Let me curiously analyse eternal farewells, and the last pressures of
loving hands. Let me smile at faces bewept, and the nodding plumes and
slow paces of funerals. Let me write down brave heroical
sentences--sentences that defy death, as brazen Goliath the hosts of
Israel.
"When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who has
learnt to die, has forgot to serve. There is nothing of evil in life
for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to
die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. _Paulus Aemilius_
answered him whom the miserable _king of Macedon_, his prisoner, sent
to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, '_Let him
make that request to himself_.' In truth, in all things, if nature do
not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform
anything to purpose. I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, but
thoughtful; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained
myself withal than the imaginations of death, even in the gayest and
most wanton time of my age. In the company of ladies, and in the
height of mirth, some have perhaps thought me possessed of some
jealousy, or meditating upon the uncertainty of some imagined hope,
whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one
surprised a few days before with a burning fever, of which he died,
returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle
fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then; and for aught I knew,
the same destiny was attending me. Yet did not this thought wrinkle my
forehead any more than any other." . . . . "Why dost thou fear this
last day? It contributes no more to thy destruction than every one of
the rest. The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does but
confer it. Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at
it. These are the good lessons our mother nature teaches. I have
often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the
image of death--whether we look upon it as to our own particular
danger, or that of another--should, without comparison, appear less
dreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it were not so, it
would be an army of whining milksops,) and that being still in all
places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance
in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than others of better
quality and education; and I do verily believe, that it is those
terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more
terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living,
the cries of mothers, wives and children, the visits of astonished and
affected friends, the attendance of pale and blubbered servants, a dark
room set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physicians
and divines; in fine, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about
us, render it so formidable, that a man almost fancies himself dead and
buried already. Children are afraid even of those they love best, and
are best acquainted with, when disguised in a vizor, and so are we; the
vizor must be removed as well from things as persons; which being taken
away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a
mean servant, or a poor chambermaid, died a day or two ago, without any
manner of apprehension or concern." [1]
"Men feare _death_ as children feare to goe in the darke; and as that
natural feare in children is increased with tales, so in the other.
Certainly the contemplation of _death_ as the _wages of sinne_, and
passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the feare of it as
a tribute unto nature, is weake. Yet in religious meditations there is
sometimes mixture of vanitie and of superstition. You shal reade in
some of the friars' books of _mortification_, that a man should thinke
unto himself what the paine is if he have but his finger-end pressed or
tortured; and thereby imagine what the pains of _death_ are when the
whole body is corrupted and dissolved; when many times _death_ passeth
with lesse paine than the torture of a Lemme. For the most vitall
parts are not the quickest of sense. Groanes and convulsions, and a
discoloured face, and friends weeping, and blackes and obsequies, and
the like, shew _death_ terrible. It is worthy the observing, that
there is no passion in the minde of man so weake but it mates and
masters the feare of _death_; and therefore death is no such terrible
enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can winne the
combat of him. _Revenge_ triumphs over _death_, love subjects it,
honour aspireth to it, _griefe_ fleeth to it, _feare_ pre-occupieth it;
nay, we read, after _Otho_ the emperour had slaine himselfe, _pitty_,
(which is the tenderest of affections,) provoked many to die, out of
meer compassion to their soveraigne, and as the truest sort of
followers. . . . . It is as naturall to die as to be born; and to a
little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He that
dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood,
who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and, therefore, a minde mixt
and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the sadness of _death_.
But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is _Nunc Dimittis_,
when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this
also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envie."
[2]
These sentences of the great essayists are brave and ineffectual as
Leonidas and his Greeks. Death cares very little for sarcasm or trope;
hurl at him a javelin or a rose, it is all one. We build around
ourselves ramparts of stoical maxims, edifying to witness, but when the
terror comes these yield as the knots of river flags to the shoulder of
Behemoth.
