The Art of Dying

I

ON the afternoon of November 16, 1927, a black man whose name was Tiger Flowers walked into the operating room of a New York hospital prepared for anæsthesia. His appearance, in point of dress, was striking and somewhat singular. In addition to the usual light garments of the hospital patient, he had attired himself for the occasion in a robe which invested him from head to foot in the tawny ground color and dark, rich markings of the tiger. This distinguished garment sat on him as on some well-conceived character in a play, its mellow ground and sinuous lines falling into a sort of harmony with his own rhythmic form and dusky hue. It is doubtful whether such proud habiliments, the mark of a primitive and self-assertive profession , ever before made their way into the awesome realm of the ether cone and the scalpel. But the black man was so beautifully built, and his lithe and supple strength was so apparent in every move, that the tiger robe seemed hardly out of keeping. And as he loosed it and threw it back in readiness to place himself upon the operating table, the surgeon and his white-gowned assistants took in with new appreciation the hard, statuesque black muscle so smoothly built up on the faultless frame of the athlete.

Mr. Flowers, the prize fighter, always wore that particular robe, symbolic of his quick craft and swiftness in the ring, whenever he made his entrance for a fight; consequently this was not the first time that he had thrown it off and stood almost naked and alone to make a trial of great issue. He had worn it on February 26, 1926, when he climbed through the ropes into the arena of Madison Square Garden to fight the battle of fifteen rounds which made him the middleweight ‘champion of the world.’ He had worn it again in the fight which was broadcast from Chicago on December 3, 1926, and which resulted in the unsatisfactory and much debated decision by which he ceased to be accounted the champion.

During the past year he had been steadily fighting his way back; and the sporting public, which now called him ‘the black fighter with a white heart,’ steadily demanded that he be given another chance. On this very day upon which he had come in to have his operation, there had been a conference in Madison Square Garden to plan measures for securing him another championship match. To Tiger Flowers, therefore, the fistic fates were once again propitious. Before long the great night would come: again the ring lights would be focused on him; again the reporters and the typewriters and the microphone would be busy with his every step and move; and the hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — who thought well of him would be listening in. . . .

As the ether was brought closer to his face he took two obedient breaths. Before it had begun to affect him he closed his eyes in submission, and they heard him say a prayer: —

These were the last words that the Tiger spoke. After the operation he seemed to rally from the ether; but he weakened and collapsed.

‘Counted out!’ exclaimed the sporting pages the next day. ‘The black fighter with a white heart has been counted out by the Great Referee.’

Two elements, aside from the colorful and picturesque, make this a complete example of dramatic dying. One was that he died at the very height of his career. In the past year he had won nineteen fights; in his last week he had won two; and in one of these, only four days before his death, he had ‘knocked out’ his opponent. The public had its attention centred upon him and was highly expectant. The other feature was that Flowers was known to be a pillar of the church, a matter of such public interest that he was called ‘the Deacon’ — .another epithet serving to enrich the vocabulary of sport. He never left his dressing room to enter a fight without ‘kneeling a moment in prayer.’ Consequently, when he donned his ring raiment to go in and be ‘put to sleep,’ and then repeated that simple, childhood prayer, he could not possibly have died more in character.

Prize fighter as he was, there was much that was good in Tiger Flowers. There was that in his eye especially which recommended him; it was deepset and earnest, and of the type that has so often, in other days, been capable of fanatic fealty to a master or a friend.

II

While this may pass as an example of the art of death on a certain plane, and might have come, with much more expenditure of pathos, out of the pages of Stowe or Dickens, it is hardly a death that would be rated as Shakespearean. For a natural masterpiece of that high order, nothing has ever impressed me so much as the death of Stonewall Jackson.

The name ‘Stonewall’ — his other name was Thomas Jonathan — is hardly a good description of him. It was given him too early in the war. A better abstract of him was tied up in a phrase which was invented, not by his friends, but by the admiring common soldier, who was wont to refer to his command as ‘Jackson’s foot cavalry.’ This was a happy hit at the very gist of his military method — his faculty of being here to-day and there to-morrow; of dodging up and down the mountain chains, in by one door and out at another; and of working by a constant succession of forced marches and sudden, unexpected attacks. The pages of history are covered with terms that try to describe Stonewall Jackson — vigilance, vigor, sagacity, celerity, promptness, resolution. It would take a very long compound word to cover his qualities; and I think the soldier’s way of saying it all is the best. Changes in the art of war have given us that seeming anomaly, the mounted infantry; but never before or since have troops so well deserved to go by the name of foot cavalry.

