EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY

 Founded 1906 by J. M. Dent (d. 1926) Edited by Ernest Rhys (d. 1946)

 ESSAYS & BELLES-LETTRES

 SARTOR RESARTUS _and_ ON HEROES

 BY THOMAS CARLYLE · INTRODUCTION

 BY PROFESSOR W. H. HUDSON

 THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a stonemason. Educated at Edinburgh University. Schoolmaster for a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris and London. Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write. In 1834 moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881. 

 SARTOR RESARTUS

 ON HEROES

 HERO WORSHIP

 THOMAS CARLYLE

 LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC. 

 _All rights reserved Made in Great Britain at The Temple Press Letchworth for J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Aldine House Bedford St. London First published in this edition 1908 Last reprinted 1948_

INTRODUCTION

One of the most vital and pregnant books in our modern literature, "Sartor Resartus" is also, in structure and form, one of the mostdaringly original. It defies exact classification. It is not aphilosophic treatise. It is not an autobiography. It is not a romance. Yet in a sense it is all these combined. Its underlying purpose is toexpound in broad outline certain ideas which lay at the root ofCarlyle's whole reading of life. But he does not elect to set theseforth in regular methodic fashion, after the manner of one writing asystematic essay. He presents his philosophy in dramatic form and in apicturesque human setting. He invents a certain Herr DiogenesTeufelsdröckh, an erudite German professor of "Allerley-Wissenschaft, "or Things in General, in the University of Weissnichtwo, of whosecolossal work, "Die Kleider, Ihr Werden und Wirken" (On Clothes: TheirOrigin and Influence), he represents himself as being only the studentand interpreter. With infinite humour he explains how this prodigiousvolume came into his hands; how he was struck with amazement by itsencyclopædic learning, and the depth and suggestiveness of itsthought; and how he determined that it was his special mission tointroduce its ideas to the British public. But how was this to bedone? As a mere bald abstract of the original would never do, thewould-be apostle was for a time in despair. But at length the happythought occurred to him of combining a condensed statement of the mainprinciples of the new philosophy with some account of thephilosopher's life and character. Thus the work took the form of a"Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, " and as such it was offeredto the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of itsfantastic title--"Sartor Resartus, " or the Tailor Patched: the tailorbeing the great German "Clothes-philosopher, " and the patching beingdone by Carlyle as his English editor. 

As a piece of literary mystification, Teufelsdröckh and his treatiseenjoyed a measure of the success which nearly twenty years before hadbeen scored by Dietrich Knickerbocker and his "History of New York. "The question of the professor's existence was solemnly discussed in atleast one important review; Carlyle was gravely taken to task forattempting to mislead the public; a certain interested reader actuallywrote to inquire where the original German work was to be obtained. All this seems to us surprising; the more so as we are now able tounderstand the purposes which Carlyle had in view in devising hisdramatic scheme. In the first place, by associating theclothes-philosophy with the personality of its alleged author (himselfone of Carlyle's splendidly living pieces of characterisation), and bypresenting it as the product and expression of his spiritualexperiences, he made the mystical creed intensely human. Stated in theabstract, it would have been a mere blank _-ism_; developed in itsintimate relations with Teufelsdröckh's character and career, it isfilled with the hot life-blood of natural thought and feeling. Secondly, by fathering his own philosophy upon a German professorCarlyle indicates his own indebtedness to German idealism, theultimate source of much of his own teaching. Yet, deep as thatindebtedness was, and anxious as he might be to acknowledge it, he wasas a humourist keenly alive to certain glaring defects of the greatGerman writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves amongthe mere minutiæ of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant andthe important; to their habit of rising at times into the cloudsrather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves inregions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their tooconspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machineryof "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It ismade the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similarcharacteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; as in themany amusing criticisms which are passed upon Teufelsdröckh's volumeas a sort of "mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded;"in the burlesque parade of the professor's "omniverous reading"(_e. G. _, Book I, Chap. V); and in the whole amazing episode of the"six considerable paper bags, " out of the chaotic contents of whichthe distracted editor in search of "biographic documents" has to makewhat he can. Nor is this quite all. Teufelsdröckh is further utilisedas the mouthpiece of some of Carlyle's more extravagant speculationsand of such ideas as he wished to throw out as it were tentatively, and without himself being necessarily held responsible for them. Thereis thus much point as well as humour in those sudden turns of theargument, when, after some exceptionally wild outburst on his_eidolon's_ part, Carlyle sedately reproves him for the fantasticcharacter or dangerous tendency of his opinions. 

It is in connection with the dramatic scheme of the book that thethird element, that of autobiography, enters into its texture, for thestory of Teufelsdröckh is very largely a transfigured version of thestory of Carlyle himself. In saying this, I am not of course thinkingmainly of Carlyle's outer life. This, indeed, is in places freelydrawn upon, as the outer lives of Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoi aredrawn upon in "David Copperfield, " "The Mill on the Floss, " "AnnaKarénina. " Entepfuhl is only another name for Ecclefechan; the pictureof little Diogenes eating his supper out-of-doors on fine summerevenings, and meanwhile watching the sun sink behind the westernhills, is clearly a loving transcript from memory; even the idyllicepisode of Blumine may be safely traced back to a romance of Carlyle'syouth. But to investigate the connection at these and other pointsbetween the mere externals of the two careers is a matter of littlemore than curious interest. It is because it incorporates andreproduces so much of Carlyle's inner history that the story ofTeufelsdröckh is really important. Spiritually considered, the wholenarrative is, in fact, a "symbolic myth, " in which the writer'spersonal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save insetting and accessories. Like Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle while still ayoung man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he hadbeen bred; like Teufelsdröckh, he had thereupon passed into the"howling desert of infidelity;" like Teufelsdröckh, he had known allthe agonies and anguish of a long period of blank scepticism andinsurgent despair, during which, turn whither he would, life respondedwith nothing but negations to every question and appeal. And as toTeufelsdröckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer in Paris, so toCarlyle in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, there had come a moment of suddenand marvellous illumination, a mystical crisis from which he hademerged a different man. The parallelism is so obvious and so close asto leave no room for doubt that the story of Teufelsdröckh issubstantially a piece of spiritual autobiography. 

This admitted, the question arises whether Carlyle had any purpose, beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiencesfor the human setting of his philosophy. It seems evident that he had. As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than amerely personal interest and meaning. He wrote of himself because hesaw in himself a type of his restless and much-troubled epoch; becausehe knew that in a broad sense his history was the history of thousandsof other young men in the generation to which he belonged. The agewhich followed upon the vast upheaval of the Revolution was one ofwidespread turmoil and perplexity. Men felt themselves to be wanderingaimlessly "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to beborn. " The old order had collapsed in shapeless ruin; but the promisedUtopia had not been realised to take its place. In many directions theforces of reaction were at work. Religion, striving to maintain itselfupon the dogmatic creeds of the past, was rapidly petrifying into amere "dead Letter of Religion, " from which all the living spirit hadfled; and those who could not nourish themselves on hearsay andinherited formula knew not where to look for the renewal of faith andhope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasmswhich had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionarymovement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it themood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial wasfelt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy on many hearts. 

It was for the men of this "sad time" that Carlyle wroteTeufelsdröckh's story; and he wrote it not merely to depict thefar-reaching consequences of their pessimism but also to make plain tothem their true path out of it. He desired to exhibit to his age thereal nature of the strange malady from which it was suffering in orderthat he might thereupon proclaim the remedy. 

What, then, is the moral significance of Carlyle's "symbolic myth"?What are the supreme lessons which he uses it to convey?

We must begin by understanding his diagnosis. For him, all the evilsof the time could ultimately be traced back to their common source inwhat may be briefly described as its want of real religion. Of churchesand creeds there were plenty; of living faith little or nothing wasleft. Men had lost all vital sense of God in the world; and because ofthis, they had taken up a fatally wrong attitude to life. They lookedat it wholly from the mechanical point of view, and judged it bymerely utilitarian standards. The "body-politic" was no longerinspired by any "soul-politic. " Men, individually and in the mass, cared only for material prosperity, sought only outward success, madethe pursuit of happiness the end and aim of their being. The divinemeaning of virtue, the infinite nature of duty, had been forgotten, and morality had been turned into a sort of ledger-philosophy, basedupon calculations of profit and loss. 

It was thus that Carlyle read the signs of the times. In suchcircumstances what was needed? Nothing less than a spiritual rebirth. Men must abandon their wrong attitude to life, and take up the rightattitude. Everything hinged on that. And that they might take up thisright attitude it was necessary first that they should be convinced oflife's essential spirituality, and cease in consequence to seek itsmeaning and test its value on the plane of merely material things. 

Carlyle thus throws passionate emphasis upon religion as the onlysaving power. But it must be noted that he does not suggest a returnto any of the dogmatic creeds of the past. Though once the expressionof a living faith, these were now for him mere lifeless formulas. Norhas he any new dogmatic creed to offer in their place. That mysticalcrisis which had broken the spell of the Everlasting No was in astrict sense--he uses the word himself--a conversion. But it was not aconversion in the theological sense, for it did not involve theacceptance of any specific articles of faith. It was simply a completechange of front; the protest of his whole nature, in a suddenlyaroused mood of indignation and defiance, against the "spirit whichdenies;" the assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which hadso long kept him trembling and whimpering before the facts ofexistence. But from that change of front came presently the vividapprehension of certain great truths which his former mood had thusfar concealed from him; and in these truths he found the secret ofthat right attitude to life in the discovery of which lay men's onlyhope of salvation from the unrest and melancholy of their time. 

From this point of view the burden of Carlyle's message to hisgeneration will be readily understood. Men were going wrong becausethey started with the thought of self, and made satisfaction of selfthe law of their lives; because, in consequence, they regardedhappiness as the chief object of pursuit and the one thing worthstriving for; because, under the influence of the current rationalism, they tried to escape from their spiritual perplexities through logicand speculation. They had, therefore, to set themselves right upon allthese matters. They had to learn that not self-satisfaction butself-renunciation is the key to life and its true law; that we have noprescriptive claim to happiness and no business to quarrel with theuniverse if it withholds it from us; that the way out of pessimismlies, not through reason, but through honest work, steady adherence tothe simple duty which each day brings, fidelity to the right as weknow it. Such, in broad statement, is the substance of Carlyle'sreligious convictions and moral teaching. Like Kant he takes his standon the principles of ethical idealism. God is to be sought, notthrough speculation, or syllogism, or the learning of the schools, butthrough the moral nature. It is the soul in action that alone findsGod. And the finding of God means, not happiness as the worldconceives it, but blessedness, or the inward peace which passesunderstanding. 

The connection between the transfigured autobiography which serves tointroduce the directly didactic element of the book and that elementitself, will now be clear. Stripped of its whimsicalities ofphraseology and its humorous extravagances, Carlyle's philosophystands revealed as essentially idealistic in character. Spirit is theonly reality. Visible things are but the manifestations, emblems, orclothings of spirit. The material universe itself is only the vestureor symbol of God; man is a spirit, though he wears the wrappings ofthe flesh; and in everything that man creates for himself he merelyattempts to give body or expression to thought. The science ofCarlyle's time was busy proclaiming that, since the universe isgoverned by natural laws, miracles are impossible and the supernaturalis a myth. Carlyle replies that the natural laws are themselves onlythe manifestation of Spiritual Force, and that thus miracle iseverywhere and all nature supernatural. We, who are the creatures oftime and space, can indeed apprehend the Absolute only when He weavesabout Him the visible garments of time and space. Thus God revealsHimself to sense through symbols. But it is as we regard these symbolsin one or other of two possible ways that we class ourselves with thefoolish man or with the wise. The foolish man sees only the symbol, thinks it exists for itself, takes it for the ultimate fact, andtherefore rests in it. The wise man sees the symbol, knows that it isonly a symbol, and penetrates into it for the ultimate fact orspiritual reality which it symbolises. 

Remote as such a doctrine may at first sight seem to be from thequestions with which men are commonly concerned, it has none the lessmany important practical bearings. Since "all Forms whereby Spiritmanifests itself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes, " civilisation and everything belonging to it--ourlanguages, literatures and arts, our governments, social machinery andinstitutions, our philosophies, creeds and rituals--are but so manyvestments woven for itself by the shaping spirit of man. Indispensablethese vestments are; for without them society would collapse inanarchy, and humanity sink to the level of the brute. Yet here againwe must emphasise the difference, already noted, between the foolishman and the wise. The foolish man once more assumes that the vestmentsexist for themselves, as ultimate facts, and that they have a value oftheir own. He, therefore, confuses the life with its clothing; is evenwilling to sacrifice the life for the sake of the clothing. The wiseman, while he, too, recognises the necessity of the vestments, andindeed insists upon it, knows that they have no independentimportance, that they derive all their potency and value from theinner reality which they were fashioned to represent and embody, butwhich they often misrepresent and obscure. He therefore never confusesthe life with the clothing, and well understands how often theclothing has to be sacrificed for the sake of the life. Thus, whilethe utility of clothes has to be recognised to the full, it is stillof the essence of wisdom to press hard upon the vital distinctionbetween the outer wrappings of man's life and that inner reality whichthey more or less adequately enfold. 

The use which Carlyle makes of this doctrine in his interpretation ofthe religious history of the world and of the crisis in thought of hisown day, will be anticipated. All dogmas, forms and ceremonials, heteaches, are but religious vestments--symbols expressing man's deepestsense of the divine mystery of the universe and the hunger and thirstof his soul for God. It is in response to the imperative necessitiesof his nature that he moulds for himself these outward emblems of hisideas and aspirations. Yet they are only emblems; and since, like allother human things, they partake of the ignorance and weakness of thetimes in which they were framed, it is inevitable that with the growthof knowledge and the expansion of thought they must presently beoutgrown. When this happens, there follows what Carlyle calls the"superannuation of symbols. " Men wake to the fact that the creeds andformulas which have come down to them from the past are no longerliving for them, no longer what they need for the embodiment of theirspiritual life. Two mistakes are now possible, and these are, indeed, commonly made together. On the one hand, men may try to ignore thegrowth of knowledge and the expansion of thought, and to cling to theoutgrown symbols as things having in themselves some mysterioussanctity and power. On the other hand, they may recklessly endeavourto cast aside the reality symbolised along with the discredited symbolitself. Given such a condition of things, and we shall find religiondegenerating into formalism and the worship of the dead letter, and, side by side with this, the impatient rejection of all religion, andthe spread of a crude and debasing materialism. Religious symbols, then, must be renewed. But their renewal can come only from within. Form, to have any real value, must grow out of life and be fed by it. 

The revolutionary quality in the philosophy of "Sartor Resartus"cannot, of course, be overlooked. Everything that man has woven forhimself must in time become merely "old clothes"; the work of histhought, like that of his hands, is perishable; his very highestsymbols have no permanence or finality. Carlyle cuts down to theessential reality beneath all shows and forms and emblems: witness hisamazing vision of a naked House of Lords. Under his penetrating gazethe "earthly hulls and garnitures" of existence melt away. Men's habitis to rest in symbols. But to rest in symbols is fatal, since they areat best but the "adventitious wrappages" of life. Clothes "have mademen of us"--true; but now, so great has their influence become that"they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us. " Hence "thebeginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes . . . Till theybecome transparent. " The logical tendency of such teaching may seem tobe towards utter nihilism. But that tendency is checked and qualifiedby the strong conservative element which is everywhere prominent inCarlyle's thought. Upon the absolute need of "clothes" the stress isagain and again thrown. They "have made men of us. " By symbols aloneman lives and works. By symbols alone can he make life and workeffective. Thus even the world's "old clothes"--its discarded formsand creeds--should be treated with the reverence due to whatever hasonce played a part in human development. Thus, moreover, we must be onour guard against the impetuosity of the revolutionary spirit and allrash rupture with the past. To cast old clothes aside before newclothes are ready--this does not mean progress, but sansculottism, ora lapse into nakedness and anarchy. 

 * * * * *

The lectures "On Heroes and Hero-Worship, " here printed with "SartorResartus, " contain little more than an amplification, through a seriesof brilliant character-studies, of those fundamental ideas of historywhich had already figured among Teufelsdröckh's social speculations. Simple in statement and clear in doctrine, this second work needs noformal introduction. It may, however, be of service just to indicateone or two points at which, apart from its set theses, it expresses orimplies certain underlying principles of all Carlyle's thought. 

In the first place, his philosophy of history rests entirely on "thegreat man theory. " "Universal History, the history of what man hasaccomplished in the world, " is for him "at bottom the History of theGreat Men who have worked here. " This conception, of course, bringshim into sharp conflict with that scientific view of history which wasalready gaining ground when "Heroes and Hero-Worship" was written, andwhich since then has become even more popular under the powerfulinfluence of the modern doctrine of evolution. A scientific historian, like Buckle or Taine, seeks to explain all changes in thought, allmovements in politics and society, in terms of general laws; his habitis, therefore, to subordinate, if not quite to eliminate, theindividual; the greatest man is treated as in a large measure theproduct and expression of the "spirit of the time. " For Carlyle, individuality is everything. While, as he is bound to admit, "no oneworks save under conditions, " external circumstances and influencescount little. The Great Man is supreme. He is not the creature of hisage, but its creator; not its servant, but its master. "The History ofthe World is but the Biography of Great Men. "

Anti-scientific in his reading of history, Carlyle is alsoanti-democratic in the practical lessons he deduces from it. Heteaches that our right relations with the Hero are discipularrelations; that we should honestly acknowledge his superiority, lookup to him, reverence him. Thus on the personal side he challenges thattendency to "level down" which he believed to be one alarming resultof the fast-spreading spirit of the new democracy. But more than this. He insists that the one hope for our distracted world of to-day liesin the strength and wisdom of the few, not in the organised unwisdomof the many. The masses of the people can never be safely trusted tosolve for themselves the intricate problems of their own welfare. Theyneed to be guided, disciplined, at times even driven, by those greatleaders of men, who see more deeply than they see into the reality ofthings, and know much better than they can ever know what is good forthem, and how that good is to be attained. Political machinery, inwhich the modern world had come to put so much faith, is only anotherdelusion of a mechanical age. The burden of history is for him alwaysthe need of the Able Man. "I say, Find me the true _Könning_, King, Able Man, and he _has_ a divine right over me. " Carlyle thus throwsdown the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democraticmovements of his time. His pronounced antagonism to the modern spiritin these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily inmind in our study of him. 

