- end_line
- 15060
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 15002
- text
- immaturity, to the attempt at a mature work,--a circumstance
sufficiently lamentable in itself; but also, in the hour of his
clamorous pennilessness, he was additionally goaded into an enterprise
long and protracted in the execution, and of all things least calculated
for pecuniary profit in the end. How these things were so, whence they
originated, might be thoroughly and very beneficially explained; but
space and time here forbid.
At length, domestic matters--rent and bread--had come to such a pass
with him, that whether or no, the first pages must go to the printer;
and thus was added still another tribulation; because the printed pages
now dictated to the following manuscript, and said to all subsequent
thoughts and inventions of Pierre--_Thus and thus_; _so and so_; _else
an ill match_. Therefore, was his book already limited, bound over, and
committed to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form
or conclusion at all. Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in
authorship that is high? While the silly Millthorpe was railing against
his delay of a few weeks and months; how bitterly did unreplying Pierre
feel in his heart, that to most of the great works of humanity, their
authors had given, not weeks and months, not years and years, but their
wholly surrendered and dedicated lives. On either hand clung to by a
girl who would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in
his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from any thing
divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of hundreds of
thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as at the Pole.
And the great woe of all was this: that all these things were
unsuspected without, and undivulgible from within; the very daggers that
stabbed him were joked at by Imbecility, Ignorance, Blockheadedness,
Self-Complacency, and the universal Blearedness and Besottedness around
him. Now he began to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were
forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate. He felt as a moose,
hamstrung. All things that think, or move, or lie still, seemed as
created to mock and torment him. He seemed gifted with loftiness, merely
that it might be dragged down to the mud. Still, the profound
willfulness in him would not give up. Against the breaking heart, and
the bursting head; against all the dismal lassitude, and deathful
faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness, and craziness, still he
like a demigod bore up. His soul's ship foresaw the inevitable rocks,
but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous wreck. Now he gave jeer
for jeer, and taunted the apes that jibed him. With the soul of an
Atheist, he wrote down the godliest things; with the feeling of misery
and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For the pangs
in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And every thing else he
disguised under the so conveniently adjustable drapery of
all-stretchable Philosophy. For the more and the more that he wrote, and
the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting
elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the
greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of
all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the
more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So that there was
nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations; nothing he more
abhorred than the loftiest part of himself. The brightest success, now
seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest
success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the
one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and
dove-tailing accidents for the rest. So beforehand he despised those
laurels which in the very nature of things, can never be impartially
bestowed. But while thus all the earth was depopulated of ambition for
- title
- Chunk 2