Charcoal Fumes
Helm, MacKinley
IN THAT most undergraduate of epochs, the fin de siecle, a noticeable number of sensitive persons in England either committed suicide or entered the Roman Church. It is fair enough to call the...
...The same purpose animates sensitive young people of our day...
...Creation then progresses in the direction of the beautiful and the good...
...Sometimes suicide may be the result of boredom, as with Hedda Gabler: but even boredom can be profoundly tragic...
...Sometimes there may be complex but comprehensible pathological causes...
...By way of preliminary one can admit, straightway, that the Catholic Church does not pretend to solve the problem of evil...
...Hardly anybody had heard that up in Cambridge Mr...
...Perhaps still others are newly finding that salvation in religion...
...It may be, unhappily, only from the point of view of one who is already enough of a Christian to understand the glowing possibilities of the Christian life that it appears attractive to proceed In a way of life which will help God carry out His benevolent plan for the establishment of the kingdom of the good...
...For such a one, the Incarnation offers not only such hope as makes living endurable, but likewise a certain new impulse to restate the purpose of living...
...For ultimately, if one is to find purpose where now futility Is, one must be pointed, like creation, toward the good...
...If such a one had heard of soul-sickness, he wouldn't have known what it meant...
...In the 'nineties you found people of the same temperament doing one of two things: perhaps not deliberating between two alternatives, not consciously choosing between death and Catholicism...
...The first of these implications of the Incarnation is a favorite subject of preachers...
...Anybody who has been an undergraduate knows with what anxiety the meaning of life is sought...
...But one must observe that he found in the Crucifixion of Christ, besides the hope of redemption from evil, a complementary impulse to share with Christ in that suffering through which He accomplished redemption...
...and then one has to show him another way of escape which is equally salutary and sufficiently romantic...
...to lament it...
...A. E. Housman was saying: But play the man, stand up and end you, When your sickness is your soul...
...Of course it would be expecting too much to suppose that soul-sickness is the invariable cause of suicide...
...how utterly He abhors it...
...The Impulses to remote ends appear to have been alike...
...On the other hand, there is the revealed Divine attitude toward evil: an attitude which, with all its insistence, does not purport to be infallibly cathartic...
...At college there is sufficient leisure for speculation and introspection: there is time to discover that the world In Itself is not so very glorious...
...Many a saint has entered the Church a disillusioned spirit...
...It is precisely because they found evil in the world or evil in themselves that English artists in the 'nineties made an end to their lives...
...The first Franciscans were many of them such youngsters : and pretty much the sort that, failing to find in life what it expects, turns instead to death...
...People in them groan under the burden of disenchantment...
...The death of Amy Levy and the baptism of Aubrey Beardsley were dramatic events calculated, while they astonished London, to accomplish an identical purpose: salvation from an unlovely world...
...In that confident turning to God, which is faith, there is lost that unutterable and lonely weariness in which comes temptation to abandon life...
...No man can now face the evil in the world with more assurance than the Christian, whose God has plainly revealed His good will...
...The journalists are amazed, and call them sophomores...
...or even to point to a rubric in the Burial Office forbidding the use of the service over a suicidal grave...
...People outside of colleges dream of the enchantment of college life...
...It is possible to be fairly successful at college: to belong to the beau monde, to make Phi Beta Kappa, presumably, even, to win a football letter, and yet to be conscious of a terrifying vacuity...
...The latter received from the hand of a friend who (literally) drew him back from death, the Cross, medicina mundl...
...yet of two poets appearing in the same number of the Yellow Book, one died by his own hand and the other was converted...
...Unless one believes that the world is entirely and irrevocably under the domination of an evil power, one can discern in the Incarnation ground for moral hopefulness, for therein has the good God declared His unalterable opposition to all that fails of being good...
...The God Who hates evil is to be thought of as willing whatsoever is lovely...
...What happened...
...Thus Amy Levy, that fastidious poet, inhaled charcoal fumes issuing from a bowl set into an exquisitely wrought Iron tripod, her intimate friends meanwhile languishing in her drawingroom, attending her death...
...There is much of heroism and wistfulness and understanding In youth—of the romantic spirit—to be caught hold of by a desire to endure as Christ endured...
...It is fair enough to call the 'nineties undergraduate because there were in those days so many sincere imposters and so many posturing sincerities...
...There is time to feel the pain of disillusionment...
...He was willing to enter into conflict with evil in order to save the world...
...And present fortitude can be cultivated by men who are hopeful for the future...
...All London set itself to just such futile speculation concerning suicide as American editors and reporters indulge themselves in now...
...What Jesus did in the Gospels He does now in His Resurrection life...
...As a matter of fact, of course, suicide is reasonable enough...
...One is under obligation to offer some measure of safety in the world in return for the imposition of an anathema upon the act of self-annihilation...
...He is the tender companion of the weak, the sinner, the outcast...
...But of this we may be confident: the causes of suicide are not commonly superficial...
...He heals the sick: the physically and the mentally sick...
...He and they thought of it seriously together, back in the days of the Shropshire Lad, whereas their priests, under pain of sin, and their journalists, under pain of ignorance, were disapproving, sceptical, or frankly uncomprehending...
...and whereas certain hardy and perdurable souls go in for reform waves, these others seek only an opportunity of escape...
...Jesus in the Gospels is confronted by every sort of evil: He demonstrates God's willingness to overcome it...
...But she holds the optimistic view, which enables her to cope with It, that God hates evil...
...It is not to be expected that Saint Paul's attitude toward his own experiences with evil will be acquired by young people to whom Christian ideas are new...
...Now while it is fair to point out that these unhappy souls posture even in their hurt, and have an eye for the spectacular even in their sincerity, it is unfair to call them sophomoric simply because they have done a thing which is not only effective but also obvious...
...Housman impressed undergraduates at Cambridge with his doctrines because he understood that it is natural for serious young men to think seriously of suicide...
...A handful of them have chosen crude forms of the Amy Levy mode of achieving that end...
...At the time when Saint Paul was writing to the Church at Rome certain Jews were inquiring how God, Who had never really demonstrated His own righteousness, could venture to call anybody else either righteous or unrighteous...
...to describe it as either brave or cowardly...
...Companioned by the Holy Spirit of God, one enters—by what miracle of revolution I—into the new life...
...but that his spirit is sick by reason of that infectious evil that surrounds him, or resides within him...
...Of course it is rarely that purely cosmic pains produce in people the states of mind which lead to suicide...
...One has to see that a young man who entertains thoughts of suicide is not necessarily deranged, nor even morbid...
...It is not adequate to call suicide silly...
...It Is somehow in this connection that suicide stands out as pitifully unsuitable: it falls lamentably short of the fulfillment of an Ideal of a universe which is to be achieved by the servants of God laboring under His direction...
...Providence beholds within itself an ideal of life which is perfectly desirable...
...Thus Aubrey Beardsley, master of a cold but delicate art, whom Arthur Symons calls "anima naturaliter pagana," found comfort at the point of death in the ministrations of his newly acquired Mother...
...More commonly it is when the individual shares in the universal distress that he begins to wish to disengage himself from the universe...
...because, that is, there was a passionate perception of important difficulties, together with a will to find a dashing, though facile, solution for them: the kind of thing that makes it quite impossible for the adult person living in the world to understand the undergraduate living in the unworld of the university...
...More accountably, however, there is that sensitiveness in undergraduates, as in artists, to a fundamental and intolerable wrongness in the world of their experience...
...The real cause being too profound—albeit being simple—the world invented all sorts of irrelevant causes, and gossiped much about them...
...One must be in league with God...
...It accomplishes an immediate end...
...Perhaps there is reason, first of all, in this: one who is sensitive enough to mourn over this world's ills is likewise able to perceive whatever of beauty resides in the universe...
...In the Gospels He teaches, eternally, that even in this life a man can be reborn into a new life which is tranquil, impregnable against the forces of evil—utterly desirable, merely by turning to God with the confidence which a child shows in a good father...
...Salvation they must have, at any price...
...Sentimental ? The death of the other was no less so...
...For inside and outside of the college} walls, no man can find the meaning of his life If It Is empty of the supernatural...
...Saint Paul explained that God showed in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross exactly what He thinks about evil...
...The primary cause of suicide being what it is, it is impossible not to engage in a momentary combat with the "problem of evil...
...A disillusioned youth needs God and the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints...
...On the one hand, then, you have evil: for which can be substituted any of its specific forms, pain, sickness, suffering, wickedness, sin—in short, any of the experiences which make life unlovely and unendurable...
...One's ground for disapproving of it is that it is unsuitable, because the end which it seeks to accomplish is not sufficiently idealistic...
...We ask, naturally, to what extent does that attitude provide assistance for one who, finding this world undesirable, contemplates suicide ? It is not easy to compound and then to compact answers...
...Thus In his letter to the Colossians he rejoices in the accession to the number of his own sufferings because thereby he is able the more nearly to endure in his own life the multiplicity of the sufferings of Christ...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 5
