Читать книгу Niels Lyhne - Jens Peter Jacobsen - Страница 6

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THERE are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden. Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses itself in them, as they return to perfect health.

But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts.

Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope, tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame. His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no God

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had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the sky.

A stillness fell upon him. His faith had flung itself blindly against the gates of heaven, and now it lay on Edele's grave with broken wings. For he had believed with the crude, implicit fairy-tale faith that children so often feel. The complex, subtly shaded figure of the Catechism is not the God children believe in; their God is the mighty one in the Old Testament, He who loved Adam and Eve so much, and to whom the whole generation of men, kings, prophets, Pharaohs, are nothing but good and bad children, this tremendous, fatherly God, who is wrathful with the anger of a giant and bountiful with the generosity of a giant, Who has hardly created life before He lets death loose upon it, Who drowns His earth in the waters from His heaven, who thunders down laws too heavy for the race He made, and who, finally, in the days of the Emperor Augustus, has pity upon men and sends His Son to death in order that the law may be broken while it is fulfilled. This God, Who always answers with a miracle, is the one to whom children speak when they pray. By and by, a day comes when they understand that they have heard His voice for the last time in the earthquake that shook Golgotha and opened the graves, and that now, since the veil of His Holy of Holies has been rent in twain, it is the God Jesus who reigns; and from that day on they pray differently.

But Niels had not yet attained to this. It is true, he had followed Jesus on His earthly pilgrimage with a believing heart, but when he saw Him subjecting Himself to the Father, going about so bereft of power and

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suffering so humanly, all this had hidden the godhead from him. He had seen in Him only the one Who did the will of the Father, the Son of God, not God Himself: therefore, it was to God the Father he had prayed, and it was God the Father who had failed him in his bitter need. But if God had turned from him, he could turn from God. If God had no ears, he had no lips; if God had no compassion, he had no worship, and he defied and cast God out of his heart.

On the day Edele was buried, he spumed the earth of the grave with his foot, whenever the pastor spoke the name of the Lord, and when he met it afterwards in books or on the lips of people, a rebellious frown would wrinkle his youthful forehead. When he lay down to sleep at night, a sense of forsaken greatness came over him, as he thought that now all the others, children and grown people, were praying to the Lord and closing their eyes in His name, while he alone held his hands from clasping in prayer, he alone refused to do God homage. He was shut out from the sheltering care of Heaven. No angel watched by his side; alone and unprotected, he drifted on the strangely murmuring waters of darkness, and loneliness enfolded him, spreading out from his bed in ever widening and receding circles. Still he did not pray; though he longed till tears came, he did not call.

And it was so all his life. He had freed himself defiantly from the point of view imposed upon him by his teachers, and he fled with his sympathy to the side of those who had wasted their strength in vainly kicking against the pricks. In the books he had been given to read and in what he had been taught, God and His chosen people and ideas marched on in an endless tri-

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umphal procession, and he had joined in the jubilant shouting, had exulted in the sense of being counted with the proud legions of the conqueror; for is not victory always righteous, and is not the victor a liberator, a reformer, a light bringer?

But now the shouting had died down. Now he was silent, and he began to enter into the thoughts of the defeated and feel with the hearts of the vanquished. He understood that even when that which prevails is good, that which yields is not therefore bad. He went over to the losing side and told himself that this was finer and greater. The power of the victor he called mere brute force and violence. He took sides--as whole-heartedly as he could--against God, but as a vassal who takes up arms against his liege lord; for he still believed, and could not drive out his faith by defiance.

His tutor, Mr. Bigum, was not one who could lead a soul back to the old paths. Indeed, his temperamental philosophy, by virtue of which he could be fired and enraptured by each and every side of the question-today one; tomorrow, another--set all dogmas adrift in the minds of his pupils. At bottom he was really a man of Christian principles, and if any one could have pinned him down saying what was the fixed point in all this fluid matter, he would most likely have replied that it was the creed of the Evangelical Lutheran Church or something akin to that, but he himself had very little inclination to drive his pupils along the straight road of orthodoxy or to warn them at every step that the least deviation from the beaten track meant straying into lies and darkness, likely to end in perdition and hell; for he had none of the passionate concern of the orthodox for jots and tittles. He was, in fact, religious in

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the slightly artistic, superior manner such talented people affect, not afraid of a little harmonizing, easily enticed into half unconscious rearrangements and adaptations, because, whatever they do, they must assert their own personality, and, in whatever spheres they fly, must hear the whirring of their own wings.

Such people do not guide, but their instruction has a fullness, a copiousness, and a wobbly many-sidedness which, provided they do not utterly confuse a pupil, tend to develop his independence in a high degree, since they almost force him to make up his mind for himself. For children can never rest upon anything vague or indefinite; their very instinct of self-preservation demands a plain Yes or a plain No, a for or against, to show them where to turn with their hate and where with their love.

Hence there was no firm and immutable authority that might have guided Niels with its constant clinching of arguments and pointing of ways. He had taken the bit in his teeth, and plunged headlong on any path that opened before him, provided only that it led him away from what had been the home of his feelings and of his thoughts.

He felt a new sense of power in thus seeing with his own eyes and choosing with his own heart and forming himself by his own will. Many new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole. It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspi-

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cious of questions, and imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment. Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife, while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was the pastor as he saw him now.

And Mr. Bigum?

He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele's love, had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the philosopher rising in Olympic calm above the vague whirlwinds and mist-born rainbows of life. It roused a painful contempt in the lad and made his doubts sleep but lightly, ready to wake in a moment. For how could he know that the very things in human nature which Mr. Bigum called by belittling names were otherwise christened when they appeared in himself, and that his Olympic calm toward that which moves common mortals was but a Titan's disdainful smile, quick with memories of a Titan's longing and a Titan's passions.

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