“I do not pretend that a man is as fully alive after his so-called death as before it. He is not. All I contend for is, that a considerable amount of efficient life still remains to some of us, and that a little life remains to all of us, after what we commonly regard as the complete cessation of life. In answer, then, to those who have just urged that the destruction of one of the two great factors of life destroys life altogether, I reply that the same must hold good as regards death.
“If to live is to be influenced and to influence, and if a man cannot be held as living when he can no longer be influenced, surely to die is to be no longer able either to influence or be influenced, and a man cannot be held dead until both these two factors of death are present. If failure of the power to be influenced vitiates life, presence of the power to influence vitiates death. And no one will deny that a man can influence for many a long year after he is vulgarly reputed as dead.
“It seems, then, that there is no such thing as either absolute life without any alloy of death, nor absolute death without any alloy of life, until, that is to say, all posthumous power to influence has faded away. And this, perhaps, is what the Sunchild meant by saying that in the midst of life we are in death, and so also that in the midst of death we are in life.
“And there is this, too. No man can influence fully until he can no more be influenced—that is to say, till after his so-called death. Till then, his ‘he’ is still unsettled. We know not what other influences may not be brought to bear upon him that may change the character of the influence he will exert on ourselves. Therefore, he is not fully living till he is no longer living. He is an incomplete work, which cannot have full effect till finished. And as for his vicarious life—which we have seen to be very real—this can be, and is, influenced by just appreciation, undue praise or calumny, and is subject, it may be, to secular vicissitudes of good and evil fortune.
“If this is not true, let us have no more talk about the immortality of great men and women. The Sunchild was never weary of talking to us (as we then sometimes thought, a little tediously) about a great poet of that nation to which it pleased him to feign that he belonged. How plainly can we not now see that his words were spoken for our learning—for the enforcement of that true view of heaven and hell on which I am feebly trying to insist? The poet’s name, he said, was Shakespeare. Whilst he was alive, very few people understood his greatness; whereas now, after some three hundred years, he is deemed the greatest poet that the world has ever known. ‘Can this man,’ he asked, ‘be said to have been truly born till many a long year after he had been reputed as truly dead? While he was in the flesh, was he more than a mere embryo growing towards birth into that life of the world to come in which he now shines so gloriously? What a small thing was that flesh and blood life, of which he was alone conscious, as compared with that fleshless life which he lives but knows not in the lives of millions, and which, had it ever been fully revealed even to his imagination, we may be sure that he could not have reached?’
“These were the Sunchild’s words, as repeated to me by one of his chosen friends while he was yet amongst us. Which, then, of this man’s two lives should we deem best worth having, if we could choose one or other, but not both? The felt or the unfelt? Who would not go cheerfully to block or stake if he knew that by doing so he could win such life as this poet lives, though he also knew that on having won it he could know no more about it? Does not this prove that in our heart of hearts we deem an unfelt life, in the heaven of men’s loving thoughts, to be better worth having than any we can reasonably hope for and still feel?
“And the converse of this is true; many a man has unhesitatingly laid down his felt life to escape unfelt infamy in the hell of men’s hatred and contempt. As body is the sacrament, or outward and visible sign, of mind; so is posterity the sacrament of those who live after death. Each is the mechanism through which the other becomes effective.
“I grant that many live but a short time when the breath is out of them. Few seeds germinate as compared with those that rot or are eaten, and most of this world’s denizens are little more than stillborn as regards the larger life, while none are immortal to the end of time. But the end of time is not worth considering; not a few live as many centuries as either they or we need think about, and surely the world, so far as we can guess its object, was made rather to be enjoyed than to last. ‘Come and go’ pervades all things of which we have knowledge, and if there was any provision made, it seems to have been for a short life and a merry one, with enough chance of extension beyond the grave to be worth trying for, rather than for the perpetuity even of the best and noblest.
“Granted, again, that
