Sartor Resartus
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Thomas Carlyle >> Sartor Resartus
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Neither, in so capricious inexpressible a Work as this of the Professor's,
can our course now more than formerly be straightforward, step by step, but
at best leap by leap. Significant Indications stand out here and there;
which for the critical eye, that looks both widely and narrowly, shape
themselves into some ground-scheme of a Whole: to select these with
judgment, so that a leap from one to the other be possible, and (in our old
figure) by chaining them together, a passable Bridge be effected: this, as
heretofore, continues our only method. Among such light-spots, the
following, floating in much wild matter about _Perfectibility_, has seemed
worth clutching at:--
"Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History," says
Teufelsdrockh, "is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle of
Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incident passed
carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with some degree of
ridicule by others: namely, George Fox's making to himself a suit of
Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a Shoemaker, was
one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine Idea of the
Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and, across all the hulls of
Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, in unspeakable Awfulness,
unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: who therefore are rightly accounted
Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced.
Sitting in his stall; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns,
rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had,
nevertheless, a Living Spirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired
Volume, through which, as through a window, it could look upwards, and
discern its celestial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled
even with some prospect of victuals, and an honorable Mastership in
Cordwainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, as the
crown of long faithful sewing,--was nowise satisfaction enough to such a
mind: but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones from that far
country, came Splendors and Terrors; for this poor Cordwainer, as we said,
was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to
minister, was full of holy mystery to him.
"The Clergy of the neighborhood, the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of
that same holy mystery, listened with un-affected tedium to his
consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to 'drink
beer, and dance with the girls.' Blind leaders of the blind! For what end
were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped
out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt on; and such a
church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held
over that spot of God's Earth,--if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the
Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned from them, with
tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible.
Mountains of encumbrance, higher than AEtna, had been heaped over that
Spirit: but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried there. Through long
days and nights of silent agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man's
force, to be free: how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed
tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this hand and that, and
emerged into the light of Heaven! That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known
it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine.--'So bandaged,
and hampered, and hemmed in,' groaned he, 'with thousand requisitions,
obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move: not
my own am I, but the World's; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, and
Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Why not;
what binds me here? Want, want!--Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages
under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light? Only
Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the hollow
of a tree will lodge me, wild berries feed me; and for Clothes, cannot I
stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather!'
"Historical Oil-painting," continues Teufelsdrockh, "is one of the Arts I
never practiced; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject were
easy of execution on the canvas. Yet often has it seemed to me as if such
first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, more and more into Day,
the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him in its hindrances and its
horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is in History. Let some
living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, picture
George Fox on that morning, when he spreads out his cutting-board for the
last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and stitches them
together into one continuous all-including Case, the farewell service of
his awl! Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little
instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and
the Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmer-strokes, and every
stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds
her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done,
there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he!
"Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest height; and for
the Poor also a Gospel has been published. Surely if, as D'Alembert
asserts, my illustrious namesake, Diogenes, was the greatest man of
Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by stronger reason is George
Fox the greatest of the Moderns, and greater than Diogenes himself: for he
too stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside all props
and shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervaluing the Earth; valuing
it rather, as a place to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heavenward
from his Earth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with a still
Strength, such as the Cynic's Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was
that Tub; a temple from which man's dignity and divinity was scornfully
preached abroad: but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was
preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love."
George Fox's "perennial suit," with all that it held, has been worn quite
into ashes for nigh two centuries: why, in a discussion on the
_Perfectibility of Society_, reproduce it now? Not out of blind sectarian
partisanship: Teufelsdrockh, himself is no Quaker; with all his pacific
tendencies, did not we see him, in that scene at the North Cape, with the
Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?
For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in this
passage than meets the ear. At the same time, who can avoid smiling at the
earnestness and Boeotian simplicity (if indeed there be not an underhand
satire in it), with which that "Incident" is here brought forward; and, in
the Professor's ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps as he durst in
Weissnichtwo, recommended to imitation! Does Teufelsdrockh anticipate
that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class of the community,
by way of testifying against the "Mammon-god," and escaping from what he
calls "Vanity's Workhouse and Ragfair," where doubtless some of them are
toiled and whipped and hoodwinked sufficiently,--will sheathe themselves in
close-fitting cases of Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme.
