For some time past I have noticed on the hoardings of London a
placard illustrated with the picture of an American gentleman named
Rutherford, who is represented lifting a prophetic fist in the manner
of the advertisements of Horatio Bottomley before that prophet of the
war had the misfortune to be found out, and declaring that there are
"thousands in this city who will never die." I have not had the
curiosity to attend his meetings or to inquire into the character of
his revelation. I do not know, therefore, whether I am likely to be
one of the people whom Mr. Rutherford has his eye upon. But the
threat which he holds over my head has led me to look the possibility
in the face. I suppose Mr. Rutherford is satisfied that it is an
agreeable possibility. He would not have come all the way from
America to tell us about it if he had not thought it was good news
that he was bringing.
I think he is mistaken. Judging from my own reactions, as the
Americans would say, to his prophecy, I fancy the general feeling
would not be one of joy but of terror. If anything could reconcile
us to the thought of death it would be the assurance that we should
never die. For the pleasure as well as the pathos of life springs
from the knowledge of its transitoriness.
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
All our goings and comings are enriched with the sense of mortality.
All our experiences are coloured by the thought that they may return
no more. Rob us of the significance of the last words of Hamlet and
the realm of poetry would become a desert, treeless and songless. It
is because "the rest is silence" that the smallest details of our
passage through life have in them the power of kindling thoughts such
as these:
Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad.
Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow--
A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord,
How rich and great the times are now!
Know, all ye sheep
And cows, that keep
On staring that I stand so long
In grass that's wet from heavy rain--
A rainbow and a cuckoo's song
May never come together again;
May never come
This side the tomb.
It is not alone the beauty of the sunset that touches us with such
poignant emotion: it is because in the passing of the day we see the
image of another passing to which we move as unfalteringly as the sun
moves into the shadow of the night. When in these autumn days we
walk in the woodlands amid the patter of the falling leaves, it is
the same subtle suggestion that attunes the note of beauty to a minor
key. Through the stillness of the forest there echo the strokes of a
distant axe felling some kingly beech. For seventy, perhaps a
hundred years it has weathered the storms of life, and now its hour
has come and in its falling there is the allegory of ourselves. I
think it is that allegory that makes my neighbour so passionately
conservative about his trees. They stand too thick about his
grounds, but he will not have the axe laid to one of them.
We cannot go an unusual journey without a dim sense of another
journey from which we shall not return, nor say a prolonged
"good-bye" without the faint echo in our minds of ultimate farewells.
And who ever left the old house that has sheltered him so long and
grown so familiar to sight and touch without feeling some shadow pass
across the spirit that is more than the shadow cast by bricks and
mortar? Life is crowded with these premonitions and forebodings that
make our pleasures richer by reminding us that they are terminable.
And such is the perversity of human nature that if Mr. Rutherford
should turn out to be well-informed, those of us who are marked down
for deathlessness would find that the pleasure of life had vanished
with its pathos. We should be panic-stricken at the idea of never
coming to an end, of never being able to escape from what
Chesterfield called "this silly world," and Salisbury "this miserable
life." We should yearn for death as the condemned prisoner yearns
for life or the icebound whaler for the spring. We do not want to
die now, but to be comfortable we want to know that we shall die some
day. Being under sentence of death we cling to life like limpets to
a rock, but if we were sentenced to life we should shriek for the
promise of death. We should hate the sunset that we were doomed to
see for ever and ever, and loathe the autumn that mocked us with its
falling leaves.
I remember that in one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
remarks that she is so happy that she regrets that she cannot live
three hundred years. We all have moments like that, moments when
life seems so good that we envy the patriarchs and would be glad if
we could abide here longer than Nature permits. But in our gayest
moments we could not contemplate the prospect of seeing in the New
Year of, let us say, 10024 A.D., with the certainty that we were
destined to wait on for the New Year of 100024 A.D., and so on to the
crack of doom. The mind would reel before such an enormous vista.
We should stagger and faint at the prospect of a journey that had no
end and of a future as limitless and unthinkable as space. We should
look into the darkness and be afraid. There may be an infinite
destiny for us to which this life is only a preparatory school. It
is not unreasonable to think it is so--that when this fitful fever is
over we may pass out into realms and into a state of being in which
the muddle of this strange episode will be resolved. But here we are
finite. Here we have no abiding city and all our feelings are
conditioned by finite terms. We are rather like the batsman at the
wicket. He does not want to get out. When he has made his 50 he
strives to make his 100, and when he has made his 100, he is just as
anxious to make 200. But it is the knowledge that the innings will
end, that every ball may be his last, that gives zest to the game.
If he knew that he never could get out, that by an inexorable decree
he was to be at the wicket for the rest of his days, he would turn
round and knock the stumps down in desperation.
No, Mr. Rutherford, you have mistaken us. We do not want your
revelation. The play is worth seeing, though I wish it were more
good-humoured and the players a little more friendly; but we do not
wish to watch it for ever. We like to know that the curtain will
fall and that, a little weary and sleepy, we shall be permitted to go
home. We are in no hurry, sir, but we like to know that the curtain
is there.