Sartor Resartus
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Thomas Carlyle >> Sartor Resartus
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"I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast
been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of?
Say it in a word: is it not because thou art not HAPPY? Because the THOU
(sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honored, nourished, soft-bedded, and
lovingly cared for? Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that
_thou_ shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to _be_
at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be
Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through
the Universe seeking after somewhat to _eat_; and shrieking dolefully
because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy _Byron_; open thy
_Goethe_."
"_Es leuchtet mir ein_, I see a glimpse of it!" cries he elsewhere: "there
is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness,
and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same
HIGHER that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have
spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of
the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and
Freedom? Which God-inspiredd Doctrine art thou also honored to be taught;
O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou
become contrite and learn it! Oh, thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully
bear what yet remain: thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to
be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the
deep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaring
billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of
Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA,
wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is
well with him."
And again: "Small is it that thou canst trample the Earth with its
injuries under thy feet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee: thou canst love
the Earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee; for this
a Greater than Zeno was needed, and he too was sent. Knowest thou that
'_Worship of Sorrow_'? The Temple thereof, founded some eighteen centuries
ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful
creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of
falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred Lamp
perennially burning."
Without pretending to comment on which strange utterances, the Editor will
only remark, that there lies beside them much of a still more questionable
character; unsuited to the general apprehension; nay wherein he himself
does not see his way. Nebulous disquisitions on Religion, yet not without
bursts of splendor; on the "perennial continuance of Inspiration;" on
Prophecy; that there are "true Priests, as well as Baal-Priests, in our own
day:" with more of the like sort. We select some fractions, by way of
finish to this farrago.
"Cease, my much-respected Herr von Voltaire," thus apostrophizes the
Professor: "shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems
finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition,
considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks
not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy
six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and
folios, and flying sheets or reams, printed before and since on the same
subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou
help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a
new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may
live? What! thou hast no faculty in that kind? Only a torch for burning,
no hammer for building? Take our thanks, then, and--thyself away.
"Meanwhile what are antiquated Mythuses to me? Or is the God present, felt
in my own heart, a thing which Herr von Voltaire will dispute out of me; or
dispute into me? To the '_Worship of Sorrow_' ascribe what origin and
genesis thou pleasest, _has_ not that Worship originated, and been
generated; is it not _here_? Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it
is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion,--for which latter whoso
will, let him worry and be worried."
"Neither," observes he elsewhere, "shall ye tear out one another's eyes,
struggling over 'Plenary Inspiration,' and such like: try rather to get a
little even Partial Inspiration, each of you for himself. One BIBLE I
know, of whose Plenary Inspiration doubt is not so much as possible; nay
with my own eyes I saw the God's-Hand writing it: thereof all other Bibles
are but Leaves,--say, in Picture-Writing to assist the weaker faculty."
Or, to give the wearied reader relief, and bring it to an end, let him take
the following perhaps more intelligible passage:--
"To me, in this our life," says the Professor, "which is an internecine
warfare with the Time-spirit, other warfare seems questionable. Hast thou
in any way a contention with thy brother, I advise thee, think well what
the meaning thereof is. If thou gauge it to the bottom, it is simply this:
'Fellow, see! thou art taking more than thy share of Happiness in the
world, something from my share: which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay
I will fight thee rather.'--Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a
beggarly matter, truly a 'feast of shells,' for the substance has been
spilled out: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human
species clutching at them!--Can we not, in all such cases, rather say:
'Take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional
fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take
it with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee!'--If Fichte's
_Wissenschaftslehre_ be, 'to a certain extent, Applied Christianity,'
surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole
Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely the Passive half: could we but do it,
as we can demonstrate it!
"But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it
convert itself into Conduct. Nay properly Conviction is not possible till
then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex
amid vortices, only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it
find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system.
Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that 'Doubt of any sort cannot
be removed except by Action.' On which ground, too, let him who gropes
painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the
dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me
was of invaluable service: '_Do the Duty which lies nearest thee_,' which
thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become
clearer.
"May we not say, however, that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is
even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly
struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and
thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lothario in
_Wilhelm Meister_, that your 'America is here or nowhere'? The Situation
that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here,
in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now
standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and
working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the
impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to
shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this
sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that
pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods
for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing
thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only
see!
"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in
bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the
wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the
greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and
God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least.
The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled conflicting elements
bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are
built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above:
instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
heaven-encompassed World.
"I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even
Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal
fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou
hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the
Night cometh, wherein no man can work."
CHAPTER X.
PAUSE.
Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such
circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdrockh, through the various
successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost
Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to
consider as Conversion. "Blame not the word," says he; "rejoice rather
that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern
Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew nothing of
Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, they had only some _Choice of
Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man:
hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to
Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and
certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their
Pietists and Methodists."
It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdrockh commences:
we are henceforth to see him "work in well-doing," with the spirit and
clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so
panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long
been stumbling in. He can say to himself: "Tools? Thou hast no Tools?
Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now alive but has tools. The basest
of created animalcules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and
warping-mill, and power-loom within its head: the stupidest of Oysters has
a Papin's-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being
that can live can do something: this let him _do_.-- Tools? Hast thou not
a Brain, furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three
fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron's Rod went out of
practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater
than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in
this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless
flux, it is appointed that _Sound_, to appearance the most fleeting, should
be the most continuing of all things. The WORD is well said to be
omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a _Fiat_.
Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God has given thee, what
the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of Priesthood was
allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is
it not honor enough therein to spend and be spent?
"By this Art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into a
handicraft," adds Teufelsdrockh, "have I thenceforth abidden. Writings of
mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am I?), have fallen, perhaps not
altogether void, into the mighty seedfield of Opinion; fruits of my unseen
sowing gratifyingly meet me here and there. I thank the Heavens that I
have now found my Calling; wherein, with or without perceptible result, I
am minded diligently to persevere.
"Nay how knowest thou," cries he, "but this and the other pregnant Device,
now grown to be a world-renowned far-working Institution; like a grain of
right mustard-seed once cast into the right soil, and now stretching out
strong boughs to the four winds, for the birds of the air to lodge in,--may
have been properly my doing? Some one's doing, it without doubt was; from
some Idea, in some single Head, it did first of all take beginning: why
not from some Idea in mine?" Does Teufelsdrockh, here glance at that
"SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (_Eigenthums-conservirende
Gesellschaft_)," of which so many ambiguous notices glide spectra-like
through these inexpressible Paper-bags? "An Institution," hints he, "not
unsuitable to the wants of the time; as indeed such sudden extension
proves: for already can the Society number, among its office-bearers or
corresponding members, the highest Names, if not the highest Persons, in
Germany, England, France; and contributions, both of money and of
meditation pour in from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining
Integrity of the world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it
round this Palladium." Does Teufelsdrockh mean, then, to give himself out
as the originator of that so notable _Eigenthums-conservirende_
("Owndom-conserving") _Gesellschaft_; and if so, what, in the Devil's name,
is it? He again hints: "At a time when the divine Commandment, _Thou
shalt not steal_, wherein truly, if well understood, is comprised the whole
Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgrus's Constitutions, Justinian's
Pandects, the Code Napoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities,
Moralities whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced with
Altar-fire and Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance: at a time, I say,
when this divine Commandment has all but faded away from the general
remembrance; and, with little disguise, a new opposite Commandment, _Thou
shalt steal_, is everywhere promulgated,--it perhaps behooved, in this
universal dotage and deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir
themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that
divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable,
are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived
to hear it asserted that _we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only
an accidental Possession and Life-rent_, what is the issue to be looked
for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited
fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps
some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole
meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors. If, therefore,
the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand
that perhaps not ill-written _Program_ in the Public Journals, with its
high _Prize-Questions_ and so liberal _Prizes_, could have proceeded,--let
him now cease such wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to
the _Concurrenz_ (Competition)."
We ask: Has this same "perhaps not ill-written _Program_," or any other
authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under the
eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? If so, what
are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the terms of Competition, and when
and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of any sort, to be
met with in these Paper-bags! Or is the whole business one other of those
whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdrockh,
meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with
us?
Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to a painful
suspicion, which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him; paralyzing
any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered his thorny
Biographical task a labor of love. It is a suspicion grounded perhaps on
trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more and more
discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdrockh, in whom
underground humors and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel within wheel,
defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these Autobiographical
Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a so-called Fact were
little better than a Fiction; if here we had no direct Camera-obscura
Picture of the Professor's History; but only some more or less fantastic
Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly enough, shadowing forth
the same! Our theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally
authentic what was but hieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in
that case we scruple not to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of,
and set adrift to make fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that
a man so known for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdrockh would all at
once frankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a German
Hofrath; and not rather deceptively _in_lock both Editor and Hofrath in the
labyrinthic tortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel (having enticed
them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look?
Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short.
On a small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but
invisible, we lately noticed, and with effort decipher, the following:
"What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou
know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing together bead-rolls of what
thou namest Facts? The Man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did,
but what he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which the fewest
have the key. And then how your Blockhead (_Dummkopf_) studies not their
Meaning; but simply whether they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral
or Immoral! Still worse is it with your Bungler (_Pfuscher_): such I have
seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking
the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile." Was the
Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts
himself, might mistake the Teufelsdrockh Serpent-of-Eternity in like
manner? For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand
satire, into a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms,
half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not
whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is
the Professor, can never say. If our suspicion be wholly unfounded, let
his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness bear the
blame.
But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted
Editor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present. Let it
suffice that we know of Teufelsdrockh, so far, if "not what he did, yet
what he became:" the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimate
bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be looked for. The
imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoever be its
flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations (flights or
involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life-element,
Teufelsdrockh, reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes
herself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature,--would be
comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being,
for us at least, a false and impossible one. His outward Biography,
therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, we saw churned utterly into
spray-vapor, may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here.
Enough that by survey of certain "pools and plashes," we have ascertained
its general direction; do we not already know that, by one way and other,
it _has_ long since rained down again into a stream; and even now, at
Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the _Philosophy of
Clothes_, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon? Over much invaluable
matter, that lies scattered, like jewels among quarry-rubbish, in those
Paper-catacombs, we may have occasion to glance back, and somewhat will
demand insertion at the right place: meanwhile be our tiresome diggings
therein suspended.
If now, before reopening the great _Clothes-Volume_, we ask what our degree
of progress, during these Ten Chapters, has been, towards right
understanding of the _Clothes-Philosophy_, let not our discouragement
become total. To speak in that old figure of the Hell-gate Bridge over
Chaos, a few flying pontoons have perhaps been added, though as yet they
drift straggling on the Flood; how far they will reach, when once the
chains are straightened and fastened, can, at present, only be matter of
conjecture.
So much we already calculate: Through many a little loophole, we have had
glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdrockh; his strange mystic,
almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is
not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME,
which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligible with such, may
by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhat peculiar view of
Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature. How all Nature and
Life are but one _Garment_, a "Living Garment," woven and ever a-weaving in
the "Loom of Time;" is not here, indeed, the outline of a whole
_Clothes-Philosophy_; at least the arena it is to work in? Remark, too,
that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaning in such a matter,
becomes less enigmatic: amid so much tumultuous obscurity, almost like
diluted madness, do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless
Reverence seem to loom forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose
rock-strata all the rest were based and built?
Nay further, may we not say that Teufelsdrockh's Biography, allowing it
even, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, as it were
preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows of things
into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The "Passivity" given him
by birth is fostered by all turns of his fortune. Everywhere cast out,
like oil out of water, from mingling in any Employment, in any public
Communion, he has no portion but Solitude, and a life of Meditation. The
whole energy of his existence is directed, through long years, on one task:
that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows
of things oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with fearfullest
destruction: only by victoriously penetrating into Things themselves can
he find peace and a stronghold. But is not this same looking through the
Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to a
_Philosophy of Clothes_? Do we not, in all this, discern some beckonings
towards the true higher purport of such a Philosophy; and what shape it
must assume with such a man, in such an era?
Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly
without guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all the fantastic
Dream-Grottos through which, as is our lot with Teufelsdrockh, he must
wander, will there be wanting between whiles some twinkling of a steady
Polar Star.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY.
As a wonder-loving and wonder-seeking man, Teufelsdrockh, from an early
part of this Clothes-Volume, has more and more exhibited himself. Striking
it was, amid all his perverse cloudiness, with what force of vision and of
heart he pierced into the mystery of the World; recognizing in the highest
sensible phenomena, so far as Sense went, only fresh or faded Raiment; yet
ever, under this, a celestial Essence thereby rendered visible: and while,
on the one hand, he trod the old rags of Matter, with their tinsels, into
the mire, he on the other everywhere exalted Spirit above all earthly
principalities and powers, and worshipped it, though under the meanest
shapes, with a true Platonic mysticism. What the man ultimately purposed
by thus casting his Greek-fire into the general Wardrobe of the Universe;
what such, more or less complete, rending and burning of Garments
throughout the whole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead
to; the rather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like
Rousseau, recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return to
the savage state: all this our readers are now bent to discover; this is,
in fact, properly the gist and purport of Professor Teufelsdrockh's
Philosophy of Clothes.
Be it remembered, however, that such purport is here not so much evolved,
as detected to lie ready for evolving. We are to guide our British Friends
into the new Gold-country, and show them the mines; nowise to dig out and
exhaust its wealth, which indeed remains for all time inexhaustible. Once
there, let each dig for his own behoof, and enrich himself.
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