Methuen’s Shilling Novels
1 The Mighty Atom Marie Corelli
2 Jane Marie Corelli
3 Boy Marie Corelli
4 Spanish Gold G. A. Birmingham
5 The Search Party G. A. Birmingham
6 Teresa of Watling Street Arnold Bennett
9 The Unofficial Honeymoon Dolf Wyllarde
12 The Demon C. N. and A. M. Williamson
17 Joseph Frank Danby
18 Round the Red Lamp Sir A. Conan Doyle
20 Light Freights W. W. Jacobs
22 The Long Road John Oxenham
71 The Gates of Wrath Arnold Bennett
72 Short Cruises W. W. Jacobs
81 The Card Arnold Bennett
87 Lalage’s Lovers G. A. Birmingham
92 White Fang Jack London
105 The Wallet of Kai Lung Ernest Bramah
108 The Adventures of Dr. Whitty G. A. Birmingham
113 Lavender and Old Lace Myrtle Reed
115 Old Rose and Silver Myrtle Reed
122 The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton E. Phillips Oppenheim
125 The Regent Arnold Bennett
127 Sally Dorothea Conyers
129 The Lodger Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
135 A Spinner in the Sun Myrtle Reed
137 The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu Sax Rohmer
139 The Golden Centipede Louise Gerard
140 The Love Pirate C. N. and A. M. Williamson
142 The Way of these Women E. Phillips Oppenheim
143 Sandy Married Dorothea Conyers
145 Chance Joseph Conrad
148 Flower of the Dusk Myrtle Reed
150 The Gentleman Adventurer H. C. Bailey
154 The Hyena of Kallu Louise Gerard
190 The Happy Hunting Ground Mrs. Alice Perrin
191 My Lady of Shadows John Oxenham
211 Max Carrados Ernest Bramah
212 Under Western Eyes Joseph Conrad
213 The Kloof Bride Ernest Glanville
215 Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo E. Phillips Oppenheim
216 The Wonder of Love E. M. Albanesi
217 A Weaver of Dreams Myrtle Reed
219 The Family Elinor Mordaunt
220 A Heritage of Peril A. W. Marchmont
221 The Kinsman Mrs. Sidgwick
222 Emmanuel Burden Hilaire Belloc
224 Broken Shackles John Oxenham
225 A Knight of Spain Marjorie Bowen
227 Byeways Robert Hichens
228 Gossamer G. A. Birmingham
229 My Friend the Chauffeur C. N. and A. M. Williamson
230 The Salving of a Derelict Maurice Drake
231 Cameos Marie Corelli
232 The Happy Valley B. M. Croker
233 Victory Joseph Conrad
A Selection only.
Methuen’s Shilling Library
36 De Profundis Oscar Wilde
37 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime Oscar Wilde
38 Selected Poems Oscar Wilde
39 An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde
40 Intentions Oscar Wilde
41 Lady Windermere’s Fan Oscar Wilde
42 Charmides and other Poems Oscar Wilde
43 Harvest Home E. V. Lucas
44 A Little of Everything E. V. Lucas
45 Vailima Letters Robert Louis Stevenson
46 Hills and the Sea Hilaire Belloc
47 The Blue Bird Maurice Maeterlinck
50 Charles Dickens G. K. Chesterton
53 Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to
his Son George Horace Lorimer
54 The Life of John Ruskin W. G. Collingwood
57 Sevastopol and other Stories Leo Tolstoy
58 The Lore of the Honey-Bee Tickner Edwardes
60 From Midshipman to Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood
62 John Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu John Boyes
63 Oscar Wilde Arthur Ransome
64 The Vicar of Morwenstow S. Baring-Gould
65 Old Country Life S. Baring-Gould
76 Home Life in France M. Betham-Edwards
77 Selected Prose Oscar Wilde
78 The Best of Lamb E. V. Lucas
80 Selected Letters Robert Louis Stevenson
83 Reason and Belief Sir Oliver Lodge
85 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde
91 Social Evils and their Remedy Leo Tolstoy
93 The Substance of Faith Sir Oliver Lodge
94 All Things Considered G. K. Chesterton
95 The Mirror of the Sea Joseph Conrad
96 A Picked Company Hilaire Belloc
116 The Survival of Man Sir Oliver Lodge
126 Science from an Easy Chair Sir Ray Lankester
141 Variety Lane E. V. Lucas
144 A Shilling for my Thoughts G. K. Chesterton
146 A Woman of No Importance Oscar Wilde
149 A Shepherd’s Life W. H. Hudson
193 On Nothing Hilaire Belloc
200 Jane Austen and her Times G. E. Mitton
214 Select Essays Maurice Maeterlinck
223 Two Generations Leo Tolstoy
226 On Everything Hilaire Belloc
234 Records and Reminiscences Sir Francis Burnand
A Selection only.