Jackson could rush in between converging armies where he would seem to have about as much chance for success as a rat in a pit, and by attacking first one and then another with forces inferior to either he could spoil the plans of all. He never ran away from one enemy without making sure that he was running toward another. As he was markedly capable of self-control, and never allowed a turn of fortune to upset or surprise him, the name ‘Stonewall’ covers him in part. Yet I think that on the whole it conveys but a static and stodgy idea of such a fighter.

Regarding his religion, at once the soft and the hard side of him, it was from this constant attitude or inner state that he wrought upon the significance of life. Peace and war alike, the quiet succession of days or the lurid burst of battle, all had to be encompassed as by the mind of the weaver and conceived as working to the end; and he never lost the thread of God’s guidance running through it all. When he was a professor in the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, he obeyed the Scriptural injunction to give a tithe of his income to the church. He taught a class of negro children on Sunday, and gave lectures on the inspiration of the Bible. It was said of him that it was his custom, when he dropped a letter into the post office, to say a prayer in behalf of the person to whom it was going.

When the war came and he was made a colonel, he was sent to destroy the works and rolling stock of the railroad at Martinsburg. Having successfully carried out instructions, he said in his report: ‘It was sad work, but I had my orders, and my duty was to obey. If the cost of the property could have been disseminated in spreading the gospel of the Prince of Peace, how much good might have been expected!’ When he originated the rebel yell at the first battle of Bull Run, he commanded his men to fire at close quarters and then make a charge, adding, ‘And when you charge, yell like furies.’ One word used in this order is worth noting — ‘furies.’ He saw no force in picturesque profanity; and he had no need for posing. It was not his way of leadership. When his men marched past him and saw his lips moving they knew that he was praying for them. They trusted him absolutely, while he in turn trusted God; and this moral stability of the man and his men, together with the vigorous workings of a Scotch-Irish intellect and the impetuosity of Southern valor, performed miracles in war.

The bullets that struck him down, while he was reconnoitring after his successful attack at Chancellorsville, came by mistake from some of his own men. Eight days after being wounded (having borne up under the amputation of an arm) he passed away in delirium; and history has recorded the things he said as he died: —

‘Order A. P. Hill to prepare for battle. . . . Tell Major Hawks to advance the commissary train. . . . Let us cross the river and rest in the shade.’

It was a stubborn battle, a hot fight, with quick strategy and high and rapid thinking. And when it was over he crossed to the other side. He must have entered into peace riding at the head of a victorious army, for certainly if it had not been a victory he would not have given that order to cross the river and rest in the shade.

Here was a truly Shakespearean passing. It is great drama written by life itself. If Shakespeare had found it standing thus in Plutarch he would have kept it and made no alteration — a thing he was great enough to do.

The death of Jackson was a greater shock to the South than is now easy to conceive. It was an event that filled the Southerners not only with sorrow, but with forebodings of defeat; for his victories had been so notable, and so almost certain, that they had learned to depend upon him as on some newly invented engine of war.

III

‘He died a soldier’s death’ is a phrase that carries meaning to almost anyone; but I wonder whether it would convey any sense whatever to speak of dying a literary man’s death. None, probably, except to take the minds of the few into the attic with Chatterton, or into the gutter with Poe, and in any case to suggest a life completely mismanaged.

Yet they do die fighting, as witness Tolstoi, whose last word was one of stubborn argument. When it was rumored that the famous writer was on his deathbed and very near the end, priests of the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia, which had deprived him of its soul benefits until he should recant certain opinions, came to visit and talk with him, hoping for a deathbed conversion. Tolstoi was invincible, and ended all by saying, ‘Even in the face of death, twice one is two.’ It is a conclusion worth remembering, even in the face of life.

