Sartor Resartus

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"Thus encircled by the mystery of Existence; under the deep heavenly
Firmament; waited on by the four golden Seasons, with their vicissitudes of
contribution, for even grim Winter brought its skating-matches and
shooting-matches, its snow-storms and Christmas-carols,--did the Child sit
and learn. These things were the Alphabet, whereby in aftertime he was to
syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World: what matters it
whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so
you have an eye to read it? For Gneschen, eager to learn, the very act of
looking thereon was a blessedness that gilded all: his existence was a
bright, soft element of Joy; out of which, as in Prospero's Island, wonder
after wonder bodied itself forth, to teach by charming.

"Nevertheless, I were but a vain dreamer to say, that even then my felicity
was perfect. I had, once for all, come down from Heaven into the Earth.
Among the rainbow colors that glowed on my horizon, lay even in childhood a
dark ring of Care, as yet no thicker than a thread, and often quite
overshone; yet always it reappeared, nay ever waxing broader and broader;
till in after-years it almost overshadowed my whole canopy, and threatened
to engulf me in final night. It was the ring of Necessity whereby we are
all begirt; happy he for whom a kind heavenly Sun brightens it into a ring
of Duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions; yet
ever, as basis and as bourn for our whole being, it is there.

"For the first few years of our terrestrial Apprenticeship, we have not
much work to do; but, boarded and lodged gratis, are set down mostly to
look about us over the workshop, and see others work, till we have
understood the tools a little, and can handle this and that. If good
Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activity together, were
the thing wanted, then was my early position favorable beyond the most. In
all that respects openness of Sense, affectionate Temper, ingenuous
Curiosity, and the fostering of these, what more could I have wished? On
the other side, however, things went not so well. My Active Power
(_Thatkraft_) was unfavorably hemmed in; of which misfortune how many
traces yet abide with me! In an orderly house, where the litter of
children's sports is hateful enough, your training is too stoical; rather
to bear and forbear than to make and do. I was forbid much: wishes in any
measure bold I had to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of Obedience
inflexibly held me down. Thus already Freewill often came in painful
collision with Necessity; so that my tears flowed, and at seasons the Child
itself might taste that root of bitterness, wherewith the whole fruitage of
our life is mingled and tempered.

"In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was beyond measure safer to
err by excess than by defect. Obedience is our universal duty and destiny;
wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we
cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of ours, is as mere
zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly Discretion, nay of
Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my upbringing. It was rigorous,
too frugal, compressively secluded, every way unscientific: yet in that
very strictness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root of
deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow?
Above all, how unskilful soever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest;
whereby every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must
ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she
taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and
habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas too
attended Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the other
world expected pay with arrears,--as, I trust, he has received; but my
Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was
in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows,
and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The
highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable,
before a Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach
inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies
build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the
divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear.
Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely,
there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there
were two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?"

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdrockh, of
spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III.
PEDAGOGY.

Hitherto we see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge,
borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed, and
much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop, but (except his soft hazel
eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a still intelligence) called
upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto, accordingly, his
aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient Philosopher and Poet in the
abstract; perhaps it would puzzle Herr Heuschrecke himself to say wherein
the special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened. For
with Gneschen, as with others, the Man may indeed stand pictured in the Boy
(at least all the pigments are there); yet only some half of the Man stands
in the Child, or young Boy, namely, his Passive endowment, not his Active.
The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts in this latter
capacity; how, when, to use his own words, "he understands the tools a
little, and can handle this or that," he will proceed to handle it.

Here, however, may be the place to state that, in much of our Philosopher's
history, there is something of an almost Hindoo character: nay perhaps in
that so well-fostered and every way excellent "Passivity" of his, which,
with no free development of the antagonist Activity, distinguished his
childhood, we may detect the rudiments of much that, in after days, and
still in these present days, astonishes the world. For the
shallow-sighted, Teufelsdrockh is oftenest a man without Activity of any
kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted, again, a man with Activity almost
superabundant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic, that no mortal
can foresee its explosions, or even when it has exploded, so much as
ascertain its significance. A dangerous, difficult temper for the modern
European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography! Now as
heretofore it will behoove the Editor of these pages, were it never so
unsuccessfully, to do his endeavor.

Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of
letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portion of his
History, Teufelsdrockh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he
"cannot remember ever to have learned;" so perhaps had it by nature. He
says generally: "Of the insignificant portion of my Education, which
depended on Schools, there need almost no notice be taken. I learned what
others learn; and kept it stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet
no manner of use in it. My Schoolmaster, a down-bent, broken-hearted,
underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for me, except
discover that he could do little: he, good soul, pronounced me a genius,
fit for the learned professions; and that I must be sent to the Gymnasium,
and one day to the University. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I
could meet with I read. My very copper pocket-money I laid out on
stall-literature; which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into
volumes. By this means was the young head furnished with a considerable
miscellany of things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments
lay mingled with Fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole
not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as
yet so peptic."

That the Entepfuhl Schoolmaster judged well, we now know. Indeed, already
in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there may have
been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms of a spirit
singularly open, thoughtful, almost poetical. Thus, to say nothing of his
Suppers on the Orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that earlier period,
have many readers of these pages stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such
reflections as the following? "It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach,
one silent noontide, and watched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this
same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and
of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the
morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the mid-day when Caesar,
doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his _Commentaries_
dry,--this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was
murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as
in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grand
World-circulation of Waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has
lasted and lasts simply with the World. Thou fool! Nature alone is
antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is
six thousand years of age." In which little thought, as in a little
fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable
meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and its relation to
ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy of Clothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingers so
lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts there are
still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there
stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. "With my first view of the
Hinterschlag Gymnasium," writes he, "my evil days began. Well do I still
remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting full of hope by
the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place, and saw
its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and _Schuldthurm_ (Jail), and the
aproned or disaproned Burghers moving in to breakfast: a little dog, in
mad terror, was rushing past; for some human imps had tied a tin kettle to
its tail; thus did the agonized creature, loud-jingling, career through the
whole length of the Borough, and become notable enough. Fit emblem of many
a Conquering Hero, to whom Fate (wedding Fantasy to Sense, as it often
elsewhere does) has malignantly appended a tin kettle of Ambition, to chase
him on; which the faster he runs, urges him the faster, the more loudly and
more foolishly! Fit emblem also of much that awaited myself, in that
mischievous Den; as in the World, whereof it was a portion and epitome!

"Alas, the kind beech-rows of Entepfuhl were hidden in the distance: I was
among strangers, harshly, at best indifferently, disposed towards me; the
young heart felt, for the first time, quite orphaned and alone." His
school-fellows, as is usual, persecuted him: "They were Boys," he says,
"mostly rude Boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude Nature, which bids the
deer-herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck-flock put to death any
broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannize over
the weak." He admits that though "perhaps in an unusual degree morally
courageous," he succeeded ill in battle, and would fain have avoided it; a
result, as would appear, owing less to his small personal stature (for in
passionate seasons he was "incredibly nimble"), than to his "virtuous
principles:" "if it was disgraceful to be beaten," says he, "it was only a
shade less disgraceful to have so much as fought; thus was I drawn two ways
at once, and in this important element of school-history, the war-element,
had little but sorrow." On the whole, that same excellent "Passivity," so
notable in Teufelsdrockh's childhood, is here visibly enough again getting
nourishment. "He wept often; indeed to such a degree that he was nicknamed
_Der Weinende_ (the Tearful), which epithet, till towards his thirteenth
year, was indeed not quite unmerited. Only at rare intervals did the young
soul burst forth into fire-eyed rage, and, with a stormfulness (_Ungestum_)
under which the boldest quailed, assert that he too had Rights of Man, or
at least of Mankin." In all which, who does not discern a fine flower-tree
and cinnamon-tree (of genius) nigh choked among pumpkins, reed-grass and
ignoble shrubs; and forced if it would live, to struggle upwards only, and
not outwards; into a _height_ quite sickly, and disproportioned to its
_breadth_?

We find, moreover, that his Greek and Latin were "mechanically" taught;
Hebrew scarce even mechanically; much else which they called History,
Cosmography, Philosophy, and so forth, no better than not at all. So that,
except inasmuch as Nature was still busy; and he himself "went about, as
was of old his wont, among the Craftsmen's workshops, there learning many
things;" and farther lighted on some small store of curious reading, in
Hans Wachtel the Cooper's house, where he lodged,--his time, it would
appear, was utterly wasted. Which facts the Professor has not yet learned
to look upon with any contentment. Indeed, throughout the whole of this
Bag _Scorpio_, where we now are, and often in the following Bag, he shows
himself unusually animated on the matter of Education, and not without some
touch of what we might presume to be anger.

