LIKE A KNIFE THROWER’S TARGET, medieval man was circumscribed by Christian dogma, which taught him that life was hell, death was torture, and hell was worse. In this scheme of things suicide was unspeakable. Against this joyless landscape the Renaissance blew in like a cool breeze, bringing an awareness of the world’s beauty and a renewed faith in man’s possibilities. Memento mori, the somber slogan of the Middle Ages, became memento vivere. Earthly life was once again valued for itself and not merely as a transition to the hereafter. Renaissance scholars rediscovered classical art, literature, and philosophy, and the Greek and Roman ideals of self-reliance and self-determination were reborn. In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” Pico della Mirandola imagines God addressing humanity: “Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature . . . as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.” And if man’s life was his own, so was his death. The decaying flesh, voracious worms, and eternal torment that filled the medieval vision of death gave way to a serene new view:
Death is a remedy against all evils: It is a most assured haven, never to be feared, and often to be sought: All comes to one period, whether man make an end of himselfe, or whether he endure it; whether he run before his day, or whether he expect it: whence soever it come, it is ever his owne, where ever the threed be broken, it is all there, it’s the end of the web. The voluntariest death, is the fairest. Life dependeth on the will of others, death on ours. In nothing should we so much accommodate our selves to our humours, as in that.
In his essay “A Custome of the Ile of Cea” (referring to state-sponsored suicide in the ancient Greek colony of Ceos), Michel de Montaigne, whose skeptical essays questioned prevailing attitudes on almost any subject, based his defense of suicide, written in the 1570s, on classical notions of free will. But Montaigne was less interested in endorsing suicide than in demystifying death. “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point,” he once wrote, “to teach us not to be afraid to die.” And in the end Montaigne’s arguments were leavened with Renaissance optimism. He found suicide not immoral but a bit foolish. “The opinion which disdaineth our life, is ridiculous,” he wrote, “for, in fine, it is our being. It is our all in all.” He introduced a practical argument that would become a staple of modern suicide prevention: “Moreover, there being so many sudden changes, and violent alterations in humane things, it is hard to judge in what state or point we are justly at the end of our hope. . . . I have seene a hundred Hares save themselves even in the Greyhounds jawes.”
“A Custome of the Ile of Cea” was the first significant discussion of suicide to question the Church’s blanket prohibition. After eight centuries suicide was once more a topic for debate. Even those who argued against it, like the fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch, disdained religious intimidation in favor of balanced argument. In The Funeral, Erasmus explained that God meant death to be dreadful “lest men far and wide commit suicide. And since, even today, we see so many do violence to themselves, what do you suppose would happen if death weren’t horrible? Whenever a servant or even a young son got a thrashing, whenever a wife fell out with her husband, whenever a man lost his money, or something else occurred that upset him, off they’d rush to noose, sword, river, cliff, poison.” Yet in The Praise of Folly, Erasmus described those who killed themselves in disgust at the miserable world as “people who lived next door to wisdom.” In Renaissance literature suicide was once more a conversation piece. Less than a century after Dante condemned suicides to the seventh circle of hell, Chaucer used Thisbe, Dido, Lucretia, and Cleopatra as models in his Legende of Goode Women; Lucretia became a heroine of Tudor and Elizabethan poetry and a popular model for Renaissance painters. And as early as 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia offered what may have been the first Christian consideration of voluntary euthanasia. In More’s ideal republic, although provided the best possible medical care, the terminally ill were permitted, even encouraged, to end their lives.
But yf the dysease be not onelye uncurable, but also full of contynuall payne and anguyshe, then the priestes and the magistrates exhort the man, seynge he ys not able to doo annye dewtye of lyffe, and by ouerlyuing hys owne deathe is noysome and yrkesome to other, and greuous to himself; that he wyll determyne with hymselfe no longer to cheryshe that pestilent and peynefull dysease: and, seynge hys lyfe ys to hym but a tourmente, that he wyll nott bee unwyllynge too dye, but rather take a good hope to hym, and other dyspatche hymselfe owte of that paynfull lyffe, as owte of a pryson or a racke of tormente, or elles suffer hym selfe wyllynglye to be rydde owte of yt by other. And in so doynge they tell hym he shal doo wyselye, seynge by hys deathe he shall lyse no commodytye, but ende hys payne.
Renaissance writers would most affect the discussion of suicide not by introducing any fresh philosophical angle but by beginning to describe what, centuries later, would be called the psychology of a suicidal person. In Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Despair, his cave littered with the corpses of suicides, presses a dagger upon the Red Cross Knight. Suddenly, a familiar-sounding iteration of the traditional arguments for and against self-destruction gives way to the magnified heartbeat of a true suicidal crisis: “. . . his hand did quake / And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene, / And troubled bloud through his pale face was seene / To come, and goe with tydings from the hart, / As it a running messenger had beene.”
