Sartor Resartus

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"They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated
records of Man's Experience?--Was Man with his Experience present at the
Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any deepest scientific
individuals yet dived down to the foundations of the Universe, and gauged
everything there? Did the Maker take them into His counsel; that they read
His ground-plan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This stands
marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These
scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen
some hand breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite,
without bottom as without shore.

"Laplace's Book on the Stars, wherein he exhibits that certain Planets,
with their Satellites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rate and in a
course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like of him have
succeeded in detecting,--is to me as precious as to another. But is this
what thou namest 'Mechanism of the Heavens,' and 'System of the World;'
this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel's Fifteen thousand
Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons, and inert
Balls, had been--looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal
Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How, their
Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?

"System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all
Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little
fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us: but who knows what deeper
courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our
little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and
quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar:
but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the
Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses; by all which the condition
of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time to time
(unmiraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is
Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his
Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through
AEons of AEons.

"We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is,--whose Author
and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as well know
the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and grand descriptive
Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar Systems, and
Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a Volume written in
celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which even Prophets
are happy that they can read here a line and there a line. As for your
Institutes, and Academies of Science, they strive bravely; and, from amid
the thick-crowded, inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick
out, by dexterous combination, some Letters in the vulgar Character, and
therefrom put together this and the other economic Recipe, of high avail in
Practice. That Nature is more than some boundless Volume of such Recipes,
or huge, well-nigh inexhaustible Domestic-Cookery Book, of which the whole
secret will in this manner one day evolve itself, the fewest dream.

"Custom," continues the Professor, "doth make dotards of us all. Consider
well, thou wilt find that Custom is the greatest of Weavers; and weaves
air-raiment for all the Spirits of the Universe; whereby indeed these dwell
with us visibly, as ministering servants, in our houses and workshops; but
their spiritual nature becomes, to the most, forever hidden. Philosophy
complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do
everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us
boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we
have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a
continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to _transcend_ the
sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?

"Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: but of
all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the
Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by
this means we live; for man must work as well as wonder: and herein is
Custom so far a kind nurse, guiding him to his true benefit. But she is a
fond foolish nurse, or rather we are false foolish nurslings, when, in our
resting and reflecting hours, we prolong the same deception. Am I to view
the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or
two hundred, or two million times? There is no reason in Nature or in Art
why I should: unless, indeed, I am a mere Work-Machine, for whom the
divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is
to the Steam-engine; a power whereby cotton might be spun, and money and
money's worth realized.

"Notable enough too, here as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency of
Names; which indeed are but one kind of such custom-woven, wonder-hiding
Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we
have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that
still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves?
Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether
_infernal_ boiling-up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted
Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real. Was
Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether it were formed within
the bodily eye, or without it? In every the wisest Soul lies a whole world
of internal Madness, an authentic Demon-Empire; out of which, indeed, his
world of Wisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as
on its dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth rind.

"But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many
other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances,
SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself,
to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it,--lie
all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor
Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In
vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can,
at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

"Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, which when he put on, and wished himself
Anywhere, behold he was There. By this means had Fortunatus triumphed over
Space, he had annihilated Space; for him there was no Where, but all was
Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself, in the Wahngasse of
Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all mankind, what a world we
should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side of the
street, another Hatter establish himself; and, as his fellow-craftsman made
Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both would I purchase,
were it with my last groschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap on your
felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhere, straightway to be
_There_! Next to clap on your other felt, and, simply by wishing that you
were _Anywhen_, straightway to be _Then_! This were indeed the grander:
shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its
Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century,
conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the
Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas,
who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time!

"Or thinkest thou it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past
annihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future?
Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer: already
through those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blinded summonest both Past
and Future, and communest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute
beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow
roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both _are_. Pierce through the
Time-element, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written
in the sanctuaries of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have
devoutly read it there: that Time and Space are not God, but creations of
God; that with God as it is a universal HERE, so is it an everlasting Now.

"And seest thou therein any glimpse of IMMORTALITY?--O Heaven! Is the
white Tomb of our Loved One, who died from our arms, and had to be left
behind us there, which rises in the distance, like a pale, mournfully
receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered miles we have
journeyed on alone,--but a pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost Friend
still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with God!--know
of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable;
that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be,
is even now and forever. This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayest
ponder at thy leisure; for the next twenty years, or the next twenty
centuries: believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not.

"That the Thought-forms, Space and Time, wherein, once for all, we are sent
into this Earth to live, should condition and determine our whole Practical
reasonings, conceptions, and imagings or imaginings, seems altogether fit,
just, and unavoidable. But that they should, furthermore, usurp such sway
over pure spiritual Meditation, and blind us to the wonder everywhere lying
close on us, seems nowise so. Admit Space and Time to their due rank as
Forms of Thought; nay even, if thou wilt, to their quite undue rank of
Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how their thin disguises hide
from us the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it not miraculous, could
I stretch forth my hand and clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily
stretch forth my hand and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it
hither and thither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle
lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not to
see that the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I
can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught
therewith? Innumerable other of this sort are the deceptions, and
wonder-hiding stupefactions, which Space practices on us.

"Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your grand anti-magician, and
universal wonder-hider, is this same lying Time. Had we but the
Time-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should see ourselves in
a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authentic Thaumaturgy, and feats
of Magic, were outdone. But unhappily we have not such a Hat; and man,
poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantily help himself without one.

"Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, built the
walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his Lyre? Yet tell me, Who built
these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning out all the sandstone rocks, to
dance along from the _Steinbruch_ (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with
frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic
pillars, squared ashlar houses and noble streets? Was it not the still
higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music
of Wisdom, succeeded in civilizing Man? Our highest Orpheus walked in
Judea, eighteen hundred years ago: his sphere-melody, flowing in wild
native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and, being of a truth
sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousand-fold
accompaniments, and rich symphonies, through all our hearts; and modulates,
and divinely leads them. Is that a wonder, which happens in two hours; and
does it cease to be wonderful if happening in two million? Not only was
Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some
inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever
done.

"Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near
moving-cause to its far distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted
through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the
last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? Oh, could I (with the
Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the Beginnings, to the
Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the
Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe,
were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed
City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most
through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But
Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise,
hides Him from the foolish.

"Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost?
The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though
he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on
coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as
with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so
loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a
Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of
Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep
away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three
minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are
shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air
and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific _fact_:
we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as
round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as
years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial
harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do not we
squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and
recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar
(_poltern_), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the
morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake
and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that
yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or
have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon
too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other
than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that
made Night hideous, flitted away?-- Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand
million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have
vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks
once.

"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry
each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These
Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its
burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round
our ME: wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to
be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire
flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior
and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they
tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a
film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's
sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little
while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very
ashes are not.

"So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation
after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth issuing from
Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in
each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like
climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on
the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:--and then the Heaven-sent is
recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a
vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of
Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in
long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus,
like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane;
haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the
Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our
passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits
which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of
us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the
earliest Van. But whence?--O Heaven whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows
not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

'We _are such stuff_
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep!'"

CHAPTER IX.
CIRCUMSPECTIVE.

Here, then, arises the so momentous question: Have many British Readers
actually arrived with us at the new promised country; is the Philosophy of
Clothes now at last opening around them? Long and adventurous has the
journey been: from those outmost vulgar, palpable Woollen Hulls of Man;
through his wondrous Flesh-Garments, and his wondrous Social Garnitures;
inwards to the Garments of his very Soul's Soul, to Time and Space
themselves! And now does the spiritual, eternal Essence of Man, and of
Mankind, bared of such wrappages, begin in any measure to reveal itself?
Can many readers discern, as through a glass darkly, in huge wavering
outlines, some primeval rudiments of Man's Being, what is changeable
divided from what is unchangeable? Does that Earth-Spirit's speech in
_Faust_,--

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

or that other thousand-times repeated speech of the Magician,
Shakespeare,--

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

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

Along this most insufficient, unheard-of Bridge, which the Editor, by
Heaven's blessing, has now seen himself enabled to conclude if not
complete, it cannot be his sober calculation, but only his fond hope, that
many have travelled without accident. No firm arch, overspanning the
Impassable with paved highway, could the Editor construct; only, as was
said, some zigzag series of rafts floating tumultuously thereon. Alas, and
the leaps from raft to raft were too often of a breakneck character; the
darkness, the nature of the element, all was against us!

Nevertheless, may not here and there one of a thousand, provided with a
discursiveness of intellect rare in our day, have cleared the passage, in
spite of all? Happy few! little band of Friends! be welcome, be of
courage. By degrees, the eye grows accustomed to its new Whereabout; the
hand can stretch itself forth to work there: it is in this grand and
indeed highest work of Palingenesia that ye shall labor, each according to
ability. New laborers will arrive; new Bridges will be built; nay, may not
our own poor rope-and-raft Bridge, in your passings and repassings, be
mended in many a point, till it grow quite firm, passable even for the
halt?

