Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh
Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _The
whole is greater than the part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors a
vacuum_: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can act
but where it is_: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave
of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for
it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor
I stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the
first the master-colors of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas
(the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are
painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain
of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously
inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial
adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount
up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nations
conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a
universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that
Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_ no
Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating in
the 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 production
and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy
of our Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living
visible 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 of
the _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the
meaning thereof?
"It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high
speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange
enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and
Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the
girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the
noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his
own boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the
valleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein
warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also
have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color,
featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While
I--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of
sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of
oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving
Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the
Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more
slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this
despicable 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, into
the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I,
the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind down.
O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too a compact
all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tailors'
and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly articulated, homogeneous little
Figure, automatic, nay alive?
"Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to
plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live
at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was
always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than
to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his
absolute 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 World
happen _twice_, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy,
or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your
ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince
or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one
and indivisible; that _he_ is naked, without vestments, till he buy or
steal such, and by forethought sew and button them.
"For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and
how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and
demoralizes 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 striped
sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something great
in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages;
and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forked
straddling animal with bandy legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterable
Mystery of Mysteries."
CHAPTER IX. ADAMITISM.
Let no courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached in the
conclusion of the last Chapter. The Editor himself, on first glancing
over that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: What, have we got
not only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? A
new Adamite, in this century, which flatters itself that it is the
Nineteenth, and destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm?
Consider, thou foolish Teufelsdrockh, what benefits unspeakable all ages
and sexes derive from Clothes. For example, when thou thyself, a watery,
pulpy, slobbery freshman and new-comer in this Planet, sattest muling
and puking in thy nurse's arms; sucking thy coral, and looking forth
into the world in the blankest manner, what hadst thou been without thy
blankets, and bibs, and other nameless hulls? A terror to thyself and
mankind! Or hast thou forgotten the day when thou first receivedst
breeches, and thy long clothes became short? The village where thou
livedst was all apprised of the fact; and neighbor after neighbor kissed
thy pudding-cheek, and gave thee, as handsel, silver or copper coins, on
that the first gala-day of thy existence. Again, wert not thou, at one
period of life, a Buck, or Blood, or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy,
or by whatever name, according to year and place, such phenomenon is
distinguished? In that one word lie included mysterious volumes. Nay,
now when the reign of folly is over, or altered, and thy clothes are not
for triumph but for defence, hast thou always worn them perforce, and as
a consequence of Man's Fall; never rejoiced in them as in a warm movable
House, a Body round thy Body, wherein that strange THEE of thine sat
snug, defying all variations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled
kerseys; half buried under shawls and broadbrims, and overalls and
mudboots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens, thou hast
bestrode that "Horse I ride;" and, though it were in wild winter, dashed
through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did
the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable,
felted or woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl,--forests
sounding and creaking, deep calling unto deep,--and the storms heap
themselves together into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through
the middle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild music hummed
in thy ears, thou too wert as a "sailor of the air;" the wreck of matter
and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting tide.
Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what had
thy fleet quadruped been?--Nature is good, but she is not the best: here
truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeed might
have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy.
Or, cries the courteous reader, has your Teufelsdrockh forgotten what he
said lately about "Aboriginal Savages," and their "condition miserable
indeed"? Would he have all this unsaid; and us betake ourselves again to
the "matted cloak," and go sheeted in a "thick natural fell"?
Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he is
saying; and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes,
in these times, "so tailorize and demoralize us," have they no redeeming
value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they of
necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdrockh, though a
Sansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to go
forth before this degenerate age "as a Sign," would nowise wish to do
it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of
Clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight
into their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we
might call the omnipotent virtue of Clothes, such as was never before
vouchsafed to any man. For example:--
"You see two individuals," he writes, "one dressed in fine Red, the
other in coarse threadbare Blue: Red says to Blue, 'Be hanged and
anatomized;' Blue hears with a shudder, and (O wonder of wonders!)
marches sorrowfully to the gallows; is there noosed up, vibrates his
hour, and the surgeons dissect him, and fit his bones into a skeleton
for medical purposes. How is this; or what make ye of your _Nothing can
act but where it is_? Red has no physical hold of Blue, no _clutch_
of him, is nowise in _contact_ with him: neither are those ministering
Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and Hangmen and Tipstaves so related to
commanding Red, that he can tug them hither and thither; but each stands
distinct within his own skin. Nevertheless, as it is spoken, so is
it done: the articulated Word sets all hands in Action; and Rope and
Improved-drop perform their work.
"Thinking reader, the reason seems to me twofold: First, that _Man is a
Spirit_, and bound by invisible bonds to _All Men_; secondly, that _he
wears Clothes_, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Has not
your Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and a
plush-gown; whereby all mortals know that he is a JUDGE?--Society, which
the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth.
"Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials,
Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, Levees, Couchees; and how
the ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke
this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, and
innumerable Bishops, Admirals, and miscellaneous Functionaries, are
advancing gallantly to the Anointed Presence; and I strive, in my remote
privacy, to form a clear picture of that solemnity,--on a sudden, as by
some enchanter's wand, the--shall I speak it?--the Clothes fly off the
whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed
Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not
a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical
or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have,
after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those
afflicted with the like."
Would to Heaven, say we, thou hadst thought right to keep it secret!
Who is there now that can read the five columns of Presentations in his
Morning Newspaper without a shudder? Hypochondriac men, and all men are
to a certain extent hypochondriac, should be more gently treated. With