A man may be reasonably convinced that, since he must die some day, and his reprieve cannot be extended long, it is best to die in battle and shoot full-blooded into the spiritual land; nevertheless, if the shadow of a rock gives some shelter from the guns, he will crawl behind it.  A few years ago there was a great Oxford philosopher who, after lecturing all morning on the beauty of being absorbed by death into the absolute and eternal, was granted the opportunity of being wrecked on a lake in the afternoon, but displayed no satisfaction at the immediate prospect of such absorption.

In the same way, despite our natural and reasonable desires for a death like Mr. Tomkinson’s, we still continue to speak, not only of sleeping in our beds, but of dying in them, as one of the chief objects of a virtuous and happy existence.  The longest and most devotional part of the Anglican Common Prayer contains a special petition entreating that we may be delivered from the sudden death which we have all agreed is so excellent a piece of fortune.  That we are not set free from love of living is shown by what Matthew Arnold called a bloodthirsty clinging to life at a moment of crisis.  I shall not forget the green terror on the faces of all the men in a railway carriage when I accidentally set fire to the train, nor have I found it really appetising to suspect even the quickest poison in my soup.  Instead of leaping gallantly into death while the trumpets are still blowing, nearly every civilised man deliberately plots out his existence so as to die, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyitch, amid the pitiful squalor of domestic indifference or solicitude.  We think health universally interesting, we meditate on diet, we measure our exercise, and shun all risks more carefully than sin.  Praising with our lips the glories of the soldier’s death, we tread with minute observance the bath-chair pathway to the sick-rooms of old age.

Are our praises of death in victory, then, all cant, and are all the eloquent rhapsodies of poets and essayists a sham?  Montaigne seems to have thought so, for, writing of those who talk fine of dying bravely, he says: 

“It happeneth that most men set a stern countenance on the matter, look big, and speak stoutly, thereby to acquire reputation, which, if they chance to live, they hope to enjoy.”

The case of our eloquent rhapsodists who hymn the joys of sudden and courageous death is evidently more favourable still, since they have every chance of living for a time, and so of enjoying a reputation for bravery without much risk.  But rather than accuse mankind of purposely dissembling terror in the hope of braggart fame, we would lay the charge upon a queer divergence between the mind and the bodily will.  No matter what the mind may say in commendation of swift and glorious death, the bodily will continues to maintain its life to the utmost, and is the last and savages enemy that the mind can overcome.  So it is that no one should reckon beforehand upon