I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who fight their battles at the base. He is invented because these naïve people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a hero. But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being brave if you had no fear. The real victory of the hero is not over outward circumstance, but over himself. One of the bravest men of our time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. By sheer will he beat down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man who knew no fear. But the very essence of his heroism was that he had fought fear and won.
It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything discreditable in knowing fear. You might as well say that there is something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood. The virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to lie and yet telling the truth. And the more you are tempted the more splendid is the resistance. Without temptation you may make a plaster saint, but not a human hero. That is why the familiar story of Nelson when a boy—"Fear! grandmother. I never saw fear. What is it?"—is so essentially false. Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by man. They were brave to the brink of recklessness. The whole episode of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the dictates of prudence. On the facts one would be compelled to admit that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance. When the issue was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster, he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore. It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call camouflage. When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. "This," said he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal." With such triumphant self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in view. But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in Southey's "Life of Nelson."
That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well. At the age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed." He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing, and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my boy.' I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I tried? 'But you won't do it again?' she said. I replied, 'Of course not—where would be the fun?'"
It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came. Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind. I was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the country the other day. It had been empty since the beginning of the war. Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade. On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried, "We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined." Then he went out and shot himself. Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any other.
In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that grows by brooding. There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling upon fear. He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who had stared insolently at a lady who was with him. His action led to a challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning. When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors as a marksman. As the night advanced he passed through all the stages from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn he found a corpse. Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape the terrors of his mind.
It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear. Give them only a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference of disastrous consequences. It is not a bad thing in this world to be born a little dull and unimaginative. You will have a much more comfortable time. And if you have not taken that precaution, you will do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies. Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom. In the romantic theatre of his mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its contents, but by its address. My name (for the purposes of this article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson. Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p." When I see it wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance altogether disproportioned to the fact. I know that taken in the lump the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons. There is not a pin to choose between us. In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson and that man called himself Thompson. Why he should have spatchcocked a "p" into his name I don't know. I daresay it was pride on his part, just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist. He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist was asked to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell." That is probably the case of the Thompsons. They don't know how to spell.
But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. We feel an outrage on our names as if it were an outrage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led to one of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some American publisher had pirated one of his books. But it was not the theft that angered him so much as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book advertised as the work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled. It is so easy to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is full length on the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he! He calls me Stephenson." I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson. Thompson, indeed!
I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford. He was addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers (whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "Do I look like a person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on. And as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like a person of the name of Thompson? Now do I?" And yet I suppose one may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I should like to try the experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. I should like to address him as Sir Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys us when people play tricks with our names. We want to be ourselves and not somebody else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and the fathers that begat us. We may not know much about our ancestors, and may not care much about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the position of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," he said, "were looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I only got as far back as my great-grandfather,who disappeared somewhere about the time of the Assizes." If we go far enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes, or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those fellows, the Thompsons.
And there is another reason for the annoyance. To misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer him the subtlest of all insults—especially if he is a Scotsman. The old prides and hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by calling him Mr. M'Donald orvice versa. Indeed, I recall the case of a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as Thompson makes me boil.
Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. I like a man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house of the Duke of Northumberland. He even put the Percy arms on his monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche. I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually "something rotten about him," as Johnson would say. He stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste." When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de Sisac)." On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac." Changing residence again, he dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
It is possible of course to go to the other extreme—to err, as it were, on the side of honesty. I know a lady who began life with the maiden name of Bloomer. She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington. Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd, whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd. She is still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health. Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into a single line on the envelope. I see the time approaching when I shall have to turn over and write, let us say,
handwritten "Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd"
handwritten "Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd"
There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all this. It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others. After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it is the better.
But the spirit of the thing is right. Let us avoid disguises. Let us stick to our names, be they ever so humble. Let us follow the great example of Cicero. His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a vetch—cicer. When he was standing for public office some anxious friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious than the Scauri or Catuli. And grandly did he redeem the promise. The Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next door neighbour. It is a good precedent for Thomson. I have a mind to make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the Pyramids. And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."
A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day. He observed two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape. It was quite a nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant. Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "Why, this is not the Leader picture at all," said she. "It is No. So-and-so." And forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures before that.
Now I am not going to make fun of these people. I am not going to make fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their infirmity. If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain. We are most of us second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to think. They had the luck to find themselves out. Probably it did not do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to be. They had been taught—heaven help them!—to admire those vacant prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at last they fought a duel. And as they lay dying on the ground one of them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of them." "Nor I either," said the other. Then they expired. I do not suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. Men are always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand. Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of our own on any subject of the mind. We think in flocks and once in the flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of mind. Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he behaved to the poet like a cad. Yet the poems were far more wonderful as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would have been as the productions of a man of sixty. The literary world of the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture into the deepest pit of oblivion. Yet, as poetry, it was as good or bad—I have never read it—in the one case as in the other.
