Part 14

=Night Owls.=--The maggot in the apple doubtless imagines that the apple was grown for its sake, and that the world could not exist without apples. So we also imagine that science and art are certainly necessary. Swedenborg, in his description of another sphere, tells us how happy men can be without such luxuries. "They know nothing of sciences as we see them in our world, and wish to know nothing; they call them 'shadows,' and compare them with clouds which come between the sun and the spectator. This idea of the sciences they have derived from certain spirits who came from our earth and introduced themselves as those who had grown wise through science. These spirits from our earth who made this claim belonged to those who see wisdom in such things as are pure matters of memory, such as languages; in historical matters, which belong to the literary world; in bare experiences and terms, especially philosophical ones. Because these have not developed their faculty of reasoning through science, they have in their second life little power of perceiving the truth, for they see only in and by means of technical terms, which like hills and thick clouds obstruct the sight of reason. Those who have employed the sciences in order to destroy matters of faith have their reason so thoroughly unsettled that in pitch-darkness they take false for true, and evil for good, like night-owls."

The flag of the university also carries the sign of an owl, but they do not know what it means.

=Apotheosis.=--When a man who has been near to us dies, he begins to loom magnified through a kind of haze. All his less-pleasing characteristics are obliterated, as if they were part of that dust which is now dissolved. His better self, on the other hand, becomes larger and clearer. It is indeed possible that the liberated spirit becomes ennobled by death, and that therefore the survivor is right in forming a new conception of the personality of the deceased. He with whom the survivor now holds spiritual intercourse is perhaps what the survivor feels him to be, and has ceased to be what he was in life. It is almost invariably the case that the survivor torments himself with reproaches that he has been guilty of some neglect towards the dead, has done him slight injustices and spoken hard words. Even the coldest-hearted begs the dead secretly for forgiveness--forgiveness for all even when it was hardly ill-meant. All this seems to signify that the dead one is alive, and has need of kindly thoughts as a compensation for the reproaches he makes himself regarding those he has left behind.

=Painting Things Black.=--There are men who anticipate their troubles, hoping thereby to neutralise or to bribe destiny. But that is a mistaken calculation. I know of an author who saw a great calamity approaching and tried to _write_ it away. He composed a drama on that theme, and hoped thereby to have escaped it. Soon afterwards, however, it arrived and the effect was as strong as though it had never been written about, perhaps even more.

Theosophists say that we can create thought-forms which assume life and reality. They mean that men can send from a distance evil suggestions which others carry out. Thus criminal romances have never deterred anyone from crime; they have on the contrary given scoundrels bright ideas for new pieces of rascality. I actually know of a society novel which criticised bank and joint-stock company frauds, with the result that such frauds increased. It is as though one let loose demons.

Therefore it is dangerous merely to think evil of men; one may do them harm thereby. But what a supernatural effort is necessary always to see good where so little is to be found! And when we try our best we find that we have played the hypocrite. It is almost hopeless to hold the balance level when it is a matter of judging men justly, for human nature is evil and cannot be altered.

=The Thorn in the Flesh.=--Whence come evil and ugly thoughts which start up in our most beautiful moments, in the hour of devotion, and even in prayer? We wish to ignore them; we have the impression that they come from without. But it is possible that they are born of the habit of letting evil thoughts have free course in silence and solitude. Still it is mysterious that the greater the height to which we have attained by striving, the deeper we fall. And I can testify from my own experience that it is at the very time of renunciation and self-discipline that one is most liable to unclean thoughts and imaginations. St. Anthony and other saints are examples of this.

A great sorrow, for instance, the longing for a lost child, is the quickest and best means of burning away the rubbish. But often, alas! on the sorrow there follows a boisterous joy which is not of the noblest kind. Immediately after our noblest moods, when we have been inspired by the most beautiful thoughts and purposes, it is possible in the next moment to feel like a coxcomb.

It is not strange that the ancients believed in demons who whisper into one's ear and suggest impure imaginations. Possibly this was St. Paul's thorn in the flesh, which pricked him so that he should not be too much uplifted.

=Despair and Grace.=--When in youth one sought to conquer evil desires, and even harmless ones, with the severest scourge provided by religion, and then saw that one could not change one's vices, one let go of the reins and life went as it went. Work was the chief occupation of middle life, and there was no time to think of one's soul. Life itself moulded one's character, and one threw a bone to the dog--the flesh in order to be able to work in peace.

