Our feelings with regard to the termination of our earthly existence are remarkably varied. In some people, there is an absolutely genuine and strong desire for cessation of individual consciousness, as in the case of John Addington Symonds. Probably, however, this is met with only in keenly sensitive natures which have suffered greatly in this life. Such unfortunate people are sometimes constitutionally unable to believe in anything better than cessation of their pain. Anything better than that is “too good to be true”, so much too good that they hardly dare wish for it. Others, who have had a happy life, naturally desire a continuance of it, and are therefore eager, like F.W.H. Myers, for that which Symonds dreaded. Others, again, and these are probably the majority, have no very marked feeling in the matter; like the good Churchman in the story, they hope to enter into everlasting bliss, but they wish you would not talk about such depressing subjects. This seems to suggest that they have secret qualms about the reality of the bliss. Perhaps they have read Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, and, though inexpressibly shocked by that exuberant work, are nevertheless tinged with a sneaking sympathy for its hero, who found the orthodox abode of the blest an unbearably dull place. The harp-playing in particular was trying, and he had difficulty in managing his wings.

Anyhow, these people avoid the subject. As Emerson says somewhere, religion has dealings with them three times in their lives: when they are christened, when they are married, and when they are buried. And undoubtedly its main appeal is in the period prior to this third formality, if they happen to have a longish illness. The rich Miss Crawley, in Vanity Fair, is typical of many. In days of health and good spirits, this venerable lady had “as free notions of religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire”; but when she was in the clutches of disease, and even though in the odour of sanctity, so to speak—for she was nursed by Mrs Reverend Bute Crawley, who hoped for the seventy thousand pounds if she could keep Rawdon and Becky off the doorstep—even with this spiritual advantage she was in much fear, and “an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.”

Well, let those laugh who will. As for me, I have great sympathy with Miss Crawley. Probably those who laugh, or are contemptuous of such cowardice, are people who have not yet come to close quarters with death—have not looked him, as the French say, in the white of the eyes. Let them wait until that happens. If they come back after that rencontre, they will be a little more tolerant of the cowardice of those whom they called weaker brethren.

Fear of death may be divided into classes, according to its cause, i.e., the intellectual state out of which it seems to arise. It may be due to the expectation of physical suffering; or, as in such cases as Cowper’s and Dr Johnson’s, to expectation of what may happen after death, in that undiscovered country from which Hamlet said no traveller returned, though he had just been talking with his father’s ghost, piping hot—as Goldsmith has it in his Essay on Metaphor—from Purgatory. In my own case, I think the fear is a little of both. And I admit that in both directions the fear is irrational. As to the physical part, it is probable that when my time comes I shall depart without much of what is usually called pain, for the heart seems to be my weak place, and I may reasonably hope that even though if attacked by other ailments, it will be the heart that will give way. There will probably be suffering through difficulty of breathing, and I dread this somewhat, for I know how unpleasant it has been in the attacks which I have survived. Still, it can hardly be compared with the agonising pain of many diseases. Rationally, then, I ought not to have much fear on the physical side.

On the spiritual side I confess with Oliver Wendell Holmes that I have never quite got from under the shadow of the orthodox hell. I had a Puritan upbringing, not severe in its home theology I am thankful to say, but involving attendance at an Independent Chapel where the minister—a good man and no hypocrite—was wont to preach very terrible sermons. I shall never quite get over the baneful effect of those damnatory fulminations. They branded my soul. They caused me more pain than anything else has ever done throughout my life—and this is saying a great deal. They made me hate God. Remember, I was a defenceless child. I knew of no other God. I thought all decent people believed like those about me. I was the only heretic—a rebel, an outlaw, an Ishmael. Conceive, if you can, the agony of a sensitive child struggling with that thought! Condemned to eternal torment, with those who, in Dante’s terrible line, “have no hope of death.” (“Inferno,”iii,46.)

Then I fell in with O.W. Holmes’s Autocrat and Professor, and found a friendly hand in the darkness. It led me to Emerson and Carlyle; then I found Darwin, Spencer, and the rest of them. My loneliness was mitigated, but the seared place in my soul was not healed, and never will be healed. I cannot read the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante without horror, and thus the poetic beauty of those great cantos is darkened for me. I cannot worship “God,” for “God” is the fiend whose image was stamped into my mind in its most plastic, most defenceless period. Truly that early teaching has much to answer for. It has poisoned a great part of my life. I suppose if I could have “accepted” that Being as my God, accepting also the sacrifice—the Blood—by which that Being’s anger was supposed to be assuaged—I suppose I should have been happy, feeling myself “saved.” (But I have lately been surprised to find how ineffective this belief can be. An acquaintance of mine, an orthodox churchwoman who has no religious doubts, and who talks much of the Bible, confesses to “a fear of death which clouds even her brightest moments”—an ever-present, unconquerable dread.) However, I could not accept the dogma. Why, I don’t know. Somehow my whole mind and heart revolted against the entire plan of salvation. I never believed any of it. I felt it could not be true. And yet it tortured me. Illogical? Yes: human beings are illogical. I am no exception. The Christian who believes he will go to heaven is equally illogical in his unwillingness to die.

