Leon Trotsky: Merezhkovsky

[My own translation of the Russian text in "Kievskaya Mysl" NN 137, 140, 19 May/1 June and 22 May/4 June 1911 , reprinted in Sochineniya, Vol. 20, Moscow-Leningrad 1926, compared to the German translation. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

I. The cultural self-lover

The fate of Mr. Merezhkovsky is highly noteworthy. He has been prophesying for a long time: in fictional prose and poetry, in theological articles and critical feuilletons, he prophesies persistently. But he was not noticed – also with a tenacity that must have seemed astonishing to him, precisely because it was too natural. He was noticed only in the very last pre-revolutionary years, when all Russian life, from surface to bottom, began to be stirred with a big stick, so that hundreds of things were revealed that were not noticed, thousands of questions surfaced that did not exist yesterday, what seemed undeniable turned into a mystery – and here the "new religious consciousness" of Mr. Merezhkovsky found a response, at least gave rise to a circle interest in it: it promised to open a way out for the pre-thunderstorm longing of some refined Petersburg souls. But the thunderstorm broke out, events rolled not only over mystical heads, the prophecies fell silent or were drowned out. Mysticism is temporarily swept away like a broom. And only when the wave of events swept back, leaving behind in many souls some kind of nervous-lustful need to renew their way of thinking in the shortest possible time, Merezhkovsky again seized attention – now on a much larger scale than before. During this period of all-round liquidation, Mr. Merezhkovsky emerged from the circle of seclusion, became worldly and began to prophesy even from the pulpit of "Rech" – which, by the way, could not have happened if Mr. I. Gessen and Milyukov¹ did not say to themselves that this prophecy is in good time. But now the signs are changing again: the demand for soul-saving sermons has fallen terribly, the prophetic department has disappeared from Rech along with the football department, the sober devil of politics is again becoming the master of the situation. In view of this, it must be admitted that Mr. Merezhkovsky sums up his results in the most timely manner, publishing his collected works. And one can only fear that the publication will be delayed, and further volumes will be published too late ...

★ ★ ★

We spoke of Merezhkovsky's prophecy not in a conventional, figurative, and certainly not in an ironic sense. Merezhkovsky is a mystic not in the broad and vague interpretation in which this word has come to be used in the literature of recent years, where they speak of the mysticism of sexual love, the mystical personality of the state, and even, it seems, the mysticism of line-by-line payments. No, Merezhkovsky, as Chekhov said about him in one letter, "definitely believes, believes as a teacher." He believes – and this is his starting point – that "life without God and death without resurrection make not only every person, but all of humanity a rotting mass." He calls his religion apocalyptic. He is waiting for the coming covenant, which will finally reconcile flesh and soul, old and new Testament. Through historical Christianity, he calls for the religion of the Trinity. "It is precisely the doctrine of the Trinity that binds historical Christianity with apocalyptic Christianity by an inextricable link." "Each of the three divine Hypostases," he explains, "is a combination of the other two, so that the entire fullness of the Trinity can be expressed by the symbolic number 333. Repeated in the devil's mirror, doubled 333 gives 666". No matter how dubious this mathematical combination is in itself (and we would strongly advise against introducing it into school textbooks of arithmetic exercises), it is quite eloquent evidence that Merezhkovsky "believes as a teacher, believes definitely." Without going further into the area of ​​the new apocalyptic dogma, where we risk getting very confused out of inexperience, we will confine ourselves to just one more expressive example.

"It seems to you," Merezhkovsky addresses Berdyaev in an "open letter" written in the tone of the epistles of the Apostle Paul, "that the problem of the devil has not been solved for me. You are mistaken: for me this problem has been finally solved."

"The problem of the devil" – what a combination of these two words alone! Irony falls before the solemn seriousness of the thinker who has finally solved the problem of the devil. And Merezhkovsky is always like this. Wit is an absolutely uncharacteristic trait for him. All the "problems" of his faith – the immortality of the devil, both 333 and 666 – he poses with concentrated seriousness. In broad daylight and loudly, he once invited Berdyaev to join him as a companion, which probably frightened this flirtatious philosophical flaneur a lot. Without collapsing from failures, Mr. Merezhkovsky walks in the chaos of our non-apocalyptic time, like "someone in black" ... – like someone in a black frock coat.

