Sartor Resartus

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"To our Friend the hours seemed moments; holy was he and happy: the words
from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on thirsty grass; all
better feelings in his soul seemed to whisper, It is good for us to be
here. At parting, the Blumine's hand was in his: in the balmy twilight,
with the kind stars above them, he spoke something of meeting again, which
was not contradicted; he pressed gently those small soft fingers, and it
seemed as if they were not hastily, not angrily withdrawn."

Poor Teufelsdrockh! it is clear to demonstration thou art smit: the Queen
of Hearts would see a "man of genius" also sigh for her; and there, by
art-magic, in that preternatural hour, has she bound and spell-bound thee.
"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many
points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite
in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either
true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But
in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds
itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its
Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy
I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life
is but the small temporary stage (_Zeitbuhne_), whereon thick-streaming
influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly, and act
tragedy and melodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most
countries, for some eighteenpence a day; but for Fantasy planets and
solar-systems will not suffice. Witness your Pyrrhus conquering the world,
yet drinking no better red wine than he had before." Alas! witness also
your Diogenes, flame-clad, scaling the upper Heaven, and verging towards
Insanity, for prize of a "high-souled Brunette," as if the Earth held but
one and not several of these!

He says that, in Town, they met again: "day after day, like his heart's
sun, the blooming Blumine shone on him. Ah! a little while ago, and he was
yet in all darkness: him what Graceful (_Holde_) would ever love?
Disbelieving all things, the poor youth had never learned to believe in
himself. Withdrawn, in proud timidity, within his own fastnesses; solitary
from men, yet baited by night-spectres enough, he saw himself, with a sad
indignation, constrained to renounce the fairest hopes of existence. And
now, O now! 'She looks on thee,' cried he: 'she the fairest, noblest; do
not her dark eyes tell thee, thou art not despised? The
Heaven's-Messenger! All Heaven's blessings be hers!' Thus did soft
melodies flow through his heart; tones of an infinite gratitude; sweetest
intimations that he also was a man, that for him also unutterable joys had
been provided.

"In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and
often with the inarticulate mystic speech of Music: such was the element
they now lived in; in such a many-tinted, radiant Aurora, and by this
fairest of Orient Light-bringers must our Friend be blandished, and the new
Apocalypse of Nature enrolled to him. Fairest Blumine! And, even as a
Star, all Fire and humid Softness, a very Light-ray incarnate! Was there
so much as a fault, a 'caprice,' he could have dispensed with? Was she not
to him in very deed a Morning-star; did not her presence bring with it airs
from Heaven? As from AEolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the
Memnon's Statue struck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was
around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale Doubt fled away
to the distance; Life bloomed up with happiness and hope. The past, then,
was all a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then, and could
not discern it! But lo now! the black walls of his prison melt away; the
captive is alive, is free. If he loved his Disenchantress? _Ach Gott_!
His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never had he named it
Love: existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into a Thought."

Nevertheless, into a Thought, nay into an Action, it must be shaped; for
neither Disenchanter nor Disenchantress, mere "Children of Time," can abide
by Feeling alone. The Professor knows not, to this day, "how in her soft,
fervid bosom the Lovely found determination, even on hest of Necessity, to
cut asunder these so blissful bonds." He even appears surprised at the
"Duenna Cousin," whoever she may have been, "in whose meagre hunger-bitten
philosophy, the religion of young hearts was, from the first, faintly
approved of." We, even at such distance, can explain it without
necromancy. Let the Philosopher answer this one question: What figure, at
that period, was a Mrs. Teufelsdrockh likely to make in polished society?
Could she have driven so much as a brass-bound Gig, or even a simple
iron-spring one? Thou foolish "absolved Auscultator," before whom lies no
prospect of capital, will any yet known "religion of young hearts" keep the
human kitchen warm? Pshaw! thy divine Blumine, when she "resigned herself
to wed some richer," shows more philosophy, though but "a woman of genius,"
than thou, a pretended man.

