A little group of men, all of whom had achieved conspicuous success in
life, were recently talking after dinner round the fire in the smoking-room
of a London club. They included an eminent lawyer, a politician whose name
is a household word, a well-known divine, and a journalist. The talk
traversed many themes, and arrived at that very familiar proposition: If it
were in your power to choose, would you live this life again? With one
exception the answer was a unanimous "No." The exception, I may remark, was
not the divine. He, like the majority, had found one visit to the play
enough. He did not want to see it again.
The question, I suppose, is as old as humanity. And the answer is old too,
and has always, I fancy, resembled that of our little group round the
smoking-room fire. It is a question that does not present itself until we
are middle-aged, for the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and
life then stretches out in such an interminable vista as to raise no
question of its recurrence. It is when you have reached the top of the pass
and are on the downward slope, with the evening shadows falling over the
valley and the church tower and with the end of the journey in view, that
the question rises unbidden to the lips. The answer does not mean that the
journey has not been worth while. It only means that the way has been long
and rough, that we are footsore and tired, and that the thought of rest is
sweet. It is nature's way of reconciling us to our common lot. She has
shown her child all the pageant of life, and now prepares him for his
"patrimony of a little mould"--
Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty, and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess--"It is enough."
Yes, it is enough. We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly--nay,
we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.
Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish,
question, "Is Life worth living?" The group round the smoking-room fire
would have answered that question--if they had troubled to answer it at
all--with an instant and scornful "Yes." They had all found life a great
and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they
would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured
experience. And that is the case with all healthy-minded people. We may,
like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the
curse dies on our lips. Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of
mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable,
for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.
Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out
of mischief. A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a
writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books. In the morning the
writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he
had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity
of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected
the chance with almost pathetic eagerness. Yet I daresay he went on
believing that he wished he had never been born. It is not only the
children who live in the world of "Let us make pretend."
No, we are all glad to have come this way once. It is the thought of a
second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause.
Sometimes you will hear men answer, "Yes, if I could have the experience I
have had in this life." By which they mean, "Yes, if I could come back with
the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I
have missed." But that is to vulgarise the question. It is to ask that life
shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is
an arch wherethrough
Gleams the untravelled world;
but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into
which I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time--all
sunshine and no shadows. But life on those terms would be the dreariest
funeral march of the marionettes. Take away the uncertainty of life, and
you take away all its magic. It would be like going to the wicket with the
certainty of making as many runs as you liked. No one would trouble to go
to the wicket on those preposterous terms. It is because I may be out first
ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such
heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure.
And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of
creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.
Moreover, how would experience help us? It is character which is destiny.
If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the
experience of all the ages would save you from futility.
No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown
terms in order to be worth living. We must come, as we came before, like
wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time. And, in spite of
all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is
against repeating it. For we know that every thing that makes life dear to
us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy
associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in
the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new
ways. Holmes once wrote a poem about being "Homesick in heaven"; but it
would be still harder to be homesick on earth--to be wandering about among
the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere
of things. We should make new friends; but they would not be the same. They
might be better; but we should not ask for better friends: we should yearn
for the old ones.
There is a fine passage in Guido Rey's noble book on the "Matterhorn" which
comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel. He was on
his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw
standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man. It
was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn--Whymper grown old, standing
there in the evening light and gazing on the mighty rock that he had
vanquished in his prime. His climbing days were done, and he sought no more
victories on the mountains. He had had his day and was content to stand
afar off, alone with his memories, leaving the joy of battle to the young
and the ardent. There was not one of those memories that he would be
without--save, of course, that terrible experience in the hour of his
victory over the Matterhorn. But had you asked him if he was still avid for
those topless grandeurs and starry majesties he would have said, "It is
enough."