" BY THE STONE EZEL."

Otago Witness, Issue 2561, 6 May 1903, Page 70

" BY THE STONE EZEL."

By Jessie Macxay.

"By the Stone Ezel." Such is the title of a quaint story of one man's lifelong devotion to another, written by one of our less-knoAvn women novelists — Katherine Macquoid, I think. And no fitter name could be chosen for any tale whose essential motive is the pure selfless, ardent affection of man for man or woman for woman. Is it necessary to remind youug colonial readers that it was by the stone Ezel that Jonathan risked life and freedom to warn David of his father's designs,- that it was by the stone Ezsl that David and Jonathan swore eternal faitli and parted for ever as earthly comrades? I fear that it is. That matchless tragedy, which worthily closed in David's Song of the Bow after Jonathan's death at Mount Gilboa, has long been regarded as the loftiest study of friendship in the world's literature ; and such it will ever remain.

That this passion of manly devotion has been approached in other times and among far other races is not unknown to readers of ancient romances, such as those of Roland and Oliver, Krishna and Rama, Damon and Pythias ; nor to readers of Shakespeare's sonnets and "In Memoriam." But it is strange to hear that there have been early civilisations in which the abiding incentive to do and dare and achieve was neither religion nor love of man and woman nor the modern broad-based love of humanity, but this same passion of romantic friendship, exalted by every power of poetry and fortified by every sanction of custom. It was this romance alone that softened the iron rule of Sparta; it was this that quickened the sunnier soul aud inspired the Olympian songs of Athens; it was this that bound together that glorious company of warrior-friends, the Theban Band. This it was, too, which inspired the ethereal discourses in which Plato explains his belief that the supremest loves of earth are the prisoned soul's delight and wonderment in beholding through the medium of a love-glorified form a reflection of the Eternal Spirit of Beauty with which the soul dwelt in unremembered ages past. Far different was the theory of the East, which explains all the magnetic forces of love and friendship as the results of life re-incarnate a,gain and again. Edwin Arnold beautifully weaves this into the " Light of Asia," where Siddhartha tells of the many forms and many lives in which he loved Yasodhara. To this passion of comradeship permeated the free polity of ancient Greece, with all her glowing art and song. It was not womanhood that inspired the loftiest soulstriving of that old heathen time ; the Greek woman's best praise was then to be " the home-abiding one, neither seen nor heard of abroad." How this shser disdain of woman's companionship turned into the cast-iron bonds of the zenana in Hindostan and Persia we know ; and we know, too, how it hardened into the less galling but still insufferably cramping bonds of conventional restraint which still to a large extent fetter women on the old Latin borders of the Mediterranean. The " Iliad " has much to say of the love of comrades ; its culminating tragedy is based on the deep passion that fired Achilles on the death of his friend Palroclus. But it gives only one picture of true conjugal devotion — the parting of Hector and Andromache.

It is a significant Tact that we hear much less of this fantastic and jealous devotion of comrades in the earliest songs of the Teutons, though friendship among them had a full meed in the custom of foster-brother-hood, of which we hear much in the Sagas. Significant, we wou'd say, because the Teutons, more than other Aryan races, held womanhood in comparatively high esteem from earliest times. So when the man and man ideal of perfect citizenship, as dreamed by Plato, Socrates, and the loftiest of the old Greco-Latins, had fallen inevitably into the hideous and unspeakable ruin in which the dawn of Christianity found the ancient world, it was the slow, sane, home-loving Teuton who at last grasped the most abiding ideal of Christian polity, whose standard unit is the family. Of the broken polity of the scattered 'Celts it is difficult now to gain a clear idea. For the pendulum had swung back again, as needs it must, and on the ruins of that old Greco-Latin civilisation which so utterly discounted the value of womanhood arose the counter fantasy of woman worship as evolved by the Troubadours of old Provence — in fact, the institution of chivalry. This unearthly apotheosis of love and beauty was subtly helped by the new force of ILuiolatry, the one shaping to asceticism, the other to license, and both falling wide of the worldcompelling force of the equal comradeship of men and women, as evolved in the AngloSaxon world.

