Sartor Resartus
by
Thomas Carlyle
Part 2 out of 4
smoked largely, or read (as beseemed a regimental Schoolmaster), and talked
to neighbors 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 Konig_, 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 valor 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
Busching'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
house-mother 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 honor they hung, looked ever
trim and gay: a roomy painted Cottage, embowered in fruit-trees and
forest-trees, evergreens and honeysuckles; rising many-colored 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 farther parley unfolding, he deposited therefrom
what seemed some Basket, overhung with green Persian silk; saying only:
_Ihr lieben Leute, hier bringe ein unschatzbares Verleihen; nehmt es in
aller Acht, sorgfaltigst benutzt es: mit hohem Lohn, oder wohl mit
schweren Zinsen, wird's einst zuruckgefordert_. '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 parlor-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-colored 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 neighboring 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-colored 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 endeavor: 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 TEUFELSDROCKH,
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 moralizing, and
embroiled discoursing, "I yet keep; still more inseparably the Name,
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. 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
clew. 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
(_Pranumeranten_), Militia-Rolls, and other Name-catalogues; extraordinary
names as we have in Germany, the name Teufelsdrockh, 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
humor? 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 seered 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 Teufelsdrockh, 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, endeavoring 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 grandnephew;
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 Nursling
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 Teufelsdrockh'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 under-currents of roguish whim, for the present
stands pledged in honor, 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?
CHAPTER II.
IDYLLIC.
"HAPPY season of Childhood!" exclaims Teufelsdrockh: "Kind Nature, that
art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with
auroral radiance; and for thy Nursling 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 frost-nipt, 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-colored 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 outpost 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 laborers
reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens
often danced to flute-music. "Glorious summer twilights," cries
Teufelsdrockh, "when the Sun, like a proud Conqueror and Imperial
Taskmaster, turned his back, with his gold-purple emblazonry, and all his
fireclad bodyguard (of Prismatic Colors); 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
Co-operation, 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 humor 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 discolored-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
favorable influences accompany him through life, especially through
childhood, and expand him, while others lie close-folded 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 vigor 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 Teufelsdrockh, "I should as
soon agree as with this other, that an acorn might, by favorable or
unfavorable 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 gray austere yet hearty patriarchal aspect, could
not but appear another Ulysses and 'much-enduring Man.' Eagerly I hung
upon his tales, when listening neighbors 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 neighborly 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 hurry-burly. Nut-brown
maids and nut-brown 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 ox-goads; shouting in
half-articulate speech, amid the inarticulate barking and bellowing. Apart
stood Potters from far Saxony, with their crockery in fair rows; Nurnberg
Pedlers, 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 particolored 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 colors 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 overshadowed 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 bourn 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 favorable 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 unfavorably 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, every way 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 Teufelsdrockh, of
spiritual pride!
CHAPTER III.
PEDAGOGY.
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 puzzle 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 every way 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, Teufelsdrockh 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 behoove the Editor of these pages, were it never so
unsuccessfully, to do his endeavor.
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, Teufelsdrockh 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 down-bent, broken-hearted,
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 mid-day when Caesar,
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 agonized 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
school-fellows, as is usual, persecuted him: "They were Boys," he says,
"mostly rude Boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude Nature, which bids the
deer-herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck-flock put to death any
broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannize 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 Teufelsdrockh'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 (_Ungestum_)
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 Nurnberg 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 Hod-man is
discharged, or reduced to hod-bearing; 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 Field-marshals for killing, there should be world-honored
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 honor, 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 labored 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, Teufelsdrockh 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, Teufelsdrockh
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 Humor of that young Soul, what character is in
him, first decisively reveals itself; and, like strong sunshine in weeping
skies, gives out variety of colors, some of which are prismatic. Thus,
with the aid of Time and of what Time brings, has the stripling Diogenes
Teufelsdrockh 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_, Teufelsdrockh 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 realized 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 favorite, 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 re-painting 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, fill 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 (_erepiren_) 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, endeavor 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
alone their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been
vouchsafed."
That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth,
Teufelsdrockh 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 favorite 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, recognized 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. Teufelsdrockh 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 nightmare, 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,
new-born 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 vapor than
of clear flame?
From various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be
inferred that Teufelsdrockh, 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 humor, 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 Zahdarm, 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 humor 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 Zahdarm 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
Miseducation, 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
warm-hearted, strong-headed and wrong-headed 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?
CHAPTER IV.
GETTING UNDER WAY.
