He was riding May Dolly, a Cheshire six-year-old, and one of his own
breeding; for just as some people think that everyone should go to his
own parish church, it was a principle with Mr. James Tomkinson that a
man should ride a horse from his own county. Straight, lithe, and ruddy,
he trotted to the starting-post, and the crowd cheered him as he went,
for they liked to see a bit of pluck. He modestly enjoyed their
applause: "I think I never saw anybody so pleased," said Mr. Justice
Grantham, who was judge in the race. It was known that the old man had
passed the limit of seventy, but only five years before he won a
steeplechase on his own, and if ever a rider fulfilled Montaigne's ideal
of a life spent in the saddle, it was he. So he rode to the
starting-post, happy in himself and modestly confident--the very model
of what a well-to-do English countryman should wish to be--a Rugby and
Balliol man, above suspicion for honesty, a busy man of affairs, a
consummate horseman, a bad speaker, and a true-hearted Liberal, holding
an equally unblemished record for courage in convictions and at fences.
The race was three and a half miles--twice round the circuit. The first
circuit was run, the last fence of it safely cleared. The second circuit
was nearly complete: only that last fence remained. It was three
hundred yards away, and he rode fast for it along the bottom. Someone
was abreast of him, someone close behind. May Dolly rushed forward, and
the fence drew nearer and nearer. He was leading; once over that fence
and victory was his--the latest victory, always worth all the rest. He
felt the moving saddle between his thighs; he heard the quick beating of
the hoofs. Something happened; there was a swerve, a sideways jump, a
vain effort at recovery, a crashing fall too quick for thought; and
before the joy of victory had died, the darkness came.
Who would not choose to plunge out of life like that? A sudden end at
the moment of victory has always been the commonplace of human desire.
When the antique sage was asked to select the happiest man in history,
his choice fell on one whose destiny resembled that of the Member for
Crewe; for Tellus the Athenian had lived a full and well-contented life,
had seen fine and gentlemanly sons and many grandchildren growing up
around him, had shared the honour and prosperity of his country, and
died fighting at Eleusis when victory was assured. Next in happiness to
Tellus came the two Argive boys, who, for want of oxen, themselves drew
their mother in a cart up the hill to worship, and, as though in answer
to her prayer for blessings on them, died in the temple that night. It
has always been so. The leap of Rome's greatest treasure into the Gulf
of earthquake was accounted an enviable opportunity. When they asked
Caesar what death he would choose, he answered, "A sudden one," and he
had his wish. "Oh, happy he whom thou in battles findest," cried Faust
to Death in the midst of all his learning; and "Let me like a soldier
fall" is the natural marching song of our Territorials.
The advantages of these hot-blooded ends are so obvious that they need
hardly be recalled, and, indeed, they have provided a theme for many of
our most inspiriting writers. To go when life is strongest and passion
is at its height; to avoid the terrors of expectation and escape the
lingering paraphernalia of sick chambers and deathbed scenes; to shirk
the stuffy and inactive hours, marked by nothing but medicines and
unwelcome meals; to elude the doctor's feigned encouragements, the
sympathy of relations anxious to resume their ordinary pursuits, the
buzzing of the parson in the ear, the fading of the casement into that
"glimmering square"--should we not all go a long way round to seek so
merciful a deliverance? "I will not die in my bed like a cow!" cried the
Northumbrian king, and was set on his feet in full armour to confront
the Arch Fear face to face. There was some poor comfort in a pose like
that; it was better than our helpless collapse into a middle-aged
cradle, with pap-boat for feeding-bottle, and a last sleep in the
nurse's arms, younger and less muscular than our own. But how much finer
to die like Romeo with a kiss, quick as the true apothecary's drugs; to
sink like Shelley in the blue water, with mind still full of the Greek
poet whom he tucked against his heart; to pass hot with fever, like
Byron, from the height of fame, while thunder presaged to the
mountaineers the loss of their great champion in freedom's war!
There is no question of it; these are axioms that all mankind is agreed
upon. Every mortal soul would choose a quick and impassioned death; all
admire a certain recklessness, an indifference to personal safety or
existence, especially in the old, to whom recklessness is most natural,
since they have less of life to risk. That was why the crowd cheered
Mr. James Tomkinson as he trotted to the starting-post, and that was why
everybody envied his rapid and victorious end. In his _Tales from a
Field Hospital_, Sir Frederick Treves told of a soldier who was brought
down from Spion Kop as a mere fragment, his limbs shattered, his face
blown away, incapable of speech or sight. When asked if he had any
message to send home before he died, he wrote upon the paper, "Did we
win?" In those words lives the very spirit of that enviable death which
all men think they long for--the death which takes no thought of self,
and swallows up fear in victory. Such a man Stevenson would have
delighted to include in his brave roll-call, and of him those final,
well-known words in _Aes Triplex_ might have been written:
"In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being,
he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the
mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly
done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual
land."
