The New Death

The New Death, the amplified form of the essay first published in the Atlantic Monthly, is by its very theme assured of an eager and a thoughtful reading. The title itself challenges scrutiny, in these days of new-old truth and a Wells-discovered God. The author defends her adjective. The New Death is "the change in standards that is being wrought in everyday living by the present concentration upon death." The heart of it is "its essentially practical acceptance of immortality, its essentially practical approach to God." Miss Kirkland implies that this experimental, adventurous faith is in itself new; yet her own assumption that a real faith is always a practical issue contradicts this inference. The attempt to adapt living to dying is new only in so far as it is becoming the universal, the supreme issue of the war. To interpret the deepest feeling of humanity at war is a hazardous task. The very formulation falsifies by rendering inarticulate, scarce conscious intuition as conscious, reasoned conviction. The author is aware of this danger; she constantly reminds us that the New Death is "a vast recuperative instinct rather than an argued faith"; she aims to deal with it pragmatically, scientifically. Yet her absorption in her theme betrays her, now into sweeping generalizations, now into absolute conclusions, that stand the test neither of her own evidence nor of the facts of experience. The first element of the new attitude toward death is defined as a new frankness and directness. It is noteworthy that in a recent essay" Freud shows how war is destroying our conventional attempt to eliminate death from life. This premise is then at one with the conclusions of psychology: and the first definition of the New Death as a resilient intuition "that spirit alone is indestructible" is also at one with the voice of witnesses from the simplest to the subtlest. The error that vitiates the argument lies in ignoring the truth, insisted on by thinkers as diverse as Freud and Gilbert Murray, that the psychology of war is a reversion to subconscious, primitive instinct underlying reason and religion. Over against Miss Kirkland's assumption that the soldier's "hilarity of heroism" is in itself a "conviction of immortality," we must set Professor Hocking's analysis of this "miracle of undepressible spirit" as a self-preserving instinct, youth's grip on life, its defense against thought. The very intensity of her appreciation of these soldier-heroes sometimes blinds her to their diversity of gifts; to cite Alan Seeger with Donald Hankey as witness to faith in a personal God is to lose not only the individual beauty but the real significance of each. A like disregard of intellectual distinctions leads to such inaccuracies as the implied identification of "scientific" and "materialistic"-as if there were no difference between a Huxley and a Haeckel. And the frequent repetition of "for the first time in the world" gives an effect of historical nearsightedness. Truly and finely does Miss Kirkland describe the final aspect of the New Death: the new valuation of daily life, "the responsibility to the dead to build the future they died for." Yet here again the argument is falsified by the assumption that faith in the human spirit is always a clear creed of immortality, and that this creed is responsible for every sign of seriousness in current life and literature, for every effort toward reconstruction and internationalism. And to trace "all the varieties of cruelty that the German soul has exhibited" to "the old, materialistic views of death" is surely to fly in the face of fact. Were there no believers in immortality among the invaders of France? No agnostics among her defenders? In Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France, cited by Miss Kirkland, Barrés bears witness on every page what cause it is that unites Catholic.... - Vassar Quarterly, Vol. 3