PART II (continued 2)

VIII THE MENACE OF THE SUNLIT HILL

I am writing on the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dante. The poet was born in 1265; I am writing in 1915. Six hundred and fifty years represent a tremendous slice of history; and these six hundred and fifty years span a chasm between two specially notable crises in the annals of this little world. Dante was born in a year of battle and of tumult, of fierce dissension and of bitter strife. It was a year that decided the destinies of empires and changed the face of Europe. Such a year, too, is this in which I write, and, writing, look down the long, long avenue of the centuries that intervene. This morning, however, I am not concerned with the story of revolution and of conflict, of political convulsions and of nations at war. Such a study would have fascinations of its own; but I deliberately leave it that I may contemplate the secret history of a great, a noble, and a tender soul. Edward FitzGerald tells us that he and Tennyson were one day looking in a shop window in Regent Street. They saw a long row of busts, among which were those of Goethe and Dante. The poet and his friend studied them closely and in silence. At last FitzGerald spoke. ‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘which is present in Dante’s face and absent from Goethe’s?’ The poet answered, ‘The divine!’ Now how did that divine element come into Dante’s life? He has himself told us. Has the spiritual autobiography of Dante, as revealed to us in the introductory lines of his Inferno, ever taken that place among our devotional classics to which it is justly entitled? Surely the pathos, the insight, and the exquisite simplicity of that first page are worthy of comparison with the choicest treasures of Bunyan or of Wesley, of Brainerd or of Fox. Let us glance at it.

I

I have heard many evangelists preach on such texts as: ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.’ It was necessary, of course, that they should explain to their audiences what they meant by this lost condition. Wisely enough, they have usually had recourse to illustration. The child lost in a London crowd; the ship lost on a trackless sea; the sheep lost among the lonely hills; the traveller lost in the endless bush,—all these have been exploited again and again. From literature, one of the best illustrations is the moving story of Enoch Arden. When poor Enoch returns from his long sojourn on the desolate island, he finds that his wife, giving him up for dead, has married Philip, and that his children worship their new father. It is the garrulous old woman at the inn who tells him, never dreaming that she is speaking to Enoch. Says she:

But none of these illustrations are as good as Dante’s. He opens by describing the emotions with which, at the age of thirty-five, his soul awoke. He was lost!

Neither Bunyan’s pilgrim in his City of Destruction, nor his City of Mansoul beleaguered by fierce foes, is quite so human or quite so convincing as this weird scene in the forest. The gloom, the loneliness, the silence, and the absence of all hints as to a way out of his misery; these make up a scene that combines all the elements of adventure with all the elements of reality. Dante was lost, and knew it.

II

The poet cannot tell us by what processes he became entangled in this jungle. ‘How first I entered it I scarce can say.’ But it does not very much matter. The way by which he escaped is the thing that concerns us; and to this theme he bravely addresses himself. In his description of his earliest sensations in the dark forest, several things are significant. He clearly regarded it as a very great gain, for example, to have discovered that he was lost. ‘I found me,’ he says, ‘I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.’ Those three words, ‘I found me,’ remind us of nothing so much as the record of the prodigal, ‘And he came to himself.’ I am pleased to notice that it is of the incomparable story of the prodigal that Dante’s opening confession reminds most of his expositors. Thus, Mr. A. G. Ferress Howell, in his valuable little monograph on Dante, observes that this finding of himself ‘shows that he has got to the point reached by the prodigal son when he said, “I will arise and go to my father.” He found, that is to say, that he had altogether missed the true object of life. The wild and trackless wood,’ Mr. Howell goes on to observe, ‘represents the world as it was in 1300. Why was it wild and trackless? Because the guides appointed to lead men to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of Philosophy, and to eternal felicity in accordance with the teachings of Revelation—the Emperor and the Pope—were both of them false to their trust.’ So here was poor Dante, only knowing that he was hopelessly lost; and unable to discover among the undergrowth about him any suggestion of a way to safety.

III

Suddenly the Vision Beautiful breaks upon him. He stumbles blindly through the forest until he arrives at the base of a sunlit mountain:

The hill is, of course, the life he fain would live—steep and difficult, but free from the mists of the valley and the entanglements of the wood. And is it not illumined by the Sun of Righteousness—‘Who leads all wanderers safe through every way’? He stepped out from the valley and cheerfully commenced the ascent. And then his troubles began. One after the other, wild beasts barred his way and dared him to persist. His path was beset with the most terrible difficulties. Now here, if anywhere, the poet betrays that spiritual insight, that flash of genuine mysticism, that entitles him to rank with the great masters. For whilst he wandered in the murky wood no ravenous beasts assailed him. There, life, however unsatisfying, was at least free from conflict. But as soon as he essayed to climb the sunlit hill his way was challenged. It is a very ancient problem. The psalmist marvelled that, whilst the wicked around him enjoyed a most profound and unruffled tranquillity, his life was so full of perplexity and trouble. John Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he, in his pilgrim progress, be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? I have often thought of the problem when out shooting. The dog invariably ignores the dead birds and devotes all his energy to the fluttering things that are struggling to escape. In the stress of the experience itself, however, such comfortable thoughts do not occur to us, and it seems passing strange that, whilst our days in the wood were undisturbed by hungry eyes or gleaming fangs, our attempt to climb the sunlit hill should bring about us a host of unexpected enemies. Many a young and eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey awaiting him.

IV

And such beasts! Trouble seemed to succeed trouble; difficulty followed on the heels of difficulty; peril came hard upon peril.

He had scarcely recovered from the shock, and driven this peril from his path, when

The panther, the lion, and the wolf; that is very suggestive, and we must look into this striking symbolism a little more closely.

V

The three fierce creatures that challenged Dante’s ascent of the sunlit hill represent evils of various kinds and characters. If a man cannot be deterred by one form of temptation, another will speedily present itself. It is, as the old prophet said, ‘as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.’ If one form of evil is unsuccessful, another instantly replaces it. If the panther is driven off, the lion appears; and if the lion is vanquished, the lean wolf takes its place. But there is more than this hidden in the poet’s parable. Did Dante intend to set forth no subtle secret by placing the three beasts in that order? Most of his expositors agree that he meant the panther to represent Lust, the lion to represent Pride, and the wolf to represent Avarice. Lust is the besetting temptation of youth, and therefore the panther comes first. Pride is the sin to which we succumb most easily in the full vigour of life. We have won our spurs, made a way for ourselves in the world, and the glamour of our triumph is too much for us. And Avarice comes, not exactly in age, but just after the zenith has been passed. The beasts were not equidistant. The lion came some time after the panther had vanished; but the wolf crept at the lion’s heels. What a world of meaning is crowded into that masterly piece of imagery! Assuming that this interpretation be sound, two other suggestions immediately confront us; and we must lend an ear to each of them in turn.

VI

The three creatures differed in character. The panther was beautiful; the lion was terrible; the wolf was horrible. Although the poet knew full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther’s spring, he was compelled to admire the creature’s exquisite beauty. ‘The hour,’ he says,

The lion, on the other hand, is the symbol of majesty and terror. But the lean she-wolf was positively horrible. Her hungry eyes, her gleaming fangs, her panting sides, filled the beholder with loathing. ‘Her leanness seemed full of all wants.’ The poet says that the very sight of her o’erwhelmed and appalled him. Dante himself confessed that, of the three, he regarded the last as by far the worst of these three brutal foes. Now I fancy that, in the temptations that respectively assail youth, maturity, and decline, I have noticed these same characteristics. As a rule, the sins of youth are beautiful sins. The appeals to youthful vice are invariably defended on aesthetic grounds. The boundary-line that divides high art from indecency is a very difficult one to define. And it is so difficult to define because the blandishments to which youth succumbs are for the most part the blandishments of beauty. Like the panther, vice is cruel and pitiless; yet the glamour of it is so fair that it ‘blends with the matin dawn and the sweet season.’ The sins that bring down the strong man, on the other hand, are not so much beautiful as terrible. The man in his prime goes down before those terrific onslaughts that the forces of evil know so well how to organize and muster. They are not lovely; they are leonine. And is it not true that the temptations that work havoc in later life are as a rule unalluring, hideous, and difficult to understand? The world is thunderstruck. It seems so incomprehensible that, after having survived his struggle with the beauteous panther and the terrible lion, a man of such mettle should yield to a lean and ugly wolf!

VII

The other thing is this: there is a distinction in method, a difference in approach, distinguishing these three beasts. The panther crouches, springs suddenly upon its unsuspecting prey, and relies on the advantage of surprise. Such are the sins of youth. ‘Alas,’ as George Macdonald so tersely says,

The lion meets you in the open, and relies upon his strength. The wolf simply persists. He follows your trail day after day. You see his wicked eyes, like fireflies, stabbing the darkness of the night. He relies not upon surprise or strength, but on wearing you down at the last. Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth—having beaten off the panther—beware of the lion and the wolf. And, still more imperatively, let him that thinketh he standeth—having vanquished both the panther and the lion—take heed lest he fall at last to the grim and frightful persistence of the lean she-wolf. It is just six hundred and fifty years to-day since Dante was born; but, as my pen has been whispering these things to me, the centuries have fallen away like a curtain that is drawn. I have saluted across the ages a man of like passions with myself, and his brave spirit has called upon mine to climb the sunlit hill in spite of everything.

