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Although the poet has not made any use of this incident in description, the actual experience which it gave him of what despair is, could not but enrich his metaphysical store, and increase his knowledge of terrible feelings; of the workings of the darkest and dreadest anticipations slow famishing death cannibalism and the rage of self-devouring hunger.
Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling in the flux.
Those who recall the last evenings of July, 1914, and the even more beautiful evening of the first day of August, must keep in their minds the wonderful splendour of Nature, as with a smile of pity she stretched out her arms to the degraded, self-devouring human race. It was nearly ten o'clock when Clerambault ceased to talk, for no one had answered him.
Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.
It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts, and aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker within, breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb English peasant, self-devouring meditation, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism.
Humanly speaking, surely the Imperial mind will be effectual in the Julich and Berg matter. There is no doubt about that fact, about that self-devouring pair of facts. To such straits is a Kaiser driven when he gets deep into spectre-hunting.
I trembled to think of this desolate child, whose griefs were incessantly augmented by solitude and idleness, of that soul defenselessly abandoned to its gloomy reveries, of that poor heart maddened, and pouncing upon itself as upon a prey; self-devouring, constantly reopening his wounds and inflaming them, without work or study to divert him a single instant from his monotonous torment. Oh!
The question then arises what we see in this abnormal state, and whether our sympathy takes the form of COMMON JOY or COMMON SORROW. This question the true MEN OF GENIUS and the true SAINTS of all times have answered in the sense that they have seen nothing but SORROW and felt nothing but COMMON SORROW. For they recognized the NORMAL state of all living things and the terrible, always self-contradictory, always self-devouring and blindly egotistic, nature of the "will of life" which is common to all living things.
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