Yes, it is all very beautiful, and all very true. Stevenson himself,
like Caesar, received the death he wished for, and, whether in reason or
in passion, every soul among us would agree that death in the midst of
life is the most desirable end. And yet--and yet--we hardly know how it
is, but, as a matter of fact, we do not seek it, and when the thing
comes our way, we prefer, if possible, to walk in the opposite
direction. The Territorial may sing himself hoarse with his prayer to
fall like a soldier, but when the bullets begin to wail around him, it
is a thousand to one that he will duck his head. A man may be reasonably
convinced that, since he must die some day, and his reprieve cannot be
extended long, it is best to die in battle and shoot full-blooded into
the spiritual land; nevertheless, if the shadow of a rock gives some
shelter from the guns, he will crawl behind it. A few years ago there
was a great Oxford philosopher who, after lecturing all morning on the
beauty of being absorbed by death into the absolute and eternal, was
granted the opportunity of being wrecked on a lake in the afternoon, but
displayed no satisfaction at the immediate prospect of such absorption.
In the same way, despite our natural and reasonable desires for a death
like Mr. Tomkinson's, we still continue to speak, not only of sleeping
in our beds, but of dying in them, as one of the chief objects of a
virtuous and happy existence. The longest and most devotional part of
the Anglican Common Prayer contains a special petition entreating that
we may be delivered from the sudden death which we have all agreed is so
excellent a piece of fortune. That we are not set free from love of
living is shown by what Matthew Arnold called a bloodthirsty clinging to
life at a moment of crisis. I shall not forget the green terror on the
faces of all the men in a railway carriage when I accidentally set fire
to the train, nor have I found it really appetising to suspect even the
quickest poison in my soup. Instead of leaping gallantly into death
while the trumpets are still blowing, nearly every civilised man
deliberately plots out his existence so as to die, like Tolstoy's Ivan
Ilyitch, amid the pitiful squalor of domestic indifference or
solicitude. We think health universally interesting, we meditate on
diet, we measure our exercise, and shun all risks more carefully than
sin. Praising with our lips the glories of the soldier's death, we
tread with minute observance the bath-chair pathway to the sick-rooms of
old age.
Are our praises of death in victory, then, all cant, and are all the
eloquent rhapsodies of poets and essayists a sham? Montaigne seems to
have thought so, for, writing of those who talk fine of dying bravely,
he says:
"It happeneth that most men set a stern countenance on the matter, look
big, and speak stoutly, thereby to acquire reputation, which, if they
chance to live, they hope to enjoy."
The case of our eloquent rhapsodists who hymn the joys of sudden and
courageous death is evidently more favourable still, since they have
every chance of living for a time, and so of enjoying a reputation for
bravery without much risk. But rather than accuse mankind of purposely
dissembling terror in the hope of braggart fame, we would lay the charge
upon a queer divergence between the mind and the bodily will. No matter
what the mind may say in commendation of swift and glorious death, the
bodily will continues to maintain its life to the utmost, and is the
last and savages enemy that the mind can overcome. So it is that no one
should reckon beforehand upon courageous behaviour when the supreme
summons for courage comes, and only those are faultlessly brave who have
never known peril. In reason everyone is convinced that all mankind is
mortal, and we hear with vague sympathy of the hosts of dead whose
skulls went to pile the pyramids of Tamerlane, or of the thousands that
the sea engulfs and earthquakes shatter. But few realise that the life
of each among those thousands was as dear to him as our life is, and,
though we congratulate heroes upon the opportunity of their death, the
moment when that opportunity would be most happy for ourselves never
seems exactly to arrive. Hardly anyone really thinks he will die, or is
persuaded that the limit to his nature has now come. But it is through
realising the incalculable craving of this bodily will to survive that
men who have themselves known danger will pay the greater reverence to
those who, conscious of mortal fears, and throbbing with the fullness of
existence, none the less in the calm ecstasy of their devotion commit
themselves to the battle, the firing squad, or the prison death as to a
chariot of fire.