SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT.
"But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and findhis dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep."—Jean Paul.—Preface to "Hesperus."
"But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and findhis dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep."—Jean Paul.—Preface to "Hesperus."
Thefollowing paragraph is taken from a diary which I kept before my decease. I will explain later on my reason for giving the extract here:—
"It has been said that no man can realize to the full the certainty of his own dissolution; that each acknowledges the inevitability of death in regard to others and to the race, but cherishes asecret conviction that he himself will, through some strange and unforeseen circumstance, prove the solitary exception.
"Of the truth of this assertion as a general rule, I cannot of course speak, but I know that I at least have never so thought. On the contrary, there are moments when death (by which I do not mean annihilation, but the dying into life) seems the only certainty there is before me, all else being shadowy and unreal. I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me—not poetically only, but positively—a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomesawake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. I stretch out my hand, as an infant does, and open and shut the fingers, and ask myself who I am and what I am doing here. I tell myself my name, and I see that the hand, the body, and the clothes that I look down upon have a strangely familiar aspect, but the name conveys no meaning to me, the familiarity is but the familiarity of an oft-dreamed dream, and is, I know, but the sign that I am still dreaming.
"I look out each day upon the face of the earth with as much wonder and surprise as if I were some new-comer thereon, and were opening my eyes upon it for the first and only time. Upon Londonand the life of it, though I passed half my days within the sound of St. Paul's, I gaze and wonder as upon some dream-pageant, with ever-increasing awe. I look up upon that ample dome, large-looming, and brooding like a Presence athwart the skies, until its surroundings and itself and those who come and go in the streets are to me as unsubstantial as 'a city visioned in a dream.'
"So supremely conscious am I at such times that
'We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep,'
that were I, while this mood is on me, to open my eyes one morning and find that all this present world and its dream-creations had passed away for ever, there would hardly stir in my heart onemomentary thrill of surprise, for I should but sigh and say, 'Ah, then, at last it has come, and now I am asleep no longer!'
"What the awakened life for which I am waiting will be like, I know not consciously, but something there is within me that does know, and that has a dumb inarticulate knowledge of it, like the memory of a dream which we have not all forgotten, yet cannot all recall. That it will beLife, I am sure—a life which though orbing in ampler cycle and vaster sweep than this life, is yet on one and the same plane with it, and in no way separate and distinct. Nay, even now this dream-world would seem to be surrounded and insphered by the waking one, even as 'time is but a parenthesis in eternity;' for there are realities inthis unreal existence, flowers and faces, love and poetry, and the morning and evening skies, which have to me no part in this perishable world, but which 'torment me ever with invitations to their own inaccessible home.'"
I have transcribed this extract from my earlier diary, not because I think there is anything in it worth preservation, but because I believe it very aptly illustrates the suitability of the punishment meted out to me in hell to my own peculiar temperament. I was one of those who lived only in thought. "The world is a dream," I said, "things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thought of them." Hence to make my punishment athought, to confront me with the memory of my crime and of its consequences, and to leave methus hell-haunted by the cry of an awakened conscience, was to inflict a torment upon me a thousand-fold more terrible than material pain.
To those, however, who think with Heine, that "mental torture is more easily to be endured than physical pain," I have a word to say. When I was in hell, I saw there the souls of men and women whom I had known in life, and I learnt something of the nature of their sufferings. Unlike my own, that punishment was, in many cases, not mental but physical; and to those who are incapable of realizing what agony a thought can bring, let me say that hell has too its bodily punishment, and punishment from which there is no escape.
MAKE AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY IN HELL, AND MEET WITH AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.
"The servants said unto Him, Wilt Thou then that we go and gather them up? But He said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.Let both grow together until the harvest."—Matt.xiii. 28, 29, 30.
"The servants said unto Him, Wilt Thou then that we go and gather them up? But He said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.Let both grow together until the harvest."—Matt.xiii. 28, 29, 30.
I comenow to what I think is the strangest part of my story. "When any one dies," I had been told in childhood, "he goes to one or the other of two places—either to hell or to heaven—according to whether he has been a good or bad man," and I recollect being not a little troubled inmy childish mind as to what became of the people whose virtues were about equally matched with their vices (as I had even then discovered was not seldom the case), and whose chances between hell and heaven were what we used to call in my schoolboy days (I do not say it irreverently) a "toss-up."
