WALLOWING IN DEATH.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1129, 25 September 1871, Page 2

WALLOWING IN DEATH.

[LONDON ECHO, JULY 13.] Death comes often enough in a shape of terror, but very rarely in one wherein its solemnity is lost in disgust. That great calm which follows all the storms of mortal life, the purity and the stillness which seem to enwrap the lifeless clay ; the strange, sweet smile which lingers on the lips of the dead when all the marks of care and pain are smoothed away, and a ray of Heaven seems to rest on what was once the temple of a living soul ere it is suffered to fall in ruins,—these beautiful and holy things are what wo are doubtless meant to connect with the memory of natural death. Even violent death ou the battle-field, or in the greater number of those accidents to which humanity is exposed, has in it one element of grandeur and awe lifting it into the region of poetry and religion. Ta see death rendered utterly degraded, hideous, beastly —to see it deprived of every remnant of sanctity and tenderness, and made—what the death of bird or brute can never be —?an object of moral horror and of physical loathsomness, — this must be a spectacle as revolting as,, happily, it is rare. Such a sight has been beheld, how--ever, this week in double shape in that, miserable cottage in Forest lane.. It was no case of poverty, or even of the common preliminary of a tragedy, an unlawful connection of the man anti woman concerned,. William Preston, or William Feast, as he was generally called, lived with his wife and their two children, in a condition which ought to have been one of much comfort and respectablity. So able was he, in his; business as a clerk in a railway office,, that having five times forfeited his post by drunkenness, his employers thought it worth while each time to reinstate him ou, promise of reform. He was earning, of course, an easy subsistence for himself and his family ; and, in addition to his salary, had received a fortnight ago a legacy of <£l4o, d. ly paid him by his, brother. His wife and he appear to have been on good terms, and to have been only too well united in their unfortunate tastes,. Out of this easy and honorable groundwork what did they make of their lives ? It is. quite vain for any picture of fancy, sack as Dickens might have drawn, to exceed, the ugliness of the truth. The “ welifurnished cottage ” in such state of disorder that it was a matter of doubt whether a deadly struggle had or had not taken place in it. In one room William Preston’s body, dressed, and covered with a sheet, bearing a frighttul gash on the brow, and so far gone in a state of decomposition as to poison the atmosphere everywhere pools of blood lying clotted, and oozing through the floor to the ceil--ing of the chamber below. In another bedroom the wife, lying on her bed in her night-dress, in a state of filth indescribable, and dead drunk, surrounded by the empty beer-cans, which explained her state. The wretched children, either stupid or paralysed with terror, hovering between their dead and drunken parents, in the pestiferous bouse, fetching drink continually to their mother, and spending the ill omened legacy in buying for her,, and for themselves a “ a pair of fashionable boots ! ” Such is the plain statement of the police as to what they saw and heard, when they entered, on that bright summer morning last Sunday, the foul sty, hardly endurable from its stench,. The few details which have since transpired throw scarcely any more light on the matter than the picture itself amply suggested. The miserable woman, previous to her death in West Ham Workhouse, seems to have said that her husband died on last Friday week or,, according to another account, on Monday —and that she had tried to put him to bed and failed, after which he fell heavily on the fender. Whether he in this way received the wound in his forehead which caused his death is not yet ascertained.. The girl, aged ten, “ with fair hair and blue eyes,” in whose jacket the “ mother made a pocket to hide the gin-bottle in, said she saw her father fall ou the fender and “ cut his eyebrow,” adding that “ mother put the sheet over father ” The child’s life appears to have been passed in buying drink and seeing it consumed. As to the neighbors, it seems they can only say that the wretched couple were known to be grossly addicted to drinking*, and that before now they had more than once shut themselves up in their for days to give full scope to tfiefi vp propensity, j

When certain poets call upon us to recognise the aesthetic merits of Vice, we think it would be rather desirable that a few stories like this of the Prestons and the Bayswater tragedy should sometimes rise to our recollection. Our ancestors were not such fools, after all, when they invented the proverb, "As ugly as Sin." It surely happens in the world that everywhere we find Sin is always ugly, always so much the ugliest of all thiugs, that nothing which is free from the leprosy of it, deserves to*be called ugly in comparison. Those who often visit hospitals and workhouses, where the most terrible forms of disease are congregated, have frequently observed that there is a disgust attaching to those which, lit e delirium tremens, have sprung from vice, never shared by the saddest cases of malady otherwise incurred. So it is with the human countenances which we behold in the marred by smallpox, burnt or scarred, they are never wholly ugly so long as honesty and kindness look out of the eyes and innocence re3ts on the lips. It is the oblique glance of malice, the grin of cruelty or sensuality, which create ugliness property so called. Even when lodged in a beautiful form, or decked with every refinement of art, there is a special ugliness in every vice from envy, and discontent, and vanity, to cruelty, and drunkenness, and profligacy. The faces lighted up by avarice at the gaming tables of Homburg and Baden Baden are seen as if in the glare of some unnatural and ghastly illumination. The watery eyes of the sot revolt us like the slime of a reptile. If. it be true, then, as it is, perhaps, justly affirmed, that this is an age in which aesthetic taste is allowed far too largely to intrude into matters which belong to the conscience and the religious life ; if men go about asking, not simply whether a religion be true, but whether it be artistic —and not whether worship be devout, but whether it be intoned in perfect musical cadence ?—if all this be so, then let us have at least, as the French say, " the qualities of our defects." Let us recognise that every species and degree of vice is an offence against good taste, as well as against good morals, and that there is no such thing possible as elegant sin, or refined wickedness. Nut always, not often, does any vice create for itseli such a spectral illustration as that cottage at Ilford, with the dead and the dying wallowing together in blood and drink. But whether greater or lesser the evil, the result is the same in kind. In the one case, life is made mean and ugly ; the power of innocent enjoyment vanishes, and the charm of existence is broken, like a lily trodden into the mire of the market-place. In the other case, Death is made not merely dreadful, but disgusting, till over the grave of the voluptuous or the drunkard not even Compassion itself could shed a tear.