Sartor ResartusThe Life and Opinions of Herr

Teufelsdröckh

Thomas Carlyle

This public-domain (U.S.) text was scannedand proofed by Ron Burkey. The ProjectGutenberg edition (“srtrs10”) was subse-quently converted to LATEX using GutenMarksoftware and re-edited with lyx software. Thefrontispiece, which was not included in theProject Gutenberg edition, has been restored.Report problems to info@sandroid.org. Revi-sion B1 differs from B0a in that “—-” has ev-erywhere been replaced by “—”.

Revision: B1Date: 01/29/2008

Contents

BOOK I. 3CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY. 3

CHAPTER II.EDITORIAL DIFFICULTIES. 11

CHAPTER III.REMINISCENCES. 17

CHAPTER IV.CHARACTERISTICS. 33

CHAPTER V.THE WORLD IN CLOTHES. 43

CHAPTER VI.APRONS. 53

CHAPTER VII.MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL. 57

CHAPTER VIII.THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES. 63

CHAPTER IX.ADAMITISM. 71

CHAPTER X.PURE REASON. 79

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CHAPTER XI.PROSPECTIVE. 87

BOOK II. 101CHAPTER I.

GENESIS. 101

CHAPTER II.IDYLLIC. 113

CHAPTER III.PEDAGOGY. 125

CHAPTER IV.GETTING UNDER WAY. 147

CHAPTER V.ROMANCE. 163

CHAPTER VI.SORROWS OF TEUFELSDRÖCKH. 181

CHAPTER VII.THE EVERLASTING NO. 195

CHAPTER VIII.CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE. 207

CHAPTER IX.THE EVERLASTING YEA. 223

CHAPTER X.PAUSE. 239

BOOK III. 251CHAPTER I.

INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY. 251

CHAPTER II.CHURCH-CLOTHES. 259

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CHAPTER III.SYMBOLS. 265

CHAPTER IV.HELOTAGE. 275

CHAPTER V.THE PHOENIX. 281

CHAPTER VI.OLD CLOTHES. 289

CHAPTER VII.ORGANIC FILAMENTS. 295

CHAPTER VIII.NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM. 307

CHAPTER IX.CIRCUMSPECTIVE. 323

CHAPTER X.THE DANDIACAL BODY. 329

CHAPTER XI.TAILORS. 349

CHAPTER XII.FAREWELL. 355

APPENDIX. 363

TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS. 365I. HIGHEST CLASS BOOKSELLER’S TASTER.365II. CRITIC OF THE SUN. . . . . . . . . . . . . 366III. NORTH—AMERICAN REVIEWER. . . . . 367IV. NEW ENGLAND EDITORS. . . . . . . . . 372

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BOOK I

1

CHAPTER I.PRELIMINARY.

Considering our present advanced state ofculture, and how the Torch of Science hasnow been brandished and borne about, withmore or less effect, for five thousand years andupwards; how, in these times especially, notonly the Torch still burns, and perhaps morefiercely than ever, but innumerable Rush-lights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat,are also glancing in every direction, so thatnot the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Natureor Art can remain unilluminated,—it mightstrike the reflective mind with some surprisethat hitherto little or nothing of a fundamen-tal character, whether in the way of Philoso-phy or History, has been written on the sub-ject of Clothes.

Our Theory of Gravitation is as good asperfect: Lagrange, it is well known, hasproved that the Planetary System, on thisscheme, will endure forever; Laplace, stillmore cunningly, even guesses that it couldnot have been made on any other scheme.Whereby, at least, our nautical Logbooks can

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be better kept; and water-transport of allkinds has grown more commodious. Of Ge-ology and Geognosy we know enough: whatwith the labors of our Werners and Huttons,what with the ardent genius of their disci-ples, it has come about that now, to manya Royal Society, the Creation of a World islittle more mysterious than the cooking ofa dumpling; concerning which last, indeed,there have been minds to whom the question,How the apples were got in, presented diffi-culties. Why mention our disquisitions on theSocial Contract, on the Standard of Taste, onthe Migrations of the Herring? Then, havewe not a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value;Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pot-tery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors?Man’s whole life and environment have beenlaid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragmentor fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, buthas been probed, dissected, distilled, desic-cated, and scientifically decomposed: our spir-itual Faculties, of which it appears there arenot a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, RoyerCollards: every cellular, vascular, muscularTissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies,Bichats.

How, then, comes it, may the reflectivemind repeat, that the grand Tissue of allTissues, the only real Tissue, should havebeen quite overlooked by Science,—the vestu-ral Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth;which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost wrap-page and overall; wherein his whole other Tis-sues are included and screened, his whole Fac-

PRELIMINARY 5

ulties work, his whole Self lives, moves, andhas its being? For if, now and then, somestraggling broken-winged thinker has cast anowl’s glance into this obscure region, the mosthave soared over it altogether heedless; re-garding Clothes as a property, not an acci-dent, as quite natural and spontaneous, likethe leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds.In all speculations they have tacitly figuredman as a Clothed Animal; whereas he is bynature a Naked Animal; and only in certaincircumstances, by purpose and device, maskshimself in Clothes. Shakespeare says, we arecreatures that look before and after: the moresurprising that we do not look round a little,and see what is passing under our very eyes.

But here, as in so many other cases, Ger-many, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinkingGermany comes to our aid. It is, after all,a blessing that, in these revolutionary times,there should be one country where abstractThought can still take shelter; that whilethe din and frenzy of Catholic Emancipations,and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris,deafen every French and every English ear,the German can stand peaceful on his scien-tific watch-tower; and, to the raging, strug-gling multitude here and elsewhere, solemnly,from hour to hour, with preparatory blastof cow-horn, emit his Horet ihr Herren undlasset’s Euch sagen; in other words, tell theUniverse, which so often forgets that fact,what o’clock it really is. Not unfrequentlythe Germans have been blamed for an un-profitable diligence; as if they struck into de-

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vious courses, where nothing was to be hadbut the toil of a rough journey; as if, forsak-ing the gold-mines of finance and that politi-cal slaughter of fat oxen whereby a man him-self grows fat, they were apt to run goose-hunting into regions of bilberries and crow-berries, and be swallowed up at last in remotepeat-bogs. Of that unwise science, which, asour Humorist expresses it,

“By geometric scaleDoth take the size of pots of ale;”

still more, of that altogether misdirected in-dustry, which is seen vigorously thrashingmere straw, there can nothing defensive besaid. In so far as the Germans are charge-able with such, let them take the consequence.Nevertheless be it remarked, that even a Rus-sian steppe has tumult and gold ornaments;also many a scene that looks desert and rock-bound from the distance, will unfold itself,when visited, into rare valleys. Nay, in anycase, would Criticism erect not only finger-posts and turnpikes, but spiked gates andimpassable barriers, for the mind of man?It is written, “Many shall run to and fro,and knowledge shall be increased.” Surelythe plain rule is, Let each considerate personhave his way, and see what it will lead to.For not this man and that man, but all menmake up mankind, and their united tasks thetask of mankind. How often have we seensome such adventurous, and perhaps much-censured wanderer light on some out-lying,neglected, yet vitally momentous province;

PRELIMINARY 7

the hidden treasures of which he first discov-ered, and kept proclaiming till the general eyeand effort were directed thither, and the con-quest was completed;—thereby, in these hisseemingly so aimless rambles, planting newstandards, founding new habitable colonies,in the immeasurable circumambient realm ofNothingness and Night! Wise man was hewho counselled that Speculation should havefree course, and look fearlessly towards all thethirty-two points of the compass, whitherso-ever and howsoever it listed.

Perhaps it is proof of the stunted condi-tion in which pure Science, especially puremoral Science, languishes among us English;and how our mercantile greatness, and in-valuable Constitution, impressing a politicalor other immediately practical tendency on allEnglish culture and endeavor, cramps the freeflight of Thought,—that this, not Philosophyof Clothes, but recognition even that we haveno such Philosophy, stands here for the firsttime published in our language. What En-glish intellect could have chosen such a topic,or by chance stumbled on it? But for thatsame unshackled, and even sequestered con-dition of the German Learned, which permitsand induces them to fish in all manner of wa-ters, with all manner of nets, it seems prob-able enough, this abtruse Inquiry might, inspite of the results it leads to, have contin-ued dormant for indefinite periods. The Edi-tor of these sheets, though otherwise boastinghimself a man of confirmed speculative habits,and perhaps discursive enough, is free to con-

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fess, that never, till these last months, did theabove very plain considerations, on our totalwant of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur to him;and then, by quite foreign suggestion. By thearrival, namely, of a new Book from Profes-sor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo; treatingexpressly of this subject, and in a style which,whether understood or not, could not even bythe blindest be overlooked. In the present Ed-itor’s way of thought, this remarkable Trea-tise, with its Doctrines, whether as judiciallyacceded to, or judicially denied, has not re-mained without effect.

“Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken(Clothes, their Origin and Influence): vonDiog. Teufelsdröckh, J. U. D. etc. Still-schweigen und Cognie. Weissnichtwo, 1831.

“Here,” says the Weissnichtwo’sche An-zeiger, “comes a Volume of that extensive,close-printed, close-meditated sort, which, beit spoken with pride, is seen only in Ger-many, perhaps only in Weissnichtwo. Is-suing from the hitherto irreproachable Firmof Stillschweigen and Company, with everyexternal furtherance, it is of such internalquality as to set Neglect at defiance. . . . Awork,” concludes the well-nigh enthusiasticReviewer, “interesting alike to the antiquary,the historian, and the philosophic thinker; amasterpiece of boldness, lynx-eyed acuteness,and rugged independent Germanism and Phi-lanthropy (derber Kerndeutschheit und Men-schenliebe); which will not, assuredly, passcurrent without opposition in high places; butmust and will exalt the almost new name of

PRELIMINARY 9

Teufelsdröckh to the first ranks of Philosophy,in our German Temple of Honor.”

Mindful of old friendship, the distin-guished Professor, in this the first blaze ofhis fame, which however does not dazzle him,sends hither a Presentation-copy of his Book;with compliments and encomiums which mod-esty forbids the present Editor to rehearse;yet without indicated wish or hope of anykind, except what may be implied in the con-cluding phrase: Mochte es (this remarkableTreatise) auch im Brittischen Boden gedeihen!

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CHAPTER II.EDITORIALDIFFICULTIES.

If for a speculative man, “whose seedfield,” inthe sublime words of the Poet, “is Time,” noconquest is important but that of new ideas,then might the arrival of Professor Teufels-dröckh’s Book be marked with chalk in theEditor’s calendar. It is indeed an “extensiveVolume,” of boundless, almost formless con-tents, a very Sea of Thought; neither calmnor clear, if you will; yet wherein the tough-est pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth,and return not only with sea-wreck but withtrue orients.

Directly on the first perusal, almost on thefirst deliberate inspection, it became apparentthat here a quite new Branch of Philosophy,leading to as yet undescried ulterior results,was disclosed; farther, what seemed scarcelyless interesting, a quite new human Individu-ality, an almost unexampled personal charac-ter, that, namely, of Professor Teufelsdröckhthe Discloser. Of both which novelties, as far

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as might be possible, we resolved to masterthe significance. But as man is emphaticallya proselytizing creature, no sooner was suchmastery even fairly attempted, than the newquestion arose: How might this acquired goodbe imparted to others, perhaps in equal needthereof; how could the Philosophy of Clothes,and the Author of such Philosophy, be broughthome, in any measure, to the business and bo-soms of our own English Nation? For if new-got gold is said to burn the pockets till it becast forth into circulation, much more maynew truth.

Here, however, difficulties occurred. Thefirst thought naturally was to publish Arti-cle after Article on this remarkable Volume,in such widely circulating Critical Journals asthe Editor might stand connected with, or bymoney or love procure access to. But, on theother hand, was it not clear that such mat-ter as must here be revealed, and treated of,might endanger the circulation of any Jour-nal extant? If, indeed, all party-divisions inthe State could have been abolished, Whig,Tory, and Radical, embracing in discrepantunion; and all the Journals of the Nationcould have been jumbled into one Journal, andthe Philosophy of Clothes poured forth in in-cessant torrents therefrom, the attempt hadseemed possible. But, alas, what vehicle ofthat sort have we, except Fraser’s Magazine?A vehicle all strewed (figuratively speaking)with the maddest Waterloo-Crackers, explod-ing distractively and destructively, whereso-ever the mystified passenger stands or sits;

EDITORIAL DIFFICULTIES 13

nay, in any case, understood to be, of lateyears, a vehicle full to overflowing, and in-exorably shut! Besides, to state the Philos-ophy of Clothes without the Philosopher, theideas of Teufelsdröckh without something ofhis personality, was it not to insure both ofentire misapprehension? Now for Biography,had it been otherwise admissible, there wereno adequate documents, no hope of obtainingsuch, but rather, owing to circumstances, aspecial despair. Thus did the Editor see him-self, for the while, shut out from all public ut-terance of these extraordinary Doctrines, andconstrained to revolve them, not without dis-quietude, in the dark depths of his own mind.

So had it lasted for some months; andnow the Volume on Clothes, read and againread, was in several points becoming lu-cid and lucent; the personality of its Au-thor more and more surprising, but, in spiteof all that memory and conjecture coulddo, more and more enigmatic; whereby theold disquietude seemed fast settling intofixed discontent,—when altogether unexpect-edly arrives a Letter from Herr HofrathHeuschrecke, our Professor’s chief friend andassociate in Weissnichtwo, with whom we hadnot previously corresponded. The Hofrath, af-ter much quite extraneous matter, began di-lating largely on the “agitation and attention”which the Philosophy of Clothes was excitingin its own German Republic of Letters; on thedeep significance and tendency of his Friend’sVolume; and then, at length, with great cir-cumlocution, hinted at the practicability of

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conveying “some knowledge of it, and of him,to England, and through England to the dis-tant West:” a work on Professor Teufelsdröckh“were undoubtedly welcome to the Family, theNational, or any other of those patriotic Li-braries, at present the glory of British Liter-ature;” might work revolutions in Thought;and so forth;—in conclusion, intimating notobscurely, that should the present Editor feeldisposed to undertake a Biography of Teufels-dröckh, he, Hofrath Heuschrecke, had it in hispower to furnish the requisite Documents.

As in some chemical mixture, that hasstood long evaporating, but would not crys-tallize, instantly when the wire or other fixedsubstance is introduced, crystallization com-mences, and rapidly proceeds till the wholeis finished, so was it with the Editor’s mindand this offer of Heuschrecke’s. Form roseout of void solution and discontinuity; likeunited itself with like in definite arrange-ment: and soon either in actual vision andpossession, or in fixed reasonable hope, theimage of the whole Enterprise had shaped it-self, so to speak, into a solid mass. Cautiouslyyet courageously, through the twopenny post,application to the famed redoubtable OLIVERYORKE was now made: an interview, in-terviews with that singular man have takenplace; with more of assurance on our side,with less of satire (at least of open satire) onhis, than we anticipated; for the rest, withsuch issue as is now visible. As to thosesame “patriotic Libraries,” the Hofrath’s coun-sel could only be viewed with silent amaze-

EDITORIAL DIFFICULTIES 15

ment; but with his offer of Documents wejoyfully and almost instantaneously closed.Thus, too, in the sure expectation of these,we already see our task begun; and this ourSartor Resartus, which is properly a “Life andOpinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh,” hourly ad-vancing.

Of our fitness for the Enterprise, to whichwe have such title and vocation, it were per-haps uninteresting to say more. Let theBritish reader study and enjoy, in simplicityof heart, what is here presented him, andwith whatever metaphysical acumen and tal-ent for meditation he is possessed of. Lethim strive to keep a free, open sense; clearedfrom the mists of prejudice, above all from theparalysis of cant; and directed rather to theBook itself than to the Editor of the Book.Who or what such Editor may be, must re-main conjectural, and even insignificant:1 itis a voice publishing tidings of the Philosophyof Clothes; undoubtedly a Spirit addressingSpirits: whoso hath ears, let him hear.

On one other point the Editor thinks itneedful to give warning: namely, that he isanimated with a true though perhaps a feebleattachment to the Institutions of our Ances-tors; and minded to defend these, according toability, at all hazards; nay, it was partly witha view to such defence that he engaged in thisundertaking. To stem, or if that be impossi-

1With us even he still communicates in some sort ofmask, or muffler; and, we have reason to think, undera feigned name!—O. Y.

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ble, profitably to divert the current of Innova-tion, such a Volume as Teufelsdröckh’s, if cun-ningly planted down, were no despicable pile,or floodgate, in the logical wear.

For the rest, be it nowise apprehended,that any personal connection of ours withTeufelsdröckh, Heuschrecke or this Philoso-phy of Clothes, can pervert our judgment, orsway us to extenuate or exaggerate. Power-less, we venture to promise, are those pri-vate Compliments themselves. Grateful theymay well be; as generous illusions of friend-ship; as fair mementos of bygone unions, ofthose nights and suppers of the gods, when,lapped in the symphonies and harmonies ofPhilosophic Eloquence, though with baser ac-companiments, the present Editor revelled inthat feast of reason, never since vouchsafedhim in so full measure! But what then? Ami-cus Plato, magis amica veritas; Teufelsdröckhis our friend, Truth is our divinity. In ourhistorical and critical capacity, we hope weare strangers to all the world; have feud orfavor with no one,—save indeed the Devil,with whom, as with the Prince of Lies andDarkness, we do at all times wage internecinewar. This assurance, at an epoch when pufferyand quackery have reached a height unex-ampled in the annals of mankind, and evenEnglish Editors, like Chinese Shopkeepers,must write on their door-lintels No cheatinghere,—we thought it good to premise.

CHAPTER III.REMINISCENCES.

To the Author’s private circle the appearanceof this singular Work on Clothes must haveoccasioned little less surprise than it has tothe rest of the world. For ourselves, at least,few things have been more unexpected. Pro-fessor Teufelsdröckh, at the period of our ac-quaintance with him, seemed to lead a quitestill and self-contained life: a man devotedto the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet morelikely, if he published at all, to publish a refu-tation of Hegel and Bardili, both of whom,strangely enough, he included under a com-mon ban; than to descend, as he has heredone, into the angry noisy Forum, with an Ar-gument that cannot but exasperate and di-vide. Not, that we can remember, was thePhilosophy of Clothes once touched upon be-tween us. If through the high, silent, med-itative Transcendentalism of our Friend wedetected any practical tendency whatever, itwas at most Political, and towards a certainprospective, and for the present quite specu-lative, Radicalism; as indeed some correspon-

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dence, on his part, with Herr Oken of Jenawas now and then suspected; though his spe-cial contributions to the Isis could never bemore than surmised at. But, at all events,nothing Moral, still less anything Didactico-Religious, was looked for from him.

Well do we recollect the last words hespoke in our hearing; which indeed, with theNight they were uttered in, are to be for-ever remembered. Lifting his huge tumblerof Gukguk,2 and for a moment lowering histobacco-pipe, he stood up in full Coffee-house(it was Zur Grunen Gans, the largest in Weiss-nichtwo, where all the Virtuosity, and nearlyall the Intellect of the place assembled of anevening); and there, with low, soul-stirringtone, and the look truly of an angel, thoughwhether of a white or of a black one mightbe dubious, proposed this toast: Die Sacheder Armen in Gottes und Teufels Namen (TheCause of the Poor, in Heaven’s name and——’s)! One full shout, breaking the leadensilence; then a gurgle of innumerable emp-tying bumpers, again followed by universalcheering, returned him loud acclaim. It wasthe finale of the night: resuming their pipes;in the highest enthusiasm, amid volumes oftobacco-smoke; triumphant, cloud-capt with-out and within, the assembly broke up, eachto his thoughtful pillow. Bleibt doch ein echterSpass- und Galgen-vogel, said several; mean-ing thereby that, one day, he would probablybe hanged for his democratic sentiments. Wo

2Gukguk is unhappily only an academical-beer.

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steckt doch der Schalk? added they, lookinground: but Teufelsdröckh had retired by pri-vate alleys, and the Compiler of these pagesbeheld him no more.

In such scenes has it been our lot to livewith this Philosopher, such estimate to form ofhis purposes and powers. And yet, thou braveTeufelsdröckh, who could tell what lurked inthee? Under those thick locks of thine, so longand lank, overlapping roof-wise the gravestface we ever in this world saw, there dwelt amost busy brain. In thy eyes too, deep undertheir shaggy brows, and looking out so stilland dreamy, have we not noticed gleams ofan ethereal or else a diabolic fire, and halffancied that their stillness was but the restof infinite motion, the sleep of a spinning-top? Thy little figure, there as, in loose ill-brushed threadbare habiliments, thou sattest,amid litter and lumber, whole days, to “thinkand smoke tobacco,” held in it a mighty heart.The secrets of man’s Life were laid open tothee; thou sawest into the mystery of the Uni-verse, farther than another; thou hadst inpetto thy remarkable Volume on Clothes. Nay,was there not in that clear logically foundedTranscendentalism of thine; still more, in thymeek, silent, deep-seated Sansculottism, com-bined with a true princely Courtesy of inwardnature, the visible rudiments of such specula-tion? But great men are too often unknown, orwhat is worse, misknown. Already, when wedreamed not of it, the warp of thy remarkableVolume lay on the loom; and silently, mysteri-ous shuttles were putting in the woof.

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How the Hofrath Heuschrecke is to furnishbiographical data, in this case, may be a curi-ous question; the answer of which, however,is happily not our concern, but his. To us itappeared, after repeated trial, that in Weiss-nichtwo, from the archives or memories of thebest-informed classes, no Biography of Teuf-elsdröckh was to be gathered; not so much asa false one. He was a stranger there, waftedthither by what is called the course of circum-stances; concerning whose parentage, birth-place, prospects, or pursuits, curiosity had in-deed made inquiries, but satisfied herself withthe most indistinct replies. For himself, hewas a man so still and altogether unpartic-ipating, that to question him even afar offon such particulars was a thing of more thanusual delicacy: besides, in his sly way, he hadever some quaint turn, not without its satiri-cal edge, wherewith to divert such intrusions,and deter you from the like. Wits spoke of himsecretly as if he were a kind of Melchizedek,without father or mother of any kind; some-times, with reference to his great historic andstatistic knowledge, and the vivid way he hadof expressing himself like an eye-witness ofdistant transactions and scenes, they calledhim the Ewige Jude, Everlasting, or as we say,Wandering Jew.

To the most, indeed, he had become not somuch a Man as a Thing; which Thing doubt-less they were accustomed to see, and withsatisfaction; but no more thought of account-ing for than for the fabrication of their dailyAllgemeine Zeitung, or the domestic habits of

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the Sun. Both were there and welcome; theworld enjoyed what good was in them, andthought no more of the matter. The manTeufelsdröckh passed and repassed, in his lit-tle circle, as one of those originals and non-descripts, more frequent in German Univer-sities than elsewhere; of whom, though yousee them alive, and feel certain enough thatthey must have a History, no History seems tobe discoverable; or only such as men give ofmountain rocks and antediluvian ruins: Thatthey have been created by unknown agen-cies, are in a state of gradual decay, and forthe present reflect light and resist pressure;that is, are visible and tangible objects in thisphantasm world, where so much other mys-tery is.

It was to be remarked that though, bytitle and diploma, Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft, or as we should say in English,“Professor of Things in General,” he had neverdelivered any Course; perhaps never been in-cited thereto by any public furtherance orrequisition. To all appearance, the enlight-ened Government of Weissnichtwo, in found-ing their New University, imagined they haddone enough, if “in times like ours,” as thehalf-official Program expressed it, “when allthings are, rapidly or slowly, resolving them-selves into Chaos, a Professorship of this kindhad been established; whereby, as occasioncalled, the task of bodying somewhat forthagain from such Chaos might be, even slightly,facilitated.” That actual Lectures should beheld, and Public Classes for the “Science of

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Things in General,” they doubtless consid-ered premature; on which ground too theyhad only established the Professorship, no-wise endowed it; so that Teufelsdröckh, “rec-ommended by the highest Names,” had beenpromoted thereby to a Name merely.

Great, among the more enlightenedclasses, was the admiration of this newProfessorship: how an enlightened Govern-ment had seen into the Want of the Age(Zeitbedurfniss); how at length, instead ofDenial and Destruction, we were to have ascience of Affirmation and Reconstruction;and Germany and Weissnichtwo were wherethey should be, in the vanguard of the world.Considerable also was the wonder at the newProfessor, dropt opportunely enough into thenascent University; so able to lecture, shouldoccasion call; so ready to hold his peace forindefinite periods, should an enlightenedGovernment consider that occasion did notcall. But such admiration and such wonder,being followed by no act to keep them living,could last only nine days; and, long before ourvisit to that scene, had quite died away. Themore cunning heads thought it was all anexpiring clutch at popularity, on the part ofa Minister, whom domestic embarrassments,court intrigues, old age, and dropsy soonafterwards finally drove from the helm.

As for Teufelsdröckh, except by his nightlyappearances at the Grune Gans, Weiss-nichtwo saw little of him, felt little of him.Here, over his tumbler of Gukguk, he satreading Journals; sometimes contemplatively

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looking into the clouds of his tobacco-pipe,without other visible employment: always,from his mild ways, an agreeable phenomenonthere; more especially when he opened hislips for speech; on which occasions the wholeCoffee-house would hush itself into silence, asif sure to hear something noteworthy. Nay,perhaps to hear a whole series and river of themost memorable utterances; such as, whenonce thawed, he would for hours indulge in,with fit audience: and the more memorable,as issuing from a head apparently not moreinterested in them, not more conscious ofthem, than is the sculptured stone head ofsome public fountain, which through its brassmouth-tube emits water to the worthy and theunworthy; careless whether it be for cookingvictuals or quenching conflagrations; indeed,maintains the same earnest assiduous look,whether any water be flowing or not.

To the Editor of these sheets, as to a youngenthusiastic Englishman, however unworthy,Teufelsdröckh opened himself perhaps morethan to the most. Pity only that we could notthen half guess his importance, and scrutinizehim with due power of vision! We enjoyed,what not three men Weissnichtwo could boastof, a certain degree of access to the Profes-sor’s private domicile. It was the attic floorof the highest house in the Wahngasse; andmight truly be called the pinnacle of Weiss-nichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the con-tiguous roofs, themselves rising from elevatedground. Moreover, with its windows it lookedtowards all the four Orte or as the Scotch say,

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and we ought to say, Airts: the sitting roomitself commanded three; another came to viewin the Schlafgemach (bedroom) at the oppo-site end; to say nothing of the kitchen, whichoffered two, as it were, duplicates, showingnothing new. So that it was in fact the specu-lum or watch-tower of Teufelsdröckh; where-from, sitting at ease he might see the wholelife-circulation of that considerable City; thestreets and lanes of which, with all their do-ing and driving (Thun und Treiben), were forthe most part visible there.

“I look down into all that wasp-nest orbee-hive,” we have heard him say, “andwitness their wax-laying and honey-making,and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur.From the Palace esplanade, where musicplays while Serene Highness is pleased to eathis victuals, down to the low lane, where inher door-sill the aged widow, knitting for athin livelihood sits to feel the afternoon sun,I see it all; for, except Schlosskirche weather-cock, no biped stands so high. Couriers arrivebestrapped and bebooted, bearing Joy andSorrow bagged up in pouches of leather: there,top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls inthe country Baron and his household; here, ontimber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfullyalong, begging alms: a thousand carriages,and wains, cars, come tumbling in with Food,with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce,inanimate or animate, and go tumbling outagain with produce manufactured. That liv-ing flood, pouring through these streets, ofall qualities and ages, knowest thou whence

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it is coming, whither it is going? Aus derEwigkeit, zu der Ewigkeit hin: From Eternity,onwards to Eternity! These are Apparitions:what else? Are they not Souls rendered vis-ible: in Bodies, that took shape and will loseit, melting into air? Their solid Pavement is aPicture of the Sense; they walk on the bosomof Nothing, blank Time is behind them and be-fore them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yel-low Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on itsheels and feather in its crown, is but of To-day, without a Yesterday or a To-morrow; andhad not rather its Ancestor alive when Hengstand Horsa overran thy Island? Friend, thouseest here a living link in that Tissue of His-tory, which inweaves all Being: watch well, orit will be past thee, and seen no more.”

“Ach, mein Lieber!” said he once, at mid-night, when we had returned from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, “it is a truesublimity to dwell here. These fringes oflamplight, struggling up through smoke andthousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms intothe ancient reign of Night, what thinks Bootesof them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs overthe Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? Thatstifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has laindown to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Van-ity, still rolling here and there through dis-tant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofedin, and lighted to the due pitch for her; andonly Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moanlike nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I say,like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sickLife, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that

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hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions,and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful andthe sorrowful are there; men are dying there,men are being born; men are praying,—on theother side of a brick partition, men are curs-ing; and around them all is the vast, voidNight. The proud Grandee still lingers in hisperfumed saloons, or reposes within damaskcurtains; Wretchedness cowers into buckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair ofstraw: in obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir lan-guidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggardhungry Villains; while Councillors of State sitplotting, and playing their high chess-game,whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whis-pers his mistress that the coach is ready; andshe, full of hope and fear, glides down, to flywith him over the borders: the Thief, stillmore silently, sets to his picklocks and crow-bars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen firstsnore in their boxes. Gay mansions, withsupper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full oflight and music and high-swelling hearts; but,in the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beatstremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes lookout through the darkness, which is aroundand within, for the light of a stern last morn-ing. Six men are to be hanged on the mor-row: comes no hammering from the Raben-stein?—their gallows must even now be o’building. Upwards of five hundred thousandtwo-legged animals without feathers lie roundus, in horizontal position; their heads all innightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams.

REMINISCENCES 27

Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers inhis rank dens of shame; and the Mother, withstreaming hair, kneels over her pallid dyinginfant, whose cracked lips only her tears nowmoisten.— All these heaped and huddled to-gether, with nothing but a little carpentry andmasonry between them;—crammed in, likesalted fish in their barrel;—or weltering, shallI say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers,each struggling to get its head above the oth-ers: such work goes on under that smoke-counterpane!—But I, mein Werther, sit aboveit all; I am alone with the stars.”

We looked in his face to see whether, inthe utterance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there;but with the light we had, which indeed wasonly a single tallow-light, and far enough fromthe window, nothing save that old calmnessand fixedness was visible.

These were the Professor’s talking sea-sons: most commonly he spoke in meremonosyllables, or sat altogether silent andsmoked; while the visitor had liberty eitherto say what he listed, receiving for answeran occasional grunt; or to look round fora space, and then take himself away. Itwas a strange apartment; full of books andtattered papers, and miscellaneous shredsof all conceivable substances, “united in acommon element of dust.” Books lay ontables, and below tables; here fluttered asheet of manuscript, there a torn handker-chief, or nightcap hastily thrown aside; ink-bottles alternated with bread-crusts, coffee-

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pots, tobacco-boxes, Periodical Literature, andBlucher Boots. Old Lieschen (Lisekin, ’Liza),who was his bed-maker and stove-lighter, hiswasher and wringer, cook, errand-maid, andgeneral lion’s-provider, and for the rest a veryorderly creature, had no sovereign authorityin this last citadel of Teufelsdröckh; only someonce in the month she half-forcibly made herway thither, with broom and duster, and (Teu-felsdröckh hastily saving his manuscripts) ef-fected a partial clearance, a jail-delivery ofsuch lumber as was not Literary. These wereher Erdbeben (earthquakes), which Teufels-dröckh dreaded worse than the pestilence;nevertheless, to such length he had beenforced to comply. Glad would he have been tosit here philosophizing forever, or till the lit-ter, by accumulation, drove him out of doors:but Lieschen was his right-arm, and spoon,and necessary of life, and would not be flatlygainsayed. We can still remember the an-cient woman; so silent that some thoughther dumb; deaf also you would often havesupposed her; for Teufelsdröckh, and Teuf-elsdröckh only, would she serve or give heedto; and with him she seemed to communi-cate chiefly by signs; if it were not rather bysome secret divination that she guessed allhis wants, and supplied them. Assiduous olddame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, inher kitchen, with the least possible violenceto the ear; yet all was tight and right there:hot and black came the coffee ever at the duemoment; and the speechless Lieschen herselflooked out on you, from under her clean white

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coif with its lappets, through her clean with-ered face and wrinkles, with a look of helpfulintelligence, almost of benevolence.

Few strangers, as above hinted, had ad-mittance hither: the only one we ever sawthere, ourselves excepted, was the HofrathHeuschrecke, already known, by name andexpectation, to the readers of these pages.To us, at that period, Herr Heuschreckeseemed one of those purse-mouthed, crane-necked, clean-brushed, pacific individuals,perhaps sufficiently distinguished in societyby this fact, that, in dry weather or inwet, “they never appear without their um-brella.” Had we not known with what “lit-tle wisdom” the world is governed; and how,in Germany as elsewhere, the ninety-and-nine Public Men can for most part be butmute train-bearers to the hundredth, perhapsbut stalking-horses and willing or unwillingdupes,—it might have seemed wonderful howHerr Heuschrecke should be named a Rath,or Councillor, and Counsellor, even in Weiss-nichtwo. What counsel to any man, or to anywoman, could this particular Hofrath give; inwhose loose, zigzag figure; in whose thin vis-age, as it went jerking to and fro, in minute in-cessant fluctuation,—you traced rather confu-sion worse confounded; at most, Timidity andphysical Cold? Some indeed said withal, hewas “the very Spirit of Love embodied:” blueearnest eyes, full of sadness and kindness;purse ever open, and so forth; the whole ofwhich, we shall now hope, for many reasons,was not quite groundless. Nevertheless friend

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Teufelsdröckh’s outline, who indeed handledthe burin like few in these cases, was proba-bly the best: Er hat Gemuth und Geist, hatwenigstens gehabt, doch ohne Organ, ohneSchicksals-Gunst; ist gegenwartig aber halb-zerruttet, halb-erstarrt, “He has heart and tal-ent, at least has had such, yet without fitmode of utterance, or favor of Fortune; and sois now half-cracked, half-congealed.”—Whatthe Hofrath shall think of this when he seesit, readers may wonder; we, safe in thestronghold of Historical Fidelity, are careless.

The main point, doubtless, for us all,is his love of Teufelsdröckh, which indeedwas also by far the most decisive feature ofHeuschrecke himself. We are enabled to as-sert that he hung on the Professor with thefondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. Andperhaps with the like return; for Teufels-dröckh treated his gaunt admirer with littleoutward regard, as some half-rational or alto-gether irrational friend, and at best loved himout of gratitude and by habit. On the otherhand, it was curious to observe with what rev-erent kindness, and a sort of fatherly protec-tion, our Hofrath, being the elder, richer, andas he fondly imagined far more practically in-fluential of the two, looked and tended on hislittle Sage, whom he seemed to consider as aliving oracle. Let but Teufelsdröckh open hismouth, Heuschrecke’s also unpuckered itselfinto a free doorway, besides his being all eyeand all ear, so that nothing might be lost: andthen, at every pause in the harangue, he gur-gled out his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh

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(for the machinery of laughter took some timeto get in motion, and seemed crank and slack),or else his twanging nasal, Bravo! Das glaub’ich; in either case, by way of heartiest ap-proval. In short, if Teufelsdröckh was Dalai-Lama, of which, except perhaps in his self-seclusion, and godlike indifference, there wasno symptom, then might Heuschrecke passfor his chief Talapoin, to whom no dough-pillhe could knead and publish was other thanmedicinal and sacred.

In such environment, social, domestic,physical, did Teufelsdröckh, at the time of ouracquaintance, and most likely does he still,live and meditate. Here, perched up in hishigh Wahngasse watch-tower, and often, insolitude, outwatching the Bear, it was thatthe indomitable Inquirer fought all his bat-tles with Dulness and Darkness; here, in allprobability, that he wrote this surprising Vol-ume on Clothes. Additional particulars: of hisage, which was of that standing middle sortyou could only guess at; of his wide surtout;the color of his trousers, fashion of his broad-brimmed steeple-hat, and so forth, we mightreport, but do not. The Wisest truly is, inthese times, the Greatest; so that an enlight-ened curiosity leaving Kings and such like torest very much on their own basis, turns moreand more to the Philosophic Class: neverthe-less, what reader expects that, with all ourwriting and reporting, Teufelsdröckh could bebrought home to him, till once the Documentsarrive? His Life, Fortunes, and Bodily Pres-ence, are as yet hidden from us, or matter only

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of faint conjecture. But, on the other hand,does not his Soul lie enclosed in this remark-able Volume, much more truly than PedroGarcia’s did in the buried Bag of Doubloons?To the soul of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, to hisopinions, namely, on the “Origin and Influenceof Clothes,” we for the present gladly return.

CHAPTER IV.CHARACTERIS-TICS.

It were a piece of vain flattery to pretendthat this Work on Clothes entirely contentsus; that it is not, like all works of genius, likethe very Sun, which, though the highest pub-lished creation, or work of genius, has nev-ertheless black spots and troubled nebulosi-ties amid its effulgence,—a mixture of insight,inspiration, with dulness, double-vision, andeven utter blindness.

Without committing ourselves to those en-thusiastic praises and prophesyings of theWeissnichtwo’sche Anzeiger, we admitted thatthe Book had in a high degree excited us toself-activity, which is the best effect of anybook; that it had even operated changes in ourway of thought; nay, that it promised to prove,as it were, the opening of a new mine-shaft,wherein the whole world of Speculation mighthenceforth dig to unknown depths. More spe-cially may it now be declared that ProfessorTeufelsdröckh’s acquirements, patience of re-

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search, philosophic and even poetic vigor, arehere made indisputably manifest; and unhap-pily no less his prolixity and tortuosity andmanifold ineptitude; that, on the whole, as inopening new mine-shafts is not unreasonable,there is much rubbish in his Book, thoughlikewise specimens of almost invaluable ore.A paramount popularity in England we can-not promise him. Apart from the choice ofsuch a topic as Clothes, too often the mannerof treating it betokens in the Author a rus-ticity and academic seclusion, unblamable, in-deed inevitable in a German, but fatal to hissuccess with our public.

Of good society Teufelsdröckh appears tohave seen little, or has mostly forgotten whathe saw. He speaks out with a strange plain-ness; calls many things by their mere dictio-nary names. To him the Upholsterer is noPontiff, neither is any Drawing-room a Tem-ple, were it never so begilt and overhung:“a whole immensity of Brussels carpets, andpier-glasses, and ormolu,” as he himself ex-presses it, “cannot hide from me that suchDrawing-room is simply a section of InfiniteSpace, where so many God-created Souls dofor the time meet together.” To Teufelsdröckhthe highest Duchess is respectable, is venera-ble; but nowise for her pearl bracelets and Ma-lines laces: in his eyes, the star of a Lord is lit-tle less and little more than the broad buttonof Birmingham spelter in a Clown’s smock;“each is an implement,” he says, “in its kind;a tag for hooking-together; and, for the rest,was dug from the earth, and hammered on a

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stithy before smith’s fingers.” Thus does theProfessor look in men’s faces with a strangeimpartiality, a strange scientific freedom; likea man unversed in the higher circles, like aman dropped thither from the Moon. Rightlyconsidered, it is in this peculiarity, runningthrough his whole system of thought, that allthese shortcomings, over-shootings, and mul-tiform perversities, take rise: if indeed theyhave not a second source, also natural enough,in his Transcendental Philosophies, and hu-mor of looking at all Matter and Materialthings as Spirit; whereby truly his case werebut the more hopeless, the more lamentable.

To the Thinkers of this nation, however,of which class it is firmly believed there areindividuals yet extant, we can safely recom-mend the Work: nay, who knows but amongthe fashionable ranks too, if it be true, as Teu-felsdröckh maintains, that “within the moststarched cravat there passes a windpipe andweasand, and under the thickliest embroi-dered waistcoat beats a heart,”—the force ofthat rapt earnestness may be felt, and hereand there an arrow of the soul pierce through?In our wild Seer, shaggy, unkempt, like a Bap-tist living on locusts and wild honey, thereis an untutored energy, a silent, as it wereunconscious, strength, which, except in thehigher walks of Literature, must be rare.Many a deep glance, and often with unspeak-able precision, has he cast into mysteriousNature, and the still more mysterious Life ofMan. Wonderful it is with what cutting words,now and then, he severs asunder the confu-

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sion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep; intothe true centre of the matter; and there notonly hits the nail on the head, but with crush-ing force smites it home, and buries it.—Onthe other hand, let us be free to admit, heis the most unequal writer breathing. Oftenafter some such feat, he will play truant forlong pages, and go dawdling and dreaming,and mumbling and maundering the merestcommonplaces, as if he were asleep with eyesopen, which indeed he is.

Of his boundless Learning, and howall reading and literature in most knowntongues, from Sanchoniathon to Dr. Lingard,from your Oriental Shasters, and Talmuds,and Korans, with Cassini’s Siamese fables,and Laplace’s Mecanique Celeste, down toRobinson Crusoe and the Belfast Town andCountry Almanack, are familiar to him,—weshall say nothing: for unexampled as it is withus, to the Germans such universality of studypasses without wonder, as a thing commend-able, indeed, but natural, indispensable, andthere of course. A man that devotes his life tolearning, shall he not be learned?

In respect of style our Author manifeststhe same genial capability, marred too oftenby the same rudeness, inequality, and ap-parent want of intercourse with the higherclasses. Occasionally, as above hinted, wefind consummate vigor, a true inspiration;his burning thoughts step forth in fit burn-ing words, like so many full-formed Miner-vas, issuing amid flame and splendor fromJove’s head; a rich, idiomatic diction, pic-

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turesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, orquaint tricksy turns; all the graces and ter-rors of a wild Imagination, wedded to theclearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicis-situde. Were it not that sheer sleeping and so-porific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions,touches even of pure doting jargon, so oftenintervene! On the whole, Professor Teufels-dröckh, is not a cultivated writer. Of hissentences perhaps not more than nine-tenthsstand straight on their legs; the remainderare in quite angular attitudes, buttressed upby props (of parentheses and dashes), andever with this or the other tagrag hangingfrom them; a few even sprawl out helplesslyon all sides, quite broken-backed and dismem-bered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worstmoods, there lies in him a singular attraction.A wild tone pervades the whole utterance ofthe man, like its keynote and regulator; nowscrewing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits,or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; now sink-ing in cadences, not without melodious hearti-ness, though sometimes abrupt enough, intothe common pitch, when we hear it only as amonotonous hum; of which hum the true char-acter is extremely difficult to fix. Up to thishour we have never fully satisfied ourselveswhether it is a tone and hum of real Humor,which we reckon among the very highest qual-ities of genius, or some echo of mere Insanityand Inanity, which doubtless ranks below thevery lowest.

Under a like difficulty, in spite even of ourpersonal intercourse, do we still lie with re-

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gard to the Professor’s moral feeling. Gleamsof an ethereal love burst forth from him, softwailings of infinite pity; he could clasp thewhole Universe into his bosom, and keep itwarm; it seems as if under that rude exte-rior there dwelt a very seraph. Then againhe is so sly and still, so imperturbably sat-urnine; shows such indifference, malign cool-ness towards all that men strive after; andever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bit-ter sardonic humor, if indeed it be not merestolid callousness,—that you look on him al-most with a shudder, as on some incarnateMephistopheles, to whom this great terres-trial and celestial Round, after all, were butsome huge foolish Whirligig, where kingsand beggars, and angels and demons, andstars and street-sweepings, were chaoticallywhirled, in which only children could take in-terest. His look, as we mentioned, is proba-bly the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of thatcast-iron gravity frequent enough among ourown Chancery suitors; but rather the grav-ity as of some silent, high-encircled mountain-pool, perhaps the crater of an extinct volcano;into whose black deeps you fear to gaze: thoseeyes, those lights that sparkle in it, may in-deed be reflexes of the heavenly Stars, but per-haps also glances from the region of NetherFire.

Certainly a most involved, self-secluded,altogether enigmatic nature, this of Teufels-dröckh! Here, however, we gladly recall tomind that once we saw him laugh; once only,perhaps it was the first and last time in his

CHARACTERISTICS 39

life; but then such a peal of laughter, enoughto have awakened the Seven Sleepers! Itwas of Jean Paul’s doing: some single bil-low in that vast World-Mahlstrom of Humor,with its heaven-kissing coruscations, whichis now, alas, all congealed in the frost ofdeath! The large-bodied Poet and the small,both large enough in soul, sat talking mis-cellaneously together, the present Editor be-ing privileged to listen; and now Paul, in hisserious way, was giving one of those inim-itable “Extra-Harangues;” and, as it chanced,On the Proposal for a Cast-metal King: grad-ually a light kindled in our Professor’s eyesand face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest light;through those murky features, a radiant ever-young Apollo looked; and he burst forth likethe neighing of all Tattersall’s,—tears stream-ing down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, footclutched into the air,—loud, long-continuing,uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face anddiaphragm only, but of the whole man fromhead to heel. The present Editor, who laughedindeed, yet with measure, began to fear allwas not right: however, Teufelsdröckh, com-posed himself, and sank into his old stillness;on his inscrutable countenance there was, ifanything, a slight look of shame; and Richterhimself could not rouse him again. Readerswho have any tincture of Psychology knowhow much is to be inferred from this; andthat no man who has once heartily and whollylaughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key,wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some

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men wear an everlasting barren simper; inthe smile of others lies a cold glitter as ofice: the fewest are able to laugh, what canbe called laughing, but only sniff and titterand snigger from the throat outwards; or atbest, produce some whiffling husky cachinna-tion, as if they were laughing through wool: ofnone such comes good. The man who cannotlaugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems,and spoils; but his whole life is already a trea-son and a stratagem.

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufels-dröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault,doubtless his worst: an almost total want ofarrangement. In this remarkable Volume, itis true, his adherence to the mere course ofTime produces, through the Narrative por-tions, a certain show of outward method; butof true logical method and sequence there istoo little. Apart from its multifarious sec-tions and subdivisions, the Work naturallyfalls into two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive,and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, un-happily, by no firm line of demarcation; in thatlabyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps,and indents, and indeed runs quite throughthe other. Many sections are of a debatablerubric, or even quite nondescript and unnam-able; whereby the Book not only loses in acces-sibility, but too often distresses us like somemad banquet, wherein all courses had beenconfounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid,oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and Frenchmustard, were hurled into one huge tureen ortrough, and the hungry Public invited to help

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itself. To bring what order we can out of thisChaos shall be part of our endeavor.

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CHAPTER V. THEWORLD INCLOTHES.

“As Montesquieu wrote a Spirit of Laws,” ob-serves our Professor, “so could I write a Spiritof Clothes; thus, with an Esprit des Lois, prop-erly an Esprit de Coutumes, we should havean Esprit de Costumes. For neither in tai-loring nor in legislating does man proceed bymere Accident, but the hand is ever guidedon by mysterious operations of the mind. Inall his Modes, and habilatory endeavors, anArchitectural Idea will be found lurking; hisBody and the Cloth are the site and materialswhereon and whereby his beautified edifice, ofa Person, is to be built. Whether he flow grace-fully out in folded mantles, based on light san-dals; tower up in high headgear, from amidpeaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell out instarched ruffs, buckram stuffings, and mon-strous tuberosities; or girth himself into sepa-rate sections, and front the world an Agglom-eration of four limbs,—will depend on the na-ture of such Architectural Idea: whether Gre-

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cian, Gothic, Later Gothic, or altogether Mod-ern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again,what meaning lies in Color! From the sober-est drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritualidiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice ofColor: if the Cut betoken Intellect and Talent,so does the Color betoken Temper and Heart.In all which, among nations as among indi-viduals, there is an incessant, indubitable,though infinitely complex working of Causeand Effect: every snip of the Scissors has beenregulated and prescribed by ever-active Influ-ences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a su-perior order are neither invisible nor illegible.

“For such superior Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy of Clothes, as of Laws,were probably a comfortable winter-eveningentertainment: nevertheless, for inferior In-telligences, like men, such Philosophies havealways seemed to me uninstructive enough.Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself buta clever infant spelling Letters from a hiero-glyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of whichlies in Eternity, in Heaven?—Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not why Iwear such and such a Garment, obey suchand such a Law; but even why I am here,to wear and obey anything!— Much, there-fore, if not the whole, of that same Spirit ofClothes I shall suppress, as hypothetical, in-effectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts,and Deductions drawn therefrom in quite an-other than that omniscient style, are my hum-bler and proper province.”

Acting on which prudent restriction, Teuf-

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elsdröckh, has nevertheless contrived to takein a well-nigh boundless extent of field; atleast, the boundaries too often lie quite be-yond our horizon. Selection being indispens-able, we shall here glance over his First Partonly in the most cursory manner. This FirstPart is, no doubt, distinguished by omnivo-rous learning, and utmost patience and fair-ness: at the same time, in its results anddelineations, it is much more likely to inter-est the Compilers of some Library of General,Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowl-edge than the miscellaneous readers of thesepages. Was it this Part of the Book whichHeuschrecke had in view, when he recom-mended us to that joint-stock vehicle of pub-lication, “at present the glory of British Liter-ature”? If so, the Library Editors are welcometo dig in it for their own behoof.

To the First Chapter, which turns on Par-adise and Fig-leaves, and leads us into in-terminable disquisitions of a mythological,metaphorical, cabalistico-sartorial and quiteantediluvian cast, we shall content ourselveswith giving an unconcerned approval. Stillless have we to do with “Lilis, Adam’s firstwife, whom, according to the Talmudists, hehad before Eve, and who bore him, in thatwedlock, the whole progeny of aerial, aquatic,and terrestrial Devils,”—very needlessly, wethink. On this portion of the Work, withits profound glances into the Adam-Kadmon,or Primeval Element, here strangely broughtinto relation with the Nifl and Muspel (Dark-ness and Light) of the antique North, it may

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be enough to say, that its correctness of de-duction, and depth of Talmudic and Rabbini-cal lore have filled perhaps not the worst He-braist in Britain with something like aston-ishment.

But, quitting this twilight region, Teuf-elsdröckh hastens from the Tower of Babel,to follow the dispersion of Mankind over thewhole habitable and habilable globe. Walk-ing by the light of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scan-dinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient andModern researches of every conceivable kind,he strives to give us in compressed shape(as the Nurnbergers give an Orbis Pictus) anOrbis Vestitus; or view of the costumes ofall mankind, in all countries, in all times.It is here that to the Antiquarian, to theHistorian, we can triumphantly say: Fallto! Here is learning: an irregular Trea-sury, if you will; but inexhaustible as theHoard of King Nibelung, which twelve wag-ons in twelve days, at the rate of three jour-neys a day, could not carry off. Sheep-skin cloaks and wampum belts; phylacter-ies, stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinesesilks, Afghaun shawls, trunk-hose, leatherbreeches, Celtic hilibegs (though breeches, asthe name Gallia Braccata indicates, are themore ancient), Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tip-pets, ruffs, fardingales, are brought vividly be-fore us,—even the Kilmarnock nightcap is notforgotten. For most part, too, we must admitthat the Learning, heterogeneous as it is, andtumbled down quite pell-mell, is true concen-trated and purified Learning, the drossy parts

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smelted out and thrown aside.Philosophical reflections intervene, and

sometimes touching pictures of human life.Of this sort the following has surprised us.The first purpose of Clothes, as our Profes-sor imagines, was not warmth or decency, butornament. “Miserable indeed,” says he, “wasthe condition of the Aboriginal Savage, glar-ing fiercely from under his fleece of hair, whichwith the beard reached down to his loins, andhung round him like a matted cloak; the restof his body sheeted in its thick natural fell.He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest,living on wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Cale-donian, squatted himself in morasses, lurkingfor his bestial or human prey; without imple-ments, without arms, save the ball of heavyFlint, to which, that his sole possession anddefence might not be lost, he had attached along cord of plaited thongs; thereby recover-ing as well as hurling it with deadly unerringskill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger andRevenge once satisfied, his next care was notComfort but Decoration (Putz). Warmth hefound in the toils of the chase; or amid driedleaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed,or natural grotto: but for Decoration he musthave Clothes. Nay, among wild people, we findtattooing and painting even prior to Clothes.The first spiritual want of a barbarous man isDecoration, as indeed we still see among thebarbarous classes in civilized countries.

“Reader, the heaven-inspired melodiousSinger; loftiest Serene Highness; nay thy ownamber-locked, snow-and-rosebloom Maiden,

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worthy to glide sylph-like almost on air, whomthou lovest, worshippest as a divine Pres-ence, which, indeed, symbolically taken, sheis,—has descended, like thyself, from thatsame hair-mantled, flint-hurling AboriginalAnthropophagus! Out of the eater comethforth meat; out of the strong cometh forthsweetness. What changes are wrought, not byTime, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, butall that Mankind does or beholds, is in con-tinual growth, re-genesis and self-perfectingvitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, intothe ever-living, ever-working Universe: it is aseed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day(says one), it will be found flourishing as aBanyan-grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest!) after a thousand years.

“He who first shortened the labor of Copy-ists by device of Movable Types was disband-ing hired Armies, and cashiering most Kingsand Senates, and creating a whole new Demo-cratic world: he had invented the Art of Print-ing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sul-phur, and Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz’spestle through the ceiling: what will thelast do? Achieve the final undisputed pros-tration of Force under Thought, of Animalcourage under Spiritual. A simple inventionit was in the old-world Grazier,—sick of lug-ging his slow Ox about the country till he gotit bartered for corn or oil,—to take a pieceof Leather, and thereon scratch or stamp themere Figure of an Ox (or Pecus); put it inhis pocket, and call it Pecunia, Money. Yethereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather

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Money is now Golden and Paper, and all mir-acles have been out-miracled: for there areRothschilds and English National Debts; andwhoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the lengthof sixpence) over all men; commands cooksto feed him, philosophers to teach him, kingsto mount guard over him,—to the length ofsixpence.—Clothes too, which began in fool-ishest love of Ornament, what have theynot become! Increased Security and pleasur-able Heat soon followed: but what of these?Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), asyet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bo-som, arose there mysteriously under Clothes;a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holyin man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinc-tions, social polity; Clothes have made Menof us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.

“But, on the whole,” continues our elo-quent Professor, “Man is a Tool-using Ani-mal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in himself,and of small stature, he stands on a basis, atmost for the flattest-soled, of some half-squarefoot, insecurely enough; has to straddle outhis legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Fee-blest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushingload for him; the steer of the meadow tosseshim aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless hecan use Tools; can devise Tools: with thesethe granite mountain melts into light dust be-fore him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it weresoft paste; seas are his smooth highway, windsand fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere doyou find him without Tools; without Tools he

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is nothing, with Tools he is all.”Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt

the stream of Oratory with a remark, that thisDefinition of the Tool-using Animal appears tous, of all that Animal-sort, considerably theprecisest and best? Man is called a LaughingAnimal: but do not the apes also laugh, or at-tempt to do it; and is the manliest man thegreatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckhhimself, as we said, laughed only once. Stillless do we make of that other French Defini-tion of the Cooking Animal; which, indeed, forrigorous scientific purposes, is as good as use-less. Can a Tartar be said to cook, when heonly readies his steak by riding on it? Again,what Cookery does the Greenlander use, be-yond stowing up his whale-blubber, as a mar-mot, in the like case, might do? Or how wouldMonsieur Ude prosper among those OrinocoIndians who, according to Humboldt, lodge incrow-nests, on the branches of trees; and, forhalf the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay,the whole country being under water? But, onthe other hand, show us the human being, ofany period or climate, without his Tools: thosevery Caledonians, as we saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has orcan have.

“Man is a Tool-using Animal,” concludesTeufelsdröckh, in his abrupt way; “of whichtruth Clothes are but one example: andsurely if we consider the interval betweenthe first wooden Dibble fashioned by man,and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or theBritish House of Commons, we shall note

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what progress he has made. He digs up cer-tain black stones from the bosom of the earth,and says to them, Transport me and this lug-gage at the rate of file-and-thirty miles anhour; and they do it: he collects, apparently bylot, six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneousindividuals, and says to them, Make this na-tion toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and, sor-row and sin for us; and they do it.”

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CHAPTER VI.APRONS.

One of the most unsatisfactory Sections inthe whole Volume is that on Aprons. Whatthough stout old Gao, the Persian Blacksmith,“whose Apron, now indeed hidden under jew-els, because raised in revolt which provedsuccessful, is still the royal standard of thatcountry;” what though John Knox’s Daughter,“who threatened Sovereign Majesty that shewould catch her husband’s head in her Apron,rather than he should lie and be a bishop;”what though the Landgravine Elizabeth, withmany other Apron worthies,—figure here? Anidle wire-drawing spirit, sometimes even atone of levity, approaching to conventionalsatire, is too clearly discernible. What, for ex-ample, are we to make of such sentences asthe following?

“Aprons are Defences; against injury tocleanliness, to safety, to modesty, sometimesto roguery. From the thin slip of notchedsilk (as it were, the emblem and beatifiedghost of an Apron), which some highest-bredhousewife, sitting at Nurnberg Work-boxes

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and Toy-boxes, has gracefully fastened on; tothe thick-tanned hide, girt round him withthongs, wherein the Builder builds, and atevening sticks his trowel; or to those jin-gling sheet-iron Aprons, wherein your other-wise half-naked Vulcans hammer and smeltin their smelt-furnace,—is there not rangeenough in the fashion and uses of this Vest-ment? How much has been concealed, howmuch has been defended in Aprons! Nay,rightly considered, what is your whole Mil-itary and Police Establishment, charged atuncalculated millions, but a huge scarlet-colored, iron-fastened Apron, wherein Societyworks (uneasily enough); guarding itself fromsome soil and stithy-sparks, in this Devil’s-smithy (Teufels-schmiede) of a world? But ofall Aprons the most puzzling to me hithertohas been the Episcopal or Cassock. Whereinconsists the usefulness of this Apron? TheOverseer (Episcopus) of Souls, I notice, hastucked in the corner of it, as if his day’swork were done: what does he shadow forththereby?” &c. &c.

Or again, has it often been the lot of ourreaders to read such stuff as we shall nowquote?

“I consider those printed Paper Aprons,worn by the Parisian Cooks, as a new vent,though a slight one, for Typography; there-fore as an encouragement to modern Liter-ature, and deserving of approval: nor is itwithout satisfaction that I hear of a cele-brated London Firm having in view to intro-duce the same fashion, with important ex-

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tensions, in England.”—We who are on thespot hear of no such thing; and indeed havereason to be thankful that hitherto there areother vents for our Literature, exuberant asit is.—Teufelsdröckh continues: “If such sup-ply of printed Paper should rise so far as tochoke up the highways and public thorough-fares, new means must of necessity be had re-course to. In a world existing by Industry, wegrudge to employ fire as a destroying element,and not as a creating one. However, Heaven isomnipotent, and will find us an outlet. In themean while, is it not beautiful to see five mil-lion quintals of Rags picked annually from theLaystall; and annually, after being macerated,hot-pressed, printed on, and sold,—returnedthither; filling so many hungry mouths by theway? Thus is the Laystall, especially with itsRags or Clothes-rubbish, the grand ElectricBattery, and Fountain-of-motion, from whichand to which the Social Activities (like vit-reous and resinous Electricities) circulate, inlarger or smaller circles, through the mighty,billowy, storm-tost chaos of Life, which theykeep alive!”—Such passages fill us, who lovethe man, and partly esteem him, with a verymixed feeling.

Farther down we meet with this: “TheJournalists are now the true Kings andClergy: henceforth Historians, unless theyare fools, must write not of Bourbon Dy-nasties, and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but ofStamped Broad-sheet Dynasties, and quitenew successive Names, according as this orthe other Able Editor, or Combination of Able

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Editors, gains the world’s ear. Of the BritishNewspaper Press, perhaps the most impor-tant of all, and wonderful enough in its se-cret constitution and procedure, a valuabledescriptive History already exists, in that lan-guage, under the title of Satan’s InvisibleWorld Displayed; which, however, by searchin all the Weissnichtwo Libraries, I have notyet succeeded in procuring (vermochte nightaufzutreiben).”

Thus does the good Homer not only nod,but snore. Thus does Teufelsdröckh, wan-dering in regions where he had little busi-ness, confound the old authentic Presbyte-rian Witchfinder with a new, spurious, imag-inary Historian of the Brittische Journalistik;and so stumble on perhaps the most egregiousblunder in Modern Literature!

CHAPTER VII.MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL.

Happier is our Professor, and more purely sci-entific and historic, when he reaches the Mid-dle Ages in Europe, and down to the end ofthe Seventeenth Century; the true era of ex-travagance in Costume. It is here that theAntiquary and Student of Modes comes uponhis richest harvest. Fantastic garbs, beggar-ing all fancy of a Teniers or a Callot, succeedeach other, like monster devouring monsterin a Dream. The whole too in brief authen-tic strokes, and touched not seldom with thatbreath of genius which makes even old rai-ment live. Indeed, so learned, precise, graphi-cal, and every way interesting have we foundthese Chapters, that it may be thrown outas a pertinent question for parties concerned,Whether or not a good English Translationthereof might henceforth be profitably incor-porated with Mr. Merrick’s valuable Work OnAncient Armor? Take, by way of example, thefollowing sketch; as authority for which Pauli-

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nus’s Zeitkurzende Lust (ii. 678) is, with seem-ing confidence, referred to:

“Did we behold the German fashionabledress of the Fifteenth Century, we mightsmile; as perhaps those bygone Germans,were they to rise again, and see our haber-dashery, would cross themselves, and invokethe Virgin. But happily no bygone German,or man, rises again; thus the Present is notneedlessly trammelled with the Past; and onlygrows out of it, like a Tree, whose roots are notintertangled with its branches, but lie peace-ably underground. Nay it is very mournful,yet not useless, to see and know, how theGreatest and Dearest, in a short while, wouldfind his place quite filled up here, and no roomfor him; the very Napoleon, the very Byron, insome seven years, has become obsolete, andwere now a foreigner to his Europe. Thus isthe Law of Progress secured; and in Clothes,as in all other external things whatsoever, nofashion will continue.

“Of the military classes in those old times,whose buff-belts, complicated chains and gor-gets, huge churn-boots, and other riding andfighting gear have been bepainted in modernRomance, till the whole has acquired some-what of a sign-post character,—I shall heresay nothing: the civil and pacific classes, lesstouched upon, are wonderful enough for us.

“Rich men, I find, have Teusinke [a per-haps untranslatable article]; also a silver gir-dle, whereat hang little bells; so that when aman walks, it is with continual jingling. Somefew, of musical turn, have a whole chime of

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bells (Glockenspiel) fastened there; which, es-pecially in sudden whirls, and the other acci-dents of walking, has a grateful effect. Ob-serve too how fond they are of peaks, andGothic-arch intersections. The male worldwears peaked caps, an ell long, which hangbobbing over the side (schief ): their shoes arepeaked in front, also to the length of an ell,and laced on the side with tags; even thewooden shoes have their ell-long noses: somealso clap bells on the peak. Further, accord-ing to my authority, the men have breecheswithout seat (ohne Gesass): these they fastenpeakwise to their shirts; and the long rounddoublet must overlap them.

“Rich maidens, again, flit abroad in gownsscolloped out behind and before, so that backand breast are almost bare. Wives of qual-ity, on the other hand, have train-gowns fouror five ells in length; which trains there areboys to carry. Brave Cleopatras, sailing intheir silk-cloth Galley, with a Cupid for steers-man! Consider their welts, a handbreadththick, which waver round them by way of hem;the long flood of silver buttons, or rather sil-ver shells, from throat to shoe, wherewiththese same welt-gowns are buttoned. Themaidens have bound silver snoods about theirhair, with gold spangles, and pendent flames(Flammen), that is, sparkling hair-drops: butof their mother’s head-gear who shall speak?Neither in love of grace is comfort forgotten.In winter weather you behold the whole faircreation (that can afford it) in long mantles,with skirts wide below, and, for hem, not one

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but two sufficient hand-broad welts; all end-ing atop in a thick well-starched Ruff, sometwenty inches broad: these are their Ruff-mantles (Kragenmantel).

“As yet among the womankind hoop-petticoats are not; but the men have doubletsof fustian, under which lie multiple ruffs ofcloth, pasted together with batter (mit Teigzusammengekleistert), which create protuber-ance enough. Thus do the two sexes vie witheach other in the art of Decoration; and asusual the stronger carries it.”

Our Professor, whether he have humorhimself or not, manifests a certain feeling ofthe Ludicrous, a sly observance of it which,could emotion of any kind be confidently pred-icated of so still a man, we might call areal love. None of those bell-girdles, bushel-breeches, counted shoes, or other the like phe-nomena, of which the History of Dress offersso many, escape him: more especially the mis-chances, or striking adventures, incident tothe wearers of such, are noticed with due fi-delity. Sir Walter Raleigh’s fine mantle, whichhe spread in the mud under Queen Elizabeth’sfeet, appears to provoke little enthusiasm inhim; he merely asks, Whether at that periodthe Maiden Queen “was red-painted on thenose, and white-painted on the cheeks, as hertire-women, when from spleen and wrinklesshe would no longer look in any glass, werewont to serve her”? We can answer that SirWalter knew well what he was doing, and hadthe Maiden Queen been stuffed parchmentdyed in verdigris, would have done the same.

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Thus too, treating of those enormous ha-biliments, that were not only slashed andgallooned, but artificially swollen out on thebroader parts of the body, by introductionof Bran,—our Professor fails not to commenton that luckless Courtier, who having seatedhimself on a chair with some projecting nailon it, and therefrom rising, to pay his de-voir on the entrance of Majesty, instanta-neously emitted several pecks of dry wheat-dust: and stood there diminished to a spindle,his galloons and slashes dangling sorrowfuland flabby round him. Whereupon the Pro-fessor publishes this reflection:—

“By what strange chances do we live inHistory? Erostratus by a torch; Milo by abullock; Henry Darnley, an unfledged boobyand bustard, by his limbs; most Kings andQueens by being born under such and sucha bed-tester; Boileau Despreaux (accordingto Helvetius) by the peck of a turkey; andthis ill-starred individual by a rent in hisbreeches,—for no Memoirist of Kaiser Otto’sCourt omits him. Vain was the prayer ofThemistocles for a talent of Forgetting: myFriends, yield cheerfully to Destiny, and readsince it is written.”—Has Teufelsdröckh, to beput in mind that, nearly related to the impos-sible talent of Forgetting, stands that talentof Silence, which even travelling Englishmenmanifest?

“The simplest costume,” observes our Pro-fessor, “which I anywhere find alluded to inHistory, is that used as regimental, by Bo-livar’s Cavalry, in the late Colombian wars.

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A square Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, isprovided (some were wont to cut off the cor-ners, and make it circular): in the centre aslit is effected eighteen inches long; throughthis the mother-naked Trooper introduces hishead and neck; and so rides shielded from allweather, and in battle from many strokes (forhe rolls it about his left arm); and not onlydressed, but harnessed and draperied.”

With which picture of a State of Nature, af-fecting by its singularity, and Old-Roman con-tempt of the superfluous, we shall quit thispart of our subject.

CHAPTER VIII.THE WORLD OUTOF CLOTHES.

If in the Descriptive-Historical portion of thisVolume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merelythe Werden (Origin and successive Improve-ment) of Clothes, has astonished many areader, much more will he in the Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of theirWirken, or Influences. It is here that thcpresent Editor first feels the pressure of histask; for here properly the higher and newPhilosophy of Clothes commences: all un-tried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; inventuring upon which, how difficult, yet howunspeakably important is it to know whatcourse, of survey and conquest, is the trueone; where the footing is firm substance andwill bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud,and may engulf us! Teufelsdröckh undertakesno less than to expound the moral, political,even religious Influences of Clothes; he under-takes to make manifest, in its thousand-foldbearings, this grand Proposition, that Man’s

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earthly interests “are all hooked and buttonedtogether, and held up, by Clothes.” He saysin so many words, “Society is founded uponCloth;” and again, “Society sails through theInfinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust’s Mantle,or rather like the Sheet of clean and uncleanbeasts in the Apostle’s Dream; and withoutsuch Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endlessdepths, or mount to inane limbos, and in ei-ther case be no more.”

By what chains, or indeed infinitely com-plected tissues, of Meditation this grand The-orem is here unfolded, and innumerable prac-tical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it wereperhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibit-ing. Our Professor’s method is not, in anycase, that of common school Logic, where thetruths all stand in a row, each holding by theskirts of the other; but at best that of prac-tical Reason’ proceeding by large Intuitionover whole systematic groups and kingdoms;whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, al-most like that of Nature, reigns in his Philos-ophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mightymaze, yet, as faith whispers, not without aplan. Nay we complained above, that a certainignoble complexity, what we must call mereconfusion, was also discernible. Often, also,we have to exclaim: Would to Heaven thosesame Biographical Documents were come! Forit seems as if the demonstration lay much inthe Author’s individuality; as if it were notArgument that had taught him, but Experi-ence. At present it is only in local glimpses,and by significant fragments, picked often at

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wide-enough intervals from the original Vol-ume, and carefully collated, that we can hopeto impart some outline or foreshadow of thisDoctrine. Readers of any intelligence are oncemore invited to favor us with their most con-centrated attention: let these, after intenseconsideration, and not till then, pronounce,Whether on the utmost verge of our actualhorizon there is not a looming as of Land;a promise of new Fortunate Islands, per-haps whole undiscovered Americas, for suchas have canvas to sail thither?—As exordiumto the whole, stand here the following longcitation:—

“With men of a speculative turn,” writesTeufelsdröckh, “there come seasons, medita-tive, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonderand fear you ask yourself that unanswerablequestion: Who am I; the thing that can say ‘I’(das Wesen das sich ICH nennt)? The world,with its loud trafficking, retires into the dis-tance; and, through the paper-hangings, andstonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Com-merce and Polity, and all the living and lifelessinteguments (of Society and a Body), where-with your Existence sits surrounded,—thesight reaches forth into the void Deep, andyou are alone with the Universe, and silentlycommune with it, as one mysterious Presencewith another.

“Who am I; what is this me? A Voice, a Mo-tion, an Appearance;—some embodied, visu-alized Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergosum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but alittle way. Sure enough, I am; and lately was

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not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The an-swer lies around, written in all colors and mo-tions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail,in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmo-nious Nature: but where is the cunning eyeand ear to whom that God-written Apoca-lypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit asin a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the re-motest century, lies not even nearer the vergethereof: sounds and many-colored visions flitround our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering,whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, wesee not; except in rare half-waking moments,suspect not. Creation, says one, lies beforeus, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun thatmade it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then,in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shad-ows as if they were substances; and sleepdeepest while fancying ourselves most awake!Which of your Philosophical Systems is otherthan a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confi-dently given out, where divisor and dividendare both unknown? What are all your nationalWars, with their Moscow Retreats, and san-guinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Som-nambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dream-ing, this Somnambulism is what we on Earthcall Life; wherein the most indeed undoubt-ingly wander, as if they knew right hand fromleft; yet they only are wise who know thatthey know nothing.

“Pity that all Metaphysics had hithertoproved so inexpressibly unproductive! The se-cret of Man’s Being is still like the Sphinx’s

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secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and forignorance of which he suffers death, the worstdeath, a spiritual. What are your Axioms,and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms?Words, words. High Air-castles are cunninglybuilt of Words, the Words well bedded alsoin good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, noKnowledge will come to lodge. The whole isgreater than the part: how exceedingly true!Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedinglyfalse and calumnious! Again, Nothing canact but where it is: with all my heart; only,WHERE is it? Be not the slave of Words:is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it,and long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in thegenuine sense, as truly as the floor I standon? But that same WHERE, with its brotherWHEN, are from the first the master-colorsof our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas(the warp and woof thereof) whereon all ourDreams and Life-visions are painted. Never-theless, has not a deeper meditation taughtcertain of every climate and age, that theWHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously insep-arable from all our thoughts, are but superfi-cial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that theSeer may discern them where they mount upout of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOR-EVER: have not all nations conceived theirGod as Omnipresent and Eternal; as exist-ing in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now?Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is buta mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time;there is no Space and no Time: WE are—weknow not what;—light-sparkles floating in the

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ether of Deity!“So that this so solid-seeming World, af-

ter all, were but an air-image, our me theonly reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production and destruction, but the re-flex of our own inward Force, the ‘phantasy ofour Dream;’ or what the Earth-Spirit in Faustnames it, the living visible Garment of God:—

‘In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm,I walk and work, above, beneath,Work and weave in endless motion!

Birth and Death,An infinite ocean;A seizing and givingThe fire of Living:

’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.’

Of twenty millions that have read andspouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist,are there yet twenty units of us that havelearned the meaning thereof?

“It was in some such mood, when wea-ried and fordone with these high speculations,that I first came upon the question of Clothes.Strange enough, it strikes me, is this samefact of there being Tailors and Tailored. TheHorse I ride has his own whole fell: striphim of the girths and flaps and extraneoustags I have fastened round him, and the noblecreature is his own sempster and weaver andspinner; nay his own boot-maker, jeweller,and man-milliner; he bounds free throughthe valleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth and easi-

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ness of fit have reached perfection; nay, thegraces also have been considered, and frillsand fringes, with gay variety of color, featlyappended, and ever in the right place, arenot wanting. While I—good Heaven!—havethatched myself over with the dead fleeces ofsheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails ofworms, the hides of oxen or seals, the feltof furred beasts; and walk abroad a mov-ing Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds andtatters raked from the Charnel-house of Na-ture, where they would have rotted, to roton me more slowly! Day after day, I mustthatch myself anew; day after day, this despi-cable thatch must lose some film of its thick-ness; some film of it, frayed away by tear andwear, must be brushed off into the Ashpit,into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole hasbeen brushed thither, and I, the dust-making,patent Rat-grinder, get new material to grinddown. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! Forhave not I too a compact all-enclosing Skin,whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tai-lors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightlyarticulated, homogeneous little Figure, auto-matic, nay alive?

“Strange enough how creatures of thehuman-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts;and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stu-pidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders andTerrors. But indeed man is, and was always,a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feeland digest, than to think and consider. Prej-udice, which he pretends to hate, is his abso-lute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere

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leads him by the nose; thus let but a Risingof the Sun, let but a Creation of the Worldhappen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous,to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps notonce in a lifetime does it occur to your or-dinary biped, of any country or generation,be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkinedPeasant, that his Vestments and his Self arenot one and indivisible; that he is naked, with-out vestments, till he buy or steal such, and byforethought sew and button them.

“For my own part, these considerations,of our Clothes-thatch, and how, reaching in-wards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizesand demoralizes us, fill me with a certain hor-ror at myself and mankind; almost as onefeels at those Dutch Cows, which, during thewet season, you see grazing deliberately withjackets and petticoats (of striped sacking), inthe meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there issomething great in the moment when a manfirst strips himself of adventitious wrappages;and sees indeed that he is naked, and, asSwift has it, ‘a forked straddling animal withbandy legs;’ yet also a Spirit, and unutterableMystery of Mysteries.”

CHAPTER IX.ADAMITISM.

Let no courteous reader take offence at theopinions broached in the conclusion of the lastChapter. The Editor himself, on first glanc-ing over that singular passage, was inclinedto exclaim: What, have we got not only a San-sculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the ab-stract? A new Adamite, in this century, whichflatters itself that it is the Nineteenth, anddestructive both to Superstition and Enthusi-asm?

Consider, thou foolish Teufelsdröckh, whatbenefits unspeakable all ages and sexes derivefrom Clothes. For example, when thou thy-self, a watery, pulpy, slobbery freshman andnew-comer in this Planet, sattest muling andpuking in thy nurse’s arms; sucking thy coral,and looking forth into the world in the blank-est manner, what hadst thou been withoutthy blankets, and bibs, and other namelesshulls? A terror to thyself and mankind! Orhast thou forgotten the day when thou firstreceivedst breeches, and thy long clothes be-came short? The village where thou livedst

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was all apprised of the fact; and neighbor afterneighbor kissed thy pudding-cheek, and gavethee, as handsel, silver or copper coins, onthat the first gala-day of thy existence. Again,wert not thou, at one period of life, a Buck, orBlood, or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy,or by whatever name, according to year andplace, such phenomenon is distinguished? Inthat one word lie included mysterious vol-umes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over,or altered, and thy clothes are not for triumphbut for defence, hast thou always worn themperforce, and as a consequence of Man’s Fall;never rejoiced in them as in a warm movableHouse, a Body round thy Body, wherein thatstrange THEE of thine sat snug, defying allvariations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled kerseys; half buried under shawls andbroadbrims, and overalls and mudboots, thyvery fingers cased in doeskin and mittens,thou hast bestrode that “Horse I ride;” and,though it were in wild winter, dashed throughthe world, glorying in it as if thou wert itslord. In vain did the sleet beat round thytemples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable,felted or woven, case of wool. In vain didthe winds howl,—forests sounding and creak-ing, deep calling unto deep,—and the stormsheap themselves together into one huge Arc-tic whirlpool: thou flewest through the middlethereof, striking fire from the highway; wildmusic hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a“sailor of the air;” the wreck of matter and thecrash of worlds was thy element and propi-tiously wafting tide. Without Clothes, without

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bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what hadthy fleet quadruped been?—Nature is good,but she is not the best: here truly was the vic-tory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeedmight have pierced thee; all short of this thoucouldst defy.

Or, cries the courteous reader, has yourTeufelsdröckh forgotten what he said latelyabout “Aboriginal Savages,” and their “condi-tion miserable indeed”? Would he have all thisunsaid; and us betake ourselves again to the“matted cloak,” and go sheeted in a “thick nat-ural fell”?

Nowise, courteous reader! The Professorknows full well what he is saying; and boththou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. IfClothes, in these times, “so tailorize and de-moralize us,” have they no redeeming value;can they not be altered to serve better; mustthey of necessity be thrown to the dogs? Thetruth is, Teufelsdröckh, though a Sansculot-tist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as hemight wish to go forth before this degenerateage “as a Sign,” would nowise wish to do it, asthose old Adamites did, in a state of Naked-ness. The utility of Clothes is altogether ap-parent to him: nay perhaps he has an insightinto their more recondite, and almost mysticqualities, what we might call the omnipotentvirtue of Clothes, such as was never beforevouchsafed to any man. For example:—

“You see two individuals,” he writes, “onedressed in fine Red, the other in coarsethreadbare Blue: Red says to Blue, ‘Be hangedand anatomized;’ Blue hears with a shudder,

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and (O wonder of wonders!) marches sorrow-fully to the gallows; is there noosed up, vi-brates his hour, and the surgeons dissect him,and fit his bones into a skeleton for medi-cal purposes. How is this; or what makeye of your Nothing can act but where it is?Red has no physical hold of Blue, no clutchof him, is nowise in contact with him: nei-ther are those ministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and Hangmen and Tipstaves sorelated to commanding Red, that he can tugthem hither and thither; but each stands dis-tinct within his own skin. Nevertheless, asit is spoken, so is it done: the articulatedWord sets all hands in Action; and Rope andImproved-drop perform their work.

“Thinking reader, the reason seems to metwofold: First, that Man is a Spirit, andbound by invisible bonds to All Men; secondly,that he wears Clothes, which are the visi-ble emblems of that fact. Has not your Redhanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and a plush-gown; whereby all mortalsknow that he is a JUDGE?—Society, whichthe more I think of it astonishes me the more,is founded upon Cloth.

“Often in my atrabiliar moods, whenI read of pompous ceremonials, FrankfortCoronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, Levees,Couchees; and how the ushers and mac-ers and pursuivants are all in waiting; howDuke this is presented by Archduke that,and Colonel A by General B, and innumer-able Bishops, Admirals, and miscellaneousFunctionaries, are advancing gallantly to the

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Anointed Presence; and I strive, in my re-mote privacy, to form a clear picture of thatsolemnity,—on a sudden, as by some en-chanter’s wand, the—shall I speak it?—theClothes fly off the whole dramatic corps;and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals,Anointed Presence itself, every mother’s sonof them, stand straddling there, not a shirton them; and I know not whether to laugh orweep. This physical or psychical infirmity, inwhich perhaps I am not singular, I have, afterhesitation, thought right to publish, for the so-lace of those afflicted with the like.”

Would to Heaven, say we, thou hadstthought right to keep it secret! Who is therenow that can read the five columns of Presen-tations in his Morning Newspaper without ashudder? Hypochondriac men, and all menare to a certain extent hypochondriac, shouldbe more gently treated. With what readinessour fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves,follows out the consequences which Teufels-dröckh, with a devilish coolness, goes on todraw:—

“What would Majesty do, could such anaccident befall in reality; should the but-tons all simultaneously start, and the solidwool evaporate, in very Deed, as here inDream? Ach Gott! How each skulks intothe nearest hiding-place; their high StateTragedy (Haupt- und Staats-Action) becomesa Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which isthe worst kind of Farce; the tables (accordingto Horace), and with them, the whole fabricof Government, Legislation, Property, Police,

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and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wailsand howls.”

Lives the man that can figure a nakedDuke of Windlestraw addressing a nakedHouse of Lords? Imagination, chokedas in mephitic air, recoils on itself, andwill not forward with the picture. TheWoolsack, the Ministerial, the OppositionBenches—infandum! infandum! And yet whyis the thing impossible? Was not every soul,or rather every body, of these Guardians ofour Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night;“a forked Radish with a head fantasticallycarved”? And why might he not, did our sternfate so order it, walk out to St. Stephen’s, aswell as into bed, in that no-fashion; and there,with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed ofJustice? “Solace of those afflicted with thelike!” Unhappy Teufelsdröckh, had man eversuch a “physical or psychical infirmity” be-fore? And now how many, perhaps, may thyunparalleled confession (which we, even to thesounder British world, and goaded on by Criti-cal and Biographical duty, grudge to reimpart)incurably infect therewith! Art thou the ma-lignest of Sansculottists, or only the maddest?

“It will remain to be examined,” adds theinexorable Teufelsdröckh, “in how far theSCARECROW, as a Clothed Person, is not alsoentitled to benefit of clergy, and English trialby jury: nay perhaps, considering his highfunction (for is not he too a Defender of Prop-erty, and Sovereign armed with the terrors ofthe Law?), to a certain royal Immunity andInviolability; which, however, misers and the

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meaner class of persons are not always volun-tarily disposed to grant him.”

“O my Friends, we are [in Yorick Sterne’swords] but as ‘turkeys driven, with a stick andred clout, to the market:’ or if some drivers, asthey do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder andput peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies theboldest!”

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CHAPTER X.PURE REASON.

It must now be apparent enough that ourProfessor, as above hinted, is a speculativeRadical, and of the very darkest tinge; ac-knowledging, for most part, in the solemnitiesand paraphernalia of civilized Life, which wemake so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and “bladders with driedpeas.” To linger among such speculations,longer than mere Science requires, a discern-ing public can have no wish. For our pur-poses the simple fact that such a Naked Worldis possible, nay actually exists (under theClothed one), will be sufficient. Much, there-fore, we omit about “Kings wrestling nakedon the green with Carmen,” and the Kingsbeing thrown: “dissect them with scalpels,”says Teufelsdröckh; “the same viscera, tis-sues, livers, lights, and other life-tackle, arethere: examine their spiritual mechanism;the same great Need, great Greed, and lit-tle Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman,who understands draught-cattle, the rimmingof wheels, something of the laws of unstable

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and stable equilibrium, with other branchesof wagon-science, and has actually put forthhis hand and operated on Nature, is themore cunningly gifted of the two. Whence,then, their so unspeakable difference? FromClothes.” Much also we shall omit aboutconfusion of Ranks, and Joan and My Lady,and how it would be everywhere “Hail fel-low well met,” and Chaos were come again:all which to any one that has once fairly pic-tured out the grand mother-idea, Society ina state of Nakedness, will spontaneously sug-gest itself. Should some sceptical individualstill entertain doubts whether in a world with-out Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, oreven Police, could exist, let him turn to theoriginal Volume, and view there the bound-less Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretch-ing sour and pestilential: over which we havelightly flown; where not only whole armiesbut whole nations might sink! If indeed thefollowing argument, in its brief riveting em-phasis, be not of itself incontrovertible andfinal:—

“Are we Opossums; have we naturalPouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how, withoutClothes, could we possess the master-organ,soul’s seat, and true pineal gland of the BodySocial: I mean, a PURSE?”

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Pro-fessor Teufelsdröckh; at worst, one knowsnot whether to hate or to love him. Forthough, in looking at the fair tapestry of hu-man Life, with its royal and even sacred fig-ures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but

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here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turnsout the rough seams, tatters, and manifoldthrums of that unsightly wrong-side, withan almost diabolic patience and indifference,which must have sunk him in the estimationof most readers,—there is that within whichunspeakably distinguishes him from all otherpast and present Sansculottists. The grandunparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdröckh is,that with all this Descendentalism, he com-bines a Transcendentalism, no less superla-tive; whereby if on the one hand he degrademan below most animals, except those jack-eted Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exaltshim beyond the visible Heavens, almost to anequality with the Gods.

“To the eye of vulgar Logic,” says he, “whatis man? An omnivorous Biped that wearsBreeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what ishe? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.Round his mysterious ME, there lies, underall those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or ofSenses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven;whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwellswith them in UNION and DIVISION; andsees and fashions for himself a Universe, withazure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands ofYears. Deep-hidden is he under that strangeGarment; amid Sounds and Colors and Forms,as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy ofa God. Stands he not thereby in the centreof Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?He feels; power has been given him to know,to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free

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in its celestial primeval brightness, even here,though but for moments, look through? Wellsaid Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold,‘the true SHEKINAH is Man:’ where else isthe GOD’S PRESENCE manifested not to oureyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?”

In such passages, unhappily too rare, thehigh Platonic Mysticism of our Author, whichis perhaps the fundamental element of his na-ture, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and,through all the vapor and tarnish of what isoften so perverse, so mean in his exterior andenvironment, we seem to look into a whole in-ward Sea of Light and Love;—though, alas,the grim coppery clouds soon roll togetheragain, and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywheretraceable in this man; and indeed, to atten-tive readers, must have been long ago ap-parent. Nothing that he sees but has morethan a common meaning, but has two mean-ings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptreand Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in thepoorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he findsProse, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in eachsort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. ForMatter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit,the manifestation of Spirit: were it never sohonorable, can it be more? The thing Visible,nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any wayconceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment,a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible,“unimaginable formless, dark with excess ofbright”? Under which point of view the follow-

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ing passage, so strange in purport, so strangein phrase, seems characteristic enough:—

“The beginning of all Wisdom is to lookfixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eye-sight, till they become transparent. ‘ThePhilosopher,’ says the wisest of this age, ‘muststation himself in the middle:’ how true! ThePhilosopher is he to whom the Highest has de-scended, and the Lowest has mounted up; whois the equal and kindly brother of all.

“Shall we tremble before clothwebs andcobwebs, whether woven in Arkwright looms,or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrest-ingly in our Imagination? Or, on the otherhand, what is there that we cannot love; sinceall was created by God?

“Happy he who can look through theClothes of a Man (the woollen, and fleshly, andofficial Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes)into the Man himself; and discern, it may be,in this or the other Dread Potentate, a moreor less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yetalso an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in themeanest Tinker that sees with eyes!”

For the rest, as is natural to a man of thiskind, he deals much in the feeling of Wonder;insists on the necessity and high worth of uni-versal Wonder; which he holds to be the onlyreasonable temper for the denizen of so sin-gular a Planet as ours. “Wonder,” says he, “isthe basis of Worship: the reign of wonder isperennial, indestructible in Man; only at cer-tain stages (as the present), it is, for someshort season, a reign in partibus infidelium.”That progress of Science, which is to destroy

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Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensura-tion and Numeration, finds small favor withTeufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise vener-ates these two latter processes.

“Shall your Science,” exclaims he, “proceedin the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted,underground workshop of Logic alone; andman’s mind become an Arithmetical Mill,whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Ta-bles of Sines and Tangents, Codification, andTreatises of what you call Political Economy,are the Meal? And what is that Science, whichthe scientific head alone, were it screwed off,and (like the Doctor’s in the Arabian Tale)set in a basin to keep it alive, could pros-ecute without shadow of a heart,—but oneother of the mechanical and menial handi-crafts, for which the Scientific Head (havinga Soul in it) is too noble an organ? I meanthat Thought without Reverence is barren,perhaps poisonous; at best, dies like cookerywith the day that called it forth; does not live,like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests, bringing food and plen-teous increase to all Time.”

In such wise does Teufelsdröckh deal hits,harder or softer, according to ability; yetever, as we would fain persuade ourselves,with charitable intent. Above all, that classof “Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers,and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, inthese days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics’ Institute ofScience, and cackle, like true Old-Romangeese and goslings round their Capitol, on any

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alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illumi-nated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable so-ciety, in full daylight, with rattle and lantern,and insist on guiding you and guarding youtherewith, though the Sun is shining, andthe street populous with mere justice-lovingmen:” that whole class is inexpressibly weari-some to him. Hear with what uncommon ani-mation he perorates:—

“The man who cannot wonder, who doesnot habitually wonder (and worship), werehe President of innumerable Royal Societies,and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste andHegel’s Philosophy, and the epitome of allLaboratories and Observatories with their re-sults, in his single head,—is but a Pair ofSpectacles behind which there is no Eye. Letthose who have Eyes look through him, thenhe may be useful.

“Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysti-cism; wilt walk through thy world by the sun-shine of what thou callest Truth, or even bythe hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic;and ‘explain’ all, ‘account’ for all, or believenothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt laugh-ter; whoso recognizes the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is every-where under our feet and among our hands;to whom the Universe is an Oracle and Tem-ple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattle-stall,—heshall be a delirious Mystic; to him thou, withsniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer thyhand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, whenhe kicks his foot through it?—Armer Teufel!Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gen-

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der? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wiltthou not die? ‘Explain’ me all this, or do oneof two things: Retire into private places withthy foolish cackle; or, what were better, giveit up, and weep, not that the reign of wonderis done, and God’s world all disembellishedand prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilet-tante and sand-blind Pedant.”

CHAPTER XI.PROSPECTIVE.

The Philosophy of Clothes is now to all read-ers, as we predicted it would do, unfolding it-self into new boundless expansions, of a cloud-capt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not with-out azure loomings in the far distance, andstreaks as of an Elysian brightness; the highlyquestionable purport and promise of which itis becoming more and more important for usto ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness,cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex ofPandemonian lava? Is it of a truth leading usinto beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?

Our Professor, like other Mystics, whetherdelirious or inspired, gives an Editor enoughto do. Ever higher and dizzier are theheights he leads us to; more piercing, all-comprehending, all-confounding are his viewsand glances. For example, this of Nature be-ing not an Aggregate but a Whole:—

“Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist: ‘If Itake the wings of the morning and dwell inthe uttermost parts of the Universe, God is

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there.’ Thou thyself, O cultivated reader, whotoo probably art no Psalmist, but a Prosaist,knowing god only by tradition, knowest thouany corner of the world where at least forceis not? The drop which thou shakest fromthy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already onthe wings of the North-wind, it is nearing theTropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate,and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there isaught motionless; without Force, and utterlydead?

“As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I saidto myself: That little fire which glows star-likeacross the dark-growing (nachtende) moor,where the sooty smith bends over his anvil,and thou hopest to replace thy lost horse-shoe,—is it a detached, separated speck, cutoff from the whole Universe; or indissolublyjoined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; isfed by air that circulates from before Noah’sDeluge, from beyond the Dog-star; therein,with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the farstranger Force of Man, are cunning affini-ties and battles and victories of Force broughtabout; it is a little ganglion, or nervous cen-tre, in the great vital system of Immensity.Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious Altar, kin-dled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sac-rifice, whose iron smoke and influence reachquite through the All; whose dingy Priest, notby word, yet by brain and sinew, preachesforth the mystery of Force; nay preaches forth(exoterically enough) one little textlet from

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the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man’sForce, commanding, and one day to be all-commanding.

“Detached, separated! I say there is nosuch separation: nothing hitherto was everstranded, cast aside; but all, were it onlya withered leaf, works together with all; isborne forward on the bottomless, shorelessflood of Action, and lives through perpetualmetamorphoses. The withered leaf is not deadand lost, there are Forces in it and aroundit, though working in inverse order; else howcould it rot? Despise not the rag from whichman makes Paper, or the litter from which theearth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no mean-est object is insignificant; all objects are aswindows, through which the philosophic eyelooks into Infinitude itself.”

Again, leaving that wondrous Schwarz-wald Smithy-Altar, what vacant, high-sailingair-ships are these, and whither will they sailwith us?

“All visible things are emblems; what thouseest is not there on its own account; strictlytaken, is not there at all: Matter exists onlyspiritually, and to represent some Idea, andbody it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicableas we think them, are so unspeakably signif-icant. Clothes, from the King’s mantle down-wards, are emblematic, not of want only, but ofa manifold cunning Victory over Want. On theother hand, all Emblematic things are prop-erly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven:must not the Imagination weave Garments,visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible cre-

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ations and inspirations of our Reason are,like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; the rather if, as we often see, theHand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or oth-erwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?

“Men are properly said to be clothed withAuthority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses,and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what isMan himself, and his whole terrestrial Life,but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garmentfor that divine me of his, cast hither, like alight-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is hesaid also to be clothed with a Body.

“Language is called the Garment ofThought: however, it should rather be, Lan-guage is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, ofThought. I said that Imagination wove thisFlesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphorsare her stuff: examine Language; what, if youexcept some few primitive elements (of natu-ral sound), what is it all but Metaphors, rec-ognized as such, or no longer recognized; stillfluid and florid, or now solid-grown and col-orless? If those same primitive elements arethe osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment,Language,—then are Metaphors its musclesand tissues and living integuments. An un-metaphorical style you shall in vain seekfor: is not your very Attention a Stretching-to? The difference lies here: some styles arelean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems os-seous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking; while others againglow in the flush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not

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without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover,there are sham Metaphors, which overhang-ing that same Thought’s-Body (best naked),and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering itout, may be called its false stuffings, super-fluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mantel), and tawdrywoollen rags: whereof he that runs and readsmay gather whole hampers,—and burn them.”

Than which paragraph on Metaphors didthe reader ever chance to see a more surpris-ingly metaphorical? However, that is not ourchief grievance; the Professor continues:—

“Why multiply instances? It is written, theHeavens and the Earth shall fade away likea Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensiblyexists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit,is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, puton for a season, and to be laid off. Thusin this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES,rightly understood, is included all that menhave thought, dreamed, done, and been: thewhole External Universe and what it holds isbut Clothing; and the essence of all Sciencelies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.”

Towards these dim infinitely expandedregions, close-bordering on the impalpableInane, it is not without apprehension, andperpetual difficulties, that the Editor seeshimself journeying and struggling. Till latelya cheerful daystar of hope hung before him,in the expected Aid of Hofrath Heuschrecke;which daystar, however, melts now, not intothe red of morning, but into a vague, grayhalf-light, uncertain whether dawn of day or

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dusk of utter darkness. For the last week,these so-called Biographical Documents arein his hand. By the kindness of a Scot-tish Hamburg Merchant, whose name, knownto the whole mercantile world, he must notmention; but whose honorable courtesy, nowand often before spontaneously manifestedto him, a mere literary stranger, he cannotsoon forget,—the bulky Weissnichtwo Packet,with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hiero-glyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of Travel,arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost.The reader shall now fancy with what hothaste it was broken up, with what breathlessexpectation glanced over; and, alas, with whatunquiet disappointment it has, since then,been often thrown down, and again taken up.

Hofrath Heuschrecke, in a too long-windedLetter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo pol-itics, dinners, dining repartees, and otherephemeral trivialities, proceeds to remindus of what we knew well already: thathowever it may be with Metaphysics, andother abstract Science originating in the Head(Verstand) alone, no Life-Philosophy (Leben-sphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretendsto be, which originates equally in the Char-acter (Gemuth), and equally speaks thereto,can attain its significance till the Charac-ter itself is known and seen; “till the Au-thor’s View of the World (Weltansicht), andhow he actively and passively came by suchview, are clear: in short till a Biographyof him has been philosophico-poetically writ-ten, and philosophico-poetically read. . . . Nay,”

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adds he, “were the speculative scientific Trutheven known, you still, in this inquiring age,ask yourself, Whence came it, and Why, andHow?—and rest not, till, if no better may be,Fancy have shaped out an answer; and ei-ther in the authentic lineaments of Fact, orthe forged ones of Fiction, a complete pictureand Genetical History of the Man and his spir-itual Endeavor lies before you. But why,” saysthe Hofrath, and indeed say we, “do I dilateon the uses of our Teufelsdröckh’s Biography?The great Herr Minister von Goethe has pen-etratingly remarked that Man is properly theonly object that interests man: thus I too havenoted, that in Weissnichtwo our whole conver-sation is little or nothing else but Biographyor Autobiography; ever humano-anecdotical(menschlich-anekdotisch). Biography is by na-ture the most universally profitable, univer-sally pleasant of all things: especially Biogra-phy of distinguished individuals.

“By this time, mein Verehrtester (my MostEsteemed),” continues he, with an eloquencewhich, unless the words be purloined fromTeufelsdröckh, or some trick of his, as wesuspect, is well-nigh unaccountable, “by thistime you are fairly plunged (vertieft) in thatmighty forest of Clothes-Philosophy; and look-ing round, as all readers do, with astonish-ment enough. Such portions and passagesas you have already mastered, and broughtto paper, could not but awaken a strange cu-riosity touching the mind they issued from;the perhaps unparalleled psychical mecha-nism, which manufactured such matter, and

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emitted it to the light of day. Had Teuf-elsdröckh also a father and mother; did he,at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live onspoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture andtears, clasp a friend’s bosom to his; lookshe also wistfully into the long burial-aisle ofthe Past, where only winds, and their lowharsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Hashe fought duels;—good Heaven! how did hecomport himself when in Love? By what sin-gular stair-steps, in short, and subterraneanpassages, and sloughs of Despair, and steepPisgah hills, has he reached this wonderfulprophetic Hebron (a true Old-Clothes Jewry)where he now dwells?

“To all these natural questions the voiceof public History is as yet silent. Certainonly that he has been, and is, a Pilgrim,and Traveller from a far Country; more orless footsore and travel-soiled; has partedwith road-companions; fallen among thieves,been poisoned by bad cookery, blistered withbug-bites; nevertheless, at every stage (forthey have let him pass), has had the Billto discharge. But the whole particulars ofhis Route, his Weather-observations, the pic-turesque Sketches he took, though all regu-larly jotted down (in indelible sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), arethese nowhere forthcoming? Perhaps quitelost: one other leaf of that mighty Volume (ofhuman Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted,unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper;and to rot, the sport of rainy winds?

“No, verehrtester Herr Herausgeber, in no

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wise! I here, by the unexampled favor youstand in with our Sage, send not a Biographyonly, but an Autobiography: at least the mate-rials for such; wherefrom, if I misreckon not,your perspicacity will draw fullest insight:and so the whole Philosophy and Philoso-pher of Clothes will stand clear to the won-dering eyes of England, nay thence, throughAmerica, through Hindostan, and the antipo-dal New Holland, finally conquer (einnehmen)great part of this terrestrial Planet!”

And now let the sympathizing readerjudge of our feeling when, in place of thissame Autobiography with “fullest insight,” wefind—Six considerable PAPER-BAGS, care-fully sealed, and marked successively, in giltChina-ink, with the symbols of the Six south-ern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in theinside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneousmasses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds andSnips, written in Professor Teufelsdröckh’sscarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating ofall imaginable things under the Zodiac andabove it, but of his own personal history onlyat rare intervals, and then in the most enig-matic manner.

Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Pro-fessor, or, as he here, speaking in the thirdperson, calls himself, “the Wanderer,” is notonce named. Then again, amidst what seemsto be a Metaphysico-theological Disquisition,“Detached Thoughts on the Steam-engine,” or,“The continued Possibility of Prophecy,” weshall meet with some quite private, not unim-portant Biographical fact. On certain sheets

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stand Dreams, authentic or not, while the cir-cumjacent waking Actions are omitted. Anec-dotes, oftenest without date of place or time,fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibyllineleaves. Interspersed also are long purely Au-tobiographical delineations; yet without con-nection, without recognizable coherence; sounimportant, so superfluously minute, theyalmost remind us of “P.P. Clerk of this Parish.”Thus does famine of intelligence alternatewith waste. Selection, order, appears to be un-known to the Professor. In all Bags the sameimbroglio; only perhaps in the Bag Capri-corn, and those near it, the confusion a lit-tle worse confounded. Close by a rather elo-quent Oration, “On receiving the Doctor’s-Hat,” lie wash-bills, marked bezahlt (set-tled). His Travels are indicated by the Street-Advertisements of the various cities he hasvisited; of which Street-Advertisements, inmost living tongues, here is perhaps the com-pletest collection extant.

So that if the Clothes-Volume itself wastoo like a Chaos, we have now instead ofthe solar Luminary that should still it, theairy Limbo which by intermixture will far-ther volatilize and discompose it! As we shallperhaps see it our duty ultimately to depositthese Six Paper-Bags in the British Museum,farther description, and all vituperation ofthem, may be spared. Biography or Auto-biography of Teufelsdröckh there is, clearlyenough, none to be gleaned here: at mostsome sketchy, shadowy fugitive likeness ofhim may, by unheard-of efforts, partly of in-

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tellect, partly of imagination, on the side ofEditor and of Reader, rise up between them.Only as a gaseous-chaotic Appendix to thataqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents ofthe Six Bags hover round us, and portionsthereof be incorporated with our delineationof it.

Daily and nightly does the Editor sit(with green spectacles) deciphering theseunimaginable Documents from their per-plexed cursiv-schrift; collating them with thealmost equally unimaginable Volume, whichstands in legible print. Over such a univer-sal medley of high and low, of hot, cold, moistand dry, is he here struggling (by union of likewith like, which is Method) to build a firmBridge for British travellers. Never perhapssince our first Bridge-builders, Sin and Death,built that stupendous Arch from Hell-gate tothe Earth, did any Pontifex, or Pontiff, under-take such a task as the present Editor. For inthis Arch too, leading, as we humbly presume,far otherwards than that grand primeval one,the materials are to be fished up from the wel-tering deep, and down from the simmeringair, here one mass, there another, and cun-ningly cemented, while the elements boil be-neath: nor is there any supernatural force todo it with; but simply the Diligence and fee-ble thinking Faculty of an English Editor, en-deavoring to evolve printed Creation out of aGerman printed and written Chaos, wherein,as he shoots to and fro in it, gathering, clutch-ing, piecing the Why to the far-distant Where-fore, his whole Faculty and Self are like to be

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swallowed up.Patiently, under these incessant toils and

agitations, does the Editor, dismissing allanger, see his otherwise robust health declin-ing; some fraction of his allotted natural sleepnightly leaving him, and little but an inflamednervous-system to be looked for. What is theuse of health, or of life, if not to do some worktherewith? And what work nobler than trans-planting foreign Thought into the barren do-mestic soil; except indeed planting Thoughtof your own, which the fewest are privilegedto do? Wild as it looks, this Philosophy ofClothes, can we ever reach its real meaning,promises to reveal new-coming Eras, the firstdim rudiments and already-budding germs ofa nobler Era, in Universal History. Is not sucha prize worth some striving? Forward with us,courageous reader; be it towards failure, or to-wards success! The latter thou sharest withus; the former also is not all our own.

BOOK II.

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CHAPTER I.GENESIS.

In a psychological point of view, it is perhapsquestionable whether from birth and geneal-ogy, how closely scrutinized soever, much in-sight is to be gained. Nevertheless, as in everyphenomenon the Beginning remains alwaysthe most notable moment; so, with regard toany great man, we rest not till, for our scien-tific profit or not, the whole circumstances ofhis first appearance in this Planet, and whatmanner of Public Entry he made, are with ut-most completeness rendered manifest. To theGenesis of our Clothes-Philosopher, then, bethis First Chapter consecrated. Unhappily, in-deed, he seems to be of quite obscure extrac-tion; uncertain, we might almost say, whetherof any: so that this Genesis of his can prop-erly be nothing but an Exodus (or transit outof Invisibility into Visibility); whereof the pre-liminary portion is nowhere forthcoming.

“In the village of Entepfuhl,” thus writeshe, in the Bag Libra, on various Papers, whichwe arrange with difficulty, “dwelt AndreasFutteral and his wife; childless, in still seclu-

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sion, and cheerful though now verging to-wards old age. Andreas had been grenadierSergeant, and even regimental Schoolmasterunder Frederick the Great; but now, quit-ting the halbert and ferule for the spade andpruning-hook, cultivated a little Orchard, onthe produce of which he, Cincinnatus-like,lived not without dignity. Fruits, the peach,the apple, the grape, with other varietiescame in their season; all which Andreas knewhow to sell: on evenings he smoked largely,or read (as beseemed a regimental School-master), and talked to neighbors that wouldlisten about the Victory of Rossbach; andhow Fritz the Only (der Einzige) had oncewith his own royal lips spoken to him, hadbeen pleased to say, when Andreas as camp-sentinel demanded the pass-word, ‘SchweigHund (Peace, hound)!’ before any of his staff-adjutants could answer. ‘Das nenn’ ich mireinen Konig, There is what I call a King,’would Andreas exclaim: ‘but the smoke ofKunersdorf was still smarting his eyes.’

“Gretchen, the housewife, won like Desde-mona by the deeds rather than the looks of hernow veteran Othello, lived not in altogethermilitary subordination; for, as Andreas said,‘the womankind will not drill (wer kann dieWeiberchen dressiren):’ nevertheless she atheart loved him both for valor and wisdom; toher a Prussian grenadier Sergeant and Reg-iment’s Schoolmaster was little other than aCicero and Cid: what you see, yet cannot seeover, is as good as infinite. Nay, was not An-dreas in very deed a man of order, courage,

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downrightness (Geradheit); that understoodBusching’s Geography, had been in the vic-tory of Rossbach, and left for dead in thecamisade of Hochkirch? The good Gretchen,for all her fretting, watched over him and hov-ered round him as only a true house-mothercan: assiduously she cooked and sewed andscoured for him; so that not only his oldregimental sword and grenadier-cap, but thewhole habitation and environment, where onpegs of honor they hung, looked ever trimand gay: a roomy painted Cottage, embow-ered in fruit-trees and forest-trees, evergreensand honeysuckles; rising many-colored fromamid shaven grass-plots, flowers struggling inthrough the very windows; under its long pro-jecting eaves nothing but garden-tools in me-thodic piles (to screen them from rain), andseats where, especially on summer nights, aKing might have wished to sit and smoke, andcall it his. Such a Bauergut (Copyhold) hadGretchen given her veteran; whose sinewyarms, and long-disused gardening talent, hadmade it what you saw.

“Into this umbrageous Man’s-nest, onemeek yellow evening or dusk, when theSun, hidden indeed from terrestrial Entep-fuhl, did nevertheless journey visible and ra-diant along the celestial Balance (Libra), itwas that a Stranger of reverend aspect en-tered; and, with grave salutation, stood be-fore the two rather astonished housemates.He was close-muffled in a wide mantle; whichwithout farther parley unfolding, he depositedtherefrom what seemed some Basket, over-

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hung with green Persian silk; saying only:Ihr lieben Leute, hier bringe ein unschatzbaresVerleihen; nehmt es in aller Acht, sorgfaltigstbenutzt es: mit hohem Lohn, oder wohl mitschweren Zinsen, wird’s einst zuruckgefordert.‘Good Christian people, here lies for you aninvaluable Loan; take all heed thereof, inall carefulness employ it: with high recom-pense, or else with heavy penalty, will it oneday be required back.’ Uttering which singu-lar words, in a clear, bell-like, forever memo-rable tone, the Stranger gracefully withdrew;and before Andreas or his wife, gazing in ex-pectant wonder, had time to fashion eitherquestion or answer, was clean gone. Neitherout of doors could aught of him be seen orheard; he had vanished in the thickets, in thedusk; the Orchard-gate stood quietly closed:the Stranger was gone once and always. Sosudden had the whole transaction been, inthe autumn stillness and twilight, so gentle,noiseless, that the Futterals could have fan-cied it all a trick of Imagination, or somevisit from an authentic Spirit. Only that thegreen-silk Basket, such as neither Imagina-tion nor authentic Spirits are wont to carry,still stood visible and tangible on their littleparlor-table. Towards this the astonished cou-ple, now with lit candle, hastily turned theirattention. Lifting the green veil, to see whatinvaluable it hid, they descried there, amiddown and rich white wrappages, no Pitt Dia-mond or Hapsburg Regalia, but, in the softestsleep, a little red-colored Infant! Beside it, laya roll of gold Friedrichs, the exact amount of

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which was never publicly known; also a Tauf-schein (baptismal certificate), wherein unfor-tunately nothing but the Name was decipher-able, other document or indication none what-ever.

“To wonder and conjecture was unavail-ing, then and always thenceforth. Nowherein Entepfuhl, on the morrow or next day,did tidings transpire of any such figure asthe Stranger; nor could the Traveller, whohad passed through the neighboring Town incoach-and-four, be connected with this Ap-parition, except in the way of gratuitous sur-mise. Meanwhile, for Andreas and his wife,the grand practical problem was: What todo with this little sleeping red-colored Infant?Amid amazements and curiosities, which hadto die away without external satisfying, theyresolved, as in such circumstances charita-ble prudent people needs must, on nursingit, though with spoon-meat, into whiteness,and if possible into manhood. The Heav-ens smiled on their endeavor: thus has thatsame mysterious Individual ever since hada status for himself in this visible Universe,some modicum of victual and lodging andparade-ground; and now expanded in bulk,faculty and knowledge of good and evil, he, asHERR DIOGENES TEUFELSDRÖCKH, pro-fesses or is ready to profess, perhaps not al-together without effect, in the new Universityof Weissnichtwo, the new Science of Things inGeneral.”

Our Philosopher declares here, as in-deed we should think he well might, that

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these facts, first communicated, by the goodGretchen Futteral, In his twelfth year, “pro-duced on the boyish heart and fancy a quiteindelible impression. Who this reverend Per-sonage,” he says, “that glided into the OrchardCottage when the Sun was in Libra, and then,as on spirit’s wings, glided out again, mightbe? An inexpressible desire, full of love and ofsadness, has often since struggled within meto shape an answer. Ever, in my distressesand my loneliness, has Fantasy turned, full oflonging (sehnsuchtsvoll), to that unknown Fa-ther, who perhaps far from me, perhaps near,either way invisible, might have taken me tohis paternal bosom, there to lie screened frommany a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost thoustill, shut out from me only by thin penetra-ble curtains of earthly Space, wend to and froamong the crowd of the living? Or art thouhidden by those far thicker curtains of theEverlasting Night, or rather of the Everlast-ing Day, through which my mortal eye andoutstretched arms need not strive to reach?Alas, I know not, and in vain vex myself toknow. More than once, heart-deluded, have Itaken for thee this and the other noble-lookingStranger; and approached him wistfully, withinfinite regard; but he too had to repel me, hetoo was not thou.

“And yet, O Man born of Woman,” criesthe Autobiographer, with one of his suddenwhirls, “wherein is my case peculiar? Hadstthou, any more than I, a Father whom thouknowest? The Andreas and Gretchen, or theAdam and Eve, who led thee into Life, and

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for a time suckled and pap-fed thee there,whom thou namest Father and Mother; thesewere, like mine, but thy nursing-father andnursing-mother: thy true Beginning and Fa-ther is in Heaven, whom with the bodily eyethou shalt never behold, but only with thespiritual. . . .

“The little green veil,” adds he, amongmuch similar moralizing, and embroiled dis-coursing, “I yet keep; still more inseparablythe Name, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Fromthe veil can nothing be inferred: a pieceof now quite faded Persian silk, like thou-sands of others. On the Name I have manytimes meditated and conjectured; but nei-ther in this lay there any clew. That it wasmy unknown Father’s name I must hesitateto believe. To no purpose have I searchedthrough all the Herald’s Books, in and withoutthe German Empire, and through all mannerof Subscriber-Lists (Pranumeranten), Militia-Rolls, and other Name-catalogues; extraordi-nary names as we have in Germany, the nameTeufelsdröckh, except as appended to my ownperson, nowhere occurs. Again, what may theunchristian rather than Christian ‘Diogenes’mean? Did that reverend Basket-bearer in-tend, by such designation, to shadow forth myfuture destiny, or his own present malign hu-mor? Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thouill-starred Parent, who like an Ostrich hadstto leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatchedinto self-support by the mere sky-influencesof Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been asmooth one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubt-

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less hast been; or indeed by the worst figureof Misfortune, by Misconduct. Often have Ifancied how, in thy hard life-battle, thou wertshot at, and slung at, wounded, hand-fettered,hamstrung, browbeaten and bedevilled by theTime-Spirit (Zeitgeist) in thyself and others,till the good soul first given thee was seeredinto grim rage, and thou hadst nothing for itbut to leave in me an indignant appeal to theFuture, and living speaking Protest againstthe Devil, as that same Spirit not of the Timeonly, but of Time itself, is well named! WhichAppeal and Protest, may I now modestly add,was not perhaps quite lost in air.

“For indeed, as Walter Shandy often in-sisted, there is much, nay almost all, inNames. The Name is the earliest Garmentyou wrap round the earth-visiting me; towhich it thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously(for there are Names that have lasted nighthirty centuries) than the very skin. And nowfrom without, what mystic influences does itnot send inwards, even to the centre; espe-cially in those plastic first-times, when thewhole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the in-visible seedgrain will grow to be an all over-shadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold theinfluence of Names, which are the most impor-tant of all Clothings, I were a second greaterTrismegistus. Not only all common Speech,but Science, Poetry itself is no other, if thouconsider it, than a right Naming. Adam’sfirst task was giving names to natural Ap-pearances: what is ours still but a continua-tion of the same; be the Appearances exotic-

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vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars, or starrymovements (as in Science); or (as in Poetry)passions, virtues, calamities, God-attributes,Gods?—In a very plain sense the Proverbsays, Call one a thief, and he will steal; in analmost similar sense may we not perhaps say,Call one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, and he willopen the Philosophy of Clothes?

“Meanwhile the incipient Diogenes, likeothers, all ignorant of his Why, his How orWhereabout, was opening his eyes to the kindLight; sprawling out his ten fingers and toes;listening, tasting, feeling; in a word, by allhis Five Senses, still more by his Sixth Senseof Hunger, and a whole infinitude of inward,spiritual, half-awakened Senses, endeavoringdaily to acquire for himself some knowledge ofthis strange Universe where he had arrived,be his task therein what it might. Infinitewas his progress; thus in some fifteen months,he could perform the miracle of—Speech! Tobreed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding afresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all isformless, powerless; yet by degrees organic el-ements and fibres shoot through the wateryalbumen; and out of vague Sensation growsThought, grows Fantasy and Force, and wehave Philosophies, Dynasties, nay Poetriesand Religions!

“Young Diogenes, or rather youngGneschen, for by such diminutive hadthey in their fondness named him, travelledforward to those high consummations, byquick yet easy stages. The Futterals, toavoid vain talk, and moreover keep the roll

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of gold Friedrichs safe, gave out that he wasa grandnephew; the orphan of some sister’sdaughter, suddenly deceased, in Andreas’sdistant Prussian birthland; of whom, as ofher indigent sorrowing widower, little enoughwas known at Entepfuhl. Heedless of allwhich, the Nursling took to his spoon-meat,and throve. I have heard him noted as a stillinfant, that kept his mind much to himself;above all, that seldom or never cried. He al-ready felt that time was precious; that he hadother work cut out for him than whimpering.”

Such, after utmost painful search andcollation among these miscellaneous Paper-masses, is all the notice we can gather ofHerr Teufelsdröckh’s genealogy. More imper-fect, more enigmatic it can seem to few read-ers than to us. The Professor, in whom trulywe more and more discern a certain satir-ical turn, and deep under-currents of rogu-ish whim, for the present stands pledged inhonor, so we will not doubt him: but seemsit not conceivable that, by the “good GretchenFutteral,” or some other perhaps interestedparty, he has himself been deceived? Shouldthese sheets, translated or not, ever reachthe Entepfuhl Circulating Library, some culti-vated native of that district might feel calledto afford explanation. Nay, since Books, likeinvisible scouts, permeate the whole habit-able globe, and Timbuctoo itself is not safefrom British Literature, may not some Copyfind out even the mysterious basket-bearingStranger, who in a state of extreme senilityperhaps still exists; and gently force even him

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to disclose himself; to claim openly a son, inwhom any father may feel pride?

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CHAPTER II.IDYLLIC.

“Happy season of Childhood!” exclaims Teu-felsdröckh: “Kind Nature, that art to alla bountiful mother; that visitest the poorman’s hut with auroral radiance; and for thyNursling hast provided a soft swathing ofLove and infinite Hope, wherein he waxesand slumbers, danced round (umgaukelt) bysweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage stillshuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a Fa-ther we have as yet a prophet, priest and king,and an Obedience that makes us free. Theyoung spirit has awakened out of Eternity,and knows not what we mean by Time; as yetTime is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sport-ful sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages:ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that sloweror quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushingof the universal World-fabric, from the gran-ite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yetunknown; and in a motionless Universe, wetaste, what afterwards in this quick-whirlingUniverse is forever denied us, the balm ofRest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long

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rough journey is at hand! A little while, andthou too shalt sleep no more, but thy verydreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, withold Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern pa-tience: ‘Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eter-nity to rest in?’ Celestial Nepenthe! thougha Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexan-der sack the world, he finds thee not; andthou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord,on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother’schild. For as yet, sleep and waking are one:the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around,and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and thebudding of Hope; which budding, if in youth,too frost-nipt, it grow to flowers, will in man-hood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rindedstone-fruit, of which the fewest can find thekernel.”

In such rose-colored light does our Pro-fessor, as Poets are wont, look back on hischildhood; the historical details of which (tosay nothing of much other vague oratoricalmatter) he accordingly dwells on with an al-most wearisome minuteness. We hear of En-tepfuhl standing “in trustful derangement”among the woody slopes; the paternal Or-chard flanking it as extreme outpost from be-low; the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by,among beech-rows, through river after river,into the Donau, into the Black Sea, intothe Atmosphere and Universe; and how “thebrave old Linden,” stretching like a parasolof twenty ells in radius, overtopping all otherrows and clumps, towered up from the cen-tral Agora and Campus Martius of the Vil-

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lage, like its Sacred Tree; and how the old mensat talking under its shadow (Gneschen oftengreedily listening), and the wearied laborersreclined, and the unwearied children sported,and the young men and maidens often dancedto flute-music. “Glorious summer twilights,”cries Teufelsdröckh, “when the Sun, like aproud Conqueror and Imperial Taskmaster,turned his back, with his gold-purple embla-zonry, and all his fireclad bodyguard (of Pris-matic Colors); and the tired brickmakers ofthis clay Earth might steal a little frolic, andthose few meek Stars would not tell of them!”

Then we have long details of the Wein-lesen (Vintage), the Harvest-Home, Christ-mas, and so forth; with a whole cycle of theEntepfuhl Children’s-games, differing appar-ently by mere superficial shades from thoseof other countries. Concerning all which, weshall here, for obvious reasons, say nothing.What cares the world for our as yet miniaturePhilosopher’s achievements under that “braveold Linden”? Or even where is the use of suchpractical reflections as the following? “In allthe sports of Children, were it only in theirwanton breakages and defacements, you shalldiscern a creative instinct (schaffenden Trieb):the Mankin feels that he is a born Man, thathis vocation is to work. The choicest presentyou can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or for destruction; eitherway it is for Work, for Change. In gregari-ous sports of skill or strength, the Boy trainshimself to Co-operation, for war or peace, asgovernor or governed: the little Maid again,

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provident of her domestic destiny, takes withpreference to Dolls.”

Perhaps, however, we may give this anec-dote, 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, reach-ing from neck to ankle, a mere body with fourlimbs: of which fashion how little could I thendivine the architectural, how much less themoral significance!”

More graceful is the following little pic-ture: “On fine evenings I was wont to carryforth my supper (bread-crumb boiled in milk),and eat it out-of-doors. On the coping of theOrchard-wall, which I could reach by climb-ing, or still more easily if Father Andreaswould set up the pruning-ladder, my porringerwas placed: there, many a sunset, have I,looking at the distant western Mountains,consumed, not without relish, my eveningmeal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hushof World’s expectation as Day died, were stilla Hebrew Speech for me; nevertheless I waslooking at the fair illuminated Letters, andhad an eye for their gilding.”

With “the little one’s friendship for cattleand poultry” we shall not much intermeddle.It may be that hereby he acquired a “certaindeeper sympathy with animated Nature:” butwhen, we would ask, saw any man, in a collec-tion of Biographical Documents, such a pieceas this: “Impressive enough (bedeutungsvoll)was it to hear, in early morning, the Swine-herd’s horn; and know that so many hungry

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happy quadrupeds were, on all sides, start-ing in hot haste to join him, for breakfaston the Heath. Or to see them at eventide,all marching in again, with short squeak, al-most in military order; and each, topograph-ically correct, trotting off in succession to theright or left, through its own lane, to its owndwelling; till old Kunz, at the Village-head,now left alone, blew his last blast, and retiredfor the night. We are wont to love the Hogchiefly in the form of Ham; yet did not thesebristly thick-skinned beings here manifest in-telligence, perhaps humor of character; atany rate, a touching, trustful submissivenessto Man,—who, were he but a Swineherd, indarned gabardine, and leather breeches moreresembling slate or discolored-tin breeches, isstill the Hierarch of this lower world?”

It is maintained, by Helvetius and hisset, that an infant of genius is quite thesame as any other infant, only that certainsurprisingly favorable influences accompanyhim through life, especially through child-hood, and expand him, while others lie close-folded and continue dunces. Herein, say they,consists the whole difference between an in-spired Prophet and a double-barrelled Game-preserver: the inner man of the one has beenfostered into generous development; that ofthe other, crushed down perhaps by vigor ofanimal digestion, and the like, has exudedand evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresus-citably stagnant at the bottom of his stomach.“With which opinion,” cries Teufelsdröckh, “Ishould as soon agree as with this other, that

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an acorn might, by favorable or unfavorableinfluences of soil and climate, be nursed intoa cabbage, or the cabbage-seed into an oak.

“Nevertheless,” continues he, “I too ac-knowledge the all-but omnipotence of earlyculture and nurture: hereby we have eithera doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering,wide-shadowing tree; either a sick yellow cab-bage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Ofa truth, it is the duty of all men, espe-cially of all philosophers, to note down withaccuracy the characteristic circumstances oftheir Education, what furthered, what hin-dered, what in any way modified it: to whichduty, nowadays so pressing for many a Ger-man Autobiographer, I also zealously addressmyself.”—Thou rogue! Is it by short clothesof yellow serge, and swineherd horns, thatan infant of genius is educated? And yet,as usual, it ever remains doubtful whetherhe is laughing in his sleeve at these Autobi-ographical times of ours, or writing from theabundance of his own fond ineptitude. For hecontinues: “If among the ever-streaming cur-rents of Sights, Hearings, Feelings for Pain orPleasure, whereby, as in a Magic Hall, youngGneschen went about environed, I might ven-ture to select and specify, perhaps these fol-lowing were also of the number:

“Doubtless, as childish sports call forthIntellect, Activity, so the young creature’sImagination was stirred up, and a Historicaltendency given him by the narrative habitsof Father Andreas; who, with his battle-reminiscences, and gray austere yet hearty

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patriarchal aspect, could not but appear an-other Ulysses and ‘much-enduring Man.’ Ea-gerly I hung upon his tales, when listeningneighbors enlivened the hearth; from theseperils and these travels, wild and far almostas Hades itself, a dim world of Adventure ex-panded itself within me. Incalculable also wasthe knowledge I acquired in standing by theOld Men under the Linden-tree: the wholeof Immensity was yet new to me; and hadnot these reverend seniors, talkative enough,been employed in partial surveys thereof fornigh fourscore years? With amazement I be-gan to discover that Entepfuhl stood in themiddle of a Country, of a World; that there wassuch a thing as History, as Biography to whichI also, one day, by hand and tongue, mightcontribute.

“In a like sense worked the Postwagen(Stage-coach), which, slow-rolling under itsmountains of men and luggage, wendedthrough our Village: northwards, truly, in thedead of night; yet southwards visibly at even-tide. Not till my eighth year did I reflect thatthis Postwagen could be other than some ter-restrial Moon, rising and setting by mere Lawof Nature, like the heavenly one; that it cameon made highways, from far cities towards farcities; weaving them like a monstrous shut-tle into closer and closer union. It was thenthat, 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 tothe end of the World!

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“Why mention our Swallows, which, out offar Africa, as I learned, threading their wayover seas and mountains, corporate cities andbelligerent nations, yearly found themselveswith the month of May, snug-lodged in ourCottage Lobby? The hospitable Father (forcleanliness’ sake) had fixed a little bracketplumb under their nest: there they built, andcaught 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 masonicincorporation, almost social police? For if, byill chance, and when time pressed, your Housefell, have I not seen five neighborly Helpersappear next day; and swashing to and fro,with animated, loud, long-drawn chirpings,and activity almost super-hirundine, completeit again before nightfall?

“But undoubtedly the grand summary ofEntepfuhl child’s culture, where as in a fun-nel its manifold influences were concentratedand simultaneously poured down on us, wasthe annual Cattle-fair. Here, assembling fromall the four winds, came the elements of anunspeakable hurry-burly. Nut-brown maidsand nut-brown men, all clear-washed, loud-laughing, bedizened and beribanded; whocame for dancing, for treating, and if possi-ble, for happiness. Topbooted Graziers fromthe North; Swiss Brokers, Italian Drovers,also topbooted, from the South; these withtheir subalterns in leather jerkins, leatherskull-caps, and long ox-goads; shouting inhalf-articulate speech, amid the inarticulate

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barking and bellowing. Apart stood Pot-ters from far Saxony, with their crockery infair rows; Nurnberg Pedlers, in booths thatto me seemed richer than Ormuz bazaars;Showmen from the Lago Maggiore; detach-ments of the Wiener Schub (Offscourings ofVienna) vociferously superintending gamesof chance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auction-eers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine (heuriger)flowed like water, still worse confoundingthe confusion; and high over all, vaulted,in ground-and-lofty tumbling, a particoloredMerry-Andrew, like the genius of the placeand of Life itself.

“Thus encircled by the mystery of Ex-istence; under the deep heavenly Firma-ment; waited on by the four golden Sea-sons, with their vicissitudes of contribution,for even grim Winter brought its skating-matches and shooting-matches, its snow-storms and Christmas-carols,—did the Childsit and learn. These things were the Alpha-bet, whereby in aftertime he was to sylla-ble and partly read the grand Volume of theWorld: what matters it whether such Alpha-bet be in large gilt letters or in small ungiltones, so you have an eye to read it? ForGneschen, eager to learn, the very act of look-ing thereon was a blessedness that gilded all:his existence was a bright, soft element of Joy;out of which, as in Prospero’s Island, wonderafter wonder bodied itself forth, to teach bycharming.

“Nevertheless, I were but a vain dreamerto say, that even then my felicity was perfect.

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I had, once for all, come down from Heaveninto the Earth. Among the rainbow colors thatglowed on my horizon, lay even in childhooda dark ring of Care, as yet no thicker than athread, and often quite overshone; yet alwaysit reappeared, nay ever waxing broader andbroader; till in after-years it almost overshad-owed my whole canopy, and threatened to en-gulf me in final night. It was the ring of Ne-cessity whereby we are all begirt; happy he forwhom a kind heavenly Sun brightens it into aring of Duty, and plays round it with beautifulprismatic diffractions; yet ever, as basis andas bourn for our whole being, it is there.

“For the first few years of our terrestrialApprenticeship, we have not much work to do;but, boarded and lodged gratis, are set downmostly to look about us over the workshop,and see others work, till we have understoodthe tools a little, and can handle this and that.If good Passivity alone, and not good Passiv-ity and good Activity together, were the thingwanted, then was my early position favorablebeyond the most. In all that respects opennessof Sense, affectionate Temper, ingenuous Cu-riosity, and the fostering of these, what morecould I have wished? On the other side, how-ever, things went not so well. My Active Power(Thatkraft) was unfavorably hemmed in; ofwhich misfortune how many traces yet abidewith me! In an orderly house, where the lit-ter of children’s sports is hateful enough, yourtraining is too stoical; rather to bear and for-bear than to make and do. I was forbid much:wishes in any measure bold I had to renounce;

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everywhere a strait bond of Obedience inflex-ibly held me down. Thus already Freewill of-ten came in painful collision with Necessity;so that my tears flowed, and at seasons theChild itself might taste that root of bitterness,wherewith the whole fruitage of our life ismingled and tempered.

“In which habituation to Obedience, truly,it was beyond measure safer to err by ex-cess than by defect. Obedience is our uni-versal duty and destiny; wherein whoso willnot bend must break: too early and too thor-oughly we cannot be trained to know thatWould, in this world of ours, is as mere zeroto Should, and for most part as the smallestof fractions even to Shall. Hereby was laidfor me the basis of worldly Discretion, nayof Morality itself. Let me not quarrel withmy upbringing. It was rigorous, too frugal,compressively secluded, every way unscien-tific: yet in that very strictness and domesticsolitude might there not lie the root of deeperearnestness, of the stem from which all noblefruit must grow? Above all, how unskilful so-ever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest;whereby every deficiency was helped. My kindMother, for as such I must ever love the goodGretchen, did me one altogether invaluableservice: she taught me, less indeed by wordthan by act and daily reverent look and habi-tude, her own simple version of the ChristianFaith. Andreas too attended Church; yet morelike a parade-duty, for which he in the otherworld expected pay with arrears,—as, I trust,he has received; but my Mother, with a true

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woman’s heart, and fine though uncultivatedsense, was in the strictest acceptation Reli-gious. How indestructibly the Good grows,and propagates itself, even among the weedyentanglements of Evil! The highest whom Iknew on Earth I here saw bowed down, withawe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven:such things, especially in infancy, reach in-wards to the very core of your being; mys-teriously does a Holy of Holies build itselfinto visibility in the mysterious deeps; andReverence, the divinest in man, springs forthundying from its mean envelopment of Fear.Wouldst thou rather be a peasant’s son thatknew, were it never so rudely, there was a Godin Heaven and in Man; or a duke’s son thatonly knew there were two-and-thirty quarterson the family-coach?”

To which last question we must answer:Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, of spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III.PEDAGOGY.

Hitherto we see young Gneschen, in hisindivisible case of yellow serge, borne for-ward mostly on the arms of kind Naturealone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind,in the terrestrial workshop, but (except hissoft hazel eyes, which we doubt not alreadygleamed with a still intelligence) called uponfor little voluntary movement there. Hith-erto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic,that of an incipient Philosopher and Poet inthe abstract; perhaps it would puzzle HerrHeuschrecke himself to say wherein the spe-cial Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowedor betokened. For with Gneschen, as with oth-ers, the Man may indeed stand pictured in theBoy (at least all the pigments are there); yetonly some half of the Man stands in the Child,or young Boy, namely, his Passive endowment,not his Active. The more impatient are we todiscover what figure he cuts in this latter ca-pacity; how, when, to use his own words, “heunderstands the tools a little, and can handlethis or that,” he will proceed to handle it.

125

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Here, however, may be the place to statethat, in much of our Philosopher’s history,there is something of an almost Hindoo char-acter: nay perhaps in that so well-fosteredand every way excellent “Passivity” of his,which, with no free development of the antag-onist Activity, distinguished his childhood, wemay detect the rudiments of much that, in af-ter days, and still in these present days, aston-ishes the world. For the shallow-sighted, Teu-felsdröckh is oftenest a man without Activityof any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted,again, a man with Activity almost superabun-dant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic,that no mortal can foresee its explosions, oreven when it has exploded, so much as as-certain its significance. A dangerous, difficulttemper for the modern European; above all,disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography!Now as heretofore it will behoove the Editorof these pages, were it never so unsuccessfully,to do his endeavor.

Among the earliest tools of any complicacywhich a man, especially a man of letters, getsto handle, are his Class-books. On this por-tion of his History, Teufelsdröckh looks downprofessedly as indifferent. Reading he “cannotremember ever to have learned;” so perhapshad it by nature. He says generally: “Of theinsignificant portion of my Education, whichdepended on Schools, there need almost no no-tice be taken. I learned what others learn; andkept it stored by in a corner of my head, see-ing as yet no manner of use in it. My School-master, a down-bent, broken-hearted, under-

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foot martyr, as others of that guild are, didlittle for me, except discover that he coulddo little: he, good soul, pronounced me a ge-nius, fit for the learned professions; and that Imust be sent to the Gymnasium, and one dayto the University. Meanwhile, what printedthing soever I could meet with I read. Myvery copper pocket-money I laid out on stall-literature; which, as it accumulated, I withmy own hands sewed into volumes. By thismeans was the young head furnished with aconsiderable miscellany of things and shad-ows of things: History in authentic fragmentslay mingled with Fabulous chimeras, whereinalso was reality; and the whole not as deadstuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutri-tive for a mind as yet so peptic.”

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judgedwell, we now know. Indeed, already in theyouthful Gneschen, with all his outward still-ness, there may have been manifest an inwardvivacity that promised much; symptoms of aspirit singularly open, thoughtful, almost po-etical. Thus, to say nothing of his Supperson the Orchard-wall, and other phenomenaof that earlier period, have many readers ofthese pages stumbled, in their twelfth year,on such reflections as the following? “It struckme much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silentnoontide, and watched it flowing, gurgling, tothink how this same streamlet had flowed andgurgled, through all changes of weather andof fortune, from beyond the earliest date ofHistory. Yes, probably on the morning whenJoshua forded Jordan; even as at the mid-day

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when Caesar, doubtless with difficulty, swamthe Nile, yet kept his Commentaries dry,—thislittle Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas orSiloa, was murmuring on across the wilder-ness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, asin the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein orveinlet of the grand World-circulation of Wa-ters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, haslasted and lasts simply with the World. Thoufool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldestart a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest onis six thousand years of age.” In which littlethought, as in a little fountain, may there notlie the beginning of those well-nigh unutter-able meditations on the grandeur and mys-tery of TIME, and its relation to ETERNITY,which play such a part in this Philosophy ofClothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic yearsthe Professor by no means lingers so lyricaland joyful as over his childhood. Green sunnytracts there are still; but intersected by bit-ter rivulets of tears, here and there stagnat-ing into sour marshes of discontent. “With myfirst view of the Hinterschlag Gymnasium,”writes he, “my evil days began. Well do I stillremember the red sunny Whitsuntide morn-ing, when, trotting full of hope by the sideof Father Andreas, I entered the main streetof the place, and saw its steeple-clock (thenstriking Eight) and Schuldthurm (Jail), andthe aproned or disaproned Burghers movingin to breakfast: a little dog, in mad terror,was rushing past; for some human imps hadtied a tin kettle to its tail; thus did the ago-

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nized creature, loud-jingling, career throughthe whole length of the Borough, and becomenotable enough. Fit emblem of many a Con-quering Hero, to whom Fate (wedding Fantasyto Sense, as it often elsewhere does) has ma-lignantly appended a tin kettle of Ambition, tochase him on; which the faster he runs, urgeshim the faster, the more loudly and more fool-ishly! Fit emblem also of much that awaitedmyself, in that mischievous Den; as in theWorld, whereof it was a portion and epitome!

“Alas, the kind beech-rows of Entepfuhlwere hidden in the distance: I was amongstrangers, harshly, at best indifferently, dis-posed towards me; the young heart felt, forthe first time, quite orphaned and alone.” Hisschool-fellows, as is usual, persecuted him:“They were Boys,” he says, “mostly rude Boys,and obeyed the impulse of rude Nature, whichbids the deer-herd fall upon any strickenhart, the duck-flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands thestrong tyrannize over the weak.” He admitsthat though “perhaps in an unusual degreemorally courageous,” he succeeded ill in bat-tle, and would fain have avoided it; a result, aswould appear, owing less to his small personalstature (for in passionate seasons he was “in-credibly nimble”), than to his “virtuous prin-ciples:” “if it was disgraceful to be beaten,”says he, “it was only a shade less disgrace-ful to have so much as fought; thus was Idrawn two ways at once, and in this importantelement of school-history, the war-element,had little but sorrow.” On the whole, that

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same excellent “Passivity,” so notable in Teu-felsdröckh’s childhood, is here visibly enoughagain getting nourishment. “He wept often;indeed to such a degree that he was nick-named Der Weinende (the Tearful), which ep-ithet, till towards his thirteenth year, was in-deed not quite unmerited. Only at rare inter-vals did the young soul burst forth into fire-eyed rage, and, with a stormfulness (Unges-tum) under which the boldest quailed, assertthat he too had Rights of Man, or at least ofMankin.” In all which, who does not discern afine flower-tree and cinnamon-tree (of genius)nigh choked among pumpkins, reed-grass andignoble shrubs; and forced if it would live, tostruggle upwards only, and not outwards; intoa height quite sickly, and disproportioned toits breadth?

We find, moreover, that his Greek andLatin were “mechanically” taught; Hebrewscarce even mechanically; much else whichthey called History, Cosmography, Philosophy,and so forth, no better than not at all. Sothat, except inasmuch as Nature was stillbusy; and he himself “went about, as was ofold his wont, among the Craftsmen’s work-shops, there learning many things;” and far-ther lighted on some small store of curiousreading, in Hans Wachtel the Cooper’s house,where he lodged,—his time, it would appear,was utterly wasted. Which facts the Profes-sor has not yet learned to look upon with anycontentment. Indeed, throughout the whole ofthis Bag Scorpio, where we now are, and oftenin the following Bag, he shows himself unusu-

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ally animated on the matter of Education, andnot without some touch of what we might pre-sume to be anger.

“My Teachers,” says he, “were hide-boundPedants, without knowledge of man’s nature,or of boy’s; or of aught save their lexicons andquarterly account-books. Innumerable deadVocables (no dead Language, for they them-selves knew no Language) they crammed intous, and called it fostering the growth of mind.How can an inanimate, mechanical Gerund-grinder, the like of whom will, in a subsequentcentury, be manufactured at Nurnberg out ofwood and leather, foster the growth of any-thing; much more of Mind, which grows, notlike a vegetable (by having its roots litteredwith etymological compost), but like a spirit,by mysterious contact of Spirit; Thought kin-dling itself at the fire of living Thought? Howshall he give kindling, in whose own inwardman there is no live coal, but all is burnt outto a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinter-schlag Professors knew syntax enough; andof the human soul thus much: that it had afaculty called Memory, and could be acted onthrough the muscular integument by appli-ance of birch-rods.

“Alas, so is it everywhere, so will it everbe; till the Hod-man is discharged, or reducedto hod-bearing; and an Architect is hired, andon all hands fitly encouraged: till communi-ties and individuals discover, not without sur-prise, that fashioning the souls of a genera-tion by Knowledge can rank on a level withblowing their bodies to pieces by Gunpowder;

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that with Generals and Field-marshals forkilling, there should be world-honored Digni-taries, and were it possible, true God-ordainedPriests, for teaching. But as yet, though theSoldier wears openly, and even parades, hisbutchering-tool, nowhere, far as I have trav-elled, did the Schoolmaster make show of hisinstructing-tool: nay, were he to walk abroadwith birch girt on thigh, as if he therefrom ex-pected honor, would there not, among the idlerclass, perhaps a certain levity be excited?”

In the third year of this Gymnasic period,Father Andreas seems to have died: the youngScholar, otherwise so maltreated, saw himselffor the first time clad outwardly in sables, andinwardly in quite inexpressible melancholy.“The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies underour feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdomsof Death, with all their innumerable silent na-tions and generations, stood before him; theinexorable word, never! now first showed itsmeaning. My Mother wept, and her sorrowgot vent; but in my heart there lay a wholelake of tears, pent up in silent desolation.Nevertheless the unworn Spirit is strong; Lifeis so healthful that it even finds nourishmentin Death: these stern experiences, planteddown by Memory in my Imagination, rosethere to a whole cypress-forest, sad but beau-tiful; waving, with not unmelodious sighs,in dark luxuriance, in the hottest sunshine,through long years of youth:—as in manhoodalso it does, and will do; for I have now pitchedmy tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb isnow my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by

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the gate of which I look upon the hostile arma-ments, and pains and penalties of tyrannousLife placidly enough, and listen to its loud-est threatenings with a still smile. O ye lovedones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bedof Rest, whom in life I could only weep for andnever help; and ye, who wide-scattered stilltoil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dye-ing the flinty ground with your blood,—yet alittle while, and we shall all meet there, andour Mother’s bosom will screen us all; andOppression’s harness, and Sorrow’s fire-whip,and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol andinhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot thenceforthharm us any more!”

Close by which rather beautiful apostro-phe, lies a labored Character of the deceasedAndreas Futteral; of his natural ability, hisdeserts in life (as Prussian Sergeant); withlong historical inquiries into the genealogy ofthe Futteral Family, here traced back as faras Henry the Fowler: the whole of which wepass over, not without astonishment. It onlyconcerns us to add, that now was the timewhen Mother Gretchen revealed to her foster-son that he was not at all of this kindred; orindeed of any kindred, having come into his-torical existence in the way already knownto us. “Thus was I doubly orphaned,” sayshe; “bereft not only of Possession, but evenof Remembrance. Sorrow and Wonder, heresuddenly united, could not but produce abun-dant fruit. Such a disclosure, in such a sea-son, struck its roots through my whole na-ture: ever till the years of mature manhood, it

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mingled with my whole thoughts, was as thestem whereon all my day-dreams and night-dreams grew. A certain poetic elevation, yetalso a corresponding civic depression, it natu-rally imparted: I was like no other; in whichfixed idea, leading sometimes to highest, andoftener to frightfullest results, may there notlie the first spring of tendencies, which in myLife have become remarkable enough? As inbirth, so in action, speculation, and social po-sition, my fellows are perhaps not numerous.”

In the Bag Sagittarius, as we at length dis-cover, Teufelsdröckh has become a Universityman; though how, when, or of what quality,will nowhere disclose itself with the small-est certainty. Few things, in the way of con-fusion and capricious indistinctness, can nowsurprise our readers; not even the total wantof dates, almost without parallel in a Bio-graphical work. So enigmatic, so chaotic wehave always found, and must always look tofind, these scattered Leaves. In Sagittarius,however, Teufelsdröckh begins to show him-self even more than usually Sibylline: frag-ments of all sorts: scraps of regular Mem-oir, College-Exercises, Programs, ProfessionalTestimoniums, Milkscores, torn Billets, some-times to appearance of an amatory cast; allblown together as if by merest chance, hence-forth bewilder the sane Historian. To combineany picture of these University, and the subse-quent, years; much more, to decipher thereinany illustrative primordial elements of theClothes-Philosophy, becomes such a problemas the reader may imagine.

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So much we can see; darkly, as through thefoliage of some wavering thicket: a youth of nocommon endowment, who has passed happilythrough Childhood, less happily yet still vig-orously through Boyhood, now at length per-fect in “dead vocables,” and set down, as hehopes, by the living Fountain, there to super-add Ideas and Capabilities. From such Foun-tain he draws, diligently, thirstily, yet never orseldom with his whole heart, for the water no-wise suits his palate; discouragements, entan-glements, aberrations are discoverable or sup-posable. Nor perhaps are even pecuniary dis-tresses wanting; for “the good Gretchen, whoin spite of advices from not disinterested rela-tives has sent him hither, must after a timewithdraw her willing but too feeble hand.”Nevertheless in an atmosphere of Poverty andmanifold Chagrin, the Humor of that youngSoul, what character is in him, first deci-sively reveals itself; and, like strong sunshinein weeping skies, gives out variety of colors,some of which are prismatic. Thus, with theaid of Time and of what Time brings, has thestripling Diogenes Teufelsdröckh waxed intomanly stature; and into so questionable an as-pect, that we ask with new eagerness, Howhe specially came by it, and regret anew thatthere is no more explicit answer. Certain ofthe intelligible and partially significant frag-ments, which are few in number, shall be ex-tracted from that Limbo of a Paper-bag, andpresented with the usual preparation.

As if, in the Bag Scorpio, Teufelsdröckhhad not already expectorated his antipeda-

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gogic spleen; as if, from the name Sagittarius,he had thought himself called upon to shootarrows, we here again fall in with such matteras this: “The University where I was educatedstill stands vivid enough in my remembrance,and I know its name well; which name, how-ever, I, from tenderness to existing interestsand persons, shall in nowise divulge. It is mypainful duty to say that, out of England andSpain, ours was the worst of all hitherto dis-covered Universities. This is indeed a timewhen right Education is, as nearly as may be,impossible: however, in degrees of wrongnessthere is no limit: nay, I can conceive a worsesystem than that of the Nameless itself; aspoisoned victual may be worse than absolutehunger.

“It is written, When the blind lead theblind, both shall fall into the ditch: wherefore,in such circumstances, may it not sometimesbe safer, if both leader and led simply—sitstill? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary,walled in a square enclosure; furnished itwith a small, ill-chosen Library; and thenturned loose into it eleven hundred Chris-tian striplings, to tumble about as they listed,from three to seven years: certain persons,under the title of Professors, being stationedat the gates, to declare aloud that it was aUniversity, and exact considerable admission-fees,—you had, not indeed in mechanicalstructure, yet in spirit and result, some im-perfect resemblance of our High Seminary. Isay, imperfect; for if our mechanical structurewas quite other, so neither was our result al-

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together the same: unhappily, we were not inCrim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city,full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the middleof a Public, which, without far costlier appa-ratus than that of the Square Enclosure, andDeclaration aloud, you could not be sure ofgulling.

“Gullible, however, by fit apparatus, allPublics are; and gulled, with the most sur-prising profit. Towards anything like aStatistics of Imposture, indeed, little as yethas been done: with a strange indifference,our Economists, nigh buried under Tablesfor minor Branches of Industry, have alto-gether overlooked the grand all-overtoppingHypocrisy Branch; as if our whole arts ofPuffery, of Quackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft,and the innumerable other crafts and myster-ies of that genus, had not ranked in Produc-tive Industry at all! Can any one, for exam-ple, so much as say, What moneys, in Liter-ature and Shoeblacking, are realized by ac-tual Instruction and actual jet Polish; whatby fictitious-persuasive Proclamation of such;specifying, in distinct items, the distributions,circulations, disbursements, incomings of saidmoneys, with the smallest approach to accu-racy? But to ask, How far, in all the sev-eral infinitely complected departments of so-cial business, in government, education, inmanual, commercial, intellectual fabricationof every sort, man’s Want is supplied by trueWare; how far by the mere Appearance oftrue Ware:—in other words, To what extent,by what methods, with what effects, in vari-

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ous times and countries, Deception takes theplace of wages of Performance: here trulyis an Inquiry big with results for the futuretime, but to which hitherto only the vaguestanswer can be given. If for the present, inour Europe, we estimate the ratio of Wareto Appearance of Ware so high even as atOne to a Hundred (which, considering theWages of a Pope, Russian Autocrat, or En-glish Game-Preserver, is probably not far fromthe mark),—what almost prodigious savingmay there not be anticipated, as the Statis-tics of Imposture advances, and so the man-ufacturing of Shams (that of Realities risinginto clearer and clearer distinction therefrom)gradually declines, and at length becomes allbut wholly unnecessary!

“This for the coming golden ages. WhatI had to remark, for the present brazen one,is, that in several provinces, as in Education,Polity, Religion, where so much is wanted andindispensable, and so little can as yet be fur-nished, probably Imposture is of sanative, an-odyne nature, and man’s Gullibility not hisworst blessing. Suppose your sinews of warquite broken; I mean your military chest in-solvent, forage all but exhausted; and that thewhole army is about to mutiny, disband, andcut your and each other’s throat,—then wereit not well could you, as if by miracle, paythem in any sort of fairy-money, feed themon coagulated water, or mere imagination ofmeat; whereby, till the real supply came up,they might be kept together and quiet? Suchperhaps was the aim of Nature, who does

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nothing without aim, in furnishing her fa-vorite, Man, with this his so omnipotent orrather omnipatient Talent of being Gulled.

“How beautifully it works, with a littlemechanism; nay, almost makes mechanismfor itself! These Professors in the Namelesslived with ease, with safety, by a mere Rep-utation, constructed in past times, and thentoo with no great effort, by quite another classof persons. Which Reputation, like a strongbrisk-going undershot wheel, sunk into thegeneral current, bade fair, with only a littleannual re-painting on their part, to hold longtogether, and of its own accord assiduouslygrind for them. Happy that it was so, for theMillers! They themselves needed not to work;their attempts at working, at what they calledEducating, now when I look back on it, fill mewith a certain mute admiration.

“Besides all this, we boasted ourselves aRational University; in the highest degreehostile to Mysticism; thus was the young va-cant mind furnished with much talk aboutProgress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice,and the like; so that all were quickly enoughblown out into a state of windy argumenta-tiveness; whereby the better sort had soon toend in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worsersort explode (erepiren) in finished Self-conceit,and to all spiritual intents become dead.—Butthis too is portion of mankind’s lot. If our erais the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it;is there not a better coming, nay come? As inlong-drawn systole and long-drawn diastole,must the period of Faith alternate with the

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period of Denial; must the vernal growth, thesummer luxuriance of all Opinions, SpiritualRepresentations and Creations, be followedby, and again follow, the autumnal decay, thewinter dissolution. For man lives in Time, hashis whole earthly being, endeavor and destinyshaped for him by Time: only in the transi-tory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eter-nity we stand on made manifest. And yet,in such winter-seasons of Denial, it is for thenobler-minded perhaps a comparative mis-ery to have been born, and to be awake andwork; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hi-bernating animals, safe-lodged in some Sala-manca University or Sybaris City, or other su-perstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence,they can slumber through, in stupid dreams,and only awaken when the loud-roaring hail-storms have all alone their work, and to ourprayers and martyrdoms the new Spring hasbeen vouchsafed.”