GLEANINGS FROM MAETERLINCK
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE BLUE BIRD
OUR ETERNITY
DEATH
MARY MAGDALENE
THE UNKNOWN GUEST
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
WISDOM AND DESTINY
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
THE BURIED TEMPLE
THE DOUBLE GARDEN
LIFE AND FLOWERS
AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
MONNA VANNA
JOYZELLE
SISTER BEATRICE; AND ARIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
MY DOG
OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS
HOURS OF GLADNESS
GLEANINGS FROM
MAETERLINCK
TRANSLATED AND COMPILED BY
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1917_
_All rights reserved_
_Copyright U.S.A. by Dodd, Mead & Co. Inc.
1913 to 1917._
INTRODUCTION
In the first act of _The Blue Bird_, the fairy Bérylune sends Mytyl
and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light,
they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms
of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in
a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the
great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and
grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the
revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl’s fingers, even the tombstones
and ‘all the grand investiture of death’ disappear, to be replaced by
luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies.
“Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass
for traces of even one tombstone.
Her brother also looks:
“There are no dead,” is his reply.
Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket
Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience’s little gasp of
delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage
effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded
as the essence of Maeterlinck’s later work. Since the _Life of the
Bee_, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as _Monna Vanna_,
_The Blind_ and _Pelléas and Mélisande_, his mind seems to have been
brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery
of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In _The Death of
Tintagiles_ there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all
its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door
opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted
efforts of Tintagiles’ sisters can neither restrain nor force back.
In _The Blue Bird_ we are shown that a man cannot die so long as
he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work
Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each
generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the
heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which
it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective
existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of
psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.
I have collected in the present volume a selection of essays illustrating
the later stages of Maeterlinck’s quest. Never in history have so
many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so
unanimously and painfully to penetrate the veil wherein the world’s
oldest mystery is shrouded. The finality of death was a challenge flung
down and eagerly taken up by all whom the loss of son or brother had
taken unawares. To Maeterlinck the war has brought in great part the
annihilation of a people, his own people; it has inspired him to a
splendour of indignation and pity; but, more gravely and urgently than
ever before, it has demanded of him an answer to the question of the
Sadducees, who “say there is no resurrection.”
Readers wishing to study the complete series of essays from which the
sixteen in this volume are taken will find them in the three books
entitled, _Our Eternity_, _The Unknown Guest_ and _The Wrack of the
Storm_, all of which are issued by the present publishers.
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
CHELSEA, _9 April 1917_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH 13
II. ANNIHILATION 31
III. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD 37
IV. OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS 63
V. THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY 75
VI. OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES 89
VII. CONCLUSIONS 105
VIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 115
IX. HEROISM 181
X. ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES 193
XI. THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 205
XII. IN MEMORIAM 213
XIII. THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 217
XIV. THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 225
XV. THE WILL OF EARTH 237
XVI. WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 247
I
OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH
1
It has been well said:
“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some
vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and
everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk
to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish
spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of
societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration,
save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast,
show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech
and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]
2
That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around
it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it but
thrives upon our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled
with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything
with its shadow. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so
unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention
to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head.
All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting
our will from it. We deliver it into the groping hands of instinct and
we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the
idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous
of ideas—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the
flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one
power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by
gleams kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive.
We do not begin to think of death until we have no longer the strength,
I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us
from another century would have difficulty in recognizing, in the depths
of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love
or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed
around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it depends
has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by
our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence,
grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has not, so to
speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the
tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical among
us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the
pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted
by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life and, if
less known, is all the more formidable. And therefore, when the impending
hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us
at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without
examining them, we had meant to lean give way like rushes beneath the
weight of the last minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections
which are illusive or are strange to us and which do not know the roads
to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared,
where naught remains afoot save terror.
