Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh
what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves, follows
out the consequences which Teufelsdrockh, with a devilish coolness, goes
on to draw:--
"What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality; should
the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate,
in very Deed, as here in Dream? _Ach Gott_! How each skulks into
the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (_Haupt- und
Staats-Action_) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is the
worst kind of Farce; _the tables_ (according to Horace), and with them,
the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and
Civilized Society, _are dissolved_, in wails and howls."
Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a
naked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils
on itself, and will not forward with the picture. The Woolsack, the
Ministerial, the Opposition Benches--_infandum! infandum_! And yet why
is the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, of
these Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; "a
forked Radish with a head fantastically carved"? And why might he not,
did our stern fate so order it, walk out to St. Stephen's, as well as
into bed, in that no-fashion; and there, with other similar Radishes,
hold a Bed of Justice? "Solace of those afflicted with the like!"
Unhappy Teufelsdrockh, had man ever such a "physical or psychical
infirmity" before? And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleled
confession (which we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded on
by Critical and Biographical duty, grudge to reimpart) incurably
infect therewith! Art thou the malignest of Sansculottists, or only the
maddest?
"It will remain to be examined," adds the inexorable Teufelsdrockh,
"in how far the SCARECROW, as a Clothed Person, is not also entitled to
benefit of clergy, and English trial by jury: nay perhaps, considering
his high function (for is not he too a Defender of Property, and
Sovereign armed with the _terrors_ of the Law?), to a certain royal
Immunity and Inviolability; which, however, misers and the meaner class
of persons are not always voluntarily disposed to grant him."
"O my Friends, we are [in Yorick Sterne's words] but as 'turkeys driven,
with a stick and red clout, to the market:' or if some drivers, as
they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder and put peas in it, the rattle
thereof terrifies the boldest!"
CHAPTER X. PURE REASON.
It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is
a speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for
most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilized Life, which
we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and
"bladders with dried peas." To linger among such speculations, longer
than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. For
our purposes the simple fact that such a _Naked World_ is possible,
nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much,
therefore, we omit about "Kings wrestling naked on the green with
Carmen," and the Kings being thrown: "dissect them with scalpels," says
Teufelsdrockh; "the same viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other
life-tackle, are there: examine their spiritual mechanism; the same
great Need, great Greed, and little Faculty; nay ten to one but the
Carman, who understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something
of the laws of unstable and stable equilibrium, with other branches
of wagon-science, and has actually put forth his hand and operated on
Nature, is the more cunningly gifted of the two. Whence, then, their
so unspeakable difference? From Clothes." Much also we shall omit about
confusion of Ranks, and Joan and My Lady, and how it would be everywhere
"Hail fellow well met," and Chaos were come again: all which to any one
that has once fairly pictured out the grand mother-idea, _Society in
a state of Nakedness_, will spontaneously suggest itself. Should some
sceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world without
Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist,
let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless
Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over
which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole
nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief
riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:--
"Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how,
without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's seat, and
true pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?"
Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdrockh; at worst,
one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though, in looking at
the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures,
he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and
indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that
unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference,
which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers,--there is
that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past
and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of
Teufelsdrockh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a
Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he
degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on
the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality
with the Gods.
"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous Biped
that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a
Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, there
lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses),
contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like,
and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for
himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of
Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds
and Colors and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably
over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not
thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He
feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not the
spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here,
though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom,
with his lips of gold, 'the true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else is the
GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in
our fellow-man?"
In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our
Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts
forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapor and tarnish
of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment,
we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;--though,
alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from
view.
Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and
indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing
that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings:
thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as
well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay,
Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend
Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the
manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honorable, can it be more? The
thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as
Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial
Invisible, "unimaginable formless, dark with excess of bright"? Under
which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so
strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:--
"The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with
armed eyesight, till they become _transparent_. 'The Philosopher,' says
the wisest of this age, 'must station himself in the middle:' how true!
The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest
has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
"Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven in
Arkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our
Imagination? Or, on the other hand, what is there that we cannot love;
since all was created by God?
"Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the woollen, and
fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man
himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate,
a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable
venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!"
For the rest, as is natural to a man of this kind, he deals much in the
feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and high worth of universal
Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable temper for the denizen
of so singular a Planet as ours. "Wonder," says he, "is the basis of
Worship: the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only
at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a
reign _in partibus infidelium_." That progress of Science, which is to
destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration,
finds small favor with Teufelsdrockh, much as he otherwise venerates
these two latter processes.
"Shall your Science," exclaims he, "proceed in the small chink-lighted,
or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's
mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere
Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you
call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which
the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's
in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute
without shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and menial
handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too
noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps
poisonous; at best, dies like cookery with the day that called it forth;
does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading
harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to all Time."
In such wise does Teufelsdrockh deal hits, harder or softer, according
to ability; yet ever, as we would fain persuade ourselves, with
charitable intent. Above all, that class of "Logic-choppers, and
treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, in these
days, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics'
Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings
round their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as
illuminated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full
daylight, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you and
guarding you therewith, though the Sun is shining, and the street
populous with mere justice-loving men:" that whole class is
inexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what uncommon animation he
perorates:--
"The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and
worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried
the whole _Mecanique Celeste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the epitome
of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single
head,--is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let