 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
14. BOOK XIV.
THE JOURNEY AND THE PAMPHLET.
I.
All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded
and attended by Silence. What a silence is that with which
the pale bride precedes the responsive I will, to the priest's
solemn question, Wilt thou have this man for thy husband?
In silence, too, the wedded hands are clasped. Yea, in silence
the child Christ was born into the world. Silence is the general
consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying
on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence
is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all
nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is
the only Voice of our God.
Nor is this so august Silence confined to things simply touching
or grand. Like the air, Silence permeates all things, and
produces its magical power, as well during that peculiar mood
which prevails at a solitary traveler's first setting forth on a
journey, as at the unimaginable time when before the world
was, Silence brooded on the face of the waters.
No word was spoken by its inmates, as the coach bearing
our young Enthusiast, Pierre, and his mournful party, sped
forth through the dim dawn into the deep midnight, which
still occupied, unrepulsed, the hearts of the old woods through
which the road wound, very shortly after quitting the village.
When first entering the coach, Pierre had pressed his hand
upon the cushioned seat to steady his way, some crumpled
leaves of paper had met his fingers. He had instinctively
clutched them; and the same strange clutching mood of his
soul which had prompted that instinctive act, did also prevail
in causing him now to retain the crumpled paper in his hand
for an hour or more of that wonderful intense silence, which
the rapid coach bore through the heart of the general stirless
morning silence of the fields and the woods.
His thoughts were very dark and wild; for a space there
was rebellion and horrid anarchy and infidelity in his soul.
This temporary mood may best be likened to that, which—according
to a singular story once told in the pulpit by a reverend
man of God—invaded the heart of an excellent priest. In the
midst of a solemn cathedral, upon a cloudy Sunday afternoon,
this priest was in the act of publicly administering the bread
at the Holy Sacrament of the Supper, when the Evil One suddenly
propounded to him the possibility of the mere moonshine
of the Christian Religion. Just such now was the mood of
Pierre; to him the Evil One propounded the possibility of the
mere moonshine of all his self-renouncing Enthusiasm. The
Evil One hooted at him, and called him a fool. But by instant
and earnest prayer—closing his two eyes, with his two
hands still holding the sacramental bread—the devout priest
had vanquished the impious Devil. Not so with Pierre. The
imperishable monument of his holy Catholic Church; the imperishable
record of his Holy Bible; the imperishable intuition
of the innate truth of Christianity;—these were the indestructible
anchors which still held the priest to his firm Faith's rock,
when the sudden storm raised by the Evil One assailed him.
But Pierre—where could he find the Church, the monument,
the Bible, which unequivocally said to him—“Go on; thou
art in the Right; I endorse thee all over; go on.”—So the
difference between the Priest and Pierre was herein:—with the
were true or not true; but with Pierre it was a question
whether certain vital acts of his were right or wrong. In this
little nut lie germ-like the possible solution of some puzzling
problems; and also the discovery of additional, and still more
profound problems ensuing upon the solution of the former.
For so true is this last, that some men refuse to solve any
present problem, for fear of making still more work for themselves
in that way.
Now, Pierre thought of the magical, mournful letter of Isabel,
he recalled the divine inspiration of that hour when the
heroic words burst from his heart—“Comfort thee, and stand
by thee, and fight for thee, will thy leapingly-acknowledging
brother!” These remembrances unfurled themselves in proud
exultations in his soul; and from before such glorious banners
of Virtue, the club-footed Evil One limped away in dismay.
But now the dread, fateful parting look of his mother came
over him; anew he heard the heart-proscribing words—“Beneath
my roof and at my table, he who was once Pierre Glendinning
no more puts himself;”—swooning in her snow-white
bed, the lifeless Lucy lay before him, wrapt as in the reverberating
echoings of her own agonizing shriek: “My heart! my heart!”
Then how swift the recurrence to Isabel, and the nameless awfulness
of his still imperfectly conscious, incipient, new-mingled
emotion toward this mysterious being. “Lo! I leave corpses
wherever I go!” groaned Pierre to himself—“Can then my conduct
be right? Lo! by my conduct I seem threatened by the
possibility of a sin anomalous and accursed, so anomalous, it
may well be the one for which Scripture says, there is never forgiveness.
