Escape and Other Essays | Page 5

they are all stories
of escapes. It is the same with all love- stories. "The course of true love
never can run smooth," says the old proverb, and love-stories are but
tales of a man or a woman's escape from the desert of lovelessness into
the citadel of love. Even tragedies like those of OEdipus and Hamlet
have the same thought in the background. In the tale of OEdipus, the
old blind king in his tattered robe, who had committed in ignorance
such nameless crimes, leaves his two daughters and the attendants
standing below the old pear-tree and the marble tomb by the sacred
fountain; he says the last faint words of love, till the voice of the god
comes thrilling upon the air:
"OEdipus, why delayest thou?"
Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of Theseus,
and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see Theseus afar off,
alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if some sight too dreadful
for mortal eyes had passed before him; but OEdipus is gone, and not
with lamentation, but in hope and wonder. Even when Hamlet dies, and
the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is to congratulate him upon his
escape from unbearable woe; and that is the same in life. If our eye falls
on the sad stories of men and women who have died by their own hand,

how seldom do they speak in the scrawled messages they leave behind
them as though they were going to silence and nothingness! It is just
the other way. The unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by
disaster, kill their children are hoping to escape with those they love
best out of miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot
fled with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays
himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and the
shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too well.
He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to live, but he
cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that makes him seek death;
only the animal endures, but man hurries away in the hope of finding
something better.
It is, however, strange to reflect how weak man's imagination is when it
comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he is to devise
anything that he desires to do when he has escaped from life. The
unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its unthinkable Nirvana, is
merely the depriving life of all its attributes; the dull sensuality of the
Mohammedan paradise, with its ugly multiplication of gross delights;
the tedious outcries of the saints in light which make the medieval
scheme of heaven into one protracted canticle--these are all deeply
unattractive, and have no power at all over the vigorous spirit. Even the
vision of Socrates, the hope of unrestricted converse with great minds,
is a very unsatisfying thought, because it yields so little material to
work upon.
The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience which
makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope and
satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the idea of
vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and uninspiring affair.
It is the process of change which is delightful, the finding out what we
can do and what we cannot, going from ignorance to knowledge, from
clumsiness to skill; even our relations with those whom we love are all
bound up with the discoveries we make about them and the degree in
which we can help them and affect them. What the mind instinctively
dislikes is stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing
to escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would be

frankly unendurable.
The reason why we dread death is because it seems to be a suspension
of all our familiar activities. It would be terrible to have nothing but
memory to depend upon. The only use of memory is that it distracts us
a little from present conditions if they are dull, and it is only too true
that the recollection in sorrow of happy things is torture of the worst
kind.
Once when Tennyson was suffering from a dangerous illness, his friend
Jowett wrote to Lady Tennyson to suggest that the poet might find
comfort in thinking of all the good he had done. But that is not the kind
of comfort that a sufferer desires; we may envy a good man his
retrospect of activity, but we cannot really suppose that to meditate
complacently upon what one has been enabled to do is the final thought
that a