Life Beyond Life

‘That seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books ... an immortality rather than a life.’—MILTON’S Areopagitica.

‘To the mortal, birth is a sort of eternity and immortality.’—Diotima, in The Symposium.

A WOMAN sat in the shade of an old wild-cherry tree. She had passed her first youth, — she had never been beautiful, but the glance that she cast at the child lying on the grass at her feet made her thoughtful face very pleasing. The little niece smiled lazily at the children playing at a distance behind the hedge. rare, sweet, companionable months. Yet it seemed to her no less a treason to put her personal happiness before a task that she felt called to do, in the old, high, beautiful sense that a cynical modernity has relegated to the lumber-room of ‘hopelessly old-fashioned’ things. She found it difficult to reconcile herself to the obliteration of so rare and significant a figure as her father had been; and her chief desire, now, was to secure for him, through the irrevocable processes of the press, the life after death that her theology did not include among its consolations; thus, by a curious inversion, re-creating the life through which her own had come.

The drowsy summer-world seemed full of little girls. But the woman’s mind was less placid than her unruffled brow. She entertained no doubt as to her answer to the letter in her hand, but with a sentiment that she had thought could belong only to extreme youth, she felt unwilling to enter into so beautiful and momentous a relationship with any obscure corner of her heart harboring reluctance. It seemed to her a sort of lèse viajesté even to question the desirability of marriage after those

As a girl, she had, like most girls of her type, enjoyed the exhilaration of situations, even painful ones. Young emotions, like young muscles, crave activity. It is inertia that wears; it is when heroism takes the form of passive endurance, that eager emotions become acrid from disuse. One of her earliest memories was of reading, surreptitiously, an account of the unrebellious if not voluntary sacrifice of the Hindu suttee, and she had carried with her for days the desire to be placed in some difficult position that should test her powers. It was the same sentiment as that aroused in the diarist who records the terrible military degradation of Emerald Uthwart, ‘a sort of desire to share his lot, —to be actually in his place for a moment,’ — the appreciation of a difficult part nobly played under the stress of thrilling and heroic emotions. But she had passed that point, and no longer saw herself the protagonist in a drama, where, even in troublous moments, the interest was no less interesting than the tragedy was tragic; and her feeling now was one almost of annoyance at this interruption of the quiet stream of their wellordered lives. Undoubtedly it was

but now ‘the heights the soul is competent to gain,’ with their fierce wide view, drew her less than the mossy depths of the quiet valley, with a placid strip of detached sky above.

One predominant trait she had retained, however —the habit of seeing difficulties of solution in personal problems go down only before some great and overwhelming principle, to which opposition might fitly yield, — which should make submission easy, or at least afford the satisfaction of a moral victory.

On one strange August afternoon, a sudden veil of clouds, black with wind, cold with sleet, had rushed out of the north and east and south at once, covering all the sky, except for a narrow band in the west. The level rays lay over the darkened earth, touching here and there a low-hung branch, but diffusing no light, no warmth, strangely unreal — merely yellow fingers on the grass of a weird, gray world; like the unearthly light when an eclipse darkens the sun, and the stars come out and the cocks crow and people look a little fearfully in each other’s faces. Such a half-light in human affairs chilled her. Her habitual need of the irradiation of some large and reconciling purpose in every conflict had become almost the equivalent of the old mystic article of faith that solved its problems by the arbitrary selection of Biblical texts, feeling that thus somehow the problem was taken out of human hands, away from human judgment. Could she then marry with a mind that looked back upon her filial duty as perhaps the strongest element in her nature?

She was not a child when her father had died, but so irreconcilable with mortality was his rare spiritual quality that she had felt an unusual shock at his loss, such as comes to the student at the verge of doubt when he gives over his religion to the hand of the philologists and tries to agree with them that his God is dead. His memory was not to be effaced from the minds of those who knew him, but it must certainly die with them, ' for the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.’ What that influence had been she neither magnified nor minimized, and she was irresistibly impelled to attempt to preserve the memory of a soul instinct with idealism, which saw only unerring and lofty purpose, which was blind and deaf to the basic vices of our complex civilization.

Unfortunately, she thought, she herself belonged to the order of hopelessly old-fashioned things, and so was not at all helped in her problem by the doctrine of the modern individualist, for whose cant about considerations of the ‘individual soul’ as a thing‘entirely one’s own’ ‘to do with as one pleases,’ she had nothing but amused contempt. She was not at all sure that in the long run, that had begun so long ago and should run so far hence, the happiness of that soul troubled at all the peace of the high gods. She was not at all sure that the ratio of human happiness was so much higher in these days of theoretical liberty. She was not at all sure that women were not as much ridden to-day by the aggressive fear of mastery as once they had been by its actuality. Men and women seemed to her interesting and significant, not as separate and separable units, but as humble elements in one great and harmonious whole. And the only serene happiness seemed to her to lie in the attempt of each to preserve that harmony that linked individual to individual, people to people, age to age.