That in the environment, here mysteri-ously enough shadowed forth, Teufelsdröckhmust have felt ill at ease, cannot be doubt-ful. “The hungry young,” he says, “looked upto their spiritual Nurses; and, for food, werebidden eat the east-wind. What vain jargon ofcontroversial Metaphysic, Etymology, and me-chanical Manipulation falsely named Science,was current there, I indeed learned, betterperhaps than the most. Among eleven hun-dred Christian youths, there will not be want-ing some eleven eager to learn. By collisionwith such, a certain warmth, a certain pol-ish was communicated; by instinct and happy

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accident, I took less to rioting (renommiren),than to thinking and reading, which latteralso I was free to do. Nay from the chaos ofthat Library, I succeeded in fishing up morebooks perhaps than had been known to thevery keepers thereof. The foundation of aLiterary Life was hereby laid: I learned, onmy own strength, to read fluently in almostall cultivated languages, on almost all sub-jects and sciences; farther, as man is ever theprime object to man, already it was my fa-vorite employment to read character in spec-ulation, and from the Writing to construe theWriter. A certain groundplan of Human Na-ture and Life began to fashion itself in me;wondrous enough, now when I look back onit; for my whole Universe, physical and spiri-tual, was as yet a Machine! However, such aconscious, recognized groundplan, the truestI had, was beginning to be there, and by ad-ditional experiments might be corrected andindefinitely extended.”

Thus from poverty does the strong educenobler wealth; thus in the destitution of thewild desert does our young Ishmael acquirefor himself the highest of all possessions,that of Self-help. Nevertheless a desert thiswas, waste, and howling with savage mon-sters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details ofhis “fever-paroxysms of Doubt;” his Inquiriesconcerning Miracles, and the Evidences of re-ligious Faith; and how “in the silent night-watches, still darker in his heart than oversky and earth, he has cast himself beforethe All-seeing, and with audible prayers cried

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vehemently for Light, for deliverance fromDeath and the Grave. Not till after long years,and unspeakable agonies, did the believingheart surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep,under the nightmare, Unbelief; and, in thishag-ridden dream, mistake God’s fair livingworld for a pallid, vacant Hades and extinctPandemonium. But through such Purgatorypain,” continues he, “it is appointed us to pass;first must the dead Letter of Religion own it-self dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, ifthe living Spirit of Religion, freed from thisits charnel-house, is to arise on us, new-bornof Heaven, and with new healing under itswings.”

To which Purgatory pains, seemingly se-vere enough, if we add a liberal measure ofEarthly distresses, want of practical guidance,want of sympathy, want of money, want ofhope; and all this in the fervid season ofyouth, so exaggerated in imagining, so bound-less in desires, yet here so poor in means,—dowe not see a strong incipient spirit oppressedand overloaded from without and from within;the fire of genius struggling up among fuel-wood of the greenest, and as yet with more ofbitter vapor than of clear flame?

From various fragments of Letters andother documentary scraps, it is to be inferredthat Teufelsdröckh, isolated, shy, retiring ashe was, had not altogether escaped notice: cer-tain established men are aware of his exis-tence; and, if stretching out no helpful hand,have at least their eyes on him. He ap-pears, though in dreary enough humor, to

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be addressing himself to the Profession ofLaw;—whereof, indeed, the world has sinceseen him a public graduate. But omittingthese broken, unsatisfactory thrums of Eco-nomical relation, let us present rather the fol-lowing small thread of Moral relation; andtherewith, the reader for himself weaving itin at the right place, conclude our dim arras-picture of these University years.

“Here also it was that I formed acquain-tance with Herr Towgood, or, as it is per-haps better written, Herr Toughgut; a youngperson of quality (von Adel), from the inte-rior parts of England. He stood connected,by blood and hospitality, with the Countsvon Zahdarm, in this quarter of Germany;to which noble Family I likewise was, by hismeans, with all friendliness, brought near.Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-cultivated; with considerable humor of char-acter: and, bating his total ignorance, forhe knew nothing except Boxing and a littleGrammar, showed less of that aristocratic im-passivity, and silent fury, than for most partbelongs to Travellers of his nation. To him Iowe my first practical knowledge of the En-glish and their ways; perhaps also somethingof the partiality with which I have ever sinceregarded that singular people. Towgood wasnot without an eye, could he have come at anylight. Invited doubtless by the presence of theZahdarm Family, he had travelled hither, inthe almost frantic hope of perfecting his stud-ies; he, whose studies had as yet been those ofinfancy, hither to a University where so much

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as the notion of perfection, not to say the ef-fort after it, no longer existed! Often we wouldcondole over the hard destiny of the Youngin this era: how, after all our toil, we wereto be turned out into the world, with beardson our chins indeed, but with few other at-tributes of manhood; no existing thing thatwe were trained to Act on, nothing that wecould so much as Believe. ‘How has our headon the outside a polished Hat,’ would Tow-good exclaim, ‘and in the inside Vacancy, ora froth of Vocables and Attorney-Logic! At asmall cost men are educated to make leatherinto shoes; but at a great cost, what am I ed-ucated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what Ihave already eaten and worn, as I came thusfar, would endow a considerable Hospital ofIncurables.’—‘Man, indeed,’ I would answer,‘has a Digestive Faculty, which must be keptworking, were it even partly by stealth. Butas for our Miseducation, make not bad worse;waste not the time yet ours, in trampling onthistles because they have yielded us no figs.Frisch zu, Bruder! Here are Books, and wehave brains to read them; here is a wholeEarth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyesto look on them: Frisch zu!’

“Often also our talk was gay; not with-out brilliancy, and even fire. We looked outon Life, with its strange scaffolding, whereall at once harlequins dance, and men arebeheaded and quartered: motley, not unter-rific was the aspect; but we looked on itlike brave youths. For myself, these wereperhaps my most genial hours. Towards

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this young warm-hearted, strong-headed andwrong-headed Herr Towgood I was even nearexperiencing the now obsolete sentiment ofFriendship. Yes, foolish Heathen that I was,I felt that, under certain conditions, I couldhave loved this man, and taken him to my bo-som, and been his brother once and always.By degrees, however, I understood the newtime, and its wants. If man’s Soul is indeed, asin the Finnish Language, and Utilitarian Phi-losophy, a kind of Stomach, what else is thetrue meaning of Spiritual Union but an Eat-ing together? Thus we, instead of Friends, areDinner-guests; and here as elsewhere havecast away chimeras.”

So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enig-matically, this little incipient romance. Whathenceforth becomes of the brave Herr Tow-good, or Toughgut? He has dived under, inthe Autobiographical Chaos, and swims wesee not where. Does any reader “in the inte-rior parts of England” know of such a man?

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CHAPTER IV.GETTING UNDERWAY.

“Thus nevertheless,” writes our Autobiogra-pher, apparently as quitting College, “wasthere realized Somewhat; namely, I, DiogenesTeufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure(Zeitbild), occupying some cubic feet of Space,and containing within it Forces both physi-cal and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts;the whole wondrous furniture, in more or lessperfection, belonging to that mystery, a Man.Capabilities there were in me to give battle,in some small degree, against the great Em-pire of Darkness: does not the very Ditcherand Delver, with his spade, extinguish manya thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Or-der, where he found the opposite? Nay yourvery Day-moth has capabilities in this kind;and ever organizes something (into its ownBody, if no otherwise), which was before Inor-ganic; and of mute dead air makes living mu-sic, though only of the faintest, by humming.

“How much more, one whose capabili-

147

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ties are spiritual; who has learned, or be-gun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art ofThought! Thaumaturgic I name it; for hith-erto 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 Mes-sage, and how it makes and unmakes wholeworlds, I shall forbear mention: but can-not the dullest hear Steam-engines clankingaround him? Has he not seen the ScottishBrass-smith’s idea (and this but a mechanicalone) travelling on fire-wings round the Cape,and across two Oceans; and stronger than anyother Enchanter’s Familiar, on all hands un-weariedly fetching and carrying: at home, notonly weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough over-turning 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 Wis-est? Truly a Thinking Man is the worst en-emy the Prince of Darkness can have; everytime such a one announces himself, I doubtnot, there runs a shudder through the NetherEmpire; and new Emissaries are trained, withnew tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, andhoodwink and handcuff him.

“With such high vocation had I too, asdenizen of the Universe, been called. Un-happy it is, however, that though born tothe amplest Sovereignty, in this way, withno less than sovereign right of Peace andWar against the Time-Prince (Zeitfurst), orDevil, and all his Dominions, your coronation-

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ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre isso difficult to get at, or even to get eye on!”

By which last wire-drawn similitude doesTeufelsdröckh mean no more than that youngmen find obstacles in what we call “getting un-der way”? “Not what I Have,” continues he,“but what I Do is my Kingdom. To each isgiven a certain inward Talent, a certain out-ward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wis-est combination of these two, a certain maxi-mum of Capability. But the hardest problemwere ever this first: To find by study of your-self, and of the ground you stand on, whatyour combined inward and outward Capabil-ity specially is. For, alas, our young soul is allbudding with Capabilities, and we see not yetwhich is the main and true one. Always toothe new man is in a new time, under new con-ditions; his course can be the fac-simile of noprior one, but is by its nature original. Andthen how seldom will the outward Capabilityfit the inward: though talented wonderfullyenough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical,bashful; nay what is worse than all, we arefoolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabil-ities, we go stupidly groping about, to gropewhich is ours, and often clutch the wrong one:in this mad work must several years of oursmall term be spent, till the purblind Youth,by practice, acquire notions of distance, andbecome a seeing Man. Nay, many so spendtheir whole term, and in ever-new expecta-tion, ever-new disappointment, shift from en-terprise to enterprise, and from side to side:till at length, as exasperated striplings of

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threescore-and-ten, they shift into their lastenterprise, that of getting buried.

“Such, since the most of us are too oph-thalmic, would be the general fate; were itnot that one thing saves us: our Hunger.For on this ground, as the prompt nature ofHunger is well known, must a prompt choicebe made: hence have we, with wise foresight,Indentures and Apprenticeships for our ir-rational young; whereby, in due season, thevague universality of a Man shall find him-self ready-moulded into a specific Craftsman;and so thenceforth work, with much or withlittle waste of Capability as it may be; yetnot with the worst waste, that of time. Nayeven in matters spiritual, since the spiritualartist too is born blind, and does not, likecertain other creatures, receive sight in ninedays, but far later, sometimes never,—is it notwell that there should be what we call Profes-sions, or Bread-studies (Brodzwecke), preap-pointed us? Here, circling like the gin-horse,for whom partial or total blindness is no evil,the Bread-artist can travel contentedly roundand round, still fancying that it is forward andforward; and realize much: for himself vict-ual; for the world an additional horse’s powerin the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill of Eco-nomic Society. For me too had such a leading-string been provided; only that it proved aneck-halter, and had nigh throttled me, tillI broke it off. Then, in the words of AncientPistol, did the world generally become mineoyster, which I, by strength or cunning, wasto open, as I would and could. Almost had I

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deceased (fast war ich umgekommen), so ob-stinately did it continue shut.”

We see here, significantly foreshadowed,the spirit of much that was to befall ourAutobiographer; the historical embodimentof which, as it painfully takes shape in hisLife, lies scattered, in dim disastrous details,through this Bag Pisces, and those that fol-low. A young man of high talent, and highthough 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 himthey are forbidden pasture: either pining inprogressive starvation, he must stand; or, inmad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leap-ing against sheer stone-walls, which he can-not leap over, which only lacerate and lamehim; till at last, after thousand attempts andendurances, he, as if by miracle, clears hisway; not indeed into luxuriant and luxuri-ous clover, yet into a certain bosky wildernesswhere existence is still possible, and Freedom,though waited on by Scarcity, is not with-out sweetness. In a word, Teufelsdröckh hav-ing thrown up his legal Profession, finds him-self 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 pas-sions without solacement, wild faculties with-out employment, ever vex and agitate him. Hetoo must enact that stern Monodrama, No Ob-

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ject and no Rest; must front its successive des-tinies, work through to its catastrophe, anddeduce therefrom what moral he can.

Yet let us be just to him, let us admitthat his “neck-halter” sat nowise easy on him;that he was in some degree forced to break itoff. If we look at the young man’s civic posi-tion, in this Nameless capital, as he emergesfrom its Nameless University, we can discernwell that it was far from enviable. His firstLaw-Examination he has come through tri-umphantly; and can even boast that the Ex-amen Rigorosum need not have frightenedhim: but though he is hereby “an Ausculta-tor of respectability,” what avails it? Thereis next to no employment to be had. Nei-ther, for a youth without connections, is theprocess of Expectation very hopeful in itself;nor for one of his disposition much cheeredfrom without. “My fellow Auscultators,” hesays, “were Auscultators: they dressed, anddigested, and talked articulate words; othervitality showed they almost none. Small spec-ulation in those eyes, that they did glarewithal! Sense neither for the high nor forthe deep, nor for aught human or divine, saveonly for the faintest scent of coming Prefer-ment.” In which words, indicating a total es-trangement on the part of Teufelsdröckh maythere not also lurk traces of a bitterness asfrom wounded vanity? Doubtless these pro-saic Auscultators may have sniffed at him,with his strange ways; and tried to hate, andwhat was much more impossible, to despisehim. Friendly communion, in any case, there

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could not be: already has the young Teufels-dröckh left the other young geese; and swimsapart, though as yet uncertain whether hehimself is cygnet or gosling.

Perhaps, too, what little employment hehad was performed ill, at best unpleasantly.“Great practical method and expertness” hemay brag of; but is there not also greatpractical pride, though deep-hidden, only thedeeper-seated? So shy a man can never havebeen popular. We figure to ourselves, how inthose days he may have played strange freakswith his independence, and so forth: do nothis own words betoken as much? “Like a veryyoung person, I imagined it was with Workalone, and not also with Folly and Sin, in my-self and others, that I had been appointed tostruggle.” Be this as it may, his progress fromthe passive Auscultatorship, towards any ac-tive Assessorship, is evidently of the slowest.By degrees, those same established men, oncepartially inclined to patronize him, seem towithdraw their countenance, and give him upas “a man of genius” against which procedurehe, in these Papers, loudly protests. “As if,”says he, “the higher did not presuppose thelower; as if he who can fly into heaven, couldnot also walk post if he resolved on it! Butthe world is an old woman, and mistakes anygilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being of-ten cheated, she will thenceforth trust noth-ing but the common copper.”

How our winged sky-messenger, unac-cepted as a terrestrial runner, contrived, inthe mean while, to keep himself from fly-

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ing skyward without return, is not too clearfrom these Documents. Good old Gretchenseems to have vanished from the scene, per-haps from the Earth; other Horn of Plenty,or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows for him;so that “the prompt nature of Hunger beingwell known,” we are not without our anxi-ety. From private Tuition, in never so manylanguages and sciences, the aid derivable issmall; neither, to use his own words, “does theyoung Adventurer hitherto suspect in himselfany literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water wages, by his wide faculty of Transla-tion. Nevertheless,” continues he, “that I sub-sisted is clear, for you find me even now alive.”Which fact, however, except upon the princi-ple of our true-hearted, kind old Proverb, that“there is always life for a living one,” we mustprofess ourselves unable to explain.

Certain Landlords’ Bills, and other eco-nomic Documents, bearing the mark of Set-tlement, indicate that he was not withoutmoney; but, like an independent Hearth-holder, if not House-holder, paid his way. Herealso occur, among many others, two little mu-tilated Notes, which perhaps throw light onhis condition. The first has now no date, orwriter’s name, but a huge Blot; and runs tothis effect: “The (Inkblot), tied down by pre-vious promise, cannot, except by best wishes,forward the Herr Teufelsdröckh’s views on theAssessorship in question; and sees himself un-der the cruel necessity of forbearing, for thepresent, what were otherwise his duty and joy,to assist in opening the career for a man of

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genius, on whom far higher triumphs are yetwaiting.” The other is on gilt paper; and inter-ests us like a sort of epistolary mummy nowdead, yet which once lived and beneficentlyworked. We give it in the original: “Herr Teuf-elsdröckh wird von der Frau Grafinn, auf Don-nerstag, zum ÆSTHETISCHEN THEE schon-stens eingeladen.”

Thus, in answer to a cry for solid pud-ding, whereof there is the most urgent need,comes, epigrammatically enough, the invita-tion to a wash of quite fluid Æsthetic Tea! HowTeufelsdröckh, now at actual hand-grips withDestiny herself, may have comported himselfamong these Musical and Literary dilettantiof both sexes, like a hungry lion invited to afeast of chickenweed, we can only conjecture.Perhaps in expressive silence, and abstinence:otherwise if the lion, in such case, is to feast atall, it cannot be on the chickenweed, but onlyon the chickens. For the rest, as this FrauGrafinn dates from the Zahdarm House, shecan be no other than the Countess and mis-tress of the same; whose intellectual tenden-cies, and good-will to Teufelsdröckh, whetheron the footing of Herr Towgood, or on hisown footing, are hereby manifest. That somesort of relation, indeed, continued, for a time,to connect our Autobiographer, though per-haps feebly enough, with this noble House,we have elsewhere express evidence. Doubt-less, if he expected patronage, it was in vain;enough for him if he here obtained occasionalglimpses of the great world, from which weat one time fancied him to have been always

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excluded. “The Zahdarms,” says he, “lived inthe soft, sumptuous garniture of Aristocracy;whereto Literature and Art, attracted and at-tached from without, were to serve as thehandsomest fringing. It was to the GnadigenFrau (her Ladyship) that this latter improve-ment was due: assiduously she gathered, dex-terously she fitted on, what fringing was to behad; lace or cobweb, as the place yielded.” WasTeufelsdröckh also a fringe, of lace or cobweb;or promising to be such? “With his Excellenz(the Count),” continues he, “I have more thanonce had the honor to converse; chiefly on gen-eral affairs, and the aspect of the world, whichhe, though now past middle life, viewed in nounfavorable light; finding indeed, except theOutrooting of Journalism (die auszurottendeJournalistik), little to desiderate therein. Onsome points, as his Excellenz was not uncho-leric, I found it more pleasant to keep silence.Besides, his occupation being that of OwningLand, there might be faculties enough, which,as superfluous for such use, were little devel-oped in him.”

That to Teufelsdröckh the aspect of theworld was nowise so faultless, and manythings besides “the Outrooting of Journalism”might have seemed improvements, we canreadily conjecture. With nothing but a barrenAuscultatorship from without, and so manymutinous thoughts and wishes from within,his position was no easy one. “The Uni-verse,” he says, “was as a mighty Sphinx-riddle, which I knew so little of, yet mustrede, or be devoured. In red streaks of un-

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speakable grandeur, yet also in the blacknessof darkness, was Life, to my too-unfurnishedThought, unfolding itself. A strange contra-diction lay in me; and I as yet knew not thesolution of it; knew not that spiritual musiccan spring only from discords set in harmony;that but for Evil there were no Good, as vic-tory is only possible by battle.”

“I have heard affirmed (surely in jest),” ob-serves he elsewhere, “by not unphilanthropicpersons, that it were a real increase of hu-man happiness, could all young men from theage of nineteen be covered under barrels, orrendered otherwise invisible; and there leftto follow their lawful studies and callings,till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at theage of twenty-five. With which suggestion,at least as considered in the light of a prac-tical scheme, I need scarcely say that I no-wise coincide. Nevertheless it is plausiblyurged that, as young ladies (Madchen) are,to mankind, precisely the most delightful inthose years; so young gentlemen (Bubchen) dothen attain their maximum of detestability.Such gawks (Gecken) are they, and foolish pea-cocks, and yet with such a vulturous hungerfor self-indulgence; so obstinate, obstreper-ous, vain-glorious; in all senses, so frowardand so forward. No mortal’s endeavor or at-tainment will, in the smallest, content the asyet unendeavoring, unattaining young gentle-man; but he could make it all infinitely better,were it worthy of him. Life everywhere is themost manageable matter, simple as a ques-tion in the Rule-of-Three: multiply your sec-

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ond and third term together, divide the prod-uct by the first, and your quotient will be theanswer,—which you are but an ass if you can-not come at. The booby has not yet found out,by any trial, that, do what one will, there isever a cursed fraction, oftenest a decimal re-peater, and no net integer quotient so much asto be thought of.”

In which passage does not there lie an im-plied confession that Teufelsdröckh himself,besides his outward obstructions, had an in-ward, still greater, to contend with; namely,a certain temporary, youthful, yet still afflic-tive derangement of head? Alas, on the for-mer side alone, his case was hard enough.“It continues ever true,” says he, “that Sat-urn, or Chronos, or what we call time, de-vours all his Children: only by incessant Run-ning, by incessant Working, may you (for somethreescore-and-ten years) escape him; andyou too he devours at last. Can any Sovereign,or Holy Alliance of Sovereigns, bid Time standstill; even in thought, shake themselves freeof Time? Our whole terrestrial being is basedon Time, and built of Time; it is wholly aMovement, a Time-impulse; Time is the au-thor of it, the material of it. Hence also ourWhole Duty, which is to move, to work,—inthe right direction. Are not our Bodies andour Souls in continual movement, whether wewill or not; in a continual Waste, requiring acontinual Repair? Utmost satisfaction of ourwhole outward and inward Wants were butsatisfaction for a space of Time; thus, whatsowe have done, is done, and for us annihilated,

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and ever must we go and do anew. O Time-Spirit, how hast thou environed and impris-oned us, and sunk us so deep in thy trou-blous dim Time-Element, that only in lucidmoments can so much as glimpses of our up-per Azure Home be revealed to us! Me, how-ever, as a Son of Time, unhappier than someothers, was Time threatening to eat quite pre-maturely; for, strive as I might, there was nogood Running, so obstructed was the path, sogyved were the feet.” That is to say, we pre-sume, speaking in the dialect of this lowerworld, that Teufelsdröckh’s whole duty andnecessity was, like other men’s, “to work,—inthe right direction,” and that no work was tobe had; whereby he became wretched enough.As was natural: with haggard Scarcity threat-ening him in the distance; and so vehementa soul languishing in restless inaction, andforced thereby, like Sir Hudibras’s sword byrust,

“To eat into itself, for lackOf something else to hew and hack;”

But on the whole, that same “excellentPassivity,” as it has all along done, is hereagain vigorously flourishing; in which circum-stance may we not trace the beginnings ofmuch that now characterizes our Professorand perhaps, in faint rudiments, the originof the Clothes-Philosophy itself? Already theattitude he has assumed towards the Worldis too defensive; not, as would have been de-sirable, a bold attitude of attack. “So farhitherto,” he says, “as I had mingled with

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mankind, I was notable, if for anything, fora certain stillness of manner, which, as myfriends often rebukingly declared, did but illexpress the keen ardor of my feelings. I, intruth, regarded men with an excess both oflove and of fear. The mystery of a Person, in-deed, is ever divine to him that has a sensefor the Godlike. Often, notwithstanding, wasI blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for myso-called Hardness (Harte), my Indifferentismtowards men; and the seemingly ironic toneI had adopted, as my favorite dialect in con-versation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm wasbut as a buckram case, wherein I had strivento envelop myself; that so my own poor Per-son might live safe there, and in all friendli-ness, being no longer exasperated by wounds.Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the lan-guage of the Devil; for which reason I havelong since as good as renounced it. But howmany individuals did I, in those days, pro-voke into some degree of hostility thereby! Anironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambus-cading ways, more especially an ironic youngman, from whom it is least expected, may beviewed as a pest to society. Have we not seenpersons of weight and name coming forward,with gentlest indifference, to tread such a oneout of sight, as an insignificancy and worm,start ceiling-high (balkenhock), and thencefall shattered and supine, to be borne homeon shutters, not without indignation, when heproved electric and a torpedo!”

Alas, how can a man with this devilishnessof temper make way for himself in Life; where

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the first problem, as Teufelsdröckh too ad-mits, is “to unite yourself with some one, andwith somewhat (sich anzuschliessen)”? Divi-sion, not union, is written on most part of hisprocedure. Let us add too that, in no greatlength of time, the only important connectionhe had ever succeeded in forming, his connec-tion with the Zahdarm Family, seems to havebeen paralyzed, for all practical uses, by thedeath of the “not uncholeric” old Count. Thisfact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in acertain Discourse on Epitaphs, huddled intothe present Bag, among so much else; of whichEssay the learning and curious penetrationare more to be approved of than the spirit.His grand principle is, that lapidary inscrip-tions, of what sort soever, should be Historicalrather than Lyrical. “By request of that wor-thy Nobleman’s survivors,” says he, “I under-took to compose his Epitaph; and not unmind-ful of my own rules, produced the following;which however, for an alleged defect of Latin-ity, a defect never yet fully visible to myself,still remains unengraven;”—wherein, we maypredict, there is more than the Latinity thatwill 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:

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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 Teufelsdröckh, “hadthe poor Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Aus-cultatorship, painfully toiled, baking brickswithout stubble, before ever the questiononce struck him with entire force: Forwhat?—Beym Himmel! For Food andWarmth! And are Food and Warmth nowhereelse, in the whole wide Universe, discoverab-le?—Come of it what might, I resolved to try.”

Thus then are we to see him in a new in-dependent capacity, though perhaps far froman improved one. Teufelsdröckh is now a manwithout Profession. Quitting the commonFleet of herring-busses and whalers, whereindeed his leeward, laggard condition waspainful enough, he desperately steers off, ona course of his own, by sextant and compassof his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Thoughneither Fleet, nor Traffic, nor Commodorespleased thee, still was it not a Fleet, sailing inprescribed track, for fixed objects; above all,in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance,by all manner of loans and borrowings, each

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could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thousail in unknown seas; and for thyself find thatshorter Northwest Passage to thy fair Spice-country of a Nowhere?—A solitary rover, onsuch a voyage, with such nautical tactics, willmeet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwithdiscover, a certain Calypso-Island detains himat the very outset; and as it were falsifies andoversets his whole reckoning.

“If in youth,” writes he once, “the Universeis majestically unveiling, and everywhereHeaven revealing itself on Earth, nowhere tothe Young Man does this Heaven on Earthso immediately reveal itself as in the YoungMaiden. Strangely enough, in this strangelife of ours, it has been so appointed. On thewhole, as I have often said, a Person (Person-lichkeit) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodoxAnthropomorphism connects my Me with allThees in bonds of Love: but it is in this ap-proximation of the Like and Unlike, that suchheavenly attraction, as between Negative andPositive, first burns out into a flame. Is thepitifullest mortal Person, think you, indiffer-ent to us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish tobe made one with him; to unite him to us, bygratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or fail-ing all these, unite ourselves to him? But howmuch more, in this case of the Like-Unlike!Here is conceded us the higher mystic pos-sibility of such a union, the highest in ourEarth; thus, in the conducting medium of Fan-tasy, flames forth that fire-development of theuniversal Spiritual Electricity, which, as un-folded between man and woman, we first em-

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phatically denominate love.“In every well-conditioned stripling, as I

conjecture, there already blooms a certainprospective Paradise, cheered by some fairestEve; nor, in the stately vistas, and flower-age and foliage of that Garden, is a Tree ofKnowledge, beautiful and awful in the midstthereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole isbut the lovelier, if Cherubim and a FlamingSword divide it from all footsteps of men; andgrant him, the imaginative stripling, only theview, not the entrance. Happy season of vir-tuous youth, when shame is still an impass-able celestial barrier; and the sacred air-citiesof Hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-hamlets of Reality; and man, by his nature, isyet infinite and free!

“As for our young Forlorn,” continues Teuf-elsdröckh evidently meaning himself, “in hissecluded way of life, and with his glowingFantasy, the more fiery that it burnt undercover, as in a reverberating furnace, his feel-ing towards the Queens of this Earth was,and indeed is, altogether unspeakable. A vis-ible Divinity dwelt in them; to our youngFriend all women were holy, were heavenly.As yet he but saw them flitting past, intheir many-colored angel-plumage; or hover-ing mute and inaccessible on the outskirts ofÆsthetic Tea: all of air they were, all Soul andForm; so lovely, like mysterious priestesses, inwhose hand was the invisible Jacob’s-ladder,whereby man might mount into very Heaven.That he, our poor Friend, should ever win forhimself one of these Gracefuls (Holden)—Ach

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Gott! how could he hope it; should he not havedied under it? There was a certain deliriousvertigo in the thought.

“Thus was the young man, if all-scepticalof Demons and Angels such as the vulgarhad once believed in, nevertheless not un-visited by hosts of true Sky-born, who vis-ibly and audibly hovered round him where-soever he went; and they had that religiousworship in his thought, though as yet it wasby their mere earthly and trivial name thathe named them. But now, if on a soul socircumstanced, some actual Air-maiden, in-corporated into tangibility and reality, shouldcast any electric glance of kind eyes, sayingthereby, ‘Thou too mayest love and be loved;’and so kindle him,—good Heaven, what avolcanic, earthquake-bringing, all-consumingfire were probably kindled!”

Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actu-ally burst forth, with explosions more or lessVesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes;as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which,in his own figurative style, we might say, hadnow not a little carbonized tinder, of Irritabil-ity; with so much nitre of latent Passion, andsulphurous Humor enough; the whole lying insuch hot neighborhood, close by “a reverberat-ing furnace of Fantasy:” have we not here thecomponents of driest Gunpowder, ready, on oc-casion of the smallest spark, to blaze up? Nei-ther, in this our Life-element, are sparks any-where wanting. Without doubt, some Angel,whereof so many hovered round, would oneday, leaving “the outskirts of Æsthetic Tea,” flit

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higher; and, by electric Promethean glance,kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it in-deed proved a Firework, and flamed off rocket-wise, in successive beautiful bursts of splen-dor, each growing naturally from the other,through the several stages of a happy Youth-ful Love; till the whole were safely burnt out;and the young soul relieved with little dam-age! Happy, if it did not rather prove a Con-flagration and mad Explosion; painfully lac-erating the heart itself; nay perhaps burst-ing the heart in pieces (which were Death);or at best, bursting the thin walls of your “re-verberating furnace,” so that it rage thence-forth all unchecked among the contiguouscombustibles (which were Madness): till of theso fair and manifold internal world of our Dio-genes, there remained Nothing, or only the“crater of an extinct volcano”!

From multifarious Documents in this BagCapricornus, and in the adjacent ones onboth sides thereof, it becomes manifest thatour philosopher, as stoical and cynical as henow looks, was heartily and even franticallyin Love: here therefore may our old doubtswhether his heart were of stone or of fleshgive way. He loved once; not wisely but toowell. And once only: for as your Congreveneeds a new case or wrappage for every newrocket, so each human heart can properly ex-hibit but one Love, if even one; the “First Lovewhich is infinite” can be followed by no sec-ond like unto it. In more recent years, ac-cordingly, the Editor of these Sheets was ledto regard Teufelsdröckh as a man not only

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who would never wed, but who would nevereven flirt; whom the grand-climacteric itself,and St. Martin’s Summer of incipient Dotage,would crown with no new myrtle-garland. Tothe Professor, women are henceforth Pieces ofArt; of Celestial Art, indeed, which celestialpieces he glories to survey in galleries, but haslost thought of purchasing.

Psychological readers are not without cu-riosity to see how Teufelsdröckh in this forhim unexampled predicament, demeans him-self; with what specialties of successive con-figuration, splendor and color, his Fireworkblazes off. Small, as usual, is the satisfac-tion that such can meet with here. Fromamid these confused masses of Eulogy andElegy, with their mad Petrarchan and Wert-erean ware lying madly scattered among allsorts of quite extraneous matter, not so muchas the fair one’s name can be deciphered. For,without doubt, the title Blumine, whereby sheis here designated, and which means simplyGoddess of Flowers, must be fictitious. Washer real name Flora, then? But what was hersurname, or had she none? Of what station inLife was she; of what parentage, fortune, as-pect? Specially, by what Pre-established Har-mony of occurrences did the Lover and theLoved meet one another in so wide a world;how did they behave in such meeting? Toall which questions, not unessential in a Bio-graphic work, mere Conjecture must for mostpart return answer. “It was appointed,” saysour Philosopher, “that the high celestial or-bit of Blumine should intersect the low sub-

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lunary one of our Forlorn; that he, lookingin her empyrean eyes, should fancy the up-per Sphere of Light was come down into thisnether sphere of Shadows; and finding him-self 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 unhappilydependent and insolvent; living, perhaps, onthe not too gracious bounty of moneyed rela-tives. But how came “the Wanderer” into hercircle? Was it by the humid vehicle of Æs-thetic Tea, or by the arid one of mere Busi-ness? Was it on the hand of Herr Towgood;or of the Gnadige Frau, who, as an ornamen-tal Artist, might sometimes like to promoteflirtation, especially for young cynical Nonde-scripts? To all appearance, it was chiefly byAccident, and the grace of Nature.

“Thou fair Waldschloss,” writes our Au-tobiographer, “what stranger ever saw thee,were it even an absolved Auscultator, offi-cially bearing in his pocket the last Relatioex Actis he would ever write, but must havepaused to wonder! Noble Mansion! Therestoodest thou, in deep Mountain Amphithe-atre, on umbrageous lawns, in thy serene soli-tude; stately, massive, all of granite; glitteringin the western sunbeams, like a palace of ElDorado, overlaid with precious metal. Beau-tiful rose up, in wavy curvature, the slope ofthy guardian Hills; of the greenest was theirsward, embossed with its dark-brown frets ofcrag, or spotted by some spreading solitaryTree and its shadow. To the unconscious Way-

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farer thou wert also as an Ammon’s Temple, inthe Libyan Waste; where, for joy and woe, thetablet of his Destiny lay written. Well mighthe pause and gaze; in that glance of his wereprophecy and nameless forebodings.”

But now let us conjecture that the so pre-sentient Auscultator has handed in his Rela-tio ex Actis; been invited to a glass of Rhine-wine; and so, instead of returning dispiritedand athirst to his dusty Town-home, is ush-ered into the Garden-house, where sit thechoicest party of dames and cavaliers: ifnot engaged in Æsthetic Tea, yet in trust-ful evening conversation, and perhaps Musi-cal Coffee, for we hear of “harps and purevoices making the stillness live.” Scarcely,it would seem, is the Garden-house inferiorin 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, fromthe wide-opened doors, fair outlook over blos-som and bush, over grove and velvet green,stretching, undulating onwards to the remoteMountain peaks: so bright, so mild, and ev-erywhere the melody of birds and happy crea-tures: it was all as if man had stolen a shelterfrom the SUIT in the bosom-vesture of Sum-mer herself. How came it that the Wandereradvanced thither with such forecasting heart(ahndungsvoll), by the side of his gay host?Did he feel that to these soft influences hishard bosom ought to be shut; that here, oncemore, Fate had it in view to try him; to mockhim, and see whether there were Humor in

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him?“Next moment he finds himself pre-

sented to the party; and especially by nameto—Blumine! Peculiar among all dames anddamosels glanced Blumine, there in her mod-esty, like a star among earthly lights. Noblestmaiden! whom he bent to, in body and in soul;yet scarcely dared look at, for the presencefilled him with painful yet sweetest embar-rassment.

“Blumine’s was a name well known to him;far and wide was the fair one heard of, for hergifts, her graces, her caprices: from all whichvague colorings of Rumor, from the censuresno less than from the praises, had our friendpainted for himself a certain imperious Queenof Hearts, and blooming warm Earth-angel,much more enchanting than your mere whiteHeaven-angels of women, in whose placidveins circulates too little naphtha-fire. Her-self also he had seen in public places; thatlight yet so stately form; those dark tresses,shading a face where smiles and sunlightplayed over earnest deeps: but all this he hadseen only as a magic vision, for him inacces-sible, almost without reality. Her sphere wastoo far from his; how should she ever thinkof him; O Heaven! how should they so muchas once meet together? And now that Rose-goddess sits in the same circle with him; thelight of her eyes has smiled on him; if hespeak, she will hear it! Nay, who knows, sincethe heavenly Sun looks into lowest valleys,but Blumine herself might have aforetimenoted the so unnotable; perhaps, from his

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very gainsayers, as he had from hers, gath-ered wonder, gathered favor for him? Was theattraction, the agitation mutual, then; poleand pole trembling towards contact, whenonce brought into neighborhood? Say rather,heart swelling in presence of the Queen ofHearts; like the Sea swelling when once nearits Moon! With the Wanderer it was even so:as in heavenward gravitation, suddenly as atthe touch of a Seraph’s wand, his whole soul isroused from its deepest recesses; and all thatwas painful and that was blissful there, dimimages, vague feelings of a whole Past and awhole Future, are heaving in unquiet eddieswithin him.

“Often, in far less agitating scenes, hadour still Friend shrunk forcibly together; andshrouded up his tremors and flutterings, ofwhat sort soever, in a safe cover of Silence,and perhaps of seeming Stolidity. How wasit, then, that here, when trembling to the coreof his heart, he did not sink into swoons, butrose into strength, into fearlessness and clear-ness? It was his guiding Genius (Damon) thatinspired him; he must go forth and meet hisDestiny. Show thyself now, whispered it, or beforever hid. Thus sometimes it is even whenyour anxiety becomes transcendental, thatthe soul first feels herself able to transcendit; that she rises above it, in fiery victory; andborne on new-found wings of victory, moves socalmly, even because so rapidly, so irresistibly.Always must the Wanderer remember, witha certain satisfaction and surprise, how inthis case he sat not silent but struck adroitly

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into the stream of conversation; which thence-forth, to speak with an apparent not a realvanity, he may say that he continued to lead.Surely, in those hours, a certain inspirationwas imparted him, such inspiration as is stillpossible in our late era. The self-secluded un-folds himself in noble thoughts, in free, glow-ing words; his soul is as one sea of light, thepeculiar home of Truth and Intellect; whereinalso Fantasy bodies forth form after form, ra-diant with all prismatic hues.”

It appears, in this otherwise so happymeeting, there talked one “Philisitine;”who even now, to the general weariness,was dominantly pouring forth Philistinism(Philistriositaten.); little witting what herowas here entering to demolish him! We omitthe series of Socratic, or rather Diogenic ut-terances, not unhappy in their way, wherebythe monster, “persuaded into silence,” seemssoon after to have withdrawn for the night.“Of which dialectic marauder,” writes ourhero, “the discomfiture was visibly felt as abenefit by most: but what were all applausesto the glad smile, threatening every momentto become a laugh, wherewith Blumine her-self repaid the victor? He ventured to addressher she answered with attention: nay what ifthere were a slight tremor in that silver voice;what if the red glow of evening were hiding atransient blush!

“The conversation took a higher tone, onefine thought called forth another: it was oneof those rare seasons, when the soul expandswith full freedom, and man feels himself

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brought near to man. Gayly in light, gracefulabandonment, the friendly talk played roundthat circle; for the burden was rolled from ev-ery heart; the barriers of Ceremony, which areindeed the laws of polite living, had meltedas into vapor; and the poor claims of Me andThee, no longer parted by rigid fences, nowflowed softly into one another; and Life lay allharmonious, many-tinted, like some fair royalchampaign, the sovereign and owner of whichwere Love only. Such music springs from kindhearts, in a kind environment of place andtime. And yet as the light grew more aerial onthe mountaintops, and the shadows fell longerover the valley, some faint tone of sadnessmay have breathed through the heart; and, inwhispers more or less audible, reminded ev-ery one that as this bright day was drawingtowards its close, so likewise must the Day ofMan’s Existence decline into dust and dark-ness; and with all its sick toilings, and joyfuland mournful noises, sink in the still Eternity.

“To our Friend the hours seemed moments;holy was he and happy: the words fromthose sweetest lips came over him like dewon thirsty grass; all better feelings in his soulseemed to whisper, It is good for us to be here.At parting, the Blumine’s hand was in his: inthe balmy twilight, with the kind stars abovethem, he spoke something of meeting again,which was not contradicted; he pressed gentlythose small soft fingers, and it seemed as ifthey were not hastily, not angrily withdrawn.”

Poor Teufelsdröckh! it is clear to demon-stration thou art smit: the Queen of Hearts

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would see a “man of genius” also sigh for her;and there, by art-magic, in that preternatu-ral hour, has she bound and spell-bound thee.“Love is not altogether a Delirium,” says heelsewhere; “yet has it many points in com-mon therewith. I call it rather a discern-ing of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Ideamade Real; which discerning again may be ei-ther true or false, either seraphic or demoniac,Inspiration or Insanity. But in the formercase too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasythat superadds itself to sight; on the so pettydomain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infiniteSpiritual. Fantasy I might call the trueHeaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensu-ous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeit-buhne), whereon thick-streaming influencesfrom both these far yet near regions meet vis-ibly, and act tragedy and melodrama. Sensecan support herself handsomely, in most coun-tries, for some eighteenpence a day; but forFantasy planets and solar-systems will notsuffice. Witness your Pyrrhus conquering theworld, yet drinking no better red wine thanhe had before.” Alas! witness also your Dio-genes, flame-clad, scaling the upper Heaven,and verging towards Insanity, for prize of a“high-souled Brunette,” as if the Earth heldbut one and not several of these!

He says that, in Town, they met again:“day after day, like his heart’s sun, the bloom-ing Blumine shone on him. Ah! a littlewhile ago, and he was yet in all darkness:him what Graceful (Holde) would ever love?

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Disbelieving all things, the poor youth hadnever learned to believe in himself. With-drawn, in proud timidity, within his ownfastnesses; solitary from men, yet baited bynight-spectres enough, he saw himself, with asad indignation, constrained to renounce thefairest hopes of existence. And now, O now!‘She looks on thee,’ cried he: ‘she the fairest,noblest; do not her dark eyes tell thee, thouart not despised? The Heaven’s-Messenger!All Heaven’s blessings be hers!’ Thus did softmelodies flow through his heart; tones of aninfinite gratitude; sweetest intimations thathe also was a man, that for him also unutter-able joys had been provided.

“In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lam-bent glances, laughter, tears, and often withthe inarticulate mystic speech of Music: suchwas the element they now lived in; in sucha many-tinted, radiant Aurora, and by thisfairest of Orient Light-bringers must ourFriend be blandished, and the new Apoca-lypse of Nature enrolled to him. Fairest Blu-mine! And, even as a Star, all Fire and hu-mid Softness, a very Light-ray incarnate! Wasthere so much as a fault, a ‘caprice,’ he couldhave dispensed with? Was she not to him invery deed a Morning-star; did not her pres-ence bring with it airs from Heaven? As fromÆolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as fromthe Memnon’s Statue struck by the rosy fingerof Aurora, unearthly music was around him,and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. PaleDoubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomedup with happiness and hope. The past, then,

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was all a haggard dream; he had been in theGarden of Eden, then, and could not discernit! But lo now! the black walls of his prisonmelt away; the captive is alive, is free. Ifhe loved his Disenchantress? Ach Gott! Hiswhole heart and soul and life were hers, butnever had he named it Love: existence was alla Feeling, not yet shaped into a Thought.”

Nevertheless, into a Thought, nay into anAction, it must be shaped; for neither Disen-chanter nor Disenchantress, mere “Childrenof Time,” can abide by Feeling alone. TheProfessor knows not, to this day, “how in hersoft, fervid bosom the Lovely found determi-nation, even on hest of Necessity, to cut asun-der these so blissful bonds.” He even appearssurprised at the “Duenna Cousin,” whoevershe may have been, “in whose meagre hunger-bitten philosophy, the religion of young heartswas, from the first, faintly approved of.” We,even at such distance, can explain it withoutnecromancy. Let the Philosopher answer thisone question: What figure, at that period, wasa Mrs. Teufelsdröckh likely to make in pol-ished society? Could she have driven so muchas a brass-bound Gig, or even a simple iron-spring one? Thou foolish “absolved Ausculta-tor,” before whom lies no prospect of capital,will any yet known “religion of young hearts”keep the human kitchen warm? Pshaw! thydivine Blumine, when she “resigned herselfto wed some richer,” shows more philosophy,though but “a woman of genius,” than thou, apretended man.

Our readers have witnessed the origin of

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this Love-mania, and with what royal splen-dor it waxes, and rises. Let no one ask us tounfold the glories of its dominant state; muchless the horrors of its almost instantaneousdissolution. How from such inorganic masses,henceforth madder than ever, as lie in theseBags, can even fragments of a living delin-eation be organized? Besides, of what profitwere it? We view, with a lively pleasure, thegay silk Montgolfier start from the ground,and shoot upwards, cleaving the liquid deeps,till it dwindle to a luminous star: but what isthere to look longer on, when once, by naturalelasticity, or accident of fire, it has exploded?A hapless air-navigator, plunging, amid tornparachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck,fast enough into the jaws of the Devil! Suf-fice it to know that Teufelsdröckh rose into thehighest regions of the Empyrean, by a natu-ral parabolic track, and returned thence in aquick perpendicular one. For the rest, let anyfeeling reader, who has been unhappy enoughto do the like, paint it out for himself: con-sidering only that if he, for his perhaps com-paratively insignificant mistress, underwentsuch agonies and frenzies, what must Teufels-dröckh’s have been, with a fire-heart, and fora nonpareil Blumine! We glance merely at thefinal scene:—

“One morning, he found his Morning-starall dimmed and dusky-red; the fair creaturewas silent, absent, she seemed to have beenweeping. Alas, no longer a Morning-star, buta troublous skyey Portent, announcing thatthe Doomsday had dawned! She said, in a

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tremulous voice, They were to meet no more.”The thunder-struck Air-sailor is not wantingto himself in this dread hour: but what availsit? We omit the passionate expostulations, en-treaties, indignations, since all was vain, andnot even an explanation was conceded him;and hasten to the catastrophe. “‘Farewell,then, Madam!’ said he, not without stern-ness, for his stung pride helped him. Sheput her hand in his, she looked in his face,tears started to her eyes; in wild audacityhe clasped her to his bosom; their lips werejoined, their two souls, like two dew-drops,rushed into one,—for the first time and for thelast!” Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortalby a kiss. And then? Why, then—“thick cur-tains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose theimmeasurable Crash of Doom; and throughthe ruins as of a shivered Universe was hefalling, falling, towards the Abyss.”

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CHAPTER VI.SORROWS OFTEUFELS-DRÖCKH.

We have long felt that, with a man like ourProfessor, matters must often be expected totake a course of their own; that in so multi-plex, intricate a nature, there might be chan-nels, both for admitting and emitting, such asthe Psychologist had seldom noted; in short,that on no grand occasion and convulsion, nei-ther in the joy-storm nor in the woe-stormcould you predict his demeanor.

To our less philosophical readers, for ex-ample, it is now clear that the so passionateTeufelsdröckh precipitated through “a shiv-ered Universe” in this extraordinary way, hasonly one of three things which he can nextdo: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writ-ing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains. Inthe progress towards any of which consumma-tions, do not such readers anticipate extrav-agance enough; breast-beating, brow-beating

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(against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemyand the like, stampings, smitings, breakagesof furniture, if not arson itself?

Nowise so does Teufelsdröckh deport him.He quietly lifts his Pilgerstab (Pilgrim-staff),“old business being soon wound up;” andbegins a perambulation and circumambula-tion of the terraqueous Globe! Curious itis, indeed, how with such vivacity of concep-tion, such intensity of feeling, above all, withthese unconscionable habits of Exaggerationin speech, he combines that wonderful still-ness of his, that stoicism in external proce-dure. Thus, if his sudden bereavement, inthis matter of the Flower-goddess, is talkedof as a real Doomsday and Dissolution of Na-ture, in which light doubtless it partly ap-peared to himself, his own nature is nowisedissolved thereby; but rather is compressedcloser. For once, as we might say, a Blu-mine by magic appliances has unlocked thatshut heart of his, and its hidden things rushout tumultuous, boundless, like genii enfran-chised from their glass vial: but no soonerare your magic appliances withdrawn, thanthe strange casket of a heart springs to again;and perhaps there is now no key extant thatwill open it; for a Teufelsdröckh as we re-marked, will not love a second time. Sin-gular Diogenes! No sooner has that heart-rending occurrence fairly taken place, thanhe affects to regard it as a thing natural, ofwhich there is nothing more to be said. “Onehighest hope, seemingly legible in the eyes ofan Angel, had recalled him as out of Death-

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shadows into celestial Life: but a gleam ofTophet passed over the face of his Angel; hewas rapt away in whirlwinds, and heard thelaughter of Demons. It was a Calenture,” addshe, “whereby the Youth saw green Paradise-groves in the waste Ocean-waters: a lying vi-sion, yet not wholly a lie, for he saw it.” Butwhat things soever passed in him, when heceased to see it; what ragings and despair-ings soever Teufelsdröckh’s soul was the sceneof, he has the goodness to conceal under aquite opaque cover of Silence. We know itwell; the first mad paroxysm past, our braveGneschen collected his dismembered philoso-phies, and buttoned himself together; he wasmeek, silent, or spoke of the weather and theJournals: only by a transient knitting of thoseshaggy brows, by some deep flash of thoseeyes, glancing one knew not whether withtear-dew or with fierce fire,—might you haveguessed what a Gehenna was within: that awhole Satanic School were spouting, thoughinaudibly, there. To consume your own choler,as some chimneys consume their own smoke;to keep a whole Satanic School spouting, if itmust spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet noslight virtue, nor one of the commonest inthese times.

Nevertheless, we will not take upon usto say, that in the strange measure he fellupon, there was not a touch of latent Insanity;whereof indeed the actual condition of theseDocuments in Capricornus and Aquarius is nobad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings,toilsome enough, are without assigned or per-

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haps assignable aim; internal Unrest seemshis sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as ifthat curse of the Prophet had fallen on him,and he were “made like unto a wheel.” Doubt-less, too, the chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite with-out note of preparation, for example, we comeupon the following slip: “A peculiar feeling itis that will rise in the Traveller, when turn-ing some hill-range in his desert road, he de-scries lying far below, embosomed among itsgroves and green natural bulwarks, and all di-minished to a toy-box, the fair Town, whereso many souls, as it were seen and yet un-seen, are driving their multifarious traffic.Its white steeple is then truly a starward-pointing finger; the canopy of blue smokeseems like a sort of Lifebreath: for always, ofits own unity, the soul gives unity to whatso-ever it looks on with love; thus does the littleDwelling-place of men, in itself a congeries ofhouses and huts, become for us an individual,almost a person. But what thousand otherthoughts unite thereto, if the place has to our-selves been the arena of joyous or mournfulexperiences; if perhaps the cradle we wererocked in still stands there, if our Lovingones still dwell there, if our Buried ones thereslumber!” Does Teufelsdröckh as the woundedeagle is said to make for its own eyrie, and in-deed military deserters, and all hunted out-cast creatures, turn as if by instinct in thedirection of their birthland,—fly first, in thisextremity, towards his native Entepfuhl; butreflecting that there no help awaits him, take

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only one wistful look from the distance, andthen 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 leastwe incline to interpret the following Notice,separated from the former by some consid-erable space, wherein, however, is nothingnoteworthy:—

“Mountains were not new to him; butrarely are Mountains seen in such combinedmajesty and grace as here. The rocks areof that sort called Primitive by the mineral-ogists, which always arrange themselves inmasses of a rugged, gigantic character; whichruggedness, however, is here tempered by asingular airiness of form, and softness of en-vironment: in a climate favorable to vegeta-tion, the gray cliff, itself covered with lichens,shoots up through a garment of foliage or ver-dure; and white, bright cottages, tree-shaded,cluster round the everlasting granite. In finevicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur:you ride through stony hollows, along straitpasses, traversed by torrents, overhung byhigh walls of rock; now winding amid bro-ken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; nowsuddenly emerging into some emerald valley,where the streamlet collects itself into a Lake,and man has again found a fair dwelling, andit seems as if Peace had established herself inthe bosom of Strength.

“To Peace, however, in this vortex of ex-istence, can the Son of Time not pretend:still less if some Spectre haunt him from the

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Past; and the Future is wholly a StygianDarkness, spectre-bearing. Reasonably mightthe Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are notthe gates of this world’s happiness inexorablyshut against thee; hast thou a hope that is notmad? Nevertheless, one may still murmur au-dibly, or in the original Greek if that suit theebetter: ‘Whoso can look on Death will start atno shadows.’

“From such meditations is the Wanderer’sattention called outwards; for now the Val-ley closes in abruptly, intersected by a hugemountain mass, the stony water-worn ascentof which is not to be accomplished on horse-back. Arrived aloft, he finds himself againlifted into the evening sunset light; and can-not but pause, and gaze round him, some mo-ments there. An upland irregular expanseof wold, where valleys in complex branchingsare suddenly or slowly arranging their de-scent towards every quarter of the sky. Themountain-ranges are beneath your feet, andfolded together: only the loftier summits lookdown here and there as on a second plain;lakes also lie clear and earnest in their soli-tude. No trace of man now visible; unless in-deed it were he who fashioned that little visi-ble link of Highway, here, as would seem, scal-ing the inaccessible, to unite Province withProvince. But sunwards, lo you! how it towerssheer up, a world of Mountains, the diademand centre of the mountain region! A hun-dred and a hundred savage peaks, in the lastlight of Day; all glowing, of gold and amethyst,like giant spirits of the wilderness; there in

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their silence, in their solitude, even as on thenight when Noah’s Deluge first dried! Beau-tiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect toour Wanderer. He gazed over those stupen-dous masses with wonder, almost with long-ing desire; never till this hour had he knownNature, that she was One, that she was hisMother and divine. And as the ruddy glowwas fading into clearness in the sky, and theSun had now departed, a murmur of Eter-nity and Immensity, of Death and of Life, stolethrough his soul; and he felt as if Death andLife were one, as if the Earth were not dead,as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne inthat splendor, and his own spirit were there-with holding communion.

“The spell was broken by a sound ofcarriage-wheels. Emerging from the hid-den Northward, to sink soon into the hiddenSouthward, came a gay Barouche-and-four: itwas open; servants and postilions wore wed-ding favors: that happy pair, then, had foundeach other, it was their marriage evening!Few moments brought them near: Du Him-mel! It was Herr Towgood and—Blumine!With slight unrecognizing salutation theypassed me; plunged down amid the neighbor-ing thickets, onwards, to Heaven, and to Eng-land; and I, in my friend Richter’s words, I re-mained alone, behind them, with the Night.”

Were it not cruel in these circumstances,here might be the place to insert an observa-tion, gleaned long ago from the great Clothes-Volume, where it stands with quite other in-tent: “Some time before Small-pox was ex-

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tirpated,” says the Professor, “there came anew malady of the spiritual sort on Europe:I mean the epidemic, now endemical, of View-hunting. Poets of old date, being privilegedwith Senses, had also enjoyed external Na-ture; but chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cupwhich holds good or bad liquor for us; thatis to say, in silence, or with slight incidentalcommentary: never, as I compute, till after theSorrows of Werter, was there man found whowould say: Come let us make a Description!Having drunk the liquor, come let us eat theglass! Of which endemic the Jenner is unhap-pily still to seek.” Too true!

We reckon it more important to remarkthat the Professor’s Wanderings, so far ashis stoical and cynical envelopment admits usto clear insight, here first take their perma-nent character, fatuous or not. That Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four seems tohave withered up what little remnant of apurpose may have still lurked in him: Lifehas become wholly a dark labyrinth; wherein,through long years, our Friend, flying fromspectres, has to stumble about at random, andnaturally with more haste than progress.

Foolish were it in us to attempt follow-ing him, even from afar, in this extraordinaryworld-pilgrimage of his; the simplest record ofwhich, were clear record possible, would fillvolumes. Hopeless is the obscurity, unspeak-able the confusion. He glides from countryto country, from condition to condition; van-ishing and reappearing, no man can calculatehow or where. Through all quarters of the

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world he wanders, and apparently throughall circles of society. If in any scene, per-haps difficult to fix geographically, he settlesfor a time, and forms connections, be sure hewill snap them abruptly asunder. Let himsink out of sight as Private Scholar (Privat-sirender), living by the grace of God in someEuropean capital, you may next find him asHadjee in the neighborhood of Mecca. It isan inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious,quick-changing; as if our Traveller, insteadof limbs and highways, had transported him-self by some wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus’Hat. The whole, too, imparted emblemati-cally, in dim multifarious tokens (as that col-lection of Street-Advertisements); with onlysome touch of direct historical notice spar-ingly interspersed: little light-islets in theworld of haze! So that, from this point, theProfessor is more of an enigma than ever. Infigurative language, we might say he becomes,not indeed a spirit, yet spiritualized, vapor-ized. Fact unparalleled in Biography: Theriver of his History, which we have tracedfrom its tiniest fountains, and hoped to seeflow onward, with increasing current, intothe ocean, here dashes itself over that terrificLover’s Leap; and, as a mad-foaming cataract,flies wholly into tumultuous clouds of spray!Low down it indeed collects again into poolsand plashes; yet only at a great distance, andwith difficulty, if at all, into a general stream.To cast a glance into certain of those pools andplashes, and trace whither they run, must,for a chapter or two, form the limit of our en-

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deavor.For which end doubtless those direct his-

torical Notices, where they can be met with,are the best. Nevertheless, of this sort toothere occurs much, which, with our presentlight, it were questionable to emit. Teuf-elsdröckh vibrating everywhere between thehighest and the lowest levels, comes into con-tact with public History itself. For example,those conversations and relations with illus-trious Persons, as Sultan Mahmoud, the Em-peror Napoleon, and others, are they not asyet rather of a diplomatic character than of abiographic? The Editor, appreciating the sa-credness of crowned heads, nay perhaps sus-pecting the possible trickeries of a Clothes-Philosopher, will eschew this province for thepresent; a new time may bring new insightand a different duty.

If we ask now, not indeed with what ul-terior Purpose, for there was none, yet withwhat immediate outlooks; at all events, inwhat mood of mind, the Professor undertookand prosecuted this world-pilgrimage,—theanswer is more distinct than favorable. “Anameless Unrest,” says he, “urged me for-ward; to which the outward motion was somemomentary lying solace. Whither should I go?My Loadstars were blotted out; in that canopyof grim fire shone no star. Yet forward mustI; the ground burnt under me; there was norest for the sole of my foot. I was alone, alone!Ever too the strong inward longing shapedPhantasms for itself: towards these, one af-ter the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A

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feeling I had, that for my fever-thirst therewas and must be somewhere a healing Foun-tain. To many fondly imagined Fountains, theSaints’ Wells of these days, did I pilgrim; togreat Men, to great Cities, to great Events:but found there no healing. In strange coun-tries, as in the well-known; in savage deserts,as in the press of corrupt civilization, it wasever the same: how could your Wanderer es-cape from—his own Shadow? Neverthelessstill Forward! I felt as if in great haste; to doI saw not what. From the depths of my ownheart, it called to me, Forwards! The windsand the streams, and all Nature sounded tome, Forwards! Ach Gott, I was even, once forall, a Son of Time.”

From which is it not clear that the internalSatanic School was still active enough? Hesays elsewhere: “The Enchiridion of Epicte-tus I had ever with me, often as my solerational companion; and regret to mentionthat the nourishment it yielded was trifling.”Thou foolish Teufelsdröckh How could it else?Hadst thou not Greek enough to understandthus much: The end of Man is an Action, andnot 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 namesher; how she feeds the sparrow on the house-top, much more her darling, man? While thoustirrest and livest, thou hast a probabilityof victual. My breakfast of tea has beencooked by a Tartar woman, with water ofthe Amur, who wiped her earthen kettle

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with a horse-tail. I have roasted wild eggsin the sand of Sahara; I have awakened inParis Estrapades and Vienna Malzleins, withno prospect of breakfast beyond elementalliquid. That I had my Living to seek savedme from Dying,—by suicide. In our busyEurope, is there not an everlasting demandfor Intellect, in the chemical, mechanical,political, religious, educational, commercialdepartments? In Pagan countries, cannot onewrite Fetishes? Living! Little knowest thouwhat alchemy is in an inventive Soul; how, aswith its little finger, it can create provisionenough for the body (of a Philosopher); andthen, as with both hands, create quite otherthan provision; namely, spectres to tormentitself withal.”

Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying with Hungeralways parallel to him; and a whole InfernalChase in his rear; so that the countenanceof Hunger is comparatively a friend’s! Thusmust he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or ofthe modern Wandering Jew,—save only thathe feels himself not guilty and but sufferingthe pains of guilt,—wend to and fro with aim-less speed. Thus must he, over the wholesurface of the Earth (by footprints), write hisSorrows of Teufelsdröckh; even as the greatGoethe, in passionate words, had to write hisSorrows of Werter, before the spirit freed her-self, and he could become a Man. Vain trulyis the hope of your swiftest Runner to es-cape “from his own Shadow”! Nevertheless, inthese sick days, when the Born of Heaven firstdescries himself (about the age of twenty) in a

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world such as ours, richer than usual in twothings, in Truths grown obsolete, and Tradesgrown obsolete,—what can the fool think butthat it is all a Den of Lies, wherein whosowill not speak Lies and act Lies, must standidle and despair? Whereby it happens that,for your nobler minds, the publishing of somesuch Work of Art, in one or the other dialect,becomes almost a necessity. For what is itproperly but an Altercation with the Devil, be-fore you begin honestly Fighting him? YourByron publishes his Sorrows of Lord George,in verse and in prose, and copiously oth-erwise: your Bonaparte represents his Sor-rows of Napoleon Opera, in an all-too stupen-dous style; with music of cannon-volleys, andmurder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lightsare the fires of Conflagration; his rhyme andrecitative are the tramp of embattled Hostsand the sound of falling Cities.—Happier is hewho, like our Clothes-Philosopher, can writesuch matter, since it must be written, on theinsensible Earth, with his shoe-soles only; andalso survive the writing thereof!

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CHAPTER VII.THEEVERLASTINGNO.

Under the strange nebulous envelopment,wherein our Professor has now shrouded him-self, no doubt but his spiritual nature is nev-ertheless progressive, and growing: for howcan the “Son of Time,” in any case, stand still?We behold him, through those dim years, in astate of crisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrim-ings, and general solution into aimless Dis-continuity, what is all this but a mad Fermen-tation; wherefrom the fiercer it is, the clearerproduct will one day evolve itself?

Such transitions are ever full of pain: thusthe Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to at-tain his new beak, must harshly dash off theold one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever ourWanderer, in his individual acts and motions,may affect, it is clear that there is a hot feverof anarchy and misery raging within; corusca-tions of which flash out: as, indeed, how could

195

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there be other? Have we not seen him dis-appointed, bemocked of Destiny, through longyears? All that the young heart might desireand pray for has been denied; nay, as in thelast worst instance, offered and then snatchedaway. Ever an “excellent Passivity;” but ofuseful, reasonable Activity, essential to theformer as Food to Hunger, nothing granted:till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he mustforcibly seize for himself an Activity, thoughuseless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of bitter-ness, which had been filling drop by drop, eversince that first “ruddy morning” in the Hinter-schlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; andthen with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs over, and evenhisses over in a deluge of foam.

He himself says once, with more justnessthan originality: “Men is, properly speaking,based upon Hope, he has no other possessionbut Hope; this world of his is emphatically thePlace of Hope.” What, then, was our Profes-sor’s possession? We see him, for the present,quite shut out from Hope; looking not into thegolden orient, but vaguely all round into a dimcopper firmament, pregnant with earthquakeand tornado.

Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sensethan we yet dream of! For, as he wanderswearisomely through this world, he has nowlost all tidings of another and higher. Fullof religion, or at least of religiosity, as ourFriend has since exhibited himself, he hidesnot that, in those days, he was wholly irre-ligious: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,”

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says he; “shade after shade goes grimly overyour soul, till you have the fixed, starless,Tartarean black.” To such readers as have re-flected, what can be called reflecting, on man’slife, and happily discovered, in contradictionto much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, specula-tive and practical, that Soul is not synony-mous with Stomach; who understand, there-fore, in our Friend’s words, “that, for man’swell-being, Faith is properly the one thingneedful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwiseweak, can cheerfully endure the shame andthe cross; and without it, Worldlings puke uptheir sick existence, by suicide, in the midst ofluxury:” to such it will be clear that, for a puremoral nature, the loss of his religious Beliefwas the loss of everything. Unhappy youngman! All wounds, the crush of long-continuedDestitution, the stab of false Friendship andof false Love, all wounds in thy so genialheart, would have healed again, had not itslife-warmth been withdrawn. Well might heexclaim, in his wild way: “Is there no God,then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle,ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside ofhis Universe, and seeing it go? Has the wordDuty no meaning; is what we call Duty no di-vine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthlyPhantasm, made up of Desire and Fear, of em-anations from the Gallows and from DoctorGraham’s Celestial-Bed? Happiness of an ap-proving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus,whom admiring men have since named Saint,feel that he was ‘the chief of sinners;’ andNero of Rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth),

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spend much of his time in fiddling? Fool-ish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who inthy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism forthe Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind meout Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,—I tellthee, Nay! To the unregenerate PrometheusVinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggra-vation of his wretchedness that he is consciousof Virtue, that he feels himself the victim notof suffering only, but of injustice. What then?Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue butsome Passion; some bubble of the blood, bub-bling in the direction others profit by? I knownot: only this I know, If what thou namestHappiness be our true aim, then are we allastray. With Stupidity and sound Digestionman may front much. But what, in thesedull unimaginative days, are the terrors ofConscience to the diseases of the Liver! Noton Morality, but on Cookery, let us build ourstronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan,as censer, let us offer sweet incense to theDevil, and live at ease on the fat things he hasprovided for his Elect!”

Thus has the bewildered Wanderer tostand, as so many have done, shouting ques-tion after question into the Sibyl-cave of Des-tiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. Itis all a grim Desert, this once-fair world ofhis; wherein is heard only the howling of wildbeasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filledmen; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pil-lar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pil-grim. To such length has the spirit of Inquirycarried him. “But what boots it (was thut’s)?”

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cries he: “it is but the common lot in this era.Not having come to spiritual majority prior tothe Siecle de Louis Quinze, and not being bornpurely a Loghead (Dummkopf ), thou hadst noother outlook. The whole world is, like thee,sold to Unbelief; their old Temples of the God-head, which for long have not been rain-proof,crumble down; and men ask now: Where isthe Godhead; our eyes never saw him?”

Pitiful enough were it, for all these wildutterances, to call our Diogenes wicked. Un-profitable servants as we all are, perhapsat no era of his life was he more decisivelythe Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God,than even now when doubting God’s exis-tence. “One circumstance I note,” says he: “af-ter all the nameless woe that Inquiry, whichfor me, what it is not always, was genuineLove of Truth, had wrought me! I never-theless still loved Truth, and would bate nojot of my allegiance to her. ‘Truth!’ I cried,‘though the Heavens crush me for followingher: no Falsehood! though a whole celestialLubberland were the price of Apostasy.’ Inconduct it was the same. Had a divine Mes-senger from the clouds, or miraculous Hand-writing on the wall, convincingly proclaimedto me This thou shalt do, with what passion-ate readiness, as I often thought, would I havedone it, had it been leaping into the infernalFire. Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders,and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies,with the sick ophthalmia and hallucinationthey had brought on, was the Infinite na-ture of Duty still dimly present to me: liv-

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ing without God in the world, of God’s lightI was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealedeyes, with their unspeakable longing, couldnowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heartHe was present, and His heaven-written Lawstill stood legible and sacred there.”

Meanwhile, under all these tribulations,and temporal and spiritual destitutions, whatmust the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have en-dured! “The painfullest feeling,” writes he, “isthat of your own Feebleness (Unkraft); ever,as the English Milton says, to be weak is thetrue misery. And yet of your Strength thereis and can be no clear feeling, save by whatyou have prospered in, by what you have done.Between vague wavering Capability and fixedindubitable Performance, what a difference! Acertain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwellsdimly in us; which only our Works can ren-der articulate and decisively discernible. OurWorks are the mirror wherein the spirit firstsees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, thefolly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself ;till it be translated into this partially possibleone, Know what thou canst work at.

“But for me, so strangely unprosperoushad I been, the net-result of my Workingsamounted as yet simply to—Nothing. Howthen could I believe in my Strength, whenthere was as yet no mirror to see it in? Everdid this agitating, yet, as I now perceive,quite frivolous question, remain to me insol-uble: Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certainWorth, such even as the most have not; or artthou the completest Dullard of these modern

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times? Alas, the fearful Unbelief is unbeliefin yourself; and how could I believe? Had notmy first, last Faith in myself, when even to methe Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared tolove, been all too cruelly belied? The specu-lative Mystery of Life grew ever more myste-rious to me: neither in the practical Mysteryhad I made the slightest progress, but beeneverywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptu-ously cast out. A feeble unit in the middle of athreatening Infinitude, I seemed to have noth-ing given me but eyes, whereby to discern myown wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetra-ble walls, as of Enchantment, divided me fromall living: was there, in the wide world, anytrue bosom I could press trustfully to mine?O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lockupon my lips: why should I speak much withthat shifting variety of so-called Friends, inwhose withered, vain and too-hungry soulsFriendship was but an incredible tradition? Insuch cases, your resource is to talk little, andthat little mostly from the Newspapers. Nowwhen I look back, it was a strange isolationI then lived in. The men and women aroundme, even speaking with me, were but Figures;I had, practically, forgotten that they werealive, that they were not merely automatic.In the midst of their crowded streets and as-semblages, I walked solitary; and (except as itwas my own heart, not another’s, that I keptdevouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jun-gle. Some comfort it would have been, could I,like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted andtormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imag-

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ine, without Life, though only diabolic Life,were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has beenpulled down, you cannot so much as believein a Devil. To me the Universe was all voidof Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hos-tility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurableSteam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indiffer-ence, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, thevast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill ofDeath! Why was the Living banished thithercompanionless, conscious? Why, if there is noDevil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?”

A prey incessantly to such corrosions,might not, moreover, as the worst aggrava-tion to them, the iron constitution even of aTeufelsdröckh threaten to fail? We conjecturethat he has known sickness; and, in spite ofhis locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of thechronic sort. Hear this, for example: “Howbeautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper!Quite another thing in practice; every win-dow of your Feeling, even of your Intellect,as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, sothat no pure ray can enter; a whole Drug-shopin your inwards; the fordone soul drowningslowly in quagmires of Disgust!”

Putting all which external and internalmiseries together, may we not find in the fol-lowing sentences, quite in our Professor’s stillvein, significance enough? “From Suicide acertain after-shine (Nachschein) of Christian-ity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indo-lence of character; for, was not that a rem-edy I had at any time within reach? Often,

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however, was there a question present to me:Should some one now, at the turning of thatcorner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, intothe other World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot,—how were it? On which ground, too,I have often, in sea-storms and sieged citiesand other death-scenes, exhibited an imper-turbability, which passed, falsely enough, forcourage.”

“So had it lasted,” concludes the Wan-derer, “so had it lasted, as in bitter protractedDeath-agony, through long years. The heartwithin me, unvisited by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memoryI had shed no tear; or once only when I, mur-muring half-audibly, recited Faust’s Death-song, that wild Selig der den er im Sieges-glanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Bat-tle’s splendor), and thought that of this lastFriend even I was not forsaken, that Destinyitself could not doom me not to die. Havingno hope, neither had I any definite fear, wereit of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if itmight be solacing, could the Arch-Devil him-self, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise tome, that I might tell him a little of my mind.And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a contin-ual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusil-lanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: itseemed as if all things in the Heavens aboveand the Earth beneath would hurt me; as ifthe Heavens and the Earth were but bound-less jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I,palpitating, waited to be devoured.

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“Full of such humor, and perhaps the mis-erablest man in the whole French Capitalor Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, aftermuch perambulation, toiling along the dirtylittle Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, amongcivic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere,and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar’sFurnace; whereby doubtless my spirits werelittle cheered; when, all at once, there rosea Thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘Whatart thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a cow-ard, dost thou forever pip and whimper, andgo cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!what is the sum-total of the worst that lies be-fore thee? Death? Well, Death; and say thepangs of Tophet too, and all that the Deviland Man may, will or can do against thee!Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not sufferwhatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,though outcast, trample Tophet itself underthy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come,then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And as Iso thought, there rushed like a stream of fireover my whole soul; and I shook base Fearaway from me forever. I was strong, of un-known strength; a spirit, almost a god. Everfrom that time, the temper of my misery waschanged: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it,but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.

“Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (dasewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through allthe recesses of my Being, of my ME; and thenwas it that my whole me stood up, in na-tive God-created majesty, and with emphasisrecorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most

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important transaction in Life, may that sameIndignation and Defiance, in a psychologicalpoint of view, be fitly called. The EverlastingNo had said: ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, out-cast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s);’to which my whole Me now made answer: ‘Iam not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!’

“It is from this hour that I incline to datemy Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon beganto be a Man.”

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CHAPTER VIII.CENTRE OFINDIFFERENCE.

Though, after this “Baphometic Fire-baptism”of his, our Wanderer signifies that his Un-rest was but increased; as, indeed, “Indigna-tion and Defiance,” especially against thingsin general, are not the most peaceable in-mates; yet can the Psychologist surmise thatit was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest;that henceforth it had at least a fixed cen-tre to revolve round. For the fire-baptizedsoul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, herefeels its own Freedom, which feeling is itsBaphometic Baptism: the citadel of its wholekingdom it has thus gained by assault, andwill keep inexpugnable; outwards from whichthe remaining dominions, not indeed with-out hard battling, will doubtless by degreesbe conquered and pacificated. Under anotherfigure, we might say, if in that great mo-ment, in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer,the old inward Satanic School was not yetthrown out of doors, it received peremptory

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judicial notice to quit;—whereby, for the rest,its howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, andrebellious gnashings of teeth, might, in themean while, become only the more tumul-tuous, and difficult to keep secret.

Accordingly, if we scrutinize these Pilgrim-ings well, there is perhaps discernible hence-forth a certain incipient method in their mad-ness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufels-dröckh now storm through the world; at worstas a spectra-fighting Man, nay who will oneday be a Spectre-queller. If pilgriming rest-lessly to so many “Saints’ Wells,” and everwithout quenching of his thirst, he neverthe-less finds little secular wells, whereby fromtime to time some alleviation is ministered. Ina word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermit-ting to “eat his own heart;” and clutches roundhim outwardly on the not-me for wholesomerfood. Does not the following glimpse exhibithim in a much more natural state?

“Towns also and Cities, especially the an-cient, I failed not to look upon with interest.How beautiful to see thereby, as through along vista, into the remote Time; to have, asit were, an actual section of almost the ear-liest Past brought safe into the Present, andset before your eyes! There, in that old City,was a live ember of Culinary Fire put down,say only two thousand years ago; and there,burning more or less triumphantly, with suchfuel as the region yielded, it has burnt, andstill burns, and thou thyself seest the verysmoke thereof. Ah! and the far more mysteri-ous live ember of Vital Fire was then also put

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down there; and still miraculously burns andspreads; and the smoke and ashes thereof (inthese Judgment-Halls and Churchyards), andits bellows-engines (in these Churches), thoustill seest; and its flame, looking out from ev-ery kind countenance, and every hateful one,still warms thee or scorches thee.

“Of Man’s Activity and Attainment thechief results are aeriform, mystic, and pre-served in Tradition only: such are his Formsof Government, with the Authority they reston; his Customs, or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and of Soul-habits; much more his col-lective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Facultyhe has acquired of manipulating Nature: allthese things, as indispensable and pricelessas they are, cannot in any way be fixed underlock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on im-palpable vehicles, from Father to Son; if youdemand sight of them, they are nowhere tobe met with. Visible Ploughmen and Ham-mermen there have been, ever from Cain andTubal-cain downwards: but where does youraccumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, andother Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused?It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, onthe sun’s rays (by Hearing and by Vision); itis a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiri-tual sort. In like manner, ask me not, Whereare the LAWS; where is the GOVERNMENT?In vain wilt thou go to Schonbrunn, to Down-ing Street, to the Palais Bourbon; thou find-est nothing there but brick or stone houses,and some bundles of Papers tied with tape.Where, then, is that same cunningly devised

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almighty GOVERNMENT of theirs to be laidhands on? Everywhere, yet nowhere: seenonly in its works, this too is a thing aeriform,invisible; or if you will, mystic and miracu-lous. So spiritual (geistig) is our whole dailyLife: all that we do springs out of Mystery,Spirit, invisible Force; only like a little Cloud-image, or Armida’s Palace, air-built, does theActual body itself forth from the great mysticDeep.

“Visible and tangible products of the Past,again, I reckon up to the extent of three:Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals; thentilled Fields, to either or to both of whichdivisions Roads with their Bridges may be-long; and thirdly—Books. In which thirdtruly, the last invented, lies a worth far sur-passing that of the two others. Wondrous in-deed is the virtue of a true Book. Not like adead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearlyneeding repair; more like a tilled field, butthen a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, letme rather say, it stands from year to year,and from age to age (we have Books thatalready number some hundred and fifty hu-man ages); and yearly comes its new produceof leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Philo-sophical, Political Systems; or were it onlySermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays), ev-ery one of which is talismanic and thaumatur-gic, for it can persuade men. O thou whoart able to write a Book, which once in thetwo centuries or oftener there is a man giftedto do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom

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they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thoutoo art a Conqueror and Victor; but of thetrue sort, namely over the Devil: thou toohast built what will outlast all marble andmetal, and be a wonder-bringing City of theMind, a Temple and Seminary and PropheticMount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth willpilgrim.— Fool! why journeyest thou weari-somely, in thy antiquarian fervor, to gazeon the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clayones of Sacchara? These stand there, as Ican tell thee, idle and inert, looking over theDesert, foolishly enough, for the last threethousand years: but canst thou not open thyHebrew BIBLE, then, or even Luther’s Ver-sion thereof?”

No less satisfactory is his sudden appear-ance not in Battle, yet on some Battle-field;which, we soon gather, must be that of Wa-gram; so that here, for once, is a certain ap-proximation to distinctness of date. Omittingmuch, let us impart what follows:—

“Horrible enough! A whole Marchfeldstrewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ru-ined tumbrils, and dead men and horses;stragglers still remaining not so much asburied. And those red mould heaps; ay, therelie the Shells of Men, out of which all theLife and Virtue has been blown; and noware they swept together, and crammed downout of sight, like blown Egg-shells!—Did Na-ture, when she bade the Donau bring downhis mould-cargoes from the Carinthian andCarpathian Heights, and spread them outhere into the softest, richest level,—intend

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thee, O Marchfeld, for a corn-bearing Nursery,whereon her children might be nursed; or fora Cockpit, wherein they might the more com-modiously be throttled and tattered? Werethy three broad Highways, meeting here fromthe ends of Europe, made for Ammunition-wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams and Still-frieds but so many ready-built Casemates,wherein the house of Hapsburg might bat-ter with artillery, and with artillery be bat-tered? Konig Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks,dies under Rodolf ’s truncheon; here KaiserFranz falls a-swoon under Napoleon’s: withinwhich five centuries, to omit the others, howhas thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced anddefiled! The greensward is torn up and tram-pled down; man’s fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge-rows, and pleasant dwellings,blown away with gunpowder; and the kindseedfield lies a desolate, hideous Place ofSkulls.—Nevertheless, Nature is at work; nei-ther shall these Powder-Devilkins with theirutmost devilry gainsay her: but all that goreand carnage will be shrouded in, absorbedinto manure; and next year the Marchfeld willbe green, nay greener. Thrifty unwearied Na-ture, ever out of our great waste educing somelittle profit of thy own,—how dost thou, fromthe very carcass of the Killer, bring Life forthe Living!

“What, speaking in quite unofficial lan-guage, is the net purport and upshot ofwar? To my own knowledge, for example,there dwell and toil, in the British village ofDumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls.

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From these, by certain ‘Natural Enemies’ ofthe French, there are successively selected,during the French war, say thirty able-bodiedmen; Dumdrudge, at her own expense, hassuckled and nursed them: she has, not with-out difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to man-hood, and even trained them to crafts, so thatone can weave, another build, another ham-mer, and the weakest can stand under thirtystone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid muchweeping and swearing, they are selected; alldressed in red; and shipped away, at the pub-lic charges, some two thousand miles, or sayonly to the south of Spain; and fed there tillwanted. And now to that same spot, in thesouth of Spain, are thirty similar French arti-sans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like man-ner wending: till at length, after infinite ef-fort, the two parties come into actual juxta-position; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty,each with a gun in his hand. Straightaway theword ‘Fire!’ is given; and they blow the soulsout of one another; and in place of sixty briskuseful craftsmen, the world has sixty deadcarcasses, which it must bury, and anew shedtears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busyas the Devil is, not the smallest! They livedfar enough apart; were the entirest strangers;nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, un-consciously, by Commerce, some mutual help-fulness between them. How then? Simpleton!their Governors had fallen out; and insteadof shooting one another, had the cunning tomake these poor blockheads shoot.—Alas, sois it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other

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lands; still as of old, ‘what devilry soeverKings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!’—Inthat fiction of the English Smollett, it is true,the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophet-ically shadowed forth; where the two NaturalEnemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe,filled with Brimstone; light the same, andsmoke in one another’s faces, till the weakergives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era,what blood-filled trenches, and contentiouscenturies, may still divide us!”

Thus can the Professor, at least in lucidintervals, look away from his own sorrows,over the many-colored world, and pertinentlyenough note what is passing there. We mayremark, indeed, that for the matter of spiri-tual culture, if for nothing else, perhaps fewperiods of his life were richer than this. Inter-nally, there is the most momentous instruc-tive Course of Practical Philosophy, with Ex-periments, going on; towards the right com-prehension of which his Peripatetic habits, fa-vorable to Meditation, might help him ratherthan hinder. Externally, again, as he wan-ders to and fro, there are, if for the longingheart little substance, yet for the seeing eyesights enough in these so boundless Travelsof his, granting that the Satanic School waseven partially kept down, what an incredibleknowledge of our Planet, and its Inhabitantsand their Works, that is to say, of all knowablethings, might not Teufelsdröckh acquire!

“I have read in most Public Libraries,” sayshe, “including those of Constantinople andSamarcand: in most Colleges, except the Chi-

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nese Mandarin ones, I have studied, or seenthat there was no studying. Unknown Lan-guages have I oftenest gathered from theirnatural repertory, the Air, by my organ ofHearing; Statistics, Geographics, Topograph-ics came, through the Eye, almost of their ownaccord. The ways of Man, how he seeks food,and warmth, and protection for himself, inmost regions, are ocularly known to me. Likethe great Hadrian, I meted out much of theterraqueous Globe with a pair of Compassesthat belonged to myself only.

“Of great Scenes why speak? Three sum-mer days, I lingered reflecting, and even com-posing (dichtete), by the Pine-chasms of Vau-cluse; and in that clear Lakelet moistened mybread. I have sat under the Palm-trees of Tad-mor; smoked a pipe among the ruins of Baby-lon. The great Wall of China I have seen; andcan testify that it is of gray brick, coped andcovered with granite, and shows only second-rate masonry.—Great Events, also, have notI witnessed? Kings sweated down (ausge-mergelt) into Berlin-and-Milan Customhouse-Officers; the World well won, and the Worldwell lost; oftener than once a hundred thou-sand individuals shot (by each other) in oneday. All kindreds and peoples and nationsdashed together, and shifted and shovelledinto heaps, that they might ferment there,and in time unite. The birth-pangs of Democ-racy, wherewith convulsed Europe was groan-ing in cries that reached Heaven, could not es-cape me.

“For great Men I have ever had the

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warmest predilection; and can perhaps boastthat few such in this era have wholly escapedme. Great Men are the inspired (speaking andacting) Texts of that divine BOOK OF REV-ELATIONS, whereof a Chapter is completedfrom epoch to epoch, and by some namedHISTORY; to which inspired Texts your nu-merous talented men, and your innumerableuntalented men, are the better or worse ex-egetic Commentaries, and wagon-load of too-stupid, heretical or orthodox, weekly Ser-mons. For my study, the inspired Texts them-selves! Thus did not I, in very early days, hav-ing disguised me as tavern-waiter, stand be-hind the field-chairs, under that shady Tree atTreisnitz by the Jena Highway; waiting uponthe great Schiller and greater Goethe; andhearing what I have not forgotten. For—”

—But at this point the Editor recalls hisprinciple of caution, some time ago laid down,and must suppress much. Let not the sa-credness of Laurelled, still more, of CrownedHeads, be tampered with. Should we, at afuture day, find circumstances altered, andthe time come for Publication, then may theseglimpses into the privacy of the Illustrious beconceded; which for the present were littlebetter than treacherous, perhaps traitorousEavesdroppings. Of Lord Byron, therefore,of Pope Pius, Emperor Tarakwang, and the“White Water-roses” (Chinese Carbonari) withtheir mysteries, no notice here! Of Napoleonhimself we shall only, glancing from afar,remark that Teufelsdröckh’s relation to himseems to have been of very varied character.

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At first we find our poor Professor on the pointof being shot as a spy; then taken into pri-vate conversation, even pinched on the ear,yet presented with no money; at last indig-nantly dismissed, almost thrown out of doors,as an “Ideologist.” “He himself,” says theProfessor, “was among the completest Ideol-ogists, at least Ideopraxists: in the Idea (inder Idee) he lived, moved and fought. Theman was a Divine Missionary, though uncon-scious of it; and preached, through the can-non’s throat, that great doctrine, La carriereouverte aux talens (The Tools to him that canhandle them), which is our ultimate PoliticalEvangel, wherein alone can liberty lie. Madlyenough he preached, it is true, as Enthu-siasts and first Missionaries are wont, withimperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant;yet as articulately perhaps as the case admit-ted. Or call him, if you will, an AmericanBackwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetratedforests, and battle with innumerable wolves,and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, ri-oting, and even theft; whom, notwithstanding,the peaceful Sower will follow, and, as he cutsthe boundless harvest, bless.”

More legitimate and decisively authenticis Teufelsdröckh’s appearance and emergence(we know not well whence) in the solitudeof the North Cape, on that June Midnight.He has a “light-blue Spanish cloak” hanginground him, as his “most commodious, princi-pal, indeed sole upper-garment;” and standsthere, on the World-promontory, looking overthe infinite Brine, like a little blue Belfry (as

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we figure), now motionless indeed, yet ready,if stirred, to ring quaintest changes.

“Silence as of death,” writes he; “for Mid-night, even in the Arctic latitudes, has itscharacter: nothing but the granite cliffsruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of thatslow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in theutmost North the great Sun hangs low andlazy, as if he too were slumbering. Yet is hiscloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirrorof waters, like a tremulous fire-pillar, shoot-ing downwards to the abyss, and hide itselfunder my feet. In such moments, Solitudealso is invaluable; for who would speak, orbe looked on, when behind him lies all Eu-rope and Africa, fast asleep, except the watch-men; and before him the silent Immensity,and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sun isbut a porch-lamp?

“Nevertheless, in this solemn momentcomes a man, or monster, scrambling fromamong the rock-hollows; and, shaggy, huge asthe Hyperborean Bear, hails me in Russianspeech: most probably, therefore, a RussianSmuggler. With courteous brevity, I signifymy indifference to contraband trade, my hu-mane intentions, yet strong wish to be pri-vate. In vain: the monster, counting doubt-less on his superior stature, and minded tomake sport for himself, or perhaps profit, wereit with murder, continues to advance; everassailing me with his importunate train-oilbreath; and now has advanced, till we standboth on the verge of the rock, the deep Sea

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rippling greedily down below. What argu-ment will avail? On the thick Hyperborean,cherubic reasoning, seraphic eloquence werelost. Prepared for such extremity, I, deftlyenough, whisk aside one step; draw out, frommy interior reservoirs, a sufficient Birming-ham Horse-pistol, and say, ‘Be so obliging asretire, Friend (Er ziehe sich zuruck, Freund),and with promptitude!’ This logic even theHyperborean understands: fast enough, withapologetic, petitionary growl, he sidles off;and, except for suicidal as well as homicidalpurposes, need not return.

“Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gun-powder: that it makes all men alike tall. Nay,if thou be cooler, cleverer than I, if thou havemore Mind, though all but no Body what-ever, then canst thou kill me first, and art thetaller. Hereby, at last, is the Goliath power-less, and the David resistless; savage Animal-ism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism is all.

“With respect to Duels, indeed, I havemy own ideas. Few things, in this so sur-prising world, strike me with more surprise.Two little visual Spectra of men, hoveringwith insecure enough cohesion in the midstof the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolvetherein, at any rate, very soon,—make pauseat the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirlround; and, simultaneously by the cunningestmechanism, explode one another into Disso-lution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt), the littlespitfires!—Nay, I think with old Hugo vonTrimberg: ‘God must needs laugh outright,

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could such a thing be, to see his wondrousManikins here below.”’

But amid these specialties, let us not for-get the great generality, which is our chiefquest here: How prospered the inner man ofTeufelsdröckh, under so much outward shift-ing! Does Legion still lurk in him, thoughrepressed; or has he exorcised that Devil’sBrood? We can answer that the symptomscontinue promising. Experience is the grandspiritual Doctor; and with him Teufelsdröckhhas now been long a patient, swallowing manya bitter bolus. Unless our poor Friend belongto the numerous class of Incurables, whichseems not likely, some cure will doubtless beeffected. We should rather say that Legion, orthe Satanic School, was now pretty well extir-pated and cast out, but next to nothing intro-duced in its room; whereby the heart remains,for the while, in a quiet but no comfortablestate.

“At length, after so much roasting,” thuswrites our Autobiographer, “I was what youmight name calcined. Pray only that it benot rather, as is the more frequent issue, re-duced to a caput-mortuum! But in any case,by mere dint of practice, I had grown fa-miliar with many things. Wretchedness wasstill wretched; but I could now partly seethrough it, and despise it. Which highestmortal, in this inane Existence, had I notfound a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted;and, when I looked through his brave garni-tures, miserable enough? Thy wishes have allbeen sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had

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they even been all granted! Did not the BoyAlexander weep because he had not two Plan-ets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; orafter that, a whole Universe? Ach Gott, whenI gazed into these Stars, have they not lookeddown on me as if with pity, from their serenespaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenlytears over the little lot of man! Thousands ofhuman generations, all as noisy as our own,have been swallowed up of Time, and thereremains no wreck of them any more; and Arc-turus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiadesare still shining in their courses, clear andyoung, as when the Shepherd first noted themin the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is thispaltry little Dog-cage of an Earth; what artthou that sittest whining there? Thou artstill Nothing, Nobody: true; but who, then, isSomething, Somebody? For thee the Familyof Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou artwholly as a dissevered limb: so be it; perhapsit is better so!”

Too-heavy-laden Teufelsdröckh! Yet surelyhis bands are loosening; one day he will hurlthe burden far from him, and bound forth freeand with a second youth.

“This,” says our Professor, “was the CEN-TRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached;through which whoso travels from the Neg-ative Pole to the Positive must necessarilypass.”

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CHAPTER IX. THEEVERLASTINGYEA.

“Temptations in the Wilderness!” exclaimsTeufelsdröckh, “Have we not all to be triedwith such? Not so easily can the old Adam,lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. OurLife is compassed round with Necessity; yet isthe meaning of Life itself no other than Free-dom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we awarfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate,Work thou in Well-doing, lies mysteriouslywritten, in Promethean Prophetic Characters,in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, nightor day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; tillit burn forth, in our conduct, a visible, actedGospel of Freedom. And as the clay-givenmandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the sametime persuasively proclaims itself through ev-ery nerve,—must not there be a confusion, acontest, before the better Influence can be-come the upper?

“To me nothing seems more natural than

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that the Son of Man, when such God-givenmandate first prophetically stirs within him,and the Clay must now be vanquished orvanquish,—should be carried of the spiritinto grim Solitudes, and there fronting theTempter do grimmest battle with him; defi-antly setting him at naught till he yield andfly. Name it as we choose: with or withoutvisible Devil, whether in the natural Desertof rocks and sands, or in the populous moralDesert of selfishness and baseness,—to suchTemptation are we all called. Unhappy ifwe are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting hasnever blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quivers dubiously amid meanerlights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in dark-ness, under earthly vapors!—Our Wildernessis the wide World in an Atheistic Century;our Forty Days are long years of suffering andfasting: nevertheless, to these also comes anend. Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory,yet the consciousness of Battle, and the re-solve to persevere therein while life or facultyis left. To me also, entangled in the enchantedforests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight andof sound, it was given, after weariest wan-derings, to work out my way into the highersunlit slopes—of that Mountain which has nosummit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!”

He says elsewhere, under a less ambi-tious figure; as figures are, once for all, nat-ural to him: “Has not thy Life been that ofmost sufficient men (tuchtigen Manner) thouhast known in this generation? An outflush

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of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the firstfallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds asvaluable herbs: this all parched away, un-der the Droughts of practical and spiritualUnbelief, as Disappointment, in thought andact, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, andDoubt gradually settled into Denial! If I havehad a second-crop, and now see the peren-nial greensward, and sit under umbrageouscedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt);herein too, be the Heavens praised, I am notwithout examples, and even exemplars.”

So that, for Teufelsdröckh, also, therehas been a “glorious revolution:” these madshadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrim-ings of his were but some purifying “Temp-tation in the Wilderness,” before his apos-tolic work (such as it was) could begin; whichTemptation is now happily over, and the Devilonce more worsted! Was “that high momentin the Rue de l’Enfer,” then, properly theturning-point of the battle; when the Fiendsaid, Worship me, or be torn in shreds; andwas answered valiantly with an Apage Sa-tana?—Singular Teufelsdröckh, would thouhadst told thy singular story in plain words!But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, for such. Nothing but innuendoes, fig-urative crotchets: a typical Shadow, fitfullywavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logicalPicture. “How paint to the sensual eye,” askshe once, “what passes in the Holy-of-Holies ofMan’s Soul; in what words, known to theseprofane times, speak even afar-off of the un-speakable?” We ask in turn: Why perplex

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these times, profane as they are, with need-less obscurity, by omission and by commis-sion? Not mystical only is our Professor, butwhimsical; and involves himself, now morethan ever, in eye-bewildering chiaroscuro.Successive glimpses, here faithfully imparted,our more gifted readers must endeavor tocombine for their own behoof.

He says: “The hot Harmattan wind hadraged itself out; its howl went silent withinme; and the long-deafened soul could nowhear. I paused in my wild wanderings; andsat me down to wait, and consider; for it wasas if the hour of change drew nigh. I seemedto surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Fly,then, false shadows of Hope; I will chase youno more, I will believe you no more. And yetoo, haggard spectres of Fear, I care not foryou; ye too are all shadows and a lie. Let merest here: for I am way-weary and life-weary;I will rest here, were it but to die: to die or tolive is alike to me; alike insignificant.”—Andagain: “Here, then, as I lay in that CENTREOF INDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by be-nignant upper Influence, into a healing sleep,the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, andI awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth.The first preliminary moral Act, Annihilationof Self (Selbst-todtung), had been happily ac-complished; and my mind’s eyes were now un-sealed, and its hands ungyved.”

Might we not also conjecture that the fol-lowing passage refers to his Locality, duringthis same “healing sleep;” that his Pilgrim-staff lies cast aside here, on “the high table-

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land;” and indeed that the repose is alreadytaking wholesome effect on him? If it werenot that the tone, in some parts, has moreof riancy, even of levity, than we could haveexpected! However, in Teufelsdröckh, thereis always the strangest Dualism: light danc-ing, with guitar-music, will be going on in thefore-court, while by fits from within comes thefaint whimpering of woe and wail. We tran-scribe the piece entire.

“Beautiful it was to sit there, as inmy skyey Tent, musing and meditating; onthe high table-land, in front of the Moun-tains; over me, as roof, the azure Dome,and around me, for walls, four azure-flowingcurtains,—namely, of the Four azure Winds,on whose bottom-fringes also I have seengilding. And then to fancy the fair Castlesthat stood sheltered in these Mountain hol-lows; with their green flower-lawns, and whitedames and damosels, lovely enough: or bet-ter still, the straw-roofed Cottages, whereinstood many a Mother baking bread, with herchildren round her:—all hidden and protect-ingly folded up in the valley-folds; yet thereand alive, as sure as if I beheld them. Orto see, as well as fancy, the nine Towns andVillages, that lay round my mountain-seat,which, in still weather, were wont to speak tome (by their steeple-bells) with metal tongue;and, in almost all weather, proclaimed theirvitality by repeated Smoke-clouds; whereon,as on a culinary horologe, I might read thehour of the day. For it was the smoke of cook-ery, as kind housewives at morning, midday,

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eventide, were boiling their husbands’ kettles;and ever a blue pillar rose up into the air,successively or simultaneously, from each ofthe nine, saying, as plainly as smoke couldsay: Such and such a meal is getting readyhere. Not uninteresting! For you have thewhole Borough, with all its love-makings andscandal-mongeries, contentions and content-ments, as in miniature, and could cover it allwith your hat.—If, in my wide Way-farings, Ihad learned to look into the business of theWorld in its details, here perhaps was theplace for combining it into general proposi-tions, and deducing inferences therefrom.

“Often also could I see the black Tem-pest marching in anger through the Distance:round some Schreckhorn, as yet grim-blue,would the eddying vapor gather, and there tu-multuously eddy, and flow down like a madwitch’s hair; till, after a space, it vanished,and, in the clear sunbeam, your Schreck-horn stood smiling grim-white, for the vaporhad held snow. How thou fermentest andelaboratest, in thy great fermenting-vat andlaboratory of an Atmosphere, of a World, ONature!—Or what is Nature? Ha! why do Inot name thee god? Art not thou the ‘LivingGarment of God’? O Heavens, is it, in verydeed, he, then, that ever speaks through thee;that lives and loves in thee, that lives andloves in me?

“Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendors, of that Truth, and Beginningof Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul.Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked

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in Nova Zembla; ah, like the mother’s voice toher little child that strays bewildered, weep-ing, in unknown tumults; like soft streamingsof celestial music to my too-exasperated heart,came that Evangel. The Universe is not deadand demoniacal, a charnel-house with spec-tres; but godlike, and my Father’s!

“With other eyes, too, could I now lookupon my fellowman: with an infinite Love,an infinite Pity. Poor, wandering, waywardman! Art thou not tried, and beaten withstripes, even as I am? Ever, whether thoubear the royal mantle or the beggar’s gabar-dine, art thou not so weary, so heavy-laden;and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O myBrother, my Brother, why cannot I shelterthee in my bosom, and wipe away all tearsfrom thy eyes!—Truly, the din of many-voicedLife, which, in this solitude, with the mind’sorgan, I could hear, was no longer a madden-ing discord, but a melting one; like inarticu-late cries, and sobbings of a dumb creature,which in the ear of Heaven are prayers. Thepoor Earth, with her poor joys, was now myneedy Mother, not my cruel Stepdame; Man,with his so mad Wants and so mean Endeav-ors, had become the dearer to me; and evenfor his sufferings and his sins, I now firstnamed him Brother. Thus was I standing inthe porch of that ‘Sanctuary of Sorrow;’ bystrange, steep ways had I too been guidedthither; and ere long its sacred gates wouldopen, and the ‘Divine Depth of Sorrow’ lie dis-closed to me.”

The Professor says, he here first got eye on

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the Knot that had been strangling him, andstraightway could unfasten it, and was free.“A vain interminable controversy,” writes he,“touching what is at present called Origin ofEvil, or some such thing, arises in every soul,since the beginning of the world; and in ev-ery soul, that would pass from idle Sufferinginto actual Endeavoring, must first be put anend to. The most, in our time, have to go con-tent with a simple, incomplete enough Sup-pression of this controversy; to a few someSolution of it is indispensable. In every newera, too, such Solution comes out in differentterms; and ever the Solution of the last erahas become obsolete, and is found unservice-able. For it is man’s nature to change his Di-alect from century to century; he cannot helpit though he would. The authentic Church-Catechism of our present century has not yetfallen into my hands: meanwhile, for my ownprivate behoof I attempt to elucidate the mat-ter so. Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe,comes of his Greatness; it is because there isan Infinite in him, which with all his cunninghe cannot quite bury under the Finite. Willthe whole Finance Ministers and Upholster-ers and Confectioners of modern Europe un-dertake, in joint-stock company, to make oneShoeblack happy? They cannot accomplishit, above an hour or two: for the Shoeblackalso has a Soul quite other than his Stomach;and would require, if you consider it, for hispermanent satisfaction and saturation, sim-ply this allotment, no more, and no less: God’sinfinite Universe altogether to himself, therein

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to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fastas it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throatlike that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them;to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing.No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grum-bles that it might have been of better vintage.Try him with half of a Universe, of an Om-nipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the pro-prietor of the other half, and declares himselfthe most maltreated of men.—Always there isa black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as Isaid, the Shadow of Ourselves.

“But the whim we have of Happiness issomewhat thus. By certain valuations, andaverages, of our own striking, we come uponsome sort of average terrestrial lot; this wefancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefea-sible right. It is simple payment of our wages,of our deserts; requires neither thanks norcomplaint; only such overplus as there may bedo we account Happiness; any deficit again isMisery. Now consider that we have the valua-tion of our own deserts ourselves, and what afund of Self-conceit there is in each of us,—doyou wonder that the balance should so oftendip the wrong way, and many a Blockhead cry:See there, what a payment; was ever worthygentleman so used!—I tell thee, Blockhead, itall comes of thy Vanity; of what thou fanci-est those same deserts of thine to be. Fancythat thou deservest to be hanged (as is mostlikely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be onlyshot: fancy that thou deservest to be hangedin a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die inhemp.

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“So true is it, what I then said, that theFraction of Life can be increased in value notso much by increasing your Numerator as bylessening your Denominator. Nay, unless myAlgebra deceive me, Unity itself divided byZero will give Infinity. Make thy claim ofwages a zero, then; thou hast the world underthy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write:‘It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) thatLife, properly speaking, can be said to begin.’

“I asked myself: What is this that, eversince earliest years, thou hast been fret-ting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? Say it in a word:is it not because thou art not happy? Becausethe thou (sweet gentleman) is not sufficientlyhonored, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovinglycared for? Foolish soul! What Act of Legisla-ture was there that thou shouldst be Happy?A little while ago thou hadst no right to be atall. What if thou wert born and predestinednot to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thounothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliestthrough the Universe seeking after somewhatto eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrionenough is not given thee? Close thy Byron;open thy Goethe.”

“Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse ofit!” cries he elsewhere: “there is in man aHIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can dowithout Happiness, and instead thereof findBlessedness! Was it not to preach forth thissame HIGHER that sages and martyrs, thePoet and the Priest, in all times, have spo-ken and suffered; bearing testimony, through

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life and through death, of the Godlike that isin Man, and how in the Godlike only has heStrength and Freedom? Which God-inspireddDoctrine art thou also honored to be taught;O Heavens! and broken with manifold merci-ful Afflictions, even till thou become contriteand learn it! Oh, thank thy Destiny for these;thankfully bear what yet remain: thou hadstneed of them; the Self in thee needed to beannihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms isLife rooting out the deep-seated chronic Dis-ease, and triumphs over Death. On the roar-ing billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, butborne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Lovenot Pleasure; love God. This is the EVER-LASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction issolved: wherein whoso walks and works, it iswell with him.”

And again: “Small is it that thou cansttrample the Earth with its injuries under thyfeet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee: thoucanst love the Earth while it injures thee,and even because it injures thee; for this aGreater than Zeno was needed, and he toowas sent. Knowest thou that ‘Worship of Sor-row’? The Temple thereof, founded some eigh-teen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, over-grown with jungle, the habitation of dolefulcreatures: nevertheless, venture forward; ina low crypt, arched out of falling fragments,thou findest the Altar still there, and its sa-cred Lamp perennially burning.”

Without pretending to comment on whichstrange utterances, the Editor will only re-mark, that there lies beside them much of

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a still more questionable character; unsuitedto the general apprehension; nay wherein hehimself does not see his way. Nebulous disqui-sitions on Religion, yet not without bursts ofsplendor; on the “perennial continuance of In-spiration;” on Prophecy; that there are “truePriests, as well as Baal-Priests, in our ownday:” with more of the like sort. We selectsome fractions, by way of finish to this farrago.

“Cease, my much-respected Herr vonVoltaire,” thus apostrophizes the Professor:“shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointedthee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thoudemonstrated this proposition, considerableor otherwise: That the Mythus of the Chris-tian Religion looks not in the eighteenth cen-tury as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thysix-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirtythousand other quartos and folios, and flyingsheets or reams, printed before and since onthe same subject, all needed to convince us ofso little! But what next? Wilt thou help usto embody the divine Spirit of that Religion ina new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture,that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing,may live? What! thou hast no faculty in thatkind? Only a torch for burning, no hammer forbuilding? Take our thanks, then, and—thyselfaway.

“Meanwhile what are antiquated Myth-uses to me? Or is the God present, felt in myown heart, a thing which Herr von Voltairewill dispute out of me; or dispute into me?To the ‘Worship of Sorrow’ ascribe what ori-gin and genesis thou pleasest, has not that

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Worship originated, and been generated; is itnot here? Feel it in thy heart, and then saywhether it is of God! This is Belief; all else isOpinion,—for which latter whoso will, let himworry and be worried.”

“Neither,” observes he elsewhere, “shall yetear out one another’s eyes, struggling over‘Plenary Inspiration,’ and such like: try ratherto get a little even Partial Inspiration, each ofyou for himself. One Bible I know, of whosePlenary Inspiration doubt is not so much aspossible; nay with my own eyes I saw theGod’s-Hand writing it: thereof all other Biblesare but Leaves,—say, in Picture-Writing to as-sist the weaker faculty.”

Or, to give the wearied reader relief, andbring it to an end, let him take the followingperhaps more intelligible passage:—

“To me, in this our life,” says the Profes-sor, “which is an internecine warfare withthe Time-spirit, other warfare seems ques-tionable. Hast thou in any way a contentionwith thy brother, I advise thee, think wellwhat the meaning thereof is. If thou gaugeit to the bottom, it is simply this: ‘Fellow, see!thou art taking more than thy share of Happi-ness in the world, something from my share:which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay Iwill fight thee rather.’—Alas, and the wholelot to be divided is such a beggarly matter,truly a ‘feast of shells,’ for the substance hasbeen spilled out: not enough to quench oneAppetite; and the collective human speciesclutching at them!—Can we not, in all suchcases, rather say: ‘Take it, thou too-ravenous

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individual; take that pitiful additional frac-tion of a share, which I reckoned mine, butwhich thou so wantest; take it with a blessing:would to Heaven I had enough for thee!’—IfFichte’s Wissenschaftslehre be, ‘to a certainextent, Applied Christianity,’ surely to a stillgreater extent, so is this. We have here not aWhole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namelythe Passive half: could we but do it, as we candemonstrate it!

“But indeed Conviction, were it never soexcellent, is worthless till it convert itself intoConduct. Nay properly Conviction is not pos-sible till then; inasmuch as all Speculationis by nature endless, formless, a vortex amidvortices, only by a felt indubitable certaintyof Experience does it find any centre to re-volve round, and so fashion itself into a sys-tem. Most true is it, as a wise man teachesus, that ‘Doubt of any sort cannot be removedexcept by Action.’ On which ground, too, lethim who gropes painfully in darkness or un-certain light, and prays vehemently that thedawn may ripen into day, lay this other pre-cept well to heart, which to me was of invalu-able service: ‘Do the Duty which lies nearestthee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thysecond Duty will already have become clearer.

“May we not say, however, that the hourof Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this:When your Ideal World, wherein the wholeman has been dimly struggling and inexpress-ibly languishing to work, becomes revealed,and thrown open; and you discover, withamazement enough, like the Lothario in Wil-

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helm Meister, that your ‘America is here ornowhere’? The Situation that has not its Duty,its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yeshere, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despi-cable Actual, wherein thou even now stand-est, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it outtherefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impedimenttoo is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuffthou art to shape that same Ideal out of: whatmatters whether such stuff be of this sort orthat, so the Form thou give it be heroic, bepoetic? O thou that pinest in the imprison-ment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to thegods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest isalready with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldstthou only see!

“But it is with man’s Soul as it was withNature: the beginning of Creation is—Light.Till the eye have vision, the whole membersare in bonds. Divine moment, when overthe tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there beLight! Ever to the greatest that has feltsuch moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, tothe simplest and least. The mad primeval Dis-cord is hushed; the rudely jumbled conflict-ing elements bind themselves into separateFirmaments: deep silent rock-foundations arebuilt beneath; and the skyey vault with its ev-erlasting Luminaries above: instead of a darkwasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,heaven-encompassed World.

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“I too could now say to myself: Be no longera Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Pro-duce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest in-finitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it,in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast inthee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoeverthy hand findeth to do, do it with thy wholemight. Work while it is called To-day; for theNight cometh, wherein no man can work.”

CHAPTER X.PAUSE.

Thus have we, as closely and perhaps sat-isfactorily as, in such circumstances, mightbe, followed Teufelsdröckh, through the var-ious successive states and stages of Growth,Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Repro-bation, into a certain clearer state of whathe himself seems to consider as Conversion.“Blame not the word,” says he; “rejoice ratherthat such a word, signifying such a thing,has come to light in our modern Era, thoughhidden from the wisest Ancients. The OldWorld knew nothing of Conversion; instead ofan Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice ofHercules. It was a new-attained progress inthe Moral Development of man: hereby hasthe Highest come home to the bosoms of themost Limited; what to Plato was but a hal-lucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is nowclear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, yourWesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists andMethodists.”

It is here, then, that the spiritual ma-jority of Teufelsdröckh commences: we are

239

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henceforth to see him “work in well-doing,”with the spirit and clear aims of a Man. Hehas discovered that the Ideal Workshop heso panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long been stum-bling in. He can say to himself: “Tools? Thouhast no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or aThing, now alive but has tools. The basest ofcreated animalcules, the Spider itself, has aspinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom within its head: the stupidest of Oys-ters has a Papin’s-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being thatcan live can do something: this let him do.—Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished, fur-nishable with some glimmerings of Light; andthree fingers to hold a Pen withal? Neversince Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or evenbefore it, was there such a wonder-workingTool: greater than all recorded miracles havebeen performed by Pens. For strangely in thisso solid-seeming World, which neverthelessis in continual restless flux, it is appointedthat Sound, to appearance the most fleeting,should be the most continuing of all things.The word is well said to be omnipotent in thisworld; man, thereby divine, can create as bya Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is inthee; what God has given thee, what the Devilshall not take away. Higher task than that ofPriesthood was allotted to no man: wert thoubut the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, isit not honor enough therein to spend and bespent?

“By this Art, which whoso will may sac-

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rilegiously degrade into a handicraft,” addsTeufelsdröckh, “have I thenceforth abidden.Writings of mine, not indeed known as mine(for what am I?), have fallen, perhaps notaltogether void, into the mighty seedfield ofOpinion; fruits of my unseen sowing gratify-ingly meet me here and there. I thank theHeavens that I have now found my Calling;wherein, with or without perceptible result, Iam minded diligently to persevere.

“Nay how knowest thou,” cries he, “but thisand the other pregnant Device, now grownto be a world-renowned far-working Institu-tion; like a grain of right mustard-seed oncecast into the right soil, and now stretch-ing out strong boughs to the four winds,for the birds of the air to lodge in,—mayhave been properly my doing? Some one’sdoing, it without doubt was; from someIdea, in some single Head, it did first of alltake beginning: why not from some Idea inmine?” Does Teufelsdröckh, here glance atthat “SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATIONOF PROPERTY (Eigenthums-conservirendeGesellschaft),” of which so many ambiguousnotices glide spectra-like through these inex-pressible Paper-bags? “An Institution,” hintshe, “not unsuitable to the wants of the time;as indeed such sudden extension proves: foralready can the Society number, among itsoffice-bearers or corresponding members, thehighest Names, if not the highest Persons,in Germany, England, France; and contribu-tions, both of money and of meditation pourin from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the

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remaining Integrity of the world, and, defen-sively and with forethought, marshal it roundthis Palladium.” Does Teufelsdröckh mean,then, to give himself out as the originatorof that so notable Eigenthums-conservirende(“Owndom-conserving”) Gesellschaft; and ifso, what, in the Devil’s name, is it? He againhints: “At a time when the divine Command-ment, Thou shalt not steal, wherein truly, ifwell understood, is comprised the whole He-brew Decalogue, with Solon’s and Lycurgrus’sConstitutions, Justinian’s Pandects, the CodeNapoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divini-ties, Moralities whatsoever, that man hashitherto devised (and enforced with Altar-fireand Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance: ata time, I say, when this divine Command-ment has all but faded away from the gen-eral remembrance; and, with little disguise,a new opposite Commandment, Thou shaltsteal, is everywhere promulgated,—it perhapsbehooved, in this universal dotage and deli-ration, the sound portion of mankind to be-stir themselves and rally. When the widestand wildest violations of that divine right ofProperty, the only divine right now extant orconceivable, are sanctioned and recommendedby a vicious Press, and the world has livedto hear it asserted that we have no Prop-erty in our very Bodies, but only an acciden-tal Possession and Life-rent, what is the is-sue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catch-poles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin;but what, except perhaps some such Univer-

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sal Association, can protect us against wholemeat-devouring and man-devouring hosts ofBoa-constrictors. If, therefore, the more se-questered Thinker have wondered, in his pri-vacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written Program in the Public Journals, withits high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes,could have proceeded,—let him now ceasesuch wonder; and, with undivided faculty,betake himself to the Concurrenz (Competi-tion).”

We ask: Has this same “perhaps not ill-written Program,” or any other authenticTransaction of that Property-conserving Soci-ety, fallen under the eye of the British Reader,in any Journal foreign or domestic? If so,what are those Prize-Questions; what are theterms of Competition, and when and where?No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light ofany sort, to be met with in these Paper-bags!Or is the whole business one other of thosewhimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities,whereby Herr Teufelsdröckh, meaning muchor nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with us?

Here, indeed, at length, must the Editorgive utterance to a painful suspicion, which,through late Chapters, has begun to haunthim; paralyzing any little enthusiasm thatmight still have rendered his thorny Bio-graphical task a labor of love. It is a suspiciongrounded perhaps on trifles, yet confirmed al-most into certainty by the more and morediscernible humoristico-satirical tendency ofTeufelsdröckh, in whom underground humors

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and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel withinwheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in oneword, that these Autobiographical Documentsare partly a mystification! What if many a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction;if here we had no direct Camera-obscura Pic-ture of the Professor’s History; but only somemore or less fantastic Adumbration, symbol-ically, perhaps significantly enough, shadow-ing forth the same! Our theory begins tobe that, in receiving as literally authenticwhat was but hieroglyphically so, HofrathHeuschrecke, whom in that case we scruplenot to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was madea fool of, and set adrift to make fools of oth-ers. Could it be expected, indeed, that aman so known for impenetrable reticence asTeufelsdröckh would all at once frankly un-lock his private citadel to an English Editorand a German Hofrath; and not rather de-ceptively inlock both Editor and Hofrath inthe labyrinthic tortuosities and covered-waysof said citadel (having enticed them thither),to see, in his half-devilish way, how the foolswould look?

Of one fool, however, the Herr Professorwill perhaps find himself short. On a smallslip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the inkbeing all but invisible, we lately noticed, andwith effort decipher, the following: “Whatare your historical Facts; still more your bio-graphical? Wilt thou know a Man, above alla Mankind, by stringing together bead-rollsof what thou namest Facts? The Man is thespirit he worked in; not what he did, but what

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he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms,for which the fewest have the key. And thenhow your Blockhead (Dummkopf ) studies nottheir Meaning; but simply whether they arewell or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Im-moral! Still worse is it with your Bungler(Pfuscher): such I have seen reading someRousseau, with pretences of interpretation;and mistaking the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternityfor a common poisonous reptile.” Was the Pro-fessor apprehensive lest an Editor, selectedas the present boasts himself, might mistakethe Teufelsdröckh Serpent-of-Eternity in likemanner? For which reason it was to be al-tered, not without underhand satire, into aplainer Symbol? Or is this merely one ofhis half-sophisms, half-truisms, which if hecan but set on the back of a Figure, he caresnot whither it gallop? We say not with cer-tainty; and indeed, so strange is the Profes-sor, can never say. If our suspicion be whollyunfounded, let his own questionable ways,not our necessary circumspectness bear theblame.

But be this as it will, the somewhat exas-perated and indeed exhausted Editor deter-mines here to shut these Paper-bags for thepresent. Let it suffice that we know of Teu-felsdröckh, so far, if “not what he did, yetwhat he became:” the rather, as his char-acter has now taken its ultimate bent, andno new revolution, of importance, is to belooked for. The imprisoned Chrysalis is now awinged Psyche: and such, wheresoever be itsflight, it will continue. To trace by what com-

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plex gyrations (flights or involuntary waft-ings) through the mere external Life-element,Teufelsdröckh, reaches his University Profes-sorship, and the Psyche clothes herself incivic Titles, without altering her now fixednature,—would be comparatively an unpro-ductive task, were we even unsuspicious ofits being, for us at least, a false and impos-sible one. His outward Biography, therefore,which, at the Blumine Lover’s-Leap, we sawchurned utterly into spray-vapor, may hoverin that condition, for aught that concerns ushere. Enough that by survey of certain “poolsand plashes,” we have ascertained its generaldirection; do we not already know that, by oneway and other, it has long since rained downagain into a stream; and even now, at Weiss-nichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with thePhilosophy of Clothes, and visible to whosowill cast eye thereon? Over much invaluablematter, that lies scattered, like jewels amongquarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs, wemay have occasion to glance back, and some-what will demand insertion at the right place:meanwhile be our tiresome diggings thereinsuspended.

If now, before reopening the great Clothes-Volume, we ask what our degree of progress,during these Ten Chapters, has been, to-wards right understanding of the Clothes-Philosophy, let not our discouragement be-come total. To speak in that old figure ofthe Hell-gate Bridge over Chaos, a few flyingpontoons have perhaps been added, though asyet they drift straggling on the Flood; how

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far they will reach, when once the chains arestraightened and fastened, can, at present,only be matter of conjecture.

So much we already calculate: Throughmany a little loophole, we have had glimpsesinto the internal world of Teufelsdröckh; hisstrange mystic, almost magic Diagram of theUniverse, and how it was gradually drawn, isnot henceforth altogether dark to us. Thosemysterious ideas on time, which merit con-sideration, and are not wholly unintelligiblewith such, may by and by prove significant.Still more may his somewhat peculiar viewof Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribesto Nature. How all Nature and Life are butone Garment, a “Living Garment,” woven andever a-weaving in the “Loom of Time;” is nothere, indeed, the outline of a whole Clothes-Philosophy; at least the arena it is to work in?Remark, too, that the Character of the Man,nowise without meaning in such a matter, be-comes less enigmatic: amid so much tumul-tuous obscurity, almost like diluted madness,do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yeta boundless Reverence seem to loom forth, asthe two mountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all the rest were based and built?

Nay further, may we not say that Teufels-dröckh’s Biography, allowing it even, as sus-pected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibitsa man, as it were preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows ofthings into Things themselves he is led andcompelled. The “Passivity” given him by birthis fostered by all turns of his fortune. Ev-

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erywhere cast out, like oil out of water, frommingling in any Employment, in any publicCommunion, he has no portion but Solitude,and a life of Meditation. The whole energy ofhis existence is directed, through long years,on one task: that of enduring pain, if he can-not cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows ofthings oppress him, withstand him, threatenhim with fearfullest destruction: only by vic-toriously penetrating into Things themselvescan he find peace and a stronghold. But is notthis same looking through the Shows, or Ves-tures, into the Things, even the first prelimi-nary to a Philosophy of Clothes? Do we not, inall this, discern some beckonings towards thetrue higher purport of such a Philosophy; andwhat shape it must assume with such a man,in such an era?

Perhaps in entering on Book Third, thecourteous Reader is not utterly without guesswhither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for allthe fantastic Dream-Grottos through which,as is our lot with Teufelsdröckh, he must wan-der, will there be wanting between whilessome twinkling of a steady Polar Star.

BOOK III.

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CHAPTER I.INCIDENT INMODERNHISTORY.

As a wonder-loving and wonder-seeking man,Teufelsdröckh, from an early part of thisClothes-Volume, has more and more exhib-ited himself. Striking it was, amid all hisperverse cloudiness, with what force of visionand of heart he pierced into the mystery ofthe World; recognizing in the highest sensiblephenomena, so far as Sense went, only freshor faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a ce-lestial Essence thereby rendered visible: andwhile, on the one hand, he trod the old ragsof Matter, with their tinsels, into the mire, heon the other everywhere exalted Spirit aboveall earthly principalities and powers, and wor-shipped it, though under the meanest shapes,with a true Platonic mysticism. What theman ultimately purposed by thus casting hisGreek-fire into the general Wardrobe of theUniverse; what such, more or less complete,

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rending and burning of Garments through-out the whole compass of Civilized Life andSpeculation, should lead to; the rather as hewas no Adamite, in any sense, and could not,like Rousseau, recommend either bodily or in-tellectual Nudity, and a return to the savagestate: all this our readers are now bent to dis-cover; this is, in fact, properly the gist andpurport of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s Philoso-phy of Clothes.

Be it remembered, however, that such pur-port is here not so much evolved, as detectedto lie ready for evolving. We are to guideour British Friends into the new Gold-country,and show them the mines; nowise to dig outand exhaust its wealth, which indeed remainsfor all time inexhaustible. Once there, let eachdig for his own behoof, and enrich himself.

Neither, in so capricious inexpressible aWork as this of the Professor’s, can our coursenow more than formerly be straightforward,step by step, but at best leap by leap. Sig-nificant Indications stand out here and there;which for the critical eye, that looks bothwidely and narrowly, shape themselves intosome ground-scheme of a Whole: to selectthese with judgment, so that a leap from oneto the other be possible, and (in our old fig-ure) by chaining them together, a passableBridge be effected: this, as heretofore, contin-ues our only method. Among such light-spots,the following, floating in much wild matterabout Perfectibility, has seemed worth clutch-ing at:—

“Perhaps the most remarkable incident

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in Modern History,” says Teufelsdröckh, “isnot the Diet of Worms, still less the Bat-tle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or anyother Battle; but an incident passed carelesslyover by most Historians, and treated withsome degree of ridicule by others: namely,George Fox’s making to himself a suit ofLeather. This man, the first of the Quak-ers, and by trade a Shoemaker, was oneof those, to whom, under ruder or purerform, the Divine Idea of the Universe ispleased to manifest itself; and, across allthe hulls of Ignorance and earthly Degra-dation, shine through, in unspeakable Aw-fulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls:who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets,God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some pe-riods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall;working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a namelessflood of rubbish, this youth had, neverthe-less, a Living Spirit belonging to him; alsoan antique Inspired Volume, through which,as through a window, it could look upwards,and discern its celestial Home. The task ofa daily pair of shoes, coupled even with someprospect of victuals, and an honorable Mas-tership in Cordwainery, and perhaps the postof Thirdborough in his hundred, as the crownof long faithful sewing,—was nowise satisfac-tion enough to such a mind: but ever amid theboring and hammering came tones from thatfar country, came Splendors and Terrors; forthis poor Cordwainer, as we said, was a Man;and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man

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he had been sent to minister, was full of holymystery to him.

“The Clergy of the neighborhood, the or-dained Watchers and Interpreters of thatsame holy mystery, listened with un-affectedtedium to his consultations, and advised him,as the solution of such doubts, to ‘drink beer,and dance with the girls.’ Blind leaders ofthe blind! For what end were their titheslevied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped out, and their surplices andcassock-aprons girt on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, andother racketing, held over that spot of God’sEarth,—if Man were but a Patent Digester,and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Re-ality? Fox turned from them, with tears anda sacred scorn, back to his Leather-paringsand his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance,higher than Ætna, had been heaped over thatSpirit: but it was a Spirit, and would notlie buried there. Through long days andnights of silent agony, it struggled and wres-tled, with a man’s force, to be free: how itsprison-mountains heaved and swayed tumul-tuously, as the giant spirit shook them to thishand and that, and emerged into the lightof Heaven! That Leicester shoe-shop, hadmen known it, was a holier place than anyVatican or Loretto-shrine.—‘So bandaged, andhampered, and hemmed in,’ groaned he, ‘withthousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tat-ters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move:not my own am I, but the World’s; and Timeflies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is

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deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast powerof Thought! Why not; what binds me here?Want, want!—Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across intothat far Land of Light? Only Meditation can,and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods:the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild berriesfeed me; and for Clothes, cannot I stitch my-self one perennial suit of Leather!’

“Historical Oil-painting,” continues Teuf-elsdröckh, “is one of the Arts I never prac-ticed; therefore shall I not decide whetherthis subject were easy of execution on thecanvas. Yet often has it seemed to me asif such first outflashing of man’s Freewill, tolighten, more and more into Day, the ChaoticNight that threatened to engulf him in itshindrances and its horrors, were properly theonly grandeur there is in History. Let someliving Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and un-derstanding heart, picture George Fox on thatmorning, when he spreads out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhidesby unwonted patterns, and stitches them to-gether into one continuous all-including Case,the farewell service of his awl! Stitch away,thou noble Fox: every prick of that little in-strument is pricking into the heart of Slav-ery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing theeacross the Prison-ditch, within which Vanityholds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into landsof true Liberty; were the work done, there isin broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art

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he!“Thus from the lowest depth there is a

path to the loftiest height; and for the Pooralso a Gospel has been published. Surely if,as D’Alembert asserts, my illustrious name-sake, Diogenes, was the greatest man of An-tiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then bystronger reason is George Fox the greatest ofthe Moderns, and greater than Diogenes him-self: for he too stands on the adamantine ba-sis of his Manhood, casting aside all propsand shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, un-dervaluing the Earth; valuing it rather, asa place to yield him warmth and food, helooks Heavenward from his Earth, and dwellsin an element of Mercy and Worship, with astill Strength, such as the Cynic’s Tub did no-wise witness. Great, truly, was that Tub; atemple from which man’s dignity and divinitywas scornfully preached abroad: but greateris the Leather Hull, for the same sermon waspreached there, and not in Scorn but in Love.”

George Fox’s “perennial suit,” with all thatit held, has been worn quite into ashes fornigh two centuries: why, in a discussion onthe Perfectibility of Society, reproduce it now?Not out of blind sectarian partisanship: Teu-felsdröckh, himself is no Quaker; with all hispacific tendencies, did not we see him, in thatscene at the North Cape, with the ArchangelSmuggler, exhibit fire-arms?

For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism,there is more meant in this passage thanmeets the ear. At the same time, who canavoid smiling at the earnestness and Boeo-

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tian simplicity (if indeed there be not an un-derhand satire in it), with which that “Inci-dent” is here brought forward; and, in theProfessor’s ambiguous way, as clearly perhapsas he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommendedto imitation! Does Teufelsdröckh anticipatethat, in this age of refinement, any consider-able class of the community, by way of tes-tifying against the “Mammon-god,” and es-caping from what he calls “Vanity’s Work-house and Ragfair,” where doubtless someof them are toiled and whipped and hood-winked sufficiently,—will sheathe themselvesin close-fitting cases of Leather? The ideais ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majestylay aside its robes of state, and Beauty itsfrills and train-gowns, for a second skin oftanned hide? By which change Huddersfieldand Manchester, and Coventry and Paisley,and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hun-gry solitudes; and only Day and Martin couldprofit. For neither would Teufelsdröckh’s maddaydream, here as we presume covertly in-tended, of levelling Society (levelling it in-deed with a vengeance, into one huge drownedmarsh!), and so attaining the political ef-fects of Nudity without its frigorific or otherconsequences,––be thereby realized. Wouldnot the rich man purchase a waterproof suitof Russia Leather; and the high-born Bellestep forth in red or azure morocco, lined withshamoy: the black cowhide being left to theDrudges and Gibeonites of the world; and soall the old Distinctions be re-established?

Or has the Professor his own deeper in-

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tention; and laughs in his sleeve at our stric-tures and glosses, which indeed are but a partthereof?

CHAPTER II.CHURCH-CLOTHES.

Not less questionable is his Chapter onChurch-Clothes, which has the farther dis-tinction of being the shortest in the Volume.We here translate it entire:—

“By Church-Clothes, it need not bepremised that I mean infinitely more thanCassocks and Surplices; and do not at allmean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothesthat men go to Church in. Far from it!Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, theForms, the Vestures, under which men haveat various periods embodied and representedfor themselves the Religious Principle; that isto say, invested the Divine Idea of the Worldwith a sensible and practically active Body, sothat it might dwell among them as a livingand life-giving WORD.

“These are unspeakably the most impor-tant of all the vestures and garnitures of Hu-man Existence. They are first spun and wo-ven, I may say, by that wonder of wonders,

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SOCIETY; for it is still only when ‘two or threeare gathered together,’ that Religion, spiritu-ally existent, and indeed indestructible, how-ever latent, in each, first outwardly mani-fests itself (as with ‘cloven tongues of fire’),and seeks to be embodied in a visible Com-munion and Church Militant. Mystical, morethan magical, is that Communing of Soul withSoul, both looking heavenward: here prop-erly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only inlooking heavenward, take it in what senseyou may, not in looking earthward, does whatwe can call Union, mutual Love, Society, be-gin to be possible. How true is that of No-valis: ‘It is certain, my Belief gains quite in-finitely the moment I can convince anothermind thereof ’! Gaze thou in the face of thyBrother, in those eyes where plays the lam-bent fire of Kindness, or in those where ragesthe lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thyown so quiet Soul is straightway involuntar-ily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and re-verberate on each other, till it is all one lim-itless confluent flame (of embracing Love, orof deadly-grappling Hate); and then say whatmiraculous virtue goes out of man into man.But if so, through all the thick-plied hulls ofour Earthly Life; how much more when it is ofthe Divine Life we speak, and inmost me is, asit were, brought into contact with inmost me!

“Thus was it that I said, the ChurchClothes are first spun and woven by Soci-ety; outward Religion originates by Society,Society becomes possible by Religion. Nay,perhaps, every conceivable Society, past and

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present, may well be figured as properly andwholly a Church, in one or other of thesethree predicaments: an audibly preachingand prophesying Church, which is the best;second, a Church that struggles to preach andprophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecostcome; and third and worst, a Church gonedumb with old age, or which only mumblesdelirium prior to dissolution. Whoso fanciesthat by Church is here meant Chapter-housesand Cathedrals, or by preaching and proph-esying, mere speech and chanting, let him,”says the oracular Professor, “read on, light ofheart (getrosten Muthes).

“But with regard to your Church proper,and the Church-Clothes specially recognizedas Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlesslyenough, that without such Vestures and sa-cred Tissues Society has not existed, and willnot exist. For if Government is, so to speak,the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, hold-ing the whole together and protecting it; andall your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for In-dustry, of hand or of head, are the FleshlyClothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues(lying under such SKIN), whereby Societystands and works;—then is Religion the in-most Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, whichministers Life and warm Circulation to thewhole. Without which Pericardial Tissue theBones and Muscles (of Industry) were inert,or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; theSKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting rawhide; and Society itself a deadcarcass,—deserving to be buried. Men were

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no longer Social, but Gregarious; which latterstate also could not continue, but must gradu-ally issue in universal selfish discord, hatred,savage isolation, and dispersion;—whereby,as we might continue to say, the very dustand dead body of Society would have evap-orated and become abolished. Such, and soall-important, all-sustaining, are the Church-Clothes to civilized or even to rational men.

“Meanwhile, in our era of the World, thosesame Church-Clothes have gone sorrowfullyout-at-elbows; nay, far worse, many of themhave become mere hollow Shapes, or Masks,under which no living Figure or Spirit anylonger dwells; but only spiders and uncleanbeetles, in horrid accumulation, drive theirtrade; and the mask still glares on youwith its glass eyes, in ghastly affectationof Life,—some generation-and-half after Reli-gion has quite withdrawn from it, and in un-noticed nooks is weaving for herself new Ves-tures, wherewith to reappear, and bless us, orour sons or grandsons. As a Priest, or Inter-preter of the Holy, is the noblest and highest ofall men, so is a Sham-priest (Schein-priester)the falsest and basest; neither is it doubtfulthat his Canonicals, were they Popes’ Tiaras,will one day be torn from him, to make ban-dages for the wounds of mankind; or even toburn into tinder, for general scientific or culi-nary purposes.

“All which, as out of place here, falls to behandled in my Second Volume, On the Palin-genesia, or Newbirth of Society; which vol-ume, as treating practically of the Wear, De-

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struction, and Retexture of Spiritual Tissues,or Garments, forms, properly speaking, theTranscendental or ultimate Portion of this mywork on Clothes, and is already in a state offorwardness.”

And herewith, no farther exposition, note,or commentary being added, does Teufels-dröckh, and must his Editor now, terminatethe singular chapter on Church-Clothes!

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CHAPTER III.SYMBOLS.

Probably it will elucidate the drift of theseforegoing obscure utterances, if we here in-sert somewhat of our Professor’s speculationson Symbols. To state his whole doctrine, in-deed, were beyond our compass: nowhere ishe more mysterious, impalpable, than in thisof “Fantasy being the organ of the Godlike;”and how “Man thereby, though based, to allseeming, on the small Visible, does neverthe-less extend down into the infinite deeps of theInvisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his Life isproperly the bodying forth.” Let us, omittingthese high transcendental aspects of the mat-ter, study to glean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what little seemslogical and practical, and cunningly arrangeit into such degree of coherence as it will as-sume. By way of proem, take the following notinjudicious remarks:—

“The benignant efficacies of Concealment,”cries our Professor, “who shall speak or sing?SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might stillbe raised to them (were this an altar-building

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time) for universal worship. Silence is theelement in which great things fashion them-selves together; that at length they mayemerge, full-formed and majestic, into thedaylight of Life, which they are thenceforth torule. Not William the Silent only, but all theconsiderable men I have known, and the mostundiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forboreto babble of what they were creating and pro-jecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities,do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for oneday: on the morrow, how much clearer are thypurposes and duties; what wreck and rubbishhave those mute workmen within thee sweptaway, when intrusive noises were shut out!Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman de-fined it, the art of concealing Thought; but ofquite stifling and suspending Thought, so thatthere is none to conceal. Speech too is great,but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscrip-tion says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen istgolden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden);or as I might rather express it: Speech is ofTime, Silence is of Eternity.

“Bees will not work except in darkness;Thought will not work except in Silence: nei-ther will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Letnot thy left hand know what thy right handdoeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thyown heart of ‘those secrets known to all.’ Isnot Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue,of all good manners and good morals? Likeother plants, Virtue will not grow unless itsroot be hidden, buried from the eye of thesun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look

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at it privily thyself, the root withers, and noflower will glad thee. O my Friends, whenwe view the fair clustering flowers that over-wreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower,and encircle man’s life with the fragrance andhues of Heaven, what hand will not smitethe foul plunderer that grubs them up by theroots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfac-tion, shows us the dung they flourish in! Menspeak much of the Printing Press with itsNewspapers: du Himmel! what are these toClothes and the Tailor’s Goose?

“Of kin to the so incalculable influences ofConcealment, and connected with still greaterthings, is the wondrous agency of Symbols. Ina Symbol there is concealment and yet revela-tion; here therefore, by Silence and by Speechacting together, comes a double significance.And if both the Speech be itself high, and theSilence fit and noble, how expressive will theirunion be! Thus in many a painted Device,or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truthstands out to us proclaimed with quite newemphasis.

“For it is here that Fantasy with her mysticwonderland plays into the small prose domainof Sense, and becomes incorporated there-with. In the Symbol proper, what we can calla Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctlyand directly, some embodiment and revela-tion of the Infinite; the Infinite is made toblend itself with the Finite, to stand visible,and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols,accordingly, is man guided and commanded,made happy, made wretched: He everywhere

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finds himself encompassed with Symbols, rec-ognized as such or not recognized: the Uni-verse is but one vast Symbol of God; nay ifthou wilt have it, what is man himself but aSymbol of God; is not all that he does sym-bolical; a revelation to Sense of the mysticgod-given force that is in him; a ‘Gospel ofFreedom,’ which he, the ‘Messias of Nature,’preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not aHut he builds but is the visible embodimentof a Thought; but bears visible record of invisi-ble things; but is, in the transcendental sense,symbolical as well as real.”

“Man,” says the Professor elsewhere, inquite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cutshort on the verge of the inane, “Man is bybirth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, ofall the owleries that ever possessed him, themost owlish, if we consider it, is that of youractually existing Motive-Millwrights. Fantas-tic tricks enough man has played, in his time;has fancied himself to be most things, downeven to an animated heap of Glass: but tofancy himself a dead Iron-Balance for weigh-ing Pains and Pleasures on, was reserved forthis his latter era. There stands he, his Uni-verse one huge Manger, filled with hay andthistles to be weighed against each other; andlooks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil!spectres are appointed to haunt him: one agehe is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. Andnow the Genius of Mechanism smothers himworse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is

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nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of Di-gestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth andin Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism;has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else:the world would indeed grind him to pieces;but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives,and cunningly compute these, and mechanizethem to grind the other way?

“Were he not, as has been said, purblindedby enchantment, you had but to bid him openhis eyes and look. In which country, in whichtime, was it hitherto that man’s history, or thehistory of any man, went on by calculated orcalculable ‘Motives’? What make ye of yourChristianities, and Chivalries, and Reforma-tions, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reignsof Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in Love? Did he neverstand so much as a contested Election? Leavehim to Time, and the medicating virtue of Na-ture.”

“Yes, Friends,” elsewhere observes the Pro-fessor, “not our Logical, Mensurative faculty,but our Imaginative one is King over us; Imight say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heav-enward; or Magician and Wizard to lead ushellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensual-ist, what is Sense but the implement of Fan-tasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in thedullest existence there is a sheen either of In-spiration or of Madness (thou partly hast itin thy choice, which of the two), that gleamsin from the circumambient Eternity, and col-ors with its own hues our little islet of Time.The Understanding is indeed thy window, too

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clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy isthy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthyor diseased. Have not I myself known fivehundred living soldiers sabred into crows’-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which theycalled their Flag; which, had you sold it at anymarket-cross, would not have brought abovethree groschen? Did not the whole Hungar-ian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketedtheir Iron Crown; an implement, as was saga-ciously observed, in size and commercial valuelittle differing from a horse-shoe? It is in andthrough Symbols that man, consciously or un-consciously, lives, works, and has his being:those ages, moreover, are accounted the no-blest which can the best recognize symbolicalworth, and prize it the highest. For is not aSymbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, somedimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?

“Of Symbols, however, I remark farther,that they have both an extrinsic and intrin-sic value; oftenest the former only. What,for instance, was in that clouted Shoe, whichthe Peasants bore aloft with them as ensignin their Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ War)? Or inthe Wallet-and-staff round which the Nether-land Gueux, glorying in that nickname of Beg-gars, heroically rallied and prevailed, thoughagainst King Philip himself? Intrinsic signif-icance these had none: only extrinsic; as theaccidental Standards of multitudes more orless sacredly uniting together; in which unionitself, as above noted, there is ever some-thing mystical and borrowing of the Godlike.

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Under a like category, too, stand, or stood,the stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; militaryBanners everywhere; and generally all na-tional or other sectarian Costumes and Cus-toms: they have no intrinsic, necessary di-vineness, or even worth; but have acquired anextrinsic one. Nevertheless through all thesethere glimmers something of a Divine Idea; asthrough military Banners themselves, the Di-vine Idea of Duty, of heroic Daring; in someinstances of Freedom, of Right. Nay the high-est ensign that men ever met and embracedunder, the Cross itself, had no meaning savean accidental extrinsic one.

“Another matter it is, however, when yourSymbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itselffit that men should unite round it. Let butthe Godlike manifest itself to Sense, let butEternity look, more or less visibly, through theTime-Figure (Zeitbild)! Then is it fit that menunite there; and worship together before suchSymbol; and so from day to day, and from ageto age, superadd to it new divineness.

“Of this latter sort are all true Works ofArt: in them (if thou know a Work of Art froma Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternitylooking through Time; the Godlike renderedvisible. Here too may an extrinsic value grad-ually superadd itself: thus certain Iliads, andthe like, have, in three thousand years, at-tained quite new significance. But nobler thanall in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work of Art is sodivine? In Death too, in the Death of the Just,as the last perfection of a Work of Art, may

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we not discern symbolic meaning? In that di-vinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, rest-ing over the beloved face which now knowsthee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) theconfluence of Time with Eternity, and somegleam of the latter peering through.

“Highest of all Symbols are those whereinthe Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, andall men can recognize a present God, andworship the Same: I mean religious Sym-bols. Various enough have been such reli-gious Symbols, what we call Religions; as menstood in this stage of culture or the other,and could worse or better body forth the God-like: some Symbols with a transient intrinsicworth; many with only an extrinsic. If thouask to what height man has carried it in thismanner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Je-sus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biog-raphy, and what followed therefrom. Higherhas the human Thought not yet reached: thisis Christianity and Christendom; a Symbolof quite perennial, infinite character; whosesignificance will ever demand to be anew in-quired into, and anew made manifest.

“But, on the whole, as Time adds much tothe sacredness of Symbols, so likewise in hisprogress he at length defaces, or even des-ecrates them; and Symbols, like all terres-trial Garments, wax old. Homer’s Epos hasnot ceased to be true; yet it is no longer ourEpos, but shines in the distance, if clearer andclearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like areceding Star. It needs a scientific telescope,it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially

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brought near us, before we can so much asknow that it was a Sun. So likewise a daycomes when the Runic Thor, with his Eddas,must withdraw into dimness; and many anAfrican Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw beutterly abolished. For all things, even Celes-tial Luminaries, much more atmospheric me-teors, have their rise, their culmination, theirdecline.

“Small is this which thou tellest me, thatthe Royal Sceptre is but a piece of gilt wood;that the Pyx has become a most foolish box,and truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, ‘of littleprice.’ A right Conjurer might I name thee,couldst thou conjure back into these woodentools the divine virtue they once held.

“Of this thing, however, be certain:wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plantinto the deep infinite faculties of man, hisFantasy and Heart; wouldst thou plant forYear and Day, then plant into his shallow su-perficial faculties, his Self-love and Arithmeti-cal Understanding, what will grow there. AHierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the Worldwill we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker;who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Sym-bols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fixit there. Such too will not always be wanting;neither perhaps now are. Meanwhile, as theaverage of matters goes, we account him Leg-islator and wise who can so much as tell whena Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.

“When, as the last English Coronation3 I3That of George IV.—ED.

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was preparing,” concludes this wonderful Pro-fessor, “I read in their Newspapers that the‘Champion of England,’ he who has to offerbattle to the Universe for his new King, hadbrought it so far that he could now ‘mounthis horse with little assistance,’ I said to my-self: Here also we have a Symbol well-nigh su-perannuated. Alas, move whithersoever youmay, are not the tatters and rags of superan-nuated worn-out Symbols (in this Ragfair of aWorld) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink,to halter, to tether you; nay, if you shake themnot aside, threatening to accumulate, and per-haps produce suffocation?”

CHAPTER IV.HELOTAGE.

At this point we determine on advertingshortly, or rather reverting, to a certain Tractof Hofrath Heuschrecke’s, entitled Institutefor the Repression of Population; which lies,dishonorably enough (with torn leaves, and aperceptible smell of aloetic drugs), stuffed intothe Bag Pisces. Not indeed for the sake of thetract itself, which we admire little; but of themarginal Notes, evidently in Teufelsdröckh’shand, which rather copiously fringe it. A fewof these may be in their right place here.

Into the Hofrath’s Institute, with its ex-traordinary schemes, and machinery of Corre-sponding Boards and the like, we shall not somuch as glance. Enough for us to understandthat Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; andso zealous for the doctrine, that his zeal al-most literally eats him up. A deadly fear ofPopulation possesses the Hofrath; somethinglike a fixed idea; undoubtedly akin to the morediluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in thatquarter of his intellectual world, is there light;nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger; open

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mouths opening wider and wider; a world toterminate by the frightfullest consummation:by its too dense inhabitants, famished intodelirium, universally eating one another. Tomake air for himself in which strangulation,choking enough to a benevolent heart, theHofrath founds, or proposes to found, this In-stitute of his, as the best he can do. It is onlywith our Professor’s comments thereon thatwe concern ourselves.

First, then, remark that Teufelsdröckh,as a speculative Radical, has his own no-tions about human dignity; that the Zahdarmpalaces and courtesies have not made him for-getful of the Futteral cottages. On the blankcover of Heuschrecke’s Tract we find the fol-lowing indistinctly engrossed:—

“Two men I honor, and no third. First, thetoilworn Craftsman that with earth-made Im-plement laboriously conquers the Earth, andmakes her man’s. Venerable to me is the hardHand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstand-ing lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal,as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerabletoo is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, be-soiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is theface of a Man living manlike. Oh, but themore venerable for thy rudeness, and evenbecause we must pity as well as love thee!Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thyback so bent, for us were thy straight limbsand fingers so deformed: thou wert our Con-script, on whom the lot fell, and fighting ourbattles wert so marred. For in thee too laya god-created Form, but it was not to be un-

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folded; encrusted must it stand with the thickadhesions and defacements of Labor: and thybody, like thy soul, was not to know freedom.Yet toil on, toil on: thou art in thy duty, be outof it who may; thou toilest for the altogetherindispensable, for daily bread.

“A second man I honor, and still morehighly: Him who is seen toiling for the spir-itually indispensable; not daily bread, but thebread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; en-deavoring towards inward Harmony; reveal-ing this, by act or by word, through all his out-ward endeavors, be they high or low? High-est of all, when his outward and his inwardendeavor are one: when we can name himArtist; not earthly Craftsman only, but in-spired Thinker, who with heaven-made Im-plement conquers Heaven for us! If the poorand humble toil that we have Food, must notthe high and glorious toil for him in return,that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom,Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees,I honor: all else is chaff and dust, which letthe wind blow whither it listeth.

“Unspeakably touching is it, however,when I find both dignities united; and he thatmust toil outwardly for the lowest of man’swants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest.Sublimer in this world know I nothing thana Peasant Saint, could such now anywherebe met with. Such a one will take thee backto Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splen-dor of Heaven spring forth from the humblestdepths of Earth, like a light shining in greatdarkness.”

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And again: “It is not because of his toilsthat I lament for the poor: we must all toil,or steal (howsoever we name our stealing),which is worse; no faithful workman findshis task a pastime. The poor is hungry andathirst; but for him also there is food anddrink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but forhim also the Heavens send Sleep, and of thedeepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewyheaven of Rest envelops him; and fitful glit-terings of cloud-skirted Dreams. But what Ido mourn over is, that the lamp of his soulshould go out; that no ray of heavenly, or evenof earthly knowledge, should visit him; butonly, in the haggard darkness, like two spec-tres, Fear and Indignation bear him company.Alas, while the Body stands so broad andbrawny, must the Soul lie blinded, dwarfed,stupefied, almost annihilated! Alas, was thistoo a Breath of God; bestowed in Heaven, buton earth never to be unfolded!—That thereshould one Man die ignorant who had capac-ity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, wereit to happen more than twenty times in theminute, as by some computations it does. Themiserable fraction of Science which our unitedMankind, in a wide Universe of Nescience,has acquired, why is not this, with all dili-gence, imparted to all?”

Quite in an opposite strain is the following:“The old Spartans had a wiser method; andwent out and hunted down their Helots, andspeared and spitted them, when they grewtoo numerous. With our improved fashions ofhunting, Herr Hofrath, now after the inven-

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tion of fire-arms, and standing armies, howmuch easier were such a hunt! Perhaps in themost thickly peopled country, some three daysannually might suffice to shoot all the able-bodied Paupers that had accumulated withinthe year. Let Governments think of this. Theexpense were trifling: nay the very carcasseswould pay it. Have them salted and bar-relled; could not you victual therewith, if notArmy and Navy, yet richly such infirm Pau-pers, in workhouses and elsewhere, as en-lightened Charity, dreading no evil of them,might see good to keep alive?”

“And yet,” writes he farther on, “theremust be something wrong. A full-formedHorse will, in any market, bring from twentyto as high as two hundred Friedrichs d’or:such is his worth to the world. A full-formedMan is not only worth nothing to the world,but the world could afford him a round sumwould he simply engage to go and hang him-self. Nevertheless, which of the two was themore cunningly devised article, even as anEngine? Good Heavens! A white EuropeanMan, standing on his two Legs, with his twofive-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones, andmiraculous Head on his shoulders, is worth, Ishould say, from fifty to a hundred Horses!”

“True, thou Gold-Hofrath,” cries the Pro-fessor elsewhere: “too crowded indeed! Mean-while, what portion of this inconsiderable ter-raqueous Globe have ye actually tilled anddelved, till it will grow no more? How thickstands your Population in the Pampas and Sa-vannas of America; round ancient Carthage,

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and in the interior of Africa; on both slopesof the Altaic chain, in the central Platform ofAsia; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary,the Curragh of Kildare? One man, in one year,as I have understood it, if you lend him Earth,will feed himself and nine others. Alas, wherenow are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing, still-expanding Europe; who, whentheir home is grown too narrow, will enlist,and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those su-perfluous masses of indomitable living Valor;equipped, not now with the battle-axe andwar-chariot, but with the steam engine andploughshare? Where are they?—Preservingtheir Game!”

CHAPTER V. THEPHOENIX.

Putting which four singular Chapters to-gether, and alongside of them numerous hints,and even direct utterances, scattered overthese Writings of his, we come upon thestartling yet not quite unlooked-for conclu-sion, that Teufelsdröckh is one of those whoconsider Society, properly so called, to be asgood as extinct; and that only the gregariousfeelings, and old inherited habitudes, at thisjuncture, hold us from Dispersion, and uni-versal national, civil, domestic and personalwar! He says expressly: “For the last threecenturies, above all for the last three quartersof a century, that same Pericardial NervousTissue (as we named it) of Religion, where liesthe Life-essence of Society, has been smote atand perforated, needfully and needlessly; tillnow it is quite rent into shreds; and Society,long pining, diabetic, consumptive, can be re-garded as defunct; for those spasmodic, gal-vanic sprawlings are not life; neither indeedwill they endure, galvanize as you may, be-yond two days.”

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“Call ye that a Society,” cries he again,“where there is no longer any Social Idea ex-tant; not so much as the Idea of a commonHome, but only of a common over-crowdedLodging-house? Where each, isolated, re-gardless of his neighbor, turned against hisneighbor, clutches what he can get, and cries‘Mine!’ and calls it Peace, because, in thecut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steelknives, but only a far cunninger sort, canbe employed? Where Friendship, Commu-nion, has become an incredible tradition; andyour holiest Sacramental Supper is a smok-ing Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist?Where your Priest has no tongue but for plate-licking: and your high Guides and Governorscannot guide; but on all hands hear it pas-sionately proclaimed: Laissez faire; Leave usalone of your guidance, such light is darkerthan darkness; eat you your wages, and sleep!