"Even God must be puzzled sometimes," I used to think to myself, "to know what to do with the folk who are not wicked enough for hell, but a little too bad for heaven." Once after I had been taken to hear a long evangelical sermon, I thought I saw a way out of the difficulty by assuming that when God "weighed" a man (I use the phraseology of the sermon referred to, and I remember that not being clear as to how much of the language was figurative or otherwise I had an idea that souls really were weighedin some sort of celestial balance) and found him "wanting," He turned the scale in the sinner's favour by pouring in some of the blood of Christ. I can recall, too, that for a day or two I went about fancying myself quite a juvenile theologian, until the conviction that even God must draw the line somewhere, set me thinking that a good many folk would thus be consigned to the bad place for doing that which was only a very little more wicked than was done by those who were admitted to the good one.
My ideas about hell and heaven, even at the time of my death, were not very clear and not very many, although I do not think they were more cloudy and less practical than are the ideas entertained upon the subject by other folk. I had been brought up in all the old-fashioned orthodox and scriptural notions, and "going to heaven" was as inseparablein my mind from upward motion of some sort as "going to hell" was with downward motion. Each of the places was a separate and distinct one—the former being situated, according to my belief, somewhere in the direction of the zenith, while the latter I localized in the bowels of the earth, and connected in my thoughts with fire and darkness. Now let me give the results of my experiences, premising only that in regard to what I have to say about the after life, it must be understood that I am speaking only of that ante-chamber of the spirit-world—that in some sense purgatory, as I am half inclined to hold it—into which I have had admittance.
My experiences, then, are briefly these.The good and the bad are not parted, but exist together as they exist here, and heaven and hell as separate places have no existence.
I will tell you how I first came to discover this. I have said that after my change (in the spirit-world that which we call "death" is spoken of as the "change") I awoke to find myself in "hell," and I ought perhaps to add that I used the word as indicating a state of mental or physical suffering—in my case the former—and not with any local significance.
Even in hell, however, there are moments when the intensity of the suffering is, for a narrow space of time at least, relaxed, and when the anguish-stricken spirit is mercifully allowed a temporary reprieve. Such a moment occurred after the first awful paroxysm of self-loathing and torture which I experienced when my past life was made known to me in its true colours, and it was in this saner, and comparatively painless interval, that I met in the spirit realm one whom I had known andhonoured on earth as a woman of the purest life and character. Being still under the impression that I was in "hell" in the sense in which I had been accustomed to think of that place, I started back upon seeing her, and hardly noticing her words of greeting, cried out in astonishment, "You here!You!and in Hades!"
"Where else should I be except whereheis?" she answered quietly, adding, as she observed my look of evident perplexity, "It is Arthur, of course, of whom I speak."
I remembered then that when I had known her first, her only living relative was a worthless brother of that name, to whom she was passionately attached, but who had been dead so long that I had hardly any recollection of him. Before I could question her further, I suppose she saw something in my face which told her all that was necessaryto be known of my own story, for she suddenly burst into tears, and taking both my hands in her own with a gesture of compassionate grief, exclaimed, "Forgive me my foolish and selfish forgetfulness! Oh, I am so, so sorry!"
It was from her that I first gathered that even for me there was yet hope, and it was from her lips that I learned much of that which I have to tell of the spirit-world.
"Do you think," said she to me, when I had again expressed my wonder at finding that heaven and hell were not as I had supposed, separate places, "Do you think that I could be happy anywhere separated from my brother? Why, even Dives in the parable was unable to forget the five brethren he had left behind him, and cried out amid the flames, asking that Lazarus might be sent to warn them, lest they too should cometo that place of torment. Is it likely, then, that any wife, mother, or sister, worthy the name, would be content to settle down idle-handed in heaven knowing that a loved one was in hell and in agony? I know there are folk on earth who try to smooth out the creases that crop up in the creed-roll of their convictions, by asserting that the truly regenerate soul will unconditionally surrender everything to the will of God, and that they, for their part, are quite prepared to leave the fate of their erring fellow-creatures in the hands of the Creator. I don't say that they are not right in so speaking, although, as far as I am concerned, I have more sympathy with old Dives and his wish to warn his sinning brethren. But how are we to know what is the final will of God in regard to one's fellows? When we are satisfied that a man who has fallen into the water is dead,we may not unnaturally conclude that the will of God, as far as this world is concerned, is that he should come to an end by drowning, and we must bow to that will; but as long as we can see a 'kick' left in him, we feel that we must do all we can to bring him round again. Isn't that natural?"
I suppose I must have manifested some surprise at the plainness of her speaking, for after glancing at me for a moment with an amused smile, and with a twinkle of her old humour (I mean that kindly eye-twinkling of humour which is not far removed from the trickle of a tear-drop, and which, for all her piety, had been a noticeable element in her personality), she said, as if in reply to what was in my mind, "No, I don't speak like a sanctified spirit, do I?"
