Various writers of splendid genius have tasked their imagination, to present us with the results of endowing a person with immortality on earth. Such a character has been delineated with great power by Godwin, in his St Leon; and by Croly in the story of Salathiel, or the Wandering Jew. It is an instructive labor, to record the wanderings, changes, weariness, abandonment, and final despair of a wretch cursed with immortality; and by the circumstance rendered a monster, out of relation with human beings; and cut off from all real sympathy with his mortal kind. It is questionable, whether these writers, or any others who have drawn similar pictures, have formed adequate conceptions, of what would be the actual result of an earthly immortality. The view of the author before me seems just. I can easily imagine the immortal delivered from earthly sorrows. But, when I contemplate him divested of the hopes, fears, affections and sympathies, which trace their origin to our common mortal nature, I cannot imagine the affections, that are to replace these.
I can conceive none other, than a being, who would become drowsy at sixty, and sleepy at a hundred. All beyond presents to me a lethargy of almost unconscious existence, from which my fancy can devise no effort of sufficient energy to arouse him. In fact, it is sufficient, that nature has awarded, in her universal decree, that man should not be out of analogy and relation with the rest of nature; to convince us, that the decision involves our best interest. The more our views of nature enlarge, the more we become conscious, that she has arranged all her laws with such perfect wisdom, that if we could reverse any of them, we should do it at the expense of our own happiness.
Of all pictures of men, rendered immortal upon earth, the most forcible, brief and revolting, is that of Swift. ‘After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the Struldbrugs among them. He said, they commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old; after which they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for otherwise, there not being more than two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they come to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, covetous, peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and their impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects, against which their envy seems particularly directed, are the vices of the younger sort, and the death of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament, and repine, that others have gone to a harbor of rest, at which they can never hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything, but what they learned, and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than their best recollection. The least miserable among them, are those, who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories. These meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities, which abound in others.
‘If a Struldbrug happen to marry one of his kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those, who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are considered dead in law. At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, and have no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to, still continue without increasing, or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellations of things, and the names of persons, even of those, who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they can never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might be capable.
‘They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished who was the oldest, although there was not above a century or two between them.
‘The reader will easily believe, from what I have heard and seen, that my keen appetite for perpetuity and life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed, and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life. The king heard all that had passed between me and my friends upon this occasion, and rallied me very pleasantly, wishing I could send a couple of Struldbrugs to my own country, to arm our people against the fear of death.’
Fear, absolutely useless, gratuitous fear, probably constitutes much the largest proportion of the whole mass of human misery; and of this proportion the fear of death is the principal part. There are but very few people who, in examining the feeling of revulsion and horror, most constantly present to their minds, will not find it to be the dread of death. The whole observation, which I have made upon human nature, has only enlightened me the more as to the universality and extent of the influence of this evil. I see it infusing bitterness into the bosoms of the young, before they are as yet capable of reflection; and ceasing not to inspire its terrors into the heart, which has experienced the sorrows of fourscore winters. I see little difference in the alarm with which it darkens the mind of the heir, elate with youthful hope, and the galley slave—those apparently the most happy, and the tenants of penitentiaries and lazar-houses. All cling alike convulsively to life, and shudder at the thought of death.
Part, and perhaps the greater part, of this fear is a sad heritage, which has been transmitted down to us, an accumulating fund of sorrow, for a hundred generations. I have stated my conviction in another place, that our education, religious ceremonies, domestic manners, in short, all the influences of the present institutions of society tend to increase this evil. I am well aware, at the same time, that the number of those, who will admit it to be an evil, is but small. Most view it as it has been considered in all Christian countries, from time immemorial, as an instrument in the hand of God and his servants, to awe, and restrain the mind, recall it from illusions and vanities, and reduce it to the seriousness and obedience of religion. The broad declamation of the pulpit for effect, revolting representations of hell-torment and the vindictive justice of God, have passed with a readier tolerance, under a kind of tacit allowance, that if the means were unworthy, the proposed end was such as would sanctify them. It is almost unnecessary to remark, that all my hope of producing any useful impression is with the small, but growing number, (in the next age, I trust, it will be a majority) who hold this whole doctrine in utter unbelief; who have no faith in amendment and conversion, that grows out of the base and servile principle of fear; and least of all the fear of death; who believe that a great reform, a thorough amelioration of our species, will never be effected, until it is made a radical principle of our whole discipline, and all our social institutions, to bring this servile passion completely under the control of our reason. With these, it is a deep and fixed conviction, that every thing base, degrading and destructive of intellect and improvement, readily associates with fear; and that the basis of true religion, generous conception, high thoughts and really noble character, is firmly laid in a young mind, when trained to become as destitute of fear, as if it were conscious of being a sinless angel, above the reach of pain or death.