Spite of all his tribulations, Pierre could not restrain a smile at this highly diverting reception; but well knowing the youth, he did not conclude from this audacious burst of enthusiastic egotism that his heart had at all corroded; for egotism is one thing, and selfishness another. No sooner did Pierre intimate his condition to him, than immediately, Charlie was all earnest and practical kindness; recommended the Apostles as the best possible lodgment for him,—cheap, snug, and convenient to most public places; he offered to procure a cart and see himself to the transport of Pierre’s luggage; but finally thought it best to mount the stairs and show him the vacant rooms. But when these at last were decided upon; and Charlie, all cheerfulness and alacrity, started with Pierre for the hotel, to assist him in the removal; grasping his arm the moment they emerged from the great arched door under the tower of the Apostles; he instantly launched into his amusing heroics, and continued the strain till the trunks were fairly in sight.
“Lord! my law-business overwhelms me! I must drive away some of my clients; I must have my exercise, and this ever-growing business denies it to me. Besides, I owe something to the sublime cause of the general humanity; I must displace some of my briefs for my metaphysical treatises. I can not waste all my oil over bonds and mortgages.—You said you were married, I think?”
But without stopping for any reply, he rattled on. “Well, I suppose it is wise after all. It settles, centralizes, and confirms a man, I have heard.—No, I didn’t; it is a random thought of my own, that!—Yes, it makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid subjectiveness, and makes all things objective; nine small children, for instance, may be considered objective. Marriage, hey!—A fine thing, no doubt, no doubt:—domestic—pretty—nice, all round. But I owe something to the world, my boy! By marriage, I might contribute to the population of men, but not to the census of mind. The great men are all bachelors, you know. Their family is the universe: I should say the planet Saturn was their elder son; and Plato their uncle.—So you are married?”
But again, reckless of answers, Charlie went on. “Pierre, a thought, my boy;—a thought for you! You do not say it, but you hint of a low purse. Now I shall help you to fill it—Stump the State on the Kantian Philosophy! A dollar a head, my boy! Pass round your beaver, and you’ll get it. I have every confidence in the penetration and magnanimousness of the people! Pierre, hark in your ear;—it’s my opinion the world is all wrong. Hist, I say—an entire mistake. Society demands an Avatar,—a Curtius, my boy! to leap into the fiery gulf, and by perishing himself, save the whole empire of men! Pierre, I have long renounced the allurements of life and fashion. Look at my coat, and see how I spurn them! Pierre! but, stop, have you ever a shilling! let’s take a cold cut here—it’s a cheap place; I go here sometimes. Come, let’s in.”
BOOK XXI.
PIERRE IMMATURELY ATTEMPTS A MATURE WORK. TIDINGS FROM THE MEADOWS. PLINLIMMON.
I.
WE are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three lofty adjoining chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a little further in time, and overlooking the hundred and one domestic details, of how their internal arrangements were finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly, now giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel, the only practical relief from the memories of her miserable past; how Isabel herself in the otherwise occupied hours of Pierre, passed some of her time in mastering the chirographical incoherencies of his manuscripts, with a view to eventually copying them out in a legible hand for the printer; or went below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in the modest and amiable society of the three young ladies and their excellent mother, found some little solace for the absence of Pierre; or, when his day’s work was done, sat by him in the twilight, and played her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.
Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning in scorn even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which, written at Saddle Meadows in the sweet legendary time of Lucy and her love, he had jealously kept from the publishers, as too true and good to be published; renouncing all his foregone self, Pierre was now engaged in a comprehensive compacted work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous motives unitedly impelled;—the burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the sale of his book, he could realize money. Swayed to universality of thought by the widely-explosive mental tendencies of the profound events which had lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that most grand productions of the best human intellects ever are built round a circle, as atolls (i. e. the primitive coral islets which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet lagoon within), digestively including the whole range of all that can be known or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilized young inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributary stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.
While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a jeering impunity. He did not see,—or if he did, he could not yet name the true cause for it,—that already, in the incipiency of his work, the heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge would not congenially weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal airiness of spontaneous creative thought. He would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back. He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and then,—without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it any way,—thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him. He did not see, that even when thus combined, all was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be, if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.
But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do never in one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full awfulness of amplitude—their overawing extent of peak crowded on peak, and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and all their wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such an encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost snows. Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God, does man come at last to gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtopping view of these Alps; and even then, the tithe is not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the Rocky Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself!