'THE END'
It is easy to conceive circumstances not widely different from those of
actual life that would, if not altogether, at least very largely, take
from death the gloom that commonly surrounds it. If all the members of
the human race died either before two or after seventy; if death was in
all cases the swift and painless thing that it is with many; and if the
old man always left behind him children to perpetuate his name, his
memory, and his thoughts, Death, though it might still seem a sad thing,
would certainly not excite the feelings it now so often produces. Of all
the events that befall us, it is that which owes most of its horror not
to itself, but to its accessories, its associations, and to the
imaginations that cluster around it. 'Death,' indeed, as a great stoical
moralist said, 'is the only evil that can never touch us. When we are,
death is not. When death comes, we are not.'
The composition of treatises of consolation intended to accustom men to
contemplate death without terror was one of the favourite exercises of
the philosophers in the Augustan and in the subsequent periods of Pagan
Rome. The chapter which Cicero has devoted to this subject in his
treatise on old age is a beautiful example of how it appeared to a
virtuous pagan, who believed in a future life which would bring him into
communion with those whom he had loved and lost on earth, but who at the
same time recognised this only as a probability, not a certainty.
"Death," he said, 'is an event either utterly to be disregarded if it
extinguish the soul's existence, or much to be wished if it convey her
to some region where she shall continue to exist for ever. One of these
two consequences must necessarily follow the disunion of soul and body;
there is no other possible alternative. What then have I to fear if
after death I shall either not be miserable or shall certainly be
happy?'
Vague notions, however, of a dim, twilight, shadowy world where the
ghosts of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they
sometimes returned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely
spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of
all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed
the belief that all things ended with death--'Post mortem nihil est,
ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the
school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative
influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as
rest; as the close of a banquet; as the universal law of nature which
befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at
an earlier period than man. It was thought of simply as
sleep--dreamless, undisturbed sleep--the final release from all the
sorrows, sufferings, anxieties, labours, and longings of life.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.[77]
The best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more.[78]
To die is landing on some silent shore
Where billows never break, nor tempests roar.[79]
It is a strange thing to observe to what a height not only of moral
excellence, but also of devotional fervour, men have arisen without any
assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Only the faintest and
most dubious glimmer of such a belief can be traced in the Psalms, in
which countless generations of Christians have found the fullest
expression of their devotional feelings, or in the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, which are perhaps the purest product of pagan piety.
As I have already said, I am endeavouring in this book to steer clear of
questions of contested theologies; but it is impossible to avoid
noticing the great changes that have been introduced into the conception
of death by some of the teaching which in different forms has grown up
under the name of Christianity, though much of it may be traced in germ
to earlier periods of human development. Death in itself was made
incomparably more terrible by the notion that it was not a law but a
punishment; that sufferings inconceivably greater than those of Earth
awaited the great masses of the human race beyond the grave; that an
event which was believed to have taken place ages before we were born,
or small frailties such as the best of us cannot escape, were sufficient
to bring men under this condemnation; that the only paths to safety were
to be found in ecclesiastical ceremonies; in the assistance of priests;
in an accurate choice among competing theological doctrines. At the same
time the largest and most powerful of the Churches of Christendom has,
during many centuries, done its utmost to intensify the natural fear of
death by associating it in the imaginations of men with loathsome images
and appalling surroundings. There can be no greater contrast than that
between the Greek tomb with its garlands of flowers, its bright,
youthful and restful imagery, and the mortuary chapels that may often be
found in Catholic countries, with their ghastly pictures of the _saved_
souls writhing in purgatorial flames, while the inscription above and
the moneybox below point out the one means of alleviating their lot.
Fermati, O Passagiero, mira tormenti.
Siamo abbandonati dai nostri parenti.
Di noi abbiate pietà, o voi amici cari.
This is one side of the picture. On the other hand it cannot be
questioned that the strong convictions and impressive ceremonies, even
of the most superstitious faith, have consoled and strengthened
multitudes in their last moments, and in the purer and more enlightened
forms of Christianity death now wears a very different aspect from what
it did in the teaching of mediæval Catholicism, or of some of the sects
that grew out of the Reformation. Human life ending in the weakness of
old age and in the corruption of the tomb will always seem a humiliating
anti-climax, and often a hideous injustice. The belief in the rightful
supremacy of conscience, and in an eternal moral law redressing the many
wrongs and injustices of life, and securing the ultimate triumph of good
over evil; the incapacity of earth and earthly things to satisfy our
cravings and ideals; the instinctive revolt of human nature against the
idea of annihilation, and its capacity for affections and attachments,
which seem by their intensity to transcend the limits of earth and carry
with them in moments of bereavement a persuasion or conviction of
something that endures beyond the grave,--all these things have found in
Christian beliefs a sanction and a satisfaction that men had failed to
find in Socrates or Cicero, or in the vague Pantheism to which
unassisted reason naturally inclines.
Looking, however, on death in its purely human aspects, the mourner
should consider how often in a long illness he wished the dying man
could sleep; how consoling to his mind was the thought of every hour of
peaceful rest; of every hour in which the patient was withdrawn from
consciousness, insensible to suffering, removed for a time from the
miseries of a dying life. He should ask himself whether these intervals
of insensibility were not on the whole the happiest in the
illness--those which he would most have wished to multiply or to
prolong. He should accustom himself, then, to think of death as
sleep--undisturbed sleep--the only sleep from which man never wakes to
pain.
You find yourself in the presence of what is a far deeper and more
poignant trial than an old man's death--a young life cut off in its
prime; the eclipse of a sun before the evening has arrived. Accustom
yourself to consider the life that has passed as a whole. A human being
has been called into the world--has lived in it ten, twenty, thirty
years. It seems to you an intolerable instance of the injustice of fate
that he is so early cut off. Estimate, then, that life as a whole, and
ask yourself whether, so judged, it has been a blessing or the reverse.
Count up the years of happiness. Count up the days, or perhaps weeks, of
illness and of pain. Measure the happiness that this short life has
given to some who have passed away; who never lived to see its early
close. Balance the happiness which during its existence it gave to those
who survived, with the poignancy and the duration of pain caused by the
loss. Here, for example, is one who lived perhaps twenty-five years in
health and vigour; whose life during that period was chequered by no
serious misfortune; whose nature, though from time to time clouded by
petty anxieties and cares, was on the whole bright, buoyant, and happy;
who had the capacity of vivid enjoyment and many opportunities of
attaining it; who felt all the thrill of health and friendship and
ecstatic pleasure. Then came a change,--a year or two with a crippled
wing--life, though not abjectly wretched, on the whole a burden, and
then the end. You can easily conceive--you can ardently desire--a better
lot, but judge fairly the lights and shades of what has been. Does not
the happiness on the whole exceed the evil? Can you honestly say that
this life has been a curse and not a blessing?--that it would have been
better if it had never been called out of nothingness?--that it would
have been better if the drama had never been played? It is over now. As
you lay in his last home the object of so much love, ask yourself
whether, even in a mere human point of view, this parenthesis between
two darknesses has not been on the whole productive of more happiness
than pain to him and to those around him.
It was an ancient saying that 'he whom the gods love dies young,' and
more than one legend representing speedy and painless death as the
greatest of blessings has descended to us from pagan antiquity; while
other legends, like that of Tithonus, anticipated the picture which
Swift has so powerfully but so repulsively drawn of the misery of old
age and its infirmities, if death did not come as a release. I have
elsewhere related an old Irish legend embodying this truth. 'In a
certain lake in Munster, it is said, there were two islands; into the
first death could never enter, but age and sickness, and the weariness
of life and the paroxysms of fearful suffering were all known there, and
they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their immortality,
learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of repose. They
launched their barks upon its gloomy waters; they touched its shore, and
they were at rest.'[80]
No one, however, can confidently say whether an early death is a
misfortune, for no one can really know what calamities would have
befallen the dead man if his life had been prolonged. How often does it
happen that the children of a dead parent do things or suffer things
that would have broken his heart if he had lived to see them! How often
do painful diseases lurk in germ in the body which would have produced
unspeakable misery if an early and perhaps a painless death had not
anticipated their development! How often do mistakes and misfortunes
cloud the evening and mar the beauty of a noble life, or moral
infirmities, unperceived in youth or early manhood, break out before the
day is over! Who is there who has not often said to himself as he looked
back on a completed life, how much happier it would have been had it
ended sooner? 'Give us timely death' is in truth one of the best prayers
that man can pray. Pain, not Death, is the real enemy to be combated,
and in this combat, at least, man can do much. Few men can have lived
long without realising how many things are worse than death, and how
many knots there are in life that Death alone can untie.
