 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
22. BOOK XXII.
THE FLOWER-CURTAIN LIFTED FROM BEFORE A TROPICAL
AUTHOR, WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL
FLESH-BRUSH PHILOSOPHY.
I.
Some days passed after the fatal tidings from the Meadows,
and at length, somewhat mastering his emotions, Pierre again
sits down in his chamber; for grieve how he will, yet work he
must. And now day succeeds day, and week follows week, and
Pierre still sits in his chamber. The long rows of cooled brick-kilns
around him scarce know of the change; but from the
fair fields of his great-great-great-grandfather's manor, Summer
hath flown like a swallow-guest; the perfidious wight, Autumn,
hath peeped in at the groves of the maple, and under pretense
of clothing them in rich russet and gold, hath stript them at
last of the slightest rag, and then ran away laughing; prophetic
icicles depend from the arbors round about the old manorial
mansion—now locked up and abandoned; and the little,
round, marble table in the viny summer-house where, of July
mornings, he had sat chatting and drinking negus with his gay
mother, is now spread with a shivering napkin of frost; sleety
varnish hath encrusted that once gay mother's grave, preparing
it for its final cerements of wrapping snow upon snow; wild
howl the winds in the woods: it is Winter. Sweet Summer is
done; and Autumn is done; but the book, like the bitter winter,
is yet to be finished.
That season's wheat is long garnered, Pierre; that season's
ripe apples and grapes are in; no crop, no plant, no fruit is
out; the whole harvest is done. Oh, woe to that belated winter-overtaken
plant, which the summer could not bring to maturity!
The drifting winter snows shall whelm it. Think,
Pierre, doth not thy plant belong to some other and tropical
clime? Though transplanted to northern Maine, the orange-tree
of the Floridas will put forth leaves in that parsimonious
summer, and show some few tokens of fruitage; yet November
will find no golden globes thereon; and the passionate old
lumber-man, December, shall peel the whole tree, wrench it off
at the ground, and toss it for a fagot to some lime-kiln. Ah,
Pierre, Pierre, make haste! make haste! force thy fruitage,
lest the winter force thee.
Watch yon little toddler, how long it is learning to stand
by itself! First it shrieks and implores, and will not try to
stand at all, unless both father and mother uphold it; then a
little more bold, it must, at least, feel one parental hand, else
again the cry and the tremble; long time is it ere by degrees
this child comes to stand without any support. But, by-and-by,
grown up to man's estate, it shall leave the very mother
that bore it, and the father that begot it, and cross the seas,
perhaps, or settle in far Oregon lands. There now, do you see
the soul. In its germ on all sides it is closely folded by the world,
as the husk folds the tenderest fruit; then it is born from the
world-husk, but still now outwardly clings to it;—still clamors
for the support of its mother the world, and its father the Deity.
But it shall yet learn to stand independent, though not without
many a bitter wail, and many a miserable fall.
That hour of the life of a man when first the help of humanity
fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence
humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard
one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which
follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness
him not of their clan. Divinity and humanity then are equally
willing that he shold starve in the street for all that either
will do for him. Now cruel father and mother have both let
go his hand, and the little soul-toddler, now you shall hear
his shriek and his wail, and often his fall.
When at Saddle Meadows, Pierre had wavered and trembled
in those first wretched hours ensuing upon the receipt of
Isabel's letter; then humanity had let go the hand of Pierre,
and therefore his cry; but when at last inured to this, Pierre
was seated at his book, willing that humanity should desert
him, so long as he thought he felt a far higher support; then,
ere long, he began to feel the utter loss of that other support,
too; ay, even the paternal gods themselves did now desert
Pierre; the toddler was toddling entirely alone, and not without
shrieks.
If man must wrestle, perhaps it is well that it should be on
the nakedest possible plain.
