MAN’S FINAL HOUR

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7974, 4 December 1911, Page 2

MAN’S FINAL HOUR

FAMOUS AUTHOR ON DEATH. REMARKABLE BOOK BY MAETERLINCK. knoai OUB SrECIAh cobp.espoxdent. LONDON. October 24. One of the most discussed books of the current publishing season will certainly be Maurice Maeterlinck's series of essays entitled "Death," published by Methuen. Tho famous author asks us to alter our attitude towards the final hour. Hitherto tho human attitude towards death has been one of dread even among people living under the mo.|t desperate and miserable conditions. That attitude is represented by the old Roman saying, "Wo know what wo are; we do not know what wo may be.” Maeterlinck asks for a new philosophy and a less fatalistic point of view: — Though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it instead of going to it with uplifted head. , . . W© deliver death into the dim hands of instinct, and wo grant it not one hour of our intelligence. So this is, apparently, to be our new attitude—to talk of, analyse, study, and deliberate upon death as a common contingency rather than avoid it as an awful finality. Maeterlinck wants us |o learn to look upon death free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of imagination:— Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it. . . We impute to it the tortures of the lost illness, and that is not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life and not of death. . . Death alonebears the weight;of the -Tefirors of nature dr the ignorance- of science that have uselessly prolonged ; torments - in- whose name 'we curse death because it puts an end to them. With this as his premise it is natural that ■ ■ Maeterlinck should discuss the question of ministering to the pains of those on the death bed- To-day, he says. Science prolongs the agony which is "the most dreadful and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror for the witnesses at least." Often the sensibility of him who is at bay with death is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings' which, to the watchers, he appears to be enduring. Some day the prejudice will, M. Maeterlinck believes, strike us as barbarism:— Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have, long sihee died out in the minds of men. . . They (the doctors) seem persuaded that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings, is snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of tho hereafter reserved for men. . . The prolongation of the agony increases the horror of death and the : horror of death demanding the pro- ' longation of the agony. . Thus does M. Maeterlinck plead for the-right to put an end to the pains of those whose case is pronounced hopeless. His point of view is certain to command attention and a great deal of criticism on humanitarian as well as philosophic lines. His piont of view is by no means a new one but it :s the first time that one of the literary giants of the world has ventured to so openly advocate tho -extinction of life in those whose case is hopeless, and who are doomed to linger in agony till kindly Death intervenes.