Then when in old age we come to reflect, and at sixty find that we have remained very much the same, we wish to begin our spiritual education, but with indifferent success. We had hoped that certain desires would disappear and certain virtues take their place by a kind of natural necessity, as we had believed when young. But, alas! that is not the case. When now we again resume the struggles of our youth the case is thus. We have raised our standard higher, and wish to root out all the weeds. What formerly seemed quite natural--envy of a fellow-worker, revenge on an enemy, pride in success, exultation at a foe's downfall, a small white lie--we now find hateful. And so we begin to struggle against the outward manifestations of these things. But when we find the inner evil just as strong as before, we finally regard ourselves as great hypocrites and are ready to despair.

Where is comfort to be found then? Religion only asserts that we are hypocrites, and our fellow-men regard it as a fact. Absolute despair seizes us. What follows then? Grace! It becomes clear to us that everything is grace, and from grace. And that we have been living on the bread of charity which we believed we had earned.

=The Last Act (From the life of a leader of the "Renaissance").=--The final act is the most important one in a drama, and a dramatist generally begins his work at the end. We sit out a long evening at the theatre in order to see the last act or "how it will go." But in the significant lives of certain men people like to ignore the last act, because it is uncomfortable and might show how the godless fare at last. He who wrote the operetta _Boccaccio_ had to append the last act to it; the jovial Florentine became a priest and delivered lectures on Dante's _Hell_, though he only reached the seventeenth canto. Voltaire's last hours, when he took the sacrament, might furnish a subject for a tragedy like the second part of _Faust_. Heine announced his conversion, which took place in 1851, in the preface to the _Romancero_: "I have returned to God like the prodigal son, after I had fed swine with the Hegelians for a long time." This preface should be printed before every collection of Heine's poems. Hegel singing penitential psalms on his death-bed might form the subject of a fresco painting for the entrance-hall of Berlin University. But the most affecting final act is Oscar Wilde's description of his prison life in _De Profundis_. He was the so-called renaissance leader, who disinterred heathenism with its false worship of beauty, which contains the foulest of all. Kierkegaard[1] would have called him the æsthete, the Sybarite cold as cast iron, the egoist round whose petty "I" the whole world was to revolve in order to understand him alone. Many, led astray like him by the seducing spirits of his youth, remained fairly free from public punishment. Wilde seems to have been picked out to furnish a startling example, for his position, at any rate in his own country, was almost that of an idol.

What he wrote lacks originality; it is whipped-up foam; glazing which, when washed off, leaves no texture; it is as restless as cross-lights, or like a mirror in a public restaurant, in a labyrinthine hall with deceptive lines and false perspectives; it runs out of the hand like albumen or frog-spawn; it is perverse as in _Dorian Gray_, the hero of which should have lost his youth by nightly excesses, while on the contrary it is only his portrait which changes.

The last act was played, and that outdid all horror, was so horrible that Wilde himself could not describe its details, which, however, oral tradition has preserved in a Swedenborgian legend.

_De Profundis_ arouses pity and fear, and one would gladly acquit the man who was perhaps the victim of his delusion; a worldly tribunal would not have judged him if he had not himself appealed to it, and that indeed for a wrong done him. It was what our renaissance-critic called a "piece of stupidity" when he made Wilde out to be a martyr of "hypocrisy," as he called justice. Wilde however seems to have taken another view of the matter to his impartial defender: "A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy. Once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said: 'Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the full.' A man's very highest moment, I have no doubt at all, is when he kneels in the dust and beats his breast and tells us all the sins of his life."

The "joy of life" whose perfume he had inhaled at Oxford through Pater's _Renaissance_ now began to grow sour.

"Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard, and callous. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. The secret of life is suffering."

Let us add that Wilde derived his most dangerous doctrine from Baudelaire and Shakespeare's sonnets. And let us close with the new view of the Renaissance which he attained to in prison: "To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ's own renaissance which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's _Divine Comedy_, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance."

[Footnote 1: Danish theologian.]

=Consequences of Learning.=--As soon as a man buries himself in books he gets black nails and dirty cuffs, forgets to wash, to comb his hair, and to shave. He neglects his duties towards life, society, and men; loses spiritual capacities, becomes absent-minded, short-sighted, wears glasses, and takes snuff in order to keep himself awake. He cannot follow a conversation with attention, cannot interest himself in other people's affairs, does not see the face of the earth by day nor the stars by night. Behind his desire to investigate lies the insidious ambition to master his material, to become an authority, to tyrannise, to make a career for himself, and to receive distinctions.

If men only reflected what tyrants they obey--these black magicians who are called professors; who settle what we are to think and believe; who test and examine, reject and choose; who form committees, write handbooks, deliver lectures, and bestow prizes on those who accept _their_ hypotheses.

And has it ever occurred to a student to criticise his teacher? No; he swallows everything uncritically. But if he goes into a church where he hears God's own word revealed by way of intuition to the prophets, then he begins to exercise his critical faculty; then he finds it very difficult to comprehend the simplest things; then he wants mathematical certainty, which he considers the highest while it is really the lowest.

Swedenborg says in one place: "Though goodness and truth are sent down through the heavens, when they reach the hells they are changed into evil and falsity; the brilliant light of the sun changes into ugly colours and its warmth becomes an evil odour."

=Rousseau.=--In my youth I read of an Englishman who shot himself because life was so wearisome. He had counted the buttons which he had to unbutton and button up every day--in his under-clothing half a dozen, in his day-shirt half a dozen, in his collar and cuffs half a dozen, in his waistcoat, trousers, and coat a dozen, in his boots, gaiters, and gloves two dozen. When he wanted to ride out he had to change, as he had also to do for dinner and the evening.

This story, though absurd, reveals the naked truth. Life has become so burdensome, and half the day is spent in useless occupations: unnecessary visits, telephoning, writing letters about nothing, reading the papers; especially in making one's toilette which formerly consisted of a becoming mantle fastened with a single cord, but has now developed into a whole set of things with buttons, hooks, eyes, strings, ribbons, needles, buckles. Our toilettes are a miniature picture of our civilisation with all its time-wasting fussiness, most of which is useless nonsense. The man who lives in the country and cultivates the ground needs neither art, science, nor literature. He who has nature needs no art, and religion is more than science and literature. There are churches everywhere, but museums, theatres, book-shops, and clubs only in the towns. Whether they are necessary is another question.

That is Rousseau!

=Rousseau Again.=--In Southern France I once saw some half-wild Arab horses running loose in a meadow. They still had their long tails to hide what is not beautiful and to protect them against the stings of insects. They seemed well adapted to their purpose, but they were more than useful: they were beautiful. And when I contemplated the lines in these beautiful creatures' bodies--the curve of the withers such as is not found in geometry, its continuation along the back and loins; the noble construction and movements of the hind-legs; the proportions of the shank below the knee tapering down to the hoof, which leaves on the sand graceful prints like Moorish arches--and when the proud creatures sped over the meadow in full gallop with movements like that of a sailing-boat on the waves, then the curves played into new harmonies and changed their form, tail, mane, and forelock floated like draperies about the body, and I thought "All that is certainly adapted for running, but it is much more, it is beautiful; it has not come to be of itself, but it is created by a Contriver, a wise and great Artist." It is, however, more than a work of art, for it has life and individuality, and no two horses are exactly alike. Then I thought of the attempts of men to "improve" this masterpiece, of the English race-horses--those machines! In this process of selection they have chosen the ugliest, docked their tails, robbed them of their fairest ornament, placed an apelike jockey on their backs in order to make money by racing. To this caricature men have degraded the beautiful gift of God.

Anyone who has learnt at school to draw a horse knows how difficult it is to make these lines harmonise, and fall and rise in the right places; to draw the head not too large and not too small, but exactly proportioned; to bring the forepart and the loins into symmetrical relations with each other; to make the neck slope gently into the fine curve of the back. It was the work of many days merely to copy the outline correctly. Raphael could not draw a horse; his Attila rides on a rocking-horse. One is often inclined to agree with Rousseau when he says everything which comes from the hand of the Creator is perfect, but when it falls into the hands of man it is spoiled.

=Materialised Apparitions.=--I have never seen it, but it is said to be a fact that in hypnotic seances those who are present produce from the half-etherialised substance of the medium a kind of being which is visible and leads an apparitional life, so long as the circle keeps together. Such among others was Professor Crookes' "Katie King."

But what causes me to believe this is a matter of everyday experience. Men create their idols out of nothing, and by means of their imagination fashion their fellow-men, both living and dead, into something quite different to what they really are. These creations naturally partake of their own substance and are after their own likeness. Sometimes they create something really great, sometimes a monster, a demigod, or a devil.

We often see that hatred against one person is, so to speak, polarised and converted into love towards his antagonist. A great unpopularity is, in the person of another, changed into a great popularity. The reward which should have been given to the worthiest is given to the unworthy, in order to crush the deserving.

At the award of a famous prize one who was uninitiated lately asked: "Why did not X get the prize?"

"Because Y was to have it," was the answer.

Fifteen years ago a very remarkable book of 650 pages was published. It obtained no notice in the press. But at the same time a wretched pamphlet received all the praise which the large book ought to have had. When I read the reviews of the paltry pamphlet I thought I was reading those of the book, for the subject-matter was the same.

Recently an important post was filled up, connected, let us say, with road-making and hydraulic structures. The person who received it was a very remarkable man. Public opinion (though not private) regarded him as the most deserving and suitable candidate. He passed for a distinguished engineer, thoroughly up in his profession, was said to be well off, an able organiser, diligent and considerate towards his subordinates.

Now it is to be remarked that the man was nothing of all that; he had never made roads or constructed hydraulic works, but left that to his skilful assistants; he did not know his profession; he neglected what he had in hand; he was not to be found in his office, for he played cards and spent the nights in carousing. He was hard towards his employees, managed so badly that he never knew the state of his affairs, and was careless in money matters.

How then had he come to be elected? Some said he had been chosen in order to punish and humble the conceited engineers who had become unpopular. Others thought that the intention was that he should come to grief and be ruined because he was feared and hated.

However that may be, he was a materialised apparition created by the hate, envy, and malignity of the crowd; he had become an idea, a lucky rascal, a ruthless man whose elevation was necessary in order to still the tumult. He was like a crude mass of ore which stood for four hundred years in the market-place and was supposed to represent Justice, but was really the counterfeit presentment of a thievish alderman foisted in by the burgomaster.

=The Art of Dying.=--The wish for power is said to be a fundamental condition of the existence of the ego, without which a man would perish, as he could not resist the pressure of others. So we were taught by the seducing spirits of our youth. But Swedenborg says the thirst for power comes from hell, and Balzac speaks of the galley-slaves of ambition who can never rest. Dante has a fine verse regarding the fate of the great painters: one must retire in order to make place for another; he passes into the shadow and is forgotten.

Even when it is unjust, as it often is, one must acquiesce in being relegated to the back-ground, for men get tired even of the best and desire change. A great name becomes oppressive, is felt as a tyranny, and hinders others from also making great names for themselves. Napoleon and Bismarck saw this clearly, for both said beforehand that the world would give a sigh of relief when they were gone. But, in order to depart content, we require religious resignation, complete irrevocable withdrawal from the world. Such as Charles the Fifth's retirement into a monastery. To receive a "benefit" on one's retirement and then to reappear on the stage is not becoming. If one considers oneself dead to the world and takes no notice of it, then a new life begins, but on the other side; it is a much more peaceful one, for it is the resurrection from the dead already here! Beethoven was vexed that the Viennese were ungrateful and forgetful when Rossini appeared and brought again in fashion the Italian opera, which Beethoven, had devoted his life to extirpate. Beethoven however, was a hard, selfish, and very proud man, who was accordingly literally tormented out of life, in great matters and in small. Increasing deafness, a disagreeable lawsuit, a mad young relative, domestic scandal, illnesses troubled his last years; he had even to be exposed to the undeserved ridicule of underlings. Thus, well prepared, he turned his back on life, and departed from all without missing anything.

So it should be, in order that nothing should bind one either with longing or with hope, in order that on the other side of the river one may not look back but go straight forward.

The object of the trials of old age is to adjust accounts, to finish up unsettled affairs, to see through the cheat of life, and to become weary of the incomplete, so that no backward longings may disturb the repose of the grave.

=Can Philosophy Bring any Blessing to Mankind?=--Such was the title of a pamphlet written in the 'sixties by a teacher of philosophy, Pontus Wikner. The question was justified; how it was answered I do not remember, but the answer must have been evasive, for the writer of the pamphlet was a professor. If he had said that all philosophy, especially systematic philosophy, was rubbish, his career would have been at an end.

When, in 1870 at the university, I wished to study æsthetics, the professor of the subject sent me to the lecturer in order to take lessons. As he sat there and talked for hours by the light of a composite candle, I tried to decipher the furrowed brow of the pale man and to ascertain whether he really understood what he taught, or whether he only taught by rote. But I could not see through him and I despaired, for I understood nothing, and I cannot learn by heart what I do not understand. That would be humbug.

About forty years later I met the professor who was now pensioned, and consequently no longer a member of the college of augurs. Then I asked him whether he had ever mastered æsthetics?

"Good gracious, no! That is why I sent you to the lecturer."

"Did he understand them then?"

"I don't think so. But he had a good memory."

Then after all it was not my fault, and I was not more stupid than the rest.