CHAPTER X. PAUSE.
Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in suchcircumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdrockh, through the varioussuccessive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, andalmost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himselfseems to consider as Conversion. "Blame not the word," says he; "rejoicerather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light inour modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old Worldknew nothing of Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, they had onlysome _Choice of Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress in the MoralDevelopment of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms ofthe most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socratesa 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 Teufelsdrockhcommences: we are henceforth to see him "work in well-doing," withthe spirit and clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the IdealWorkshop he so panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnishedWorkshop 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, nowalive but has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the Spideritself, has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom withinits head: the stupidest of Oysters has a Papin's-Digester, withstone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being that can live can dosomething: this let him _do_.--Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished,furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three fingers to hold aPen withal? Never since Aaron's Rod went out of practice, or even beforeit, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recordedmiracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in this sosolid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless flux,it is appointed that _Sound_, to appearance the most fleeting, shouldbe the most continuing of all things. The WORD is well said to beomnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a_Fiat_. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God has giventhee, what the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that ofPriesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest in thatsacred Hierarchy, is it not honor enough therein to spend and be spent?
"By this Art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into ahandicraft," adds Teufelsdrockh, "have I thenceforth abidden. Writingsof mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am I?), have fallen, perhapsnot altogether void, into the mighty seedfield of Opinion; fruits of myunseen sowing gratifyingly meet me here and there. I thank the Heavensthat I have now found my Calling; wherein, with or without perceptibleresult, I am minded diligently to persevere.
"Nay how knowest thou," cries he, "but this and the other pregnantDevice, now grown to be a world-renowned far-working Institution; likea grain of right mustard-seed once cast into the right soil, and nowstretching out strong boughs to the four winds, for the birds of theair to lodge in,--may have been properly my doing? Some one's doing, itwithout doubt was; from some Idea, in some single Head, it did first ofall 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 ambiguousnotices glide spectra-like through these inexpressible Paper-bags? "AnInstitution," hints he, "not unsuitable to the wants of the time; asindeed such sudden extension proves: for already can the Society number,among its office-bearers or corresponding members, the highest Names, ifnot the highest Persons, in Germany, England, France; and contributions,both of money and of meditation pour in from all quarters; to, ifpossible, enlist the remaining Integrity of the world, and, defensivelyand with forethought, marshal it round this Palladium." DoesTeufelsdrockh mean, then, to give himself out as the originator ofthat so notable _Eigenthums-conservirende_ ("Owndom-conserving")_Gesellschaft_; and if so, what, in the Devil's name, is it? He againhints: "At a time when the divine Commandment, _Thou shalt not steal_,wherein truly, if well understood, is comprised the whole HebrewDecalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgrus's Constitutions, Justinian'sPandects, the Code Napoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities,Moralities whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced withAltar-fire and Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance: at a time, I say,when this divine Commandment has all but faded away from the generalremembrance; and, with little disguise, a new opposite Commandment,_Thou shalt steal_, is everywhere promulgated,--it perhaps behooved, inthis universal dotage and deliration, the sound portion of mankind tobestir themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violationsof that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant orconceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and theworld has lived to hear it asserted that _we have no Property in ourvery Bodies, but only an accidental Possession and Life-rent_, whatis the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by theirnoose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin;but what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protectus against whole meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts ofBoa-constrictors. If, therefore, the more sequestered Thinker havewondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written_Program_ in the Public Journals, with its high _Prize-Questions_ and soliberal _Prizes_, could have proceeded,--let him now cease suchwonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to the _Concurrenz_(Competition)."
We ask: Has this same "perhaps not ill-written _Program_," or any otherauthentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen underthe eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? Ifso, what are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the terms of Competition,and when and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of anysort, to be met with in these Paper-bags! Or is the whole business oneother of those whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, wherebyHerr Teufelsdrockh, meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to playfast-and-loose with us?
Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to a painfulsuspicion, which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him;paralyzing any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered histhorny Biographical task a labor of love. It is a suspicion groundedperhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more andmore discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdrockh, inwhom underground humors and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheelwithin wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that theseAutobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if manya so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had nodirect Camera-obscura Picture of the Professor's History; but only somemore or less fantastic Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantlyenough, shadowing forth the same! Our theory begins to be that, inreceiving as literally authentic what was but hieroglyphically so,Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruple not to name HofrathNose-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 impenetrablereticence as Teufelsdrockh would all at once frankly unlock his privatecitadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not ratherdeceptively _in_lock both Editor and Hofrath in the labyrinthictortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel (having enticed themthither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look?
Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himselfshort. On a small slip, formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink beingall but invisible, we lately noticed, and with effort decipher,the following: "What are your historical Facts; still more yourbiographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringingtogether bead-rolls of what thou namest Facts? The Man is the spirithe worked in; not what he did, but what he became. Facts are engravedHierograms, for which the fewest have the key. And then how yourBlockhead (_Dummkopf_) studies not their Meaning; but simply whetherthey are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worseis it with your Bungler (_Pfuscher_): such I have seen reading someRousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the ill-cutSerpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous rept
ile." Was the Professorapprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself,might mistake the Teufelsdrockh Serpent-of-Eternity in like manner? Forwhich reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, intoa 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 caresnot whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strangeis the Professor, can never say. If our suspicion be wholly unfounded,let his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness bearthe blame.
But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhaustedEditor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present. Let itsuffice that we know of Teufelsdrockh, so far, if "not what he did, yetwhat he became:" the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimatebent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be looked for. Theimprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoeverbe its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations(flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere externalLife-element, Teufelsdrockh, reaches his University Professorship, andthe Psyche clothes herself in civic Titles, without altering her nowfixed nature,--would be comparatively an unproductive task, were we evenunsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false and impossible one.His outward Biography, therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, wesaw churned utterly into spray-vapor, may hover in that condition, foraught that concerns us here. Enough that by survey of certain "pools andplashes," we have ascertained its general direction; do we not alreadyknow that, by one way and other, it _has_ long since rained down againinto a stream; and even now, at Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still,fraught with the _Philosophy of Clothes_, and visible to whoso willcast eye thereon? Over much invaluable matter, that lies scattered,like jewels among quarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs, we may haveoccasion to glance back, and somewhat will demand insertion at the rightplace: meanwhile be our tiresome diggings therein suspended.
If now, before reopening the great _Clothes-Volume_, we ask what ourdegree of progress, during these Ten Chapters, has been, towards rightunderstanding of the _Clothes-Philosophy_, let not our discouragementbecome total. To speak in that old figure of the Hell-gate Bridge overChaos, a few flying pontoons have perhaps been added, though as yet theydrift straggling on the Flood; how far they will reach, when once thechains are straightened and fastened, can, at present, only be matter ofconjecture.
So much we already calculate: Through many a little loophole, we havehad glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdrockh; his strangemystic, almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was graduallydrawn, is not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideason TIME, which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligiblewith such, may by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhatpeculiar view of Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature. Howall Nature and Life are but one _Garment_, a "Living Garment," woven andever a-weaving in the "Loom of Time;" is not here, indeed, the outlineof a whole _Clothes-Philosophy_; at least the arena it is to work in?Remark, too, that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaningin such a matter, becomes less enigmatic: amid so much tumultuousobscurity, almost like diluted madness, do not a certain indomitableDefiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem to loom forth, as the twomountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all the rest were based andbuilt?
Nay further, may we not say that Teufelsdrockh's Biography, allowing iteven, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, as itwere preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows ofthings into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The "Passivity"given him by birth is fostered by all turns of his fortune. Everywherecast out, like oil out of water, from mingling in any Employment, inany public Communion, he has no portion but Solitude, and a life ofMeditation. The whole energy of his existence is directed, through longyears, on one task: that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thuseverywhere do the Shows of things oppress him, withstand him, threatenhim with fearfullest destruction: only by victoriously penetrating intoThings themselves can he find peace and a stronghold. But is not thissame looking through the Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even thefirst preliminary to a _Philosophy of Clothes_? Do we not, in allthis, discern some beckonings towards the true higher purport of sucha Philosophy; and what shape it must assume with such a man, in such anera?
Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterlywithout guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all thefantastic Dream-Grottos through which, as is our lot with Teufelsdrockh,he must wander, will there be wanting between whiles some twinkling of asteady Polar Star.
Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh Page 20