With all the resources of intellect, and armed with the best that education can give, her father had chosen to care less about what might be in the problematical future than what had been in the known past. He had been one of those who argue that faith might easily and satisfactorily be taken whole, and human energies turned to more immediate and useful things. For surely, he had said, it was not faith that was at fault; even though it had been, for so many centuries, faith in the wrong thing. It had been the conjunction of worldly power with faith that had made of what should have been the greatest of blessings the most abhorred of weapons in the hands of Satan.

wrote a poet who touched the opposite pole of religious thought, looking backward, not to Religion, but to Nationality with its immortal traditions, forward to Science, in that rare combination of power that inspires the modern Italian. But that fight was happily over, and Cæsar no longer stretched the hand to Peter. Enough had been gained thereby. Beyond that, how far should human reason reach to the heart of ‘ the world that took but six days to make, and is like to take six thousand to make out’? His doubts he had salved with the Psalmist, ‘The Heavens are the Heavens of the Lord, but the earth hath he given to the children of men ’ — echoed by Euripides’s chorus, ‘This is the life that saves all pain, if a man confine his thoughts to human themes as is his mortal nature, making no pretense where heaven is concerned. . . . Sophistry is not wisdom, and to indulge in thoughts beyond man’s ken is to shorten life.’

Different as were her views on matters of theology, she was too sympathetic not to see that such orthodoxy — the conservatism of a man who could take religion out of the constraining barriers of dogmatism, and show it as undeniably related to as much of the eternal verities as humanity can grasp — cannot be contemptuously disposed of in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, as being a mere ‘ facile unintelligent acquiescence.’ Facile it certainly was not. Surely it was infinitely easier, as in Micah’s day, to care for only‘the willful pleasure of the soul.’ Still less was it unintelligent, for, as George Eliot says of Dinah Morris’s rather primitive Methodism, every faith is a sort of ‘rudimentary culture,’ suffusing the imagination and taking the mind back through the past. Individualism bases itself on emotion; it is conservatism that is intellectual in its essence — not the conservatism of the multitude who follow merely the unalterable rule of prescribed duties, but of those who feel that nothing that is human, that has ever been thought beautiful and worthy to be expressed, and lived for, and sacrificed for, should be lost in the onward movement of things earthly and spiritual. So that even he who has irrevocably denied divine prescience in the plan may still wish to be linked to all that has gone before, and may call it humanism, perhaps, or the historic consciousness.

Strange and paradoxical that in such men humanism should become almost identical with the conservatism that was so long its persistent enemy. It was with him acquiescence in something that seemed of too lofty essence to be touched with uncovered hands, something that had revealed itself to great souls meditating in the midst of vast distances, beneath infinite spaces of sky. Lesser souls might easily reverence their loftiness, though they might doubt their inspiration.

Such orthodoxy, stripped of theology, might still hold the thoughtful and independent mind that confesses to a lurking poetic sense. For through their inheritance of traditional beliefs and habits, men may bridge the abyss of the years, looking back through the near and clearly remembered and understood, reaching by easy gradations the visionary beginnings of things. In the synagogue, at the central point of the immemorial service, the officiant lifts the unrolled scroll in both hands and, turning to all sides, shows it to the congregation. And the layman says with him, ‘This is the law that Moses set before the children of Israel by the mouth of the Lord’; recognizing that, in spite of his Biblical exegesis and his comparative jurisprudence, it is the law, inasmuch as millions of living men, who admitted no doubt, have so proclaimed it. Such customs find their sanction in something deeper than reason. When Reason shall have held sway over men as long as Authority has reigned, the gradual deposit of the new method may effectually rout the throng of associations that cling to customs but yesterday cast off, customs that found their origins in alien lands, among alien peoples, founded perhaps in unreason, perhaps in what we have learned to call superstition, but that bear with them the accretion of ages of human hopes.

He had never failed to recognize that it may — indeed, almost always had — become ‘a terrible and paralyzing tyranny.’ Side by side with the orderly festivals, the beautiful pagan seemly things, were the living torches of Nero, the cruelty and the slavery; behind the gorgeous, gold-decked processions in glorious churches, hid incredible inquisitorial terrors. Nevertheless he had doubted whether there was more danger of conservatism ossifying into the motionless rock than of individualism disintegrating into chaos. Shortly before his death, he had read with much pleasure Maeterlinck’s charming fancy that the dead live again whenever we think of them, and he had asked her whether they did not live forever, their acts, their memories, when successive generations willingly preserved the things they reverenced. Truly, a strange figure amidst the ‘heads that are disposed unto schism and complexionally propense to innovation’ that surrounded him in the modern world.