Finally, we have to remember that in the whole tone and temper of histeaching Carlyle is fundamentally the Puritan. The dogmas ofPuritanism he had indeed outgrown; but he never outgrew its ethics. His thought was dominated and pervaded to the end, as Froude rightlysays, by the spirit of the creed he had dismissed. By reference tothis one fact we may account for much of his strength, and also formost of his limitations in outlook and sympathy. Those limitations thereader will not fail to notice for himself. But whatever allowance hasto be made for them, the strength remains. It is, perhaps, the secretof Carlyle's imperishable greatness as a stimulating and upliftingpower that, beyond any other modern writer, he makes us feel with himthe supreme claims of the moral life, the meaning of our ownresponsibilities, the essential spirituality of things, theindestructible reality of religion. If he had thus a special messagefor his own generation, that message has surely not lost any of itsvalue for ours. "Put Carlyle in your pocket, " says Dr. Hal to PaulKelver on his starting out in life. "He is not all the voices, but heis the best maker of men I know. " And as a maker of men, Carlyle'sappeal to us is as great as ever. 

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON. 

 _Life of Schiller_ (_Lond. Mag. _, 1823-4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement published in the People's Edition, 1873). _Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship_, 1824. _Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry_ (from the French of Legendre), 1824. _German Romance_, 1827. _Sartor Resartus_ (_Fraser's Mag. _, 1833-4), 1835 (Boston), 1838. _French Revolution_, 1837, 1839. _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, 1839, 1840, 1847, 1857. (In these were reprinted Articles from _Edinburgh Review_, _Foreign Review_, _Foreign Quarterly Review_, _Fraser's Magazine_, _Westminster Review_, _New Monthly Magazine_, _London and Westminster Review_, _Keepsake Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_, _Times_). _Chartism_, 1840. _Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History_, 1841. _Past and Present_, 1843. _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations_, 1845. _Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver Cromwell_, 1847 (Fraser). _Original Discourses on the Negro Question_ (Fraser, 1849), 1853. _Latter-day Pamphlets_, 1850. _Life of John Sterling_, 1851. _History of Friedrich II. Of Prussia_, 1858-65. _Inaugural Address at Edinburgh_, 1866. _Shooting Niagara: and After?_ 1867 (from "Macmillan"). _The Early Kings of Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox_, 1875. 

 There were also contributions to Brewster's _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_, vols. Xiv. , xv. , and xvi. ; to _New Edinburgh Review_, 1821, 1822; _Fraser's Magazine_, 1830, 1831; _The Times_, 19 June, 1844 ("Mazzini"); 28 November, 1876; 5 May, 1877; _Examiner_, 1848; _Spectator_, 1848. 

 First Collected Edition of Works, 1857-58 (16 vols. ). 

 _Reminiscences_, ed. By Froude in 1881, but superseded by C. E. Norton's edition of 1887. Norton has also edited two volumes of _Letters_ (1888), and Carlyle's correspondence with Emerson (1883) and with Goethe (1887). Other volumes of correspondence are _New Letters_ (1904), _Carlyle Intime_ (1907), _Love Letters_ (1909), _Letters to Mill, Sterling, and Browning_ (1923), all ed. By Alexander Carlyle. See also _Last Words of Carlyle_, 1892. 

 The fullest _Life_ is that by D. A. Wilson. The first of six volumes appeared in 1923, and by 1934 only one remained to be published. 

CONTENTS

SARTOR RESARTUS

BOOK I

 CHAP. PAGE I. PRELIMINARY 1 II. EDITORIAL DIFFICULTIES 5 III. REMINISCENCES 9 IV. CHARACTERISTICS 20 V. THE WORLD IN CLOTHES 25 VI. APRONS 31 VII. MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL 34 VIII. THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES 37 IX. ADAMITISM 43 X. PURE REASON 47 XI. PROSPECTIVE 52

BOOK II

 I. GENESIS 61 II. IDYLLIC 68 III. PEDAGOGY 76 IV. GETTING UNDER WAY 90 V. ROMANCE 101 VI. SORROWS OF TEUFELSDRÖCKH 112 VII. THE EVERLASTING NO 121 VIII. CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE 128 IX. THE EVERLASTING YEA 138 X. PAUSE 149

BOOK III

 I. INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY 156 II. CHURCH-CLOTHES 161 III. SYMBOLS 163 IV. HELOTAGE 170 V. THE PHOENIX 174 VI. OLD CLOTHES 179 VII. ORGANIC FILAMENTS 183 VIII. NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM 191 IX. CIRCUMSPECTIVE 201 X. THE DANDIACAL BODY 204 XI. TAILORS 216 XII. FAREWELL 219

APPENDIX--TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS 225

SUMMARY 231

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

LECTURE ITHE HERO AS DIVINITY. Odin. Paganism: ScandinavianMythology 239

LECTURE IITHE HERO AS PROPHET. Mahomet: Islam 277

LECTURE IIITHE HERO AS POET. Dante; Shakspeare 311

LECTURE IVTHE HERO AS PRIEST. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism 346

LECTURE VTHE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 383

LECTURE VITHE HERO AS KING. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism 422

INDEX 469

SARTOR RESARTUS

BOOK FIRST

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY

Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torchof Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or lesseffect, for five-thousand years and upwards; how, in these timesespecially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercelythan ever, but innumerable Rush-lights, and Sulphur-matches, kindledthereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallestcranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated, --it mightstrike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little ornothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophyor History, has been written on the subject of Clothes. 

Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect: Lagrange, it is wellknown, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, willendure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that itcould not have been made on any other scheme. Whereby, at least, ournautical Logbooks can be better kept; and water-transport of all kindshas grown more commodious. Of Geology and Geognosy we know enough:what with the labours of our Werners and Huttons, what with the ardentgenius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a RoyalSociety, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than thecooking of a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have beenminds to whom the question, _How the apples were got in_, presenteddifficulties. Why mention our disquisitions on the Social Contract, onthe Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the Herring? Then, have wenot a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value; Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man'swhole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated;scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, buthas been probed, dissected, distilled, desiccated, and scientificallydecomposed: our spiritual Faculties, of which it appears there are nota few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards: every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies, Bichâts. 

How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grandTissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quiteoverlooked by Science, --the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen orother cloth; which Man's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage andoverall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has itsbeing? For if, now and then, some straggling, broken-winged thinkerhas cast an owl's-glance into this obscure region, the most havesoared over it altogether heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves oftrees, like the plumage of birds. In all speculations they havetacitly figured man as a _Clothed Animal_; whereas he is by nature a_Naked Animal_; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose anddevice, masks himself in Clothes. Shakespeare says, we are creaturesthat look before and after: the more surprising that we do not lookround a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes. 

But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessingthat, in these revolutionary times, there should be one country whereabstract Thought can still take shelter; that while the din and frenzyof Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris, deafen every French and every English ear, the German can standpeaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, strugglingmultitude here and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, withpreparatory blast of cowhorn, emit his _Höret ihr Herren und lasset'sEuch sagen_; in other words, tell the Universe, which so often forgetsthat fact, what o'clock it really is. Not unfrequently the Germanshave been blamed for an unprofitable diligence; as if they struck intodevious courses, where nothing was to be had but the toil of a roughjourney; as if, forsaking the gold-mines of finance and that politicalslaughter of fat oxen whereby a man himself grows fat, they were aptto run goose-hunting into regions of bilberries and crowberries, andbe swallowed up at last in remote peat-bogs. Of that unwise science, which, as our Humorist expresses it, --

 'By geometric scale Doth take the size of pots of ale;'

still more, of that altogether misdirected industry, which is seenvigorously thrashing mere straw, there can nothing defensive be said. In so far as the Germans are chargeable with such, let them take theconsequence. Nevertheless, be it remarked, that even a Russian steppehas tumuli and gold ornaments; also many a scene that looks desert androck-bound from the distance, will unfold itself, when visited, intorare valleys. Nay, in any case, would Criticism erect not onlyfinger-posts and turnpikes, but spiked gates and impassable barriers, for the mind of man? It is written, 'Many shall run to and fro, andknowledge shall be increased. ' Surely the plain rule is, Let eachconsiderate person have his way, and see what it will lead to. For notthis man and that man, but all men make up mankind, and their unitedtasks the task of mankind. How often have we seen some suchadventurous, and perhaps much-censured wanderer light on someout-lying, neglected, yet vitally-momentous province; the hiddentreasures of which he first discovered, and kept proclaiming till thegeneral eye and effort were directed thither, and the conquest wascompleted;--thereby, in these his seemingly so aimless rambles, planting new standards, founding new habitable colonies, in theimmeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night! Wise manwas he who counselled that Speculation should have free course, andlook fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed. 

Perhaps it is proof of the stunted condition in which pure Science, especially pure moral Science, languishes among us English; and howour mercantile greatness, and invaluable Constitution, impressing apolitical or other immediately practical tendency on all Englishculture and endeavour, cramps the free flight of Thought, --that this, not Philosophy of Clothes, but recognition even that we have no suchPhilosophy, stands here for the first time published in our language. What English intellect could have chosen such a topic, or by chancestumbled on it? But for that same unshackled, and even sequesteredcondition of the German Learned, which permits and induces them tofish in all manner of waters, with all manner of nets, it seemsprobable enough, this abstruse Inquiry might, in spite of the resultsit leads to, have continued dormant for indefinite periods. The Editorof these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of confirmedspeculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to confess, that never, till these last months, did the above very plainconsiderations, on our total want of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur tohim; and then, by quite foreign suggestion. By the arrival, namely, ofa new Book from Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo; treatingexpressly of this subject, and in a style which, whether understood ornot, could not even by the blindest be overlooked. In the presentEditor's way of thought, this remarkable Treatise, with its Doctrines, whether as judicially acceded to, or judicially denied, has notremained without effect. 

'_Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken_ (Clothes, their Origin andInfluence): _von Diog. Teufelsdröckh, J. U. D. Etc. _ _Stillschweigen undCo^{gnie}. _ _Weissnichtwo_, 1831. 

'Here, ' says the _Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger_, 'comes a Volume of thatextensive, close-printed, close-meditated sort, which, be it spokenwith pride, is seen only in Germany, perhaps only in Weissnichtwo. Issuing from the hitherto irreproachable Firm of Stillschweigen andCompany, with every external furtherance, it is of such internalquality as to set Neglect at defiance. ' * * * * 'A work, ' concludesthe wellnigh enthusiastic Reviewer, 'interesting alike to theantiquary, the historian, and the philosophic thinker; a masterpieceof boldness, lynx-eyed acuteness, and rugged independent Germanism andPhilanthropy (_derber Kerndeutschheit und Menschenliebe_); which willnot, assuredly, pass current without opposition in high places; butmust and will exalt the almost new name of Teufelsdröckh to the firstranks of Philosophy, in our German Temple of Honour. '

Mindful of old friendship, the distinguished Professor, in this thefirst blaze of his fame, which however does not dazzle him, sendshither a Presentation-copy of his Book; with compliments and encomiumswhich modesty forbids the present Editor to rehearse; yet withoutindicated wish or hope of any kind, except what may be implied in theconcluding phrase: _Möchte es_ (this remarkable Treatise) _auch imBrittischen Boden gedeihen_!

CHAPTER II

EDITORIAL DIFFICULTIES

If for a speculative man, 'whose seedfield, ' in the sublime words ofthe Poet, 'is Time, ' no conquest is important but that of new ideas, then might the arrival of Professor Teufelsdröckh's Book be markedwith chalk in the Editor's calendar. It is indeed an 'extensiveVolume, ' of boundless, almost formless contents, a very Sea ofThought; neither calm nor clear, if you will; yet wherein the toughestpearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only withsea-wreck but with true orients. 

Directly on the first perusal, almost on the first deliberateinspection, it became apparent that here a quite new Branch ofPhilosophy, leading to as yet undescried ulterior results, wasdisclosed; farther, what seemed scarcely less interesting, a quite newhuman Individuality, an almost unexampled personal character, that, namely, of Professor Teufelsdröckh the Discloser. Of both whichnovelties, as far as might be possible, we resolved to master thesignificance. But as man is emphatically a proselytising creature, nosooner was such mastery even fairly attempted, than the new questionarose: How might this acquired good be imparted to others, perhaps inequal need thereof: how could the Philosophy of Clothes, and theAuthor of such Philosophy, be brought home, in any measure, to thebusiness and bosoms of our own English Nation? For if new-got gold issaid to burn the pockets till it be cast forth into circulation, muchmore may new truth. 

Here, however, difficulties occurred. The first thought naturally wasto publish Article after Article on this remarkable Volume, in suchwidely-circulating Critical Journals as the Editor might standconnected with, or by money or love procure access to. But, on theother hand, was it not clear that such matter as must here be revealed, and treated of, might endanger the circulation of any Journal extant?If, indeed, all party-divisions in the State could have been abolished, Whig, Tory, and Radical, embracing in discrepant union; and all theJournals of the Nation could have been jumbled into one Journal, andthe Philosophy of Clothes poured forth in incessant torrents therefrom, the attempt had seemed possible. But, alas, what vehicle of that sorthave we, except _Fraser's Magazine_? A vehicle all strewed(figuratively speaking) with the maddest Waterloo-Crackers, explodingdistractively and destructively, wheresoever the mystified passengerstands or sits; nay, in any case, understood to be, of late years, avehicle full to overflowing, and inexorably shut! Besides, to state thePhilosophy of Clothes without the Philosopher, the ideas ofTeufelsdröckh without something of his personality, was it not toinsure both of entire misapprehension? Now for Biography, had it beenotherwise admissible, there were no adequate documents, no hope ofobtaining such, but rather, owing to circumstances, a special despair. Thus did the Editor see himself, for the while, shut out from allpublic utterance of these extraordinary Doctrines, and constrained torevolve them, not without disquietude, in the dark depths of his ownmind. 

So had it lasted for some months; and now the Volume on Clothes, readand again read, was in several points becoming lucid and lucent; thepersonality of its Author more and more surprising, but, in spite ofall that memory and conjecture could do, more and more enigmatic;whereby the old disquietude seemed fast settling into fixeddiscontent, --when altogether unexpectedly arrives a Letter from HerrHofrath Heuschrecke, our Professor's chief friend and associate inWeissnichtwo, with whom we had not previously corresponded. TheHofrath, after much quite extraneous matter, began dilating largely onthe 'agitation and attention' which the Philosophy of Clothes wasexciting in its own German Republic of Letters; on the deepsignificance and tendency of his Friend's Volume; and then, at length, with great circumlocution, hinted at the practicability of conveying'some knowledge of it, and of him, to England, and through England tothe distant West': a work on Professor Teufelsdröckh 'were undoubtedlywelcome to the _Family_, the _National_, or any other of thosepatriotic _Libraries_, at present the glory of British Literature';might work revolutions in Thought; and so forth;--in conclusion, intimating not obscurely, that should the present Editor feel disposedto undertake a Biography of Teufelsdröckh, he, Hofrath Heuschrecke, had it in his power to furnish the requisite Documents. 

As in some chemical mixture, that has stood long evaporating, butwould not crystallise, instantly when the wire or other fixedsubstance is introduced, crystallisation commences, and rapidlyproceeds till the whole is finished, so was it with the Editor's mindand this offer of Heuschrecke's. Form rose out of void solution anddiscontinuity; like united itself with like in definite arrangement:and soon either in actual vision and possession, or in fixedreasonable hope, the image of the whole Enterprise had shaped itself, so to speak, into a solid mass. Cautiously yet courageously, throughthe twopenny post, application to the famed redoubtable OLIVER YORKEwas now made: an interview, interviews with that singular man havetaken place; with more of assurance on our side, with less of satire(at least of open satire) on his, than we anticipated;--for the rest, with such issue as is now visible. As to those same 'patriotic_Libraries_, ' the Hofrath's counsel could only be viewed with silentamazement; but with his offer of Documents we joyfully and almostinstantaneously closed. Thus, too, in the sure expectation of these, we already see our task begun; and this our _Sartor Resartus_, whichis properly a 'Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, ' hourlyadvancing. 

 * * * * *

Of our fitness for the Enterprise, to which we have such title andvocation, it were perhaps uninteresting to say more. Let the Britishreader study and enjoy, in simplicity of heart, what is here presentedhim, and with whatever metaphysical acumen and talent for meditationhe is possessed of. Let him strive to keep a free, open sense; clearedfrom the mists of prejudice, above all from the paralysis of cant; anddirected rather to the Book itself than to the Editor of the Book. Whoor what such Editor may be, must remain conjectural, and eveninsignificant:[1] it is a voice publishing tidings of the Philosophyof Clothes; undoubtedly a Spirit addressing Spirits: whoso hath ears, let him hear. 

 [1] With us even he still communicates in some sort of mask, or muffler: and, we have reason to think, under a feigned name!--O. Y. 

On one other point the Editor thinks it needful to give warning:namely, that he is animated with a true though perhaps a feebleattachment to the Institutions of our Ancestors; and minded to defendthese, according to ability, at all hazards; nay, it was partly with aview to such defence that he engaged in this undertaking. To stem, orif that be impossible, profitably to divert the current of Innovation, such a Volume as Teufelsdröckh's, if cunningly planted down, were nodespicable pile, or floodgate, in the logical wear. 

For the rest, be it nowise apprehended, that any personal connexion ofours with Teufelsdröckh, Heuschrecke, or this Philosophy of Clothescan pervert our judgment, or sway us to extenuate or exaggerate. Powerless, we venture to promise, are those private Complimentsthemselves. Grateful they may well be; as generous illusions offriendship; as fair mementos of bygone unions, of those nights andsuppers of the gods, when, lapped in the symphonies and harmonies ofPhilosophic Eloquence, though with baser accompaniments, the presentEditor revelled in that feast of reason, never since vouchsafed him inso full measure! But what then? _Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas_;Teufelsdröckh is our friend, Truth is our divinity. In our historicaland critical capacity, we hope we are strangers to all the world; havefeud or favour with no one, --save indeed the Devil, with whom, as withthe Prince of Lies and Darkness, we do at all times wage internecinewar. This assurance, at an epoch when puffery and quackery havereached a height unexampled in the annals of mankind, and even EnglishEditors, like Chinese Shopkeepers, must write on their door-lintels_No cheating here_, --we thought it good to premise. 

CHAPTER III

REMINISCENCES

To the Author's private circle the appearance of this singular Work onClothes must have occasioned little less surprise than it has to therest of the world. For ourselves, at least, few things have been moreunexpected. Professor Teufelsdröckh, at the period of our acquaintancewith him, seemed to lead a quite still and self-contained life: a mandevoted to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more likely, if hepublished at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili, bothof whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than todescend, as he has here done, into the angry noisy Forum, with anArgument that cannot but exasperate and divide. Not, that we canremember, the Philosophy of Clothes once touched upon between us. Ifthrough the high, silent, meditative Transcendentalism of our Friendwe detected any practical tendency whatever, it was at most Political, and towards a certain prospective, and for the present quitespeculative, Radicalism; as indeed some correspondence, on his part, with Herr Oken of Jena was now and then suspected; though his specialcontribution to the _Isis_ could never be more than surmised at. But, at all events, nothing Moral, still less anything Didactico-Religious, was looked for from him. 

Well do we recollect the last words he spoke in our hearing; whichindeed, with the Night they were uttered in, are to be foreverremembered. Lifting his huge tumbler of _Gukguk_, [2] and for a momentlowering his tobacco-pipe, he stood up in full Coffee-house (it was_Zur Grünen Gans_, the largest in Weissnichtwo, where all theVirtuosity, and nearly all the Intellect of the place assembled of anevening); and there, with low, soul-stirring tone, and the look trulyof an angel, though whether of a white or of a black one might bedubious, proposed this toast: _Die Sache der Armen in Gottes undTeufels Namen_ (The Cause of the Poor, in Heaven's name and ----'s)!One full shout, breaking the leaden silence; then a gurgle ofinnumerable emptying bumpers, again followed by universal cheering, returned him loud acclaim. It was the finale of the night: resumingtheir pipes; in the highest enthusiasm, amid volumes of tobacco-smoke;triumphant, cloud-capt without and within, the assembly broke up, eachto his thoughtful pillow. _Bleibt doch ein echter Spass- undGalgen-vogel_, said several; meaning thereby that, one day, he wouldprobably be hanged for his democratic sentiments. _Wo steckt doch derSchalk?_ added they, looking round: but Teufelsdröckh had retired byprivate alleys, and the Compiler of these pages beheld him no more. 

 [2] Gukguk is unhappily only an academical-beer. 

In such scenes has it been our lot to live with this Philosopher, suchestimate to form of his purposes and powers. And yet, thou braveTeufelsdröckh, who could tell what lurked in thee? Under those thicklocks of thine, so long and lank, overlapping roof-wise the gravestface we ever in this world saw, there dwelt a most busy brain. In thyeyes too, deep under their shaggy brows, and looking out so still anddreamy, have we not noticed gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolicfire, and half-fancied that their stillness was but the rest ofinfinite motion, the _sleep_ of a spinning-top? Thy little figure, there as, in loose, ill-brushed threadbare habiliments, thou sattest, amid litter and lumber, whole days, to 'think and smoke tobacco, ' heldin it a mighty heart. The secrets of man's Life were laid open tothee; thou sawest into the mystery of the Universe, farther thananother; thou hadst _in petto_ thy remarkable Volume on Clothes. Nay, was there not in that clear logically-founded Transcendentalism ofthine; still more, in thy meek, silent, deep-seated Sansculottism, combined with a true princely Courtesy of inward nature, the visiblerudiments of such speculation? But great men are too often unknown, orwhat is worse, misknown. Already, when we dreamed not of it, the warpof thy remarkable Volume lay on the loom; and silently, mysteriousshuttles were putting in the woof!

 * * * * *

How the Hofrath Heuschrecke is to furnish biographical data, in thiscase, may be a curious question; the answer of which, however, ishappily not our concern, but his. To us it appeared, after repeatedtrial, that in Weissnichtwo, from the archives or memories of thebest-informed classes, no Biography of Teufelsdröckh was to begathered; not so much as a false one. He was a stranger there, waftedthither by what is called the course of circumstances; concerningwhose parentage, birthplace, prospects, or pursuits, curiosity hadindeed made inquiries, but satisfied herself with the most indistinctreplies. For himself, he was a man so still and altogetherunparticipating, that to question him even afar off on suchparticulars was a thing of more than usual delicacy: besides, in hissly way, he had ever some quaint turn, not without its satirical edge, wherewith to divert such intrusions, and deter you from the like. Witsspoke of him secretly as if he were a kind of Melchizedek, withoutfather or mother of any kind; sometimes, with reference to his greathistoric and statistic knowledge, and the vivid way he had ofexpressing himself like an eye-witness of distant transactions andscenes, they called him the _Ewige Jude_, Everlasting, or as we say, Wandering Jew. 

To the most, indeed, he had become not so much a Man as a Thing; whichThing doubtless they were accustomed to see, and with satisfaction;but no more thought of accounting for than for the fabrication oftheir daily _Allgemeine Zeitung_, or the domestic habits of the Sun. Both were there and welcome; the world enjoyed what good was in them, and thought no more of the matter. The man Teufelsdröckh passed andrepassed, in his little circle, as one of those originals andnondescripts, more frequent in German Universities than elsewhere; ofwhom, though you see them alive, and feel certain enough that theymust have a History, no History seems to be discoverable; or only suchas men give of mountain rocks and antediluvian ruins: That they mayhave been created by unknown agencies, are in a state of gradualdecay, and for the present reflect light and resist pressure; that is, are visible and tangible objects in this phantasm world, where so muchother mystery is. 

It was to be remarked that though, by title and diploma, _Professorder Allerley-Wissenschaft_, or as we should say in English, 'Professorof Things in General, ' he had never delivered any Course; perhapsnever been incited thereto by any public furtherance or requisition. To all appearance, the enlightened Government of Weissnichtwo, infounding their New University, imagined they had done enough, if 'intimes like ours, ' as the half-official Program expressed it, 'when allthings are, rapidly or slowly, resolving themselves into Chaos, aProfessorship of this kind had been established; whereby, as occasioncalled, the task of bodying somewhat forth again from such Chaos mightbe, even slightly, facilitated. ' That actual Lectures should be held, and Public Classes for the 'Science of Things in General, ' theydoubtless considered premature; on which ground too they had onlyestablished the Professorship, nowise endowed it; so thatTeufelsdröckh, 'recommended by the highest Names, ' had been promotedthereby to a Name merely. 

Great, among the more enlightened classes, was the admiration of thisnew Professorship: how an enlightened Government had seen into theWant of the Age (_Zeitbedürfniss_); how at length, instead of Denialand Destruction, we were to have a science of Affirmation andReconstruction; and Germany and Weissnichtwo were where they shouldbe, in the vanguard of the world. Considerable also was the wonder atthe new Professor, dropt opportunely enough into the nascentUniversity; so able to lecture, should occasion call; so ready to holdhis peace for indefinite periods, should an enlightened Governmentconsider that occasion did not call. But such admiration and suchwonder, being followed by no act to keep them living, could last onlynine days; and, long before our visit to that scene, had quite diedaway. The more cunning heads thought it was all an expiring clutch atpopularity, on the part of a Minister, whom domestic embarrassments, court intrigues, old age, and dropsy soon afterwards finally drovefrom the helm. 

As for Teufelsdröckh, except by his nightly appearances at the _GrüneGans_, Weissnichtwo saw little of him, felt little of him. Here, overhis tumbler of Gukguk, he sat reading Journals; sometimescontemplatively looking into the clouds of his tobacco-pipe, withoutother visible employment: always, from his mild ways, an agreeablephenomenon there; more especially when he opened his lips for speech;on which occasions the whole Coffee-house would hush itself intosilence, as if sure to hear something noteworthy. Nay, perhaps to heara whole series and river of the most memorable utterances; such as, when once thawed, he would for hours indulge in, with fit audience:and the more memorable, as issuing from a head apparently not moreinterested in them, not more conscious of them, than is the sculpturedstone head of some public fountain, which through its brass mouth-tubeemits water to the worthy and the unworthy; careless whether it be forcooking victuals or quenching conflagrations; indeed, maintains thesame earnest assiduous look, whether any water be flowing or not. 

To the Editor of these sheets, as to a young enthusiastic Englishman, however unworthy, Teufelsdröckh opened himself perhaps more than tothe most. Pity only that we could not then half guess his importance, and scrutinise him with due power of vision! We enjoyed, what notthree men in Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of accessto the Professor's private domicile. It was the attic floor of thehighest house in the Wahngasse; and might truly be called the pinnacleof Weissnichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the contiguous roofs, themselves rising from elevated ground. Moreover, with its windows itlooked towards all the four _Orte_, or as the Scotch say, and we oughtto say, _Airts_: the sitting-room itself commanded three; another cameto view in the _Schlafgemach_ (bedroom) at the opposite end; to saynothing of the kitchen, which offered two, as it were, _duplicates_, and showing nothing new. So that it was in fact the speculum orwatch-tower of Teufelsdröckh; wherefrom, sitting at ease, he might seethe whole life-circulation of that considerable City; the streets andlanes of which, with all their doing and driving (_Thun und Treiben_), were for the most part visible there. 

"I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive, " have we heard himsay, "and witness their wax-laying and honey-making, andpoison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased to eat hisvictuals, down to the low lane, where in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I seeit all; for, except the Schlosskirche weathercock, no biped stands sohigh. Couriers arrive bestrapped and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrowbagged-up in pouches of leather: there, top-laden, and with four swifthorses, rolls-in the country Baron and his household; here, ontimber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: athousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, andgo tumbling out again with Produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thouwhence it is coming, whither it is going? _Aus der Ewigkeit, zu derEwigkeit hin_: From Eternity, onwards to Eternity! These areApparitions: what else? Are they not Souls rendered visible: inBodies, that took shape and will lose it, melting into air? Theirsolid Pavement is a picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom ofNothing, blank Time is behind them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its heels andfeather in its crown, is but of Today, without a Yesterday or aTomorrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsaoverran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a living link in thatTissue of History, which inweaves all Being: watch well, or it will bepast thee, and seen no more. "

"_Ach, mein Lieber!_" said he once, at midnight, when we had returnedfrom the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimityto dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smokeand thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign ofNight, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs overthe Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum ofMidnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheelsof Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, arebearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch for her;and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, areabroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sickLife, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous covelet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat liessimmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men aredying there, men are being born; men are praying, --on the other sideof a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is thevast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumedsaloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers intotruckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: inobscure cellars, _Rouge-et-Noir_ languidly emits its voice-of-destinyto haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. TheLover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full ofhope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders: theThief, still more silently, sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, orlurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gaymansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light andmusic and high-swelling hearts; but, in the Condemned Cells, the pulseof life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look-out throughthe darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a sternlast morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow: comes nohammering from the _Rabenstein_?--their gallows must even now be o'building. Upwards of five-hundred-thousand two-legged animals withoutfeathers lie round us, in horizontal positions; their heads all innightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, andstaggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, withstreaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose crackedlips only her tears now moisten. --All these heaped and huddledtogether, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry betweenthem;--crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel;--or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each strugglingto get its _head above_ the others: _such_ work goes on under thatsmoke-counterpane!--But I, _mein Werther_, sit above it all; I amalone with the Stars. "

We looked in his face to see whether, in the utterance of suchextraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there; butwith the light we had, which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness andfixedness was visible. 

These were the Professor's talking seasons: most commonly he spoke inmere monosyllables, or sat altogether silent, and smoked; while thevisitor had liberty either to say what he listed, receiving for answeran occasional grunt; or to look round for a space, and then takehimself away. It was a strange apartment; full of books and tatteredpapers, and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable substances, 'united in a common element of dust. ' Books lay on tables, and belowtables; here fluttered a sheet of manuscript, there a tornhandkerchief, or nightcap hastily thrown aside; ink-bottles alternatedwith bread-crusts, coffee-pots, tobacco-boxes, Periodical Literature, and Blücher Boots. Old Lieschen (Lisekin, 'Liza), who was hisbed-maker and stove-lighter, his washer and wringer, cook, errand-maid, and general lion's-provider, and for the rest a veryorderly creature, had no sovereign authority in this last citadel ofTeufelsdröckh; only some once in the month she half-forcibly made hermay thither, with broom and duster, and (Teufelsdröckh hastily savinghis manuscripts) effected a partial clearance, a jail-delivery of suchlumber as was not literary. These were her _Erdbeben_ (earthquakes), which Teufelsdröckh dreaded worse than the pestilence; nevertheless, to such length he had been forced to comply. Glad would he have beento sit here philosophising forever, or till the litter, byaccumulation, drove him out of doors: but Lieschen was his right-arm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and would not be flatly gainsayed. We can still remember the ancient woman; so silent that some thoughther dumb; deaf also you would often have supposed her; forTeufelsdröckh, and Teufelsdröckh only, would she serve or give heedto; and with him she seemed to communicate chiefly by signs; if itwere not rather by some secret divination that she guessed all hiswants, and supplied them. Assiduous old dame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, in her kitchen, with the least possible violence to theear; yet all was tight and right there: hot and black came the coffeeever at the due moment; and the speechless Lieschen herself looked outon you, from under her clean white coif with its lappets, through herclean withered face and wrinkles, with a look of helpful intelligence, almost of benevolence. 

Few strangers, as above hinted, had admittance hither: the only one weever saw there, ourselves excepted, was the Hofrath Heuschrecke, already known, by name and expectation, to the readers of these pages. To us, at that period, Herr Heuschrecke seemed one of thosepurse-mouthed, crane-necked, clean-brushed, pacific individuals, perhaps sufficiently distinguished in society by this fact, that, indry weather or in wet, 'they never appear without their umbrella. ' Hadwe not known with what 'little wisdom' the world is governed; and how, in Germany as elsewhere, the ninety-and-nine Public Men can for mostpart be but mute train-bearers to the hundredth, perhaps butstalking-horses and willing or unwilling dupes, --it might have seemedwonderful how Herr Heuschrecke should be named a Rath, or Councillor, and Counsellor, even in Weissnichtwo. What counsel to any man, or toany woman, could this particular Hofrath give; in whose loose, zigzagfigure; in whose thin visage, as it went jerking to and fro, in minuteincessant fluctuation, --you traced rather confusion worse confounded;at most, Timidity and physical Cold? Some indeed said withal, he was'the very Spirit of Love embodied': blue earnest eyes, full of sadnessand kindness; purse ever open, and so forth; the whole of which, weshall now hope, for many reasons, was not quite groundless. Nevertheless friend Teufelsdröckh's outline, who indeed handled theburin like few in these cases, was probably the best: _Er hat Gemüthund Geist, hat wenigstens gehabt, doch ohne Organ, ohneSchicksals-Gunst; ist gegenwärtig aber halb-zerrüttet, halb-erstarrt_, "He has heart and talent, at least has had such, yet without fit modeof utterance, or favour of Fortune; and so is now half-cracked, half-congealed. "--What the Hofrath shall think of this when he seesit, readers may wonder: we, safe in the stronghold of HistoricalFidelity, are careless. 

The main point, doubtless, for us all, is his love of Teufelsdröckh, which indeed was also by far the most decisive feature of Heuschreckehimself. We are enabled to assert that he hung on the Professor withthe fondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. And perhaps with the likereturn; for Teufelsdröckh treated his gaunt admirer with littleoutward regard, as some half-rational or altogether irrational friend, and at best loved him out of gratitude and by habit. On the otherhand, it was curious to observe with what reverent kindness, and asort of fatherly protection, our Hofrath, being the elder, richer, andas he fondly imagined far more practically influential of the two, looked and tended on his little Sage, whom he seemed to consider as aliving oracle. Let but Teufelsdröckh open his mouth, Heuschrecke'salso unpuckered itself into a free doorway, besides his being all eyeand all ear, so that nothing might be lost: and then, at every pausein the harangue, he gurgled-out his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh(for the machinery of laughter took some time to get in motion, andseemed crank and slack), or else his twanging nasal, _Bravo! Dasglaub' ich_; in either case, by way of heartiest approval. In short, if Teufelsdröckh was Dalai-Lama, of which, except perhaps in hisself-seclusion, and god-like indifference, there was no symptom, thenmight Heuschrecke pass for his chief Talapoin, to whom no dough-pillhe could knead and publish was other than medicinal and sacred. 

In such environment, social, domestic, physical, did Teufelsdröckh, atthe time of our acquaintance, and most likely does he still, live andmeditate. Here, perched-up in his high Wahngasse watch-tower, andoften, in solitude, outwatching the Bear, it was that the indomitableInquirer fought all his battles with Dulness and Darkness; here, inall probability, that he wrote this surprising Volume on _Clothes_. Additional particulars: of his age, which was of that standing middlesort you could only guess at; of his wide surtout; the colour of histrousers, fashion of his broad-brimmed steeple-hat, and so forth, wemight report, but do not. The Wisest truly is, in these times, theGreatest; so that an enlightened curiosity, leaving Kings and suchliketo rest very much on their own basis, turns more and more to thePhilosophic Class: nevertheless, what reader expects that, with allour writing and reporting, Teufelsdröckh could be brought home to him, till once the Documents arrive? His Life, Fortunes, and BodilyPresence, are as yet hidden from us, or matter only of faintconjecture. But, on the other hand, does not his Soul lie enclosed inthis remarkable Volume, much more truly than Pedro Garcia's did in theburied Bag of Doubloons? To the soul of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, to hisopinions, namely, on the 'Origin and Influence of Clothes, ' we for thepresent gladly return. 

