Part 9

=Revolution-Sheep.=--The teacher continued: "In the year 1889 we celebrated the French Revolution, but there was little life or order in the celebration. Everything which was uprooted in 1789 still existed--Church and State, kings and courts, priests and officials. The French republic was the worst of all, with its Panama Canal jobbers at the head: Wilson, Herz, Clemenceau, Arton. The constitution was kept alive by bribes, bills of exchange more or less false, and pensions. Offices were created in order to find places for voters, husbands of mistresses, and the discontented. At that time the French republic was governed by criminals, and the Church by pagans. Military and civil orders were sold, works of art bought, votes canvassed for. One could not become a deputy for less than two hundred thousand francs. Then executioners and revolutions were necessary, for the principles of the Great Revolution, if one can talk of principles in connection with a volcano in eruption, were forgotten. Now in the perspective of a hundred years the 'Great' Revolution appeared only like an execution, a decimation on a large scale; an experiment with negative results, but as such certainly very interesting. One of the recollections of my youth is that when we 'who were born with the ideas of the French Revolution' (ideas revived in 1848) began to talk of the 'Great' Revolution, we were called 'Revolution-sheep.' I did not understand this at the time, for I did not yet think for myself but merely drivelled. But now I understand it. Now we know that the constitution of a country is almost a matter of indifference for the common weal; thus one constitution is not much better or worse than another."

="Life Woven of the Same Stuff as our Dreams"=--The teacher said: "Life itself can often appear like a bad dream. One morning I went for a walk in the country, and was absorbed in my thoughts, when a great Danish dog rushed towards me. A young rascal stood near, laughing. I drew my revolver, and exclaimed, 'Call off the dog, or I shoot it.' The young fellow only laughed, the dog retreated, and I went on. On my way back, a man armed with a musket met me, and asked how I dared threaten to shoot his son. I answered, that the threat had only referred to the dog. On the evening of the same day I was told that the dog had been found dead, and that I was suspected of having poisoned it. Although I was innocent, I was regarded as an assassin. That was a nice business!

"Again: one evening I went to see my four-year-old daughter, who waited for me below in the park. From the distance I saw her in the company of two unpleasant-looking children, but she did not see me. As I quickened my steps, I saw that she went off farther with the children. I called her, but she did not hear. I ran and saw her at the entrance of a cellar, into which the children wanted to pull her down. She resisted them, but they took hold of her clothes. Now she screamed, and consequently did not hear my call. I wished to hasten to her, but between us there was a grass lawn, with an iron railing round it, on which I did not venture to tread for fear of the police. So I stood there and called. At last my child pulled herself free, but did not see me. So weirdly things may happen sometimes!"

=The Gospel of the Pagans.=--The teacher continued: "The gospel of the pagans is immunity from punishment; if one mentions a case where it has gone ill with a scoundrel, the pagans snort and say one is too severe. But it is life which is severe. The gospel of the pagans consists in showing that virtue is simplicity and is seduced; that religion is a disease; that scoundrelism is a form of strength, and ought to conquer by the right of the stronger. Sometimes, by way of a change, they demand that a weak rascal should be pardoned; that everything should be forgiven and tolerated. By 'toleration' they mean that one should let oneself be suppressed and persecuted by them. If one resists, they cry, 'He revenges himself. He is a bad man.' But revenge presupposes some offence as the cause, and when the cause disappears the effect disappears. Certainly there are some men who avenge their own stupidity on the innocent. I have an enemy, who still revenges himself on me because he could not steal my money. The gospel for him would be the law reversed, 'You may steal, but others may not.'"

=Punished by the Imagination.=--The teacher continued: "Swedenborg speaks of being punished by the imagination. That is what doctors generally call 'hallucination.' He who suffers from persecution-mania is persecuted. The Philistines think he is only persecuted by his imaginations, but if the wise man asks why he is persecuted by his imaginations, conscience answers by ceaselessly endeavouring to discover the persecutor. The patient goes through the whole list of the persons whom he has offended. If they are many in number, and their hatred is justified, one may well suppose that the sick man is persecuted by their hatred, for which his awakened conscience is now receptive.

"In my inner life punishment by hallucinations has played the chief part; but after I had discovered the rationale of it, I regarded the hallucination itself as a punishment. The severest form of punishment is suspicion, when I am obliged to suspect the innocent. That is irresistible. My thoughts sway between trust and mistrust. I struggle and conquer myself gradually, either by acknowledging myself wrong, or by accepting the breach of faith resignedly. But if I give vent to suspicion I must ask for pardon; then I take this humiliation as a discharge. Most of my misfortunes have been imaginary; but they have had the same effect as real ones, because I came to the consciousness of my own wrong-doing. The incurable man is the obstinate one who believes himself wrongfully persecuted by other men.

=Bankruptcy of Philosophy.=--"When Kant during the dark period of the 'Illumination' had proved that philosophy can prove nothing, he set up the theory of the categorical imperative and postulate, _i.e._ the demands of religion and morality. Put in plain language, that is equivalent to faith. This declaration of the bankruptcy of philosophy saved men from useless brain-cudgelling. Christianity revived, now supported by the philosophers with Hegel at their head. But the old stream flowed parallel with it once more. In spite of the bankruptcy of philosophy, notes of exchange were issued and cashed by the dunder-headed free-thinkers Feuerbach and Strauss. They wanted to approach God with the everyday intelligence which one uses in kitchens and grocers' shops. The last fool was Renan, whose cheques still circulate mostly among college-students and the like. At the beginning of the last century E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote thus: 'In ancient times we had a simple generous faith; we recognised that there was a Higher, but knew also that our senses were insufficient to reach it. Then came the "Illumination," which made everything so clear, that for sheer clearness not a trace could be seen. And now we are told that the supernatural is to be grasped by a firm arm of flesh and bone.' To-day it is called the Science of Religion. That is a science which starts from the false presupposition that religion is a mental disease because it cannot be mathematically proved."

=A Whole Life in an Hour.=--The teacher said: "I had a strange experience, which I have not understood, but which I must remember. I woke up one morning feeling cheerful without any special reason. Obeying an impulse, I went into the town. As I wandered about at random, I came into the quarter where I had been born and brought up. I saw the kindergarten and school I used to attend, and my parents' house. I went through narrow streets and passed by the national school in which I was worried as a student-teacher. I saw two different houses in which I had suffered as a private tutor. I went northwards and came to another school in which I had been tortured. In a market-place I passed another house in which, during my childhood, our only acquaintance lived, and twenty years later in the same dwelling there lived my worst enemy. I passed by a house in which my sister had been married thirty years before, and another house in which my brother had had a hard struggle. Then I came to a third school in which I was a student; in the same house lives still my first and last publisher. I passed by a house where, forty years ago, I was accepted as an aspirant for the stage, and where I offered my first drama; also by the house where I was married for the first time. Then the meaning of it began to grow clearer. I saw the furniture warehouse whence I ordered my furniture the last time. I passed by the house where my wife and child lived three years ago.

"In the space of one hour I had seen the panorama of my whole life in living pictures. Only three years were wanting to the present time. It was like an agony or a death-hour when the whole of life rushes past one.

"Then I felt drawn northward where my last child and her mother live. An instinct told me to bring perfume for the mother and school-fees for the child, as that day it was going to the kindergarten for the first time. Then I began to hunt for the perfume; it ought to have been lilac, but I had to take lily-of-the-valley. I also wanted flowers, but could not find any.

"So I continued northwards and came to their house; the sun shone in, the table was spread for coffee; there was an air of comfort, homeliness, and kindness over all. I was received in a friendly way, felt in a moment that the whole of my black life lay behind me, and realised the happiness of merely being alive."

=The After-Odour.=--The teacher continued: "As I went thence, I felt the happiness of the present. All the past was only the dark background. I was thankful in my heart, when I remembered all I had come through without perishing. When I came home, I learnt through the telephone that my worst enemy had died on the morning of this very day. His death-struggle was taking place at the very time that I made the pilgrimage through my past life. I reflected: Why should I pass through my agony just when he died? He was a 'black man'[1] with an obsolete materialistic view of things which he thought was modern; a literary huckster who wrote reviews of marchionesses' rubbishy books, in order to be invited to their castles, and praised his associates as long as they consorted with him; the partisan of a coterie and a log-roller.

"I had never come into personal contact with him, but once, a long time ago, he had called himself my pupil. He could not however grow, nor follow me upwards. It was now as though my old self had died in him. Perhaps therefore I suffered his death and felt it just now. But why the perfume? That I know not. But when I learnt that the deceased decomposed so rapidly that he had to be buried at once, I could not help connecting the perfume with his dissolution. When, eight days afterwards, I read a posthumous review by the deceased of my last work, and saw that he regretted that I was not a pagan and lamented my defection from the Lord of Dung, it was as though I sniffed an after-odour from the dunghole, and I seized the perfume-flask in good earnest."

[Footnote 1: Strindberg's expression for a free-thinker.]

=Peaches and Turnips.=--The teacher continued: "At the same time a similar death happened. Another of the 'Black Flags' departed under peculiar circumstances two days after the first. I had known this man during the period in which the ape-king ruled. We did not like each other, but like condemned criminals were compelled to keep together. Our friendship was only the reverse-side of a hatred; his hideous appearance frightened me; his profession was equally repulsive, but brought in much money. He wrote according to the taste of the time, and lived in the false idea that he was 'illuminated' and liberal-minded. When his father died, the son expressed his regret that 'his father had recovered the faith of his childhood.' What happened then? The son who lived in faith in wickedness and ugliness, began to develop this faith in a peculiar way. He had in his writings shown a predilection for turnips; in his latter days he inoculated peaches with turnip-juice in order to make the southern fruit partake of the beautiful flavour of the latter. The same perverse taste was evident in his last book; there his sympathy is decidedly on the side of the 'blacks.' He ended in an asylum. He could not be saved, for he did not know how to seek the Saviour. So he died. I had just regretted not having sent some flowers to his grave, when I saw in an obituary notice that the dead man had vented a noisome lie against me, which a bosom friend of his now repeats in print. In the same notice the world is threatened with his posthumous writings. When they come out, I will buy a flower and hold it under my nose, while I breathe a sigh of gratitude to him, who restored to me the faith of my childhood and saved me from the mad-house."

=The Web of Lies.=--The pupil said: "I am eight-and-fifty years old; have lied less than others; and have therefore always believed what others said. When, in my old age, I sit together with friends of my youth and make comparisons, I find that my whole life is a web of lies. Last night I sat with such a friend, and had a protracted talk of the following intelligent kind. I said, 'When the Prince of X. married....' 'Married! He isn't married.' 'Isn't he? Is that a lie too?' 'He has never been married.' 'Now during twenty years I have spread it abroad that he was married, and a whole story has been built on this lie, which I was about to relate, but now I must drop it.'

"Here is another lie! During thirty years I have told people that Dr. H. was present when the Malunger murderer was executed. He had falsely informed me that, as a medical student, he had received a commission to examine the head after it had been cut off. He gave me such interesting details on the subject that I was accustomed to describe them in company. What a liar he was!

"'But he _was_ there.' 'Was he there?' 'Certainly; I saw him standing behind the priest when I took a photograph of the scaffold.' 'You? Have you ... Are you lying or is he?' 'I am not.' 'No; now I don't know where I am. Everything is topsy-turvy. For the last ten years I have retracted the lie which I had spread. I have made Dr. H. a liar! One ought never to speak or write, but only draw the things which one absolutely needs. He was then really there! How can I restore to him his honour, of which I have robbed him?'"

=Lethe.=--The teacher answered: "This whole web of lies, errors, misunderstandings, which forms the basis of our lives, transforms life itself into something dreamlike and unreal, and must be dissolved when we pass into the other life. I read to-day of a dying man. Instead of seeing his life pass by him, as is usually the case, his whole life dissolved into a cloud; his memory failed; all bitterness and all trouble disappeared; and on the other hand, all his disappointed hopes assumed an aspect of reality. He thought he was loved by his wife, who had been cold to him; he thanked her for all the tenderness which she had never shown him. The children who had deserted him he saw again in the bright light of youth; he seemed to hear the sound of little feet upon the floor, the characteristic of a happy home, and his face wore a happy smile. The dark autumn weather outside changed into spring; little girls handed him roses to kiss in order to enchance their value. Finally he saw himself and his family in an arbour drinking coffee out of Dresden china cups, into which they dipped yellow saffron-cakes.... Then he fell into his last sleep. It was a beautiful and enviable death; it was paradise. From the ancient Lethe he drank forgetfulness of the troubles he had undergone before he trod the Elysian fields. If it only were so! To drag all one's bygone filth with one in memory cannot be favourable to a new life in purity. There are illnesses in which one loses memory. May death prove to be such an illness!"

=A Suffering God.=--The teacher said: "The idea of a suffering God was foolishness to the Greeks, who considered a God as a tyrant gloating over the sufferings of men. But the seeming contradiction is solved if one supposes that a Holy Being deposits itself, so to speak, in humanity, and that humanity then becomes defiled. That is a boundless grief like his who has deposited the best part of his soul and his emotions with a woman. If she then goes and defiles herself, she defiles her husband. Or a father's nature has passed over to his children, and he wishes to see his best impulses continued and multiplied by them, and his likeness ennobled. If the children dishonour themselves, the father suffers; the stem withers when the roots are injured.

"Such I imagine to be the feelings of God the Father when the sinfulness of humanity grows noisome and dishonours Him, and perhaps threatens to affect His own holiness. He will be wroth and lament--perhaps even feel Himself defiled--rather than cut off the cancerous limb of humanity. Christ is no more represented as beautiful, but with features distorted by the sins of others; these he has taken on himself or drawn to himself, for he who approaches pitch is defiled. In order to be free from the impure element he must die by the destruction of the body. Incarnation involved the greatest suffering of all.

