STRANGER. The Powers That Be play tricks....
MELCHER. The Powers play tricks on tricksters, and delude the arrogant, particularly those who alone believe they possess truth and knowledge! Number eight in the catalogue. Victor Hugo. He split himself into countless parts. He was a peer of France, a Grandee of Spain, a friend of Kings, and the socialist author of Les Misérables. The peers naturally called him a renegade, and the socialists a reformer. Number nine. Count Friedrich Leopold von Stollberg. He wrote a fanatical book for the Protestants, and then suddenly became a Catholic! Inexplicable in a sensible man. A miracle, eh? A little journey to Damascus, perhaps? Number ten. Lafayette. The heroic upholder of freedom, the revolutionary, who was forced to leave France as a suspected reactionary, because he wanted to help Louis XVI; and then was captured by the Austrians and carried off to Olmütz as a revolutionary! What was he in reality?
STRANGER. Both!
MELCHER. Yes, both. He had the two halves that made a whole—a whole man. Number eleven. Bismarck. A paradox. The honest diplomat, who maintained he'd discovered that to tell the truth was the greatest of ruses. And so was compelled—by the Powers, I suppose?—to spend the last six years of his life unmasking himself as a conscious liar. You're tired. Then we'll stop now.
STRANGER. Yes, if one clings to the same ideas all one's life, and holds the same opinions, one grows old according to nature's laws, and gets called conservative, old-fashioned, out of date. But if one goes on developing, keeping pace with one's own age, renewing oneself with the perennially youthful impulses of contemporary thought, one's called a waverer and a renegade.
MELCHER. That's as old as the world! But does an intelligent, man heed what he's called? One is, what one's becoming.
STRANGER. But who revises the periodically changing views of contemporary opinion?
MELCHER. You ought to answer that yourself, and indeed in this way. It is the Powers themselves who promulgate contemporary opinion, as they develop in apparent circles. Hegel, the philosopher of the present, himself dimorphous, for both a 'left'-minded and a 'right'-minded Hegel can always be quoted, has best explained the contradictions of life, of history and of the spirit, with his own magic formula. Thesis: affirmation; Antithesis: negation; Synthesis: comprehension! Young man, or rather, comparatively young man! You began life by accepting everything, then went on to denying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehending everything. Be exclusive no longer. Do not say: either—or, but: not only—but also! In a word, or two words rather, Humanity and Resignation!
Curtain.
[Choir of the Monastery Chapel. An open coffin with a bier cloth and two burning candles. The CONFESSOR leads in the STRANGER by the hand. The STRANGER is dressed in the white shirt of the novice.]