3
Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says:
“It is not worthy of a Christian”—and I would add, of a man—“to postpone
his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him
off.”
It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in
the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and stand by
it. He would say to death:
“I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my
eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you were not: that is enough
to prevent you from becoming mine.”
He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a tried image against which the
last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes
would draw fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying,
which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that
of the peaks of his existence, where would be gathered, like angels of
peace, the most lucid, the most rarefied thoughts of his life. Is not
that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer,
if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the
unknown?
4
“The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making
death grievous.”
And Bacon wrote:
“_Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa._”
Let us, then, learn to look upon death as it is in itself, free from
the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination.
Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
Thus we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not
just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They
form part of life and not of death. We readily forget the most cruel
sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence
destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let
death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before
it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of
pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of
the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly
prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts a term to
them.
5
In point of fact, whereas sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the
agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now
what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the
last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching
during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked,
disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of everything, into an unknown
that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has
ever felt.
It is doubly unjust to impute the torments of that second to death.
We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would
remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown
into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most
dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the
watchers, at least; for very often the consciousness of him whom death,
in Bossuet’s phrase, has “brought to bay” is already greatly dulled and
perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it
seems to be enduring. All doctors consider it their first duty to prolong
to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hopeless agony.
Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, twenty times wished and not
once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?
They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey
leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded
by tears, curb their revolt and recoil before a law which all recognize
and revere as the highest law of man’s conscience.
6
One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarous. Its roots go down
to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
long since died out in the intelligence of men. That is why the doctors
act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that
every minute gained amid the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from
the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the
hereafter reserve for men; and of two evils, to avoid that which they
know to be imaginary, they choose the only real one. Besides, in thus
postponing the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best
part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which
makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation
of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death
demanding the prolongation of the agony.
7
The doctors, on their side, say or might say that, in the present stage
of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty
of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
insupportable torments, might be murder. Doubtless there is not one
chance in a hundred thousand that the patient escape. No matter: if that
chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days,
or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life,
but much rather, as the Romans called it, “an extended death,” those
hundred thousand useless torments will not have been in vain. A single
hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.
Here we have, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if
we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
we see with all that remains to us, that is to say, with every imaginable
pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and
which is heavy enough to raise by a hair’s-breadth the other scale that
dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of
another world.
8
Swollen by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes such
that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors’ reasons. And yet there
is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are
slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least
to dull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do
so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure
out niggardly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish
and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance,
that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life
refusing to give place to on-coming rest.
It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring.
It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death.
It happens before it and beneath it. It is not the arrival of death but
the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death but life that
we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that
wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten from every side at the approach of
death, but not at its call; and, though they gather round it, they did
not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you
if you do not yield to it? All those strugglings, those waitings, those
tossings, those tragic cursings are on the side of the slope to which
we cling and not on the other side. They are, indeed, accidental and
temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge merely
helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer
hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act
with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every
evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick
man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor
metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as
that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be nothing else to take into
consideration, it will be possible to surround death with profounder
ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death
once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon
it without fear and to lighten that which comes after.
9
Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The
first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our
mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful.
The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first.
Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it
the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that digs
our graves and orders us to keep that which is made to disappear? If we
cannot think without horror of what befalls the beloved in the grave, is
it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit
to some place unknown, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the
body which it leaves with us? Death descends into our midst to change
the place of a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does
and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. For it is
already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to
prolong to the very utmost, as though we were persuaded that it is our
only security against forgetfulness. I am well aware that, from any
other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innocent;
and that, looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no
more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all
is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage,
whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the foul ordeal. Purified
by fire, the remembrance lives enthroned as a beautiful idea; and death
is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well
understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens
in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure
of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form
of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who
depart but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the
ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger
in consolation or despair.
10
There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time in
putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there.
Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not
proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not one of them
brings us a proof before which an honest intelligence can bow. Nor would
it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to
believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to
be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest of them
has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to
try to attain, before all and in all things, that which appears to be the
truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief whose
doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest
and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story,
which, even if scientifically substantiated, would be merely a beautiful
lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles
no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that
creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith,
vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough
to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any
other, he knew the stock proofs of the theologians, for they had been
the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs
could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four
most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to mankind, must have given
it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments,
whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he
glories and, in a manner, rejoices in their futility:
“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for
their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give
a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a
foolishness, _stultitiam_; and then you complain that they do not prove
it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in
being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”
His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and
devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the
universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for
which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:
“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery
itself is incomprehensible to man.”
He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by
an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more
serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another,
small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which
it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a
fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In
the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller
to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the
smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries
his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an
amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries
which he cultivates or on which he dwells.
To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him;
and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the
monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair
of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion
with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist.
We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He
does not exist.
“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having
neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore
incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”
God is or is not.
“But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it.
There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the
uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or
tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one
or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either.”
The correct course would be not to wager at all.
“Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are
launched in it.”
Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for
which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering,
at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small
pleasures, a few wretched comforts of this life, because your little
sacrifice will not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity
of unspeakable happiness.
“‘It is true, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.’
“Never mind, follow the way in which they began who believe and who at
first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc.
That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of
the beasts.”
“‘But that is just what I am afraid of.’
“Why? What have you to lose?”
Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument
to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that
human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands
our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our
choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some
æsthetic or sentimental pitch-and-toss? Or has He set within us another
higher and surer faculty, before which the understanding must yield? If
so, where is it? What is its name? If this God punishes us for not having
blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon
the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having
made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us,
a choice which is rejected by that best and most divine part which He
has implanted in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of
a cruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible
snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith that
injustice may load us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal
presence of its Author.
II
ANNIHILATION
1
And now we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there;
we know only what is not there. It is the vaster by all that we have
learned to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to
break through its darkness—for man has the right to hope for that which
he does not yet conceive—the only point that interests us, because it is
situated in the little circle which our actual intelligence traces in the
thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which
we are bound will be dreadful or not.
Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more:
total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival
without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival in the universal
consciousness, or with a consciousness different from that which we
possess in this world.
2
Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity
without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is
dispersed but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out
of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a
quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no
place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished
millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will
perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the
same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able
to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness,
nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exists, under whatever form,
it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyse it, to define
it, or to understand it, thoughts and expressions fail us, or create that
which they are struggling to deny. It is as contrary to the nature of our
reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as
to conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative
infinity, a sort of infinity of darkness opposed to that which our
intelligence strives to illumine, or rather it is but a child-name or
nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted
to embrace, for we call nothingness all that escapes our senses or our
reason and exists without our knowledge.
3
But, it will perhaps be said, though the annihilation of every world
and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is
impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothingness and
everlasting death? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by
words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness.
We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we
believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to
recognize that our idea of death is much too puerile to contain the least
truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the
destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has
a life a little different from ours. Even so do we act towards a world
that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because
we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is
extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learned
that the most inert matter, to outward seeming, is animated by movements
so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than
sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable
energy locked up in a wayside stone.
“There is no room for death!” cried Emily Brontë.
But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should
really become inert and motionless, it would none the less persist under
one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility,
would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All
that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as
that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw
us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible
than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands,
the less comprehensible do nothingness and death become. In any case—and
this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could
not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.
III
COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD
1
The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the
dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are
obtained by the agency of a medium[2] in a state of ecstasy, or rather
“trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition
is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical
manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium
Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical
balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second or
subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit
the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic invasion,” as
Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the “entranced” subject,
the normal consciousness and personality are entirely done away with;
and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by word of mouth, more often
in writing, to the questions put to him. It has happened that he speaks
and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and
his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent conversations.
More rarely, the voice and the two hands are “possessed” at one and the
same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously,
manifestations of this sort lend themselves, to frauds and impostures of
all kinds; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there
are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of
good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by
scientific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally
inflexible scepticism, that it becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion
at the finish.[3] Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the
details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance
of Mrs. Piper, the famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard
Hodgson, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver
Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other
hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal
details which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in
the presence of an entirely new, improbable but genuine phenomenon, which
is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial
phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special
study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore
content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject
to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_; and, above all, to the
twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., notably to
the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings
in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the facts and
arguments that may be adduced for or against the agency of the dead; and,
lastly, to Myers’ great work, _Human Personality and its Survival after
Bodily Death_.
