But all these faiths are another story. Faiths are good when they are not counter to reason, and the most matter-of-fact of us act on them every hour. But the big ones won’t come at mere bidding. What I have been principally trying to get you to do, in case you are subject to the blues, is to take hold and keep hold of the actual prosaic fact that in our year and place of grace, life has reached a fairly substantial foundation, and that throwing oneself open to every possible attack of the blues, through a chronic feeling that life is on a very ticklish basis, not only permits a great many needless attacks, but goes counter to the facts—is mathematically absurd. When you are scared, it is not because the universe is going to turn turtle, but because you are confusing its center of gravity with your own, and developing too much of a wrong sort of gravity above your own. Hopefulness is really the only reasonable attitude; at worst you lose nothing by it, unless it makes you careless.
Life is fairly reliable, and death at worst is simply nothing, while there are growing reasons to believe that it is better than life. And yet it is the one unfailing subject of abnormal brooding. It is possible at any moment, inevitable at some moment; and for that very reason it is, from most aspects, as a subject of worry, absurd at any moment. One of the sanest and sweetest men I ever knew, who lived to be nearly ninety, told me that he never thought of it.
Of all the humbugs of priestcraft, it is the greatest. The priests, who once owned a third of England, and probably more than a third of Italy, made more money out of death and its accessories than out of all the rest of the paraphernalia in their kit. Hell and purgatory and poor dear Dante’s scenery and properties were all part of the machinery. How shocked Dante would have been if he had realized how he was furnishing such ammunition! (A friend, on reading this, was surprised at my calling Dante “dear,” because he is generally regarded as so austere a man. To me he is not only dear, but like nearly all great geniuses, “as a little child.”) And some four centuries later, how shocked would have been another poet—not so poor or quite so dear, if he could have realized what a part he was playing in the same loathsome game! With them, one thinks of the geniuses who wrote the Dies Irae and those other wonderful hymns, and questions what they too might have felt if they had realized all they were doing. Then come to mind some other contributors to the humbug, who as a rule were not poor, and were not dear at all, and who stole the sheet-iron thunder and resin lightning—John Calvin and Cotton Mather, and so on down to some poor dear men even so late as when the older of us were in college, who made us get up before daylight in winter, and go and hear them pray, because they feared that if they didn’t, and we didn’t, we should all go to Dante’s or Milton’s or some other man’s Hell.
Well, perhaps we who have a new century to play with, especially the younger of us, fancy among its fresh attractions a thorough emancipation from these old superstitions. But they are in the very blood our fathers transmitted to us. Many have had all the anti-toxic serum needed for immunity from serious attacks, but we are all liable to twinges—hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from that identical disease, when we don’t know what’s the matter with us.
Fear of pain is part of the equipment of self-defense evolved in the higher animals, but whether those below man fear death, is, I suppose, open to question. I believe horses and sheep, at least, show fear or aversion from the dead of their own kind. I have known it instantly shown by a child supposed too young to know anything of the subject. But be all that as it may, you can get far above the mere animal instinct, up into the tender human affections like those of my dear old friend, and find it probably true that normal creatures do not think about death, unless some external circumstance leads them to. Yet my old friend, with intelligence enough for the ordinary demands of life and the most delicate of its courtesies, would not have been called a thoughtful or imaginative man. But another dear old friend who was both (I don’t know why I shouldn’t say that I’m thinking of Stedman), I don’t believe ever thought much about death, except in the abstract, unless some distinct external circumstance led him to. And he was a very unusually normal man. On the whole, I don’t believe normal people do think about it, in the concrete, unless they have to. Well then, most of the thought about it in the concrete is abnormal, and in more senses than even the priests made it, death is a humbug.
Don’t let us get the blues about it then. If we want an excuse for them, let’s find it reasonably, in being obliged to survive when we prefer to follow. But there are few such cases, and Time takes care of them; and, as reasoning beings, let us realize that it is sweet and normal that he should, and let us no more resist Time in our perverse ways, than we would in the ways of the Egyptians.
And our ways are very perverse when they make us cling to some of the most absurd fashions from older civilizations, and neglect the wise ones. How long will it take us to put the Greek symbol of the lovely youth with the inverted torch, in place of the skull and cross-bones on the Puritan tombs? But we are coming on well when we bring forward the symbols of love to cover grief, and put flowers with the crape outside the door, and over the coffin. But we are not doing equally well when, after we let a woman have a veil, or a man slink down a side street, because they don’t want to recognize people, we, after they have got beyond that, still compel them to keep away from people, and even from music and the theatre, when they most need them. We can generally count on mourners suffering enough without any aid from such fashions.
But leaving out our relations to other people, in the deepest part of our very selves—the part that gets the blues, why have them over the certainty of death? When we were boys, wasn’t it a good way to avoid them before going back to school, to make the most of the last days? Today may be the last day.