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XI
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 1 WHEN we behold the terrible loss of
so many young lives, when we see so many incarnations of physical and moral
vigour, of intellect and of glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first
flower, we are on the verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies
and aspirations of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss
whence comes no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence has
humanity squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects so lavishly.
For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where the bravest, the
truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die
and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak, the ailing, in a
word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for
over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation,
one which seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And
we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great trial
and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this stunted race,
shorn of all the best and noblest part of it. The problem is certainly one of the
darkest that has ever vexed the minds of men. It contains a material truth
before which we remain defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can
discover no remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible
truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater and
deeper-lying truths. And on the other hand mankind appears to be such a
necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not
only survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them
and emerging greater and stronger than before. 2
We know that peace is better than
war; it were madness to compare the two. We know that, if this cataclysm let
loose by an act of unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would
doubtless have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose
manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a third or a
fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination and destruction had
been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities that poison the air we
breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the social question,
the one great question, the matter of life and death which justice demands that
posterity should face, would have found its definite solution, once and for
all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not
realise. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young
existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit, will leave
in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as we know that among
those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back
again and which contained inventions and discoveries that will now perhaps be
lost to us for centuries. We know that we shall never grasp the consequences of
this thrusting back of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But,
granting all this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand upon our
feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed, nothing perishes
and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is not destroyed at all. Our
moral world, even as our physical world, is a vast but hermetically-sealed
sphere, whence naught can issue, whence naught can fall to be dissolved in space.
All that exists, all that comes into being upon this earth remains there and
bears fruit; and the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches
flung away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There is
no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the mark, not
even waste or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every side does not leave
our planet; and the reason why the courage of our fighters seems so general and
yet so extraordinary is that all the might of the dead has passed into those
who survive. All those forces of wisdom, patience, honour and self-sacrifice
which increase day by day and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of
danger, feel rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but
the souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls. 3
It is well at times to contemplate
invisible things as though we saw them with our eyes. This was the aim of all
the great religions, when they but represented under forms appropriate to the
manners of their day the latent deep, instinctive truths, the general and
essential truths which are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and
recognised that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead,
and have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the
Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation, or
transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or ancestor-worship.
The last are more fully convinced than any other nation that the dead do not
cease to live and that they direct our actions, are exalted by our virtues and
become gods. Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has
most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor- worship, says: “One of the surprises of our future
will certainly be a return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the
mere assumption that they contained no truths — beliefs still called barbarous,
pagan, mediæval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after
year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the
barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different
paths, as near to some one point of eternal truth as any thinker of the
nineteenth century. We are now learning, also, that the theories of the
astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We
have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been
dreamed, — that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever been imagined, — which future science will not prove to have
contained some germ of reality.” 1 There are many things which might be
added to these lines, notably all that the most recent of our sciences,
metaphysics, is engaged in discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties
of our subconsciousness. 4
But, to return more directly to
what we were saying, was it not observed that, after the great battles of the
Napoleonic era, the birth-rate increased in an extraordinary manner, as though
the lives suddenly cut short in their prime were not really dead and were eager
to be back again in our midst and complete their career? If we could follow
with our eyes all that is happening in the spiritual world that rises above us
on every side, we should no doubt see that it is the same with the moral force
that seems to be lost on the field of slaughter. It knows where to go, it knows
its goal, it does not hesitate. All that our wonderful dead relinquished they
bequeath to us; and, when they die for us, they leave us their lives not in any
strained, metaphorical sense, but in a very real and direct way. Virtue goes
out of every man who falls while performing a deed of glory; and that virtue
drops down upon us; and nothing of him is lost and nothing evaporates in the
shock of a premature end. He gives us in one solitary and mighty stroke what he
would have given us in a long life of duty and love. Death does not injure
life; it is powerless against it. Life’s aggregate never changes. What death
takes from those who fall enters into those who are left standing. The number
of lamps grows less, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer
so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages, the more it
increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its
phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man will end by
conquering death. |
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