CHAPTER IV

CHARACTERISTICS

It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothesentirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, likethe very Sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work ofgenius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amidits effulgence, --a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dulness, double-vision, and even utter blindness. 

Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises andprophesyings of the _Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger_, we admitted that theBook had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is thebest effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our wayof thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening ofa new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of Speculation mighthenceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now bedeclared that Professor Teufelsdröckh's acquirements, patience ofresearch, philosophic and even poetic vigour, are here madeindisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity andtortuosity and manifold ineptitude; that, on the whole, as in openingnew mine-shafts is not unreasonable, there is much rubbish in hisBook, though likewise specimens of almost invaluable ore. A paramountpopularity in England we cannot promise him. Apart from the choice ofsuch a topic as Clothes, too often the manner of treating it betokensin the Author a rusticity and academic seclusion, unblamable, indeedinevitable in a German, but fatal to his success with our public. 

Of good society Teufelsdröckh appears to have seen little, or hasmostly forgotten what he saw. He speaks-out with a strange plainness;calls many things by their mere dictionary names. To him theUpholsterer is no Pontiff, neither is any Drawing-room a Temple, wereit never so begilt and overhung: 'a whole immensity of Brusselscarpets, and pier-glasses, and or-molu, ' as he himself expresses it, 'cannot hide from me that such Drawing-room is simply a section ofInfinite Space, where so many God-created Souls do for the time meettogether. ' To Teufelsdröckh the highest Duchess is respectable, isvenerable; but nowise for her pearl bracelets and Malines laces: inhis eyes, the star of a Lord is little less and little more than thebroad button of Birmingham spelter in a Clown's smock; 'each is animplement, ' he says, 'in its kind; a tag for _hooking-together_; and, for the rest, was dug from the earth, and hammered on a smithy beforesmith's fingers. ' Thus does the Professor look in men's faces with astrange impartiality, a strange scientific freedom; like a manunversed in the higher circles, like a man dropped thither from theMoon. Rightly considered, it is in this peculiarity, running throughhis whole system of thought, that all these short-comings, over-shootings, and multiform perversities, take rise: if indeed theyhave not a second source, also natural enough, in his TranscendentalPhilosophies, and humour of looking at all Matter and Material thingsas Spirit; whereby truly his case were but the more hopeless, the morelamentable. 

To the Thinkers of this nation, however, of which class it is firmlybelieved there are individuals yet extant, we can safely recommend theWork: nay, who knows but among the fashionable ranks too, if it betrue, as Teufelsdröckh maintains, that 'within the most starchedcravat there passes a windpipe and weasand, and under the thickliestembroidered waistcoat beats a heart, '--the force of that raptearnestness may be felt, and here and there an arrow of the soulpierce through? In our wild Seer, shaggy, unkempt, like a Baptistliving on locusts and wild honey, there is an untutored energy, asilent, as it were unconscious, strength, which, except in the higherwalks of Literature, must be rare. Many a deep glance, and often withunspeakable precision, has he cast into mysterious Nature, and thestill more mysterious Life of Man. Wonderful it is with what cuttingwords, now and then, he severs asunder the confusion; shears down, were it furlongs deep, into the true centre of the matter; and therenot only hits the nail on the head, but with crushing force smites ithome, and buries it. --On the other hand, let us be free to admit, heis the most unequal writer breathing. Often after some such feat, hewill play truant for long pages, and go dawdling and dreaming, andmumbling and maundering the merest commonplaces, as if he were asleepwith eyes open, which indeed he is. 

Of his boundless Learning, and how all reading and literature in mostknown tongues, from _Sanchoniathon_ to _Dr Lingard_, from yourOriental _Shasters_, and _Talmuds_, and _Korans_, with Cassini's_Siamese Tables_, and Laplace's _Mécanique Céleste_, down to _RobinsonCrusoe_ and the _Belfast Town and Country Almanack_, are familiar tohim, --we shall say nothing: for unexampled as it is with us, to theGermans such universality of study passes without wonder, as a thingcommendable, indeed, but natural, indispensable, and there of course. A man that devotes his life to learning, shall he not be learned?

In respect of style our Author manifests the same genial capability, marred too often by the same rudeness, inequality, and apparent wantof intercourse with the higher classes. Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigour, a true inspiration; his burning thoughtsstep forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from Jove's head; a rich, idiomaticdiction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quainttricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages;circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, sooften intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdröckh is not acultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenthsstand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angularattitudes, buttressed-up by props (of parentheses and dashes), andever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few evensprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed anddismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there liesin him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole utteranceof the man, like its keynote and regulator; now screwing itself aloftas into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; nowsinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, thoughsometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it onlyas a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremelydifficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfiedourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckonamong the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mereInsanity and Inanity, which doubtless ranks below the very lowest. 

Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, dowe still lie with regard to the Professor's moral feeling. Gleams ofan ethereal Love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity;he could clasp the whole Universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; itseems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Thenagain he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows suchindifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; andever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, ifindeed it be not mere stolid callousness, --that you look on him almostwith a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom thisgreat terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some hugefoolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, andstars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which onlychildren could take interest. His look, as we mentioned, is probablythe gravest ever seen: yet it is not of that cast-iron gravityfrequent enough among our own Chancery suitors; but rather the gravityas of some silent, high-encircled mountain-pool, perhaps the crater ofan extinct volcano; into whose black deeps you fear to gaze: thoseeyes, those lights that sparkle in it, may indeed be reflexes of theheavenly Stars, but perhaps also glances from the region of NetherFire!

Certainly a most involved, self-secluded, altogether enigmatic nature, this of Teufelsdröckh! Here, however, we gladly recall to mind thatonce we saw him _laugh_; once only, perhaps it was the first and lasttime in his life; but then such a peal of laughter, enough to haveawakened the Seven Sleepers! It was of Jean Paul's doing: some singlebillow in that vast World-Mahlstrom of Humour, with its heaven-kissingcoruscations, which is now, alas, all congealed in the frost of death!The large-bodied Poet and the small, both large enough in soul, sattalking miscellaneously together, the present Editor being privilegedto listen; and now Paul, in his serious way, was giving one of thoseinimitable 'Extra-harangues'; and, as it chanced, On the Proposal fora _Cast-metal King_: gradually a light kindled in our Professor's eyesand face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest light; through those murkyfeatures, a radiant, ever-young Apollo looked; and he burst forth likethe neighing of all Tattersall's, --tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air, --loud, long-continuing, uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face and diaphragm only, but of thewhole man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with measure, began to fear all was not right: however, Teufelsdröckh composed himself, and sank into his old stillness; onhis inscrutable countenance there was, if anything, a slight look ofshame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again. Readers who haveany tincture of Psychology know how much is to be inferred from this;and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can bealtogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: thecipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear aneverlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitteras of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat outwards; or atbest, produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they werelaughing through wool: of none such comes good. The man who cannotlaugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but hiswhole life is already a treason and a stratagem. 

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcelypardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want ofarrangement. In this remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence tothe mere course of Time produces, through the Narrative portions, acertain show of outward method; but of true logical method andsequence there is too little. Apart from its multifarious sections andsubdivisions, the Work naturally falls into two Parts; aHistorical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthiccombination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quitethrough the other. Many sections are of a debatable rubric or evenquite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only loses inaccessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup andsolid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, werehurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invitedto help itself. To bring what order we can out of this Chaos shall bepart of our endeavour. 

CHAPTER V

THE WORLD IN CLOTHES

'As Montesquieu wrote a _Spirit of Laws_, ' observes our Professor, 'socould I write a _Spirit of Clothes_; thus, with an _Esprit des Lois_, properly an _Esprit de Coutumes_, we should have an _Esprit deCostumes_. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does manproceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysteriousoperations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavours, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Clothare the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in foldedmantles, based on light sandals; tower-up in high headgear, from amidpeaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell-out in starched ruffs, buckramstuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separatesections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs, --willdepend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian orAnglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in Colour! From the soberestdrab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfoldthemselves in choice of Colour: if the Cut betoken Intellect andTalent, so does the Colour betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect:every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed byever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superiororder are neither invisible nor illegible. 

'For such superior Intelligences a Cause-and-Effect Philosophy ofClothes, as of Laws, were probably a comfortable winter-eveningentertainment: nevertheless, for inferior Intelligences, like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling Lettersfrom a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which lies inEternity, in Heaven?--Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not why I wear such and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; buteven why _I_ am _here_, to wear and obey anything!--Much, therefore, if not the whole, of that same _Spirit of Clothes_ I shall suppress, as hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent: naked Facts, andDeductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omniscientstyle, are my humbler and proper province. '

Acting on which prudent restriction, Teufelsdröckh has neverthelesscontrived to take-in a well-nigh boundless extent of field; at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection beingindispensable, we shall here glance-over his First Part only in themost cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt, distinguished byomnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the sametime, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely tointerest the Compilers of some _Library_ of General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge than the miscellaneous readers ofthese pages. Was it this Part of the Book which Heuschrecke had inview, when he recommended us to that joint-stock vehicle ofpublication, 'at present the glory of British Literature'? If so, theLibrary Editors are welcome to dig in it for their own behoof. 

To the First Chapter, which turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves, andleads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological, metaphorical, cabalistico-sartorial and quite antediluvian cast, weshall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval. Stillless have we to do with 'Lilis, Adam's first wife, whom, according tothe Talmudists, he had before Eve, and who bore him, in that wedlock, the whole progeny of aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial Devils, '--veryneedlessly, we think. On this portion of the Work, with its profoundglances into the _Adam-Kadmon_, or Primeval Element, here strangelybrought into relation with the _Nifl_ and _Muspel_ (Darkness andLight) of the antique North, it may be enough to say, that itscorrectness of deduction, and depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lorehave filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist in Britain with somethinglike astonishment. 

But, quitting this twilight region, Teufelsdröckh hastens from theTower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the wholehabitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modernresearches of every conceivable kind, he strives to give us incompressed shape (as the Nürnbergers give an _Orbis Pictus_) an _OrbisVestitus_; or view of the costumes of all mankind, in all countries, in all times. It is here that to the Antiquarian, to the Historian, wecan triumphantly say: Fall to! Here is learning: an irregularTreasury, if you will; but inexhaustible as the Hoard of KingNibelung, which twelve wagons in twelve days, at the rate of threejourneys a day, could not carry off. Sheepskin cloaks and wampumbelts; phylacteries, stoles, albs; chlamydes, togas, Chinese silks, Afghaun shawls, trunk-hose, leather breeches, Celtic philibegs (thoughbreeches, as the name _Gallia Braccata_ indicates, are the moreancient), Hussar cloaks, Vandyke tippets, ruffs, fardingales, arebrought vividly before us, --even the Kilmarnock nightcap is notforgotten. For most part, too, we must admit that the Learning, heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is trueconcentrated and purified Learning, the drossy parts smelted out andthrown aside. 

Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching picturesof human life. Of this sort the following has surprised us. The firstpurpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth ordecency, but ornament. 'Miserable indeed, ' says he, 'was the conditionof the Aboriginal Savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece ofhair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung roundhim like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thicknatural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living onwild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself inmorasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his solepossession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cordof plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it withdeadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger and Revengeonce satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but Decoration (_Putz_). Warmth he found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, inhis hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but forDecoration he must have Clothes. Nay, among wild people we findtattooing and painting even prior to Clothes. The first spiritual wantof a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see among thebarbarous classes in civilised countries. 

'Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest SereneHighness; nay thy own amber-locked, snow-and-rose-bloom Maiden, worthyto glide sylphlike almost on air, whom thou lovest, worshippest as adivine Presence, which, indeed, symbolically taken, she is, --hasdescended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurlingAboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of the eater cometh forth meat; out ofthe strong cometh forth sweetness. What changes are wrought, not bytime, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does orbeholds, is in continual growth, regenesis and self-perfectingvitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, ever-working Universe: it is a seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticedto-day (says one), it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-grove(perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest!) after a thousand years. 

'He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of _MovableTypes_ was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings andSenates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had inventedthe Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur, andCharcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling: what willthe last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force underThought, of Animal courage under Spiritual. A simple invention it wasin the old-world Grazier, --sick of lugging his slow Ox about thecountry till he got it bartered for corn or oil, --to take a piece ofLeather, and thereon scratch or stamp the mere Figure of an Ox (or_Pecus_); put it in his pocket, and call it _Pecunia_, Money. Yethereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now Golden andPaper, and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there areRothschilds and English National Debts; and whoso has sixpence issovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks tofeed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard overhim, --to the length of sixpence. --Clothes too, which began infoolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! IncreasedSecurity and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (_Schaam_, Modesty), as yet a stranger to theAnthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; amystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave usindividuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men ofus; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us. 

'But, on the whole, ' continues our eloquent Professor, 'Man is aTool-using Animal (_Handthierendes Thier_). Weak in himself, and ofsmall stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out hislegs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Threequintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosseshim aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can deviseTools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust beforehim; he kneads glowing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are hissmooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do youfind him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he isall. '

Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with aremark, that this Definition of the Tool-using Animal, appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the precisest and best? Man iscalled a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attemptto do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher?Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do wemake of that other French Definition of the Cooking Animal; which, indeed, for rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can aTartar be said to cook, when he only readies his steak by riding onit? Again, what Cookery does the Greenlander use, beyond stowing-uphis whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the like case, might do? Or howwould Monsieur Ude prosper among those Orinocco Indians, who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow-nests, on the branches of trees;and, for half the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay, the wholecountry being under water? But, on the other hand, show us the humanbeing, of any period or climate, without his Tools: those veryCaledonians, as we saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such asno brute has or can have. 

'Man is a Tool-using Animal, ' concludes Teufelsdröckh in his abruptway; 'of which truth Clothes are but one example: and surely if weconsider the interval between the first wooden Dibble fashioned byman, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or the British House ofCommons, we shall note what progress he has made. He digs up certainblack stones from the bosom of the earth, and says to them, _Transportme and this luggage at the rate of five-and-thirty miles an hour_; andthey do it: he collects, apparently by lot, six-hundred andfifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, _Make thisnation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us_;and they do it. '

CHAPTER VI

APRONS

One of the most unsatisfactory Sections in the whole Volume is that on_Aprons_. What though stout old Gao, the Persian Blacksmith, 'whoseApron, now indeed hidden under jewels, because raised in revolt whichproved successful, is still the royal standard of that country'; whatthough John Knox's Daughter, 'who threatened Sovereign Majesty thatshe would catch her husband's head in her Apron, rather than he shouldlie and be a bishop'; what though the Landgravine Elizabeth, with manyother Apron worthies, --figure here? An idle wire-drawing spirit, sometimes even a tone of levity, approaching to conventional satire, is too clearly discernible. What, for example, are we to make of suchsentences as the following?

'Aprons are Defences; against injury to cleanliness, to safety, tomodesty, sometimes to roguery. From the thin slip of notched silk (asit were, the Emblem and beatified Ghost of an Apron), which somehighest-bred housewife, sitting at Nürnberg Workboxes and Toyboxes, has gracefully fastened on; to the thick-tanned hide, girt round himwith thongs, wherein the Builder builds, and at evening sticks histrowel; or to those jingling sheet-iron Aprons, wherein your otherwisehalf-naked Vulcans hammer and smelt in their smelt-furnace, --is therenot range enough in the fashion and uses of this Vestment? How muchhas been concealed, how much has been defended in Aprons! Nay, rightlyconsidered, what is your whole Military and Police Establishment, charged at uncalculated millions, but a huge scarlet-coloured, iron-fastened Apron, wherein Society works (uneasily enough); guardingitself from some soil and stithy-sparks, in this Devil's-smithy(_Teufelsschmiede_) of a world? But of all Aprons the most puzzling tome hitherto has been the Episcopal or Cassock. Wherein consists theusefulness of this Apron? The Overseer (_Episcopus_) of Souls, Inotice, has tucked-in the corner of it, as if his day's work weredone: what does he shadow forth thereby?' &c. &c. 

Or again, has it often been the lot of our readers to read such stuffas we shall now quote?

'I consider those printed Paper Aprons, worn by the Parisian Cooks, asa new vent, though a slight one, for Typography; therefore as anencouragement to modern Literature, and deserving of approval: nor isit without satisfaction that I hear of a celebrated London Firm havingin view to introduce the same fashion, with important extensions, inEngland. '--We who are on the spot hear of no such thing; and indeedhave reason to be thankful that hitherto there are other vents for ourLiterature, exuberant as it is. --Teufelsdröckh continues: 'If suchsupply of printed Paper should rise so far as to choke-up the highwaysand public thoroughfares, new means must of necessity be had recourseto. In a world existing by Industry, we grudge to employ fire as adestroying element, and not as a creating one. However, Heaven isomnipotent, and will find us an outlet. In the mean while, is it notbeautiful to see five-million quintals of Rags picked annually fromthe Laystall; and annually, after being macerated, hot-pressed, printed-on, and sold, --returned thither; filling so many hungry mouthsby the way? Thus is the Laystall, especially with its Rags orClothes-rubbish, the grand Electric Battery, and Fountain-of-motion, from which and to which the Social Activities (like vitreous andresinous Electricities) circulate, in larger or smaller circles, through the mighty, billowy, storm-tost Chaos of Life, which they keepalive!'--Such passages fill us, who love the man, and partly esteemhim, with a very mixed feeling. 

Farther down we meet with this: 'The Journalists are now the trueKings and Clergy: henceforth Historians, unless they are fools, mustwrite not of Bourbon Dynasties, and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but ofStamped Broad-sheet Dynasties, and quite new successive Names, according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of AbleEditors, gains the world's ear. Of the British Newspaper Press, perhaps the most important of all, and wonderful enough in its secretconstitution and procedure, a valuable descriptive History alreadyexists, in that language, under the title of _Satan's Invisible WorldDisplayed_; which, however, by search in all the WeissnichtwoLibraries, I have not yet succeeded in procuring (_vermöchte nichtaufzutreiben_). '

Thus does the good Homer not only nod, but snore. Thus doesTeufelsdröckh, wandering in regions where he had little business, confound the old authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a new, spurious, imaginary Historian of the _Brittische Journalistik_; and sostumble on perhaps the most egregious blunder in Modern Literature!

