CONCERNING THE DEAR DEPARTED

Frank Moore Colby

Author of "Imaginary Obligations," etc.

I SUPPOSE a great many other people have, like myself, the habit of clipping from the newspapers and magazines articles about well-known persons, recently deceased, in whom for one reason or another they have been interested. I suppose they, too, have been chagrined by the strange and uniform irrelevance of these articles.

Perhaps it was a writer whose work had won us by some slight quality, hard to define, harder still to prove important; for not one world-problem had he solved and his moral tones were anything but clarion. And, if he drew us to the higher plane, we had no sense of being hoisted, and I think we must have kept our vices, for I can cite no certain instance of redemption. Not a wifebeater amongst us had stayed his busy hand merely because-of reading him. Yet for ten months after that agreeable sinner died there was not an "appreciation" or an "estimate" to be found that mentioned any but his moral qualities. No sign indeed from the survivors that an individual had lived at all, but only that the wisp of a well-bleached reputation had fluttered for a little while about the world. Down he went into that Potter's field of large moralities, wherein all dead celebrities look alike.

I have no quarrel with funeral formalities or the practice of telling decent lies about the dead. When, by the burial custom of the press, a man becomes a "timely topic," it is to be expected that all the early notices shall seem as similar as black rosettes, and that even for some time afterwards biography shall be merely decorative—a matter of waxen wreaths of speech tendered by persons from whom apparently the mind has fled leaving only a nil nisi bonum expression. It is no doubt fitting that journalists, having no flags to lower, should write for a time with their brains at half-mast. Still I see no reason why after a reasonable interval, persons, related to the departed, should be as reticent as widows concerning any of his actual traits. I have known a devil-may-care humorist to be praised for a whole year after -his demise only for those qualities which kept him out of jail.

OR, perhaps it was a statesmen with some distinctive gift of speech, in no wise remarkable, but seeming so in public life. He drew us for the pleasure of seeing his mind in action, even if it were going the wrong way—an illicit pleasure, so they say, and certainly the forbidden fruit of party politics. In his day there were only Democrats and Republicans; and yet I have known both of them to run the risk of losing their hereditary opinions merely for the fun of hearing him. The truths he spoke would bear no paraphrase, for he taught no man what to think; he merely put him in a mood for thinking.

HE could speak well of his country without that advertising air, and he could side with reformers without catching that nasal moral twang—feat which in his day seemed superhuman. For it was a time when the gap between a political issue and a human thought was wider even than it is at present. It was possible to distinguish him from other men even when he talked about the tariff. Yet from the accounts written for five years after his death I could gather only that he was composed exclusively of virtues. Most of them remarked that "his conscience never slept"—no doubt from the best mortuary motives—but it was a vile calumny nevertheless, for who would have mourned the loss of a man whose conscience never slept? We should have hailed, rather, the removal of a nuisance.

OR IT may have been an editor, who seemed rather a large figure in his day because in the city in which he lived he was followed only by journalistic ciphers—one who appeared in print with all his sins upon him, revenge, and malice, and the love of low causes, but with his gifts, too, and his generous impulses, and above all with his power of setting the mind in motion, one way or another, but at least in motion—and what risks to our moral characters would we not gladly run for any New York newspaper man who could set our minds in motion? For the question of newspapers, as of politics, was not so much whether they had a good or bad character as whether they had any character at all.

In the forty "lives" that I have gathered since, all lines and wrinkles of his personality are smoothed away. Fancy the anger of his lusty ghost revisiting these biographers. They expressed him in units of his "power for good," or moral foot-pounds. They boiled him down to a sort of social medicine containing exactly three helpful "central thoughts" and one "deeper message to mankind."

CO FROM my own collection of biographies I infer that their first steps in respecting a man's memory was to try to forget what the man was like. They were under the constraint of custom and I daresay it could not be helped, but it seems as if they need not have gone so far and might at least have taken some pains to account for our personal interest. Why so completely rob a man of his earthly probability, extenuating, justifying, issuing him in little, judgment-day editions, from which you would suppose that he had never lived in the flesh but only as a principle? No public man, however wicked he may have been, could have deserved this awful charity—this hearse-like literature with its undiscriminating black plumes of speech suiting equally any kind of character, provided its possessor is dead.

THERE is certainly no such harmony in human nature as appears in print on these occasions, and it gives some force to the conjecture that certain branches of biographical activity, especially the writing of estimates and appreciations, are the work of a definite, well-organized trade group. I have heard it said that perhaps the strange word "pinking" often displayed on undertakers' windows might perhaps include the writing of appreciations. It would account for the recurrent patterns, the striking identities even in detail, if the appreciative writing about the dead could be traced to a labor organization, a pinkers' union or something of the kind. It seems more probable that men should write of one another in that manner, if they were drilled rigorously as a body, regulated, fused, personally obliterated in one way or another, effaced as individuals that they might pull together as pinkers.

AT ALL events on turning over the leaves of my scrapbook, I can not escape the conviction that biography has become in large part a coooperative industry.