Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh
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,