The Project Gutenberg eBook ofDeathThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: DeathAuthor: Maurice MaeterlinckTranslator: Alexander Teixeira de MattosRelease date: February 22, 2010 [eBook #31354]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: DeathAuthor: Maurice MaeterlinckTranslator: Alexander Teixeira de MattosRelease date: February 22, 2010 [eBook #31354]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Title: Death
Author: Maurice MaeterlinckTranslator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Author: Maurice Maeterlinck
Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Release date: February 22, 2010 [eBook #31354]
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH ***
E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland,and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team(http://www.pgdp.net)
Copyright, 1911ByMaurice MaeterlinckPublished, January, 1912All rights reserved
THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK INUNIFORM STYLE AND BINDINGESSAYSThe Treasure of the HumbleWisdom and DestinyThe Life of the BeeThe Buried TempleThe Double GardenThe Measure of the HoursDeathPLAYSSister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe BleueJoyzelle and Monna VannaThe Blue Bird, A Fairy PlayMary MagdalenePélléas and Mélisande, and Other PlaysPrincess MaleineThe Intruder, and Other PlaysAglavaine and SelysetteHOLIDAY EDITIONSThe text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned books.Our Friend the DogOld-Fashioned FlowersThe SwarmThe Intelligence of the FlowersChrysanthemumsThe Leaf of OliveThoughts from Maeterlinck
THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK INUNIFORM STYLE AND BINDING
ESSAYS
The Treasure of the HumbleWisdom and DestinyThe Life of the BeeThe Buried TempleThe Double GardenThe Measure of the HoursDeath
PLAYS
Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe BleueJoyzelle and Monna VannaThe Blue Bird, A Fairy PlayMary MagdalenePélléas and Mélisande, and Other PlaysPrincess MaleineThe Intruder, and Other PlaysAglavaine and Selysette
HOLIDAY EDITIONS
The text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned books.
Our Friend the DogOld-Fashioned FlowersThe SwarmThe Intelligence of the FlowersChrysanthemumsThe Leaf of OliveThoughts from Maeterlinck
Camera Portrait by E. O. Hoppé, London
CHAP.PAGEIOUR IDEA OF DEATH3IIA PRIMITIVE IDEA5IIIWE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OURIDEA OF DEATH10IVWE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICHGOES BEFORE12VTHE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTEDTO MAN ALONE14VITHE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGINGTHE PANGS OF DEATH17VIITHEIR ARGUMENT19VIIITHAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH21IXTHE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO DONOT BELONG TO DEATH25XWHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN INTOWHICH DEATH HURLS US, LET US FIRSTPUT RELIGIOUS FEARS FROM OUR MINDS29XIANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE33XIITHE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS37XIIIIT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE39XIVTHE SAME, CONTINUED45XVIF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOTBE DREADFUL48XVITHE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS51XVIITHE SAME, CONTINUED54XVIIITHE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME ATORTURE57XIXA NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS ANDDEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY60XXTHE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCHOUR MIND65XXIINFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR REASON68XXIIINFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR SENSES71XXIIIWHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE KNOW?74XXIVTHE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASONAND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT77XXVOUR FAITH IN INFINITY81XXVITHE SAME, CONTINUED84XXVIISHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?87XXVIIIQUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS?90XXIXTHE SAME, CONTINUED95XXXIT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWERTHEM99XXXIEVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT FROMSUFFERING102
I
It has been well said:
“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who amto die outright—of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]
T
That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But,though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces, which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes kindledonly to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength, I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence,grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable. And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to lean, give way like rushes beneath the weightof the last moments. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.
I
It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to learn to stand by it. He would say to death:
“I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming my master.”
He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried imageagainst which the last agony would not prevail and in which the phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?
T
The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making death grievous.”
Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it. Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life andnot of death. We easily forget the most cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts an end to them.
I
In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrorswhich the human soul has ever felt.
It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who, in Bossuet’s phrase, is “at bay with death,” is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctorsconsider it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as the highest law of human conscience.
O
One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from the incomparably moredreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one. Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the agony.
T
They, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter. If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days, or, at the utmost, a fewmonths of a life that will not be the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, “an extended death,” those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain. A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.
Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of another world.
I
Increased by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors’ reasons. And yet there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure out dropby drop the clemency and peace which they grudge and which they ought to lavish, dreading lest they should weaken the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of life that does not wish to give place to the coming quiet.
It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring. It is enough to state once more that all this does not concern death. It happens before it and below it. It is not the arrival of death, but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death, but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten up from every side at the approach of death, but not atits call; and, though they gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? All those strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are on this same side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other side. They are, for that matter, accidental and temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge only helps us to die in greater pain than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn against its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our misfortunes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowingthat it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be other things to consider, it will be possible to surround death with deeper delights and fairer dreams. Henceforth, in any case, once death is exonerated from all that goes before, it will be easier to face it without fear and to enlighten that which follows after.
D
Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The first has neither face nor shape and overshadows the whole region of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful and strikes all our senses. Let us first examine the latter.
Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it the same injustice at itsgoing as at its coming. Is it death that digs our graves and orders us to keep there that which was made to disappear? If we cannot think without horror of the fate of the beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit to some place unknown, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us? Death descends upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. And it is already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to prolong as much as we possibly can, as though we were persuaded that it is our onlysecurity against forgetfulness. I am well aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innoxious. Looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the hateful test. Purified by fire, the memory lives in the heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. Thefigure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart, but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the very background of life the great image upon which their eyes linger in consolation or despair.
T
There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us not delay in putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not one of them brings us a proof beforewhich a candid intelligence can bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things, that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty? He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is buttressed by propheciesand miracles no less uncertain. If not by our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some æsthetic or sentimental hazard? Or has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of acruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of its Author.
H
Here we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to break through its darkness—for man has the right to hope for that which he does not yet conceive—the only point that interests us, because it is situated in the little circle which ouractual intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.
Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this world.
Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom ofour flesh, not a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exist, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyze it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny. It is as contrary to the nature of ourreason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any case—and this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.
N
Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached this question in an essay onImmortality,[2]of which I will only reproduce an essential passage, contenting myself with supporting it with a few new considerations.
What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into the centre of the universe, the only point that matters inspace and time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is almost certain that an intellect devoid of senses, devoid of organs to create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which derived from our sensibility all that gave it life.
T
This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of its destruction, this ego is neither our mind nor our body, since we recognize that both are waves that flow away and are renewed incessantly. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or substance, for these are always in evolution, nor life, which is the cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for us to apprehend or define it, to tell where it dwells. When we try to go backto its last source, we find hardly more than a succession of memories, a series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled, attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. “As an English poet has very truly said, that which clamours aloud for eternity is the very part of me that will perish.”
It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively, that every reality of our life disappears before this phantom. It is a matter of utter indifference to us that throughout eternity our body or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air, star; it is likewise indifferent to us that our intellect should expand until it mixes with the life of the worlds, understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a few almostalways insignificant facts accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.
“I care not,” says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand nothing. “I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses: they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centre wherein lies the sensitive point which I feel to be all myself. They are now set loose, floating in space and time, and their fate is as unknown to me as that of the most distant constellations. Anything that occurs exists for me only upon condition that Ibe able to recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and precisely nowhere, which I turn like a mirror about this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it.”
Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is supplied by our senses; and even the images and words—which in reality are but images—by the aid of which it strives to tear itself from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could that mind remain what it was when there is nothing left to it of that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall itcarry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows itself only by grace of that body? A few memories of a life in common? Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space and in unlimited time?