Will Majesty lay aside its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and
train-gowns, for a second skin of tanned hide? By which change
Huddersfield and Manchester, and Coventry and Paisley, and the
Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day and Martin
could profit. For neither would Teufelsdrockh's mad daydream, here as we
presume covertly intended, of levelling Society (_levelling_ it indeed with
a vengeance, into one huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining the political
effects of Nudity without its frigorific or other consequences,--be thereby
realized. Would not the rich man purchase a waterproof suit of Russia
Leather; and the high-born Belle step forth in red or azure morocco, lined
with shamoy: the black cowhide being left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of
the world; and so all the old Distinctions be re-established?
Or has the Professor his own deeper intention; and laughs in his sleeve at
our strictures and glosses, which indeed are but a part thereof?
CHAPTER II.
CHURCH-CLOTHES.
Not less questionable is his Chapter on _Church-Clothes_, which has the
farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume. We here translate
it entire:--
"By Church-Clothes, it need not be premised that I mean infinitely more
than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the mere haberdasher
Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it! Church-Clothes are,
in our vocabulary, the Forms, the _Vestures_, under which men have at
various periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious
Principle; that is to say, invested the Divine Idea of the World with a
sensible and practically active Body, so that it might dwell among them as
a living and life-giving WORD.
"These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and
garnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and woven, I may say,
by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it is still only when 'two or three
are gathered together,' that Religion, spiritually existent, and indeed
indestructible, however latent, in each, first outwardly manifests itself
(as with 'cloven tongues of fire'), and seeks to be embodied in a visible
Communion and Church Militant. Mystical, more than magical, is that
Communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward: here properly Soul
first speaks with Soul; for only in looking heavenward, take it in what
sense you may, not in looking earthward, does what we can call Union,
mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis:
'It is certain, my Belief gains quite _infinitely_ the moment I can
convince another mind thereof'! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in
those eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where
rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is
straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and
reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of
embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculous
virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the thick-plied
hulls of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of the Divine Life we
speak, and inmost ME is, as it were, brought into contact with inmost ME!
"Thus was it that I said, the Church Clothes are first spun and woven by
Society; outward Religion originates by Society, Society becomes possible
by Religion. Nay, perhaps, every conceivable Society, past and present,
may well be figured as properly and wholly a Church, in one or other of
these three predicaments: an audibly preaching and prophesying Church,
which is the best; second, a Church that struggles to preach and prophesy,
but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come; and third and worst, a Church
gone dumb with old age, or which only mumbles delirium prior to
dissolution. Whoso fancies that by Church is here meant Chapter-houses and
Cathedrals, or by preaching and prophesying, mere speech and chanting, let
him," says the oracular Professor, "read on, light of heart (_getrosten
Muthes_).
"But with regard to your Church proper, and the Church-Clothes specially
recognized as Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlessly enough, that without
such Vestures and sacred Tissues Society has not existed, and will not
exist. For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body
Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and all your
Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the
Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying _under_ such
SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;--then is Religion the inmost
Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and warm Circulation
to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the Bones and Muscles (of
Industry) were inert, or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; the SKIN
would become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting rawhide; and Society itself
a dead carcass,--deserving to be buried. Men were no longer Social, but
Gregarious; which latter state also could not continue, but must gradually
issue in universal selfish discord, hatred, savage isolation, and
dispersion;--whereby, as we might continue to say, the very dust and dead
body of Society would have evaporated and become abolished. Such, and so
all-important, all-sustaining, are the Church-Clothes to civilized or even
to rational men.
"Meanwhile, in our era of the World, those same Church-Clothes have gone
sorrowfully out-at-elbows; nay, far worse, many of them have become mere
hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any longer
dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive
their trade; and the mask still glares on you with its glass eyes, in
ghastly affectation of Life,--some generation-and-half after Religion has
quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new
Vestures, wherewith to reappear, and bless us, or our sons or grandsons.
As a Priest, or Interpreter of the Holy, is the noblest and highest of all
men, so is a Sham-priest (_Schein-priester_) the falsest and basest;
neither is it doubtful that his Canonicals, were they Popes' Tiaras, will
one day be torn from him, to make bandages for the wounds of mankind; or
even to burn into tinder, for general scientific or culinary purposes.
"All which, as out of place here, falls to be handled in my Second Volume,
_On the Palingenesia, or Newbirth of Society_; which volume, as treating
practically of the Wear, Destruction, and Retexture of Spiritual Tissues,
or Garments, forms, properly speaking, the Transcendental or ultimate
Portion of this my work on _Clothes_, and is already in a state of
forwardness."
And herewith, no farther exposition, note, or commentary being added, does
Teufelsdrockh, and must his Editor now, terminate the singular chapter on
Church-Clothes!
CHAPTER III.
SYMBOLS.
Probably it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscure utterances,
if we here insert somewhat of our Professor's speculations on _Symbols_.
To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our compass: nowhere is
he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of "Fantasy being the organ of
the Godlike;" and how "Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the
small Visible, does nevertheless extend down into the infinite deeps of the
Invisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his Life is properly the bodying
forth." Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter,
study to glean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what
little seems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such
degree of coherence as it will assume. By way of proem, take the following
not injudicious remarks:--
"The benignant efficacies of Concealment," cries our Professor, "who shall
speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them
(were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the
element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length
they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which
they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the
considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of
these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay,
in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but _hold thy tongue for one
day_: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what
wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when
intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman
defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and
suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great,
but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: _Sprechen ist
silbern, Schweigen ist golden_ (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or
as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
"Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in
Silence: neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left
hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy
own heart of 'those secrets known to all.' Is not Shame (_Schaam_) the soil
of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants,
Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the
sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it privily thyself, the
root withers, and no flower will glad thee. O my Friends, when we view the
fair clustering flowers that overwreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower,
and encircle man's life with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand
will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and,
with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in!
Men speak much of the Printing Press with its Newspapers: _du Himmel_!
what are these to Clothes and the Tailor's Goose?
"Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected
with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of _Symbols_. In a
Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by Silence
and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both
the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive
will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem,
the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.
"For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the
small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the
Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less
distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite;
the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and
as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and
commanded, made happy, made wretched: He everywhere finds himself
encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized: the
Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is
man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a
revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a 'Gospel
of Freedom,' which he, the 'Messias of Nature,' preaches, as he can, by act
and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought;
but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental
sense, symbolical as well as real."
"Man," says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these
high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the verge of the
inane, "Man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the
owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if we consider it, is
that of your actually existing Motive-Millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough
man has played, in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, down
even to an animated heap of Glass: but to fancy himself a dead
Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was reserved for this his
latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge Manger, filled with hay
and thistles to be weighed against each other; and looks long-eared enough.
Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him: one age he is
hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden, befooled; in all ages,
bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any
Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of
Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can see
nothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else:
the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the
Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to
grind the other way?
"Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to
bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it
hitherto that man's history, or the history of any man, went on by
calculated or calculable 'Motives'? What make ye of your Christianities,
and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reigns of
Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in _Love_?
Did he never stand so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time, and
the medicating virtue of Nature."
"Yes, Friends," elsewhere observes the Professor, "not our Logical,
Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say,
Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us
hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the
implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest
existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly
hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the
circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of
Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not
make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or
diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into
crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag;
which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above
three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some
tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron
Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial
value little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through _Symbols_
that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being:
those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best
recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol
ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the
Godlike?
"Of Symbols, however, I remark farther, that they have both an extrinsic
and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, for instance, was in
that clouted Shoe, which the Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign in
their _Bauernkrieg_ (Peasants' War)? Or in the Wallet-and-staff round
which the Netherland _Gueux_, glorying in that nickname of Beggars,
heroically rallied and prevailed, though against King Philip himself?
Intrinsic significance these had none: only extrinsic; as the accidental
Standards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in which
union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and
borrowing of the Godlike. Under a like category, too, stand, or stood, the
stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; military Banners everywhere; and
generally all national or other sectarian Costumes and Customs: they have
no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired an
extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of
a Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Idea of
Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right. Nay the
highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had
no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
"Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsic meaning, and
is of itself _fit_ that men should unite round it. Let but the Godlike
manifest itself to Sense, let but Eternity look, more or less visibly,
through the Time-Figure (_Zeitbild_)! Then is it fit that men unite there;
and worship together before such Symbol; and so from day to day, and from
age to age, superadd to it new divineness.
"Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art: in them (if thou know a
Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking
through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may an extrinsic
value gradually superadd itself: thus certain _Iliads_, and the like,
have, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But nobler
than all in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men; for what
other Work of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of the Just, as
the last perfection of a Work of Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning?
In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the
beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears)
the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering
through.
"Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into
Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the Same: I
mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious Symbols,
what we call _Religions_; as men stood in this stage of culture or the
other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some Symbols with
a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to
what height man has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol:
on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed
therefrom. Higher has the human Thought not yet reached: this is
Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite
character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into,
and anew made manifest.
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