Death is terrible only in presence. When distant, or supposed to be
distant, we can call him hard or tender names, nay, even poke our poor
fun at him. _Mr. Punch_, on one occasion, when he wished to ridicule
the useful-information leanings of a certain periodical publication,
quoted from its pages the sentence, "Man is mortal," and people were
found to grin broadly over the exquisite stroke of humour. Certainly
the words, and the fact they contain, are trite enough. Utter the
sentence gravely in any company, and you are certain to provoke
laughter. And yet some subtile recognition of the fact of death runs
constantly through the warp and woof of the most ordinary human
existence. And this recognition does not always terrify. The spectre
has the most cunning disguises, and often when near us we are unaware
of the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the
sweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasures with
which we behold the vapours of morning; it comes between the passionate
lips of lovers; it lives in the thrill of kisses. "An inch deeper, and
you will find the emperor." Probe joy to its last fibre, and you will
find death. And it is the most merciful of all the merciful provisions
of nature, that a haunting sense of insecurity should deepen the
enjoyment of what we have secured; that the pleasure of our warm human
day and its activities should to some extent arise from a vague
consciousness of the waste night which environs it, in which no arm is
raised, in which no voice is ever heard. Death is the ugly fact which
nature has to hide, and she hides it well. Human life were otherwise
an impossibility. The pantomime runs on merrily enough; but when once
Harlequin lifts his vizor, Columbine disappears, the jest is frozen on
the Clown's lips, and the hand of the filching Pantaloon is arrested in
the act. Wherever death looks, _there_ is silence and trembling. But
although on every man he will one day or another look, he is coy of
revealing himself till the appointed time. He makes his approaches
like an Indian warrior, under covers and ambushes. We have our parts
to play, and he remains hooded till they are played out. We are
agitated by our passions, we busily pursue our ambitions, we are
acquiring money or reputation, and all at once, in the centre of our
desires, we discover the "Shadow feared of man." And so nature fools
the poor human mortal evermore. When she means to be deadly, she
dresses her face in smiles; when she selects a victim, she sends him a
poisoned rose. There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form
of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for
his prey.
And death is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is as common as
births; it is of more frequent occurrence than marriages and the
attainment of majorities. But the difference between death and other
forms of human experience lies in this, that we can gain no information
about it. The dead man is wise, but he is silent. We cannot wring his
secret from him. We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which gathers
on the rigid face. As a consequence, when our thought rests on death
we are smitten with isolation and loneliness. We are without company
on the dark road; and we have advanced so far upon it that we cannot
hear the voices of our friends. It is in this sense of loneliness,
this consciousness of identity and nothing more, that the terror of
dying consists. And yet, compared to that road, the most populous
thoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert. What enumerator will take
for us the census of dead? And this matter of death and dying, like
most things else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own fears and
hopes. Death, terrible to look forward to, may be pleasant even to
look back at. Could we be admitted to the happy fields, and hear the
conversations which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that to
conquer death a man has but to die; that by that act terror is softened
into familiarity, and that the remembrance of death becomes but as the
remembrance of yesterday. To these fortunate ones death may be but a
date, and dying a subject fruitful in comparisons, a matter on which
experiences may be serenely compared. Meantime, however, _we_ have not
yet reached that measureless content, and death scares, piques,
tantalises, as mind and nerve are built. Situated as we are, knowing
that it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it
curiously, at times. Nothing interests us so much. The Highland seer
pretended that he could see the winding-sheet high upon the breast of
the man for whom death was waiting. Could we behold any such visible
sign, the man who bore it, no matter where he stood--even if he were a
slave watching Caesar pass--would usurp every eye. At the coronation
of a king, the wearing of that order would dim royal robe, quench the
sparkle of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald's cry. Death
makes the meanest beggar august, and that augustness would assert
itself in the presence of a king. And it is this curiosity with regard
to everything related to death and dying which makes us treasure up the
last sayings of great men, and attempt to wring out of them tangible
meanings. Was Goethe's "Light--light, more light!" a prayer, or a
statement of spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the fact
that the room in which he lay was filling with the last twilight? In
consonance with our own natures, we interpret it the one way or the
other--_he_ is beyond our questioning. For the same reason it is that
men take interest in executions--from Charles I. on the scaffold at
Whitehall, to Porteous in the Grassmarket execrated by the mob. These
men are not dulled by disease, they are not delirious with fever; they
look death in the face, and what in these circumstances they say and do
has the strangest fascination for us.
What does the murderer think when his eyes are forever blinded by the
accursed nightcap? In what form did thought condense itself between
the gleam of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles's head in
the saw-dust? This kind of speculation may be morbid, but it is not
necessarily so. All extremes of human experience touch us; and we have
all the deepest personal interest in the experience of death. Out of
all we know about dying we strive to clutch something which may break
its solitariness, and relieve us by a touch of companionship.
