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MOUNTAIN PATHS
I
THE POWER OF THE DEAD
1
IN that curious little
masterpiece A Beleagured City, Mrs. Oliphant shows us the dead of a provincial
town suddenly waxing indignant over the conduct and the morals of those
inhabiting the town which they founded. They rise up in rebellion, invest the
houses, the streets, the market-places and, by the pressure of their
innumerable multitude, all-powerful though invisible, repulse the living,
thrust them out of doors and, setting a strict watch, permit them to return to
their rooftrees only after a treaty of peace and penitence has purified their
hearts, atoned for their offences and ensured a more worthy future.
Mountain Paths Undoubtedly a
great truth underlies this fiction, which appears to us farfetched because we
perceive only material and ephemeral realities. The dead live and move in our
midst far more really and effectually than the most venturesome imagination
could depict. It is very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even
seems increasingly certain that they never allowed themselves to be confined
there. Under the tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned there are
only a few ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they have abandoned without
regret and which in all probability they no longer deign to remember. All that
was themselves continues to have its being in our midst. How and under what
aspect? After all these thousands, perhaps millions of years, we do not yet
know; and no religion has been able to tell us with satisfying certainty,
though all have striven to do so; but we may, by means of certain tokens, hope
to learn.
2
Without further considering
a mighty but obscure truth, which it is for the moment impossible to state
precisely or to render palpable, let us concern ourselves with one which cannot
be disputed. As I have said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be,
there is at any rate one place where our dead cannot perish, where they
continue to exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more
actively; and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which for those
whom we have lost becomes Heaven or Hell according as we draw nearer to or
travel farther from their thoughts and their desires, is within ourselves.
And their thoughts and their
desires are always higher than our own. It is, therefore, by uplifting
ourselves that we approach them. It is we who must take the first steps, for
they can no longer descend, whereas it is always possible for us to rise; for
the dead, whatever they may have been in life, become better than the best of
us. The least worthy of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its
littlenesses, its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well; and the
spirit alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to desire only what
is good. There are no wicked dead, because there are no wicked souls. This is
why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life to those who were no more and
transform our memory, which they inhabit, into Heaven.
3
And what was always true of
all the dead is far more true to-day, when only the best are chosen for the
tomb. In the region which we believe to be under the earth, which we call the
Kingdom of the Shades and which in reality is the ethereal region and the
Kingdom of Light, there are at this moment disturbances no less profound than
those which we have experienced on the surface of the earth. The young dead
have invaded it from every side; and since the beginning of this world they
have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas in the
customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who leave us
receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in this incomparable
host who, to borrow Pericles' expression, "has not departed from life at
the height of glory." Not one of them but has gone up, not down, to his
death clad in the greatest sacrifice that man can make for an idea that cannot
die. All that we have hitherto believed, all that we have striven to attain
beyond ourselves, all that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all
that has overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all
this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such
a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had for ever
disappeared, were for ever useless and voiceless, for ever without influence in
a world to which they have given life.
4
It is hardly possible that
this could be so as regards the external survival of the dead; but it is
absolutely certain that it is not so as regards their survival in ourselves.
Here nothing is lost and no one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a
multitude of heroes struck down in the flower of their youth and very different
from the pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the
sick and the old, who had already ceased to exist before leaving the earth. We
must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our homes, both in our cities and
in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest hovel, there lives
and reigns a young dead man in the glory of his strength. He fills the poorest,
darkest dwelling with a splendour of which it had never ventured to dream. His
constant presence, imperious and inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion
and ideas which it had never known before, hallows everything around it, makes
the eyes look higher, prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air
that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are mustered
there and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts the whole people on a scale
of unexampled vastness.
5
Such dead as these have a
power as profound, as fruitful as life and less precarious. It is terrible that
this experience should have been made, for it is the most pitiless and the
first in such enormous masses that mankind has undergone; but, now that the
ordeal is over, we shall soon gather the most unexpected fruits. It will not be
long before we see the differences widen and the destinies diverge between the
nations which have acquired all these dead and all this glory and those which
were deprived of them; and we shall perceive with amazement that the nations
which have lost the most are those which have kept their riches and their men.
There are losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the
future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the mere
thought of whom accomplishes things which our bodies cannot perform. There are
dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers life; and we are almost every
one of us at this moment the mandataries of a being greater, nobler, graver,
wiser and more truly living than ourselves. With all those who accompany him,
he will be our judge, if it be true that the dead weigh the soul of the living
and that our happiness depends on their verdict. He will be our guide and our
protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its misfortunes
to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty dead soaring above his
head and speaking within his heart.
We shall live henceforward
under their laws, which will be more just but not more severe nor more
cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake to suppose that the dead love nothing
but gloom: they love only that justice and that truth which are the eternal
forms of happiness.
From the depths of this
justice and this truth in which they are all immersed, they will help us to
destroy the great falsehoods of existence; for war and death, if they sow
innumerable miseries and misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as
many lives as they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made
for us will have been in vain -- and this is not possible -- if they do not
first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and which it is
not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is ashamed of them and
will be eager to make an end of them.
They will teach us, before
all else, from the depths of our hearts which are their living tombs, to love
those who outlive them, since it is in them alone that they wholly exist.
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