The three chambers of Pierre at the Apostles' were connecting
ones. The first—having a little retreat where Delly slept—
was used for the more exacting domestic purposes: here also
their meals were taken; the second was the chamber of Isabel;
the third was the closet of Pierre. In the first—the dining
room, as they called it—there was a stove which boiled the
water for their coffee and tea, and where Delly concocted their
light repasts. This was their only fire; for, warned again and
again to economize to the uttermost, Pierre did not dare to purchase
any additional warmth. But by prudent management, a
very little warmth may go a great way. In the present case,
it went some forty feet or more. A horizontal pipe, after elbowing
away from above the stove in the dining-room, pierced
the partition wall, and passing straight through Isabel's chamber,
entered the closet of Pierre at one corner, and then abruptly
disappeared into the wall, where all further caloric—if any—
December sun. Now, the great distance of Pierre's calorical
stream from its fountain, sadly impaired it, and weakened it. It
hardly had the flavor of heat. It would have had but very inconsiderable
influence in raising the depressed spirits of the
most mercurial thermometer; certainly it was not very elevating
to the spirits of Pierre. Besides, this calorical stream,
small as it was, did not flow through the room, but only entered
it, to elbow right out of it, as some coquettish maidens enter
the heart; moreover, it was in the furthest corner from the only
place where, with a judicious view to the light, Pierre's desk-barrels
and board could advantageously stand. Often, Isabel
insisted upon his having a separate stove to himself; but Pierre
would not listen to such a thing. Then Isabel would offer her
own room to him; saying it was of no indispensable use to her
by day; she could easily spend her time in the dining-room;
but Pierre would not listen to such a thing; he would not deprive
her of the comfort of a continually accessible privacy;
besides, he was now used to his own room, and must sit by that
particular window there, and no other. Then Isabel would insist
upon keeping her connecting door open while Pierre was
employed at his desk, that so the heat of her room might bodily
go into his; but Pierre would not listen to such a thing: because
he must be religiously locked up while at work; outer
love and hate must alike be excluded then. In vain Isabel
said she would make not the slightest noise, and muffle the
point of the very needle she used. All in vain. Pierre was
inflexible here.
Yes, he was resolved to battle it out in his own solitary
closet; though a strange, transcendental conceit of one of the
more erratic and non-conforming Apostles,—who was also at
this time engaged upon a profound work above stairs, and who
denied himself his full sufficiency of food, in order to insure
an abundant fire;—the strange conceit of this Apostle, I say,
kingdoms of Nature, caloric was the great universal producer
and vivifyer, and could not be prudently excluded from the
spot where great books were in the act of creation; and therefore,
he (the Apostle) for one, was resolved to plant his head
in a hot-bed of stove-warmed air, and so force his brain to
germinate and blossom, and bud, and put forth the eventual,
crowning, victorious flower;—though indeed this conceit rather
staggered Pierre—for in truth, there was no small smack of
plausible analogy in it—yet one thought of his purse would
wholly expel the unwelcome intrusion, and reinforce his own
previous resolve.
However lofty and magnificent the movements of the stars;
whatever celestial melodies they may thereby beget; yet the
astronomers assure us that they are the most rigidly methodical
of all the things that exist. No old housewife goes her
daily domestic round with one millionth part the precision of
the great planet Jupiter in his stated and unalterable revolutions.
He has found his orbit, and stays in it; he has timed
himself, and adheres to his periods. So, in some degree with
Pierre, now revolving in the troubled orbit of his book.
Pierre rose moderately early; and the better to inure himself
to the permanent chill of his room, and to defy and beard
to its face, the cruelest cold of the outer air; he would—behind
the curtain—throw down the upper sash of his window;
and on a square of old painted canvas, formerly wrapping
some bale of goods in the neighborhood, treat his limbs, of
those early December mornings, to a copious ablution, in water
thickened with incipient ice. Nor, in this stoic performance,
was he at all without company,—not present, but adjoiningly
sympathetic; for scarce an Apostle in all those scores and
scores of chambers, but undeviatingly took his daily December
bath. Pierre had only to peep out of his pane and glance
round the multi-windowed, inclosing walls of the quadrangle,
philosophical nudity, refreshing his meager bones with crash-towel
and cold water. “Quick be the play,” was their motto:
“Lively our elbows, and nimble all our tenuities.” Oh, the
dismal echoings of the raspings of flesh-brushes, perverted to
the filing and polishing of the merest ribs! Oh, the shuddersome
splashings of pails of ice-water over feverish heads, not
unfamiliar with aches! Oh, the rheumatical cracklings of
rusted joints, in that defied air of December! for every thick-frosted
sash was down, and every lean nudity courted the
zephyr!
Among all the innate, hyena-like repellants to the reception
of any set form of a spiritually-minded and pure archetypical
faith, there is nothing so potent in its skeptical tendencies, as
that inevitable perverse ridiculousness, which so often bestreaks
some of the essentially finest and noblest aspirations of those
men, who disgusted with the common conventional quackeries,
strive, in their clogged terrestrial humanities, after some imperfectly
discerned, but heavenly ideals: ideals, not only imperfectly
discerned in themselves, but the path to them so
little traceable, that no two minds will entirely agree upon it.
Hardly a new-light Apostle, but who, in superaddition to
his revolutionary scheme for the minds and philosophies of
men, entertains some insane, heterodoxical notions about the
economy of his body. His soul, introduced by the gentlemanly
gods, into the supernal society,—practically rejects that
most sensible maxim of men of the world, who chancing to
gain the friendship of any great character, never make that the
ground of boring him with the supplemental acquaintance of
their next friend, who perhaps, is some miserable ninny. Love
me, love my dog, is only an adage for the old country-women
who affectionately kiss their cows. The gods love the soul of
a man; often, they will frankly accost it; but they abominate
his body; and will forever cut it dead, both here and hereafter.
behind thee. And most impotently thou strivest with thy
purifying cold baths, and thy diligent scrubbings with flesh-brushes,
to prepare it as a meet offering for their altar. Nor
shall all thy Pythagorean and Shellian dietings on apple-parings,
dried prunes, and crumbs of oat-meal cracker, ever fit
thy body for heaven. Feed all things with food convenient for
them,—that is, if the food be procurable. The food of thy
soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But
the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed it then
on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful
resurrection, if there is any to be. Say, wouldst thou rise with
a lantern jaw and a spavined knee? Rise with brawn on thee,
and a most royal corporation before thee; so shalt thou in that
day claim respectful attention. Know this: that while many
a consumptive dietarian has but produced the merest literary
flatulencies to the world; convivial authors have alike given
utterance to the sublimest wisdom, and created the least gross
and most ethereal forms. And for men of demonstrative
muscle and action, consider that right royal epitaph which
Cyrus the Great caused to be engraved on his tomb—“I could
drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.”
Ah, foolish! to think that by starving thy body, thou shalt
fatten thy soul! Is yonder ox fatted because yonder lean fox
starves in the winter wood? And prate not of despising thy
body, while still thou flourisheth thy flesh-brush! The finest
houses are most cared for within; the outer walls are freely
left to the dust and the soot. Put venison in thee, and so wit
shall come out of thee. It is one thing in the mill, but another
in the sack.
Now it was the continual, quadrangular example of those
forlorn fellows, the Apostles, who, in this period of his half-developments
and transitions, had deluded Pierre into the Flesh-Brush
Philosophy, and had almost tempted him into the Apple-Parings
chambers of the Apostles' were scattered with the
stems of apples, the stones of prunes, and the shells of pea-nuts.
They went about huskily muttering the Kantian Categories
through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the
crumbs of Graham crackers. A tumbler of cold water was the
utmost welcome to their reception rooms; at the grand supposed
Sanhedrim presided over by one of the deputies of Plotinus
Plinlimmon, a huge jug of Adam's Ale, and a bushel-basket
of Graham crackers were the only convivials. Continually
bits of cheese were dropping from their pockets, and
old shiny apple parchments were ignorantly exhibited every
time they drew out a manuscript to read you. Some were
curious in the vintages of waters; and in three glass decanters
set before you, Fairmount, Croton, and Cochituate; they held
that Croton was the most potent, Fairmount a gentle tonic, and
Cochituate the mildest and least inebriating of all. Take some
more of the Croton, my dear sir! Be brisk with the Fairmount!
Why stops that Cochituate? So on their philosophical tables
went round their Port, their Sherry, and their Claret.
Some, further advanced, rejected mere water in the bath, as
altogether too coarse an element; and so, took to the Vaporbaths,
and steamed their lean ribs every morning. The smoke
which issued from their heads, and overspread their pages, was
prefigured in the mists that issued from under their door-sills
and out of their windows. Some could not sit down of a morning
until after first applying the Vapor-bath outside, and then
thoroughly rinsing out their interiors with five cups of cold
Croton. They were as faithfully replenished fire-buckets; and
could they, standing in one cordon, have consecutively pumped
themselves into each other, then the great fire of 1835 had
been far less wide-spread and disastrous.
