He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one?
I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's safe--in his lifetime, anyway."
Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his lifetime? It's the life beyond life--the life beyond life."
It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking about it then.
He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead they'll let him speak."
"Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em."
"He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to me that evening.
He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to mean--for him.
He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That pilgrimage was my last--it'll be two years ago this autumn--and it was in the spring of last year he died.
He was happy in his death. It saved him from the thing he dreaded above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. It has not come yet. We are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue. We miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the papers. There is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate extinction. It revived the public interest in him. It jogged the feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. It brought the familiar portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns. And there was more laurel and a larger crowd at Brookwood than on the day when we first met him in the churchyard at Chenies.
And then we said there had been stuff in him. We talked (in the papers) of his "output." He had been, after all, a prodigious, a gigantic worker. He appealed to our profoundest national instincts, to our British admiration of sound business, of the self-made, successful man. He might not have done anything for posterity, but he had provided magnificently for his child and widow.
So we appraised him. Then on the top of it all the crash came, the tremendous crash that left his child and widow almost penniless. He hadn't provided for them at all. He had provided for nothing but his own advertisement. He had been living, not only beyond his income, but beyond, miles beyond, his capital, beyond even the perennial power that was the source of it. And he had been afraid, poor fellow! to retrench, to reduce by one cucumber-frame the items of the huge advertisement; why, it would have been as good as putting up the shop windows--his publishers would instantly have paid him less.