PAUSE.
Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such
circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdrockh, through the various
successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost
Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to
consider as Conversion. "Blame not the word," says he; "rejoice rather
that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern
Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew nothing of
Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, they had only some _Choice of
Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man:
hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to
Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and
certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their
Pietists and Methodists."
It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdrockh commences:
we are henceforth to see him "work in well-doing," with the spirit and
clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so
panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long
been stumbling in. He can say to himself: "Tools? Thou hast no Tools?
Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now alive but has tools. The basest
of created animalcules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and
warping-mill, and power-loom within its head: the stupidest of Oysters has
a Papin's-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being
that can live can do something: this let him _do_.-- Tools? Hast thou not
a Brain, furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three
fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron's Rod went out of
practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater
than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in
this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless
flux, it is appointed that _Sound_, to appearance the most fleeting, should
be the most continuing of all things. The WORD is well said to be
omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a _Fiat_.
Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God has given thee, what
the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of Priesthood was
allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is
it not honor enough therein to spend and be spent?
"By this Art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into a
handicraft," adds Teufelsdrockh, "have I thenceforth abidden. Writings of
mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am I?), have fallen, perhaps not
altogether void, into the mighty seedfield of Opinion; fruits of my unseen
sowing gratifyingly meet me here and there. I thank the Heavens that I
have now found my Calling; wherein, with or without perceptible result, I
am minded diligently to persevere.
"Nay how knowest thou," cries he, "but this and the other pregnant Device,
now grown to be a world-renowned far-working Institution; like a grain of
right mustard-seed once cast into the right soil, and now stretching out
strong boughs to the four winds, for the birds of the air to lodge in,--may
have been properly my doing? Some one's doing, it without doubt was; from
some Idea, in some single Head, it did first of all take beginning: why
not from some Idea in mine?" Does Teufelsdrockh, here glance at that
"SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (_Eigenthums-conservirende
Gesellschaft_)," of which so many ambiguous notices glide spectra-like
through these inexpressible Paper-bags? "An Institution," hints he, "not
unsuitable to the wants of the time; as indeed such sudden extension
proves: for already can the Society number, among its office-bearers or
corresponding members, the highest Names, if not the highest Persons, in
Germany, England, France; and contributions, both of money and of
meditation pour in from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining
Integrity of the world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it
round this Palladium." Does Teufelsdrockh mean, then, to give himself out
as the originator of that so notable _Eigenthums-conservirende_
("Owndom-conserving") _Gesellschaft_; and if so, what, in the Devil's name,
is it? He again hints: "At a time when the divine Commandment, _Thou
shalt not steal_, wherein truly, if well understood, is comprised the whole
Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgrus's Constitutions, Justinian's
Pandects, the Code Napoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities,
Moralities whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced with
Altar-fire and Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance: at a time, I say,
when this divine Commandment has all but faded away from the general
remembrance; and, with little disguise, a new opposite Commandment, _Thou
shalt steal_, is everywhere promulgated,--it perhaps behooved, in this
universal dotage and deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir
themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that
divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable,
are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived
to hear it asserted that _we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only
an accidental Possession and Life-rent_, what is the issue to be looked
for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited
fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps
some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole
meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors. If, therefore,
the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand
that perhaps not ill-written _Program_ in the Public Journals, with its
high _Prize-Questions_ and so liberal _Prizes_, could have proceeded,--let
him now cease such wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to
the _Concurrenz_ (Competition)."
We ask: Has this same "perhaps not ill-written _Program_," or any other
authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under the
eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? If so, what
are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the terms of Competition, and when
and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of any sort, to be
met with in these Paper-bags! Or is the whole business one other of those
whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdrockh,
meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with
us?
Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to a painful
suspicion, which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him; paralyzing
any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered his thorny
Biographical task a labor of love. It is a suspicion grounded perhaps on
trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more and more
discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdrockh, in whom
underground humors and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel within wheel,
defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these Autobiographical
Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a so-called Fact were
little better than a Fiction; if here we had no direct Camera-obscura
Picture of the Professor's History; but only some more or less fantastic
Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly enough, shadowing forth
the same! Our theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally
authentic what was but hieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in
that case we scruple not to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of,
and set adrift to make fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that
a man so known for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdrockh would all at
once frankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a German
Hofrath; and not rather deceptively _in_lock both Editor and Hofrath in the
labyrinthic tortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel (having enticed
them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look?
Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short.
On a small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but
invisible, we lately noticed, and with effort decipher, the following:
"What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou
know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing together bead-rolls of what
thou namest Facts? The Man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did,
but what he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which the fewest
have the key. And then how your Blockhead (_Dummkopf_) studies not their
Meaning; but simply whether they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral
or Immoral! Still worse is it with your Bungler (_Pfuscher_): such I have
seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking
the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile." Was the
Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts
himself, might mistake the Teufelsdrockh Serpent-of-Eternity in like
manner? For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand
satire, into a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms,
half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not
whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is
the Professor, can never say. If our suspicion be wholly unfounded, let
his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness bear the
blame.
But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted
Editor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present. Let it
suffice that we know of Teufelsdrockh, so far, if "not what he did, yet
what he became:" the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimate
bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be looked for. The
imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoever be its
flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations (flights or
involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life-element,
Teufelsdrockh, reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes
herself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature,--would be
comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being,
for us at least, a false and impossible one. His outward Biography,
therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, we saw churned utterly into
spray-vapor, may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here.
Enough that by survey of certain "pools and plashes," we have ascertained
its general direction; do we not already know that, by one way and other,
it _has_ long since rained down again into a stream; and even now, at
Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the _Philosophy of
Clothes_, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon? Over much invaluable
matter, that lies scattered, like jewels among quarry-rubbish, in those
Paper-catacombs, we may have occasion to glance back, and somewhat will
demand insertion at the right place: meanwhile be our tiresome diggings
therein suspended.
If now, before reopening the great _Clothes-Volume_, we ask what our degree
of progress, during these Ten Chapters, has been, towards right
understanding of the _Clothes-Philosophy_, let not our discouragement
become total. To speak in that old figure of the Hell-gate Bridge over
Chaos, a few flying pontoons have perhaps been added, though as yet they
drift straggling on the Flood; how far they will reach, when once the
chains are straightened and fastened, can, at present, only be matter of
conjecture.
So much we already calculate: Through many a little loophole, we have had
glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdrockh; his strange mystic,
almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is
not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME,
which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligible with such, may
by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhat peculiar view of
Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature. How all Nature and
Life are but one _Garment_, a "Living Garment," woven and ever a-weaving in
the "Loom of Time;" is not here, indeed, the outline of a whole
_Clothes-Philosophy_; at least the arena it is to work in? Remark, too,
that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaning in such a matter,
becomes less enigmatic: amid so much tumultuous obscurity, almost like
diluted madness, do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless
Reverence seem to loom forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose
rock-strata all the rest were based and built?
Nay further, may we not say that Teufelsdrockh's Biography, allowing it
even, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, as it were
preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows of things
into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The "Passivity" given him
by birth is fostered by all turns of his fortune. Everywhere cast out,
like oil out of water, from mingling in any Employment, in any public
Communion, he has no portion but Solitude, and a life of Meditation. The
whole energy of his existence is directed, through long years, on one task:
that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows
of things oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with fearfullest
destruction: only by victoriously penetrating into Things themselves can
he find peace and a stronghold. But is not this same looking through the
Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to a
_Philosophy of Clothes_? Do we not, in all this, discern some beckonings
towards the true higher purport of such a Philosophy; and what shape it
must assume with such a man, in such an era?
Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly
without guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all the fantastic
Dream-Grottos through which, as is our lot with Teufelsdrockh, he must
wander, will there be wanting between whiles some twinkling of a steady
Polar Star.