Remember, above all, that whatever may lie beyond the tomb, the tomb
itself is nothing to you. The narrow prison-house, the gloomy pomp, the
hideousness of decay, are known to the living and the living alone. By a
too common illusion of the imagination, men picture themselves as
consciously dead,--going through the process of corruption, and aware of
it; imprisoned with the knowledge of the fact in the most hideous of
dungeons. Endeavour earnestly to erase this illusion from your mind, for
it lies at the root of the fear of death, and it is one of the worst
sides of mediæval and of much modern teaching and art that it tends to
strengthen it. Nothing, if we truly realise it, is less real than the
grave. We should be no more concerned with the after fate of our
discarded bodies than with that of the hair which the hair-cutter has
cut off. The sooner they are resolved into their primitive elements the
better. The imagination should never be suffered to dwell upon their
decay.
Bacon has justly noticed that while death is often regarded as the
supreme evil, there is no human passion that does not become so powerful
as to lead men to despise it. It is not in the waning days of life, but
in the full strength of youth, that men, through ambition or the mere
love of excitement, fearlessly and joyously encounter its risk.
Encountered in hot blood it is seldom feared, and innumerable accounts
of shipwrecks and other accidents, and many episodes in every war, show
conclusively how calmly honour, duty, and discipline can enable men of
no extraordinary characters, virtues, or attainments, to meet it even
when it comes before them suddenly, as an inevitable fact, and without
any of that excitement which might blind their eyes. If we analyse our
own feelings on the death of those we love, we shall probably find that,
except in cases where life is prematurely shortened and much promise cut
off, pity for the dead person is rarely a marked element. The feelings
which had long been exclusively concentrated on the sufferings of the
dying man take a new course when the moment of death arrives. It is the
sudden blank; the separation from him who is dear to us; the cessation
of the long reciprocity of love and pleasure,--in a word our own
loss,--that affects us then. 'A happy release' is perhaps the phrase
most frequently heard around a death-bed. And as we look back through
the vista of a few years, and have learned to separate death more
clearly from the illness that preceded it, the sense of its essential
peacefulness and naturalness grows upon us. A vanished life comes to be
looked upon as a day that has past, but leaving many memories behind it.
It is, I think, a healthy tendency that is leading men in our own
generation to turn away as much as possible from the signs and the
contemplation of death. The pomp and elaboration of funerals; protracted
mournings surrounding us with the gloom of an ostentatious and
artificial sorrow; above all, the long suspension of those active habits
which nature intended to be the chief medicine of grief, are things
which at least in the English-speaking world are manifestly declining.
We should try to think of those who have passed away as they were at
their best, and not in sickness or in decay. True sorrow needs no
ostentation, and the gloom of death no artificial enhancement. Every
good man, knowing the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its
hour, will make it one of his first duties to provide for those he loves
when he has himself passed away, and to do all in his power to make the
period of bereavement as easy as possible. This is the last service he
can render before the ranks are closed, and his place is taken, and the
days of forgetfulness set in. In careers of riot and of vice the thought
of death may have a salutary restraining influence; but in a useful,
busy, well-ordered life it should have little place. It was not the
Stoics alone who 'bestowed too much cost on death, and by their
preparations made it more fearful.'[81] As Spinoza has taught, 'the
proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live,' and as
long as he is discharging this task aright he may leave the end to take
care of itself. The great guiding landmarks of a wise life are indeed
few and simple; to do our duty--to avoid useless sorrow--to acquiesce
patiently in the inevitable.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] _The Tempest._
[78] _Measure for Measure._
[79] Garth.
[80] _History of European Morals_, i. p. 203. The legend is related by
Camden.
[81] Bacon.