"THE KING OF TERRORS"
Skulls may not affright us, nor present fashion ordain cross-bones upon
our sepulchres; but still in the face of death the commonplaces of
comfort shrivel, and philosophy's consolations strike cold as the
symbolism of the tomb. All that lives must die; we know it, but that
death is common does not assuage particular grief, nor can the
contemplation of prehistoric ruins soften regret for one baby's smile.
Man's dogma has proved vain as his philosophy. Age after age has
composed some vision of continued life, and sought to allay its fear or
sorrow with suitable imaginations. Mummies of death outlive their
granite; vermilion and the scalping-knife lie ready for the happy
hunting grounds; beside the royal carcass two score of concubines and
warriors are buried quick; Walhalla rings with clashing swords whose
wounds close up again at sunset; heroes tread the fields of shadowy
asphodel, and on Elysian plains attenuated poets welcome the sage
newcomer to their converse; houris reward the faithful for holy
slaughter; prophets reveal a gorgeous city and pearly gates beyond the
river; the poet tells of circles winding downward to the abyss, and
upward to the Rose of Paradise; upon the bishop's tomb in St. Praxed's
one Pan is carved, and Moses with the tables; upon the gravestone of an
Albanian chief they scratch his rifle and his horse; and over the
slave's low mound in Angola plantations his basket and mattock are laid,
lest he should miss them. So various are the devices contrived for the
solace of mankind, or for his instruction. But one by one, like the dead
themselves, those devices have passed and passed away, leaving mankind
unwitting and unconsoled. For there is still one road that each
traveller must discover afresh, and death's door, at which all men
stand, opens only inwards.
Maurice Maeterlinck has always remained very conscious of that door. How
often in his whispering dramas we are made aware of it! How often,
without even the knock of warning, it suddenly gapes or stands ajar, and
unseen hands are pulling, and children are drawn in, and young girls are
drawn in, and wise men, and the old, while the living world remains
outside, still at breakfast, still busy with its evening games and
sewing, still blindly groping for its departed guide! From the outset,
Maeterlinck has been an amateur of death. In a little volume that bears
Death's name, he utters his meditation upon death's nature and
significance. Like other philosophers and all old wives, he also
attempts our consolation. Mankind demands a consolation, for without it,
perhaps, the species could hardly have survived their foreknowledge of
the end. But in treating the first two terrors to which he applies his
comfortable arguments, Maeterlinck's reasoning appears to me almost
irrelevant, almost obsolete. He attributes the terrified apprehension of
death, first, to the fear of pain in dying, and, secondly, to the fear
of anguish hereafter. In neither fear, I think, does the essential
horror of death now lie. All who have witnessed various forms of death,
whether on the field or in the sick chamber, will agree that the
process of dying is seldom more difficult or more painful than taking
off one's clothes. The blood ebbs, the senses sleep, "the casement
slowly grows a glimmering square," breath gradually fails,
unconsciousness faints into deeper unconsciousness, and that is all.
Even in terrible wounds and cases of extreme pain, medicine can now
alleviate the worst, nor, in any case, do I believe that the expectation
of physical agony, however severe, has much share in the instinct that
stands aghast at death. If fear of pain thus preoccupied the soul,
martyrs would not have sown the Church, nor would births continue.
In combating the dread of future torment, Maeterlinck may have better
cause for giving comfort. Long generations have been haunted by that
terror. "Ay, but to die," cries Claudio in _Measure for Measure_:
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!"
Nor were such terrors mediaeval only. Till quite recent years they cast
a gloom over the existence of honourable and laborious men. Remember
that scene in Oxford when Dr. Johnson, with a look of horror,
acknowledged that he was much oppressed by the fear of death, and when
the amiable Dr. Adams suggested that God was infinitely good, he
replied:
"'As I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which
salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be
damned' (looking dismally). Dr. Adams: 'What do you mean by damned?'
Johnson (passionately and loudly): 'Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished
everlastingly.'"
No one disputes that for many ages the lives of even the just and good
were burdened by such oppressive fears. Perhaps, indeed, the just and
good were more burdened than the wicked; for to the wicked their own
sins seldom appear so deadly black, and when a Balkan priest lately
displayed pictures of eternal torment as warnings to a savage
mountaineer's enormities, he was met by the reply, "Even we should not
be so cruel." But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck's
reassurances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would
appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they
linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death. Was there not,
at all events, one strenuous Canon of the Established Church who
defiantly proclaimed that he would rather be damned than annihilated?
"Men fear death," says Bacon's familiar sentence; "men fear death, as
children fear to go in the dark." It is not the dread of pain and
torment; it is the dark that terrifies; it is Kingsley's horror of
annihilation; it is the hot life's fear of ceasing to be. I grant that
many are unconscious of this fear. In word, at all events, there are
multitudes, perhaps the greater part of mankind, who long for the
annihilation of self, who direct their lives by the great hope of
becoming in the end absorbed into the Universe. Their perpetual prayer
is to be rid of personality at the last, no matter through what strange
embodiments the self must pass before it reach the bliss of nothingness.
Similar, though less doctrinal, was the prayer of Job when he counted
himself among those who long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for
it more than for hid treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad
when they can find the grave. "Why died I not from the womb?" he cried:
"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should
have slept; then, had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors
of the earth, which built solitary places for themselves."
How far the loss of personal consciousness by absorption into universal
infinity is identical with the eternal rest desired by Job might be long
disputed. Sir Thomas Browne, having heard of the Brahmin or Buddhist
conceptions of futurity, would draw a thin distinction:
"Others," he says, "rather than be lost in the uncomfortable
night of nothing, were content to recede into the common
being; and make one particle of the public soul of all things,
which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine
original again."
In effect this doctrine comes very near Maeterlinck's plea of comfort.
Annihilation, he says, is impossible, because nothing is destructible.
But when confronted with the eternal antinomy of death, that both the
end and the survival of personality are equally inconceivable, he
hesitates. He admits that survival without consciousness would be the
same as the annihilation o self (in which case he maintains death could
be no evil, bringing only eternal sleep). But he rejects this solution
as flattering only to ignorance, and has visions of a new ego collecting
a fresh nucleus round itself and developing in infinity. For the "narrow
ego" which we partly know--the humble self of memories and identity, the
soul that sums up experience into some kind of unity--he expresses
considerable contempt, as a frail and forgetful thing; and he seeks to
waft us away into an intellect devoid of senses, which he says almost
certainly exists, and into an infinity which is "nothing if it be not
felicity."
I do not know. A man may say what he pleases about intellect devoid of
senses, or about the felicity of infinity. One statement may be as true
as the other, or the reverse of both may be true. Talk of that kind
rests on no sounder basis than the old assertions about the houris and
the happy hunting-grounds, and it brings no surer consolation. Even when
Maeterlinck tells us that it is impossible for the universe to be a
mistake, and that our own reason necessarily corresponds with the
eternal laws of the universe, we may answer that we hope, and even
believe, that he is right, but on such a basis we can found no certainty
whatever. Nor does the self, when, warm with life, inspired with vital
passion, and energising for its own fulfilment, it stands horrified
before the gulf of death, fearing no conceivable torment, but only the
cessation of its power and identity--at such a moment that inward and
isolated self can derive no reassurance from the dim possibility of some
future nucleus, under cover of which it may pass into the felicity of
the universal infinite, stripped of its memory, its present personality,
and its flesh.
Fear of annihilation, or of the loss of identity, which is the same
thing, I take to be one of the remaining terrors in European minds
meditating on death. Of all the imagined forms of survival, only one is
obviously more horrible than the night of nothing, and that is the state
in which Beethoven twangs a banjo and Gladstone utters the political
forecasts of a distinguished journalist. It may be that my affection for
the "narrow ego" is too violent, but, for myself, I do not find M.
Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other
philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still
survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the
severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved. "No, no, no life,"
cries Lear:
"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!"
It is the cry of all mankind when love is thus slit in twain; nor is
sorrow comforted because coral is made of love's bones, or violets
spring from his flesh, and the vanished self is possibly absorbed into
the felicity of an infinite and everlasting azure.