“Thus, too,” continues he, “does an ob-servant eye discern everywhere that saddestspectacle: The Poor perishing, like neglected,foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger andOverwork; the Rich, still more wretchedly, ofIdleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth. The High-est in rank, at length, without honor from theLowest; scarcely, with a little mouth-honor, asfrom tavern-waiters who expect to put it in thebill. Once-sacred Symbols fluttering as emptyPageants, whereof men grudge even the ex-pense; a World becoming dismantled: in oneword, the STATE fallen speechless, from obe-sity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken intoa Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!”

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We might ask, are there many “observanteyes,” belonging to practical men in Englandor elsewhere, which have descried these phe-nomena; or is it only from the mystic eleva-tion of a German Wahngasse that such won-ders are visible? Teufelsdröckh contends thatthe aspect of a “deceased or expiring Society”fronts us everywhere, so that whoso runs mayread. “What, for example,” says he, “is the uni-versally arrogated Virtue, almost the sole re-maining Catholic Virtue, of these days? Forsome half-century, it has been the thing youname ‘Independence.’ Suspicion of ‘Servility,’of reverence for Superiors, the very dog-leechis anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your Su-periors worthy to govern, and you worthy toobey, reverence for them were even your onlypossible freedom. Independence, in all kinds,is rebellion; if unjust rebellion, why parade it,and everywhere prescribe it?”

But what then? Are we returning, asRousseau prayed, to the state of Nature? “TheSoul Politic having departed,” says Teufels-dröckh, “what can follow but that the BodyPolitic be decently interred, to avoid putres-cence? Liberals, Economists, Utilitariansenough I see marching with its bier, andchanting loud paeans, towards the funeralpile, where, amid wailings from some, andsaturnalian revelries from the most, the ven-erable Corpse is to be burnt. Or, in plainwords, that these men, Liberals, Utilitarians,or whatsoever they are called, will ultimatelycarry their point, and dissever and destroymost existing Institutions of Society, seems a

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thing which has some time ago ceased to bedoubtful.

“Do we not see a little subdivision of thegrand Utilitarian Armament come to lighteven in insulated England? A living nucleus,that will attract and grow, does at length ap-pear there also; and under curious phasis;properly as the inconsiderable fag-end, andso far in the rear of the others as to fancy it-self the van. Our European Mechanizers area sect of boundless diffusion, activity, and co-operative spirit: has not Utilitarianism flour-ished in high places of Thought, here amongourselves, and in every European country,at some time or other, within the last fiftyyears? If now in all countries, except per-haps England, it has ceased to flourish, orindeed to exist, among Thinkers, and sunkto Journalists and the popular mass,—whosees not that, as hereby it no longer preaches,so the reason is, it now needs no Preach-ing, but is in full universal Action, the doc-trine everywhere known, and enthusiasticallylaid to heart? The fit pabulum, in thesetimes, for a certain rugged workshop intel-lect and heart, nowise without their corre-sponding workshop strength and ferocity, itrequires but to be stated in such scenes tomake proselytes enough.— Admirably calcu-lated for destroying, only not for rebuilding!It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till thewhole World-kennel will be rabid: then woe tothe Huntsmen, with or without their whips!They should have given the quadrupeds wa-ter,” adds he; “the water, namely, of Knowl-

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edge and of Life, while it was yet time.”Thus, if Professor Teufelsdröckh can be re-

lied on, we are at this hour in a most criti-cal condition; beleaguered by that boundless“Armament of Mechanizers” and Unbelievers,threatening to strip us bare! “The World,”says he, “as it needs must, is under a pro-cess of devastation and waste. which, whetherby silent assiduous corrosion, or open quickercombustion, as the case chances, will effectu-ally enough annihilate the past Forms of So-ciety; replace them with what it may. Forthe present, it is contemplated that whenman’s whole Spiritual Interests are once di-vested, these innumerable stript-off Garmentsshall mostly be burnt; but the sounder Ragsamong them be quilted together into one hugeIrish watch-coat for the defence of the Bodyonly!”—This, we think, is but Job’s-news tothe humane reader.

“Nevertheless,” cries Teufelsdröckh, “whocan hinder it; who is there that can clutchinto the wheelspokes of Destiny, and say tothe Spirit of the Time: Turn back, I commandthee?—Wiser were it that we yielded to the In-evitable and Inexorable, and accounted eventhis the best.”

Nay, might not an attentive Editor, draw-ing his own inferences from what stands writ-ten, conjecture that Teufelsdröckh, individ-ually had yielded to this same “Inevitableand Inexorable” heartily enough; and now satwaiting the issue, with his natural diabolico-angelical Indifference, if not even Placidity?Did we not hear him complain that the World

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was a “huge Ragfair,” and the “rags and tat-ters of old Symbols” were raining down ev-erywhere, like to drift him in, and suffocatehim? What with those “unhunted Helots” ofhis; and the uneven sic vos non vobis pres-sure and hard-crashing collision he is pleasedto discern in existing things; what with the sohateful “empty Masks,” full of beetles and spi-ders, yet glaring out on him, from their glasseyes, “with a ghastly affectation of life,”—wefeel entitled to conclude him even willing thatmuch should be thrown to the Devil, so it werebut done gently! Safe himself in that “Pinna-cle of Weissnichtwo,” he would consent, witha tragic solemnity, that the monster UTIL-ITARIA, held back, indeed, and moderatedby nose-rings, halters, foot-shackles, and ev-ery conceivable modification of rope, shouldgo forth to do her work;—to tread down oldruinous Palaces and Temples with her broadhoof, till the whole were trodden down, thatnew and better might be built! Remarkable inthis point of view are the following sentences.

“Society,” says he, “is not dead: that Car-cass, which you call dead Society, is but hermortal coil which she has shuffled off, to as-sume a nobler; she herself, through perpet-ual metamorphoses, in fairer and fairer de-velopment, has to live till Time also mergein Eternity. Wheresoever two or three LivingMen are gathered together, there is Society;or there it will be, with its cunning mecha-nisms and stupendous structures, overspread-ing this little Globe, and reaching upwards toHeaven and downwards to Gehenna: for al-

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ways, under one or the other figure, it has twoauthentic Revelations, of a God and of a Devil;the Pulpit, namely, and the Gallows.”

Indeed, we already heard him speak of“Religion, in unnoticed nooks, weaving forherself new Vestures;”—Teufelsdröckh him-self being one of the loom-treadles? Else-where he quotes without censure that strangeaphorism of Saint Simon’s, concerning whichand whom so much were to be said: “L’aged’or, qu’une aveugle tradition a place jusqu’icidans le passe, est devant nous; The golden age,which a blind tradition has hitherto placed inthe Past, is Before us.”—But listen again:—

“When the Phoenix is fanning her funeralpyre, will there not be sparks flying! Alas,some millions of men, and among them suchas a Napoleon, have already been licked intothat high-eddying Flame, and like moths con-sumed there. Still also have we to fear thatincautious beards will get singed.

“For the rest, in what year of grace suchPhoenix-cremation will be completed, youneed not ask. The law of Perseverance isamong the deepest in man: by nature he hateschange; seldom will he quit his old house tillit has actually fallen about his ears. Thushave I seen Solemnities linger as Ceremonies,sacred Symbols as idle Pageants, to the ex-tent of three hundred years and more afterall life and sacredness had evaporated outof them. And then, finally, what time thePhoenix Death-Birth itself will require, de-pends on unseen contingencies.—Meanwhile,would Destiny offer Mankind, that after, say

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two centuries of convulsion and conflagration,more or less vivid, the fire-creation should beaccomplished, and we to find ourselves againin a Living Society, and no longer fightingbut working,—were it not perhaps prudent inMankind to strike the bargain?”

Thus is Teufelsdröckh, content that oldsick Society should be deliberately burnt(alas, with quite other fuel than spice-wood);in the faith that she is a Phoenix; and thata new heaven-born young one will rise out ofher ashes! We ourselves, restricted to the dutyof Indicator, shall forbear commentary. Mean-while, will not the judicious reader shake hishead, and reproachfully, yet more in sorrowthan in anger, say or think: From a Doctorutriusque Juris, titular Professor in a Uni-versity, and man to whom hitherto, for hisservices, Society, bad as she is, has givennot only food and raiment (of a kind), butbooks, tobacco and gukguk, we expected moregratitude to his benefactress; and less of ablind trust in the future which resembles thatrather of a philosophical Fatalist and Enthu-siast, than of a solid householder paying scot-and-lot in a Christian country.

CHAPTER VI. OLDCLOTHES.

As mentioned above, Teufelsdröckh, though aSansculottist, is in practice probably the po-litest man extant: his whole heart and lifeare penetrated and informed with the spiritof politeness; a noble natural Courtesy shinesthrough him, beautifying his vagaries; likesunlight, making a rosyfingered, rainbow-dyed Aurora out of mere aqueous clouds; naybrightening London-smoke itself into gold va-por, as from the crucible of an alchemist. Hearin what earnest though fantastic wise he ex-presses himself on this head:—

“Shall Courtesy be done only to the rich,and only by the rich? In Good-breeding, whichdiffers, if at all, from High-breeding, onlyas it gracefully remembers the rights of oth-ers, rather than gracefully insists on its ownrights, I discern no special connection withwealth or birth: but rather that it lies in hu-man nature itself, and is due from all men to-wards all men. Of a truth, were your School-master at his post, and worth anything whenthere, this, with so much else, would be re-

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formed. Nay, each man were then also hisneighbor’s schoolmaster; till at length a rude-visaged, unmannered Peasant could no morebe met with, than a Peasant unacquaintedwith botanical Physiology, or who felt not thatthe clod he broke was created in Heaven.

“For whether thou bear a sceptre or asledge-hammer, art not thou ALIVE; is notthis thy brother ALIVE? ‘There is but onetemple in the world,’ says Novalis, ‘and thattemple is the Body of Man. Nothing is holierthan this high Form. Bending before men is areverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh.We touch Heaven, when we lay our hands ona human Body.’

“On which ground, I would fain carry itfarther than most do; and whereas the En-glish Johnson only bowed to every Clergyman,or man with a shovel-hat, I would bow to ev-ery Man with any sort of hat, or with no hatwhatever. Is not he a Temple, then; the vis-ible Manifestation and Impersonation of theDivinity? And yet, alas, such indiscriminatebowing serves not. For there is a Devil dwellsin man, as well as a Divinity; and too often thebow is but pocketed by the former. It would goto the pocket of Vanity (which is your clearestphasis of the Devil, in these times); thereforemust we withhold it.

“The gladder am I, on the other hand, todo reverence to those Shells and outer Husksof the Body, wherein no devilish passion anylonger lodges, but only the pure emblem andeffigies of Man: I mean, to Empty, or even toCast Clothes. Nay, is it not to Clothes that

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most men do reverence: to the fine froggedbroadcloth, nowise to the ‘straddling animalwith bandy legs’ which it holds, and makesa Dignitary of? Who ever saw any Lordmy-lorded in tattered blanket fastened withwooden skewer? Nevertheless, I say, there isin such worship a shade of hypocrisy, a practi-cal deception: for how often does the Body ap-propriate what was meant for the Cloth only!Whoso would avoid falsehood, which is theessence of all Sin, will perhaps see good totake a different course. That reverence whichcannot act without obstruction and perver-sion when the Clothes are full, may have freecourse when they are empty. Even as, for Hin-doo Worshippers, the Pagoda is not less sacredthan the God; so do I too worship the hollowcloth Garment with equal fervor, as when itcontained the Man: nay, with more, for I nowfear no deception, of myself or of others.

“Did not King Toomtabard, or, in otherwords, John Baliol, reign long over Scotland;the man John Baliol being quite gone, andonly the ‘Toom Tabard’ (Empty Gown) remain-ing? What still dignity dwells in a suit of CastClothes! How meekly it bears its honors! Nohaughty looks, no scornful gesture: silent andserene, it fronts the world; neither demand-ing worship, nor afraid to miss it. The Hatstill carries the physiognomy of its Head: butthe vanity and the stupidity, and goose-speechwhich was the sign of these two, are gone. TheCoat-arm is stretched out, but not to strike;the Breeches, in modest simplicity, depend atease, and now at last have a graceful flow;

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the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotousdesire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it.Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense,from the carking cares and foul vices of theWorld; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse;as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messen-ger, or purified Apparition, visiting our lowEarth.

“Often, while I sojourned in that mon-strous tuberosity of Civilized Life, the Cap-ital of England; and meditated, and ques-tioned Destiny, under that ink-sea of vapor,black, thick, and multifarious as Spartanbroth; and was one lone soul amid those grind-ing millions;—often have I turned into theirOld-Clothes Market to worship. With awe-struck heart I walk through that MonmouthStreet, with its empty Suits, as through a San-hedrim of stainless Ghosts. Silent are they,but expressive in their silence: the past wit-nesses and instruments of Woe and Joy, ofPassions, Virtues, Crimes, and all the fath-omless tumult of Good and Evil in ‘the Prisonmen call Life.’ Friends! trust not the heart ofthat man for whom Old Clothes are not vener-able. Watch, too, with reverence, that beardedJewish High-priest, who with hoarse voice,like some Angel of Doom, summons them fromthe four winds! On his head, like the Pope, hehas three Hats,—a real triple tiara; on eitherhand are the similitude of wings, whereonthe summoned Garments come to alight; andever, as he slowly cleaves the air, sounds forthhis deep fateful note, as if through a trum-pet he were proclaiming: ‘Ghosts of Life, come

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to Judgment!’ Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts:he will purify you in his Purgatory, with fireand with water; and, one day, new-createdye shall reappear. Oh, let him in whom theflame of Devotion is ready to go out, whohas never worshipped, and knows not whatto worship, pace and repace, with austerestthought, the pavement of Monmouth Street,and say whether his heart and his eyes stillcontinue dry. If Field Lane, with its longfluttering rows of yellow handkerchiefs, be aDionysius’ Ear, where, in stifled jarring hub-bub, we hear the Indictment which Povertyand Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that it hasleft them there cast out and trodden underfoot of Want, Darkness and the Devil,—thenis Monmouth Street a Mirza’s Hill, where, inmotley vision, the whole Pageant of Existencepasses awfully before us; with its wail andjubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bells and gallows-ropes, farce-tragedy, beast-godhood,—the Bedlam of Creation!”

To most men, as it does to ourselves, allthis will seem overcharged. We too havewalked through Monmouth Street; but withlittle feeling of “Devotion:” probably in partbecause the contemplative process is so fa-tally broken in upon by the brood of money-changers who nestle in that Church, and im-portune the worshipper with merely secularproposals. Whereas Teufelsdröckh, might bein that happy middle state, which leaves tothe Clothes-broker no hope either of sale orof purchase, and so be allowed to linger therewithout molestation.—Something we would

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have given to see the little philosophical fig-ure, with its steeple-hat and loose flowingskirts, and eyes in a fine frenzy, “pacing andrepacing in austerest thought” that foolishStreet; which to him was a true Delphic av-enue, and supernatural Whispering-gallery,where the “Ghosts of Life” rounded strangesecrets in his ear. O thou philosophic Teufels-dröckh, that listenest while others only gab-ble, and with thy quick tympanum hearest thegrass grow!

At the same time, is it not strange that, inPaper-bag Documents destined for an Englishwork, there exists nothing like an authenticdiary of this his sojourn in London; and ofhis Meditations among the Clothes-shops onlythe obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither,in conversation (for, indeed, he was not a manto pester you with his Travels), have we heardhim more than allude to the subject.

For the rest, however, it cannot be unin-teresting that we here find how early the sig-nificance of Clothes had dawned on the nowso distinguished Clothes-Professor. Might webut fancy it to have been even in MonmouthStreet, at the bottom of our own English “ink-sea,” that this remarkable Volume first tookbeing, and shot forth its salient point in hissoul,—as in Chaos did the Egg of Eros, oneday to be hatched into a Universe!

CHAPTER VII.ORGANICFILAMENTS.

For us, who happen to live while the World-Phoenix is burning herself, and burning soslowly that, as Teufelsdröckh calculates, itwere a handsome bargain would she engageto have done “within two centuries,” thereseems to lie but an ashy prospect. Not alto-gether so, however, does the Professor figureit. “In the living subject,” says he, “changeis wont to be gradual: thus, while the ser-pent sheds its old skin, the new is alreadyformed beneath. Little knowest thou of theburning of a World-Phoenix, who fanciest thatshe must first burn out, and lie as a deadcinereous heap; and therefrom the young onestart up by miracle, and fly heavenward. Farotherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creationand Destruction proceed together; ever as theashes of the Old are blown about, do organicfilaments of the New mysteriously spin them-selves: and amid the rushing and the wav-ing of the Whirlwind element come tones of

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a melodious Death-song, which end not but intones of a more melodious Birth-song. Nay,look into the Fire-whirlwind with thy owneyes, and thou wilt see.” Let us actuallylook, then: to poor individuals, who cannot ex-pect to live two centuries, those same organicfilaments, mysteriously spinning themselves,will be the best part of the spectacle. First,therefore, this of Mankind in general:—

“In vain thou deniest it,” says the Profes-sor; “thou art my Brother. Thy very Hatred,thy very Envy, those foolish Lies thou tellestof me in thy splenetic humor: what is all thisbut an inverted Sympathy? Were I a Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to telllies of me? Not thou! I should grind all un-heeded, whether badly or well.

“Wondrous truly are the bonds that uniteus one and all; whether by the soft bindingof Love, or the iron chaining of Necessity, aswe like to choose it. More than once have Isaid to myself, of some perhaps whimsicallystrutting Figure, such as provokes whimsicalthoughts: ‘Wert thou, my little Brotherkin,suddenly covered up within the largest imag-inable Glass bell,—what a thing it were, notfor thyself only, but for the world! Post Let-ters, more or fewer, from all the four winds,impinge against thy Glass walls, but have todrop unread: neither from within comes therequestion or response into any Post-bag; thyThoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thyManufacture into no purchasing hand: thouart no longer a circulating venous-arterialHeart, that, taking and giving, circulatest

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through all Space and all Time: there has aHole fallen out in the immeasurable, univer-sal World-tissue, which must be darned upagain!’

“Such venous-arterial circulation, of Let-ters, verbal Messages, paper and other Pack-ages, going out from him and coming in, area blood-circulation, visible to the eye: but thefiner nervous circulation, by which all things,the minutest that he does, minutely influenceall men, and the very look of his face blesses orcurses whomso it lights on, and so generatesever new blessing or new cursing: all this youcannot see, but only imagine. I say, there isnot a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg,can quarrel with his squaw, but the wholeworld must smart for it: will not the price ofbeaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that thecasting of this pebble from my hand alters thecentre of gravity of the Universe.

“If now an existing generation of menstand so woven together, not less indissol-ubly does generation with generation. Hastthou ever meditated on that word, Tradi-tion: how we inherit not Life only, but allthe garniture and form of Life; and work, andspeak, and even think and feel, as our Fa-thers, and primeval grandfathers, from thebeginning, have given it us?—Who printedthee, for example, this unpretending Volumeon the Philosophy of Clothes? Not the HerrenStillschweigen and Company; but Cadmus ofThebes, Faust of Mentz, and innumerable oth-ers whom thou knowest not. Had there beenno Moesogothic Ulfila, there had been no En-

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glish Shakspeare, or a different one. Simple-ton! It was Tubal-cain that made thy veryTailor’s needle, and sewed that court-suit ofthine.

“Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a liv-ing indivisible whole, much more is Mankind,the Image that reflects and creates Nature,without which Nature were not. As palpa-ble lifestreams in that wondrous IndividualMankind, among so many life-streams thatare not palpable, flow on those main currentsof what we call Opinion; as preserved in Insti-tutions, Polities, Churches, above all in Books.Beautiful it is to understand and know that aThought did never yet die; that as thou, theoriginator thereof, hast gathered it and cre-ated it from the whole Past, so thou wilt trans-mit it to the whole Future. It is thus that theheroic heart, the seeing eye of the first times,still feels and sees in us of the latest; that theWise Man stands ever encompassed, and spir-itually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses andbrothers; and there is a living, literal Commu-nion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and asthe History of the World.

“Noteworthy also, and serviceable for theprogress of this same Individual, wilt thoufind his subdivision into Generations. Gener-ations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind:Death and Birth are the vesper and the matinbells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and torise refreshed for new advancement. Whatthe Father has made, the Son can make andenjoy; but has also work of his own appointedhim. Thus all things wax, and roll onwards;

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Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing iscompleted, but ever completing. Newton haslearned to see what Kepler saw; but there isalso a fresh heaven-derived force in Newton;he must mount to still higher points of vision.So too the Hebrew Lawgiver is, in due time,followed by an Apostle of the Gentiles. In thebusiness of Destruction, as this also is fromtime to time a necessary work, thou findest alike sequence and perseverance: for Luther itwas as yet hot enough to stand by that burn-ing of the Pope’s Bull; Voltaire could not warmhimself at the glimmering ashes, but requiredquite other fuel. Thus likewise, I note, theEnglish Whig has, in the second generation,become an English Radical; who, in the thirdagain, it is to be hoped, will become an En-glish Rebuilder. Find Mankind where thouwilt, thou findest it in living movement, inprogress faster or slower: the Phoenix soarsaloft, hovers with outstretched wings, fillingEarth with her music; or, as now, she sinks,and with spheral swan-song immolates her-self in flame, that she may soar the higher andsing the clearer.”

Let the friends of social order, in such a dis-astrous period, lay this to heart, and derivefrom it any little comfort they can. We subjoinanother passage, concerning Titles:—

“Remark, not without surprise,” says Teuf-elsdröckh, “how all high Titles of Honor comehitherto from Fighting. Your Herzog (Duke,Dux) is Leader of Armies; your Earl (Jarl)is Strong Man; your Marshal cavalry Horse-shoer. A Millennium, or reign of Peace and

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Wisdom, having from of old been prophesied,and becoming now daily more and more indu-bitable, may it not be apprehended that suchFighting titles will cease to be palatable, andnew and higher need to be devised?

“The only Title wherein I, with confidence,trace eternity is that of King. Konig (King),anciently Konning, means Ken-ning (Cun-ning), or which is the same thing, Can-ning.Ever must the Sovereign of Mankind be fitlyentitled King.”

“Well, also,” says he elsewhere, “was itwritten by Theologians: a King rules by di-vine right. He carries in him an authorityfrom God, or man will never give it him. CanI choose my own King? I can choose my ownKing Popinjay, and play what farce or tragedyI may with him: but he who is to be my Ruler,whose will is to be higher than my will, waschosen for me in Heaven. Neither except insuch Obedience to the Heaven-chosen is Free-dom so much as conceivable.”

The Editor will here admit that, amongall the wondrous provinces of Teufelsdröckh’sspiritual world, there is none he walks in withsuch astonishment, hesitation, and even pain,as in the Political. How, with our English loveof Ministry and Opposition, and that gener-ous conflict of Parties, mind warming itselfagainst mind in their mutual wrestle for thePublic Good, by which wrestle, indeed, is ourinvaluable Constitution kept warm and alive;how shall we domesticate ourselves in thisspectral Necropolis, or rather City both of theDead and of the Unborn, where the Present

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seems little other than an inconsiderable Filmdividing the Past and the Future? In thosedim long-drawn expanses, all is so immeasur-able; much so disastrous, ghastly; your veryradiances and straggling light-beams have asupernatural character. And then with suchan indifference, such a prophetic peacefulness(accounting the inevitably coming as alreadyhere, to him all one whether it be distant bycenturies or only by days), does he sit;—andlive, you would say, rather in any other agethan in his own! It is our painful duty to an-nounce, or repeat, that, looking into this man,we discern a deep, silent, slow-burning, inex-tinguishable Radicalism, such as fills us withshuddering admiration.

Thus, for example, he appears to make lit-tle even of the Elective Franchise; at leastso we interpret the following: “Satisfy your-selves,” he says, “by universal, indubitableexperiment, even as ye are now doing orwill do, whether FREEDOM, heaven-born andleading heavenward, and so vitally essen-tial for us all, cannot peradventure be me-chanically hatched and brought to light inthat same Ballot-Box of yours; or at worst,in some other discoverable or devisable Box,Edifice, or Steam-mechanism. It were amighty convenience; and beyond all feats ofmanufacture witnessed hitherto.” Is Teufels-dröckh acquainted with the British constitu-tion, even slightly?—He says, under anotherfigure: “But after all, were the problem, asindeed it now everywhere is, To rebuild yourold House from the top downwards (since you

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must live in it the while), what better, whatother, than the Representative Machine willserve your turn? Meanwhile, however, mockme not with the name of Free, ‘when youhave but knit up my chains into ornamen-tal festoons.”’—Or what will any member ofthe Peace Society make of such an assertionas this: “The lower people everywhere desireWar. Not so unwisely; there is then a demandfor lower people—to be shot!”

Gladly, therefore, do we emerge from thosesoul-confusing labyrinths of speculative Radi-calism, into somewhat clearer regions. Here,looking round, as was our hest, for “organicfilaments,” we ask, may not this, touching“Hero-worship,” be of the number? It seemsof a cheerful character; yet so quaint, so mys-tical, one knows not what, or how little, maylie under it. Our readers shall look with theirown eyes:—

“True is it that, in these days, man can doalmost all things, only not obey. True like-wise that whoso cannot obey cannot be free,still less bear rule; he that is the inferior ofnothing, can be the superior of nothing, theequal of nothing. Nevertheless, believe notthat man has lost his faculty of Reverence;that if it slumber in him, it has gone dead.Painful for man is that same rebellious Inde-pendence, when it has become inevitable; onlyin loving companionship with his fellows doeshe feel safe; only in reverently bowing downbefore the Higher does he feel himself exalted.

“Or what if the character of our so trou-blous Era lay even in this: that man had for-

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ever cast away Fear, which is the lower; butnot yet risen into perennial Reverence, whichis the higher and highest?

“Meanwhile, observe with joy, so cunninglyhas Nature ordered it, that whatsoever manought to obey, he cannot but obey. Before nofaintest revelation of the Godlike did he everstand irreverent; least of all, when the God-like showed itself revealed in his fellow-man.Thus is there a true religious Loyalty for-ever rooted in his heart; nay in all ages, evenin ours, it manifests itself as a more or lessorthodox Hero-worship. In which fact, thatHero-worship exists, has existed, and willforever exist, universally among Mankind,mayest thou discern the corner-stone of liv-ing rock, whereon all Polities for the remotesttime may stand secure.”

Do our readers discern any such corner-stone, or even so much as what Teufelsdröckh,is looking at? He exclaims, “Or hast thouforgotten Paris and Voltaire? How the aged,withered man, though but a Sceptic, Mocker,and millinery Court-poet, yet because even heseemed the Wisest, Best, could drag mankindat his chariot-wheels, so that princes cov-eted a smile from him, and the loveliest ofFrance would have laid their hair beneath hisfeet! All Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship; though their Divinity, moreover, wasof feature too apish.

“But if such things,” continues he, “weredone in the dry tree, what will be done inthe green? If, in the most parched season ofMan’s History, in the most parched spot of

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Europe, when Parisian life was at best but ascientific Hortus Siccus, bedizened with someItalian Gumflowers, such virtue could comeout of it; what is to be looked for when Lifeagain waves leafy and bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shall have nothing apelike, but bewholly human? Know that there is in mana quite indestructible Reverence for whatso-ever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly coun-terfeits such holding. Show the dullest clod-poll, show the haughtiest featherhead, that asoul higher than himself is actually here; werehis knees stiffened into brass, he must downand worship.”

Organic filaments, of a more authen-tic sort, mysteriously spinning themselves,some will perhaps discover in the followingpassage:—

“There is no Church, sayest thou? Thevoice of Prophecy has gone dumb? This is evenwhat I dispute: but in any case, hast thounot still Preaching enough? A Preaching Friarsettles himself in every village; and builds apulpit, which he calls Newspaper. Therefromhe preaches what most momentous doctrineis in him, for man’s salvation; and dost notthou listen, and believe? Look well, thou seesteverywhere a new Clergy of the MendicantOrders, some barefooted, some almost bare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teachand preach, zealously enough, for copper almsand the love of God. These break in pieces theancient idols; and, though themselves too of-ten reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be,mark out the sites of new Churches, where the

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true God-ordained, that are to follow, may findaudience, and minister. Said I not, Before theold skin was shed, the new had formed itselfbeneath it?”

Perhaps also in the following; where-with we now hasten to knit up this ravelledsleeve:—

“But there is no Religion?” reiteratesthe Professor. “Fool! I tell thee, there is.Hast thou well considered all that lies inthis immeasurable froth-ocean we name LIT-ERATURE? Fragments of a genuine Church-Homiletic lie scattered there, which Time willassort: nay fractions even of a Liturgy couldI point out. And knowest thou no Prophet,even in the vesture, environment, and di-alect of this age? None to whom the Godlikehad revealed itself, through all meanest andhighest forms of the Common; and by himbeen again prophetically revealed: in whoseinspired melody, even in these rag-gatheringand rag-burning days, Man’s Life again be-gins, were it but afar off, to be divine? Know-est thou none such? I know him, and namehim—Goethe.

“But thou as yet standest in no Temple;joinest in no Psalm-worship; feelest well that,where there is no ministering Priest, the peo-ple perish? Be of comfort! Thou art not alone,if thou have Faith. Spake we not of a Commu-nion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal, accom-panying and brother-like embracing thee, sothou be worthy? Their heroic Sufferings riseup melodiously together to Heaven, out of alllands, and out of all times, as a sacred Mis-

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erere; their heroic Actions also, as a boundlesseverlasting Psalm of Triumph. Neither saythat thou hast now no Symbol of the Godlike.Is not God’s Universe a Symbol of the Godlike;is not Immensity a Temple; is not Man’s His-tory, and Men’s History, a perpetual Evangel?Listen, and for organ-music thou wilt ever, asof old, hear the Morning Stars sing together.”

CHAPTER VIII.NATURAL SUPER-NATURALISM.

It is in his stupendous Section, headed Natu-ral Supernaturalism, that the Professor firstbecomes a Seer; and, after long effort, such aswe have witnessed, finally subdues under hisfeet this refractory Clothes-Philosophy, andtakes victorious possession thereof. Phan-tasms enough he has had to struggle with;“Cloth-webs and Cob-webs,” of Imperial Man-tles, Superannuated Symbols, and what not:yet still did he courageously pierce through.Nay, worst of all, two quite mysterious, world-embracing Phantasms, TIME and SPACE,have ever hovered round him, perplexing andbewildering: but with these also he now res-olutely grapples, these also he victoriouslyrends asunder. In a word, he has lookedfixedly on Existence, till, one after the other,its earthly hulls and garnitures have allmelted away; and now, to his rapt vision, theinterior celestial Holy-of-Holies lies disclosed.

Here, therefore, properly it is that the Phi-

307

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losophy of Clothes attains to Transcendental-ism; this last leap, can we but clear it, takes ussafe into the promised land, where Palingen-esia, in all senses, may be considered as be-ginning. “Courage, then!” may our Diogenesexclaim, with better right than Diogenes theFirst once did. This stupendous Section we,after long painful meditation, have found notto be unintelligible; but, on the contrary, togrow clear, nay radiant, and all-illuminating.Let the reader, turning on it what utmostforce of speculative intellect is in him, do hispart; as we, by judicious selection and adjust-ment, shall study to do ours:—

“Deep has been, and is, the significance ofMiracles,” thus quietly begins the Professor;“far deeper perhaps than we imagine. Mean-while, the question of questions were: Whatspecially is a Miracle? To that Dutch Kingof Siam, an icicle had been a miracle; whosohad carried with him an air-pump, and vialof vitriolic ether, might have worked a mir-acle. To my Horse, again, who unhappily isstill more unscientific, do not I work a mira-cle, and magical ‘Open sesame!’ every time Iplease to pay twopence, and open for him animpassable Schlagbaum, or shut Turnpike?

“‘But is not a real Miracle simply a vio-lation of the Laws of Nature?’ ask several.Whom I answer by this new question: Whatare the Laws of Nature? To me perhaps therising of one from the dead were no violationof these Laws, but a confirmation; were somefar deeper Law, now first penetrated into, andby Spiritual Force, even as the rest have all

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been, brought to bear on us with its MaterialForce.

“Here too may some inquire, not withoutastonishment: On what ground shall one, thatcan make Iron swim, come and declare thattherefore he can teach Religion? To us, truly,of the Nineteenth Century, such declarationwere inept enough; which nevertheless to ourfathers, of the First Century, was full of mean-ing.

“‘But is it not the deepest Law of Naturethat she be constant?’ cries an illuminatedclass: ‘Is not the Machine of the Universefixed to move by unalterable rules?’ Probableenough, good friends: nay I, too, must believethat the God, whom ancient inspired men as-sert to be ‘without variableness or shadow ofturning,’ does indeed never change; that Na-ture, that the Universe, which no one whomit so pleases can be prevented from calling aMachine, does move by the most unalterablerules. And now of you, too, I make the oldinquiry: What those same unalterable rules,forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature,may possibly be?

“They stand written in our Works of Sci-ence, say you; in the accumulated records ofMan’s Experience?—Was Man with his Expe-rience present at the Creation, then, to seehow it all went on? Have any deepest scien-tific individuals yet dived down to the foun-dations of the Universe, and gauged every-thing there? Did the Maker take them intoHis counsel; that they read His ground-planof the incomprehensible All; and can say, This

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stands marked therein, and no more thanthis? Alas, not in anywise! These scien-tific individuals have been nowhere but wherewe also are; have seen some hand breadthsdeeper than we see into the Deep that is infi-nite, without bottom as without shore.

“Laplace’s Book on the Stars, wherein heexhibits that certain Planets, with their Satel-lites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rateand in a course, which, by greatest good for-tune, he and the like of him have succeeded indetecting,—is to me as precious as to another.But is this what thou namest ‘Mechanism ofthe Heavens,’ and ‘System of the World;’ this,wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Her-schel’s Fifteen thousand Suns per minute, be-ing left out, some paltry handful of Moons,and inert Balls, had been—looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill;so that we can now prate of their Whereabout;their How, their Why, their What, being hidfrom us, as in the signless Inane?

“System of Nature! To the wisest man,wide as is his vision, Nature remains ofquite infinite depth, of quite infinite expan-sion; and all Experience thereof limits itselfto some few computed centuries and mea-sured square-miles. The course of Nature’sphases, on this our little fraction of a Planet,is partially known to us: but who knowswhat deeper courses these depend on; whatinfinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our littleEpicycle revolves on? To the Minnow ev-ery cranny and pebble, and quality and acci-dent, of its little native Creek may have be-

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come familiar: but does the Minnow under-stand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents,the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon’sEclipses; by all which the condition of its lit-tle Creek is regulated, and may, from time totime (unmiraculously enough), be quite over-set and reversed? Such a minnow is Man;his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean theimmeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodicCurrents the mysterious Course of Providencethrough Æons of Æons.

“We speak of the Volume of Nature: andtruly a Volume it is,—whose Author andWriter is God. To read it! Dost thou, doesman, so much as well know the Alphabetthereof? With its Words, Sentences, andgrand descriptive Pages, poetical and philo-sophical, spread out through Solar Systems,and Thousands of Years, we shall not trythee. It is a Volume written in celestial hiero-glyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of whicheven Prophets are happy that they can readhere a line and there a line. As for your Insti-tutes, and Academies of Science, they strivebravely; and, from amid the thick-crowded,inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic writ-ing, pick out, by dexterous combination, someLetters in the vulgar Character, and there-from put together this and the other economicRecipe, of high avail in Practice. That Na-ture is more than some boundless Volume ofsuch Recipes, or huge, well-nigh inexhaustibleDomestic-Cookery Book, of which the wholesecret will in this manner one day evolve it-self, the fewest dream.

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“Custom,” continues the Professor, “dothmake dotards of us all. Consider well, thouwilt find that Custom is the greatest ofWeavers; and weaves air-raiment for all theSpirits of the Universe; whereby indeed thesedwell with us visibly, as ministering servants,in our houses and workshops; but their spiri-tual nature becomes, to the most, forever hid-den. Philosophy complains that Custom hashoodwinked us, from the first; that we do ev-erything by Custom, even Believe by it; thatour very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinkingas we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs aswe have never heard questioned. Nay, whatis Philosophy throughout but a continual bat-tle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort totranscend the sphere of blind Custom, and sobecome Transcendental?

“Innumerable are the illusions andlegerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of allthese, perhaps the cleverest is her knackof persuading us that the Miraculous, bysimple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.True, it is by this means we live; for manmust work as well as wonder: and hereinis Custom so far a kind nurse, guiding himto his true benefit. But she is a fond foolishnurse, or rather we are false foolish nurslings,when, in our resting and reflecting hours, weprolong the same deception. Am I to view theStupendous with stupid indifference, becauseI have seen it twice, or two hundred, or twomillion times? There is no reason in Natureor in Art why I should: unless, indeed, I am amere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift

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of Thought were no other than the terrestrialgift of Steam is to the Steam-engine; a powerwhereby cotton might be spun, and moneyand money’s worth realized.

“Notable enough too, here as elsewhere,wilt thou find the potency of Names; which in-deed are but one kind of such custom-woven,wonder-hiding Garments. Witchcraft, andall manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology,we have now named Madness, and Diseasesof the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that stillthe new question comes upon us: What isMadness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before,does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific,altogether infernal boiling-up of the NetherChaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Visionof Creation, which swims thereon, which wename the Real. Was Luther’s Picture of theDevil less a Reality, whether it were formedwithin the bodily eye, or without it? In everythe wisest Soul lies a whole world of internalMadness, an authentic Demon-Empire; out ofwhich, indeed, his world of Wisdom has beencreatively built together, and now rests there,as on its dark foundations does a habitableflowery Earth rind.

“But deepest of all illusory Appearances,for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends,are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, space and time.These, as spun and woven for us from be-fore Birth itself, to clothe our celestial me fordwelling here, and yet to blind it,—lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warpand woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this

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Phantasm Existence, weave and paint them-selves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall youendeavor to strip them off; you can, at best,but rend them asunder for moments, and lookthrough.

“Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, whichwhen he put on, and wished himself Any-where, behold he was There. By this meanshad Fortunatus triumphed over Space, hehad annihilated Space; for him there was noWhere, but all was Here. Were a Hatter toestablish himself, in the Wahngasse of Weiss-nichtwo, and make felts of this sort for allmankind, what a world we should have ofit! Still stranger, should, on the opposite sideof the street, another Hatter establish him-self; and, as his fellow-craftsman made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating!Of both would I purchase, were it with mylast groschen; but chiefly of this latter. Toclap on your felt, and, simply by wishing thatyou were Anywhere, straightway to be There!Next to clap on your other felt, and, simplyby wishing that you were Anywhen, straight-way to be Then! This were indeed the grander:shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of theWorld to its Fire-Consummation; here histor-ically present in the First Century, convers-ing face to face with Paul and Seneca; thereprophetically in the Thirty-first, conversingalso face to face with other Pauls and Senecas,who as yet stand hidden in the depth of thatlate Time!

“Or thinkest thou it were impossible,unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated, then,

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or only past; is the Future non-extant, oronly future? Those mystic faculties of thine,Memory and Hope, already answer: al-ready through those mystic avenues, thou theEarth-blinded summonest both Past and Fu-ture, and communest with them, though asyet darkly, and with mute beckonings. Thecurtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtainsof To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal. Believewhat thou findest written in the sanctuariesof Man’s Soul, even as all Thinkers, in allages, have devoutly read it there: that Timeand Space are not God, but creations of God;that with God as it is a universal here, so is itan everlasting Now.

“And seest thou therein any glimpse ofIMMORTALITY?—O Heaven! Is the whiteTomb of our Loved One, who died from ourarms, and had to be left behind us there,which rises in the distance, like a pale, mourn-fully receding Milestone, to tell how many toil-some uncheered miles we have journeyed onalone,—but a pale spectral Illusion! Is thelost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as weare Here mysteriously, with God!—know of atruth that only the Time-shadows have per-ished, or are perishable; that the real Being ofwhatever was, and whatever is, and whateverwill be, is even now and forever. This, shouldit unhappily seem new, thou mayest ponder atthy leisure; for the next twenty years, or thenext twenty centuries: believe it thou must;understand it thou canst not.

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“That the Thought-forms, Space and Time,wherein, once for all, we are sent into thisEarth to live, should condition and determineour whole Practical reasonings, conceptions,and imagings or imaginings, seems altogetherfit, just, and unavoidable. But that theyshould, furthermore, usurp such sway overpure spiritual Meditation, and blind us to thewonder everywhere lying close on us, seemsnowise so. Admit Space and Time to theirdue rank as Forms of Thought; nay even, ifthou wilt, to their quite undue rank of Re-alities: and consider, then, with thyself howtheir thin disguises hide from us the bright-est God-effulgences! Thus, were it not miracu-lous, could I stretch forth my hand and clutchthe Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch forthmy hand and therewith clutch many a thing,and swing it hither and thither. Art thoua grown baby, then, to fancy that the Mir-acle lies in miles of distance, or in poundsavoirdupois of weight; and not to see that thetrue inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies inthis, that I can stretch forth my hand at all;that I have free Force to clutch aught there-with? Innumerable other of this sort are thedeceptions, and wonder-hiding stupefactions,which Space practices on us.

“Still worse is it with regard to Time. Yourgrand anti-magician, and universal wonder-hider, is this same lying Time. Had we but theTime-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only,we should see ourselves in a World of Mir-acles, wherein all fabled or authentic Thau-maturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone.

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But unhappily we have not such a Hat; andman, poor fool that he is, can seldom andscantily help himself without one.

“Were it not wonderful, for instance, hadOrpheus, or Amphion, built the walls ofThebes by the mere sound of his Lyre? Yettell me, Who built these walls of Weiss-nichtwo; summoning out all the sandstonerocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch(now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with fright-ful green-mantled pools); and shape them-selves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squaredashlar houses and noble streets? Was it notthe still higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who,in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wis-dom, succeeded in civilizing Man? Our high-est Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hun-dred years ago: his sphere-melody, flowing inwild native tones, took captive the ravishedsouls of men; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though nowwith thousand-fold accompaniments, and richsymphonies, through all our hearts; and mod-ulates, and divinely leads them. Is that a won-der, which happens in two hours; and does itcease to be wonderful if happening in two mil-lion? Not only was Thebes built by the mu-sic of an Orpheus; but without the music ofsome inspired Orpheus was no city ever built,no work that man glories in ever done.

“Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance,if thou have eyes, from the near moving-causeto its far distant Mover: The stroke that cametransmitted through a whole galaxy of elas-tic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last

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ball only had been struck, and sent flying?Oh, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat)transport thee direct from the Beginnings, tothe Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed,and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea ofcelestial wonder! Then sawest thou that thisfair Universe, were it in the meanest provincethereof, is in very deed the star-domed City ofGod; that through every star, through everygrass-blade, and most through every LivingSoul, the glory of a present God still beams.But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God,and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him fromthe foolish.

“Again, could anything be more miracu-lous than an actual authentic Ghost? TheEnglish Johnson longed, all his life, to seeone; but could not, though he went to CockLane, and thence to the church-vaults, andtapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did henever, with the mind’s eye as well as withthe body’s, look round him into that full tideof human Life he so loved; did he never somuch as look into Himself? The good Doc-tor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic asheart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghostswere travelling the streets by his side. Oncemore I say, sweep away the illusion of Time;compress the threescore years into three min-utes: what else was he, what else are we? Arewe not Spirits, that are shaped into a body,into an Appearance; and that fade away againinto air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor,it is a simple scientific fact: we start outof Nothingness, take figure, and are Appari-

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tions; round us, as round the veriest spec-tre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes areas years and aeons. Come there not tones ofLove and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings,like the Song of beatified Souls? And again,do not we squeak and gibber (in our discor-dant, screech-owlish debatings and recrimi-natings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, andfearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in ourmad Dance of the Dead,—till the scent of themorning air summons us to our still Home;and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?Where now is Alexander of Macedon: doesthe steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behindhim; or have they all vanished utterly, evenas perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too,and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Cam-paigns! Was it all other than the veriestSpectre-hunt; which has now, with its howl-ing tumult that made Night hideous, flittedaway?— Ghosts! There are nigh a thousandmillion walking the Earth openly at noon-tide; some half-hundred have vanished fromit, some half-hundred have arisen in it, erethy watch ticks once.

“O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awfulto consider that we not only carry each afuture Ghost within him; but are, in verydeed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence hadwe them; this stormy Force; this life-bloodwith its burning Passion? They are dust andshadow; a Shadow-system gathered round ourme: wherein, through some moments or years,the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the

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Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse,fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells inhis arm and heart: but warrior and war-horseare a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more.Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were afirm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film;it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horsesink beyond plummet’s sounding. Plummet’s?Fantasy herself will not follow them. A littlewhile ago, they were not; a little while, andthey are not, their very ashes are not.

“So has it been from the beginning, sowill it be to the end. Generation after gen-eration takes to itself the Form of a Body;and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night,on Heaven’s mission APPEARS. What Forceand Fire is in each he expends: one grind-ing in the mill of Industry; one hunter-likeclimbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science;one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks ofStrife, in war with his fellow:—and then theHeaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesturefalls away, and soon even to Sense becomesa vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven’sArtillery, does this mysterious MANKINDthunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknownDeep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathingSpirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; hastestormfully across the astonished Earth; thenplunge again into the Inane. Earth’s moun-tains are levelled, and her seas filled up, inour passage: can the Earth, which is but deadand a vision, resist Spirits which have real-

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ity and are alive? On the hardest adamantsome footprint of us is stamped in; the lastRear of the host will read traces of the ear-liest Van. But whence?—O Heaven whither?Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that itis through Mystery to Mystery, from God andto God.

‘We are such stuffAs Dreams are made of, and our little LifeIs rounded with a sleep!’”

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CHAPTER IX. CIR-CUMSPECTIVE.

Here, then, arises the so momentous ques-tion: Have many British Readers actually ar-rived with us at the new promised country; isthe Philosophy of Clothes now at last open-ing around them? Long and adventurous hasthe journey been: from those outmost vulgar,palpable Woollen Hulls of Man; through hiswondrous Flesh-Garments, and his wondrousSocial Garnitures; inwards to the Garmentsof his very Soul’s Soul, to Time and Spacethemselves! And now does the spiritual, eter-nal Essence of Man, and of Mankind, baredof such wrappages, begin in any measure toreveal itself? Can many readers discern, asthrough a glass darkly, in huge wavering out-lines, some primeval rudiments of Man’s Be-ing, what is changeable divided from whatis unchangeable? Does that Earth-Spirit’sspeech in Faust,—

“’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by;”

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or that other thousand-times repeated speechof the Magician, Shakespeare,—

“And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces,The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself,And all which it inherit, shall dissolve;And like this unsubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a wrack behind;”

begin to have some meaning for us? In a word,do we at length stand safe in the far region ofPoetic Creation and Palingenesia, where thatPhoenix Death-Birth of Human Society, and ofall Human Things, appears possible, is seen tobe inevitable?

Along this most insufficient, unheard-ofBridge, which the Editor, by Heaven’s bless-ing, has now seen himself enabled to con-clude if not complete, it cannot be his sobercalculation, but only his fond hope, thatmany have travelled without accident. Nofirm arch, overspanning the Impassable withpaved highway, could the Editor construct;only, as was said, some zigzag series of raftsfloating tumultuously thereon. Alas, and theleaps from raft to raft were too often of abreakneck character; the darkness, the na-ture of the element, all was against us!

Nevertheless, may not here and there oneof a thousand, provided with a discursivenessof intellect rare in our day, have cleared thepassage, in spite of all? Happy few! little bandof Friends! be welcome, be of courage. By de-grees, the eye grows accustomed to its newWhereabout; the hand can stretch itself forth

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to work there: it is in this grand and indeedhighest work of Palingenesia that ye shall la-bor, each according to ability. New laborerswill arrive; new Bridges will be built; nay, maynot our own poor rope-and-raft Bridge, in yourpassings and repassings, be mended in manya point, till it grow quite firm, passable evenfor the halt?

Meanwhile, of the innumerable multitudethat started with us, joyous and full of hope,where now is the innumerable remainder,whom we see no longer by our side? The mosthave recoiled, and stand gazing afar off, in un-sympathetic astonishment, at our career: nota few, pressing forward with more courage,have missed footing, or leaped short; and nowswim weltering in the Chaos-flood, some to-wards this shore, some towards that. To thesealso a helping hand should be held out; atleast some word of encouragement be said.

Or, to speak without metaphor, with whichmode of utterance Teufelsdröckh unhappilyhas somewhat infected us,—can it be hiddenfrom the Editor that many a British Readersits reading quite bewildered in head, and af-flicted rather than instructed by the presentWork? Yes, long ago has many a BritishReader been, as now, demanding with some-thing like a snarl: Whereto does all this lead;or what use is in it?

In the way of replenishing thy purse,or otherwise aiding thy digestive faculty, OBritish Reader, it leads to nothing, and thereis no use in it; but rather the reverse, for itcosts thee somewhat. Nevertheless, if through

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this unpromising Horn-gate, Teufelsdröckh,and we by means of him, have led thee intothe true Land of Dreams; and through theClothes-Screen, as through a magical Pierre-Pertuis, thou lookest, even for moments, intothe region of the Wonderful, and seest and fee-lest that thy daily life is girt with Wonder, andbased on Wonder, and thy very blankets andbreeches are Miracles,—then art thou profitedbeyond money’s worth; and hast a thankful-ness towards our Professor; nay, perhaps inmany a literary Tea-circle wilt open thy kindlips, and audibly express that same.

