Sartor Resartus

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"This for the coming golden ages. What I had to remark, for the present
brazen one, is, that in several provinces, as in Education, Polity,
Religion, where so much is wanted and indispensable, and so little can as
yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of sanative, anodyne nature, and
man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. Suppose your sinews of war quite
broken; I mean your military chest insolvent, forage all but exhausted; and
that the whole army is about to mutiny, disband, and cut your and each
other's throat,--then were it not well could you, as if by miracle, pay
them in any sort of fairy-money, feed them on coagulated water, or mere
imagination of meat; whereby, till the real supply came up, they might be
kept together and quiet? Such perhaps was the aim of Nature, who does
nothing without aim, in furnishing her favorite, Man, with this his so
omnipotent or rather omnipatient Talent of being Gulled.

"How beautifully it works, with a little mechanism; nay, almost makes
mechanism for itself! These Professors in the Nameless lived with ease,
with safety, by a mere Reputation, constructed in past times, and then too
with no great effort, by quite another class of persons. Which Reputation,
like a strong brisk-going undershot wheel, sunk into the general current,
bade fair, with only a little annual re-painting on their part, to hold
long together, and of its own accord assiduously grind for them. Happy
that it was so, for the Millers! They themselves needed not to work; their
attempts at working, at what they called Educating, now when I look back on
it, fill me with a certain mute admiration.

"Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the
highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind
furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages,
Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a
state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end
in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (_crepiren_) in
finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.--But this
too is portion of mankind's lot. If our era is the Era of Unbelief, why
murmur under it; is there not a better coming, nay come? As in long-drawn
systole and long-drawn diastole, must the period of Faith alternate with
the period of Denial; must the vernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all
Opinions, Spiritual Representations and Creations, be followed by, and
again follow, the autumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in
Time, has his whole earthly being, endeavor and destiny shaped for him by
Time: only in the transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity
we stand on made manifest. And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, it is
for the nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been born, and
to be awake and work; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hibernating
animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University or Sybaris City, or other
superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber through,
in stupid dreams, and only awaken when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all
alone their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been
vouchsafed."

That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth,
Teufelsdrockh must have felt ill at ease, cannot be doubtful. "The hungry
young," he says, "looked up to their spiritual Nurses; and, for food, were
bidden eat the east-wind. What vain jargon of controversial Metaphysic,
Etymology, and mechanical Manipulation falsely named Science, was current
there, I indeed learned, better perhaps than the most. Among eleven
hundred Christian youths, there will not be wanting some eleven eager to
learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain polish was
communicated; by instinct and happy accident, I took less to rioting
(_renommiren_), than to thinking and reading, which latter also I was free
to do. Nay from the chaos of that Library, I succeeded in fishing up more
books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The
foundation of a Literary Life was hereby laid: I learned, on my own
strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost
all subjects and sciences; farther, as man is ever the prime object to man,
already it was my favorite employment to read character in speculation, and
from the Writing to construe the Writer. A certain groundplan of Human
Nature and Life began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when I
look back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual, was as yet
a Machine! However, such a conscious, recognized groundplan, the truest I
had, _was_ beginning to be there, and by additional experiments might be
corrected and indefinitely extended."

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in the
destitution of the wild desert does our young Ishmael acquire for himself
the highest of all possessions, that of Self-help. Nevertheless a desert
this was, waste, and howling with savage monsters. Teufelsdrockh gives us
long details of his "fever-paroxysms of Doubt;" his Inquiries concerning
Miracles, and the Evidences of religious Faith; and how "in the silent
night-watches, still darker in his heart than over sky and earth, he has
cast himself before the All-seeing, and with audible prayers cried
vehemently for Light, for deliverance from Death and the Grave. Not till
after long years, and unspeakable agonies, did the believing heart
surrender; sink into spell-bound sleep, under the nightmare, Unbelief; and,
in this hag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair living world for a pallid,
vacant Hades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain,"
continues he, "it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead Letter of
Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living
Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel-house, is to arise on us,
new-born of Heaven, and with new healing under its wings."

To which Purgatory pains, seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberal
measure of Earthly distresses, want of practical guidance, want of
sympathy, want of money, want of hope; and all this in the fervid season of
youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires, yet here so
poor in means,--do we not see a strong incipient spirit oppressed and
overloaded from without and from within; the fire of genius struggling up
among fuel-wood of the greenest, and as yet with more of bitter vapor than
of clear flame?

