Part 28

Light in darkness—light springing up out of darkness—the blessedness of this is emphatically recognised both by signal example and in special promise, in Holy Writ. When the hand of Moses was stretched out toward heaven, and darkness fell over the land of Egypt, even darkness which might be felt—a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days—the Egyptians saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings. “When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.” “For thou wilt light my candle; the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.” In the same Psalm that tells how clouds and darkness are round about Him, the Father of lights, is contained the exulting assurance, that “light is sown for the righteous.” The light of the righteous rejoiceth, when the lamp of the wicked hath been put out. Well may spiritual aspirations be fervent for light to be sent forth, to lead and to guide to His holy hill and tabernacle, lest the feet of the wayfarer slip in a way that he knows not; and, above all, when they stumble on the dark mountains, or lose their footing in the swelling of Jordan.

_Lux è tenebris_—who will not prize it? who does not need it? For—

“What am I? An infant crying in the night, An infant _crying for the light_, And with no language but a cry.”

An exceeding bitter cry this crying for the light sometimes is, in such as those, for instance, whom Robertson of Brighton describes as “turning from side to side,” feeling with horror the old, and all they hold dear, crumbling away—the ancient light going out—more than half suspecting the falsehood of the rest, and with an earnestness amounting to agony, leaving their home, like the Magians, and inquiring for fresh light.

Turning from side to side, with the wailing note of interrogation, “Who will show us any good?” And then, more earnestly than ever, “Lord, lift Thou up the LIGHT of Thy countenance upon us.” In vain we turn from side to side. To whom should we go but unto Thee? Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts; show the LIGHT of Thy countenance, and we shall be saved.

Observable for special application is what Locke makes observable as a general fact, that new-born children always turn their eyes to that part whence the light comes, lay them how you please.

When the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, it is suggestively remarked by an eminent author, that the same succouring hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately shuts out the bright prospect again for a time, a bandage being passed over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness of their recovered sense, they should be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to light. But, as he goes on to say, between the awful blank of total privation of vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the widest difference. “In the moment of their restoration the blind have but one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The new darkness is not like the void darkness of old: it is filled with rapid, changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms, rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.” And thus is it made evident that even when the handkerchief is passed over them, the once sightless eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as they were before. All the more, however, they now dread the blankness of that total eclipse, now that, as it were, to them that walked in the shadow of death, light is sprung up. Light, how much the more precious for that background of blackness of darkness, darkness that still may be felt!

Light that may be felt, is the theme of blind old Œdipus, in Sophocles, at the hour of his mysterious departure—the hour and the power of darkness. Farewell he bids to—

“Light, sweet Light! Rayless to me—mine once, and even now I feel thee palpable, round this worn form Clinging in last embrace.”

Immortal as Homer is the prayer of his Ajax to die, if die he must, in the light. Contrast with this the _modus moriendi_ of Pompey the Great, as pictured in Corneille:—

“D’un des pans de sa robe it couvre son visage, A son mauvais dentin en aveugle obéit, Et dédaigne de voir le ciel qui le trahit.”

So with the Greek wife in Landor’s Hellenics, who resists the bidding to fall not on her knees, but to look up:—

“The hand That is to slay me, best may slay me thus. I dare no longer see the light of heaven.”[35]

But to die in the light is the almost universal craving. “As a matter of fact, nothing,” it has been remarked, “is more common than the craving and demand for light a little before death;” a remark confirmed by the sad experience of many who have tended and watched the last moments of a friend. “What more frequent than a prayer to open the shutters, and let in the sun? What complaint more repeated, and more touching than that ‘it is growing dark’?” We are told of a sufferer who did not seem in immediate danger, suddenly ordering the sick room to be lit up as for a gala. When this was mentioned to the physician, he said, gravely, “No worse sign.” We all remember the tenor of the last words of Dr. Adam, of the High School, Edinburgh, as recorded (however variously) by Scott and Lord Cockburn and others. It was in his bed-chamber, and in the forenoon, that he died; and finding that he could not see, the old schoolmaster, believing himself in the familiar school-room, exclaimed, “It is getting dark, boys; we must put off the rest till to-morrow.” It was the darkness of death. And to the living, to-morrow, above all, _that_ to-morrow, never comes.

