BOOKS.
THE LAND OF DARKNESS.*
WE could dispense with "the experience of the little Pilgrim," who has never seemed to us half as impressive as the other
spiritual conceptions of the remarkable writer to whom, we suppose, "The Open Door," "Lady Mary," and various other impressive visions of the invisible world are due. In truth, "the little Pilgrim" is, to the taste of the present writer at least, a little mawkish, a little goody-goody, a little flavoured by the same want of character which is so apt to spoil all good heroes and heroines, whether they belong to the visible or the invisible world. Even George Eliot used sometimes to fail here,—witness the " Mira " of Daniel Deronda, who has a horrid habit of folding her hands, and gives the same im- pression of almost ostentatious humility which aggrieves us in "the little Pilgrim" of this remarkable writer's invisible world. Goethe, if we remember rightly, expressed to Eckermann his fear of being beset in the world to come by good people who directly they saw him, would burst out with,—
" Did I not tell you so ? Did I not assure you that there was another world in which we should meet ?" That particular
fear of being bored by self-satisfied believers in immortality has never haunted the present writer, but certainly he has sometimes feared that if the society of the good made perfect were at all like what it is sometimes represented,—like that of "The Little Pilgrim," for instance,—it would be very easy to et too much of it. Perhaps it might be more tolerable in reality than it is in fiction. The colourlessness of character might disappear if one had a really good woman actually before one. The humility might take some specific shape which would relieve one of its excessive sintplesse. But, be that as it may, to our taste there is no part of this remarkable volume which borders on being flat, except the virtuous experience of "the little Pilgrim," whether in revisiting earth or in receiving the outcasts who have actually found their painful way over the dark mountains from the world of the lost to the world of the saved.
Our author's conception of "the Land of Darkness" is pre- sented in various forms. First we have a purely selfish world
• The Land of Darkness, along with some Further Chapters of the Experience of the Little Pilgrim, London: Macmillan and Co. 1388. presented, where all things go on much as they do in the most self sh regions of this world, except that there is no illusion as to either one's own or anybody's else's good motives, scorn and rage being perfectly perceptible behind the appear- ance of civility which is assumed,—only apparently as the worldly world here assumes it,—to prevent the utter dissolu- tion of society. As society is the only escape from the horror of self, and society becomes impossible if scorn and rage are not to some extent suppressed, the wholly selfish world to which we are first intraduced has just the superficial varnish of decency over it wYch is essential for any society at all. Here is a specimen of the striking opening scene in that "World of Darkness" which it is the chief intention of the writer to delineate :— " I was much surprised by the fact that the traffic, which was never stilled for a moment, seemed to have no sort of ragulation. Some carriages dashed along, upsetting the smaller vehicles in their way, without the least restraint or order, either, as it seemed, from their own good sense, or from the laws and customs of the place. When an accident happened, there was a great shouting, and sometimes a furious enconnter,—but nobody seemed to interfere. This was the first impression made upon me. The passengers on the pavement were equally regardless. I was myself pushed out of the way, first to one side, then to another, hustled when I paused for a moment, trodden upon and driven about. I retreated soon to the doorway of a shop, from whence with a little more safety I could see what was going on. The noise made my head ring. It seemed to me that I could not hear myself think. If this were to go on for ever, I said to my- self, I should soon go mad. Oh no,' said some one behind me, not at all ; you will get used to it ; you will be glad of it. One does not want to hear one's thoughts ; most of them are not worth hearing!—I turned round and saw it was the master of the shop, who had come to the door on seeing me. He had the usual smile of a man who hoped to sell his wares; but to my horror and astonishment, by some process which I could not understand, I saw that he was saying to himself, What a d—d fool ! here's another of those cursed wretches, d— him !' all with the same smile. I started back, and answered him as hotly, 'What do you
mean by calling me a d d fool ?—fool yourself, and all the rest of it. Is this the way you receive strangers here ?'—' Yes,' he said, with the same smile, this is the way ; and I only describe you as you are, as you will soon see. Will you walk in and look over my shop ? Perhaps you will find something to suit you if you are just setting up, as I suppose.'—I looked at him closely, but this time I could not see that he was saying anything beyond what was expressed by his lips, and I followed him into the shop, principally because it was quieter than the street, and without any intention of buying—for what should I buy in a strange place where I had no settled habitation, and which probably I was
only passing through P I had always been attracted to this sort of thing, and had longed to buy such articles for my house when I had one, but never had it in my power. Now I had no house, nor any means of paying so far as I knew, but I felt quite at my ease about buying, and inquired into the prices with the greatest composure. They are just the sort of thing I want. I will take these, I think ; but you must set them aside for me, for I do not at the present moment exactly know—'—' You mean you have got no rooms to put them in,' said the master of the shop. You must get a house directly, that's all. If you're only up to it, it is easy enough. Look about until you find something you like, and then—take possession.'—' Take possession '—I was so much surprised that I stared at him with mingled indignation and surprise= of what belongs to another man ?' I said. I was not conscious of anything ridiculous in my look. I was indignant, which is not a state of mind in which there is any absurdity ; but the shopkeeper suddenly burst into a storm of laughter. He laughed till he seemed almost to fall into convulsions, with a harsh mirth which reminded me of the old image of the crackling of thorns, and had neither amusement nor warmth in it ; and presently this was echoed all around, and looking up, I saw grinning faces full of derision, bent upon me from every side, from the stairs which led to the upper part of the house and from the depths of the shop behind—faces with pens behind their ears, faces in workmen's caps, all distended from ear to ear, with a sneer and a mock and a rage of laughter which nearly sent me mad. I hurled I don't know what imprecations at them as I rushed out, stopping my ears in a paroxysm of fury and mortification."