★ ★ ★

For it is not a cassock that Mr. Merezhkovsky is wearing, but a frock coat, moreover, of the most excellent French cut, as evidence that we are facing a secular man who is not at all intending to renounce the blessings of this world. In anticipation of the coming covenant, Mr. Merezhkovsky not only accepts the lenten food, but also other food. And the latter is even preferable.

His mysticism is not impatient, not impetuous. He does not feel at all in a field tent, on the contrary, his inclinations are sedentary, he wants, really wants to take a thorough look around here on earth. He even sees "a great untruth, or rather, a great incompleteness" in the feelings of the first centuries of Christianity with their impetously impatient expectation of the end. And you can't live in the dying mood for centuries. Thousands of years have passed since the first disciples believed that "the end is at the door" – and more may still pass. And in this slowness of the world-historical process, which leads from the first coming to the second, there is, according to Merezhkovsky, a "desirability" of its own. The truth about eternity should not obscure the truth about time, and longing for eternity should not prevent us from enjoying comfort. This is the very essence of the "new religious consciousness".

Mr. A. Blok reproached us, the unassigned, that we do not understand Merezhkovsky, that we do not see how his soul is torn into pieces: he seeks the higher hail and at the same time is in love with culture. He does not love it, as we do, with a calculating, prosaic love, but in love like an artist, like Don Quixote.

That Merezhkovsky is firmly attached to culture is so. But why – like Don Quixote? Don Quixote's love is not only fanatical, but also fantastic and hopeless in its fantasticness: it is love for what is condemned by history, a struggle for what cannot be defended. But what danger threatens the accumulated wealth of centuries with which Merezhkovsky is "in love"?

However, there is an active and passionate – and at the same time, a non-Don-Quixote – attitude towards culture: among the socially disadvantaged, among the awakened masses, who have yet to pave their way to culture. But such love is not the lot of Merezhkovsky: he has no need either to prove or to exercise his right to culture – he only has to love it with a calm and satisfied love of possession. Greek classics, church fathers, French erotica – he uses it all as naturally as he uses a pocket watch or a handkerchief. Culture – from room comfort to the highest aesthetic values – is not a treasure that he is afraid to lose, and not an ideal that he wants to achieve, but the milieu given to him. Milieu (according to Merezhkovsky, "middle") is flat, philistinism, and satisfied philistinism is rudeness. Where to look for salvation from immersion in the rudeness of ennobled cultural vegetation? And here mysticism comes to the rescue. In it, Merezhkovsky has a super-cultural sanction of culture, a guarantee that, by sucking on culture, he does a higher deed and, most importantly, is not just rotting human flesh, even if it is civilised. Culture and Eternity are two foundations of Merezhkovsky. Eternity is the most preferential deferral of payment for moral bills presented by culture. Reconciling with cultural contradictions and with itself, Eternity guarantees, above all else, beyond the limits of culture, an eminently tempting continuation.

★ ★ ★

Merezhkovsky simply turned out to be an early cultural individualist, a premature European self-lover in a historical environment hostile to such a type, for here everything still breathed collective feelings and moods. In the struggle for his self-preservation, Merezhkovsky fenced himself off from everyone and built for himself his own personal temple, from within himself. Me and culture, me and eternity – this is its central, its only theme. Among the Russian intelligent mystics, most of them of the newest formation, Merezhkovsky stands apart, as an indigenous mystic. Struve, Berdyaev, Bulgakov and other materialists became half-mystics and mystics, to the extent that their political sympathies moved from left to right. But Merezhkovsky moved his political sympathies from right to left in the struggle to preserve his mysticism. From the consecration of autocracy, he came to the Christian-anarchist ideal of theocratic powerlessness – not because he was looking for the truth of human relations, but solely under the influence of the needs of his personal self-assertion, but all-round, so that he could completely satisfy both "here" and "there", so that one doesn't has to worry about anything anymore. The revolutionary epoch created a crack in his individualistic shell and showed that there is in the world not only "I" and culture, but also a third factor: the mass, and Merezhkovsky allowed the mass into his inner chambers, however, only a little further than the threshold, and not the real mass of the people, but for his own use he himself invented, "the most apocalyptic in the world." The ideal Christian community turns out to be just a facelift of the apocalyptic millennial reign of saints on earth and practically does not commit to anything. "It is almost impossible to find even the first real point for a theocratic 'action'”, Merezhkovsky himself complains melancholy, and, nevertheless, does not subject his earthly ideal to any revision, for for him it is, in essence, not a matter of overturning this unrighteous world, but about how to mystically interpret it. Is it worth worrying about the impossibility of social action, since the "problem of the devil" is finally resolved!

In contrast to Ivan Karamazov², who still agreed to accept God, but did not accept the world he created, with innocent victims, tortured babies, and who respectfully, that is, in essence, boldly, returned his ticket – Mr. Merezhkovsky is always ready to accept the world – both with Pobedonostsev, and with anarchy – only under one condition: that this world should be mystically salted, so that it would not rot and stink.

So he remained, this early European self-lover, in Russian conditions an alien figure in a correct black frock coat. “In Russia they didn’t love me and scolded me,” complains Merezhkovsky, “abroad they loved me and praised me; but both here and there they did not understand my I.” There is a little false self-consolation in this fair complaint. It is true that Merezhkovsky was praised abroad, that is, in fact, they praised him, but it is completely wrong that he was loved there. Europeans, and even then only the Romans, approved of the author of Leonardo³ as a writer who was well acquainted with Europe, at least with the outer shell of its culture, as an educated European of barbarians; but there can be no question of any significance of him in the life of ideas of the West. And in his homeland, which was all shuddering from internal tension, it was precisely for this reason that they did not love him and did not praise him, because in all his transformations they invariably discovered the same mystic-observer, a person from the outside, a selfish stranger. From his loneliness, Merezhkovsky sought shelter in different places, but always without success. Among the hierarchs with whom he talked a lot, he found official complacency and not at all mystical bureaucracy: "Do not be flippant and do not be superstitious," they said to him, "stand where we indicate: we have everything provided for." On the part of the liberals, he met only skeptical benevolence: "There is no need to save us, we will save ourselves somehow, but try it among the masses: there we will support you against the Left" ... Finally, among the "Lefts," that is, ... among the intelligentsia (Merezhkovsky never looked deeper), he found "real religious ascetics and martyrs", but – alas! – martyrs in the name of humanity, ascetics without God.

Remaining a stranger to everyone, Merezhkovsky does not build anything on the connection of people with each other, in his social conclusions he does not at all persist. Here he is docile, compliant and conditional to the extreme. At first he blessed the Pobedonostsev statehood, then he blessed "The Pale Horse"⁴ ... Declaring bourgeoisness as a devil's daughter, he settled down perfectly in Rech's feuilletons. Branding the state as a devilish seduction, he united with Struve, the herald of the divinity of the state principle. Summoning Berdyaev to be his fellow traveller, he interrogates him not about his views on the future historical fate of humankind, but only about whether he, Berdyaev, "believes that the man Jesus, crucified under Pontius Pilate, was not only a Man, but also God." "This is the only thing," says Merezhkovsky himself, "that we have finally gained and which we can never lose." In this confession, Merezhkovsky is fully revealed. Between the foundation of culture and the dome of mysticism, where the "truth about social salvation" should be placed, he has an open void, which he is powerless to fill once and for all. Yes, he does not even notice it, for by all his nature he is not a social person, but an introverted self-lover.

II. The quotation devil

But is Merezhkovsky's mysticism beyond doubt? The only thing that is "finally acquired" (apart from the cultural foundation underfoot, about which there is no dispute), the apocalyptic dome over the head, is it really authentic, from the forged gold of mysticism, without ligature?

So where, then, does the cultural self-lover of the twentieth century in the most modern frock coat get genuine mysticism? And will he grasp it? And does he need it? .. But he would not be a cultural cream skimmer, in the most refined sense of the word, if he did not know that one must not put a finger in the mouth of mysticism, for it is intolerant and gluttonous, like a skinny Pharaoh's cow, it is capable of absorbing the whole culture without a trace, with all its convenient, sweet and beautiful conquests. After all, it drives from the world into monasticism, into asceticism – this is its natural aspiration. Therefore, immortality must be taken in reasonable doses, otherwise, according to Rozanov's expression, the world can turn rancid from it. The truth about eternity and the truth about time must be kept in balance most of all ... Eternity will come in due time, but for now we will take away from it a thousand years (one moment!), And even a thousand years – will not diminish it, but to our earthly age a century is enough.

And, at the same time, is the price of eternity big, let me ask you, if you exchange it for moments? After all, this is, neither give nor take, that one hundred-ruble nightingale, which the merchant ordered to fry in the tavern, and when it was fried, he demanded to cut off his portion for a dime.

Does our mystic completely introduce eternity into his personal use, does it determine the rhythm of his life by it? Not at all, he unceremoniously exchanges it in the small shop of history for a small coin of time. And then, consuming the same time as we, sinners, he swaggers over us – saying that he has cut off only a small portion of eternity, but that he has plenty of eternity to spare ...

Merezhkovsky has a favorite image: "an imaginary mirror depth, a real plane." So he talks about Russian atheism, he also characterises the devil so. Whether he is right about atheism, we will not analyse, and how accurately he depicts the devil, we find it difficult to decide. But it seems to us that he could best describe himself with these words. After all, all his new religious consciousness lies in a plane, devoid of flesh and blood, only external outlines, a projection of something, a naked formula, one shadow of other people's beliefs, one mirror image of unknown depths ...

Does he finally believe? If he speaks, then he believes. But he is not given to infect others with his faith. He always appears to be anxious, but he does not disturb anyone. He is terribly rich in titanic antitheses, but they do not excite, do not burst into consciousness, are not remembered. He always has penetration in his tone, but he does not penetrate. He lacks a little: genuine passion. He has a soul without wings. He is selfish. He is the coldest, calculating, symmetrical person, measuring and weighing, following his every step. He does earthly calculations, no doubt, much better than apocalyptic ones. By nature he is not a mystic, but also not a realist: he is sobriety itself.

And at the same time – and his whole fate is the guarantee of that – an ineradicable, irresistible need for mysticism, a mysterious take-off, ascent, passion lives in him. By his own sobriety, he is frightened to the very core – and all his mysticism is stubborn, not knowing the rest of overcoming himself in himself.

★ ★ ★

The struggle with one's own sobriety in the name of "abysses", Christian or pagan, all the same – for both are equally inaccessible – is the main contradiction that runs through the work of Mr. Merezhkovsky. And in front of this subjective contradiction, objective contradictions recede and are unrecognisably belittled in his mind: between realism and mysticism, scientific law and dogma, mental self-order and social construction, between submissive humankind and all-conquering humankind. All these contradictions generated by historical development are alien to him in their internal moral tension: they only provide him with material for literary antitheses. He exploits them in a parasitic, superficial way in the fight against his own temperance and thinks that he is reconciling them. Unable to join the passion of great historical principles, restoring a son to a father and a brother to a brother, he presents his moral impotence, in which everything is depersonalised, as a synthesis.

Hence the apparent courage with which he accepts extreme conclusions in both directions. The new religious consciousness adopts "all traditions, all dogmas, all sacraments, all revelations" and at the same time all culture and the juice of it – science. It accepts legends that contradict the laws of gravity and impenetrability, overturning the entire Euclidean mind upside down, and at the same time – all human conquests, past and future, based on the laws of this very Euclidean mind. But how does it take them? Does it translate them into a higher synthesis (where is it, where are the hints of of!)? Or does he simply put up with a premature contradiction, developing it into a cowardly compromise?

Old man Karamazov says: "But I'm ready to believe in hell, only without a ceiling ... Well, if there is no ceiling, then there are no hooks. And if there are no hooks, then it's all for naught..." How does Merezhkovsky think to overcome this everyday Voltaireanism, a reflex of rationalistic forms of modern life? Will he scare you with "rudeness"? Not enough: if the hooks are not intimidating, then the word even less so. But this is only the first blow.

The second, the most difficult, comes from the side of scientific natural science. What, in essence, can Mr. Merezhkovsky present in this area? How and with what is he going to get even with natural science?

The third, already completely unbearable test comes from the side of the historical, evolutionary or dialectical method, which is the very essence of modern mental culture. What is on earth, what is under the earth – it considers everything in the process of emergence, development and disappearance. Step by step, it cleans up virgin spaces, displacing mythological creatures from them and developing a true picture of development – from the atom to the amoeba and from the amoeba to Mr. Merezhkovsky. Revealing at what stage of biological development, in what conditions and in what form the belief in miracles was born and what transformations it experienced, it subordinates the "miracle" in its psychological roots to the laws of nature and thus kills it.