IX AMONG THE ICEBERGS

Not so very long ago, and not so very far from this Tasmanian home of mine, I beheld a spectacle that took me completely by surprise, and even now baffles my best endeavours to describe it. I was on board a fine steamship four days out from Hobart. In the early afternoon, as I was rising from a brief siesta, I was startled by a voice exclaiming excitedly, ‘Oh, do come and see such a splendid iceberg!’ I confess that at first I entertained the notion with a liberal allowance of caution. I was afflicted with very grave suspicions. At sea, folk are apt to forget the calendar, and every day in the year has an awkward way of getting itself mistaken for the first of April. But the manifest earnestness of my informant bore down before it all base doubts, and I was sufficiently convinced to hurry up to the promenade deck. I looked eagerly far out to port, and then to starboard, but nothing was to be seen! It was the old story of ‘water, water everywhere!’ My suspicions returned in an aggravated form. Indignantly I sought out my informant, and peremptorily demanded production of the promised iceberg. ‘It’s dead ahead,’ he replied calmly, ‘and can therefore only be seen as yet from the bows.’ To the bows I accordingly hastened, and there I found a crowd, comprising both passengers and crew, already congregated.

And surely enough, I then and there beheld the most magnificent and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon upon which these eyes ever rested. Right ahead of the ship there loomed up on the far horizon what appeared, under an overcast, leaden sky, to be a fair-sized island, with a high and rocky coast. In the distance stood a tall, rugged peak, as of a mountain towering up like a monarch coldly proud of his desolate island realm. The whole stood out strikingly gloomy and forbidding against the distant eastern skyline. But, hey, presto! even as we watched it, in less time than it takes to tell, a wonderful transformation scene was enacted before our eyes. Suddenly, from over the stern, the sun shone out, flinging all its radiant splendours on the colossal object of our undivided attention.

In the twinkling of an eye, as if by magic, that which but a second ago might have passed for a barren rocky island was transformed into a brilliant mass of dazzling whiteness. Everything seemed to have been transfigured. A fairyland of pearly palaces, flashing with diamonds and emeralds, could not have eclipsed its glories now! There it still stood, indescribably terrible and grand, right in our track, as though daring us to approach any nearer to its gleaming purities. And as the sunlight refracted about it, all the colours of the rainbow seemed to play around its brow. Moreover, the genial warmth produced another wonder. For, under its benign influence, the glittering peaks gave off columns of vapour. They seemed to smoke like volcanoes.

The wonder grew upon us as we watched. And yet, straight on, our good ship held her way, her course unaltered and her speed unabated, as if, fascinated by the majestic beauty before her, she were eager to dash herself to pieces at the feet of such pure and awful loveliness. Ever greater and ever more splendid it appeared as the distance lessened between us and it, until we really seemed to be approaching an almost perilous proximity. Then, of a sudden, the ship swerved to the north-ward, and we ran by within a few hundred yards of the icy monster. Who could help recalling the adventure of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’?

Or Tennyson’s lovely simile, wherein he says that we ourselves are like

Then once again the fickle sun veiled his face, and that which had appeared at first as a rocky island in mid-ocean, and afterwards as a flashing palace of crystals, now assumed a dulled whiteness as of one huge mass of purest chalk.

The heavy southern seas were dashing angrily against it, seeming jealously to resent its escape from their own frozen dominions. And the great clouds of spray which, as a consequence, were hurled into mid-air gave an added grandeur to a spectacle that seemed to need no supplementary charms. For miles around, the sea was strewn with enormous masses of floating ice, some as large as an ordinary two-story house, and all of the most fantastic shapes, which had apparently swarmed off from the main berg. One long row of these, stretching out from the monster right across the ship’s course, looked for a moment not unlike a great ice-reef connected with the berg, and caused no little anxiety until the line of apparent peril had been safely negotiated. When we were clean abreast, a gun was fired from the bridge of the steamer, in order, I understand, to ascertain from the rapidity and volume of the echo the approximate distance, and, by deduction, the size of our polar acquaintance. Nor were there wanting those who were sanguine enough to expect that the atmospheric vibration set in operation by the explosion might finish the work of dislocation which any cracks or fissures had already begun, and bring down at least some tottering peaks or pinnacles. Sir John Franklin, in one of his northern voyages, saw this feat accomplished. But, if any of my companions expected to witness a similar phenomenon, they had reckoned without their host. The unaffected dignity of the sullen monster mocked our puny effort to bring about his downfall. Hercules scorned the ridiculous weapons of the pigmies! The dull booming of the gun started a thousand weird echoes on the desolate ice. They snarled out their remonstrance at our intrusion upon their wonted solitude, and then again lapsed sulkily into silence. The temperature dropped instantly, and I recalled a famous saying of Dr. Thomas Guthrie’s, whose life I had just been reading. In one of his speeches, before the Synod of Angus and Mearns, he said, ‘I know of churches that would be all the better of some little heat. An iceberg of a minister has been floated in among them, and they have cooled down to something below zero.’ ‘An iceberg of a minister!’ I think of the nipping air on board when our ship was in the midst of the ice; and the memory of it makes me shiver! ‘An iceberg of a minister!’ God, in His great mercy, save me from being such a minister as that!

