THE LAND OF SUSPENSE.
IN the remarkable and most pathetic story which the brilliant author of the series on "The Seen and the Unseen" contributes to the New Year's number of Black. wood's Magazine, and which she entitles "A Land of Suspense," the leading idea is that in this new kind of Purgatory,—a Purgatory very unlike that of Dante,—which she has imagined and delineated for us, the chief feature is the suspended and paralysing conditions of life which in- visibility, or apparent bodilessness, gives to those spirits which are not yet accepted by God. It would appear that this powerful writer, who seems to have so keen a sense of the independent existence of the spirit of man, and yet so pro- found a conviction that the human spirit needs to be "clothed upon" with a celestial body of its own, in order to live any natural and complete life, intends to suggest that so long as the will has not taken any final turn for good or ill, so long it still has, though bodily death is passed, a life of probation in which there is still an opening left for repentance. In this "Land of Suspense" the spirit may wander where it will in perfect freedom, though without the power to plunge into further evil, and equally without the power to engage in any practical or acceptable life of duty and service. It is supposed to live oppressed by the weight of "too much liberty ; " and this is caused by its absolute invisibility to other spirits, although by the help of its voice, which it still retains, it can if it chooses enter into communication with other invisible prisoners like itself and also with those more blessed spirits which have already been "clothed upon," to use St. Paul's expression, with a more perfect and incorruptible body of their own. Is the idea taken from that fine touch in "The Passing of Arthur," when Arthur hears Sir Gavrain's spirit moaning on the blast I'— "Farewell, there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind, And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight."
Probably not, for unless there is a "laud of Suspense" for all or almost all who have passed away,—and there possibly may be,—a traitor would hardly be chosen as a typical inhabitant of "the Land of Suspense." And perhaps this new kind of Purgatory in which there is room for both hope and dread, is not intended so much to illustrate the horrors of a life in which there is little to soften the anguish of remorse, as the merciful alleviations of a life in which there is much to draw the mind towards the glimmer of a possible peace. At all events all the power of the author of these stories of "The Seen and the Unseen" is concentrated here in the delineation of that spiritual loneliness and tremor of the soul which results when all its definite attachments and duties become mere memories, and its imprisonment begins in a fair solitude that can only be broken by the surrender of all pride and wilfulness of purpose, and the willing confession of its own helplessness. The art with which this powerful writer pictures the first sense of exulta- tion in the lightness and freedom of the disembodied state, before the calamity of its invisibility and exclusion from any such social "give and take" as that of our human world had been realised, and the shiver that is sent through this traveller in the Unseen, unseen himself, when he perceives the cloud which hides him from the eyes of happier
immortals, is very subtle and impressive :—
" It was here for the first time that the traveller saw any con- course of people. Upon the slopes he had met but few, mostly solitary individuals, with here and there a group of friends. They were a people of genial countenance, smiling, and with friendly looks; but it surprised and a little wounded him that they took no notice of him, did not give him so much as a Good morning— nay, even pushed him off the path, though without the least appearance of any unkindly feeling. As he sat upon the roadside and watched the people of this unknown land coming and going across the bridge from the town, his heart was moved within him by the sight of so many fellow-creatures, all, as it seemed, so gay, so kind, so friendly, but without a sign or look as if they recog- nised his existence at all. It seemed to him a long time since he had exchanged a word with any one, and a great sense of lone- liness took possession of him. He had not felt this upon the little-frequented paths from which he had come; but here, among so many, to receive not even a look from any passer-by seemed to him an injury and a disappointment which it was hard to bear. He reflected, however, that in the country from which he came such a thing might easily have happened with a wandering foreigner resting upon the roadside, whom nobody knew : yet he was scarcely comforted by this thought, for he felt sure that at least such a stranger would have been looked at, if no more— would have met the questioning of many eyes, some with perhaps a smile in them, and all curious to know what he did there. Even curiosity would have been something : it would have been kinder than to ignore him completely as these people were doing ; yet there was nothing in their look to make him believe that they were unfeeling or discourteous. After a while he felt that he could bear this estrangement from his kind no longer, and getting up on his feet, he said Good morning' to a group that were passing, feeling in himself that there was a wistfulness, almost an entreaty in his tone. He saw that they were startled by his address, and looked round first, as if to see where his voice came from—yet in a moment answered, with what seemed almost an outcry of response and greeting, saying Good morning,' and God bless you!' eagerly." (pp. 132-33.) And then the father of this disembodied traveller, who is no longer disembodied but has been "clothed upon" with a celestial body, comes to seek the disembodied wanderer "After a moment he said, the softness of his voice seeming to
search through the silence as his eyes searched through the void, My son ! are you here, my son ? ' The young man still paused a little, unwilling to relieve the other, yet not willing to lose the pleasure of revealing like a reproach his own abandoned state. 'I am here,' at last he said. The father pushed through the trees
and came to him quickly, and once more there came into the young man's mind the story of him who saw his son a long way
off, and ran and fell upon his neck. Had he himself been as of