Meanwhile, of the innumerable multitude that started with us, joyous and
full of hope, where now is the innumerable remainder, whom we see no longer
by our side? The most have recoiled, and stand gazing afar off, in
unsympathetic astonishment, at our career: not a few, pressing forward
with more courage, have missed footing, or leaped short; and now swim
weltering in the Chaos-flood, some towards this shore, some towards that.
To these also a helping hand should be held out; at least some word of
encouragement be said.

Or, to speak without metaphor, with which mode of utterance Teufelsdrockh
unhappily has somewhat infected us,-- can it be hidden from the Editor that
many a British Reader sits reading quite bewildered in head, and afflicted
rather than instructed by the present Work? Yes, long ago has many a
British Reader been, as now, demanding with something like a snarl:
Whereto does all this lead; or what use is in it?

In the way of replenishing thy purse, or otherwise aiding thy digestive
faculty, O British Reader, it leads to nothing, and there is no use in it;
but rather the reverse, for it costs thee somewhat. Nevertheless, if
through this unpromising Horn-gate, Teufelsdrockh, and we by means of him,
have led thee into the true Land of Dreams; and through the Clothes-Screen,
as through a magical _Pierre-Pertuis_, thou lookest, even for moments, into
the region of the Wonderful, and seest and feelest that thy daily life is
girt with Wonder, and based on Wonder, and thy very blankets and breeches
are Miracles,-- then art thou profited beyond money's worth; and hast a
thankfulness towards our Professor; nay, perhaps in many a literary
Tea-circle wilt open thy kind lips, and audibly express that same.

Nay farther, art not thou too perhaps by this time made aware that all
Symbols are properly Clothes; that all Forms whereby Spirit manifests
itself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes; and
thus not only the parchment Magna Charta, which a Tailor was nigh cutting
into measures, but the Pomp and Authority of Law, the sacredness of
Majesty, and all inferior Worships (Worth-ships) are properly a Vesture and
Raiment; and the Thirty-nine Articles themselves are articles of
wearing-apparel (for the Religious Idea)? In which case, must it not also
be admitted that this Science of Clothes is a high one, and may with
infinitely deeper study on thy part yield richer fruit: that it takes
scientific rank beside Codification, and Political Economy, and the Theory
of the British Constitution; nay rather, from its prophetic height looks
down on all these, as on so many weaving-shops and spinning-mills, where
the Vestures which _it_ has to fashion, and consecrate, and distribute,
are, too often by haggard hungry operatives who see no farther than their
nose, mechanically woven and spun?

But omitting all this, much more all that concerns Natural Supernaturalism,
and indeed whatever has reference to the Ulterior or Transcendental portion
of the Science, or bears never so remotely on that promised Volume of the
_Palingenesie der menschlichen Gesellschaft_ (Newbirth of Society),--we
humbly suggest that no province of Clothes-Philosophy, even the lowest, is
without its direct value, but that innumerable inferences of a practical
nature may be drawn therefrom. To say nothing of those pregnant
considerations, ethical, political, symbolical, which crowd on the
Clothes-Philosopher from the very threshold of his Science; nothing even of
those "architectural ideas," which, as we have seen, lurk at the bottom of
all Modes, and will one day, better unfolding themselves, lead to important
revolutions,--let us glance for a moment, and with the faintest light of
Clothes-Philosophy, on what may be called the Habilatory Class of our
fellow-men. Here too overlooking, where so much were to be looked on, the
million spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, washers, and wringers, that
puddle and muddle in their dark recesses, to make us Clothes, and die that
we may live,--let us but turn the reader's attention upon two small
divisions of mankind, who, like moths, may be regarded as Cloth-animals,
creatures that live, move and have their being in Cloth: we mean, Dandies
and Tailors.

In regard to both which small divisions it may be asserted without scruple,
that the public feeling, unenlightened by Philosophy, is at fault; and even
that the dictates of humanity are violated. As will perhaps abundantly
appear to readers of the two following Chapters.

CHAPTER X.
THE DANDIACAL BODY.

First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness,
what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose
trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every
faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to
this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others
dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a
German Professor, of unequalled learning and acumen, writes his enormous
Volume to demonstrate, has sprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without
effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of
Cloth. What Teufelsdrockh would call a "Divine Idea of Cloth" is born with
him; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or
wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes.

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