THE REIGN OF DARKNESS.
LIVING in London in the winter months has come to mean living in something not far from perpetual twilight, and that, too, not clear twilight, but rather the light of which 'Zechariah spoke, which should be neither clear nor dark, "not day and not night," but a day turned into night by the brooding of vapours in mid-air. The darkness we suffer from is not the darkness that Blanco White spoke of in the famous sonnet, darkness which reveals the infinite though distant glories of which we were unconscious so long as the sunlight prevailed. It is a darkness that reveals nothing but the fumes which make it, unless it be, perhaps, the fumes which it breeds in the mind,—the darkness not of mystery, nor even of tempest, but of earthy exhalations which suffocate instead of overawing the imagination. Indeed, the seer of that grim vision, "The Land of Darkness," of which we wrote a fortnight ago, could hardly have described more exactly what we have been gazing on day after day in London, than when he painted the thick and never-lifted shadows which hung over that abode of despair, with its faint perspec- tive of streets fading away nog in the distance, but in a ghastly proximity to the eye which explores it in vain. It is the sort of darkness which might result from an epidemic of .cataract that did not spare man, woman, or child, horse or ass or dog, a simultaneous darkening of everybody's vision, rather than a mere withdrawal of light. You see even what you do see much less distinctly than in a clear evening, and you see but little of what you expect to see ; everybody -.becomes shortsighted at once, and those who are always -shortsighted become half-blind. When the sunlight is merely -withdrawn, you see all lesser lights, distant or near, and -see them all the more vividly; but when this thick darkness is diffused through the air, you see the nearer lamps as faintly as you see the daylight, and the distant lights not at all, so that you are not compensated for the loss of clearness in what is near by a suddenly increased power of piercing the spacious perspectives of the universe. A paralysis of vision falls upon all alike, and even more in relation to what is far than what is near; not only is the whole universe contracted, but you do not know on whom you may suddenly emerge as from a moving cloud, or who may not from a moving cloud suddenly emerge upon you. That which obstructs the vision, oppresses
the imagination also, and with the disappearance of light, even energy of mind shrinks and dwindles. Every one seems to lose something of his common inheritance, and to dread more and more the possibility of becoming a separate and painful centre of darkness, instead of an almost unconscious sharer in the prodigal overflow of light.
And yet, if we think of it, does not this dubious groping of individual units in a world of cloud, seem much more the sort of life appropriate to man, if the predominant philosophy be true, than the life to which we are so much accustomed that we almost regard it as a special misfortune, not to say a wrong, when we are deprived of it P What could be imagined as a fitter environment for the world of agnostics than these dim glimpses of each other which we just catch through parting banks of fog, and the forbidding glare of lurid vapour which roofs-in the mighty city Here, indeed, we might say, with the great agnostic poet,—
" Yes, in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless, watery wild, We mortal millions live alone."
For if human life resembled generally the recent winter life of London, its external scenery would fitly correspond with the theory of it that gains the sanction of the most celebrated masters. The drifts of blinding vapour which float down the streets would be much more suitable symbols of the Unknown and Unknowable than either the bright-blue sky of day or the dark-blue sky of night with its uncounted suns. And the glimpses that we obtain of the world and then lose again would be much more representative of the picture usually presented of our fragmentary guesses at right and truth, than the rising floods of knowledge and sympathy and mutual respect in which we all share as we share in the common air and common sunlight. Indeed, may we not justly say that if this sudden contraction of our range of vision and of our sense of common well-being, is a useful kind of practical parable, it is so chiefly because the modern dwellers in great cities are too apt to gain an excessive and unreasonable sense of security from the extraordinary success of their arrangements for exchanging with each other the supply of their various wants ; in short, because they are too apt to forget on how many conditions, and on conditions, both physical and moral, how far from stable, the success of these arrangements really depends ? Less than a week's heavy snow might bring on us a famine which no energy could avert,—nay, a week of fog so dense as has some- times lasted for a single night might throw London into unutterable misery. Let the darkness which fortunately, as a rule, floats only in the upper air, descend bodily on the streets, and a lasting snow itself would hardly effect a more hopeless confusion. It is not anything in our arrangements which prevents these misfortunes. Such calamities are as well within the limits of probability in this latitude, as are destruc- tive earthquakes between the Andes and the Pacific. And it is well that we should not overrate the confidence which we too blindly place in the perseverance of ordinary physical con- ditions, or exaggerate that false courage which we derive from perceiving that every one expects to-day to be as yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day. What we call civilisation ought to do as much to put us on our guard against this blind confidence, as to give us new weapons with which to meet un- usual perils when they occur. But, as a matter of fact, it does not do so. It appears only to add to the blind arrogance with which we count upon our power of meeting new contin-
gencies; and perhaps that sudden sense of impotence which unexpected darkness, or the unexpected deposit of a few million tons of fine white powder upon the earth, produces, is more useful in telling us how far we of the great city are from commanding the issues of our own destiny, than any a priori reasoning derived from our knowledge of the forces of Nature could ever be. The light of heaven is far more gracious to us than we have any a priori right to expect. The storms of heaven are far more lenient than we have any
adequate intellectual grounds for supposing that they would be. The exceptional hurricane such as desolated the other day a great tract in the United States ; the exceptional earthquake such as once ruined Lisbon, and has frequently ruined smaller cities in South America ; the exceptional flood which swept away all the food of Orissa; the exceptional fire which once did at least as much to purify as to destroy London, have hardly been more than adequate warnings of the inefficiency of our knowledge, and the 'incompetence of civilisation to grapple with the excesses of the destructive forces around us. None the less the clear sunlight and the starlit sky remain the natural symbols of the benignant and elevating elements of the mystery around us, and even the agnostic looks at a prevalence of darkness or of storm as a sort of anomaly which really misrepresents the permanent attitude of the power around us towards the life within us.
We have said that darkness generally diminishes the springs of energy in man, and disheartens him for his work ; but this, though true of lasting darkness, can only be said with reserve of periodic darkness, whether physical or moral. There is a sort of power which only comes to full con- sciousness in darkness. If tradition has any truth, it was a blind poet who has left us the brightest pictures of "the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky." Such power as Milton's, or Samson's, Milton's Hebrew hero, did its greatest work when cut off from the light which usually stimulates human energy. When Beethoven's ears were stopped against the sound which was to him more than light, he composed his greatest music.
Darkness, which usually depresses human energy, sometimes concentrates and vivifies it. Where the light is inward, ex- ternal darkness only reveals it. Athens, Sparta, and Rome were all greatest in their darkest hour ; and so were the great prophets of Israel. There is something in the mere shock of great darkness, physical or moral, which itself kindles a mind rooted in trust. Not only so, but even some brilliant intel- lectual lights are struck out of darkness. Carlyle never wrote anything so impressive as what he wrote in a sort of despair, and Wordsworth must have been deeply convinced of the same truth when he said, in his noble sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture, after calling him "the most unhappy man of men : "—
" There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee ; thou haat great allies ; Thy friends are exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
No man can have felt more deeply than Wordsworth that it was in the darkness which brooded over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour that the greatest victory of divine love was achieved, and certainly no one was more constant than he in maintaining that the most tragic of human fates is fullest of supernatural encouragement. Perhaps even in the mere physical darkness of our great city's winter, there may be more true regenerating agency than in that blaze of summer which seems to represent so much more adequately the genius of creative power.
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