The Defendant | Page 9

so soft that
they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was
sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in
comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more
certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds
obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and
silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the
heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure

stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.
But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar
one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist.
When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill
and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they
are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and
musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops.
But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an
abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they
love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in
the skeleton of the man.
The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with
which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without
claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may
assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity
never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating
expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of
the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of
himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the
architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a
man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite
insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.
One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity
that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a
factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left
naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution;
but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own,
all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of
Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature
(new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the
essential symbol of life.
The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all.
It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any

objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being
undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the
skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is
shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He
contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be
genteel--a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of
animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous
shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs,
when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog,
the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole
universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big
for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it
comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour
rather abruptly deserts him.
In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times
and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a
vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the
fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere
dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to
meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the
grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of
beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than
harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in
aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity,