Part 10

"On one occasion a liar with whom I lived on intimate terms made me think that my last book had been a failure. For five years I believed it, suffered under the belief, and lost my courage. On my return to Sweden I found that the book had had a great success. Five years had been struck out of my life; I was nearly losing self-respect and the courage to support existence. That is equivalent to murder. And this behaviour on the part of my only friend, for whom I had worked and made sacrifices, gave me such a shock that all my ideas were confused. It took me years to rearrange them and bring them into proper order. True and false were mingled together: lies became reality, and my whole life seemed as unsubstantial as smoke. I was not far from ruin and the loss of reason."

=Innocent Guilt.=--The teacher continued: "During the five years in which I believed myself unjustly treated, I also incurred guilt. I had cursed those who had been just towards me, wished evil to my benefactors, repelled my admirers, avoided my adherents. And when I should now have felt remorse for it, I could not do so sincerely. On the one hand I felt myself innocent, and almost the victim of another's falsehood. But the evil which I had done was there, and must be atoned for. Such tangles are not easy to undo. Yet it is not good in life to show mistrust towards men; one must take things easily, without criticism and too careful reckoning. The deceiver says, to be sure, 'He who does not keep a sharp look-out, has himself to blame if he is cheated.' But if one does look out, and will not let oneself be cheated, one is credited with a morbid mistrustfulness. It is not easy to live, and among lawless men it is better to be cheated than to cheat. The Talmud says: 'Be rather among those who are cursed than those who curse; rather among the persecuted than the persecutors: read in the Scripture, No bird is more persecuted than the dove; yet God has chosen it for a sacrifice on His altar.'"

=The Charm of Old Age.=--The teacher said: "The charms of old age are many. The greatest is the consciousness that it is not long till evening when one can undress and lie down, without the necessity of rising up and dressing again. The diminution of the body's strength lessens its resistance to the free motions of the soul. One's interest in merely temporal matters decreases, and one begins to take a bird's-eye view of things. Seemingly important trifles shrink to insignificance. Old estimates of the values of things are changed. All that one has experienced lies like a litter of straw under one's feet; one stands in it and grows in the midst of one's past. We have found a constant amid all variables, that is, the instability of life, the transitoriness and mutability of all things. Everything is repeated; there are scarcely any surprises. We know everything beforehand, expect no improvement, are no more deceived by false hopes, demand nothing more of men, neither gratitude, nor faithfulness, nor love, only some companionship in solitude. If we are deceived, we think it is part of the play, and even find a sort of consolation in it, because it confirms our views, which we do not like to see refuted. We become, finally, cheerful pessimists. When, on the discovery of a new cheat, we can say, 'What did I tell you?' we feel almost a sense of pleasure."

=The Ring-System.=--The teacher said: "In our old schools, the pupils were arranged not in classes, but in rings, and the forms were not placed in rows, but in circles. When I read of the circles of Dante's hell, I thought of my old school. But outside in life, I found this ring-system also. Men seemed linked together in concentric circles, each of which formed a little system of views. Each circle spoke its own language, expressed its meaning in old formulas, revered its gods, created its great men, often out of nothing. In each circle they had found the truth, and worked for development, but in a different way to the others. The first circle was really the lowest, but it considered itself the most important, because it was the first. When I read a paper or a book which comes from other circles than mine, I only see so much--that they are mad or stand on their heads. It stifles me, and has a hostile effect. I surmise that the five great races of the earth feel that, when they meet one another. In their minds they are as foreign to each other as though they came from the five great planets, although they have many human characteristics in common."

=Lust, Hate, and Fear, or the Religion of the Heathen.=--The teacher said: "You know one of my tasks in life has been to unmask gyneolatry, the worship of women in history and life. I have called it 'the superstition of the heathen,' because there is something exclusively heathenish about it. Woman-worship is the religion of the heathen, but it is a religion of fear, which has nothing to do with love. Lust, hate, and fear--those are the component parts of it. As soon as a heathen comes in the proximity of a woman, he becomes tame and cowardly; faithless towards his friends, his convictions, and himself. He immediately desires that others should venerate his idol whom he hates and fears. That is a side of his animal self-love.

"Gyneolatry is not Christian in its origin, but heathenish. All animals and savage races fear their women. When heathenism in the Græco-Roman and Moorish colonies of southern France and Italy got the upper hand, then began gyneolatry, the worship of mistresses. This worship was dishonestly confounded with chivalrous reverence for the Madonna, which was quite another thing. This religion of the heathen is the religion of fear and concealed hatred. Therefore all tyrants have been punished by having a woman oppress and torment them. Swedenborg explains the reason."

="Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy."=--The teacher continued: "A man's goodwill and generosity towards his wife stands in direct relation to her behaviour. When therefore a woman is ill-treated by her husband, we know of what sort she is. The apparently subordinate position which the woman occupies is the direct result of the position which nature has assigned to this immature transition-form between child and man. The child has also a subordinate position; that is quite natural, and no reasonable man has objected to it. Woman is the earth-spirit who effectuates a certain harmony with the earth-life. To this earth-life we must bring our sacrifice; therefore it is that a man feels at home in his house, and therefore wife and child comfort and protect us against the cold abstraction, life.

"Marriage is the hardest school in which renunciation and self-conquest is learned; it is also a forcing-house for wickedness of all kinds, especially the hellish sin of imperiousness. How low the sons of the Lord of Dung stand on the ladder of development may be seen from their conviction that they are only equal to the woman or subordinate to her. Blinded by this penal hallucination, they work for their own destruction when they battle for the emancipation of women, for the gods wish to destroy them.

=The Slavery of the Prophet.=--"Stuart Mill, who became the prophet of the woman's cause, had formed an attachment for another man's wife.[1] As a punishment he had to live in the hallucination that he derived all his thoughts from her. She was indeed his medium, and as such she repeated his thoughts as though they came from her, and he believed she was his superior. When somebody asked if he had received his 'Logic,' which he wrote before he knew her, also from her, he answered, 'Yes.' This sober Positivist, who only believed in tables of statistics, was obsessed by the powerful delusion that the simple-minded woman was his Genius. He could not rise to a higher idea of God. One thing I am sure of: as soon as a man deserts God, he becomes the thrall of a female devil. All tyrants, above and below, are caught in these chains, out of which only God in heaven can help a man. But He can certainly. One sees it in those who have come alive out of this hell. I know one...."

"I know two!" the pupil interrupted.

[Footnote 1: Mrs. Taylor.]

=Absurd Problems.=--The teacher continued: "There are several reasons why woman is depicted as a sphinx by men. She is incomprehensible because her soul is rudimentary, and she thinks with her body. Her judgments are dictated by interests and passions, she draws conclusions according to the state of the weather and the phases of the moon. She will sell her best friend for a theatre-ticket, or leave her sick child to see a balloon ascend. She murders her husband in order to be able to go to a bathing-resort, and forswears her religion for a diamond ring. At the same time she can appear to be a charming woman, tender towards her children, amiable, and before all things polite and affable. She may also appear a good household manager, or at any rate enjoy the reputation of being one. She can produce the illusion that she is quick at apprehension, although she does not really understand a word. She can exhibit sacrifices which are only ostentation, and give away only in order to receive back. Why cannot one guess the riddle of this sphinx? Because there is no riddle there! Why is woman incomprehensible? Because the problem is absurd. She is an irrational function because she operates with variable quantities under the radical signs.

"Nevertheless we take her as a charming actuality, a delightful child who may pull three hairs out of our beard; but if it pulls the fourth, there is an end to the enchantment."

=The Crooked Rib.=--The teacher said: "Goethe says in his _Divan_,[1] 'Woman is fashioned out of a crooked rib; if one tries to bend her, she breaks; if one lets her alone, she becomes still more crooked.' Thus there is nothing to be done. The only tactics one can adopt, as Napoleon did, are flight, or at any rate to break off contact and intimacy. This never fails; if one deprives a woman of the victim of her hatred, she pines away.

"Man loves and woman hates; man gives and woman takes; man sacrifices and woman devours. When the woman wishes to show her superiority in intellect, she commits a rascality. Her utmost endeavour is to deceive her husband. If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy. When woman gets her milk-teeth, she does not learn to speak but to lie, for speech and falsehood are synonymous for her. Every married man knows all that. But politeness and his own vanity keep him silent. Often he is silent because of his children; often because he is ashamed in the name of humanity. He thinks how often one has drunk the toasts of mother, wife, sister, daughter--these fictions in a world of deceit, where all is vanity of vanities. But many men are silent because they are afraid of being called 'woman-haters.' They are afraid!"

[Footnote 1: The saying is originally Muhammed's.]

=White Slavery.=--The teacher said: "In the whole of the upper and middle classes and a good way below them the following is the case with regard to marriage: When a man marries, his work, which he can devolve on no one else, increases. His wife, on the other hand, at once gets a servant to do her work; if she has children, then she gets a nurse besides. But she herself sits there without occupation, and tries to kill time with useless trivialities. In this way she can neither get an appetite for dinner, nor sleep at night. In the evening her husband comes home, and wants to enjoy the domestic hearth; but his wife wants to go to the theatre and restaurant. She is not tired, but bored by want of occupation, and therefore wants amusement. Women, in fact, seem not to be born for domestic life, but for the theatre, the restaurant, and the street. Therefore women complain that they must sit at home. Although they have slaves to serve them, they call themselves 'slaves' and hold meetings to their own emancipation, but not that of their servants. Their animalised husbands support them without observing that they themselves are slaves; for he who works for the idle is a slave. But it is written, 'Ye are bought with a price; be slaves to no man.'"

=Noodles.=--The pupil asked: "What is a woman-hater?"

The teacher answered: "I do not know. But the expression is used as a term of reproach by noodles, for those who say what all think. Noodles are those men who cannot come near a woman without losing their heads and becoming faithless. They purchase the woman's favour by delivering up the heads of their friends on silver chargers; and they absorb so much femininity, that they see with feminine eyes and feel with feminine feelings. There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not tell one's wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche not badly, Peladan is the master. Thackeray wrote _Men's Wives_ but the book was ignored. Balzac has unmasked Caroline in the _Petites Misères de la vie Conjugale_. Otto Weininger discovered the deceit at the age of twenty; he did not wait for the consequent vengeance, but went his own way, _i.e._ died. I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that a woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever therefore calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together."

=Inextricable Confusion.=--The teacher continued: "If on the other side of the grave there were a Judge Rhadamanthus appointed to arrange the disputes of men, he would never come to an end. Life is such a tissue of lies, errors, misunderstandings, of debts and demands, that a balancing of the books is impossible. I know men who have been lied about their whole lives through. I know of one who was branded through his whole life with the stigma of a seducer, although he has never seduced, but was seduced himself. I know of an uncommonly truthful man who had the reputation of being a liar. I know an honourable man who passed for a thief. I know a man who was three times married, and had children in all three marriages, but was said to be no man, because he, as a man, would not be the slave of his wife. I know many who are sincerely religious and yet are called hypocrites, although the chief point in religion is sincerity. But, on the other hand, I know heathen who professed to be atheists, although in their bedchambers they sang penitential psalms when they were nervous in the dark and feared the consequences of their misdeeds. They were so cowardly that they dared not fall under the suspicion of being religious, but bragged of their courage and strength of character. They would not abandon the Black Flag; they would not be untrue to the ideal of their youth--godlessness. Rascally right and good-hearted stupidity form a problem too complicated for Rhadamanthus himself to solve. Only the Crucified could do it with the single saying which He addressed to the penitent thief, 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.'"

=Phantoms.=--The teacher said: "When intelligence and the power of reflection are matured, and one thinks about men, their outlines begin to dissolve, and they turn into phantoms. Indeed, one never really knows a man; one knows only his own, or others' ideas of him, but when these ideas change, the image of him becomes indistinct and is obscured with a veil. We form our conception of a person whom we have never seen according to others' ideas of him. Thus, for example, the personality of a famous painter was described to me by an author. After two years the author had formed another idea of him, and imparted that to me, and I had to alter my view of him. Then there came another describer, and gave me quite a different idea of the painter. He was followed by a third and a fourth. After this I saw the painter's pictures, and could not understand how he could paint in the way he did. But the painter himself I never saw. He has become for me a phantom without clear outlines, composed of different-coloured pieces of glass, which do not harmonise, and alter according to my moods. I expect that when I meet him he will not resemble my idea of him at all, but have the effect of quite another independent phantom."

=Mirage Pictures.=--The teacher said: "When I have lived for some time in solitude my acquaintances begin to appear like mirage-pictures before me. Some gain by distance, occasion only friendly feelings, and are surrounded by an atmosphere of light and peace. Others whom I really like very well when they are near, lose by absence, and appear to be hostile. Thus I may hate a friend in his absence, look upon him as unpleasant and inimical, but as soon as he comes, enter into friendly contact with him. There is a woman whose proximity I cannot bear, but whom I love at a distance. We write letters to each full of regard and friendliness. When we have longed for each other for a time and must meet, we immediately begin to quarrel, become vulgar and unsympathetic, and part in anger. We love each other on a higher plane, but cannot live in the same room. We dream of meeting again, spiritualised, on some green island, where only we two can live, or, at any rate, only our child with us. I remember a half-hour which we three actually spent hand in hand on a green island by the sea-coast. It seemed to me like heaven. Then the clocks struck the hour of noon, and we were back again on earth, and soon after that, in hell."

=Trifle not with Love.=--The pupil said: "When a man and a woman are united in love, a single being is the result, whose existence is a positive pleasure, as long as harmony reigns. But this being is an extremely sensitive receptive instrument, and is exposed to disturbances from outer currents which act from all distances, an inconvenience which it shares with wireless telegraphy. Therefore a disturbance of the relationship between a married pair is the greatest pain which exists. Unfaithfulness is a cosmic crime which brings the one or the other member of the married pair into perverse relations with their own sex. If the husband loves another woman, his wife is exposed to terrible alternate currents; by turns she loves and hates the woman who is her rival. Often she can be the friend of her husband's paramour, but more often her enemy. Whoever comes between a pair who love, does not so with impunity. The hate which he arouses is so terrible, that he can be lamed by the discharge, lose all energy and pleasure in life. Therefore it is rightly said, 'Trifle not with love.'"

=A "Taking" Religion.=--The pupil said: "When Buddhism, mixed with Vedantism, became fashionable in 1890, all the renegades from Christianity flocked to it and tried to fill the vacuum in their religious lives. Six thousand new gods were received with applause forthwith; the new trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, Siva--encountered no objections; spirits, ghosts, genies, fairies were thought quite natural; Gautama's heaven and hell were thrown into the bargain, accompanied by a slight flavour of asceticism. Those who denied the Resurrection found reincarnation quite a simple affair. But the favourite was Krishna. He was the incarnation of the god Vishnu, who descended to earth in order to be born of earthly parents and to save fallen humanity. His coming was prophesied, and so dreaded that a massacre of new-born infants like that at Bethlehem was plotted, but unsuccessfully. Krishna fulfilled his mission, conquered the evil powers, and finally endured a voluntary death. That 'took'! The trinity Brahma, Vishnu, Siva 'took,' but Father, Son, Holy Spirit did not 'take.' Krishna 'took,' but not Christ. It was strange!"

=The Sixth Sense.=--The pupil continued: "The outer eye can reflect images, the inner eye can conceive them. There are therefore two kinds of sight, an outer and an inner. Of the senses, that of smell is the most immediate when it has to do with the conveyance of impressions. But there seem also to be two kinds of faculties of smell. Swedenborg says that a false man smells of sour gastric juice, but only for the person to whom he has been false. In this case the smell-perception is only subjective, but it is of great objective value in judging men. In this case the organ of smell seems to operate with æther-waves. According to Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences, good men exhale sweet perfume, and bad men a stench like that of corpses. He says that misers smell like rats, and so on. Legends of the saints relate that the corpses of those who have kept their souls and bodies pure, when they dissolve, exhale a flower-like perfume. In short, every soul has its scent, which varies according to its characteristics.

"This sixth sense the clothes-hygienist Jäger believed he had discovered after he had begun to observe and train his outer and inner man. I will speak now of my own experiences in the matter. They did not begin till I had passed through the great purgatorial fire which burnt up the rubbish of my soul, and after I had scrambled out of the worst of the mire by self-discipline and asceticism. They are accustomed to boil off the gum from raw silk before it is spun, and so my nerve-fibres seemed to have been 'scoured' by the sufferings of life, and gone through a process like the 'fining' of silk."

=Exteriorisation of Sensibility.=--The pupil continued: "I happened once, when watching a spider in a web, to see her 'exteriorise her sensibility,' or in other words reel out a nerve-substance for herself with which she remains in touch, and by means of which she becomes aware when flies come and when the weather changes. Raspail, who in his masterly works has cast many a far-reaching glance behind the curtains of nature, has in one place philosophised over the spider's web. In other works dealing with transcendent natural sciences, one finds the doubt expressed whether the object of the spider's web is only to be a fly-trap. I myself have counted four and twenty radii in the web of the garden-spider resembling an hour-circle, and have asked myself whether, besides being a barometer and trap, the web is also a kind of clock.

"Now it seems as though I had myself in a similar manner exteriorised my sensibility. I feel at a distance when anyone interferes with my destiny, when enemies threaten my personal existence, and also when people speak well of me or wish me well. I feel in the street whether those I meet are friends or foes; I have felt the pain of an operation undergone by a man to whom I was fairly indifferent; twice I have shared the death-agonies of others with the accompanying corporeal and psychical sufferings. The last time I went through three illnesses in six hours, and when the absent person with whom I suffered was liberated by death, I rose up well. This makes life painful, but rich and interesting."