To denude death of its terrible associations were a vain attempt. The
atmosphere is always cold around an iceberg. In the contemplation of
dying the spirit may not flinch, but pulse and heart, colour and
articulation, are always cowards. No philosophy will teach them
bravery in the stern presence. And yet there are considerations which
rob death of its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. The
thoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, and in certain moved
moments, which, after they have gone, we can recognise to have been our
happiest, some subtle thought of death has been curiously intermixed.
And this subtle intermixture it is which gives the happy moment its
character--which makes the difference between the gladness of a child,
resident in mere animal health and impulse, and too volatile to be
remembered, and the serious joy of a man, which looks before and after,
and takes in both this world and the next. Speaking broadly, it may be
said that it is from some obscure recognition of the fact of death that
life draws its final sweetness. An obscure, haunting recognition, of
course; for if more than that, if the thought becomes palpable,
defined, and present, it swallows up everything. The howling of the
winter wind outside increases the warm satisfaction of a man in bed;
but this satisfaction is succeeded by quite another feeling when the
wind grows into a tempest, and threatens to blow the house down. And
this remote recognition of death may exist almost constantly in a man's
mind, and give to his life keener zest and relish. His lights may burn
the brighter for it, and his wines taste sweeter. For it is on the
tapestry or a dim ground that the figures come out in the boldest
relief and the brightest colour.
If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed,
clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It
is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. The brutes die
even as we; but it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us
human. If nature cunningly hides death, and so permits us to play out
our little games, it is easily seen that our knowing it to be
inevitable, that to every one of us it will come one day or another, is
a wonderful spur to action. We really do work while it is called
to-day, because the night cometh when no man can work. We may not
expect it soon--it may not have sent us a single _avant-courier_--yet
we all know that every day brings it nearer. On the supposition that
we were to live here always, there would be little inducement to
exertion. But, having some work at heart, the knowledge that we may
be, any day, finally interrupted, is an incentive to diligence. We
naturally desire to have it completed, or at least far advanced toward
completion, before that final interruption takes place. And knowing
that his existence here is limited, a man's workings have reference to
others rather than to himself, and thereby into his nature comes a new
influx of nobility. If a man plants a tree, he knows that other hands
than his will gather the fruit; and when he plants it, he thinks quite
as much of those other hands as of his own. Thus to the poet there is
the dearer life after life; and posterity's single laurel leaf is
valued more than a multitude of contemporary bays. Even the man
immersed in money-making does not make money so much for himself as for
those who may come after him. Riches in noble natures have a double
sweetness. The possessor enjoys his wealth, and he heightens that
enjoyment by the imaginative entrance into the pleasure which his son
or his nephew may derive from it when he is away, or the high uses to
which he may turn it. Seeing that we have no perpetual lease of life
and its adjuncts, we do not live for ourselves. And thus it is that
death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us
the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence. My
life, and your life, flowing on thus day by day, is a vapid enough
piece of business; but when we think that it must _close_, a multitude
of considerations, not connected with ourselves but with others, rush
in, and vapidity vanishes at once. Life, if it were to flow on forever
and _thus_, would stagnate and rot. The hopes, and fears, and regrets,
which move and trouble it, keep it fresh and healthy, as the sea is
kept alive by the trouble of its tides. In a tolerably comfortable
world, where death is not, it is difficult to see from what quarter
these healthful fears, regrets, and hopes could come. As it is, there
are agitations and sufferings in our lots enough; but we must remember
that it is on account of these sufferings and agitations that we become
creatures breathing thoughtful breath. As has already been said, death
takes away the commonplace of life. And positively, when one looks on
the thousand and one poor, foolish, ignoble faces of this world, and
listens to the chatter as poor and foolish as the faces, one, in order
to have any proper respect for them, is forced to remember that
solemnity of death, which is silently waiting. The foolishest person
will look grand enough one day. The features are poor now, but the
hottest tears and the most passionate embraces will not seem out of
place _then_. If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course
is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race,
what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out
in death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone
away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is
the man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the most
volatile, serious--all noble, more or less. And nature will not be
surprised into disclosures. The man stretched out there may have been
voluble as a swallow, but now--when he could speak to some
purpose--neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously.
Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and
elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that
melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf
brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys
the beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_
fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the
beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.
Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant emotion is mixed and
deepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have never
encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices
in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply
because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A
mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping
child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it
more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red
cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled
in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. All
great joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexity
and the deepness of its reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enough
from a single key, but the richest music is that in which the whole
force of the instrument is employed, in the production of which every
key is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestic
tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. Pleasures which rise
beyond the mere gratification of the senses are dependant for their
exquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which they
evoke. And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can
include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning
pathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or
less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.
In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the
arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place
to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap
for it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly.
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. Into our
commonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan
from the airy void into the ordinary village lake; and just as the
swan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts itself on its wings
and betakes itself to the void again, _it_ leaves us, and our sole
possession is its memory. And it is characteristic of pleasure that we
can never recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone. Happiness
never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse
of its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. From
the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has
been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its
echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.
And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment there
lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which past
happiness dwells is always a regretful memory. This is why the tritest
utterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has always
about it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects.
In the wake of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour. The
finest set of verses of our modern time describes how the poet gazed on
the "happy autumn fields," and remembered the "days that were no more."
After all, a man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is
he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, and
attains thereby a certain picturesqueness. The grim thought stands in
the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thought
of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young man
cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as
the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The
young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just
as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The
most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably
comfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he has
little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his
heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death
as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of
it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine.
In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most
pretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does
the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a
reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the
magnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and
while undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his "Lara," as he
informs us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes in
whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who then
affected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felt
his richest wines powdered with the dust of graves,--of which wine,
notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him,--wrote,
"That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least."
The sleep referred to being death. This was meant to take away the
reader's breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself to
his pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with this
Shakspeare's far out-looking and thought-heavy lines--lines which,
under the same image, represent death--
"To die--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream;--ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come!"
And you see at once how a man's notions of death and dying are deepened
by a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little as
youth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart to
poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or to
stick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure
from the irrelevancy.
The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out of
a great battle. Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seems
to have been charmed. And knowing how it fared with his
friends--perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down,
silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimation
of the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will accept
of it, the day after--a man, as he draws near middle age, begins to
suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in
a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he
anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the
colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out
toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt
to be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is the
pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow of
delight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-plucked
flowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance
of nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occupies a post, and is
in discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illness
and convalescence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be a cruel
interruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person is
harassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength. He
is placed _hors de combat_; all the while he is conscious that the
battle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal a
misfortune. Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced,
he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention
which sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, and
accept them as before as compensation in full. The world is ever with
him; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself in
an intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and a
fatal issue--which in such cases is ever on the cards--would destroy
all these, and bring about more serious matters than the shedding of
tears. In a man's earlier illnesses, too, he had not only no such
definite future to work out, he had a stronger spring of life and hope;
he was rich in time, and could wait; and lying in his chamber now, he
cannot help remembering that, as Mr. Thackeray expresses it, there
comes at last an illness to which there may be no convalescence. What
if that illness be already come? And so there is nothing left for him,
but to bear the rod with patience, and to exercise a humble faith in
the Ruler of all. If he recovers, some half-dozen people will be made
happy; if he does not recover, the same number of people will be made
miserable for a little while, and, during the next two or three days,
acquaintances will meet in the street--"You've heard of poor So-and-so?
Very sudden! Who would have thought it? Expect to meet you at ----'s
on Thursday. Good-bye." And so to the end. Your death and my death
are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be
stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts
close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although
we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are
near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss
us much either.
We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed sayings; we wish to know
how the matter stands; how the whole thing looks to the dying.
Unhappily--perhaps, on the whole, happily--we can gather no information
from these. The dying are nearly as reticent as the dead. The
inferences we draw from the circumstances of death, the pallor, the
sob, the glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. Manfred
exclaims, "Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!" Sterling wrote
Carlyle "that it was all very strange, yet not so strange as it seemed
to the lookers on." And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The world
has lasted six thousand years now, and, with the exception of those at
present alive, the millions who have breathed upon it--splendid
emperors, horny-fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought has
never stirred--_have_ died, and what they have done, we also shall be
able to do. It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our
fears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we
shall be as wise as they--and as taciturn.
[1] Montaigne.
[2] Bacon.