Nay farther, art not thou too perhaps bythis time made aware that all Symbols areproperly Clothes; that all Forms wherebySpirit manifests itself to sense, whether out-wardly or in the imagination, are Clothes; andthus not only the parchment Magna Charta,which a Tailor was nigh cutting into mea-sures, but the Pomp and Authority of Law, thesacredness of Majesty, and all inferior Wor-ships (Worth-ships) are properly a Vestureand Raiment; and the Thirty-nine Articlesthemselves are articles of wearing-apparel(for the Religious Idea)? In which case, mustit not also be admitted that this Science ofClothes is a high one, and may with infinitelydeeper study on thy part yield richer fruit:that it takes scientific rank beside Codifica-tion, and Political Economy, and the Theoryof the British Constitution; nay rather, fromits prophetic height looks down on all these,as on so many weaving-shops and spinning-mills, where the Vestures which it has to fash-

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ion, and consecrate, and distribute, are, too of-ten by haggard hungry operatives who see nofarther than their nose, mechanically wovenand spun?

But omitting all this, much more allthat concerns Natural Supernaturalism, andindeed whatever has reference to the Ul-terior or Transcendental portion of theScience, or bears never so remotely onthat promised Volume of the Palingene-sie der menschlichen Gesellschaft (Newbirthof Society),—we humbly suggest that noprovince of Clothes-Philosophy, even the low-est, is without its direct value, but that in-numerable inferences of a practical naturemay be drawn therefrom. To say nothing ofthose pregnant considerations, ethical, politi-cal, symbolical, which crowd on the Clothes-Philosopher from the very threshold of hisScience; nothing even of those “architecturalideas,” which, as we have seen, lurk at thebottom of all Modes, and will one day, bet-ter unfolding themselves, lead to importantrevolutions,—let us glance for a moment, andwith the faintest light of Clothes-Philosophy,on what may be called the Habilatory Classof our fellow-men. Here too overlooking,where so much were to be looked on, the mil-lion spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, wash-ers, and wringers, that puddle and muddlein their dark recesses, to make us Clothes,and die that we may live,—let us but turnthe reader’s attention upon two small divi-sions of mankind, who, like moths, may be re-garded as Cloth-animals, creatures that live,

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move and have their being in Cloth: we mean,Dandies and Tailors.

In regard to both which small divisionsit may be asserted without scruple, that thepublic feeling, unenlightened by Philosophy, isat fault; and even that the dictates of human-ity are violated. As will perhaps abundantlyappear to readers of the two following Chap-ters.

CHAPTER X. THEDANDIACALBODY.

First, touching Dandies, let us consider, withsome scientific strictness, what a Dandy spe-cially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man,a Man whose trade, office and existence con-sists in the wearing of Clothes. Every fac-ulty of his soul, spirit, purse and person isheroically consecrated to this one object, thewearing of Clothes wisely and well: so thatas others dress to live, he lives to dress. Theall-importance of Clothes, which a GermanProfessor, of unequalled learning and acu-men, writes his enormous Volume to demon-strate, has sprung up in the intellect of theDandy without effort, like an instinct of ge-nius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth.What Teufelsdröckh would call a “Divine Ideaof Cloth” is born with him; and this, likeother such Ideas, will express itself outwardly,or wring his heart asunder with unutterablethroes.

But, like a generous, creative enthusiast,

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he fearlessly makes his Idea an Action; showshimself in peculiar guise to mankind; walksforth, a witness and living Martyr to the eter-nal worth of Clothes. We called him a Poet:is not his body the (stuffed) parchment-skinwhereon he writes, with cunning Hudders-field dyes, a Sonnet to his mistress’ eyebrow?Say, rather, an Epos, and Clotha Virumquecano, to the whole world, in Macaronic verses,which he that runs may read. Nay, if yougrant, what seems to be admissible, that theDandy has a Thinking-principle in him, andsome notions of Time and Space, is there notin this life-devotedness to Cloth, in this sowilling sacrifice of the Immortal to the Per-ishable, something (though in reverse order)of that blending and identification of Eternitywith Time, which, as we have seen, consti-tutes the Prophetic character?

And now, for all this perennial Martyr-dom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what isit that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, wemay say, that you would recognize his exis-tence; would admit him to be a living object;or even failing this, a visual object, or thingthat will reflect rays of light. Your silver oryour gold (beyond what the niggardly Law hasalready secured him) he solicits not; simplythe glance of your eyes. Understand his mys-tic significance, or altogether miss and mis-interpret it; do but look at him, and he iscontented. May we not well cry shame onan ungrateful world, which refuses even thispoor boon; which will waste its optic facultyon dried Crocodiles, and Siamese Twins; and

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over the domestic wonderful wonder of won-ders, a live Dandy, glance with hasty indiffer-ence, and a scarcely concealed contempt! Himno Zoologist classes among the Mammalia, noAnatomist dissects with care: when did we seeany injected Preparation of the Dandy in ourMuseums; any specimen of him preserved inspirits! Lord Herringbone may dress himselfin a snuff-brown suit, with snuff-brown shirtand shoes: it skills not; the undiscerning pub-lic, occupied with grosser wants, passes by re-gardless on the other side.

The age of Curiosity, like that of Chivalry,is indeed, properly speaking, gone. Yet per-haps only gone to sleep: for here arises theClothes-Philosophy to resuscitate, strangelyenough, both the one and the other! Shouldsound views of this Science come to prevail,the essential nature of the British Dandy, andthe mystic significance that lies in him, can-not always remain hidden under laughableand lamentable hallucination. The follow-ing long Extract from Professor Teufelsdröckhmay set the matter, if not in its true light,yet in the way towards such. It is to be re-gretted, however, that here, as so often else-where, the Professor’s keen philosophic per-spicacity is somewhat marred by a certainmixture of almost owlish purblindness, or elseof some perverse, ineffectual, ironic tendency;our readers shall judge which:—

“In these distracted times,” writes he,“when the Religious Principle, driven out ofmost Churches, either lies unseen in thehearts of good men, looking and longing and

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silently working there towards some newRevelation; or else wanders homeless overthe world, like a disembodied soul seekingits terrestrial organization,—into how manystrange shapes, of Superstition and Fanati-cism, does it not tentatively and errantly castitself! The higher Enthusiasm of man’s na-ture is for the while without Exponent; yetdoes it continue indestructible, unweariedlyactive, and work blindly in the great chaoticdeep: thus Sect after Sect, and Church afterChurch, bodies itself forth, and melts againinto new metamorphosis.

“Chiefly is this observable in England,which, as the wealthiest and worst-instructedof European nations, offers precisely the el-ements (of Heat, namely, and of Darkness),in which such moon-calves and monstrositiesare best generated. Among the newer Sectsof that country, one of the most notable, andclosely connected with our present subject, isthat of the Dandies; concerning which, whatlittle information I have been able to procuremay fitly stand here.

“It is true, certain of the English Journal-ists, men generally without sense for the Re-ligious Principle, or judgment for its mani-festations, speak, in their brief enigmatic no-tices, as if this were perhaps rather a Secu-lar Sect, and not a Religious one; neverthe-less, to the psychologic eye its devotional andeven sacrificial character plainly enough re-veals itself. Whether it belongs to the classof Fetish-worships, or of Hero-worships orPolytheisms, or to what other class, may in

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the present state of our intelligence remainundecided (schweben). A certain touch ofManicheism, not indeed in the Gnostic shape,is discernible enough; also (for human Er-ror walks in a cycle, and reappears at in-tervals) a not-inconsiderable resemblance tothat Superstition of the Athos Monks, whoby fasting from all nourishment, and lookingintensely for a length of time into their ownnavels, came to discern therein the true Apoc-alypse of Nature, and Heaven Unveiled. Tomy own surmise, it appears as if this Dandia-cal Sect were but a new modification, adaptedto the new time, of that primeval Supersti-tion, Self-worship; which Zerdusht, Quang-foutchee, Mahomet, and others, strove ratherto subordinate and restrain than to eradicate;and which only in the purer forms of Reli-gion has been altogether rejected. Wherefore,if any one chooses to name it revived Ahri-manism, or a new figure of Demon-Worship,I have, so far as is yet visible, no objection.

“For the rest, these people, animated withthe zeal of a new Sect, display courage andperseverance, and what force there is in man’snature, though never so enslaved. They af-fect great purity and separatism; distinguishthemselves by a particular costume (whereofsome notices were given in the earlier part ofthis Volume); likewise, so far as possible, bya particular speech (apparently some brokenLingua-franca, or English-French); and, onthe whole, strive to maintain a true Nazarenedeportment, and keep themselves unspottedfrom the world.

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“They have their Temples, whereof thechief, as the Jewish Temple did, stands intheir metropolis; and is named Almack’s, aword of uncertain etymology. They worshipprincipally by night; and have their High-priests and High-priestesses, who, however,do not continue for life. The rites, by somesupposed to be of the Menadic sort, or per-haps with an Eleusinian or Cabiric character,are held strictly secret. Nor are Sacred Bookswanting to the Sect; these they call Fashion-able Novels: however, the Canon is not com-pleted, and some are canonical and others not.

“Of such Sacred Books I, not without ex-pense, procured myself some samples; and inhope of true insight, and with the zeal whichbeseems an Inquirer into Clothes, set to inter-pret and study them. But wholly to no pur-pose: that tough faculty of reading, for whichthe world will not refuse me credit, was herefor the first time foiled and set at naught.In vain that I summoned my whole energies(mich weidlich anstrengte), and did my veryutmost; at the end of some short space, Iwas uniformly seized with not so much whatI can call a drumming in my ears, as a kindof infinite, unsufferable, Jew’s-harping andscrannel-piping there; to which the fright-fullest species of Magnetic Sleep soon super-vened. And if I strove to shake this away,and absolutely would not yield, there camea hitherto unfelt sensation, as of DeliriumTremens, and a melting into total deliquium:till at last, by order of the Doctor, dreadingruin to my whole intellectual and bodily fac-

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ulties, and a general breaking up of the con-stitution, I reluctantly but determinedly for-bore. Was there some miracle at work here;like those Fire-balls, and supernal and infer-nal prodigies, which, in the case of the JewishMysteries, have also more than once scaredback the Alien? Be this as it may, such fail-ure on my part, after best efforts, must excusethe imperfection of this sketch; altogether in-complete, yet the completest I could give of aSect too singular to be omitted.

“Loving my own life and senses as I do, nopower shall induce me, as a private individ-ual, to open another Fashionable Novel. Butluckily, in this dilemma, comes a hand fromthe clouds; whereby if not victory, deliveranceis held out to me. Round one of those Book-packages, which the Stillschweigen’sche Buch-handlung is in the habit of importing fromEngland, come, as is usual, various wasteprinted-sheets (Maculatur-blatter), by way ofinterior wrappage: into these the Clothes-Philosopher, with a certain Mahometan rev-erence even for waste-paper, where curiousknowledge will sometimes hover, disdains notto cast his eye. Readers may judge of hisastonishment when on such a defaced stray-sheet, probably the outcast fraction of someEnglish Periodical, such as they name Mag-azine, appears something like a Dissertationon this very subject of Fashionable Novels! Itsets out, indeed, chiefly from a Secular pointof view; directing itself, not without asper-ity, against some to me unknown individualnamed Pelham, who seems to be a Mysta-

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gogue, and leading Teacher and Preacher ofthe Sect; so that, what indeed otherwise wasnot to be expected in such a fugitive frag-mentary sheet, the true secret, the Religiousphysiognomy and physiology of the DandiacalBody, is nowise laid fully open there. Never-theless, scattered lights do from time to timesparkle out, whereby I have endeavored toprofit. Nay, in one passage selected from theProphecies, or Mythic Theogonies, or what-ever they are (for the style seems very mixed)of this Mystagogue, I find what appears to be aConfession of Faith, or Whole Duty of Man, ac-cording to the tenets of that Sect. Which Con-fession or Whole Duty, therefore, as proceed-ing from a source so authentic, I shall herearrange under Seven distinct Articles, and invery abridged shape lay before the Germanworld; therewith taking leave of this matter.Observe also, that to avoid possibility of error,I, as far as may be, quote literally from theOriginal:—

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ARTICLES OF FAITH.

1. ‘Coats should have nothing of the trian-gle about them; at the same time, wrin-kles behind should be carefully avoided.

2. ‘The collar is a very important point: itshould be low behind, and slightly rolled.

3. ‘No license of fashion can allow a man ofdelicate taste to adopt the posterial lux-uriance of a Hottentot.

4. ‘There is safety in a swallow-tail.

5. ‘The good sense of a gentleman isnowhere more finely developed than inhis rings.

6. ‘It is permitted to mankind, under cer-tain restrictions, to wear white waist-coats.

7. ‘The trousers must be exceedingly tightacross the hips.’

“All which Propositions I, for the present, con-tent myself with modestly but peremptorilyand irrevocably denying.

“In strange contrast with this DandiacalBody stands another British Sect, originally,as I understand, of Ireland, where its chiefseat still is; but known also in the main Is-land, and indeed everywhere rapidly spread-ing. As this Sect has hitherto emitted no

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Canonical Books, it remains to me in the samestate of obscurity as the Dandiacal, which haspublished Books that the unassisted humanfaculties are inadequate to read. The mem-bers appear to be designated by a consider-able diversity of names, according to their var-ious places of establishment: in England theyare generally called the Drudge Sect; also,unphilosophically enough, the White Negroes;and, chiefly in scorn by those of other com-munions, the Ragged-Beggar Sect. In Scot-land, again, I find them entitled Hallanshak-ers, or the Stook of Duds Sect; any individualcommunicant is named Stook of Duds (thatis, Shock of Rags), in allusion, doubtless, totheir professional Costume. While in Ireland,which, as mentioned, is their grand parenthive, they go by a perplexing multiplicity ofdesignations, such as Bogtrotters, Redshanks,Ribbonmen, Cottiers, Peep-of-Day Boys, Babesof the Wood, Rockites, Poor-Slaves: which last,however, seems to be the primary and genericname; whereto, probably enough, the othersare only subsidiary species, or slight varieties;or, at most, propagated offsets from the parentstem, whose minute subdivisions, and shadesof difference, it were here loss of time to dwellon. Enough for us to understand, what seemsindubitable, that the original Sect is that ofthe Poor-Slaves; whose doctrines, practices,and fundamental characteristics pervade andanimate the whole Body, howsoever denomi-nated or outwardly diversified.

“The precise speculative tenets of thisBrotherhood: how the Universe, and Man,

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and Man’s Life, picture themselves to themind of an Irish Poor-Slave; with what feel-ings and opinions he looks forward on theFuture, round on the Present, back on thePast, it were extremely difficult to specify.Something Monastic there appears to be intheir Constitution: we find them bound bythe two Monastic Vows, of Poverty and Obe-dience; which vows, especially the former, it issaid, they observe with great strictness; nay,as I have understood it, they are pledged, andbe it by any solemn Nazarene ordination ornot, irrevocably consecrated thereto, even be-fore birth. That the third Monastic Vow, ofChastity, is rigidly enforced among them, Ifind no ground to conjecture.

“Furthermore, they appear to imitate theDandiacal Sect in their grand principle ofwearing a peculiar Costume. Of which IrishPoor-Slave Costume no description will in-deed be found in the present Volume; for thisreason, that by the imperfect organ of Lan-guage it did not seem describable. Their rai-ment consists of innumerable skirts, lappetsand irregular wings, of all cloths and of allcolors; through the labyrinthic intricacies ofwhich their bodies are introduced by some un-known process. It is fastened together by amultiplex combination of buttons, thrums andskewers; to which frequently is added a gir-dle of leather, of hempen or even of strawrope, round the loins. To straw rope, indeed,they seem partial, and often wear it by wayof sandals. In head-dress they affect a cer-tain freedom: hats with partial brim, without

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crown, or with only a loose, hinged, or valvecrown; in the former case, they sometimes in-vert the hat, and wear it brim uppermost, likea university-cap, with what view is unknown.

“The name Poor-Slaves seems to indicatea Slavonic, Polish, or Russian origin: not so,however, the interior essence and spirit oftheir Superstition, which rather displays aTeutonic or Druidical character. One mightfancy them worshippers of Hertha, or theEarth: for they dig and affectionately workcontinually in her bosom; or else, shut upin private Oratories, meditate and manipu-late the substances derived from her; seldomlooking up towards the Heavenly Luminar-ies, and then with comparative indifference.Like the Druids, on the other hand, they livein dark dwellings; often even breaking theirglass windows, where they find such, andstuffing them up with pieces of raiment, orother opaque substances, till the fit obscurityis restored. Again, like all followers of Nature-Worship, they are liable to out-breakings of anenthusiasm rising to ferocity; and burn men,if not in wicker idols, yet in sod cottages.

“In respect of diet, they have also their ob-servances. All Poor-Slaves are Rhizophagous(or Root-eaters); a few are Ichthyophagous,and use Salted Herrings: other animal foodthey abstain from; except indeed, with per-haps some strange inverted fragment of aBrahminical feeling, such animals as die anatural death. Their universal sustenance isthe root named Potato, cooked by fire alone;and generally without condiment or relish of

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any kind, save an unknown condiment namedPoint, into the meaning of which I have vainlyinquired; the victual Potatoes-and-Point notappearing, at least not with specific accu-racy of description, in any European Cookery-Book whatever. For drink, they use, withan almost epigrammatic counterpoise of taste,Milk, which is the mildest of liquors, andPotheen, which is the fiercest. This latter Ihave tasted, as well as the English Blue-Ruin,and the Scotch Whiskey, analogous fluids usedby the Sect in those countries: it evidentlycontains some form of alcohol, in the higheststate of concentration, though disguised withacrid oils; and is, on the whole, the most pun-gent substance known to me,—indeed, a per-fect liquid fire. In all their Religious Solem-nities, Potheen is said to be an indispensablerequisite, and largely consumed.

“An Irish Traveller, of perhaps common ve-racity, who presents himself under the to meunmeaning title of The late John Bernard, of-fers the following sketch of a domestic estab-lishment, the inmates whereof, though suchis not stated expressly, appear to have been ofthat Faith. Thereby shall my German read-ers now behold an Irish Poor-Slave, as it werewith their own eyes; and even see him atmeat. Moreover, in the so precious waste-paper sheet above mentioned, I have foundsome corresponding picture of a DandiacalHousehold, painted by that same DandiacalMystagogue, or Theogonist: this also, by wayof counterpart and contrast, the world shalllook into.

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“First, therefore, of the Poor-Slave, whoappears likewise to have been a species ofInnkeeper. I quote from the original:

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POOR-SLAVE HOUSEHOLD.

“‘The furniture of this Caravanseraconsisted of a large iron Pot, twooaken Tables, two Benches, twoChairs, and a Potheen Noggin.There was a Loft above (attainableby a ladder), upon which the in-mates slept; and the space belowwas divided by a hurdle into twoApartments; the one for their cowand pig, the other for themselvesand guests. On entering the housewe discovered the family, eleven innumber, at dinner: the father sit-ting at the top, the mother at thebottom, the children on each side,of a large oaken Board, which wasscooped out in the middle, like atrough, to receive the contents oftheir Pot of Potatoes. Little holeswere cut at equal distances to con-tain Salt; and a bowl of Milk stoodon the table: all the luxuries ofmeat and beer, bread, knives anddishes were dispensed with.’

The Poor-Slave himself our Traveller found,as he says, broad-backed, black-browed, ofgreat personal strength, and mouth from earto ear. His Wife was a sun-browned but well-featured woman; and his young ones, bareand chubby, had the appetite of ravens. Of

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their Philosophical or Religious tenets or ob-servances, no notice or hint.

“But now, secondly, of the DandiacalHousehold; in which, truly, that often-mentioned Mystagogue and inspired Penmanhimself has his abode:—

DANDIACAL HOUSEHOLD.

“‘A Dressing-room splendidly fur-nished; violet-colored curtains,chairs and ottomans of the samehue. Two full-length Mirrors areplaced, one on each side of a table,which supports the luxuries of theToilet. Several Bottles of Perfumes,arranged in a peculiar fashion,stand upon a smaller table ofmother-of-pearl: opposite to theseare placed the appurtenances ofLavation richly wrought in frostedsilver. A Wardrobe of Buhl is onthe left; the doors of which, beingpartly open, discover a profusionof Clothes; Shoes of a singularlysmall size monopolize the lowershelves. Fronting the wardrobe adoor ajar gives some slight glimpseof a Bath-room. Folding-doorsin the background.—Enter theAuthor,’ our Theogonist in person,‘obsequiously preceded by a FrenchValet, in white silk Jacket andcambric Apron.’

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“Such are the two Sects which, at this mo-ment, divide the more unsettled portion of theBritish People; and agitate that ever-vexedcountry. To the eye of the political Seer,their mutual relation, pregnant with the el-ements of discord and hostility, is far fromconsoling. These two principles of Dandia-cal Self-worship or Demon-worship, and Poor-Slavish or Drudgical Earth-worship, or what-ever that same Drudgism may be, do as yet in-deed manifest themselves under distant andnowise considerable shapes: nevertheless, intheir roots and subterranean ramifications,they extend through the entire structure ofSociety, and work unweariedly in the secretdepths of English national Existence; strivingto separate and isolate it into two contradic-tory, uncommunicating masses.

“In numbers, and even individualstrength, the Poor-Slaves or Drudges, itwould seem, are hourly increasing. TheDandiacal, again, is by nature no prosely-tizing Sect; but it boasts of great hereditaryresources, and is strong by union; whereasthe Drudges, split into parties, have as yetno rallying-point; or at best only co-operateby means of partial secret affiliations. If,indeed, there were to arise a Communion ofDrudges, as there is already a Communion ofSaints, what strangest effects would followtherefrom! Dandyism as yet affects to lookdown on Drudgism: but perhaps the hour oftrial, when it will be practically seen whichought to look down, and which up, is not sodistant.

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“To me it seems probable that the twoSects will one day part England betweenthem; each recruiting itself from the interme-diate ranks, till there be none left to enliston either side. Those Dandiacal Manicheans,with the host of Dandyizing Christians, willform one body: the Drudges, gathering roundthem whosoever is Drudgical, be he Chris-tian or Infidel Pagan; sweeping up likewise allmanner of Utilitarians, Radicals, refractoryPot-wallopers, and so forth, into their generalmass, will form another. I could liken Dandy-ism and Drudgism to two bottomless boilingWhirlpools that had broken out on oppositequarters of the firm land: as yet they ap-pear only disquieted, foolishly bubbling wells,which man’s art might cover in; yet markthem, their diameter is daily widening: theyare hollow Cones that boil up from the infi-nite Deep, over which your firm land is buta thin crust or rind! Thus daily is the inter-mediate land crumbling in, daily the empireof the two Buchan-Bullers extending; till nowthere is but a foot-plank, a mere film of Landbetween them; this too is washed away: andthen—we have the true Hell of Waters, andNoah’s Deluge is out-deluged!

“Or better, I might call them two bound-less, and indeed unexampled Electric Ma-chines (turned by the ‘Machinery of Society’),with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgismthe Negative, Dandyism the Positive; one at-tracts hourly towards it and appropriates allthe Positive Electricity of the nation (namely,the Money thereof); the other is equally busy

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with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger),which is equally potent. Hitherto you see onlypartial transient sparkles and sputters: butwait a little, till the entire nation is in anelectric state: till your whole vital Electric-ity, no longer healthfully Neutral, is cut intotwo isolated portions of Positive and Nega-tive (of Money and of Hunger); and standsthere bottled up in two World-Batteries! Thestirring of a child’s finger brings the two to-gether; and then—What then? The Earth isbut shivered into impalpable smoke by thatDoom’s thunder-peal; the Sun misses one ofhis Planets in Space, and thenceforth thereare no eclipses of the Moon.—Or better still,I might liken”—

Oh, enough, enough of likenings and simil-itudes; in excess of which, truly, it is hardto say whether Teufelsdröckh or ourselves sinthe more.

We have often blamed him for a habit ofwire-drawing and over-refining; from of oldwe have been familiar with his tendency toMysticism and Religiosity, whereby in every-thing he was still scenting out Religion: butnever perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusionsso cloud and distort his otherwise most pierc-ing vision, as in this of the Dandiacal Body!Or was there something of intended satire; isthe Professor and Seer not quite the blinkardhe affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal weshould have decisively answered in the affir-mative; but with a Teufelsdröckh there everhovers some shade of doubt. In the meanwhile, if satire were actually intended, the

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case is little better. There are not wantingmen who will answer: Does your Professortake us for simpletons? His irony has overshotitself; we see through it, and perhaps throughhim.

CHAPTER XI.TAILORS.

Thus, however, has our first Practical Infer-ence from the Clothes-Philosophy, that whichrespects Dandies, been sufficiently drawn;and we come now to the second, concern-ing Tailors. On this latter our opinion hap-pily quite coincides with that of Teufelsdröckhhimself, as expressed in the concluding pageof his Volume, to whom, therefore, we will-ingly give place. Let him speak his own lastwords, in his own way:—

“Upwards of a century,” says he, “mustelapse, and still the bleeding fight of Free-dom be fought, whoso is noblest perishing inthe van, and thrones be hurled on altars likePelion on Ossa, and the Moloch of Iniquityhave his victims, and the Michael of Justicehis martyrs, before Tailors can be admitted totheir true prerogatives of manhood, and thislast wound of suffering Humanity be closed.

“If aught in the history of the world’s blind-ness could surprise us, here might we in-deed pause and wonder. An idea has goneabroad, and fixed itself down into a wide-

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spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a dis-tinct species in Physiology, not Men, but frac-tional Parts of a Man. Call any one a Schnei-der (Cutter, Tailor), is it not, in our dislocated,hoodwinked, and indeed delirious conditionof Society, equivalent to defying his perpet-ual fellest enmity? The epithet schneidermas-sig (tailor-like) betokens an otherwise unap-proachable degree of pusillanimity; we intro-duce a Tailor’s-Melancholy, more opprobriousthan any Leprosy, into our Books of Medicine;and fable I know not what of his generating itby living on Cabbage. Why should I speak ofHans Sachs (himself a Shoemaker, or kind ofLeather-Tailor), with his Schneider mit demPanier? Why of Shakspeare, in his Taming ofthe Shrew, and elsewhere? Does it not standon record that the English Queen Elizabeth,receiving a deputation of Eighteen Tailors, ad-dressed them with a ‘Good morning, gentle-men both!’ Did not the same virago boast thatshe had a Cavalry Regiment, whereof neitherhorse nor man could be injured; her Regiment,namely, of Tailors on Mares? Thus every-where is the falsehood taken for granted, andacted on as an indisputable fact.

“Nevertheless, need I put the question toany Physiologist, whether it is disputable ornot? Seems it not at least presumable, that,under his Clothes, the Tailor has bones andviscera, and other muscles than the sartorius?Which function of manhood is the Tailor notconjectured to perform? Can he not arrest fordebt? Is he not in most countries a taxpayinganimal?

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“To no reader of this Volume can it bedoubtful which conviction is mine. Nay if thefruit of these long vigils, and almost preter-natural Inquiries, is not to perish utterly,the world will have approximated towards ahigher Truth; and the doctrine, which Swift,with the keen forecast of genius, dimly an-ticipated, will stand revealed in clear light:that the Tailor is not only a Man, but some-thing of a Creator or Divinity. Of Franklinit was said, that ‘he snatched the Thunderfrom Heaven and the Sceptre from Kings:’but which is greater, I would ask, he thatlends, or he that snatches? For, looking awayfrom individual cases, and how a Man is bythe Tailor new-created into a Nobleman, andclothed not only with Wool but with Dignityand a Mystic Dominion,—is not the fair fab-ric of Society itself, with all its royal mantlesand pontifical stoles, whereby, from naked-ness and dismemberment, we are organizedinto Polities, into nations, and a whole co-operating Mankind, the creation, as has herebeen often irrefragably evinced, of the Tai-lor alone?—What too are all Poets and moralTeachers, but a species of Metaphorical Tai-lors? Touching which high Guild the greatestliving Guild-brother has triumphantly askedus: ‘Nay if thou wilt have it, who but the Poetfirst made Gods for men; brought them downto us; and raised us up to them?’

“And this is he, whom sitting downcast, onthe hard basis of his Shopboard, the worldtreats with contumely, as the ninth part ofa man! Look up, thou much-injured one,

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look up with the kindling eye of hope, andprophetic bodings of a noble better time. Toolong hast thou sat there, on crossed legs, wear-ing thy ankle-joints to horn; like some sacredAnchorite, or Catholic Fakir, doing penance,drawing down Heaven’s richest blessings, fora world that scoffed at thee. Be of hope! Al-ready streaks of blue peer through our clouds;the thick gloom of Ignorance is rolling asun-der, and it will be Day. Mankind will repaywith interest their long-accumulated debt:the Anchorite that was scoffed at will be wor-shipped; the Fraction will become not an In-teger only, but a Square and Cube. With as-tonishment the world will recognize that theTailor is its Hierophant and Hierarch, or evenits God.

“As I stood in the Mosque of St. Sophia,and looked upon these Four-and-Twenty Tai-lors, sewing and embroidering that rich Cloth,which the Sultan sends yearly for the Caabaof Mecca, I thought within myself: How manyother Unholies has your covering Art madeholy, besides this Arabian Whinstone!

“Still more touching was it when, turn-ing the corner of a lane, in the ScottishTown of Edinburgh, I came upon a Signpost,whereon stood written that such and such aone was ‘Breeches-Maker to his Majesty;’ andstood painted the Effigies of a Pair of LeatherBreeches, and between the knees these mem-orable words, SIC ITUR AD ASTRA. Was notthis the martyr prison-speech of a Tailor sigh-ing indeed in bonds, yet sighing towards deliv-erance, and prophetically appealing to a bet-

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ter day? A day of justice, when the worth ofBreeches would be revealed to man, and theScissors become forever venerable.

“Neither, perhaps, may I now say, has hisappeal been altogether in vain. It was inthis high moment, when the soul, rent, as itwere, and shed asunder, is open to inspiringinfluence, that I first conceived this Work onClothes: the greatest I can ever hope to do;which has already, after long retardations, oc-cupied, and will yet occupy, so large a sectionof my Life; and of which the Primary and sim-pler Portion may here find its conclusion.”

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CHAPTER XII.FAREWELL.

So have we endeavored, from the enormous,amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scot-tish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdröckh hadkneaded for his fellow-mortals, to pick outthe choicest Plums, and present them sep-arately on a cover of our own. A labori-ous, perhaps a thankless enterprise; in which,however, something of hope has occasionallycheered us, and of which we can now wash ourhands not altogether without satisfaction. Ifhereby, though in barbaric wise, some morselof spiritual nourishment have been added tothe scanty ration of our beloved British world,what nobler recompense could the Editor de-sire? If it prove otherwise, why should hemurmur? Was not this a Task which Destiny,in any case, had appointed him; which havingnow done with, he sees his general Day’s-workso much the lighter, so much the shorter?

Of Professor Teufelsdröckh, it seems im-possible to take leave without a mingled feel-ing of astonishment, gratitude, and disap-proval. Who will not regret that talents,

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which might have profited in the higher walksof Philosophy, or in Art itself, have been somuch devoted to a rummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often to a scraping in ken-nels, where lost rings and diamond-necklacesare nowise the sole conquests? Regret is un-avoidable; yet censure were loss of time. Tocure him of his mad humors British Criticismwould essay in vain: enough for her if she can,by vigilance, prevent the spreading of suchamong ourselves. What a result, should thispiebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical styleof writing, not to say of thinking, become gen-eral among our Literary men! As it mightso easily do. Thus has not the Editor him-self, working over Teufelsdröckh’s German,lost much of his own English purity? Even asthe smaller whirlpool is sucked into the larger,and made to whirl along with it, so has thelesser mind, in this instance, been forced tobecome portion of the greater, and, like it, seeall things figuratively: which habit time andassiduous effort will be needed to eradicate.

Nevertheless, wayward as our Professorshows himself, is there any reader that canpart with him in declared enmity? Let us con-fess, there is that in the wild, much-suffering,much-inflicting man, which almost attachesus. His attitude, we will hope and believe, isthat of a man who had said to Cant, Begone;and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not be;and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me:a man who had manfully defied the “Time-Prince,” or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps,Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated

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from birth to that warfare, and now stoodminded to wage the same, by all weapons,in all places, at all times. In such a cause,any soldier, were he but a Polack Scythe-man,shall be welcome.

Still the question returns on us: How coulda man occasionally of keen insight, not with-out keen sense of propriety, who had realThoughts to communicate, resolve to emitthem in a shape bordering so closely on theabsurd? Which question he were wiser thanthe present Editor who should satisfactorilyanswer. Our conjecture has sometimes been,that perhaps Necessity as well as Choice wasconcerned in it. Seems it not conceivable that,in a Life like our Professor’s, where so muchbountifully given by Nature had in Practicefailed and misgone, Literature also wouldnever rightly prosper: that striving with hischaracteristic vehemence to paint this and theother Picture, and ever without success, heat last desperately dashes his sponge, full ofall colors, against the canvas, to try whetherit will paint Foam? With all his stillness,there were perhaps in Teufelsdröckh desper-ation enough for this.

A second conjecture we hazard with evenless warranty. It is, that Teufelsdröckh, isnot without some touch of the universal feel-ing, a wish to proselytize. How often alreadyhave we paused, uncertain whether the ba-sis of this so enigmatic nature were reallyStoicism and Despair, or Love and Hope onlyseared into the figure of these! Remarkable,moreover, is this saying of his: “How were

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Friendship possible? In mutual devotednessto the Good and True: otherwise impossible;except as Armed Neutrality, or hollow Com-mercial League. A man, be the Heavens everpraised, is sufficient for himself; yet were tenmen, united in Love, capable of being and ofdoing what ten thousand singly would fail in.Infinite is the help man can yield to man.”And now in conjunction therewith considerthis other: “It is the Night of the World, andstill long till it be Day: we wander amid theglimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun andthe Stars of Heaven are as if blotted out fora season; and two immeasurable Phantoms,HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, with the Ghoul,SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth,and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleep-ers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.”

But what of the awe-struck Wakeful whofind it a Reality? Should not these unite;since even an authentic Spectre is not visi-ble to Two?—In which case were this Enor-mous Clothes-Volume properly an enormousPitch-pan, which our Teufelsdröckh in hislone watch-tower had kindled, that it mightflame far and wide through the Night, andmany a disconsolately wandering spirit beguided thither to a Brother’s bosom!—We sayas before, with all his malign Indifference,who knows what mad Hopes this man mayharbor?

Meanwhile there is one fact to be statedhere, which harmonizes ill with such conjec-ture; and, indeed, were Teufelsdröckh madelike other men, might as good as altogether

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subvert it. Namely, that while the Beacon-fire blazed its brightest, the Watchman hadquitted it; that no pilgrim could now ask him:Watchman, what of the Night? Professor Teu-felsdröckh, be it known, is no longer visi-bly present at Weissnichtwo, but again to allappearance lost in space! Some time ago,the Hofrath Heuschrecke was pleased to fa-vor us with another copious Epistle; whereinmuch is said about the “Population-Institute;”much repeated in praise of the Paper-bag Doc-uments, the hieroglyphic nature of which ourHofrath still seems not to have surmised;and, lastly, the strangest occurrence commu-nicated, to us for the first time, in the follow-ing paragraph:—

“Ew. Wohlgeboren will have seen from thePublic Prints, with what affectionate andhitherto fruitless solicitude Weissnichtwo re-gards the disappearance of her Sage. Mightbut the united voice of Germany prevail onhim to return; nay could we but so much aselucidate for ourselves by what mystery hewent away! But, alas, old Lieschen experi-ences or affects the profoundest deafness, theprofoundest ignorance: in the Wahngasse alllies swept, silent, sealed up; the Privy Councilitself can hitherto elicit no answer.

“It had been remarked that while the ag-itating news of those Parisian Three Daysflew from mouth to month, and dinned ev-ery ear in Weissnichtwo, Herr Teufelsdröckhwas not known, at the Gans or elsewhere,to have spoken, for a whole week, any sylla-ble except once these three: Es geht an (It

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is beginning). Shortly after, as Ew. Wohlge-boren knows, was the public tranquillity here,as in Berlin, threatened by a Sedition of theTailors. Nor did there want Evil-wishers, orperhaps mere desperate Alarmists, who as-serted that the closing Chapter of the Clothes-Volume was to blame. In this appalling crisis,the serenity of our Philosopher was indescrib-able: nay, perhaps through one humble indi-vidual, something thereof might pass into theRath (Council) itself, and so contribute to thecountry’s deliverance. The Tailors are now en-tirely pacificated.—

“To neither of these two incidents can Iattribute our loss: yet still comes there theshadow of a suspicion out of Paris and its Pol-itics. For example, when the Saint-SimonianSociety transmitted its Propositions hither,and the whole Gans was one vast cackle oflaughter, lamentation and astonishment, ourSage sat mute; and at the end of the thirdevening said merely: ‘Here also are menwho have discovered, not without amazement,that Man is still Man; of which high, long-forgotten Truth you already see them make afalse application.’ Since then, as has been as-certained by examination of the Post-Director,there passed at least one Letter with its An-swer between the Messieurs Bazard-Enfantinand our Professor himself; of what tenor cannow only be conjectured. On the fifth nightfollowing, he was seen for the last time!

“Has this invaluable man, so obnoxious tomost of the hostile Sects that convulse ourEra, been spirited away by certain of their

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emissaries; or did he go forth voluntarily totheir head-quarters to confer with them, andconfront them? Reason we have, at least ofa negative sort, to believe the Lost still living;our widowed heart also whispers that ere longhe will himself give a sign. Otherwise, indeed,his archives must, one day, be opened by Au-thority; where much, perhaps the Palingene-sie itself, is thought to be reposited.”

Thus far the Hofrath; who vanishes, as ishis wont, too like an Ignis Fatuus, leaving thedark still darker.

So that Teufelsdröckh’s public Historywere not done, then, or reduced to an even,unromantic tenor; nay, perhaps the betterpart thereof were only beginning? We stand ina region of conjectures, where substance hasmelted into shadow, and one cannot be dis-tinguished from the other. May Time, whichsolves or suppresses all problems, throw gladlight on this also! Our own private conjecture,now amounting almost to certainty, is that,safe-moored in some stillest obscurity, not tolie always still, Teufelsdröckh, is actually inLondon!

Here, however, can the present Editor,with an ambrosial joy as of over-wearinessfalling into sleep, lay down his pen. Well doeshe know, if human testimony be worth aught,that to innumerable British readers likewise,this is a satisfying consummation; that innu-merable British readers consider him, duringthese current months, but as an uneasy in-terruption to their ways of thought and di-gestion; and indicate so much, not without a

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certain irritancy and even spoken invective.For which, as for other mercies, ought nothe to thank the Upper Powers? To one andall of you, O irritated readers, he, with out-stretched arms and open heart, will wave akind farewell. Thou too, miraculous Entity,who namest thyself YORKE and OLIVER,and with thy vivacities and genialities, withthy all too Irish mirth and madness, and odorof palled punch, makest such strange work,farewell; long as thou canst, fare-well! Havewe not, in the course of Eternity, travelledsome months of our Life-journey in partialsight of one another; have we not existed to-gether, though in a state of quarrel?

APPENDIX.

This questionable little Book was undoubt-edly written among the mountain solitudes, in1831; but, owing to impediments natural andaccidental, could not, for seven years more,appear as a Volume in England;—and had atlast to clip itself in pieces, and be content tostruggle out, bit by bit, in some courageousMagazine that offered. Whereby now, to cer-tain idly curious readers, and even to myselftill I make study, the insignificant but at lastirritating question, What its real history andchronology are, is, if not insoluble, consider-ably involved in haze.

To the first English Edition, 1838, whichan American, or two American had nowopened the way for, there was slightinglyprefixed, under the title, “Testimonies ofAuthors,” some straggle of real documents,which, now that I find it again, sets the mat-ter into clear light and sequence:—and shallhere, for removal of idle stumbling-blocks andnugatory guessings from the path of everyreader, be reprinted as it stood. (Author’s Note,of 1868.)

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TESTIMONIES OFAUTHORS.

I. HIGHEST CLASSBOOKSELLER’S TASTER.Taster to Bookseller.—“The Author of Teufels-dröckh is a person of talent; his work displayshere and there some felicity of thought and ex-pression, considerable fancy and knowledge:but whether or not it would take with the pub-lic seems doubtful. For a jeu d’esprit of thatkind it is too long; it would have suited betteras an essay or article than as a volume. TheAuthor has no great tact; his wit is frequentlyheavy; and reminds one of the German Baronwho took to leaping on tables and answeredthat he was learning to be lively. Is the work atranslation?”

Bookseller to Editor.—“Allow me to saythat such a writer requires only a little moretact to produce a popular as well as an ablework. Directly on receiving your permission,I sent your MS. to a gentleman in the highestclass of men of letters, and an accomplished

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German scholar: I now enclose you his opin-ion, which, you may rely upon it, is a just one;and I have too high an opinion of your goodsense to” &c. &c.—Ms. (penes nos), London,17th September, 1831.

II. CRITIC OF THE SUN.“Fraser’s Magazine exhibits the usual bril-liancy, and also the” &c.

“Sartor Resartus is what old Dennis usedto call ‘a heap of clotted nonsense,’ mixed how-ever, here and there, with passages markedby thought and striking poetic vigor. Butwhat does the writer mean by ‘Baphometicfire-baptism’? Why cannot he lay aside hispedantry, and write so as to make himself gen-erally intelligible? We quote by way of cu-riosity a sentence from the Sartor Resartus;which may be read either backwards or for-wards, for it is equally intelligible either way:indeed, by beginning at the tail, and so work-ing up to the head, we think the reader willstand the fairest chance of getting at its mean-ing: ‘The fire-baptized soul, long so scathedand thunder-riven, here feels its own freedom;which feeling is its Baphometic baptism: thecitadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gainedby assault, and will keep inexpugnable; out-wards from which the remaining dominions,not indeed without hard battering, will doubt-less by degrees be conquered and pacificated.’Here is a”—Sun Newspaper, 1st April, 1834.

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III. NORTH—AMERICANREVIEWER.. . . “After a careful survey of the whole ground,our belief is that no such persons as Profes-sors Teufelsdröckh or Counsellor Heuschreckeever existed; that the six Paper-bags, withtheir China-ink inscriptions and multifariouscontents, are a mere figment of the brain;that the ‘present Editor’ is the only personwho has ever written upon the Philosophy ofClothes; and that the Sartor Resartus is theonly treatise that has yet appeared upon thatsubject;—in short, that the whole account ofthe origin of the work before us, which thesupposed Editor relates with so much gravity,and of which we have given a brief abstract,is, in plain English, a hum.

“Without troubling our readers at anygreat length with our reasons for entertain-ing these suspicions, we may remark, that theabsence of all other information on the sub-ject, except what is contained in the work, isitself a fact of a most significant character.The whole German press, as well as the par-ticular one where the work purports to havebeen printed, seems to be under the controlof Stillschweigen and Co. —Silence and Com-pany. If the Clothes-Philosophy and its au-thor are making so great a sensation through-out Germany as is pretended, how happensit that the only notice we have of the factis contained in a few numbers of a monthlyMagazine published at London! How hap-

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pens it that no intelligence about the matterhas come out directly to this country? Wepique ourselves here in New England uponknowing at least as much of what is going onin the literary way in the old Dutch Mother-land as our brethren of the fast-anchored Isle;but thus far we have no tidings whatever ofthe ‘extensive close-printed, close-meditatedvolume,’ which forms the subject of this pre-tended commentary. Again, we would re-spectfully inquire of the ‘present Editor’ uponwhat part of the map of Germany we areto look for the city of Weissnichtwo—‘Know-not-where’—at which place the work is sup-posed to have been printed, and the Authorto have resided. It has been our fortune tovisit several portions of the German territory,and to examine pretty carefully, at differenttimes and for various purposes, maps of thewhole; but we have no recollection of any suchplace. We suspect that the city of Know-not-where might be called, with at least as muchpropriety, Nobody-knows-where, and is to befound in the kingdom of Nowhere. Again, thevillage of Entepfuhl—‘Duck-pond’—where thesupposed Author of the work is said to havepassed his youth, and that of Hinterschlag,where he had his education, are equally for-eign to our geography. Duck-ponds enoughthere undoubtedly are in almost every villagein Germany, as the traveller in that countryknows too well to his cost, but any particu-lar village denominated Duck-pond is to us al-together terra incognita. The names of thepersonages are not less singular than those

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of the places. Who can refrain from a smileat the yoking together of such a pair of ap-pellatives as Diogenes Teufelsdröckh? Thesupposed bearer of this strange title is repre-sented as admitting, in his pretended autobi-ography, that ‘he had searched to no purposethrough all the Heralds’ books in and withoutthe German empire, and through all mannerof Subscribers’-lists, Militia-rolls, and otherName-catalogues,’ but had nowhere been ableto find ‘the name Teufelsdröckh, except as ap-pended to his own person.’ We can readily be-lieve this, and we doubt very much whetherany Christian parent would think of condemn-ing a son to carry through life the burdenof so unpleasant a title. That of Counsel-lor Heuschrecke—‘Grasshopper’— though notoffensive, looks much more like a piece offancy-work than a ‘fair business transaction.’The same may be said of Blumine—‘Flower-Goddess’—the heroine of the fable; and so ofthe rest.

“In short, our private opinion is, as wehave remarked, that the whole story of a cor-respondence with Germany, a university ofNobody-knows-where, a Professor of Thingsin General, a Counsellor Grasshopper, aFlower-Goddess Blumine, and so forth, hasabout as much foundation in truth as thelate entertaining account of Sir John Her-schel’s discoveries in the moon. Fictions ofthis kind are, however, not uncommon, andought not, perhaps, to be condemned with toomuch severity; but we are not sure that wecan exercise the same indulgence in regard to

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the attempt, which seems to be made to mis-lead the public as to the substance of the workbefore us, and its pretended German original.Both purport, as we have seen, to be upon thesubject of Clothes, or dress. Clothes, their Ori-gin and Influence, is the title of the supposedGerman treatise of Professor Teufelsdröckhand the rather odd name of Sartor Resar-tus—the Tailor Patched—which the presentEditor has affixed to his pretended commen-tary, seems to look the same way. But thoughthere is a good deal of remark throughoutthe work in a half-serious, half-comic styleupon dress, it seems to be in reality a trea-tise upon the great science of Things in Gen-eral, which Teufelsdröckh, is supposed to haveprofessed at the university of Nobody-knows-where. Now, without intending to adopt atoo rigid standard of morals, we own that wedoubt a little the propriety of offering to thepublic a treatise on Things in General, un-der the name and in the form of an Essayon Dress. For ourselves, advanced as we un-fortunately are in the journey of life, far be-yond the period when dress is practically amatter of interest, we have no hesitation insaying, that the real subject of the work isto us more attractive than the ostensible one.But this is probably not the case with themass of readers. To the younger portion ofthe community, which constitutes everywherethe very great majority, the subject of dressis one of intense and paramount importance.An author who treats it appeals, like the poet,to the young men end maddens—virginibus

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puerisque—and calls upon them, by allthe motives which habitually operate moststrongly upon their feelings, to buy his book.When, after opening their purses for this pur-pose, they have carried home the work intriumph, expecting to find in it some par-ticular instruction in regard to the tying oftheir neckcloths, or the cut of their corsets,and meet with nothing better than a disserta-tion on Things in General, they will—to usethe mildest term—not be in very good hu-mor. If the last improvements in legislation,which we have made in this country, shouldhave found their way to England, the author,we think, would stand some chance of beingLynched. Whether his object in this pieceof supercherie be merely pecuniary profit, orwhether he takes a malicious pleasure inquizzing the Dandies, we shall not undertaketo say. In the latter part of the work, he de-votes a separate chapter to this class of per-sons, from the tenor of which we should bedisposed to conclude, that he would considerany mode of divesting them of their propertyvery much in the nature of a spoiling of theEgyptians.

“The only thing about the work, tendingto prove that it is what it purports to be, acommentary on a real German treatise, is thestyle, which is a sort of Babylonish dialect,not destitute, it is true, of richness, vigor,and at times a sort of singular felicity of ex-pression, but very strongly tinged throughoutwith the peculiar idiom of the German lan-guage. This quality in the style, however, may

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be a mere result of a great familiarity withGerman literature; and we cannot, therefore,look upon it as in itself decisive, still less asoutweighing so much evidence of an oppositecharacter.”— North-American Review, No. 89,October, 1835.

IV. NEW ENGLANDEDITORS.“The Editors have been induced, by the ex-pressed desire of many persons, to collect thefollowing sheets out of the ephemeral pam-phlets4 in which they first appeared, underthe conviction that they contain in themselvesthe assurance of a longer date.

“The Editors have no expectation that thislittle Work will have a sudden and generalpopularity. They will not undertake, as thereis no need, to justify the gay costume in whichthe Author delights to dress his thoughts,or the German idioms with which he hassportively sprinkled his pages. It is his humorto advance the gravest speculations upon thegravest topics in a quaint and burlesque style.If his masquerade offend any of his audience,to that degree that they will not hear what hehas to say, it may chance to draw others tolisten to his wisdom; and what work of imag-ination can hope to please all! But we willventure to remark that the distaste excited bythese peculiarities in some readers is great-

4Fraser’s (London) Magazine, 1833-34.

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est at first, and is soon forgotten; and that theforeign dress and aspect of the Work are quitesuperficial, and cover a genuine Saxon heart.We believe, no book has been published formany years, written in a more sincere style ofidiomatic English, or which discovers an equalmastery over all the riches of the language.The Author makes ample amends for the oc-casional eccentricity of his genius, not only byfrequent bursts of pure splendor, but by thewit and sense which never fail him.

“But what will chiefly commend the Bookto the discerning reader is the manifest de-sign of the work, which is, a Criticism uponthe Spirit of the Age—we had almost said, ofthe hour—in which we live; exhibiting in themost just and novel light the present aspectsof Religion, Politics, Literature, Arts, and So-cial Life. Under all his gayety the Writer hasan earnest meaning, and discovers an insightinto the manifold wants and tendencies of hu-man nature, which is very rare among ourpopular authors. The philanthropy and thepurity of moral sentiment, which inspire thework, will find their way to the heart of everylover of virtue.”—Preface to Sartor Resartus:Boston, 1835, 1837.

SUNT, FUERUNT VEL FUERE.LONDON, 30TH JUNE, 1838.