Ah! ye poor lean ones! ye wretched Soakites and Vaporites!
have not your niggardly fortunes enough rinsed ye out,
and throwing still more cold Croton on yourselves and the
world? Ah! attach the screw of your hose-pipe to some fine
old butt of Madeira! pump us some sparkling wine into the
world! see, see, already, from all eternity, two-thirds of it have
lain helplessly soaking!
II.
With cheek rather pale, then, and lips rather blue, Pierre
sits down to his plank.
But is Pierre packed in the mail for St. Petersburg this
morning? Over his boots are his moccasins; over his ordinary
coat is his surtout; and over that, a cloak of Isabel's. Now he
is squared to his plank; and at his hint, the affectionate Isabel
gently pushes his chair closer to it, for he is so muffled, he can
hardly move of himself. Now Delly comes in with bricks hot
from the stove; and now Isabel and she with devoted solicitude
pack away these comforting stones in the folds of an old blue
cloak, a military garment of the grandfather of Pierre, and tenderly
arrange it both over and under his feet; but putting the
warm flagging beneath. Then Delly brings still another hot
brick to put under his inkstand, to prevent the ink from thickening.
Then Isabel drags the camp-bedstead nearer to him, on
which are the two or three books he may possibly have occasion
to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and some water,
and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the
plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. Is Pierre a
shepherd, or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect,
reduced himself to the miserable condition of the last. With
the crook-ended cane, Pierre—unable to rise without sadly
impairing his manifold intrenchments, and admitting the cold
should chance to need any thing beyond the reach of his arm,
then the crook-ended cane drags it to his immediate vicinity.
Pierre glances slowly all round him; every thing seems to
be right; he looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction
at Isabel; a tear gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from
him by coming very close to him, stooping over, and kissing
his brow. 'Tis her lips that leave the warm moisture there;
not her tears, she says.
“I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don't, don't be so
long to-day. I will call thee at half-past four. Thou shalt not
strain thine eyes in the twilight.”
“We will see about that,” says Pierre, with an unobserved
attempt at a very sad pun. “Come, thou must go. Leave
me.”
And there he is left.
Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest
form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood,
and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing,
upbubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look
around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable
of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the
place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A
rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally
black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet,
a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap
of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing
like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious
whoop of savage and untamable health; and then I look
in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage,
which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold
your victim!
III.
Some hours pass. Let us peep over the shoulder of Pierre,
and see what it is he is writing there, in that most melancholy
closet. Here, topping the reeking pile by his side, is the last
sheet from his hand, the frenzied ink not yet entirely dry. It
is much to our purpose; for in this sheet, he seems to have
directly plagiarized from his own experiences, to fill out the
mood of his apparent author-hero, Vivia, who thus soliloquizes:
“A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me. Now I
drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and all philosophical
pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, a child of the
Primeval Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me, as
pall on pall. Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean
Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the
night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain this darkness,
exorcise this devil, ye can not. Tell me not, thou inconceivable
coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee and
thy immortality, so long as—like a hired waiter—thou makest
thyself `generally useful.' Already the universe gets on without
thee, and could still spare a million more of the same identical
kidney. Corporations have no souls, and thy Pantheism,
what was that? Thou wert but the pretensious, heartless part
of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed
in it like an egg from which the meat hath been sucked.”
Here is a slip from the floor.
“Whence flow the panegyrical melodies that precede the
march of these heroes? From what but from a sounding brass
and a tinkling cymbal!”
And here is a second.
“Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; tell me why those four
limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail—day out, day in—week
out, week in—month out, month in—and himself the voluntary
spiritual life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this that
a man should grow wise, and leave off his most excellent and
calumniated folly?”
And here is a third.
“Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; he, who in the pursuit of
the highest health of virtue and truth, shows but a pallid cheek!
Weigh his heart in thy hand, oh, thou gold-laced, virtuoso
Goethe! and tell me whether it does not exceed thy standard
weight!”
And here is a fourth.
“Oh God, that man should spoil and rust on the stalk, and
be wilted and threshed ere the harvest hath come! And oh
God, that men that call themselves men should still insist on a
laugh! I hate the world, and could trample all lungs of mankind
as grapes, and heel them out of their breath, to think of
the woe and the cant,—to think of the Truth and the Lie!
Oh! blessed be the twenty-first day of December, and cursed
be the twenty-first day of June!”