That is the hell which pure worldly selfishness makes for itself when it is left to itself :—and it is assuredly very powerfully drawn.
Next comes the hell of avarice, of which we have only a glimpse, though a lurid and very impressive glimpse ; and then the hell of godless tyranny, of cold conventional order, where the organisation of espionage is perfect, and all that is hideous in the form of disease or misery is penned up together in a dungeon whence no sound can be heard. That, too, is a powerful picture, and not less so the hell of godless pleasure, and the hell of godless though scientific industry, though that appears to be in a certain sense to the writer's mind the least ignoble of all the divisions of hell, and perhaps the nearest to a door of escape. There is, indeed, in the latter part of the book a fine companion sketch to this,—a sketch of the hell of godless Art, where perhaps the writer has intended to suggest that the true spirit of Art, even in its most selfish phase, is less inaccessible to the mind of Christ than any other kind of selfishness, unless it be the spirit of scientific industry. The proud and rebellious artist is, indeed, haunted by the face of Christ, and is redeemed by that haunting face ; but the proud and rebellious captain of industry who commands the resources of a whole universe of inventions, sickens of his. own labours and pains, deeming God the only worthy end of human life. We are inclined to think the latter conception the higher of the two, though certainly not the most favoured by divine grace.
The only point on which we are disposed to doubt the adequacy of the author's picture of the self-tormenting- character of human evil, is the apparent absence of all remorse except in the moments of anguish when some one calls upon God's name, and as a consequence, every creature who hears that name is pierced with the most poignant torture,, being compelled to review his own past, to see all the points at- which he took the wrong way and might have taken the right way, and to writhe under the consciousness of his ruined life. We should suppose that remorse is a much more constant and substantial element in the condition even of those who are, when left to themselves, wholly impenitent, than this vision of the world of darkness represents. Doubtless there is plenty of moral evil whose perpetrators do not suffer at all from remorse in this world ; but then, in this world they are able to plunge themselves in new interests, and in these new interests to obtain something like forgetfulness of the past. But surely that cannot apply to the mere fictions, the mere ghosts of interest, which this powerful' writer depicts as the only resource of the evil mind in the life beyond. Surely the gnawing of the old fang of conscience stimulated by the knowledge that all the misery is of one's own making, and that but for what one has oneself freely resolved" to do, it need not have been, must pierce through any super- ficial crust of social curiosity, or business, or pleasure, or in- vention, or art, which the evil mind could devise by way of a temporary opiate or sedative. The throbbing of the fang of remorse is powerfully painted whenever the name of God is uttered in the evil world ; but surely it should not be limited to crises of divine judgment, but should pervade the whole life of impenitent evil. The curses which these purely selfish beings so freely bestow upon each other should be still more liberally heaped on themselves.
What will perhaps attract the most attention from the theo- logical side, is thewriter's profound belief that though sin brin"gs upon itself the loss of divine grace, it does not bring on itself any divine decree of banishment from God's presence, for it is- assumed that if at any time and by any means the heart can turn resolutely from evil and from the world of darkness, an dare the acute pain and toil and almost hopeless passion of the endeavour to return to the world of light, God interposes no obstacle. We believe that nothing can be found in Christ's teaching to intimate that God ever interposes the slightest obstacle of his own to an act of true penitence, and that there is no warrant in Scripture for conceiving death as a final dividing-line which excludes for over the possibility of further probation and of further penitence. But there is a certain inconsistency in the way in which this writer states the case, for while it is explicitly asserted that God leaves to them- selves those who pass into the state of darkness, yet in the only case in which we have the history of a triumphant return from it, it is clear that it was the haunting of the sinner's mind by Christ,—in other words, an act of supreme grace,— and not any mere voluntary upheaving of the will of the sinner, which regained him his access to God. And we hardly know which of the two heresies rigid theology would condemn the more severely, the notion that any human will could turn to God without the grace of God "preventing it," to pour into it good desires, or the heresy that the grace of God could follow the sinner into the world of darkness and despair, in order to reclaim him and lure him back to righteous- ness. Theologians have always been divided between the eager desire to lay all the stress they could on the infinitude of the divine love and the barrenness and emptiness of human nature apart from God, and the fear lest if they do not put a rigid limit of time on the sphere of the operation of that love, men would sin all the more recklessly because they knew that the door of repentance would never be shut against them. Doubtless it is a serious dilemma. The only way out of it seems to be to hold that, on the one hand, God never interposes on his own part any difficulty in the way of repentance; and on the other, that by an irreversible law of human nature, every downward step makes a return more and more difficult and less and less likely, so that every step in deterioration practically erects a new barrier in the way of repentance, a barrier not of God's making but of man's. Beyond this it seems very difficult to go, without either teaching men to think less of the infinitude of God's love, or teaching them to think less of the infinite evil of sin. So far as our author can, he sedulously avoids both dangers ; but if he incurs either rather than the other, it is the latter. Still, in the fine passage in which he describes the various acts of judgment which take place during life,—in which the guilty soul is at once the accused and the judge, sitting to hear the accusations brought against it, the pleas offered in its favour, and summing up the evidence for and against itself, —the writer certainly does his best,— and a better it would be hard for anybody to do,—to magnify the danger and appal the conscience of easy self- excusers.
