Essays in Rebellion Part 22

No one who knew Rochefoucauld only by reputation would guess such sentences to be his. They reveal "the man differing from himself"; or, rather, perhaps, they reveal the true nature, that usually put on a thin but protective armour of cynicism when it appeared before the world.

Here we see the inward being of the man who, twice in his life, was overwhelmed by that "violent and lasting pa.s.sion," and was driven by it into strange and dangerous courses where self-love was no guide. But to quote more would induce the peculiar weariness that maxims always bring--the weariness that comes of scattered, disconnected, and abstract thought, no matter how wise. "Give us instances," we cry. "Show us the thing in the warmth of flesh and blood." Nor will we any longer be put off by pillules from seeking the abundance of life's great feast.

x.x.xIII

THE LAST FENCE

He was riding May Dolly, a Cheshire six-year-old, and one of his own breeding; for just as some people think that everyone should go to his own parish church, it was a principle with Mr. James Tomkinson that a man should ride a horse from his own county. Straight, lithe, and ruddy, he trotted to the starting-post, and the crowd cheered him as he went, for they liked to see a bit of pluck. He modestly enjoyed their applause: "I think I never saw anybody so pleased," said Mr. Justice Grantham, who was judge in the race. It was known that the old man had pa.s.sed the limit of seventy, but only five years before he won a steeplechase on his own, and if ever a rider fulfilled Montaigne's ideal of a life spent in the saddle, it was he. So he rode to the starting-post, happy in himself and modestly confident--the very model of what a well-to-do English countryman should wish to be--a Rugby and Balliol man, above suspicion for honesty, a busy man of affairs, a consummate horseman, a bad speaker, and a true-hearted Liberal, holding an equally unblemished record for courage in convictions and at fences.

The race was three and a half miles--twice round the circuit. The first circuit was run, the last fence of it safely cleared. The second circuit was nearly complete: only that last fence remained. It was three hundred yards away, and he rode fast for it along the bottom. Someone was abreast of him, someone close behind. May Dolly rushed forward, and the fence drew nearer and nearer. He was leading; once over that fence and victory was his--the latest victory, always worth all the rest. He felt the moving saddle between his thighs; he heard the quick beating of the hoofs. Something happened; there was a swerve, a sideways jump, a vain effort at recovery, a crashing fall too quick for thought; and before the joy of victory had died, the darkness came.

Who would not choose to plunge out of life like that? A sudden end at the moment of victory has always been the commonplace of human desire.

When the antique sage was asked to select the happiest man in history, his choice fell on one whose destiny resembled that of the Member for Crewe; for Tellus the Athenian had lived a full and well-contented life, had seen fine and gentlemanly sons and many grandchildren growing up around him, had shared the honour and prosperity of his country, and died fighting at Eleusis when victory was a.s.sured. Next in happiness to Tellus came the two Argive boys, who, for want of oxen, themselves drew their mother in a cart up the hill to worship, and, as though in answer to her prayer for blessings on them, died in the temple that night. It has always been so. The leap of Rome's greatest treasure into the Gulf of earthquake was accounted an enviable opportunity. When they asked Caesar what death he would choose, he answered, "A sudden one," and he had his wish. "Oh, happy he whom thou in battles findest," cried Faust to Death in the midst of all his learning; and "Let me like a soldier fall" is the natural marching song of our Territorials.

The advantages of these hot-blooded ends are so obvious that they need hardly be recalled, and, indeed, they have provided a theme for many of our most inspiriting writers. To go when life is strongest and pa.s.sion is at its height; to avoid the terrors of expectation and escape the lingering paraphernalia of sick chambers and deathbed scenes; to shirk the stuffy and inactive hours, marked by nothing but medicines and unwelcome meals; to elude the doctor's feigned encouragements, the sympathy of relations anxious to resume their ordinary pursuits, the buzzing of the parson in the ear, the fading of the cas.e.m.e.nt into that "glimmering square"--should we not all go a long way round to seek so merciful a deliverance? "I will not die in my bed like a cow!" cried the Northumbrian king, and was set on his feet in full armour to confront the Arch Fear face to face. There was some poor comfort in a pose like that; it was better than our helpless collapse into a middle-aged cradle, with pap-boat for feeding-bottle, and a last sleep in the nurse's arms, younger and less muscular than our own. But how much finer to die like Romeo with a kiss, quick as the true apothecary's drugs; to sink like Sh.e.l.ley in the blue water, with mind still full of the Greek poet whom he tucked against his heart; to pa.s.s hot with fever, like Byron, from the height of fame, while thunder presaged to the mountaineers the loss of their great champion in freedom's war!

There is no question of it; these are axioms that all mankind is agreed upon. Every mortal soul would choose a quick and impa.s.sioned death; all admire a certain recklessness, an indifference to personal safety or existence, especially in the old, to whom recklessness is most natural, since they have less of life to risk. That was why the crowd cheered Mr. James Tomkinson as he trotted to the starting-post, and that was why everybody envied his rapid and victorious end. In his _Tales from a Field Hospital_, Sir Frederick Treves told of a soldier who was brought down from Spion Kop as a mere fragment, his limbs shattered, his face blown away, incapable of speech or sight. When asked if he had any message to send home before he died, he wrote upon the paper, "Did we win?" In those words lives the very spirit of that enviable death which all men think they long for--the death which takes no thought of self, and swallows up fear in victory. Such a man Stevenson would have delighted to include in his brave roll-call, and of him those final, well-known words in _Aes Triplex_ might have been written:

"In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he pa.s.ses 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."

Yes, it is all very beautiful, and all very true. Stevenson himself, like Caesar, received the death he wished for, and, whether in reason or in pa.s.sion, every soul among us would agree that death in the midst of life is the most desirable end. And yet--and yet--we hardly know how it is, but, as a matter of fact, we do not seek it, and when the thing comes our way, we prefer, if possible, to walk in the opposite direction. The Territorial may sing himself hoa.r.s.e with his prayer to fall like a soldier, but when the bullets begin to wail around him, it is a thousand to one that he will duck his head. A man may be reasonably convinced that, since he must die some day, and his reprieve cannot be extended long, it is best to die in battle and shoot full-blooded into the spiritual land; nevertheless, if the shadow of a rock gives some shelter from the guns, he will crawl behind it. A few years ago there was a great Oxford philosopher who, after lecturing all morning on the beauty of being absorbed by death into the absolute and eternal, was granted the opportunity of being wrecked on a lake in the afternoon, but displayed no satisfaction at the immediate prospect of such absorption.

In the same way, despite our natural and reasonable desires for a death like Mr. Tomkinson's, we still continue to speak, not only of sleeping in our beds, but of dying in them, as one of the chief objects of a virtuous and happy existence. The longest and most devotional part of the Anglican Common Prayer contains a special pet.i.tion entreating that we may be delivered from the sudden death which we have all agreed is so excellent a piece of fortune. That we are not set free from love of living is shown by what Matthew Arnold called a bloodthirsty clinging to life at a moment of crisis. I shall not forget the green terror on the faces of all the men in a railway carriage when I accidentally set fire to the train, nor have I found it really appetising to suspect even the quickest poison in my soup. Instead of leaping gallantly into death while the trumpets are still blowing, nearly every civilised man deliberately plots out his existence so as to die, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyitch, amid the pitiful squalor of domestic indifference or solicitude. We think health universally interesting, we meditate on diet, we measure our exercise, and shun all risks more carefully than sin. Praising with our lips the glories of the soldier's death, we tread with minute observance the bath-chair pathway to the sick-rooms of old age.

Are our praises of death in victory, then, all cant, and are all the eloquent rhapsodies of poets and essayists a sham? Montaigne seems to have thought so, for, writing of those who talk fine of dying bravely, he says:

"It happeneth that most men set a stern countenance on the matter, look big, and speak stoutly, thereby to acquire reputation, which, if they chance to live, they hope to enjoy."

The case of our eloquent rhapsodists who hymn the joys of sudden and courageous death is evidently more favourable still, since they have every chance of living for a time, and so of enjoying a reputation for bravery without much risk. But rather than accuse mankind of purposely dissembling terror in the hope of braggart fame, we would lay the charge upon a queer divergence between the mind and the bodily will. No matter what the mind may say in commendation of swift and glorious death, the bodily will continues to maintain its life to the utmost, and is the last and savages enemy that the mind can overcome. So it is that no one should reckon beforehand upon courageous behaviour when the supreme summons for courage comes, and only those are faultlessly brave who have never known peril. In reason everyone is convinced that all mankind is mortal, and we hear with vague sympathy of the hosts of dead whose skulls went to pile the pyramids of Tamerlane, or of the thousands that the sea engulfs and earthquakes shatter. But few realise that the life of each among those thousands was as dear to him as our life is, and, though we congratulate heroes upon the opportunity of their death, the moment when that opportunity would be most happy for ourselves never seems exactly to arrive. Hardly anyone really thinks he will die, or is persuaded that the limit to his nature has now come. But it is through realising the incalculable craving of this bodily will to survive that men who have themselves known danger will pay the greater reverence to those who, conscious of mortal fears, and throbbing with the fullness of existence, none the less in the calm ecstasy of their devotion commit themselves to the battle, the firing squad, or the prison death as to a chariot of fire.

x.x.xIV

THE ELEMENT OF CALM

All are aware that we have no abiding city here, but that, says the hymn-writer, is a truth which should not cost the saint a tear, and our politicians appear to lament it as little as the saints. Their eyes are dry; it does not distress their mind, it seems hardly to occur to them, unless, perhaps, they are defeated candidates. One might suppose from their manner that eternal truths depended on their efforts, and that the city they seek to build would abide for ever. Could all this toil and expenditure be lavished on a transitory show, all this eloquence upon the baseless fabric of a vision, all this hatred and malice upon things that wax old as doth a garment and like a vesture are rolled up? One would think from his preoccupied zeal that every politician was laying the foundation stone of an everlasting Jerusalem, did not reason and experience alike forbid the possibility.

May it not rather be that the politicians, like the saints, keep the tears of mortality out of their eyes by contemplating this pa.s.sing dream under the aspect of eternal realities? In months when the heavens at night are filled with constellations of peculiar beauty, may we not suppose that the politician, emerging from the Town Hall amid the cheers and execrations of the voice that represents the voice of G.o.d, lifts up his eyes unto the heavens, where p.r.o.ne Orion still grasps his sword, and Auriga drives his chariot of fire, and the pole star hangs immovable, by which Ulysses set his helm? And as he gazes, he recognises with joy in his heart that the stars themselves, with all their recurrent comets and flaming meteors and immovable constellations, hardly cast a stain upon the white radiance of eternity, under which he has been striving and crying and perpetrating comparatively trifling deviations from exactness.

It is a consolation which a large proportion, probably more than half, of mankind shares with our politicians. Like them, the greater part of mankind is aware that there is peace somewhere beyond these voices, that life with all its unsatisfied longings and its repet.i.tion of care is transitory as a summer cloud, and that the only way of escape from the pain and misery, the foulness and corruption, of this material universe is by the destruction of all desires, except the one engrossing desire for non-existence. That is why the majority of mankind has set itself to overcome the unholy urgings of ambition, the pleasure of selfish and revengeful purposes, and the deeply-implanted delight in cruelty and unkindness. Such conquest is the essential part of the Fourfold Path by which the bliss of extinction may be attained. Let him cease to be ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a politician may slowly be extinguished. Life follows life, and each life fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain of previous existences. "Quisque suos patimur manes." The sin that most easily besets us fixes the shape of our next incarnation, and, did not a politician strictly follow the guidance of the Fourfold Path, the first election after his death might see him re-appear as a sheep, a cave-dweller, or a rat.

Never to have been born is best; never to be born again is the hope and motive of all good men among the greater part of mankind. It is not only the teaching of the most famous Buddha which has told them so. A Preacher more familiar to us has said the same, and our Western churches do but repeat an echo from the East. "I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive," he wrote; "yea, better is he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery? asked Job. From age to age the question has been asked by far more than half the human race, and yet the human race continues, miserable and unholy though it is.

But the widest expression of this common cry is found in Buddhism, and therein is found also a doctrine of peace that seeks to answer it. From the turmoil of the street and market-place, from the atomic vortex of public meetings, ballot stations, and motors decked with flags, let us turn to the "Psalms of the Sisters," those Buddhist nuns whose utterances Mrs. Rhys Davids has edited for the Pali Text Society. In this inextricable error of existence--this charnel-house of corrupting bodies wherein the soul lies imprisoned too long--time and s.p.a.ce do not seriously matter. Let us turn from Haggerston and Battersea and the Parliamentary squabbles of to-day, and visit the regions where the great mountains were standing and the holy Ganges flowed within two or three centuries before or after the birth of Christ. Somewhere about that time, somewhere about that place, these women, having in most cases, fulfilled their various parts in wives, mothers, or courtesans, retired to the Homeless Life in mountains, forests, or the banks of streams where they might seek deliverance for their souls. With shaven heads, and clad in the deep saffron cloth such as the ascetic wanderer of India still wears, furnished only with a bowl for the unasked offerings of the pious and compa.s.sionate, they went their way, free from the cares and desires of this putrefying world. As one of them--a goldsmith's daughter, to whom the Master himself had taught the Norm of the Fourfold Path--as one of them explained to the tiresome relations who tried to call her back:

"Why herewithal, my kinsmen--nay, my foes-- Why yoke me in your minds with sense desires?

Know me as her who fled the life of sense, Shorn of her hair, wrapt in her yellow robe.

The food from hand to mouth, glean'd here and there, The patchwork robe--these things are meet for me, The base and groundwork of the homeless life."

Some sought escape from the depression of luxury, some from the wretchedness of the poor, some from the abominations of the wanton, some from the boredom of tending an indifferent husband. One of them thus utters her complaint with frank simplicity:

"Rising betimes, I went about the house, Then, with my hands and feet well cleansed I went To bring respectful greeting to my lord, And taking comb and mirror, unguents, soap, I dressed and groomed him as a handmaid might.

I boiled the rice, I washed the pots and pans; And as a mother on her only child, So did I minister to my good man.

For me, who with toil infinite then worked, And rendered service with a humble mind, Rose early, ever diligent and good, For me he nothing felt, save sore dislike."

Others sought freedom of intellect, others the free development of personality; but, in the end, it was deliverance from earthly desires that all were seeking, for it is only through such deliverance that the final blessedness of total extinction can be reached. Then, as they cry, they cease to wander in the jungles of the senses, rebirth comes no more, and the peace of Nirvana is won. A poor Brahmin's daughter who had been married to a cripple, thus exults in a multiplied redemption:

"O free, indeed! O gloriously free Am I in freedom from three crooked things:-- From quern, from mortar, from my crook-back'd lord!

Ay, but I'm free from rebirth and from death, And all that dragged me back is hurled away."

But more truly characteristic of the spiritual mind is the joyful advice of one who, having perfected herself in meditation, could thus commune with her soul:

"Hast thou not seen sorrow and ill in all The springs of life? Come thou not back to birth!

Cast out the pa.s.sionate desire again to Be.

So shalt thou go thy ways calm and serene."

Thus only by the recognition of the sorrow of the world, by the conquest of all desires, and by the exercise of kindliness to all that breathe this life of misery, is that Path to be trodden of which the fourth stage enters Nirvana's peace. Thus only can we escape from this repulsive carca.s.s--"this bag of skin with carrion filled," as one of the Sisters called it--and so be merged into the element of calm, just as the s.p.a.ce inside a bowl is merged into the element of s.p.a.ce when at last the bowl is broken and will never need scrubbing more.

It is thought that Gautama, the great Buddha, whose effigy in the calm of contemplation is the n.o.blest work of Indian art, fondly believed that all mankind would seek deliverance along the path he pointed out, and that so, within a few generations, the human race, together, perhaps, with every living thing that breathes beneath the law of Karma, would pa.s.s from sorrow into nothingness. Mankind has not fulfilled his expectation. The task of expiation is not yet completed, and, in the midst of anguish, corruption, and the flux of all material things, the human race goes swarming on. I suppose it is about as numerous as ever, and, though something like half of it accepts the teaching of the Buddha as divine, they seem in no more hurry to fulfil its precepts than are the followers of other Founders. We cannot say that mankind has gone very far along the Fourfold Path, for there are still many of us who would rather be a mouse than nothing; yet it remains an accepted truth of the Buddhistic doctrine, that above this fleeting and variegated world there abides the element of calm. As the final Chorus "Mysticus"

of _Faust_ proclaims: "All things transitory are but a symbol," and if any politician during the storm of worldly desires has for a moment lost sight of truth's eternal stars that guide his way, let him now turn to the "Psalms of the Sisters." Even if he has been successful in his ambition, he will there find peace, discovering in Nirvana the quiet Chiltern Hundreds of the soul.

x.x.xV

"THE KING OF TERRORS"

Skulls may not affright us, nor present fashion ordain cross-bones upon our sepulchres; but still in the face of death the commonplaces of comfort shrivel, and philosophy's consolations strike cold as the symbolism of the tomb. All that lives must die; we know it, but that death is common does not a.s.suage particular grief, nor can the contemplation of prehistoric ruins soften regret for one baby's smile.

Man's dogma has proved vain as his philosophy. Age after age has composed some vision of continued life, and sought to allay its fear or sorrow with suitable imaginations. Mummies of death outlive their granite; vermilion and the scalping-knife lie ready for the happy hunting grounds; beside the royal carca.s.s two score of concubines and warriors are buried quick; Walhalla rings with clashing swords whose wounds close up again at sunset; heroes tread the fields of shadowy asphodel, and on Elysian plains attenuated poets welcome the sage newcomer to their converse; houris reward the faithful for holy slaughter; prophets reveal a gorgeous city and pearly gates beyond the river; the poet tells of circles winding downward to the abyss, and upward to the Rose of Paradise; upon the bishop's tomb in St. Praxed's one Pan is carved, and Moses with the tables; upon the gravestone of an Albanian chief they scratch his rifle and his horse; and over the slave's low mound in Angola plantations his basket and mattock are laid, lest he should miss them. So various are the devices contrived for the solace of mankind, or for his instruction. But one by one, like the dead themselves, those devices have pa.s.sed and pa.s.sed away, leaving mankind unwitting and unconsoled. For there is still one road that each traveller must discover afresh, and death's door, at which all men stand, opens only inwards.

Maurice Maeterlinck has always remained very conscious of that door. How often in his whispering dramas we are made aware of it! How often, without even the knock of warning, it suddenly gapes or stands ajar, and unseen hands are pulling, and children are drawn in, and young girls are drawn in, and wise men, and the old, while the living world remains outside, still at breakfast, still busy with its evening games and sewing, still blindly groping for its departed guide! From the outset, Maeterlinck has been an amateur of death. In a little volume that bears Death's name, he utters his meditation upon death's nature and significance. Like other philosophers and all old wives, he also attempts our consolation. Mankind demands a consolation, for without it, perhaps, the species could hardly have survived their foreknowledge of the end. But in treating the first two terrors to which he applies his comfortable arguments, Maeterlinck's reasoning appears to me almost irrelevant, almost obsolete. He attributes the terrified apprehension of death, first, to the fear of pain in dying, and, secondly, to the fear of anguish hereafter. In neither fear, I think, does the essential horror of death now lie. All who have witnessed various forms of death, whether on the field or in the sick chamber, will agree that the process of dying is seldom more difficult or more painful than taking off one's clothes. The blood ebbs, the senses sleep, "the cas.e.m.e.nt slowly grows a glimmering square," breath gradually fails, unconsciousness faints into deeper unconsciousness, and that is all.

Even in terrible wounds and cases of extreme pain, medicine can now alleviate the worst, nor, in any case, do I believe that the expectation of physical agony, however severe, has much share in the instinct that stands aghast at death. If fear of pain thus preoccupied the soul, martyrs would not have sown the Church, nor would births continue.

In combating the dread of future torment, Maeterlinck may have better cause for giving comfort. Long generations have been haunted by that terror. "Ay, but to die," cries Claudio in _Measure for Measure_:

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling!"

Nor were such terrors mediaeval only. Till quite recent years they cast a gloom over the existence of honourable and laborious men. Remember that scene in Oxford when Dr. Johnson, with a look of horror, acknowledged that he was much oppressed by the fear of death, and when the amiable Dr. Adams suggested that G.o.d was infinitely good, he replied:

"'As I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be d.a.m.ned' (looking dismally). Dr. Adams: 'What do you mean by d.a.m.ned?'

Johnson (pa.s.sionately and loudly): 'Sent to h.e.l.l, Sir, and punished everlastingly.'"