II

DAY OF ALL THE DEAD

1881

An address given at Newton Hall, 31st December 1881, on the celebration of the "Day of the Dead," when the poem by George Eliot - "Oh may I join the choir invisible!"—was set as a Cantata, for voices and chorus. The Music by Henry Holmes of the Royal College of Music.

WE meet, as we are wont to meet, on this the last day of the year, in the spirit of grateful remembrance of those who have gone before us on the earth. It is a meeting, to share in which, needs no particular phase of belief; a practice in which there is nothing of an exclusive kind, nothing critical or negative; one in which all serious men can join us without a sense of anything strange, and without sacrificing anything that they hold sacred themselves. Nor is there anything about this occasion of artificial and studied gloom. We do not sorrow as those who have no hope. We rather rejoice in a sober and manly way, with humane and grateful remembrance of those who through all the past ages in their deaths have left us their lives, and on this night of all the year especially, it is natural to face. the eternal problem -What are the Dead to the living, and what are the living to the Dead?

Poetry, the spontaneous instinct of mankind, and the

rites of not a few religious communions, have found a common ground in this association of the last hours of the year with that great host of the majority into the ranks of which we are hastening so swiftly. The year is dying in the night. The bells from a thousand steeples are about to ring in the new year. The most frivolous amongst us can pause in his merriment, and trust that there may one day be heard the bells that shall ring in the larger heart, the kindlier hand. The gatherings around us of families and old friends, the churches filling for some midnight service, the echoes through our brain of so many a noble passage from the poets all are in harmony with our thoughts. The faith, which in this Hall we meet with a view of understanding better, but adds some breath, and depth, and glow, as I think, to this old-world sentiment and practice. It reminds me always-this close of the year so much akin to the close of the day and of life, of those words of Dante, whose pensive face looks down on us to-night, where he says in what are, I often fancy, some of the most touching lines in the whole range of poetry:

Era gia l'ora che volge il disio

Ai naviganti, ed intenerisce il cuore
Lo di ch' han detto ai dolci amici addio:

E che lo nuovo peregrin d' amore

Punge, se ode squilla di lontano,

Che paia il giorno pianger che si muore.

Now was the hour that wakens fond desire

In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful heart,
Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell.

The pilgrim newly on his road with love
Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far,

That seems to mourn for the expiring day.

But our thoughts in this place are occupied with some

thing more than vague poetic sentiment. They are filled with a conception which is precise, philosophic, and rich in fruitful suggestion. It is a conception as real and human on the one side, as it is boundless and inspiring on the other. It is a conception which disturbs no faith, shocks no sentiment, arouses no controversy, and is entirely in accord with all profound thoughts and all generous feelings which we meet with in the world. It has never been seriously denied, and it is hardly capable of logical refutation. It has long coloured the ideas of philosophers, moralists, and poets but it has been made an organic and living truth only in our own generation. St. Paul had a vision of it when he said, We are every one members one of another. Pascal saw it when he said, "The generations of men should be regarded as the life of one man ever enduring and ever learning." Shelley had a sense of it when he said:

Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul.

It is a conception of two kindred aspects:- the first, is the indefinite persistence throughout human life of all thoughts, acts, and feelings, however remote in time; the second is, the mysterious and boundless extent to which all human actions and ideas affect the living, transfuse and colour the Present, until they are absorbed in the ocean of the Past and thus join in the end to mould the Future.

All serious thought about life and about history has long been familiar with the idea of a regular sequence in the ages; and the earliest meditations about mankind have started with the idea that man is a social being. But the great philosophic discovery of this century has been the proof of the reality of organic laws in man's life, the full maturity of that idea which our English philosopher

has made familiar to us under the name of the Social Organism. Under the impulse of that potent idea, an idea which has passed into the fibre of modern thought, marvellous vitality has been given to our old and cruder ideas about Society and about the Past. In lieu of a pale and mechanical sequence of epochs, we see Mankind living through the ages just as the Man lives through moments and hours of his life. the child is the father of the Man our ancestors are but the childish years of our race our distant descendants will be but the maturity of the life that we are all living to-day. We see our generation of contemporaries, not working together like the ants in their nest or the bees in their hive by mechanical methods, but acting and reacting on each other like the tissues and nerves of the living organism, for ever receiving and shedding on each other subtle pulsations of heart, intellect, and will; more potently and more rapidly than the brain can act on the finger, or the heart send a glow to the eye or the brow. Follow out this clear and triumphant truth into all its consequences of action and of feeling-draw it out from the closet of the thinker and make it ever present in our lives treat it no more as a truth of philosophy but make it the mainspring of duty and of hope, and we have what we call our positive belief in its fulness. See the Dead, not in their mortal part, as laid to their rest, but living around us and in us, active and revered as they never were in life. Hear their voices, not in the hollow echoes of the tomb, but at our firesides, and in the good and pure words of every worthy man around us, in the swelling record of science, art, poetry, philosophy, and morals; in all that forms our mental and moral food, in "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely."

Let us dwell on this idea till it grows familiar to us as a household word; let us cultivate all the wealth of feeling which it is able to inspire. And we shall come to feel the collective might of the past surrounding us like an atmosphere, training us like a parent, and ministering to every want of brain and activity. They no more overpower our personal life, those who have gone before, than the notion of Providence in any creed overpowers the individual soul; they create us and enable us to create what we leave of permanent behind us. Turn to the great spirits whose images surround us in this place. Each day of every week which governs our daily business recalls the work of Moses and the Hebrew race. Blot out Homer and what would Greece be, or Poetry be? Blot out Archimedes and Aristotle, and Science and Philosophy are left in the air without foundation or axiom. Cæsar is to this day, after nineteen centuries, in many languages the word for Sovereign. St. Paul means to us the extension of the Gospel of Christ to all nations and people. Who could conceive modern history without Charlemagne, or modern poetry without Dante and Shakespeare? Gutenberg has transformed our lives, as completely as modern Europe has been recast by the work of Frederick; or as modern philosophy is based on Descartes, and modern Biology on the analyses of Bichat. And, as Newton brought the light into Nature and Nature's laws, so has Comte brought light upon Man and the laws of Man.

There are in our Calendar of great men 558 names, of all of whom the same thing is true in a certain degree. The continuance of their works and lives in us is true of 5000, of 50,000 men. It is true of every just and worthy life that has ever been passed on this earth. It is true, not of every life alone, but of every hour, and every act of every