To give any adequate conception of the imaginative force displayed in this volume is not easy; but we conclude by quoting the striking glimpse given us by the writer, of the hell of avarice from which the unhappy being who tells the story escaped comparatively unharmed,—since avarice had not been one of his earthly passions :— "Fear can act in two ways : it paralyses and it renders cunning. At this moment I found it inspire me. I made my plans before I started, how to steal along under the cover of the blighted brush- wood which broke the line of the valley here and there. I set out only after long thought, seizing the moment when the vaguely perceived band were scouring in the other direction intercepting the travellers. Thus, with many pauses, I got near to the pit's mouth in safety. But my curiosity was as great as, almost greater than, my terror. I had kept far from the road, dragging myself sometimes on hands and feet over broken ground, tearing my clothes and my flesh upon the thorns ; and on that farther side all seemed so silent and so dark in the shadow cast by some dis- used machinery, behind which the glare of the fire from below blazed upon the other side of the opening, that I could not crawl along in the darkness, and pass, which would have been the safe way ; but with a breathless hot desire to see and know, dragged myself to the very edge to look down. Though I was in the shadow, my eyes were nearly put out by the glare on which I gazed. It was not fire ; it was the lurid glow of the gold, glowing like flame, at which countless miners were working. They were all about like flies, some on their knees, some bent double as they stooped over their work, some lying cramped upon shelves and ledges. The sight was wonderful, and terrible beyond descrip- tion. The workmen seemed to consume away with the heat and the glow, even in the few minutes I gazed. Their eyes shrank into their heads, their faces blackened. I could see some trying to secrete morsels of the glowing metal, which burned whatever it touched, and some who were being searched by the superiors of the mines, and some who were punishing the offenders, fixing them up against the blazing wall of gold. The fear went out of my mind, so much absorbed was I in this sight. I gazed, seeing farther and farther every moment, into crevices and seams of the glowing metal, always with more and more slaves at work, and the entire pantomime of labour and theft, and search and punishment, going on and on—the baked faces dark against the golden glare, the hot eyes taking a yellow reflection, the monotonous clamour of pick and shovel, and cries and curses, and all the in- distinguishable sound of a multitude of human creatures. And the floor below, and the low roof which overhung whole myriads within a few inches of their faces, and the irregular walls all breached and shelved, were every one the same, a pandemonium of gold,—gold everywhere. I had loved many foolish things in my life, but never this : which was perhaps why I gazed and kept my sight, though there rose out of it a blast of heat which scorched the brain. While I stooped over, intent on the sight, some one who had come up by my side to gaze too was caught by the fumes (as I suppose) ; for suddenly I was aware of a dark object falling prone into the glowing interior with a cry and crash which brought back my first wild panic. He fell in a heap, from which his arms shot forth wildly as he reached the bottom, and his cry was half anguish yet half desire. I saw him seized by half-a-dozen eager watchers, and pitched upon a ledge just under the roof, and tools thrust into his hands. I held on by an old shaft, trembling, unable to move. Perhaps I cried too in my horror—for one of the overseers who stood in the centre of the glare looked up. He had the air of ordering all that was going on, and stood unaffected by the blaze, commanding the other wretched officials, who obeyed him like dogs. He seemed to me, in my terror, like a figure of gold, the image, perhaps, ef wealth or Pluto, or I know not what : for I suppose my brain began to grow confused, and my hold on the shaft to relax. I had strength enough, however, for I cared not for the gold, to fling myself back the other way upon the ground, where I rolled backward, downward, I knew not how, turning over and over, upon sharp ashes and metallic edges, which tore my hair and beard,—and for a moment I knew no more."
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