The Fear of Death in Ancient and Modern Times

In comparing the grounds for fearing death in ancient and in modern times, it may be said roughly that the physical terrors are constant, while the moral terrors are variable. Not, indeed, that the mere physical terrors have been, strictly speaking, unchanged. For it is probable that the ancients, being used to hardship and suffering, were less sensitive to the sting of death than we are. On the other hand, it is certain that the progress of medicine, including the use of anaesthetics, has done something toward extracting that sting, and will in time do much more. No doubt our medical improvements often increase the immediate fear of death which is felt by the dying; if the dying suffered more, their minds would be distracted, and they would shrink less from the final relief. But, at any rate, those medical improvements tend to mitigate the apprehension which the mere pain of dying excites in the world at large. And it is enough for my purpose that this pain of dying can hardly be worse with us than it was with our forefathers; the balance, if balance there is, is probably in our favor. Yet, strange to say, the entire terrors of death seem to be greater in our time than in that of the great classical writers. To prove this assertion would not be easy; but scholars will hardly dispute it.

It is remarkable that Bacon, when maintaining the paradox that the fear of death is the weakest of emotions, chooses all his examples from among pagans. He mentions, among other instances, the dying jest of Vespasian, 'Ut puto, Deus fio.' It would be unfair to judge of the ancient indifference to death from this exceptional utterance; just as, on the other hand, it would be unfair to judge of the modern alarm at death from the case of Johnson, who, when the surgeon made slight scarifications in his swollen leg, exclaimed, "Deeper! deeper! I want length of life; and you are afraid of giving me pain, which I do not value." Yet it is hard not to think that these opposite frames of mind exhibit the ancient and modern tendencies in regard to death, though they exhibit them "writ large." The best of the ancients knew, as we do not know, how to obey the maxim of the great poet of stoicism, and to take a negative view of death as the mere end of life, the goal in the course of nature; if infirm or suffering they could even go the length of Dryden's rendering of that maxim: "And count it Nature's privilege to die."

Hence they managed to take death easily, through thinking of it as a matter of course, and thinking but little of it even thus; while with us on the other hand, death is just what Byron called it, "the doom we dread, yet dwell upon," and it is life which now dwindles into being the accident of our existence, l'antichambre de la mort, or rather, de l'eternite. In truth, the ancients (or, more properly, the Greek and Roman free citizens,) in seeking fortem animum, mortis terrore carentem, acted by anticipation on my friend's rule, not to regret the inevitable; and to this unregretfulness, this dislike of breaking their wings against the bars of their cage, they owed much of that light-hearted joyousness which formed a real side of their character, though a less important side than we are apt to think.

It is observed by Lessing that, in comparing the views entertained by different ages or races concerning death, their art proves a safer guide than their literature. Perhaps we may explain the grounds of this judgement by saying that literature is able, and is therefore expected, to give a diorama of what it depicts, while art can give only a panorama. Thus, in describing death, writers, especially poets, have to ring the changes of ever-varying, yet monotonous, details concerning the divers modes and stages, and the unexhilarating appendages of dying. On the other hand, a painter or sculptor is in the strictest manner bound to the unities of space and time. Thus, if he seeks to represent death in the abstract, he can only give a momentary and concentrated view of it. His representation must (so far as it goes) include everything, and yet must include nothing that needs to be explained; so that he must confine himself to the essential and constant features of death, as distinguished from those which are accidental, and which vary in individual cases.

What, then, are the essential ideas of death that are embodied in ancient and in modern art? To this Lessing replies that ancient art generally symbolized death by emblems of repose and insensibility, modern art by a skeleton. It is true that he deprecates and denounces this tendency of modern art. Being himself on the side of the angels, he would have agreed with Coleridge that a good man's surest friends should be "himself, his Maker, and the angel Death." And as an angel rather than as a skeleton, he would fain have seen death typified. Still, in dealing with things, not as he wished them to be, but as they are, he emphatically declares that ancient art and ancient thought represented death more favorably than modern art or modern thought. Hence it appears that his authority in this matter, being given with reluctance, should carry all the more weight, and that this authority is distinctly on the side of the view for which we have been contending. — Fortnightly Review.