When or if we succeed in getting rid of hell, the spiritual fear of death becomes less torturing, remaining only as a vague dread, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy. Bacon says that we fear death as children fear to go in the dark. In my own case, it is somewhat thus that the fear now presents itself. The old hell-fear, though not utterly obliterated, is becoming less all-swallowing. This very desirable state of affairs is partly the result of the conclusions to which I have been led by psychical research. After many years of experiment and close study, I can say that I know something about after-death conditions. Not that I pretend to be able to coerce other people into a similar belief, even if I wanted to. Each must travel his own path. Moreover, psychical research being a science, its results are not more certain than those of other sciences. Alternative theories in explanation of any phenomenon are always possible. There is no such thing as knock-down proof. But for my part I can say that I know—in the same way that I know the truth of Mendeleef’s law, or Avogadro’s law, or Dalton’s atomic theory—that human beings do not become extinct when they die, that they are often able to communicate with us after that event, and that they are not in any orthodox heaven or hell. My knowledge is based partly on a lengthy and carefully-conducted series of sittings which some intimate friends of mine have had with a medium known to me; partly on my own results over a period of several years of systematic investigation; and partly on various curious experiences of psychic friends of mine who are in no sense professional mediums. (Details to some extent in my New Evidences in Psychical Research (Rider, 1911) and Psychical Investigations (Cassell, 1917.) I now believe, with the Bishop of London, that a man is essentially the same five minutes after death as he was five minutes before. As the old woman says in David Copperfield, “death doesn’t change us more than life”—no, nor as much!

The upshot is, of course, that my spiritual fear of death has, I am thankful to say, almost vanished. The lurid future has taken on a milder radiance.

It is not that I want assuring of “happiness” in a future state as compensation for misery in this. I should be quite contented if I could be assured that death is annihilation. It would at least be a cessation of suffering; and that is much. I could agree with Keats:

Easeful death—it is a good word. Keats knew disease, and was content with prospect of ease; though at the end there is a note of depression or despair at the thought of becoming a “sod,” deaf and blind to beauty.

This reminds us of the attitude of other poets towards the great problem. Tennyson is mildly optimistic and placid; stretches, indeed, somewhat lame hands of faith in his sorrowful moments when his friend has died, but on the whole is healthily disposed; friendly to the most cheerful way of looking at it; inclined, with true British burliness, to make the best of a bad job—a job which, after all, may not be so very bad when we come to closer quarters with it. Afar, death is the spectre feared of man; seen nearer, he may metamorphose into a beautiful Iris, sent by heavenly mercy. And, afterwards, the new spiritual state will probably be an improvement—Aeonian evolution through all the spheres. Therefore, away with all selfish mourning either about our own prospective fate or that of those who have left us. Let us hate the black negation of the bier:

No doubt Tennyson was to a very great extent able to stay himself on the personal mystic experiences described in his poem The Ancient Sage—experiences which gave him a subjective assurance that death was “a ludicrous impossibility”. Browning, characteristically buoyant, was ready to face death with a laugh; the fog in the throat will pass, the black minute’s at end, then thy breast. In Prospice we feel the eager sureness with which he looked forward to rejoining her whose bodily presence had left him a few months before. But even Browning’s cheery salutation is outdone by Whitman. The American, though acquainted with suffering as Browning was not, and though apparently without much belief or interest in personal survival, was almost uncannily friendly to his own taking off. And it was not because he suffered so greatly that he hailed release. It was more the natural outcome of his joyous temperament, subdued at the last to a kind of solemn exaltation. The following stanzas were written with George Inness’ picture The Valley of the Shadow of Death in mind:

This is indeed a change from the idea of Death as King of Terrors, as “spectre feared of man”. (In Memoriam)

The Greek idea, at its best, seems to have been half-way between the two extremes. It regarded death with more or less equanimity, as being certainly not the greatest evil—no king of terrors—but merely an emissary of greater Powers, to whose will we must bow, though with dignity:

Sophocles has the same thought, with an added touch of Hamlet-like irritation about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune:

Cicero voices the same pagan feeling, in the contented language of a rather tired, wise old man:

And was it not Cato—fine old Stoic—who, finding his natural force abating, and accepting the hint furnished by a stumble in the street, stooped and kissed the ground: “Proserpine, I come!” and went home, making a speedy end, unwilling to suffer the indignity of disease and the shame of being served in weakness? Modern opinion wisely reprobates suicide, but there is something noble in the Roman attitude, condemn it as we will. As a modern and almost comic example of a modern Stoic’s attitude to this same question of death we may cite the famous lines of Walter Savage Landor:

“Strove with none”, indeed! As a matter of fact, Landor strove with everybody. He was one of the most quarrelsome men that ever lived. The only man who could tolerate him was Browning. But in his mellower moments, at least, he was “ready to depart”, quietly acquiescing in the scheme of things. To depart, note; not to be extinguished. And this view is, all things considered, the most sane and wholesome view of the great problem of Death. We did not begin to live when we were born in this present tenement of flesh; we shall not cease to live when we quit it. ’Tis but a tent for a night, an interlude, a descent into matter, a temporary incarnation for educative purposes, of the soul or a part of it, as it pursues its lone way towards the ineffable goal. This life is but a sleep and a forgetting;

Death, then, is to be welcomed when it comes. We must not run to meet it, or run from it; but we should welcome it when God thinks fit to send it, His messenger. The beautiful eternal right hand beckons, and the soul gladly arises and departs, to “that imperial palace whence it came”, or to fare forth on some “adventure brave and new”.

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