under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our professor has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the “son of time,” in any case, stand still? we behold him, through those dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition: his mad pilgrimings, and general solution into aimless discontinuity, what is all this but a mad fermentation; wherefrom the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself?
such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one upon rocks. what stoicism soever our wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? have we not seen him disappointed, bemocked of destiny, through long years? all that the young heart might desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance, offered and then snatched away. ever an “excellent passivity;” but of useful, reasonable activity, essential to the former as food to hunger, nothing granted: till at length, in this wild pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for himself an activity, though useless, unreasonable. alas, his cup of bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, ever since that first “ruddy morning” in the hinterschlag gymnasium, was at the very lip; and then with that poison-drop, of the towgood-and-blumine business, it runs over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam.
he himself says once, with more justness than originality: “men is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.” what, then, was our professor’s possession? we see him, for the present, quite shut out from hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.
alas, shut out from hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! for, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: “doubt had darkened into unbelief,” says he; “shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, tartarean black.” to such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man’s life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much profit-and-loss philosophy, speculative and practical, that soul is not synonymous with stomach; who understand, therefore, in our friend’s words, “that, for man’s well-being, faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:” to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious belief was the loss of everything. unhappy young man! all wounds, the crush of long-continued destitution, the stab of false friendship and of false love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn. well might he exclaim, in his wild way: “is there no god, then; but at best an absentee god, sitting idle, ever since the first sabbath, at the outside of his universe, and seeing it go? has the word duty no meaning; is what we call duty no divine messenger and guide, but a false earthly phantasm, made up of desire and fear, of emanations from the gallows and from doctor graham’s celestial–bed? happiness of an approving conscience! did not paul of tarsus, whom admiring men have since named saint, feel that he was ‘the chief of sinners;’ and nero of rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling? foolish wordmonger and motive-grinder, who in thy logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out virtue from the husks of pleasure, — i tell thee, nay! to the unregenerate prometheus vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. what then? is the heroic inspiration we name virtue but some passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by? i know not: only this i know, if what thou namest happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much. but what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the liver! not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!”
thus has the bewildered wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the sibyl-cave of destiny, and receive no answer but an echo. it is all a grim desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no pillar of cloud by day, and no pillar of fire by night, any longer guides the pilgrim. to such length has the spirit of inquiry carried him. “but what boots it (was thut’s)?” cries he: “it is but the common lot in this era. not having come to spiritual majority prior to the siecle de louis quinze, and not being born purely a loghead (dummkopf ), thou hadst no other outlook. the whole world is, like thee, sold to unbelief; their old temples of the godhead, which for long have not been rain-proof, crumble down; and men ask now: where is the godhead; our eyes never saw him?”
pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our diogenes wicked. unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the servant of goodness, the servant of god, than even now when doubting god’s existence. “one circumstance i note,” says he: “after all the nameless woe that inquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine love of truth, had wrought me! i nevertheless still loved truth, and would bate no jot of my allegiance to her. ‘truth!’ i cried, ‘though the heavens crush me for following her: no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland were the price of apostasy.’ in conduct it was the same. had a divine messenger from the clouds, or miraculous handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me this thou shalt do, with what passionate readiness, as i often thought, would i have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal fire. thus, in spite of all motive-grinders, and mechanical profit-and-loss philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the infinite nature of duty still dimly present to me: living without god in the world, of god’s light i was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see him, nevertheless in my heart he was present, and his heaven-written law still stood legible and sacred there.”
meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, what must the wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured! “the painfullest feeling,” writes he, “is that of your own feebleness (unkraft); ever, as the english milton says, to be weak is the true misery. and yet of your strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. between vague wavering capability and fixed indubitable performance, what a difference! a certain inarticulate self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our works can render articulate and decisively discernible. our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
“but for me, so strangely unprosperous had i been, the net-result of my workings amounted as yet simply to — nothing. how then could i believe in my strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in? ever did this agitating, yet, as i now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain to me insoluble: hast thou a certain faculty, a certain worth, such even as the most have not; or art thou the completest dullard of these modern times? alas, the fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself; and how could i believe? had not my first, last faith in myself, when even to me the heavens seemed laid open, and i dared to love, been all too cruelly belied? the speculative mystery of life grew ever more mysterious to me: neither in the practical mystery had i made the slightest progress, but been everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast out. a feeble unit in the middle of a threatening infinitude, i seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom i could press trustfully to mine? o heaven, no, there was none! i kept a lock upon my lips: why should i speak much with that shifting variety of so-called friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls friendship was but an incredible tradition? in such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the newspapers. now when i look back, it was a strange isolation i then lived in. the men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but figures; i had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. in the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, i walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that i kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. some comfort it would have been, could i, like a faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the devil; for a hell, as i imagine, without life, though only diabolic life, were more frightful: but in our age of down-pulling and disbelief, the very devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a devil. to me the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary golgotha, and mill of death! why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? why, if there is no devil; nay, unless the devil is your god?”
a prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a teufelsdrockh threaten to fail? we conjecture that he has known sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort. hear this, for example: “how beautiful to die of broken-heart, on paper! quite another thing in practice; every window of your feeling, even of your intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires of disgust!”
putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we not find in the following sentences, quite in our professor’s still vein, significance enough? “from suicide a certain after-shine (nachschein) of christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence of character; for, was not that a remedy i had at any time within reach? often, however, was there a question present to me: should some one now, at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of space, into the other world, or other no-world, by pistol-shot, — how were it? on which ground, too, i have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falsely enough, for courage.”
“so had it lasted,” concludes the wanderer, “so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted death-agony, through long years. the heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. almost since earliest memory i had shed no tear; or once only when i, murmuring half-audibly, recited faust’s death-song, that wild selig der den er im siegesglanze findet (happy whom he finds in battle’s splendor), and thought that of this last friend even i was not forsaken, that destiny itself could not doom me not to die. having no hope, neither had i any definite fear, were it of man or of devil: nay, i often felt as if it might be solacing, could the arch–devil himself, though in tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that i might tell him a little of my mind. and yet, strangely enough, i lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of i knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein i, palpitating, waited to be devoured.
“full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole french capital or suburbs, was i, one sultry dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little rue saint–thomas de l’enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as nebuchadnezzar’s furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a thought in me, and i asked myself: ‘what art thou afraid of? wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? death? well, death; and say the pangs of tophet too, and all that the devil and man may, will or can do against thee! hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? let it come, then; i will meet it and defy it!’ and as i so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and i shook base fear away from me forever. i was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance.
“thus had the everlasting no (das ewige nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my me; and then was it that my whole me stood up, in native god-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. such a protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same indignation and defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. the everlasting no had said: ‘behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is mine (the devil’s);’ to which my whole me now made answer: ‘i am not thine, but free, and forever hate thee!’
“it is from this hour that i incline to date my spiritual new-birth, or baphometic fire-baptism; perhaps i directly thereupon began to be a man.”