From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite
conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in
his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet
that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him
to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he
has no power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities
human souls are like drowning men; well enough they
know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of
that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning
men do drown.
IV.
From eight o'clock in the morning till half-past four in the
evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight hours and a half!
From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of
gay-hearted horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle;—but Pierre
sits there in his room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad
thanks, and crisp turkeys;—but Pierre sits there in his room;
soft through the snows, on tinted Indian moccasin, Merry Christmas
comes stealing;—but Pierre sits there in his room; it is
New-Year's, and like a great flagon, the vast city overbrims at
all curb-stones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations;—
but Pierre sits there in his room:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells at
throbbing neck-band, or swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks,
and crisp turkeys of thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin
of Merry Christmas softly stealing through the snows; nor
New-Year's curb-stones, wharves, and piers, over-brimming with
bubbling jubilations:—Nor jingling sleigh-bells, nor glad
Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating New Year's:
—Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year;—none of these are for
Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of
Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity.
Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak,
Piko, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves.
He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes
the intent ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate
silence, and then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is,
as if she heard the busy claw of some midnight mole in the
ground. Sometimes, she hears a low cough, and sometimes
the scrape of his crook-handled cane.
Here surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a
half, repeated day after day. In the heart of such silence,
surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction?
Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him?—Unutterable,
that a man should be thus!
When in the meridian flush of the day, we recall the black
apex of night; then night seems impossible; this sun can never
go down. Oh that the memory of the uttermost gloom as an
already tasted thing to the dregs, should be no security against
its return. One may be passibly well one day, but the next, he
may sup at black broth with Pluto.
Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read
in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped
in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must
undoubtedly go to the worms?
Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of
Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalizing of the
strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, have
upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being
writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled
one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for
Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable
cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But
circumstances have so decreed, that the one can not be composed
on the paper, but only as the other is writ down in his
soul. And the one of the soul is elephantinely sluggish, and
will not budge at a breath. Thus Pierre is fastened on by two
leeches;—how then can the life of Pierre last? Lo! he is fitting
himself for the highest life, by thinning his blood and collapsing
his heart. He is learning how to live, by rehearsing
the part of death.
Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in
that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded,
that the wiser and the profounder he should grow, the
more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that
could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to
the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation
and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened
up in him, consume all his vigor; would he, he could not now
be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and
merry romance. Now he sees, that with every accession of the
personal divine to him, some great land-slide of the general
surrounding divineness slips from him, and falls crashing
away. Said I not that the gods, as well as mankind, had
unhanded themselves from this Pierre? So now in him you
behold the baby toddler I spoke of; forced now to stand and
toddle alone.
Now and then he turns to the camp-bed, and wetting his
towel in the basin, presses it against his brow. Now he leans
back in his chair, as if to give up; but again bends over and
plods.
Twilight draws on, the summons of Isabel is heard from the
door; the poor, frozen, blue-lipped, soul-shivering traveler for
St. Petersburg is unpacked; and for a moment stands toddling
on the floor. Then his hat, and his cane, and out he sallies
for fresh air. A most comfortless staggering of a stroll!
People gaze at him passing, as at some imprudent sick man,
willfully burst from his bed. If an acquaintance is met, and
would say a pleasant newsmonger's word in his ear, that acquaintance
turns from him, affronted at his hard aspect of icy
discourtesy. “Bad-hearted,” mutters the man, and goes on.
He comes back to his chambers, and sits down at the neat
table of Delly; and Isabel soothingly eyes him, and presses
him to eat and be strong. But his is the famishing which
loathes all food. He can not eat but by force. He has assassinated
the natural day; how then can be eat with an appetite?
If he lays him down, he can not sleep; he has waked
the infinite wakefulness in him; then how can he slumber?
Still his book, like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching
fain would he behead himself, to gain one night's repose. At
last the heavy hours move on; and sheer exhaustion overtakes
him, and he lies still—not asleep as children and day-laborers
sleep—but he lies still from his throbbings, and for that interval
holdingly sheaths the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets
it not enter his heart.
Morning comes; again the dropt sash, the icy water, the
flesh-brush, the breakfast, the hot bricks, the ink, the pen, the
from-eight-o'clock-to-half-past-four, and the whole general inclusive
hell of the same departed day.
Ah! shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and
cloaks, is this the warm lad that once sung to the world of the
Tropical Summer?
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |