 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
9. BOOK IX.
MORE LIGHT, AND THE GLOOM OF THAT LIGHT. MORE
GLOOM, AND THE LIGHT OF THAT GLOOM.
I.
In those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth,
and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind
fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects
are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed
through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted
maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally
become wholly inverted; the very heavens themselves being not
innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly
in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are
exhibited.
But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable
Arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns
us entirely away from them; and we learn that it is not for
man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he
entirely loses the directing compass of his mind; for arrived at
the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle
indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.
But even the less distant regions of thought are not without
their singular introversions. Hardly any sincere man of ordinary
reflective powers, and accustomed to exercise them at all,
but must have been independently struck by the thought, that,
mind,—meaning the inroads of Truth into Error—which has
ever been regarded by hopeful persons as the one fundamental
thing most earnestly to be prayed for as the greatest possible
Catholic blessing to the world;—almost every thinking man
must have been some time or other struck with the idea, that,
in certain respects, a tremendous mistake may be lurking here,
since all the world does never gregariously advance to Truth,
but only here and there some of its individuals do; and by advancing,
leave the rest behind; cutting themselves forever adrift
from their sympathy, and making themselves always liable to
be regarded with distrust, dislike, and often, downright—
though, ofttimes, concealed—fear and hate. What wonder,
then, that those advanced minds, which in spite of advance,
happen still to remain, for the time, ill-regulated, should now
and then be goaded into turning round in acts of wanton aggression
upon sentiments and opinions now forever left in their
rear. Certain it is, that in their earlier stages of advance, especially
in youthful minds, as yet untranquilized by long habituation
to the world as it inevitably and eternally is; this aggressiveness
is almost invariably manifested, and as invariably afterward
deplored by themselves.
That amazing shock of practical truth, which in the compass
of a very few days and hours had not so much advanced, as
magically transplanted the youthful mind of Pierre far beyond
all common discernments; it had not been entirely unattended
by the lamentable rearward aggressiveness we have endeavored
to portray above. Yielding to that unwarrantable mood, he
had invaded the profound midnight slumbers of the Reverend
Mr. Falsgrave, and most discourteously made war upon that
really amiable and estimable person. But as through the
strange force of circumstances his advance in insight had been
so surprisingly rapid, so also was now his advance in some sort
of wisdom, in charitableness; and his concluding words to Mr
gentleman's study, he had begun to repent his ever entering it
on such a mission.
And as he now walked on in the profound meditations induced
by the hour; and as all that was in him stirred to and
fro, intensely agitated by the ever-creative fire of enthusiastic
earnestness, he became fully alive to many palliating considerations,
which had they previously occurred to him would have
peremptorily forbidden his impulsive intrusion upon the respectable
clergyman.
But it is through the malice of this earthly air, that only by
being guilty of Folly does mortal man in many cases arrive at
the perception of Sense. A thought which should forever free
us from hasty imprecations upon our ever-recurring intervals of
Folly; since though Folly be our teacher, Sense is the lesson
she teaches; since if Folly wholly depart from us, Further
Sense will be her companion in the flight, and we will be left
standing midway in wisdom. For it is only the miraculous
vanity of man which ever persuades him, that even for the most
richly gifted mind, there ever arrives an earthly period, where
it can truly say to itself, I have come to the Ultimate of Human
Speculative Knowledge; hereafter, at this present point I will
abide. Sudden onsets of new truth will assail him, and overturn
him as the Tartars did China; for there is no China Wall
that man can build in his soul, which shall permanently stay
the irruptions of those barbarous hordes which Truth ever
nourishes in the loins of her frozen, yet teeming North; so
that the Empire of Human Knowledge can never be lasting in
any one dynasty, since Truth still gives new Emperors to the
earth.
But the thoughts we here indite as Pierre's are to be very
carefully discriminated from those we indite concerning him.
Ignorant at this time of the ideas concerning the reciprocity
and partnership of Folly and Sense, in contributing to the mental
his thoughtlessness, and began to stagger in his soul; as distrustful
of that radical change in his general sentiments, which
had thus hurried him into a glaring impropriety and folly; as
distrustful of himself, the most wretched distrust of all. But
this last distrust was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he
felt, had sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust
of his intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly
enthusiast cause of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon
that cause itself.
But though evermore hath the earnest heart an eventual
balm for the most deplorable error of the head; yet in the interval
small alleviation is to be had, and the whole man droops
into nameless melancholy. Then it seems as though the most
magnanimous and virtuous resolutions were only intended for
fine spiritual emotions, not as mere preludes to their bodily
translation into acts; since in essaying their embodiment,
we have but proved ourselves miserable bunglers, and thereupon
taken ignominious shame to ourselves. Then, too, the
never-entirely repulsed hosts of Commonness, and Conventionalness,
and Worldly Prudent-mindedness return to the
charge; press hard on the faltering soul; and with inhuman
hootings deride all its nobleness as mere eccentricity, which
further wisdom and experience shall assuredly cure. The man
is as seized by arms and legs, and convulsively pulled either
way by his own indecisions and doubts. Blackness advances
her banner over this cruel altercation, and he droops and swoons
beneath its folds.
It was precisely in this mood of mind that, at about two in
the morning, Pierre, with a hanging head, now crossed the private
threshold of the Mansion of Saddle Meadows.
II.
In the profoundly silent heart of a house full of sleeping
serving-men and maids, Pierre now sat in his chamber before
his accustomed round table, still tossed with the books and the
papers which, three days before, he had abruptly left, for a sudden
and more absorbing object. Uppermost and most conspicuous
among the books were the Inferno of Dante, and the
Hamlet of Shakspeare.
His mind was wandering and vague; his arm wandered and
was vague. Soon he found the open Inferno in his hand, and
his eye met the following lines, allegorically overscribed within
the arch of the outgoings of the womb of human life:
Through me you pass into eternal pain;
Through me, among the people lost for aye.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
He dropped the fatal volume from his hand; he dropped his
fated head upon his chest.
His mind was wandering and vague: his arm wandered and
was vague. Some moments passed, and he found the open
Hamlet in his hand, and his eyes met the following lines:
That ever I was born to set it right!”
He dropped the too true volume from his hand; his petrifying
heart dropped hollowly within him as a pebble down Carrisbrook
well.
III.
The man Dante Alighieri received unforgivable affronts and
insults from the world; and the poet Dante Alighieri bequeathed
his immortal curse to it, in the sublime malediction
of the Inferno. The fiery tongue whose political forkings lost
him the solacements of this world, found its malicious counterpart
in that muse of fire, which would forever bar the vast bulk
of mankind from all solacement in the worlds to come. Fortunately
for the felicity of the Dilletante in Literature, the horrible
allegorical meanings of the Inferno, lie not on the surface;
but unfortunately for the earnest and youthful piercers into truth
and reality, those horrible meanings, when first discovered, infuse
their poison into a spot previously unprovided with that sovereign
antidote of a sense of uneapitulatable security, which is only
the possession of the furthest advanced and profoundest souls.
Judge ye, then, ye Judicious, the mood of Pierre, so far as
the passage in Dante touched him.
If among the deeper significances of its pervading indefiniteness,
which significances are wisely hidden from all but the
rarest adepts, the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet convey any one
particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses of man, it is
this:—that all meditation is worthless, unless it prompt to action;
that it is not for man to stand shillyshallying amid the
conflicting invasions of surrounding impulses; that in the earliest
instant of conviction, the roused man must strike, and, if
possible, with the precision and the force of the lightning-bolt.
Pierre had always been an admiring reader of Hamlet; but
neither his age nor his mental experience thus far had qualified
him either to catch initiating glimpses into the hopeless gloom
of its interior meaning, or to draw from the general story those
superficial and purely incidental lessons, wherein the painstaking
moralist so complacently expatiates.
The intensest light of reason and revelation combined, can
not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as
will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter
darkness is then his light, and cat-like he distinctly sees all
objects through a medium which is mere blindness to common
vision. Wherefore have Gloom and Grief been celebrated of
old as the selectest chamberlains to knowledge? Wherefore is
it, that not to know Gloom and Grief is not to know aught
that an heroic man should learn?
By the light of that gloom, Pierre now turned over the soul
of Hamlet in his hand. He knew not—at least, felt not—then,
that Hamlet, though a thing of life, was, after all, but a thing
of breath, evoked by the wanton magic of a creative hand, and as
wantonly dismissed at last into endless halls of hell and night.