Corpses behind me, and the last sin before, how
then can my conduct be right?”
In this mood, the silence accompanied him, and the first visible
rays of the morning sun in this same mood found him and
saluted him. The excitement and the sleepless night just
the sweet quiescence of the air, and the monotonous cradle-like
motion of the coach over a road made firm and smooth by a
refreshing shower over night; these had wrought their wonted
effect upon Isabel and Delly; with hidden faces they leaned
fast asleep in Pierre's sight. Fast asleep—thus unconscious,
oh sweet Isabel, oh forlorn Delly, your swift destinies I bear in
my own!
Suddenly, as his sad eye fell lower and lower from scanning
their magically quiescent persons, his glance lit upon his own
clutched hand, which rested on his knee. Some paper protruded
from that clutch. He knew not how it had got there,
or whence it had come, though himself had closed his own
gripe upon it. He lifted his hand and slowly unfingered and
unbolted the paper, and unrolled it, and carefully smoothed it,
to see what it might be.
It was a thin, tattered, dried-fish-like thing; printed with
blurred ink upon mean, sleazy paper. It seemed the opening
pages of some ruinous old pamphlet—a pamphlet containing a
chapter or so of some very voluminous disquisition. The conclusion
was gone. It must have been accidentally left there by
some previous traveler, who perhaps in drawing out his handkerchief,
had ignorantly extracted his waste paper.
There is a singular infatuation in most men, which leads
them in odd moments, intermitting between their regular occupations,
and when they find themselves all alone in some quiet
corner or nook, to fasten with unaccountable fondness upon the
merest rag of old printed paper—some shred of a long-exploded
advertisement perhaps—and read it, and study it, and reread
it, and pore over it, and fairly agonize themselves over this
miserable, sleazy paper-rag, which at any other time, or in any
other place, they would hardly touch with St. Dunstan's long
tongs. So now, in a degree, with Pierre. But notwithstanding
that he, with most other human beings, shared in the
the title of the dried-fish-like, pamphlet-shaped rag, did almost
tempt him to pitch it out of the window. For, be a man's
mood what it may, what sensible and ordinary mortal could
have patience for any considerable period, to knowingly hold in
his conscious hand a printed document (and that too a very
blurred one as to ink, and a very sleazy one as to paper), so
metaphysically and insufferably entitled as this:—“Chronometricals
& Horologicals?”
Doubtless, it was something vastly profound; but it is to be
observed, that when a man is in a really profound mood, then
all merely verbal or written profundities are unspeakably repulsive,
and seem downright childish to him. Nevertheless,
the silence still continued; the road ran through an almost unplowed
and uninhabited region; the slumberers still slumbered
before him; the evil mood was becoming well nigh insupportable
to him; so, more to force his mind away from the
dark realities of things than from any other motive, Pierre
finally tried his best to plunge himself into the pamphlet.
II.
Sooner or later in this life, the earnest, or enthusiastic youth
comes to know, and more or less appreciate this startling solecism:—That
while, as the grand condition of acceptance to
God, Christianity calls upon all men to renounce this world;
yet by all odds the most Mammonish part of this world—
Europe and America—are owned by none but professed Christian
nations, who glory in the owning, and seem to have some
reason therefor.
This solecism once vividly and practically apparent; then
comes the earnest reperusal of the Gospels: the intense self-absorption
on the Mount. From that divine mount, to all earnest-loving
youths, flows an inexhaustible soul-melting stream of tenderness
and loving-kindness; and they leap exulting to their
feet, to think that the founder of their holy religion gave utterance
to sentences so infinitely sweet and soothing as these;
sentences which embody all the love of the Past, and all the
love which can be imagined in any conceivable Future. Such
emotions as that Sermon raises in the enthusiastic heart; such
emotions all youthful hearts refuse to ascribe to humanity as
their origin. This is of God! cries the heart, and in that cry
ceases all inquisition. Now, with this fresh-read sermon in his
soul, the youth again gazes abroad upon the world. Instantly,
in aggravation of the former solecism, an overpowering sense
of the world's downright positive falsity comes over him; the
world seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies. The sense
of this thing is so overpowering, that at first the youth is apt to
refuse the evidence of his own senses; even as he does that
same evidence in the matter of the movement of the visible sun
in the heavens, which with his own eyes he plainly sees to go
round the world, but nevertheless on the authority of other persons,—the
Copernican astronomers, whom he never saw—he
believes it not to go round the world, but the world round it.
