Sartor Resartus

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With which picture of a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and
Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part of our
subject.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES.

If in the Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdrockh,
discussing merely the _Werden_ (Origin and successive Improvement) of
Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the
Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their _Wirken_, or
Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of
his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes
commences: all untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; in
venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to
know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the
footing is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere
cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdrockh undertakes no less than to expound
the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes
to make manifest, in its thousand-fold bearings, this grand Proposition,
that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttoned together, and
held up, by Clothes." He says in so many words, "Society is founded upon
Cloth;" and again, "Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a
Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the
Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless
depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in either case be no more."

By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this
grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are
drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our
Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where
the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but
at best that of practical Reason' proceeding by large Intuition over whole
systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity,
almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture
of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay
we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call
mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim:
Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems
as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it
were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is
only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at
wide-enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated,
that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine.
Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favor us with their
most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and
not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon
there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands,
perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail
thither?--As exordium to the whole, stand here the following long
citation:--

"With men of a speculative turn," writes Teufelsdrockh, "there come
seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you
ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say
'I' (_das Wesen das sich ICH nennt_)? The world, with its loud
trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings,
and stonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the
living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your
Existence sits surrounded,--the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and
you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one
mysterious Presence with another.

"Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;--some
embodied, visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind? _Cogito, ergo sum_. Alas,
poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and
lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around,
written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and
wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where
is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield
articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and
Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies
not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-colored visions flit
round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and
Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not.
Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun
that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream,
how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest
while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems
is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where
divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars,
with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the
Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what
we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if
they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they
know nothing.

"Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly
unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret:
a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death,
the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and
Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly
built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein,
however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _The whole is greater than the
part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors a vacuum_: how exceedingly
false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can act but where it is_: with all
my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave of Words: is not the
Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it,
Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that
same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the first the master-colors of
our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof)
whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not
a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE
and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but
superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern
them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have
not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing
in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find
that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_
no Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating
in the ether of Deity!

"So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our
ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production and
destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy of our
Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living visible
Garment of God_:--

"'In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living:
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.'

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the
_Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning
thereof?

"It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high
speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange
enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and
Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the
girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the
noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his own
boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys,
with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth and
easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been
considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color, featly
appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While I--good
Heaven!-- have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the
bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the
felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with
shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would
have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself
anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its
thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed
off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been
brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rat-grinder, get new
material to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I
too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass
of tailors' and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly articulated,
homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

"Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest
facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in
the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a
blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and
consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver;
mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising
of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen _twice_, and it ceases
to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a
lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or
generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his
Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that _he_ is naked,
without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and
button them.

"For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and how,
reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and demoralizes
us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind; almost as one
feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing
deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped sacking), in the
meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something great in the moment when
a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees indeed that
he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forked straddling animal with bandy
legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries."

CHAPTER IX.
ADAMITISM.

Let no courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached in the
conclusion of the last Chapter. The Editor himself, on first glancing over
that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: What, have we got not only
a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? A new Adamite,
in this century, which flatters itself that it is the Nineteenth, and
destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm?

Consider, thou foolish Teufelsdrockh, what benefits unspeakable all ages
and sexes derive from Clothes. For example, when thou thyself, a watery,
pulpy, slobbery freshman and new-comer in this Planet, sattest muling and
puking in thy nurse's arms; sucking thy coral, and looking forth into the
world in the blankest manner, what hadst thou been without thy blankets,
and bibs, and other nameless hulls? A terror to thyself and mankind! Or
hast thou forgotten the day when thou first receivedst breeches, and thy
long clothes became short? The village where thou livedst was all apprised
of the fact; and neighbor after neighbor kissed thy pudding-cheek, and gave
thee, as handsel, silver or copper coins, on that the first gala-day of thy
existence. Again, wert not thou, at one period of life, a Buck, or Blood,
or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy, or by whatever name, according to
year and place, such phenomenon is distinguished? In that one word lie
included mysterious volumes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over, or
altered, and thy clothes are not for triumph but for defence, hast thou
always worn them perforce, and as a consequence of Man's Fall; never
rejoiced in them as in a warm movable House, a Body round thy Body, wherein
that strange THEE of thine sat snug, defying all variations of Climate?
Girt with thick double-milled kerseys; half buried under shawls and
broadbrims, and overalls and mudboots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin
and mittens, thou hast bestrode that "Horse I ride;" and, though it were in
wild winter, dashed through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its
lord. In vain did the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy
impenetrable, felted or woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds
howl,--forests sounding and creaking, deep calling unto deep,--and the
storms heap themselves together into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou
flewest through the middle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild
music hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a "sailor of the air;" the wreck
of matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting
tide. Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what
had thy fleet quadruped been?--Nature is good, but she is not the best:
here truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeed might
have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy.

Or, cries the courteous reader, has your Teufelsdrockh forgotten what he
said lately about "Aboriginal Savages," and their "condition miserable
indeed"? Would he have all this unsaid; and us betake ourselves again to
the "matted cloak," and go sheeted in a "thick natural fell"?

Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he is saying;
and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these
times, "so tailorize and demoralize us," have they no redeeming value; can
they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to
the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdrockh, though a Sansculottist, is no
Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this
degenerate age "as a Sign," would nowise wish to do it, as those old
Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is
altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more
recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we might call the omnipotent
virtue of Clothes, such as was never before vouchsafed to any man. For
example:--

"You see two individuals," he writes, "one dressed in fine Red, the other
in coarse threadbare Blue: Red says to Blue, 'Be hanged and anatomized;'
Blue hears with a shudder, and (O wonder of wonders!) marches sorrowfully
to the gallows; is there noosed up, vibrates his hour, and the surgeons
dissect him, and fit his bones into a skeleton for medical purposes. How
is this; or what make ye of your _Nothing can act but where it is_? Red
has no physical hold of Blue, no _clutch_ of him, is nowise in _contact_
with him: neither are those ministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and
Hangmen and Tipstaves so related to commanding Red, that he can tug them
hither and thither; but each stands distinct within his own skin.
Nevertheless, as it is spoken, so is it done: the articulated Word sets
all hands in Action; and Rope and Improved-drop perform their work.

"Thinking reader, the reason seems to me twofold: First, that _Man is a
Spirit_, and bound by invisible bonds to _All Men_; secondly, that _he
wears Clothes_, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Has not your
Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and a plush-gown;
whereby all mortals know that he is a JUDGE?--Society, which the more I
think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth.

"Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials,
Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, Levees, Couchees; and how the
ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke this is
presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable
Bishops, Admirals, and miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing gallantly
to the Anointed Presence; and I strive, in my remote privacy, to form a
clear picture of that solemnity,--on a sudden, as by some enchanter's wand,
the--shall I speak it?--the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and
Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every
mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I
know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity,
in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right
to publish, for the solace of those afflicted with the like."

Would to Heaven, say we, thou hadst thought right to keep it secret! Who
is there now that can read the five columns of Presentations in his Morning
Newspaper without a shudder? Hypochondriac men, and all men are to a
certain extent hypochondriac, should be more gently treated. With what
readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves, follows out the
consequences which Teufelsdrockh, with a devilish coolness, goes on to
draw:--

"What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality; should
the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very
Deed, as here in Dream? _Ach Gott_! How each skulks into the nearest
hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (_Haupt- und Staats-Action_) becomes
a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; _the
tables_ (according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of
Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized Society, _are
dissolved_, in wails and howls."

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a
naked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on
itself, and will not forward with the picture. The Woolsack, the
Ministerial, the Opposition Benches--_infandum! infandum_! And yet why is
the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, of these
Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; "a forked
Radish with a head fantastically carved"? And why might he not, did our
stern fate so order it, walk out to St. Stephen's, as well as into bed, in
that no-fashion; and there, with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of
Justice? "Solace of those afflicted with the like!" Unhappy
Teufelsdrockh, had man ever such a "physical or psychical infirmity"
before? And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleled confession (which
we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded on by Critical and
Biographical duty, grudge to reimpart) incurably infect therewith! Art
thou the malignest of Sansculottists, or only the maddest?

"It will remain to be examined," adds the inexorable Teufelsdrockh, "in how
far the SCARECROW, as a Clothed Person, is not also entitled to benefit of
clergy, and English trial by jury: nay perhaps, considering his high
function (for is not he too a Defender of Property, and Sovereign armed
with the _terrors_ of the Law?), to a certain royal Immunity and
Inviolability; which, however, misers and the meaner class of persons are
not always voluntarily disposed to grant him."

"O my Friends, we are [in Yorick Sterne's words] but as 'turkeys driven,
with a stick and red clout, to the market:' or if some drivers, as they do
in Norfolk, take a dried bladder and put peas in it, the rattle thereof
terrifies the boldest!"

CHAPTER X.
PURE REASON.

It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a
speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most
part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilized Life, which we make
so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and "bladders
with dried peas." To linger among such speculations, longer than mere
Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. For our purposes
the simple fact that such a _Naked World_ is possible, nay actually exists
(under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit
about "Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen," and the Kings being
thrown: "dissect them with scalpels," says Teufelsdrockh; "the same
viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other life-tackle, are there:
examine their spiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, and
little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who understands
draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of unstable
and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has
actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly
gifted of the two. Whence, then, their so unspeakable difference? From
Clothes." Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan and
My Lady, and how it would be everywhere "Hail fellow well met," and Chaos
were come again: all which to any one that has once fairly pictured out
the grand mother-idea, _Society in a state of Nakedness_, will
spontaneously suggest itself. Should some sceptical individual still
entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest
Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the
original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of
Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have
lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink!
If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of
itself incontrovertible and final:--

"Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how,
without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's seat, and true
pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?"

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdrockh; at worst,
one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though, in looking at
the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he
dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and
indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that
unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference,
which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers, --there is that
within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present
Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdrockh is,
that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no
less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most
animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him
beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods.

"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous Biped
that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a
Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under
all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the
Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in
UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with
azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he under
that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colors and Forms, as it were, swathed
in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a
God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of
Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay
does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness,
even here, though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint
Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, 'the true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else
is the GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts,
as in our fellow-man?"

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our
Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts
forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapor and tarnish
of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we
seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;--though, alas, the
grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.

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