There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this subject. In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. It was printed in the papers as an example of bad French. "Wherever did these military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous phrases?" In his own literary circles Anatole France himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters. The critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of Michelet. Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at his best, from Michelet in his finest period. How the great sceptic must have enjoyed that evening!
It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are afraid to think. It is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed in thinking independently. We only succeed in getting into other flocks. Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the "advanced" people singing their praises. They were not real praises that expressed genuine feeling. They were the artificial enthusiasms of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion. They would rave over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion—rather than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had no meaning.
We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or our own judgment. We want some authority to lean up against, and when we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table. I would rather a man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. I once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that writer." I smiled at his naïveté, but I respected his courage. He couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend that he could. That is far better than the affectations with which men conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of being burned. Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical established thought can be. Aristotle was almost as sacred as the Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed against the Logic of the Organon." We have liberated thought from the restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and integrity. We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we follow the fashions in hats.
The evil, I suppose, lies in our education. We standardise our children. We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching them to be themselves—new incarnations of the human spirit, new prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world. We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom. They are not in fear of the stake, but they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day. The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom. It only thrives under suppression. We need to have our liberties taken away from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.
I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in that task. It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn. The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard. I carried some of the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice and had forgotten the trick. The saw would go askew, the points would dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
Then I remembered. You are over-doing it, I said. You are making a mess of the job by too much energy—misdirected energy. The trick of sawing wood is to work within your strength. You are starting at it as if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke. It is the mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania. They bit off more than they could chew. You are biting off more than you can chew, and you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you see. The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand, to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to take your time and to avoid too much energy. "Gently does it," is the motto.
It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting. I suppose I am one of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit. We want a thing done, but we cannot wait to do it. We rush at the task with all our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance against the perversity of things. It reminds me of the remark which a professional made to me at the practice nets long ago. He was watching a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself. "He would make a good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three balls at once." Recall any really great bowler you have known and you will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of ease and reserve power. He was never spending up to the hilt. There was always something left in the bank. I do not speak of the medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth. With all their physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had something in hand. There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically. The temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility. And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of the art reveal itself. He will mow for three hours on end with never a pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his hip pocket. What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful leisureliness of his action! You could go to sleep watching him, and you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning. There is the experience of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis. At the bottom, all that John Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once. He is always master of his job.
And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it were, too high? You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your futility. You are playing over your strength. You are screaming at the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly. Then perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers, and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right flight and just the right direction and just the right length. And you purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is moderation.
It is so in all things. The man who wins is the man who keeps cool, whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the impression that there is more in him than ever comes out. I have seen many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting it. What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of his style? There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same authority and finality of speech. He conveys the sense of a mind disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest, understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves controversy silent. Take his indictment of Germany as an example. It was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany. Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a word of extravagance or violence. It was the naked truthfulness of it that was so terrible and unanswerable.
And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his experiences in the first great battle of the Somme. Yet the characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any straining after effect. He just left the thing he described to speak for itself in all its bare horror. It was a lesson we people who write would do well to remember. Let us have fewer adjectives, good people, fewer epithets. Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun. It is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable. Was it not Stendhal who used to read theCode Napoléononce a year to teach him its severity of style?
*****
It is still raining. I will return to the barn and practise the philosophy of moderation on those logs.
A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. There was no affectation of bravado in the remark. He made it quite simply, as if he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected him, but its insanitariness. Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. "It makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war. "I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though recalling the past.
I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has been struck by this attitude of mind towards death. I remember a friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown to pieces by his side. "It is as though war develops another integument," he said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part of a machine that has no feelings—only functions."
In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of us. There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the last two and a half years. If the ghostly army of the slain were to file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by. And if behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the vast procession would not be in sight. If we had been asked three years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers—such of them as trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts. That is certainly done. You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a skilfully arranged entertainment—in which one attractive "turn" follows another in swift succession. Once they actually showed a man falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage. Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us of the reality behind this pictured imposture. There has never been a lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the Red Harvest. We are like the dyer's hand. We are subdued to what we work in. Even those who have been directly stricken find that they bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves. We have got into a new habit of thought about death—in a sense a truer habit of thought. It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible divinity. It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent. We accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud of tragic fear and strangeness. The heart seems steeled to the blows of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of years that, at the most, is soon told.
It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings will resume their sway. But it will be long before they recover their former tyranny over the mind. This generation has companioned Death too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old. And that, I think, is a gain. I have always felt that Johnson's morbid attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of mental disease. Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he should not reach home alive. But he was quite healthy in his thought. It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught unawares.
