THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so
terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands
alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes
all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps
suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege
and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the
business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a
pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together.
There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again,
in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but
leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which
must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs
striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule
trees of mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant
going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least
memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what
remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much
grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the
door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the
eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay,
in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every
circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in
leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go
dangerously wrong in practice.
As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful
whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on
conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in
South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in
this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more
impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving
gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and
suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the
foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at
any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble
man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young people,
and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless and
desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable
married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper
within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to
smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a
catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly be
relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the
Creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer
and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse.
And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these
South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of
ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in
over-crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and
swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would
set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically
looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of
petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the
ship’s powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and
every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If we
clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract
idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for the
subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the
hour and no one would follow them into battle—the blue-peter might fly at
the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if these
philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should
affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any
battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our
ancestors have miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be
lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And
what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step
we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all
around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the
time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a
mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there
is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the
old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier;
they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of
the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it
was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having
outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a
guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass,
their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling
with laughter, through years of man’s age compared to which the valley at
Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.
It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was
a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any
old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.
Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern
and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those
who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning
through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers
one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a
vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiæ bay; and when
they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Prætorian
guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no
bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man.
Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts! and
into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God’s pale
Prætorian throws us over in the end!
We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer
bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is
it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech,
incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard
so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of
Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we
think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense proportion of
boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their hands
instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a
professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one of
God’s creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man’s unconcern and
brazen boldness in the face of death!
We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into
daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death
is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others;
and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on
earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical
guess at the meaning of the word _life_. All literature, from Job and
Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look
upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to
rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our
sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say
that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work
for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and
piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy
volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with
modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a
Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very
well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a
Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or
a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker’s man; but
not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its
dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all
the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout—that we
do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its
conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but
living. Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree
of providence; no man’s eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but
although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine,
active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these
anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life’s
possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at
all the most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply
interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed
texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions,
and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love of living is
stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding
merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and
walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the
matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral
procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers
yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides
must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they
draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine
is an answer to most standard works upon the question. When a man’s
heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and
soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the
door, like the Commander’s statue; we have something else in hand, thank
God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world over.
All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting company with all
his aches and ecstasies. For us also the trap is laid. But we are so
fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death.
It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small
blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to
the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the
pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.
We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the
Permanence of the Possibility, a man’s head is generally very bald, and
his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as
a lane leading to a dead wall—a mere bag’s end, as the French say—or
whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our
turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we
thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its
vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and
vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the
hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one
conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing
terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No
one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the
thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how
little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in
what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he
ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass,
did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage
and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s
cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our
precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all
abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not
looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the
past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.
And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good
citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is
nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own
carcase, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took
his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own
digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a
dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or
soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin
to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature;
and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise
is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now
the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock
of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and
cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world,
keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs,
until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may
shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of
the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim.
Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all
sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover
of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside,
he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare,
push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. “A peerage or
Westminster Abbey!” cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.
These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain
satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or
other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the
nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of
prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb
indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and
carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely
considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more
considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who would project a serial
novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who
would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the
consideration of death?
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego
all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature—as if
that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a
stretch! As if it were not to die in one’s own lifetime, and without
even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be
the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent
Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm’s
length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is
better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the
sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not
give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push
and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished
undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of
the man who means execution, which out-lives the most untimely ending.
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good
work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every
heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse
behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even
if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying
out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope,
and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once
tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in
such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort
of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the
man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much
as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the
highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are
hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.