old, this was what his father would have done,—but how can a man embrace a voice? Yet the movement melted him, and made him rise to his feet to meet the other, though still with that un- reasoning resentment in his mind, as though the door had been shut upon him, which was not shut, though he was unable to , cross the threshold. There was authority and command, as of one used to rule, in the face of this man who was his father : but everything else was veiled with the great pity and love that was in his voice. 'It was not thus we hoped to welcome you, my son, my son !' he cried, coming near, with his arms stretched out.— ' How is it,' cried the young man, that I feel all my members from head to foot, and every faculty, and yet you see me not, touch me not ? It makes a man mad to be, and yet not to be.'— ' God 'save you!' said the father, with tears. God aid you! We know not how it is,—nor can we do anything to help. It is for your purification, and because that which is must have its natural accomplishment. The sins of the flesh destroy the flesh, as is just. But you, you are still able to love, to think, to adore your God in His Works. My son, accept and submit,—and the better day will come.'—' Submit ! to be nothing !' said the young man. And then he cried bitterly, Have I any choice ? It is stronger than I am. I must submit, since you will not help, nor any one. If my mother—' and here his voice broke." (pp. 14647.) This will show sufficiently how subtle is the delineation of that loneliness in which the voice only is left for the purpose of communicating with others whether "unclothed" or "clothed upon." Of course, the voice had to be retained or there would be no story to tell ; and the voice being the most spiritual, but also perhaps the least satisfying, of tho
channels of communication with our friends,—the channel which seems to stimulate most vividly the desire for more ample means of intercourse and to gratify that desire least,—the man who has become to every one but himself a mere voice,—a wandering voice,—feels as if he had been deprived of all reality, while still in his own nature a man full of needs, and yearnings, and memories, and despondencies, and of an uncontrollable desire for the play of active powers. And it is this half-and-half life, this all but solitary imprison- ment in a liberty of thinking and moving about without pur- pose or true action, of which this unique writer endeavours to delineate the horror.
We entirely agree with the writer of these remarkable stories of "the Unseen" that more and more we need to include in the conception of the intermediate state a further stage of probation for some at least of those who enter it; for the more we look at life as it actually is, the more certain it becomes that the most widely different degrees of probation have been given to human beings in their present life, and that while some have had a true probation of life- long length, others have had an extremely limited proba- tion, and others, again, what is virtually no probation at all. Nor have we ever been able to understand on what revealed statement we are supposed to go in the assumption that all probation ceases with this life. Even the most strictly orthodox believers, even the Roman Catholics, are compelled to interpose hypothetically a whole life of probation com- pressed into the few hours or minutes or seconds of the death-stroke.
"Between the saddle and the ground He mercy sought and mercy found," is the couplet in which the popular belief in this sort of sup- plementary probation is beat expressed. But even that couplet will answer no purpose for the child or man who has not learned that there is such a need as that of mercy, nor that there is any being to whom prayer for mercy may be made. As St. Paul says, those to whom no Gospel has been preached can have had no chance of accepting or rejecting God's mercy. And there is something very unnatural and even positively artificial in the attempt to cram a whole world of spiritual experience into the few instants into which the death of the body is compressed. When Christ speaks of judgment, he speaks of the judgment of those who have been tried, who have had the opportunity of feeding and clothing and ministering to "the least of these " his brethren, and who have deliberately availed themselves of, or deliberately rejected, that opportunity. How many millions are there in this world to whom, so far as we can see, no such opportunity has ever been afforded, and who are so circumstanced that, if there be no opportunity beyond the grave, death closes the door against all such probation for ever? In none of Christ's parables in which judgment is touched upon, is there any hint even that those to whom no trial, or no adequate trial, has been given, are to be included in the condemnation of those who have been tried and found wanting.
But whether "the Land of Suspense," as the author of these stories of "The Seen and the Unseen" calls it, is one in which farther probation is provided by reducing the spirit of man to the unique insulation here so powerfully and pathetically delineated, is another question. We do not understand that the remarkable authoress who tells these stories intends to give their exact imaginative form any very special signi- ficance. All the greater spiritual writers have found a great importance in the detachment of the character from all those distractions by which the reflectiveness and urgency of the conscience is attenuated, and every one knows that as a matter of experience in this life, seasons of more or less entire loneliness are amongst the most adequate of the moral stimu- lants which the conscience receives. Nor is there any better representation of that loneliness than the man's sense that all his external energies have dwindled to the dimensions of a mere voice, suggests to us. When John the Baptist in his humility wished to represent the inadequacy of his own spiritual influence as compared with that of him "the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy to unloose," he called him- self "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," and certainly intended thereby to indicate the absence of that spiritual might for which he longed. This subtle critic has taken up the idea and intensified it in her conception of the wandering voices which sometimes bewail their helplessness, and some. times magnify their ghostly and ghastly liberty of speculative waywardness into a privilege of arbitrary freedom. But if there be, as we hope there is, a "Land of Suspense" beyond the grave, we cannot doubt that in some fashion or other there will be found opportunities there for that long communing of the conscience of man with his memory, which is here so powerfully and graphically described.
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