It is the not impartially bestowed privilege of the more final
insights, that at the same moment they reveal the depths, they
do, sometimes, also reveal—though by no means so distinctly—
some answering heights. But when only midway down the
gulf, its crags wholly conceal the upper vaults, and the wanderer
thinks it all one gulf of downward dark.
Judge ye, then, ye Judicious, the mood of Pierre, so far as
the passage in Hamlet touched him.
IV.
Torn into a hundred shreds the painted pages of Hell and
Hamlet lay at his feet, which trampled them, while their vacant
covers mocked him with their idle titles. Dante had made him
fierce, and Hamlet had insinuated that there was none to strike.
Dante had taught him that he had bitter cause of quarrel;
Hamlet taunted him with faltering in the fight. Now he began
to curse anew his fate, for now he began to see that after all he
and in meditative sentimentalities wasting the moments
consecrated to instant action.
Eight-and-forty hours and more had passed. Was Isabel
acknowledged? Had she yet hung on his public arm? Who
knew yet of Isabel but Pierre? Like a skulking coward he had
gone prowling in the woods by day, and like a skulking coward
he had stolen to her haunt by night! Like a thief he had sat
and stammered and turned pale before his mother, and in the
cause of Holy Right, permitted a woman to grow tall and hector
over him! Ah! Easy for man to think like a hero; but
hard for man to act like one. All imaginable audacities readily
enter into the soul; few come boldly forth from it.
Did he, or did he not vitally mean to do this thing? Was
the immense stuff to do it his, or was it not his? Why defer?
Why put off? What was there to be gained by deferring and
putting off? His resolution had been taken, why was it not
executed? What more was there to learn? What more which
was essential to the public acknowledgment of Isabel, had remained
to be learned, after his first glance at her first letter?
Had doubts of her identity come over him to stay him?—None
at all. Against the wall of the thick darkness of the mystery
of Isabel, recorded as by some phosphoric finger was the burning
fact, that Isabel was his sister. Why then? How then?
Whence then this utter nothing of his acts? Did he stagger at
the thought, that at the first announcement to his mother concerning
Isabel, and his resolution to own her boldly and lovingly,
his proud mother, spurning the reflection on his father,
would likewise spurn Pierre and Isabel, and denounce both him
and her, and hate them both alike, as unnatural accomplices
against the good name of the purest of husbands and parents?
Not at all. Such a thought was not in him. For had he not
already resolved, that his mother should know nothing of the
fact of Isabel?—But how now? What then? How was Isabel
nothing of that acknowledgment?—Short-sighted, miserable
palterer and huckster, thou hast been playing a most fond and
foolish game with thyself! Fool and coward! Coward and
fool! Tear thyself open, and read there the confounding story
of thy blind dotishness! Thy two grand resolutions—the public
acknowledgment of Isabel, and the charitable withholding
of her existence from thy own mother,—these are impossible
adjuncts.—Likewise, thy so magnanimous purpose to screen thy
father's honorable memory from reproach, and thy other intention,
the open vindication of thy fraternalness to Isabel,—these
also are impossible adjuncts. And the having individually entertained
four such resolves, without perceiving that once
brought together, they all mutually expire; this, this ineffable
folly, Pierre, brands thee in the forehead for an unaccountable
infatuate!
Well may'st thou distrust thyself, and curse thyself, and tear
thy Hamlet and thy Hell! Oh! fool, blind fool, and a million
times an ass! Go, go, thou poor and feeble one! High deeds
are not for such blind grubs as thou! Quit Isabel, and go to
Lucy! Beg humble pardon of thy mother, and hereafter be a
more obedient and good boy to her, Pierre—Pierre, Pierre,—
infatuate!
Impossible would it be now to tell all the confusion and confoundings
in the soul of Pierre so soon as the above absurdities
in his mind presented themselves first to his combining consciousness.
He would fain have disowned the very memory
and the mind which produced to him such an immense scandal
upon his common sanity. Now indeed did all the fiery
floods in the Inferno, and all the rolling gloom in Hamlet suffocate
him at once in flame and smoke. The cheeks of his soul
collapsed in him: he dashed himself in blind fury and swift
madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his
loathed identity.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |