"The King Of Terrors"

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Title:     "The King Of Terrors"
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

Skulls may not affright us, nor present fashion ordain cross-bones upon our sepulchres; but still in the face of death the commonplaces of comfort shrivel, and philosophy's consolations strike cold as the symbolism of the tomb. All that lives must die; we know it, but that death is common does not assuage particular grief, nor can the contemplation of prehistoric ruins soften regret for one baby's smile. Man's dogma has proved vain as his philosophy. Age after age has composed some vision of continued life, and sought to allay its fear or sorrow with suitable imaginations. Mummies of death outlive their granite; vermilion and the scalping-knife lie ready for the happy hunting grounds; beside the royal carcass two score of concubines and warriors are buried quick; Walhalla rings with clashing swords whose wounds close up again at sunset; heroes tread the fields of shadowy asphodel, and on Elysian plains attenuated poets welcome the sage newcomer to their converse; houris reward the faithful for holy slaughter; prophets reveal a gorgeous city and pearly gates beyond the river; the poet tells of circles winding downward to the abyss, and upward to the Rose of Paradise; upon the bishop's tomb in St. Praxed's one Pan is carved, and Moses with the tables; upon the gravestone of an Albanian chief they scratch his rifle and his horse; and over the slave's low mound in Angola plantations his basket and mattock are laid, lest he should miss them. So various are the devices contrived for the solace of mankind, or for his instruction. But one by one, like the dead themselves, those devices have passed and passed away, leaving mankind unwitting and unconsoled. For there is still one road that each traveller must discover afresh, and death's door, at which all men stand, opens only inwards.

Maurice Maeterlinck has always remained very conscious of that door. How often in his whispering dramas we are made aware of it! How often, without even the knock of warning, it suddenly gapes or stands ajar, and unseen hands are pulling, and children are drawn in, and young girls are drawn in, and wise men, and the old, while the living world remains outside, still at breakfast, still busy with its evening games and sewing, still blindly groping for its departed guide! From the outset, Maeterlinck has been an amateur of death. In a little volume that bears Death's name, he utters his meditation upon death's nature and significance. Like other philosophers and all old wives, he also attempts our consolation. Mankind demands a consolation, for without it, perhaps, the species could hardly have survived their foreknowledge of the end. But in treating the first two terrors to which he applies his comfortable arguments, Maeterlinck's reasoning appears to me almost irrelevant, almost obsolete. He attributes the terrified apprehension of death, first, to the fear of pain in dying, and, secondly, to the fear of anguish hereafter. In neither fear, I think, does the essential horror of death now lie. All who have witnessed various forms of death, whether on the field or in the sick chamber, will agree that the process of dying is seldom more difficult or more painful than taking off one's clothes. The blood ebbs, the senses sleep, "the casement slowly grows a glimmering square," breath gradually fails, unconsciousness faints into deeper unconsciousness, and that is all. Even in terrible wounds and cases of extreme pain, medicine can now alleviate the worst, nor, in any case, do I believe that the expectation of physical agony, however severe, has much share in the instinct that stands aghast at death. If fear of pain thus preoccupied the soul, martyrs would not have sown the Church, nor would births continue.

In combating the dread of future torment, Maeterlinck may have better cause for giving comfort. Long generations have been haunted by that terror. "Ay, but to die," cries Claudio in _Measure for Measure_:

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!"

Nor were such terrors mediaeval only. Till quite recent years they cast a gloom over the existence of honourable and laborious men. Remember that scene in Oxford when Dr. Johnson, with a look of horror, acknowledged that he was much oppressed by the fear of death, and when the amiable Dr. Adams suggested that God was infinitely good, he replied:

"'As I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned' (looking dismally). Dr. Adams: 'What do you mean by damned?' Johnson (passionately and loudly): 'Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.'"

