 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
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.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |