Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh
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