"My Teachers," says he, "were hide-bound Pedants, without knowledge of
man's nature, or of boy's; or of aught save their lexicons and quarterly
account-books. Innumerable dead Vocables (no dead Language, for they
themselves knew no Language) they crammed into us, and called it fostering
the growth of mind. How can an inanimate, mechanical Gerund-grinder, the
like of whom will, in a subsequent century, be manufactured at Nurnberg out
of wood and leather, foster the growth of anything; much more of Mind,
which grows, not like a vegetable (by having its roots littered with
etymological compost), but like a spirit, by mysterious contact of Spirit;
Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How shall _he_ give
kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt
out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax
enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called
Memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance
of birch-rods.

"Alas, so is it everywhere, so will it ever be; till the Hod-man is
discharged, or reduced to hod-bearing; and an Architect is hired, and on
all hands fitly encouraged: till communities and individuals discover, not
without surprise, that fashioning the souls of a generation by Knowledge
can rank on a level with blowing their bodies to pieces by Gunpowder; that
with Generals and Field-marshals for killing, there should be world-honored
Dignitaries, and were it possible, true God-ordained Priests, for teaching.
But as yet, though the Soldier wears openly, and even parades, his
butchering-tool, nowhere, far as I have travelled, did the Schoolmaster
make show of his instructing-tool: nay, were he to walk abroad with birch
girt on thigh, as if he therefrom expected honor, would there not, among
the idler class, perhaps a certain levity be excited?"

In the third year of this Gymnasic period, Father Andreas seems to have
died: the young Scholar, otherwise so maltreated, saw himself for the
first time clad outwardly in sables, and inwardly in quite inexpressible
melancholy. "The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had
yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent
nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word, NEVER! now
first showed its meaning. My Mother wept, and her sorrow got vent; but in
my heart there lay a whole lake of tears, pent up in silent desolation.
Nevertheless the unworn Spirit is strong; Life is so healthful that it even
finds nourishment in Death: these stern experiences, planted down by
Memory in my Imagination, rose there to a whole cypress-forest, sad but
beautiful; waving, with not unmelodious sighs, in dark luxuriance, in the
hottest sunshine, through long years of youth:--as in manhood also it does,
and will do; for I have now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb
is now my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look
upon the hostile armaments, and pains and penalties of tyrannous Life
placidly enough, and listen to its loudest threatenings with a still smile.
O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in
life I could only weep for and never help; and ye, who wide-scattered still
toil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dyeing the flinty ground with
your blood,--yet a little while, and we shall all meet THERE, and our
Mother's bosom will screen us all; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's
fire-whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed
Time, cannot thenceforth harm us any more!"

Close by which rather beautiful apostrophe, lies a labored Character of the
deceased Andreas Futteral; of his natural ability, his deserts in life (as
Prussian Sergeant); with long historical inquiries into the genealogy of
the Futteral Family, here traced back as far as Henry the Fowler: the
whole of which we pass over, not without astonishment. It only concerns us
to add, that now was the time when Mother Gretchen revealed to her
foster-son that he was not at all of this kindred; or indeed of any
kindred, having come into historical existence in the way already known to
us. "Thus was I doubly orphaned," says he; "bereft not only of Possession,
but even of Remembrance. Sorrow and Wonder, here suddenly united, could
not but produce abundant fruit. Such a disclosure, in such a season,
struck its roots through my whole nature: ever till the years of mature
manhood, it mingled with my whole thoughts, was as the stem whereon all my
day-dreams and night-dreams grew. A certain poetic elevation, yet also a
corresponding civic depression, it naturally imparted: _I was like no
other_; in which fixed idea, leading sometimes to highest, and oftener to
frightfullest results, may there not lie the first spring of tendencies,
which in my Life have become remarkable enough? As in birth, so in action,
speculation, and social position, my fellows are perhaps not numerous."

In the Bag _Sagittarius_, as we at length discover, Teufelsdrockh has
become a University man; though how, when, or of what quality, will nowhere
disclose itself with the smallest certainty. Few things, in the way of
confusion and capricious indistinctness, can now surprise our readers; not
even the total want of dates, almost without parallel in a Biographical
work. So enigmatic, so chaotic we have always found, and must always look
to find, these scattered Leaves. In _Sagittarius_, however, Teufelsdrockh
begins to show himself even more than usually Sibylline: fragments of all
sorts: scraps of regular Memoir, College-Exercises, Programs, Professional
Testimoniums, Milkscores, torn Billets, sometimes to appearance of an
amatory cast; all blown together as if by merest chance, henceforth
bewilder the sane Historian. To combine any picture of these University,
and the subsequent, years; much more, to decipher therein any illustrative
primordial elements of the Clothes-Philosophy, becomes such a problem as
the reader may imagine.