M. de Lescure, dying of the wounds he had received at the battle of Chollet, awaited with his usual serenity the advent of his last hour. “Open the windows,” said he to his wife, who was watching by his bedside, “is it clear?” “Yes,” she said, “the sun is shining.” “I have, then,” replied the dying general, “a veil before my eyes.” A veil that no man could raise. Chateaubriand, in describing the last hours of his sister, Madame de Beaumont—the Lucile of his “Memoires d’outre-tombe”—incidentally relates that “she begged of me to open the window.... A ray of sunshine rested upon her bed, and seemed to rejoice her spirit.” The same circumstance is related of the dying Emperor Alexander. So it is of Dr. Channing. Karl Ludwig Sand, on the scaffold, begged that the bandage over his eyes might be so placed that he could, until his last moment, see the light. And it was so. Turner’s biographer tells us that almost at the very hour of the old painter’s death, his landlady wheeled his chair to the window, that he might see the sunshine he had loved so much, mantling the river, and glowing on the sails of the passing boats. “The old painter died with the winter-morning sun shining upon his face, as he was lying in his bed. The attendant drew up the window-blind, and the morning sun shone on the dying artist—the sun he had so often beheld with such love and such veneration,” and painted, at sundry times and in divers manners, with such force.

Rousseau’s wish, when in a dying state, to be carried into the open air, that he might have “a parting look at the glorious orb of day,” is referred to by one of the many biographers of Robert Burns, in recording that poet’s remark one beautiful evening, when the sun was shining brightly through the casement. The hand of death was then upon him, and a young friend rose to let down the window-blinds, fearing the light might be too much for him. Burns thanked her, with a look of great benignity, but prayed her to let the sun shine on: “he will not shine long for me.”

Tender and true is the pathos in one of Mrs. Richard Trench’s letters, touching the death of her endeared child, Bessy, where we read: “The last phrase she uttered, except those expressive of her latest wants and pain, was a desire the window-curtain might be withdrawn, that she might look at the stars.” Sunlight or starlight, it is light we cherish, and that cherishes us. Light from the first, light to the last. Happy, if the light we cherish is the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.

Another set of variations on the same theme will form the section next ensuing.

_WISHED-FOR DAY._

ACTS xxvii. 29.

It was in a ship of Alexandria, sailing into Italy, when sailing was now dangerous, because of the advanced season; it was during a voyage which Paul, a passenger, foresaw and foretold would be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of lives two hundred threescore and sixteen; it was after there had arisen against the ship a tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, before which the vessel became a helpless drift; then it was that the crew and passengers, exceedingly tossed with the tempest, and not comforted—except the apostle, gave up, with the same exception, all hope of escape, and gloomily awaited the bitter end. On the third day they cast out the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on them, all hope that they should be saved was then taken away. The fourteenth night was come, and they were driven up and down in Adria, and about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country, and sounded once and again, and found reason to fear lest they should have fallen upon rocks. So they cast four anchors out of the stern, and _wished for the day_—ηὔχοντο ἡμέραν γενέσθαι. If ’tis double death to die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. With something of a shuddering sympathy can they connect the fact that, on the day whence all Good Fridays take their name, there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour, with that other fact that about the ninth hour there was heard a wailing cry, whose echo reverberates through all space and time, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_

Ever memorable in classical lore is the supplication of the Greek warrior in Homer, not to die in the dark. Let him see his foe, and see his end, however imminent, however inevitable. King Edward II., in Christopher Marlowe’s historical tragedy, left alone in the Berkeley Castle dungeon with Lightborn, a murderer, exclaims:—

“I see my tragedy written in thy brows; Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand, And let me see the stroke before it comes, That even then, when I shall lose my life, My mind may be more steadfast on my God.”

Frequent in historical narrative are instances like that of Labedoyère, who when brought out to be shot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, and looking straight at the levelled muskets, exclaimed in a loud voice, “Fire, my friends!” Marshal Ney, a week or two later, also refused to have his eyes bandaged. “For five-and-twenty years,” he said, “I have been accustomed to face the balls of the enemy.” Then taking off his hat with his left hand, and placing his right upon his heart, he too said in a loud voice, fronting the soldiers, “My comrades, fire on me.” Murat fell in a like manner, after a like request,—but gazing to the last on a medallion which contained portraits of his wife and four children.

What mainly tends to pile up the agony of Goisvintha, in the historical romance of “Antonina,” when alone in the vaults with the madman Ulpius, is the distracting absence of light. “Bewildered and daunted by the darkness and mystery around her, she vainly strained her eyes to look through the obscurity, as Ulpius drew her on into the recess.... Suddenly he heard her pause, as if panic-stricken in the darkness, and her voice ascended to him, groaning, ‘Light, light! oh, where is the light?’” She is held forth at this crisis, as a terrible evidence of the debasing power of crime, as she now stands, enfeebled by the weight of her own avenging guilt, and “by the agency of darkness, whose perils the innocent and the weak have been known to brave.” It is only your melodramatic villain that flings forth his flourish in the style of Velasquez in “Braganza,”—addressing the duke, his judge:—

“Yes, in your gloomiest dungeons plunge me down. Welcome, congenial darkness! horrors, hail! No more these loathing eyes shall see that sun Whose irksome beams light up thy pageant triumph.”

And thus Sir Walter Scott has full warranty for proving the exceptional courage of his captive Englishman, when subjected to a midnight trial in the vaults of the _Vehmgericht_, by showing him unappalled by even the utter darkness of that terrible court. “Even in these agitating circumstances, the mind of the undaunted Englishman remained unshaken, and his eyelid did not quiver nor his heart beat quicker, though he seemed, according to the expression of Scripture, to be a pilgrim in the valley of the shadow of death, beset by numerous snares, and encompassed by total darkness, where light was most necessary for safety.” It is only in an oblique sense that what Euripides says is true, of the coward being very valiant in the dark—ἐν ὄρφνῃ δραπέτης μέγα σθένει.

Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns. But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. “Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition of his warrior’s prayer, that ‘live or die, it might be in the light of day.’” One is reminded of the lines in Racine:—

“Enfin toute l’horreur d’un combat ténébreux; Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?”

It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash and collision occurred in a tunnel—in that very place which nobody, even on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that “Ajax’s prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes us in daylight.”

In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (_deadly night_, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. “No nurse’s tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful.” Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light.

The last words audible of Goethe were, “_More light!_” The final darkness grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was passing under the shadow of death.

“Light! give me more light,” is the cry of the dying woman in “The Dead Secret,”—whereby hangs that tale. How often Lord Lytton remarks, is “light!” the last word of those round whom the shades are gathering. And he says it in reference to the last hours of one of the characters he has described with most success as well as elaboration, John Burley, who discourses of what is precious in light, as the darkness closes about him. When he lies down, and the attendant would withdraw the light, he moves uneasily. “Not that,” he murmurs, “light to the last!” And putting forth a wan hand, he draws aside the curtain, so that the light may fall full on his face. When his only friend returns, and steals back to Burley’s room on tiptoe, it is to see light stream through the cottage lattice—not the miserable ray lit by a human hand—but the still and holy effulgence of a moonlit heaven. Burley has died in sleep—calmly, and the half open eyes have the look of inexpressible softness which death sometimes leaves; “and still they were turned towards the light; and the light burned clear.” Which things are an allegory.

