I.
We are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three
lofty adjoining chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a
little further in time, and overlooking the hundred and one
domestic details, of how their internal arrangements were
finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly, now
giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter
occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel,
the only practical relief from the memories of her miserable
past; how Isabel herself in the otherwise occupied hours of
Pierre, passed some of her time in mastering the chirographical
incoherencies of his manuscripts, with a view to eventually
copying them out in a legible hand for the printer; or went
below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in the modest
and amiable society of the three young ladies and their excellent
mother, found some little solace for the absence of
Pierre; or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the
twilight, and played her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter
after chapter born of its wondrous suggestiveness; but alas!
eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where
the deepest words end, there music begins with its supersensuous
and all-confounding intimations.
Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning
in scorn even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which,
written at Saddle Meadows in the sweet legendary time of
Lucy and her love, he had jealously kept from the publishers,
as too true and good to be published; renouncing all his foregone
self, Pierre was now engaged in a comprehensive compacted
work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous
motives unitedly impelled;—the burning desire to deliver what
he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to
the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely
penniless, unless by the sale of his book, he could realize
money. Swayed to universality of thought by the widely-explosive
mental tendencies of the profound events which had
lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which
he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that
most grand productions of the best human intellects ever are
built round a circle, as atolls (i. e. the primitive coral islets
which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest seas, rise
funnel-like to the surface, and present there a hoop of white
rock, which though on the outside everywhere lashed by the
ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet lagoon within),
digestively including the whole range of all that can be known
or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book,
which the world should hail with surprise and delight. A
varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly
acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course
of the multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of
almost any civilized young inquirer after Truth; this poured
one considerable contributary stream into that bottomless
spring of original thought which the occasion and time had
caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in
reality to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of
absolute Truth, all mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle
hard to overcome; and not an accelerator helpingly pushing
him along.
While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted
into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he
was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition. That
ultimate element once fairly gained, then books no more are
needed for buoys to our souls; our own strong limbs support
us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a jeering impunity.
He did not see,—or if he did, he could not yet name
the true cause for it,—that already, in the incipiency of his
work, the heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge
would not congenially weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal
airiness of spontaneous creative thought. He would climb
Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back. He did not see,
that it was nothing at all to him, what other men had written;
that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in
himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him
(Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something
transcendently great. He did not see that there is no
such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one
great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to
domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind;
but that all existing great works must be federated in the
fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic
whole; and then,—without at all dictating to his own mind,
or unduly biasing it any way,—thus combined, they would
prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him. He did
not see, that even when thus combined, all was but one small
mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and inexhaustibility
in himself; that all the great books in the world are but the
mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied
images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors,
distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind
what the mirror may be, if we would see the object, we must
look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.
But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do
never in one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously
reveal their full awfulness of amplitude—their overawing extent
of peak crowded on peak, and spur sloping on spur, and
chain jammed behind chain, and all their wonderful battalionings
of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that on first
entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at once
perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such
an encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost
snows. Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God,
does man come at last to gain his Mont Blanc and take an
overtopping view of these Alps; and even then, the tithe is
not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the Rocky
Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the
soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material
spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once
feel himself fairly afloat in himself!
But not now to consider these ulterior things, Pierre, though
strangely and very newly alive to many before unregarded
wonders in the general world; still, had he not as yet procured
for himself that enchanter's wand of the soul, which but touching
the humblest experiences in one's life, straightway it starts
up all eyes, in every one of which are endless significancies.
Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well of his childhood,
to find what fish might be there; for who dreams to find
fish in a well? the running stream of the outer world, there
doubtless swim the golden perch and the pickerel! Ten million
things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy
lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this
Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to
see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens
he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any
geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist
of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis,
the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By
vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we
come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus;
but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant
as vast is the soul of a man!