It would be Shakespeare, of course, who most fully explored the suicidal person’s internal landscape. In his eight tragedies there are fourteen suicides. Shakespeare examined what were known as honor suicides—to avoid capture, to rejoin a lost loved one, and so on—and saw them not as types but as individuals with complex motives. Cassius, for instance, who orders his servant to run him through with his sword, is not simply the traditional “suicide to avoid capture” but a proud man undone by his refusal to compromise his lofty self-concept. Othello, too, values his good name more than his life. He stabs himself not so much out of guilt for killing Desdemona but as a way of reviving his reputation. As M. D. Faber has pointed out in an essay on Shakespeare’s suicides, Othello kills the bad part of himself (the jealous monster who killed innocent Desdemona) so that the good part (the just, noble warrior) may live on posthumously. Faber suggested that Romeo’s suicide is less a romantic attempt to rejoin his lost loved one, Juliet, than an impulsive act of rage, spite, and frustration. “ ‘I defy you, stars,’ cries Romeo just as he decides to die, and in that cry we have much of what is driving him,” wrote Faber. “. . . His suicide is, in large part, an obscene gesture directed toward the world and the world’s authorities.” Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, unable to express his anger at his mother for marrying his uncle, turns his rage inward and contemplates suicide. In his famous soliloquy he moves from the religious prohibitions, his dismay that God had “fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” to a practical consideration of the pros and cons. Although he admits that exchanging “a sea of troubles” for the “sleep of death” is “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” he hesitates, worried that what comes after death might be even worse than his troubled life.
In 1608, seven years after Hamlet was first produced and published, John Donne summed up the arguments for and against suicide in Biathanatos, subtitled: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise. Wherein The Nature, and the extent of all those Lawes, which seeme to be violated by this Act, are diligently surveyed. The first defense of suicide in the English language was as formidable as its title. Its three parts, devoted to demonstrating that suicide does not contradict the laws of nature, of reason, or of God, were a witty, erudite dismantling of the traditional arguments against what Donne called “the disease of head-long dying.”
Donne concluded his vast and detailed survey of suicide by observing that “in all ages, in all places, upon all occasions, men of all conditions, have affected it, and inclin’d to doe it.” Suicide is universal, as much a part of us as the instinct of self-preservation it seems to deny. Donne’s conclusion rendered the moral question less absolute, affirming that “no law is so primary and simple . . . but that circumstances alter it. In which case a private man is Emperor of himselfe. . . . And he whose conscience well tempred and dispassion’d, assures him that the reason of selfe-preservation ceases in him, may also presume that the law ceases too.”
Donne’s insistence that each case must be judged individually was probably the result of his own “circumstance.” In the preface to Biathanatos he explained his reasons for writing the book. After describing a man “eminent and illustrious, in the full glory and Noone of Learning,” who was prevented from throwing himself off a Paris bridge, Donne confessed that he had considered suicide himself. “I have often such a sickely inclination,” he wrote, although he could not explain exactly why. “Whensoever any affliction assailes me, mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presen’s it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.”
In The Savage God, A. Alvarez explored the reasons for Donne’s “sickely inclination.” Donne wrote Biathanatos at the age of thirty-six, when his brilliant career as poet and courtier was at low ebb. Having been dismissed from his post as private secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Donne lived with his wife and children outside London. Unable to write or to find a job, Donne thought of death. In a 1608 letter to a friend he wrote of the “thirst and inhiation after the next life” that often overtook him. But Donne admitted that his suicidal thoughts were not wholly due to his reduced circumstances “because I had the same desires when I went with the tyde, and enjoyed fairer hopes than now.”
Whatever kept him from “head-long dying” is not known, but that same year Donne wrote Biathanatos. Alvarez has suggested that the book itself saved Donne. “I wonder if Biathanatos didn’t begin as a prelude to self-destruction and finish as a substitute for it,” he wrote. “That is, he set out to find precedents and reasons for killing himself while still remaining Christian—or, at least, without damning himself eternally. But the process of writing the book and marshaling his intricate learning and dialectical skill may have relieved the tension and helped to re-establish his sense of his self.” Although Donne, who took vows to enter the Church in 1615, continued to be preoccupied by death in his sermons from the pulpit as dean of St. Paul’s and in his divine poems, he forbade publication of Biathanatos “because it is upon a misinterpretable subject.” When it was finally published in 1646, fifteen years after his death, it created a storm of comment. But despite its learned discussion of suicide, the book’s main contribution may have been in the simple confession of the preface. Suicide, Donne explained, may be neither a heroic, rational choice nor a sin and a crime, but “a sickely inclination” that can overwhelm a person.
Donne’s “sickely inclination” sounds like depression. In the seventeenth century it was known as melancholy, a catchall term that described a variety of moods and symptoms. In the Middle Ages it existed as accidie, a sinful malaise born of despair of the grace of God. In “The Parson’s Tale,” Chaucer described how accidie made a man “hevy, thoghtful, and wrawe.” A different sort of melancholy was found in the ballads of medieval troubadours, who sang of dying lovers and the supreme value of love on earth. That romantic seed bloomed in the Renaissance when melancholy stemmed not from the sinner’s horror of death and eternity but from a realization of the brevity of life. In literature and drama, melancholy would become associated with sensitive, thoughtful, superior minds, even genius, and it threatened to become a fashionable affliction.
To Robert Burton melancholy was far too painful to consider fashionable. “If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart,” he wrote in 1621 in The Anatomy of Melancholy, a chatty, rambling field guide to the species. According to Burton, melancholy was near-ubiquitous, and the fact that his book went through seven editions in forty years may support his claim. A parson and Oxford don who lived, he admitted, “a silent, sedentary, solitary life,” Burton himself suffered from persistent melancholy, which he could sometimes alleviate by going down to the Isis to listen to the shouts and curses of the bargemen. But many melancholics, he wrote, found relief only in death. (Burton was rumored to have hanged himself.)
Though the parson in Burton dutifully repeated the antisuicide arguments and quoted the laws and penalties against the act, the humanist in him seems to have realized that suicide, like the melancholy from which he suffered, may not be a matter of choice: “In extremity, they know not what they do, deprived of reason, judgment, all, as a ship that is void of a pilot, must needs impinge upon the next rock or sands, and suffer shipwreck.” He questioned the Church’s damnation of suicide and suggested that man himself is in no position to pass judgment. “What may happen to one may happen to another. Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case, it may be thine.”
If the Stoics, with their ultrarational approach, had made suicide seem heroic, icy, and a little impersonal, Christianity, by damning and degrading it, had made it seem foul and inhuman. With the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Donne, and Burton managed to humanize suicide, treating it as an object of sympathy rather than of worship or horror. This change was even reflected in the work of several ecclesiastical writers, who, while condemning suicide, admitted to certain exceptions. “There be two sorts of voluntarie deathes,” observed Reverend Tuke in A Discourse on Death in 1613, “the one lawful and honest, such as the death of Martyrs, the other dishonest and unlawful, when men have neyther lawfull calling, nor honest endes, as of Peregrinus, who burnt himselfe in a pile of wood, thinking thereby to live forever in mens remembrance.” Saint Cyran’s “Casus Regius” listed thirty-four situations in which the self-murderer was innocent, and theologians and philosophers of the school of Grotius and Pufendorf condoned suicide when committed to avoid dishonor or sin, to save oneself from death by torture, or to offer up one’s own life to save that of a friend. In 1613, alarmed by a rash of suicides near Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Protestant minister Johannes Neser preached three sermons in which he reiterated that those who committed premeditated suicide when sane were damned. But men who were driven to suicide by intense vexations, chronic sickness, or extreme pain were not damned, he said, because they did not know what they were doing. When in doubt as to a suicide’s sinfulness—as in cases of gout, bladder stone, and urinary gravel, where acute pain might cause temporary derangement—he concluded that the verdict must be left to God.
In 1637, concerned by an apparent increase in suicide, an English country clergyman named John Sym wrote Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing. While agreeing with prevailing seventeenth-century opinion that suicide was the devil’s work and “utterly unlawful,” Sym compiled what may have been the first collection of warning signs: “gastly lookes, wilde frights and flaights, nestling and restlesse behaviour, a mindlessnesse and close dumpishnesse, both in company and in good imployments; a distracted countenance and cariage; speaking and talking to, and with themselves, in their solitary places and dumps; reasoning and resolving with themselves about that fact, and their motives to it, in a perplexed disturbed manner, with the like.” If these signs were present, said Sym, the melancholy man must take precautions to keep the devil at bay: “shunning to go upon lawfull calling into solitary retired places; over waters, bridges, upon battlements of houses; or neere steepe downe places . . . shunning to be alone, or in dark places.” Drawing on his experience counseling potential suicides, Sym concluded, “Self-murder is prevented, not so much by arguments against the fact; which disswades from the conclusion; as by the discovery and removall of the motives and causes, whereupon they are tempted to do the same: as diseases are cured by removing of the causes, rather than of their symptoms.”
Sym’s conclusion—treat the causes and not the symptoms—was ahead of its time. Despite—or perhaps because of—sympathetic consideration for the suicide in Renaissance philosophy and literature, there remained a vast gap between enlightened opinion and the law. Whether a man be pushed to suicide by melancholy, by fever, or by the devil, he risked a variety of punishments. Even the benevolence of More’s Utopia extended only so far: unauthorized suicides were to be “caste unburied into some stinkyng marrish.” Their fate was mild compared to that of suicides in the real world. Facing what they believed to be a rising toll of suicides, courts invoked stiffer penalties in the hope that if fear of eternal damnation was not enough to deter the potential suicide, concern for his property, family, reputation, and corpse might be.
In fifteenth-century France the body of one Louis de Beaumont was to be dragged through the streets “as cruelly as possible, to set an example for others.” An ordinance of 1670 reaffirmed that suicide was treason against God and king. The suicide’s corpse was hauled through the streets of the city, hanged upside down, then thrown into a sewer or the town dump. His property was forfeited to the king. If the deceased was a nobleman, he was declared a commoner. His forests were razed, his castle demolished, his shield and coat of arms broken, and his memory defamed ad perpetuam rei memoriam—to the end of memory. If the corpse of a suicide could not be found, a sentence of defamation was brought in against his name. In 1582, in Scotland, where according to the law “self-murder is as highly criminal as the killing of our neighbor,” the Kirk Sessions of Perth refused to allow the corpse of a man who had committed suicide by drowning to be “brought through the town in daylight, neither yet to be buried among the Faithful—but in the little inch [island] within the water.” In 1598, in Edinburgh, the body of a woman who drowned herself was “harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows.” In Finland, suicides judged insane were buried outside the churchyard without traditional ceremonies; if “of sound mind,” the corpse was burned on a pyre in the forest. Those who attempted suicide were imprisoned with a diet of bread, water, and flogging. In Italy, suicides were hanged; if the corpse could not be found, it was hanged in effigy. In Austria, a person who attempted suicide was imprisoned “until he be persuaded by education that self-preservation is a duty to God, the State and to himself, show complete repentance and may be expected to mend his ways.”
In 1601 the lawyer William Fulbecke matter-of-factly described the English punishment of the day: “The body is drawn out of the house, wherein the person killed himself, with ropes; not by the door, for of that he is unworthy, but through some hole or pit made under the threshold of the door; and is thence drawn by an horse to the place of punishment or shame, where it is hanged on a gibbet; and none may take it down, but by order of the magistrate.” Suicides were tried posthumously in the coroner’s court. The usual penalty for felo de se—property confiscation and burial at a crossroads with a wooden stake through the heart—could be avoided if the jury ruled the deceased had acted from insanity. To secure a proper burial, friends and relatives of the dead man had to persuade the court that their loved one was a madman. If the deceased was a man of wealth or position, he was more apt to be found insane and allowed burial; less fortunate suicides were usually awarded the stake and crossroads. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although Ophelia is allowed burial in sanctified ground, she is denied full rites; the priest explains to Laertes, “We should profane the service of the dead / To sing a requiem, and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls.”