No one disputes that for many ages the lives of even the just and good were burdened by such oppressive fears. Perhaps, indeed, the just and good were more burdened than the wicked; for to the wicked their own sins seldom appear so deadly black, and when a Balkan priest lately displayed pictures of eternal torment as warnings to a savage mountaineer's enormities, he was met by the reply, "Even we should not be so cruel." But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck's reassurances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death. Was there not, at all events, one strenuous Canon of the Established Church who defiantly proclaimed that he would rather be damned than annihilated?

"Men fear death," says Bacon's familiar sentence; "men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark." It is not the dread of pain and torment; it is the dark that terrifies; it is Kingsley's horror of annihilation; it is the hot life's fear of ceasing to be. I grant that many are unconscious of this fear. In word, at all events, there are multitudes, perhaps the greater part of mankind, who long for the annihilation of self, who direct their lives by the great hope of becoming in the end absorbed into the Universe. Their perpetual prayer is to be rid of personality at the last, no matter through what strange embodiments the self must pass before it reach the bliss of nothingness. Similar, though less doctrinal, was the prayer of Job when he counted himself among those who long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave. "Why died I not from the womb?" he cried:

"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I
should have slept; then, had I been at rest, with kings
and counsellors of the earth, which built solitary
places for themselves."

How far the loss of personal consciousness by absorption into universal infinity is identical with the eternal rest desired by Job might be long disputed. Sir Thomas Browne, having heard of the Brahmin or Buddhist conceptions of futurity, would draw a thin distinction:

"Others," he says, "rather than be lost in the uncomfortable
night of nothing, were content to recede into the common
being; and make one particle of the public soul of all
things, which was no more than to return into their unknown
and divine original again."

In effect this doctrine comes very near Maeterlinck's plea of comfort. Annihilation, he says, is impossible, because nothing is destructible. But when confronted with the eternal antinomy of death, that both the end and the survival of personality are equally inconceivable, he hesitates. He admits that survival without consciousness would be the same as the annihilation o self (in which case he maintains death could be no evil, bringing only eternal sleep). But he rejects this solution as flattering only to ignorance, and has visions of a new ego collecting a fresh nucleus round itself and developing in infinity. For the "narrow ego" which we partly know--the humble self of memories and identity, the soul that sums up experience into some kind of unity--he expresses considerable contempt, as a frail and forgetful thing; and he seeks to waft us away into an intellect devoid of senses, which he says almost certainly exists, and into an infinity which is "nothing if it be not felicity."

I do not know. A man may say what he pleases about intellect devoid of senses, or about the felicity of infinity. One statement may be as true as the other, or the reverse of both may be true. Talk of that kind rests on no sounder basis than the old assertions about the houris and the happy hunting-grounds, and it brings no surer consolation. Even when Maeterlinck tells us that it is impossible for the universe to be a mistake, and that our own reason necessarily corresponds with the eternal laws of the universe, we may answer that we hope, and even believe, that he is right, but on such a basis we can found no certainty whatever. Nor does the self, when, warm with life, inspired with vital passion, and energising for its own fulfilment, it stands horrified before the gulf of death, fearing no conceivable torment, but only the cessation of its power and identity--at such a moment that inward and isolated self can derive no reassurance from the dim possibility of some future nucleus, under cover of which it may pass into the felicity of the universal infinite, stripped of its memory, its present personality, and its flesh.

Fear of annihilation, or of the loss of identity, which is the same thing, I take to be one of the remaining terrors in European minds meditating on death. Of all the imagined forms of survival, only one is obviously more horrible than the night of nothing, and that is the state in which Beethoven twangs a banjo and Gladstone utters the political forecasts of a distinguished journalist. It may be that my affection for the "narrow ego" is too violent, but, for myself, I do not find M. Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved. "No, no, no life," cries Lear:

"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!"

It is the cry of all mankind when love is thus slit in twain; nor is sorrow comforted because coral is made of love's bones, or violets spring from his flesh, and the vanished self is possibly absorbed into the felicity of an infinite and everlasting azure.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: "The King Of Terrors"

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