CHAPTER VII

MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL

Happier is our Professor, and more purely scientific and historic, when he reaches the Middle Ages in Europe, and down to the end of theSeventeenth Century; the true era of extravagance in Costume. It ishere that the Antiquary and Student of Modes comes upon his richestharvest. Fantastic garbs, beggaring all fancy of a Teniers or aCallot, succeed each other, like monster devouring monster in a Dream. The whole too in brief authentic strokes, and touched not seldom withthat breath of genius which makes even old raiment live. Indeed, solearned, precise, graphical, and everyway interesting have we foundthese Chapters, that it may be thrown-out as a pertinent question forparties concerned, Whether or not a good English Translation thereofmight henceforth be profitably incorporated with Mr. Merrick'svaluable Work _On Ancient Armour_? Take, by way of example, thefollowing sketch; as authority for which Paulinus's _ZeitkürzendeLust_ (ii. 678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to:

'Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century, we might smile; as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to riseagain, and see our haberdashery, would cross themselves, and invokethe Virgin. But happily no bygone German, or man, rises again; thusthe Present is not needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only growsout of it, like a Tree, whose roots are not intertangled with itsbranches, but lie peaceably underground. Nay it is very mournful, yetnot useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a shortwhile, would find his place quite filled-up here, and no room for him;the very Napoleon, the very Byron, in some seven years, has becomeobsolete, and were now a foreigner to his Europe. Thus is the Law ofProgress secured; and in Clothes, as in all other external thingswhatsoever, no fashion will continue. 

'Of the military classes in those old times, whose buff-belts, complicated chains and gorgets, huge churn-boots, and other riding andfighting gear have been bepainted in modern Romance, till the wholehas acquired somewhat of a sign-post character, --I shall here saynothing: the civil and pacific classes, less touched upon, arewonderful enough for us. 

'Rich men, I find, have _Teusinke_' (a perhaps untranslateablearticle); 'also a silver girdle, whereat hang little bells; so thatwhen a man walks, it is with continual jingling. Some few, of musicalturn, have a whole chime of bells (_Glockenspiel_) fastened there;which, especially in sudden whirls, and the other accidents ofwalking, has a grateful effect. Observe too how fond they are ofpeaks, and Gothic-arch intersections. The male world wears peakedcaps, an ell long, which hang bobbing over the side (_schief_): theirshoes are peaked in front, also to the length of an ell, and laced onthe side with tags; even the wooden shoes have their ell-long noses:some also clap bells on the peak. Further, according to my authority, the men have breeches without seat (_ohne Gesäss_): these they fastenpeakwise to their shirts; and the long round doublet must overlapthem. 

'Rich maidens, again, flit abroad in gowns scolloped out behind andbefore, so that back and breast are almost bare. Wives of quality, onthe other hand, have train-gowns four or five ells in length; whichtrains there are boys to carry. Brave Cleopatras, sailing in theirsilk-cloth Galley, with a Cupid for steersman! Consider their welts, ahandbreadth thick, which waver round them by way of hem; the longflood of silver buttons, or rather silver shells, from throat to shoe, wherewith these same welt-gowns are buttoned. The maidens have boundsilver snoods about their hair, with gold spangles, and pendent flames(_Flammen_), that is, sparkling hair-drops: but of their mother'sheadgear who shall speak? Neither in love of grace is comfortforgotten. In winter weather you behold the whole fair creation (thatcan afford it) in long mantles, with skirts wide below, and, for hem, not one but two sufficient hand-broad welts; all ending atop in athick well-starched Ruff, some twenty inches broad: these are theirRuff-mantles (_Kragenmäntel_). 

'As yet among the womankind hoop-petticoats are not; but the men havedoublets of fustian, under which lie multiple ruffs of cloth, pastedtogether with batter (_mit Teig zusammengekleistert_), which createprotuberance enough. Thus do the two sexes vie with each other in theart of Decoration; and as usual the stronger carries it. '

Our Professor, whether he hath humour himself or not, manifests acertain feeling of the Ludicrous, a sly observance of it, which, couldemotion of any kind be confidently predicated of so still a man, wemight call a real love. None of those bell-girdles, bushel-breeches, cornuted shoes, or other the like phenomena, of which the History ofDress offers so many, escape him: more especially the mischances, orstriking adventures, incident to the wearers of such, are noticed withdue fidelity. Sir Walter Raleigh's fine mantle, which he spread in themud under Queen Elizabeth's feet, appears to provoke little enthusiasmin him; he merely asks, Whether at that period the Maiden Queen 'wasred-painted on the nose, and white-painted on the cheeks, as hertire-women, when from spleen and wrinkles she would no longer look inany glass, were wont to serve her?' We can answer that Sir Walter knewwell what he was doing, and had the Maiden Queen been stuffedparchment dyed in verdigris, would have done the same. 

Thus too, treating of those enormous habiliments, that were not onlyslashed and galooned, but artificially swollen-out on the broaderparts of the body, by introduction of Bran, --our Professor fails notto comment on that luckless Courtier, who having seated himself on achair with some projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to payhis _devoir_ on the entrance of Majesty, instantaneously emittedseveral pecks of dry wheat-dust: and stood there diminished to aspindle, his galoons and slashes dangling sorrowful and flabby roundhim. Whereupon the Professor publishes this reflection:

'By what strange chances do we live in History? Erostratus by a torch;Milo by a bullock; Henry Darnley, an unfledged booby and bustard, byhis limbs; most Kings and Queens by being born under such and such abed-tester; Boileau Despréaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck ofa turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in hisbreeches, --for no Memoirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain wasthe prayer of Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield cheerfully to Destiny, and read since it is written. '--HasTeufelsdröckh to be put in mind that, nearly related to the impossibletalent of Forgetting, stands that talent of Silence, which eventravelling Englishmen manifest?

'The simplest costume, ' observes our Professor, 'which I anywhere findalluded to in History, is that used as regimental, by Bolivar'sCavalry, in the late Columbian wars. A square Blanket, twelve feet indiagonal, is provided (some were wont to cut-off the corners, and makeit circular): in the centre a slit is effected eighteen inches long;through this the mother-naked Trooper introduces his head and neck:and so rides shielded from all weather, and in battle from manystrokes (for he rolls it about his left arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and draperied. '

With which picture of a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part ofour subject. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES

If in the Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merely the _Werden_ (Origin and successiveImprovement) of Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more willhe in the Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their_Wirken_, or Influences. It is here that the present Editor firstfeels the pressure of his task; for here properly the higher and newPhilosophy of Clothes commences: an untried, almost inconceivableregion, or chaos; in venturing upon which, how difficult, yet howunspeakably important is it to know what course, of survey andconquest, is the true one; where the footing is firm substance andwill bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud, and may engulf us!Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man'searthly interests 'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes. ' He says in so many words, 'Society is founded uponCloth'; and again, 'Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, ason a Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and uncleanbeasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, wouldsink to endless depths, or mount to inane limboes, and in either casebe no more. '

By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditationthis grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practicalCorollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition toattempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, thatof common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, eachholding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practicalReason, proceeding by large Intuition over whole systematic groups andkingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like thatof Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: amighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay wecomplained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must callmere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim:Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For itseems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality;as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. Atpresent it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide-enough intervals from the original Volume, andcarefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline orforeshadow of this Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once moreinvited to favour us with their most concentrated attention: letthese, after intense consideration, and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there is not alooming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps wholeundiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail thither?--Asexordium to the whole, stand here the following long citation:

'With men of a speculative turn, ' writes Teufelsdröckh, 'there comeseasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fearyou ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am _I_; the thingthat can say "I" (_das Wesen das sich_ ICH _nennt_)? The world, withits loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through thepaper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerceand Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Societyand a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded, --the sightreaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another. 

'Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;--someembodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? _Cogito, ergo sum. _Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, Iam; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer liesaround, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones ofjubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmoniousNature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-writtenApocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundlessPhantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, theremotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds andmany-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rarehalf-waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadowsas if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselvesmost awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than adream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisorand dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars, withtheir Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but theSomnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism iswhat we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtinglywander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wisewho know that they know nothing. 

'Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressiblyunproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx'ssecret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which hesuffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, andCategories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castlesare cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in goodLogic-mortar, wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _Thewhole is greater than the part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhorsa vacuum_: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing canact but where it is_: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not theslave of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, andlong for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly asthe floor I stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, arefrom the first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto; say rather, theCanvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams andLife-visions are painted! Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditationtaught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, somysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficialterrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them wherethey mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have notall nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; asexisting in a universal HERE, an everlasting NOW? Think well, thou toowilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewiseTime; there _is_ no Space and no Time: WE are--we know notwhat;--light-sparkles floating in the æther of Deity!

'So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but anair-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousandfoldproduction and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the "phantasy of our Dream"; or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ namesit, _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 ofthe _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned themeaning thereof?

'It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these highspeculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strangeenough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors andTailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of thegirths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, andthe noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay hisown bootmaker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through thevalleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; whereinwarmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the gracesalso have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety ofcolour, featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While I--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleecesof sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides ofoxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a movingRag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from theCharnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on memore slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some filmof it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed-off into theAshpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushedthither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new materialto grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too acompact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass oftailors' 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 toplainest 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 anddigest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends tohate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads himby the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation ofthe World happen _twice_, and it ceases to be marvellous, to benoteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does itoccur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be hegold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments andhis Self are not one and indivisible; that _he_ is naked, withoutvestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew andbutton them. 

'For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, andhow, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorises anddemoralises 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 stripedsacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is somethinggreat in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitiouswrappages; and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, "aforked straddling animal with bandy legs"; yet also a Spirit, andunutterable Mystery of Mysteries. '

CHAPTER IX

ADAMITISM

Let no courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached in theconclusion of the last Chapter. The Editor himself, on first glancingover that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: What, have we gotnot only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? Anew Adamite, in this century, which flatters itself that it is theNineteenth, and destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm?

Consider, thou foolish Teufelsdröckh, what benefits unspeakable allages and sexes derive from Clothes. For example, when thou thyself, awatery, pulpy, slobbery freshman and new-comer in this Planet, sattestmuling and puking in thy nurse's arms; sucking thy coral, and lookingforth into the world in the blankest manner, what hadst thou beenwithout thy blankets, and bibs, and other nameless hulls? A terror tothyself and mankind! Or hast thou forgotten the day when thou firstreceivedst breeches, and thy long clothes became short? The villagewhere thou livedst was all apprised of the fact; and neighbour afterneighbour kissed thy pudding-cheek, and gave thee, as handsel, silveror 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 andplace, such phenomenon is distinguished? In that one word lie includedmysterious volumes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over, oraltered, and thy clothes are not for triumph but for defence, hastthou 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 thyBody, wherein that strange THEE of thine sat snug, defying allvariations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled kerseys;half-buried under shawls and broad-brims, and overalls and mud-boots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens, thou hast bestrode that'Horse I ride'; and, though it were in wild winter, dashed through theworld, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did the sleetbeat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted orwoven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl, --forests sounding andcreaking, deep calling unto deep, --and the storms heap themselvestogether into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through themiddle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild music hummed inthy ears, thou too wert as a 'sailor of the air'; the wreck of matterand the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting tide. Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what hadthy fleet quadruped been?--Nature is good, but she is not the best:here truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeedmight have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy. 

Or, cries the courteous reader, has your Teufelsdröckh forgotten whathe said lately about 'Aboriginal Savages, ' and their 'conditionmiserable indeed'? Would he have all this unsaid; and us betakeourselves again to the 'matted cloak, ' and go sheeted in a 'thicknatural fell'?

Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he issaying; and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these times, 'so tailorise and demoralise us, ' have they noredeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they ofnecessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdröckh, though aSansculottist, is no Adamite; and much perhaps as he might wish to goforth before this degenerate age 'as a Sign, ' would nowise wish to doit, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility ofClothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insightinto their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we mightcall the omnipotent virtue of Clothes, such as was never beforevouchsafed to any man. For example:

'You see two individuals, ' he writes, 'one dressed in fine Red, theother in coarse threadbare Blue: Red says to Blue, "Be hanged andanatomised"; Blue hears with a shudder, and (O wonder of wonders!)marches sorrowfully to the gallows; is there noosed-up, vibrates hishour, and the surgeons dissect him, and fit his bones into a skeletonfor medical purposes. How is this; or what make ye of your _Nothingcan act but where it is_? Red has no physical hold of Blue, no_clutch_ of him, is nowise in _contact_ with him: neither are thoseministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and Hangmen and Tipstaves sorelated to commanding Red, that he can tug them hither and thither;but each stands distinct within his own skin. Nevertheless, as it isspoken, 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 isa Spirit_, and bound by invisible bonds to _All Men_; secondly, that_he wears Clothes_, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Hasnot your Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and aplush-gown; whereby all mortals know that he is a JUDGE?--Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded uponCloth. 

'Often in my atrabiliar-moods, when I read of pompous ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, Levees, Couchees; and howthe ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Dukethis is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, andinnumerable Bishops, Admirals, and miscellaneous Functionaries, areadvancing gallantly to the Anointed Presence; and I strive, in myremote privacy, to form a clear picture of that solemnity, --on asudden, as by some enchanter's wand, the--shall I speak it?--theClothes fly-off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son ofthem, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know notwhether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, inwhich perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thoughtright 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 inhis Morning Newspaper without a shudder? Hypochondriac men, and allmen are to a certain extent hypochondriac, should be more gentlytreated. With what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of thenerves, follows out the consequences which Teufelsdröckh, with adevilish 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 woolevaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream? _Ach Gott!_ How each skulksinto the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (_Haupt- undStaats-Action_) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is theworst kind of Farce; _the tables_ (according to Horace), and withthem, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilised Society, _are dissolved_, in wails and howls. '

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing anaked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoilson itself, and will not forward with the picture. The Woolsack, theMinisterial, the Opposition Benches--_infandum! infandum!_ And yet whyis the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, ofthese Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; 'aforked 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 asinto bed, in that no-fashion; and there, with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of Justice? 'Solace of those afflicted with the like!'Unhappy Teufelsdröckh, had man ever such a 'physical or psychicalinfirmity' before? And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleledconfession (which we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded-onby Critical and Biographical duty, grudge to re-impart) incurablyinfect therewith! Art thou the malignest of Sansculottists, or onlythe maddest?

'It will remain to be examined, ' adds the inexorable Teufelsdröckh, 'in how far the SCARECROW, as a Clothed Person, is not also entitledto benefit of clergy, and English trial by jury: nay perhaps, considering his high function (for is not he too a Defender ofProperty, and Sovereign armed with the _terrors_ of the Law?), to acertain royal Immunity and Inviolability; which, however, misers andthe meaner class of persons are not always voluntarily disposed togrant him. ' * * *

* * * 'O my Friends, we are (in Yorick Sterne's words) but as "turkeysdriven 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, therattle thereof terrifies the boldest!'

CHAPTER X

PURE REASON

It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, isa speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and 'bladders with dried peas. ' To linger among suchspeculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning publiccan have no wish. For our purposes the simple fact that such a _NakedWorld_ is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), willbe sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about 'Kings wrestling nakedon the green with Carmen, ' and the Kings being thrown: 'dissect themwith scalpels, ' says Teufelsdröckh; 'the same viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other life-tackle are there: examine theirspiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, and littleFaculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who understandsdraught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws ofunstable and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is themore cunningly gifted of the two. Whence, then, their so unspeakabledifference? From Clothes. ' Much also we shall omit about confusion ofRanks, and Joan and My Lady, and how it would be everywhere 'Hailfellow well met, ' and Chaos were come again: all which to any one thathas once fairly pictured-out the grand mother-idea, _Society in astate of nakedness_, will spontaneously suggest itself. Should somesceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world withoutClothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundlessSerbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: overwhich we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but wholenations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its briefriveting 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, andtrue pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?'

Nevertheless, it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdröckh; atworst, one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though, inlooking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and evensacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chieflyon the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, andmanifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolicpatience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimationof most readers, --there is that within which unspeakably distinguisheshim from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grandunparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdröckh is, that with all thisDescendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no less superlative;whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most animals, exceptthose jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond thevisible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods. 

'To the eye of vulgar Logic, ' says he, 'what is man? An omnivorousBiped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? ASoul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, therelies, 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 forhimself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands ofYears. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds andColours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricablyover-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he notthereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? Hefeels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not thespirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, withhis lips of gold, "the true SHEKINAH is Man": where else is theGOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, asin our fellow-man?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism ofour Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapourand tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior andenvironment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light andLove;--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; andindeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothingthat he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings:thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, aswell as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gipsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and areverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honourable, can it bemore? The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any wayconceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of thehigher, celestial Invisible, 'unimaginable, formless, dark with excessof bright'? Under which point of view the following passage, sostrange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

'The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or evenwith armed eyesight, till they become _transparent_. "ThePhilosopher, " says the wisest of this age, "must station himself inthe middle": how true! The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest hasdescended, and the Lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindlybrother of all. 

'Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven inArkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly inour imagination? Or, on the other hand, what is there that we cannotlove; since all was created by God?

'Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the woollen, andfleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Manhimself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also aninscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees witheyes!'

For the rest, as is natural to a man of this kind, he deals much inthe feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and high worth ofuniversal Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable temper forthe denizen of so singular a Planet as ours. 'Wonder, ' says he, 'isthe basis of Worship: the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructiblein Man; only at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some shortseason, a reign _in partibus infidelium_. ' That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensurationand Numeration, finds small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as heotherwise venerates these two latter processes. 