Mr. Dickens intensifies the wretchedness of his prisoner at Marseilles by the deprivation of light in a prison that, like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean. What light he does get comes languishing down a square funnel that blinds a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky is never seen—nor anything else. What he does see of the “light of day” he calls the light of yesterday week, the light of six months ago, the light of six years ago: so slack and dead. Bitter indeed is the import of the curse, “Let it look for light and have none.” Piteous indeed is the import of the pathetic remonstrance, “Wherefore is light given to him in misery?” Graphic indeed is the description of a place “where the light is as darkness.” Darkness and light are both alike to One only.

The record of the last day in the life of Patrick Fraser Tytler opens as follows:—“On Sunday, the 23rd, he grew confused in memory, experienced difficulty in swallowing, and complained of darkness. The curtain was drawn, and the light of the winter morning was suffered to stream on his bed; but in vain. He folded his hands, and exclaimed, ‘I see how it is.’”

John Foxe relates this incident in his narrative of the martyrdom of William Hunter, apprentice to a silk weaver in London, but discharged from his master’s employment for refusing to attend mass, and finally condemned to the stake as an incorrigible heretic. “Then said William, ‘Son of God, shine upon me!’ and immediately the sun in the element shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way, whereat the people mused, because it was dark a little time before.”

_THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND._

PROVERBS xviii. 24.

In the last book of the Pentateuch we meet with a verse which, incidentally, seems to recognise how much more vitally close and intimate may be the affinity between a man and his bosom friend, than between the same man and his own brother. The brother is spoken of without descriptive epithet or adjunct of any kind; while of the friend it is added, “which is as thine own soul.”[36] An ever memorable verse in the book of Proverbs has immortalized the truth, that “there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.”

None too many are the testimonies on record of brotherly attachment such as Columbus signalizes in his correspondence. To his elder son, Diego, the affectionate father writes concerning the younger, Fernando, then a stripling midway in his teens, “To thy brother conduct thyself as the elder brother should unto the younger. Thou hast no other, and I praise God that this is such a one as thou dost need. Ten brothers would not be too many for thee. Never have I found a better friend to right or left than my brothers.” General testimony points the other way. Cicero, who, himself a good brother, in one place moots the question whether it is just to prefer our friends to our relations—_quæritur sitne æquum amicos cognatis anteferre_,—in another decides that friendship is better than relationship: _præstat amicitia propinquitati_. It has been remarked by Samuel Bailey, of Sheffield, that parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, reciprocally complain of each other’s deficiency of affection, and think it hard that the tie of relationship should not secure invariable kindness and indestructible love: expecting some secret influence of blood, some physical sympathy, some natural attraction, to retain the affection of their relatives, without any solicitude on their part to cherish or confirm it; and forgetting that man is so constituted as to love only what in some way or other, directly or indirectly, immediately or remotely, gives him pleasure,—that even natural affection is the result of pleasurable associations in his mind, or at least may be overcome by associations of an opposite character, and that the sure way to make themselves beloved is to display amiable qualities to those whose regard they wish to obtain.[37] Crabbe has a terse couplet on—

... “those Who are called friends because they are not foes;”

meaning by friends, kinsfolk; but such as, though not more than kin, are less than kind. Dr. Croly’s hero, Marston, soldier and statesman, on receiving, in his isolation, three letters from three proved friends, yet comparative strangers, describes himself as feeling, “while holding their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent relationship.” So Mr. Thackeray is bitter on what it is to have sham friends and no sympathy; ties of kindred which bind one, as it were, to the corpse of friendship, and oblige one to bear through life the weight and the embraces of this lifeless, cold connection.

Noteworthy among the avowals of Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Religio Medici,” is this: “I confess I do not observe that order that the schools ordain our affections,—to love our parents, wives, children, and then our friends; for, excepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe the principles of life.” The father and the son may, as Montaigne says, be of quite contrary humours, and brothers be without any sympathy with brothers. So Feltham asserts it to be likeness which makes the true love-knot of friendship. When we find another of our own disposition, what is it, he asks, but the same soul in a divided body? “We are then intermutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us; hence a friend is a more sacred name than a brother.” What avails it, he further asks, to have bodies of the same original, when the souls within them differ?