with livid scars, their backs a mass of sores, with tattered
patchwork clothing that gave them shade rather than covering!
... Letters were branded on their foreheads, their heads were
half shaven, iron rings were welded about their ankles, they
were hideously pale, and the smoky darkness of that steaming,
gloomy den had ulcerated their eyelids: their sight was impaired,
and their bodies smeared and filthy white with the
powdered meal, making them look like boxers who sprinkle
themselves with dust before they fight."
Even to animals the same pity for their sufferings is extended—a pity unusual among the ancients, and still hardly known around the Mediterranean. Yet Apuleius counted the sorrows of the ill-used ass, and, speaking of the same flour mill, he describes the old mules and pack-horses labouring there, with drooping heads, their necks swollen with gangrenes and putrid sores, their nostrils panting with the harsh cough that continually racked them, their chests ulcerated by the ceaseless rubbing of their hempen harness, their hoofs swollen to an enormous size as the result of their long journeys round the mill, their ribs laid bare even to the bone by their endless floggings, and all their hides rough with the scab of neglect and decay.
The first writer of the modern novel—first of romanticists—Apuleius has been called. Romance! If we must keep those rather futile distinctions, it is as the first of realists that we would remember him. For, as in a dream, he has shown us the actual life that mankind led in the temple, the workshop, the market-place, and the forest, during the century after the Apostles died. And we find it much the same as the actual life of toiling mankind in all ages—full of unwelcome labour and suffering and continual apprehension, haunted by ghostly fears and self-imagined horrors, but illuminated by sudden laughter, and continually goaded on by an inexplicable desire to submit itself to that hard service of perfection under which, as the priest of the goddess informed Lucius in the story, man may perceive most fully the greatness of his liberty.
XXXI
It is horrible. We are being overpopulated with spirits. Day by day, hundreds of newly-created ghosts issue into the world—not the poor relics and incorporeal shadows of the dead, but real living ghosts, who never had any other existence except as they now appear. They are creations of the mind—figments they are sometimes called—but they have as real an existence as any other created thing. We love them or hate them, we talk about them, we quote them, we discuss their characters. To many people they are much more alive than the solid human beings whom in some respects they resemble. Obviously they are more interesting, else the travellers in a railway carriage would converse instead of reading. Some minds cannot help producing them. They produce them as easily as the queen bee produces the eggs that hatch into drones. And both the number and productivity of such minds are terribly on the increase. A few years ago Anatole France told us that, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day were published, not to mention the newspapers; and the rate has gone up since then. He called it a monstrous orgy. He said it would end in driving us mad. He called books the opium of the West. They devour us, he said. He foresaw the day when we shall all be librarians. We are rushing, he said, through study into general paralysis.
Does it not remind one of the horror with which the wise and prudent about a century ago began to regard the birth-rate? They beheld the geometrical progression of life catching up the arithmetical progression of food with fearful strides. Mankind became to them a devouring mouth, always agape, like a nestling's, and incessantly multiplying, like a bacillus. What was the good of improving the condition of Tom and Sal, if Tom and Sal, in consequence of the improvement, went their way and in a few years produced Dick, Poll, Bill, and Meg, who proceeded to eat up the improvement, and in a generation produced sixteen other devourers hungrier than themselves? It was an awesome picture, that ravenous and reduplicating mouth! It cast a chill over humanity, and blighted the hope of progress for many years. To some it is still a bodeful portent, presaging eternal famine. It still hangs ominously over the nations. But, on the whole, its terrors have lately declined; one cannot exactly say why. Either the mouth is not so hungry, or it gets more to eat, or, for good or evil, it does not multiply so fast. And now there are these teachers of Eugenics, always insisting on quality.
The question is whether some similar means might not check the multiplication of the ghosts that threaten to devour the mind of man. The progression of man's mind can hardly be called even arithmetical, and the increase of ghosts accelerates frightfully in comparison. If Paris produced fifty books a day some years ago, London probably produces a hundred now. And then there is Berlin, and all the German Universities, where professors must write or die. And there are New York and Boston. Rome and Athens still count for something, and so does Madrid. Scandinavia is no longer sterile, and a few of Russia's mournful progeny escape strangulation at their birth. Not every book, it is true, embodies a living soul. Many are stillborn; many are like dolls, bleeding sawdust. But in most there dwells some kind of life, hungry for the human brain, and day by day its share of sustenance diminishes, if shares are equal. They are not equal, but the inequality only increases the clamour of the poor among the ghosts.
Take the case of novels, which make up the majority of books in the modern world. We will assume the average of souls in a novel to be five, the same as the average of a human family. Probably it is considerably higher, but take it at five. Let us suppose that fifty novels are produced per day in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and other large cities together, which I believe to be a low estimate. Not counting Sundays and Bank holidays, this will give us rather more than 75,000 newly created souls a year—cannibal souls, ravening for the brains of men and women similar to the brains that gave them birth, and each able to devour as many brains as it can catch. It is no good saying that nearly all are short-lived, dying in six months like summer flies. The dead are but succeeded by increasing hordes. They swarm about us; they bite us at every turn. They sit in our chairs, and hover round our tables. They speak to us on mountain tops, and if we descend into the Tube, they are there. They absorb the solid world, making it of no account beside the spirit world in which we dwell, so that we neither see nor hear nor handle the realities of outward life, but perceive them only, if at all, through filmy veils and apparitions, the haunting offspring of another's mind. And remember, we are now speaking of the spirits in novels alone. Besides novels, there are the breeding grounds of the drama, the essay, the lyric, and every other kind of spiritual and imaginative book. In every corner the spirits lurk, ready to spring upon us unaware. We are ghost-ridden. The witches tear us. Our life is no longer our own. It has become a nebula of alien dreams. O wretched men that we are! Who shall deliver us from the body of these shades?
To what can we look? Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves. In the end, Nature may adjust their birthrate. But at what cost, after how cruel a struggle for existence! Might not teachers of eugenics do something drastic, and at once? Critics are the teachers of spiritual eugenics. Could not a few timely words from them hold the productive powers of certain brains in check? It is easily said, but the result is very doubtful. Mr. Walkley, in an unintentionally despairing article in the Times, once maintained that the critics were powerless to stem the increasing flood that pours in upon us, like that hideous stream of babies that Mr. Wells once saw pouring down some gutter or rain-pipe. Mr. Walkley said no real and industrious artist ever stops to listen to criticism. He said the artist simply cannot help it; the creature is bound to go on creating, whatever people say. Mr. Walkley went further, and told us the critic himself is an artist; that he also cannot help it, but is bound to create. So we go on from bad to worse, the creative artist not only producing shadows on his own account, but the shades of shadows through the critics. Our state is becoming a bewildered horror; and yet we cannot deny that Mr. Walkley was right, though we may regard his pessimism as exaggerated. There are one or two cases on record in which criticism, or the fear of it, has really checked the production of peculiarly sensitive and fastidious minds. I will not mention Keats, for after the savage and Tartarly article he went on producing in greater quantity and finer quality than ever before, and would have so continued but for a very natural death. Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed, is a happier instance. And there may here and there also have been a poet or novelist like that "Pictor Ignotus" of Browning's, who cried:
Ye praise so!"
He would have had a painter's fame:
Have scared me, like the revels through a door
Of some strange house of idols at its rites!
This world seemed not the world it was, before:
Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped
... Who summoned those cold faces that begun
To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped
Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun,
They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!"
Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her. Wordsworth seems to have read his critics, but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no heed. "Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet," he called them:
feeble to grapple with him;—men of palsied imagination and
indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid,
who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many,
are greedy after vicious provocatives;—judges, whose censure
is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!"
In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in Christopher North for Tennyson:
I forgave you all the blame;
I could not forgive the praise,
Rusty Christopher!"
On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics. Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the others is too self-confident for prudence to smother. Obviously, they care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for Malthus. They disregard them. The most savage criticism only confirms their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain. Against such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make? May we not advise them to drop the old method of frontal attack altogether? Let them adopt the methods of these new teachers of Eugenics, whom we have described as insisting on quality. For the teachers of Eugenics, as I understand, do not go about saying, "O parents, what inferior and degenerate children you have! How goose-faced, rabbit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, pot-bellied, spindle-shanked, and splay-footed they are! It was a most anti-social action to produce these puny monstrosities, and when you found yourselves falling in love, you ought to have run to opposite antipodes." That, I believe, is no longer the method of the Eugenic teacher. He now shows beforehand wherein the beauty and excellence of human development may lie. He insists upon quality, he raises a standard, he diffuses an unconscious fastidiousness of selection. He does not prevent Tom and Sal from falling in love, but he makes Tom, and especially Sal, less satisfied with the first that comes, less easily bemused with the tenth-rate rubbish of a man or girl.
By similar methods, it seems to us, the critics might even now relieve humanity from the oncoming host of spirits that threatens to overwhelm us. They find it useless to tell creative writers how hideous and mis-begotten their productions are—how deeply tainted with erotics, neurotics, hysteria, consumption, or fatty degeneration. Either the writers do not listen, or they reply, "Thank you, but neurotics and degeneracy are in the fashion, and we like them." Let the critics change their method by widely extending their action. Let them insist upon quality, and show beforehand what quality means. Let them rise from the position of reviewers, and apply to the general thought of the world that critical power of which Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote:
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him
towards perfection by making his mind dwell upon what is
excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things."
Such criticism, if persisted in by all critics for a generation, would act as so wholesome and tonic a course of Eugenic instruction, would so strongly insist upon quality, and so widely diffuse an unconscious fastidiousness of selection, that the locust cloud of phantoms which now darken the zenith might be dissipated, and again we should behold the sky which is the home of stars. For we may safely suppose that excellence will never be super-abundant, nor quality be found in hordes. No one can tell how fine, how fit, and few the children of our creative artists might then become. But, as in prophetic vision, we can picture the rarity of their beauty, and when they come knocking at our door, we will share with them the spiritual food that they demand from our brains, and give them a drink of our brief and irrevocable time.
XXXII
There are minds that run to maxims as Messrs. Holloway and Beecham ran to pills. From the fields and mines of experience they cull their secret ingredients, concentrate them in the alembic of wit, mould them into compact and serviceable form, and put them upon the market of publicity for the universal benefit of mankind. Such essence of wisdom will surely cure all ills; such maxims must be worth a guinea a box. When the wise and the worldly have condensed their knowledge and observation into portable shape, why go further and pay more for a medicine of the soul, or, indeed, for the soul's sustenance? Pills, did we say? Are there not tabloids that supply the body with oxygen, hydrogen, calorics, or whatever else is essential to life in the common hundredweights and gallons of bread, meat, and drink? Why not feed our souls on maxims, like those who spread the board for courses of a bovril lozenge apiece, two grains of phosphorus, three of nitrogen, one of saccharine, a dewdrop of alcohol, and half a scruple of caffeine to conclude?
It is a stimulating thought, encouraging to economy of time and space. We read to acquire wisdom, and no one grudges zeal in that pursuit. But still, the time spent upon it, especially in our own country, is what old journalists used to call "positively appalling," and in some books, perhaps, we may draw blank. Read only maxims, and in the twinkling of an eye you catch the thing that you pursue. It is not "Wisdom while you wait"; there is no waiting at all. It is a "lightning lunch," a "kill" without the risk and fatigue of hunting. The find and the death are simultaneous. And as to space, a poacher's pocket will hold your library; where now the sewers of Bloomsbury crack beneath the accumulating masses of superfluous print, one single shelf will contain all that man needs to know; and Mr. Carnegie's occupation will be gone.
For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen's re-issue of an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld's Maxims, edited by Mr. George Powell. The book is a little large for tabloids. It runs to nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently divided by ten or even by a hundred. But still, as Rochefoucauld is the very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion. He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bacon—great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century, who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real inventors of maxims. Their sugar-coating was spread too thick. Often their teaching was sugar to the core—a sweetmeat, not a pill; or, like the fraudulent patents in the trade, it revealed soft soap within the covering, and nothing more. George Meredith had a natural love of maxims, and an instinct for them. One remembers the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in Richard Feverel, and the Old Buccaneer in The Amazing Marriage. But usually his maxims want the bitter tang:
"For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained
to Him; that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with
their strength."
"No regrets; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow."
"My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my
temper."