'Shall your Science, ' exclaims he, 'proceed in the smallchink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logicalone; and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory isthe Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, andTreatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? And whatis 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 italive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart, --but one other ofthe mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head(having a Soul in it) is too noble an organ? I mean that Thoughtwithout Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at best, dies likecookery with the day that called it forth; does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests, bringing food andplenteous increase to all Time. '

In such wise does Teufelsdröckh deal hits, harder or softer, accordingto ability; yet ever, as we would fain persuade ourselves, withcharitable intent. Above all, that class of 'Logic-choppers, andtreble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, in thesedays, so numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics'Institute of Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese andgoslings round their Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in fullday-light, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you andguarding you therewith, though the Sun is shining, and the streetpopulous with mere justice-loving men': that whole class isinexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what uncommon animation heperorates:

'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (andworship) were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carriedthe whole _Mécanique Céleste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and theepitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, inhis single head, --is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is noEye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful. 

'Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy worldby the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the hand-lampof what I call Attorney-Logic; and "explain" all, "account" for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; whosorecognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which iseverywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe isan Oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattlestall, --he shallbe a delirious Mystic; to him thou, with sniffing charity, wiltprotrusively proffer thy hand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, whenhe kicks his foot through it?--_Armer Teufel!_ Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gender? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thounot die? "Explain" me all this, or do one of two things: Retire intoprivate places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give itup, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's worldall disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art aDilettante and sandblind Pedant. '

CHAPTER XI

PROSPECTIVE

The Philosophy of Clothes is now to all readers, as we predicted itwould do, unfolding itself into new boundless expansions, of acloudclapt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not without azure loomingsin the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian brightness; thehighly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming moreand more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysianbrightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonianlava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, orthe yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?

Our Professor, like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do. Ever higher and dizzier are the heightshe leads us to; more piercing, all-comprehending, all-confounding arehis views and glances. For example, this of Nature being not anAggregate but a Whole:

'Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist: "If I take the wings of the morningand dwell in the uttermost parts of the universe, God is there. " Thouthyself, O cultivated reader, who too probably art no Psalmist, but aProsaist, knowing GOD only by tradition, knowest thou any corner ofthe world where at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakestfrom thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thoufindest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it isnearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not liemotionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force, and utterly dead?

'As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little firewhich grows star-like across the dark-growing (_nachtende_) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replacethy lost horse-shoe, --is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off fromthe whole Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; is fed by airthat circulates from before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the Dogstar;therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far stranger Forceof Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of Forcebrought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in thegreat vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconsciousAltar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whoseiron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingyPriest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth themystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one littletextlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man's Force, commanding, and one day to be all-commanding. 

'Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation: nothinghitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only awithered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on thebottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetualmetamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there areForces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else howcould it _rot_? Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or thelitter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanestobject is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which thephilosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself. '

Again, leaving that wondrous Schwarzwald Smithy-Altar, what vacant, high-sailing air-ships are these, and whither will they sail with us?

'All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on itsown account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists onlyspiritually, and to represent some Idea, and _body_ it forth. HenceClothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic not of wantonly, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven orhand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reasonare, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful;--therather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothesor otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?

'Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed withBeauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what isMan himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothingor visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like alight-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothedwith a Body. 

'Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should ratherbe, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of thought. I said thatImagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors areher stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitiveelements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognisedas such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and florid, or nowsolid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are theosseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language, --then are Metaphorsits muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphoricalstyle you shall in vain seek for: is not your very _Attention_ a_Stretching-to_? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quitepallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking; while others again glow in theflush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my owncase) not without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover, there are shamMetaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called itsfalse stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (_Putz-Mäntel_), and tawdrywoollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather wholehampers, --and burn them. '

Than which paragraph on Metaphors did the reader ever chance to see amore surprisingly metaphorical? However, that is not our chiefgrievance; the Professor continues:

'Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earthshall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: theTime-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoeverrepresents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit ofRaiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this onepregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all thatmen have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universeand what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science liesin the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES. '

Towards these dim infinitely-expanded regions, close-bordering on theimpalpable Inane, it is not without apprehension, and perpetualdifficulties, that the Editor sees himself journeying and struggling. Till lately a cheerful daystar of hope hung before him, in theexpected Aid of Hofrath Heuschrecke; which daystar, however, meltsnow, not into the red of morning, but into a vague, gray half-light, uncertain whether dawn of day or dusk of utter darkness. For the lastweek, these so-called Biographical Documents are in his hand. By thekindness of a Scottish Hamburg Merchant, whose name, known to thewhole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honourablecourtesy, now and often before spontaneously manifested to him, a mereliterary stranger, he cannot soon forget, --the bulky WeissnichtwoPacket, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, andmiscellaneous tokens of Travel, arrived here in perfect safety, andfree of cost. The reader shall now fancy with what hot haste it wasbroken up, with what breathless expectation glanced over; and, alas, with what unquiet disappointment it has, since then, been often throwndown, and again taken up. 

Hofrath Heuschrecke, in a too long-winded Letter, full of compliments, Weissnichtwo politics, dinners, dining repartees, and other ephemeraltrivialities, proceeds to remind us of what we know well already: thathowever it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Scienceoriginating in the Head (_Verstand_) alone, no Life-Philosophy(_Lebensphilosophie_), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, whichoriginates equally in the Character (_Gemüth_), and equally speaksthereto, can attain its significance till the Character itself isknown and seen; 'till the Author's View of the World (_Weltansicht_), and how he actively and passively came by such view, are clear: inshort till a Biography of him has been philosophico-poeticallywritten, and philosophico-poetically read. ' 'Nay, ' adds he, 'were thespeculative scientific Truth even known, you still, in this inquiringage, ask yourself, Whence came it, and Why, and How?--and rest not, till, if no better may be, Fancy have shaped-out an answer; and eitherin the authentic lineaments of Fact, or the forged ones of Fiction, acomplete picture and Genetical History of the Man and his spiritualEndeavour lies before you. But why, ' says the Hofrath, and indeed saywe, 'do I dilate on the uses of our Teufelsdröckh's Biography? Thegreat Herr Minister von Goethe has penetratingly remarked that "Man isproperly the _only_ object that interests man": thus I too have noted, that in Weissnichtwo our whole conversation is little or nothing elsebut Biography or Auto-Biography; ever humano-anecdotical(_menschlich-anekdotisch_). Biography is by nature the mostuniversally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especiallyBiography of distinguished individuals. 

'By this time, _mein Verehrtester_ (my Most Esteemed), ' continues he, with an eloquence which, unless the words be purloined fromTeufelsdröckh, or some trick of his, as we suspect, is well-nighunaccountable, 'by this time you are fairly plunged (_vertieft_) inthat mighty forest of Clothes-Philosophy; and looking round, as allreaders do, with astonishment enough. Such portions and passages asyou have already mastered, and brought to paper, could not but awakena strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhapsunparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, andemitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdröckh also a father andmother; did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat?Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his;looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, whereonly winds, and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Has hefought duels;--good Heaven! how did he comport himself when in Love?By what singular stair-steps, in short, and subterranean passages, andsloughs of Despair, and steep Pisgah hills, has he reached thiswonderful prophetic Hebron (a true Old-Clothes Jewry) where he nowdwells?

'To all these natural questions the voice of public History is as yetsilent. Certain only that he has been, and is, a Pilgrim, andTraveller from a far Country; more or less footsore and travel-soiled;has parted with road-companions; fallen among thieves, been poisonedby bad cookery, blistered with bug-bites; nevertheless at every stage(for they have let him pass), has had the Bill to discharge. But thewhole particulars of his Route, his Weather-observations, thepicturesque Sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (inindelible sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), are thesenowhere forthcoming? Perhaps quite lost: one other leaf of that mightyVolume (of human Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper; and to rot, the sport of rainy winds?

'No, _verehrtester Herr Herausgeber_, in no wise! I here, by theunexampled favour you stand in with our Sage, send not a Biographyonly, but an Autobiography: at least the materials for such;wherefrom, if I misreckon not, your perspicacity will draw fullestinsight: and so the whole Philosophy and Philosopher of Clothes willstand clear to the wondering eyes of England, nay thence, throughAmerica, through Hindostan, and the antipodal New Holland, finallyconquer (_einnehmen_) great part of this terrestrial Planet!'

And now let the sympathising reader judge of our feeling when, inplace of this same Autobiography with 'fullest insight, ' we find--Sixconsiderable PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked successively, ingilt China-ink, with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs, beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed Bags liemiscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, writtenin Professor Teufelsdröckh's scarce legible _cursiv-schrift_; andtreating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, butof his own personal history only at rare intervals, and then in themost enigmatic manner. 

Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Professor, or, as he here, speaking in the third person, calls himself, 'the Wanderer, ' is not oncenamed. Then again, amidst what seems to be a Metaphysico-theologicalDisquisition, 'Detached Thoughts on the Steam-engine, ' or, 'Thecontinued Possibility of Prophecy, ' we shall meet with some quiteprivate, not unimportant Biographical fact. On certain sheets standDreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking Actions areomitted. Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, flyloosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed alsoare long purely Autobiographical delineations; yet without connexion, without recognisable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluouslyminute, they almost remind us of 'P. P. Clerk of this Parish. ' Thusdoes famine of intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, order, appears to be unknown to the Professor. In all Bags the sameimbroglio; only perhaps in the Bag _Capricorn_, and those near it, theconfusion a little worse confounded. Close by a rather eloquent Oration, 'On receiving the Doctor's-Hat, ' lie washbills, marked _bezahlt_(settled). His Travels are indicated by the Street-Advertisements ofthe various cities he has visited; of which Street-Advertisements, inmost living tongues, here is perhaps the completest collection extant. 

So that if the Clothes-Volume itself was too like a Chaos, we have nowinstead of the solar Luminary that should still it, the airy Limbowhich by intermixture will farther volatilise and discompose it! As weshall perhaps see it our duty ultimately to deposit these SixPaper-Bags in the British Museum, farther description, and allvituperation of them, may be spared. Biography or Autobiography ofTeufelsdröckh there is, clearly enough, none to be gleaned here: atmost some sketchy, shadowy fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-ofefforts, partly of intellect, partly of imagination, on the side ofEditor and of Reader; rise up between them. Only as a gaseous-chaoticAppendix to that aqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents of the SixBags hover round us, and portions thereof be incorporated with ourdelineation of it. 

Daily and nightly does the Editor sit (with green spectacles)deciphering these unimaginable Documents from their perplexed_cursiv-schrift_; collating them with the almost equally unimaginableVolume, which stands in legible print. Over such a universal medley ofhigh and low, of hot, cold, moist and dry, is he here struggling (byunion of like with like, which is Method) to build a firm Bridge forBritish travellers. Never perhaps since our first Bridge-builders, Sinand Death, built that stupendous Arch from Hell-gate to the Earth, didany Pontifex, or Pontiff, undertake such a task as the present Editor. For in this Arch too, leading, as we humbly presume, far otherwardsthan that grand primeval one, the materials are to be fished-up fromthe weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another, and cunningly cemented, while the elements boilbeneath: nor is there any supernatural force to do it with; but simplythe Diligence and feeble thinking Faculty of an English Editor, endeavouring to evolve printed Creation out of a German printed andwritten Chaos, wherein, as he shoots to and fro in it, gathering, clutching, piercing the Why to the far-distant Wherefore, his wholeFaculty and Self are like to be swallowed up. 

Patiently, under these incessant toils and agitations, does theEditor, dismissing all anger, see his otherwise robust healthdeclining; some fraction of his allotted natural sleep nightly leavinghim, and little but an inflamed nervous-system to be looked for. Whatis the use of health, or of life, if not to do some work therewith?And what work nobler than transplanting foreign Thought into thebarren domestic soil; except indeed planting Thought of your own, which the fewest are privileged to do? Wild as it looks, thisPhilosophy of Clothes, can we ever reach its real meaning, promises toreveal new-coming Eras, the first dim rudiments and already-buddinggerms of a nobler Era, in Universal History. Is not such a prize worthsome striving? Forward with us, courageous reader; be it towardsfailure, or towards success! The latter thou sharest with us; theformer also is not all our own. 

BOOK SECOND

CHAPTER I

GENESIS

In a psychological point of view, it is perhaps questionable whetherfrom birth and genealogy, how closely scrutinised soever, much insightis to be gained. Nevertheless, as in every phenomenon the Beginningremains always the most notable moment; so, with regard to any greatman, we rest not till, for our scientific profit or not, the wholecircumstances of his first appearance in this Planet, and what mannerof Public Entry he made, are with utmost completeness renderedmanifest. To the Genesis of our Clothes-Philosopher, then, be thisFirst Chapter consecrated. Unhappily, indeed, he seems to be of quiteobscure extraction; uncertain, we might almost say, whether of any: sothat this Genesis of his can properly be nothing but an Exodus (ortransit out of Invisibility into Visibility); whereof the preliminaryportion is nowhere forthcoming. 

'In the village of Entepfuhl, ' thus writes he, in the Bag _Libra_, onvarious Papers, which we arrange with difficulty, 'dwelt AndreasFutteral and his wife; childless, in still seclusion, and cheerfulthough now verging towards old age. Andreas had been grenadierSergeant, and even regimental Schoolmaster under Frederick the Great;but now, quitting the halbert and ferule for the spade andpruning-hook, cultivated a little Orchard, on the produce of which he, Cincinnatus-like, lived not without dignity. Fruits, the peach, theapple, the grape, with other varieties came in their season; all whichAndreas knew how to sell: on evenings he smoked largely, or read (asbeseemed a regimental Schoolmaster), and talked to neighbours thatwould listen about the Victory of Rossbach; and how Fritz the Only(_der Einzige_) had once with his own royal lips spoken to him, hadbeen pleased to say, when Andreas as camp-sentinel demanded thepass-word, "_Schweig Hund_ (Peace, hound)!" before any of hisstaff-adjutants could answer. "_Das nenn' ich mir einen König_, Thereis what I call a King, " would Andreas exclaim: "but the smoke ofKunersdorf was still smarting his eyes. "

'Gretchen, the housewife, won like Desdemona by the deeds rather thanthe looks of her now veteran Othello, lived not in altogether militarysubordination; for, as Andreas said, "the womankind will not drill(_wer kann die Weiberchen dressiren_)": nevertheless she at heartloved him both for valour and wisdom; to her a Prussian grenadierSergeant and Regiment's Schoolmaster was little other than a Ciceroand Cid: what you see, yet cannot see over, is as good as infinite. Nay, was not Andreas in very deed a man of order, courage, downrightness (_Geradheit_); that understood Büsching's _Geography_, had been in the victory of Rossbach, and left for dead in the camisadeof Hochkirch? The good Gretchen, for all her fretting, watched overhim and hovered round him as only a true housemother can: assiduouslyshe cooked and sewed and scoured for him; so that not only his oldregimental sword and grenadier-cap, but the whole habitation andenvironment, where on pegs of honour they hung, looked ever trim andgay: a roomy painted Cottage, embowered in fruit-trees andforest-trees, evergreens and honeysuckles; rising many-coloured fromamid shaven grass-plots, flowers struggling-in through the verywindows; under its long projecting eaves nothing but garden-tools inmethodic piles (to screen them from rain), and seats where, especiallyon summer nights, a King might have wished to sit and smoke, and callit his. Such a _Bauergut_ (Copyhold) had Gretchen given her veteran;whose sinewy arms, and long-disused gardening talent, had made it whatyou saw. 

'Into this umbrageous Man's-nest, one meek yellow evening or dusk, when the Sun, hidden indeed from terrestrial Entepfuhl, didnevertheless journey visible and radiant along the celestial Balance(_Libra_), it was that a Stranger of reverend aspect entered; and, with grave salutation, stood before the two rather astonishedhousemates. He was close-muffled in a wide mantle; which withoutfurther parley unfolding, he deposited therefrom what seemed someBasket, overhung with green Persian silk; saying only: _Ihr liebenLeute, hier bringe ein unschätzbares Verleihen; nehmt es in allerAcht, sorgfältigst benützt es: mit hohem Lohn, oder wohl mit schwerenZinsen, wird's einst zurückgefordert. _ "Good Christian people, herelies for you an invaluable Loan; take all heed thereof, in allcarefulness employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavypenalty, will it one day be required back. " Uttering which singularwords, in a clear, bell-like, forever memorable tone, the Strangergracefully withdrew; and before Andreas or his wife, gazing inexpectant wonder, had time to fashion either question or answer, wasclean gone. Neither out of doors could aught of him be seen or heard;he had vanished in the thickets, in the dusk; the Orchard-gate stoodquietly closed: the Stranger was gone once and always. So sudden hadthe whole transaction been, in the autumn stillness and twilight, sogentle, noiseless, that the Futterals could have fancied it all atrick of Imagination, or some visit from an authentic Spirit. Onlythat the green-silk Basket, such as neither Imagination nor authenticSpirits are wont to carry, still stood visible and tangible on theirlittle parlour-table. Towards this the astonished couple, now with litcandle, hastily turned their attention. Lifting the green veil, to seewhat invaluable it hid, they descried there, amid down and rich whitewrappages, no Pitt Diamond or Hapsburg Regalia, but, in the softestsleep, a little red-coloured Infant! Beside it, lay a roll of goldFriedrichs, the exact amount of which was never publicly known; also a_Taufschein_ (baptismal certificate), wherein unfortunately nothingbut the Name was decipherable; other document or indication nonewhatever. 

