talked about. Few human beings,
and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man
in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old
soldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to
fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have
desired to see these things and have not seen them. But in the
description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they
are used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to
describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially
the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always
says, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white
waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple
flower in his button-hole." As if any one would expect him to have a
crimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him
to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole.

But this process, which is absurd enough when applied to the ordinary
and external lives of worldly people, becomes perfectly intolerable when
it is applied, as it always is applied, to the one episode which is
serious even in the lives of politicians. I mean their death. When we
have been sufficiently bored with the account of the simple costume of
the millionaire, which is generally about as complicated as any that he
could assume without being simply thought mad; when we have been told
about the modest home of the millionaire, a home which is generally much
too immodest to be called a home at all; when we have followed him
through all these unmeaning eulogies, we are always asked last of all to
admire his quiet funeral. I do not know what else people think a funeral
should be except quiet. Yet again and again, over the grave of every one
of those sad rich men, for whom one should surely feel, first and last,
a speechless pity--over the grave of Beit, over the grave of
Whiteley--this sickening nonsense about modesty and simplicity has been
poured out. I well remember that when Beit was buried, the papers said
that the mourning-coaches contained everybody of importance, that the
floral tributes were sumptuous, splendid, intoxicating; but, for all
that, it was a simple and quiet funeral. What, in the name of Acheron,
did they expect it to be? Did they think there would be human
sacrifice--the immolation of Oriental slaves upon the tomb? Did they