I was a little taken aback by her question, but answered that I was somewhat surprisedat the homeliness of her speech, but was glad to find that death had left her old personality unaltered.
"Of course it has," she answered, "my personality is just the old personality of my earth-life, and I should not wish it to be otherwise. To awaken after the change, which you call death, only to find that one's personality had been transformed into that of another person—no matter how excellent that other person might be—would not be immortality but transmutation. But you were about to ask me a question concerning my brother before we got upon the subject of personality," she continued; "you didn't put your question into words, but your looks expressed it, and thoughts cannot be concealed in the spirit-world."
"Yes," I said, "I had a question to askyou, and it is this: You know how surprised I was to find that heaven and hell are not, as I supposed, separate places. Now what is God's reason for allowing the good and the bad to exist together here, as they do on earth? Is it because He shrinks from breaking up the old family-life (as it must be broken, if right-doers and wrong-doers be set apart), and because He would still use the influence of the good to reclaim the evil?"
"Even that," she said, "I cannot tell you, for I am a mere child in His kingdom. I do know that many of heaven's noblest are engaged, as I am, in striving to stir up souls to repentance; but whether our efforts to save the sinner from his sin after death are of any avail, I cannot say positively, for it has not been given me to know. We are told that after His death our crucifiedLord preached to the spirits in prison; and although the theologians will explain it all away for you if you will let them, I believe that He came here to hell in search of the so-called lost, and I don't think I can be doing anything opposed to His will, in trying all I can to save my brother."
"When you and I were on earth together," she continued, after a pause, "you once sent me a copy of theContemporary Review, containing an article written by Dr. Knighton. The name of the article was 'Conversations with Carlyle,' and the writer related one conversation in which I was very much interested, and which I have often thought of since. I read it so many times, that I think I can remember it word for word.
"'I was going to tell you about an Indian poem which some one sent me translated,'said Carlyle. 'I think it was called the "Mahabarat." It describes seven sons as going off to seek their fortunes. They all go different ways, and six of them land in hell after many adventures. The seventh is of nobler seed; he perseveres, fights his way manfully through great trials. His faithful dog, an ugly little monster, but very faithful, dies at last. He, himself, fainting, and well-nigh despairing, meets an old man, Indra disguised, who offers to open for him the gates of heaven. "But where are my brothers?" he asks; "are they there?" "No, they are all in hell." "Then I will go to hell too, and stop with them, unless you get them out." So saying, he turns off and trudges away. Indra pities him, and gets his brothers out of hell. The six enter heaven first, the seventh stops. "My poor faithful dog," says he; "I will not leave him."Indra remonstrates, but it is useless. The faithful dog, ugly as he was, is too well remembered, and he will not have paradise without it. He succeeds finally, Indra relents, and lets even the dog in. But, sir,' added Carlyle, 'there is more pathos about that dog than in a thousand of our modern novels, pathos enough to make a man sit down and cry almost.'"
"Yes," I said, "I remember the story well. I wonder what old Carlyle would say about it now? Have you ever seen him here? or Emerson? or Richter? or Robertson of Brighton?"
"Robertson!" she answered; "as yet I know only one of the many circles into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it; but I suspect that if you and I could see where Robertson is, we should find him infinitely nearer to the Father-heartof the universe than I at least can for countless ages ever hope to attain!"
"What do you mean by 'circles'?" I said. "Am I to understand that there is a kind of sifting and sorting process going on, by which each human soul is, on its arrival here, assigned a fitting place and level among his or her spiritual fellows?"
"I don't know that I should express it quite in those words," she answered, "although I cannot think just now of a less clumsy way of putting it, but there is some such gathering of like to like as that of which you speak. The majority begin, as we did, in this lower circle, and remain here until they are fitted to move onward to a higher sphere. Others take a place in that higher sphere immediately, and some few are led into the Holy Presence straightway. To die is not to close the eyes on earthmerely to open them the next minute in heaven; it is not a sudden transition from darkness to light, or from light to darkness. No, it is a slow and gradual awakening, for no human soul could bear so sudden a shock. Your own transition was, comparatively speaking, an exceptionally rapid one, but I know of some who have been 'changed' for a quarter of a century, and are only now becoming conscious of the fact. Of one thing you may be certain, and that is that God is never in a hurry in the education of a human soul. He works in this world as in the natural one, not by fits and starts and sudden convulsions, but by slow and imperceptible developments, and none but Himself knows what He is going to make of us before He has done—if indeed He ever will have done, which I question. Whatever sphere of work He may assignto us here is the one for which He has all along been preparing us. Our Saviour told the disciples that in His Father's house were many mansions, not one big one where they were all to dwell together, but 'many mansions,' and that He went to prepare a place for them; and you may be positive that He would not so have spoken were not some individual preparation necessary.