If Merezhkovsky is right that the first Christians would not have stood the test if they looked into the course on church history, then it is permissible to ask: what are the relations of Mr. Merezhkovsky himself to the scientific history of primitive religions? Did he seriously subject himself to this test? Darwinism, Marxism – has he settled his score with them? It is unnecessary even to raise these questions. In the works of Merezhkovsky, one does not feel the most distant breath of the historical method. With the stubborn limitation of a pedagogue, he interprets his most subjective and most modern needs into old texts, torn off from their historical roots. In world history, he sees not a natural process of the development of the collective human being, who has broken off from the chain of his zoological ancestors and systematically subjugates the earth, but a motley moving panorama in which an imperious chance is from time to time curbed by the direct intervention of extraterrestrial forces.

But where is the science in this? And where is the reconciliation of culture with mysticism? After all, in this case its soul is actually turned off from culture: the scientific method of world cognition. But culture minus the scientific ideas that inspire it, is only comfort. Not the oak, but only the acorn. That a self-lover, and especially a sober one, can "reconcile in the highest unity" the golden acorns of the newest comfort with the oaks of ancient legends is not a miracle. But is it worth building a garden for the "new religious consciousness" for this?

When Alyosha Karamazov, Mr. Merezhkovsky's closest patron, respectfully speaks of the funeral pancakes: "time-honoured, eternal and therefore good," you feel that no matter how much Dostoevsky hides behind his poor and impersonal Alyosha, he, Dostoevsky, cannot have the funeral pancake in his mouth: for the author of "The Karamazovs" sees the real depths and genuine contradictions. And Mr. Merezhkovsky, opening a new epoch of the human spirit, in the most conscientious manner undertakes to consume all the pancake of ritual, and thinks that by this feat he will reconcile earth with heaven ...

And the result is this: even though Merezhkovsky knows for sure that the millennial kingdom of the saints will come at the very end, already before the destruction of the cosmic world; although he solved the problem of the devil and, moreover, solved it finally; although he promises to cope even with the funeral pancake (if it isn't a clod after all!), he didn’t reconcile not only the objective contradictions of realism and mysticism, but he didn’t achieve his own inner balance at all. "It is better to be a pea jester," he himself admits, "than a modern prophet." And is it not fatal that he recalls the pea jester?

The devil that, for the sake of a diplomatic evening with a St. Petersburg lady, was accordingly embodied: a tailcoat, a white tie, gloves – and in this form raced through the starry spaces, where the temperature is 150 degrees below zero, so that he had to catch severe rheumatism and be treated for it with Goff's maltz extract (incarnated – therefore, accept the consequences!), – after all, this rheumatic devil of Ivan Karamazov completely determines the level, frankly, of the buffoon, on which Merezhkovsky seeks imaginary synthesis. The spirit opens up: eternity and the ether of stellar spaces – nothing inaccessible! – and for temporary bodily incarnation: maltz extract of material culture. And our initial proposal that irony falls dead in the face of the cultured European who has found the exact formula of the devil turns out to be completely unfounded. Actually not so! No matter how unrelated to Merezhkovsky the Heine element of insolent wit is, which also erases the lines between hell and maltz extract, only from the other end, but the more sensitive he is from this unprotected side of his, the more he is afraid of the poison of Voltaire, the more he is, despite for all external courage, timid about the reticularity (ridiculousness) of his mission.

Take for example the ominous prophecy of Mr. Merezhkovsky, who predicted nothing more and nothing less than the death of the city of St. Petersburg on the Neva, in a feuilleton in "Rech": "Petersburg will be empty." What is it: a mind game? But who is playing so …? A mockery? But whose? Mystical fanaticism? … with a Parisian frock coat? – "I must have a fever," Merezhkovsky explains, "don't be surprised that my words will look like delirium." This means that he takes his divination seriously if he refers to a fever in mitigation. But, however, excuse me: one, two, three, four ... twenty-four. Twenty-four quotes! Take the trouble to check: there are two dozen quotes in the Pythian feuilleton: from "Petersburg antiquity", from Lermontov, of course, from Dostoevsky, from a factory ditty, from Radishchev, of course, again from Dostoevsky, from Antioch Kantemir, from Ivan Aksakov, of course, from the Apocalypse, etc., etc. ... Who does this, let me ask you, especially in delirium? He stumbled across two lines, took a book off the shelf, copied the quote, then again from himself. He prophesied five lines, again took off a book, wrote out a rhyme, and again into the arms of the prophetic fever. And this is always the case with Merezhkovsky: as if walking on rubble, risking every minute of running into a spearhead, and, worst of all, you soon lose all hope that this exhausting path really leads somewhere.

What is this ill-fated quotomania of Merezhkovsky, which makes his articles an impossible hodgepodge from poetic and prosaic passages, arbitrarily shredded, interspersed with his own half-thoughts, half-hints, also similar to scattered quotations?

Needless to say, a quote is sometimes both useful and necessary. It can persuade or testify. It can entertain or serve as a decoration. It may even open an outlet for the author's modesty if, interrupting his presentation, he steps aside to give the floor to another, greater one.

Merezhkovsky's quotes are not proof, for he does not prove anything at all. These are not decorations either, for it is difficult to imagine another style, more offensive to literary taste. This is not modesty either, for Merezhkovsky quotes just anyone, big and small, and almost always with outrageous disrespect for the author, tearing out two or three words, a line, often for the sake of only one consonance. At first, this manner is striking as excessive tastelessness and, if it will be allowed to say this in relation to our so European writer, it is precisely its lack of culture that strikes. A monstrous lack of measure and an addiction to sham effects characterise the cultural parvenu (upstart), which is too richly dressed to be comme il faut (as it should), and in literature too defiantly "brilliant" to produce a complete aesthetic impression. In moments, this indiscriminate greed for verbal tinsel is quite reminiscent of a savage who adorns himself with an ostrich feather, a ring in his nostril and a shard of a beer bottle. But for Merezhkovsky, the most cultured and enlightened writer, this violence against taste must have some deeper reasons of its own. And it has.

If one is not afraid to be too crudely understood, one could say that a bad conscience manifests itself in this literary manner: a "mystical" impotence that cannot overcome skepticism and irony, a creative impotence that fears clarity and simplicity most of all. Where there is not enough power of ideas, literary cunning comes to the rescue. And the quote is its weapon. The courage with which Merezhkovsky dares to present to us, children of the 20th century, his apocalyptic prophecies, is only the façade side; and behind it hides a secret fear of his own sobriety. Those who are possessed by passion are not afraid to be ridiculous, they prophesy without flirting with fever, and they herald the end of the world, without hiding behind quotes. Merezhkovsky's spiritual cowardice is incomparably deeper and more meaningful than his phraseological courage, and this is to such an extent that his ostentatious courage consists in essence on the premises of his cowardice.

The psychological hide and seek from oneself can be traced further, going from quotes to their authors. Merezhkovsky always has "companions": Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov, Herzen and many others. Most of all, he is afraid to remain face to face with himself. Contrary to the definition of Merezhkovsky himself, his companions are not at all "eternal" – otherwise he would have to always walk in a crowd. It would be more correct if we say that Merezhkovsky himself is the "companion". He adheres to one, to the other, accompanies them, like a devoted and faithful, like a loving disciple, selects their words, repeats their gestures. But this is only external. In fact, what happens with the imaginary "companions" is exactly the same as what happens with the quotations, also three-quarters imaginary: they serve as a cover with which Merezhkovsky, like with a corpse in a war, protects himself from enemy shots. If he had not been such a self-absorbed self, he would never have allowed himself such an unceremonious reprisal against his teachers, such disfiguring psychological vivisections. He always has the giants of the ancient and new worlds only as attorneys by appointment: advocates of God or advocates of the devil. With that cold symmetry that distinguishes him, he distributes them in two ranks and instructs them to formulate what he cannot formulate in his own name and in his own words.

Therefore, we dare to think that the only genuine unclean force tempting Mr. Merezhkovsky is that devil, or rather, some devil of the XIV class, who is in charge of quotations. Ah, these treacherous quotes! They lure Mr. Merezhkovsky with their ready-made smartness, promise him to cover up all the holes in his "new consciousness" and present his thoughts in the most prominent and advantageous way possible. And then, when the deed is done and the quotes, like dried leaves, are raked into a heap, the little devil sticks out his tongue from the top of it and says: "Well, you please to be a prophet, but you don't have your own words!"