THE EVERLASTING NO.
Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has now
shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless
progressive, and growing: for how can the "Son of Time," in any case,
stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state of crisis,
of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution into aimless
Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation; wherefrom the
fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself?
Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is
sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one upon
rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and
motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and
misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how
could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed, bemocked of
Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart might desire and
pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance, offered and
then snatched away. Ever an "excellent Passivity;" but of useful,
reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger, nothing
granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize
for himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of
bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, ever since that first
"ruddy morning" in the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; and
then with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs
over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam.
He himself says once, with more justness than originality: "Men is,
properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope;
this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope." What, then, was our
Professor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut out from
Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into a dim
copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.
Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For, as
he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of
another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our
Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he
was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he;
"shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed,
starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be
called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction
to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is
not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's
words, "that, for man's well-being, Faith is properly the one thing
needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the
shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick
existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:" to such it will be clear
that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the
loss of everything. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of
long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love,
all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its
life-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: "Is
there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since
the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and _see_ing it go? Has
the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and
Guide, but a false earthly Phantasm, made up of Desire and Fear, of
emanations from the Gallows and from Doctor Graham's Celestial-Bed?
Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom
admiring men have since named Saint, feel that _he_ was 'the chief of
sinners;' and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (_wohlgemuth_), spend much of
his time in fiddling? Foolish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who in thy
Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst
fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,--I tell thee, Nay! To
the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest
aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he
feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What
then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion; some
bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others _profit_ by? I know
not: only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then
are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much.
But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience
to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us
build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us
offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has
provided for his Elect!"
Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting
question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no
Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his;
wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of
despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar
of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To such length has the
spirit of Inquiry carried him. "But what boots it (_was thut's_)?" cries
he: "it is but the common lot in this era. Not having come to spiritual
majority prior to the _Siecle de Louis Quinze_, and not being born purely a
Loghead (_Dummkopf_ ), thou hadst no other outlook. The whole world is,
like thee, sold to Unbelief; their old Temples of the Godhead, which for
long have not been rain-proof, crumble down; and men ask now: Where is the
Godhead; our eyes never saw him?"
Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes
wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life
was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than
even now when doubting God's existence. "One circumstance I note," says
he: "after all the nameless woe that Inquiry, which for me, what it is not
always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me! I nevertheless still
loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my allegiance to her. 'Truth!' I
cried, 'though the Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood!
though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy.' In
conduct it was the same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or
miraculous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me _This
thou shalt do_, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would I
have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in spite
of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with
the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite
nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the world,
of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with
their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart
He was present, and His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred
there."
Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual
destitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured!
"The painfullest feeling," writes he, "is that of your own Feebleness
(_Unkraft_); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true
misery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling,
save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague
wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference!
A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only
our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are
the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence,
too, the folly of that impossible Precept, _Know thyself_; till it be
translated into this partially possible one, _Know what thou canst work
at_.
"But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net-result of my
Workings amounted as yet simply to--Nothing. How then could I believe in
my Strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in? Ever did this
agitating, yet, as I now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain to me
insoluble: Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certain Worth, such even as the
most have not; or art thou the completest Dullard of these modern times?
Alas, the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself; and how could I
believe? Had not my first, last Faith in myself, when even to me the
Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all too cruelly belied?
The speculative Mystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to me: neither
in the practical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, but been
everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast out. A feeble unit in
the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me
but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet
impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was
there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine?
O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I
speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose
withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible
tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little
mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange
isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with
me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive,
that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets
and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not
another's, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle.
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself
tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life,
though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of
Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot
so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of
Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead,
immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind
me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of
Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why,
if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?"
A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst
aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdrockh threaten
to fail? We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in spite of his
locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort. Hear this, for
example: "How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another
thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as
it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a
whole Drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in
quagmires of Disgust!"
Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not find
in the following sentences, quite in our Professor's still vein,
significance enough? "From Suicide a certain after-shine (_Nachschein_) of
Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence of character;
for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach? Often, however,
was there a question present to me: Should some one now, at the turning of
that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other World, or
other No-world, by pistol-shot,--how were it? On which ground, too, I have
often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and other death-scenes, exhibited an
imperturbability, which passed, falsely enough, for courage."
"So had it lasted," concludes the Wanderer, "so had it lasted, as in bitter
protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within me, unvisited
by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming
fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when
I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Death-song, that wild _Selig der
den er im Siegesglanze findet_ (Happy whom _he_ finds in Battle's
splendor), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken,
that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither
had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as
if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean
terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And
yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if
all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if
the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster,
wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.
"Full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French
Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation,
toiling along the dirty little _Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer_, among civic
rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as
Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered;
when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What
_art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and
whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the
sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say
the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do
against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it
be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under
thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and
defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my
whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of
unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper
of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but
Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.
"Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (_das ewige Nein_) pealed authoritatively
through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my
whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis
recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in
Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of
view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art
fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);' to which my
whole Me now made answer: '_I_ am not thine, but Free, and forever hate
thee!'
"It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man."