Epimenides.
How true that there is nothing dead in this Universe; that what
we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse
order! “The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,” says one,
“has still force; else how could it _rot?_” Our whole Universe is
but an infinite Complex of Forces; thousandfold, from Gravitation
up to Thought and Will; man’s Freedom environed with Necessity of
Nature: in all which nothing at any moment slumbers, but all is
for ever awake and busy. The thing that lies isolated inactive
thou shalt nowhere discover; seek every where from the granite
mountain, slow-mouldering since Creation, to the passing
cloud-vapour, to the living man; to the action, to the spoken
word of man. The word that is spoken, as we know,
flies-irrevocable: not less, but more, the action that is done.
“The gods themselves,” sings Pindar, “cannot annihilate the
action that is done.” No: this, once done, is done always; cast
forth into endless Time; and, long conspicuous or soon hidden,
must verily work and grow for ever there, an indestructible new
element in the Infinite of Things. Or, indeed, what _is_ this
Infinite of Things itself, which men name Universe, but an
action, a sum-total of Actions and Activities? The living
ready-made sum-total of these three,—which Calculation cannot
add, cannot bring on its tablets; yet the sum, we say, is written
visible: All that has been done, All that is doing, All that will
be done! Understand it well, the Thing thou beholdest, that Thing
is an Action, the product and expression of exerted Force: the
All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb _To do._
Shoreless Fountain-Ocean of Force, of power to _do;_ wherein
Force rolls and circles, billowing, many-streamed, harmonious;
wide as Immensity, deep as Eternity; beautiful and terrible, not
to be comprehended: this is what man names Existence and
Universe; this thousand-tinted Flame-image, at once veil and
revelation, reflex such as he, in his poor brain and heart, can
paint, of One Unnameable dwelling in inaccessible light! From
beyond the Star-galaxies, from before the Beginning of Days, it
billows and rolls,—round _thee_, nay thyself art of it, in this
point of Space where thou now standest, in this moment which thy
clock measures.
Or apart from all Transcendentalism, is it not a plain truth of
sense, which the duller mind can even consider as a truism, that
human things wholly are in continual movement, and action and
reaction; working continually forward, phasis after phasis, by
unalterable laws, towards prescribed issues? How often must we
say, and yet not rightly lay to heart: The seed that is sown, it
will spring! Given the summer’s blossoming, then there is also
given the autumnal withering: so is it ordered not with
seedfields only, but with transactions, arrangements,
philosophies, societies, French Revolutions, whatsoever man works
with in this lower world. The Beginning holds in it the End, and
all that leads thereto; as the acorn does the oak and its
fortunes. Solemn enough, did we think of it,—which unhappily and
also happily we do not very much! Thou there canst begin; the
Beginning is for thee, and there: but where, and of what sort,
and for whom will the End be? All grows, and seeks and endures
its destinies: consider likewise how much grows, as the trees do,
whether _we_ think of it or not. So that when your Epimenides,
your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle, awakens
again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years’ sleep of
his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change
while we think not of it; much even that is within us. The truth
that was yesterday a restless Problem, has today grown a Belief
burning to be uttered: on the morrow, contradiction has
exasperated it into mad Fanaticism; obstruction has dulled it
into sick Inertness; it is sinking towards silence, of
satisfaction or of resignation. Today is not Yesterday, for man
or for thing. Yesterday there was the oath of Love; today has
come the curse of Hate. Not willingly: ah, no; but it could not
help coming. The golden radiance of youth, would it willingly
have tarnished itself into the dimness of old age?—Fearful: how
we stand enveloped, deep-sunk, in that Mystery of TIME; and are
Sons of Time; fashioned and woven out of Time; and on us, and on
all that we have, or see, or do, is written: Rest not, Continue
not, Forward to thy doom!
But in seasons of Revolution, which indeed distinguish themselves
from common seasons by their _velocity_ mainly, your miraculous
Seven-sleeper might, with miracle enough, wake _sooner:_ not by
the century, or seven years, need he sleep; often not by the
seven months. Fancy, for example, some new Peter Klaus, sated
with the jubilee of that Federation day, had lain down, say
directly after the Blessing of Talleyrand; and, reckoning it all
safe _now_, had fallen composedly asleep under the timber-work of
the Fatherland’s Altar; to sleep there, not twenty-one years, but
as it were year and day. The cannonading of Nanci, so far off,
does not disturb him; nor does the black mortcloth, close at
hand, nor the requiems chanted, and minute guns, incense-pans and
concourse right over his head: none of these; but Peter sleeps
through them all. Through one circling year, as we say; from July
14th of 1790, till July the 17th of 1791: but on that latter day,
no Klaus, nor most leaden Epimenides, only the Dead could
continue sleeping; and so our miraculous Peter Klaus awakens.
With what eyes, O Peter! Earth and sky have still their joyous
July look, and the Champ-de-Mars is multitudinous with men: but
the jubilee-huzzahing has become Bedlam-shrieking, of terror and
revenge; not blessing of Talleyrand, or any blessing, but
cursing, imprecation and shrill wail; our cannon-salvoes are
turned to sharp shot; for swinging of incense-pans and
Eighty-three Departmental Banners, we have waving of the one
sanguinous _Drapeau-Rouge_.—Thou foolish Klaus! The one lay in
the other, the one _was_ the other _minus_ Time; even as
Hannibal’s rock-rending vinegar lay in the sweet new wine. That
sweet Federation was of last year; this sour Divulsion is the
self-same substance, only older by the appointed days.
No miraculous Klaus or Epimenides sleeps in these times: and yet,
may not many a man, if of due opacity and levity, act the same
miracle in a natural way; we mean, with his eyes open? Eyes has
he, but he sees not, except what is under his nose. With a
sparkling briskness of glance, as if he not only saw but saw
through, such a one goes whisking, assiduous, in his circle of
officialities; not dreaming but that _it_ is the whole world: as,
indeed, where your vision terminates, does not inanity begin
_there_, and the world’s end clearly declares itself—to you?
Whereby our brisk sparkling assiduous official person (call him,
for instance, Lafayette), suddenly startled, after year and day,
by huge grape-shot tumult, stares not less astonished at it than
Peter Klaus would have done. Such natural-miracle Lafayette can
perform; and indeed not he only but most other officials,
non-officials, and generally the whole French People can perform
it; and do bounce up, ever and anon, like amazed Seven-sleepers
awakening; awakening amazed at the noise they themselves _make_.
So strangely is Freedom, as we say, environed in Necessity; such
a singular Somnambulism, of Conscious and Unconscious, of
Voluntary and Involuntary, is this life of man. If any where in
the world there was astonishment that the Federation Oath went
into grape-shot, surely of all persons the French, first swearers
and then shooters, felt astonished the most.
Alas, offences must come. The sublime Feast of Pikes, with its
effulgence of brotherly love, unknown since the Age of Gold, has
changed nothing. That prurient heat in Twenty-five millions of
hearts is not cooled thereby; but is still hot, nay hotter. Lift
off the pressure of command from so many millions; all pressure
or binding rule, except such melodramatic Federation Oath as they
have bound _themselves_ with! For _Thou shalt_ was from of old
the condition of man’s being, and his weal and blessedness was in
obeying that. Wo for him when, were it on hest of the clearest
necessity, rebellion, disloyal isolation, and mere _I will_,
becomes his rule! But the Gospel of Jean-Jacques has come, and
the first Sacrament of it has been celebrated: all things, as we
say, are got into hot and hotter prurience; and must go on
pruriently fermenting, in continual change noted or unnoted.
“Worn out with disgusts,” Captain after Captain, in Royalist
moustachioes, mounts his warhorse, or his Rozinante war-garron,
and rides minatory across the Rhine; till all have ridden.
Neither does civic Emigration cease: Seigneur after Seigneur
must, in like manner, ride or roll; impelled to it, and even
compelled. For the very Peasants despise him in that he dare not
join his order and fight.[325] Can he bear to have a Distaff, a
_Quenouille_ sent to him; say in copper-plate shadow, by post; or
fixed up in wooden reality over his gate-lintel: as if he were no
Hercules but an Omphale? Such scutcheon they forward to him
diligently from behind the Rhine; till he too bestir himself and
march, and in sour humour, another Lord of Land is gone, _not_
taking the Land with him. Nay, what of Captains and emigrating
Seigneurs? There is not an angry word on any of those Twenty-five
million French tongues, and indeed not an angry thought in their
hearts, but is some fraction of the great Battle. Add many
successions of angry words together, you have the manual brawl;
add brawls together, with the festering sorrows they leave, and
they rise to riots and revolts. One reverend thing after another
ceases to meet reverence: in visible material combustion, château
after château mounts up; in spiritual invisible combustion, one
authority after another. With noise and glare, or noisily and
unnoted, a whole Old System of things is vanishing piecemeal: on
the morrow thou shalt look and it is not.