'To wonder and conjecture was unavailing, then and always thenceforth. Nowhere in Entepfuhl, on the morrow or next day, did tidings transpireof any such figure as the Stranger; nor could the Traveller, who hadpassed through the neighbouring Town in coach-and-four, be connectedwith this Apparition, except in the way of gratuitous surmise. Meanwhile, for Andreas and his wife, the grand practical problem was:What to do with this little sleeping red-coloured Infant? Amidamazements and curiosities, which had to die away without externalsatisfying, they resolved, as in such circumstances charitable prudentpeople needs must, on nursing it, though with spoon-meat, intowhiteness, and if possible into manhood. The Heavens smiled on theirendeavour: thus has that same mysterious Individual ever since had astatus for himself in this visible Universe, some modicum of victualand lodging and parade-ground; and now expanded in bulk, faculty andknowledge of good and evil, he, as HERR DIOGENES TEUFELSDRÖCKH, professes or is ready to profess, perhaps not altogether withouteffect, in the new University of Weissnichtwo, the new Science ofThings in General. '

Our Philosopher declares here, as indeed we should think he wellmight, that these facts, first communicated, by the good GretchenFutteral, in his twelfth year, 'produced on the boyish heart and fancya quite indelible impression. Who this Reverend Personage, ' he says, 'that glided into the Orchard Cottage when the Sun was in Libra, andthen, as on spirit's wings, glided out again, might be? Aninexpressible desire, full of love and of sadness, has often sincestruggled within me to shape an answer. Ever, in my distresses and myloneliness, has Fantasy turned, full of longing (_sehnsuchtsvoll_), tothat unknown Father, who perhaps far from me, perhaps near, either wayinvisible, might have taken me to his paternal bosom, there to liescreened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost thou still, shutout from me only by thin penetrable curtains of earthly Space, wend toand fro among the crowd of the living? Or art thou hidden by those farthicker curtains of the Everlasting Night, or rather of theEverlasting Day, through which my mortal eye and outstretched armsneed not strive to reach? Alas, I know not, and in vain vex myself toknow. More than once, heart-deluded, have I taken for thee this andthe other noble-looking Stranger; and approached him wistfully, withinfinite regard; but he too had to repel me; he too was not thou. 

'And yet, O Man born of Woman, ' cries the Autobiographer, with one ofhis sudden whirls, 'wherein is my case peculiar? Hadst thou, any morethan I, a Father whom thou knowest? The Andreas and Gretchen, or theAdam and Eve, who led thee into Life, and for a time suckled andpap-fed thee there, whom thou namest Father and Mother; these were, like mine, but thy nursing-father and nursing-mother: thy trueBeginning and Father is in Heaven, whom with the bodily eye thou shaltnever behold, but only with the spiritual. '

'The little green veil, ' adds he, among much similar moralising, andembroiled discoursing, 'I yet keep; still more inseparably the Name, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. From the veil can nothing be inferred: a pieceof now quite faded Persian silk, like thousands of others. On the NameI have many times meditated and conjectured; but neither in this laythere any clue. That it was my unknown Father's name I must hesitateto believe. To no purpose have I searched through all the Herald'sBooks, in and without the German Empire, and through all manner ofSubscriber-Lists (_Pränumeranten_), Militia-Rolls, and otherName-catalogues; extraordinary names as we have in Germany, the nameTeufelsdröckh, except as appended to my own person, nowhere occurs. Again, what may the unchristian rather than Christian "Diogenes" mean?Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend, by such designation, toshadow-forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humour?Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred Parent, who like anOstrich hadst to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched intoself-support by the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimagehave been a smooth one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been;or indeed by the worst figure of Misfortune, by Misconduct. Often haveI fancied how, in thy hard life-battle, thou wert shot at, and slungat, wounded, hand-fettered, hamstrung, browbeaten and bedevilled bythe Time-Spirit (_Zeitgeist_) in thyself and others, till the goodsoul first given thee was seared into grim rage; and thou hadstnothing for it but to leave in me an indignant appeal to the Future, and living speaking Protest against the Devil, as that same Spirit notof the Time only, but of Time itself, is well named! Which Appeal andProtest, may I now modestly add, was not perhaps quite lost in air. 

'For indeed, as Walter Shandy often insisted, there is much, nayalmost all, in Names. The Name is the earliest Garment you wrap roundthe earth-visiting ME; to which it thenceforth cleaves, moretenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirtycenturies) than the very skin. And now from without, what mysticinfluences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially inthose plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree!Names? Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the mostimportant of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Notonly all common Speech, but Science, Poetry itself is no other, ifthou consider it, than a right _Naming_. Adam's first task was givingnames to natural Appearances: what is ours still but a continuation ofthe same; be the Appearances exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars or starry movements (as in Science); or (as in Poetry) passions, virtues, calamities, God-attributes, Gods?--In a very plain sense theProverb says, _Call one a thief, and he will steal_; in an almostsimilar sense may we not perhaps say, _Call one DiogenesTeufelsdröckh, and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes?_'

 * * * * *

'Meanwhile the incipient Diogenes, like others, all ignorant of hisWhy, his How or Whereabout, was opening his eyes to the kind Light;sprawling-out his ten fingers and toes; listening, tasting, feeling;in a word, by all his Five Senses, still more by his Sixth Sense ofHunger, and a whole infinitude of inward, spiritual, half-awakenedSenses, endeavouring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge ofthis strange Universe where he had arrived, be his task therein whatit might. Infinite was his progress; thus in some fifteen months, hecould perform the miracle of--Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it notlike brooding a fresh (celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by degrees organic elements and fibres shoot throughthe watery albumen; and out of vague Sensation grows Thought, growsFantasy and Force, and we have Philosophies, Dynasties, nay Poetriesand Religions!

'Young Diogenes, or rather young Gneschen, for by such diminutive hadthey in their fondness named him, travelled forward to those highconsummations, by quick yet easy stages. The Futterals, to avoid vaintalk, and moreover keep the roll of gold Friedrichs safe, gave-outthat he was a grand-nephew; the orphan of some sister's daughter, suddenly deceased, in Andreas's distant Prussian birthland; of whom, as of her indigent sorrowing widower, little enough was known atEntepfuhl. Heedless of all which, the Nurseling took to hisspoon-meat, and throve. I have heard him noted as a still infant, thatkept his mind much to himself; above all, that seldom or never cried. He already felt that time was precious; that he had other work cut-outfor him than whimpering. '

 * * * * *

Such, after utmost painful search and collation among thesemiscellaneous Paper-masses, is all the notice we can gather of HerrTeufelsdröckh's genealogy. More imperfect, more enigmatic it can seemto few readers than to us. The Professor, in whom truly we more andmore discern a certain satirical turn, and deep undercurrents ofroguish whim, for the present stands pledged in honour, so we will notdoubt him: but seems it not conceivable that, by the 'good GretchenFutteral, ' or some other perhaps interested party, he has himself beendeceived? Should these sheets, translated or not, ever reach theEntepfuhl Circulating Library, some cultivated native of that districtmight feel called to afford explanation. Nay, since Books, likeinvisible scouts, permeate the whole habitable globe, and Timbuctooitself is not safe from British Literature, may not some Copy find outeven the mysterious basket-bearing Stranger, who in a state of extremesenility perhaps still exists; and gently force even him to disclosehimself; to claim openly a son, in whom any father may feel pride?

CHAPTER II

IDYLLIC

'Happy season of Childhood!' exclaims Teufelsdröckh: 'Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hutwith auroral radiance; and for thy Nurseling hast provided, a softswathing of Love, and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round (_umgaukelt_) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottagestill shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have asyet a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us free. The young spirit has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what wemean by Time; as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportfulsunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages: ah! the secret ofVicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and ceaselessdown-rushing of the universal World-fabric, from the granite mountainto the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is foreverdenied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy longrough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep nomore, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, with oldArnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest? Shall I nothave all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a Pyrrhusconquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not;and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleep and waking areone: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and everywhere isdewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, buta prickly, bitter-rinded stone-fruit, of which the fewest can find thekernel. '

In such rose-coloured light does our Professor, as Poets are wont, look back on his childhood; the historical details of which (to saynothing of much other vague oratorical matter) he accordingly dwellson with an almost wearisome minuteness. We hear of Entepfuhl standing'in trustful derangement' among the woody slopes; the paternal Orchardflanking it as extreme out-post from below; the little Kuhbach gushingkindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into theDonau, into the Black Sea, into the Atmosphere and Universe; and how'the brave old Linden, ' stretching like a parasol of twenty ells inradius, overtopping all other rows and clumps, towered-up from thecentral _Agora_ and _Campus Martius_ of the Village, like its SacredTree; and how the old men sat talking under its shadow (Gneschen oftengreedily listening), and the wearied labourers reclined, and theunwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens often dancedto flute-music. 'Glorious summer twilights, ' cries Teufelsdröckh, 'when the Sun, like a proud Conqueror and Imperial Taskmaster, turnedhis back, with his gold-purple emblazonry, and all his firecladbody-guard (of Prismatic Colours); and the tired brickmakers of thisclay Earth might steal a little frolic, and those few meek Stars wouldnot tell of them!'

Then we have long details of the _Weinlesen_ (Vintage), theHarvest-Home, Christmas, and so forth; with a whole cycle of theEntepfuhl Children's-games, differing apparently by mere superficialshades from those of other countries. Concerning all which, we shallhere, for obvious reasons, say nothing. What cares the world for ouras yet miniature Philosopher's achievements under that 'brave oldLinden'? Or even where is the use of such practical reflections as thefollowing? 'In all the sports of Children, were it only in theirwanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creativeinstinct (_schaffenden Trieb_): the Mankin feels that he is a bornMan, that his vocation is to work. The choicest present you can makehim is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or fordestruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In gregarioussports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Coöperation, for war or peace, as governor or governed: the little Maid again, provident of her domestic destiny, takes with preference to Dolls. '

Perhaps, however, we may give this anecdote, considering who it isthat relates it: 'My first short-clothes were of yellow serge; orrather, I should say, my first short-cloth, for the vesture was oneand indivisible, reaching from neck to ankle, a mere body with fourlimbs: of which fashion how little could I then divine thearchitectural, how much less the moral significance!'

More graceful is the following little picture: 'On fine evenings I waswont to carry-forth my supper (bread-crumb boiled in milk), and eat itout-of-doors. On the coping of the Orchard-wall, which I could reachby climbing, or still more easily if Father Andreas would set-up thepruning-ladder, my porringer was placed: there, many a sunset, have I, looking at the distant western Mountains, consumed, not withoutrelish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush ofWorld's expectation as Day died, were still a Hebrew Speech for me;nevertheless I was looking at the fair illuminated Letters, and had aneye for their gilding. '

With 'the little one's friendship for cattle and poultry' we shall notmuch intermeddle. It may be that hereby he acquired a 'certain deepersympathy with animated Nature': but when, we would ask, saw any man, in a collection of Biographical Documents, such a piece as this:'Impressive enough (_bedeutungsvoll_) was it to hear, in earlymorning, the Swineherd's horn; and know that so many hungry happyquadrupeds were, on all sides, starting in hot haste to join him, forbreakfast on the Heath. Or to see them at eventide, all marching-inagain, with short squeak, almost in military order; and each, topographically correct, trotting-off in succession to the right orleft, through its own lane, to its own dwelling; till old Kunz, at theVillage-head, now left alone, blew his last blast, and retired for thenight. We are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form of Ham; yet didnot these bristly thick-skinned beings here manifest intelligence, perhaps humour of character; at any rate, a touching, trustfulsubmissiveness to Man, --who, were he but a Swineherd, in darnedgabardine, and leather breeches more resembling slate ordiscoloured-tin breeches, is still the Hierarch of this lower world?'

It is maintained, by Helvetius and his set, that an infant of geniusis quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisinglyfavourable influences accompany him through life, especially throughchildhood, and expand him, while others lie closefolded and continuedunces. Herein, say they, consists the whole difference between aninspired Prophet and a double-barrelled Game-preserver: the inner manof the one has been fostered into generous development; that of theother, crushed-down perhaps by vigour of animal digestion, and thelike, has exuded and evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresuscitablystagnant at the bottom of his stomach. 'With which opinion, ' criesTeufelsdröckh, 'I should as soon agree as with this other, that anacorn might, by favourable or unfavourable influences of soil andclimate, be nursed into a cabbage, or the cabbage-seed into an oak. 

'Nevertheless, ' continues he, 'I too acknowledge the all-butomnipotence of early culture and nurture: hereby we have either adoddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either asick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, itis the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note-downwith accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their Education, what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it: to whichduty, nowadays so pressing for many a German Autobiographer, I alsozealously address myself. '--Thou rogue! Is it by short-clothes ofyellow serge, and swineherd horns, that an infant of genius iseducated? And yet, as usual, it ever remains doubtful whether he islaughing in his sleeve at these Autobiographical times of ours, orwriting from the abundance of his own fond ineptitude. For hecontinues: 'If among the ever-streaming currents of Sights, Hearings, Feelings for Pain or Pleasure, whereby, as in a Magic Hall, youngGneschen went about environed, I might venture to select and specify, perhaps these following were also of the number:

'Doubtless, as childish sports call forth Intellect, Activity, so theyoung creature's Imagination was stirred up, and a Historical tendencygiven him by the narrative habits of Father Andreas; who, with hisbattle-reminiscences, and gay austere yet hearty patriarchal aspect, could not but appear another Ulysses and "much-enduring Man. " EagerlyI hung upon his tales, when listening neighbours enlivened the hearth;from these perils and these travels, wild and far almost as Hadesitself, a dim world of Adventure expanded itself within me. Incalculable also was the knowledge I acquired in standing by the OldMen under the Linden-tree: the whole of Immensity was yet new to me;and had not these reverend seniors, talkative enough, been employed inpartial surveys thereof for nigh fourscore years? With amazement Ibegan to discover that Entepfuhl stood in the middle of a Country, ofa World; that there was such a thing as History, as Biography; towhich I also, one day, by hand and tongue, might contribute. 

'In a like sense worked the _Postwagen_ (Stage-coach), which, slow-rolling under its mountains of men and luggage, wended throughour Village: northwards, truly, in the dead of night; yet southwardsvisibly at eventide. Not till my eighth year did I reflect that thisPostwagen could be other than some terrestrial Moon, rising andsetting by mere Law of Nature, like the heavenly one; that it came onmade highways, from far cities towards far cities; weaving them like amonstrous shuttle into closer and closer union. It was then that, independently of Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_, I made this not quiteinsignificant reflection (so true also in spiritual things): _Anyroad, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of theworld!_

'Why mention our Swallows, which, out of far Africa, as I learned, threading their way over seas and mountains, corporate cities andbelligerent nations, yearly found themselves, with the month of May, snug-lodged in our Cottage Lobby? The hospitable Father (forcleanliness' sake) had fixed a little bracket plumb under their nest:there they built, and caught flies, and twittered, and bred; and all, I chiefly, from the heart loved them. Bright, nimble creatures, whotaught _you_ the mason-craft; nay, stranger still, gave you a masonicincorporation, almost social police? For if, by ill chance, and whentime pressed, your House fell, have I not seen five neighbourlyHelpers appear next day; and swashing to and fro, with animated, loud, long-drawn chirpings, and activity almost super-hirundine, complete itagain before nightfall?

'But undoubtedly the grand summary of Entepfuhl child's-culture, whereas in a funnel its manifold influences were concentrated andsimultaneously poured-down on us, was the annual Cattle-fair. Here, assembling from all the four winds, came the elements of anunspeakable hurly-burly. Nutbrown maids and nutbrown men, allclear-washed, loud-laughing, bedizened and beribanded; who came fordancing, for treating, and if possible, for happiness. TopbootedGraziers from the North; Swiss Brokers, Italian Drovers, alsotopbooted, from the South; these with their subalterns in leatherjerkins, leather skull-caps, and long oxgoads; shouting inhalf-articulate speech, amid the inarticulate barking and bellowing. Apart stood Potters from far Saxony, with their crockery in fair rows;Nürnberg Pedlars, in booths that to me seemed richer than Ormuzbazaars; Showmen from the Lago Maggiore; detachments of the _WienerSchub_ (Offscourings of Vienna) vociferously superintending games ofchance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine(_heuriger_) flowed like water, still worse confounding the confusion;and high over all, vaulted, in ground-and-lofty tumbling, aparticoloured Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the place and of Lifeitself. 

'Thus encircled by the mystery of Existence; under the deep heavenlyFirmament; waited-on by the four golden Seasons, with theirvicissitudes of contribution, for even grim Winter brought itsskating-matches and shooting-matches, its snow-storms andChristmas-carols, --did the Child sit and learn. These things were theAlphabet, whereby in aftertime he was to syllable and partly read thegrand Volume of the World; what matters it whether such Alphabet be inlarge gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to readit? For Gneschen, eager to learn, the very act of looking thereon wasa blessedness that gilded all: his existence was a bright, softelement of Joy; out of which, as in Prospero's Island, wonder afterwonder bodied itself forth, to teach by charming. 

'Nevertheless, I were but a vain dreamer to say, that even then myfelicity was perfect. I had, once for all, come down from Heaven intothe Earth. Among the rainbow colours that glowed on my horizon, layeven in childhood a dark ring of Care, as yet no thicker than athread, and often quite overshone; yet always it reappeared, nay everwaxing broader and broader; till in after-years it almostover-shadowed my whole canopy, and threatened to engulf me in finalnight. It was the ring of Necessity whereby we are all begirt; happyhe for whom a kind heavenly Sun brightens it into a ring of Duty, andplays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions; yet ever, asbasis and as bourne for our whole being, it is there. 

 * * * * *

'For the first few years of our terrestrial Apprenticeship, we havenot much work to do; but, boarded and lodged gratis, are set downmostly to look about us over the workshop, and see others work, tillwe have understood the tools a little, and can handle this and that. If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activitytogether, were the thing wanted, then was my early position favourablebeyond the most. In all that respects openness of Sense, affectionateTemper, ingenuous Curiosity, and the fostering of these, what morecould I have wished? On the other side, however, things went not sowell. My Active Power (_Thatkraft_) was unfavourably hemmed-in; ofwhich misfortune how many traces yet abide with me! In an orderlyhouse, where the litter of children's sports is hateful enough, yourtraining is too stoical; rather to bear and forbear than to make anddo. I was forbid much: wishes in any measure bold I had to renounce;everywhere a strait bond of Obedience inflexibly held me down. Thusalready Freewill often came in painful collision with Necessity; sothat my tears flowed, and at seasons the Child itself might taste thatroot of bitterness, wherewith the whole fruitage of our life ismingled and tempered. 

