The symbolic treatment of the theme of life after death is more effective and shows more literary art than the conventional pictures of Mrs. Ward’s and Mrs. Oliphant’s. No human vocabulary is able to describe immortality of glory or despair, hence it is more effective merely to suggest the thought by allegory or symbolism. Hawthorne gives us a symbolic morality in The Celestial Railroad, where he pictures the road between heaven and hell, drawing on Bunyan’s imagery to describe the landscape and characters. Apollyon is engineer and emits realistic blasts of smoke. Eugene Field[179] tells of a mother just entering heaven who asks an angel where she may find her little baby, dead long ago, to whom the angel whispers that she is the babe, grown to maturity in Paradise. Julian Hawthorne’s Lovers in Heaven is a symbolic picture of the after life, where a man just dead goes in search of the beloved he lost long before. He sees her on the far slope of a heavenly hill, but before he can reach her the devil appears to him in his own double, “the Satan of mine own self, the part of me wherein God had no share.” This is a quite modern concept of diabolism. But love struggles to save him, and he resists his evil self.
Ahrinziman, by Anita Silvani, shows lurid pictures of the world to come. In the Inferno of the Dark Star the soul sees the attendant genii of his life, each symbolizing some passion of his nature. There are horrible astral birds and beasts and combinations unknown to mortal biology, while vultures hover overhead and a foul astral odor fills the air. The spirits are of peculiar substance, for they fight and slay each other, some being torn to pieces. The soul is supposed to progress toward the Silver and later the Golden Star. Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds is a queer production, preaching the doctrine of psychical electricity, which is to be a sort of wonder-working magician, and in other novels she gives theories of radio-activity, a theosophical cure-all for this world and the next.
A Vision of Judgment, by H. G. Wells, is a satire on man’s judgment of sin and character and of destiny after death, showing the pettiness and folly of Ahab, proud of his sins, and the hypocrisy of a so-called saint, conceited over his self-torture. “At last the two sat side by side, stark of all illusions, in the shadow of the robe of God’s charity, like brothers.” The picture of God and the throne vanish and they behold a land austere and beautiful, with the enlightened souls of men in clean bodies all about him. This symbolic allegory setting forth the shallowness of human judgment as set against God’s clarity of vision and charity of wisdom is like Oscar Wilde’s The House of Judgment, a terrible piece of symbolism expressed in a few words. A soul who has been altogether evil comes at last before God to be judged. God speaks to him of his vileness, his cruelty, his selfishness, to all of which the soul makes confession of guilt.
And God, closing the book of the man’s Life, said, “Surely I will send thee into Hell. Even unto Hell will I send thee.”
And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”
And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and for what reason?”
“Because in Hell I have always lived,” answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.
And after a space God spake and said to the man, “Seeing that I may not send thee into Hell, I will send thee into Heaven. Surely unto Heaven I will send thee.”