Chapter CLXXXV: Section 6: After which festivities Thyrsis bid farewell to his family

once more, and went away to wrestle with his angel. Weeks of failure and struggle it cost him before he could get back what he had lost--before he could recall those phrases that had once blazed white-hot in his brain, and could see again the whole gigantic form and figure of his undertaking. Many an hour he spent pacing his little eight-foot piazza--four steps and a half each way, back and forth; many a night he would sit before his little fourteen-inch stove, so lost in his meditations that the stove would lose its red-hot glow, and the icy gale which raged outside and rattled the door would steal in through the cracks and set him to shivering.

Other times he would trudge through the snow and mud to the town, spending the day in the library, and then bringing out an armful of books to last him through the night. Thyrsis had read pretty thoroughly the literature of the six languages he knew; but now--this was the appalling nature of his task--he had to go back and read it over again. He did not realize, until he got actually at the work, what an utter overturning there would be in all his ideas. How strange it was to return and read the “classics” of one’s youth! What oceans of futility one discovered, what mountains of pretense--and with what forests of scholarship grown over them! It seemed to Thyrsis that everywhere he turned the search-light of his new truth, the structure of his opinions would topple like a house of cards. Truly, here was a _“Götzendämmerung”_, an _“Umwertung aller Werthe”!_

The worst of it was that he had to read, not only literature, but also history--often his own kind of history, that had not yet been written. If he wished to know the Shakespearean dramas as a product of the aristocratic and imperialist ideal in the glory and intoxication of its youth, he had to study, not only Shakespeare’s poetry, but the cultural and social life of the Elizabethan people. And he could not take any man’s word for the truth; he had to know for himself. The thing that would avail him in this battle was not eloquence and fervor, not the flashes of his irony and the white-hot shafts of his scorn. What he must have were facts, and more facts--and then again facts!

The facts were there, to be had for the gathering. Thyrsis again could only compare himself to Aladdin in his palace. Could it be believed that so many ideas had been left for one man to discover? It seemed to him, that the kingdoms of literature lay at his mercy; he was like a magician who has discovered a new spell, which places his rivals in his power. He knew that this book, if he could ever finish it, would alter the aspect of literary criticism, as a blow changes the pattern in a kaleidoscope.

Thyrsis had failed many times before, but this time he felt that success was in his hands; he knew the bookworld now, he was master of the game. This would set them to thinking, this would stir them up! He had got under the armor of his enemy at last, and he could feel him wince and writhe at each thrust that he drove home. So he wrought at his task, in a state of tense excitement, living always in imagination in the midst of the battle, following stroke with stroke and driving a rout before him.--So he would be for weeks; and then would come the reaction, when he fell back exhausted, and realized that his victory was mere phantasy, that nothing of it really counted until he had completed his labor. And that would take two years! Two years!