DEAD MEN'S TALES

An incident which has recently gained a good deal of publicity in the newspapers might have furnished inspiration for one of Poe's best tales of horror. It deals with a suicide -a man found dead with a revolver in his had; but in this case the revolver in his hand; but in this case the revolver had not been fired. The man, it seems, had died of fright while meditating his end. He probably had experienced some very unpleasant "last hours".

But on top of this episode, there appears the story of a man who claims to have experienced the sensation of dying enough times to have exhausted the resources of a cat. He defines dying as "the process of passing from that quickened consciousness we term life into that black borderland which, so far as we know, edges eternity". Then, in an article written just before an operation which proved fatal to him, he tells of the various ways in which he had previously met death:--by falling down an elevator shaft, from the effects of a mine explosion, from a shell-wound, from anaesthetic, and from loss of blood. But every time the return to life proved more painful to him than the leaving of it. At last he was able to look forward to real death with composure, and was frankly unable to see what the public could find that was interesting in it.

A partial explanation has been offered. The great mass of people, whose lives are prosaic in the extreme, and who crave excitement to satisfy their natural impulses, find an outlet for their emotions in the reading of tales of murder and suicide. They find a kind of psychological relief in the death and mental anguish of others; and thus, perhaps, are kept from committing suicide themselves. Mental stimulation furnishes a sort of antitoxin to what is generally termed "the latent blood-lust of a morbid humanity."

The explanation is still somewhat incomplete. Man may crave excitement: but it is curiosity that really killed the cat. The Greek philosopher who jumped overboard into the Aegean in order to test Plato's theories on the immortality of the soul, was merely the first fool of his kind. A modern husband who killed himself in order to see whether his wife had gone to heaven or not suffered from the same infirmity of mind. Critics of journalistic sensationalism should be more tolerant: instead of an incitement to crime, the green and pink and yellow sheets are simply a relief for pent-up curiosity. For this relief, much thanks!