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. 6 6 6 '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 '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 ima'gine, 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 Steamengine, rolling-on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from 'limb. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! 6 6 6 เ '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 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 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 Drugshop in your inwards; the fordone soul drowning 'slowly in quagmires of Disgust!' 6 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.' เ 6 '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 dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest 6 memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er 'im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not for'saken, 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, pusil'lanimous, 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 de'voured. 6 'Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the 'whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, 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 'art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever 6 เ 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 whatso 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.' 6 CHAPTER VIII. CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE. THOUGH, after this Baphometic Fire-baptism' of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed, Indignation and Defiance,' especially against things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that hence forth it had at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the firebaptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated. Under another figure, we might say, if in that great moment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, the old inward Satanic School was not yet thrown out of doors, it received peremptory judicial notice to quit ;—whereby, for the rest, its howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, and rebellious gnashings of teeth, might, in the mean while, become only the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep secret. Accordingly, if we scrutinise these Pilgrimings well, there is perhaps discernible henceforth a certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufelsdröckh now storm through the world; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man, nay who will one day be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many' Saints' Wells,' and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless finds little secular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation is ministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to eat his own heart;' and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer food. Does not the following glimpse exhibit him in a much more natural state? 6 'Towns also and Cities, especially the ancient, I failed not to look-upon with interest. How beautiful to see thereby, as through a long vista, into the remote Time; to have, as it were, an actual 'section of almost the earliest Past brought safe into the Present, ' and set before your eyes! There, in that old City, was a live 'ember of Culinary Fire put-down, say only two-thousand years ago; and there, burning more or less triumphantly, with such 'fuel as the region yielded, it has burnt, and still burns, and thou thyself seest the very smoke thereof. Ah! and the far more mysterious live ember of Vital Fire was then also put-down 'there; and still miraculously burns and spreads; and the smoke ' and ashes thereof (in these Judgment-Halls and Churchyards), ' and its bellows-engines (in these Churches), thou still seest; and ' its flame, looking-out from every kind countenance, and every 'hateful one, still warms thee or scorches thee. 6 6 ' Of Man's Activity and Attainment the chief results are aeri'form, mystic, and preserved in Tradition only: such are his 'Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his Cus'toms, or Fashions both of Cloth-Habits and of Soul-habits; much 'more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he 'has acquired of manipulating Nature: all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock-and-key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehi'cles, from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them, they are ' nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen 'there have been, ever from Cain and Tubalcain downwards: but 'where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and ' other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself ' on the atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and by ‘Vision) ; it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort. 'In like manner, ask me not, Where are the LAWS; where is the 'GOVERNMENT? In vain wilt thou go to Schönbrunn, to Downing Street, to the Palais Bourbon: thou findest nothing there, but 'brick or stone houses, and some bundles of Papers tied with 'tape. Where then is that same cunningly-devised almighty 'GOVERNMENT of theirs to be laid hands on? Everywhere, yet 'nowhere seen only in its works, this too is a thing aeriform, invisible; or if you will, mystic and miraculous. So spiritual '(geistig) is our whole daily Life: all that we do springs out of 'Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; only like a little Cloud-image, or Armida's Palace, air-built, does the Actual body itself forth 'from the great mystic Deep. Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon-up 'to the extent of three: Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals; 'then tilled Fields, to either or to both of which divisions Roads ' with their Bridges may belong; and thirdly Books. In 'which third truly, the last-invented, lies a worth far surpassing 'that of the two others. Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true 'Book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but then a spiritual field: ' like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books that already number some hundred-and-fifty human ages); and yearly comes its new 'produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, 'Political Systems; or were it only Sermons, Pamphlets, Jour'nalistic Essays), every one of which is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, ' and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City'burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast 'all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, |