CHAPTER VII.

THE EVERLASTING NO.

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 raving 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: Man 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 around into a dim copper fir mament, 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, Tar'tarean 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-be'ing, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it. Mar'tyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the 'cross; and without it, Wordlings 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 every thing. 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 abseentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sab'bath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the 'word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Mes'senger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made up of De'sire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Doc'tor Graham's Celestial-bed? Happiness of an approving Con'science! 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 Word-monger, and Motive-grinder, 'who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the God'like 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 fryingpan, C 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 thuts)?' cries he; it is but the common lot in this era. Not having come to spirit'ual majority prior to the Siècle de Louis Quinze, and not being 'born purely a Loghead (Dummkopf), thou hadst no other out'look. 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 God'head; 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 Apostacy." 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 de, '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 differ 'ence! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and de'cisively 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 your'self; and how could I believe? Had not my first, last Faith in 'myself, when even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I

6

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, C 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 midst of their crowded 'streets, and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it 6 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 Downpulling 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. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? 6 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 Teufelsdröckh 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 Prac