In this, as in most things, Cæsar shone with that grand sanity that makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history. He neither sought death nor shunned it. When Hirtius and Pansa remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of death." That is the common-sense attitude—as remote from the spirit of the miser as from that of the spendthrift. And that other comment of his on death is equally deserving of recall. He was dining the night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined the conspiracy against him. As he sat dispatching his letters, the others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable. One of the group asked Cæsar what death he would prefer. He looked up from his papers and said, "That which is least expected." This was not an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland, the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died suddenly." It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an incident of the journey.
Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory. As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch entered to ask the watchword. "Æquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his face to the everlasting shadow."
With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its noblest expression. It faced the shadow without illusions and without fear. It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an implacable fact to be faced implacably. Sir Thomas More met it like a bridegroom. In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower. Who can read that moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's wife) without catching its pity and its glory? "In good faythe, Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me that should rather have comforted him." And when Sir Thomas Pope comes early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings—"Quiet yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse eternally." And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common fellow: the executioner). What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a benefitt? Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his executyoner thirtye peeces of golde.... And soe was he by Maister Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the place of execution. Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge down let me shift for myselfe. Then desired he all the people there aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke Churche. Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed, turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.' So passed Sir Thomas More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may be left to share the crown of noble dying.
I had rather a shock to-day. I was sitting down to write an article on a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor ofThe Star, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more attractive hare. It was a letter announcing my lamented demise. There was no doubt about it. There was the date and there was the name (a nice name, too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black and white. And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had adorned.
Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated." I am not dead. I am not half dead. I am not even feeling poorly. I had a tooth out a week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for ever so long. I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance. Moreover, as all the people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even if I had been on board. And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the previous port of call. It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend that I wasn't saved. I was. But though I am most flagrantly and aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of myself as if I were dead. I find it quite an agreeable diversion. Not that I am morbid. I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for Beginners." You may remember the chapter. If not, it is short enough to repeat:
What I like about CliveIs that he is no longer alive.There's something to be saidFor being dead.
That is overdoing the thing. What I find agreeable is being alive and thinking I am dead. You have the advantage of both worlds, so to speak. In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears over myself. I have wept at my own grave-side. I have composed my own obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving piece of work. I have met my friends and condoled with them over my decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they were quite nice. Some of them made me think that I might write up the obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous, kindly, wise, humorous, generous character—in a word, let myself go a bit more. Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I was one of the people that he could do without. But then Old Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead. I discounted Grumpington. I took no notice of Grumpington—the beast.
And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case no subject for tears. After all, said I, the world is not such a gay place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it. I have left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate, too, in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me. "What dreams may come!" Well, so be it. I have no fear of the dreams of death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like a nightmare. If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better dreams. If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks. If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well. "I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters, "and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome." And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament....
Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If you prick me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I shall still write.
I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my companion pointed to a group—a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper, two women and a child—sitting on a seat on the platform. "There they are," he said. "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless, you'll find them sitting there." "What for?" I asked. "Oh, in case there's a raid. They are taking things in time; they are running no risks. You'll see a few at most stations." And as the train passed from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular, and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.
There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger, but these good people carry apprehension to excess. We need not underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves ridiculous about them. So far as the average individual life is concerned they are almost negligible. Assuming that the circumference of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone of danger. But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs. Let us assume, however, that they get up to an average of twenty bombs. It will be over three hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril. I do not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the streets when a raid is on. It is true I may not get my turn for three hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my turn has come. So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody. It is foolish to take risks that you need not take. But it is not less foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform, not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.
This is carrying the fear of death to extremities. I have referred to Cæsar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger. In the end he was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live. You may, of course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess. Smalley, in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that champagne." "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington. "Then why do you do it?" "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not anticipate."
I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms. He was not refusing, like Cæsar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain misery. It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living, which is quite another thing. But at least he got a present pleasure for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers, and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at all. They only exist. They are like Chesterfield in his later years. "I am become a vegetable," he said. "I have been dead twelve years, but I don't want any one to know about it." Those people in the Tube are quite dead, although they don't know about it. What is more, they have never been alive.
You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly. You know that the Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves of the past. Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your heels. A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window. You can't take a ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy. I have myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his companion at the wicket. Why, those people so forlornly dodging death in the Tube were not out of the danger zone. They were probably in more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality, and incubating death than they would have been going about their reasonable tasks in the fresh air above. You may die from the fear of death. I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously." There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you are. The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously. Life is a dangerous calling, full of pitfalls. You, getting the coal in the mine by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at hand. You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the ship stoking the fire—all alike are in an adventure that may terminate at any moment. Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in, not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand, declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our steps.