Our readers have witnessed the origin of this Love-mania, and with what
royal splendor it waxes, and rises. Let no one ask us to unfold the
glories of its dominant state; much less the horrors of its almost
instantaneous dissolution. How from such inorganic masses, henceforth
madder than ever, as lie in these Bags, can even fragments of a living
delineation be organized? Besides, of what profit were it? We view, with
a lively pleasure, the gay silk Montgolfier start from the ground, and
shoot upwards, cleaving the liquid deeps, till it dwindle to a luminous
star: but what is there to look longer on, when once, by natural
elasticity, or accident of fire, it has exploded? A hapless air-navigator,
plunging, amid torn parachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck, fast enough
into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdrockh rose
into the highest regions of the Empyrean, by a natural parabolic track, and
returned thence in a quick perpendicular one. For the rest, let any
feeling reader, who has been unhappy enough to do the like, paint it out
for himself: considering only that if he, for his perhaps comparatively
insignificant mistress, underwent such agonies and frenzies, what must
Teufelsdrockh's have been, with a fire-heart, and for a nonpareil Blumine!
We glance merely at the final scene:--

"One morning, he found his Morning-star all dimmed and dusky-red; the fair
creature was silent, absent, she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no
longer a Morning-star, but a troublous skyey Portent, announcing that the
Doomsday had dawned! She said, in a tremulous voice, They were to meet no
more." The thunder-struck Air-sailor is not wanting to himself in this
dread hour: but what avails it? We omit the passionate expostulations,
entreaties, indignations, since all was vain, and not even an explanation
was conceded him; and hasten to the catastrophe. "'Farewell, then, Madam!'
said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride helped him. She put
her hand in his, she looked in his face, tears started to her eyes; in wild
audacity he clasped her to his bosom; their lips were joined, their two
souls, like two dew-drops, rushed into one,--for the first time and for the
last!" Thus was Teufelsdrockh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why,
then--"thick curtains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose the
immeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shivered Universe
was he falling, falling, towards the Abyss."

CHAPTER VI.
SORROWS OF TEUFELSDROCKH.

We have long felt that, with a man like our Professor, matters must often
be expected to take a course of their own; that in so multiplex, intricate
a nature, there might be channels, both for admitting and emitting, such as
the Psychologist had seldom noted; in short, that on no grand occasion and
convulsion, neither in the joy-storm nor in the woe-storm could you predict
his demeanor.

To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so
passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through "a shivered Universe" in this
extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do:
Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his
brains. In the progress towards any of which consummations, do not such
readers anticipate extravagance enough; breast-beating, brow-beating
(against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings,
smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself?

Nowise so does Teufelsdrockh deport him. He quietly lifts his _Pilgerstab_
(Pilgrim-staff), "old business being soon wound up;" and begins a
perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe! Curious it
is, indeed, how with such vivacity of conception, such intensity of
feeling, above all, with these unconscionable habits of Exaggeration in
speech, he combines that wonderful stillness of his, that stoicism in
external procedure. Thus, if his sudden bereavement, in this matter of the
Flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Doomsday and Dissolution of Nature,
in which light doubtless it partly appeared to himself, his own nature is
nowise dissolved thereby; but rather is compressed closer. For once, as we
might say, a Blumine by magic appliances has unlocked that shut heart of
his, and its hidden things rush out tumultuous, boundless, like genii
enfranchised from their glass vial: but no sooner are your magic
appliances withdrawn, than the strange casket of a heart springs to again;
and perhaps there is now no key extant that will open it; for a
Teufelsdrockh as we remarked, will not love a second time. Singular
Diogenes! No sooner has that heart-rending occurrence fairly taken place,
than he affects to regard it as a thing natural, of which there is nothing
more to be said. "One highest hope, seemingly legible in the eyes of an
Angel, had recalled him as out of Death-shadows into celestial Life: but a
gleam of Tophet passed over the face of his Angel; he was rapt away in
whirlwinds, and heard the laughter of Demons. It was a Calenture," adds
he, "whereby the Youth saw green Paradise-groves in the waste Ocean-waters:
a lying vision, yet not wholly a lie, for _he_ saw it." But what things
soever passed in him, when he ceased to see it; what ragings and
despairings soever Teufelsdrockh's soul was the scene of, he has the
goodness to conceal under a quite opaque cover of Silence. We know it
well; the first mad paroxysm past, our brave Gneschen collected his
dismembered philosophies, and buttoned himself together; he was meek,
silent, or spoke of the weather and the Journals: only by a transient
knitting of those shaggy brows, by some deep flash of those eyes, glancing
one knew not whether with tear-dew or with fierce fire,--might you have
guessed what a Gehenna was within: that a whole Satanic School were
spouting, though inaudibly, there. To consume your own choler, as some
chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a whole Satanic School spouting,
if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negative yet no slight virtue, nor one of
the commonest in these times.

