"It happeneth that most men set a stern countenance on the matter, look big, and speak stoutly, thereby to acquire reputation, which, if they chance to live, they hope to enjoy."
The case of our eloquent rhapsodists who hymn the joys of sudden and courageous death is evidently more favourable still, since they have every chance of living for a time, and so of enjoying a reputation for bravery without much risk. But rather than accuse mankind of purposely dissembling terror in the hope of braggart fame, we would lay the charge upon a queer divergence between the mind and the bodily will. No matter what the mind may say in commendation of swift and glorious death, the bodily will continues to maintain its life to the utmost, and is the last and savages enemy that the mind can overcome. So it is that no one should reckon beforehand upon courageous behaviour when the supreme summons for courage comes, and only those are faultlessly brave who have never known peril. In reason everyone is convinced that all mankind is mortal, and we hear with vague sympathy of the hosts of dead whose skulls went to pile the pyramids of Tamerlane, or of the thousands that the sea engulfs and earthquakes shatter. But few realise that the life of each among those thousands was as dear to him as our life is, and, though we congratulate heroes upon the opportunity of their death, the moment when that opportunity would be most happy for ourselves never seems exactly to arrive. Hardly anyone really thinks he will die, or is persuaded that the limit to his nature has now come. But it is through realising the incalculable craving of this bodily will to survive that men who have themselves known danger will pay the greater reverence to those who, conscious of mortal fears, and throbbing with the fullness of existence, none the less in the calm ecstasy of their devotion commit themselves to the battle, the firing squad, or the prison death as to a chariot of fire.
XXXIV
THE ELEMENT OF CALM
All are aware that we have no abiding city here, but that, says the hymn-writer, is a truth which should not cost the saint a tear, and our politicians appear to lament it as little as the saints. Their eyes are dry; it does not distress their mind, it seems hardly to occur to them, unless, perhaps, they are defeated candidates. One might suppose from their manner that eternal truths depended on their efforts, and that the city they seek to build would abide for ever. Could all this toil and expenditure be lavished on a transitory show, all this eloquence upon the baseless fabric of a vision, all this hatred and malice upon things that wax old as doth a garment and like a vesture are rolled up? One would think from his preoccupied zeal that every politician was laying the foundation stone of an everlasting Jerusalem, did not reason and experience alike forbid the possibility.
May it not rather be that the politicians, like the saints, keep the tears of mortality out of their eyes by contemplating this passing dream under the aspect of eternal realities? In months when the heavens at night are filled with constellations of peculiar beauty, may we not suppose that the politician, emerging from the Town Hall amid the cheers and execrations of the voice that represents the voice of God, lifts up his eyes unto the heavens, where prone Orion still grasps his sword, and Auriga drives his chariot of fire, and the pole star hangs immovable, by which Ulysses set his helm? And as he gazes, he recognises with joy in his heart that the stars themselves, with all their recurrent comets and flaming meteors and immovable constellations, hardly cast a stain upon the white radiance of eternity, under which he has been striving and crying and perpetrating comparatively trifling deviations from exactness.
It is a consolation which a large proportion, probably more than half, of mankind shares with our politicians. Like them, the greater part of mankind is aware that there is peace somewhere beyond these voices, that life with all its unsatisfied longings and its repetition of care is transitory as a summer cloud, and that the only way of escape from the pain and misery, the foulness and corruption, of this material universe is by the destruction of all desires, except the one engrossing desire for non-existence. That is why the majority of mankind has set itself to overcome the unholy urgings of ambition, the pleasure of selfish and revengeful purposes, and the deeply-implanted delight in cruelty and unkindness. Such conquest is the essential part of the Fourfold Path by which the bliss of extinction may be attained. Let him cease to be ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a politician may slowly be extinguished. Life follows life, and each life fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain of previous existences. "Quisque suos patimur manes." The sin that most easily besets us fixes the shape of our next incarnation, and, did not a politician strictly follow the guidance of the Fourfold Path, the first election after his death might see him re-appear as a sheep, a cave-dweller, or a rat.
Never to have been born is best; never to be born again is the hope and motive of all good men among the greater part of mankind. It is not only the teaching of the most famous Buddha which has told them so. A Preacher more familiar to us has said the same, and our Western churches do but repeat an echo from the East. "I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive," he wrote; "yea, better is he than both they which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery? asked Job. From age to age the question has been asked by far more than half the human race, and yet the human race continues, miserable and unholy though it is.