Did Christianity, as certain modern Hellenic philosophers complain, deliberately cramp and ignore the noble passion of friendship, as the ancient Hellenic ideal deliberately cramped and ignored the noble passion of love? That cannot be conceded for a moment, remembering the beautiful picture of the favour vouchsafed to John, the beloved disciple. And when the pure tender simplicity of family life in apostolic times had been assailed by the subtly-veiled pride of asceticism, the lonely Thebaid, the chilly anchorite's ceHs still were often visited by a gleam of generous human pasbion in the brotherly love of the monks. The story of St. Augustine's sorrow for the dead friend of his youth is powerfully though simply told in his "Confessions." St. Bernard, mourning a dead monk, laments thus : "Flow, flow, my tears, so eager to flow ! He who prevented your flowing is here no more. It is not he who is dead ; it is I who now live only to die. Why, O why, have we loved, and why have we | lost each other?"' The letters of the 1 holy prelate Anselm to Laufranc and other friends breathe ed attachment as fervent and deep as any poems of ancient Athens or Thebes. The eminently ireIUJJWUfI 3Jld. CO.SHUinal\f.An birmauitv ci

Shakespeare was not complete without the passionate ardour of friendship revealed in bis sonnets. The deep spirituality and lawloving Saxon conservatism of Tennyson in no way hindered the tender self-revelation of "In Memoriam" — that stupendous and stately hymnn of man's friendship. Walt Whitman, the apostle of the new democracy of the West, writes thus: — "It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervent comradeship (the adhesive love at least rivalling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going bsyond it) that I look for the counterbalance anJ offset of oui" materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualisation thereof."

But though Christianity clearly interdicted or circumscribed no sentiment uplifting to the" race, it would seem that the conventional impress of medieval chivalry, with its fantastic woman-worship, is too much on our thought and speech, inasmuch as deep heart-sufficing elect friendship is neither understood nor indeed commended by the multitude. When ordinary thinkers speak of friendship, they mean a watery sentiment partly founded on dutiful esteem, partly on a sense of favours received or expected. They have no idea that nwn can be borne to man, or woman to woman, on a wave of subtle, unreasoning, immediate attraction, such as that which brought Stephen de la Boetie to Montaigne, Wagner to King Ludwig II of Babaria, or Anne to the Duchess of Maryborough. And thus, while Walt Whitman's and inward Carpeutei's dream of a State purified by a general return to the piinciples of Homeric friendship is open to grave question, those souls which now, as then, are capable of such a noble passion are misunderstood and mocked.

Let it not be imagined that heroic friendship has been monopolised by man. Few records in this connection are available from ancient times, and from such as thera are we gather that the male historian has seldom viewed these female attachments with the admiration ot sympathy he always expected regarding his own comradeships. The most famous example of modern times — that of Anne and the Duchess of Maryborough — only attained fame by reason of its political results. Certainly, the "Ladies of Llangollen" were also noted in a bygone generation. They were two Irish ladies, of good birth — Lady Eleanor Butler and Lady Sarah Ponsonby. Lady Eleanor was the elder by 20 years, but that was no bar to their romantic attachment : when Lady Sarah was about 17, they left their homes, bought a cottage at Llangollen, and spent their lives together iv great content and peace. They were visited by the most noted men of the time, and their names were a proverb throughout Britain. In- 1829 Lady Eleanor Butler died, at the age of 90, and not long afterwards Lady Sarah folloVed her "beloved one," with whom she had spent more than 60 happy years. The beautiful friendship of Frances Willard and Lady Henry Somerset is a thing of our own time ; it was no less tender, "though soon severed by death.

To return to the stone Ezel: Are we to think, then, as superficial writers, both orthodox and heterodox, would have us think, that the story of David and Jonathan was a sporadic or miraculous incident in a book made up mainly of sporadic or miraculous incidents? Are we to be shaken or disillusioned because the field of profane history reveals to us migV=7 and mysterious areas of spiritual revelation or organised similitudes unknown to those whose lamp of knowledge cast light on the Jewish pathway only? Not so. Such widened vistas only convince the candid mind that the Scriptures are to be regarded as islands which are the moun-tain-tops of extinct continents — nothing appearing above but what is broadly based on truth submerged by time ; but standing firm on the eternal verities of evolving humanity and evolving revelation.