 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
III.
As a statue, planted on a revolving pedestal, shows now this
limb, now that; now front, now back, now side; continually
changing, too, its general profile; so does the pivoted, statued
soul of man, when turned by the hand of Truth. Lies only
never vary; look for no invariableness in Pierre. Nor does
he revolves. Catch his phases as your insight may.
Another day passed on; Glen and Frederic still absenting
themselves, and Pierre and Isabel and Lucy all dwelling together.
The domestic presence of Lucy had begun to produce
a remarkable effect upon Pierre. Sometimes, to the covertly
watchful eye of Isabel, he would seem to look upon Lucy with
an expression illy befitting their singular and so-supposed merely
cousinly relation; and yet again, with another expression
still more unaccountable to her,—one of fear and awe, not unmixed
with impatience. But his general detailed manner toward
Lucy was that of the most delicate and affectionate considerateness—nothing
more. He was never alone with her;
though, as before, at times alone with Isabel.
Lucy seemed entirely undesirous of usurping any place about
him; manifested no slightest unwelcome curiosity as to Pierre,
and no painful embarrassment as to Isabel. Nevertheless, more
and more did she seem, hour by hour, to be somehow inexplicably
sliding between them, without touching them. Pierre
felt that some strange heavenly influence was near him, to keep
him from some uttermost harm; Isabel was alive to some
untraceable displacing agency. Though when all three were
together, the marvelous serenity, and sweetness, and utter unsuspectingness
of Lucy obviated any thing like a common embarrassment:
yet if there was any embarrassment at all beneath
that roof, it was sometimes when Pierre was alone with Isabel,
after Lucy would innocently quit them.
Meantime Pierre was still going on with his book; every
moment becoming still the more sensible of the intensely inauspicious
circumstances of all sorts under which that labor was
proceeding. And as the now advancing and concentring enterprise
demanded more and more compacted vigor from him,
he felt that he was having less and less to bring to it. For not
only was it the signal misery of Pierre, to be invisibly—though
the attempt at a mature work,—a circumstance sufficiently lamentable
in itself; but also, in the hour of his clamorous pennilessness,
he was additionally goaded into an enterprise long
and protracted in the execution, and of all things least calculated
for pecuniary profit in the end. How these things were
so, whence they originated, might be thoroughly and very beneficially
explained; but space and time here forbid.
At length, domestic matters—rent and bread—had come to
such a pass with him, that whether or no, the first pages must
go to the printer; and thus was added still another tribulation;
because the printed pages now dictated to the following manuscript,
and said to all subsequent thoughts and inventions of
Pierre—Thus and thus; so and so; else an ill match. Therefore,
was his book already limited, bound over, and committed
to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form
or conclusion at all. Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty
in authorship that is high? While the silly Millthorpe was
railing against his delay of a few weeks and months; how bitterly
did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart, that to most of the
great works of humanity, their authors had given, not weeks
and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered
and dedicated lives. On either hand clung to by a girl who
would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in
his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from
any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of
hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as
at the Pole.
And the great woe of all was this: that all these things
were unsuspected without, and undivulgible from within; the
very daggers that stabbed him were joked at by Imbecility,
Ignorance, Blockheadedness, Self-Complacency, and the universal
Blearedness and Besottedness around him. Now he began
to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut
things that think, or move, or lie still, seemed as created to
mock and torment him. He seemed gifted with loftiness,
merely that it might be dragged down to the mud. Still, the
profound willfulness in him would not give up. Against the
breaking heart, and the bursting head; against all the dismal
lassitude, and deathful faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness,
and craziness, still he like a demigod bore up. His soul's
ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and
make a courageous wreck. Now he gave jeer for jeer, and
taunted the apes that jibed him. With the soul of an Atheist,
he wrote down the godliest things; with the feeling of misery
and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For
the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And
every thing else he disguised under the so conveniently adjustable
drapery of all-stretchable Philosophy. For the more and
the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he
dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal
lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written
thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great
books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the
more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So
that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations;
nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself.
The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him,
since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be
the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth
part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing
accidents for the rest. So beforehand he despised those
laurels which in the very nature of things, can never be impartially
bestowed. But while thus all the earth was depopulated
of ambition for him; still circumstances had put him in
the attitude of an eager contender for renown. So beforehand
he felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or
So, beforehand he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine
loftiness for the whole infinite company of infinitesimal critics.
His was the scorn which thinks it not worth the while to be
scornful. Those he most scorned, never knew it. In that
lonely little closet of his, Pierre foretasted all that this world
hath either of praise or dispraise; and thus foretasting both
goblets, anticipatingly hurled them both in its teeth. All panegyric,
all denunciation, all criticism of any sort, would come
too late for Pierre.
But man does never give himself up thus, a doorless and
shutterless house for the four loosened winds of heaven to howl
through, without still additional dilapidations. Much oftener
than before, Pierre laid back in his chair with the deadly feeling
of faintness. Much oftener than before, came staggering
home from his evening walk, and from sheer bodily exhaustion
economized the breath that answered the anxious inquiries as to
what might be done for him. And as if all the leagued spiritual
inveteracies and malices, combined with his general bodily
exhaustion, were not enough, a special corporeal affliction now
descended like a sky-hawk upon him. His incessant application
told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some
days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening
them wide to the light. Through the lashes he peered upon
the paper, which so seemed fretted with wires. Sometimes he
blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper;—thus
unconsciously symbolizing the hostile necessity and distaste,
the former whereof made of him this most unwilling states-prisoner
of letters.
As every evening, after his day's writing was done, the
proofs of the beginning of his work came home for correction,
Isabel would read them to him. They were replete with errors;
but preoccupied by the thronging, and undiluted, pure
imaginings of things, he became impatient of such minute,
the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished
to the entomological critics.
But at last he received a tremendous interior intimation, to
hold off—to be still from his unnatural struggle.
In the earlier progress of his book, he had found some relief
in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfare
of the city; that so, the utter isolation of his soul,
might feel itself the more intensely from the incessant jogglings
of his body against the bodies of the hurrying thousands.
Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights,
than pleasant ones; for then, the great thoroughfares were less
thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat
like schooners' broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged
like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced
ship's blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempests through the
deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark, triumphant joy; that while
others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the
storm-admiral, whose most vindictive peltings of hail-stones,—
striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body,—melted into
soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled from off him.
By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend
his steps down the dark, narrow side-streets, in quest of the
more secluded and mysterious tap-rooms. There he would feel
a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair,
ordering his half-pint of ale before him, and drawing over his
cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of
the social castaways, who here had their haunts from the bitterest
midnights.
But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and
now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest
warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to
him. Among these he had now been accustomed to wind in
and out every evening; till one night as he paused a moment
all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he
was; he did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He
could not see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes,
he seemed to feel that the lids were open. Then he was sensible
of a combined blindness, and vertigo, and staggering; before
his eyes a million green meteors danced; he felt his foot
tottering upon the curb, he put out his hands, and knew no
more for the time. When he came to himself he found that
he was lying crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and
slime. He raised himself to try if he could stand; but the
fit was entirely gone. Immediately he quickened his steps
homeward, forbearing to rest or pause at all on the way, lest
that rush of blood to his head, consequent upon his sudden
cessation from walking, should again smite him down. This
circumstance warned him away from those desolate streets, lest
the repetition of the fit should leave him there to perish by
night in unknown and unsuspected loneliness. But if that terrible
vertigo had been also intended for another and deeper
warning, he regarded such added warning not at all; but again
plied heart and brain as before.
But now at last since the very blood in his body had in vain
rebelled against his Titanic soul; now the only visible outward
symbols of that soul—his eyes—did also turn downright traitors
to him, and with more success than the rebellious blood.
He had abused them so recklessly, that now they absolutely
refused to look on paper. He turned them on paper, and
they blinked and shut. The pupils of his eyes rolled away
from him in their own orbits. He put his hand up to them,
and sat back in his seat. Then, without saying one word,
he continued there for his usual term, suspended, motionless,
blank.
But next morning—it was some few days after the arrival
of Lucy—still feeling that a certain downright infatuation, and
of any great, deep book, or even any wholly unsuccessful
attempt at any great, deep book; next morning he returned
to the charge. But again the pupils of his eyes rolled away
from him in their orbits: and now a general and nameless
torpor—some horrible foretaste of death itself—seemed stealing
upon him.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |