Men sometimes seem to persuade themselves that it is a brave thing thus to face death. The shadowy terrors of what may come after death are too little realized to deter a man from his act when compared with the real disgrace that he is so familiar with and that he has often witnessed in actual life. It is the man, as a rule, who has most condemned others when something has gone wrong, who has found no sympathy in his heart for the slips of his fellows, who discovers no courage in himself when he has to face disgrace. He does not realize that for most men there are so many extenuations of any evil that a man may do, that the large-minded man is ready to forgive and eventually to forget almost anything that happens. "To know all is to forgive all," and the more we know of men the readier we are to forgive them. Little men do not forgive and cannot forget the failings of their fellows and they think that everyone else looks upon men's failings in the same way. It is only the small, narrow man who contemplates suicide as a refuge from disgrace, and the fact that he can complacently plan the abandonment of others not only to the disgrace which he himself is not ready to face, but to all the suffering consequent upon it, is the best proof of his littleness of soul. The utter pusillanimity of suicide is the best mental antidote for the temptation to it.
Besides, the thought that deterred Hamlet may well be urged:
There's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause;
. . . who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life;
Cut that the dread of something after death.—
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns.—puzzles the will;
And makes us rather bear those ills we have.
Than fly to others we know not of?
It is sometimes said that this is the argument of a coward, but such cowardice is as reasonable as the dread of touching a wire that may be carrying a high charge of electricity. Besides it is only such an argument that will properly suit the man who, in his cowardice, is ready to let others bear the brunt of his disgrace, flying from it himself. [Footnote 57]
[Footnote 57: Is life worth living? How old this argument as to suicide is can perhaps best be appreciated from the fact that it is discussed very suggestively in a papyrus of the Middle Kingdom the date of which is probably not later than 2500 B. C, which is now in the Berlin Museum and is recognized to be the most ancient text of its kind that has been preserved in the Nile Valley. I have referred to this in the initial historical chapter. I think that I have more than once turned men's thoughts from the serious contemplation of suicide—always a dangerous thing—by discussing with them this fact that men have at all times in the world's history argued just the same way on these subjects. Men prefer not to resemble the dead ones, and a motive is all that is needed. ]
There has sometimes been an erroneous tendency to confuse suicide and heroism, but Chesterton, in "Orthodoxy," [Footnote 58] has well expressed the difference:
[Footnote 58: ["Orthodoxy"] by Gilbert K. Chesterton, New York, John Lane Co., 1909.]
A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for a great cause and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.
The feature of incidents in life that bring with them disgrace and punishment which needs to be insisted on for those to whom the thought of suicide comes, is that the sensation which the revelation of such acts causes is but a passing phase of present-day publicity, and that after all it is not even a nine-days' wonder, but a two- or three-days' wonder, and then it is forgotten and replaced by something else. The facing of the condemnation for the moment may seem an extremely severe trial. The world's blame, however, is largely a bogey, a dread that is phantom-like and that disappears, or at least diminishes, to a great degree as soon as it is bravely faced. Besides, as practically every man who has been carrying around a guilty secret with him for years is free to confess, there is an immense sense of relief once the worst is known. At last the effort at concealment, the nervous tension, the fear of the moment of exposure are all past and a new set of thoughts can be allowed to come. Those may be unpleasant and yet they are not so bad as the dread of discovery that hung over the unfortunate. If a man can be braced up to meet exposure, usually he will find in a very few days that there are sources of consolation that make it much easier for him to live than he thought possible before.