[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain
criticisms on a book of mine entitled, _The Religion of a Literary
Man_--_Religio Scriptoris_--hence the names given to the two 'persons.'
It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to
which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]
LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for
the life after death?
SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost
have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to
exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters
less to us than we imagine.
LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that
it matters much to many, to most of us. It does, I know, to me.
SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really
too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my
senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the
secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak
of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who
have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But
I--well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day.
The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints.
To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his
pistol--and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your
soul.
To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog,
that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the
consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For
you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with
him as well. I shall smoulder for years, you will be carried to heaven,
like Enoch, in a beautiful lightning.
'A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What can it know of Death?'
That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.
LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a
hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a
robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live
again, if only to make sure of that _magnum opus_--just to realise
those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?
SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on
his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you,
Lector--such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding
labour-house vast of being.'
But, Lector, you who love work so well--have you never heard tell of
a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my
Lector?--not tired at the end of a busy day, but tired in the morning,
tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on
their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning
sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his
morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you
be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that
when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few
years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May
it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by
a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so
short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins
to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort
croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or
romance can overcome--don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to
seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would
fall'?
LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my
youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your
ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?
SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my
particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been
supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most
general among men. Was it not old age?--which, like youth, is
independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old
in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the
desire of rest.
LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling
fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its
imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain
hours of its youth over again?--and would the old man not give all he
possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?
SCRIPTOR. He would give everything--but the certainty of rest. After
seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us
in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is
not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are
uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its
passions, but age has its comforts.
LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice
betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have
you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you?
Have you looked on death face to face?
SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have--but once. It is now about five years
ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the
memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world
where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better
perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with
him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem
to lose the sense of his terror--nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it
is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to
be known to be loved.
LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now
it moves you to name; or is the memory too sad to recall?
SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as
winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died--a winter
that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble
forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow
of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of
all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the
beginning.
There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest
lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood,
and after some struggle--for they were not born into that class which
is denied the luxury of struggle--at length saw a little home bright
in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong,
suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like
the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought,
was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and
pray. Suddenly my friend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what
at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the
house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with
babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my
poor stricken friend could say.
Ah! her face! How can I describe it? It was much sweeter afterwards,
but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so
thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little
goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh
like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black
weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling
sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it
wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her
straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in
the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know,
was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being well again,
and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all
these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused
smile, showed her thin wrists?--how say that they would soon be strong
and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from
us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the
fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy
familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread
as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to
her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She
was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the
flesh crept. She was going to die.
Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial,
maybe an operation?--for perhaps the pains of the body are the
keenest, after all--those of the spirit are at least in some part
metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is
behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death
some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.
Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they
had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see
her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that
awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form
beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the
indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable
terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy
sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her
face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with
a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of
her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as
though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed
upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called
to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost
Eurydice. Poor lad!--poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the
tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life
that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He
could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to
leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never
look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
last time and close my eyes for ever.
LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really _feel_ and not be morbid? If one
be morbid, one can still be brave.
LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
after death.
SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we _desire_
all things. Who has not cried for the moon in his time? But what is
the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we _wish it_, wish it with
a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we _knew_.
LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
its probability?--and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
convinced of its truth.
SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability! O my Lector, what a poor
substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a _fact_--a fact of
which he has his own personal proof and knowledge--a scientific, not
an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they
are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.
LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
faith?
SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness'
by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were
bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise;
but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of
virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our
theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and
ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can
be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being
moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible for no
inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the
baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from
the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt.
It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of
manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all
such disagreeables to the hereafter.
'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
As he threw his life away--
What need to hoard?
He could well afford
To squander his mortal day.
With Eternity his, what need to care?--
A sort of immortal millionaire.'
LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the
line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other
views from a poet.
SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that
the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to
sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make
_facts_ sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing
of--for beautiful it is, however it be marred; with this wonderful
life--and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such
bitter pain; with such _certainties_ for his theme, we yet beg him to
sing to us of shadows!
And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith
in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let
our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it--I would hang them as
enemies of society.
LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point--you at least _hope_
for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as
a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?
SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the
Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and
space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this
popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of
wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if
they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,
the probable profits of the invention--and not a word of the wonder of
the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?
No! let us keep the Unseen--or, if it must be discovered, let the key
thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.