Sartor Resartus

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"Did not King _Toomtabard_, or, in other words, John Baliol, reign long
over Scotland; the man John Baliol being quite gone, and only the 'Toom
Tabard' (Empty Gown) remaining? What still dignity dwells in a suit of
Cast Clothes! How meekly it bears its honors! No haughty looks, no
scornful gesture: silent and serene, it fronts the world; neither
demanding worship, nor afraid to miss it. The Hat still carries the
physiognomy of its Head: but the vanity and the stupidity, and
goose-speech which was the sign of these two, are gone. The Coat-arm is
stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modest simplicity,
depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides
no evil passion, no riotous desire; 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 the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a
Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified Apparition, visiting our
low Earth.

"Often, while I sojourned in that monstrous tuberosity of Civilized Life,
the Capital of England; and meditated, and questioned Destiny, under that
ink-sea of vapor, black, thick, and multifarious as Spartan broth; and was
one lone soul amid those grinding millions;--often have I turned into their
Old-Clothes Market to worship. With awe-struck heart I walk through that
Monmouth Street, with its empty Suits, as through a Sanhedrim of stainless
Ghosts. Silent are they, but expressive in their silence: the past
witnesses and instruments of Woe and Joy, of Passions, Virtues, Crimes, and
all the fathomless tumult of Good and Evil in 'the Prison men call Life.'
Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom Old Clothes are not
venerable. Watch, too, with reverence, that bearded Jewish High-priest,
who with hoarse voice, like some Angel of Doom, summons them from the four
winds! On his head, like the Pope, he has three Hats,--a real triple
tiara; on either hand are the similitude of wings, whereon the summoned
Garments come to alight; and ever, as he slowly cleaves the air, sounds
forth his deep fateful note, as if through a trumpet he were proclaiming:
'Ghosts of Life, come to Judgment!' Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he
will purify you in his Purgatory, with fire and with water; and, one day,
new-created ye shall reappear. Oh, let him in whom the flame of Devotion
is ready to go out, who has never worshipped, and knows not what to
worship, pace and repace, with austerest thought, the pavement of Monmouth
Street, and say whether his heart and his eyes still continue dry. If
Field Lane, with its long fluttering rows of yellow handkerchiefs, be a
Dionysius' Ear, where, in stifled jarring hubbub, we hear the Indictment
which Poverty and Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that it has left them
there cast out and trodden under foot of Want, Darkness and the
Devil,--then is Monmouth Street a Mirza's Hill, where, in motley vision,
the whole Pageant of Existence passes awfully before us; with its wail and
jubilee, 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, all this will seem overcharged. We
too have walked through Monmouth Street; but with little feeling of
"Devotion:" probably in part because the contemplative process is so
fatally broken in upon by the brood of money-changers who nestle in that
Church, and importune the worshipper with merely secular proposals.
Whereas Teufelsdrockh, might be in that happy middle state, which leaves to
the Clothes-broker no hope either of sale or of purchase, and so be allowed
to linger there without molestation.--Something we would have given to see
the little philosophical figure, with its steeple-hat and loose flowing
skirts, and eyes in a fine frenzy, "pacing and repacing in austerest
thought" that foolish Street; which to him was a true Delphic avenue, and
supernatural Whispering-gallery, where the "Ghosts of Life" rounded strange
secrets in his ear. O thou philosophic Teufelsdrockh, that listenest while
others only gabble, and with thy quick tympanum hearest the grass grow!

At the same time, is it not strange that, in Paper-bag Documents destined
for an English work, there exists nothing like an authentic diary of this
his sojourn in London; and of his Meditations among the Clothes-shops only
the obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither, in conversation (for, indeed,
he was not a man to pester you with his Travels), have we heard him more
than allude to the subject.

For the rest, however, it cannot be uninteresting that we here find how
early the significance of Clothes had dawned on the now so distinguished
Clothes-Professor. Might we but fancy it to have been even in Monmouth
Street, at the bottom of our own English "ink-sea," that this remarkable
Volume first took being, and shot forth its salient point in his soul,--as
in Chaos did the Egg of Eros, one day to be hatched into a Universe!

CHAPTER VII.
ORGANIC FILAMENTS.

For us, who happen to live while the World-Phoenix is burning herself, and
burning so slowly that, as Teufelsdrockh calculates, it were a handsome
bargain would she engage to have done "within two centuries," there seems
to lie but an ashy prospect. Not altogether so, however, does the
Professor figure it. "In the living subject," says he, "change is wont to
be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the new is already
formed beneath. Little knowest thou of the burning of a World-Phoenix, who
fanciest that she must first burn out, and lie as a dead cinereous heap;
and therefrom the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward. Far
otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed
together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic
filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing
and the waving of the Whirlwind element come tones of a melodious
Death-song, which end not but in tones of a more melodious Birth-song.
Nay, look into the Fire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see."
Let us actually look, then: to poor individuals, who cannot expect to live
two centuries, those same organic filaments, 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 Professor; "thou art my Brother. Thy
very Hatred, thy very Envy, those foolish Lies thou tellest of me in thy
splenetic humor: what is all this but an inverted Sympathy? Were I a
Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me? Not thou!
I should grind all unheeded, whether badly or well.