"But the death of Christ may also signify that the Father freed himself from the sins of humanity, and broke off connection with the evil race who dishonoured Him. He who will now seek Him must rise to His heights, and gain admission by a pure life. He Himself will descend no more into this valley of filth; the air is too thick, the company too mixed. And that is why things are as they are."

=The Atonement.=--The teacher said: "The work of the Atonement has been very difficult for me to understand. Often I have tried to explain in a way satisfactory to myself, but without success. If God had offered up His Son as an atonement for mankind, there would necessarily have been peace and paradisal quietness on earth, but such is not the case. The period of the Roman emperors before Christ was indeed terrible, but the next thousand years were no better; they rather resembled a deluge in which the old nations were exterminated by barbarians. The second millennium was better, very much better. The third will perhaps close with a complete reconciliation between humanity and God. Everything points to that, though the heathen may reign for a while as instruments of chastisement, and executioners and possessors of wealth. The Egyptian has an important part to play, and slavery is not bad as a school of discipline. In the desert one learns the difficult art of loneliness, and in the strange land of Assyria one feels a wholesome home-sickness. Still, when the Egyptian raises his stick to strike, comfort yourself with Christ's words to Pilate, 'Thou wouldest have no power over Me, if it were not given thee from above.' And when you eat the bread of the heathen, think like the Maccabees, 'I eat thy bread, but I do not sacrifice upon thy altar.' Everything is tolerable so long as we do not let ourselves be beguiled into believing that those who are in power are God's friends and favourites. Our fine gentlemen who imagine that they are forwarding development and are the sole trustees of right, progress, and illumination, are only children of this world. Let that be granted them, and much good may it do them!"

=When Nations Go Mad.=--The teacher said: "Nations are sometimes seized by madness as by other diseases. The Javanese are said to suffer from chronic madness; the men run amuck with a knife in order to slay; the women suffer from a mania for mimicry; if they see anyone throw something into the air, they imitate the gesture; they can even under such circumstances throw their children away. The Japanese again are attacked by megalomania; someone begins to shout, 'We will conquer China!' and his cry is taken up by the whole town and the whole land. The French were raving when, in 1870, they sang 'A Berlin,' and did not even reach the Rhine. Paris was captured. But the French declared it was not captured, but had surrendered. When the enemy had marched in peaceably and spared the town, and after peace was concluded the French set their own town on fire. That was madness. Then they shot down thirty thousand of their own countrymen, while in the war itself only eighty thousand French had fallen."

"But some nations are seized by a mania for suicide. I know a land from which people emigrate at the rate of a hundred a day; in which the only important industry--iron-mining--is hampered by an export duty; that is suicide. In the same land, where the taxes are generally collected by levying distraints, they voted forty million pounds for the army; but when the muster-rolls came to be made up, the men were not to be found. In the same country the State maintains a railway of a hundred miles in length; recently the train came in with one passenger, whose journey had cost the State more than a thousand kronas. That is suicide."

=The Poison of Lies.=--The teacher said: "Let us return to life, and to men whom we think we know better than anything else, although self-knowledge is the hardest of all. A perpetual accusation which people bring against each other is that of lying. All lie more or less--by omitting principal points and emphasising secondary ones, or by colouring matters of fact. Often they do it with an excusable purpose; for instance, when a friend is being spoken about.

"But there are men who seem to be composed of falsehood and deceit. Such are the liars from necessity, who lie in order to obtain something; such, too, are the liars from ostentation, who lie in order to be superior to others, and to keep them down. One may be poisoned in the atmosphere which they spread around them.

"There is a pair of liars whom I have never seen, but often heard spoken about. When I merely hear about them and their falsehoods, I feel my brain affected, and their poison works telepathically on my nerves. The pair are dogged by misfortune, and live alone. They tell each other lies also, and pretend to themselves that they are martyrs, although their misfortunes are solely due to their deceits. They believe that they are persecuted by men, while, on the contrary, men fly from them. Such they have been since childhood, and seem unable to change. Perhaps their mendacity is a form of punishment, for 'they that hate the righteous shall be guilty.'"

=Murderous Lies.=--The teacher continued: "When one lives on intimate terms with liars, one runs a risk of becoming a liar oneself. One believes what they say, bases his views on their falsehoods, spreads their false reports in good faith, defends their sophistries, and is entangled in their deceits. Moreover, one's whole view of life is distorted, one loses contact with reality, lives in a fictitious world of feeling, regards friends as foes and foes as friends, thinks one is loved while one is hated, and vice versa.