Essays in Rebellion Part 23

No one disputes that for many ages the lives of even the just and good were burdened by such oppressive fears. Perhaps, indeed, the just and good were more burdened than the wicked; for to the wicked their own sins seldom appear so deadly black, and when a Balkan priest lately displayed pictures of eternal torment as warnings to a savage mountaineer's enormities, he was met by the reply, "Even we should not be so cruel." But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck's rea.s.surances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death. Was there not, at all events, one strenuous Canon of the Established Church who defiantly proclaimed that he would rather be d.a.m.ned than annihilated?

"Men fear death," says Bacon's familiar sentence; "men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark." It is not the dread of pain and torment; it is the dark that terrifies; it is Kingsley's horror of annihilation; it is the hot life's fear of ceasing to be. I grant that many are unconscious of this fear. In word, at all events, there are mult.i.tudes, perhaps the greater part of mankind, who long for the annihilation of self, who direct their lives by the great hope of becoming in the end absorbed into the Universe. Their perpetual prayer is to be rid of personality at the last, no matter through what strange embodiments the self must pa.s.s before it reach the bliss of nothingness.

Similar, though less doctrinal, was the prayer of Job when he counted himself among those who long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave. "Why died I not from the womb?" he cried:

"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then, had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built solitary places for themselves."

How far the loss of personal consciousness by absorption into universal infinity is identical with the eternal rest desired by Job might be long disputed. Sir Thomas Browne, having heard of the Brahmin or Buddhist conceptions of futurity, would draw a thin distinction:

"Others," he says, "rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being; and make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine original again."

In effect this doctrine comes very near Maeterlinck's plea of comfort.

Annihilation, he says, is impossible, because nothing is destructible.

But when confronted with the eternal antinomy of death, that both the end and the survival of personality are equally inconceivable, he hesitates. He admits that survival without consciousness would be the same as the annihilation o self (in which case he maintains death could be no evil, bringing only eternal sleep). But he rejects this solution as flattering only to ignorance, and has visions of a new ego collecting a fresh nucleus round itself and developing in infinity. For the "narrow ego" which we partly know--the humble self of memories and ident.i.ty, the soul that sums up experience into some kind of unity--he expresses considerable contempt, as a frail and forgetful thing; and he seeks to waft us away into an intellect devoid of senses, which he says almost certainly exists, and into an infinity which is "nothing if it be not felicity."

I do not know. A man may say what he pleases about intellect devoid of senses, or about the felicity of infinity. One statement may be as true as the other, or the reverse of both may be true. Talk of that kind rests on no sounder basis than the old a.s.sertions about the houris and the happy hunting-grounds, and it brings no surer consolation. Even when Maeterlinck tells us that it is impossible for the universe to be a mistake, and that our own reason necessarily corresponds with the eternal laws of the universe, we may answer that we hope, and even believe, that he is right, but on such a basis we can found no certainty whatever. Nor does the self, when, warm with life, inspired with vital pa.s.sion, and energising for its own fulfilment, it stands horrified before the gulf of death, fearing no conceivable torment, but only the cessation of its power and ident.i.ty--at such a moment that inward and isolated self can derive no rea.s.surance from the dim possibility of some future nucleus, under cover of which it may pa.s.s into the felicity of the universal infinite, stripped of its memory, its present personality, and its flesh.

Fear of annihilation, or of the loss of ident.i.ty, which is the same thing, I take to be one of the remaining terrors in European minds meditating on death. Of all the imagined forms of survival, only one is obviously more horrible than the night of nothing, and that is the state in which Beethoven tw.a.n.gs a banjo and Gladstone utters the political forecasts of a distinguished journalist. It may be that my affection for the "narrow ego" is too violent, but, for myself, I do not find M.

Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved. "No, no, no life,"

cries Lear:

"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!"

It is the cry of all mankind when love is thus slit in twain; nor is sorrow comforted because coral is made of love's bones, or violets spring from his flesh, and the vanished self is possibly absorbed into the felicity of an infinite and everlasting azure.

x.x.xVI

STRULDBRUGS

What a fuss they make, proclaiming the secret of long life! We must stay abed till noon, they say; we must take life slowly and comfortably; we must avoid worry, live moderately, drink wine, smoke cigars, and read the _Times_. Yes; there is one who, in a letter to the _Times_, boasted his grandfather sustained life for a hundred and one years by reading all the leading and special articles of that paper; his father got to eighty-eight on the same diet; himself follows their footsteps on fare that is new every morning. Another writer has subscribed to the _Times_ for sixty-seven years, and now is ninety-two on the strength of it.

Avoid worry, fret not yourself because of evildoers, let not indignation lacerate your heart, take the sensible and solid view of things, read the _Times_, and you will surpa.s.s the Psalmist's limit of threescore years and ten.

What a picture of beneficent comfort it calls up! The breakfast-room furniture fit to outlast the Pyramids, the maroon leather of deep armchairs, the marble clock ticking to half-past nine beneath the bronze figure with the scythe and hourgla.s.s, the boots set to warm upon the hearthrug, the crisp bacon sizzling gently beneath its silver cover, the pleasant wife murmuring gently behind the silver urn, the paper set beside the master's plate. Isaiah knew not of such regimen, else he would not have cried that all flesh is gra.s.s, and all the goodliness thereof as the flower of the field.

Others there are whom poverty precludes from silver, and the narrow estate of home from daily sustenance on the _Times_. Some study diuturnity upon two meals a day, or pursue old age by means of "unfired food," Others devour roots by moonlight, or savagely dine upon a pocket of raw beans. These are intemperate on water, or bewail the touch of salt as sacrilege against the sacrifice of eggs. These grovel for nuts like the Hamps.h.i.+re hog, or impiously celebrate the fruitage by which man fell. Some cast away their coats, some their hosen, some their hats.

They go barefoot but for sandals. They wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, eschewing flesh for their food, and vegetables for their clothing. They plunge distracted into boiling water. Shudderingly, they break the frosty Serpentine. They absorb the sun's rays like pigeons upon the housetops, or s.h.i.+ver naked in suburban chambers that they may recover the barbaric tang. They walk through rivers fully clothed, and shake their vesture as a dog his coat; or are hydrophobic for their skins, fearing to wash lest they disturb essential oils. They shave their heads as a cure for baldness, or in gentle gardens emulate the raging lion's mane. One dreads to miss his curdled milk by the fraction of a minute; another, at the semblance of a cold, puts off his supper for three weeks and a day. One calculates upon longevity by means of bare knees, another apprehends the approach of death through the orifice in the palm of a leather glove.

Of course, it is all right. Life is of inestimable value, and nothing can compensate a corpse for the loss of it. Falstaff knew that, and, like the Magpie Moth, wisely counterfeited death to avoid the irretrievable step of dying. Our prudent livers display an equal wisdom, not exactly counterfeiting death, but living gingerly--living, as it were, at half-c.o.c.k, lest life should go off suddenly with a flash and bang, leaving them nowhere. Of course, they are quite right. Life being pleasurable, it is well to spread it out as far as it will go. As to honour, the h.o.a.ry head in itself is a crown of glory, and when a man reaches ninety, people will call him wonderful, though for ninety years he has been a fool. The objects of living are, for the most part, obscure and variable, and prudent livers may well ask why for the obscure and variable objects of life they should lose life itself--"Propter causas vivendi perdere vitam," if we may reverse the old quotation.

So they are quite justified in eating the bread of carefulness, and no one who has known danger will condemn their solicitude for safely. But yet, in hearing of those devices, or perusing the _Sour Milk Gazette_ and the _Valetudinarian's Handbook_, somehow there come to my mind the words, "Insanitas Sanitutum, omnia Insanitas!" And suddenly the picture of those woeful islanders whom Gulliver discovered rises before me. For, as we remember, in the realm of Laputa, he found a certain number of both s.e.xes (about eleven hundred) who were called Struldbrugs, or Immortals, because, being born with a certain spot over the left eyebrow, they were destined never to know the common visitation of death. We remember how Gulliver envied them, accounting them the happiest of human beings, since they had obtained in perpetuity the blessing of life, for which all men struggle so hard that whoever has one foot in the grave is sure to hold back the other as strongly as he can. But in the end, he concluded that their lot was not really enviable, seeing that increasing years only brought an increase of their dullness and incapacity:

"They were not only opinionative," he writes, "peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friends.h.i.+p, and dead to all natural affections, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing pa.s.sions. But those objects against which their envy seems princ.i.p.ally directed are the vices of the younger sort, and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive."

The explorer further discovered that, after the age of eighty, the marriages of the Struldbrugs were dissolved, because the law thought it a reasonable indulgence that those who were condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife; also that they could never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory would not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and after about two hundred years, they could not hold conversation with their neighbours, the mortals, because the language of the country was always upon the flux.

It is a pity that the laws of Laputa stringently forbade the export of Struldbrugs, else, Gulliver tells us, he would gladly have brought a couple to this country, to arm our people against the fear of death.

Had he only done so, what a lot of letters to the _Times_, advertis.e.m.e.nts of patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should have been spared! If earthly immortality were known to be such a curse, we could more easily convince the most scrupulous devotee of health that old age was little better than immortality.

It is not, therefore, as though great age were such a catch that it should demand all these delicate manipulations of diet, sleep, rest-cures, health-resorts, scourings, and temperatures, for its attainment. How refres.h.i.+ng to escape from this hospital atmosphere into the free air, blowing whither it lists, and to fling oneself carelessly upon existence, as Sir George Birdwood, for instance, has done! He also wrote to the _Times_, but in a very different tone. Like another Gulliver, he pictured the calamity of millionaires living on till their heirs are senile. It is all nonsense, he said, to prescribe rules for life. One of his oldest friends drank a bottle of cognac a day, and, as for himself--well, we know that he is eighty, has lived a varied and dangerous life in many lands, has written on carrots, chestnuts, carpets, art, scholars.h.i.+p, all manner of absorbing subjects, and yet he heartily survives:

"I attribute my senility--let others say senect.i.tude," he shouts in his cheery way, "to a certain playful devilry of spirit, a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the Indian Office on a bilked pension I swore by all the G.o.ds I would make up for it by living on ten years, instead of one, which was all an insurance society told me I was worth."

That sounds the true note, blowing the horn of old forests and battles.

"A playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"--how stirring to the stagnant lives of prudent regularity! "Lie in bed till noon-day!"

he goes on; "I would rather be some monstrous flat-fish at the bottom of the Atlantic than accept human life on such terms." Who in future will hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats, nursings, comforts, and attention to health, without beholding in his mind that monstrous flat-fish, blind and deaf with age, rotting at ease upon the Atlantic slime? Life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, and it is no new thing to discover eternity in a minute. "I have not time to make money,"

said the naturalist, Aga.s.siz, when his friends advised some pecuniary advantage; and, in the same way, every really fortunate man says he has no time to bother about living. So soon as a human being does anything simply because he thinks it will "do him good," and not for pleasure, interest, or service, he should withdraw from this present world as gracefully as he can. Of course, we all want to live, but even in death there can hardly be anything so very awful, since it is so common.

"The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat and drink." "He that loses his life shall find it," said one Teacher. "Live dangerously," said another; and "Try to be killed" is still the best advice for a soldier who would rise. For life is to be measured by its intensity, and not by the tapping of a death-watch beetle. "I've lost my appet.i.te. I can't eat!"

groaned the patient whom Carlyle knew. "My dear sir, that is not of the slightest consequence," replied the good physician; and how wise are those scientists who deny to invalids the existence of their pain! Sir George Birdwood recalled the saying of Plato that attention to health is one of the greatest hindrances to life, and I vaguely remember Plato's commendation of the working-man, who, in illness, just takes a dose, and if that doesn't cure him, remarks, "If I must die, I must die," and dies accordingly. That is how the working-man dies still; though sometimes he is now buoyed up by the thought of his funeral's grandeur.

"A certain playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"--for life or death those are the best regulations.

x.x.xVII

"LIBERTe, LIBERTe, CHeRIE!"

Just escaped from the prison-house of Russia, I had reached Ma.r.s.eilles.

The whole city, the bay, and the surrounding hills, bright with villas and farms, glittered in suns.h.i.+ne. So did the spidery bridge that swings the ferry across the Old Harbour's mouth. Even the fortifications looked quite amiable under such a sky. Booming sirens sounded the approach of great liners, moving slowly to their appointed docks. Little steamers hurried from point to point along the sh.o.r.es with crowded decks, and the lighthouses stood white against the Mediterranean blue.

The streets were thronged with busy people. The shops and cafes were thronged. At all the bathing places along the bay crowds of men, women, and children were plunging with joy into the cool, transparent water.

The walls and kiosks were covered with gay advertis.e.m.e.nts of b.a.l.l.s, concerts, theatres, and open air music-halls. Flaunting and flirting to and fro, women recalled what pleasure was. Electric trams went clanging down the lines. Motors hooted as they set off for tours in the Alps.

Little carriages, with many-coloured hoods, loitered temptingly beside tine pavements. The stalls along the quay shone with every variety of gleaming fish, and every produce of the kindly earth. The sun went smiling through the air; the sea smiled in answer. And over all, high upon her rocky hill, watched the great image of Notre Dame de la Garde.

"This is civilisation! This is liberty!" cried a Frenchman, who had joined our s.h.i.+p in Turkey, and was now seated beside me, enjoying the return to security, peace, and the comfort of his own language.

Yes; it was civilisation, and it was liberty. Has not the name of Ma.r.s.eilles breathed the very spirit of liberty all over the world? And yet his words recalled to me another scene, and the remark of another native of Ma.r.s.eilles.

We were steaming slowly along the West Coast of Africa, landing cargo at point after point, or calling for it as required. Day by day we wallowed through the oily water, under a misty sun, that did not roast, but boiled. Day by day we watched the low-lying sh.o.r.e--the unvarying line of white beach, almost as white as the foam which dashed against it; and beyond the beach, the long black line of unbroken forest. Nothing was to be seen but those parallel lines of white beach and black forest, stretching both ways to the horizon. At dawn they were partly concealed by serpentining ghosts of mist that slowly vanished under the increasing heat; and at sunset the mists stole silently over them again. But all day and all night the sickly stench of vegetation, putrefying in the steam of those forests from age to age, pervaded the s.h.i.+p as with the breath of plague.

One morning the scream of our whistle and the bang of our little signal-gun, followed by the prolonged rattle of the anchor-chain running through the hawse-pipe, showed that we had reached some point of call.

The s.h.i.+p lay about half a mile off sh.o.r.e, and one could see black figures running about the beach and pus.h.i.+ng off a big black boat. The spray shot high in the air as the bow dived through the surf, and soon we could hear the hiss and gasp of the rowers as they drew near. They were naked negroes, s.h.i.+ning with oil and sweat. Standing up in the boat, with face to bow, they plunged their paddles perpendicularly into the water with a hiss, and drew them out with a gasp. A swirling circle of foam marked where each stroke had fallen, and the boat surged nearer through the swell, till, with a swish of backing paddles, it stopped alongside the s.h.i.+p's ladder, like a horse reined up. Out of the stern there stepped a little figure, just recognisable as a white man. His helmet was soaked and battered out of shape. The tattered relics of his white-duck suit were plastered with yellow palm-oil and various kinds of grease. So was the singlet, which was his only other clothing. So were his face and hands. But he was a white man, and he came up the s.h.i.+p's side with the confident air of Europe.

The purser greeted him on deck, and they disappeared into the purser's cabin to make out the bill of lading. The hatch was opened, and the steam crane began hauling barrels and sacks out of the boat, and then depositing other great barrels in their place, according to the simplest form of barter. The barrels we took smelt of palm-oil; the barrels we gave smelt of rum. When the boat could hold no more, the little man reappeared with the purser, and was introduced to me as Mr. Jacks.

He took off his battered helmet, inclined his body from the middle of his back, and said, "Enchanted, sair!"

Then he gave me his oily hand, which wanted rubbing down with a bit of deck swabbing.

"You fit for go sh.o.r.e one time?" he asked in the pidjin English of the Coast, still keeping his helmet politely raised.

"Oui, certainement, toute suite," I replied in the pidjin French of England.