TO look back over a long stretch of years, or to re-read the annals of a Society with which one has been closely associated, is to be reminded of the loss of many cherished comrades and friends. During the past decade, especially, there are few households that have not become more intimately associated with Death; but even in this matter, it would seem, the war, far from “making men think,” has thrown them back more and more on the ancient substitutes for thought, and on consolations which only console when they are quite uncritically accepted.

For though the ceaseless conflict between death and love has brought to the aid of mankind in this age, as in all ages, a host of comforters who, whether by religion or by philosophy, have made light of the terrors of the grave, they have as yet failed to supply the solace for which mankind has long looked and is still looking. They profess to remove “the sting of death,” but leave its real bitterness—the sundering of lover from lover, friend from friend—unmitigated and untouched.

Death is the eternal foe of love; and it is just because it is the foe of love, not only because it is the foe of life, that it is properly and naturally dreaded. Its sting lies not in the mortality, but in the separation. A lover, a friend, a relative, grieves, not because the loved one is mortal, still less because he himself is mortal, but because they two will meet no more in the relation in which they have stood to each other.

It is useless to surmise, or to assert, that the spirit passes, after death, into other spheres of activity or of happiness; for, even if there were proof of this, it would in no way lessen the grief of those who are bereaved of the actual. It was long ago pointed out by Lucretius that even a renewed physical life would in any case be so different from the present life that it could not be justly regarded as in any true sense a continuance of it:

In like manner a future spiritual life could never compensate for the severance of love in this life; for it is of the very essence of love to desire, not similar things, nor as good things, nor even better things, but the same things. As Richard Jefferies wrote: “I do not want change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green: the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, ... and I want them in the same place.”

And what is true of the nature-lover is not less true of the human-lover, be he parent, or brother, or husband, or friend. It is not a solace but a mockery of such passionate affection to assert that it can be compensated for its disruption in the present by a new but changed condition in the future. A recognition of this truth may be seen in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “He Prefers Her Earthly”:

But this, it may be said, is to set love in rebellion against not death only, but the very laws of life. There is truth in such censure; and wisest is he who can so reconcile his longings with his destiny as to know enough of the sweetness of love without too much of the bitterness of regret. Perhaps, in some fairer society of a future age, when love is more generally shared, the sting of death will be less acute; but what centuries have yet to pass before that “Golden City” of which John Barlas sang can be realized?

Meantime it would almost seem that to the religious folk who assume a perpetuity of individual life, the thought of death sometimes becomes less solemn, less sacred, than it is to those who have no supernatural beliefs. The easy assurance of immortality to which friends who are writing letters of condolence to a mourner too often have recourse, is usually a sign less of sympathy than of the lack of it; for it is not sympathetic to repeat ancient formulas in face of a present and very real grief; indeed, it is in many cases an impertinence, when it is done without any regard to the views of the person to whom such solace is addressed. Among the professional ghouls who watch the death-notices in the papers, none, perhaps, are more callous—not even the would-be buyers of old clothes or artificial teeth—than the pious busybodies who intrude on homes of sorrow with their vacant tracts and booklets. Nay, worse: nowadays mourners are lucky if some spiritist acquaintance does not have a beatific vision of the lost one; for the dead seem to be regarded as a lawful prey by any one who sees visions and dreams dreams, and who is determined to call them as witnesses that there is no reality in the most stringent ordinances of nature:

With much appropriateness did Matthew Arnold introduce his trenchant rebuke of human arrogance into a poem on the grave of a dog; for mankind has neither right nor reason to presume for itself an hereafter which it denies to humbler fellow-beings who share at least the ability to suffer and to love. Can any one, not a mere barbarian, who has watched the death of an animal whom he loved, and by whom he was himself loved with that faithful affection which is never withheld when it is merited, dare to doubt that the conditions of life and death are essentially the same for human and for non-human? Is an animal’s death one whit less poignant in remembrance than that of one’s dearest human friend? Must it not remain with us as ineffaceably?

That individual love should resent the thraldom of death may be unreasonable; but it is useless to ignore the fact of such resentment, or to proffer consolations which can neither convince nor console. From the earliest times the poets, above all others, have borne witness to love’s protest. Perhaps the most moving lyric in Roman literature is that short elegy written by Catullus at his brother’s grave, full of a deep passion which can hardly be conveyed in another tongue.

A similar cry is heard in that famous passage of Virgil, where the bereaved Orpheus refuses to be comforted for the loss of his Eurydice. And nearly two thousand years later we find Wordsworth, a Christian poet, echoing the same lamentation:

Mark the reference to “years unborn.” Wordsworth was a believer in immortality; but immortality itself cannot restore what is past and gone. All the sages and seers and prophets, that have given mankind the benefit of their wisdom since the world began, have so far failed to provide the least crumb of comfort for the ravages of death, or to explain why love should be for ever built up to be for ever overthrown, and why union should always be followed by disseverance.

There may, of course, be a solution of this tragedy hereafter to be discovered by mankind; all that we know is that, as yet, no human being has found the clue to the mystery, or, if he has found it, has vouchsafed the knowledge to his fellow-mortals. For we must dismiss as idle the assertion that such things cannot be communicated in words. Anything that is apprehended by the mind can be expressed by the mouth—not adequately, perhaps, yet still, in some measure, expressed—and the reason why this greatest of secrets has never been conveyed is that, as yet, it has never been apprehended.

It is, doubtless, this lack of any real knowledge, of any genuine consolation, that drives mankind to seek refuge in the more primitive superstitions. Something more definite, more tangible, is not unnaturally desired; and therefore men turn to the assurances of what is called spiritualism—the refusal to believe that death, in the accepted sense, has taken place at all. This creed is at least free from the vagueness of the ordinary religious view of death. It is small comfort to be told that a lost friend is sitting transfigured, harp in hand, in some skiey mansion of the blest; but it might mitigate the bereavement of some mourners (not all) to converse with their lost one, and to learn that he exists in much the same manner, and with the same affections as before. Some who “prefer him earthly” are less likely to be disappointed in spiritualism than in any other philosophy; the danger is rather that they should find him too earthly—enjoying a cigarette, perhaps, as in a case mentioned in recent revelations of the spirit-life. This is literalness with a vengeance; but however ludicrous and incredible it may be, it is not—from the comforter’s point of view—meaningless; whereas it is unmeaning to tell a mourner that the loved one is not lost, to him, when the whole environment and fabric of their love are shattered and destroyed.

Is there, then—pending such fuller knowledge as mankind may hereafter gain—no present comfort for death’s tyranny? I have spoken of the poets as the champions of love against death; and it is perhaps in poetry, the poetry of love and death, that the best solace will be found—in that open-eyed and quite rational view of the struggle, which does not deny the reality of death, but asserts the reality of love. It is amusing to hear those who do not accept the orthodox creed as regards an after-life described as cold “materialists” and “sceptics.” For who have written most loftily, most spiritually, about death and the great emotions that are implied in the word—the religionists and “spiritualists,” who pretend to a mystic knowledge, or the great free-thinking poets, from the time of Lucretius to the time of Shelley and James Thomson? Can any “spiritualist” poetry match the great sublime passages of the De Rerum NaturÂ, or, to come to our own age, of The City of Dreadful Night?

It is to the poets, then, not to the dogmatists, that we must look for solace; for, where knowledge is still unattainable, an aspiration is wiser than an assertion, and the theme of death is one which can be far better treated idealistically than as a matter of doctrine. In poetry, as nowhere else, can be expressed those manifold moods, and half-moods, in which the noblest human minds have sought relief when confronted by this mighty problem; and far more soothing than any unsubstantial promises of futurity is the charm that is felt in the magic of beautiful verse. In Milton’s words:

At the present time, when a great war has brought bereavement into so many homes, and when superstition is reaping its harvest among the sad and broken lives that are everywhere around us, how can rational men do better than recall as many minds as possible from the false teachers to the true, from the priests, who claim a knowledge which they do not possess, to the poets, in whom, as Shelley said, there is “the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature”? And the testimony of the poets cannot be mistaken; their first word and their last word is Love. Whether it be Cowper, gazing on his mother’s portrait; or Burns, lamenting his Highland Mary; or Wordsworth, in his elegies for Lucy; or Shelley, in the raptures of his “Adonais”; or pessimists, such as Edgar Poe and James Thomson, to whom love was the “sole star of light in infinite black despair”—the lesson that we learn from them is the same. For death there is no solace but in love; it is to love’s name that the human heart must cling.