Nevertheless, we will not take upon us to say, that in the strange measure
he fell upon, there was not a touch of latent Insanity; whereof indeed the
actual condition of these Documents in _Capricornus_ and _Aquarius is_ no
bad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings, toilsome enough, are without
assigned or perhaps assignable aim; internal Unrest seems his sole
guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen
on him, and he were "made like unto a wheel." Doubtless, too, the chaotic
nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note of
preparation, for example, we come upon the following slip: "A peculiar
feeling it is that will rise in the Traveller, when turning some hill-range
in his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomed among its groves
and green natural bulwarks, and all diminished to a toy-box, the fair Town,
where so many souls, as it were seen and yet unseen, are driving their
multifarious traffic. Its white steeple is then truly a starward-pointing
finger; the canopy of blue smoke seems like a sort of Lifebreath: for
always, of its own unity, the soul gives unity to whatsoever it looks on
with love; thus does the little Dwelling-place of men, in itself a
congeries of houses and huts, become for us an individual, almost a person.
But what thousand other thoughts unite thereto, if the place has to
ourselves been the arena of joyous or mournful experiences; if perhaps the
cradle we were rocked in still stands there, if our Loving ones still dwell
there, if our Buried ones there slumber!" Does Teufelsdrockh as the
wounded eagle is said to make for its own eyrie, and indeed military
deserters, and all hunted outcast creatures, turn as if by instinct in the
direction of their birthland,--fly first, in this extremity, towards his
native Entepfuhl; but reflecting that there no help awaits him, take only
one wistful look from the distance, and then wend elsewhither?

Little happier seems to be his next flight: into the wilds of Nature; as
if in her mother-bosom he would seek healing. So at least we incline to
interpret the following Notice, separated from the former by some
considerable space, wherein, however, is nothing noteworthy:--

"Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are Mountains seen in such
combined majesty and grace as here. The rocks are of that sort called
Primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses
of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here
tempered by a singular airiness of form, and softness of environment: in a
climate favorable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with
lichens, shoots up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and white,
bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round the everlasting granite. In
fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur: you ride through stony
hollows, along strait passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls
of rock; now winding amid broken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; now
suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet collects
itself into a Lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and it seems
as if Peace had established herself in the bosom of Strength.

"To Peace, however, in this vortex of existence, can the Son of Time not
pretend: still less if some Spectre haunt him from the Past; and the
Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing. Reasonably might the
Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of this world's happiness
inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope that is not mad?
Nevertheless, one may still murmur audibly, or in the original Greek if
that suit thee better: 'Whoso can look on Death will start at no shadows.'

"From such meditations is the Wanderer's attention called outwards; for now
the Valley closes in abruptly, intersected by a huge mountain mass, the
stony water-worn ascent of which is not to be accomplished on horseback.
Arrived aloft, he finds himself again lifted into the evening sunset light;
and cannot but pause, and gaze round him, some moments there. An upland
irregular expanse of wold, where valleys in complex branchings are suddenly
or slowly arranging their descent towards every quarter of the sky. The
mountain-ranges are beneath your feet, and folded together: only the
loftier summits look down here and there as on a second plain; lakes also
lie clear and earnest in their solitude. No trace of man now visible;
unless indeed it were he who fashioned that little visible link of Highway,
here, as would seem, scaling the inaccessible, to unite Province with
Province. But sunwards, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world of
Mountains, the diadem and centre of the mountain region! A hundred and a
hundred savage peaks, in the last light of Day; all glowing, of gold and
amethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness; there in their silence, in
their solitude, even as on the night when Noah's Deluge first dried!
Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to our Wanderer. He gazed
over those stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire; never
till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was his
Mother and divine. And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the
sky, and the Sun had now departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of
Death and of Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life
were one, as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had
its throne in that splendor, and his own spirit were therewith holding
communion.

