"If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death"
About this Quote
There is a cold-blooded showmanship in Smith's line: nobility is easiest to manufacture when the subject can no longer contradict the story. "Your best course is to kill him" lands like a dare, but it's really an accusation. We elevate the dead not because death clarifies character, but because it silences complexity. A living person leaks: pettiness, compromise, messy desire. A dead one can be edited into an emblem.
Smith is writing in a Victorian atmosphere that treated death as a kind of moral theater, with elaborate mourning rituals and a thriving culture of elegy. The poem-as-funeral becomes a machine for refinement: it strips away the awkward bits and leaves a clean silhouette. His phrasing borrows the language of inheritance and "race", a 19th-century shorthand for lineage and bloodlines, to show how quickly "nobility" becomes a story we tell ourselves about pedigree and destiny. Death, in this logic, is the ultimate credentialing service. It stages the body as proof of "superiority" that can't be cross-examined.
The nastiest subtext is how death flatters the living. To call the dead noble is also to declare oneself discerning, reverent, part of the right tradition. Smith's cynicism isn't anti-grief; it's anti-mythmaking. He recognizes the social convenience of martyrdom and posthumous reputation: kill the man, and you finally get the man you wanted all along - simplified, purified, usable.
Smith is writing in a Victorian atmosphere that treated death as a kind of moral theater, with elaborate mourning rituals and a thriving culture of elegy. The poem-as-funeral becomes a machine for refinement: it strips away the awkward bits and leaves a clean silhouette. His phrasing borrows the language of inheritance and "race", a 19th-century shorthand for lineage and bloodlines, to show how quickly "nobility" becomes a story we tell ourselves about pedigree and destiny. Death, in this logic, is the ultimate credentialing service. It stages the body as proof of "superiority" that can't be cross-examined.
The nastiest subtext is how death flatters the living. To call the dead noble is also to declare oneself discerning, reverent, part of the right tradition. Smith's cynicism isn't anti-grief; it's anti-mythmaking. He recognizes the social convenience of martyrdom and posthumous reputation: kill the man, and you finally get the man you wanted all along - simplified, purified, usable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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