The Colonies appear to have been no less stringent. The Puritans, who fled England, in part, as a repudiation of the social changes taking place there, believed suicide to be “the worst kind of murder,” as the Reverend Increase Mather described it in his treatise A Call to the Tempted. A Sermon on the horrid Crime of Self-Murder. A man, said Mather, “cannot disgrace himself more than by committing such a sin.” Melancholy was no excuse; Satan was behind each and every suicide. (Tormented by “Hypocondriacal affection,” Mather had himself been tempted toward self-destruction but, armed only with his faith, had kept the devil at bay.) In Mather’s Massachusetts, a 1660 edict outlawing “Self-Murther” proclaimed that those “who lay violent hands on themselves” shall be buried “in some Common High-way . . . and a Cart-load of Stones laid upon the Grave as a Brand of Infamy, and as a warning to others to beware of the like Damnable practices.” (The suicide’s property, however, was not confiscated. Attempted suicides were whipped, imprisoned, and held liable for court costs.) Thus in the spring of 1707, one Abraham Harris of Boston, a young whitewasher, having “felloniously and willfully Murthered himself, by Hanging himself with a Neckcloth—Contrary to the Peace of Our Soveraign Lady the Queen,” was buried at a crossroads near the gallows on the Roxbury Highway, and a cartload of stones was laid on his grave. The burial cost the county sixteen shillings, including one shilling for “money lay’d out in drink” for the constable and six gravediggers.
“Wheresoever you finde many and severe Lawes against an offence,” observed Donne in Biathanatos, “it is not safe from thence to conclude an extreame enormity or hainousnesse in the fault, but a propensnesse of that people, at that time, to that fault.” Clergymen were convinced that a loosening of morals during the Renaissance inspired an increase in suicide. The act, wrote an anonymous observer in 1647, “is now growne so common, that selfe murther is scarce accounted any newes.” The evidence is not conclusive. The nature of suicide, however, seems to have changed. In the early years of the Renaissance numerous suicides aspired to the classical mode. In 1538 the Florentine patriot Philip Strozzi, accused in the assassination of Alessandro de Medici, was captured; fearing that under torture he might betray the names of fellow conspirators, he decided on suicide. After carving a line from Virgil—“Arise from my bones, avenger of these wrongs!”—on his cell wall, he stabbed himself, leaving behind a note in which he asked that he be permitted to have his place with Cato of Utica and other great suicides of antiquity. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the stage abounded with classical suicides. In France there were plays about Lucretia, Brutus, Cassius, and at least two on Cato. In England, Joseph Addison’s Cato was a hit in 1713. Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, observed to a friend that “Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours.” Twenty-four years later Addison’s cousin and protégé Eustace Budgell loaded his pockets with stones and threw himself into the Thames, leaving behind a note: “What Cato did and Addison approved cannot be wrong.”
But Budgell’s suicide was hardly in the tradition of Cato’s. A writer and scholar, he had lost twenty-two thousand pounds in the South Sea Bubble speculation and died a failed, lonely man. If his death lacked the classical touch, it hinted at something more complex and more human. By the end of the Renaissance, suicides could no longer be seen simply as the result of honor, black bile, or the devil. They were the product of human struggle, of pride, loneliness, melancholy—and especially poverty. Between 1597 and 1644, of three hundred suicides in three English counties, more than half left no goods at all. The suicides included twenty-nine laborers, thirty-seven spinsters, and assorted shoemakers, tinkers, hostlers, bricklayers, and so on. Far more characteristic than the showily heroic suicide of Philip Strozzi was that of Richard and Bridget Smith in 1732.
Smith was a bookbinder who had fallen into debt after a series of losses and disappointments. He and his wife, agreeing that a life of numbing poverty had little to offer, decided to commit suicide. After cutting their daughter’s throat, they hanged themselves from the bedpost, leaving a note addressed to the public:
These actions, considered in all their circumstances, being somewhat uncommon, it may not be improper to give some account of the cause; and that it was an inveterate hatred we conceived against poverty and rags, evils that through a train of unlucky accidents were become inevitable. For we appeal to all that ever knew us, whether we were idle or extravagant, whether or no we have not taken as much pains to get our living as our neighbours, although not attended with the same success. We apprehend the taking our child’s life away to be a circumstance for which we shall be generally condemned; but for our own parts we are perfectly easy on that head. We are satisfied it is less cruelty to take the child with us, even supposing a state of annihilation as some dream of, than to leave her friendless in the world, exposed to ignorance and misery. . . . We are not ignorant of those laws made in terrorem, but leave the disposal of our bodies to the wisdom of the coroner and his jury, the thing being indifferent to us where our bodies are laid. . . .
Richard Smith
Bridget Smith
The Smiths were buried at the crossroads near the Turnpike at Newington.
To Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Richard and Bridget Smith’s decision to end their lives was perfectly reasonable, and to punish it with a stake through the heart was an outrage. In an age that scorned anything hinting of medievalism and put a premium on the rights of the individual, suicide seemed an essential human liberty. “To be happy or not to be at all,” wrote Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, reworking Hamlet. “Such is the option which nature has given to every human being.” Suicide, insisted the Rationalists, was not a mortal sin or a crime against the state—to elevate an essentially private act into a cosmic blow against the universe seemed absurd.