She had no delusions as to the ultimate value of his or any other man’s work. Neither had she any of the deadening neurotic vanity that, seeing itself always in relation to the universe, despises all accomplishment. Happily many things, above all, the completion of this work, seemed to her to be eminently worth doing. The door to doubt that had persistently flown open in her almost morbid girlhood, she now kept firmly closed behind the barriers of common sense, — in its literal interpretation, meaning that those things that the sensations and sensibilities of all men at all times have agreed on, become, in themselves, true expressions of that ’law of nature,’ dear to philosophers, ‘inherent in nature and the human heart.’ Philosophies that deny the credibility of men’s senses, seeking for absolute standards, reach at last the pitiful position taken by Tolstoi, who would deny and destroy all that the intellect has so laboriously built up, so painfully struggled for, because, in his view, our impressions of the universe may be as far from the truth as are the impressions that the senses of tiny animals give of us. She felt, however, that human terms accord with human sensations, and that the agreement of men to call the grass green gives that color a definite existence, even though Rembrandt’s green may have been what we now call brown.

The idealism that, denying reality, conceives the universe as merely a dream in the eternal mind, that shall vanish some day when the dreamer wakes, had always seemed to her fantastic and merely literary, until she had come to understand it through two strange experiences. Once, at a time of profound mental exhaustion, objects around her had suddenly lost their objectivity and had seemed merely projections of her mind against space. Once, on her return from the far land of Anæsthesia, the familiar world on which her eyes opened seemed to her but a feeble reflection of the real world she had just left, and a vague sense almost of amusement at the ignorance and self-delusion that the surgeon shared with those around her, mingled with the remembered sense of awe at his great knowledge and daring skill. With the clearing of that state, she realized that that far land had existed only in her own mind, and she concluded that, if conceptions of absolute truth, independent of experience, had to be reached through such flashes of possible insight but at the cost of such really terrifying mental conflict, it was better for mankind to remain blind, unconscious of its blindness.

So, wise or foolish, men had agreed that death was disagreeable, annihilation undesirable, remembrance sweet. Religion, out of its hope that this fleeting world might not be all, evolved a doctrine of unending life in another world. The Greek, the Brahmin, gave the soul another habitat, and called their doctrine metempsychosis. The artist sought immortality in art, in selfexpression — a form of creative impulse as irresistibly strong as that by which the world is peopled — the cacoethes scribendi, strong wherever life is strong, pouring out the countless memoirs of Erasmus, the hundred volumes of George Sand. Of all that formed the audiences of the ancient world, those live to-day who expressed themselves, those who thought in marble, who conceived in bronze. With all men, since grateful Homer at Chios put his benefactor’s name among the companions of Ulysses in the Odyssey, since Milton died happy that posterity would not willingly let his memory die, — it is mortality’s protest against dissolution, the recoil from oblivion.

But there was another kind of immortality. With all her sympathetic understanding of her father’s intellectual type, what he had deliberately taught, what he had taught by simply being what he was, with all her gift of expression, she knew that she never could show him as she felt him. He could never live in her pages as he lived in her. Even in the many matters in which, a child of her century, she differed from him, she still could understand completely his strong convictions and deepest incommunicable preoccupations.

The child at her feet stirred in soft sleep, opened her eyes, and turned again to deeper sleep.

That morning, lured by a flash of color blazing unexpectedly through an open space, she had pushed past the detaining arms of her neighbor’s barberry hedge and had come upon a formal old-fashioned garden, inclosed on three sides by tall, slim young Normandy poplars, broken only where through a low, stone, ivy-covered gate, a little girl was bending over a glow of scarlet geranium. She could see yet the riot of color in the formal beds, the pink and white and vermilion of the verbenas, the scarlet of the poppies, the countless blends of color on the sweet peas, and the dainty larkspurs flaunting their blue cups to a bluer sky, the purple sheet where the columbines hung their lovely bells between modest borders of pansies and alyssum. She could smell yet the odors in the warm air, of beds of heliotrope and lavender, mixed so subtly with the delicious fragrance of the roses. The unexpected vision had startled her, so near to her all summer as she had sat under the paternal arm of the old wildcherry tree that hung so low in the corner of her garden.

And here this child, his grandchild, lay sleeping in the lulling summer quiet, and it was the face of her father that she saw as she had never seen it before — with the soft white hair, that hung so gently, changed to brown, but with the same pure outline, the same clear skin, the same placid mouth, the same deep brown eyes. She felt the branches spreading out behind that child, gathering from the ends of the earth the material that had gone to make her, concentrating in her, only to spread out again infinitely in the lives that should come after. In the likeness of so much of her own self to her father, she was reminded of a quaint fancy she had read of a metempsychosis of ideas as well as of souls, of opinions finding ‘after certain revolutions men and minds like those that first begat them.’ In the unconscious child, as in herself, she saw the indissoluble links between the countless armies ‘who have passed through the body and gone,’ who should bear on their lives, his life, forever to the countless armies ‘fresh from the Protoplast, furnished for ages to come.’ Thus might the heavy, earth-worn human mass be leavened!

The chilling half-light was gone as she came back from her abstraction. She looked around her at the lovely blooming world and there passed into her face ‘beauty born of murmuring sound ’ — the murmuring as of running water in the leaves of the full-blown ash tree, the twittering of the young thrushes in the well-filled nests. A shadow fell on the grass beside her, and the deep eyes and the grave mouth smiled as she gave him both her hands.