The Creators

The Book Of Eulogies
by Phyllis Theroux

This invaluable anthology is the first and only collection dedicated to the art of the eulogy. For the past several years, Phyllis Theroux has collected the most eloquent and moving writing commemorating a death, assessing a life, or offering solace to the bereaved. Ranging from Thomas Jefferson's magisterial eulogy for George Washington to Anna Quindlen's affectionate memorial for her grandmother; from Helen Keller's words about her dear friend Mark Twain to Adlai Stevenson's about Eleanor Roosevelt, The Book of Eulogies establishes that great eulogies are a celebration of remarkable lives that can illuminate, confirm, inspire, and redirect our own.

Theroux has included some of the world's most well-known tributes, such as Pericles' Funeral Oration, Jules Michelet's appreciation of Jeanne d'Arc, Victor Hugo's ringing words on the one hundredth anniversary of Voltaire's death, Cardinal Suenens's eulogy for Pope John XXIII. But most of the eulogized assembled here are eighteenth- to twentieth-century Americans, and the stories of their lives illuminate our history with a particularly intimate light. In Robert Kennedy's extemporaneous remarks upon hearing of the death of Martin Luther King, or Eugene McCarthy's tribute to his friend and colleague, Hubert Humphrey, the values, wisdom, and spirit of both the eulogized and the eulogizer are revealed.

The Book of Eulogies is a sourcebook for anyone who must find words of solace, understanding, and inspiration on the occasion of a beloved's death. It is also a treasury of astonishing eloquence, passion, and humanity — a record of extraordinary lives, seen through the eyes of those who knew and loved them.

Chapter 1

If there is any one reason to single out artists as being more necessary to our lives than any others, it is because they provide us with light that cannot be extinguished. They go into dark rooms and poke at their souls until the contours of our own are familiar to us. They stare at flowers until their secrets unfold, wrestle with angels that the rest of us are terrified to disturb.

They are a diverse lot, genteel ladies tapping out nightmares on manual typewriters, patresfamilias filling up cathedrals with sound. And to lay the completed lives of a number of artists end to end is to realize how little time so many of them had to work. Henry David Thoreau died at forty-five, Robert Louis Stevenson at forty-four. Flannery O'Connor had only ten years to produce a lifetime of work. But the brevity of the artist's life bears little relationship to the fruitfulness of it. Neither does creativity necessarily diminish at the end.

With age some of the greatest artists increased in depth and strength, oftentimes under crushing adversity. Beethoven created his most beautiful music after he went completely deaf. Milton was blind when he dictated Paradise Lost to his daughter. Yeats battled mental illness and the specter of poverty, the artist's most frequent companion beside the muse. In a sarcastic letter to Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson defined a "patron" as "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help."

We live in a culture that assumes an artist must have a massive ego to maintain creative momentum. But Bach was unconcerned with posterity, Emily Dickinson scribbled poetry behind a curtain, and Renoir, who did not underestimate his worth, was nonetheless always a learner. His words on the last day of his life, which was spent painting, were "I think I am beginning to understand something about it."

One of the most touching tributes is by Hannah Arendt for W. H. Auden. "What made him a poet," she writes, "was his extraordinary facility with, and love for, words, but what made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the 'curse.' "But she wonders whether he realized what was going to be involved.

"It seems... very unlikely that young Auden, when he decided that he was going to be a great poet, knew the price he would have to pay. I think it entirely possible that in the end... he might have considered the price too high."

Speaking of Auden, Arendt sums up the debt we owe to all great artists: "We... his audience, readers and listeners, can only be grateful that he paid his price up to the last penny."

"The music of Bach disturbs human complacency because one can't readily understand finiteness in its presence."

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
(1685-1750)
by
William F. Buckley Jr.
(1925- )

Bach brought the polyphonic baroque tradition in music to its highest peak of excellence, but he had no idea of his own greatness, except as a performer, and most of his works were not published before he died. A deeply religious man, Bach served as music director for the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, Germany, from 1723 until his death.

William F. Buckley Jr., the noted conservative author, critic, television personality, and newspaper columnist, is an amateur performer of Bach's piano works. This tribute is excerpted from one of his columns.

... Bach has the impact of a testimonial to God's providence not because he wrote the most searingly beautiful church music ever heard (about "The Passion According to St. Matthew" one can say only that it does credit to the Gospel according to St. Matthew), but because he wrote the most beautiful music ever written. If one were to throw away the three hundred cantatas, the hundred-odd chorale preludes, the three oratorios, the passions, and the Mass (which would be the equivalent of destroying half of Shakespeare), still the other half would sustain Bach as a creature whose afflatus is inexplicable, for some of us, in the absence of a belief in God.