"I do not know in which of these 'mansions of the blest' Frederick Robertson, of whom you ask, is now dwelling, but you must not think because his spiritual circle is far removed from mine that all communication and companionship are cut off between us. On the contrary, he is often, very often, here, and I have not seldom held soul-communion with him and felt his spirit near to me. This circle, however, is but the outer edge of the spirit-world—only one step,indeed, removed from the life of the earth and of the body—and I don't think we are capable yet of understanding the finer distinctions of spiritual companionship." And then her voice seemed to sound to me like the voice of one in the far distance, I felt the darkness closing in upon me on every side, and knew that my hour of punishment was again at hand.
Upon the details of that punishment it would serve no good purpose again to dwell, and if in the next two or three chapters I make only a passing allusion to my subsequent sufferings in Hades, the reader must understand that it is not because those sufferings had in any way ceased to be, but because I wish to put more prominently forward the singular facts in regard to the condition of others, which came to my knowledge during the time of my sojourningin the spirit-world. That these facts were not without their own influence in bringing about the change in myself, hereafter to be described, will, I think, be apparent to all, but that change I shall not attempt to trace out, step by step, to its ultimate development. It is of what I saw and heard, rather than of what I endured, that I now come to speak, and although my recollections are all too disconnected and fragmentary I give those recollections just as they still linger in my memory, and without attempting to follow too closely the narrative of my own personal doings in Hades.
I SEE SOME STRANGE SIGHTS IN HELL, AND AM FAVOURED WITH SOMETHING IN THE NATURE OF A SERMON.
"They eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,They go to church on Sunday;And many are afraid of God,And more of Mrs. Grundy."
Itis a long time ago since Religion first took to preaching at the World, and now at last the World has grown wearied of it, and has taken in her turn to preaching at Religion; and in this verse by Mr. Locker-Lampson she has a text which is sternly, trenchantly, grimly true in its satire.I know there are folk who affect to be scandalized at what they consider an irreverence, but I for one can recall no sermon in which the worldliness and the worthlessness of many so-called Christians have received as terrible a rebuke as they have in these lines by a writer ofvers de société.
I will tell you why I have introduced this topic into my diary. When I was in hell, I saw one there whom, save for his averted looks and pitiable endeavours to escape my observation, I should probably have passed unnoticed. He was one of those at whom the verse I have quoted is directed. His pitfall in life had been nothing more vicious than vanity. He was a coward who was so blind in his cowardice that he feared God less than he feared Mrs. Grundy, and who, in order to secure the approval of man, had not scrupled to do that which he knew washateful to his Maker. His life had been a living lie. Love of approbation was so strong in him that he was never happy except in perpetually posing and in endeavouring to pass himself off for that which he knew he was not. And with what result? That he had spent his days in preparing for himself his punishment. The one and only aim of his existence had been to win the approval of others, and, lo! one morning he awoke in Hades to find himself the despised of the despised and the laughing stock of the very Devil. He had so pandered to his love of approbation that it had grown at last into a disease, and I saw few more pitiable sights in my wanderings than that of this wretched creature, slinking shamefacedly through hell, and wincing, as from a blow, at the glance of every passer.
Of all vices none is so vindictive to itswretched victim as vanity. It is continually craving for the wherewithal to gratify its insatiate appetite, whilst growing but the hungrier for a meal. The very clamorousness of its demands not seldom defeats its own purpose, for sooner or later it is sure to be discovered, and none of us honour the man whom we suspect of "jumping" to gain our good opinion. Of the power which vanity may acquire over a human soul I read lately an awful instance. We are told that the last emotion visible on the face of Pranzini, the French murderer, as he stood waiting to be despatched into eternity, was a simper of gratified vanity (and what share vanity had in bringing him to that scaffold only He who reads all hearts can tell) at being the prominent object of interest to so large and distinguished an assembly. And that as he was about to step with bloodupon his soul into the presence of the Great Avenger!