Just so, too, he hears good and wise people sincerely say: This
world only seems to be saturated and soaking with lies; but in
reality it does not so lie soaking and saturate; along with some
lies, there is much truth in this world. But again he refers to
his Bible, and there he reads most explicitly, that this world is
unconditionally depraved and accursed; and that at all hazards
men must come out of it. But why come out of it, if it be a
True World and not a Lying World? Assuredly, then, this
world is a lie.
Hereupon then in the soul of the enthusiast youth two armies
come to the shock; and unless he prove recreant, or unless
to reconcile this world with his own soul, then there is no
peace for him, no slightest truce for him in this life. Now
without doubt this Talismanic Secret has never yet been found;
and in the nature of human things it seems as though it never
can be. Certain philosophers have time and again pretended
to have found it; but if they do not in the end discover their
own delusion, other people soon discover it for themselves, and
so those philosophers and their vain philosophy are let glide
away into practical oblivion. Plato, and Spinoza, and Goethe,
and many more belong to this guild of self-impostors, with a
preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose
vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their
Greek or German Neoplatonical originals. That profound
Silence, that only Voice of our God, which I before spoke of;
from that divine thing without a name, those impostor philosophers
pretend somehow to have got an answer; which is as
absurd, as though they should say they had got water out of
stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?
Certainly, all must admit, that if for any one this problem
of the possible reconcilement of this world with our own souls
possessed a peculiar and potential interest, that one was Pierre
Glendinning at the period we now write of. For in obedience
to the loftiest behest of his soul, he had done certain vital acts,
which had already lost him his worldly felicity, and which he
felt must in the end indirectly work him some still additional
and not-to-be-thought-of woe.
Soon then, as after his first distaste at the mystical title, and
after his then reading on, merely to drown himself, Pierre at
last began to obtain a glimmering into the profound intent of
the writer of the sleazy rag pamphlet, he felt a great interest
awakened in him. The more he read and re-read, the more
this interest deepened, but still the more likewise did his failure
to comprehend the writer increase. He seemed somehow to
conceit refused to become clear to him. The reason whereof is
not so easy to be laid down; seeing that the reason-originating
heart and mind of man, these organic things themselves are not
so easily to be expounded. Something, however, more or less
to the point, may be adventured here.
If a man be in any vague latent doubt about the intrinsic
correctness and excellence of his general life-theory and practical
course of life; then, if that man chance to light on any other
man, or any little treatise, or sermon, which unintendingly, as
it were, yet very palpably illustrates to him the intrinsic incorrectness
and non-excellence of both the theory and the practice
of his life; then that man will—more or less unconsciously—
try hard to hold himself back from the self-admitted comprehension
of a matter which thus condemns him. For in this
case, to comprehend, is himself to condemn himself, which is
always highly inconvenient and uncomfortable to a man.
Again. If a man be told a thing wholly new, then—during the
time of its first announcement to him—it is entirely impossible
for him to comprehend it. For—absurd as it may seem—men
are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended
before (though but in the embryo, as it were). Things new
it is impossible to make them comprehend, by merely talking
to them about it. True, sometimes they pretend to comprehend;
in their own hearts they really believe they do comprehend;
outwardly look as though they did comprehend; wag
their bushy tails comprehendingly; but for all that, they do not
comprehend. Possibly, they may afterward come, of themselves,
to inhale this new idea from the circumambient air, and
so come to comprehend it; but not otherwise at all. It will
be observed, that neither points of the above speculations do we,
in set terms, attribute to Pierre in connection with the rag
pamphlet. Possibly both might be applicable; possibly neither.