“When I am overcome by anguish, poverty, or humiliation, why must I be prevented from putting an end to my troubles, and harshly deprived of the remedy which lies in my power?” wrote Montesquieu in 1721. In Persian Letters the Oriental traveler Usbek, writing from Paris to a friend in Smyrna, is astonished by the “ferocity” of the European laws against suicide. “They are put to death for a second time, so to speak; their bodies are dragged in disgrace through the streets and branded, to denote infamy, and their goods are confiscated.” He argues that if life is a gift, if the gift ceases to give pleasure, why is one not free to part with it? The body is destined to perish in any case, he concludes, and the soul to live on, so how is the order of Providence disturbed? In the vast scheme of things, the persistence of a person in bearing the agonies of a hopeless illness seems merely vain. “All such ideas, my dear Ibben, originate in our pride alone.”
Fifty years later another letter discussing suicide stirred controversy. In Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint Preux, a young man disappointed in love, writes an impassioned letter to his English friend Lord Bomston, explaining that suicide is neither a crime nor inconsistent with belief in God. “Every man has a right by nature to pursue what he thinks is good, and avoid what he thinks evil, in all matters which are not injurious to others,” he writes, echoing the Stoic argument. “When our life becomes a misery to ourselves, and is of advantage to no one, we are thus at liberty to put an end to our being.” God gave man reason to enable him to choose between good and evil, says Saint Preux, and reason tells us that an unhappy life must be remedied as much as a diseased body: “If it is permitted to seek a cure for gout, why not for life?” He compares the man who does not know how to relieve an unhappy life by seeking death to the man who allows his wound to gangrene rather than summoning a surgeon. As for theologians who insist that suicide disqualifies us from Providence, Saint Preux maintains that in killing ourselves we merely destroy our bodies but bring our immortal souls, in death, closer to God. Saint Preux admits exceptions: people who have duties to others should not dispose of themselves. But, he concludes, since he is not a magistrate, has no family to support, and for friends has only Lord Bomston, nothing stands in his way.
“Young man, a blind ecstasy leads you astray,” Lord Bomston begins his reply, in which he discusses the importance of remaining at one’s post and stresses the cowardice of despair. He suggests that his friend might find relief in helping others. “Each time thou art tempted to quit life, say to thyself, let me at least do one good action before I die, then go in search for one indigent person, whom thou mayest relieve; for one under misfortune, whom thou mayest console; for one under oppression, whom thou mayest defend.” While Rousseau followed this prescription in his own life, readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse felt that the passion of Saint Preux’s arguments overwhelmed the elegance of Bomston’s and indicated where Rousseau’s sympathies lay. Preachers accused him of spawning suicides; Saint Preux would become a model for Goethe’s Werther, which would in turn be blamed for a rash of self-killing. In a letter to Voltaire, Rousseau wrote that the wise man will sometimes give up his life when nature and bad fortune give a distinct order to depart. Rousseau’s own unhappy life was increasingly haunted by madness, and after his death in 1778 there were rumors that he had killed himself.
Voltaire’s position on suicide was not unlike that of many twentieth-century liberals. On one hand, as a passionate opponent of superstition and injustice, he opposed laws that degraded a suicide’s corpse and deprived his innocent family. Calling confiscation of the suicide’s property “brigandage,” Voltaire, with characteristic acidity, noted that in practice “his goods are given to the King, who almost always grants half of them to the leading lady of the Opera, who prevails upon one of her lovers to ask for it; the other half by law belongs to the Inland Revenue.” In his novels and plays Voltaire attacked dogmatism and oppression and proclaimed the individual’s mastery over his own destiny. If “self-murder” was a wrong against society, he argued, are not the voluntary homicides committed in war and sanctioned by the laws of all countries far more harmful to the human race? Like Donne, he believed that circumstance, not dogma, must be our guide in judging suicide. Every case must be weighed on its own merits—“Each one has his reasons for his behavior.” To Voltaire some reasons were better than others. He teased the hypersensitive melancholics and suggested that young girls who drown themselves for love should not be hasty—change is as common in love as it is in business. Voltaire complained that eighteenth-century suicides could learn a thing or two from the old masters: “We kill ourselves, too,” he wrote, “but it is when we have lost our money or in the rare excess of a wild passion for an object which isn’t worth it.” As for himself, the antisuicide laws made his own suicide improbable, he jokingly confessed in a letter to his friend the Marquise du Deffand: “It is a decision that I shall not take, at least not yet, for the reason that I have got myself annuities from two sovereigns and I should be inconsolable if my death enriched two crowned heads.”
The arguments of the eighteenth-century Rationalists were summed up by Scottish philosopher David Hume in his essay “On Suicide.” With the confidence of a sharpshooter he set up his targets—“If suicide be criminal, it must be a transgression of our duty either to God, our neighbour, or ourselves”—and then picked them off one by one.
Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty, that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, it would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. If I turn aside a stone which is falling upon my head, I disturb the course of nature; and I invade the peculiar province of the Almighty, by lengthening out my life beyond the period, which, by the general laws of matter and motion, he has assigned it.
A hair, a fly, an insect, is able to destroy this mighty being whose life is of such importance. Is it an absurdity to suppose that human prudence may lawfully dispose of what depends on such insignificant causes? It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?
If all events proceed from God, said Hume, then so, too, does suicide: “When I fall upon my own sword, therefore, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever.” To those who insisted that suicide was a crime against nature, Hume pointed out that man alters nature in many acceptable ways: building houses, cultivating land, sailing upon the ocean. “In all these actions we employ our powers of mind and body to produce some innovation in the course of nature; and in none of them do we any more. They are all of them therefore equally innocent, or equally criminal.”
