That individual love should resent the thraldom of death may be unreasonable; but it is useless to ignore the fact of such resentment, or to proffer consolations which can neither convince nor console. From the earliest times the poets, above all others, have borne witness to love’s protest. Perhaps the most moving lyric in Roman literature is that short elegy written by Catullus at his brother’s grave, full of a deep passion which can hardly be conveyed in another tongue.
Borne far o’er many lands, o’er many seas,
On this sad service, brother, have I sped,
To proffer thee death’s last solemnities,
And greet, though words be vain, the silent dead:
For thou art lost, so cruel fate decrees;
Ah, brother, from my sight untimely fled!
Yet take these gifts, ordained in bygone years
For mournful dues when funeral rites befell;
Take them, all streaming with a brother’s tears:
And thus, for evermore—hail and farewell!
A similar cry is heard in that famous passage of Virgil, where the bereaved Orpheus refuses to be comforted for the loss of his Eurydice. And nearly two thousand years later we find Wordsworth, a Christian poet, echoing the same lamentation:
... When I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn,
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
Mark the reference to “years unborn.” Wordsworth was a believer in immortality; but immortality itself cannot restore what is past and gone. All the sages and seers and prophets, that have given mankind the benefit of their wisdom since the world began, have so far failed to provide the least crumb of comfort for the ravages of death, or to explain why love should be for ever built up to be for ever overthrown, and why union should always be followed by disseverance.
There may, of course, be a solution of this tragedy hereafter to be discovered by mankind; all that we know is that, as yet, no human being has found the clue to the mystery, or, if he has found it, has vouchsafed the knowledge to his fellow-mortals. For we must dismiss as idle the assertion that such things cannot be communicated in words. Anything that is apprehended by the mind can be expressed by the mouth—not adequately, perhaps, yet still, in some measure, expressed—and the reason why this greatest of secrets has never been conveyed is that, as yet, it has never been apprehended.
It is, doubtless, this lack of any real knowledge, of any genuine consolation, that drives mankind to seek refuge in the more primitive superstitions. Something more definite, more tangible, is not unnaturally desired; and therefore men turn to the assurances of what is called spiritualism—the refusal to believe that death, in the accepted sense, has taken place at all. This creed is at least free from the vagueness of the ordinary religious view of death. It is small comfort to be told that a lost friend is sitting transfigured, harp in hand, in some skiey mansion of the blest; but it might mitigate the bereavement of some mourners (not all) to converse with their lost one, and to learn that he exists in much the same manner, and with the same affections as before. Some who “prefer him earthly” are less likely to be disappointed in spiritualism than in any other philosophy; the danger is rather that they should find him too earthly—enjoying a cigarette, perhaps, as in a case mentioned in recent revelations of the spirit-life. This is literalness with a vengeance; but however ludicrous and incredible it may be, it is not—from the comforter’s point of view—meaningless; whereas it is unmeaning to tell a mourner that the loved one is not lost, to him, when the whole environment and fabric of their love are shattered and destroyed.
Is there, then—pending such fuller knowledge as mankind may hereafter gain—no present comfort for death’s tyranny? I have spoken of the poets as the champions of love against death; and it is perhaps in poetry, the poetry of love and death, that the best solace will be found—in that open-eyed and quite rational view of the struggle, which does not deny the reality of death, but asserts the reality of love. It is amusing to hear those who do not accept the orthodox creed as regards an after-life described as cold “materialists” and “sceptics.” For who have written most loftily, most spiritually, about death and the great emotions that are implied in the word—the religionists and “spiritualists,” who pretend to a mystic knowledge, or the great free-thinking poets, from the time of Lucretius to the time of Shelley and James Thomson? Can any “spiritualist” poetry match the great sublime passages of the De Rerum Naturâ, or, to come to our own age, of The City of Dreadful Night?
It is to the poets, then, not to the dogmatists, that we must look for solace; for, where knowledge is still unattainable, an aspiration is wiser than an assertion, and the theme of death is one which can be far better treated idealistically than as a matter of doctrine. In poetry, as nowhere else, can be expressed those manifold moods, and half-moods, in which the noblest human minds have sought relief when confronted by this mighty problem; and far more soothing than any unsubstantial promises of futurity is the charm that is felt in the magic of beautiful verse. In Milton’s words:
... I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of death.