V

LIVING DOGS AND DEAD LIONS

I

Mosgiel was in the throes of an anniversary. As part of the programme, John Broadbanks and I were exchanging pulpits. In order to be on the spot when Sunday arrived, I was driven over to Silverstream on the Saturday evening. When I awoke on Sunday morning, and looking out of the Manse window, found the whole plain buried deep in snow, I was glad that I had taken this precaution. At breakfast we speculated on the chances of my having a congregation. Later on, however, the buggies began to arrive, and by eleven o’clock most of the homesteads were represented. But what about Sunday school in the afternoon? I told the teachers to feel under no obligation to come. ‘I shall be here,’ I said, ‘and if any of the children put in an appearance, I shall be pleased to look after them.’ When the afternoon came, there were three scholars present—Jack Linacre, who had ridden over on his pony from a farm about two miles away; Alec Crosby, a High School boy, who lived in a large house just across the fields; and little Myrtle Broadbanks—Goldilocks, as we called her—who had accompanied me from the Manse. I decided to return with my three companions to the Manse and to hold our Sunday school by the fireside.

‘Well,’ I said, as soon as we were all cosily seated, ‘I was reading this morning in the Bible about a living dog and a dead lion. Which would you rather be?’ There was a pause. Jack was the first to speak.

Oh, I’d rather be the living dog,’ he blurted out; ‘it’s better to be alive than dead any day!’

‘‘Oh, I don’t know!’ exclaimed Alec. Alec was a thoughtful boy who had already carried off two or three scholarships. He had been weighing the matter carefully while Jack was giving us the benefit of his first impressions. ‘I don’t know. A dead lion has been a living lion, while the living dog will be a dead dog some day. I think I’d rather be the dead lion.’

‘Well, Goldilocks,’ I said, turning to the little maiden at my side, ‘and what do you think about it?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I think I’d like a little of both. I’d like to be a lion like the one and alive like the other!’

This all happened many years ago. Jack Linacre now owns the farm from which he then rode over; Alec Crosby is a doctor with a large practice in Sydney; and I heard of Goldilocks’ wedding only a few weeks ago. I expect they have forgotten all about the snowy afternoon that we spent by the fireside at Silverstream; but I smile still as I recall the answers that they gave to the question that I set them.

II

‘There is something to be said for Jack’s way of looking at things. Our love of life is our master-passion. It animates us at every point. It is because we are in love with life that we see so much beauty in the dawning of a new day and find so wealthy a romance in the unfolding of the Spring. We feel that, among the myriad mysteries of the universe, there is no mystery so elusive and so sublime as this one. A living moth is a more wonderful affair than a dead moon. Indeed, we only recognize the strength of the hold that life has upon us when there is some question of its extinction. Let a man stand on the seashore, and, unable to help, watch an exhausted swimmer struggle for his life in the seething waters; let him look up and follow the movements of a steeplejack as he climbs a dizzy spire; let him visit a circus and see an artist hazard his life in the course of some sensational performance; and, for the moment, he will find his heart in his mouth. The blood will forsake his face; he will be filled with trepidation and palpitation; he can scarcely breathe! And why? The people in peril are nothing to him. For him, life would go on in just the same way whether they live or die. Yet their danger fills him with uncontrollable excitement! Or look, if you will, in quite another direction.

‘I was in a tramcar yesterday afternoon. In the corner opposite was a lad—probably an errand-boy—curled up with a book. His sparkling eyes were glued to the pages; his face was flushed with excitement; he was completely lost to his immediate surroundings. I rose to leave the car. The movement evidently aroused him. He glanced out of the window, and then, with a start, shut the book and sprang up to follow me.

‘Have you passed your proper corner?’ I asked when, side by side, we reached the pavement.

‘‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘I was reading the book and never noticed.’

‘Exciting, was it?’ I inquired, reaching out my hand for the volume. On the cover was a picture of a Red Indian galloping across the prairie, with a white girl thrown across the front of his saddle.

‘My word, it was!’ he replied. ‘It’s about a fellow who was flying for his life from the Indians and took refuge in a cave. And, when he got back into the dark part of the cave, he felt something warm and then heard the growl of a bear. My! I thought he was dead that time!’

And what did it matter? It was nothing to this errand-boy whether this hero of his—a mere frolic of an author’s fancy—lived or died. And yet the life or death of that hero was of such moment to him that, for the time being, his mind lost its hold upon realities in order that it might concentrate itself upon a fight among shadows! It is our intense, our persistent, our unquenchable love of life that explains the fascination of all tales of romance and adventure. ‘With man as with animals,’ says Dr. James Martineau, ‘death is the evil from which he himself most shrinks, and which he most deplores for those he loves; it is the utmost that he can inflict upon his enemy and the maximum which the penal justice of society can award to its criminals. It is the fear of death which gives their vivid interest to all hairbreadth escapes, in the shipwreck or amid the glaciers or in the fight; and it is man’s fear of death that supplies the chief tragic element in all his art.’ When we find ourselves following with breathless interest the movements of the traveller, the hunter or the explorer, we fancy that our emotion arises from a solicitude for the man himself. As a matter of fact, it arises from nothing of the kind. It arises from our love of life-for-its-own-sake.

