And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”
And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee unto Heaven, and for what reason?”
“Because, never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it!” answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.
The fact that a man’s thoughts make his heaven or his hell is brought out in a recent book, The Case of John Smith, by Elizabeth Bisland, where the central character receives a revelation while working at his typewriter one day. The message says, “Oh, Peevish and Perverse! How know you that you have not died elsewhere and that this is not the Heaven which there you dreamed? How know you that your Hell may not lie only in not recognizing this as Heaven?”
In many recent examples of allegory and symbolism we get suggestive impressions of the other life, of the soul’s realities. Some of these have the inevitable words, the fatal phrases that seem to penetrate into the real heaven and hell for us. The most remarkable instance of symbolic treatment of the after-life is in Souls on Fifth, by Granville Barker, where the spirits of the dead are represented as unable to rise above the level of the ideals they had held in life, and drift endlessly up and down the Avenue, some in the form of tarnished gilt, some with white plague spots of cowardice, or blisters of slanderous thoughts, some horny with selfishness, some with lines of secret cruelty. There are few squares but mostly irregular shapes of sin.
The purely humorous treatment of life after death, the comic pictures of heaven and hell, are of a piece with the humorous treatment of other phases of supernaturalism, and are distinctly modern. The flippant way in which sacred subjects are handled is a far cry from the heaven and hell of Dante and Milton. Modern writers slap the devil on the back, make fun of the archangels and appeal to the ridiculous in one-time sacred situations, with a freedom that would have made the Puritans gasp. For instance, St. Peter has been the butt of so many jokes that he is really hackneyed.
The Flying Dutchman, whom Brander Matthews introduces in his Primer of Imaginary Geography, and who says that the Wandering Jew is the only person he can have any satisfactory chats with now, speaks of knowing Charon, “who keeps the ferry across the Styx. I met him last month and he was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery.” He says that hell is now lighted by electricity and that Pluto has put in all the modern improvements. John Kendrick Bangs, in his House-boat on the Styx, brings together the shades of many illustrious persons; Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Socrates, Xantippe, Captain Kidd, and many others. From them we get pictures of the life after death and of their characteristic attitudes toward it and each other. He continues the situation in The Pursuit of the House-boat, as the redoubtable Captain Kidd makes off with the ship and the ladies, leaving all the men behind. But they follow the bold buccaneer and after exciting adventures reaching from the Styx to Paris, they recapture the fair. Carolyn Wells has recently given us a Styx River Anthology. In modern stories we visit the comic devil on his native heath, see him in his own home town, as in previous chapters we discussed him in his appearances on earth. Kipling’s The Last of the Stories shows us the Hades of literary endeavor, the limbo of lost characters, presided over by a large and luminous devil of fluent tongue. Kipling recognizes many persons from fiction, and sees various tortures in process. All do obeisance to the shade of Rabelais, the Master. Kipling is terrified by the characters he himself has brought into being and begs to hide his face from them. F. Marion Crawford gives us another glimpse of literary eternity,[180] where the spirits of learned personages meet and discuss life. A recent poem describes a meeting and dialogue in Hades between Chaucer and Cressida.
It is possibly Bernard Shaw who would be most liable to prosecution by the devil for lèse-majesté, for in Man and Superman, Mine Host of the Pit is represented as an affable gentleman who tries to make hell attractive to his guests, and exercises not the least constraint on their movements. They are free to leave him and go to heaven if they like,—he only warns them that they will find it tiresome. He converses with Don Juan and a couple of other blasé mortals, uttering Shavian iconoclasms with an air of courteous boredom. He is very different from the sinister personage of conventional fiction.