"Thus nevertheless," writes our Autobiographer, apparently as quitting
College, "was there realized Somewhat; namely, I, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh:
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 Day-moth has capabilities in this kind; and ever
organizes 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
Brass-smith'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 (_Zeitfurst_), 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 wire-drawn similitude does Teufelsdrockh 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_), preappointed 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 realize 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 war 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, Teufelsdrockh
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 connections, 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 Teufelsdrockh 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 Teufelsdrockh 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
patronize 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
Teufelsdrockh'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
Teufelsdrockh wird von der Frau Grafinn, auf Donnerstag, zum AESTHETISCHEN
THEE schonstens 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 _AEsthetic Tea_! How Teufelsdrockh, now at actual hand-grips
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 Grafinn dates from the _Zahdarm House_, she can be no other than
the Countess and mistress of the same; whose intellectual tendencies, and
good-will to Teufelsdrockh, 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 Zahdarms," 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 _Gnadigen Frau_ (her Ladyship) that
this latter improvement was due: assiduously she gathered, dexterously she
fitted on, what fringing was to be had; lace or cobweb, as the place
yielded." Was Teufelsdrockh 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 honor to converse; chiefly on general affairs, and the
aspect of the world, which he, though now past middle life, viewed in no
unfavorable 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 Teufelsdrockh 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 (_Madchen_) are,
to mankind, precisely the most delightful in those years; so young
gentlemen (_Bubchen_) 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,
vain-glorious; in all senses, so froward and so forward. No mortal's
endeavor or attainment will, in the smallest, content the as yet
unendeavoring, 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
Teufelsdrockh 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 Teufelsdrockh'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 characterizes 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 ardor 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
Godlike. Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers
hated, for my so-called Hardness (_Harte_), my Indifferentism towards men;
and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favorite 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 (_balkenhock_),
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 Teufelsdrockh 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 connection he had
ever succeeded in forming, his connection with the Zahdarm Family, seems to
have been paralyzed, 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:
HIC JACET
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 TUMULT DEVOLVENS,
IN STERCUS
PALAM CONVERTIT.
NUNC A LABORE REQUIESCENTEM
OPERA SEQUUNTUR.
SI MONUMENTUM QUAERIS,
FIMETUM ADSPICE.
PRIMUM IN ORBE DEJECIT [_sub dato_]; POSTREMUM [_sub dato_].
CHAPTER V.
ROMANCE.
"For long years," writes Teufelsdrockh, "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. Teufelsdrockh 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
Teufelsdrockh! 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 Northwest
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 (_Personlichkeit_) 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 Teufelsdrockh 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-colored angel-plumage; or hovering mute and inaccessible on the
outskirts of _AEsthetic 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 wheresoever 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 carbonized tinder, of Irritability; with so
much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurous Humor enough; the whole lying
in such hot neighborhood, 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 _AEsthetic Tea_,"
flit higher; and, by electric Promethean glance, kindle no despicable
firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a Firework, and flamed off
rocket-wise, in successive beautiful bursts of splendor, 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
Teufelsdrockh 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 Teufelsdrockh in
this for him unexampled predicament, demeans himself; with what specialties
of successive configuration, splendor and color, 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; high-born, and of high spirit; but unhappily dependent and
insolvent; living, perhaps, on the not too gracious bounty of moneyed
relatives. But how came "the Wanderer" into her circle? Was it by the
humid vehicle of _AEsthetic Tea_, or by the arid one of mere Business? Was
it on the hand of Herr Towgood; or of the Gnadige Frau, who, as an
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 Garden-house, where sit the choicest party of dames and
cavaliers: if not engaged in AEsthetic 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
Garden-house inferior in respectability to the noble Mansion itself.
"Embowered amid rich foliage, rose-clusters, and the hues and odors 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 SUIT 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 Humor 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
colorings of Rumor, 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 favor for him? Was the attraction, the agitation mutual, then;
pole and pole trembling towards contact, when once brought into
neighborhood? 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 (_Damon_) 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
"Philisitine;" who even now, to the general weariness, was dominantly
pouring forth Philistinism (_Philistriositaten_.); 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. Gayly 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 vapor; 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 aerial on the mountaintops, 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 Teufelsdrockh! 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 (_Zeitbuhne_), 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 enrolled 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 AEolian 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. Teufelsdrockh 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 splendor 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 organized? 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 Teufelsdrockh 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
Teufelsdrockh'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 Teufelsdrockh 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."
CHAPTER VI.
SORROWS OF TEUFELSDROCKH.
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 demeanor.
To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so
passionate Teufelsdrockh 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 Teufelsdrockh 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 vial: 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
Teufelsdrockh 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 Teufelsdrockh'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 toy-box, 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 Lifebreath: 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 Teufelsdrockh 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 only
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 favorable 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 strait 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 thee 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 splendor, 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 postilions wore wedding
favors: 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 unrecognizing salutation they passed me; plunged
down amid the neighboring 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 connections, be sure he
will snap them abruptly asunder. Let him sink out of sight as Private
Scholar (_Privatsirender_), living by the grace of God in some European
capital, you may next find him as Hadjee in the neighborhood of Mecca. It
is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our
Traveller, instead of limbs and highways, 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
spiritualized, vaporized. 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 endeavor.
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. Teufelsdrockh
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 favorable. "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 Phantasms 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 civilization, 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 Teufelsdrockh
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 Teufelsdrockh! 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 Teufelsdrockh_; 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!
CHAPTER VII.
THE EVERLASTING NO.
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 justness than originality: "Men 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.
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