Of lives mismanaged, or become sadly tangled and out of hand, the much loved O. Henry stands as an example. When he was dying in New York, none too affluent despite his industrious imagination, his mood seems to have gone back to the fears and trepidations of childhood; for as the light was fading from his eyes he said, ‘I don’t want to go home in the dark.’ If there was ever a mind that had reason to be sophisticated, a soul that had a right to plead contamination by the world, it was the mind, the soul, of O. Henry. Instantly when he was dead the news about him was let loose: his true name was Will Porter; he had been a fugitive from justice in Honduras and other South American countries; he had served a term in the Ohio penitentiary; he had been the companion of criminals great and small. Yet in the end he proved to be essentially ‘right,’ and more sinned against than sinning. And he must have known all the time he was writing his stories that the newspapers had his obituary standing and ready to shoot broadcast in cold lead. Those who believe in the total depravity of human nature are partly wrong. There is that in some men, at least, which remains untouched and undefiled — a fire fed by experience and suffering which completely purifies this pot of clay.

Grover Cleveland — who was, I am proud to say, an avowed friend of mine — died speaking the truth. No man was ever more vilely attacked than was Cleveland when he first ran for the presidency. The newspapers of to-day would not give space to such cartoons as I remember seeing when I was a boy — so much has the world improved. Yet his solid and homely figure looms large in the rank of presidents, while personalities that were more striking and spectacular have dwindled in significance. His last words were, ‘I have tried so hard to do right.’ It was a great ending, because the whole world knew it was the truth.

The Russian poet, Pushkin, who was fatally wounded in a duel, seems to have died the death of the true book lover. Miss Repplier tells us in one of her essays that when he was dying his young wife asked him whether there were no friends or relatives whom he wished to see, whereupon he lifted his eyes slowly to the shelf where stood his favorite books, and said, ‘Farewell, my friends.’

In 1895, when I was a young man, I was sent to get some information from a priest in Chicago who was said to be the oldest priest in the largest Roman Catholic parish in the world. He was an Irishman, well past his ninetieth year, who no longer said Mass, but was, nevertheless, a witty and distinguished member of the family, or community, of priests who served the extensive parish. As I was leaving I remarked that he had reached an extreme old age; to which he replied, ‘Yes, my boy; I already have one foot in Heaven.’ Several times in the past thirty-odd years this remark has come back to me to be given further thought.

IV

No doubt the spirit in which a man dies is largely determined by his race, temperament, education, and intellectual force, together with the spirit of the times. In these present days of the new poetry, the new music, and the new philosophy of living we might logically expect a new note in dying. While I do not pretend to be an expert, I am sure that I could submit some examples which a critic of dying, if there were such a personage, would identify as being neither Elizabethan, nor Queen Anne, nor Georgian, nor Victorian. Something, in fact, which would be at once recognized as an example of the New Dying. I can best indicate what I mean by setting forth an instance.

The Norwegian tramp steamer Grontoft, having taken on cargo at Galveston, New Orleans, and Norfolk, sailed from the last-named port on February 20, 1922, bound for Esbjerg. The Grontoft labored against heavy head winds until Thursday, March 2, when it became disabled and went down in a midAtlantic hurricane at a point seven hundred miles east of Cape Race. All that is known of the sinking of the Grontoft was picked up by the wireless of the steamer Estonia, of the Baltic American line, which went to the rescue of the Grontoft, but arrived too late. The messages from the wireless of the Grontoft consisted at first of the usual SOS signals of a ship in trouble, followed by instructions regarding the ship’s bearing; but as time wore on and the end came nearer and nearer, the operator, who had been transmitting according to the captain’s orders, began to add remarks of his own, and finally, when all hope was evidently at an end, he used the apparatus before him to express his own state of mind — a remarkable series of last words in the face of certain death.

The Estonia, a Danish steamer hailing from Danzig and bound for New York, was making its way out of the Baltic into the North Sea, headed west, at about the time the Grontoft was sailing from Norfolk. The Estonia encountered hurricane weather all the way across the Atlantic, gale after gale springing up from different quarters with hardly a lull between. At ten o’clock on the morning of March 2, Edward Hansen, the radio operator, who was reading a magazine in t he wireless shack with the receivers over his ears, heard an SOS. It came from the Grontoft, which reported its position as seven hundred miles east of Cape Race.

