THE TYRANT'S "TIMOR MORTIS."
SOME six months ago two young men—one of them a subaltern officer whose regiment had just been warned for service in South Africa—happened to be walking over a country estate. They stopped in their walk to watch the work of a noticeably old man engaged in the ordinary occupation of "hedging and ditching." The man worked silently and methodically, taking no notice of the onlookers, merely cutting and bending the hawthorn stems in a machine- like, every-day-of-the-week fashion. "That's a very old man," commented the subaltern. "How much does he earn ? " "He's eighty-two," he was answered. "He has been working on the estate since he was six or seven, and he'll work for years yet. He earns about 14s. a week." The young man thought for a little. "Does that man, I wonder, work on and on knowing, or rather perpetually remembering, what it all amounts to ? " "But after all," his companion' commented,
"what is the difference between you and him ? You go out to South Africa knowing that, so far as you are con- cerned, a stray bullet may any day put an end to every. thing. He remains in Sussex knowing that some illness incidental to old age may any • day put an end to everything for him." "But," answered the young man, "I had never before thought about an end. coming so slowly." Is there not in that slight and sudden reflection something like the gist of a whole great matter? The ordinary man thinks that he knows what to expect, and frames his calculations accordingly. Place him in circum- stances which he has not realised, and he finds that he has some- thing new to expect. He remodels his calculations, slowly or quickly, and in doing so he perhaps becomes puzzled or frightened. The young soldier willing to face a sudden and violent death charging at the head of his men at an en- trenched position would probably recoil from that prospect of death which is calmly accepted by the victim of cancer. Similarly the victim of cancer quite conceivably might shrink in terror from the swift end threatened by a flight of bullets. In each case the man is unprepared for an eventuality he has not considered. He needs time to make up his mind.
But while he is making up his mind, and when he has made up his mind—when he knows, or thinks he knows, the eventuality, and is prepared to face it—what then? "Men fears Death, as Children feare to go in the Darke." The tremendous eimplicity of Bacon's aphorism sums up the rule. The rule is that no man does not "fear" death. But there are the exceptions. There are men who do not fear death; there are other men who are unreasonably, hideously afraid of it. There is the mean, and there must be the extremes. In considering the spectrum of human life you have to take account of the ultra-violet rays. The yellow in the middle gives. you the mean; as you approach the green on one side and the orange on the other you get to appreciate the slight, slow divergences which lead to what it is impossible to see and difficult to understand. In the middle you have the sane, average, ordinary man, "fearing" death as "Children fears to go in the Darke " ; not always in the same degree; edging occasionally towards the orange which leads to horror, veering back to the green which tends through incuriousness to welcome, but in the main and as a rule "fearing" death simply as men fear change,—which is what the matter shortly stated comes to. "The unknown is ever terrible." But on each side of the sane man you find the tendency to the variant. On the extreme one hand you find the man who is afraid of life—the suicide; on the other, the man whose mind is obsessed with the terror of leaving life; both being the exceptions to the great rule. Is it wrong to say that the exceptions are more interesting than the rule ? It is at all events true that consideration of the exceptions leads to a better understanding of what is normal. By observa- tion of insanity you come to know what sanity means.
"He is the King, who fears nothing; he is the King, who shall desire nothing." Could a more striking exception be found to the great rule than the Sultan of Turkey? Of what is he King ? A man who, ruling over millions of sub- jects, is so afraid of each unit of those millions that he thinks first, not of his people, but of his bodyguard; a man who has organised a police system and a ring of detectives and spies about his own person second to none in the world in respect of the cleverness and the ferocity of the men employed ; a man who has thirty private sleeping-rooms—so the story goes —and dares not sleep in the same room two nights running, steel-cased though the sleeping-chambers of the Palace are, and perpetually guarded as is the room chosen for the night by an attached slave and by huge dogs ; a man who carries weapons about him with the intention to shoot down any stranger who does not come into his presence with his hands, literally speaking, above his head; who is said to have shot a man on sight because the man, being a petitioner, foolishly carried his petition in his pocket and groped for it with his hand; who is said even to have shot a child—the story may be worthless, but that it should be possible of belief means that much else is true—on suddenly seeing him playing with a dagger-shaped hairpin,—of what is that man King? Not of his reason. He does not " fear " death reason- ably. His fright of one thing distorts his view of everything ; his terror deflects his vision, he spies the head of the pistol
in the lead of the pencil; he dares hardly to see a man with clothes, lest clothes conceal a knife; he cannot eat until his doctor has eaten before him, and even then he is afraid of trusting his doctor. Is such a life worth living? He at least fears to leave it; and strangely enough, though so pitiable a coward, as a coward he is tremendous. His servants fear death at the hands of the man they know, as he himself fears death from a quarter he does not know; the man who is him- self hideously afraid of the last penalty continually exacts it from others, and is flattered and feared for doing so. It is a picture for a prototype of which you must go back perhaps to Tiberius at Capreae ; the strangling of the guilty Sejar.us foreshadows the milder fate of the probably quite innocent Fuad Pasha. But there you touch politics, which are outside the range of this article. We are only concerned here with the mental attitude towards a great rule of a particular exception to that rule.
Such an attitude as we have tried to describe can only be defined as insanity. It is the insanity of the tyrant, and in- sanity only possible to the tyrant. Perhaps it is the tyrant's set and proper punishment—" the particular hell which each man carries about with him "—but that, again, is outside the range of our discussion. It is, of course, the position of the man which makes his insanity remarkable. Other men all over the world are threatened with the same simple, terrible thing, yet other men do not take like, or comparatively like, precautions against its coming. The tyrant believes that death might come to him at any moment, and he tries by all the means at his disposal to prevent its coming; the sane man knows that it may come at any moment, but he tries to " live " before it comes. It is a curious fact that among sane men you do not find this exaggerated timor mortis precisely in those cases in which death is most imminent and ominous. The consumptive patient, even if he knows what consumption means, is almost invariably hopeful for the future ; hope, indeed, is one of the symptoms of the disease. The man who knows that he may drop dead at any moment from heart disease begins, rightly and sanely, building a house. The man who is engaged in a trade dangerous to life and limb does not swerve from his ordinary path. The truck-shunter, who well knows that next year's Board of Trade Returns will show, as every year's Board of Trade Returns have shown in the past,. so many truck-shunters killed and so many injured, goes quietly home to his supper. Of course, to this rule also there are exceptions, and you occasionally meet men whom an omnipresent and exaggerated fear of death depresses to the verge of insanity. Yet still tha insanity is of a different kind from the insanity ot the tyrant, because it has different effects. The insane fear of death of an ordinary 'citizen may affect a few friends and relations, but it does not affect the com- munity considered as a whole. The insane fear of death of the tyrant chokes and paralyses a nation; it communicates itself to those immediately about him, and through them to the people as a whole. Of course, it is true that the charac- ter of a nation reacts in a sense upon the character of its ruler; but the tyrant can resist that reaction, as Abdurrahman showed in moulding to his will a people ruled over before him by men who had to, fear much what Abd-ul-Hamid fears to- day. And when the tyrant not only does not resist the reaction upon him 'of the national character, but, further, when he gives full rein to his own fears and terrors, then he becomes much more than a mere madman. "The tyrant is of all men the most miserable," wrote Plato. But the tyrant who is mad, who cannot yet be said to have "death between his teeth," as the man with cancer has it, yet who is per- petually and hideously occupied with fear of its first touch, is more than miserable. He is the human beast in its most horrible and dangerous form.
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