Turning to the argument that suicide is a crime against society, Hume maintained that “a man who retires from life does no harm to society: he only ceases to do good; which, if it is an injury, is of the lowest kind.” Furthermore, like Montesquieu, Hume believed that citizenship is a two-way responsibility; when man withdraws himself from society, is he still bound any longer? In any case, wrote Hume, “I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself: why then should I prolong a miserable existence because of some frivolous advantage which the public may perhaps receive from me?”
To Hume the flaw in the “crime against self” argument seemed self-evident. “That suicide may often be consistent with interest and with our duty to ourselves, no one can question, who allows that age, sickness, or misfortune, may render life a burden, and make it worse even than annihilation.” In any case, he wondered, why was the rest of the world so wounded by suicide? “The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”
Written at least twenty years before Hume’s death, “On Suicide” was not published until 1777, the year after he died. It was promptly suppressed and was later published from the apparently more tolerant grounds of Basel. But Hume’s “oyster” did not go down easily; he and his fellow eighteenth-century “apologists” for suicide, as their enemies referred to them, provoked a fresh torrent of rhetoric from antisuicide moralists. (One London minister, remarking that “On Suicide” had reportedly inspired a friend of Hume’s to shoot himself, suggested that Hume should have practiced what he preached.) From pulpits and printing presses across Europe they redoubled the volume of hellfire and brimstone against what they variously described as “a pusillanimous escape,” “that miserable insanity,” “the foul offspring of vile progenitors,” “The Certain Characteristic of a foolish, weak Mind,” “An Atrocious Offense Against God and Man,” “the offspring of hell,” “a crime of the deepest dye,” “the most sordid and unworthy selfishness,” and “the act of cowards, poltroons, and deserters.” As for the causes of this act, they compiled an impressive list of culprits: “gambling,” “government,” “vanity,” “modern philosophy,” “intemperate drinking,” “licentious novels,” “want of benevolence,” “want of ambition,” “Habits of Idleness,” “the examples of profligates,” “Indulgence of Criminal Love,” “a criminal love of the world,” “A Gloomy and Misguided Imagination,” “a weakness and timidity of mind,” “the difficulty of procuring a livelihood,” “the great number of authorized lotteries,” “a base, corrupt, loathsome sinful State of Mind,” “the fatal insanity of commercial speculation and the irrational desire of becoming wealthy on a sudden,” “the mistaken fashion in education which has latterly prevailed, [in which] the superficial shewy and frivolous accomplishments are almost universally preferred to solid science and modest virtue,” and above all, “want of submission to the Judge and Arbitrator of human affairs,” or as another preacher put it, “Godlessness.”
To stem what they believed to be a growing tide of self-destruction, they called for increased church attendance, fewer insanity verdicts in coroners’ courts, and stricter antisuicide penalties. “The carcass should have the Burial of an Ass, and the utmost Marks of Reproach cast upon it,” suggested one writer, “in order to deter others from giving way to, or falling into the like Snares and Wiles of the Devil.” Another proposed that these “sons of perdition” be hanged in chains head down and every minister required to preach against the crime once a year. Another suggested that the bodies of self-murderers be dissected publicly on stages in marketplaces and the skeletons handed over to surgeons to “contribute somewhat to the advancement of anatomical knowledge.” One minister favored a combination of all of the above. “It might not only be refused all rites of burial, but be exposed naked to public view, be dragged on an hurdle in the most ignominious posture, and undergo every disgraceful mark of shame, contempt and abhorrence,” he wrote. “The populace on these occasions might be harangued with energy on the foulness of the crime, and then the carcass delivered over (like that of the common murderer) for the purposes of public dissection; so that he, who had voluntarily withdrawn himself from being further useful to society in his life, might become so in his death.”
Buried in the bombast were important arguments—duty to the state, the virtue of suffering, responsibility to family—but their shrillness obscured their logic. “Many of those who have maintained the criminality of Suicide have indulged an intemperance of zeal, a bitterness of expression, which are ill suited both to the teacher and the investigator of moral science; and which tend to cast unfavourable suspicions, as well upon the Reasoning as upon the Reasoner,” observed Richard Hey, a graduate student at Cambridge, whose dissertation on suicide won a university prize in 1783. “It is time that we cease to injure our cause by an injudicious defence of it.” Hey noted that a softer touch was also more effective with would-be suicides. “There is a singular impropriety in using a severity of address to the persons whom we would retain from the commission of Suicide,” he wrote. “The state of mind in which this crime is usually committed, requires gentleness of treatment; as far as may be consistent with an open and full representation of the truth. Wherefore all unnecessary harshness is to be studiously avoided, as tending in a peculiar manner to defeat our principal purpose.” While Hey’s approach was sympathetic, his conclusion was familiar: “Suicide must stand universally condemned.”
While preachers reiterated familiar theological objections, the reasoning of antisuicide philosophers became increasingly secular. They focused their arguments on an idea first raised by Aquinas that suicide goes against human nature. In 1690, John Locke published his Second Treatise on Government, a manifesto based on the assumptions that life is an “inalienable right” and “life-preservation” a primary law of nature. To the pro-suicide Rationalists the option of suicide was a mark of man’s freedom. To Locke freedom was based on self-preservation, which ruled out suicide: “Freedom, then, is not . . . for everyone to do . . . as he pleases. . . . Freedom . . . is so . . . closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it. . . . Nobody can give more power than he has himself, and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give another power over it.” Immanuel Kant took the argument one step further. Kant, who believed that Hume’s skepticism signaled the end of philosophy, proposed an absolute moral code in which “duty” occupied a central position. Man’s first duty was self-preservation; suicide was therefore a vice. “The rule of morality does not admit of it under any condition because it degrades human nature below the level of animal nature and so destroys it.” Although his argument was largely secular, Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which declared that individual behavior ought to serve as an example for all mankind, prohibited suicide no less rigidly than did religion.
In Reflections on Suicide, published in 1813, Madame de Staël maintained that there could be no blanket judgment. “The causes of misery, and its intensity, vary equally with circumstances and individuals,” she observed. “We might as well attempt to count the waves of the sea, as to analyze the combinations of destiny and character.” Her main quarrel was with the idea that suffering was an excuse for killing oneself: “The greatest faculties of the soul are developed only by suffering.” But for the majority of suicides her attitude was one of sympathy: “We ought not to be offended with those who are so wretched as to be unable to support the burden of existence, nor should we applaud those who sink under its weight, since, to sustain it, would be a greater proof of their moral strength.” This was a factor that writers on both sides of the debate had largely overlooked: would-be suicides were unhappy and in pain. The discussion of suicide could not be limited to a moral debate of right or wrong, cowardice or bravery, sin or honor; the suffering that may lead to the act must be acknowledged. Indeed, at one point in her essay de Staël seemed to be overwhelmed by feeling. “Oh!” she wrote. “What despair is required for such an act! May pity, the most profound pity, be granted to him who is guilty of it!”
While opposing suicide on moral grounds, many writers argued against the antisuicide laws. The Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria pointed out that in economic terms the state was more wronged by the emigrant than by the suicide since the former took his property with him, whereas the latter left his behind. Confiscations inflicted injustice on a man’s family, and punishment of the corpse, he observed, was as futile as beating a statue. Only God, he concluded, could punish a suicide. Under attack by the eighteenth-century Rationalists, antisuicide laws gradually fell into disuse. In Geneva, indignities to the corpse were abolished in 1770 after the body of an “innocent” man was dragged through the streets. In southern France, armed citizens stormed a prison to seize the body of a suicide and prevent its being hauled through the town. The following year, in the same district, a crowd gathered to halt the execution of a sentence against a suicide’s corpse; police called to the scene made numerous arrests. In 1770, degradation of the corpse was also officially abolished in France; legal action was to be taken only against the suicide’s name. In 1790 the French National Assembly, on the motion of Dr. Joseph Guillotin, who would become famous for championing a swift mode of execution, repealed all sanctions against suicide. In the new penal code of 1791, it was not even mentioned. Suicide was legal.
In England, although there was no change in the law through the eighteenth century, coroners’ juries made increasing use of the insanity loophole to spare the suicide’s corpse and his innocent family. Between 1770 and 1778, coroners in the county of Kent investigated 580 possible suicides and returned only 15 verdicts of felo de se. Such leniency dismayed legal purists. “The excuse of not being in his senses ought not to be strained to that length, to which our coroner’s juries are apt to carry it,” grumbled the celebrated jurist William Blackstone, “viz. that the very act of suicide is evidence of insanity; as if every man, who acted contrary to reason, had no reason at all: for the same argument would prove every other criminal non-compos, as well as the self-murderer.” Lunacy, however, remained largely an upper-class prerogative; the verdict of felo de se was apt to be applied only to lower-class suicides. “A penniless poor dog, who has not left enough money to defray the funeral charges, may perhaps be excluded the churchyard,” observed The Connoisseur, a satirical magazine, “but self-murder by pistol genteelly mounted, or the Paris-hilted sword, qualifies the polite owner for a sudden death, and entitles him to the pompous burial and a monument setting forth his virtues in Westminster-Abbey.”
England’s stubborn refusal to relax its official position on suicide may have been partly the result of its reputation. During the eighteenth century it became generally accepted—by everyone but the English—that as a people they were particularly prone to self-destruction. “We do not find in history that the Romans ever killed themselves without a cause; but the English are apt to commit suicide most unaccountably; they destroy themselves even in the bosom of happiness,” wrote Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws in 1748. “This action among the Romans was the effect of education, being connected with their principles and customs; among the English it is the consequence of a distemper.” Other reasons put forth for “the English malady” ranged from religious decay, rationalism, licentiousness, and lack of exercise to the people’s fondness for butcher’s meat, rich foods, sea coal, gambling, and tea. The most frequently cited culprit was the weather. An anonymous eighteenth-century French novel begins, “In the gloomy Month of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves . . .” In 1805, in a letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson reflected that his country’s clear skies would offer protection against any predilection for hanging that Americans might have inherited from their ancestors. In a satirical essay Boswell suggested that freezing might be a useful suicide prevention device. As November approached, “the English, instead of hanging or drowning themselves, will certainly prefer having themselves frozen up . . . and when it is fine weather, up they will spring like swallows to the enjoyment of happiness.”
Some Englishmen were unamused. “Self-murder! Name it not; our island’s shame; / That makes her the reproach of neighb’ring states,” lamented Robert Blair in his poem “The Grave.” “O Britain, infamous for suicide! / An island in thy manners!” cried Edward Young in “Night Thoughts.” “It is a melancholy consideration, that there is no country in Europe, or perhaps in the habitable world, where the horrid crime of self-murder is so common as it is in England,” thundered John Wesley, founder of Methodism, proposing that the tide of English suicide would turn if self-murderers were hanged upside down in chains. Others questioned whether England’s notoriety was deserved. An entry on suicide in the 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica attributed it to rigorous newspaper reporting of suicide—a point Voltaire had made when he remarked that if Paris newspapers kept statistics as accurately as England’s, France’s reputation for suicide would rival its neighbor’s. In an 1804 travel book Thomas Holcroft wrote, “I doubt if as many suicides be committed through all Great Britain in a year as in Paris alone in a month.”