"The spell was broken by a sound of carriage-wheels. Emerging from the
hidden Northward, to sink soon into the hidden Southward, came a gay
Barouche-and-four: it was open; servants and postilions wore wedding
favors: that happy pair, then, had found each other, it was their marriage
evening! Few moments brought them near: _Du Himmel_! It was Herr Towgood
and--Blumine! With slight unrecognizing salutation they passed me; plunged
down amid the neighboring thickets, onwards, to Heaven, and to England; and
I, in my friend Richter's words, _I remained alone, behind them, with the
Night_."

Were it not cruel in these circumstances, here might be the place to insert
an observation, gleaned long ago from the great _Clothes-Volume_, where it
stands with quite other intent: "Some time before Small-pox was
extirpated," says the Professor, "there came a new malady of the spiritual
sort on Europe: I mean the epidemic, now endemical, of View-hunting.
Poets of old date, being privileged with Senses, had also enjoyed external
Nature; but chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cup which holds good or bad
liquor for us; that is to say, in silence, or with slight incidental
commentary: never, as I compute, till after the _Sorrows of Werter_, was
there man found who would say: Come let us make a Description! Having
drunk the liquor, come let us eat the glass! Of which endemic the Jenner
is unhappily still to seek." Too true!

We reckon it more important to remark that the Professor's Wanderings, so
far as his stoical and cynical envelopment admits us to clear insight, here
first take their permanent character, fatuous or not. That Basilisk-glance
of the Barouche-and-four seems to have withered up what little remnant of a
purpose may have still lurked in him: Life has become wholly a dark
labyrinth; wherein, through long years, our Friend, flying from spectres,
has to stumble about at random, and naturally with more haste than
progress.

Foolish were it in us to attempt following him, even from afar, in this
extraordinary world-pilgrimage of his; the simplest record of which, were
clear record possible, would fill volumes. Hopeless is the obscurity,
unspeakable the confusion. He glides from country to country, from
condition to condition; vanishing and reappearing, no man can calculate how
or where. Through all quarters of the world he wanders, and apparently
through all circles of society. If in any scene, perhaps difficult to fix
geographically, he settles for a time, and forms connections, be sure he
will snap them abruptly asunder. Let him sink out of sight as Private
Scholar (_Privatsirender_), living by the grace of God in some European
capital, you may next find him as Hadjee in the neighborhood of Mecca. It
is an inexplicable Phantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our
Traveller, instead of limbs and highways, had transported himself by some
wishing-carpet, or Fortunatus' Hat. The whole, too, imparted
emblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that collection of
Street-Advertisements); with only some touch of direct historical notice
sparingly interspersed: little light-islets in the world of haze! So
that, from this point, the Professor is more of an enigma than ever. In
figurative language, we might say he becomes, not indeed a spirit, yet
spiritualized, vaporized. Fact unparalleled in Biography: The river of
his History, which we have traced from its tiniest fountains, and hoped to
see flow onward, with increasing current, into the ocean, here dashes
itself over that terrific Lover's Leap; and, as a mad-foaming cataract,
flies wholly into tumultuous clouds of spray! Low down it indeed collects
again into pools and plashes; yet only at a great distance, and with
difficulty, if at all, into a general stream. To cast a glance into
certain of those pools and plashes, and trace whither they run, must, for a
chapter or two, form the limit of our endeavor.

For which end doubtless those direct historical Notices, where they can be
met with, are the best. Nevertheless, of this sort too there occurs much,
which, with our present light, it were questionable to emit. Teufelsdrockh
vibrating everywhere between the highest and the lowest levels, comes into
contact with public History itself. For example, those conversations and
relations with illustrious Persons, as Sultan Mahmoud, the Emperor
Napoleon, and others, are they not as yet rather of a diplomatic character
than of a biographic? The Editor, appreciating the sacredness of crowned
heads, nay perhaps suspecting the possible trickeries of a
Clothes-Philosopher, will eschew this province for the present; a new time
may bring new insight and a different duty.