So much we can see; darkly, as through the foliage of some wavering
thicket: a youth of no common endowment, who has passed happily through
Childhood, less happily yet still vigorously through Boyhood, now at length
perfect in "dead vocables," and set down, as he hopes, by the living
Fountain, there to superadd Ideas and Capabilities. From such Fountain he
draws, diligently, thirstily, yet never or seldom with his whole heart, for
the water nowise suits his palate; discouragements, entanglements,
aberrations are discoverable or supposable. Nor perhaps are even pecuniary
distresses wanting; for "the good Gretchen, who in spite of advices from
not disinterested relatives has sent him hither, must after a time withdraw
her willing but too feeble hand." Nevertheless in an atmosphere of Poverty
and manifold Chagrin, the Humor of that young Soul, what character is in
him, first decisively reveals itself; and, like strong sunshine in weeping
skies, gives out variety of colors, some of which are prismatic. Thus,
with the aid of Time and of what Time brings, has the stripling Diogenes
Teufelsdrockh waxed into manly stature; and into so questionable an aspect,
that we ask with new eagerness, How he specially came by it, and regret
anew that there is no more explicit answer. Certain of the intelligible
and partially significant fragments, which are few in number, shall be
extracted from that Limbo of a Paper-bag, and presented with the usual
preparation.

As if, in the Bag _Scorpio_, Teufelsdrockh had not already expectorated his
antipedagogic spleen; as if, from the name _Sagittarius_, he had thought
himself called upon to shoot arrows, we here again fall in with such matter
as this: "The University where I was educated still stands vivid enough in
my remembrance, and I know its name well; which name, however, I, from
tenderness to existing interests and persons, shall in nowise divulge. It
is my painful duty to say that, out of England and Spain, ours was the
worst of all hitherto discovered Universities. This is indeed a time when
right Education is, as nearly as may be, impossible: however, in degrees
of wrongness there is no limit: nay, I can conceive a worse system than
that of the Nameless itself; as poisoned victual may be worse than absolute
hunger.

"It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the
ditch: wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if
both leader and led simply--sit still? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary,
walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen
Library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings,
to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years: certain
persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to
declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable
admission-fees,--you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit
and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary. I say,
imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so neither was
our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary,
but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the
middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the
Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.

"Gullible, however, by fit apparatus, all Publics are; and gulled, with the
most surprising profit. Towards anything like a _Statistics of Imposture_,
indeed, little as yet has been done: with a strange indifference, our
Economists, nigh buried under Tables for minor Branches of Industry, have
altogether overlooked the grand all-overtopping Hypocrisy Branch; as if our
whole arts of Puffery, of Quackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft, and the
innumerable other crafts and mysteries of that genus, had not ranked in
Productive Industry at all! Can any one, for example, so much as say, What
moneys, in Literature and Shoeblacking, are realized by actual Instruction
and actual jet Polish; what by fictitious-persuasive Proclamation of such;
specifying, in distinct items, the distributions, circulations,
disbursements, incomings of said moneys, with the smallest approach to
accuracy? But to ask, How far, in all the several infinitely complected
departments of social business, in government, education, in manual,
commercial, intellectual fabrication of every sort, man's Want is supplied
by true Ware; how far by the mere Appearance of true Ware:--in other words,
To what extent, by what methods, with what effects, in various times and
countries, Deception takes the place of wages of Performance: here truly
is an Inquiry big with results for the future time, but to which hitherto
only the vaguest answer can be given. If for the present, in our Europe,
we estimate the ratio of Ware to Appearance of Ware so high even as at One
to a Hundred (which, considering the Wages of a Pope, Russian Autocrat, or
English Game-Preserver, is probably not far from the mark),--what almost
prodigious saving may there not be anticipated, as the _Statistics of
Imposture_ advances, and so the manufacturing of Shams (that of Realities
rising into clearer and clearer distinction therefrom) gradually declines,
and at length becomes all but wholly unnecessary!

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