In his Lavengro, George Borrow describes an open-air service which he attended on a large open moor. The preacher—a tall, thin man in a plain coat and with a calm, serious face—was urging his hearers not to love life overmuch and to prepare themselves for death. ‘The service over,’ Borrow says, ‘I wandered along the heath till I came to a place where, beside a thick furze, sat a man, his eyes fixed intently on the red ball of the setting sun.’ It looked like his old comrade, Jasper Petulengro, the gipsy.

‘Is that you, Jasper?’

‘Indeed, brother!’

‘And what,’ enquired the newcomer, sitting by the gipsy’s side, ‘what is your opinion of death, Jasper?’

‘Life is sweet, brother!’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Think so! There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?’

I need say no more in order to show that there is a good deal to be said for Jack Linacre’s way of looking at things

How beautiful it is to be alive!
   To wake each morn as if the Maker’s grace
Did us afresh from nothingness derive
   That we might sing ‘How happy is our case!
How beautiful it is to be alive!’

From Jack’s point of view there can be no doubt that one living dog is worth all the dead lions that ever were or will be!

III

Alec Crosby, however, is not so sure. ‘A dead lion,’ he points out, ‘has been a living lion, while the living dog will be a dead dog some day.’ There is something in that. He means, if I rightly catch the drift of his philosophy, that you can pay too much for the privilege of being alive. Everything else has its price, and most of us buy our goods on too high a market. One man pays too much for popularity; he sells his conscience for it. Another pays too much for fame; it costs him his health. A third buys his money too dearly; in gaining the whole world he loses his own soul. And in the same way, a man may pay too much even for life itself. The dog, as Alec Crosby probably knew, is usually employed in Oriental literature as an emblem of the contemptible; the dog in our modern sense—Rover, Carlo and the rest—is unknown. The lion, on the other hand, is invariably the symbol of the courageous. Alec thinks that, all things considered, it is better to be a dead hero than a living coward. Alec reminds me of Artemus Ward. On the day of a general election, Artemus entered a polling-booth and began to look about him in evident perplexity. The returning officer approached and offered to help him.

  ‘For whom do you desire to vote?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to vote for Henry Clay!’ replied Artemus Ward.

  ‘For Henry Clay!’ exclaimed the astounded officer, ‘why, Henry Clay has been dead for years!’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ replied Artemus Ward, ‘but I’d rather vote for Henry Clay dead than for either of these men living!’

 Alec Crosby could easily call a great host of witnesses to support his view of the matter. Let me summon two—one from martyrology and one from fiction.

 My first witness shall be Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. For his fidelity to the truth, Cranmer was sentenced to die at the stake. But every day during his imprisonment he was offered life and liberty if only he would sign the deed of recantation. Every morning the document was spread out before him and the pen placed in his hand. Day after day, he resisted the terrible temptation. But, as Jasper says, life is very sweet; the craving to live was too strong; Cranmer yielded. But, as soon as the horror of a cruel death had been removed, he felt that he had bought the boon of life at too high a price. The death with which he had been threatened was the death of a lion; the life that he was living was the life of a dog! He held himself in contempt and abhorrence. He cowered before the faces of his fellow men! Life on such terms was intolerable. He made a recantation of the recantation. As a token of his remorse, he burned to a cinder the hand with which he signed the cowardly document. And then, at peace with his conscience, he embraced a fiery death with a joyful heart. He felt that it was a thousand times better to be a dead lion than a living dog.

My witness from fiction is introduced to me by Maxwell Gray. In The Silence of Dean Maitland, he shows that life may be bought at too high a price. Cyril Maitland had committed a murder; yet all the circumstances pointed to the guilt of his innocent friend, Henry Everard. Maitland felt every day that it was his duty to confess; but the lure of life was too strong for him; and, besides, he was a minister, and his confession would bring shame upon his sacred office! And so the years went by. While Everard languished in jail, having been sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, Maitland advanced in popularity and won swift preferment. He became a dean. But his life was a torture to him. He felt that death—even the death that he had dreaded—would have been infinitely preferable. And, after suffering agonies such as Everard in prison never knew, he at last made a clean breast of his guilt and laid down the life for which he had paid too much. Thomas Cranmer and Dean Maitland would both take sides with Alec Crosby.

IV

But it was Goldilocks that, on that snowy afternoon at Silverstream, hit the nail on the head.

 ‘I think I’d like a little of both,’ she said. ‘I’d like to be a lion like the one and alive like the other!’

 Precisely! With her feminine facility for putting her finger on the very heart of things, Goldilocks has brushed away all irrelevancies and got to bedrock. For, after all, the question of life and death does not really concern us. A dog, living or dead, can be nothing other than a dog; a lion, living or dead, can be nothing other than a lion. The dead lion, as Alec Crosby says, was a living lion once; the living dog will be a dead dog some day. Goldilocks helps us to clear the issue. The real alternative is not between life and death; for life and death come in turn to dog and lion alike. The real question is between the canine and the leonine. Shall I live contemptibly or shall I live courageously?

 ‘And I looked,’ says the last of the Biblical writers, ‘and behold, a lion—the Lion of the tribe of Juda!’

 Like a lion He lived! With the courage of a lion He died! And in leonine splendour He moves through all the world above. Goldilocks had evidently made up her mind, in life and in death, to model her character and experience upon His!

F. W. Boreham.