Certain it is, however, that at the time, in his own heart, he
writer's conceit in all its bearings. Yet was this conceit apparently
one of the plainest in the world; so natural, a child
might almost have originated it. Nevertheless, again so profound,
that scarce Juggularius himself could be the author;
and still again so exceedingly trivial, that Juggularius' smallest
child might well have been ashamed of it.
Seeing then that this curious paper rag so puzzled Pierre;
foreseeing, too, that Pierre may not in the end be entirely uninfluenced
in his conduct by the torn pamphlet, when afterwards
perhaps by other means he shall come to understand it;
or, peradventure, come to know that he, in the first place, did
—seeing too that the author thereof came to be made known
to him by reputation, and though Pierre never spoke to him,
yet exerted a surprising sorcery upon his spirit by the mere
distant glimpse of his countenance;—all these reasons I account
sufficient apology for inserting in the following chapters
the initial part of what seems to me a very fanciful and mystical,
rather than philosophical Lecture, from which, I confess,
that I myself can derive no conclusion which permanently satisfies
those peculiar motions in my soul, to which that Lecture
seems more particularly addressed. For to me it seems more
the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the
solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations
are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they
are the only possible human solutions), therefore it may help to
the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be
wholly without use. At the worst, each person can now skip,
or read and rail for himself.
III.
“EI,”
BY
PLOTINUS PLINLIMMON,
(In Three Hundred and Thirty-three Lectures.)
1. LECTURE FIRST.
CHRONOMETRICALS AND HOROLOGICALS,
(Being not so much the Portal, as part of the temporary Scaffold to the
Portal of this new Philosophy.)
“Few of us doubt, gentlemen, that human life on this earth
is but a state of probation; which among other things implies,
that here below, we mortals have only to do with things provisional.
Accordingly, I hold that all our so-called wisdom is
likewise but provisional.
“This preamble laid down, I begin.
“It seems to me, in my visions, that there is a certain most
rare order of human souls, which if carefully carried in the body
will almost always and everywhere give Heaven's own Truth,
with some small grains of variance. For peculiarly coming
from God, the sole source of that heavenly truth, and the great
Greenwich hill and tower from which the universal meridians
are far out into infinity reckoned; such souls seem as London
sea-chronometers (Greek, time-namers) which as the London
ship floats past Greenwich down the Thames, are accurately
adjusted by Greenwich time, and if heedfully kept, will still
give that same time, even though carried to the Azores. True,
in nearly all cases of long, remote voyages—to China, say—
chronometers of the best make, and the most carefully treated,
the possibility of the error being corrected by direct comparison
with their great standard; but skillful and devout observations
of the stars by the sextant will serve materially to lessen such
errors. And besides, there is such a thing as rating a chronometer;
that is, having ascertained its degree of organic inaccuracy,
however small, then in all subsequent chronometrical
calculations, that ascertained loss or gain can be readily added
or deducted, as the case may be. Then again, on these long
voyages, the chronometer may be corrected by comparing it
with the chronometer of some other ship at sea, more recently
from home.
“Now in an artificial world like ours, the soul of man is further
removed from its God and the Heavenly Truth, than the
chronometer carried to China, is from Greenwich. And, as
that chronometer, if at all accurate, will pronounce it to be
12 o'clock high-noon, when the China local watches say, perhaps,
it is 12 o'clock midnight; so the chronometric soul, if in
this world true to its great Greenwich in the other, will always,
in its so-called intuitions of right and wrong, be contradicting
the mere local standards and watch-maker's brains of this earth.
“Bacon's brains were mere watch-maker's brains; but Christ
was a chronometer; and the most exquisitely adjusted and
exact one, and the least affected by all terrestrial jarrings, of
any that have ever come to us. And the reason why his
teachings seemed folly to the Jews, was because he carried that
Heaven's time in Jerusalem, while the Jews carried Jerusalem
time there. Did he not expressly say—My wisdom (time) is
not of this world? But whatever is really peculiar in the
wisdom of Christ seems precisely the same folly to-day as it
did 1850 years ago. Because, in all that interval his bequeathed
chronometer has still preserved its original Heaven's
time, and the general Jerusalem of this world has likewise
carefully preserved its own.
“But though the chronometer carried from Greenwich to
China, should truly exhibit in China what the time may be at
Greenwich at any moment; yet, though thereby it must
necessarily contradict China time, it does by no means thence
follow, that with respect to China, the China watches are at all
out of the way. Precisely the reverse. For the fact of that
variance is a presumption that, with respect to China, the
Chinese watches must be all right; and consequently as the
China watches are right as to China, so the Greenwich chronometers
must be wrong as to China. Besides, of what use to
the Chinaman would a Greenwich chronometer, keeping Greenwich
time, be? Were he thereby to regulate his daily actions,
he would be guilty of all manner of absurdities:—going to
bed at noon, say, when his neighbors would be sitting down to
dinner. And thus, though the earthly wisdom of man be
heavenly folly to God; so also, conversely, is the heavenly
wisdom of God an earthly folly to man. Literally speaking,
this is so. Nor does the God at the heavenly Greenwich expect
common men to keep Greenwich wisdom in this remote
Chinese world of ours; because such a thing were unprofitable
for them here, and, indeed, a falsification of Himself, inasmuch
as in that case, China time would be identical with Greenwich
time, which would make Greenwich time wrong.
“But why then does God now and then send a heavenly
chronometer (as a meteoric stone) into the world, uselessly as
it would seem, to give the lie to all the world's time-keepers?
Because he is unwilling to leave man without some occasional
testimony to this:—that though man's Chinese notions of
things may answer well enough here, they are by no means
universally applicable, and that the central Greenwich in which
He dwells goes by a somewhat different method from this
world. And yet it follows not from this, that God's truth is
one thing and man's truth another; but—as above hinted,
their very contradictions they are made to correspond.
“By inference it follows, also, that he who finding in himself
a chronometrical soul, seeks practically to force that heavenly
time upon the earth; in such an attempt he can never succeed,
with an absolute and essential success. And as for himself, if
he seek to regulate his own daily conduct by it, he will but
array all men's earthly time-keepers against him, and thereby
work himself woe and death. Both these things are plainly
evinced in the character and fate of Christ, and the past and
present condition of the religion he taught. But here one
thing is to be especially observed. Though Christ encountered
woe in both the precept and the practice of his chronometricals,
yet did he remain throughout entirely without folly or sin.
Whereas, almost invariably, with inferior beings, the absolute
effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the
chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior
beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined
before. It is the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorized.
“To any earnest man of insight, a faithful contemplation of
these ideas concerning Chronometricals and Horologicals, will
serve to render provisionally far less dark some few of the
otherwise obscurest things which have hitherto tormented the
honest-thinking men of all ages What man who carries a
heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless
he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this
world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by
that same heavenly soul? And yet by an infallible instinct he
knows, that that monitor can not be wrong in itself.
“And where is the earnest and righteous philosopher, gentlemen,
who looking right and left, and up and down, through all
the ages of the world, the present included; where is there such
an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a sort
of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of,
give the lie to Him; so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the
instinctively known ways of Heaven. But it is not, and can
not be so; nor will he who regards this chronometrical conceit
aright, ever more be conscious of that horrible idea. For he
will then see, or seem to see, that this world's seeming incompatibility
with God, absolutely results from its meridianal correspondence
with him.
“This chronometrical conceit does by no means involve the
justification of all the acts which wicked men may perform. For
in their wickedness downright wicked men sin as much against
their own horologes, as against the heavenly chronometer. That
this is so, their spontaneous liability to remorse does plainly
evince. No, this conceit merely goes to show, that for the mass
of men, the highest abstract heavenly righteousness is not only
impossible, but would be entirely out of place, and positively
wrong in a world like this. To turn the left cheek if the right
be smitten, is chronometrical; hence, no average son of man
ever did such a thing. To give all that thou hast to the poor,
this too is chronometrical; hence no average son of man ever
did such a thing. Nevertheless, if a man gives with a certain
self-considerate generosity to the poor; abstains from doing
downright ill to any man; does his convenient best in a general
way to do good to his whole race; takes watchful loving
care of his wife and children, relatives, and friends; is perfectly
tolerant to all other men's opinions, whatever they may be; is
an honest dealer, an honest citizen, and all that; and more especially
if he believe that there is a God for infidels, as well as
for believers, and acts upon that belief; then, though such a
man falls infinitely short of the chronometrical standard,
though all his actions are entirely horologic;—yet such a man
need never lastingly despond, because he is sometimes guilty of
some minor offense:—hasty words, impulsively returning a
wine while he knows there are those around him who lack a
loaf of bread. I say he need never lastingly despond on account
of his perpetual liability to these things; because not to
do them, and their like, would be to be an angel, a chronometer;
whereas, he is a man and a horologe.
“Yet does the horologe itself teach, that all liabilities to these
things should be checked as much as possible, though it is certain
they can never be utterly eradicated. They are only to be
checked, then, because, if entirely unrestrained, they would
finally run into utter selfishness and human demonism, which,
as before hinted, are not by any means justified by the horologe.
“In short, this Chronometrical and Horological conceit, in sum,
seems to teach this:—That in things terrestrial (horological) a
man must not be governed by ideas celestial (chronometrical);
that certain minor self-renunciations in this life his own mere
instinct for his own every-day general well-being will teach him
to make, but he must by no means make a complete unconditional
sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other being, or any
cause, or any conceit. (For, does aught else completely and
unconditionally sacrifice itself for him? God's own sun does
not abate one tittle of its heat in July, however you swoon
with that heat in the sun. And if it did abate its heat on your
behalf, then the wheat and the rye would not ripen; and so,
for the incidental benefit of one, a whole population would
suffer.)
“A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or
attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the
only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.
When they go to heaven, it will be quite another thing. There,
they can freely turn the left cheek, because there the right
cheek will never be smitten. There they can freely give all to
the poor, for there there will be no poor to give to. A due appreciation
being authoritatively taught by his dogmatical teachers that he
must, while on earth, aim at heaven, and attain it, too, in all
his earthly acts, on pain of eternal wrath; and finding by experience
that this is utterly impossible; in his despair, he is too
apt to run clean away into all manner of moral abandonment,
self-deceit, and hypocrisy (cloaked, however, mostly under an
aspect of the most respectable devotion); or else he openly
runs, like a mad dog, into atheism. Whereas, let men be
taught those Chronometricals and Horologicals, and while still
retaining every common-sense incentive to whatever of virtue
be practicable and desirable, and having these incentives strengthened,
too, by the consciousness of powers to attain their mark;
then there would be an end to that fatal despair of becoming
at all good, which has too often proved the vice-producing result
in many minds of the undiluted chronometrical doctrines
hitherto taught to mankind. But if any man say, that such a
doctrine as this I lay down is false, is impious; I would charitably
refer that man to the history of Christendom for the last
1800 years; and ask him, whether, in spite of all the maxims
of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence,
wrong, and iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of
the world's story? Therefore, it follows, that so far as practical
results are concerned—regarded in a purely earthly light—the
only great original moral doctrine of Christianity (i. e. the
chronometrical gratuitous return of good for evil, as distinguished
from the horological forgiveness of injuries taught by
some of the Pagan philosophers), has been found (horologically)
a false one; because after 1800 years' inculcation from tens of
thousands of pulpits, it has proved entirely impracticable.
“I but lay down, then, what the best mortal men do daily
practice; and what all really wicked men are very far removed
from. I present consolation to the earnest man, who,
among all his human frailties, is still agonizingly conscious of
virtue to the vicious; and interfere not with the eternal
truth, that, sooner or later, in all cases, downright vice is downright
woe.
“Moreover: if—”
But here the pamphlet was torn, and came to a most untidy
termination.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |