[I add an extract from my Diary.--T. B.]
Diary, Jan. 15.--A week ago, while I was writing the above unfinished
lines, I received a letter to say that my friend Herbert was dead--he
to whom these letters have been written. It seems that he had been
getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no renewed
threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile. But, rising
from his chair in the course of the evening, he had cried out faintly;
put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his chair unconscious, and,
in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe. They say it was a sudden
heart-failure.
It is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all precaution
that some little hunted creature should not escape, and that, while we
watched and devised, it had slipped off by some other outlet the very
existence of which we had not suspected.
Of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is simply a
piece of good fortune. If I could know that such would be the manner of
my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind. To die
quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative
tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about
one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy. But for his
wife and his poor girls! To have had no last word, no conscious look
from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part
of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery.
I cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the
remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is
absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it
trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. I cannot think of him as
dead and silent; yet even before I heard the news, he was buried. I
cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling spirit of my friend
tried to fling me, as it were, some last message; or that I suffered
with him, and shared his last conscious thought.
Perhaps I shall grow to think of Herbert as dead. But, meanwhile, I am
preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to come upon
one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. It reveals to
one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life is. One ought,
I feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to discount it. It is,
after all, the only certain future event in our lives.
And yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as
though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our thoughts,
as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the darkness lifts,
and until we may resume our vivid interests again.
I do not, of course, mean that it should be a steady, melancholy
preoccupation. If we have to die, we are also meant to live; but we
ought to combine and co-ordinate the thought of it. It ought to take
its place among the other great certainties of life, without weakening
our hold upon the activity of existence. How is this possible? For the
very terror of death lies not in the sad accidents of mortality, the
stiffened and corrupting form, the dim eye, the dreadful
pageantry--over that we can triumph; but it is the blank cessation of
all that we know of life, the silence of the mind that loved us, the
irreparable wound.
Some turn hungrily to Spiritualism to escape from this terrible
mystery. But, so far as I have looked into Spiritualism, it seems to me
only to have proved that, if any communication has ever been made from
beyond the gate of death--and even such supposed phenomena are
inextricably intertwined with quackeries and deceits--it is an abnormal
and not a normal thing. The scientific evidence for the continuance of
personal identity is nil; the only hope lies in the earnest desire of
the hungering heart.
The spirit cries out that it dare not, it cannot cease to be. It cannot
bear the thought of all the energy and activity of life proceeding in
its accustomed course, deeds being done, words being uttered, the
problems which the mind pondered being solved, the hopes which the
heart cherished being realised--"and I not there." It is a ghastly
obsession to think of all the things that one has loved best--quiet
work, the sunset on familiar fields, well-known rooms, dear books,
happy talk, fireside intercourse--and one's own place vacant, one's
possessions dispersed among careless hands, eye and ear and voice
sealed and dumb. And yet how strange it is that we should feel thus
about the future, experience this dumb resentment at the thought that
there should be a future in which one may bear no part, while we
acquiesce so serenely in claiming no share in the great past of the
world that enacted itself before we came into being. It never occurs to
us to feel wronged because we had no conscious outlook upon the things
that have been; why should we feel so unjustly used because our outlook
may be closed upon the things that shall be hereafter? Why should we
feel that the future somehow belongs to us, while we have no claim upon
the past? It is a strange and bewildering mystery; but the fact that
the whole of our nature cries out against extinction is the strongest
argument that we shall yet be, for why put so intensely strong an
instinct in the heart unless it is meant to be somehow satisfied?
Only one thought, and that a stern one, can help us--and that is the
certainty that we are in stronger hands than our own. The sense of
free-will, the consciousness of the possibility of effort, blinds us to
this; we tend to mistake the ebullience of temperament for the
deliberate choice of the will. Yet have we any choice at all? Science
says no; while the mind, with no less instinctive certainty, cries out
that we have a choice. Yet take some sharp crisis of life--say an
overwhelming temptation. If we resist it, what is it but a resultant of
many forces? Experience of past failures and past resolves combine with
trivial and momentary motives to make us choose to resist. If we fail
and yield, the motive is not strong enough. Yet we have the sense that
we might have done differently: we blame ourselves, and not the past
which made us ourselves.
But with death it is different. Here, if ever, falls the fiat of the
Mind that bade us be. And thus the only way in which we can approach it
is to put ourselves in dependence upon that Spirit. And the only course
we can follow is this: not by endeavouring to anticipate in thought the
moment of our end--that, perhaps, only adds to its terrors when it
comes--but by resolutely and tenderly, day after day, learning to
commend ourselves to the hand of God; to make what efforts we can; to
do our best; to decide as simply and sincerely as possible what our
path should be, and then to leave the issue humbly and quietly with God.
I do this, a little; it brings with it a wonderful tranquillity and
peace. And the strange thing is that one does not do it oftener, when
one has so often experienced its healing and strengthening power.
To live then thus; not to cherish far-off designs, or to plan life too
eagerly; but to do what is given us to do as carefully as we can; to
follow intuitions; to take gratefully the joys of life; to take its
pains hopefully, always turning our hearts to the great and merciful
Heart above us, which a thousand times over turns out to be more tender
and pitiful than we had dared to hope. How far I am from this faith.
And yet I see clearly that it is the only power that can sustain. For
in such a moment of insight even the thought of the empty chair, the
closed books, the disused pen, the sorrowing hearts, and the
flower-strewn mound fail to blur the clear mirror of the mind.
For him there can be but two alternatives: either the spirit that we
knew has lost the individuality that we knew and is merged again in the
great vital force from which it was for a while separated; or else,
under some conditions that we cannot dream of, the identity remains,
free from the dreary material conditions, free to be what it desired to
be; knowing perhaps the central peace which we know only by subtle
emanations; seeing the region in which beauty, and truth, and purity,
and justice, and high hopes, and virtue are at one; no longer baffled
by delay, and drooping languor, and sad forebodings, but free and pure
as viewless air.