Part 28 (1/2)
As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights.
She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been awaiting me.
[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:--
”Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, St.i.tch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy--whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.”
NOVEMBER.
Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?
In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in Devons.h.i.+re, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun--an old muzzle-loader. Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her acquaintance she pa.s.sed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended--good housewife that she was--down to the last small office.
In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to public wors.h.i.+p and acquainted me with h.e.l.l. From my eighth to my twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with h.e.l.l, and would wake up in the night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no very vivid fear for myself--or if vivid it was but occasional and rare.
Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but I had a desperate a.s.surance that both my parents were d.a.m.ned, and I loved them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood was tormented with visions of h.e.l.l derived from the pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived from my reading--the ghost of an evil old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, _The Tapestried Room_, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's _Diary of a Late Physician_. I had happened on these horrors among the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.
For three or four years these companions--the vision of h.e.l.l particularly and my parents in it--murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never been troubled at all by h.e.l.l or the fear of it.
The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one, or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the first . . . and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things with the serious.
There has been no great loss, though--apart from the missing of sociableness--if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the a.n.a.logies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without resort to a.n.a.logy. But there are good and bad a.n.a.logies, and of all bad ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the flower.
”The flowers that we behold each year In chequer'd meads their heads to rear, New rising from the tomb; The eglantines and honey daisies, And all those pretty smiling faces That still in age grow young-- Even those do cry That though men die, Yet life from death may come,”
Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not _in pari materia_; that all the true correspondence between man and the flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him--all in this world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to another after all its a.n.a.logies have been met and satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are, one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow ”not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain,” so G.o.d will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form hereafter. Objections may be urged against this ill.u.s.tration: I am only concerned to point out that it ill.u.s.trates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric.
Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours--or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, ”And pray what would become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made everlasting?” As Jowett asked, with his usual dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the _Phaedo_--
”What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . To beings const.i.tuted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of h.e.l.l, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them.”
This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks--the fallacy of using 'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms.
He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of time at all, but an absolute negation of it.
There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private journal (1883):--
”After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, G.o.d, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being.”
It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview--these two, aged and great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pa.s.s into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.
This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but because--to quote Jowett again--”considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another.”
I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument, and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts--and especially if we have children, as at forty every man ought--our centre of gravity has completely s.h.i.+fted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous and charitable comprehension.
Of all the opening pa.s.sages in Plato--master of beautiful openings--I like best that of the _Laws_. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the three persons of the dialogue--strangers to one another, but bound on a common pilgrimage--join company and fall into converse together. One is an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are elderly.
Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.
”It will pa.s.s the time pleasantly,” he suggests; ”for I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is considerable, and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty trees which will protect us from the scorching sun. Being no longer young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation.”