Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh

by Thomas Carlyle

  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 theSpeculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their _Wirken_, orInfluences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressureof his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothescommences: all untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; inventuring upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is itto know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where thefooting is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, ormere cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdrockh undertakes no less than toexpound the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; heundertakes to make manifest, in its thousand-fold bearings, this grandProposition, that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttonedtogether, and held up, by Clothes." He says in so many words, "Societyis founded upon Cloth;" and again, "Society sails through the Infinitudeon Cloth, as on a Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean andunclean beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle,would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in eithercase be no more."

  By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditationthis grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practicalCorollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition toattempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that ofcommon school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holdingby 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, wasalso discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim: Would to Heaventhose same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if thedemonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were notArgument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is onlyin local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often atwide-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 theirmost concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration,and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actualhorizon there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new FortunateIslands, perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas tosail thither?--As exordium to the whole, stand here the following longcitation:--

  "With men of a speculative turn," writes Teufelsdrockh, "there comeseasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear youask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that cansay 'I' (_das Wesen das sich ICH nennt_)? The world, with its loudtrafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings,and stonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and allthe living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewithyour Existence sits surrounded,--the sight reaches forth into the voidDeep, 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;--someembodied, 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 andwail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but whereis the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse willyield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria andDream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century,lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-colored visionsflit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dreamand Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspectnot. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; butthe Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in thatstrange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances;and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of yourPhilosophical Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient,confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown? Whatare all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinaryhate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? ThisDreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life; wherein themost 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 inexpressiblyunproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx'ssecret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which hesuffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, andCategories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castlesare cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in goodLogic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _Thewhole is greater than the part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors avacuum_: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can actbut where it is_: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slaveof Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long forit, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floorI stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from thefirst the master-colors of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas(the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions arepainted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certainof every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriouslyinseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrialadhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mountup out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nationsconceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in auniversal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find thatSpace is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_ noSpace and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating inthe 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 productionand destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasyof our Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the livingvisible 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 ofthe _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned themeaning thereof?

  "It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these highspeculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strangeenough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors andTailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of thegirths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and thenoble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay hisown boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through thevalleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; whereinwarmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces alsohave been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color,featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. WhileI--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces ofsheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides ofoxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a movingRag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from theCharnel-house of Nature, where they
would have rotted, to rot on me moreslowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, thisdespicable 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, intothe 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 compactall-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tailors'and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly articulated, homogeneous littleFigure, automatic, nay alive?

  "Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes toplainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, liveat ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and wasalways, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, thanto think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is hisabsolute 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 Worldhappen _twice_, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy,or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to yourordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Princeor russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not oneand indivisible; that _he_ is naked, without vestments, till he buy orsteal such, and by forethought sew and button them.

  "For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, andhow, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes anddemoralizes 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 stripedsacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something greatin the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages;and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forkedstraddling animal with bandy legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterableMystery of Mysteries."