The call came loudly, as if from no great distance, and a computation of the Estonia’s position showed it to be but forty-five miles west of the disabled ship, and running away from it. Great seas were breaking over the Estonia’s stern, and the wind was terrific. To put about under such circumstances was a great risk; but Captain Jorgenson, against the judgment of his officers, ordered the wheel put over, whereupon the Estonia fell into the trough and rolled between mountainous seas that threatened to engulf the ship before it won its way around. Steaming under forced fires, the Estonia barely made its way forward at six knots an hour.

Meanwhile Hansen, in his wireless shack, was listening intently. Presently he heard the operator of the Grontoft passing flippant comments on the weather, followed by the appropriate ‘ha-ha’ of wireless laughter.

‘God pity the poor boys at sea on such a night as this,’ wired the operator. This is a stock jest of sailors, alluding to what the people ashore are probably saying about them. Then came the dots and dashes of a ‘ha-ha.’ To which was added, ‘The old man thinks it may blow up by night.'

At eleven o’clock the Grontoft sent a second S O S. It was followed by more comment by the operator. ‘ Well, the steward is making sandwiches for the lifeboats,’ he remarked. ‘Looks like we are going to have a picnic.’

At 11.30 the Grontoft cut in again. ‘The old wagon has a list like a rundown heel,’ the operator reported to his listeners. ‘This is no weather to be out without an umbrella.’

The operator on the Estonia reported that they were making headway. ‘Hold on; we shall soon be alongside,’ he told the Grontoft.

To this came no reply. The operator of the Grontoft was now silent until 12.10 P.M. ‘We are sinking stern first. The boats are smashed. Can’t hold out longer,’ he said. ‘The skipper dictated that,’ he added. ‘He ought to know. . . . Where did I put my hat? . . . Sorry we could n’t wait for you.

. . . Pressing business elsewhere. . . . Skaal. . . .’

The Estonia, arriving four hours late at the designated point on the ocean, found not a vestige of the Norwegian tramp steamer and its crew of thirty-five. ‘Skaal,’ meaning ‘Your good health,’ was the last that was ever heard from the steamer Grontoft.

Holding now to our intention of examining into the art of tragedy, we must note that the foregoing has a decided touch of Shakespeare, especially in the regard that Shakespeare’s great failing, as expressed by Dr. Blair, consists in ‘the grotesque mixture of serious and comic in one piece.’ Certainly this death scene by the wireless operator of the Grontoft would never have met with the critical approval of that bright pupil of Voltaire’s, Frederick the Great, who was pained by ‘the wretched taste’ of Shakespeare, and who wrote, after attending a German theatre, ‘You will there see, in action, the abominable plays of Shakespeare, translated into our language.’

There are, indeed, two schools of tragedy — the good-taste school of the French, who have always had trouble in understanding the incongruities of Hamlet, the frivolous Dane; and the Northern school, whose fathers began by outdoing Nature herself in her wild and changing moods. Considering that the operator of the Grontoft said ‘Skaal’ when he sank, I think he has a right to be judged according to the Northern or Hamlet school, which would entirely exculpate him from any charge of bad taste.

Something of this same spirit must have been working in Charles Frohman when he stood on the deck of the Lusitania, as on a mid-ocean stage with all the continents for an audience, and remarked, as the waters were coming up to get him, that death is life’s greatest adventure.

V

There is another sort of dying which differs from either of these in the extent to which it makes the last scene a conscious and deliberate drama. There have been men so dauntless, and with such an instinct for showmanship, that, finding it incumbent upon them to die in public with a curious throng of spectators, they have set to work and planned the scene with such effects that it was a complete and entertaining work of the imagination. Such a personage was the Mac Phcrson whose sword is preserved at Duff House, the seat of the Duke of Fife, at Banff, Scotland.

Mac Pherson was a freebooter of great physical strength and of considerable musical taste and accomplishment. Among his accomplishments was that of playing the violin. While lying in prison under sentence of death he composed his ‘Farewell,’ originating both the air and the words, the latter of which began: —

When brought to the foot of the gallows at Banff, he played his ‘Farewell,’ danced it round the gallows tree with steps that embellished its lively and springing air, and then broke his fiddle across his knee and was hanged.