XIX, The Last Smile. WE have all seen in print, and most of us perhaps on real living lips and faces, what is called a sardonic smile. Not all of us may be aware of the alleged origin of that expression. The sardonic laugh of the ancients was an involuntary distension of the muscles of the mouth, occasioned by a poisonous plant grown in Sardinia; and persons who died of this poison had a smile on their countenance—whence came about the meaning of a forced, or affected, and grimacing smile. To a mere muscular mechanical movement is referred, by physiologists, the smile, so sweetly the reverse of sardonic, which is to be observed so often on the faces of the dying, and of the dead. But under the spell of that suggestive aspect, one is inclined to scout at a physiological reduction of it to its lowest terms, in the style of Horatio's objection to a certain post-mortem examination on the part of the Prince of Denmark that "twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Rather one suffers one's feelings to find scope and devout expression in Keble's teaching, that No smile is like the smile of death, Edgar Poe adverts somewhere to what he calls "that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death." Between a Poe and a Keble there is, in all things, a distinction with a difference. How differently from Gibbon would Keble have described the dying smile of that unnamed hero and martyr—the quidam of Lactantius-who was burnt, or rather roasted, before a slow fire, for tearing down the edict of Diocletian, and upon whom the executioners, zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the emperor, exhausted every refinement of cruelty, without being able to subdue his patience, or to alter the steady and insulting smile," so the historian of the Roman Empire calls it, "which, in his dying agonies, he still preserved in his countenance." For, such of the bystanders as sympathised with the sufferer had not to wait till that tyranny of pain was overpast before the smile that sealed his bliss should be seen, and felt; it was there from the first, and it was there to the last. No waiting for it as for that of the promised smile in Mrs. Browning's poem : Weep not. I weep not. 66 Death is strong. The eyes of Death are dry. But lay this scroll upon my breast And wait awhile for the corpse's smile Which shineth presently. Nor is the last smile so uniform in expression and expressiveness as some would contend. Not too literally is Mr. Procter's stanza to be rendered, which says that All faces melt in smiles and tears, Stirr'd up by many a passion strange, Then king and peasant, bride and nun, Without, however, essaying in the least to differentiate among the specific varieties of the one generic smile, let us glance at a few recorded examples here and there, whether in the records of actual life, or as transferred thence to the uses of poetry and prose fiction, to point a moral or adorn a tale. Chateaubriand claims, at the time of the exhumations of 1815, to have at once recognised the head of the Queen, “by the smile which this head had directed towards me at Versailles," and which imagination, or some correlative force, so complacently but so unmistakably saw there still. Beattie's letter, announcing the death of Lord Lyttleton, records a "fixed smile on his lifeless countenance." When the amiable doctor, some twenty years later, had to record the death of his own promising son, he was careful not to omit in his instance the like record of a settled smile. To apply the words since written by son of sire—the Angel of death came tranquilly, and, with a smile That cast its sweet reflection on thy face, Of Geoffrey St. Hilaire it was that Edgar Quinet wrote, “Il s'approche, en souriant, de la vérité sans voile”—and this was literally true in articulo mortis. Surely the angels had straikit him,” said one of the children of that venerable Jameson of Methven who, renowned for a lifelong smile, was found dead one morning on the hearthrug,-"the smile shining all radiant on his face," as having defied and survived death. Wordsworth devoutly commemorates in a sonnet the "heaven-revealing smile" on the face of the “dear Sister, become Death's Bride," he lost in 1836. To him that vision sanctified the sway of Death. Perthes writes of the endeared Caroline that had left him the evening before: "The body is ¡nexpressibly beautiful, from the height of the forehead and the sweet loving smile that plays about the mouth." Illusion, if you will; but who could grudge the bereaved a cherished illusion such as that indulged in by the widowed empress of Alexander I., thus writing of the departed czar : Notre cher défunt a repris son air de bienveillance, son sourire me prouve qu'il est heureux, et qu'il voit des choses plus belles qu'ici bas." It did not look like death, they tell us of Professor Aytoun, when he lay with "a heavenly smile upon his lips, and the colour on his cheek.” 66 Purposely these examples are varied by glimpses of faces diverse as well as divers. John Wesley lay in a kind of state, dressed in his clerical habit, with gown, cassock, and bands; the old clerical cap on his head; a Bible in one hand, and a white handkerchief in the other. "The face was placid, and the expression which death had fixed upon his venerable features was that of a serene and heavenly smile." Douglas Jerrold, in a moment, his son tells us, without a struggle, peacefully as a child falls asleep in its nurse's arms, "fell into his long rest, with a smile upon his face." Sharp had been his physical anguish a few hours before, and iterated his appeals to the doctor, "Why torture a dying creature, doctor?" when endeavours were being made for his relief. Margaret Fuller's imagination was haunted by the sublime smile in death of that Morris Birkbeck, one of the "true patriarchs" of the West, who refused to be saved from drowning when he found that his son could not save them both. When the body was found, there was on the face the sweetest smile; and his son said, "Just so he smiled upon me when he let me go and pushed me away from him." This little narrative touched Margaret's imagination in very early youth, and often, she says, "has come up, in lonely vision, that face, serenely smiling above the current which bore him away to another realm of being." Once and again, in Ion, does Talfourd picture a father's dying smile-in one case, of a warrior writhing in the last grapple of his sinewy frame, who Strove to cast a smile (And not in vain) upon his fragile wife, in that plague-stricken city and home. In the other case it is Ctesiphon's father, and Ctesiphon tells how their hands were joined in nervous grasp for the last time, and eye met eye in earnest gaze, and A smile Of the old sweetness played upon his lips, And life forsook him. The Maimuna of Southey's Thalaba, when her hour was come, bade them turn her face to Mecca; and in her languid eyes the joy of certain hope lit a last lustre, "and in death a smile was on her cheek." One of Moore's Irish Melodies, in a minor key, declares of the subject of its commemoration that Life ne'er look'd more truly bright Donna Maria in Talfourd's Castilian tragedy responds nobly to her husband's appeal to smile through her anguish : |