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, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars.  It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again.  That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know.  But at least they were taught that death was humorous.

There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty.  But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one.  The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness.  A hundred instances might be taken.  The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel.  Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in ‘Maud’ could