriminately. There is a childlike pro
cedure in reading him, just as there is a
childlike appreciation of him. The childlike
mind balks at too flagrant sentimentality,
and, feeling no Puritanical obligation to the
unpleasant, serenely avoids it. The proper
procedure in reading Dickens is to skip mer
rily through him very much as one skips
merrily through the streets on a rainy day.
For there are puddles in Dickeno, of course.
But after one has charted a course one can
easily avoid them. When one has read
Dombey and Son several times, one knows
that at page 207 one is to take a little run,
and jump over into the next chapter, on page
212, thus avoiding, the death of little Paul.
So, too, in David Copverfield one skips airily
over most of Dora's housekeeping, her un
timely, but not wholly unfortunate death,
and Trotwood's ridiculous proposal to Agnes.
And truly, the exercise of such skipping is
invigorating, rather than wearying.
But your grown-up readers of Dickens, not
knowing their ground, blunder into all the
puddles. Of course the water oozes up
through thejr elderly shoes; of course they
get soggy and irritable; is it any wonder
that, when they have gone home and acquired
bad 1 colds directly, they anathematize the
weather? Unfortunately, they can not be
persuaded to venture forth again; they have
little use for a book in which one has to skip.
Sometimes one feels that they have a moral
scruple against skipping; that it would be
cheating to skip a paragraph here, or a
chapter there. They feel it their duty to
wade through every puddle, no matter how
disagreeable it may be. Then, of course,
they are prejudiced against Dickens, and
their contempt of him knows no bounds.
But to the childlike mind there are so many
.compensations for the puddles that it for
gets them almost entirely, once it has leaped
nimbly over them. If one manages to avoid
a ducking, or a splashing, there is nothing
more delightful than a spring rain. And
when one is not caught unexpectedly, some
times even the ducking or the splashing is
enjoyable. After all, it is only when one is
unprepared for them that the spring
showers are disagreeable.
There are a half dozen vigorous characters
for each weak one in Dickens; a dozen inim
itable situations for each conventional one;
a whole gross of exquisitely absurd speeches
for each stupid or commonplace one. Betsey
Trotwood is one of these vigorous characters
who help to make up for Agnes; .Captain
Turtle's escape from his landlady partially
. atones for Florence's disinheritance by hef
father; Mrs. Nickleby's enlightening remin
iscences make up entirely for all the Nicholas-Madeline
dialogues in the book. At all
events, the childlike mind is satisfied with
these adjustments.
But there are portions of Dickens which
need no adjustment at all; they suit the child
like mind exactly as they are; some of the
Sketches, many of 'the short stories, like the
Christmas Carol, and most of all, the little
group of short stories called Holiday Ro
mance, exactly hit the fancy and capture the
affection of the childlike reader. Holiday
Romance purports to come from the pens
(Continued on Page Four)