From various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps, it is to be
inferred that Teufelsdrockh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not
altogether escaped notice: certain established men are aware of his
existence; and, if stretching out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes
on him. He appears, though in dreary enough humor, to be addressing
himself to the Profession of Law;--whereof, indeed, the world has since
seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory
thrums of Economical relation, let us present rather the following small
thread of Moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself weaving it
in at the right place, conclude our dim arras-picture of these University
years.

"Here also it was that I formed acquaintance with Herr Towgood, or, as it
is perhaps better written, Herr Toughgut; a young person of quality (_von
Adel_), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by blood
and hospitality, with the Counts von Zahdarm, in this quarter of Germany;
to which noble Family I likewise was, by his means, with all friendliness,
brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-cultivated; with
considerable humor of character: and, bating his total ignorance, for he
knew nothing except Boxing and a little Grammar, showed less of that
aristocratic impassivity, and silent fury, than for most part belongs to
Travellers of his nation. To him I owe my first practical knowledge of the
English and their ways; perhaps also something of the partiality with which
I have ever since regarded that singular people. Towgood was not without
an eye, could he have come at any light. Invited doubtless by the presence
of the Zahdarm Family, he had travelled hither, in the almost frantic hope
of perfecting his studies; he, whose studies had as yet been those of
infancy, hither to a University where so much as the notion of perfection,
not to say the effort after it, no longer existed! Often we would condole
over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how, after all our toil,
we were to be turned out into the world, with beards on our chins indeed,
but with few other attributes of manhood; no existing thing that we were
trained to Act on, nothing that we could so much as Believe. 'How has our
head on the outside a polished Hat,' would Towgood exclaim, 'and in the
inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney-Logic! At a small cost
men are educated to make leather into shoes; but at a great cost, what am I
educated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what I have already eaten and worn,
as I came thus far, would endow a considerable Hospital of
Incurables.'--'Man, indeed,' I would answer, 'has a Digestive Faculty,
which must be kept working, were it even partly by stealth. But as for our
Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in trampling
on thistles because they have yielded us no figs. _Frisch zu, Bruder_!
Here are Books, and we have brains to read them; here is a whole Earth and
a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them: _Frisch zu_!'

"Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We
looked out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at once
harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered: motley, not
unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths. For
myself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this young
warm-hearted, strong-headed and wrong-headed Herr Towgood I was even near
experiencing the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yes, foolish
Heathen that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I could have
loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his brother once and
always. By degrees, however, I understood the new time, and its wants. If
man's _Soul_ is indeed, as in the Finnish Language, and Utilitarian
Philosophy, a kind of _Stomach_, what else is the true meaning of Spiritual
Union but an Eating together? Thus we, instead of Friends, are
Dinner-guests; and here as elsewhere have cast away chimeras."

So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enigmatically, this little incipient
romance. What henceforth becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut?
He has dived under, in the Autobiographical Chaos, and swims we see not
where. Does any reader "in the interior parts of England" know of such a
man?

CHAPTER IV.
GETTING UNDER WAY.

"Thus nevertheless," writes our Autobiographer, apparently as quitting
College, "was there realized Somewhat; namely, I, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh:
a visible Temporary Figure (_Zeitbild_), occupying some cubic feet of
Space, and containing within it Forces both physical and spiritual; hopes,
passions, thoughts; the whole wondrous furniture, in more or less
perfection, belonging to that mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in
me to give battle, in some small degree, against the great Empire of
Darkness: does not the very Ditcher and Delver, with his spade, extinguish
many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Order, where he found the
opposite? Nay your very Day-moth has capabilities in this kind; and ever
organizes something (into its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before
Inorganic; and of mute dead air makes living music, though only of the
faintest, by humming.

"How much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who has learned, or
begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of Thought! Thaumaturgic I name
it; for hitherto all Miracles have been wrought thereby, and henceforth
innumerable will be wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some.
Of the Poet's and Prophet's inspired Message, and how it makes and unmakes
whole worlds, I shall forbear mention: but cannot the dullest hear
Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he not seen the Scottish
Brass-smith's IDEA (and this but a mechanical one) travelling on fire-wings
round the Cape, and across two Oceans; and stronger than any other
Enchanter's Familiar, on all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at
home, not only weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old
system of Society; and, for Feudalism and Preservation of the Game,
preparing us, by indirect but sure methods, Industrialism and the
Government of the Wisest? Truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the
Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, I
doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire; and new
Emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and
hoodwink and handcuff him.

"With such high vocation had I too, as denizen of the Universe, been
called. Unhappy it is, however, that though born to the amplest
Sovereignty, in this way, with no less than sovereign right of Peace and
War against the Time-Prince (_Zeitfurst_), or Devil, and all his Dominions,
your coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre is so difficult
to get at, or even to get eye on!"

By which last wire-drawn similitude does Teufelsdrockh mean no more than
that young men find obstacles in what we call "getting under way"? "Not
what I Have," continues he, "but what I Do is my Kingdom. To each is given
a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each,
by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of Capability. But
the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself,
and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward
Capability specially is. For, alas, our young soul is all budding with
Capabilities, and we see not yet which is the main and true one. Always
too the new man is in a new time, under new conditions; his course can be
the _fac-simile_ of no prior one, but is by its nature original. And then
how seldom will the outward Capability fit the inward: though talented
wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay what
is worse than all, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of
Capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and
often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work must several years of our
small term be spent, till the purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions
of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their whole term,
and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappointment, shift from enterprise
to enterprise, and from side to side: till at length, as exasperated
striplings of threescore-and-ten, they shift into their last enterprise,
that of getting buried.

"Such, since the most of us are too ophthalmic, would be the general fate;
were it not that one thing saves us: our Hunger. For on this ground, as
the prompt nature of Hunger is well known, must a prompt choice be made:
hence have we, with wise foresight, Indentures and Apprenticeships for our
irrational young; whereby, in due season, the vague universality of a Man
shall find himself ready-moulded into a specific Craftsman; and so
thenceforth work, with much or with little waste of Capability as it may
be; yet not with the worst waste, that of time. Nay even in matters
spiritual, since the spiritual artist too is born blind, and does not, like
certain other creatures, receive sight in nine days, but far later,
sometimes never,--is it not well that there should be what we call
Professions, or Bread-studies (_Brodzwecke_), preappointed us? Here,
circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or total blindness is no
evil, the Bread-artist can travel contentedly round and round, still
fancying that it is forward and forward; and realize much: for himself
victual; for the world an additional horse's power in the grand corn-mill
or hemp-mill of Economic Society. For me too had such a leading-string
been provided; only that it proved a neck-halter, and had nigh throttled
me, till I broke it off. Then, in the words of Ancient Pistol, did the
world generally become mine oyster, which I, by strength or cunning, was to
open, as I would and could. Almost had I deceased (_fast war ich
umgekommen_), so obstinately did it continue shut."

We see here, significantly foreshadowed, the spirit of much that was to
befall our Autobiographer; the historical embodiment of which, as it
painfully takes shape in his Life, lies scattered, in dim disastrous
details, through this Bag _Pisces_, and those that follow. A young man of
high talent, and high though still temper, like a young mettled colt,
"breaks off his neck-halter," and bounds forth, from his peculiar manger,
into the wide world; which, alas, he finds all rigorously fenced in.
Richest clover-fields tempt his eye; but to him they are forbidden pasture:
either pining in progressive starvation, he must stand; or, in mad
exasperation, must rush to and fro, leaping against sheer stone-walls,
which he cannot leap over, which only lacerate and lame him; till at last,
after thousand attempts and endurances, he, as if by miracle, clears his
way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain
bosky wilderness where existence is still possible, and Freedom, though
waited on by Scarcity, is not without sweetness. In a word, Teufelsdrockh
having thrown up his legal Profession, finds himself without landmark of
outward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided Belief, or inward
guidance, is frightfully aggravated. Necessity urges him on; Time will not
stop, neither can he, a Son of Time; wild passions without solacement, wild
faculties without employment, ever vex and agitate him. He too must enact
that stern Monodrama, _No Object and no Rest_; must front its successive
destinies, work through to its catastrophe, and deduce therefrom what moral
he can.

Yet let us be just to him, let us admit that his "neck-halter" sat nowise
easy on him; that he was in some degree forced to break it off. If we look
at the young man's civic position, in this Nameless capital, as he emerges
from its Nameless University, we can discern well that it was far from
enviable. His first Law-Examination he has come through triumphantly; and
can even boast that the _Examen Rigorosum_ need not have frightened him:
but though he is hereby "an _Auscultator_ of respectability," what avails
it? There is next to no employment to be had. Neither, for a youth
without connections, is the process of Expectation very hopeful in itself;
nor for one of his disposition much cheered from without. "My fellow
Auscultators," he says, "were Auscultators: they dressed, and digested,
and talked articulate words; other vitality showed they almost none. Small
speculation in those eyes, that they did glare withal! Sense neither for
the high nor for the deep, nor for aught human or divine, save only for the
faintest scent of coming Preferment." In which words, indicating a total
estrangement on the part of Teufelsdrockh may there not also lurk traces of
a bitterness as from wounded vanity? Doubtless these prosaic Auscultators
may have sniffed at him, with his strange ways; and tried to hate, and what
was much more impossible, to despise him. Friendly communion, in any case,
there could not be: already has the young Teufelsdrockh left the other
young geese; and swims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is
cygnet or gosling.

