ON HEROES, HERO WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN
HISTORY
BOOK 1: I. PRELIMINARY, II. EDITORIAL
DIFFICULTIES, III. REMINISCENCES, IV. CHARACTERISTICS, V. THE WORLD
IN CLOTHES, VI. APRONS, VII.
MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL, VIII. THE WORLD OUT OF
CLOTHES, IX. ADAMITISM, X.
PURE REASON, XI. PROSPECTIVE
BOOK 2: I. GENESIS, II. IDYLLIC, III. PEDAGOGY, IV. GETTING UNDER
WAY, V. ROMANCE, VI.
SORROWS OF TEUFELSDRÖCKH, VII. THE EVERLASTING NO,
VIII. CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE, IX. THE EVERLASTING YEA, X. PAUSE
BOOK 3: I. INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY, II.
CHURCH-CLOTHES, III. SYMBOLS, IV. HELOTAGE, V. THE PHOENIX,
VI. OLD CLOTHES, VII.
ORGANIC FILAMENTS, VIII. NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM,
IX. CIRCUMSPECTIVE, X. THE
DANDIACAL BODY, XI. TAILORS, XII. FAREWELL
APPENDIX—TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS
Considering our present
advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished
and borne about, with more or less effect, for five-thousand years and upwards;
how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps
more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rush-lights, and Sulphur-matches,
kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest
cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,--it might strike
the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a
fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been
written on the subject of Clothes.
Our Theory of Gravitation
is as good as perfect: Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the
Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more
cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on any other scheme.
Whereby, at least, our nautical Logbooks can be better kept; and
water-transport of all kinds has grown more commodious. Of Geology and Geognosy
we know enough: what with the labours of our Werners and Huttons, what with the
ardent genius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a Royal
Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of
a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the
question, How the apples were got in,
presented difficulties. Why mention our disquisitions on the Social Contract,
on the Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the Herring? Then, have we not a
Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value; Philosophies of Language, of History, of
Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man’s whole life and
environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of
his Soul, Body, and Possessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled,
desiccated, and scientifically decomposed: our spiritual Faculties, of which it
appears there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards:
every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies,
Bichâts.
How, then, comes it, may
the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real
Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science,--the vestural Tissue,
namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost
wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and
screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its
being? For if, now and then, some straggling, broken-winged thinker has cast an
owl’s-glance into this obscure region, the most have soared over it altogether
heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite natural
and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. In all
speculations they have tacitly figured man as a Clothed Animal; whereas he is by nature a Naked Animal; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and
device, masks himself in Clothes. Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look
before and after: the more surprising that we do not look round a little, and
see what is passing under our very eyes.
But here, as in so many
other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to
our aid. It is, after all, a blessing that, in these revolutionary times, there
should be one country where abstract Thought can still take shelter; that while
the din and frenzy of Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts
of Paris, deafen every French and every English ear, the German can stand
peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, struggling
multitude here and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory
blast of cowhorn, emit his Höret ihr Herren und lasset’s Euch sagen; in other words, tell the Universe, which so often
forgets that fact, what o’clock it really is. Not unfrequently the Germans have
been blamed for an unprofitable diligence; as if they struck into devious
courses, where nothing was to be had but the toil of a rough journey; as if,
forsaking the gold-mines of finance and that political slaughter of fat oxen
whereby a man himself grows fat, they were apt to run goose-hunting into
regions of bilberries and crowberries, and be swallowed up at last in remote
peat-bogs. Of that unwise science, which, as our Humorist expresses it,--
‘By
geometric scale Doth take the size of pots of ale;’
still more, of that
altogether misdirected industry, which is seen vigorously thrashing mere straw,
there can nothing defensive be said. In so far as the Germans are chargeable
with such, let them take the consequence. Nevertheless, be it remarked, that
even a Russian steppe has tumuli and gold ornaments; also many a scene that
looks desert and rock-bound from the distance, will unfold itself, when
visited, into rare valleys. Nay, in any case, would Criticism erect not only
finger-posts and turnpikes, but spiked gates and impassable barriers, for the
mind of man? It is written, ‘Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased.’ Surely the plain rule is, Let each considerate person have his way,
and see what it will lead to. For not this man and that man, but all men make
up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind. How often have we seen
some such adventurous, and perhaps much-censured wanderer light on some
out-lying, neglected, yet vitally-momentous province; the hidden treasures of
which he first discovered, and kept proclaiming till the general eye and effort
were directed thither, and the conquest was completed;--thereby, in these his
seemingly so aimless rambles, planting new standards, founding new habitable
colonies, in the immeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night!
Wise man was he who counselled that Speculation should have free course, and
look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever
and howsoever it listed.
Perhaps it is proof of the
stunted condition in which pure Science, especially pure moral Science,
languishes among us English; and how our mercantile greatness, and invaluable
Constitution, impressing a political or other immediately practical tendency on
all English culture and endeavour, cramps the free flight of Thought,--that
this, not Philosophy of Clothes, but recognition even that we have no such
Philosophy, stands here for the first time published in our language. What
English intellect could have chosen such a topic, or by chance stumbled on it?
But for that same unshackled, and even sequestered condition of the German
Learned, which permits and induces them to fish in all manner of waters, with
all manner of nets, it seems probable enough, this abstruse Inquiry might, in
spite of the results it leads to, have continued dormant for indefinite
periods. The Editor of these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of
confirmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to
confess, that never, till these last months, did the above very plain
considerations, on our total want of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur to him; and
then, by quite foreign suggestion. By the arrival, namely, of a new Book from
Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo; treating expressly of this subject,
and in a style which, whether understood or not, could not even by the blindest
be overlooked. In the present Editor’s way of thought, this remarkable
Treatise, with its Doctrines, whether as judicially acceded to, or judicially
denied, has not remained without effect.
‘Die Kleider, ihr Werden
und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence): von Diog. Teufelsdröckh,
J.U.D. etc. Stillschweigen und Co^{gnie}. Weissnichtwo, 1831.
‘Here,’ says the Weissnichtwo’sche
Anzeiger, ‘comes a Volume of that
extensive, close-printed, close-meditated sort, which, be it spoken with pride,
is seen only in Germany, perhaps only in Weissnichtwo. Issuing from the
hitherto irreproachable Firm of Stillschweigen and Company, with every external
furtherance, it is of such internal quality as to set Neglect at defiance.’ * *
* * ‘A work,’ concludes the wellnigh enthusiastic Reviewer, ‘interesting alike
to the antiquary, the historian, and the philosophic thinker; a masterpiece of
boldness, lynx-eyed acuteness, and rugged independent Germanism and
Philanthropy (derber Kerndeutschheit und Menschenliebe); which will not, assuredly, pass current without
opposition in high places; but must and will exalt the almost new name of
Teufelsdröckh to the first ranks of Philosophy, in our German Temple of Honour.’
Mindful of old friendship,
the distinguished Professor, in this the first blaze of his fame, which however
does not dazzle him, sends hither a Presentation-copy of his Book; with
compliments and encomiums which modesty forbids the present Editor to rehearse;
yet without indicated wish or hope of any kind, except what may be implied in
the concluding phrase: Möchte es
(this remarkable Treatise) auch im Brittischen Boden gedeihen!
If for a speculative man,
‘whose seedfield,’ in the sublime words of the Poet, ‘is Time,’ no conquest is
important but that of new ideas, then might the arrival of Professor
Teufelsdröckh’s Book be marked with chalk in the Editor’s calendar. It is
indeed an ‘extensive Volume,’ of boundless, almost formless contents, a very
Sea of Thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will; yet wherein the toughest
pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck
but with true orients.
Directly on the first
perusal, almost on the first deliberate inspection, it became apparent that
here a quite new Branch of Philosophy, leading to as yet undescried ulterior
results, was disclosed; farther, what seemed scarcely less interesting, a quite
new human Individuality, an almost unexampled personal character, that, namely,
of Professor Teufelsdröckh the Discloser. Of both which novelties, as far as
might be possible, we resolved to master the significance. But as man is
emphatically a proselytising creature, no sooner was such mastery even fairly
attempted, than the new question arose: How might this acquired good be
imparted to others, perhaps in equal need thereof: how could the Philosophy of
Clothes, and the Author of such Philosophy, be brought home, in any measure, to
the business and bosoms of our own English Nation? For if new-got gold is said
to burn the pockets till it be cast forth into circulation, much more may new
truth.
Here, however, difficulties
occurred. The first thought naturally was to publish Article after Article on
this remarkable Volume, in such widely-circulating Critical Journals as the
Editor might stand connected with, or by money or love procure access to. But,
on the other hand, was it not clear that such matter as must here be revealed,
and treated of, might endanger the circulation of any Journal extant? If,
indeed, all party-divisions in the State could have been abolished, Whig, Tory,
and Radical, embracing in discrepant union; and all the Journals of the Nation
could have been jumbled into one Journal, and the Philosophy of Clothes poured
forth in incessant torrents therefrom, the attempt had seemed possible. But,
alas, what vehicle of that sort have we, except Fraser’s Magazine? A vehicle all strewed (figuratively speaking) with
the maddest Waterloo-Crackers, exploding distractively and destructively,
wheresoever the mystified passenger stands or sits; nay, in any case,
understood to be, of late years, a vehicle full to overflowing, and inexorably
shut! Besides, to state the Philosophy of Clothes without the Philosopher, the
ideas of Teufelsdröckh without something of his personality, was it not to
insure both of entire misapprehension? Now for Biography, had it been otherwise
admissible, there were no adequate documents, no hope of obtaining such, but
rather, owing to circumstances, a special despair. Thus did the Editor see
himself, for the while, shut out from all public utterance of these
extraordinary Doctrines, and constrained to revolve them, not without
disquietude, in the dark depths of his own mind.
So had it lasted for some
months; and now the Volume on Clothes, read and again read, was in several
points becoming lucid and lucent; the personality of its Author more and more
surprising, but, in spite of all that memory and conjecture could do, more and
more enigmatic; whereby the old disquietude seemed fast settling into fixed
discontent,--when altogether unexpectedly arrives a Letter from Herr Hofrath
Heuschrecke, our Professor’s chief friend and associate in Weissnichtwo, with
whom we had not previously corresponded. The Hofrath, after much quite
extraneous matter, began dilating largely on the ‘agitation and attention’
which the Philosophy of Clothes was exciting in its own German Republic of
Letters; on the deep significance and tendency of his Friend’s Volume; and
then, at length, with great circumlocution, hinted at the practicability of
conveying ‘some knowledge of it, and of him, to England, and through England to
the distant West’: a work on Professor Teufelsdröckh ‘were undoubtedly welcome
to the Family, the National, or any other of those patriotic Libraries, at present the glory of British Literature’; might
work revolutions in Thought; and so forth;--in conclusion, intimating not
obscurely, that should the present Editor feel disposed to undertake a
Biography of Teufelsdröckh, he, Hofrath Heuschrecke, had it in his power to
furnish the requisite Documents.
As in some chemical
mixture, that has stood long evaporating, but would not crystallise, instantly
when the wire or other fixed substance is introduced, crystallisation
commences, and rapidly proceeds till the whole is finished, so was it with the
Editor’s mind and this offer of Heuschrecke’s. Form rose out of void solution
and discontinuity; like united itself with like in definite arrangement: and
soon either in actual vision and possession, or in fixed reasonable hope, the
image of the whole Enterprise had shaped itself, so to speak, into a solid
mass. Cautiously yet courageously, through the twopenny post, application to
the famed redoubtable OLIVER YORKE was now made: an interview, interviews with
that singular man have taken place; with more of assurance on our side, with
less of satire (at least of open satire) on his, than we anticipated;--for the
rest, with such issue as is now visible. As to those same ‘patriotic Libraries,’ the Hofrath’s counsel could only be viewed with
silent amazement; but with his offer of Documents we joyfully and almost
instantaneously closed. Thus, too, in the sure expectation of these, we already
see our task begun; and this our Sartor Resartus, which is properly a ‘Life and Opinions of Herr
Teufelsdröckh,’ hourly advancing.
* * * * *
Of our fitness for the
Enterprise, to which we have such title and vocation, it were perhaps
uninteresting to say more. Let the British reader study and enjoy, in
simplicity of heart, what is here presented him, and with whatever metaphysical
acumen and talent for meditation he is possessed of. Let him strive to keep a
free, open sense; cleared from the mists of prejudice, above all from the
paralysis of cant; and directed rather to the Book itself than to the Editor of
the Book. Who or what such Editor may be, must remain conjectural, and even
insignificant:[1] it is a voice publishing tidings of the Philosophy of
Clothes; undoubtedly a Spirit addressing Spirits: whoso hath ears, let him
hear.
[1] With us even he still
communicates in some sort of mask, or muffler: and, we have reason to think,
under a feigned name!--O. Y.
On one other point the
Editor thinks it needful to give warning: namely, that he is animated with a
true though perhaps a feeble attachment to the Institutions of our Ancestors;
and minded to defend these, according to ability, at all hazards; nay, it was
partly with a view to such defence that he engaged in this undertaking. To
stem, or if that be impossible, profitably to divert the current of Innovation,
such a Volume as Teufelsdröckh’s, if cunningly planted down, were no despicable
pile, or floodgate, in the logical wear.
For the rest, be it nowise
apprehended, that any personal connexion of ours with Teufelsdröckh,
Heuschrecke, or this Philosophy of Clothes can pervert our judgment, or sway us
to extenuate or exaggerate. Powerless, we venture to promise, are those private
Compliments themselves. Grateful they may well be; as generous illusions of
friendship; as fair mementos of bygone unions, of those nights and suppers of
the gods, when, lapped in the symphonies and harmonies of Philosophic
Eloquence, though with baser accompaniments, the present Editor revelled in that
feast of reason, never since vouchsafed him in so full measure! But what then? Amicus
Plato, magis amica veritas;
Teufelsdröckh is our friend, Truth is our divinity. In our historical and
critical capacity, we hope we are strangers to all the world; have feud or
favour with no one,--save indeed the Devil, with whom, as with the Prince of
Lies and Darkness, we do at all times wage internecine war. This assurance, at
an epoch when puffery and quackery have reached a height unexampled in the
annals of mankind, and even English Editors, like Chinese Shopkeepers, must
write on their door-lintels No cheating here,--we thought it good to premise.
To the Author’s private
circle the appearance of this singular Work on Clothes must have occasioned
little less surprise than it has to the rest of the world. For ourselves, at
least, few things have been more unexpected. Professor Teufelsdröckh, at the
period of our acquaintance with him, seemed to lead a quite still and
self-contained life: a man devoted to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more
likely, if he published at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili,
both of whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than to
descend, as he has here done, into the angry noisy Forum, with an Argument that
cannot but exasperate and divide. Not, that we can remember, the Philosophy of
Clothes once touched upon between us. If through the high, silent, meditative
Transcendentalism of our Friend we detected any practical tendency whatever, it
was at most Political, and towards a certain prospective, and for the present
quite speculative, Radicalism; as indeed some correspondence, on his part, with
Herr Oken of Jena was now and then suspected; though his special contribution
to the Isis could never be more
than surmised at. But, at all events, nothing Moral, still less anything
Didactico-Religious, was looked for from him.
Well do we recollect the
last words he spoke in our hearing; which indeed, with the Night they were
uttered in, are to be forever remembered. Lifting his huge tumbler of Gukguk,[2] and for a moment lowering his tobacco-pipe, he
stood up in full Coffee-house (it was Zur Grünen Gans, the largest in Weissnichtwo, where all the
Virtuosity, and nearly all the Intellect of the place assembled of an evening);
and there, with low, soul-stirring tone, and the look truly of an angel, though
whether of a white or of a black one might be dubious, proposed this toast: Die
Sache der Armen in Gottes und Teufels Namen (The Cause of the Poor, in Heaven’s name and ----‘s)! One full shout,
breaking the leaden silence; then a gurgle of innumerable emptying bumpers,
again followed by universal cheering, returned him loud acclaim. It was the
finale of the night: resuming their pipes; in the highest enthusiasm, amid
volumes of tobacco-smoke; triumphant, cloud-capt without and within, the
assembly broke up, each to his thoughtful pillow. Bleibt doch ein echter
Spass- und Galgen-vogel, said
several; meaning thereby that, one day, he would probably be hanged for his
democratic sentiments. Wo steckt doch der Schalk? added they, looking round: but Teufelsdröckh had
retired by private alleys, and the Compiler of these pages beheld him no more.
[2] Gukguk is unhappily
only an academical-beer.
In such scenes has it been
our lot to live with this Philosopher, such estimate to form of his purposes
and powers. And yet, thou brave Teufelsdröckh, who could tell what lurked in
thee? Under those thick locks of thine, so long and lank, overlapping roof-wise
the gravest face we ever in this world saw, there dwelt a most busy brain. In
thy eyes too, deep under their shaggy brows, and looking out so still and
dreamy, have we not noticed gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire, and
half-fancied that their stillness was but the rest of infinite motion, the sleep of a spinning-top? Thy little figure, there as, in
loose, ill-brushed threadbare habiliments, thou sattest, amid litter and
lumber, whole days, to ‘think and smoke tobacco,’ held in it a mighty heart. The
secrets of man’s Life were laid open to thee; thou sawest into the mystery of
the Universe, farther than another; thou hadst in petto thy remarkable Volume on Clothes. Nay, was there not
in that clear logically-founded Transcendentalism of thine; still more, in thy
meek, silent, deep-seated Sansculottism, combined with a true princely Courtesy
of inward nature, the visible rudiments of such speculation? But great men are
too often unknown, or what is worse, misknown. Already, when we dreamed not of
it, the warp of thy remarkable Volume lay on the loom; and silently, mysterious
shuttles were putting in the woof!
* * * * *
How the Hofrath Heuschrecke
is to furnish biographical data, in this case, may be a curious question; the
answer of which, however, is happily not our concern, but his. To us it
appeared, after repeated trial, that in Weissnichtwo, from the archives or
memories of the best-informed classes, no Biography of Teufelsdröckh was to be
gathered; not so much as a false one. He was a stranger there, wafted thither
by what is called the course of circumstances; concerning whose parentage,
birthplace, prospects, or pursuits, curiosity had indeed made inquiries, but
satisfied herself with the most indistinct replies. For himself, he was a man
so still and altogether unparticipating, that to question him even afar off on
such particulars was a thing of more than usual delicacy: besides, in his sly
way, he had ever some quaint turn, not without its satirical edge, wherewith to
divert such intrusions, and deter you from the like. Wits spoke of him secretly
as if he were a kind of Melchizedek, without father or mother of any kind;
sometimes, with reference to his great historic and statistic knowledge, and
the vivid way he had of expressing himself like an eye-witness of distant
transactions and scenes, they called him the Ewige Jude, Everlasting, or as we say, Wandering Jew.
To the most, indeed, he had
become not so much a Man as a Thing; which Thing doubtless they were accustomed
to see, and with satisfaction; but no more thought of accounting for than for
the fabrication of their daily Allgemeine Zeitung, or the domestic habits of the Sun. Both were there
and welcome; the world enjoyed what good was in them, and thought no more of
the matter. The man Teufelsdröckh passed and repassed, in his little circle, as
one of those originals and nondescripts, more frequent in German Universities
than elsewhere; of whom, though you see them alive, and feel certain enough
that they must have a History, no History seems to be discoverable; or only
such as men give of mountain rocks and antediluvian ruins: That they may have
been created by unknown agencies, are in a state of gradual decay, and for the
present reflect light and resist pressure; that is, are visible and tangible
objects in this phantasm world, where so much other mystery is.
It was to be remarked that
though, by title and diploma, Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft, or as we should say in English, ‘Professor of Things
in General,’ he had never delivered any Course; perhaps never been incited
thereto by any public furtherance or requisition. To all appearance, the
enlightened Government of Weissnichtwo, in founding their New University,
imagined they had done enough, if ‘in times like ours,’ as the half-official
Program expressed it, ‘when all things are, rapidly or slowly, resolving
themselves into Chaos, a Professorship of this kind had been established;
whereby, as occasion called, the task of bodying somewhat forth again from such
Chaos might be, even slightly, facilitated.’ That actual Lectures should be
held, and Public Classes for the ‘Science of Things in General,’ they doubtless
considered premature; on which ground too they had only established the
Professorship, nowise endowed it; so that Teufelsdröckh, ‘recommended by the
highest Names,’ had been promoted thereby to a Name merely.
Great, among the more
enlightened classes, was the admiration of this new Professorship: how an
enlightened Government had seen into the Want of the Age (Zeitbedürfniss); how at length, instead of Denial and Destruction,
we were to have a science of Affirmation and Reconstruction; and Germany and
Weissnichtwo were where they should be, in the vanguard of the world.
Considerable also was the wonder at the new Professor, dropt opportunely enough
into the nascent University; so able to lecture, should occasion call; so ready
to hold his peace for indefinite periods, should an enlightened Government
consider that occasion did not call. But such admiration and such wonder, being
followed by no act to keep them living, could last only nine days; and, long
before our visit to that scene, had quite died away. The more cunning heads
thought it was all an expiring clutch at popularity, on the part of a Minister,
whom domestic embarrassments, court intrigues, old age, and dropsy soon
afterwards finally drove from the helm.
As for Teufelsdröckh,
except by his nightly appearances at the Grüne Gans, Weissnichtwo saw little of him, felt little of him.
Here, over his tumbler of Gukguk, he sat reading Journals; sometimes
contemplatively looking into the clouds of his tobacco-pipe, without other
visible employment: always, from his mild ways, an agreeable phenomenon there;
more especially when he opened his lips for speech; on which occasions the
whole Coffee-house would hush itself into silence, as if sure to hear something
noteworthy. Nay, perhaps to hear a whole series and river of the most memorable
utterances; such as, when once thawed, he would for hours indulge in, with fit
audience: and the more memorable, as issuing from a head apparently not more
interested in them, not more conscious of them, than is the sculptured stone
head of some public fountain, which through its brass mouth-tube emits water to
the worthy and the unworthy; careless whether it be for cooking victuals or
quenching conflagrations; indeed, maintains the same earnest assiduous look,
whether any water be flowing or not.
To the Editor of these
sheets, as to a young enthusiastic Englishman, however unworthy, Teufelsdröckh opened
himself perhaps more than to the most. Pity only that we could not then half
guess his importance, and scrutinise him with due power of vision! We enjoyed,
what not three men in Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of access
to the Professor’s private domicile. It was the attic floor of the highest
house in the Wahngasse; and might truly be called the pinnacle of Weissnichtwo,
for it rose sheer up above the contiguous roofs, themselves rising from
elevated ground. Moreover, with its windows it looked towards all the four Orte, or as the Scotch say, and we ought to say, Airts: the sitting-room itself commanded three; another
came to view in the Schlafgemach
(bedroom) at the opposite end; to say nothing of the kitchen, which offered
two, as it were, duplicates, and
showing nothing new. So that it was in fact the speculum or watch-tower of
Teufelsdröckh; wherefrom, sitting at ease, he might see the whole
life-circulation of that considerable City; the streets and lanes of which,
with all their doing and driving (Thun und Treiben), were for the most part visible there.
“I look down into all that
wasp-nest or bee-hive,” have we heard him say, “and witness their wax-laying
and honey-making, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade,
where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down to
the low lane, where in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin
livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all; for, except the
Schlosskirche weathercock, no biped stands so high. Couriers arrive bestrapped
and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged-up in pouches of leather: there,
top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls-in the country Baron and his
household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging
alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with Food,
with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, and go
tumbling out again with Produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring
through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is
coming, whither it is going? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewigkeit hin: From Eternity, onwards to Eternity! These are
Apparitions: what else? Are they not Souls rendered visible: in Bodies, that
took shape and will lose it, melting into air? Their solid Pavement is a
picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind
them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen
yonder, with spurs on its heels and feather in its crown, is but of Today,
without a Yesterday or a Tomorrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when
Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a living link in
that Tissue of History, which inweaves all Being: watch well, or it will be
past thee, and seen no more.”
“Ach, mein Lieber!” said he once, at midnight, when we had returned from
the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, “it is a true sublimity to dwell here.
These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousandfold
exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of
them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal
fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the
chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets,
are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and
only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum,
I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven!
Oh, under that hideous covelet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable
gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the
sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are
praying,--on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around
them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his
perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into
truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure
cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly
emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of
State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are
Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of
hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders: the Thief, still
more silently, sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the
watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and
dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in
the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot
eyes look-out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light
of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow: comes no
hammering from the Rabenstein?--their
gallows must even now be o’ building. Upwards of five-hundred-thousand
two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal positions;
their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries
aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother,
with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips
only her tears now moisten.—All these heaped and huddled together, with
nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them;--crammed in, like
salted fish in their barrel;--or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian
pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others: such work goes on under that smoke-counterpane!--But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars.”
We looked in his face to
see whether, in the utterance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling
might be traced there; but with the light we had, which indeed was only a
single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old
calmness and fixedness was visible.
These were the Professor’s
talking seasons: most commonly he spoke in mere monosyllables, or sat
altogether silent, and smoked; while the visitor had liberty either to say what
he listed, receiving for answer an occasional grunt; or to look round for a
space, and then take himself away. It was a strange apartment; full of books
and tattered papers, and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable substances,
‘united in a common element of dust.’ Books lay on tables, and below tables;
here fluttered a sheet of manuscript, there a torn handkerchief, or nightcap
hastily thrown aside; ink-bottles alternated with bread-crusts, coffee-pots,
tobacco-boxes, Periodical Literature, and Blücher Boots. Old Lieschen (Lisekin,
‘Liza), who was his bed-maker and stove-lighter, his washer and wringer, cook,
errand-maid, and general lion’s-provider, and for the rest a very orderly
creature, had no sovereign authority in this last citadel of Teufelsdröckh;
only some once in the month she half-forcibly made her may thither, with broom
and duster, and (Teufelsdröckh hastily saving his manuscripts) effected a
partial clearance, a jail-delivery of such lumber as was not literary. These
were her Erdbeben (earthquakes),
which Teufelsdröckh dreaded worse than the pestilence; nevertheless, to such
length he had been forced to comply. Glad would he have been to sit here
philosophising forever, or till the litter, by accumulation, drove him out of
doors: but Lieschen was his right-arm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and
would not be flatly gainsayed. We can still remember the ancient woman; so
silent that some thought her dumb; deaf also you would often have supposed her;
for Teufelsdröckh, and Teufelsdröckh only, would she serve or give heed to; and
with him she seemed to communicate chiefly by signs; if it were not rather by some
secret divination that she guessed all his wants, and supplied them. Assiduous
old dame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, in her kitchen, with the least
possible violence to the ear; yet all was tight and right there: hot and black
came the coffee ever at the due moment; and the speechless Lieschen herself
looked out on you, from under her clean white coif with its lappets, through
her clean withered face and wrinkles, with a look of helpful intelligence,
almost of benevolence.
Few strangers, as above hinted,
had admittance hither: the only one we ever saw there, ourselves excepted, was
the Hofrath Heuschrecke, already known, by name and expectation, to the readers
of these pages. To us, at that period, Herr Heuschrecke seemed one of those
purse-mouthed, crane-necked, clean-brushed, pacific individuals, perhaps
sufficiently distinguished in society by this fact, that, in dry weather or in
wet, ‘they never appear without their umbrella.’ Had we not known with what
‘little wisdom’ the world is governed; and how, in Germany as elsewhere, the
ninety-and-nine Public Men can for most part be but mute train-bearers to the
hundredth, perhaps but stalking-horses and willing or unwilling dupes,--it
might have seemed wonderful how Herr Heuschrecke should be named a Rath, or
Councillor, and Counsellor, even in Weissnichtwo. What counsel to any man, or
to any woman, could this particular Hofrath give; in whose loose, zigzag
figure; in whose thin visage, as it went jerking to and fro, in minute
incessant fluctuation,--you traced rather confusion worse confounded; at most,
Timidity and physical Cold? Some indeed said withal, he was ‘the very Spirit of
Love embodied’: blue earnest eyes, full of sadness and kindness; purse ever
open, and so forth; the whole of which, we shall now hope, for many reasons,
was not quite groundless. Nevertheless friend Teufelsdröckh’s outline, who
indeed handled the burin like few in these cases, was probably the best: Er
hat Gemüth und Geist, hat wenigstens gehabt, doch ohne Organ, ohne Schicksals-Gunst;
ist gegenwärtig aber halb-zerrüttet, halb-erstarrt, “He has heart and talent, at least has had such, yet
without fit mode of utterance, or favour of Fortune; and so is now
half-cracked, half-congealed.”—What the Hofrath shall think of this when he
sees it, readers may wonder: we, safe in the stronghold of Historical Fidelity,
are careless.
The main point, doubtless,
for us all, is his love of Teufelsdröckh, which indeed was also by far the most
decisive feature of Heuschrecke himself. We are enabled to assert that he hung
on the Professor with the fondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. And perhaps
with the like return; for Teufelsdröckh treated his gaunt admirer with little
outward regard, as some half-rational or altogether irrational friend, and at
best loved him out of gratitude and by habit. On the other hand, it was curious
to observe with what reverent kindness, and a sort of fatherly protection, our
Hofrath, being the elder, richer, and as he fondly imagined far more
practically influential of the two, looked and tended on his little Sage, whom
he seemed to consider as a living oracle. Let but Teufelsdröckh open his mouth,
Heuschrecke’s also unpuckered itself into a free doorway, besides his being all
eye and all ear, so that nothing might be lost: and then, at every pause in the
harangue, he gurgled-out his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh (for the machinery
of laughter took some time to get in motion, and seemed crank and slack), or
else his twanging nasal, Bravo! Das glaub’ ich; in either case, by way of heartiest approval. In
short, if Teufelsdröckh was Dalai-Lama, of which, except perhaps in his
self-seclusion, and god-like indifference, there was no symptom, then might
Heuschrecke pass for his chief Talapoin, to whom no dough-pill he could knead
and publish was other than medicinal and sacred.
In such environment,
social, domestic, physical, did Teufelsdröckh, at the time of our acquaintance,
and most likely does he still, live and meditate. Here, perched-up in his high
Wahngasse watch-tower, and often, in solitude, outwatching the Bear, it was
that the indomitable Inquirer fought all his battles with Dulness and Darkness;
here, in all probability, that he wrote this surprising Volume on Clothes. Additional particulars: of his age, which was of
that standing middle sort you could only guess at; of his wide surtout; the
colour of his trousers, fashion of his broad-brimmed steeple-hat, and so forth,
we might report, but do not. The Wisest truly is, in these times, the Greatest;
so that an enlightened curiosity, leaving Kings and suchlike to rest very much
on their own basis, turns more and more to the Philosophic Class: nevertheless,
what reader expects that, with all our writing and reporting, Teufelsdröckh
could be brought home to him, till once the Documents arrive? His Life,
Fortunes, and Bodily Presence, are as yet hidden from us, or matter only of
faint conjecture. But, on the other hand, does not his Soul lie enclosed in
this remarkable Volume, much more truly than Pedro Garcia’s did in the buried
Bag of Doubloons? To the soul of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, to his opinions,
namely, on the ‘Origin and Influence of Clothes,’ we for the present gladly
return.
It were a piece of vain
flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is
not, like all works of genius, like the very Sun, which, though the highest
published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and
troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration,
with dulness, double-vision, and even utter blindness.
Without committing
ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and prophesyings of the Weissnichtwo’sche
Anzeiger, we admitted that the Book
had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of
any book; that it had even operated changes in our way of thought; nay, that it
promised to prove, as it were, the opening of a new mine-shaft, wherein the
whole world of Speculation might henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially
it may now be declared that Professor Teufelsdröckh’s acquirements, patience of
research, philosophic and even poetic vigour, are here made indisputably
manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and tortuosity and manifold
ineptitude; that, on the whole, as in opening new mine-shafts is not
unreasonable, there is much rubbish in his Book, though likewise specimens of
almost invaluable ore. A paramount popularity in England we cannot promise him.
Apart from the choice of such a topic as Clothes, too often the manner of
treating it betokens in the Author a rusticity and academic seclusion,
unblamable, indeed inevitable in a German, but fatal to his success with our
public.
Of good society
Teufelsdröckh appears to have seen little, or has mostly forgotten what he saw.
He speaks-out with a strange plainness; calls many things by their mere
dictionary names. To him the Upholsterer is no Pontiff, neither is any
Drawing-room a Temple, were it never so begilt and overhung: ‘a whole immensity
of Brussels carpets, and pier-glasses, and or-molu,’ as he himself expresses
it, ‘cannot hide from me that such Drawing-room is simply a section of Infinite
Space, where so many God-created Souls do for the time meet together.’ To
Teufelsdröckh the highest Duchess is respectable, is venerable; but nowise for
her pearl bracelets and Malines laces: in his eyes, the star of a Lord is
little less and little more than the broad button of Birmingham spelter in a
Clown’s smock; ‘each is an implement,’ he says, ‘in its kind; a tag for hooking-together; and, for the rest, was dug from the earth, and
hammered on a smithy before smith’s fingers.’ Thus does the Professor look in
men’s faces with a strange impartiality, a strange scientific freedom; like a
man unversed in the higher circles, like a man dropped thither from the Moon.
Rightly considered, it is in this peculiarity, running through his whole system
of thought, that all these short-comings, over-shootings, and multiform
perversities, take rise: if indeed they have not a second source, also natural
enough, in his Transcendental Philosophies, and humour of looking at all Matter
and Material things as Spirit; whereby truly his case were but the more
hopeless, the more lamentable.
To the Thinkers of this
nation, however, of which class it is firmly believed there are individuals yet
extant, we can safely recommend the Work: nay, who knows but among the
fashionable ranks too, if it be true, as Teufelsdröckh maintains, that ‘within
the most starched cravat there passes a windpipe and weasand, and under the
thickliest embroidered waistcoat beats a heart,’—the force of that rapt
earnestness may be felt, and here and there an arrow of the soul pierce
through? In our wild Seer, shaggy, unkempt, like a Baptist living on locusts and
wild honey, there is an untutored energy, a silent, as it were unconscious,
strength, which, except in the higher walks of Literature, must be rare. Many a
deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he cast into mysterious
Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of Man. Wonderful it is with what
cutting words, now and then, he severs asunder the confusion; shears down, were
it furlongs deep, into the true centre of the matter; and there not only hits
the nail on the head, but with crushing force smites it home, and buries
it.—On the other hand, let us be free to admit, he is the most unequal
writer breathing. Often after some such feat, he will play truant for long
pages, and go dawdling and dreaming, and mumbling and maundering the merest
commonplaces, as if he were asleep with eyes open, which indeed he is.
Of his boundless Learning,
and how all reading and literature in most known tongues, from Sanchoniathon to Dr Lingard, from your Oriental Shasters,
and Talmuds, and Korans, with Cassini’s Siamese Tables, and Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste, down to Robinson Crusoe and the Belfast Town and Country Almanack, are familiar to him,--we shall say nothing: for
unexampled as it is with us, to the Germans such universality of study passes
without wonder, as a thing commendable, indeed, but natural, indispensable, and
there of course. A man that devotes his life to learning, shall he not be
learned?
In respect of style our
Author manifests the same genial capability, marred too often by the same
rudeness, inequality, and apparent want of intercourse with the higher classes.
Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigour, a true inspiration;
his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed
Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from Jove’s head; a rich, idiomatic
diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns;
all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest
Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping
and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure
doting jargon, so often intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdröckh is not
a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight
on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed-up by
props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag
hanging from them; a few even sprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite
broken-backed and dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods,
there lies in him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole
utterance of the man, like its keynote and regulator; now screwing itself aloft
as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; now sinking
in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough,
into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum
the true character is extremely difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never
fully satisfied ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humour, which we
reckon among the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere
Insanity and Inanity, which doubtless ranks below the very lowest.
Under a like difficulty, in
spite even of our personal intercourse, do we still lie with regard to the
Professor’s moral feeling. Gleams of an ethereal Love burst forth from him,
soft wailings of infinite pity; he could clasp the whole Universe into his
bosom, and keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a
very seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine;
shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and
ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it
be not mere stolid callousness,--that you look on him almost with a shudder, as
on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial
Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and
beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were
chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest. His look, as
we mentioned, is probably the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of that
cast-iron gravity frequent enough among our own Chancery suitors; but rather
the gravity as of some silent, high-encircled mountain-pool, perhaps the crater
of an extinct volcano; into whose black deeps you fear to gaze: those eyes,
those lights that sparkle in it, may indeed be reflexes of the heavenly Stars,
but perhaps also glances from the region of Nether Fire!
Certainly a most involved,
self-secluded, altogether enigmatic nature, this of Teufelsdröckh! Here,
however, we gladly recall to mind that once we saw him laugh; once only, perhaps it was the first and last time in
his life; but then such a peal of laughter, enough to have awakened the Seven
Sleepers! It was of Jean Paul’s doing: some single billow in that vast
World-Mahlstrom of Humour, with its heaven-kissing coruscations, which is now,
alas, all congealed in the frost of death! The large-bodied Poet and the small,
both large enough in soul, sat talking miscellaneously together, the present
Editor being privileged to listen; and now Paul, in his serious way, was giving
one of those inimitable ‘Extra-harangues’; and, as it chanced, On the Proposal
for a Cast-metal King: gradually a
light kindled in our Professor’s eyes and face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest
light; through those murky features, a radiant, ever-young Apollo looked; and
he burst forth like the neighing of all Tattersall’s,--tears streaming down his
cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air,--loud, long-continuing,
uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole
man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with
measure, began to fear all was not right: however, Teufelsdröckh composed
himself, and sank into his old stillness; on his inscrutable countenance there
was, if anything, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse
him again. Readers who have any tincture of Psychology know how much is to be
inferred from this; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed
can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key,
wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren
simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are
able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and
snigger from the throat outwards; or at best, produce some whiffling husky
cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good.
The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.
Considered as an Author,
Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an
almost total want of arrangement. In this remarkable Volume, it is true, his
adherence to the mere course of Time produces, through the Narrative portions,
a certain show of outward method; but of true logical method and sequence there
is too little. Apart from its multifarious sections and subdivisions, the Work
naturally falls into two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive, and a
Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of
demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents,
and indeed runs quite through the other. Many sections are of a debatable
rubric or even quite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only
loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet,
wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid,
oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one
huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invited to help itself. To bring
what order we can out of this Chaos shall be part of our endeavour.
‘As Montesquieu wrote a Spirit
of Laws,’ observes our Professor, ‘so
could I write a Spirit of Clothes;
thus, with an Esprit des Lois,
properly an Esprit de Coutumes, we
should have an Esprit de Costumes.
For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident,
but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his
Modes, and habilatory endeavours, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking;
his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his
beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out
in folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower-up in high headgear, from amid
peaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell-out in starched ruffs, buckram
stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate sections,
and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs,--will depend on the nature
of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or
altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in
Colour! From the soberest drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual
idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice of Colour: if the Cut betoken
Intellect and Talent, so does the Colour betoken Temper and Heart. In all
which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable,
though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every snip of the
Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active Influences, which
doubtless to Intelligences of a superior order are neither invisible nor
illegible.
‘For such superior
Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy of Clothes, as of Laws, were
probably a comfortable winter-evening entertainment: nevertheless, for inferior
Intelligences, like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me
uninstructive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant
spelling Letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which
lies in Eternity, in Heaven?--Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not
why I wear such and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; but even why I am here,
to wear and obey anything!--Much, therefore, if not the whole, of that same Spirit
of Clothes I shall suppress, as
hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts, and Deductions
drawn therefrom in quite another than that omniscient style, are my humbler and
proper province.’
Acting on which prudent
restriction, Teufelsdröckh has nevertheless contrived to take-in a well-nigh
boundless extent of field; at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond
our horizon. Selection being indispensable, we shall here glance-over his First
Part only in the most cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt,
distinguished by omnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the
same time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to interest
the Compilers of some Library of
General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge than the miscellaneous
readers of these pages. Was it this Part of the Book which Heuschrecke had in
view, when he recommended us to that joint-stock vehicle of publication, ‘at
present the glory of British Literature’? If so, the Library Editors are
welcome to dig in it for their own behoof.
To the First Chapter, which
turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves, and leads us into interminable disquisitions of
a mythological, metaphorical, cabalistico-sartorial and quite antediluvian
cast, we shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval. Still
less have we to do with ‘Lilis, Adam’s first wife, whom, according to the
Talmudists, he had before Eve, and who bore him, in that wedlock, the whole
progeny of aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial Devils,’—very needlessly, we
think. On this portion of the Work, with its profound glances into the Adam-Kadmon, or Primeval Element, here strangely brought into relation
with the Nifl and Muspel (Darkness and Light) of the antique North, it may be
enough to say, that its correctness of deduction, and depth of Talmudic and
Rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist in Britain with
something like astonishment.
But, quitting this twilight
region, Teufelsdröckh hastens from the Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion
of Mankind over the whole habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light
of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modern
researches of every conceivable kind, he strives to give us in compressed shape
(as the Nürnbergers give an Orbis Pictus) an Orbis Vestitus; or
view of the costumes of all mankind, in all countries, in all times. It is here
that to the Antiquarian, to the Historian, we can triumphantly say: Fall to!
Here is learning: an irregular Treasury, if you will; but inexhaustible as the
Hoard of King Nibelung, which twelve wagons in twelve days, at the rate of
three journeys a day, could not carry off. Sheepskin cloaks and wampum belts;
phylacteries, stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinese silks, Afghaun shawls,
trunk-hose, leather breeches, Celtic philibegs (though breeches, as the name Gallia
Braccata indicates, are the more
ancient), Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tippets, ruffs, fardingales, are brought
vividly before us,--even the Kilmarnock nightcap is not forgotten. For most
part, too, we must admit that the Learning, heterogeneous as it is, and
tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is true concentrated and purified Learning, the
drossy parts smelted out and thrown aside.
Philosophical reflections
intervene, and sometimes touching pictures of human life. Of this sort the
following has surprised us. The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor
imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament. ‘Miserable indeed,’ says he,
‘was the condition of the Aboriginal Savage, glaring fiercely from under his
fleece of hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round
him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural
fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits; or,
as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his
bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy
Flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had
attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling
it with deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger and Revenge
once satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but Decoration (Putz). Warmth he found in the toils of the chase; or amid
dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for
Decoration he must have Clothes. Nay, among wild people we find tattooing and
painting even prior to Clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is
Decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilised
countries.
‘Reader, the
heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Serene Highness; nay thy own
amber-locked, snow-and-rose-bloom Maiden, worthy to glide sylphlike almost on
air, whom thou lovest, worshippest as a divine Presence, which, indeed,
symbolically taken, she is,--has descended, like thyself, from that same
hair-mantled, flint-hurling Aboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of the eater cometh
forth meat; out of the strong cometh forth sweetness. What changes are wrought,
not by time, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does or
beholds, is in continual growth, regenesis and self-perfecting vitality. Cast
forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, ever-working Universe: it is a
seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says one), it will be found
flourishing as a Banyan-grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest!) after a
thousand years.
‘He who first shortened the
labour of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most
Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented
the Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur, and Charcoal
drove Monk Schwartz’s pestle through the ceiling: what will the last do?
Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under Thought, of Animal
courage under Spiritual. A simple invention it was in the old-world
Grazier,--sick of lugging his slow Ox about the country till he got it bartered
for corn or oil,--to take a piece of Leather, and thereon scratch or stamp the
mere Figure of an Ox (or Pecus);
put it in his pocket, and call it Pecunia, Money. Yet hereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now
Golden and Paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there are
Rothschilds and English National Debts; and whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to
the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers
to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,--to the length of
sixpence.—Clothes too, which began in foolishest love of Ornament, what
have they not become! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed:
but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous
bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine
for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social
polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make
Clothes-screens of us.
‘But, on the whole,’
continues our eloquent Professor, ‘Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes
Thier). Weak in himself, and of small
stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some
half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the
very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load
for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag.
Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite
mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it
were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying
steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing,
with Tools he is all.’
Here may we not, for a
moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with a remark, that this Definition of
the Tool-using Animal, appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the
precisest and best? Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also
laugh, or attempt to do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest
laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we
make of that other French Definition of the Cooking Animal; which, indeed, for
rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can a Tartar be said to
cook, when he only readies his steak by riding on it? Again, what Cookery does
the Greenlander use, beyond stowing-up his whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the
like case, might do? Or how would Monsieur Ude prosper among those Orinocco
Indians, who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow-nests, on the branches of
trees; and, for half the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay, the whole
country being under water? But, on the other hand, show us the human being, of
any period or climate, without his Tools: those very Caledonians, as we saw,
had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has or can have.
‘Man is a Tool-using
Animal,’ concludes Teufelsdröckh in his abrupt way; ‘of which truth Clothes are
but one example: and surely if we consider the interval between the first
wooden Dibble fashioned by man, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or the
British House of Commons, we shall note what progress he has made. He digs up
certain black stones from the bosom of the earth, and says to them, Transport
me and this luggage at the rate of five-and-thirty miles an hour; and they do it: he collects, apparently by lot,
six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, Make
this nation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us; and they do it.’
One of the most
unsatisfactory Sections in the whole Volume is that on Aprons. What though stout old Gao, the Persian Blacksmith,
‘whose Apron, now indeed hidden under jewels, because raised in revolt which
proved successful, is still the royal standard of that country’; what though
John Knox’s Daughter, ‘who threatened Sovereign Majesty that she would catch
her husband’s head in her Apron, rather than he should lie and be a bishop’;
what though the Landgravine Elizabeth, with many other Apron worthies,--figure
here? An idle wire-drawing spirit, sometimes even a tone of levity, approaching
to conventional satire, is too clearly discernible. What, for example, are we
to make of such sentences as the following?
‘Aprons are Defences;
against injury to cleanliness, to safety, to modesty, sometimes to roguery.
From the thin slip of notched silk (as it were, the Emblem and beatified Ghost
of an Apron), which some highest-bred housewife, sitting at Nürnberg Workboxes
and Toyboxes, has gracefully fastened on; to the thick-tanned hide, girt round
him with thongs, wherein the Builder builds, and at evening sticks his trowel;
or to those jingling sheet-iron Aprons, wherein your otherwise half-naked
Vulcans hammer and smelt in their smelt-furnace,--is there not range enough in
the fashion and uses of this Vestment? How much has been concealed, how much
has been defended in Aprons! Nay, rightly considered, what is your whole
Military and Police Establishment, charged at uncalculated millions, but a huge
scarlet-coloured, iron-fastened Apron, wherein Society works (uneasily enough);
guarding itself from some soil and stithy-sparks, in this Devil’s-smithy (Teufelsschmiede) of a world? But of all Aprons the most puzzling to
me hitherto has been the Episcopal or Cassock. Wherein consists the usefulness
of this Apron? The Overseer (Episcopus) of Souls, I notice, has tucked-in the corner of it, as if his day’s
work were done: what does he shadow forth thereby?’ &c. &c.
Or again, has it often been
the lot of our readers to read such stuff as we shall now quote?
‘I consider those printed
Paper Aprons, worn by the Parisian Cooks, as a new vent, though a slight one,
for Typography; therefore as an encouragement to modern Literature, and
deserving of approval: nor is it without satisfaction that I hear of a
celebrated London Firm having in view to introduce the same fashion, with important
extensions, in England.’—We who are on the spot hear of no such thing;
and indeed have reason to be thankful that hitherto there are other vents for
our Literature, exuberant as it is.—Teufelsdröckh continues: ‘If such
supply of printed Paper should rise so far as to choke-up the highways and
public thoroughfares, new means must of necessity be had recourse to. In a
world existing by Industry, we grudge to employ fire as a destroying element,
and not as a creating one. However, Heaven is omnipotent, and will find us an
outlet. In the mean while, is it not beautiful to see five-million quintals of
Rags picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being macerated,
hot-pressed, printed-on, and sold,--returned thither; filling so many hungry
mouths by the way? Thus is the Laystall, especially with its Rags or
Clothes-rubbish, the grand Electric Battery, and Fountain-of-motion, from which
and to which the Social Activities (like vitreous and resinous Electricities)
circulate, in larger or smaller circles, through the mighty, billowy,
storm-tost Chaos of Life, which they keep alive!’—Such passages fill us,
who love the man, and partly esteem him, with a very mixed feeling.
Farther down we meet with
this: ‘The Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy: henceforth
Historians, unless they are fools, must write not of Bourbon Dynasties, and
Tudors and Hapsburgs; but of Stamped Broad-sheet Dynasties, and quite new
successive Names, according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of
Able Editors, gains the world’s ear. Of the British Newspaper Press, perhaps
the most important of all, and wonderful enough in its secret constitution and
procedure, a valuable descriptive History already exists, in that language,
under the title of Satan’s Invisible World Displayed; which, however, by search in all the Weissnichtwo
Libraries, I have not yet succeeded in procuring (vermöchte nicht
aufzutreiben).’
Thus does the good Homer
not only nod, but snore. Thus does Teufelsdröckh, wandering in regions where he
had little business, confound the old authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a
new, spurious, imaginary Historian of the Brittische Journalistik; and so stumble on perhaps the most egregious blunder
in Modern Literature!
Happier is our Professor,
and more purely scientific and historic, when he reaches the Middle Ages in
Europe, and down to the end of the Seventeenth Century; the true era of
extravagance in Costume. It is here that the Antiquary and Student of Modes
comes upon his richest harvest. Fantastic garbs, beggaring all fancy of a
Teniers or a Callot, succeed each other, like monster devouring monster in a
Dream. The whole too in brief authentic strokes, and touched not seldom with
that breath of genius which makes even old raiment live. Indeed, so learned,
precise, graphical, and everyway interesting have we found these Chapters, that
it may be thrown-out as a pertinent question for parties concerned, Whether or
not a good English Translation thereof might henceforth be profitably
incorporated with Mr. Merrick’s valuable Work On Ancient Armour? Take, by way of example, the following sketch; as
authority for which Paulinus’s Zeitkürzende Lust (ii. 678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to:
‘Did we behold the German
fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century, we might smile; as perhaps those
bygone Germans, were they to rise again, and see our haberdashery, would cross
themselves, and invoke the Virgin. But happily no bygone German, or man, rises
again; thus the Present is not needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only
grows out of it, like a Tree, whose roots are not intertangled with its
branches, but lie peaceably underground. Nay it is very mournful, yet not
useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would
find his place quite filled-up here, and no room for him; the very Napoleon,
the very Byron, in some seven years, has become obsolete, and were now a
foreigner to his Europe. Thus is the Law of Progress secured; and in Clothes,
as in all other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue.
‘Of the military classes in
those old times, whose buff-belts, complicated chains and gorgets, huge
churn-boots, and other riding and fighting gear have been bepainted in modern
Romance, till the whole has acquired somewhat of a sign-post character,--I
shall here say nothing: the civil and pacific classes, less touched upon, are
wonderful enough for us.
‘Rich men, I find, have Teusinke’ (a perhaps untranslateable article); ‘also a silver
girdle, whereat hang little bells; so that when a man walks, it is with
continual jingling. Some few, of musical turn, have a whole chime of bells (Glockenspiel) fastened there; which, especially in sudden whirls,
and the other accidents of walking, has a grateful effect. Observe too how fond
they are of peaks, and Gothic-arch intersections. The male world wears peaked
caps, an ell long, which hang bobbing over the side (schief): their shoes are peaked in front, also to the length
of an ell, and laced on the side with tags; even the wooden shoes have their
ell-long noses: some also clap bells on the peak. Further, according to my
authority, the men have breeches without seat (ohne Gesäss): these they fasten peakwise to their shirts; and the
long round doublet must overlap them.
‘Rich maidens, again, flit
abroad in gowns scolloped out behind and before, so that back and breast are
almost bare. Wives of quality, on the other hand, have train-gowns four or five
ells in length; which trains there are boys to carry. Brave Cleopatras, sailing
in their silk-cloth Galley, with a Cupid for steersman! Consider their welts, a
handbreadth thick, which waver round them by way of hem; the long flood of
silver buttons, or rather silver shells, from throat to shoe, wherewith these
same welt-gowns are buttoned. The maidens have bound silver snoods about their
hair, with gold spangles, and pendent flames (Flammen), that is, sparkling hair-drops: but of their
mother’s headgear who shall speak? Neither in love of grace is comfort
forgotten. In winter weather you behold the whole fair creation (that can
afford it) in long mantles, with skirts wide below, and, for hem, not one but
two sufficient hand-broad welts; all ending atop in a thick well-starched Ruff,
some twenty inches broad: these are their Ruff-mantles (Kragenmäntel).
‘As yet among the womankind
hoop-petticoats are not; but the men have doublets of fustian, under which lie
multiple ruffs of cloth, pasted together with batter (mit Teig
zusammengekleistert), which create protuberance
enough. Thus do the two sexes vie with each other in the art of Decoration; and
as usual the stronger carries it.’
Our Professor, whether he
hath humour himself or not, manifests a certain feeling of the Ludicrous, a sly
observance of it, which, could emotion of any kind be confidently predicated of
so still a man, we might call a real love. None of those bell-girdles,
bushel-breeches, cornuted shoes, or other the like phenomena, of which the
History of Dress offers so many, escape him: more especially the mischances, or
striking adventures, incident to the wearers of such, are noticed with due
fidelity. Sir Walter Raleigh’s fine mantle, which he spread in the mud under
Queen Elizabeth’s feet, appears to provoke little enthusiasm in him; he merely
asks, Whether at that period the Maiden Queen ‘was red-painted on the nose, and
white-painted on the cheeks, as her tire-women, when from spleen and wrinkles
she would no longer look in any glass, were wont to serve her?’ We can answer
that Sir Walter knew well what he was doing, and had the Maiden Queen been
stuffed parchment dyed in verdigris, would have done the same.
Thus too, treating of those
enormous habiliments, that were not only slashed and galooned, but artificially
swollen-out on the broader parts of the body, by introduction of Bran,--our
Professor fails not to comment on that luckless Courtier, who having seated
himself on a chair with some projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to
pay his devoir on the entrance of
Majesty, instantaneously emitted several pecks of dry wheat-dust: and stood
there diminished to a spindle, his galoons and slashes dangling sorrowful and
flabby round him. Whereupon the Professor publishes this reflection:
‘By what strange chances do
we live in History? Erostratus by a torch; Milo by a bullock; Henry Darnley, an
unfledged booby and bustard, by his limbs; most Kings and Queens by being born
under such and such a bed-tester; Boileau Despréaux (according to Helvetius) by
the peck of a turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in his
breeches,--for no Memoirist of Kaiser Otto’s Court omits him. Vain was the
prayer of Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield cheerfully
to Destiny, and read since it is written.’—Has Teufelsdröckh to be put in
mind that, nearly related to the impossible talent of Forgetting, stands that
talent of Silence, which even travelling Englishmen manifest?
‘The simplest costume,’
observes our Professor, ‘which I anywhere find alluded to in History, is that
used as regimental, by Bolivar’s Cavalry, in the late Columbian wars. A square
Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, is provided (some were wont to cut-off the
corners, and make it circular): in the centre a slit is effected eighteen
inches long; through this the mother-naked Trooper introduces his head and
neck: and so rides shielded from all weather, and in battle from many strokes
(for he rolls it about his left arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and
draperied.’
With which picture of a
State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and Old-Roman contempt of the
superfluous, we shall quit this part of our subject.
If in the
Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merely
the Werden (Origin and successive
Improvement) of Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the
Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their Wirken, or Influences. It is here that the present Editor
first feels the pressure of his task; for here properly the higher and new
Philosophy of Clothes commences: an untried, almost inconceivable region, or
chaos; in venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is
it to know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the footing
is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud, and may
engulf us! Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral,
political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make
manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man’s
earthly interests ‘are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by
Clothes.’ He says in so many words, ‘Society is founded upon Cloth’; and again,
‘Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust’s Mantle, or
rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the Apostle’s Dream; and
without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane
limboes, and in either case be no more.’
By what chains, or indeed
infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this grand Theorem is here
unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were
perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our Professor’s method is not, in
any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row,
each holding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason,
proceeding by large Intuition over whole systematic groups and kingdoms;
whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns
in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith
whispers, not without a plan. Nay we complained above, that a certain ignoble
complexity, what we must call mere confusion, was also discernible. Often,
also, we have to exclaim: Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents
were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author’s
individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience.
At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked
often at wide-enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully
collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this
Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favour us with their
most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and not
till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there
is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps whole
undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail thither?--As exordium to
the whole, stand here the following long citation:
‘With men of a speculative
turn,’ writes Teufelsdröckh, ‘there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful
hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who
am I; the thing that can say “I” (das
Wesen das sich ICH nennt)? The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into
the distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied
tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of
Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded,--the sight
reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and
silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another.
‘Who am I; what is this ME?
A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;--some embodied, visualised Idea in the
Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum.
Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and
lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written in
all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in
thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning
eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning?
We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the
faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof:
sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering,
whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking
moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious
Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that
strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep
deepest while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical
Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out,
where divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars,
with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the
Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on
Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew
right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.
‘Pity that all Metaphysics
had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man’s Being is
still like the Sphinx’s secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance
of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms,
and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are
cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar, wherein,
however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. The whole is greater than the part: how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, Nothing
can act but where it is: with all my
heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave of Words: is not the Distant, the
Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine
sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother
WHEN, are from the first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto; say rather,
the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions
are painted! Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every
climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all
our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the
Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and
FOREVER: have not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal;
as existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting NOW? Think well, thou too wilt
find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there is no Space and no Time: WE are—we know not
what;--light-sparkles floating in the æther of Deity!
‘So that this so solid-seeming
World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature,
with its thousandfold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own
inward Force, the “phantasy of our Dream”; or what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God:
“In Being’s floods, in
Action’s storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless
motion! Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of
Living: ‘Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the
Garment thou seest Him by.”
Of twenty millions that
have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned
the meaning thereof?
‘It was in some such mood,
when wearied and fordone with these high speculations, that I first came upon
the question of Clothes. Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of
there being Tailors and Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell:
strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round
him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his
own bootmaker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys,
with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth and easiness
of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been considered, and
frills and fringes, with gay variety of colour, featly appended, and ever in
the right place, are not wanting. While I—good Heaven!--have thatched
myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the
entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and
walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from
the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more
slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this
despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed
away by tear and wear, must be brushed-off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall;
till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I, the dust-making,
patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile!
most vile! For have not I too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier?
Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a
tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?
‘Strange enough how
creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere
inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and
Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much
readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he
pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads
him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the
World happen twice, and it ceases
to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a
lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be
he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his
Self are not one and indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by
forethought sew and button them.
‘For my own part, these
considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and how, reaching inwards even to our
heart of hearts, it tailorises and demoralises us, fill me with a certain
horror at myself and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which,
during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats
(of striped sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something
great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages;
and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, “a forked straddling
animal with bandy legs”; yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of
Mysteries.’
Let no courteous reader
take offence at the opinions broached in the conclusion of the last Chapter.
The Editor himself, on first glancing over that singular passage, was inclined
to exclaim: What, have we got not only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes
in the abstract? A new Adamite, in this century, which flatters itself that it
is the Nineteenth, and destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm?
Consider, thou foolish
Teufelsdröckh, what benefits unspeakable all ages and sexes derive from
Clothes. For example, when thou thyself, a watery, pulpy, slobbery freshman and
new-comer in this Planet, sattest muling and puking in thy nurse’s arms;
sucking thy coral, and looking forth into the world in the blankest manner,
what hadst thou been without thy blankets, and bibs, and other nameless hulls?
A terror to thyself and mankind! Or hast thou forgotten the day when thou first
receivedst breeches, and thy long clothes became short? The village where thou
livedst was all apprised of the fact; and neighbour after neighbour kissed thy
pudding-cheek, and gave thee, as handsel, silver or copper coins, on that the
first gala-day of thy existence. Again, wert not thou, at one period of life, a
Buck, or Blood, or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy, or by whatever name,
according to year and place, such phenomenon is distinguished? In that one word
lie included mysterious volumes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over, or
altered, and thy clothes are not for triumph but for defence, hast thou always
worn them perforce, and as a consequence of Man’s Fall; never rejoiced in them
as in a warm movable House, a Body round thy Body, wherein that strange THEE of
thine sat snug, defying all variations of Climate? Girt with thick
double-milled kerseys; half-buried under shawls and broad-brims, and overalls
and mud-boots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens, thou hast
bestrode that ‘Horse I ride’; and, though it were in wild winter, dashed
through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did the
sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted or
woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl,--forests sounding and
creaking, deep calling unto deep,--and the storms heap themselves together into
one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through the middle thereof, striking
fire from the highway; wild music hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a ‘sailor
of the air’; the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and
propitiously wafting tide. Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst
thou been; what had thy fleet quadruped been?--Nature is good, but she is not
the best: here truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeed
might have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy.
Or, cries the courteous
reader, has your Teufelsdröckh forgotten what he said lately about ‘Aboriginal
Savages,’ and their ‘condition miserable indeed’? Would he have all this
unsaid; and us betake ourselves again to the ‘matted cloak,’ and go sheeted in
a ‘thick natural fell’?
Nowise, courteous reader!
The Professor knows full well what he is saying; and both thou and we, in our
haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these times, ‘so tailorise and demoralise
us,’ have they no redeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better;
must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdröckh,
though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go
forth before this degenerate age ‘as a Sign,’ would nowise wish to do it, as
those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is
altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more
recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we might call the omnipotent
virtue of Clothes, such as was never before vouchsafed to any man. For example:
‘You see two individuals,’
he writes, ‘one dressed in fine Red, the other in coarse threadbare Blue: Red
says to Blue, “Be hanged and anatomised”; Blue hears with a shudder, and (O
wonder of wonders!) marches sorrowfully to the gallows; is there noosed-up,
vibrates his hour, and the surgeons dissect him, and fit his bones into a
skeleton for medical purposes. How is this; or what make ye of your Nothing
can act but where it is? Red has no
physical hold of Blue, no clutch
of him, is nowise in contact with
him: neither are those ministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and Hangmen
and Tipstaves so related to commanding Red, that he can tug them hither and
thither; but each stands distinct within his own skin. Nevertheless, as it is
spoken, so is it done: the articulated Word sets all hands in Action; and Rope
and Improved-drop perform their work.
‘Thinking reader, the
reason seems to me twofold: First, that Man is a Spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to All Men; secondly, that he wears Clothes, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Has not
your Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and a plush-gown;
whereby all mortals know that he is a JUDGE?--Society, which the more I think
of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth.
‘Often in my
atrabiliar-moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations,
Royal Drawing-rooms, Levees, Couchees; and how the ushers and macers and
pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke this is presented by Archduke that,
and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable Bishops, Admirals, and
miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing gallantly to the Anointed Presence;
and I strive, in my remote privacy, to form a clear picture of that
solemnity,--on a sudden, as by some enchanter’s wand, the—shall I speak
it?--the Clothes fly-off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops,
Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother’s son of them, stand
straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep.
This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I
have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those
afflicted with the like.’
Would to Heaven, say we,
thou hadst thought right to keep it secret! Who is there now that can read the
five columns of Presentations in his Morning Newspaper without a shudder?
Hypochondriac men, and all men are to a certain extent hypochondriac, should be
more gently treated. With what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of
the nerves, follows out the consequences which Teufelsdröckh, with a devilish
coolness, goes on to draw:
‘What would Majesty do,
could such an accident befall in reality; should the buttons all simultaneously
start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream? Ach
Gott! How each skulks into the
nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (Haupt- und Staats-Action) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is
the worst kind of Farce; the tables
(according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of Government,
Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilised Society, are dissolved, in wails and howls.’
Lives the man that can
figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on itself, and will not forward
with the picture. The Woolsack, the Ministerial, the Opposition Benches—infandum!
infandum! And yet why is the thing
impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, of these Guardians of our
Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; ‘a forked Radish with a head
fantastically carved’? And why might he not, did our stern fate so order it,
walk out to St Stephen’s, as well as into bed, in that no-fashion; and there,
with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of Justice? ‘Solace of those afflicted
with the like!’ Unhappy Teufelsdröckh, had man ever such a ‘physical or psychical
infirmity’ before? And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleled confession
(which we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded-on by Critical and
Biographical duty, grudge to re-impart) incurably infect therewith! Art thou
the malignest of Sansculottists, or only the maddest?
‘It will remain to be
examined,’ adds the inexorable Teufelsdröckh, ‘in how far the SCARECROW, as a
Clothed Person, is not also entitled to benefit of clergy, and English trial by
jury: nay perhaps, considering his high function (for is not he too a Defender
of Property, and Sovereign armed with the terrors of the Law?), to a certain royal Immunity and
Inviolability; which, however, misers and the meaner class of persons are not
always voluntarily disposed to grant him.’ * * *
* * * ‘O my Friends, we are
(in Yorick Sterne’s words) but as “turkeys driven with a stick and red clout,
to the market”: or if some drivers, as they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder
and put peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!’
It must now be apparent
enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a speculative Radical, and of
the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and
paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many
Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and ‘bladders with dried peas.’ To linger among such
speculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have
no wish. For our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed
one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about ‘Kings wrestling naked
on the green with Carmen,’ and the Kings being thrown: ‘dissect them with
scalpels,’ says Teufelsdröckh; ‘the same viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and
other life-tackle are there: examine their spiritual mechanism; the same great
Need, great Greed, and little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who
understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of
unstable and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has
actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly
gifted of the two. Whence, then, their so unspeakable difference? From
Clothes.’ Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan and My
Lady, and how it would be everywhere ‘Hail fellow well met,’ and Chaos were
come again: all which to any one that has once fairly pictured-out the grand
mother-idea, Society in a state of nakedness, will spontaneously suggest itself. Should some
sceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes,
the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to
the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism,
stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not
only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following
argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and
final:
‘Are we Opossums; have we
natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess
the master-organ, soul’s seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I
mean, a PURSE?’
Nevertheless, it is
impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdröckh; at worst, one knows not whether to
hate or to love him. For though, in looking at the fair tapestry of human Life,
with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but
here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and
manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience
and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most
readers,--there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all
other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of
Teufelsdröckh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a
Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade
man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other,
exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods.
‘To the eye of vulgar
Logic,’ says he, ‘what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the
eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round
his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh
(or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to
his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for
himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years.
Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours and
Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is
sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of
Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him
to know, to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial
primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through? Well said
Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, “the true SHEKINAH is Man”: where else
is the GOD’S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in
our fellow-man?’
In such passages, unhappily
too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the
fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood:
and, through all the vapour and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean
in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of
Light and Love;--though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together
again, and hide it from view.
Such tendency to Mysticism
is everywhere traceable in this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must
have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common
meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and
Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gipsy-Blanket, he
finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a
reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the
manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing
Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible,
what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible,
‘unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright’? Under which point of view
the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems
characteristic enough:
‘The beginning of all
Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they
become transparent. “The
Philosopher,” says the wisest of this age, “must station himself in the
middle”: how true! The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and
the Lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
‘Shall we tremble before
clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven in Arkwright looms, or by the silent
Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our imagination? Or, on the other hand, what
is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God?
‘Happy he who can look
through the Clothes of a Man (the woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper
and State-paper Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this
or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus;
yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees with
eyes!’
For the rest, as is natural
to a man of this kind, he deals much in the feeling of Wonder; insists on the
necessity and high worth of universal Wonder; which he holds to be the only
reasonable temper for the denizen of so singular a Planet as ours. ‘Wonder,’
says he, ‘is the basis of Worship: the reign of wonder is perennial,
indestructible in Man; only at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some
short season, a reign in partibus infidelium.’ That progress of Science, which is to destroy
Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small
favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter
processes.
‘Shall your Science,’
exclaims he, ‘proceed in the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted,
underground workshop of Logic alone; and man’s mind become an Arithmetical
Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents,
Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal?
And what is that Science, which the scientific head alone, were it screwed off,
and (like the Doctor’s in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive,
could prosecute without shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and
menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too
noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps
poisonous; at best, dies like cookery with the day that called it forth; does
not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests,
bringing food and plenteous increase to all Time.’
In such wise does
Teufelsdröckh deal hits, harder or softer, according to ability; yet ever, as
we would fain persuade ourselves, with charitable intent. Above all, that class
of ‘Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder;
who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics’
Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round
their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated
Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full day-light, with rattle
and lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding you therewith, though the
Sun is shining, and the street populous with mere justice-loving men’: that
whole class is inexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what uncommon
animation he perorates:
‘The man who cannot wonder,
who does not habitually wonder (and worship) were he President of innumerable
Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mécanique Céleste and Hegel’s Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and
Observatories with their results, in his single head,--is but a Pair of
Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through
him, then he may be useful.
‘Thou wilt have no Mystery
and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest
Truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic; and “explain”
all, “account” for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt
laughter; whoso recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery,
which is everywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is
an Oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattlestall,--he shall be a
delirious Mystic; to him thou, with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer
thy hand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, when he kicks his foot through it?--Armer
Teufel! Doth not thy cow calve, doth
not thy bull gender? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thou not die?
“Explain” me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with
thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the
reign of wonder is done, and God’s world all disembellished and prosaic, but
that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.’
The Philosophy of Clothes
is now to all readers, as we predicted it would do, unfolding itself into new
boundless expansions, of a cloudclapt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not
without azure loomings in the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian
brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming
more and more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness,
cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian lava? Is it of a
truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of
a Hell-on-Earth?
Our Professor, like other
Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do. Ever
higher and dizzier are the heights he leads us to; more piercing,
all-comprehending, all-confounding are his views and glances. For example, this
of Nature being not an Aggregate but a Whole:
‘Well sang the Hebrew
Psalmist: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts
of the universe, God is there.” Thou thyself, O cultivated reader, who too
probably art no Psalmist, but a Prosaist, knowing GOD only by tradition,
knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not? The drop
which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow
thou findest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it is nearing
the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless?
Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force, and utterly dead?
‘As I rode through the
Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little fire which grows star-like across
the dark-growing (nachtende) moor,
where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost
horse-shoe,--is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off from the whole
Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily)
kindled at the Sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah’s Deluge,
from beyond the Dogstar; therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far
stranger Force of Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of
Force brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great
vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious Altar, kindled
on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence
reach quite through the All; whose dingy Priest, not by word, yet by brain and
sinew, preaches forth the mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically
enough) one little textlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man’s
Force, commanding, and one day to be all-commanding.
‘Detached, separated! I say
there is no such separation: nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside;
but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne
forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through
perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are
Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or
the litter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is
insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye
looks into Infinitude itself.’
Again, leaving that
wondrous Schwarzwald Smithy-Altar, what vacant, high-sailing air-ships are
these, and whither will they sail with us?
‘All visible things are
emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is
not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea,
and body it forth. Hence Clothes,
as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from
the King’s mantle downwards, are emblematic not of want only, but of a manifold
cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are
properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave
Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations
of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful;--the
rather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise)
reveal such even to the outward eye?
‘Men are properly said to
be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay,
if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an
Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither,
like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed
with a Body.
‘Language is called the
Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the
Flesh-Garment, the Body, of thought. I said that Imagination wove this
Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language;
what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it
all but Metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and
florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are
the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,--then are Metaphors its
muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style you shall
in vain seek for: is not your very Attention a Stretching-to? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the
muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten and
dead-looking; while others again glow in the flush of health and vigorous
self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency.
Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought’s-Body
(best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called
its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mäntel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and
reads may gather whole hampers,--and burn them.’
Than which paragraph on
Metaphors did the reader ever chance to see a more surprisingly metaphorical?
However, that is not our chief grievance; the Professor continues:
‘Why multiply instances? It
is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which
indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists,
whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of
Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant
subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought,
dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but
Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.’
Towards these dim
infinitely-expanded regions, close-bordering on the impalpable Inane, it is not
without apprehension, and perpetual difficulties, that the Editor sees himself
journeying and struggling. Till lately a cheerful daystar of hope hung before
him, in the expected Aid of Hofrath Heuschrecke; which daystar, however, melts
now, not into the red of morning, but into a vague, gray half-light, uncertain
whether dawn of day or dusk of utter darkness. For the last week, these
so-called Biographical Documents are in his hand. By the kindness of a Scottish
Hamburg Merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not
mention; but whose honourable courtesy, now and often before spontaneously
manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky
Weissnichtwo Packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and
miscellaneous tokens of Travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of
cost. The reader shall now fancy with what hot haste it was broken up, with
what breathless expectation glanced over; and, alas, with what unquiet
disappointment it has, since then, been often thrown down, and again taken up.
Hofrath Heuschrecke, in a
too long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners,
dining repartees, and other ephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remind us of
what we know well already: that however it may be with Metaphysics, and other
abstract Science originating in the Head (Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which
originates equally in the Character (Gemüth), and equally speaks thereto, can attain its
significance till the Character itself is known and seen; ‘till the Author’s
View of the World (Weltansicht),
and how he actively and passively came by such view, are clear: in short till a
Biography of him has been philosophico-poetically written, and
philosophico-poetically read.’ ‘Nay,’ adds he, ‘were the speculative scientific
Truth even known, you still, in this inquiring age, ask yourself, Whence came
it, and Why, and How?--and rest not, till, if no better may be, Fancy have
shaped-out an answer; and either in the authentic lineaments of Fact, or the
forged ones of Fiction, a complete picture and Genetical History of the Man and
his spiritual Endeavour lies before you. But why,’ says the Hofrath, and indeed
say we, ‘do I dilate on the uses of our Teufelsdröckh’s Biography? The great
Herr Minister von Goethe has penetratingly remarked that “Man is properly the only object that interests man”: thus I too have noted,
that in Weissnichtwo our whole conversation is little or nothing else but Biography
or Auto-Biography; ever humano-anecdotical (menschlich-anekdotisch). Biography is by nature the most universally
profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially Biography of
distinguished individuals.
‘By this time, mein
Verehrtester (my Most Esteemed),’
continues he, with an eloquence which, unless the words be purloined from
Teufelsdröckh, or some trick of his, as we suspect, is well-nigh unaccountable,
‘by this time you are fairly plunged (vertieft) in that mighty forest of Clothes-Philosophy; and
looking round, as all readers do, with astonishment enough. Such portions and
passages as you have already mastered, and brought to paper, could not but
awaken a strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps
unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted
it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdröckh also a father and mother; did he, at
one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and
tears, clasp a friend’s bosom to his; looks he also wistfully into the long
burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds, and their low harsh moan, give
inarticulate answer? Has he fought duels;--good Heaven! how did he comport
himself when in Love? By what singular stair-steps, in short, and subterranean
passages, and sloughs of Despair, and steep Pisgah hills, has he reached this
wonderful prophetic Hebron (a true Old-Clothes Jewry) where he now dwells?
‘To all these natural
questions the voice of public History is as yet silent. Certain only that he
has been, and is, a Pilgrim, and Traveller from a far Country; more or less
footsore and travel-soiled; has parted with road-companions; fallen among
thieves, been poisoned by bad cookery, blistered with bug-bites; nevertheless
at every stage (for they have let him pass), has had the Bill to discharge. But
the whole particulars of his Route, his Weather-observations, the picturesque
Sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (in indelible
sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), are these nowhere
forthcoming? Perhaps quite lost: one other leaf of that mighty Volume (of human
Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper;
and to rot, the sport of rainy winds?
‘No, verehrtester Herr
Herausgeber, in no wise! I here, by
the unexampled favour you stand in with our Sage, send not a Biography only,
but an Autobiography: at least the materials for such; wherefrom, if I
misreckon not, your perspicacity will draw fullest insight: and so the whole
Philosophy and Philosopher of Clothes will stand clear to the wondering eyes of
England, nay thence, through America, through Hindostan, and the antipodal New
Holland, finally conquer (einnehmen)
great part of this terrestrial Planet!’
And now let the
sympathising reader judge of our feeling when, in place of this same
Autobiography with ‘fullest insight,’ we find—Six considerable
PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked successively, in gilt China-ink, with
the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in the
inside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener
Shreds and Snips, written in Professor Teufelsdröckh’s scarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the
Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal history only at rare intervals,
and then in the most enigmatic manner.
Whole fascicles there are,
wherein the Professor, or, as he here, speaking in the third person, calls
himself, ‘the Wanderer,’ is not once named. Then again, amidst what seems to be
a Metaphysico-theological Disquisition, ‘Detached Thoughts on the
Steam-engine,’ or, ‘The continued Possibility of Prophecy,’ we shall meet with
some quite private, not unimportant Biographical fact. On certain sheets stand
Dreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking Actions are omitted.
Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate
slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long purely
Autobiographical delineations; yet without connexion, without recognisable
coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of
‘P.P. Clerk of this Parish.’ Thus does famine of intelligence alternate with
waste. Selection, order, appears to be unknown to the Professor. In all Bags
the same imbroglio; only perhaps in the Bag Capricorn, and those near it, the confusion a little worse
confounded. Close by a rather eloquent Oration, ‘On receiving the
Doctor’s-Hat,’ lie washbills, marked bezahlt (settled). His Travels are indicated by the
Street-Advertisements of the various cities he has visited; of which
Street-Advertisements, in most living tongues, here is perhaps the completest
collection extant.
So that if the
Clothes-Volume itself was too like a Chaos, we have now instead of the solar
Luminary that should still it, the airy Limbo which by intermixture will
farther volatilise and discompose it! As we shall perhaps see it our duty
ultimately to deposit these Six Paper-Bags in the British Museum, farther
description, and all vituperation of them, may be spared. Biography or
Autobiography of Teufelsdröckh there is, clearly enough, none to be gleaned
here: at most some sketchy, shadowy fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-of
efforts, partly of intellect, partly of imagination, on the side of Editor and
of Reader; rise up between them. Only as a gaseous-chaotic Appendix to that
aqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents of the Six Bags hover round us, and
portions thereof be incorporated with our delineation of it.
Daily and nightly does the
Editor sit (with green spectacles) deciphering these unimaginable Documents
from their perplexed cursiv-schrift;
collating them with the almost equally unimaginable Volume, which stands in
legible print. Over such a universal medley of high and low, of hot, cold, moist
and dry, is he here struggling (by union of like with like, which is Method) to
build a firm Bridge for British travellers. Never perhaps since our first
Bridge-builders, Sin and Death, built that stupendous Arch from Hell-gate to
the Earth, did any Pontifex, or Pontiff, undertake such a task as the present
Editor. For in this Arch too, leading, as we humbly presume, far otherwards
than that grand primeval one, the materials are to be fished-up from the
weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another,
and cunningly cemented, while the elements boil beneath: nor is there any
supernatural force to do it with; but simply the Diligence and feeble thinking
Faculty of an English Editor, endeavouring to evolve printed Creation out of a
German printed and written Chaos, wherein, as he shoots to and fro in it,
gathering, clutching, piercing the Why to the far-distant Wherefore, his whole
Faculty and Self are like to be swallowed up.
Patiently, under these
incessant toils and agitations, does the Editor, dismissing all anger, see his
otherwise robust health declining; some fraction of his allotted natural sleep
nightly leaving him, and little but an inflamed nervous-system to be looked
for. What is the use of health, or of life, if not to do some work therewith?
And what work nobler than transplanting foreign Thought into the barren
domestic soil; except indeed planting Thought of your own, which the fewest are
privileged to do? Wild as it looks, this Philosophy of Clothes, can we ever reach
its real meaning, promises to reveal new-coming Eras, the first dim rudiments
and already-budding germs of a nobler Era, in Universal History. Is not such a
prize worth some striving? Forward with us, courageous reader; be it towards
failure, or towards success! The latter thou sharest with us; the former also
is not all our own.
In a psychological point of
view, it is perhaps questionable whether from birth and genealogy, how closely
scrutinised soever, much insight is to be gained. Nevertheless, as in every
phenomenon the Beginning remains always the most notable moment; so, with
regard to any great man, we rest not till, for our scientific profit or not,
the whole circumstances of his first appearance in this Planet, and what manner
of Public Entry he made, are with utmost completeness rendered manifest. To the
Genesis of our Clothes-Philosopher, then, be this First Chapter consecrated.
Unhappily, indeed, he seems to be of quite obscure extraction; uncertain, we
might almost say, whether of any: so that this Genesis of his can properly be
nothing but an Exodus (or transit out of Invisibility into Visibility); whereof
the preliminary portion is nowhere forthcoming.
‘In the village of
Entepfuhl,’ thus writes he, in the Bag Libra, on various Papers, which we arrange with difficulty,
‘dwelt Andreas Futteral and his wife; childless, in still seclusion, and
cheerful though now verging towards old age. Andreas had been grenadier
Sergeant, and even regimental Schoolmaster under Frederick the Great; but now,
quitting the halbert and ferule for the spade and pruning-hook, cultivated a
little Orchard, on the produce of which he, Cincinnatus-like, lived not without
dignity. Fruits, the peach, the apple, the grape, with other varieties came in
their season; all which Andreas knew how to sell: on evenings he smoked
largely, or read (as beseemed a regimental Schoolmaster), and talked to
neighbours that would listen about the Victory of Rossbach; and how Fritz the
Only (der Einzige) had once with
his own royal lips spoken to him, had been pleased to say, when Andreas as
camp-sentinel demanded the pass-word, “Schweig Hund (Peace, hound)!” before any of his staff-adjutants
could answer. “Das nenn’ ich mir einen König, There is what I call a King,” would Andreas exclaim:
“but the smoke of Kunersdorf was still smarting his eyes.”
‘Gretchen, the housewife,
won like Desdemona by the deeds rather than the looks of her now veteran
Othello, lived not in altogether military subordination; for, as Andreas said,
“the womankind will not drill (wer kann die Weiberchen dressiren)”: nevertheless she at heart loved him both for
valour and wisdom; to her a Prussian grenadier Sergeant and Regiment’s
Schoolmaster was little other than a Cicero and Cid: what you see, yet cannot
see over, is as good as infinite. Nay, was not Andreas in very deed a man of
order, courage, downrightness (Geradheit); that understood Büsching’s Geography, had been in the victory of Rossbach, and left for
dead in the camisade of Hochkirch? The good Gretchen, for all her fretting,
watched over him and hovered round him as only a true housemother can:
assiduously she cooked and sewed and scoured for him; so that not only his old
regimental sword and grenadier-cap, but the whole habitation and environment,
where on pegs of honour they hung, looked ever trim and gay: a roomy painted
Cottage, embowered in fruit-trees and forest-trees, evergreens and
honeysuckles; rising many-coloured from amid shaven grass-plots, flowers
struggling-in through the very windows; under its long projecting eaves nothing
but garden-tools in methodic piles (to screen them from rain), and seats where,
especially on summer nights, a King might have wished to sit and smoke, and
call it his. Such a Bauergut
(Copyhold) had Gretchen given her veteran; whose sinewy arms, and long-disused
gardening talent, had made it what you saw.
‘Into this umbrageous
Man’s-nest, one meek yellow evening or dusk, when the Sun, hidden indeed from
terrestrial Entepfuhl, did nevertheless journey visible and radiant along the
celestial Balance (Libra), it was
that a Stranger of reverend aspect entered; and, with grave salutation, stood
before the two rather astonished housemates. He was close-muffled in a wide
mantle; which without further parley unfolding, he deposited therefrom what
seemed some Basket, overhung with green Persian silk; saying only: Ihr
lieben Leute, hier bringe ein unschätzbares Verleihen; nehmt es in aller Acht,
sorgfältigst benützt es: mit hohem Lohn, oder wohl mit schweren Zinsen, wird’s
einst zurückgefordert. “Good
Christian people, here lies for you an invaluable Loan; take all heed thereof,
in all carefulness employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty,
will it one day be required back.” Uttering which singular words, in a clear,
bell-like, forever memorable tone, the Stranger gracefully withdrew; and before
Andreas or his wife, gazing in expectant wonder, had time to fashion either
question or answer, was clean gone. Neither out of doors could aught of him be seen
or heard; he had vanished in the thickets, in the dusk; the Orchard-gate stood
quietly closed: the Stranger was gone once and always. So sudden had the whole
transaction been, in the autumn stillness and twilight, so gentle, noiseless,
that the Futterals could have fancied it all a trick of Imagination, or some
visit from an authentic Spirit. Only that the green-silk Basket, such as
neither Imagination nor authentic Spirits are wont to carry, still stood
visible and tangible on their little parlour-table. Towards this the astonished
couple, now with lit candle, hastily turned their attention. Lifting the green
veil, to see what invaluable it hid, they descried there, amid down and rich
white wrappages, no Pitt Diamond or Hapsburg Regalia, but, in the softest
sleep, a little red-coloured Infant! Beside it, lay a roll of gold Friedrichs,
the exact amount of which was never publicly known; also a Taufschein (baptismal certificate), wherein unfortunately
nothing but the Name was decipherable; other document or indication none
whatever.
‘To wonder and conjecture
was unavailing, then and always thenceforth. Nowhere in Entepfuhl, on the
morrow or next day, did tidings transpire of any such figure as the Stranger;
nor could the Traveller, who had passed through the neighbouring Town in
coach-and-four, be connected with this Apparition, except in the way of
gratuitous surmise. Meanwhile, for Andreas and his wife, the grand practical
problem was: What to do with this little sleeping red-coloured Infant? Amid
amazements and curiosities, which had to die away without external satisfying,
they resolved, as in such circumstances charitable prudent people needs must,
on nursing it, though with spoon-meat, into whiteness, and if possible into
manhood. The Heavens smiled on their endeavour: thus has that same mysterious
Individual ever since had a status for himself in this visible Universe, some
modicum of victual and lodging and parade-ground; and now expanded in bulk,
faculty and knowledge of good and evil, he, as HERR DIOGENES TEUFELSDRÖCKH,
professes or is ready to profess, perhaps not altogether without effect, in the
new University of Weissnichtwo, the new Science of Things in General.’
Our Philosopher declares
here, as indeed we should think he well might, that these facts, first
communicated, by the good Gretchen Futteral, in his twelfth year, ‘produced on
the boyish heart and fancy a quite indelible impression. Who this Reverend
Personage,’ he says, ‘that glided into the Orchard Cottage when the Sun was in
Libra, and then, as on spirit’s wings, glided out again, might be? An
inexpressible desire, full of love and of sadness, has often since struggled
within me to shape an answer. Ever, in my distresses and my loneliness, has
Fantasy turned, full of longing (sehnsuchtsvoll), to that unknown Father, who perhaps far from me,
perhaps near, either way invisible, might have taken me to his paternal bosom,
there to lie screened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost thou still,
shut out from me only by thin penetrable curtains of earthly Space, wend to and
fro among the crowd of the living? Or art thou hidden by those far thicker
curtains of the Everlasting Night, or rather of the Everlasting Day, through
which my mortal eye and outstretched arms need not strive to reach? Alas, I
know not, and in vain vex myself to know. More than once, heart-deluded, have I
taken for thee this and the other noble-looking Stranger; and approached him
wistfully, with infinite regard; but he too had to repel me; he too was not
thou.
‘And yet, O Man born of
Woman,’ cries the Autobiographer, with one of his sudden whirls, ‘wherein is my
case peculiar? Hadst thou, any more than I, a Father whom thou knowest? The
Andreas and Gretchen, or the Adam and Eve, who led thee into Life, and for a
time suckled and pap-fed thee there, whom thou namest Father and Mother; these
were, like mine, but thy nursing-father and nursing-mother: thy true Beginning
and Father is in Heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shalt never behold, but
only with the spiritual.’
‘The little green veil,’
adds he, among much similar moralising, and embroiled discoursing, ‘I yet keep;
still more inseparably the Name, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. From the veil can
nothing be inferred: a piece of now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of
others. On the Name I have many times meditated and conjectured; but neither in
this lay there any clue. That it was my unknown Father’s name I must hesitate
to believe. To no purpose have I searched through all the Herald’s Books, in
and without the German Empire, and through all manner of Subscriber-Lists (Pränumeranten), Militia-Rolls, and other Name-catalogues;
extraordinary names as we have in Germany, the name Teufelsdröckh, except as
appended to my own person, nowhere occurs. Again, what may the unchristian
rather than Christian “Diogenes” mean? Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend,
by such designation, to shadow-forth my future destiny, or his own present
malign humour? Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred Parent, who
like an Ostrich hadst to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into
self-support by the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been
a smooth one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or indeed by the
worst figure of Misfortune, by Misconduct. Often have I fancied how, in thy
hard life-battle, thou wert shot at, and slung at, wounded, hand-fettered,
hamstrung, browbeaten and bedevilled by the Time-Spirit (Zeitgeist) in thyself and others, till the good soul first
given thee was seared into grim rage; and thou hadst nothing for it but to
leave in me an indignant appeal to the Future, and living speaking Protest
against the Devil, as that same Spirit not of the Time only, but of Time
itself, is well named! Which Appeal and Protest, may I now modestly add, was
not perhaps quite lost in air.
‘For indeed, as Walter
Shandy often insisted, there is much, nay almost all, in Names. The Name is the
earliest Garment you wrap round the earth-visiting ME; to which it thenceforth
cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty
centuries) than the very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences
does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic
first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible
seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the
influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a
second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common Speech, but Science, Poetry
itself is no other, if thou consider it, than a right Naming. Adam’s first task was giving names to natural
Appearances: what is ours still but a continuation of the same; be the
Appearances exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars or starry movements (as
in Science); or (as in Poetry) passions, virtues, calamities, God-attributes,
Gods?--In a very plain sense the Proverb says, Call one a thief, and he will
steal; in an almost similar sense may
we not perhaps say, Call one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, and he will open the
Philosophy of Clothes?’
* * * * *
‘Meanwhile the incipient
Diogenes, like others, all ignorant of his Why, his How or Whereabout, was
opening his eyes to the kind Light; sprawling-out his ten fingers and toes;
listening, tasting, feeling; in a word, by all his Five Senses, still more by
his Sixth Sense of Hunger, and a whole infinitude of inward, spiritual,
half-awakened Senses, endeavouring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge
of this strange Universe where he had arrived, be his task therein what it
might. Infinite was his progress; thus in some fifteen months, he could perform
the miracle of—Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a
fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by
degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen; and out
of vague Sensation grows Thought, grows Fantasy and Force, and we have
Philosophies, Dynasties, nay Poetries and Religions!
‘Young Diogenes, or rather
young Gneschen, for by such diminutive had they in their fondness named him,
travelled forward to those high consummations, by quick yet easy stages. The
Futterals, to avoid vain talk, and moreover keep the roll of gold Friedrichs
safe, gave-out that he was a grand-nephew; the orphan of some sister’s daughter,
suddenly deceased, in Andreas’s distant Prussian birthland; of whom, as of her
indigent sorrowing widower, little enough was known at Entepfuhl. Heedless of
all which, the Nurseling took to his spoon-meat, and throve. I have heard him
noted as a still infant, that kept his mind much to himself; above all, that
seldom or never cried. He already felt that time was precious; that he had
other work cut-out for him than whimpering.’
* * * * *
Such, after utmost painful
search and collation among these miscellaneous Paper-masses, is all the notice
we can gather of Herr Teufelsdröckh’s genealogy. More imperfect, more enigmatic
it can seem to few readers than to us. The Professor, in whom truly we more and
more discern a certain satirical turn, and deep undercurrents of roguish whim,
for the present stands pledged in honour, so we will not doubt him: but seems
it not conceivable that, by the ‘good Gretchen Futteral,’ or some other perhaps
interested party, he has himself been deceived? Should these sheets, translated
or not, ever reach the Entepfuhl Circulating Library, some cultivated native of
that district might feel called to afford explanation. Nay, since Books, like
invisible scouts, permeate the whole habitable globe, and Timbuctoo itself is
not safe from British Literature, may not some Copy find out even the
mysterious basket-bearing Stranger, who in a state of extreme senility perhaps
still exists; and gently force even him to disclose himself; to claim openly a
son, in whom any father may feel pride?
‘Happy season of
Childhood!’ exclaims Teufelsdröckh: ‘Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful
mother; that visitest the poor man’s hut with auroral radiance; and for thy
Nurseling hast provided, a soft swathing of Love, and infinite Hope, wherein he
waxes and slumbers, danced-round (umgaukelt) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage still
shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have as yet a prophet,
priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us free. The young spirit has
awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet Time is no
fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to the child are as
ages: ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and
ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric, from the granite mountain
to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless Universe, we taste,
what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is forever denied us, the balm
of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A
little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be
mimic battles; thou too, with old Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience:
“Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?” Celestial Nepenthe!
though a Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds
thee not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids,
on the heart of every mother’s child. For as yet, sleep and waking are one: the
fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and
the budding of Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to
flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded
stone-fruit, of which the fewest can find the kernel.’
In such rose-coloured light
does our Professor, as Poets are wont, look back on his childhood; the
historical details of which (to say nothing of much other vague oratorical
matter) he accordingly dwells on with an almost wearisome minuteness. We hear
of Entepfuhl standing ‘in trustful derangement’ among the woody slopes; the
paternal Orchard flanking it as extreme out-post from below; the little Kuhbach
gushing kindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into the Donau,
into the Black Sea, into the Atmosphere and Universe; and how ‘the brave old
Linden,’ stretching like a parasol of twenty ells in radius, overtopping all
other rows and clumps, towered-up from the central Agora and Campus Martius of the Village, like its Sacred Tree; and how the old
men sat talking under its shadow (Gneschen often greedily listening), and the
wearied labourers reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the young
men and maidens often danced to flute-music. ‘Glorious summer twilights,’ cries
Teufelsdröckh, ‘when the Sun, like a proud Conqueror and Imperial Taskmaster,
turned his back, with his gold-purple emblazonry, and all his fireclad
body-guard (of Prismatic Colours); and the tired brickmakers of this clay Earth
might steal a little frolic, and those few meek Stars would not tell of them!’
Then we have long details
of the Weinlesen (Vintage), the
Harvest-Home, Christmas, and so forth; with a whole cycle of the Entepfuhl
Children’s-games, differing apparently by mere superficial shades from those of
other countries. Concerning all which, we shall here, for obvious reasons, say
nothing. What cares the world for our as yet miniature Philosopher’s
achievements under that ‘brave old Linden’? Or even where is the use of such
practical reflections as the following? ‘In all the sports of Children, were it
only in their wanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creative
instinct (schaffenden Trieb): the
Mankin feels that he is a born Man, that his vocation is to work. The choicest
present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or
for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In gregarious sports of
skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Coöperation, for war or peace, as
governor or governed: the little Maid again, provident of her domestic destiny,
takes with preference to Dolls.’
Perhaps, however, we may
give this anecdote, considering who it is that relates it: ‘My first
short-clothes were of yellow serge; or rather, I should say, my first
short-cloth, for the vesture was one and indivisible, reaching from neck to
ankle, a mere body with four limbs: of which fashion how little could I then
divine the architectural, how much less the moral significance!’
More graceful is the
following little picture: ‘On fine evenings I was wont to carry-forth my supper
(bread-crumb boiled in milk), and eat it out-of-doors. On the coping of the
Orchard-wall, which I could reach by climbing, or still more easily if Father
Andreas would set-up the pruning-ladder, my porringer was placed: there, many a
sunset, have I, looking at the distant western Mountains, consumed, not without
relish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of World’s
expectation as Day died, were still a Hebrew Speech for me; nevertheless I was
looking at the fair illuminated Letters, and had an eye for their gilding.’
With ‘the little one’s
friendship for cattle and poultry’ we shall not much intermeddle. It may be
that hereby he acquired a ‘certain deeper sympathy with animated Nature’: but
when, we would ask, saw any man, in a collection of Biographical Documents,
such a piece as this: ‘Impressive enough (bedeutungsvoll) was it to hear, in early morning, the Swineherd’s
horn; and know that so many hungry happy quadrupeds were, on all sides,
starting in hot haste to join him, for breakfast on the Heath. Or to see them
at eventide, all marching-in again, with short squeak, almost in military
order; and each, topographically correct, trotting-off in succession to the
right or left, through its own lane, to its own dwelling; till old Kunz, at the
Village-head, now left alone, blew his last blast, and retired for the night.
We are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form of Ham; yet did not these
bristly thick-skinned beings here manifest intelligence, perhaps humour of
character; at any rate, a touching, trustful submissiveness to Man,--who, were
he but a Swineherd, in darned gabardine, and leather breeches more resembling
slate or discoloured-tin breeches, is still the Hierarch of this lower world?’
It is maintained, by
Helvetius and his set, that an infant of genius is quite the same as any other
infant, only that certain surprisingly favourable influences accompany him
through life, especially through childhood, and expand him, while others lie
closefolded and continue dunces. Herein, say they, consists the whole
difference between an inspired Prophet and a double-barrelled Game-preserver:
the inner man of the one has been fostered into generous development; that of
the other, crushed-down perhaps by vigour of animal digestion, and the like,
has exuded and evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresuscitably stagnant at the
bottom of his stomach. ‘With which opinion,’ cries Teufelsdröckh, ‘I should as
soon agree as with this other, that an acorn might, by favourable or
unfavourable influences of soil and climate, be nursed into a cabbage, or the
cabbage-seed into an oak.
‘Nevertheless,’ continues
he, ‘I too acknowledge the all-but omnipotence of early culture and nurture:
hereby we have either a doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing
tree; either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a
truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note-down
with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their Education, what
furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it: to which duty, nowadays
so pressing for many a German Autobiographer, I also zealously address
myself.’—Thou rogue! Is it by short-clothes of yellow serge, and swineherd
horns, that an infant of genius is educated? And yet, as usual, it ever remains
doubtful whether he is laughing in his sleeve at these Autobiographical times
of ours, or writing from the abundance of his own fond ineptitude. For he
continues: ‘If among the ever-streaming currents of Sights, Hearings, Feelings
for Pain or Pleasure, whereby, as in a Magic Hall, young Gneschen went about
environed, I might venture to select and specify, perhaps these following were
also of the number:
‘Doubtless, as childish
sports call forth Intellect, Activity, so the young creature’s Imagination was
stirred up, and a Historical tendency given him by the narrative habits of
Father Andreas; who, with his battle-reminiscences, and gay austere yet hearty
patriarchal aspect, could not but appear another Ulysses and “much-enduring
Man.” Eagerly I hung upon his tales, when listening neighbours enlivened the
hearth; from these perils and these travels, wild and far almost as Hades
itself, a dim world of Adventure expanded itself within me. Incalculable also
was the knowledge I acquired in standing by the Old Men under the Linden-tree:
the whole of Immensity was yet new to me; and had not these reverend seniors,
talkative enough, been employed in partial surveys thereof for nigh fourscore
years? With amazement I began to discover that Entepfuhl stood in the middle of
a Country, of a World; that there was such a thing as History, as Biography; to
which I also, one day, by hand and tongue, might contribute.
‘In a like sense worked the
Postwagen (Stage-coach), which,
slow-rolling under its mountains of men and luggage, wended through our
Village: northwards, truly, in the dead of night; yet southwards visibly at
eventide. Not till my eighth year did I reflect that this Postwagen could be
other than some terrestrial Moon, rising and setting by mere Law of Nature,
like the heavenly one; that it came on made highways, from far cities towards
far cities; weaving them like a monstrous shuttle into closer and closer union.
It was then that, independently of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, I made this not quite insignificant reflection (so
true also in spiritual things): Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will
lead you to the end of the world!
‘Why mention our Swallows,
which, out of far Africa, as I learned, threading their way over seas and
mountains, corporate cities and belligerent nations, yearly found themselves,
with the month of May, snug-lodged in our Cottage Lobby? The hospitable Father
(for cleanliness’ sake) had fixed a little bracket plumb under their nest:
there they built, and caught flies, and twittered, and bred; and all, I
chiefly, from the heart loved them. Bright, nimble creatures, who taught you the mason-craft; nay, stranger still, gave you a
masonic incorporation, almost social police? For if, by ill chance, and when
time pressed, your House fell, have I not seen five neighbourly Helpers appear
next day; and swashing to and fro, with animated, loud, long-drawn chirpings,
and activity almost super-hirundine, complete it again before nightfall?
‘But undoubtedly the grand
summary of Entepfuhl child’s-culture, where as in a funnel its manifold
influences were concentrated and simultaneously poured-down on us, was the
annual Cattle-fair. Here, assembling from all the four winds, came the elements
of an unspeakable hurly-burly. Nutbrown maids and nutbrown men, all
clear-washed, loud-laughing, bedizened and beribanded; who came for dancing,
for treating, and if possible, for happiness. Topbooted Graziers from the
North; Swiss Brokers, Italian Drovers, also topbooted, from the South; these
with their subalterns in leather jerkins, leather skull-caps, and long oxgoads;
shouting in half-articulate speech, amid the inarticulate barking and
bellowing. Apart stood Potters from far Saxony, with their crockery in fair
rows; Nürnberg Pedlars, in booths that to me seemed richer than Ormuz bazaars;
Showmen from the Lago Maggiore; detachments of the Wiener Schub (Offscourings of Vienna) vociferously superintending
games of chance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine
(heuriger) flowed like water,
still worse confounding the confusion; and high over all, vaulted, in
ground-and-lofty tumbling, a particoloured Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the
place and of Life itself.
‘Thus encircled by the
mystery of Existence; under the deep heavenly Firmament; waited-on by the four
golden Seasons, with their vicissitudes of contribution, for even grim Winter
brought its skating-matches and shooting-matches, its snow-storms and Christmas-carols,--did
the Child sit and learn. These things were the Alphabet, whereby in aftertime
he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World; what matters
it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so
you have an eye to read it? For Gneschen, eager to learn, the very act of
looking thereon was a blessedness that gilded all: his existence was a bright,
soft element of Joy; out of which, as in Prospero’s Island, wonder after wonder
bodied itself forth, to teach by charming.
‘Nevertheless, I were but a
vain dreamer to say, that even then my felicity was perfect. I had, once for
all, come down from Heaven into the Earth. Among the rainbow colours that
glowed on my horizon, lay even in childhood a dark ring of Care, as yet no
thicker than a thread, and often quite overshone; yet always it reappeared, nay
ever waxing broader and broader; till in after-years it almost over-shadowed my
whole canopy, and threatened to engulf me in final night. It was the ring of
Necessity whereby we are all begirt; happy he for whom a kind heavenly Sun
brightens it into a ring of Duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic
diffractions; yet ever, as basis and as bourne for our whole being, it is
there.
* * * * *
‘For the first few years of
our terrestrial Apprenticeship, we have not much work to do; but, boarded and
lodged gratis, are set down mostly to look about us over the workshop, and see
others work, till we have understood the tools a little, and can handle this
and that. If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activity
together, were the thing wanted, then was my early position favourable beyond
the most. In all that respects openness of Sense, affectionate Temper,
ingenuous Curiosity, and the fostering of these, what more could I have wished?
On the other side, however, things went not so well. My Active Power (Thatkraft) was unfavourably hemmed-in; of which misfortune how
many traces yet abide with me! In an orderly house, where the litter of
children’s sports is hateful enough, your training is too stoical; rather to
bear and forbear than to make and do. I was forbid much: wishes in any measure
bold I had to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of Obedience inflexibly held
me down. Thus already Freewill often came in painful collision with Necessity;
so that my tears flowed, and at seasons the Child itself might taste that root
of bitterness, wherewith the whole fruitage of our life is mingled and
tempered.
‘In which habituation to
Obedience, truly, it was beyond measure safer to err by excess than by defect.
Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must
break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in
this world of ours, is as mere zero to Should, and for most part as the
smallest of fractions even to Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of
worldly Discretion, nay, of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my
upbringing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, everyway
unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domestic solitude might there not
lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must
grow? Above all, how unskilful soever, it was loving, it was well-meant,
honest; whereby every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must
ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she
taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and
habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas too attended
Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the other world expected
pay with arrears,--as, I trust, he has received; but my Mother, with a true
woman’s heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest
acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows, and propagates
itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on
Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven:
such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your
being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the
mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying
from its mean envelopment of Fear. Wouldst thou rather be a peasant’s son that
knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a
duke’s son that only knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the
family-coach?’
To which last question we
must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of spiritual pride!
Hitherto we see young
Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge, borne forward mostly on the
arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind, in the
terrestrial workshop; but (except his soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not
already gleamed with a still intelligence) called upon for little voluntary
movement there. Hitherto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of an
incipient Philosopher and Poet in the abstract; perhaps it would trouble Herr
Heuschrecke himself to say wherein the special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet
foreshadowed or betokened. For with Gneschen, as with others, the Man may
indeed stand pictured in the Boy (at least all the pigments are there); yet
only some half of the Man stands in the Child, or young Boy, namely, his
Passive endowment, not his Active. The more impatient are we to discover what
figure he cuts in this latter capacity; how when, to use his own words, ‘he
understands the tools a little, and can handle this or that,’ he will proceed to
handle it.
Here, however, may be the
place to state that, in much of our Philosopher’s history, there is something
of an almost Hindoo character: nay perhaps in that so well-fostered and
everyway excellent ‘Passivity’ of his, which, with no free development of the
antagonist Activity, distinguished his childhood, we may detect the rudiments
of much that, in after days, and still in these present days, astonishes the
world. For the shallow-sighted, Teufelsdröckh is oftenest a man without
Activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted, again, a man with
Activity almost superabundant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic, that
no mortal can foresee its explosions, or even when it has exploded, so much as
ascertain its significance. A dangerous, difficult temper for the modern
European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography! Now as
heretofore it will behove the Editor of these pages, were it never so
unsuccessfully, to do his endeavour.
Among the earliest tools of
any complicacy which a man, especially a man of letters, gets to handle, are
his Class-books. On this portion of his History, Teufelsdröckh looks down
professedly as indifferent. Reading he ‘cannot remember ever to have learned’;
so perhaps had it by nature. He says generally: ‘Of the insignificant portion
of my Education, which depended on Schools, there need almost no notice be
taken. I learned what others learn; and kept it stored-by in a corner of my
head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it. My Schoolmaster, a downbent,
brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for
me, except discover that he could do little: he, good soul, pronounced me a
genius, fit for the learned professions; and that I must be sent to the
Gymnasium, and one day to the University. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever
I could meet with I read. My very copper pocket-money I laid-out on
stall-literature; which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into
volumes. By this means was the young head furnished with a considerable
miscellany of things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments lay
mingled with Fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole not as
dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as yet so
peptic.’
That the Entepfuhl
Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed, already in the youthful
Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there may have been manifest an
inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms of a spirit singularly open,
thoughtful, almost poetical. Thus, to say nothing of his Suppers on the
Orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that earlier period, have many readers of
these pages stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such reflections as the
following? ‘It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide,
and watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed
and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the
earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan;
even as at the midday when Cæsar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet
kept his Commentaries dry,--this
little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was murmuring on across
the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as in the Euphrates and the
Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand World-circulation of Waters, which,
with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with the World. Thou
fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag
thou sittest on is six-thousand years of age.’ In which little thought, as in a
little fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable
meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and its relation to ETERNITY,
which play such a part in this Philosophy of Clothes?
Over his Gymnasic and
Academic years the Professor by no means lingers so lyrical and joyful as over
his childhood. Green sunny tracts there are still; but intersected by bitter
rivulets of tears, here and there stagnating into sour marshes of discontent.
‘With my first view of the Hinterschlag Gymnasium,’ writes he, ‘my evil days
began. Well do I still remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when,
trotting full of hope by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street
of the place, and saw its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and Schuldthurm (Jail), and the aproned or disaproned Burghers
moving-in to breakfast: a little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for some
human imps had tied a tin-kettle to its tail; thus did the agonised creature,
loud-jingling, career through the whole length of the Borough, and become
notable enough. Fit emblem of many a Conquering Hero, to whom Fate (wedding
Fantasy to Sense, as it often elsewhere does) has malignantly appended a tin-kettle
of Ambition, to chase him on; which the faster he runs, urges him the faster,
the more loudly and more foolishly! Fit emblem also of much that awaited
myself, in that mischievous Den; as in the World, whereof it was a portion and
epitome!
‘Alas, the kind beech-rows
of Entepfuhl were hidden in the distance: I was among strangers, harshly, at
best indifferently, disposed towards me; the young heart felt, for the first
time, quite orphaned and alone.’ His schoolfellows, as is usual, persecuted
him: ‘They were Boys,’ he says, ‘mostly rude Boys, and obeyed the impulse of
rude Nature, which bids the deerherd fall upon any stricken hart, the
duck-flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands
the strong tyrannise over the weak.’ He admits, that though ‘perhaps in an
unusual degree morally courageous,’ he succeeded ill in battle, and would fain
have avoided it; a result, as would appear, owing less to his small personal
stature (for in passionate seasons he was ‘incredibly nimble’), than to his
‘virtuous principles’: ‘if it was disgraceful to be beaten,’ says he, ‘it was
only a shade less disgraceful to have so much as fought; thus was I drawn two
ways at once, and in this important element of school-history, the war-element,
had little but sorrow.’ On the whole, that same excellent ‘Passivity,’ so
notable in Teufelsdröckh’s childhood, is here visibly enough again getting
nourishment. ‘He wept often; indeed to such a degree that he was nicknamed Der
Weinende (the Tearful), which epithet,
till towards his thirteenth year, was indeed not quite unmerited. Only at rare
intervals did the young soul burst-forth into fire-eyed rage, and, with a
stormfulness (Ungestüm) under
which the boldest quailed, assert that he too had Rights of Man, or at least of
Mankin.’ In all which, who does not discern a fine flower-tree and
cinnamon-tree (of genius) nigh choked among pumpkins, reed-grass and ignoble
shrubs; and forced if it would live, to struggle upwards only, and not
outwards; into a height quite sickly,
and disproportioned to its breadth?
We find, moreover, that his
Greek and Latin were ‘mechanically’ taught; Hebrew scarce even mechanically;
much else which they called History, Cosmography, Philosophy, and so forth, no
better than not at all. So that, except inasmuch as Nature was still busy; and
he himself ‘went about, as was of old his wont, among the Craftsmen’s
workshops, there learning many things’; and farther lighted on some small store
of curious reading, in Hans Wachtel the Cooper’s house, where he lodged,--his
time, it would appear, was utterly wasted. Which facts the Professor has not
yet learned to look upon with any contentment. Indeed, throughout the whole of
this Bag Scorpio, where we now
are, and often in the following Bag, he shows himself unusually animated on the
matter of Education, and not without some touch of what we might presume to be
anger.
‘My Teachers,’ says he,
‘were hide-bound Pedants, without knowledge of man’s nature, or of boy’s; or of
aught save their lexicons and quarterly account-books. Innumerable dead
Vocables (no dead Language, for they themselves knew no Language) they crammed
into us, and called it fostering the growth of mind. How can an inanimate,
mechanical Gerund-grinder, the like of whom will, in a subsequent century, be
manufactured at Nürnberg out of wood and leather, foster the growth of
anything; much more of Mind, which grows, not like a vegetable (by having its
roots littered with etymological compost), but like a spirit, by mysterious
contact of Spirit; Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How
shall he give kindling, in whose
own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead
grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the
human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be
acted-on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch-rods.
‘Alas, so is it everywhere,
so will it ever be; till the Hodman is discharged, or reduced to hodbearing,
and an Architect is hired, and on all hands fitly encouraged: till communities
and individuals discover, not without surprise, that fashioning the souls of a
generation by Knowledge can rank on a level with blowing their bodies to pieces
by Gunpowder; that with Generals and Fieldmarshals for killing, there should be
world-honoured Dignitaries, and were it possible, true God-ordained Priests,
for teaching. But as yet, though the Soldier wears openly, and even parades,
his butchering-tool, nowhere, far as I have travelled, did the Schoolmaster
make show of his instructing-tool: nay, were he to walk abroad with birch girt
on thigh, as if he therefrom expected honour, would there not, among the idler
class, perhaps a certain levity be excited?’
In the third year of this
Gymnasic period, Father Andreas seems to have died: the young Scholar,
otherwise so maltreated, saw himself for the first time clad outwardly in
sables, and inwardly in quite inexpressible melancholy. ‘The dark bottomless
Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death,
with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him;
the inexorable word, NEVER! now first showed its meaning. My Mother wept, and
her sorrow got vent; but in my heart there lay a whole lake of tears, pent-up
in silent desolation. Nevertheless the unworn Spirit is strong; Life is so
healthful that it even finds nourishment in Death: these stern experiences,
planted down by Memory in my Imagination, rose there to a whole cypress-forest,
sad but beautiful; waving, with not unmelodious sighs, in dark luxuriance, in
the hottest sunshine, through long years of youth:--as in manhood also it does,
and will do; for I have now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb is
now my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look upon the
hostile armaments, and pains and penalties of tyrannous Life placidly enough,
and listen to its loudest threatenings with a still smile. O ye loved ones,
that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep
for and never help; and ye, who wide-scattered still toil lonely in the
monster-bearing Desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood,--yet a little
while, and we shall all meet THERE, and our Mother’s bosom will screen us all;
and Oppression’s harness, and Sorrow’s fire-whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs
that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot thenceforth harm us any more!’
Close by which rather
beautiful apostrophe, lies a laboured Character of the deceased Andreas
Futteral; of his natural ability, his deserts in life (as Prussian Sergeant);
with long historical inquiries into the genealogy of the Futteral Family, here
traced back as far as Henry the Fowler: the whole of which we pass over, not
without astonishment. It only concerns us to add, that now was the time when
Mother Gretchen revealed to her foster-son that he was not at all of this
kindred, or indeed of any kindred, having come into historical existence in the
way already known to us. ‘Thus was I doubly orphaned,’ says he; ‘bereft not
only of Possession, but even of Remembrance. Sorrow and Wonder, here suddenly
united, could not but produce abundant fruit. Such a disclosure, in such a
season, struck its roots through my whole nature: ever till the years of mature
manhood, it mingled with my whole thoughts, was as the stem whereon all my
day-dreams and night-dreams grew. A certain poetic elevation, yet also a
corresponding civic depression, it naturally imparted: I was like no other; in which fixed-idea, leading sometimes to highest,
and oftener to frightfullest results, may there not lie the first spring of
Tendencies, which in my Life have become remarkable enough? As in birth, so in
action, speculation, and social position, my fellows are perhaps not numerous.’
* * * * *
In the Bag Sagittarius, as we at length discover, Teufelsdröckh has become a
University man; though, how, when, or of what quality, will nowhere disclose
itself with the smallest certainty. Few things, in the way of confusion and
capricious indistinctness, can now surprise our readers; not even the total
want of dates, almost without parallel in a Biographical work. So enigmatic, so
chaotic we have always found, and must always look to find, these scattered
Leaves. In Sagittarius, however,
Teufelsdröckh begins to show himself even more than usually Sibylline:
fragments of all sorts; scraps of regular Memoir, College-Exercises, Programs,
Professional Testimoniums, Milkscores, torn Billets, sometimes to appearance of
an amatory cast; all blown together as if by merest chance, henceforth bewilder
the sane Historian. To combine any picture of these University, and the
subsequent, years; much more, to decipher therein any illustrative primordial
elements of the Clothes-Philosophy, becomes such a problem as the reader may
imagine.
So much we can see; darkly,
as through the foliage of some wavering thicket: a youth of no common
endowment, who has passed happily through Childhood, less happily yet still
vigorously through Boyhood, now at length perfect in ‘dead vocables,’ and set
down, as he hopes, by the living Fountain, there to superadd Ideas and
Capabilities. From such Fountain he draws, diligently, thirstily, yet never or
seldom with his whole heart, for the water nowise suits his palate;
discouragements, entanglements, aberrations are discoverable or supposable. Nor
perhaps are even pecuniary distresses wanting; for ‘the good Gretchen, who in
spite of advices from not disinterested relatives has sent him hither, must
after a time withdraw her willing but too feeble hand.’ Nevertheless in an
atmosphere of Poverty and manifold Chagrin, the Humour of that young Soul, what
character is in him, first decisively reveals itself; and, like strong sunshine
in weeping skies, gives out variety of colours, some of which are prismatic.
Thus, with the aid of Time and of what Time brings, has the stripling Diogenes
Teufelsdröckh waxed into manly stature; and into so questionable an aspect,
that we ask with new eagerness, How he specially came by it, and regret anew
that there is no more explicit answer. Certain of the intelligible and
partially significant fragments, which are few in number, shall be extracted
from that Limbo of a Paper-bag, and presented with the usual preparation.
As if, in the Bag Scorpio, Teufelsdröckh had not already expectorated his
antipedagogic spleen; as if, from the name Sagittarius, he had thought himself called upon to shoot arrows,
we here again fall-in with such matter as this: ‘The University where I was
educated still stands vivid enough in my remembrance, and I know its name well;
which name, however, I, from tenderness to existing interests and persons,
shall in nowise divulge. It is my painful duty to say that, out of England and
Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered Universities. This is
indeed a time when right Education is, as nearly as may be, impossible:
however, in degrees of wrongness there is no limit: nay, I can conceive a worse
system than that of the Nameless itself; as poisoned victual may be worse than
absolute hunger.
‘It is written, When the
blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch: wherefore, in such
circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if both leader and led
simply—sit still? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary; walled-in a square
enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose
into it eleven-hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed,
from three to seven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors,
being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and
exact considerable admission-fees,--you had, not indeed in mechanical
structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High
Seminary. I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so
neither was our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim
Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in
the middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the
Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.
‘Gullible, however, by fit
apparatus, all Publics are; and gulled, with the most surprising profit.
Towards anything like a Statistics of Imposture, indeed, little as yet has been done: with a strange
indifference, our Economists, nigh buried under Tables for minor Branches of
Industry, have altogether overlooked the grand all-overtopping Hypocrisy
Branch; as if our whole arts of Puffery, of Quackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft,
and the innumerable other crafts and mysteries of that genus, had not ranked in
Productive Industry at all! Can any one, for example, so much as say, What
moneys, in Literature and Shoeblacking, are realised by actual Instruction and
actual jet Polish; what by fictitious-persuasive Proclamation of such;
specifying, in distinct items, the distributions, circulations, disbursements,
incomings of said moneys, with the smallest approach to accuracy? But to ask,
How far, in all the several infinitely-complected departments of social business,
in government, education, in manual, commercial, intellectual fabrication of
every sort, man’s Want is supplied by true Ware; how far by the mere Appearance
of true Ware:--in other words, To what extent, by what methods, with what
effects, in various times and countries, Deception takes the place of wages of
Performance: here truly is an Inquiry big with results for the future time, but
to which hitherto only the vaguest answer can be given. If for the present, in
our Europe, we estimate the ratio of Ware to Appearance of Ware so high even as
at One to a Hundred (which, considering the Wages of a Pope, Russian Autocrat,
or English Game-Preserver, is probably not far from the mark),--what almost
prodigious saving may there not be anticipated, as the Statistics of
Imposture advances, and so the
manufacturing of Shams (that of Realities rising into clearer and clearer
distinction therefrom) gradually declines, and at length becomes all but wholly
unnecessary!
‘This for the coming golden
ages. What I had to remark, for the present brazen one, is, that in several
provinces, as in Education, Polity, Religion, where so much is wanted and
indispensable, and so little can as yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of
sanative, anodyne nature, and man’s Gullibility not his worst blessing. Suppose
your sinews of war quite broken; I mean your military chest insolvent, forage
all but exhausted; and that the whole army is about to mutiny, disband, and cut
your and each other’s throat,--then were it not well could you, as if by
miracle, pay them in any sort of fairy-money, feed them on coagulated water, or
mere imagination of meat; whereby, till the real supply came up, they might be
kept together and quiet? Such perhaps was the aim of Nature, who does nothing
without aim, in furnishing her favourite, Man, with this his so omnipotent or
rather omnipatient Talent of being Gulled.
‘How beautifully it works,
with a little mechanism; nay, almost makes mechanism for itself! These
Professors in the Nameless lived with ease, with safety, by a mere Reputation,
constructed in past times, and then too with no great effort, by quite another
class of persons. Which Reputation, like a strong, brisk-going undershot wheel,
sunk into the general current, bade fair, with only a little annual repainting
on their part, to hold long together, and of its own accord assiduously grind
for them. Happy that it was so, for the Millers! They themselves needed not to
work; their attempts at working, at what they called Educating, now when I look
back on it, filled me with a certain mute admiration.
‘Besides all this, we
boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the highest degree hostile to
Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about
Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were
quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the
better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort
explode (crepiren) in finished
Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.—But this too is
portion of mankind’s lot. If our era is the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under
it; is there not a better coming, nay come? As in long-drawn Systole and
long-drawn Diastole, must the period of Faith alternate with the period of
Denial; must the vernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all Opinions,
Spiritual Representations and Creations, be followed by, and again follow, the
autumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in Time, has his whole
earthly being, endeavour and destiny shaped for him by Time: only in the
transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity we stand on made
manifest. And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, it is for the
nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been born, and to be awake
and work; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hibernating animals,
safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or Sybaris City, or other
superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber-through, in
stupid dreams, and only awaken when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done
their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been
vouchsafed.’
That in the environment,
here mysteriously enough shadowed forth, Teufelsdröckh must have felt ill at
ease, cannot be doubtful. ‘The hungry young,’ he says, ‘looked up to their
spiritual Nurses; and, for food, were bidden eat the east-wind. What vain
jargon of controversial Metaphysic, Etymology, and mechanical Manipulation
falsely named Science, was current there, I indeed learned, better perhaps than
the most. Among eleven-hundred Christian youths, there will not be wanting some
eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain
polish was communicated; by instinct and happy accident, I took less to rioting
(renommiren), than to thinking and
reading, which latter also I was free to do. Nay from the chaos of that
Library, I succeeded in fishing-up more books perhaps than had been known to
the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a Literary Life was hereby laid : I
learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated
languages, on almost all subjects and sciences; farther, as man is ever the
prime object to man, already it was my favourite employment to read character
in speculation, and from the Writing to construe the Writer. A certain
groundplan of Human Nature and Life began to fashion itself in me; wondrous
enough, now when I look back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and
spiritual, was as yet a Machine! However, such a conscious, recognised
groundplan, the truest I had, was
beginning to be there, and by additional experiments might be corrected and
indefinitely extended.’
Thus from poverty does the
strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the destitution of the wild desert does our
young Ishmael acquire for himself the highest of all possessions, that of
Self-help. Nevertheless a desert this was, waste, and howling with savage
monsters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details of his ‘fever-paroxysms of
Doubt’; his Inquiries concerning Miracles, and the Evidences of religious
Faith; and how ‘in the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart than
over sky and earth, he has cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible
prayers cried vehemently for Light, for deliverance from Death and the Grave.
Not till after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did the believing heart
surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, under the night-mare, Unbelief; and, in
this hag-ridden dream, mistake God’s fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades
and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain,’ continues he, ‘it is
appointed us to pass; first must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead,
and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this
its charnel-house, is to arise on us, newborn of Heaven, and with new healing
under its wings.’
To which Purgatory pains,
seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberal measure of Earthly distresses,
want of practical guidance, want of sympathy, want of money, want of hope; and
all this in the fervid season of youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so
boundless in desires, yet here so poor in means,--do we not see a strong
incipient spirit oppressed and overloaded from without and from within; the
fire of genius struggling-up among fuel-wood of the greenest, and as yet with
more of bitter vapour than of clear flame?
From various fragments of
Letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be inferred that Teufelsdröckh,
isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain
established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching-out no helpful
hand, have at least their eyes on him. He appears, though in dreary enough
humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;--whereof, indeed,
the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken,
unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, let us present rather the
following small thread of Moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself
weaving it in at the right place, conclude our dim arras-picture of these
University years.
‘Here also it was that I
formed acquaintance with Herr Towgood, or, as it is perhaps better written,
Herr Toughgut; a young person of quality (von Adel), from the interior parts of England. He stood
connected, by blood and hospitality, with the Counts von Zähdarm, in this
quarter of Germany; to which noble Family I likewise was, by his means, with
all friendliness, brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably
ill-cultivated; with considerable humour of character: and, bating his total
ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a little Grammar, showed less
of that aristocratic impassivity, and silent fury, than for most part belongs
to Travellers of his nation. To him I owe my first practical knowledge of the
English and their ways; perhaps also something of the partiality with which I
have ever since regarded that singular people. Towgood was not without an eye,
could he have come at any light. Invited doubtless by the presence of the Zähdarm
Family, he had travelled hither, in the almost frantic hope of perfecting his
studies; he, whose studies had as yet been those of infancy, hither to a
University where so much as the notion of perfection, not to say the effort
after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole over the hard destiny of
the Young in this era: how, after all our toil, we were to be turned-out into
the world, with beards on our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of
manhood; no existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that we
could so much as Believe. “How has our head on the outside a polished Hat,”
would Towgood exclaim, “and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and
Attorney-Logic! At a small cost men are educated to make leather into shoes;
but at a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what I
have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, would endow a considerable
Hospital of Incurables.”—“Man, indeed,” I would answer, “has a Digestive
Faculty, which must be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for
our Mis-education, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in
trampling on thistles because they have yielded us no figs. Frisch zu,
Bruder! Here are Books, and we have
brains to read them; here is a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes
to look on them: Frisch zu!”
‘Often also our talk was
gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We looked-out on Life, with its
strange scaffolding, where all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded
and quartered: motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like
brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this
young warmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood I was even near
experiencing the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yes, foolish Heathen
that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have loved this man,
and taken him to my bosom, and been his brother once and always. By degrees,
however, I understood the new time, and its wants. If man’s Soul is indeed, as in the Finnish Language, and
Utilitarian Philosophy, a kind of Stomach, what else is the true meaning of Spiritual Union but an Eating
together? Thus we, instead of Friends, are Dinner-guests; and here as elsewhere
have cast away chimeras.’
So ends, abruptly as is
usual, and enigmatically, this little incipient romance. What henceforth
becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut? He has dived-under, in the
Autobiographical Chaos, and swims we see not where. Does any reader ‘in the
interior parts of England’ know of such a man?
‘Thus, nevertheless,’
writes our autobiographer, apparently as quitting College, ‘was there realised
Somewhat; namely, I, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure (Zeitbild), occupying some cubic feet of Space, and containing
within it Forces both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; the
whole wondrous furniture, in more or less perfection, belonging to that
mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in me to give battle, in some small
degree, against the great Empire of Darkness: does not the very Ditcher and
Delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a
little Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your very Daymoth has
capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something (into its own Body, if
no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; and of mute dead air makes living
music, though only of the faintest, by humming.
‘How much more, one whose
capabilities are spiritual; who has learned, or begun learning, the grand
thaumaturgic art of Thought! Thaumaturgic I name it; for hitherto all Miracles
have been wrought thereby, and henceforth innumerable will be wrought; whereof
we, even in these days, witness some. Of the Poet’s and Prophet’s inspired
Message, and how it makes and unmakes whole worlds, I shall forbear mention:
but cannot the dullest hear Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he not seen
the Scottish Brassmith’s IDEA (and this but a mechanical one) travelling on
fire-wings round the Cape, and across two Oceans; and stronger than any other
Enchanter’s Familiar, on all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at home,
not only weaving Cloth, but rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of
Society; and, for Feudalism and Preservation of the Game, preparing us, by
indirect but sure methods, Industrialism and the Government of the Wisest?
Truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every
time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through
the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if
possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him.
‘With such high vocation
had I too, as denizen of the Universe, been called. Unhappy it is, however,
that though born to the amplest Sovereignty, in this way, with no less than
sovereign right of Peace and War against the Time-Prince (Zeitfürst), or Devil, and all his Dominions, your
coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre is so difficult to get at,
or even to get eye on!’
By which last wiredrawn
similitude does Teufelsdröckh mean no more than that young men find obstacles
in what we call ‘getting under way’? ‘Not what I Have,’ continues he, ‘but what
I Do is my Kingdom. To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward
Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain
maximum of Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by
study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward
and outward Capability specially is. For, alas, our young soul is all budding
with Capabilities, and we see not yet which is the main and true one. Always
too the new man is in a new time, under new conditions; his course can be the fac-simile of no prior one, but is by its nature original. And
then how seldom will the outward Capability fit the inward: though talented
wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is
worse than all, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we
go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong
one: in this mad work must several years of our small term be spent, till the
purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing
Man. Nay, many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new
disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side:
till at length, as exasperated striplings of threescore-and-ten, they shift
into their last enterprise, that of getting buried.
‘Such, since the most of us
are too ophthalmic, would be the general fate; were it not that one thing saves
us: our Hunger. For on this ground, as the prompt nature of Hunger is well
known, must a prompt choice be made: hence have we, with wise foresight,
Indentures and Apprenticeships for our irrational young; whereby, in due
season, the vague universality of a Man shall find himself ready-moulded into a
specific Craftsman; and so thenceforth work, with much or with little waste of
Capability as it may be; yet not with the worst waste, that of time. Nay even
in matters spiritual, since the spiritual artist too is born blind, and does
not, like certain other creatures, receive sight in nine days, but far later,
sometimes never,--is it not well that there should be what we call Professions,
or Bread-studies (Brodzwecke),
pre-appointed us? Here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or total
blindness is no evil, the Bread-artist can travel contentedly round and round,
still fancying that it is forward and forward; and realise much: for himself
victual; for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand corn-mill or
hemp-mill of Economic Society. For me too had such a leading-string been provided;
only that it proved a neck-halter, and had nigh throttled me, till I broke it
off. Then, in the words of Ancient Pistol, did the world generally become mine
oyster, which I, by strength or cunning, was to open, as I would and could.
Almost had I deceased (fast wär ich umgekommen), so obstinately did it continue shut.’
We see here, significantly
foreshadowed, the spirit of much that was to befall our Autobiographer; the
historical embodiment of which, as it painfully takes shape in his Life, lies
scattered, in dim disastrous details, through this Bag Pisces, and those that follow. A young man of high talent,
and high though still temper, like a young mettled colt, ‘breaks-off his
neck-halter,’ and bounds forth, from his peculiar manger, into the wide world;
which, alas, he finds all rigorously fenced-in. Richest clover-fields tempt his
eye; but to him they are forbidden pasture: either pining in progressive
starvation, he must stand; or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro,
leaping against sheer stone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which only
lacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts and endurances,
he, as if by miracle, clears his way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious
clover, yet into a certain bosky wilderness where existence is still possible,
and Freedom, though waited on by Scarcity, is not without sweetness. In a word,
Teufelsdröckh having thrown-up his legal Profession, finds himself without
landmark of outward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided Belief, or
inward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. Necessity urges him on; Time will
not stop, neither can he, a Son of Time; wild passions without solacement, wild
faculties without employment, ever vex and agitate him. He too must enact that
stern Monodrama, No Object and no Rest; must front its successive destinies, work through to its catastrophe,
and deduce therefrom what moral he can.
Yet let us be just to him,
let us admit that his ‘neck-halter’ sat nowise easy on him; that he was in some
degree forced to break it off. If we look at the young man’s civic position, in
this Nameless capital, as he emerges from its Nameless University, we can
discern well that it was far from enviable. His first Law-Examination he has
come through triumphantly; and can even boast that the Examen Rigorosum need not have frightened him: but though he is hereby
‘an Auscultator of
respectability,’ what avails it? There is next to no employment to be had.
Neither, for a youth without connexions, is the process of Expectation very hopeful
in itself; nor for one of his disposition much cheered from without. ‘My fellow
Auscultators,’ he says, ‘were Auscultators: they dressed, and digested, and
talked articulate words; other vitality showed they almost none. Small
speculation in those eyes, that they did glare withal! Sense neither for the
high nor for the deep, nor for aught human or divine, save only for the
faintest scent of coming Preferment.’ In which words, indicating a total
estrangement on the part of Teufelsdröckh, may there not also lurk traces of a
bitterness as from wounded vanity? Doubtless these prosaic Auscultators may
have sniffed at him, with his strange ways; and tried to hate, and what was
much more impossible, to despise him. Friendly communion, in any case, there could
not be: already has the young Teufelsdröckh left the other young geese; and
swims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is cygnet or gosling.
Perhaps, too, what little
employment he had was performed ill, at best unpleasantly. ‘Great practical
method and expertness’ he may brag of; but is there not also great practical
pride, though deep-hidden, only the deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have
been popular. We figure to ourselves, how in those days he may have played
strange freaks with his independence, and so forth: do not his own words
betoken as much? ‘Like a very young person, I imagined it was with Work alone,
and not also with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been
appointed to struggle.’ Be this as it may, his progress from the passive
Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evidently of the slowest.
By degrees, those same established men, once partially inclined to patronise
him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up as ‘a man of genius’:
against which procedure he, in these Papers, loudly protests. ‘As if,’ says he,
‘the higher did not presuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven,
could not also walk post if he resolved on it! But the world is an old woman,
and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated,
she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.’
How our winged
sky-messenger, unaccepted as a terrestrial runner, contrived, in the mean
while, to keep himself from flying skyward without return, is not too clear
from these Documents. Good old Gretchen seems to have vanished from the scene,
perhaps from the Earth; other Horn of Plenty, or even of Parsimony, nowhere
flows for him; so that ‘the prompt nature of Hunger being well known,’ we are
not without our anxiety. From private Tuition, in never so many languages and
sciences, the aid derivable is small; neither, to use his own words, ‘does the
young Adventurer hitherto suspect in himself any literary gift; but at best
earns bread-and-water wages, by his wide faculty of Translation. Nevertheless,’
continues he, ‘that I subsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive.’
Which fact, however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind old
Proverb, that ‘there is always life for a living one,’ we must profess
ourselves unable to explain.
Certain Landlords’ Bills,
and other economic Documents, bearing the mark of Settlement, indicate that he
was not without money; but, like an independent Hearth-holder, if not
House-holder, paid his way. Here also occur, among many others, two little
mutilated Notes, which perhaps throw light on his condition. The first has now
no date, or writer’s name, but a huge Blot; and runs to this effect: ‘The (Inkblot), tied-down by previous promise, cannot, except by best
wishes, forward the Herr Teufelsdröckh’s views on the Assessorship in question;
and sees himself under the cruel necessity of forbearing, for the present, what
were otherwise his duty and joy, to assist in opening the career for a man of
genius, on whom far higher triumphs are yet waiting.’ The other is on gilt
paper; and interests us like a sort of epistolary mummy now dead, yet which
once lived and beneficently worked. We give it in the original: ‘Herr
Teufelsdröckh wird von der Frau Gräfinn, auf Donnerstag, zum ÆSTHETISCHEN THEE schönstens eingeladen.’
Thus, in answer to a cry
for solid pudding, whereof there is the most urgent need, comes,
epigrammatically enough, the invitation to a wash of quite fluid Æsthetic
Tea! How Teufelsdröckh, now at actual
handgrips with Destiny herself, may have comported himself among these Musical
and Literary Dilettanti of both sexes, like a hungry lion invited to a feast of
chickenweed, we can only conjecture. Perhaps in expressive silence, and
abstinence: otherwise if the lion, in such case, is to feast at all, it cannot
be on the chickenweed, but only on the chickens. For the rest, as this Frau
Gräfinn dates from the Zähdarm House,
she can be no other than the Countess and mistress of the same; whose
intellectual tendencies, and good-will to Teufelsdröckh, whether on the footing
of Herr Towgood, or on his own footing, are hereby manifest. That some sort of
relation, indeed, continued, for a time, to connect our Autobiographer, though
perhaps feebly enough, with this noble House, we have elsewhere express
evidence. Doubtless, if he expected patronage, it was in vain; enough for him
if he here obtained occasional glimpses of the great world, from which we at
one time fancied him to have been always excluded. ‘The Zähdarms,’ says he,
‘lived in the soft, sumptuous garniture of Aristocracy; whereto Literature and
Art, attracted and attached from without, were to serve as the handsomest
fringing. It was to the Gnädigen Frau
(her Ladyship) that this latter improvement was due: assiduously she gathered,
dextrously she fitted-on, what fringing was to be had; lace or cobweb, as the
place yielded.’ Was Teufelsdröckh also a fringe, of lace or cobweb; or
promising to be such? ‘With his Excellenz (the Count),’ continues he, ‘I have more than once had the honour to
converse; chiefly on general affairs, and the aspect of the world, which he,
though now past middle life, viewed in no unfavourable light; finding indeed,
except the Outrooting of Journalism (die auszurottende Journalistik), little to desiderate therein. On some points, as
his Excellenz was not uncholeric,
I found it more pleasant to keep silence. Besides, his occupation being that of
Owning Land, there might be faculties enough, which, as superfluous for such
use, were little developed in him.’
That to Teufelsdröckh the
aspect of the world was nowise so faultless, and many things besides ‘the
Outrooting of Journalism’ might have seemed improvements, we can readily
conjecture. With nothing but a barren Auscultatorship from without, and so many
mutinous thoughts and wishes from within, his position was no easy one. ‘The
Universe,’ he says, ‘was as a mighty Sphinx-riddle, which I knew so little of,
yet must rede, or be devoured. In red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yet also
in the blackness of darkness, was Life, to my too-unfurnished Thought,
unfolding itself. A strange contradiction lay in me; and I as yet knew not the
solution of it; knew not that spiritual music can spring only from discords set
in harmony; that but for Evil there were no Good, as victory is only possible
by battle.’
‘I have heard affirmed
(surely in jest),’ observes he elsewhere, ‘by not unphilanthropic persons, that
it were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of
nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there
left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and
wiser, at the age of twenty-five. With which suggestion, at least as considered
in the light of a practical scheme, I need scarcely say that I nowise coincide.
Nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, as young ladies (Mädchen) are, to mankind, precisely the most delightful in
those years; so young gentlemen (Bübchen) do then attain their maximum of detestability. Such gawks (Gecken) are they; and foolish peacocks, and yet with such a
vulturous hunger for self-indulgence; so obstinate, obstreperous, vainglorious;
in all senses, so froward and so forward. No mortal’s endeavour or attainment
will, in the smallest, content the as yet unendeavouring, unattaining young
gentleman; but he could make it all infinitely better, were it worthy of him.
Life everywhere is the most manageable matter, simple as a question in the
Rule-of-Three: multiply your second and third term together, divide the product
by the first, and your quotient will be the answer,--which you are but an ass
if you cannot come at. The booby has not yet found-out, by any trial, that, do
what one will, there is ever a cursed fraction, oftenest a decimal repeater,
and no net integer quotient so much as to be thought of.’
In which passage does not
there lie an implied confession that Teufelsdröckh himself, besides his outward
obstructions, had an inward, still greater, to contend with; namely, a certain
temporary, youthful, yet still afflictive derangement of head? Alas, on the
former side alone, his case was hard enough. ‘It continues ever true,’ says he,
‘that Saturn, or Chronos, or what we call TIME, devours all his Children: only
by incessant Running, by incessant Working, may you (for some
threescore-and-ten years) escape him; and you too he devours at last. Can any
Sovereign, or Holy Alliance of Sovereigns, bid Time stand still; even in
thought, shake themselves free of Time? Our whole terrestrial being is based on
Time, and built of Time; it is wholly a Movement, a Time-impulse; Time is the
author of it, the material of it. Hence also our Whole Duty, which is to move,
to work,--in the right direction. Are not our Bodies and our Souls in continual
movement, whether we will or not; in a continual Waste, requiring a continual
Repair? Utmost satisfaction of our whole outward and inward Wants were but
satisfaction for a space of Time; thus, whatso we have done, is done, and for
us annihilated, and ever must we go and do anew. O Time-Spirit, how hast thou
environed and imprisoned us, and sunk us so deep in thy troublous dim
Time-Element, that only in lucid moments can so much as glimpses of our upper
Azure Home be revealed to us! Me, however, as a Son of Time, unhappier than
some others, was Time threatening to eat quite prematurely; for, strive as I
might, there was no good Running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved were the
feet.’ That is to say, we presume, speaking in the dialect of this lower world,
that Teufelsdröckh’s whole duty and necessity was, like other men’s, ‘to
work,--in the right direction,’ and that no work was to be had; whereby he
became wretched enough. As was natural: with haggard Scarcity threatening him
in the distance; and so vehement a soul languishing in restless inaction, and
forced thereby, like Sir Hudibras’s sword by rust,
To eat into itself for lack
Of something else to hew and hack!
But on the whole, that same
‘excellent Passivity,’ as it has all along done, is here again vigorously flourishing;
in which circumstance may we not trace the beginnings of much that now
characterises our Professor; and perhaps, in faint rudiments, the origin of the
Clothes-Philosophy itself? Already the attitude he has assumed towards the
World is too defensive; not, as would have been desirable, a bold attitude of
attack. ‘So far hitherto,’ he says, ‘as I had mingled with mankind, I was
notable, if for anything, for a certain stillness of manner, which, as my
friends often rebukingly declared, did but ill express the keen ardour of my
feelings. I, in truth, regarded men with an excess both of love and of fear.
The mystery of a Person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the
God-like. Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers hated,
for my so-called Hardness (Härte),
my Indifferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as
my favourite dialect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as a
buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor
Person might live safe there, and in all friendliness, being no longer
exasperated by wounds. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the
Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it. But how many
individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of hostility
thereby! An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways, more
especially an ironic young man, from whom it is least expected, may be viewed
as a pest to society. Have we not seen persons of weight and name coming
forward, with gentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as an
insignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (balkenhoch), and thence fall shattered and supine, to be borne
home on shutters, not without indignation, when he proved electric and a
torpedo!’
Alas, how can a man with
this devilishness of temper make way for himself in Life; where the first
problem, as Teufelsdröckh too admits, is ‘to unite yourself with some one and
with somewhat (sich anzuschliessen)’?
Division, not union, is written on most part of his procedure. Let us add too
that, in no great length of time, the only important connexion he had ever
succeeded in forming, his connexion with the Zähdarm Family, seems to have been
paralysed, for all practical uses, by the death of the ‘not uncholeric’ old
Count. This fact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain Discourse
on Epitaphs, huddled into the present
Bag, among so much else; of which Essay the learning and curious penetration
are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that
lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than
Lyrical. ‘By request of that worthy Nobleman’s survivors,’ says he, ‘I
undertook to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced
the following; which however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never
yet fully visible to myself, still remains unengraven’;--wherein, we may
predict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an English reader:
PHILIPPUS ZAEHDARM,
COGNOMINE MAGNUS,
ZAEHDARMI COMES, EX IMPERII
CONCILIO, VELLERIS AUREI, PERISCELIDIS, NECNON VULTURIS NIGRI EQUES.
QUI DUM SUB LUNA AGEBAT,
QUINQUIES MILLE PERDICES
PLUMBO CONFECIT:
VARII CIBI
CENTUMPONDIA MILLIES
CENTENA MILLIA, PER SE, PERQUE SERVOS QUADRUPEDES BIPEDESVE HAUD SINE TUMULTU
DEVOLVENS,
IN STERCUS
PALAM CONVERTIT.
NUNC A LABORE REQUIESCENTEM
OPERA SEQUUNTUR.
SI MONUMENTUM QUÆRIS,
FIMETUM ADSPICE.
PRIMUM IN ORBE DEJECIT [sub
dato]; POSTREMUM [sub dato].
‘For long years,’ writes
Teufelsdröckh, ‘had the poor Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Auscultatorship,
painfully toiled, baking bricks without stubble, before ever the question once
struck him with entire force: For what?--Beym Himmel! For Food and Warmth! And are Food and Warmth nowhere
else, in the whole wide Universe, discoverable?--Come of it what might, I
resolved to try.’
Thus then are we to see him
in a new independent capacity, though perhaps far from an improved one.
Teufelsdröckh is now a man without Profession. Quitting the common Fleet of
herring-busses and whalers, where indeed his leeward, laggard condition was
painful enough, he desperately steers-off, on a course of his own, by sextant
and compass of his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Though neither Fleet, nor
Traffic, nor Commodores pleased thee, still was it not a Fleet, sailing in prescribed track, for fixed objects;
above all, in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans
and borrowings, each could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in
unknown seas; and for thyself find that shorter North-west Passage to thy fair
Spice-country of a Nowhere?--A solitary rover, on such a voyage, with such
nautical tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a
certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and as it were falsifies
and oversets his whole reckoning.
‘If in youth,’ writes he
once, ‘the Universe is majestically unveiling, and everywhere Heaven revealing
itself on Earth, nowhere to the Young Man does this Heaven on Earth so
immediately reveal itself as in the Young Maiden. Strangely enough, in this
strange life of ours, it has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often
said, a Person (Persönlichkeit) is
ever holy to us: a certain orthodox Anthropomorphism connects my Me with all Thees in bonds of Love: but it is in this approximation of the Like and
Unlike, that such heavenly attraction, as between Negative and Positive, first
burns-out into a flame. Is the pitifullest mortal Person, think you,
indifferent to us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him;
to unite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or failing all
these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more, in this case of the Like-Unlike!
Here is conceded us the higher mystic possibility of such a union, the highest
in our Earth; thus, in the conducting medium of Fantasy, flames-forth that fire-development of the universal Spiritual Electricity,
which, as unfolded between man and woman, we first emphatically denominate
LOVE.
‘In every well-conditioned
stripling, as I conjecture, there already blooms a certain prospective
Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve; nor, in the stately vistas, and
flowerage and foliage of that Garden, is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and
awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier,
if Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant
him, the imaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy season
of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier; and the
sacred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of
Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free!
‘As for our young Forlorn,’
continues Teufelsdröckh, evidently meaning himself, ‘in his secluded way of
life, and with his glowing Fantasy, the more fiery that it burnt under cover,
as in a reverberating furnace, his feeling towards the Queens of this Earth
was, and indeed is, altogether unspeakable. A visible Divinity dwelt in them;
to our young Friend all women were holy, were heavenly. As yet he but saw them
flitting past, in their many-coloured angel-plumage; or hovering mute and
inaccessible on the outskirts of Æsthetic Tea: all of air they were, all Soul and Form; so lovely,
like mysterious priestesses, in whose hand was the invisible Jacob’s-ladder,
whereby man might mount into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever
win for himself one of these Gracefuls (Holden)--Ach Gott!
how could he hope it; should he not have died under it? There was a certain
delirious vertigo in the thought.
‘Thus was the young man, if
all-sceptical of Demons and Angels such as the vulgar had once believed in,
nevertheless not unvisited by hosts of true Sky-born, who visibly and audibly
hovered round him whereso he went; and they had that religious worship in his
thought, though as yet it was by their mere earthly and trivial name that he
named them. But now, if on a soul so circumstanced, some actual Air-maiden,
incorporated into tangibility and reality, should cast any electric glance of
kind eyes, saying thereby, “Thou too mayest love and be loved”; and so kindle
him,--good Heaven, what a volcanic, earthquake-bringing, all-consuming fire were
probably kindled!’
Such a fire, it afterwards
appears, did actually burst-forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in
the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which,
in his own figurative style, we might say, had now not a little carbonised
tinder, of Irritability; with so much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurous
Humour enough; the whole lying in such hot neighbourhood, close by ‘a
reverberating furnace of Fantasy’: have we not here the components of driest
Gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze-up? Neither, in
this our Life-element, are sparks anywhere wanting. Without doubt, some Angel,
whereof so many hovered round, would one day, leaving ‘the outskirts of Æsthetic
Tea,’ flit nigher; and, by electric
Promethean glance, kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a
Firework, and flamed-off rocketwise, in successive beautiful bursts of
splendour, each growing naturally from the other, through the several stages of
a happy Youthful Love; till the whole were safely burnt-out; and the young soul
relieved with little damage! Happy, if it did not rather prove a Conflagration
and mad Explosion; painfully lacerating the heart itself; nay perhaps bursting
the heart in pieces (which were Death); or at best, bursting the thin walls of
your ‘reverberating furnace,’ so that it rage thenceforth all unchecked among
the contiguous combustibles (which were Madness): till of the so fair and
manifold internal world of our Diogenes, there remained Nothing, or only the
‘crater of an extinct volcano!’
From multifarious Documents
in this Bag Capricornus, and in
the adjacent ones on both sides thereof, it becomes manifest that our
philosopher, as stoical and cynical as he now looks, was heartily and even frantically
in Love: here therefore may our old doubts whether his heart were of stone or
of flesh give way. He loved once; not wisely but too well. And once only: for
as your Congreve needs a new case or wrappage for every new rocket, so each
human heart can properly exhibit but one Love, if even one; the ‘First Love
which is infinite’ can be followed by no second like unto it. In more recent
years, accordingly, the Editor of these Sheets was led to regard Teufelsdröckh
as a man not only who would never wed, but who would never even flirt; whom the
grand-climacteric itself, and St. Martin’s Summer of incipient Dotage, would crown with no new
myrtle-garland. To the Professor, women are henceforth Pieces of Art; of
Celestial Art, indeed; which celestial pieces he glories to survey in
galleries, but has lost thought of purchasing.
Psychological readers are
not without curiosity to see how Teufelsdröckh, in this for him unexampled
predicament, demeans himself; with what specialties of successive
configuration, splendour and colour, his Firework blazes-off. Small, as usual,
is the satisfaction that such can meet with here. From amid these confused
masses of Eulogy and Elegy, with their mad Petrarchan and Werterean ware lying
madly scattered among all sorts of quite extraneous matter, not so much as the
fair one’s name can be deciphered. For, without doubt, the title Blumine, whereby she is here designated, and which means
simply Goddess of Flowers, must be fictitious. Was her real name Flora, then?
But what was her surname, or had she none? Of what station in Life was she; of
what parentage, fortune, aspect? Specially, by what Pre-established Harmony of
occurrences did the Lover and the Loved meet one another in so wide a world;
how did they behave in such meeting? To all which questions, not unessential in
a Biographic work, mere Conjecture must for most part return answer. ‘It was
appointed,’ says our Philosopher, ‘that the high celestial orbit of Blumine
should intersect the low sublunary one of our Forlorn; that he, looking in her
empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper Sphere of Light was come down into this
nether sphere of Shadows; and finding himself mistaken, make noise enough.’
We seem to gather that she
was young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, and some one’s Cousin; highborn, and of high
spirit; but unhappily dependent and insolvent; living, perhaps, on the
not-too-gracious bounty of monied relatives. But how came ‘the Wanderer’ into
her circle? Was it by the humid vehicle of Æsthetic Tea, or by the arid one of mere Business? Was it on the
hand of Herr Towgood; or of the Gnädige Frau, who, as ornamental Artist, might
sometimes like to promote flirtation, especially for young cynical
Nondescripts? To all appearance, it was chiefly by Accident, and the grace of
Nature.
‘Thou fair Waldschloss,’
writes our Autobiographer, ‘what stranger ever saw thee, were it even an
absolved Auscultator, officially bearing in his pocket the last Relatio ex
Actis he would ever write, but must
have paused to wonder! Noble Mansion! There stoodest thou, in deep Mountain
Amphitheatre, on umbrageous lawns, in thy serene solitude; stately, massive,
all of granite; glittering in the western sunbeams, like a palace of El Dorado,
overlaid with precious metal. Beautiful rose up, in wavy curvature, the slope
of thy guardian Hills; of the greenest was their sward, embossed with its
dark-brown frets of crag, or spotted by some spreading solitary Tree and its
shadow. To the unconscious Wayfarer thou wert also as an Ammon’s Temple, in the
Libyan Waste; where, for joy and woe, the tablet of his Destiny lay written.
Well might he pause and gaze; in that glance of his were prophecy and nameless
forebodings.’
But now let us conjecture
that the so presentient Auscultator has handed-in his Relatio ex Actis; been invited to a glass of Rhine-wine; and so,
instead of returning dispirited and athirst to his dusty Town-home, is ushered
into the Gardenhouse, where sit the choicest party of dames and cavaliers: if
not engaged in Æsthetic Tea, yet in trustful evening conversation, and perhaps
Musical Coffee, for we hear of ‘harps and pure voices making the stillness
live.’ Scarcely, it would seem, is the Gardenhouse inferior in respectability
to the noble Mansion itself. ‘Embowered amid rich foliage, rose-clusters, and
the hues and odours of thousand flowers, here sat that brave company; in front,
from the wide-opened doors, fair outlook over blossom and bush, over grove and
velvet green, stretching, undulating onwards to the remote Mountain peaks: so
bright, so mild, and everywhere the melody of birds and happy creatures: it was
all as if man had stolen a shelter from the Sun in the bosom-vesture of Summer
herself. How came it that the Wanderer advanced thither with such forecasting
heart (ahndungsvoll), by the side
of his gay host? Did he feel that to these soft influences his hard bosom ought
to be shut; that here, once more, Fate had it in view to try him; to mock him,
and see whether there were Humour in him?
‘Next moment he finds
himself presented to the party; and especially by name to—Blumine!
Peculiar among all dames and damosels glanced Blumine, there in her modesty,
like a star among earthly lights. Noblest maiden! whom he bent to, in body and
in soul; yet scarcely dared look at, for the presence filled him with painful
yet sweetest embarrassment.
‘Blumine’s was a name well
known to him; far and wide was the fair one heard of, for her gifts, her
graces, her caprices: from all which vague colourings of Rumour, from the
censures no less than from the praises, had our friend painted for himself a
certain imperious Queen of Hearts, and blooming warm Earth-angel, much more
enchanting than your mere white Heaven-angels of women, in whose placid veins
circulates too little naphtha-fire. Herself also he had seen in public places;
that light yet so stately form; those dark tresses, shading a face where smiles
and sunlight played over earnest deeps: but all this he had seen only as a
magic vision, for him inaccessible, almost without reality. Her sphere was too
far from his; how should she ever think of him; O Heaven! how should they so
much as once meet together? And now that Rose-goddess sits in the same circle
with him; the light of her eyes
has smiled on him; if he speak, she will hear it! Nay, who knows, since the
heavenly Sun looks into lowest valleys, but Blumine herself might have
aforetime noted the so unnotable; perhaps, from his very gainsayers, as he had
from hers, gathered wonder, gathered favour for him? Was the attraction, the
agitation mutual, then; pole and pole trembling towards contact, when once
brought into neighbourhood? Say rather, heart swelling in presence of the Queen
of Hearts; like the Sea swelling when once near its Moon! With the Wanderer it
was even so: as in heavenward gravitation, suddenly as at the touch of a
Seraph’s wand, his whole soul is roused from its deepest recesses; and all that
was painful and that was blissful there, dim images, vague feelings of a whole
Past and a whole Future, are heaving in unquiet eddies within him.
‘Often, in far less agitating
scenes, had our still Friend shrunk forcibly together; and shrouded-up his
tremors and flutterings, of what sort soever, in a safe cover of Silence, and
perhaps of seeming Stolidity. How was it, then, that here, when trembling to
the core of his heart, he did not sink into swoons, but rose into strength,
into fearlessness and clearness? It was his guiding Genius (Dämon) that inspired him; he must go forth and meet his
Destiny. Show thyself now, whispered it, or be forever hid. Thus sometimes it
is even when your anxiety becomes transcendental, that the soul first feels
herself able to transcend it; that she rises above it, in fiery victory; and
borne on new-found wings of victory, moves so calmly, even because so rapidly,
so irresistibly. Always must the Wanderer remember, with a certain satisfaction
and surprise, how in this case he sat not silent, but struck adroitly into the
stream of conversation; which thenceforth, to speak with an apparent not a real
vanity, he may say that he continued to lead. Surely, in those hours, a certain
inspiration was imparted him, such inspiration as is still possible in our late
era. The self-secluded unfolds himself in noble thoughts, in free, glowing
words; his soul is as one sea of light, the peculiar home of Truth and
Intellect; wherein also Fantasy bodies-forth form after form, radiant with all
prismatic hues.’
It appears, in this
otherwise so happy meeting, there talked one ‘Philistine’; who even now, to the
general weariness, was dominantly pouring-forth Philistinism (Philistriositäten); little witting what hero was here entering to
demolish him! We omit the series of Socratic, or rather Diogenic utterances,
not unhappy in their way, whereby the monster, ‘persuaded into silence,’ seems
soon after to have withdrawn for the night. ‘Of which dialectic marauder,’
writes our hero, ‘the discomfiture was visibly felt as a benefit by most: but
what were all applauses to the glad smile, threatening every moment to become a
laugh, wherewith Blumine herself repaid the victor? He ventured to address her,
she answered with attention: nay what if there were a slight tremor in that
silver voice; what if the red glow of evening were hiding a transient blush!
‘The conversation took a
higher tone, one fine thought called forth another: it was one of those rare
seasons, when the soul expands with full freedom, and man feels himself brought
near to man. Gaily in light, graceful abandonment, the friendly talk played
round that circle; for the burden was rolled from every heart; the barriers of
Ceremony, which are indeed the laws of polite living, had melted as into
vapour; and the poor claims of Me
and Thee, no longer parted by
rigid fences, now flowed softly into one another; and Life lay all harmonious,
many-tinted, like some fair royal champaign, the sovereign and owner of which
were Love only. Such music springs from kind hearts, in a kind environment of
place and time. And yet as the light grew more aërial on the mountain-tops, and
the shadows fell longer over the valley, some faint tone of sadness may have
breathed through the heart; and, in whispers more or less audible, reminded
every one that as this bright day was drawing towards its close, so likewise
must the Day of Man’s Existence decline into dust and darkness; and with all
its sick toilings, and joyful and mournful noises sink in the still Eternity.
‘To our Friend the hours
seemed moments; holy was he and happy: the words from those sweetest lips came
over him like dew on thirsty grass; all better feelings in his soul seemed to
whisper: It is good for us to be here. At parting, the Blumine’s hand was in
his: in the balmy twilight, with the kind stars above them, he spoke something
of meeting again, which was not contradicted; he pressed gently those small
soft fingers, and it seemed as if they were not hastily, not angrily
withdrawn.’
Poor Teufelsdröckh! it is
clear to demonstration thou art smit: the Queen of Hearts would see a ‘man of
genius’ also sigh for her; and there, by art-magic, in that preternatural hour,
has she bound and spell-bound thee. ‘Love is not altogether a Delirium,’ says
he elsewhere; ‘yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a
discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which
discerning again may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac,
Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it
is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual
plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual.
Fantasy I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous
life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbühne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these
far yet near regions meet visibly, and act tragedy and melodrama. Sense can
support herself handsomely, in most countries, for some eighteenpence a day;
but for Fantasy planets and solar-systems will not suffice. Witness your
Pyrrhus conquering the world, yet drinking no better red wine than he had
before.’ Alas! witness also your Diogenes, flame-clad, scaling the upper
Heaven, and verging towards Insanity, for prize of a ‘high-souled Brunette,’ as
if the earth held but one and not several of these!
He says that, in Town, they
met again: ‘day after day, like his heart’s sun, the blooming Blumine shone on
him. Ah! a little while ago, and he was yet in all darkness; him what Graceful
(Holde) would ever love?
Disbelieving all things, the poor youth had never learned to believe in
himself. Withdrawn, in proud timidity, within his own fastnesses; solitary from
men, yet baited by night-spectres enough, he saw himself, with a sad
indignation, constrained to renounce the fairest hopes of existence. And now, O
now! “She looks on thee,” cried he: “she the fairest, noblest; do not her dark
eyes tell thee, thou art not despised? The Heaven’s-Messenger! All Heaven’s
blessings be hers!” Thus did soft melodies flow through his heart; tones of an
infinite gratitude; sweetest intimations that he also was a man, that for him
also unutterable joys had been provided.
‘In free speech, earnest or
gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and often with the inarticulate
mystic speech of Music: such was the element they now lived in; in such a
many-tinted, radiant Aurora, and by this fairest of Orient Light-bringers must
our Friend be blandished, and the new Apocalypse of Nature unrolled to him.
Fairest Blumine! And, even as a Star, all Fire and humid Softness, a very
Light-ray incarnate! Was there so much as a fault, a “caprice,” he could have
dispensed with? Was she not to him in very deed a Morning-Star; did not her
presence bring with it airs from Heaven? As from Æolian Harps in the breath of
dawn, as from the Memnon’s Statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora,
unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale
Doubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomed-up with happiness and hope. The
past, then, was all a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then,
and could not discern it! But lo now! the black walls of his prison melt away;
the captive is alive, is free. If he loved his Disenchantress? Ach Gott! His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but
never had he named it Love: existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into a
Thought.’
Nevertheless, into a
Thought, nay into an Action, it must be shaped; for neither Disenchanter nor
Disenchantress, mere ‘Children of Time,’ can abide by Feeling alone. The
Professor knows not, to this day, ‘how in her soft, fervid bosom the Lovely
found determination, even on hest of Necessity, to cut-asunder these so
blissful bonds.’ He even appears surprised at the ‘Duenna Cousin,’ whoever she
may have been, ‘in whose meagre, hunger-bitten philosophy, the religion of
young hearts was, from the first, faintly approved of.’ We, even at such
distance, can explain it without necromancy. Let the Philosopher answer this
one question: What figure, at that period, was a Mrs. Teufelsdröckh likely to
make in polished society? Could she have driven so much as a brass-bound Gig,
or even a simple iron-spring one? Thou foolish ‘absolved Auscultator,’ before
whom lies no prospect of capital, will any yet known ‘religion of young hearts’
keep the human kitchen warm? Pshaw! thy divine Blumine when she ‘resigned
herself to wed some richer,’ shows more philosophy, though but ‘a woman of
genius,’ than thou, a pretended man.
Our readers have witnessed
the origin of this Love-mania, and with what royal splendour it waxes, and
rises. Let no one ask us to unfold the glories of its dominant state; much less
the horrors of its almost instantaneous dissolution. How from such inorganic
masses, henceforth madder than ever, as lie in these Bags, can even fragments
of a living delineation be organised? Besides, of what profit were it? We view,
with a lively pleasure, the gay silk Montgolfier start from the ground, and
shoot upwards, cleaving the liquid deeps, till it dwindle to a luminous star:
but what is there to look longer on, when once, by natural elasticity, or
accident of fire, it has exploded? A hapless air-navigator, plunging amid torn
parachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck, fast enough into the jaws of the
Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdröckh rose into the highest regions of
the Empyrean, by a natural parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick
perpendicular one. For the rest, let any feeling reader, who has been unhappy
enough to do the like, paint it out for himself: considering only that if he,
for his perhaps comparatively insignificant mistress, underwent such agonies
and frenzies, what must Teufelsdröckh’s have been, with a fire-heart, and for a
nonpareil Blumine! We glance merely at the final scene:
‘One morning, he found his
Morning-Star all dimmed and dusky-red; the fair creature was silent, absent,
she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no longer a Morning-star, but a
troublous skyey Portent, announcing that the Doomsday had dawned! She said, in
a tremulous voice, They were to meet no more.’ The thunder-struck Air-sailor is
not wanting to himself in this dread hour: but what avails it? We omit the
passionate expostulations, entreaties, indignations, since all was vain, and
not even an explanation was conceded him; and hasten to the catastrophe.
‘”Farewell, then, Madam!” said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride
helped him. She put her hand in his, she looked in his face, tears started to
her eyes: in wild audacity he clasped her to his bosom; their lips were joined,
their two souls, like two dew-drops, rushed into one,--for the first time, and
for the last!’ Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why,
then—‘thick curtains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose the
immeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was
he falling, falling, towards the Abyss.’
We have long felt that,
with a man like our Professor, matters must often be expected to take a course
of their own; that in so multiplex, intricate a nature, there might be
channels, both for admitting and emitting, such as the Psychologist had seldom
noted; in short, that on no grand occasion and convulsion, neither in the
joy-storm nor in the woe-storm, could you predict his demeanour.
To our less philosophical
readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdröckh, precipitated
through ‘a shivered Universe’ in this extraordinary way, has only one of three
things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic
Poetry; or blow-out his brains. In the progress towards any of which
consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravagance enough;
breast-beating, brow-beating (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and
the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself?
Nowise so does
Teufelsdröckh deport him. He quietly lifts his Pilgerstab (Pilgrim-staff), ‘old business being soon wound-up’;
and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe!
Curious it is, indeed, how with such vivacity of conception, such intensity of
feeling, above all, with these unconscionable habits of Exaggeration in speech,
he combines that wonderful stillness of his, that stoicism in external
procedure. Thus, if his sudden bereavement, in this matter of the
Flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Doomsday and Dissolution of Nature, in
which light doubtless it partly appeared to himself, his own nature is nowise
dissolved thereby; but rather is compressed closer. For once, as we might say,
a Blumine by magic appliances has unlocked that shut heart of his, and its
hidden things rush-out tumultuous, boundless, like genii enfranchised from
their glass phial: but no sooner are your magic appliances withdrawn, than the
strange casket of a heart springs-to again; and perhaps there is now no key
extant that will open it; for a Teufelsdröckh, as we remarked, will not love a
second time. Singular Diogenes! No sooner has that heart-rending occurrence
fairly taken place, than he affects to regard it as a thing natural, of which
there is nothing more to be said. ‘One highest hope, seemingly legible in the
eyes of an Angel, had recalled him as out of Death-shadows into celestial Life:
but a gleam of Tophet passed-over the face of his Angel; he was rapt away in
whirlwinds, and heard the laughter of Demons. It was a Calenture,’ adds he,
‘whereby the Youth saw green Paradise-groves in the waste Ocean-waters: a lying
vision, yet not wholly a lie, for he
saw it.’ But what things soever passed in him, when he ceased to see it; what
ragings and despairings soever Teufelsdröckh’s soul was the scene of, he has
the goodness to conceal under a quite opaque cover of Silence. We know it well;
the first mad paroxysm past, our brave Gneschen collected his dismembered
philosophies, and buttoned himself together; he was meek, silent, or spoke of
the weather and the Journals: only by a transient knitting of those shaggy
brows, by some deep flash of those eyes, glancing one knew not whether with
tear-dew or with fierce fire,--might you have guessed what a Gehenna was
within; that a whole Satanic School were spouting, though inaudibly, there. To
consume your own choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a
whole Satanic School spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet
no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times.
Nevertheless, we will not
take upon us to say, that in the strange measure he fell upon, there was not a
touch of latent Insanity; whereof indeed the actual condition of these
Documents in Capricornus and Aquarius is no bad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings, toilsome
enough, are without assigned or perhaps assignable aim; internal Unrest seems
his sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had
fallen on him, and he were ‘made like unto a wheel.’ Doubtless, too, the
chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note
of preparation, for example, we come upon the following slip: ‘A peculiar
feeling it is that will rise in the Traveller, when turning some hill-range in
his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomed among its groves and
green natural bulwarks, and all diminished to a toybox, the fair Town, where so
many souls, as it were seen and yet unseen, are driving their multifarious
traffic. Its white steeple is then truly a starward-pointing finger; the canopy
of blue smoke seems like a sort of Life-breath: for always, of its own unity,
the soul gives unity to whatsoever it looks on with love; thus does the little
Dwelling place of men, in itself a congeries of houses and huts, become for us
an individual, almost a person. But what thousand other thoughts unite thereto,
if the place has to ourselves been the arena of joyous or mournful experiences;
if perhaps the cradle we were rocked in still stands there, if our Loving ones
still dwell there, if our Buried ones there slumber!’ Does Teufelsdröckh, as
the wounded eagle is said to make for its own eyrie, and indeed military
deserters, and all hunted outcast creatures, turn as if by instinct in the
direction of their birthland,--fly first, in this extremity, towards his native
Entepfuhl; but reflecting that there no help awaits him, take but one wistful
look from the distance, and then wend elsewhither?
Little happier seems to be
his next flight: into the wilds of Nature; as if in her mother-bosom he would
seek healing. So at least we incline to interpret the following Notice,
separated from the former by some considerable space, wherein, however, is
nothing noteworthy:
‘Mountains were not new to
him; but rarely are Mountains seen in such combined majesty and grace as here.
The rocks are of that sort called Primitive by the mineralogists, which always
arrange themselves in masses of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness,
however, is here tempered by a singular airiness of form, and softness of
environment: in a climate favourable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself
covered with lichens, shoots-up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and
white, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. In
fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur: you ride through stony
hollows, along straight passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls
of rock; now winding amid broken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; now
suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet collects itself
into a Lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and it seems as if Peace
had established herself in the bosom of Strength.
‘To Peace, however, in this
vortex of existence, can the Son of Time not pretend: still less if some
Spectre haunt him from the Past; and the future is wholly a Stygian Darkness,
spectre-bearing. Reasonably might the Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the
gates of this world’s happiness inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope
that is not mad? Nevertheless, one may still murmur audibly, or in the original
Greek if that suit better: “Whoso can look on Death will start at no shadows.”
‘From such meditations is
the Wanderer’s attention called outwards; for now the Valley closes-in
abruptly, intersected by a huge mountain mass, the stony water-worn ascent of
which is not to be accomplished on horseback. Arrived aloft, he finds himself
again lifted into the evening sunset light; and cannot but pause, and gaze
round him, some moments there. An upland irregular expanse of wold, where
valleys in complex branchings are suddenly or slowly arranging their descent
towards every quarter of the sky. The mountain-ranges are beneath your feet,
and folded together: only the loftier summits look down here and there as on a
second plain; lakes also lie clear and earnest in their solitude. No trace of
man now visible; unless indeed it were he who fashioned that little visible
link of Highway, here, as would seem, scaling the inaccessible, to unite
Province with Province. But sunwards, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world
of Mountains, the diadem and centre of the mountain region! A hundred and a
hundred savage peaks, in the last light of Day; all glowing, of gold and
amethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness; there in their silence, in
their solitude, even as on the night when Noah’s Deluge first dried! Beautiful,
nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to our Wanderer. He gazed over those
stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire; never till this hour
had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was his Mother, and divine. And
as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun had now
departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of Life, stole
through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one, as if the Earth
were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne in that splendour,
and his own spirit were therewith holding communion.
‘The spell was broken by a
sound of carriage-wheels. Emerging from the hidden Northward, to sink soon into
the hidden Southward, came a gay Barouche-and-four: it was open; servants and
postillions wore wedding-favours: that happy pair, then, had found each other,
it was their marriage evening! Few moments brought them near: Du Himmel! It was Herr Towgood and—Blumine! With slight
unrecognising salutation they passed me; plunged down amid the neighbouring
thickets, onwards, to Heaven, and to England; and I, in my friend Richter’s
words, I remained alone, behind them, with the Night.’
Were it not cruel in these
circumstances, here might be the place to insert an observation, gleaned long
ago from the great Clothes-Volume,
where it stands with quite other intent: ‘Some time before Small-pox was
extirpated,’ says the Professor, ‘there came a new malady of the spiritual sort
on Europe: I mean the epidemic, now endemical, of View-hunting. Poets of old
date, being privileged with Senses, had also enjoyed external Nature; but
chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cup which holds good or bad liquor for us; that
is to say, in silence, or with slight incidental commentary: never, as I
compute, till after the Sorrows of Werter, was there man found who would say: Come let us make a Description!
Having drunk the liquor, come let us eat the glass! Of which endemic the Jenner
is unhappily still to seek.’ Too true!
We reckon it more important
to remark that the Professor’s Wanderings, so far as his stoical and cynical
envelopment admits us to clear insight, here first take their permanent
character, fatuous or not. That Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four seems
to have withered-up what little remnant of a purpose may have still lurked in
him: Life has become wholly a dark labyrinth; wherein, through long years, our
Friend, flying from spectres, has to stumble about at random, and naturally
with more haste than progress.
Foolish were it in us to
attempt following him, even from afar, in this extraordinary world-pilgrimage
of his; the simplest record of which, were clear record possible, would fill
volumes. Hopeless is the obscurity, unspeakable the confusion. He glides from
country to country, from condition to condition; vanishing and reappearing, no
man can calculate how or where. Through all quarters of the world he wanders,
and apparently through all circles of society. If in any scene, perhaps
difficult to fix geographically, he settles for a time, and forms connexions,
be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder. Let him sink out of sight as
Private Scholar (Privatisirender),
living by the grace of God in some European capital, you may next find him as
Hadjee in the neighbourhood of Mecca. It is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria,
capricious, quick-changing; as if our Traveller, instead of limbs and
high-ways, had transported himself by some wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus’ Hat.
The whole, too, imparted emblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that
collection of Street-Advertisements); with only some touch of direct historical
notice sparingly interspersed: little light-islets in the world of haze! So
that, from this point, the Professor is more of an enigma than ever. In
figurative language, we might say he becomes, not indeed a spirit, yet
spiritualised, vaporised Fact unparalleled in Biography: The river of his
History, which we have traced from its tiniest fountains, and hoped to see flow
onward, with increasing current, into the ocean, here dashes itself over that
terrific Lover’s Leap; and, as a mad-foaming cataract, flies wholly into
tumultuous clouds of spray! Low down it indeed collects again into pools and plashes;
yet only at a great distance, and with difficulty, if at all, into a general
stream. To cast a glance into certain of those pools and plashes, and trace
whither they run, must, for a chapter or two, form the limit of our endeavour.
For which end doubtless
those direct historical Notices, where they can be met with, are the best.
Nevertheless, of this sort too there occurs much, which, with our present
light, it were questionable to emit. Teufelsdröckh, vibrating everywhere
between the highest and the lowest levels, comes into contact with public
History itself. For example, those conversations and relations with illustrious
Persons, as Sultan Mahmoud, the Emperor Napoleon, and others, are they not as
yet rather of a diplomatic character than of a biographic? The Editor,
appreciating the sacredness of crowned heads, nay perhaps suspecting the
possible trickeries of a Clothes-Philosopher, will eschew this province for the
present; a new time may bring new insight and a different duty.
If we ask now, not indeed
with what ulterior Purpose, for there was none, yet with what immediate
outlooks; at all events, in what mood of mind, the Professor undertook and
prosecuted this world-pilgrimage,--the answer is more distinct than favourable.
‘A nameless Unrest,’ says he, ‘urged me forward; to which the outward motion
was some momentary lying solace. Whither should I go? My Loadstars were blotted
out; in that canopy of grim fire shone no star. Yet forward must I; the ground
burnt under me; there was no rest for the sole of my foot. I was alone, alone!
Ever too the strong inward longing shaped Fantasms for itself: towards these,
one after the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A feeling I had, that for my
fever-thirst there was and must be somewhere a healing Fountain. To many fondly
imagined Fountains, the Saints’ Wells of these days, did I pilgrim; to great
Men, to great Cities, to great Events: but found there no healing. In strange
countries, as in the well-known; in savage deserts, as in the press of corrupt
civilisation, it was ever the same: how could your Wanderer escape from—his
own Shadow? Nevertheless still
Forward! I felt as if in great haste; to do I saw not what. From the depths of
my own heart, it called to me, Forwards! The winds and the streams, and all
Nature sounded to me, Forwards! Ach Gott, I was even, once for all, a Son of Time.’
From which is it not clear
that the internal Satanic School was still active enough? He says elsewhere:
‘The Enchiridion of Epictetus I
had ever with me, often as my sole rational companion; and regret to mention
that the nourishment it yielded was trifling.’ Thou foolish Teufelsdröckh! How
could it else? Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end
of Man is an Action, and not a Thought,
though it were the noblest?
‘How I lived?’ writes he
once: ‘Friend, hast thou considered the “rugged all-nourishing Earth,” as
Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the house-top, much more
her darling, man? While thou stirrest and livest, thou hast a probability of
victual. My breakfast of tea has been cooked by a Tartar woman, with water of
the Amur, who wiped her earthen kettle with a horse-tail. I have roasted
wild-eggs in the sand of Sahara; I have awakened in Paris Estrapades and Vienna Malzleins, with no prospect of breakfast beyond elemental
liquid. That I had my Living to seek saved me from Dying,--by suicide. In our
busy Europe, is there not an everlasting demand for Intellect, in the chemical,
mechanical, political, religious, educational, commercial departments? In Pagan
countries, cannot one write Fetishes? Living! Little knowest thou what alchemy
is in an inventive Soul; how, as with its little finger, it can create
provision enough for the body (of a Philosopher); and then, as with both hands,
create quite other than provision; namely, spectres to torment itself withal.’
Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying
with Hunger always parallel to him; and a whole Infernal Chase in his rear; so
that the countenance of Hunger is comparatively a friend’s! Thus must he, in
the temper of ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew,--save only that he
feels himself not guilty and but suffering the pains of guilt,--wend to and fro
with aimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the Earth (by
footprints), write his Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh; even as the great Goethe, in passionate words, had
to write his Sorrows of Werter,
before the spirit freed herself, and he could become a Man. Vain truly is the
hope of your swiftest Runner to escape ‘from his own Shadow’! Nevertheless, in
these sick days, when the Born of Heaven first descries himself (about the age
of twenty) in a world such as ours, richer than usual in two things, in Truths
grown obsolete, and Trades grown obsolete,--what can the fool think but that it
is all a Den of Lies, wherein whoso will not speak Lies and act Lies, must
stand idle and despair? Whereby it happens that, for your nobler minds, the
publishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes
almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an Altercation with the Devil,
before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byron publishes his Sorrows of
Lord George, in verse and in prose,
and copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his Sorrows of Napoleon Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music of
cannon-volleys, and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires
of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embattled Hosts and
the sound of falling Cities.—Happier is he who, like our Clothes-Philosopher,
can write such matter, since it must be written, on the insensible Earth, with
his shoe-soles only; and also survive the writing thereof!
Under the strange nebulous
envelopment, wherein our Professor has now shrouded himself, no doubt but his
spiritual nature is nevertheless progressive, and growing: for how can the ‘Son
of Time,’ in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in
a state of crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution
into aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation; wherefrom,
the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself?
Such transitions are ever
full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak,
must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our
Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that
there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which
flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him
disappointed, bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart
might desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance,
offered and then snatched away. Ever an ‘excellent Passivity’; but of useful,
reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger, nothing
granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for
himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of bitterness,
which had been filling drop by drop, ever since that first ‘ruddy morning’ in
the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; and then with that
poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs over, and even hisses
over in a deluge of foam.
He himself says once, with
more justice than originality: ‘Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he
has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place
of Hope.’ What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present,
quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all
round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.
Alas, shut-out from Hope,
in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For, as he wanders wearisomely through
this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of
religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited
himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: ‘Doubt
had darkened into Unbelief,’ says he; ‘shade after shade goes grimly over your
soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.’ To such readers as
have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man’s life, and happily
discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-loss Philosophy, speculative
and practical, that Soul is not
synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend’s words,
‘that, for man’s well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with
it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and
without it, worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst
of luxury’: to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of
his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man! All wounds,
the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of
false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not
its life-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: ‘Is
there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the
first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we
call Duty no divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made-up of
Desire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Dr. Graham’s
Celestial-Bed? Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus,
whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that he was “the chief of sinners”; and Nero of Rome, jocund
in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much
of his time in fiddling? Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy
Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain
grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,--I tell thee, Nay! To the
unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation
of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himself the
victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is the heroic
inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling
in the direction others profit by?
I know not: only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim,
then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much.
But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to
the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our
stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet
incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect!’
Thus has the bewildered
Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into
the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim
Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of
wild-beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of
Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To
such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him. ‘But what boots it (was
thut’s)?’ cries he: ‘it is but the
common lot in this era. Not having come to spiritual majority prior to the Siècle
de Louis Quinze, and not being born
purely a Loghead (Dummkopf), thou
hadst no other outlook. The whole world is, like thee, sold to Unbelief; their
old Temples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rainproof, crumble
down; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?’
Pitiful enough were it, for
all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants
as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant
of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God’s existence.
‘One circumstance I note,’ says he: ‘after all the nameless woe that Inquiry,
which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me,
I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my allegiance to
her. “Truth”! I cried, “though the Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood!
though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy.” In conduct it
was the same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting
on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me This thou shalt do, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought,
would I have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in
spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with
the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite nature
of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the world, of God’s
light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their
unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was
present, and His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.’
Meanwhile, under all these
tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, what must the Wanderer,
in his silent soul, have endured! ‘The painfullest feeling,’ writes he, ‘is
that of your own Feebleness (Unkraft);
ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true misery. And yet of
your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have
prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague wavering Capability and
fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference! A certain inarticulate
Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render
articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the
spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that
impossible Precept, Know thyself;
till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst
work-at.
‘But for me, so strangely
unprosperous had I been, the net-result of my Workings amounted as yet simply
to—Nothing. How then could I believe in my Strength, when there was as
yet no mirror to see it in? Ever did this agitating, yet, as I now perceive,
quite frivolous question, remain to me insoluble: Hast thou a certain Faculty,
a certain Worth, such even as the most have not; or art thou the completest
Dullard of these modern times? Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in
yourself; and how could I believe? Had not my first, last Faith in myself, when
even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all-too
cruelly belied? The speculative Mystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to
me: neither in the practical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, but
been everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast-out. A feeble unit in
the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but
eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls,
as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world,
any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none!
I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety
of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship
was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk
little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it
was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even
speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they
were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In midst of their crowded
streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart,
not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle.
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself
tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life,
though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling
and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as
believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of
Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine,
rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast,
gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished
thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the
Devil is your God’?
A prey incessantly to such
corrosions, might not, moreover, as the worst aggravation to them, the iron
constitution even of a Teufelsdröckh threaten to fail? We conjecture that he
has known sickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of
the chronic sort. Hear this, for example: ‘How beautiful to die of
broken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every window of your
Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so
that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drugshop in your inwards; the fordone soul
drowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!’
Putting all which external
and internal miseries together, may we not find in the following sentences,
quite in our Professor’s still vein, significance enough? ‘From Suicide a
certain aftershine (Nachschein) of
Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence of character; for,
was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach? Often, however, was there
a question present to me: Should some one now, at the turning of that corner,
blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other World, or other No-World, by
pistol-shot,--how were it? On which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms
and sieged cities and other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which
passed, falsely enough, for courage.’
‘So had it lasted,’
concludes the Wanderer, ‘so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony,
through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was
smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I
had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust’s
Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle’s splendour), and thought that of this last Friend
even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die.
Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil:
nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil himself,
though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of
my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining
fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if
the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster,
wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.
‘Full of such humour, and
perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one
sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue
Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, among civic
rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as
Nebuchadnezzar’s Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered;
when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou
forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what
is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and
say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do
against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be;
and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy
feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!”
And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and
I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a
spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed:
not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.
‘Thus had the EVERLASTING
NO (das ewige Nein) pealed
authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it
that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis
recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life,
may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be
fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou are fatherless,
outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)”; to which my whole Me now made
answer: “I am not thine, but Free,
and forever hate thee!”
‘It is from this hour that
I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I
directly thereupon began to be a Man.’
Though, after this
‘Baphometic Fire-baptism’ of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Unrest was
but increased; as, indeed, ‘Indignation and Defiance,’ especially against
things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist
surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had
at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptised soul, long so
scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its
Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by
assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining
dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees be
conquered and pacificated. Under another figure, we might say, if in that great
moment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, the old inward Satanic School was not yet thrown out of doors, it
received peremptory judicial notice to quit;--whereby, for the rest, its
howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, and rebellious gnashings of teeth, might,
in the meanwhile, become only the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep
secret.
Accordingly, if we
scrutinise these Pilgrimings well, there is perhaps discernible henceforth a
certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does
Teufelsdröckh now storm through the world; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man,
nay who will one day be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many
‘Saints’ Wells,’ and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless
finds little secular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation is
ministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to ‘eat his
own heart’; and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer food.
Does not the following glimpse exhibit him in a much more natural state?
‘Towns also and Cities,
especially the ancient, I failed not to look upon with interest. How beautiful
to see thereby, as through a long vista, into the remote Time; to have, as it
were, an actual section of almost the earliest Past brought safe into the
Present, and set before your eyes! There, in that old City, was a live ember of
Culinary Fire put down, say only two thousand years ago; and there, burning
more or less triumphantly, with such fuel as the region yielded, it has burnt,
and still burns, and thou thyself seest the very smoke thereof. Ah! and the far
more mysterious live ember of Vital Fire was then also put down there; and
still miraculously burns and spreads; and the smoke and ashes thereof (in these
Judgment-Halls and Churchyards), and its bellows-engines (in these Churches),
thou still seest; and its flame, looking out from every kind countenance, and
every hateful one, still warms thee or scorches thee.
‘Of Man’s Activity and
Attainment the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in Tradition
only: such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his
Customs, or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and of Soul-habits; much more his collective
stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating Nature:
all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way
be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable
vehicles, from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them, they are nowhere to
be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, ever from Cain
and Tubalcain downwards: but where does your accumulated Agricultural,
Metallurgic, and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself
on the atmospheric air, on the sun’s rays (by Hearing and by Vision); it is a
thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort. In like manner, ask me
not, Where are the LAWS; where is the GOVERNMENT? In vain wilt thou go to
Schönbrunn, to Downing Street, to the Palais Bourbon: thou findest nothing
there but brick or stone houses, and some bundles of Papers tied with tape.
Where, then, is that same cunningly-devised almighty GOVERNMENT of theirs to be
laid hands on? Everywhere, yet nowhere: seen only in its works, this too is a
thing aeriform, invisible; or if you will, mystic and miraculous. So spiritual
(geistig) is our whole daily Life:
all that we do springs out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; only like a
little Cloud-image, or Armida’s Palace, air-built, does the Actual body itself
forth from the great mystic Deep.
‘Visible and tangible
products of the Past, again, I reckon-up to the extent of three: Cities, with
their Cabinets and Arsenals; then tilled Fields, to either or to both of which
divisions Roads with their Bridges may belong; and thirdly----Books. In which
third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two
others. Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book. Not like a dead city of
stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but
then a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands
from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books that already number some
hundred-and-fifty human ages); and yearly comes its new produce of leaves
(Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Political Systems; or were it only
Sermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which is talismanic and
thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. O thou who art able to write a Book,
which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy
not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name
Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor: but of the true
sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble
and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and
Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.—Fool!
why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the
stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I
can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for
the last three-thousand years: but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then,
or even Luther’s Version thereof?’
No less satisfactory is his
sudden appearance not in Battle, yet on some Battle-field; which, we soon
gather, must be that of Wagram; so that here, for once, is a certain approximation
to distinctness of date. Omitting much, let us impart what follows:
‘Horrible enough! A whole
Marchfeld strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead
men and horses; stragglers still remaining not so much as buried. And those red
mould heaps: ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and
Virtue has been blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed-down out of
sight, like blown Egg-shells!--Did Nature, when she bade the Donau bring down
his mould-cargoes from the Carinthian and Carpathian Heights, and spread them
out here into the softest, richest level,--intend thee, O Marchfeld, for a
corn-bearing Nursery, whereon her children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit,
wherein they might the more commodiously be throttled and tattered? Were thy
three broad Highways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for
Ammunition-wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so many
ready-built Casemates, wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with
artillery, and with artillery be battered? König Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks,
dies under Rodolf’s truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon under
Napoleon’s: within which five centuries, to omit the others, how has thy
breast, fair Plain, been defaced and defiled! The greensward is torn-up and
trampled-down; man’s fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedgerows, and pleasant
dwellings, blown-away with gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies a desolate,
hideous Place of Sculls.—Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall
these Powder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all that gore
and carnage will be shrouded-in, absorbed into manure; and next year the
Marchfeld will be green, nay greener. Thrifty unwearied Nature, ever out of our
great waste educing some little profit of thy own,--how dost thou, from the
very carcass of the Killer, bring Life for the Living!
‘What, speaking in quite
unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge,
for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually
some five-hundred souls. From these, by certain “Natural Enemies” of the
French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty
able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them:
she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even
trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer,
and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid
much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped
away, at the public charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south
of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of
Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like
manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come
into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun
in his hand. Straightway the word “Fire!” is given: and they blow the souls out
of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has
sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these
men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough
apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even,
unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then?
Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and, instead of shooting one
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.—Alas, so is
it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, “what
devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!”—In that fiction
of the English Smollet, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps
prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take
each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one
another’s faces, till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era,
what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!’
Thus can the Professor, at
least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows, over the
many-coloured world, and pertinently enough note what is passing there. We may
remark, indeed, that for the matter of spiritual culture, if for nothing else,
perhaps few periods of his life were richer than this. Internally, there is the
most momentous instructive Course of Practical Philosophy, with Experiments,
going on; towards the right comprehension of which his Peripatetic habits,
favourable to Meditation, might help him rather than hinder. Externally, again,
as he wanders to and fro, there are, if for the longing heart little substance,
yet for the seeing eye sights enough: in these so boundless Travels of his,
granting that the Satanic School was even partially kept down, what an
incredible knowledge of our Planet, and its Inhabitants and their Works, that
is to say, of all knowable things, might not Teufelsdröckh acquire!
‘I have read in most Public
Libraries,’ says he, ‘including those of Constantinople and Samarcand: in most
Colleges, except the Chinese Mandarin ones, I have studied, or seen that there
was no studying. Unknown Languages have I oftenest gathered from their natural
repertory, the Air, by my organ of Hearing; Statistics, Geographics,
Topographics came, through the Eye, almost of their own accord. The ways of
Man, how he seeks food, and warmth, and protection for himself, in most
regions, are ocularly known to me. Like the great Hadrian, I meted-out much of
the terraqueous Globe with a pair of Compasses that belonged to myself only.
‘Of great Scenes why speak?
Three summer days, I lingered reflecting, and even composing (dichtete), by the Pinechasms of Vaucluse; and in that clear
Lakelet moistened my bread. I have sat under the Palm-trees of Tadmor; smoked a
pipe among the ruins of Babylon. The great Wall of China I have seen; and can
testify that it is of gray brick, coped and covered with granite, and shows
only second-rate masonry.—Great Events, also, have not I witnessed? Kings
sweated-down (ausgemergelt) into
Berlin-and-Milan Customhouse-Officers; the World well won, and the World well
lost; oftener than once a hundred-thousand individuals shot (by each other) in
one day. All kindreds and peoples and nations dashed together, and shifted and
shovelled into heaps, that they might ferment there, and in time unite. The
birth-pangs of Democracy, wherewith convulsed Europe was groaning in cries that
reached Heaven, could not escape me.
‘For great Men I have ever
had the warmest predilection; and can perhaps boast that few such in this era
have wholly escaped me. Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts
of that divine BOOK OF REVELATIONS, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch
to epoch, and by some named HISTORY; to which inspired Texts your numerous
talented men, and your innumerable untalented men, are the better or worse
exegetic Commentaries, and wagonload of too-stupid, heretical or orthodox,
weekly Sermons. For my study the inspired Texts themselves! Thus did not I, in
very early days, having disguised me as tavern-waiter, stand behind the
field-chairs, under that shady Tree at Treisnitz by the Jena Highway; waiting
upon the great Schiller and greater Goethe; and hearing what I have not
forgotten. For----‘
----But at this point the
Editor recalls his principle of caution, some time ago laid down, and must
suppress much. Let not the sacredness of Laurelled, still more, of Crowned
Heads, be tampered with. Should we, at a future day, find circumstances
altered, and the time come for Publication, then may these glimpses into the
privacy of the Illustrious be conceded; which for the present were little
better than treacherous, perhaps traitorous Eavesdroppings. Of Lord Byron, therefore,
of Pope Pius, Emperor Tarakwang, and the ‘White Water-roses’ (Chinese
Carbonari) with their mysteries, no notice here! Of Napoleon himself we shall
only, glancing from afar, remark that Teufelsdröckh’s relation to him seems to
have been of very varied character. At first we find our poor Professor on the
point of being shot as a spy; then taken into private conversation, even
pinched on the ear, yet presented with no money; at last indignantly dismissed,
almost thrown out of doors, as an ‘Ideologist.’ ‘He himself,’ says the
Professor, ‘was among the completest Ideologists, at least Ideopraxists: in the
Idea (in der Idee) he lived, moved
and fought. The man was a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and
preached, through the cannon’s throat, that great doctrine, La carrière
ouverte aux talens (The Tools to him
that can handle them), which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone
can liberty lie. Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and first
Missionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as
articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an
American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with
innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and
even theft; whom, notwithstanding, the peaceful Sower will follow, and, as he
cuts the boundless harvest, bless.’
More legitimate and
decisively authentic is Teufelsdröckh’s appearance and emergence (we know not
well whence) in the solitude of the North Cape, on that June Midnight. He has
‘a light-blue Spanish cloak’ hanging round him, as his ‘most commodious,
principal, indeed sole upper garment’; and stands there, on the
World-promontory, looking over the infinite Brine, like a little blue Belfry
(as we figure), now motionless indeed, yet ready, if stirred, to ring quaintest
changes.
‘Silence as of death,’
writes he; ‘for Midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has its character:
nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that
slow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in the utmost North the great Sun hangs
low and lazy, as if he too were slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of
crimson and cloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters,
like a tremulous fire-pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself
under my feet. In such moments, Solitude also is invaluable; for who would
speak, or be looked on, when behind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast
asleep, except the watchmen; and before him the silent Immensity, and Palace of
the Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp?
‘Nevertheless, in this
solemn moment comes a man, or monster, scrambling from among the rock-hollows;
and, shaggy, huge as the Hyperborean Bear, hails me in Russian speech: most
probably, therefore, a Russian Smuggler. With courteous brevity, I signify my
indifference to contraband trade, my humane intentions, yet strong wish to be
private. In vain: the monster, counting doubtless on his superior stature, and
minded to make sport for himself, or perhaps profit, were it with murder,
continues to advance; ever assailing me with his importunate train-oil breath;
and now has advanced, till we stand both on the verge of the rock, the deep Sea
rippling greedily down below. What argument will avail? On the thick
Hyperborean, cherubic reasoning, seraphic eloquence were lost. Prepared for
such extremity, I, deftly enough, whisk aside one step; draw out, from my
interior reservoirs, a sufficient Birmingham Horse-pistol, and say, “Be so
obliging as retire, Friend (Er ziehe sich zurück, Freund), and with promptitude!” This logic even the
Hyperborean understands; fast enough, with apologetic, petitionary growl, he
sidles off; and, except for suicidal as well as homicidal purposes, need not
return.
‘Such I hold to be the
genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men alike tall. Nay, if thou be
cooler, cleverer than I, if thou have more Mind, though all but no Body whatever, then canst thou
kill me first, and art the taller. Hereby, at last, is the Goliath powerless,
and the David resistless; savage Animalism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism
is all.
‘With respect to Duels,
indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me
with more surprise. Two little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure
enough cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at
any rate, very soon,--make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl
round; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another
into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt), the little spitfires!--Nay, I think with old Hugo
von Trimberg: “God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his
wondrous Manikins here below.”’
* * * * *
But amid these specialties,
let us not forget the great generality, which is our chief quest here: How
prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting? Does
Legion still lurk in him, though repressed; or has he exorcised that Devil’s
Brood? We can answer that the symptoms continue promising. Experience is the
grand spiritual Doctor; and with him Teufelsdröckh has now been long a patient,
swallowing many a bitter bolus. Unless our poor Friend belong to the numerous
class of Incurables, which seems not likely, some cure will doubtless be
effected. We should rather say that Legion, or the Satanic School, was now
pretty well extirpated and cast out, but next to nothing introduced in its
room; whereby the heart remains, for the while, in a quiet but no comfortable
state.
‘At length, after so much
roasting,’ thus writes our Autobiographer, ‘I was what you might name calcined.
Pray only that it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a caput-mortuum! But in any case, by mere dint of practice, I had
grown familiar with many things. Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could
now partly see through it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inane
Existence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I
looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thy wishes have all been
sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had they even been all granted! Did not the
Boy Alexander weep because he had not two Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar
System; or after that, a whole Universe? Ach Gott, when I gazed into these Stars, have they not looked
down on me as if with pity, from their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with
heavenly tears over the little lot of man! Thousands of human generations, all
as noisy as our own, have been swallowed-up of Time, and there remains no wreck
of them any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still
shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted them
in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth;
what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art still Nothing, Nobody: true;
but who, then, is Something, Somebody? For thee the Family of Man has no use;
it rejects thee; thou art wholly as a dissevered limb: so be it; perhaps it is
better so!’
Too-heavy-laden
Teufelsdröckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; one day he will hurl the
burden far from him, and bound forth free and with a second youth.
‘This,’ says our Professor,
‘was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached; through which whoso travels
from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass.’
‘Temptations in the
Wilderness!’ exclaims Teufelsdröckh: ‘Have we not all to be tried with such?
Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our
Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no
other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the
beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, Work
thou in Welldoing, lies mysteriously
written, in Promethean Prophetic Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no
rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in
our conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given mandate,
Eat thou and be filled, at the
same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve,--must not there be
a confusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become the upper?
‘To me nothing seems more
natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first
prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished, or
vanquish,--should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there
fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at
naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible
Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous
moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,--to such Temptation are we all
called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that
divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendour;
but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in
darkness, under earthly vapours!--Our Wilderness is the wide World in an
Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and fasting:
nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not
Victory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein
while life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests,
demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest
wanderings, to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes—of that
Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!’
He says elsewhere, under a
less ambitious figure; as figures are, once for all, natural to him: ‘Has not
thy Life been that of most sufficient men (tüchtigen Männer) thou hast known in this generation? An out-flush of
foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds
as valuable herbs: this all parched away, under the Droughts of practical and
spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave
rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial! If I have had a
second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under umbrageous
cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens praised,
I am not without examples, and even exemplars.’
So that, for Teufelsdröckh
also, there has been a ‘glorious revolution’: these mad shadow-hunting and
shadow-hunted Pilgrimings of his were but some purifying ‘Temptation in the
Wilderness,’ before his Apostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which
Temptation is now happily over, and the Devil once more worsted! Was ‘that high
moment in the Rue de l’Enfer,’
then, properly the turning-point of the battle; when the Fiend said, Worship
me or be torn in shreds; and was
answered valiantly with an Apage Satana?--Singular Teufelsdröckh, would thou hadst told thy singular story in
plain words! But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such.
Nothing but innuendoes, figurative crotchets: a typical Shadow, fitfully
wavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture. ‘How paint to the
sensual eye,’ asks he once, ‘what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man’s Soul;
in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?’
We ask in turn: Why perplex these times, profane as they are, with needless
obscurity, by omission and by commission? Not mystical only is our Professor,
but whimsical; and involves himself, now more than ever, in eye-bewildering chiaroscuro. Successive glimpses, here faithfully imparted, our
more gifted readers must endeavour to combine for their own behoof.
He says: ‘The hot Harmattan
wind had raged itself out; its howl went silent within me; and the
long-deafened soul could now hear. I paused in my wild wanderings; and sat me
down to wait, and consider; for it was as if the hour of change drew nigh. I
seemed to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Fly, then, false shadows of
Hope; I will chase you no more, I will believe you no more. And ye too, haggard
spectres of Fear, I care not for you; ye too are all shadows and a lie. Let me
rest here: for I am way-weary and life-weary; I will rest here, were it but to
die: to die or to live is alike to me; alike insignificant.’—And again:
‘Here, then, as I lay in that CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by
benignant upper Influence, into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled
gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first
preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Selbst-tödtung), had been happily accomplished; and my mind’s eyes
were now unsealed, and its hands ungyved.’
Might we not also
conjecture that the following passage refers to his Locality, during this same
‘healing sleep’; that his Pilgrim-staff lies cast aside here, on ‘the high
table-land’; and indeed that the repose is already taking wholesome effect on
him? If it were not that the tone, in some parts, has more of riancy, even of
levity, than we could have expected! However, in Teufelsdröckh, there is always
the strangest Dualism: light dancing, with guitar-music, will be going on in
the fore-court, while by fits from within comes the faint whimpering of woe and
wail. We transcribe the piece entire:
‘Beautiful it was to sit
there, as in my skyey Tent, musing and meditating; on the high table-land, in
front of the Mountains; over me, as roof, the azure Dome, and around me, for
walls, four azure-flowing curtains,--namely, of the Four azure winds, on whose
bottom-fringes also I have seen gilding. And then to fancy the fair Castles
that stood sheltered in these Mountain hollows; with their green flower-lawns,
and white dames and damosels, lovely enough: or better still, the straw-roofed
Cottages, wherein stood many a Mother baking bread, with her children round
her:--all hidden and protectingly folded-up in the valley-folds; yet there and
alive, as sure as if I beheld them. Or to see, as well as fancy, the nine Towns
and Villages, that lay round my mountain-seat, which, in still weather, were
wont to speak to me (by their steeple-bells) with metal tongue; and, in almost
all weather, proclaimed their vitality by repeated Smoke-clouds; whereon, as on
a culinary horologe, I might read the hour of the day. For it was the smoke of
cookery, as kind housewives at morning, midday, eventide, were boiling their
husbands’ kettles; and ever a blue pillar rose up into the air, successively or
simultaneously, from each of the nine, saying, as plainly as smoke could say:
Such and such a meal is getting ready here. Not uninteresting! For you have the
whole Borough, with all its love-makings and scandal-mongeries, contentions and
contentments, as in miniature, and could cover it all with your hat.—If,
in my wide Wayfarings, I had learned to look into the business of the World in
its details, here perhaps was the place for combining it into general
propositions, and deducing inferences therefrom.
‘Often also could I see the
black Tempest marching in anger through the Distance: round some Schreckhorn,
as yet grim-blue, would the eddying vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy,
and flow down like a mad witch’s hair; till, after a space, it vanished, and,
in the clear sunbeam, your Schreckhorn stood smiling grim-white, for the vapour
had held snow. How thou fermentest and elaboratest, in thy great fermenting-vat
and laboratory of an Atmosphere, of a World, O Nature!--Or what is Nature? Ha!
why do I not name thee GOD? Art not thou the “Living Garment of God”? O
Heavens, is it, in very deed, HE, then, that ever speaks through thee; that
lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
‘Fore-shadows, call them
rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell
mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova
Zembla; ah, like the mother’s voice to her little child that strays bewildered,
weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my
too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and
demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father’s!
‘With other eyes, too,
could I now look upon my fellow man; with an infinite Love, an infinite Pity.
Poor, wandering, wayward man! Art thou not tired, and beaten with stripes, even
as I am? Ever, whether thou bear the royal mantle or the beggar’s gabardine,
art thou not so weary, so heavy-laden; and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O my
Brother, my Brother, why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe away all
tears from thy eyes! Truly, the din of many-voiced Life, which, in this
solitude, with the mind’s organ, I could hear, was no longer a maddening
discord, but a melting one; like inarticulate cries, and sobbings of a dumb
creature, which in the ear of Heaven are prayers. The poor Earth, with her poor
joys, was now my needy Mother, not my cruel Stepdame; Man, with his so mad
Wants and so mean Endeavours, had become the dearer to me; and even for his
sufferings and his sins, I now first named him Brother. Thus was I standing in
the porch of that “Sanctuary of Sorrow;” by strange, steep ways had I too been guided thither; and ere long
its sacred gates would open, and the “Divine Depth of Sorrow” lie disclosed to me.’
The Professor says, he here
first got eye on the Knot that had been strangling him, and straightway could
unfasten it, and was free. ‘A vain interminable controversy,’ writes he,
‘touching what is at present called Origin of Evil, or some such thing, arises
in every soul, since the beginning of the world; and in every soul, that would
pass from idle Suffering into actual Endeavouring, must first be put an end to.
The most, in our time, have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough
Suppression of this controversy; to a few some Solution of it is indispensable.
In every new era, too, such Solution comes-out in different terms; and ever the
Solution of the last era has become obsolete, and is found unserviceable. For
it is man’s nature to change his Dialect from century to century; he cannot
help it though he would. The authentic Church-Catechism of our present century has not yet fallen into my
hands: meanwhile, for my own private behoof, I attempt to elucidate the matter
so. Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because
there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury
under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and
Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in jointstock company, to make one
Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two; for the
Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if
you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this
allotment, no more, and no less: God’s infinite Universe altogether to
himself, therein to enjoy infinitely,
and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like
that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as
nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have
been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he
sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself
the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine:
it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.
‘But the whim we have of
Happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own
striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy
belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible right. It is simple payment of our
wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint; only such overplus as there may be do we account Happiness; any deficit again is Misery. Now consider that we have the
valuation of our own deserts ourselves, and what a fund of Self-conceit there
is in each of us,--do you wonder that the balance should so often dip the wrong
way, and many a Blockhead cry: See there, what a payment; was ever worthy
gentleman so used!--I tell thee, Blockhead, it all comes of thy Vanity; of what
thou fanciest those same deserts
of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely),
thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be
hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.
‘So true is it, what I then
say, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by
increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my
Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy
claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest
of our time write: “It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly
speaking, can be said to begin.”
‘I asked myself: What is
this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and
lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? Say it in a word: is it not
because thou art not HAPPY? Because the THOU (sweet gentleman) is not
sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovingly cared for? Foolish
soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no
right to be at all. What if thou
wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing
other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after
somewhat to eat; and shrieking
dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.’
‘Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!’ cries he elsewhere: ‘there
is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and
instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach-forth this same HIGHER
that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and
suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike
that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which
God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and
broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite, and
learn it! O, thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain: thou
hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant
fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, and
triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but
borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is
the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks
and works, it is well with him.’
And again: ‘Small is it
that thou canst trample the Earth with its injuries under thy feet, as old
Greek Zeno trained thee: thou canst love the Earth while it injures thee, and
even because it injures thee; for this a Greater than Zeno was needed, and he
too was sent. Knowest thou that “Worship of Sorrow”? The Temple thereof, founded some eighteen centuries
ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful
creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of falling
fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred Lamp perennially
burning.’
Without pretending to
comment on which strange utterances, the Editor will only remark, that there
lies beside them much of a still more questionable character; unsuited to the
general apprehension; nay wherein he himself does not see his way. Nebulous disquisitions
on Religion, yet not without bursts of splendour; on the ‘perennial continuance
of Inspiration;’ on Prophecy; that there are ‘true Priests, as well as
Baal-Priests, in our own day:’ with more of the like sort. We select some
fractions, by way of finish to this farrago.
‘Cease, my much-respected
Herr von Voltaire,’ thus apostrophises the Professor: ‘shut thy sweet voice;
for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated
this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian
Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas,
were thy six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos
and folios, and flying sheets or reams, printed before and since on the same
subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou help
us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new
vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?
What! thou hast no faculty in that kind? Only a torch for burning, no hammer
for building? Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.
‘Meanwhile what are
antiquated Mythuses to me? Or is the God present, felt in my own heart, a thing
which Herr von Voltaire will dispute out of me; or dispute into me? To the “Worship
of Sorrow” ascribe what origin and
genesis thou pleasest, has not
that Worship originated, and been generated; is it not here? Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it is of
God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion,--for which latter whoso will let him
worry and be worried.’
‘Neither,’ observes he
elsewhere, ‘shall ye tear-out one another’s eyes, struggling over “Plenary
Inspiration,” and suchlike: try rather to get a little even Partial
Inspiration, each of you for himself. One BIBLE I know, of whose Plenary
Inspiration doubt is not so much as possible; nay with my own eyes I saw the
God’s-Hand writing it: thereof all other Bibles are but leaves,--say, in
Picture-Writing to assist the weaker faculty.’
Or, to give the wearied
reader relief, and bring it to an end, let him take the following perhaps more
intelligible passage:
‘To me, in this our life,’
says the Professor, ‘which is an internecine warfare with the Time-spirit,
other warfare seems questionable. Hast thou in any way a Contention with thy
brother, I advise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is. If thou gauge
it to the bottom, it is simply this: “Fellow, see! thou art taking more than
thy share of Happiness in the world, something from my share: which, by the Heavens, thou shall not; nay I
will fight thee rather.”—Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a
beggarly matter, truly a “feast of shells,” for the substance has been spilled
out: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species
clutching at them!--Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: “Take it, thou
too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share,
which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing:
would to Heaven I had enough for thee!”—If Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre be, “to a certain extent, Applied Christianity,”
surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole Duty of
Man, yet a Half Duty, namely the Passive half: could we but do it, as we can
demonstrate it!
‘But indeed Conviction,
were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct.
Nay properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation
is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only by a felt
indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round,
and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us,
that “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.” On which ground, too,
let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays
vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to
heart, which to me was of invaluable service: “Do the Duty which lies
nearest thee,” which thou knowest to
be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
‘May we not say, however,
that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this: When your Ideal World,
wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing
to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement
enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister, that your “America is here or nowhere”? The
Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes
here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even
now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working,
believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in
thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out
of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou
give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the
Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and
create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
“here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see!
‘But it is with man’s Soul
as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye
have vision, the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the
tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let
there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not
miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest
and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting
elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations
are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead
of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed
World.
‘I too could now say to
myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce!
Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up!
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is
called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.’
Thus have we, as closely
and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such circumstances, might be, followed
Teufelsdröckh through the various successive states and stages of Growth,
Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of
what he himself seems to consider as Conversion. ‘Blame not the word,’ says he;
‘rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in
our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew
nothing of Conversion; instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral
Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most
Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now
clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their
Pietists and Methodists.’
It is here, then, that the
spiritual majority of Teufelsdröckh commences: we are henceforth to see him
‘work in well-doing,’ with the spirit and clear aims of a Man. He has
discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so panted for is even this same Actual
ill-furnished Workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself:
‘Tools? Thou hast no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now alive but
has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the Spider itself, has a
spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom within its head: the stupidest
of Oysters has a Papin’s-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in:
every being that can live can do something: this let him do.—Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished,
furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three fingers to hold a Pen
withal? Never since Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was
there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recorded miracles have been
performed by Pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which
nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that Sound, to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most
continuing of all things. The WORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world;
man, thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God
has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of
Priesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest in that sacred
Hierarchy, is it not honour enough therein to spend and be spent?
‘By this Art, which whoso
will may sacrilegiously degrade into a handicraft,’ adds Teufelsdröckh, ‘have I
thenceforth abidden. Writings of mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am I?), have fallen, perhaps not altogether void, into the
mighty seed-field of Opinion; fruits of my unseen sowing gratifyingly meet me
here and there. I thank the Heavens that I have now found my Calling; wherein,
with or without perceptible result, I am minded diligently to persevere.
‘Nay how knowest thou,’
cries he, ‘but this and the other pregnant Device, now grown to be a
world-renowned far-working Institution; like a grain of right mustard-seed once
cast into the right soil, and now stretching-out strong boughs to the four
winds, for the birds of the air to lodge in,--may have been properly my doing?
Some one’s doing, it without doubt was; from some Idea, in some single Head, it
did first of all take beginning: why not from some Idea in mine?’ Does
Teufelsdröckh here glance at that ‘SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (Eigenthums-conservirende
Gesellschaft),’ of which so many
ambiguous notices glide spectre-like through these inexpressible Paper-bags?
‘An Institution,’ hints he, ‘not unsuitable to the wants of the time; as indeed
such sudden extension proves: for already can the Society number, among its
office-bearers or corresponding members, the highest Names, if not the highest
Persons, in Germany, England, France; and contributions, both of money and of
meditation, pour-in from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining
Integrity of the world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it round
this Palladium.’ Does Teufelsdröckh mean, then, to give himself out as the
originator of that so notable Eigenthums-conservirende (‘Owndom-conserving’) Gesellschaft; and if so, what, in the Devil’s name, is it? He
again hints: ‘At a time when the divine Commandment, Thou shalt not steal, wherein truly, if well understood, is comprised the
whole Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon’s and Lycurgus’s Constitutions, Justinian’s
Pandects, the Code Napoléon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities, Moralities
whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced with Altar-fire and
Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance: at a time, I say, when this divine
Commandment has all-but faded away from the general remembrance; and, with
little disguise, a new opposite Commandment, Thou shalt steal, is everywhere promulgated,--it perhaps behooved, in
this universal dotage and deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir
themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine
right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are
sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived to hear
it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only an
accidental Possession and Life-rent,
what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their
noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep-down the smaller sort of vermin; but
what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against
whole meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors? If,
therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from
what hand that perhaps not ill-written Program in the Public Journals, with its high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes, could have proceeded,--let him now cease such
wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to the Concurrenz (Competition).’
We ask: Has this same
‘perhaps not ill-written Program,’
or any other authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen
under the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? If so,
what are those Prize-Questions;
what are the terms of Competition, and when and where? No printed
Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of any sort, to be met with in these
Paper-bags! Or is the whole business one other of those whimsicalities and
perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdröckh, meaning much or
nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with us?
* * * * *
Here, indeed, at length,
must the Editor give utterance to a painful suspicion, which, through late
Chapters, has begun to haunt him; paralysing any little enthusiasm that might
still have rendered his thorny Biographical task a labour of love. It is a
suspicion grounded perhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by
the more and more discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdröckh,
in whom underground humours and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel within
wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these
Autobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a so-called
Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had no direct Camera-obscura
Picture of the Professor’s History; but only some more or less fantastic
Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly enough, shadowing-forth the
same! Our theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally authentic what
was but hieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruple
not to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of, and set adrift to make
fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that a man so known for
impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdröckh, would all at once frankly unlock his
private citadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not rather
deceptively inlock both Editor and
Hofrath in the labyrinthic tortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel
(having enticed them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools
would look?
Of one fool, however, the
Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short. On a small slip, formerly
thrown aside as blank, the ink being all-but invisible, we lately notice, and
with effort decipher, the following: ‘What are your historical Facts; still
more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by
stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts? The Man is the spirit
he worked in; not what he did, but what he became. Facts are engraved
Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key. And then how your Blockhead (Dummkopf) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether they
are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worse is it with
your Bungler (Pfuscher): such I
have seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and
mistaking the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile.’ Was
the Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts
himself, might mistake the Teufelsdröckh Serpent-of-Eternity in like manner?
For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, into a
plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms, half-truisms, which
if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not whither it gallop? We
say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is the Professor, can never say.
If our suspicion be wholly unfounded, let his own questionable ways, not our necessary
circumspectness, bear the blame.
But be this as it will, the
somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted Editor determines here to shut these
Paper-bags for the present. Let it suffice that we know of Teufelsdröckh, so
far, if ‘not what he did, yet what he became:’ the rather, as his character has
now taken its ultimate bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be
looked for. The imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such,
wheresoever be its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations
(flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life element,
Teufelsdröckh reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes
herself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature,--would be
comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being, for
us at least, a false and impossible one. His outward Biography, therefore,
which, at the Blumine Lover’s-Leap, we saw churned utterly into spray-vapour,
may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here. Enough that by
survey of certain ‘pools and plashes,’ we have ascertained its general
direction; do we not already know that, by one way and other, it has long since rained-down again into a stream; and even
now, at Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the Philosophy of
Clothes, and visible to whoso will
cast eye thereon? Over much invaluable matter, that lies scattered, like jewels
among quarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs we may have occasion to glance
back, and somewhat will demand insertion at the right place: meanwhile be our
tiresome diggings therein suspended.
If now, before reopening
the great Clothes-Volume, we ask
what our degree of progress, during these Ten Chapters, has been, towards right
understanding of the Clothes-Philosophy, let not our discouragement become total. To speak in that old figure
of the Hell-gate Bridge over Chaos, a few flying pontoons have perhaps been
added, though as yet they drift straggling on the Flood; how far they will
reach, when once the chains are straightened and fastened, can, at present,
only be matter of conjecture.
So much we already
calculate: Through many a little loop-hole, we have had glimpses into the
internal world of Teufelsdröckh; his strange mystic, almost magic Diagram of
the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is not henceforth altogether dark
to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME, which merit consideration, and are not
wholly unintelligible with such, may by and by prove significant. Still more
may his somewhat peculiar view of Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to
Nature. How all Nature and Life are but one Garment, a ‘Living Garment,’ woven and ever a-weaving in the
‘Loom of Time;’ is not here, indeed, the outline of a whole Clothes-Philosophy; at least the arena it is to work in? Remark, too,
that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaning in such a matter, becomes
less enigmatic: amid so much tumultuous obscurity, almost like diluted madness,
do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem to
loom-forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all the rest were
based and built?
Nay further, may we not say
that Teufelsdröckh’s Biography, allowing it even, as suspected, only a
hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, as it were preappointed for
Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows of things into Things themselves
he is led and compelled. The ‘Passivity’ given him by birth is fostered by all
turns of his fortune. Everywhere cast out, like oil out of water, from mingling
in any Employment, in any public Communion, he has no portion but Solitude, and
a life of Meditation. The whole energy of his existence is directed, through
long years, on one task: that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus
everywhere do the Shows of things oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with
fearfullest destruction: only by victoriously penetrating into Things
themselves can he find peace and a stronghold. But is not this same looking
through the Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to
a Philosophy of Clothes? Do we
not, in all this, discern some beckonings towards the true higher purport of
such a Philosophy; and what shape it must assume with such a man, in such an
era?
Perhaps in entering on Book
Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly without guess whither he is bound:
nor, let us hope, for all the fantastic Dream-Grottoes through which, as is our
lot with Teufelsdröckh, he must wander, will there be wanting between whiles
some twinkling of a steady Polar Star.
As a wonder-loving and
wonder-seeking man, Teufelsdröckh, from an early part of this Clothes-Volume,
has more and more exhibited himself. Striking it was, amid all his perverse
cloudiness, with what force of vision and of heart he pierced into the mystery
of the World; recognising in the highest sensible phenomena, so far as Sense
went, only fresh or faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a celestial Essence
thereby rendered visible: and while, on the one hand, he trod the old rags of
Matter, with their tinsels, into the mire, he on the other everywhere exalted
Spirit above all earthly principalities and powers, and worshipped it, though
under the meanest shapes, with a true Platonic Mysticism. What the man
ultimately purposed by thus casting his Greek-fire into the general Wardrobe of
the Universe; what such, more or less complete, rending and burning of Garments
throughout the whole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to;
the rather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like Rousseau,
recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return to the savage
state: all this our readers are now bent to discover; this is, in fact,
properly the gist and purport of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s Philosophy of
Clothes.
Be it remembered, however,
that such purport is here not so much evolved, as detected to lie ready for
evolving. We are to guide our British Friends into the new Gold-country, and
show them the mines; nowise to dig-out and exhaust its wealth, which indeed
remains for all time inexhaustible. Once there, let each dig for his own
behoof, and enrich himself.
Neither, in so capricious
inexpressible a Work as this of the Professor’s can our course now more than
formerly be straightforward, step by step, but at best leap by leap.
Significant Indications stand-out here and there; which for the critical eye,
that looks both widely and narrowly, shape themselves into some ground-scheme
of a Whole: to select these with judgment, so that a leap from one to the other
be possible, and (in our old figure) by chaining them together, a passable
Bridge be effected: this, as heretofore, continues our only method. Among such
light-spots, the following, floating in much wild matter about Perfectibility, has seemed worth clutching at:
‘Perhaps the most
remarkable incident in Modern History,’ says Teufelsdröckh, ‘is not the Diet of
Worms, still less the Battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other
Battle; but an incident passed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated
with some degree of ridicule by others: namely, George Fox’s making to himself
a suit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a
Shoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine
Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and, across all the hulls
of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness,
unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets,
God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his
stall; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin,
swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had, nevertheless,
a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through
which, as through a window, it could look upwards, and discern its celestial
Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with some prospect of
victuals, and an honourable Mastership in Cordwainery, and perhaps the post of
Thirdborough in his hundred, as the crown of long faithful sewing,--was nowise
satisfaction enough to such a mind: but ever amid the boring and hammering came
tones from that far country, came Splendours and Terrors; for this poor Cordwainer,
as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man he had been
sent to minister, was full of holy mystery to him.
‘The Clergy of the
neighbourhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of that same holy
mystery, listened with unaffected tedium to his consultations, and advised him,
as the solution of such doubts, to “drink beer and dance with the girls.” Blind
leaders of the blind! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what
were their shovel-hats scooped-out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons
girt-on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other
racketing, held over that spot of God’s Earth,--if Man were but a Patent
Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned from
them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible.
Mountains of encumbrance, higher than Ætna, had been heaped over that Spirit:
but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried there. Through long days and
nights of silent agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man’s force, to be
free: how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giant
spirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven!
That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican
or Loretto-shrine.—“So bandaged, and hampered, and hemmed in,” groaned
he, “with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I
can neither see nor move: not my own am I, but the World’s; and Time flies
fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast
power of Thought! Why not; what binds me here? Want, want!--Ha, of what? Will
all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light?
Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the hollow
of a tree will lodge me, wild-berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch
myself one perennial suit of Leather!”
‘Historical Oil-painting,’
continues Teufelsdröckh, ‘is one of the Arts I never practised; therefore shall
I not decide whether this subject were easy of execution on the canvas. Yet
often has it seemed to me as if such first outflashing of man’s Freewill, to
lighten, more and more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf
him in its hindrances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is
in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding
heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when he spreads-out his
cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and
stitches them together into one continuous all-including Case, the farewell
service of his awl! Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little
instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the
Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, and in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is
bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse
and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is in broad
Europe one Free Man, and thou art he!
‘Thus from the lowest depth
there is a path to the loftiest height; and for the Poor also a Gospel has been
published. Surely if, as D’Alembert asserts, my illustrious namesake, Diogenes,
was the greatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by
stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Moderns; and greater than
Diogenes himself: for he too stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood,
casting aside all props and shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervaluing
the Earth; valuing it rather, as a place to yield him warmth and food, he looks
Heavenward from his Earth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with
a still Strength, such as the Cynic’s Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was
that Tub; a temple from which man’s dignity and divinity was scornfully
preached abroad: but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was
preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love.’
* * * * *
George Fox’s ‘perennial
suit,’ with all that it held, has been worn quite into ashes for nigh two
centuries: why, in a discussion on the Perfectibility of Society, reproduce it now? Not out of blind sectarian
partisanship: Teufelsdröckh himself is no Quaker; with all his pacific
tendencies, did not we see him, in that scene at the North Cape, with the
Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?
For us, aware of his deep
Sansculottism, there is more meant in this passage than meets the ear. At the
same time, who can avoid smiling at the earnestness and Boeotian simplicity (if
indeed there be not an underhand satire in it), with which that ‘Incident’ is
here brought forward; and, in the Professor’s ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps
as he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended to imitation! Does Teufelsdröckh anticipate
that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class of the community, by
way of testifying against the ‘Mammon-god,’ and escaping from what he calls
‘Vanity’s Workhouse and Ragfair,’ where doubtless some of them are toiled and
whipped and hoodwinked sufficiently,--will sheathe themselves in close-fitting
cases of Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay aside
its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and train-gowns, for a second-skin of
tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield and Manchester, and Coventry and
Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day
and Martin could profit. For neither would Teufelsdröckh’s mad daydream, here
as we presume covertly intended, of levelling Society (levelling it indeed with a vengeance, into one huge drowned
marsh!), and so attaining the political effects of Nudity without its
frigorific or other consequences,--be thereby realised. Would not the rich man
purchase a waterproof suit of Russia Leather; and the high-born Belle
step-forth in red or azure morocco, lined with shamoy: the black cowhide being
left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the old
Distinctions be re-established?
Or has the Professor his
own deeper intention; and laughs in his sleeve at our strictures and glosses,
which indeed are but a part thereof?
Not less questionable is
his Chapter on Church-Clothes,
which has the farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume. We here
translate it entire:
‘By Church-Clothes, it need
not be premised that I mean infinitely more than Cassocks and Surplices; and do
not at all mean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in.
Far from it! Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and
represented for themselves the Religious Principle; that is to say, invested
The Divine Idea of the World with a sensible and practically active Body, so
that it might dwell among them as a living and life-giving WORD.
‘These are unspeakably the
most important of all the vestures and garnitures of Human Existence. They are
first spun and woven, I may say, by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it is
still only when “two or three are gathered together,” that Religion,
spiritually existent, and indeed indestructible, however latent, in each, first
outwardly manifests itself (as with “cloven tongues of fire”), and seeks to be
embodied in a visible Communion and Church Militant. Mystical, more than
magical, is that Communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward: here
properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only in looking heavenward, take it
in what sense you may, not in looking earthward, does what we can call Union,
mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: “It is
certain my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof”! Gaze thou in the face
of thy Brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in
those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet
Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and
reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of
embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculous
virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the thick-plied hulls
of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of the Divine Life we speak, and
inmost ME is, as it were, brought into contact with inmost ME!
‘Thus was it that I said,
the Church-Clothes are first spun and woven by Society; outward Religion
originates by Society, Society becomes possible by Religion. Nay, perhaps,
every conceivable Society, past and present, may well be figured as properly and
wholly a Church, in one or other of these three predicaments: an audibly
preaching and prophesying Church, which is the best; second, a Church that
struggles to preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come;
and third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which only mumbles
delirium prior to dissolution. Whoso fancies that by Church is here meant
Chapterhouses and Cathedrals, or by preaching and prophesying, mere speech and
chanting, let him,’ says the oracular Professor, ‘read on, light of heart (getrosten
Muthes).
‘But with regard to your
Church proper, and the Church-Clothes specially recognised as Church-Clothes, I
remark, fearlessly enough, that without such Vestures and sacred Tissues
Society has not existed, and will not exist. For if Government is, so to speak,
the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting
it; and all your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of
head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying under such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;--then
is Religion the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and
warm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the Bones and
Muscles (of Industry) were inert, or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; the
SKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting raw-hide; and Society
itself a dead carcass,--deserving to be buried. Men were no longer Social, but
Gregarious; which latter state also could not continue, but must gradually
issue in universal selfish discord, hatred, savage isolation, and
dispersion;--whereby, as we might continue to say, the very dust and dead body
of Society would have evaporated and become abolished. Such, and so
all-important, all-sustaining, are the Church-Clothes to civilised or even to
rational men.
‘Meanwhile, in our era of
the World, those same Church-Clothes have gone sorrowfully out-at-elbows; nay,
far worse, many of them have become mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which
no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean
beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares
on you with its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life,--some
generation-and-half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in
unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to reappear, and
bless us, or our sons or grandsons. As a Priest, or Interpreter of the Holy, is
the noblest and highest of all men, so is a Sham-priest (Schein-priester) the falsest and basest; neither is it doubtful that
his Canonicals, were they Popes’ Tiaras, will one day be torn from him, to make
bandages for the wounds of mankind; or even to burn into tinder, for general
scientific or culinary purposes.
‘All which, as out of place
here, falls to be handled in my Second Volume, On the Palingenesia, or
Newbirth of Society; which volume, as
treating practically of the Wear, Destruction, and Retexture of Spiritual
Tissues, or Garments, forms, properly speaking, the Transcendental or ultimate
Portion of this my work on Clothes,
and is already in a state of forwardness.’
And herewith, no farther
exposition, note, or commentary being added, does Teufelsdröckh, and must his
Editor now, terminate the singular chapter on Church-Clothes!
Probably it will elucidate
the drift of these foregoing obscure utterances, if we here insert somewhat of
our Professor’s speculations on Symbols. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our compass: nowhere
is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of ‘Fantasy being the organ of
the God-like;’ and how ‘Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the small
Visible, does nevertheless extend down into the infinite deeps of the
Invisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his Life is properly the bodying forth.’
Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter, study to
glean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what little seems
logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence
as it will assume. By way of proem, take the following not injudicious remarks:
‘The benignant efficacies
of Concealment,’ cries our Professor, ‘who shall speak or sing? SILENCE and
SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building
time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things
fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and
majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not
William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the
most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were
creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but
hold thy tongue for one day: on
the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and
rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises
were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of
concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there
is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss
Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might
rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
‘Bees will not work except
in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work
except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth!
Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of “those secrets known to all.”
Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of
all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will
not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun
shine on it, nay do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no
flower will glad thee. O my Friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers
that over-wreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man’s life
with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul
plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and with grinning, grunting
satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in! Men speak much of the
Printing-Press with its Newspapers: du Himmel! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor’s Goose?’
‘Of kin to the so
incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected with still greater
things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore,
by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if
both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive
will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the
commonest Truth stands-out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.
‘For it is here that
Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense,
and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a
Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment
and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the
Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols,
accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere
finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised as such or not recognised:
the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is
man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a
revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a “Gospel of
Freedom,” which he, the “Messias of Nature,” preaches, as he can, by act and
word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears
visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense,
symbolical as well as real.’
‘Man,’ says the Professor
elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations,
which we have here cut short on the verge of the inane, ‘Man is by birth
somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him,
the most owlish, if we consider it, is that of your actually existing
Motive-Millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough man has played, in his time; has
fancied himself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of Glass; but
to fancy himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was
reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge
Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other; and
looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him:
one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priestridden, befooled; in all
ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any
Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of
Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but
Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would
indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and
cunningly compute these, and mechanise them to grind the other way?
‘Were he not, as has been
said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to bid him open his eyes and look.
In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man’s history, or the
history of any man, went on by calculated or calculable “Motives”? What make ye
of your Christianities, and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillese
Hymns, and Reigns of Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself
been in Love? Did he never stand
so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time, and the medicating virtue
of Nature.’
‘Yes, Friends,’ elsewhere
observes the Professor, ‘not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our
Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us
heavenward; our Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the
basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it
drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of
Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the
two), that gleams-in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its own
hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too
clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving
retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five-hundred living
soldiers sabred into crows’-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they
called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have
brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like
some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron
Crown; an Implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value
little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works,
and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can
the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a
Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of
the Godlike?
‘Of Symbols, however, I
remark farther, that they have both an extrinsic and intrinsic value; oftenest
the former only. What, for instance, was in that clouted Shoe, which the
Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign in their Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ War)? Or in the Wallet-and-staff round
which the Netherland Gueux,
glorying in that nickname of Beggars, heroically rallied and prevailed, though
against King Philip himself? Intrinsic significance these had none: only
extrinsic; as the accidental Standards of multitudes more or less sacredly
uniting together; in which union itself, as above noted, there is ever
something mystical and borrowing of the Godlike. Under a like category, too,
stand, or stood, the stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; military Banners
everywhere; and generally all national or other Sectarian Costumes and Customs:
they have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired
an extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of a
Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Idea of Duty,
of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right. Nay, the highest
ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning
save an accidental extrinsic one.
‘Another matter it is,
however, when your Symbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itself fit that men should unite round it. Let but the Godlike
manifest itself to Sense; let but Eternity look, more or less visibly, through
the Time-Figure (Zeitbild)! Then
is it fit that men unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and so
from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.
‘Of this latter sort are
all true works of Art: in them (if thou know a Work of Art from a Daub of
Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered
visible. Here too may an extrinsic value gradually superadd itself: thus
certain Iliads, and the like,
have, in three-thousand years, attained quite new significance. But nobler than
all in this kind, are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work
of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of the Just, as the last perfection
of a Work of Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinely
transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the beloved face which now
knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) the confluence of Time with
Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through.
‘Highest of all Symbols are
those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can
recognise a present God, and worship the same: I mean religious Symbols.
Various enough have been such religious Symbols, what we call Religions; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other,
and could worse or better body-forth the Godlike: some Symbols with a transient
intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man
has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of
Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher
has the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a
Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character: whose significance will ever
demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.
‘But, on the whole, as time
adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so likewise in his progress he at
length defaces or even desecrates them; and Symbols, like all terrestrial
Garments, wax old. Homer’s Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and
clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star. It needs a
scientific telescope, it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought
near us, before we can so much as know that it was a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic Thor,
with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo and
Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even Celestial Luminaries,
much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise, their culmination, their
decline.’
‘Small is this which thou
tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but a piece of gilt-wood; that the Pyx
has become a most foolish box, and truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, “of little
price.” A right Conjuror might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into
these wooden tools the divine virtue they once held.’
‘Of this thing, however, be
certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite
faculties of man, his Fantasy and Heart; wouldst thou plant for Year and Day,
then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his Self-love and
Arithmetical Understanding, what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, and
Pontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who,
Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix
it there. Such too will not always be wanting; neither perhaps now are.
Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we account him Legislator and wise
who can so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.
‘When, as the last English
Coronation[3] was preparing,’ concludes this wonderful Professor, ‘I read in
their Newspapers that the “Champion of England,” he who has to offer battle to
the Universe for his new King, had brought it so far that he could now “mount
his horse with little assistance,” I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbol
well-nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters
and rags of superannuated worn-out symbols (in this Ragfair of a World)
dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if you
shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce
suffocation?’
[3] That of George
IV.—ED.
At this point we determine
on adverting shortly, or rather reverting, to a certain Tract of Hofrath
Heuschrecke’s, entitled Institute for the Repression of Population; which lies, dishonourable enough (with torn leaves,
and a perceptible smell of aloetic drugs), stuffed into the Bag Pisces. Not indeed for the sake of the Tract itself, which
we admire little; but of the marginal Notes, evidently in Teufelsdröckh’s hand,
which rather copiously fringe it. A few of these may be in their right place
here.
Into the Hofrath’s Institute, with its extraordinary schemes, and machinery of
Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for
us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for
the doctrine, that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of
Population possesses the Hofrath; something like a fixed-idea; undoubtedly akin
to the more diluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in that quarter of his
intellectual world, is there light; nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger; open
mouths opening wider and wider; a world to terminate by the frightfullest
consummation: by its too dense inhabitants, famished into delirium, universally
eating one another. To make air for himself in which strangulation, choking
enough to a benevolent heart, the Hofrath founds, or proposes to found, this Institute of his, as the best he can do. It is only with our
Professor’s comments thereon that we concern ourselves.
First, then, remark that
Teufelsdröckh, as a speculative Radical, has his own notions about human
dignity; that the Zähdarm palaces and courtesies have not made him forgetful of
the Futteral cottages. On the blank cover of Heuschrecke’s Tract we find the
following indistinctly engrossed:
‘Two men I honour, and no
third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement
laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man’s. Venerable to me is the
hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue,
indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the
rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy
rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated
Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and
fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and
fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a god-created Form,
but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions
and defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know
freedom. Yet toil on, toil on: thou
art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thou toilest for the altogether
indispensable, for daily bread.
‘A second man I honour, and
still more highly: Him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable;
not daily bread, but the bread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring
towards inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and
his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him Artist; not earthly
Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers
Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high
and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance,
Freedom, Immortality?--These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is
chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
‘Unspeakably touching is
it, however, when I find both dignities united; and he that must toil outwardly
for the lowest of man’s wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest.
Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a Peasant Saint, could such now
anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou
wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of
Earth, like a light shining in great darkness.’
And again: ‘It is not
because of his toils that I lament for the poor: we must all toil, or steal
(howsoever we name our stealing), which is worse; no faithful workman finds his
task a pastime. The poor is hungry and a-thirst; but for him also there is food
and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but for him also the Heavens send
Sleep, and of the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest
envelops him, and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted Dreams. But what I do
mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of
heavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit him; but only, in the
haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation bear him company.
Alas, while the Body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded,
dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated! Alas, was this too a Breath of God;
bestowed in Heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!--That there should one
Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it
to happen more than twenty times in the minute, as by some computations it
does. The miserable fraction of Science which our united Mankind, in a wide
Universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence,
imparted to all?’
Quite in an opposite strain
is the following: ‘The old Spartans had a wiser method; and went out and
hunted-down their Helots, and speared and spitted them, when they grew too
numerous. With our improved fashions of hunting, Herr Hofrath, now after the
invention of fire-arms, and standing-armies, how much easier were such a hunt!
Perhaps in the most thickly-peopled country, some three days annually might
suffice to shoot all the able-bodied Paupers that had accumulated within the
year. Let Governments think of this. The expense were trifling: nay the very
carcasses would pay it. Have them salted and barrelled; could not you victual
therewith, if not Army and Navy, yet richly such infirm Paupers, in workhouses
and elsewhere, as enlightened Charity, dreading no evil of them, might see good
to keep alive?’
‘And yet,’ writes he
farther on, ‘there must be something wrong. A full-formed Horse will, in any
market, bring from twenty to as high as two-hundred Friedrichs d’or: such is
his worth to the world. A full-formed Man is not only worth nothing to the
world, but the world could afford him a round sum would he simply engage to go
and hang himself. Nevertheless, which of the two was the more cunningly-devised
article, even as an Engine? Good Heavens! A white European Man, standing on his
two Legs, with his two five-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones, and miraculous
Head on his shoulders, is worth, I should say, from fifty to a hundred Horses!’
‘True, thou Gold-Hofrath,’
cries the Professor elsewhere: ‘too crowded indeed! Meanwhile, what portion of
this inconsiderable terraqueous Globe have ye actually tilled and delved, till
it will grow no more? How thick stands your Population in the Pampas and
Savannas of America; round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; on
both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central Platform of Asia; in Spain,
Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare? One man, in one year, as
I have understood it, if you lend him Earth, will feed himself and nine others.
Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing,
still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist,
and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable
living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with
the steam-engine and ploughshare? Where are they?--Preserving their Game!’
Putting which four singular
Chapters together, and alongside of them numerous hints, and even direct
utterances, scattered over these Writings of his, we come upon the startling
yet not quite unlooked-for conclusion, that Teufelsdröckh is one of those who
consider Society, properly so called, to be as good as extinct; and that only
the gregarious feelings, and old inherited habitudes, at this juncture, hold us
from Dispersion, and universal national, civil, domestic and personal war! He
says expressly: ‘For the last three centuries, above all for the last three
quarters of a century, that same Pericardial Nervous Tissue (as we named it) of
Religion, where lies the Life-essence of Society, has been smote-at and
perforated, needfully and needlessly; till now it is quite rent into shreds;
and Society, long pining, diabetic, consumptive, can be regarded as defunct;
for those spasmodic, galvanic sprawlings are not life; neither indeed will they
endure, galvanise as you may, beyond two days.’
‘Call ye that a Society,’
cries he again, ‘where there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much
as the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common over-crowded Lodging-house?
Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his
neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries “Mine!” and calls it Peace,
because, in the cut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a
far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has become an
incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern
Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has no tongue but for
plate-licking: and your high Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all
hands hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez faire; Leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than darkness; eat you
your wages, and sleep!
‘Thus, too,’ continues he,
‘does an observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spectacle: The Poor
perishing, like neglected, foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Over-work;
the Rich, still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Over-growth. The
Highest in rank, at length, without honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with a
little mouth-honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in the bill.
Once-sacred Symbols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereof men grudge even the
expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the CHURCH fallen
speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken into a Police-Office,
straitened to get its pay!’
We might ask, are there
many ‘observant eyes,’ belonging to practical men in England or elsewhere,
which have descried these phenomena; or is it only from the mystic elevation of
a German Wahngasse that such
wonders are visible? Teufelsdröckh contends that the aspect of a ‘deceased or
expiring Society’ fronts us everywhere, so that whoso runs may read. ‘What, for
example,’ says he, ‘is the universally-arrogated Virtue, almost the sole
remaining Catholic Virtue, of these days? For some half century, it has been
the thing you name “Independence.” Suspicion of “Servility,” of reverence for
Superiors, the very dogleech is anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your Superiors
worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them were even your
only possible freedom. Independence, in all kinds, is rebellion; if unjust
rebellion, why parade it, and everywhere prescribe it?’
But what then? Are we
returning, as Rousseau prayed, to the state of Nature? ‘The Soul Politic having
departed,’ says Teufelsdröckh, ‘what can follow but that the Body Politic be
decently interred, to avoid putrescence! Liberals, Economists, Utilitarians
enough I see marching with its bier, and chanting loud pæans, towards the
funeral-pile, where, amid wailings from some, and saturnalian revelries from
the most, the venerable Corpse is to be burnt. Or, in plain words, that these
men, Liberals, Utilitarians, or whatsoever they are called, will ultimately
carry their point, and dissever and destroy most existing Institutions of
Society, seems a thing which has some time ago ceased to be doubtful.
‘Do we not see a little
subdivision of the grand Utilitarian Armament come to light even in insulated
England? A living nucleus, that will attract and grow, does at length appear
there also; and under curious phasis; properly as the inconsiderable fag-end,
and so far in the rear of the others as to fancy itself the van. Our European
Mechanisers are a sect of boundless diffusion, activity, and co-operative
spirit: has not Utilitarianism flourished in high places of Thought, here among
ourselves, and in every European country, at some time or other, within the
last fifty years? If now in all countries, except perhaps England, it has ceased
to flourish, or indeed to exist, among Thinkers, and sunk to Journalists and
the popular mass,--who sees not that, as hereby it no longer preaches, so the
reason is, it now needs no Preaching, but is in full universal Action, the
doctrine everywhere known, and enthusiastically laid to heart? The fit pabulum,
in these times, for a certain rugged workshop intellect and heart, nowise
without their corresponding workshop strength and ferocity, it requires but to
be stated in such scenes to make proselytes enough.—Admirably calculated
for destroying, only not for rebuilding! It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness;
till the whole World-kennel will be rabid: then woe to the Huntsmen, with or
without their whips! They should have given the quadrupeds water,’ adds he;
‘the water, namely, of Knowledge and of Life, while it was yet time.’
Thus, if Professor
Teufelsdröckh can be relied on, we are at this hour in a most critical
condition; beleaguered by that boundless ‘Armament of Mechanisers’ and
Unbelievers, threatening to strip us bare! ‘The world,’ says he, ‘as it needs
must, is under a process of devastation and waste, which, whether by silent
assiduous corrosion, or open quicker combustion, as the case chances, will
effectually enough annihilate the past Forms of Society; replace them with what
it may. For the present, it is contemplated that when man’s whole Spiritual
Interests are once divested, these
innumerable stript-off Garments shall mostly be burnt; but the sounder Rags
among them be quilted together into one huge Irish watchcoat for the defence of
the Body only!’—This, we think, is but Job’s-news to the humane reader.
‘Nevertheless,’ cries
Teufelsdröckh, ‘who can hinder it; who is there that can clutch into the
wheel-spokes of Destiny, and say to the Spirit of the Time: Turn back, I
command thee?--Wiser were it that we yielded to the Inevitable and Inexorable,
and accounted even this the best.’
Nay, might not an attentive
Editor, drawing his own inferences from what stands written, conjecture that
Teufelsdröckh individually had yielded to this same ‘Inevitable and Inexorable’
heartily enough; and now sat waiting the issue, with his natural
diabolico-angelical Indifference, if not even Placidity? Did we not hear him
complain that the World was a ‘huge Ragfair,’ and the ‘rags and tatters of old
Symbols’ were raining-down everywhere, like to drift him in, and suffocate him?
What with those ‘unhunted Helots’ of his; and the uneven sic-vos-non-vobis pressure and hard-crashing collision he is pleased to
discern in existing things; what with the so hateful ‘empty Masks,’ full of
beetles and spiders, yet glaring out on him, from their glass eyes, ‘with a
ghastly affectation of life,’—we feel entitled to conclude him even
willing that much should be thrown to the Devil, so it were but done gently!
Safe himself in that ‘Pinnacle of Weissnichtwo,’ he would consent, with a
tragic solemnity, that the monster UTILITARIA, held back, indeed, and moderated
by nose-rings, halters, foot-shackles, and every conceivable modification of
rope, should go forth to do her work;--to tread down old ruinous Palaces and
Temples with her broad hoof, till the whole were trodden down, that new and
better might be built! Remarkable in this point of view are the following
sentences.
‘Society,’ says he, ‘is not
dead: that Carcass, which you call dead Society, is but her mortal coil which
she has shuffled off, to assume a nobler; she herself, through perpetual
metamorphoses, in fairer and fairer development, has to live till Time also
merge in Eternity. Wheresoever two or three Living Men are gathered together,
there is Society; or there it will be, with its cunning mechanisms and
stupendous structures, overspreading this little Globe, and reaching upwards to
Heaven and downwards to Gehenna: for always, under one or the other figure, it
has two authentic Revelations, of a God and of a Devil; the Pulpit, namely, and
the Gallows.’
Indeed, we already heard
him speak of ‘Religion, in unnoticed nooks, weaving for herself new
Vestures’;--Teufelsdröckh himself being one of the loom-treadles? Elsewhere he
quotes without censure that strange aphorism of Saint-Simon’s, concerning which
and whom so much were to be said: L’âge d’or, qu’une aveugle tradition a
placé jusqu’ici dans le passé, est devant nous; The golden age, which a blind tradition has hitherto
placed in the Past, is Before us.’—But listen again:
‘When the Phoenix is
fanning her funeral pyre, will there not be sparks flying! Alas, some millions
of men, and among them such as a Napoleon, have already been licked into that
high-eddying Flame, and like moths consumed there. Still also have we to fear
that incautious beards will get singed.
‘For the rest, in what year
of grace such Phoenix-cremation will be completed, you need not ask. The law of
Perseverance is among the deepest in man: by nature he hates change; seldom
will he quit his old house till it has actually fallen about his ears. Thus
have I seen Solemnities linger as Ceremonies, sacred Symbols as idle-Pageants,
to the extent of three-hundred years and more after all life and sacredness had
evaporated out of them. And then, finally, what time the Phoenix Death-Birth
itself will require, depends on unseen contingencies.—Meanwhile, would
Destiny offer Mankind, that after, say two centuries of convulsion and
conflagration, more or less vivid, the fire-creation should be accomplished,
and we too find ourselves again in a Living Society, and no longer fighting but
working,--were it not perhaps prudent in Mankind to strike the bargain?’
Thus is Teufelsdröckh
content that old sick Society should be deliberately burnt (alas! with quite
other fuel than spicewood); in the faith that she is a Phoenix; and that a new
heaven-born young one will rise out of her ashes! We ourselves, restricted to
the duty of Indicator, shall forbear commentary. Meanwhile, will not the
judicious reader shake his head, and reproachfully, yet more in sorrow than in
anger, say or think: From a Doctor utriusque Juris, titular Professor in a University, and man to whom
hitherto, for his services, Society, bad as she is, has given not only food and
raiment (of a kind), but books, tobacco and gukguk, we expected more gratitude
to his benefactress; and less of a blind trust in the future, which resembles
that rather of a philosophical Fatalist and Enthusiast, than of a solid
householder paying scot-and-lot in a Christian country.
As mentioned above,
Teufelsdröckh, though a sansculottist, is in practice probably the politest man
extant: his whole heart and life are penetrated and informed with the spirit of
politeness; a noble natural Courtesy shines through him, beautifying his
vagaries; like sunlight, making a rosy-fingered, rainbow-dyed Aurora out of
mere aqueous clouds; nay brightening London-smoke itself into gold vapour, as
from the crucible of an alchemist. Hear in what earnest though fantastic wise
he expresses himself on this head:
‘Shall Courtesy be done
only to the rich, and only by the rich? In Good-breeding, which differs, if at
all, from High-breeding, only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others,
rather than gracefully insists on its own rights, I discern no special
connexion with wealth or birth: but rather that it lies in human nature itself,
and is due from all men towards all men. Of a truth, were your Schoolmaster at
his post, and worth anything when there, this, with so much else, would be
reformed. Nay, each man were then also his neighbour’s schoolmaster; till at
length a rude-visaged, unmannered Peasant could no more be met with, than a
Peasant unacquainted with botanical Physiology, or who felt not that the clod
he broke was created in Heaven.
‘For whether thou bear a
sceptre or a sledgehammer, art thou not ALIVE; is not this thy brother ALIVE?
“There is but one temple in the world,” says Novalis, “and that temple is the
Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high Form. Bending before men is a
reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay
our hands on a human Body.”
‘On which ground, I would
fain carry it farther than most do; and whereas the English Johnson only bowed
to every Clergyman, or man with a shovel-hat, I would bow to every Man with any
sort of hat, or with no hat whatever. Is not he a Temple, then; the visible
Manifestation and Impersonation of the Divinity? And yet, alas, such
indiscriminate bowing serves not. For there is a Devil dwells in man, as well
as a Divinity; and too often the bow is but pocketed by the former. It would go to the pocket of Vanity (which is your
clearest phasis of the Devil, in these times); therefore must we withhold it.
‘The gladder am I, on the
other hand, to do reverence to those Shells and outer Husks of the Body,
wherein no devilish passion any longer lodges, but only the pure emblem and
effigies of Man: I mean, to Empty, or even to Cast Clothes. Nay, is it not to
Clothes that most men do reverence: to the fine frogged broadcloth, nowise to
the “straddling animal with bandy legs” which it holds, and makes a Dignitary
of? Who ever saw any Lord my-lorded in tattered blanket fastened with wooden
skewer? Nevertheless, I say, there is in such worship a shade of hypocrisy, a
practical deception: for how often does the Body appropriate what was meant for
the Cloth only! Whoso would avoid falsehood, which is the essence of all Sin,
will perhaps see good to take a different course. That reverence which cannot
act without obstruction and perversion when the Clothes are full, may have free
course when they are empty. Even as, for Hindoo Worshippers, the Pagoda is not
less sacred than the God; so do I too worship the hollow cloth Garment with
equal fervour, as when it contained the Man: nay, with more, for I now fear no
deception, of myself or of others.
‘Did not King Toomtabard, or, in other words, John Baliol, reign long over
Scotland; the man John Baliol being quite gone, and only the “Toom Tabard”
(Empty Gown) remaining? What still dignity dwells in a suit of Cast Clothes!
How meekly it bears its honours! No haughty looks, no scornful gesture: silent
and serene, it fronts the world; neither demanding worship, nor afraid to miss
it. The Hat still carries the physiognomy of its Head: but the vanity and the
stupidity, and goose-speech which was the sign of these two, are gone. The
Coat-arm is stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modest
simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat
hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in
it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and
foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a
Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified Apparition, visiting our low
Earth.
‘Often, while I sojourned
in that monstrous tuberosity of Civilised Life, the Capital of England; and
meditated, and questioned Destiny, under that ink-sea of vapour, black, thick,
and multifarious as Spartan broth; and was one lone soul amid those grinding
millions;--often have I turned into their Old-Clothes Market to worship. With
awe-struck heart I walk through that Monmouth Street, with its empty Suits, as
through a Sanhedrim of stainless Ghosts. Silent are they, but expressive in
their silence: the past witnesses and instruments of Woe and Joy, of Passions,
Virtues, Crimes, and all the fathomless tumult of Good and Evil in “the Prison
men call Life.” Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom Old Clothes
are not venerable. Watch, too, with reverence, that bearded Jewish High-priest,
who with hoarse voice, like some Angel of Doom, summons them from the four
winds! On his head, like the Pope, he has three Hats,--a real triple tiara; on
either hand are the similitude of wings, whereon the summoned Garments come to
alight; and ever, as he slowly cleaves the air, sounds forth his deep fateful
note, as if through a trumpet he were proclaiming: “Ghosts of Life, come to
Judgment!” Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he will purify you in his Purgatory,
with fire and with water; and, one day, new-created ye shall reappear. O, let
him in whom the flame of Devotion is ready to go out, who has never worshipped,
and knows not what to worship, pace and repace, with austerest thought, the
pavement of Monmouth Street, and say whether his heart and his eyes still
continue dry. If Field Lane, with its long fluttering rows of yellow
handkerchiefs, be a Dionysius’ Ear, where, in stifled jarring hubbub, we hear
the Indictment which Poverty and Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that it has
left them there cast-out and trodden under foot of Want, Darkness and the
Devil,--then is Monmouth Street a Mirza’s Hill, where, in motley vision, the
whole Pageant of Existence passes awfully before us; with its wail and jubilee,
mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bells and gallows-ropes, farce-tragedy,
beast-godhood,--the Bedlam of Creation!’
* * * * *
To most men, as it does to
ourselves, all this will seem overcharged. We too have walked through Monmouth
Street; but with little feeling of ‘Devotion’: probably in part because the
contemplative process is so fatally broken in upon by the brood of
money-changers who nestle in that Church, and importune the worshipper with
merely secular proposals. Whereas Teufelsdröckh might be in that happy middle
state, which leaves to the Clothes-broker no hope either of sale or of
purchase, and so be allowed to linger there without
molestation.—Something we would have given to see the little
philosophical figure, with its steeple-hat and loose flowing skirts, and eyes
in a fine frenzy, ‘pacing and repacing in austerest thought’ that foolish
Street; which to him was a true Delphic avenue, and supernatural
Whispering-gallery, where the ‘Ghosts of Life’ rounded strange secrets in his
ear. O thou philosophic Teufelsdröckh, that listenest while others only gabble,
and with thy quick tympanum hearest the grass grow!
At the same time, is it not
strange that, in Paper-bag Documents destined for an English work, there exists
nothing like an authentic diary of this his sojourn in London; and of his
Meditations among the Clothes-shops only the obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither,
in conversation (for, indeed, he was not a man to pester you with his Travels),
have we heard him more than allude to the subject.
For the rest, however, it
cannot be uninteresting that we here find how early the significance of Clothes
had dawned on the now so distinguished Clothes-Professor. Might we but fancy it
to have been even in Monmouth Street, at the bottom of our own English
‘ink-sea,’ that this remarkable Volume first took being, and shot forth its
salient point in his soul,--as in Chaos did the Egg of Eros, one day to be
hatched into a Universe!
For us, who happen to live
while the World-Phoenix is burning herself, and burning so slowly that, as
Teufelsdröckh calculates, it were a handsome bargain would she engage to have
done ‘within two centuries,’ there seems to lie but an ashy prospect. Not
altogether so, however, does the Professor figure it. ‘In the living subject,’
says he, ‘change is wont to be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its old
skin, the new is already formed beneath. Little knowest thou of the burning of
a World-Phoenix, who fanciest that she must first burn-out, and lie as a dead
cinereous heap; and therefrom the young one start-up by miracle, and fly
heavenward. Far otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction
proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic
filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing and the
waving of the Whirlwind-Element come tones of a melodious Deathsong, which end
not but in tones of a more melodious Birthsong. Nay, look into the
Fire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see.’ Let us actually look,
then: to poor individuals, who cannot expect to live two centuries, those same
organic filaments, mysteriously spinning themselves, will be the best part of
the spectacle. First, therefore, this of Mankind in general:
‘In vain thou deniest it,’
says the Professor; ‘thou art my
Brother. Thy very Hatred, thy very Envy, those foolish lies thou tellest of me
in thy splenetic humour: what is all this but an inverted Sympathy? Were I a
Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me? Not thou! I
should grind all unheeded, whether badly or well.
‘Wondrous truly are the
bonds that unite us one and all; whether by the soft binding of Love, or the
iron chaining of Necessity, as we like to choose it. More than once have I said
to myself, of some perhaps whimsically strutting Figure, such as provokes
whimsical thoughts: “Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered-up
within the largest imaginable Glass-bell,--what a thing it were, not for
thyself only, but for the world! Post Letters, more or fewer, from all the four
winds, impinge against thy Glass walls, but have to drop unread: neither from within
comes there question or response into any Postbag; thy Thoughts fall into no
friendly ear or heart, thy Manufacture into no purchasing hand: thou art no
longer a circulating venous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving,
circulatest through all Space and all Time: there has a Hole fallen-out in the
immeasurable, universal World-tissue, which must be darned-up again!”
‘Such venous-arterial
circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paper and other Packages, going out
from him and coming in, are a blood-circulation, visible to the eye: but the
finer nervous circulation, by which all things, the minutest that he does,
minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses
whomso it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing: all
this you cannot see, but only imagine. I say, there is not a red Indian,
hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must
smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that
the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the
Universe.
‘If now an existing
generation of men stand so woven together, not less indissolubly does
generation with generation. Hast thou ever meditated on that word, Tradition:
how we inherit not Life only, but all the garniture and form of Life; and work,
and speak, and even think and feel, as our Fathers, and primeval grandfathers,
from the beginning, have given it us?--Who printed thee, for example, this
unpretending Volume on the Philosophy of Clothes? Not the Herren Stillschweigen
and Company; but Cadmus of Thebes, Faust of Mentz, and innumerable others whom
thou knowest not. Had there been no Moesogothic Ulfila, there had been no
English Shakspeare, or a different one. Simpleton! it was Tubalcain that made
thy very Tailor’s needle, and sewed that court-suit of thine.
‘Yes, truly; if Nature is
one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that
reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature were not. As palpable life-streams
in that wondrous Individual Mankind, among so many life-streams that are not
palpable, flow on those main-currents of what we call Opinion; as preserved in
Institutions, Polities, Churches, above all in Books. Beautiful it is to
understand and know that a Thought did never yet die; that as thou, the
originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so
thou wilt transmit it to the whole Future. It is thus that the heroic heart,
the seeing eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest;
that the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud
of witnesses and brothers; and there is a living, literal Communion of
Saints, wide as the World itself, and
as the History of the World.
‘Noteworthy also, and
serviceable for the progress of this same Individual, wilt thou find his
subdivision into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind:
Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to
sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has made, the
Son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all
things wax, and roll onwards; Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is
completed, but ever completing. Newton has learned to see what Kepler saw; but
there is also a fresh heaven-derived force in Newton; he must mount to still
higher points of vision. So too the Hebrew Lawgiver is, in due time, followed
by an Apostle of the Gentiles. In the business of Destruction, as this also is
from time to time a necessary work, thou findest a like sequence and
perseverance: for Luther it was as yet hot enough to stand by that burning of
the Pope’s Bull; Voltaire could not warm himself at the glimmering ashes, but
required quite other fuel. Thus likewise, I note, the English Whig has, in the
second generation, become an English Radical; who, in the third again, it is to
be hoped, will become an English Rebuilder. Find Mankind where thou wilt, thou
findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower: the Phoenix soars
aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with her music; or, as
now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she
may soar the higher and sing the clearer.’
Let the friends of social
order, in such a disastrous period, lay this to heart, and derive from it any
little comfort they can. We subjoin another passage, concerning Titles:
‘Remark, not without
surprise,’ says Teufelsdröckh, ‘how all high Titles of Honour come hitherto
from fighting. Your Herzog (Duke, Dux) is Leader of Armies; your Earl (Jarl) is Strong Man; your Marshal cavalry Horse-shoer. A
Millennium, or reign of Peace and Wisdom, having from of old been prophesied,
and becoming now daily more and more indubitable, may it not be apprehended
that such Fighting-titles will cease to be palatable, and new and higher need
to be devised?
‘The only Title wherein I,
with confidence, trace eternity, is that of King. König (King), anciently Könning, means Ken-ning (Cunning), or which is the same
thing, Can-ning. Ever must the Sovereign of Mankind be fitly entitled King.’
‘Well, also,’ says he
elsewhere, ‘was it written by Theologians: a King rules by divine right. He
carries in him an authority from God, or man will never give it him. Can I
choose my own King? I can choose my own King Popinjay, and play what farce or
tragedy I may with him: but he who is to be my Ruler, whose will is to be
higher than my will, was chosen for me in Heaven. Neither except in such
Obedience to the Heaven-chosen is Freedom so much as conceivable.’
* * * * *
The Editor will here admit
that, among all the wondrous provinces of Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual world,
there is none he walks in with such astonishment, hesitation, and even pain, as
in the Political. How, with our English love of Ministry and Opposition, and
that generous conflict of Parties, mind warming itself against mind in their
mutual wrestle for the Public Good, by which wrestle, indeed, is our invaluable
Constitution kept warm and alive; how shall we domesticate ourselves in this
spectral Necropolis, or rather City both of the Dead and of the Unborn, where
the Present seems little other than an inconsiderable Film dividing the Past
and the Future? In those dim longdrawn expanses, all is so immeasurable; much
so disastrous, ghastly; your very radiances and straggling light-beams have a
supernatural character. And then with such an indifference, such a prophetic
peacefulness (accounting the inevitably coming as already here, to him all one
whether it be distant by centuries or only by days), does he sit;--and live,
you would say, rather in any other age than in his own! It is our painful duty
to announce, or repeat, that, looking into this man, we discern a deep, silent,
slow-burning, inextinguishable Radicalism, such as fills us with shuddering
admiration.
Thus, for example, he
appears to make little even of the Elective Franchise; at least so we interpret
the following: ‘Satisfy yourselves,’ he says, ‘by universal, indubitable
experiment, even as ye are now doing or will do, whether FREEDOM, heavenborn
and leading heavenward, and so vitally essential for us all, cannot
peradventure be mechanically hatched and brought to light in that same
Ballot-Box of yours; or at worst, in some other discoverable or devisable Box,
Edifice, or Steam-mechanism. It were a mighty convenience; and beyond all feats
of manufacture witnessed hitherto.’ Is Teufelsdröckh acquainted with the
British Constitution, even slightly?--He says, under another figure: ‘But after
all, were the problem, as indeed it now everywhere is, To rebuild your old
House from the top downwards (since you must live in it the while), what
better, what other, than the Representative Machine will serve your turn?
Meanwhile, however, mock me not with the name of Free, “when you have but
knit-up my chains into ornamental festoons.”’—Or what will any member of
the Peace Society make of such an assertion as this: ‘The lower people
everywhere desire War. Not so unwisely; there is then a demand for lower
people—to be shot!’
Gladly, therefore, do we
emerge from those soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative Radicalism, into
somewhat clearer regions. Here, looking round, as was our hest, for ‘organic
filaments,’ we ask, may not this, touching ‘Hero-worship,’ be of the number? It
seems of a cheerful character; yet so quaint, so mystical, one knows not what,
or how little, may lie under it. Our readers shall look with their own eyes:
‘True is it that, in these
days, man can do almost all things, only not obey. True likewise that whoso
cannot obey cannot be free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of
nothing, can be the superior of nothing, the equal of nothing. Nevertheless,
believe not that man has lost his faculty of Reverence; that if it slumber in
him, it has gone dead. Painful for man is that same rebellious Independence,
when it has become inevitable; only in loving companionship with his fellows
does he feel safe; only in reverently bowing down before the Higher does he
feel himself exalted.
‘Or what if the character
of our so troublous Era lay even in this: that man had forever cast away Fear,
which is the lower; but not yet risen into perennial Reverence, which is the
higher and highest?
‘Meanwhile, observe with
joy, so cunningly has Nature ordered it, that whatsoever man ought to obey, he
cannot but obey. Before no faintest revelation of the Godlike did he ever stand
irreverent; least of all, when the Godlike showed itself revealed in his
fellow-man. Thus is there a true religious Loyalty forever rooted in his heart;
nay in all ages, even in ours, it manifests itself as a more or less orthodox Hero-worship. In which fact, that Hero-worship exists, has
existed, and will forever exist, universally among Mankind, mayest thou discern
the corner-stone of living-rock, whereon all Polities for the remotest time may
stand secure.’
Do our readers discern any
such corner-stone, or even so much as what Teufelsdröckh is looking at? He
exclaims, ‘Or hast thou forgotten Paris and Voltaire? How the aged, withered
man, though but a Sceptic, Mocker, and millinery Court-poet, yet because even
he seemed the Wisest, Best, could drag mankind at his chariot-wheels, so that
princes coveted a smile from him, and the loveliest of France would have laid
their hair beneath his feet! All Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship;
though their Divinity, moreover, was of feature too apish.
‘But if such things,’
continues he, ‘were done in the dry tree, what will be done in the green? If,
in the most parched season of Man’s History, in the most parched spot of
Europe, when Parisian life was at best but a scientific Hortus Siccus, bedizened with some Italian Gumflowers, such virtue
could come out of it; what is to be looked for when Life again waves leafy and
bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shall have nothing apelike, but be wholly human?
Know that there is in man a quite indestructible Reverence for whatsoever holds
of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such holding. Show the dullest
clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is
actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.’
Organic filaments, of a
more authentic sort, mysteriously spinning themselves, some will perhaps
discover in the following passage:
‘There is no Church, sayest
thou? The voice of Prophecy has gone dumb? This is even what I dispute: but in
any case, hast thou not still Preaching enough? A Preaching Friar settles
himself in every village; and builds a pulpit, which he calls Newspaper. Therefrom
he preaches what most momentous doctrine is in him, for man’s salvation; and
dost not thou listen, and believe? Look well, thou seest everywhere a new
Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some almost bare-backed,
fashion itself into shape, and teach and preach, zealously enough, for copper
alms and the love of God. These break in pieces the ancient idols; and, though
themselves too often reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be, mark out the
sites of new Churches, where the true God-ordained, that are to follow, may
find audience, and minister. Said I not, Before the old skin was shed, the new
had formed itself beneath it?’
Perhaps also in the
following; wherewith we now hasten to knit-up this ravelled sleeve:
‘But there is no Religion?’
reiterates the Professor. ‘Fool! I tell thee, there is. Hast thou well
considered all that lies in this immeasurable froth-ocean we name LITERATURE?
Fragments of a genuine Church-Homiletic lie scattered there, which Time will assort: nay fractions even of a Liturgy could I point out. And knowest thou no Prophet, even
in the vesture, environment, and dialect of this age? None to whom the God-like
had revealed itself, through all meanest and highest forms of the Common; and
by him been again prophetically revealed: in whose inspired melody, even in
these rag-gathering and rag-burning days, Man’s Life again begins, were it but
afar off, to be divine? Knowest thou none such? I know him, and name
him—Goethe.
‘But thou as yet standest
in no Temple; joinest in no Psalm-worship; feelest well that, where there is no
ministering Priest, the people perish? Be of comfort! Thou art not alone, if
thou have Faith. Spake we not of a Communion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal,
accompanying and brother-like embracing thee, so thou be worthy? Their heroic
Sufferings rise up melodiously together to Heaven, out of all lands, and out of
all times, as a sacred Miserere;
their heroic Actions also, as a boundless everlasting Psalm of Triumph. Neither
say that thou hast now no Symbol of the Godlike. Is not God’s Universe a Symbol
of the Godlike; is not Immensity a Temple; is not Man’s History, and Men’s
History, a perpetual Evangel? Listen, and for organ-music thou wilt ever, as of
old, hear the Morning Stars sing together.’
It is in his stupendous
Section, headed Natural Supernaturalism, that the Professor first becomes a Seer; and, after long effort, such
as we have witnessed, finally subdues under his feet this refractory
Clothes-Philosophy, and takes victorious possession thereof. Phantasms enough
he has had to struggle with; ‘Cloth-webs and Cob-webs,’ of Imperial Mantles,
Superannuated Symbols, and what not: yet still did he courageously pierce
through. Nay, worst of all, two quite mysterious, world-embracing Phantasms,
TIME and SPACE, have ever hovered round him, perplexing and bewildering: but
with these also he now resolutely grapples, these also he victoriously rends
asunder. In a word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till, one after the other,
its earthly hulls and garnitures have all melted away; and now, to his rapt
vision, the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed.
Here, therefore, properly
it is that the Philosophy of Clothes attains to Transcendentalism; this last
leap, can we but clear it, takes us safe into the promised land, where Palingenesia, in all senses, may be considered as beginning.
‘Courage, then!’ may our Diogenes exclaim, with better right than Diogenes the
First once did. This stupendous Section we, after long painful meditation, have
found not to be unintelligible; but, on the contrary, to grow clear, nay
radiant, and all-illuminating. Let the reader, turning on it what utmost force
of speculative intellect is in him, do his part; as we, by judicious selection and
adjustment, shall study to do ours:
‘Deep has been, and is, the
significance of Miracles,’ thus quietly begins the Professor; ‘far deeper
perhaps than we imagine. Meanwhile, the question of questions were: What
specially is a Miracle? To that Dutch King of Siam, an icicle had been a
miracle; whoso had carried with him an air-pump, and vial of vitriolic ether,
might have worked a miracle. To my Horse, again, who unhappily is still more
unscientific, do not I work a miracle, and magical “Open sesame!” every time I please to pay twopence, and open for
him an impassable Schlagbaum, or
shut Turnpike?
‘”But is not a real Miracle
simply a violation of the Laws of Nature?” ask several. Whom I answer by this
new question: What are the Laws of Nature? To me perhaps the rising of one from
the dead were no violation of these Laws, but a confirmation; were some far
deeper Law, now first penetrated into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the rest
have all been, brought to bear on us with its Material Force.
‘Here too may some inquire,
not without astonishment: On what ground shall one, that can make Iron swim,
come and declare that therefore he can teach Religion? To us, truly, of the
Nineteenth Century, such declaration were inept enough; which nevertheless to
our fathers, of the First Century, was full of meaning.
‘”But is it not the deepest
Law of Nature that she be constant?” cries an illuminated class: “Is not the
Machine of the Universe fixed to move by unalterable rules?” Probable enough,
good friends: nay I, too, must believe that the God, whom ancient inspired men
assert to be “without variableness or shadow of turning,” does indeed never
change; that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be
prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules. And
now of you, too, I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules,
forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature, may possibly be?
‘They stand written in our
Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated records of Man’s Experience?--Was
Man with his Experience present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went
on? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived-down to the foundations
of the Universe, and gauged everything there? Did the Maker take them into His counsel;
that they read His groundplan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This
stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These
scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some
handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom
as without shore.
‘Laplace’s Book on the
Stars, wherein he exhibits that certain Planets, with their Satellites, gyrate
round our worthy Sun, at a rate and in a course, which, by greatest good fortune,
he and the like of him have succeeded in detecting,--is to me as precious as to
another. But is this what thou namest “Mechanism of the Heavens,” and “System
of the World”; this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel’s
Fifteen-thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons,
and inert Balls, had been—looked at, nicknamed, and marked in the
Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How,
their Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?
‘System of Nature! To the
wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all
Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured
square-miles. The course of Nature’s phases, on this our little fraction of a
Planet, is partially known to us: but who knows what deeper courses these
depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our little Epicycle
revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident,
of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow
understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and
Monsoons, and Moon’s Eclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek
is regulated, and may, from time to time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed?
Such a Minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable
All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence
through Æons of Æons.
‘We speak of the Volume of
Nature: and truly a Volume it is,--whose Author and Writer is God. To read it!
Dost thou, does man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words,
Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out
through Solar Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a
Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which
even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line. As for
your Institutes, and Academies of Science, they strive bravely; and, from amid
the thick-crowded, inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick-out, by
dextrous combination, some Letters in the vulgar Character, and therefrom put
together this and the other economic Recipe, of high avail in Practice. That
Nature is more than some boundless Volume of such Recipes, or huge, well-nigh
inexhaustible Domestic-Cookery Book, of which the whole secret will in this
manner one day evolve itself, the fewest dream.
* * * * *
‘Custom,’ continues the
Professor, ‘doth make dotards of us all. Consider well, thou wilt find that
Custom is the greatest of Weavers; and weaves air-raiment for all the Spirits
of the Universe; whereby indeed these dwell with us visibly, as ministering
servants, in our houses and workshops; but their spiritual nature becomes, to
the most, forever hidden. Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us,
from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our
very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such
Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout
but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?
‘Innumerable are the
illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the
cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple
repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live; for man
must work as well as wonder: and herein is Custom so far a kind nurse, guiding
him to his true benefit. But she is a fond foolish nurse, or rather we are
false foolish nurslings, when, in our resting and reflecting hours, we prolong
the same deception. Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference,
because I have seen it twice, or two-hundred, or two-million times? There is no
reason in Nature or in Art why I should: unless, indeed, I am a mere
Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the
terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine; a power whereby Cotton might
be spun, and money and money’s worth realised.
‘Notable enough too, here
as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency of Names; which indeed are but one
kind of such custom-woven, wonder-hiding Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner
of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness and Diseases of the
Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is
Madness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain a
mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted
Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real. Was Luther’s
Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether it were formed within the bodily
eye, or without it? In every the wisest Soul lies a whole world of internal
Madness, an authentic Demon Empire; out of which, indeed, his world of Wisdom
has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as on its dark
foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind.
* * * * *
‘But deepest of all
illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two
grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun
and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for
dwelling here, and yet to blind it,--lie all embracing, as the universal
canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm
Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you
endeavour to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for
moments, and look through.
‘Fortunatus had a wishing
Hat, which when he put on, and wished himself Anywhere, behold he was There. By
this means had Fortunatus triumphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for
him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself,
in the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all mankind,
what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side
of the street, another Hatter establish himself; and as his fellow-craftsman
made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both would I purchase,
were it with my last groschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap-on your
felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap-on your other felt, and, simply by
wishing that you were Anywhen,
straightway to be Then! This were
indeed the grander: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its
Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing
face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first,
conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand
hidden in the depth of that late Time!
‘Or thinkest thou it were
impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past; is the
Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and
Hope, already answer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the
Earth-blinded summonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though
as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down,
the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the
Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man’s Soul,
even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: that Time and
Space are not God, but creations of God: that with God as it is a universal
HERE, so is it an everlasting NOW.
‘And seest thou therein any
glimpse of IMMORTALITY?--O Heaven! Is the white Tomb of our Loved One, who died
from our arms, and had to be left behind us there, which rises in the distance,
like a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered
miles we have journeyed on alone,--but a pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost
Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with
God!--Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are
perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever
will be, is even now and forever.
This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayest ponder at thy leisure; for the
next twenty years, or the next twenty centuries: believe it thou must;
understand it thou canst not.
‘That the Thought-forms,
Space and Time, wherein, once for all, we are sent into this Earth to live,
should condition and determine our whole Practical reasonings, conceptions, and
imagines or imaginings,--seems altogether fit, just, and unavoidable. But that
they should, furthermore, usurp such sway over pure spiritual Meditation, and
blind us to the wonder everywhere lying close on us, seems nowise so. Admit
Space and Time to their due rank as Forms of Thought; nay even, if thou wilt,
to their quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how
their thin disguises hide from us the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it
not miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand and clutch the Sun? Yet thou
seest me daily stretch forth my hand and therewith clutch many a thing, and
swing it hither and thither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to fancy that the
Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not
to see that the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I
can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught
therewith? Innumerable other of this sort are the deceptions, and wonder-hiding
stupefactions, which Space practises on us.
‘Still worse is it with
regard to Time. Your grand anti-magician, and universal wonder-hider, is this
same lying Time. Had we but the Time-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only,
we should see ourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authentic
Thaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone. But unhappily we have not such a
Hat; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantily help himself
without one.
‘Were it not wonderful, for
instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound
of his Lyre? Yet tell me, Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning-out
all the sandstone rocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with frightful
green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars,
squared ashlar houses and noble streets? Was it not the still higher Orpheus,
or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded
in civilising Man? Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years
ago: his sphere-melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished
souls of men; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds,
though now with thousandfold accompaniments, and rich symphonies, through all
our hearts; and modulates, and divinely leads them. Is that a wonder, which
happens in two hours; and does it cease to be wonderful if happening in two
million? Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the
music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man
glories-in ever done.
‘Sweep away the Illusion of
Time; glance, if thou hast eyes, from the near moving-cause to its far-distant
Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic
balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and
sent flying? O, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct
from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy
heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that
this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed
the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade,
and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But
Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides
Him from the foolish.
‘Again, could anything be
more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all
his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to
the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with
the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide
of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good
Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a
million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say,
sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three
minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are
shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade-away again into air and
Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are
Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to
Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith,
as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beautified Souls? And again,
do not we squeak and jibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and
recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,--till the
scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes
awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that
yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have
they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and
his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest
Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous,
flitted away?--Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand-million walking the Earth openly
at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have
arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.
‘O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the