The intercontinental competition raged throughout the eighteenth century. Although the numbers were debatable, the nature of suicide had unquestionably altered. A century that began with the suicides of Richard and Bridget Smith would conclude with the deaths of two French soldiers, twenty and twenty-four, who shot themselves out of ennui on Christmas Day, 1773. “No urgent motive has prompted us to intercept our career of life except the disgust of existing here a moment under the idea, that we must at one time or other cease to be,” they explained in their note. “We leave our parts to be performed by those, who are silly enough to wish to act them a few hours longer.” Accounts of such blasé suicides filled newspapers and drawing room conversations: the Englishman who hanged himself “in order to avoid the trouble of pulling off and on his clothes”; the Frenchman who, when asked to dine by a friend, replied, “With the greatest pleasure—yet, now I think of it, I am particularly engaged to shoot myself.” Suicide had become decadent, trivial; one could not take it too seriously. “There are little domestic news,” complained Horace Walpole, whose correspondence was spiced with world-weary references to self-destruction, in a letter to Richard Bentley. “If you insist upon some, why, I believe I could persuade somebody or other to hang themselves; but that is scarce an article uncommon enough to send cross the sea.”
This nonchalance surrounding the subject of suicide would become even more flagrant in the Romantic Age. If eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers made the act philosophically defensible, the Romantics of the early nineteenth century made it positively seductive. The Romantic movement began as a reaction to the rationalism of the Age of Reason. If a man’s life was indeed of no more importance to the universe than that of an oyster, to the Romantics a man’s death was everything, a transcendent reunion with nature and with God. “How wonderful is death,” wrote Shelley. “A quiet of the heart,” Byron called it. Keats longed to “cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Taking the Renaissance combination of creativity and melancholy one step further, the Romantics coupled genius and premature death. The poetic sensibility was too good for this world; best to burn brightly and die young, like a shooting star. Some did. Keats died in 1821 at twenty-five, Shelley a year later at twenty-nine, and Byron two years after that, at thirty-six.
If dying young was glamorous, suicide was the ultimate thrill. The act showed an enviable, even heroic refusal to accept the banality of the world. In their preoccupation with suicide the Romantics had two early models. Thomas Chatterton, the precocious son of a schoolmaster, had begun publishing his brilliant poems at age sixteen. At nineteen, penniless, starving, and unappreciated, he swallowed arsenic in his lodging house garret. The details of Chatterton’s suicide in 1770 were hardly romantic. What was distilled from them, however—a combination of genius and early death—was irresistible to the Romantics. “The marvelous Boy, the sleepless Soul that perished in his pride,” as Wordsworth called him in his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” became the model of the doomed poet for several generations of Romantic poets and would-be poets.
Four years after the death of Chatterton, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther offered a second lethal symbol in the lovesick young hero who shoots himself. As a young man Goethe himself had longed for a glorious death. He had admired Emperor Otto’s suicide by stabbing and decided that he would kill himself like Otto or not kill himself at all. “By this conviction, I saved myself from the purpose, or indeed, more properly speaking, from the whim, of suicide,” he later wrote. “Among a considerable collection of arms, I possessed a costly, well-ground dagger. This I laid down nightly by my side; and, before extinguishing the light, I tried whether I could succeed in sending the sharp point an inch or two deep into my heart. But as I truly never could succeed, I at last took to laughing at myself, threw away all these hypochondriacal crotchets, and determined to live.” Writing Werther, it has been suggested, kept Goethe from becoming Werther.
Like Goethe, most of the Romantic writers confined their intoxication with death to literature. Those who followed their own prescription hardly “cease[d] upon the midnight with no pain.” Poor, lonely, rejected, and nearing fifty, the poet Thomas Beddoes took curare in Basel. German playwright Heinrich von Kleist, who had proposed suicide pacts to friends for a decade, finally found an accomplice in an incurably ill young woman. After shooting her, Kleist killed himself. Gérard de Nerval, tormented by insanity, used a frayed apron string to hang himself from a lamppost in Paris at age forty-six. More often, like Goethe, the Romantics merely toyed with suicide. The young Chateaubriand brought a shotgun to a lonely forest on his father’s estate with the stated intention of killing himself, but his suicide was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a gamekeeper. He died of old age at seventy-nine. The twenty-year-old de Musset, shown a beautiful view, cried, “Ah! It would be a beautiful place to kill oneself in!” Although de Musset asserts that twice he laid the point of a dagger against his heart, he never drew blood and eventually died at forty-six of a heart attack.
These celebrated writers stopped short of the act itself, but many young men who lacked the talent to express the Romantic ideal in prose expressed it with their death. Life imitated art: Werther, of course, was said to have inspired suicides all over Europe for decades, and numerous deaths were blamed on Byron’s Manfred, Chateaubriand’s René, and Lamartine’s Raphael. Alfred-Victor de Vigny’s play Chatterton was said to have doubled the annual rate of suicide in France between 1830 and 1840, when young men “practised it as one of the most elegant of sports,” according to one historian. Suicide clubs flourished. In his letters, Flaubert, writing nostalgically of the friends with whom he’d spent his youth, captured the essential spirit of the Romantic flirtation with suicide: “We swung between madness and suicide; some of them killed themselves . . . another strangled himself with his tie, several died in debauchery in order to escape boredom; it was beautiful!”