[XIV]
TRIBULATIONS
Interned in this little university town, without hope of getting out of it, I engage in the terrible fight against my worst enemy—myself. Every morning, when I go for a walk on the wall under the plane trees, the large red lunatic asylum reminds me of the danger I have escaped, and of that which still awaits me, if I relapse. Swedenborg, by explaining to me the true character of my terrors during the last year, has delivered me from the fear of electricians, "black" magicians, wizards, the ambition of the gold-maker, and from madness. He has pointed out the only way to salvation: to seek out the demons in their dens within myself, and there to slay them by—repentance. Balzac, the Prophet's assistant, has taught me in Séraphita that "Pain of conscience is a weakness which does not put an end to sin; repentance is the only power which makes a decisive end of all." Very well, let us repent! But is not that equivalent to criticising Providence, which has chosen me for its scourge? and to saying to the powers: "You have guided my destiny ill; you have made me and commissioned me to chastise, to overthrow idols, to stir up revolt, and then you withdraw your protection from me and disown me in an absurd way, telling me to creep to the cross and repent!"
Strange "circulus vitiosus," which I already foresaw in my twentieth year, when I wrote my drama Meister Olaf, and which has constituted the tragedy of my life. Why be tormented during thirty years in order to be taught by experience what one had already foreboded? When young I was sincerely pious, and you have made me a freethinker. Out of the freethinker you have made an atheist, and out of the atheist a religious man. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have been a herald of socialism. Five years later, you have shown me the absurdity of socialism; you have made all my prophecies futile. And supposing I become again religious, I am sure that, in another ten years, you will reduce religion to an absurdity.
Ah! what a game the gods play with us poor mortals! And therefore, in the most tormented moments of life, we too can laugh with self-conscious raillery.
How is it that you wish us to take earnestly what is nothing but a huge bad joke?
For whom was Christ the Saviour? Consider the most Christian of all Christians, our pious Scandinavians, these amæmic, wretched, timid creatures, who look as though they were possessed. They seem to carry an evil spirit in their hearts, and observe how most of their leaders have ended in prison as criminals. Why has their master delivered them over to the enemy? Is religion a punishment, and Christ an Avenger?