One sees at once that these are not medicinal maxims, but excellent advice—concentrated sermons, after our English manner. "Friends may laugh: I am not roused. My enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night"—that has a keener flavour. So has "Never forgive an injury without a return blow for it." Among the living, Mr. Bernard Shaw is sometimes infected by an English habit of sermonising. "Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a sermon. But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste. These from The Revolutionist's Handbook, for instance, are true maxims:
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity."
"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The
distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."
"Home is the girl's prison, and the woman's workhouse."
"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."
But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as Chamfort to the Master himself. There is a difference. If Chamfort brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised:
pas l'instinct ou la fierté de l'éléphant, qui ne se reproduit pas
dans la servitude."
"Otez l'amour-propre de l'amour, il en reste très peu de
chose."
"Il n'y a que l'inutilité du premier déluge qui empêche
Dieu d'en envoyer un second."
"L'homme arrive novice à chaque âge de la vie."
"Sans le gouvernement on ne rirait plus en France."
With a difference, these come very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read. "Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for his own Sake": so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, just as there is no escape from Meredith's Egoist. All of us move darkly in that awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, "When a Man hath travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable part of the Map." On the belief that self-love prompts and pervades all actions, the greater part of the maxims are founded. The most famous of them all is the saying that "Hypocrisy is a sort of Homage which Vice pays to Virtue," but there are others that fly from mouth to mouth, and treat more definitely of self-love. "The reason why Ladies and their Lovers are at ease in one another's company, is because they never talk of anything but themselves"; or "There is something not unpleasing to us in the misfortunes of our best friends." These are, perhaps, the three most famous, though we doubt whether the last of them has enough truth in it for a first-rate maxim. Might one not rather say that the perpetual misfortunes of our friends are the chief plague of existence? Goethe came nearer the truth when he wrote: "I am happy enough for myself. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for others, I am not happy." But Rochefoucauld had to play the cynic, and a dash of cynicism adds a fine ingredient to a maxim.
Nevertheless, after reading this book of Maxims through again, all the seven hundred and more (a hideous task, almost as bad as reading a whole volume of Punch on end), I incline to think Rochefoucauld's reputation for cynicism much exaggerated. It may be that the world grows more cynical with age, unlike a man, whose cynical period ends with youth. At all events, in the last twenty years we have had half a dozen writers who, as far as cynicism goes, could give Rochefoucauld fifty maxims in a hundred. In all artificial and inactive times and places, as in Rochefoucauld's France, Queen Anne's England, the London of the end of last century, and our Universities always, epigram and a dandy cynicism are sure to flourish until they often sicken us with the name of literature. But in Rochefoucauld we perceive glimpses of something far deeper than the cynicism that makes his reputation. It is not to a cynic, or to the middle of the seventeenth century in France, that we should look for such sayings as these:
does from other People."
"Eloquence is as much seen in the Tone and Cadence of
the Eyes, and the Air of the Face, as in the Choice of proper
Expressions."
"When we commend good Actions heartily, we make them
in some measure our own."
Such sayings lie beyond the probe of the cynic, or the wit of the literary man. They spring from sympathetic observation and a quietly serious mind. And there is something equally fresh and unexpected in some of the sayings upon passion:
in persuading."
"It is not in the Power of any the most crafty Dissimulation
to conceal Love long where it really is, nor to counterfeit it
long where it is not."
"Love pure and untainted with any other Passions (if such
a Thing there be) lies hidden in the Bottom of our Heart, so
exceedingly close that we scarcely know it ourselves."
"The more passionately a Man loves his Mistress, the readier
he is to hate her." (Compare Catullus's "Odi et amo.")
"The same Resolution which helps to resist Love, helps to
make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled
Minds are always driven about with Passions, but never absolutely
filled with any."
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 passion," 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.
XXXIII
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 passed 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 assured. 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 passion 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 casement 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 Shelley in the blue water, with mind still full of the Greek poet whom he tucked against his heart; to pass 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 impassioned 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:
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."
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 passion, 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 hoarse 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 petition 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.
XXXIV
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 passing 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 God, lifts up his eyes unto the heavens, where prone 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 repetition 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 space 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 compassionate, 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 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:
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:
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:
The springs of life? Come thou not back to birth!
Cast out the passionate 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 carcass—"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 space inside a bowl is merged into the element of space 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 noblest 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 pass 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.