'A simple childThat lightly draws its breath,And feels its life in every limb,What can it know of Death?'
'A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What can it know of Death?'
That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.
LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live again, if only to make sure of thatmagnum opus—just to realise those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?
SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you, Lector—such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding labour-house vast of being.'
But, Lector, you who love work so well—have you never heard tell of a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my Lector?—not tired at the endof a busy day, but tired in the morning, tired in the Memnonian sunlight, when larks and barrel-organs start on their blithe insistent rounds. No, the man who is tired of a morning sings not music-hall songs in his bedroom as he dashes about in his morning bath. But will you never want to go to bed, Lector? Will you be always like the children who hate to be sent to bed, and think that when they are grown up they will never go to bed at all? Yet in a few years' time how glad they are of the stray chance of bed at ten. May it not be so with sleep's twin-brother? In our young vigour, driven by a hundred buoyant activities, enticed by dream on dream, time seems so short for all we think we have to do; but surely when the blood begins to thin, and the heart to wax less extravagantly buoyant, when comfort croons a kettle-song whose simple spell no sirens of ambition or romance can overcome—don't you think that then 'bedtime' will come to seem the best hour of the day, and 'Death as welcome as a friend would fall'?
LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scriptor. You say my health, my youth, as you waggishly call it, puts me out of court. Yet surely your ill-health and low spirits just as surely vitiate your judgment?
SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most general among men. Was it not old age?—which, like youth, is independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the desire of rest.
LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain hours of its youth over again?—and would the old man not give all he possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?
SCRIPTOR. He would give everything—but the certainty of rest. After seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us in. Besides, age may not be sosure of the advantages of youth. All is not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its passions, but age has its comforts.
LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you? Have you looked on death face to face?
SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have—but once. It is now about five years ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem to lose the sense of his terror—nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to be known to be loved.
LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now it moves you toname; or is the memory too sad to recall?
SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died—a winter that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the beginning.
There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood, and after some struggle—for they were not born into that class which is denied the luxury of struggle—at length saw a little home bright in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong, suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought, was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and pray. Suddenly myfriend sent for me, and I saw with my own eyes what at a distance it had seemed impossible to believe. As I entered the house, with the fresh air still upon me, I spoke confidently, with babbling ignorant tongue. 'Wait till you see her face!' was all my poor stricken friend could say.
Ah! her face! How can I describe it? It was much sweeter afterwards, but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know, was not to know. How was one to talk to her—talk of being well again, and books and country walks, when she had soplainly done with all these things? How bear up when she, with a half-sad, half-amused smile, showed her thin wrists?—how say that they would soon be strong and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the fearful garments of death, changing before our eyes from ruddy familiar humanity into a being of another element, an element we dread as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the flesh crept. She was going to die.
Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial, maybe an operation?—for perhaps the pains of the body are the keenest, after all—those of the spirit are at least in some part metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.
Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice. Poor lad!—poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravestto stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to leave to their simple joys. And from that night to this I can never look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it, too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world, bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets, without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the last time and close my eyes for ever.
LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.
SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one reallyfeeland not be morbid? If one be morbid, one can still be brave.
LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere after death.
SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, wedesireall things.Who has not cried for the moon in his time? But what is the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish, however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to listen to the cry of our desires? Of course wewish it, wish it with a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise man bravely stifles. It would all be different if weknew.
LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of its probability?—and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been convinced of its truth.
SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability! O my Lector, what a poor substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking? Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as afact—a fact of which he has his own personal proof and knowledge—a scientific, not an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact,they are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.
LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for this dream, as you call it?—for what seems to me this sustaining faith?
SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness' by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise; but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being moralising, this belief in immortality is responsiblefor no inconsiderable portion of the wrong and misery of the world. It is the baneful narcotic which has soothed the selfish and the slothful from the beginning. It is that unlimited credit which makes the bankrupt. It simply gives us all eternity to procrastinate in. Instead of manfully eating our peck of dirt here and now, we leave it and all such disagreeables to the hereafter.
'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"As he threw his life away—What need to hoard?He could well affordTo squander his mortal day.With Eternity his, what need to care?—A sort of immortal millionaire.'
'He said, "I believe in Eternal Life,"
As he threw his life away—
What need to hoard?
He could well afford
To squander his mortal day.
With Eternity his, what need to care?—
A sort of immortal millionaire.'
LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other views from a poet.
SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to makefactssing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing of—for beautiful itis, however it be marred; with this wonderful life—and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such bitter pain; with suchcertaintiesfor his theme, we yet beg him to sing to us of shadows!
And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it—I would hang them as enemies of society.
LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point—you at leasthopefor immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?
SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,the probable profits of the invention—and not a word of the wonder of the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?
No! let us keep the Unseen—or, if it must be discovered, let the key thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.
No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is but one opinion uponthe moon—namely, our own. And if you think that science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon compounds'—God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its opinion upon matters so remote as the stars—or even the moon, which is comparatively near at hand?
Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad half-crown.
As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief—and no one was ever more intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports, whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your passage on thatcondition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a trifle the captain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to come back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than a glass or two of bright wine—indeed, when the captain is very kind, a flower will take you there and back in no time; if you want to stay whole days there, but still come back dreamy and strange, you may take a little dark root and smoke it in a silver pipe, or you may drink a little phial of poppy-juice, and thus you shall find the Land of Heart's Desire; but if you are wise and would stay in that land for ever, the terms are even easier—a little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of lead no bigger than a pea, and a farthing's-worth of explosive fire, and thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire for ever.
I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed againstthe quay like arms that were eager to strike and be done, and a bell was beating impatient summons to be gone. The dark captain stood ready on the bridge, and he looked into each of our faces as we passed on board. 'Is it for the long voyage?' he said. 'Yes! the long voyage,' I said—and his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.
At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never reach our port in the moon—so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.
Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a little hard ofthe captain; but those of us whose position was exactly the reverse, who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed were invested there, were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe on the captain who was taking us thither.
There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.
I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.
'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded oneither bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown rose, in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.
'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say, "No, I will notkeep silence. Mine is the voice she listens for in her sleep. She will wake again for no voice but mine. Dear one, awake, the morning of all mornings has come!"'
As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes; like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems. Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.
Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either inThe Yellow Book,The Nineteenth Century,The Cosmopolitan,The Westminster Gazette, orThe Realm, to the editors of which the writer is indebted for kind permission to reprint.