2
The “entranced” mediums are invaded or possessed by different familiar
spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and
ambiguous name of “controls.” Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession
by Phinuit, George Pelham, or “G.P.,” Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs.
Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual tenant,
while graver and more illustrious personages would take possession of
Stainton Moses, a clergyman. Each of these spirits retains a sharply
defined character, which is consistent throughout and which, moreover,
for the most part bears no relation to that of the medium. Amongst these,
Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most attractive, the most original,
the most living, the most active and, above all, the most talkative.
They centralize the communications after a fashion; they come and go
officiously; and, should any one of those present wish to be brought
into touch with the soul of a deceased relative or friend, they fly in
search of it, find it amid the invisible throng, usher it in, announce
its presence, speak in its name, transmit and, so to speak, translate
the questions and replies; for it seems that it is very difficult for the
dead to communicate with the living and that they need special aptitudes
and a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances. We will not yet examine
what they have to reveal to us; but to see them thus fluttering to and
fro amid the multitude of their discarnate brothers and sisters gives
us a first impression of the next world which is none too reassuring;
and we say to ourselves that the dead of to-day are strangely like those
whom Ulysses conjured up out of the Cimmerian darkness three thousand
years ago: pale and empty shades, bewildered, incoherent, puerile and
terror-stricken, like unto dreams, more numerous than the leaves that
fall in autumn and, like them, trembling in the unknown winds from the
vast plains of the other world. They no longer even have enough life to
be unhappy; and they seem to drag out, we know not where, a precarious
and idle existence, to wander aimlessly, to hover round us, slumbering,
or chattering among one another of the minor matters of this world; and,
when a gap is made in their darkness, to hasten from all sides, like
flocks of famished birds, hungering for light and the sound of a human
voice. And, in spite of ourselves, we think of the _Odyssey_ and the
sinister words of the shade of Achilles as it issued from Erebus:
“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being
on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not
much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”
3
What have these latterday dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a
remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events
here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above
all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist,
that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to convince us
of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with
extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also
extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connections of the
person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even of a
stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little infirmities,
that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or personal tendencies of a
third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance:
they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an
insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all
the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained
from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but
there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even
the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.
We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits,
incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards
greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to
believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed
and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not
at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?
4
And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these
objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so
often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson
and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves
among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They
at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal
in order to allay the uneasy curiosity of men. Myers in particular,
the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil
that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who
were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out
yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion.
He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was
questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s familiar
spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet
fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the evening,
and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.
The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’
“communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first
few words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed, Faithful to
his idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity
for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society
for Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all
recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed
a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next
president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should
be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest,
that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him:
“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”
He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also
complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the
mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines
of Virgil.”[4] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if
through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his
way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were
dead, he thought they were only visions.”
This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about
all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which
better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others
which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character
and ways of thinking and speaking would possess some value if none of
those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at
the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they
are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the
medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.
5
A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the
names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s
Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over
a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_.
Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of
the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years,
he devoted himself to Mrs. Piper the medium, working with her twice a
week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject
of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been
exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death;
and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper
that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience
than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape
and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after
his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs.
Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during
several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to
give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard
professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this
kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain
for the emotion experienced on thus finding yourself in the presence of
an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but
anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking,
grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling.
The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak,
surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second
time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the
best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain
that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic
is the only road that leads to the truth.
“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of
sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would be
determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought to
make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching my
mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays
only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that the
decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one’s
general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from
one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at least—in
a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may draw an
anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may
signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[5]
And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:
“_I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably
there_, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole
acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s dream-life,
even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the results
found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson’s, or be
some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await
more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty
or a hundred years.”[6]
As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in
his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately
that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These hesitations on the
part of a man who has revolutionized our psychological ideas and who
possessed a brain as wonderfully organized and well-balanced as that
of our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor
of medicine and a professor of philosophy, sceptical by nature and
scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to
conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not
a question of allowing ourselves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced
by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is
a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute,
which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must
not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh.
6