"Men create their God after their own image," says Mr. Stigand in his "Life of Heine"; and it is a fact that the conception of God changes with the manners and morals of a people. To our Puritan forefathers He was a just but awful Judge, who, from His home in the vast abysses of space, kept an unwinking watch upon us, His creatures, and, with eyes of telescopic minuteness, noted every breach of His commandments, in order that He might visit it with a fiery and fearful vengeance. That man-created God is no more: He is dead, and another God reigns in His stead; but in our natural reaction from the conception of the vindictive God of past generations, we have come, in these days, to lose sight of thefact that our God is a chastening one. Not only have we turned a deaf ear to the thunders and the threats of old-fashioned orthodoxy, with its talk of everlasting punishment and lakes of brimstone, but many of uspooh-poohthe thought of a hell at all, and speak of God as though He were a good-natured and weakly-indulgent parent, on whose leniency we might lightly presume, forgetting that sin—unrepented sin—never can and never must go unpunished.
It was in this contemptuously indifferent way that one whom I knew well on earth was accustomed to speak. He was a man of free and open disposition, with a perfect genius for friendship, but his life would not bear too close an inquiry. I remember his being warned in my presence of the punishment which must await the course he was pursuing, and his answering, as I had oftenheard him answer before, that even if hewereon the road to hell (if, indeed, such a place existed, which he was inclined to doubt), he had at least the consolation of knowing that plenty of other "good fellows" were bound for the same destination, and that he was quite sure that he should feel more at home among the sinners in hell than he should among the saints in heaven.
Well, when I was in hell, I saw a sight there which is worth recording as an example of the ingenuity of the Devil in apportioning to each person the punishment best fitted to his individual case. I say "of the Devil," because I learned that he has a part (under certain restrictions and by Divine permission) in the imposition of necessary chastisement, and he is therefore an unwitting worker in the kingdom of heaven. He has indeed been such a worker from thebeginning, for in spite of his serpent-like cunning and subtlety, he was the first fool, and will be the last. The acknowledged and ancient enemy of God, he is and has been playing into the hands of the Almighty for ages, and among all fools none is so simple a fool as he.
The sight, then, to which I have referred was that of a desolate plain, low-lying and unlighted, and in the centre of it there roamed one who called out ever and anon, as if in search of a companion, but to whom there came no answer save the distant echo of his own cry. A more lonely and lifeless spot I have never seen. The silence which brooded over the place seemed sometimes to oppress the forsaken wanderer like a presence, for, with a half-affrighted and despairing cry, he set off at a panic-stricken run, as if seeking to escape this silence by flight;but, notwithstanding his haste, he made, I observed, no progress, for he was but moving round and round in one continuous ring. Of this, however, he seemed unaware; for once, when he passed near me, I heard him cry out as if in despair, "Is there no living soul in all this void and voiceless desert?" And, as he hurried by, and I caught a sight of his face, I saw that it was the face of the man who had said that hell would not be hell to him so long as he and his boon companions were together.
Another former acquaintance that I met there interested me even more. He was a man whom I had always regarded as deeply religious, and his presence in hell (by which I mean as one who was undergoing punishment) was to me the greater cause for surprise.
"What is it," I said to him, "that brings you here? not impurity, surely? and I cannot think of any other reason."
"No," he answered, "it is not impurity, for that was never one of my failings. To this day, I am unable to understand the relish with which most young men (and occasionally, be it said with shame, those who are not young) listen to the kind of conversation which is current sometimes in the smoking-room. We hold our handkerchiefs to our noses when we pass a place where there is an unpleasant odour, and turn hastily away if we come upon a repulsive sight; and impure talk affects me always as does a disgusting object or a nauseous smell.
"You are surprised at finding me here in hell, because you have always believed me to be one who thought much and felt deeply on religious subjects. But you forget thatto have religious feeling, and to act upon religious principle, are in many ways distinct. There are men who, though they are naturally incapable of lofty thought, would scorn to do anything immoral or mean; and, on the other hand, there are men who feel intensely on all religious subjects, who pray fervently and often, sing hymns with eyes streaming with tears of heartfelt earnestness, and yet their actions are not seldom unworthy, and their lives will not bear too close an inquiry. 'There is no self-delusion more fatal,' as Mr. Lowell has said, 'than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiment, while the life is grovelling and sensual.' It is a delusion which bids a man close his eyes lest he see where he is going; it comes to him with its harlot-beauties daintily draped in the robes of an angel of light, and singshymns before the very gates of hell. It is because I am one who so deluded, or who tried so to delude himself, that you and I meet here to-day. We set out together with the broad path and the narrow path before us. You, by one fatal and irrevocable step, swerved to the broad path from the narrow, and that single step plunged you headlong and hopeless into this abyss. And I, well, I appeared to myself and to others to be walking in the narrow way; and yet, by the making of continual divergences, so trifling as to seem of but little or no account, I find myself eventually in the same awful abyss that you are in, and on a level fully as loathsome as your own. Though I have committed no such crime as you have committed, I was, in the petty details of my daily life, habitually untrue; and so the time came at last, in which, with every desire to serveGod faithfully and to follow the dictates of conscience, I found that the power to make my will subservient to my wishes had slipped unnoticed from me. Habit has the strength of a giant, for good as well as for evil, and the will to do right on every occasion is as much a matter of training as is mere physical strength. The man who is habitually untrue in small things, cannot, even though he wish it, do right in great ones, any more than the man of untrained muscle can, by a mere exercise of volition, lift weights which would try the practised athlete. The only way in which to become Christlike is not to endeavour to feel so, not to seek to arouse sentiment or emotion (as drunkards fly for strength to stimulants), but to make Christliness the persistent and unconditionalhabitof our lives. We must learn day by day to resist the first rising of a desire to do, orto say, or to think, that which we know diverges by the hundredth part of an inch from the path which conscience would have us to walk; and we must so school ourselves that we can, by sheer force of will, rise above the mood of the moment, so that we act not by impulse or by inclination, but by conscience."
He stopped, and, reading my thoughts, said, in reply to them: "Yes, there is, indeed, something grimly humorous in my setting up to preach to others; but it cost me my hope of heaven, and a lifetime, to learn the lesson, and God knows I have it by heart at last! One more illustration and I have done. Let us suppose that you and I are standing on the deck of a ship which is steering straight for a certain haven, and that you put your hand on the helm and shift her a fraction of an inch from the lineon which she is running. The angle at which you have swerved from that line may be so utterly infinitesimal that it might be measured by a hair's breadth, but let that angle be carried out to its ultimate destination, and you will be borne miles and miles away from the harbour for which you are bound.
"Remember, then, when next you are called upon to make choice, be it in never so trifling a matter, between good and evil, between obeying conscience or disobeying her, that you are choosing in that moment between hell and between heaven, not for to-day, this week, or to-morrow, but for eternity!"
A LOVE STORY IN HELL.
"And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relayAnd ultimate outpost of eternity?"—D.G. Rossetti.
Someyears ago, a near relative of mine, the editor of a certain paper, was taken seriously ill, and was told by the doctors that complete rest was absolutely necessary for his recovery. As I had frequently assisted him in the preparation of "copy," and was acquainted with the routine of his office, it was arranged that I should attend on certain days in each week, and be answerable for the work during his absence.The journal was one which was made up largely of extracts from other papers, and my duties consisted less in the selection of original matter, than in the more prosaic plying of paste-brush and scissors; but the number of manuscripts received was large, and for a week or two at least I tried conscientiously to give each separate packet something like a fair consideration. I remember that the very first manuscript on which I was called to pronounce judgment was one entitled, "The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor." It is too lengthy to be printed here in full, but as the love-story from which my chapter takes its heading was largely attributable to the publication of this manuscript, I have transcribed some paragraphs from it, which I think will serve to give the reader a general idea of its tone.
The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor.
"Yes, I am in love, although as yet I could not tell what the name of my love is or will be. But in every inspired poem or perfect picture, in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming, musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with pictures. I see her bend with eyes that brim with tears of blessing to fold two dimpled hands together, and tolisten to a baby voice which whispers after hers the hallowed words to 'Our Father in Heaven.' And as the little voice dies away into the holy hush of the last Amen, and the little lids droop like the petals of a primrose over the tired eyes, my dream-picture changes again, and I am rambling among the walks I love so well, but no longer alone, no longer wrapt in melancholy musing for—now trudging cheerily along with hand clasped fast in mine and face upturned to listen, now darting bird-like aside in search of fly or flower—there journeys ever with me my little son and hers. We wander merrily through that sunny stretch of meadow—the children's meadow, as we call it—where the grass grows lush and long, and where the blithe day through the skylark ever sings and soars; we cross the stile and enter the shady shelter of the 'Lover'sLane,' dark, as it always is, with the dense green of overarching ash and hazel, and then we reach that sunny, wind-swept and sloping hillside, where he and I love to linger, watching the slow sailing of stately clouds above, or listening to the tinkle and purl of the brooklet which ripples over the pebbles in the valley far below. In the joyous wonder of the child heart beside me at all that is beautiful in this beautiful world, I forget the books and the making of books with which my brain is busied; and when the first flush of rapture is over and the little brain has sobered into calm, I tell my boy of the Brother-Lord who loves him, and who was once such a little child as he, and of the dear Lord-Father by whom all that is beautiful was made."
The writer of the "Confessions" then goes on to speak of love, and of the womanhe loves; but as his concluding paragraph will sufficiently serve to give an idea of his thoughts on the subject, it is hardly necessary to quote the passage in full. "Yes, I love her, I love her truly, and she too loves me, or will. It is not blind love, or foolish idolatry. She knows all my faults—the pitiful paltriness of my life, the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice—she knows them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that they are not my life, but the trouble of it. So also is my love for her. I love her not only for her present self, but for the sake of the self she is seeking to be—the self which in some measure indeed she now is; for that which in our truer moments we have striven to be; the Ideal upon which our eyes are ever fixed,to which (no matter how sorely we may have sinned against it in the struggle of the day) our thoughts return at night with but the more unutterable if despairing longing and love—thatin some manner we are, and shall be, notwithstanding our ever-recurrent failure and sin.
"I do not ask or expect that she shall be always true to her high ideal, for I know that to none of us is it given to walk with unfaltering feet. I remember, too, that she is no angel, but a woman with womanly weakness and human faults, for all of which I am touched with true and tender sympathy, to love her not the less, but the more. But that she shouldhavesuch an ideal, and be capable of such an aim—for that reason, if for no other, I must love and honour her with the deepest love and honour of my soul. I am not so blind as to suppose itwill be all summer and sunshine in the life which she and I will, I hope, one day lead together. I know my own evil nature too well not to be aware that there will be times when she will find it hard to prevent love being turned into loathing and confidence into contempt; and I think, with sinking of spirit, of the sore disappointment she will feel when she finds what a shabby-souled common-place creature her husband is, compared with the being into whom her love had idealized him. At such times of despondency, however, I try to remember what Miss Muloch has said about wedded life—and who has written more helpful words than she? 'I would have every woman marry,' she says, 'not merely liking a man well enough to accept him as a husband, but loving him so wholly that, wedded or not, she feels she is at heart his wife, andnone other's, to the end of her life. So faithful that she can see all his little faults (though she takes care no one else shall see them), yet would as soon think of loving him the less for these, as of ceasing to look up to heaven because there are a few clouds in the sky. So true and so fond that she needs neither to vex him with her constancy nor burden him with her love, since both are self-existent and entirely independent of anything he gives or takes away. Thus she will marry neither from liking nor esteem, nor gratitude for his love, but from the fulness of her own. If they never marry, as sometimes happens ... God will cause them to meet in the next existence. They cannot be parted; they belong to one another.'
"These are helpful words, and true; but there is a passage by poor George Eliot(alas for that adjective!), which to me is still more beautiful, and with which I cannot do better than conclude. 'What greater thing is there,' she says, 'for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain,' and, 'to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?'"
I was interested in this article as well as in the writer, and asked him for further contributions. He responded by sending a couple of sonnets, and although the "swing of his arm" was, to quote Rossetti, "freer in prose than in verse," I accepted, and printed them in the journal of which I had charge. When I came to know him afterwards,I found that he was young, and of that highly-strung nervous and poetic temperament which often proves little less than a calamity to its possessor. A more morbidly sensitive being I never met. The emotional part of his nature seemed in excess, and he felt all—the small as well as the great, the pleasant as well as the painful—intensely. His nervous vitality was too near the surface. He was easily "worked-up," and took life, or rather its incidents, too seriously. The one intellectual thing which men of such a temperament would be wise to refrain from doing, is not seldom the very thing they do—abandon themselves passionately to the pursuit of poetry. After that there is little hope for them. The world may be the richer by many a work of art, but from thenceforth and for ever Sorrow will have them for her own."Poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots of things," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and "one finds everywhere some strain at the roots of one's heart." Moreover, the pursuit of poetry is a practice which as surely grows upon one as does the use of drug or opiate, and my advice to the men and women of a highly-strung and supersensitive temperament—if they wish to make comfort their first consideration—is, "Avoid poetry as you would poison, making instead a study of that which is animal and coarse. Music and all other 'softening' influences you will, in accordance with the contention of Plato in 'The Republic,' deliberately eschew, striving rather to acquire that delightful pachydermatous condition of feeling and enviable indifference to the susceptibilities of others, which add so immeasurably to the comfort of life."
However, to return to the writer of "The Strange Confessions." The number of the journal containing his article had not been published more than a couple of days, before I received a letter signed by a lady who was unknown to me, asking that I would favour her with the address of the contributor. I replied, of course, that I could not do so without his permission, but that if she wished to be put into communication with him, and would send a letter addressed to the office of the paper, it should be duly forwarded. She did so, and when, as was natural enough, he wrote a cordial reply, she found something else in his letter about which to question him, and a correspondence consequently ensued. Whether she was or was not a heartless and accomplished flirt I never knew; but if ever a woman deliberately set herself to win, and—as subsequentevents showed—to break a man's heart, it was this lady. I learned afterwards that she was very beautiful, and as she herself wrote occasional tales and verses for the magazines, it was not to be wondered at that my contributor should be greatly interested in her epistles. She succeeded before long in making his acquaintance, and set herself to carry on in earnest the work which her insinuating letters had begun. She did not, however, find him quite the easy prey which she had perhaps expected; for though it is certain that he loved her from the moment of meeting, he was shy and self-depreciatory, and sought persistently to avoid her. But she paused at nothing to effect her purpose. She had set her heart upon "a scalp," and by looks, words, and deeds, she strove to convince him that she loved him, and strove at last successfully.I remember meeting him one morning, and thinking, as I watched the light which came into his face when he spoke of her, of the graceful lines in Mr. Austin Dobson's "Story of Rosina." In the poem, however, it is the woman, and not the man, who is heart-broken:—
"As for the girl, she turned to her new being,Came, as a bird that hears its fellow call;Blessed as the blind that blesses God for seeing;Grew as a flower on which the sun-rays fall,Loved if you will; she never named it so;Love comes unseen, we only see it go."
When I saw him again all was over. I had sought him out in his chambers, not having heard from him for a month, and he did not hear me enter. Her portrait (the one she had given him) was before him, and he had fallen by the table, half-kneeling, half-lying, with his head on his arm. It is a fearful thing to hear a strong man sob as he wassobbing then! God grant that I may never hear another, or see a face of such hopeless haggard misery as was his when he raised it!
It is not of him, however, that I wish now to speak, but of her. Of all the faces which I saw in hell, there was one which had for me a fascination beyond any other. It was the face of a beautiful woman, queenly of manner and fair of figure as a full-blown lily, and with those deep dark eyes thatseemto shine out from soul-depths, deep as the distant heaven, and yetmaymean no more than does the shallow facing of quicksilver behind a milliner's mirror. I recognised her instantly by the portrait, and never out of hell have I seen such misery on any woman's face as I saw on hers. The sentence in punishment of her sin was a strange one. It was that she should now love himwhose heart she had broken, with the same passionately intense but hopeless love with which he had loved her. It was a just but awful retribution. As some death-stricken and hunted creature presses frantically on as if to escape the arrow that it carries in its breast, so, heedless of all that was passing around her, heedless of shadow or shine, she pressed on and on through the realms of hell, her eyes fixed and wide-distended in agony, and her hands clutching ceaselessly at her bosom, as if the heart of her were being riven in twain. "O God!" I heard her cry, as she passed me, "my heart is broken! my heart is broken! and, alas, one cannot die of a broken heart in hell."
I saw her once again. She had fallen to the ground, and with hopeless hands pressed against burning brows was writhing as if in physical pain, and with her very soul consumedof passion. One whom I knew—it was his sister—was kneeling beside her, and with gentle words besought her to calm herself, but she pushed the ministering hand away despairingly, crying out: "A heart cannot break as mine is breaking without a shriek. If I had loved him, and he me, and he had died," she said, "I could have borne it, knowing that I should meet him hereafter, but to live loveless through a loveless Eternity,thatis the thought which kills me;" and then with a great cry of, "Oh! why should a merciful God let any of His creatures suffer as I am suffering now?" she rose up, and fled away before me.
I never saw her again, nor do I know whether or not it was given her to win back the love she had lost; but, after she had gone, I turned to his sister—the woman whohad striven to comfort her brother's betrayer—saying that I thought the punishment greater than the sin.
"Greater than the sin!" was the reply. "It may be that, being his sister, I judge her harshly; but if yours is the most awful crime which your sex can commit against womanhood, then it seems to me that hers—a like breach of trust—is the blackest sin which a woman can commit against a man. Nor can it be said of hers that it was the deed of a moment—a moment of over-mastering passion, for it was deliberate and cruel. I say that that woman killed my brother!" she cried fiercely; "killed him body and soul, and sent him away heart-broken, and bereft of faith in womanhood and in God. And to gratify what? her vanity—a passion as selfish and hateful, if less brutal, than your own. You haverecognised the loathsomeness of your act; but she, God help her! thinks of nothing but herself, and while she so thinks, heaven itself would be but hell to her, and in all hell there is as yet for her no hope of heaven."
THE MYSTERY OF "THE DEAD WHO DIE."