Perhaps, too, what little employment he had was performed ill, at best
unpleasantly. "Great practical method and expertness" he may brag of; but
is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, only the
deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have been popular. We figure to
ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks with his
independence, and so forth: do not his own words betoken as much? "Like a
very young person, I imagined it was with Work alone, and not also with
Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been appointed to
struggle." Be this as it may, his progress from the passive
Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evidently of the
slowest. By degrees, those same established men, once partially inclined to
patronize him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up as "a
man of genius" against which procedure he, in these Papers, loudly
protests. "As if," says he, "the higher did not presuppose the lower; as
if he who can fly into heaven, could not also walk post if he resolved on
it! But the world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a
gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing
but the common copper."

How our winged sky-messenger, unaccepted as a terrestrial runner,
contrived, in the mean while, to keep himself from flying skyward without
return, is not too clear from these Documents. Good old Gretchen seems to
have vanished from the scene, perhaps from the Earth; other Horn of Plenty,
or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows for him; so that "the prompt nature of
Hunger being well known," we are not without our anxiety. From private
Tuition, in never so many languages and sciences, the aid derivable is
small; neither, to use his own words, "does the young Adventurer hitherto
suspect in himself any literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water
wages, by his wide faculty of Translation. Nevertheless," continues he,
"that I subsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive." Which fact,
however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind old Proverb,
that "there is always life for a living one," we must profess ourselves
unable to explain.

Certain Landlords' Bills, and other economic Documents, bearing the mark of
Settlement, indicate that he was not without money; but, like an
independent Hearth-holder, if not House-holder, paid his way. Here also
occur, among many others, two little mutilated Notes, which perhaps throw
light on his condition. The first has now no date, or writer's name, but a
huge Blot; and runs to this effect: "The (_Inkblot_), tied down by
previous promise, cannot, except by best wishes, forward the Herr
Teufelsdrockh's views on the Assessorship in question; and sees himself
under the cruel necessity of forbearing, for the present, what were
otherwise his duty and joy, to assist in opening the career for a man of
genius, on whom far higher triumphs are yet waiting." The other is on gilt
paper; and interests us like a sort of epistolary mummy now dead, yet which
once lived and beneficently worked. We give it in the original: "_Herr
Teufelsdrockh wird von der Frau Grafinn, auf Donnerstag, zum AESTHETISCHEN
THEE schonstens eingeladen_."

Thus, in answer to a cry for solid pudding, whereof there is the most
urgent need, comes, epigrammatically enough, the invitation to a wash of
quite fluid _AEsthetic Tea_! How Teufelsdrockh, now at actual hand-grips
with Destiny herself, may have comported himself among these Musical and
Literary dilettanti of both sexes, like a hungry lion invited to a feast of
chickenweed, we can only conjecture. Perhaps in expressive silence, and
abstinence: otherwise if the lion, in such case, is to feast at all, it
cannot be on the chickenweed, but only on the chickens. For the rest, as
this Frau Grafinn dates from the _Zahdarm House_, she can be no other than
the Countess and mistress of the same; whose intellectual tendencies, and
good-will to Teufelsdrockh, whether on the footing of Herr Towgood, or on
his own footing, are hereby manifest. That some sort of relation, indeed,
continued, for a time, to connect our Autobiographer, though perhaps feebly
enough, with this noble House, we have elsewhere express evidence.
Doubtless, if he expected patronage, it was in vain; enough for him if he
here obtained occasional glimpses of the great world, from which we at one
time fancied him to have been always excluded. "The Zahdarms," says he,
"lived in the soft, sumptuous garniture of Aristocracy; whereto Literature
and Art, attracted and attached from without, were to serve as the
handsomest fringing. It was to the _Gnadigen Frau_ (her Ladyship) that
this latter improvement was due: assiduously she gathered, dexterously she
fitted on, what fringing was to be had; lace or cobweb, as the place
yielded." Was Teufelsdrockh also a fringe, of lace or cobweb; or promising
to be such? "With his _Excellenz_ (the Count)," continues he, "I have more
than once had the honor to converse; chiefly on general affairs, and the
aspect of the world, which he, though now past middle life, viewed in no
unfavorable light; finding indeed, except the Outrooting of Journalism
(_die auszurottende Journalistik_), little to desiderate therein. On some
points, as his _Excellenz_ was not uncholeric, I found it more pleasant to
keep silence. Besides, his occupation being that of Owning Land, there
might be faculties enough, which, as superfluous for such use, were little
developed in him."

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