"Wondrous truly are the bonds that unite us one and all; whether by the
soft binding of Love, or the iron chaining of Necessity, as we like to
choose it. More than once have I said to myself, of some perhaps
whimsically strutting Figure, such as provokes whimsical thoughts: 'Wert
thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered up within the largest
imaginable Glass bell,--what a thing it were, not for thyself only, but for
the world! Post Letters, more or fewer, from all the four winds, impinge
against thy Glass walls, but have to drop unread: neither from within
comes there question or response into any Post-bag; thy Thoughts fall into
no friendly ear or heart, thy Manufacture into no purchasing hand: thou
art no longer a circulating venous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving,
circulatest through all Space and all Time: there has a Hole fallen out in
the immeasurable, universal World-tissue, which must be darned up again!'

"Such venous-arterial circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paper and
other Packages, going out from him and coming in, are a blood-circulation,
visible to the eye: but the finer nervous circulation, by which all
things, the minutest that he does, minutely influence all men, and the very
look of his face blesses or curses whomso it lights on, and so generates
ever new blessing or new cursing: all this you cannot see, but only
imagine. I say, there is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can
quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not
the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that the casting of
this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.

"If now an existing generation of men stand so woven together, not less
indissolubly does generation with generation. Hast thou ever meditated on
that word, Tradition: how we inherit not Life only, but all the garniture
and form of Life; and work, and speak, and even think and feel, as our
Fathers, and primeval grandfathers, from the beginning, have given it
us?--Who printed thee, for example, this unpretending Volume on the
Philosophy of Clothes? Not the Herren Stillschweigen and Company; but
Cadmus of Thebes, Faust of Mentz, and innumerable others whom thou knowest
not. Had there been no Moesogothic Ulfila, there had been no English
Shakspeare, or a different one. Simpleton! It was Tubal-cain that made
thy very Tailor's needle, and sewed that court-suit of thine.

"Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is
Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature
were not. As palpable lifestreams in that wondrous Individual Mankind,
among so many life-streams that are not palpable, flow on those main
currents of what we call Opinion; as preserved in Institutions, Polities,
Churches, above all in Books. Beautiful it is to understand and know that
a Thought did never yet die; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast
gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt transmit it to
the whole Future. It is thus that the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the
first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest; that the Wise Man
stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses
and brothers; and there is a living, literal _Communion of Saints_, wide as
the World itself, and as the History of the World.

"Noteworthy also, and serviceable for the progress of this same Individual,
wilt thou find his subdivision into Generations. Generations are as the
Days of toilsome Mankind: Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin
bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new
advancement. What the Father has made, the Son can make and enjoy; but has
also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax, and roll onwards;
Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing.
Newton has learned to see what Kepler saw; but there is also 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 the business of Destruction, as this also is from time
to time a necessary work, thou findest a like sequence and perseverance:
for Luther it was as yet hot enough to stand by that burning of the Pope's
Bull; Voltaire could not warm himself at the glimmering ashes, but required
quite other fuel. Thus likewise, I note, the English Whig has, in the
second generation, become an English Radical; who, in the third again, it
is to be hoped, will become an English Rebuilder. Find Mankind where thou
wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower:
the Phoenix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with
her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates
herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer."

Let the friends of social order, in such a disastrous period, lay this to
heart, and derive from it any little comfort they can. We subjoin another
passage, concerning Titles:--

"Remark, not without surprise," says Teufelsdrockh, "how all high Titles of
Honor come hitherto 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 Wisdom, having from of
old been prophesied, and becoming now daily more and more indubitable, may
it not be apprehended that such Fighting titles will cease to be palatable,
and new 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 (Cunning), or which is
the same thing, Can-ning. Ever must the Sovereign of Mankind be fitly
entitled King."

"Well, also," says he elsewhere, "was it written by Theologians: a King
rules by divine right. He carries in him an authority from God, or man
will never give it him. Can I choose my own King? I can choose my own
King Popinjay, and play what farce or tragedy I may with him: but he who
is to be my Ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was chosen for
me in Heaven. Neither except in such Obedience to the Heaven-chosen is
Freedom so much as conceivable."

The Editor will here admit that, among all the wondrous provinces of
Teufelsdrockh's spiritual world, there is none he walks in with such
astonishment, hesitation, and even pain, as in the Political. How, with
our English love of Ministry and Opposition, and that generous conflict of
Parties, mind warming itself against mind in their mutual wrestle for the
Public Good, by which wrestle, indeed, is our invaluable Constitution kept
warm and alive; how shall we domesticate ourselves in this spectral
Necropolis, or rather City both of the Dead and of the Unborn, where the
Present seems little other than an inconsiderable Film dividing the Past
and the Future? In those dim long-drawn expanses, all is so immeasurable;
much so disastrous, ghastly; your very radiances and straggling light-beams
have a supernatural character. And then with such an indifference, such a
prophetic peacefulness (accounting the inevitably coming as already here,
to him all one whether it be distant by centuries or only by days), does he
sit;--and live, you would say, rather in any other age than in his own! It
is our painful duty to announce, or repeat, that, looking into this man, we
discern a deep, silent, slow-burning, inextinguishable Radicalism, such as
fills us with shuddering admiration.

Thus, for example, he appears to make little even of the Elective
Franchise; at least so we interpret the following: "Satisfy yourselves,"
he says, "by universal, indubitable experiment, even as ye are now doing or
will do, whether FREEDOM, heaven-born and leading heavenward, and so
vitally essential for us all, cannot peradventure be mechanically hatched
and brought to light in that same Ballot-Box of yours; or at worst, in some
other discoverable or devisable Box, Edifice, or Steam-mechanism. It were
a mighty convenience; and beyond all feats of manufacture witnessed
hitherto." Is Teufelsdrockh acquainted with the British constitution, even
slightly?--He says, under another figure: "But after all, were the
problem, as indeed it now everywhere is, To rebuild your old House from the
top downwards (since you must live in it the while), what better, what
other, than the Representative Machine will serve your turn? Meanwhile,
however, mock me not with the name of Free, 'when you have but knit up my
chains into ornamental festoons.'"--Or what will any member of the Peace
Society make of such an assertion as this: "The lower people everywhere
desire War. Not so unwisely; there is then a demand for lower people--to
be shot!"

Gladly, therefore, do we emerge from those soul-confusing labyrinths of
speculative Radicalism, into somewhat clearer regions. Here, looking
round, as was our hest, for "organic filaments," we ask, may not this,
touching "Hero-worship," be of the number? It seems of a cheerful
character; yet so quaint, so mystical, one knows not what, or how little,
may lie under it. Our readers shall look with their own eyes:--

"True is it that, in these days, man can do almost all things, only not
obey. True likewise that whoso cannot obey cannot be free, still less bear
rule; he that is the inferior of nothing, can be the superior of nothing,
the equal of nothing. Nevertheless, believe not that man has lost his
faculty of Reverence; that if it slumber in him, it has gone dead. Painful
for man is that same rebellious Independence, when it has become
inevitable; only in loving companionship with his fellows does he feel
safe; only in reverently bowing down before the Higher does he feel himself
exalted.

"Or what if the character of our so troublous Era lay even in this: that
man had forever cast away Fear, which is the lower; but not yet risen into
perennial Reverence, which is the higher and highest?

"Meanwhile, observe with joy, so cunningly has Nature ordered it, that
whatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey. Before no faintest
revelation of the Godlike did he ever stand irreverent; least of all, when
the Godlike showed itself revealed in his fellow-man. Thus is there a true
religious Loyalty forever rooted in his heart; nay in all ages, even in
ours, it manifests itself as a more or less orthodox _Hero-worship_. In
which fact, that Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist,
universally among Mankind, mayest thou discern the corner-stone of living
rock, whereon all Polities for the remotest time may stand secure."

Do our readers discern any such corner-stone, or even so much as what
Teufelsdrockh, is looking at? He exclaims, "Or hast thou forgotten Paris
and Voltaire? How the aged, withered man, though but a Sceptic, Mocker,
and millinery Court-poet, yet because even he seemed the Wisest, Best,
could drag mankind at his chariot-wheels, so that princes coveted a smile
from him, and the loveliest of France would have laid their hair beneath
his feet! All Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship; though their
Divinity, moreover, was of feature too apish.

"But if such things," continues he, "were done in the dry tree, what will
be done in the green? If, in the most parched season of Man's History, in
the most parched spot of Europe, when Parisian life was at best but a
scientific _Hortus Siccus_, bedizened with some Italian Gumflowers, such
virtue could come out of it; what is to be looked for when Life again waves
leafy and bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shall have nothing apelike, but be
wholly human? Know that there is in man a quite indestructible Reverence
for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such
holding. Show the dullest clodpoll, show the haughtiest featherhead, that
a soul higher than himself is actually here; were his knees stiffened into
brass, he must down and worship."

Organic filaments, of a more authentic sort, mysteriously spinning
themselves, some will perhaps discover in the following passage:--

"There is no Church, sayest thou? The voice of Prophecy has gone dumb?
This is even what I dispute: but in any case, hast thou not still
Preaching enough? A Preaching Friar settles himself in every village; and
builds a pulpit, which he calls Newspaper. Therefrom he preaches what most
momentous doctrine is in him, for man's salvation; and dost not thou
listen, and believe? Look well, thou seest everywhere a new Clergy of the
Mendicant Orders, some barefooted, some almost bare-backed, fashion itself
into shape, and teach and preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the
love of God. These break in pieces the ancient idols; and, though
themselves too often reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be, mark out
the sites of new Churches, where the true God-ordained, that are to follow,
may find audience, and minister. Said I not, Before the old skin was shed,
the new had formed itself beneath it?"

Perhaps also in the following; wherewith we now hasten to knit up this
ravelled sleeve:--

"But there is no Religion?" reiterates the Professor. "Fool! I tell thee,
there is. Hast thou well considered all that lies in this immeasurable
froth-ocean we name LITERATURE? Fragments of a genuine Church-_Homiletic_
lie scattered there, which Time will assort: nay fractions even of a
_Liturgy_ could I point out. And knowest thou no Prophet, even in the
vesture, environment, and dialect of this age? None to whom the Godlike
had revealed itself, through all meanest and highest forms of the Common;
and by him been again prophetically revealed: in whose inspired melody,
even in these rag-gathering and rag-burning days, Man's Life again begins,
were it but afar off, to be divine? Knowest thou none such? I know him,
and name him--Goethe.

"But thou as yet standest in no Temple; joinest in no Psalm-worship;
feelest well that, where there is no ministering Priest, the people perish?
Be of comfort! Thou art not alone, if thou have Faith. Spake we not of a
Communion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal, accompanying and brother-like
embracing thee, so thou be worthy? Their heroic Sufferings rise up
melodiously together to Heaven, out of all lands, and out of all times, as
a sacred _Miserere_; their heroic Actions also, as a boundless everlasting
Psalm of Triumph. Neither say that 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 History, and Men's History, a perpetual Evangel? Listen, and
for organ-music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing
together."

CHAPTER VIII.
NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM.

It is in his stupendous Section, headed _Natural Supernaturalism_, that the
Professor first becomes a Seer; and, after long effort, such as we have
witnessed, finally subdues under his feet this refractory
Clothes-Philosophy, and takes victorious possession thereof. Phantasms
enough he has had to struggle with; "Cloth-webs and Cob-webs," of Imperial
Mantles, 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 and bewildering: but with these also he now resolutely
grapples, these also he victoriously rends asunder. In a word, he has
looked fixedly on Existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hulls
and garnitures have all melted away; and now, to his rapt vision, the
interior celestial Holy-of-Holies lies disclosed.

Here, therefore, properly it is that the Philosophy of Clothes attains to
Transcendentalism; this last leap, can we but clear it, takes us safe into
the promised land, where _Palingenesia_, in all senses, may be considered
as beginning. "Courage, then!" may our Diogenes exclaim, with better right
than Diogenes the First once did. This stupendous Section we, after long
painful meditation, have found not to be unintelligible; but, on the
contrary, to grow clear, nay radiant, and all-illuminating. Let the
reader, turning on it what utmost force of speculative intellect is in him,
do his part; as we, by judicious selection and adjustment, shall study to
do ours:--

"Deep has been, and is, the significance of Miracles," thus quietly begins
the Professor; "far deeper perhaps than we imagine. Meanwhile, the
question of questions were: What specially is a Miracle? To that Dutch
King of Siam, an icicle had been a miracle; whoso had carried with him an
air-pump, and vial of vitriolic ether, might have worked a miracle. To my
Horse, again, who unhappily is still more unscientific, do not I work a
miracle, and magical '_Open sesame_!_'_ every time I please to pay
twopence, and open for him an impassable _Schlagbaum_, or shut Turnpike?

"'But is not a real Miracle simply a violation of the Laws of Nature?' ask
several. Whom I answer by this new question: What are the Laws of Nature?
To me perhaps the rising of one from the dead were no violation of these
Laws, but a confirmation; were some far deeper Law, now first penetrated
into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the rest have all been, brought to
bear on us with its Material Force.

"Here too may some inquire, not without astonishment: On what ground shall
one, that can make Iron swim, come and declare that therefore he can teach
Religion? To us, truly, of the Nineteenth Century, such declaration were
inept enough; which nevertheless to our fathers, of the First Century, was
full of meaning.

"'But is it not the deepest Law of Nature that she be constant?' cries an
illuminated class: 'Is not the Machine of the Universe fixed to move by
unalterable rules?' Probable enough, good friends: nay I, too, must
believe that the God, whom ancient inspired men assert to be 'without
variableness or shadow of turning,' does indeed never change; that Nature,
that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be prevented from
calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules. And now of
you, too, I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules,
forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature, may possibly be?

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