The long-sustained excitement to which these events had given rise had scarcely begun to subside when the cry arose, ‘An iceberg on the starboard bow!’ This, in its turn, was speedily succeeded by ‘Another!’ Then, ‘An iceberg on the port bow!’ And yet once more ‘Another!’ till we were literally surrounded by icebergs. At tea-time we could peep through the saloon portholes at no fewer than five of these polar giants. Although most of them were larger than our first acquaintance—at least one of them being about three miles in length—none of these later appearances succeeded in arousing the same degree of enthusiasm as that with which we hailed the advent of the first. For one thing, the charm of novelty had, of course, begun to wear off. And, for another, they were of a less romantic shape, most of them being perfectly flat, as though some great polar plain were being broken up and we were being favoured with the superfluous territory in casual instalments. And, by the way, speaking of the shape of icebergs, I am told that the icebergs of the two hemispheres are quite different in shape, the Arctic bergs being irregular in outline, with lofty pinnacles and glittering domes, while the Antarctic bergs are, generally speaking, flat-topped, and of less fantastic form. The delicate traceries of the far North do not reflect themselves in the sturdier and more matter-of-fact monsters of the South. The appearance of icebergs in such numbers, of such dimensions, in these latitudes, and at this time of the year, constitutes, I am credibly informed, a very unusual if not, indeed, a quite unique experience. The theory was freely advanced that some volcanic disturbance had visited the polar regions and had dislodged these massive fragments. However that may be, we were not at all sorry that it had fallen to our happy lot to behold a spectacle of such sublimity. And when we reflected that less than one-tenth of each mass was visible above the water-line, we were able to form a more adequate appreciation of the stupendous proportions of our gigantic neighbours. Reflecting upon this aspect of the matter, I remembered to have heard, in my college days, a popular London preacher make excellent use of this phenomenon. ‘When,’ he said impressively, ‘when you are tempted to judge sin from its superficial appearance, and to judge it leniently, remember that sins are like icebergs—the greater part of them is out of sight!’

A certain amount of anxiety was felt, I confess, by most of us as night cast her sable mantle over sea and ice. To admire an iceberg in broad daylight is one thing; to be racing on amidst a crowd of them by night is quite another. Ice, however, casts around it a weird, warning light of its own, which makes its presence perceptible even in the darkest night. So all night long the good ship sped bravely on her ocean track, and all night long the captain himself kept cold and sleepless vigil on the bridge. When morning broke, three fresh icebergs were to be seen away over the stern. But we had now shaped a more northerly course; and we therefore waved adieu to these magnificent monsters which we were so delighted to have seen, and scarcely less pleased to have left. They will doubtless have melted from existence long before they will have melted from our memories.

Yes, they will have melted! And that reminds me of another famous saying of the great Dr Thomas Guthrie, a saying which is peculiarly to the point just now. ‘The existence,’ he said, ‘of the Mohammedan power in Turkey is just a question of time. Its foundations are year by year wearing away, like that of an iceberg which has floated into warm seas, and, as happens with that creation of a cold climate, it will by-and-by become top-heavy, the centre of gravity being changed, and it will topple over! What a commotion then!’ Ah! what a commotion, to be sure!

They will have melted! Silly things! They grew weary of that realm of white and stainless purity to which they once belonged; they broke away from their old connexions and set out upon their long, long drift. They drifted on and on towards the milder north; on and on towards warmer seas; on and on towards the balmy breath and ceaseless sunshine of the tropics. And, in return, the sunshine destroyed them. Yes, the sunshine destroyed them. I have seen something very much like it in the Church and in the world. ‘Therefore,’ says a great writer, who had himself felt the fatal lure of too-much-sunshine, ‘therefore let us take the more steadfast hold of the things which we have heard, lest at any time we drift away from them.’ It is a tragedy of no small magnitude when, like the iceberg, a man is lured by sparkling summer seas to his own undoing.