If we ask now, not indeed with what ulterior Purpose, for there was none,
yet with what immediate outlooks; at all events, in what mood of mind, the
Professor undertook and prosecuted this world-pilgrimage,--the answer is
more distinct than favorable. "A nameless Unrest," says he, "urged me
forward; to which the outward motion was some momentary lying solace.
Whither should I go? My Loadstars were blotted out; in that canopy of grim
fire shone no star. Yet forward must I; the ground burnt under me; there
was no rest for the sole of my foot. I was alone, alone! Ever too the
strong inward longing shaped Phantasms for itself: towards these, one
after the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A feeling I had, that for my
fever-thirst there was and must be somewhere a healing Fountain. To many
fondly imagined Fountains, the Saints' Wells of these days, did I pilgrim;
to great Men, to great Cities, to great Events: but found there no
healing. In strange countries, as in the well-known; in savage deserts, as
in the press of corrupt civilization, it was ever the same: how could your
Wanderer escape from--_his own Shadow_? Nevertheless still Forward! I
felt as if in great haste; to do I saw not what. From the depths of my own
heart, it called to me, Forwards! The winds and the streams, and all
Nature sounded to me, Forwards! _Ach Gott_, I was even, once for all, a
Son of Time."

From which is it not clear that the internal Satanic School was still
active enough? He says elsewhere: "The _Enchiridion of Epictetus_ I had
ever with me, often as my sole rational companion; and regret to mention
that the nourishment it yielded was trifling." Thou foolish Teufelsdrockh
How could it else? Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much:
_The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought_, though it were the
noblest?

"How I lived?" writes he once: "Friend, hast thou considered the 'rugged
all-nourishing Earth,' as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the
sparrow on the house-top, much more her darling, man? While thou stirrest
and livest, thou hast a probability of victual. My breakfast of tea has
been cooked by a Tartar woman, with water of the Amur, who wiped her
earthen kettle with a horse-tail. I have roasted wild eggs in the sand of
Sahara; I have awakened in Paris _Estrapades_ and Vienna _Malzleins_, with
no prospect of breakfast beyond elemental liquid. That I had my Living to
seek saved me from Dying,--by suicide. In our busy Europe, is there not an
everlasting demand for Intellect, in the chemical, mechanical, political,
religious, educational, commercial departments? In Pagan countries, cannot
one write Fetishes? Living! Little knowest thou what alchemy is in an
inventive Soul; how, as with its little finger, it can create provision
enough for the body (of a Philosopher); and then, as with both hands,
create quite other than provision; namely, spectres to torment itself
withal."

Poor Teufelsdrockh! Flying with Hunger always parallel to him; and a whole
Infernal Chase in his rear; so that the countenance of Hunger is
comparatively a friend's! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or
of the modern Wandering Jew,--save only that he feels himself not guilty
and but suffering the pains of guilt,--wend to and fro with aimless speed.
Thus must he, over the whole surface of the Earth (by footprints), write
his _Sorrows of Teufelsdrockh_; even as the great Goethe, in passionate
words, had to write his _Sorrows of Werter_, before the spirit freed
herself, and he could become a Man. Vain truly is the hope of your
swiftest Runner to escape "from his own Shadow"! Nevertheless, in these
sick days, when the Born of Heaven first descries himself (about the age of
twenty) in a world such as ours, richer than usual in two things, in Truths
grown obsolete, and Trades grown obsolete,--what can the fool think but
that it is all a Den of Lies, wherein whoso will not speak Lies and act
Lies, must stand idle and despair? Whereby it happens that, for your
nobler minds, the publishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other
dialect, becomes almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an
Altercation with the Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your
Byron publishes his _Sorrows of Lord George_, in verse and in prose, and
copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his _Sorrows of Napoleon_
Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music of cannon-volleys, and
murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of Conflagration;
his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embattled Hosts and the sound of
falling Cities.--Happier is he who, like our Clothes-Philosopher, can write
such matter, since it must be written, on the insensible Earth, with his
shoe-soles only; and also survive the writing thereof!

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