If it is true, as the poet says, that one can't look out upon a sunset without feeling divinity, then it is also true that one can't close the door on the sunset and, entering the darkened chapel, listen to the organist play one of Bach's toccatas and fugues without sensing divinity.

It is not necessary to believe in God in order to revel in Bach. It is not necessary, for that matter, to love one's country in order to fight for it, nor even to love one's family in order to protect it. And there is no need to make heavy weather over the point, though there is a need for such human modesty as Einstein expressed when he said that the universe was not explicable except by the acknowledgment of an unknown mover. The music of Bach disturbs human complacency because one can't readily understand finiteness in its presence.

Carl Sagan, who sometimes sounds like the village atheist, reports that the biologist Lewis Thomas of the Sloan-Kettering Institute answered, when asked what message he thought we should send to other civilizations in space in that rocket we fired up there a few years ago with earthly jewels packed in its cone, "I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach." Then he paused and said, "But that would be boasting." There are those who believe it is not merely to boast, but to be vainglorious to suggest that the movements of Bach's pen could have been animated by less than divine impulse.

There are sobering lessons to contemplate. One of them is that when he lived, he was almost entirely unnoticed. True, he was renowned as a virtuoso at the harpsichord and the organ. When he died, one of his biographers notes, there were something on the order of ninety obituaries written, only three of which, however, mentioned him as a composer. This is tantamount to remembering Shakespeare as a great actor.

The thought reminds us of what it is that we almost let slip through our fingers — and reminds us, even more darkly, of what it is that we have irreversibly let slip through our fingers. We are reluctant to believe that anyone else ever existed of such artistic eminence as JSB; but we can never know, can we? Nor can we ever understand how it was that so musically minded a culture as that of what we now know as East Germany could have greeted so indifferently a genius so overpowering.

And it reminds us, too, that there are among us men and women who will not drink from this most precious vessel of our cultural patrimony. To some he does not speak. If we understand that, then we understand, surely, what the problems are in Geneva, where grown men are actually talking to each other as if it were a challenge to formulate arrangements by which the world should desist from the temptation to destroy itself. If a human being exists who is unmoved by the B minor Mass, it should not surprise that human beings exist who are unmoved by democracy, or freedom, or peace. They have eyes but they do not see, ears but they do not hear. Well, Bach tended to end his manuscripts with the initials S.D.G. — Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory. But God shares that glory, and did so three hundred years ago when Johann Sebastian was born.

"As the behemoth storms through the seas, so he strained the boundaries of his art."

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
(1770-1827)
by
Franz Grillparzer
(1791-1872)

Beethoven, the towering musical genius who bridged the classical and romantic eras, enjoyed one luxury beyond his talent — it was recognized during his lifetime. But at the age of thirty-one his hearing began to deteriorate, and for the last ten years of his life he was entirely deaf. During that time he composed the Hammerklavier sonata, the monumental Ninth Symphony, and five string quartets considered by some authorities to be the greatest music ever created. He never married, although he had a number of heartbreaking romances with unattainable women, and his personal life was a lonely one.

Franz Grillparzer was the leading Austrian playwright of his time. He was asked to compose a eulogy, which was then delivered by the actor and orator Heinrich Anschutz on March 29, 1827.

As we stand here at the grave of the deceased, we are, as it were, the representatives of a whole nation, of the German people in its entirety, grieving at the fall of the one, highly celebrated half of the remaining vanished glory of indigenous art, of the nation's flourishing spirit. To be sure, the hero of German poesy, Goethe, still lives — and may he live long! — but the last master of sonorous song, of music's sweet voice, the heir to Handel's immortal fame and Bach's, the heir to Haydn and Mozart, has passed away, and we stand weeping by the torn strings of faded harmony.

Of faded harmony! Let me call him so! For here was an artist, and what he was, he was only through art. The thorns of life had wounded him deeply; as a shipwrecked man clings to the shore, so he fled into your arms, O Art, equally glorious sister of the good and the true, comforter of suffering, begotten on high. He held fast to you, and even when the gate was closed through which you had gained entrance to him and spoke to him; when his deaf ear made him blind to your features, still he carried your image in his heart, and when he died, it still lay upon his breast.

He was an artist, and who has arisen beside him? As the behemoth storms through the seas, so he strained the boundaries of his art. From the cooing of the dove to the rolling of thunder, from the most intricately woven of idiosyncratic artistic devices to the terrifying point where achieved form becomes the lawless clashing forces of nature, he had reckoned everything, grasped everything. Those who come after him will not be able to continue, they will have to begin, for the predecessor halted only where art itself halts....

He was an artist, but also a human being. A human being in the word's fullest meaning. Because he shut himself off from the world, they called him hostile, and because he avoided emotion, unfeeling. Oh, he who knows himself to be hard does not flee! It is precisely the excess of emotion that shuns emotion. When he fled the world, it was because in the depths of his loving heart he found no weapon to resist it; when he withdrew from people, it occurred after he had given them his all and received nothing in return. He remained lonely because he found no other. But until his death he retained a humane heart toward all people, a fatherly one to his family, devoted his talent and life to the whole world!

So he was, so he died, so he shall live for all time.

You, however, who have followed our lead thus far, govern your pain! You have not lost him, you have gained him. Not until the gates of our life close behind us do the gates to the temple of immortality spring open. There he stands among the great of all times, untouchable, forever. Therefore depart from his place of rest, mourning but composed, and whenever in life the power of his creations overwhelms you like a gathering storm, whenever your tears flow in the midst of a still unborn generation, remember this hour and think: we were there when they buried him, and when he died, we wept.

"I saw her first just as I rose out of an illness from which I had never thought to recover. I remember the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes. An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterize the woman."

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
(1816-1855)
by
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-1863)

Charlotte Brontë, the English novelist most well known for Jane Eyre, was the daughter of an impoverished, widowed Anglican clergyman and the sister of novelists Emily and Anne Brontë. Self-publishing their first work under the names "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell," they became the faceless toast of literary London. In 1854, Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, but died of pregnancy toxemia only a year after her marriage.

Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray is best known today for his novel Vanity Fair and its wily, albeit winning, heroine, Becky Sharp, who must make her unsupported way in society. It was a task that fell to Charlotte Brontë as well.

Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honor, so to speak of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! At nine o'clock at night, Mrs. Gaskell tells us, after evening prayers, when their guardian and relative had gone to bed, the three poetesses — the three maidens Charlotte and Emily and Anne — Charlotte being the "motherly friend and guardian to the other two" — "began, like restless wild animals, to pace up and down their parlors," making out "their wonderful stories, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be their future life."

One evening at the close of 1854, as Charlotte Nichols sat with her husband by the fire, listening to the howling of the wind about the house, she suddenly said to her husband, "If you had not been with me, I must have been writing now." She then ran upstairs and brought down and read aloud the beginning of a new tale. When she had finished, her husband remarked, "The critics will accuse you of repetition." She replied, "Oh! I shall alter that. I always begin two or three times before I can please myself." But it was not to be. The trembling little hand was to write no more. The heart, newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, was soon to cease to beat; that intrepid outspeaker and champion of truth, that eager, impetuous redresser of wrong, was to be called out of the world's fight and struggle, to lay down the shining arms....

I saw her first just as I rose out of an illness from which I had never thought to recover. I remember the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes. An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterize the woman. Twice I recollect she took me to task for what she held to be errors in doctrine. Once about Fielding we had a disputation. She spoke her mind out. She jumped too rapidly to conclusions.... She formed conclusions that might be wrong and built up whole theories of character upon them. New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or affectation, with extraordinary keenness of vision. She was angry with her favorites if their conduct or conversation fell below her idea.

Often she seemed to be judging the London folk prematurely: but perhaps the city is rather angry at being judged. I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure and lofty and high-minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely — of that passion for truth — of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable, history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame — of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth — this great earth? — this little speck in the infinite universe of God — and with what wonder do we think of today, with what awe await tomorrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear!...

How well I remember the delight and wonder and pleasure with which I read Jane Eyre, sent to me by an author whose name and sex were then alike to me; the strange fascinations of the book; and how with my own work pressing upon me, I could not, having taken the volumes up, lay them down until they were read through! Hundreds of those who, like myself, recognized and admired that masterwork of a great genius will look with a mournful interest and regard and curiosity upon this, the last fragmentary sketch from the noble hand which wrote Jane Eyre.

"To her, life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality."

EMILY DICKINSON
(1830-1886)
by
Susan Gilbert Dickinson
(D. 1913)

Emily Dickinson, one of the great American poets, was virtually unknown during her lifetime beyond her circle of family and friends in Amherst, Massachusetts. Around the age of thirty, she began to live the life of a recluse, eventually not leaving the house or seeing friends or family visitors. At her death, over a thousand poems were found in her bureau drawers. Susan Dickinson was her sister-in-law. She wrote this editorial for the Springfield Republican newspaper.

The death of Miss Emily Dickinson, daughter of the late Edward Dickinson, at Amherst on Saturday, makes another sad inroad on the small circle so long occupying the old family mansion.... Very few in the village, except among the older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions.... As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship.... Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career — her endowments being so exceptional — but the "mesh of her soul"... was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work....

To her, life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer.

Copyright © 1997 by Phyllis Theroux

About the Author

Phyllis Theroux is the author of California and Other States of Grace and Nightlights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark. The founder of the Nightwriters seminar, she is a magazine columnist, children's book writer, and was a regular essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She lives in Ashland, Virginia.