'In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was beyond measure saferto err by excess than by defect. Obedience is our universal duty anddestiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and toothoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world ofours, is as mere zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest offractions even to Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldlyDiscretion, nay, of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with myupbringing! It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, everyway unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domesticsolitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of thestem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unskilfulsoever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby everydeficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must ever lovethe good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: shetaught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look andhabitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas tooattended Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in theother world expected pay with arrears, --as, I trust, he has received;but my Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivatedsense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructiblythe Good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedyentanglements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on Earth I here sawbowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: suchthings, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of yourbeing; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibilityin the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springsforth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear. Wouldst thou ratherbe a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a Godin Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there weretwo-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?'

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdröckh, ofspiritual pride!

CHAPTER III

PEDAGOGY

Hitherto we see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellowserge, borne forward mostly on the arms of kind Nature alone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop; but (excepthis soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a stillintelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of anincipient Philosopher and Poet in the abstract; perhaps it wouldtrouble Herr Heuschrecke himself to say wherein the special Doctrineof Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened. For with Gneschen, aswith others, the Man may indeed stand pictured in the Boy (at leastall the pigments are there); yet only some half of the Man stands inthe Child, or young Boy, namely, his Passive endowment, not hisActive. The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts inthis latter capacity; how when, to use his own words, 'he understandsthe tools a little, and can handle this or that, ' he will proceed tohandle it. 

Here, however, may be the place to state that, in much of ourPhilosopher's history, there is something of an almost Hindoocharacter: nay perhaps in that so well-fostered and everyway excellent'Passivity' of his, which, with no free development of the antagonistActivity, distinguished his childhood, we may detect the rudiments ofmuch that, in after days, and still in these present days, astonishesthe world. For the shallow-sighted, Teufelsdröckh is oftenest a manwithout Activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted, again, aman with Activity almost superabundant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic, that no mortal can foresee its explosions, oreven when it has exploded, so much as ascertain its significance. Adangerous, difficult temper for the modern European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a Biography! Now as heretofore it willbehove the Editor of these pages, were it never so unsuccessfully, todo his endeavour. 

Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially aman of letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portionof his History, Teufelsdröckh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he 'cannot remember ever to have learned'; so perhaps had itby nature. He says generally: 'Of the insignificant portion of myEducation, which depended on Schools, there need almost no notice betaken. I learned what others learn; and kept it stored-by in a cornerof my head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it. My Schoolmaster, adownbent, brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guildare, 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 theUniversity. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I could meet with Iread. My very copper pocket-money I laid-out on stall-literature;which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into volumes. Bythis means was the young head furnished with a considerable miscellanyof things and shadows of things: History in authentic fragments laymingled with Fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and thewhole not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritivefor 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 otherphenomena of that earlier period, have many readers of these pagesstumbled, in their twelfth year, on such reflections as the following?'It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, andwatched it flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet hadflowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of History. Yes, probably on the morningwhen Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the midday when Cæsar, doubtlesswith difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his _Commentaries_ dry, --thislittle Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas or Siloa, was murmuring onacross the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen: here, too, as in theEuphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet of the grandWorld-circulation of Waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, haslasted and lasts simply with the World. Thou fool! Nature alone isantique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest onis six-thousand years of age. ' In which little thought, as in a littlefountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nighunutterable meditations on the grandeur and mystery of TIME, and itsrelation to ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy ofClothes?

Over his Gymnasic and Academic years the Professor by no means lingersso lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green sunny tracts thereare still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and therestagnating into sour marshes of discontent. 'With my first view of theHinterschlag Gymnasium, ' writes he, 'my evil days began. Well do Istill remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting fullof hope by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street ofthe place, and saw its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and_Schuldthurm_ (Jail), and the aproned or disaproned Burghers moving-into breakfast: a little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for somehuman imps had tied a tin-kettle to its tail; thus did the agonisedcreature, loud-jingling, career through the whole length of theBorough, and become notable enough. Fit emblem of many a ConqueringHero, to whom Fate (wedding Fantasy to Sense, as it often elsewheredoes) has malignantly appended a tin-kettle of Ambition, to chase himon; which the faster he runs, urges him the faster, the more loudlyand more foolishly! Fit emblem also of much that awaited myself, inthat mischievous Den; as in the World, whereof it was a portion andepitome!

'Alas, the kind beech-rows of Entepfuhl were hidden in the distance: Iwas among strangers, harshly, at best indifferently, disposed towardsme; the young heart felt, for the first time, quite orphaned andalone. ' His schoolfellows, as is usual, persecuted him: 'They wereBoys, ' he says, 'mostly rude Boys, and obeyed the impulse of rudeNature, which bids the deerherd fall upon any stricken hart, theduck-flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and onall hands the strong tyrannise over the weak. ' He admits, that though'perhaps in an unusual degree morally courageous, ' he succeeded ill inbattle, and would fain have avoided it; a result, as would appear, owing less to his small personal stature (for in passionate seasons hewas 'incredibly nimble'), than to his 'virtuous principles': 'if itwas disgraceful to be beaten, ' says he, 'it was only a shade lessdisgraceful to have so much as fought; thus was I drawn two ways atonce, and in this important element of school-history, thewar-element, had little but sorrow. ' On the whole, that same excellent'Passivity, ' so notable in Teufelsdröckh's childhood, is here visiblyenough again getting nourishment. 'He wept often; indeed to such adegree that he was nicknamed _Der Weinende_ (the Tearful), whichepithet, till towards his thirteenth year, was indeed not quiteunmerited. Only at rare intervals did the young soul burst-forth intofire-eyed rage, and, with a stormfulness (_Ungestüm_) under which theboldest quailed, assert that he too had Rights of Man, or at least ofMankin. ' In all which, who does not discern a fine flower-tree andcinnamon-tree (of genius) nigh choked among pumpkins, reed-grass andignoble shrubs; and forced if it would live, to struggle upwards only, and not outwards; into a _height_ quite sickly, and disproportioned toits _breadth_?

We find, moreover, that his Greek and Latin were 'mechanically'taught; Hebrew scarce even mechanically; much else which they calledHistory, Cosmography, Philosophy, and so forth, no better than not atall. 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 storeof curious reading, in Hans Wachtel the Cooper's house, where helodged, --his time, it would appear, was utterly wasted. Which factsthe Professor has not yet learned to look upon with any contentment. Indeed, throughout the whole of this Bag _Scorpio_, where we now are, and often in the following Bag, he shows himself unusually animated onthe matter of Education, and not without some touch of what we mightpresume to be anger. 

'My Teachers, ' says he, 'were hide-bound Pedants, without knowledge ofman's nature, or of boy's; or of aught save their lexicons andquarterly account-books. Innumerable dead Vocables (no dead Language, for they themselves knew no Language) they crammed into us, and calledit fostering the growth of mind. How can an inanimate, mechanicalGerund-grinder, the like of whom will, in a subsequent century, bemanufactured at Nürnberg out of wood and leather, foster the growth ofanything; much more of Mind, which grows, not like a vegetable (byhaving its roots littered with etymological compost), but like aspirit, by mysterious contact of Spirit; Thought kindling itself atthe fire of living Thought? How shall _he_ give kindling, in whose owninward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a deadgrammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough;and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by appliance ofbirch-rods. 

'Alas, so is it everywhere, so will it ever be; till the Hodman isdischarged, or reduced to hodbearing, and an Architect is hired, andon all hands fitly encouraged: till communities and individualsdiscover, not without surprise, that fashioning the souls of ageneration by Knowledge can rank on a level with blowing their bodiesto pieces by Gunpowder; that with Generals and Fieldmarshals forkilling, there should be world-honoured Dignitaries, and were itpossible, true God-ordained Priests, for teaching. But as yet, thoughthe Soldier wears openly, and even parades, his butchering-tool, nowhere, far as I have travelled, did the Schoolmaster make show ofhis instructing-tool: nay, were he to walk abroad with birch girt onthigh, as if he therefrom expected honour, would there not, among theidler class, perhaps a certain levity be excited?'

In the third year of this Gymnasic period, Father Andreas seems tohave died: the young Scholar, otherwise so maltreated, saw himself forthe first time clad outwardly in sables, and inwardly in quiteinexpressible melancholy. 'The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies underour feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all theirinnumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; theinexorable word, NEVER! now first showed its meaning. My Mother wept, and her sorrow got vent; but in my heart there lay a whole lake oftears, pent-up in silent desolation. Nevertheless the unworn Spirit isstrong; Life is so healthful that it even finds nourishment in Death:these stern experiences, planted down by Memory in my Imagination, rose there to a whole cypress-forest, sad but beautiful; waving, withnot unmelodious sighs, in dark luxuriance, in the hottest sunshine, through long years of youth:--as in manhood also it does, and will do;for I have now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb is nowmy inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look uponthe hostile armaments, and pains and penalties of tyrannous Lifeplacidly enough, and listen to its loudest threatenings with a stillsmile. O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed ofRest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help; and ye, whowide-scattered still toil lonely in the monster-bearing Desert, dyeingthe flinty ground with your blood, --yet a little while, and we shallall meet THERE, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all; andOppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire-whip, and all the GehennaBailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot thenceforthharm us any more!'

Close by which rather beautiful apostrophe, lies a laboured Characterof the deceased Andreas Futteral; of his natural ability, his desertsin life (as Prussian Sergeant); with long historical inquiries intothe genealogy of the Futteral Family, here traced back as far as Henrythe Fowler: the whole of which we pass over, not without astonishment. It only concerns us to add, that now was the time when Mother Gretchenrevealed to her foster-son that he was not at all of this kindred, orindeed of any kindred, having come into historical existence in theway already known to us. 'Thus was I doubly orphaned, ' says he;'bereft not only of Possession, but even of Remembrance. Sorrow andWonder, here suddenly united, could not but produce abundant fruit. Such a disclosure, in such a season, struck its roots through my wholenature: ever till the years of mature manhood, it mingled with mywhole thoughts, was as the stem whereon all my day-dreams andnight-dreams grew. A certain poetic elevation, yet also acorresponding civic depression, it naturally imparted: _I was like noother_; in which fixed-idea, leading sometimes to highest, and oftenerto frightfullest results, may there not lie the first spring ofTendencies, which in my Life have become remarkable enough? As inbirth, so in action, speculation, and social position, my fellows areperhaps not numerous. '

 * * * * *

In the Bag _Sagittarius_, as we at length discover, Teufelsdröckh hasbecome a University man; though, how, when, or of what quality, willnowhere disclose itself with the smallest certainty. Few things, inthe way of confusion and capricious indistinctness, can now surpriseour readers; not even the total want of dates, almost without parallelin a Biographical work. So enigmatic, so chaotic we have always found, and must always look to find, these scattered Leaves. In_Sagittarius_, however, Teufelsdröckh begins to show himself even morethan usually Sibylline: fragments of all sorts; scraps of regularMemoir, College-Exercises, Programs, Professional Testimoniums, Milkscores, torn Billets, sometimes to appearance of an amatory cast;all blown together as if by merest chance, henceforth bewilder thesane Historian. To combine any picture of these University, and thesubsequent, years; much more, to decipher therein any illustrativeprimordial elements of the Clothes-Philosophy, becomes such a problemas the reader may imagine. 

So much we can see; darkly, as through the foliage of some waveringthicket: a youth of no common endowment, who has passed happilythrough Childhood, less happily yet still vigorously through Boyhood, now at length perfect in 'dead vocables, ' and set down, as he hopes, by the living Fountain, there to superadd Ideas and Capabilities. Fromsuch Fountain he draws, diligently, thirstily, yet never or seldomwith his whole heart, for the water nowise suits his palate;discouragements, entanglements, aberrations are discoverable orsupposable. Nor perhaps are even pecuniary distresses wanting; for'the good Gretchen, who in spite of advices from not disinterestedrelatives has sent him hither, must after a time withdraw her willingbut too feeble hand. ' Nevertheless in an atmosphere of Poverty andmanifold Chagrin, the Humour of that young Soul, what character is inhim, first decisively reveals itself; and, like strong sunshine inweeping skies, gives out variety of colours, some of which areprismatic. Thus, with the aid of Time and of what Time brings, has thestripling Diogenes Teufelsdröckh waxed into manly stature; and into soquestionable an aspect, that we ask with new eagerness, How hespecially came by it, and regret anew that there is no more explicitanswer. Certain of the intelligible and partially significantfragments, which are few in number, shall be extracted from that Limboof a Paper-bag, and presented with the usual preparation. 

As if, in the Bag _Scorpio_, Teufelsdröckh had not alreadyexpectorated his antipedagogic spleen; as if, from the name_Sagittarius_, he had thought himself called upon to shoot arrows, wehere again fall-in with such matter as this: 'The University where Iwas educated still stands vivid enough in my remembrance, and I knowits name well; which name, however, I, from tenderness to existinginterests and persons, shall in nowise divulge. It is my painful dutyto say that, out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of allhitherto discovered Universities. This is indeed a time when rightEducation is, as nearly as may be, impossible: however, in degrees ofwrongness there is no limit: nay, I can conceive a worse system thanthat of the Nameless itself; as poisoned victual may be worse thanabsolute hunger. 

'It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall intothe ditch: wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes besafer, if both leader and led simply--sit still? Had you, anywhere inCrim Tartary; walled-in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven-hundredChristian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three toseven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors, beingstationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, andexact considerable admission-fees, --you had, not indeed in mechanicalstructure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of ourHigh Seminary. I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure wasquite other, so neither was our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full ofsmoke and sin; moreover, in the middle of a Public, which, without farcostlier apparatus than that of the Square Enclosure, and Declarationaloud, you could not be sure of gulling. 

'Gullible, however, by fit apparatus, all Publics are; and gulled, with the most surprising profit. Towards anything like a _Statisticsof Imposture_, indeed, little as yet has been done: with a strangeindifference, our Economists, nigh buried under Tables for minorBranches of Industry, have altogether overlooked the grandall-overtopping Hypocrisy Branch; as if our whole arts of Puffery, ofQuackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft, and the innumerable other crafts andmysteries of that genus, had not ranked in Productive Industry at all!Can any one, for example, so much as say, What moneys, in Literatureand Shoeblacking, are realised by actual Instruction and actual jetPolish; what by fictitious-persuasive Proclamation of such; specifying, in distinct items, the distributions, circulations, disbursements, incomings of said moneys, with the smallest approach to accuracy? Butto ask, How far, in all the several infinitely-complected departmentsof social business, in government, education, in manual, commercial, intellectual fabrication of every sort, man's Want is supplied by trueWare; how far by the mere Appearance of true Ware:--in other words, Towhat extent, by what methods, with what effects, in various times andcountries, Deception takes the place of wages of Performance: heretruly is an Inquiry big with results for the future time, but to whichhitherto only the vaguest answer can be given. If for the present, inour Europe, we estimate the ratio of Ware to Appearance of Ware sohigh even as at One to a Hundred (which, considering the Wages of aPope, Russian Autocrat, or English Game-Preserver, is probably not farfrom the mark), --what almost prodigious saving may there not beanticipated, as the _Statistics of Imposture_ advances, and so themanufacturing of Shams (that of Realities rising into clearer andclearer distinction therefrom) gradually declines, and at lengthbecomes all but wholly unnecessary!

'This for the coming golden ages. What I had to remark, for thepresent brazen one, is, that in several provinces, as in Education, Polity, Religion, where so much is wanted and indispensable, and solittle can as yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of sanative, anodyne nature, and man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. Supposeyour sinews of war quite broken; I mean your military chest insolvent, forage all but exhausted; and that the whole army is about to mutiny, disband, and cut your and each other's throat, --then were it not wellcould you, as if by miracle, pay them in any sort of fairy-money, feedthem on coagulated water, or mere imagination of meat; whereby, tillthe real supply came up, they might be kept together and quiet? Suchperhaps was the aim of Nature, who does nothing without aim, infurnishing her favourite, Man, with this his so omnipotent or ratheromnipatient Talent of being Gulled. 

'How beautifully it works, with a little mechanism; nay, almost makesmechanism for itself! These Professors in the Nameless lived withease, with safety, by a mere Reputation, constructed in past times, and then too with no great effort, by quite another class of persons. Which Reputation, like a strong, brisk-going undershot wheel, sunkinto the general current, bade fair, with only a little annualrepainting on their part, to hold long together, and of its own accordassiduously grind for them. Happy that it was so, for the Millers!They themselves needed not to work; their attempts at working, at whatthey called Educating, now when I look back on it, filled me with acertain mute admiration. 

'Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in thehighest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mindfurnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown outinto a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort hadsoon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode(_crepiren_) in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intentsbecome dead. --But this too is portion of mankind's lot. If our era isthe Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it; is there not a bettercoming, nay come? As in long-drawn Systole and long-drawn Diastole, must the period of Faith alternate with the period of Denial; must thevernal growth, the summer luxuriance of all Opinions, SpiritualRepresentations and Creations, be followed by, and again follow, theautumnal decay, the winter dissolution. For man lives in Time, has hiswhole earthly being, endeavour and destiny shaped for him by Time:only in the transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity westand on made manifest. And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, itis for the nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have beenborn, and to be awake and work; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hibernating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, orSybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle ofIndolence, they can slumber-through, in stupid dreams, and only awakenwhen the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done their work, and to ourprayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been vouchsafed. '

That in the environment, here mysteriously enough shadowed forth, Teufelsdröckh must have felt ill at ease, cannot be doubtful. 'Thehungry young, ' he says, 'looked up to their spiritual Nurses; and, forfood, were bidden eat the east-wind. What vain jargon of controversialMetaphysic, Etymology, and mechanical Manipulation falsely namedScience, was current there, I indeed learned, better perhaps than themost. Among eleven-hundred Christian youths, there will not be wantingsome eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain polish was communicated; by instinct and happy accident, Itook less to rioting (_renommiren_), than to thinking and reading, which latter also I was free to do. Nay from the chaos of thatLibrary, I succeeded in fishing-up more books perhaps than had beenknown to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a Literary Lifewas hereby laid : I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently inalmost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences;farther, as man is ever the prime object to man, already it was myfavourite employment to read character in speculation, and from theWriting to construe the Writer. A certain groundplan of Human Natureand Life began to fashion itself in me; wondrous enough, now when Ilook back on it; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual, was asyet a Machine! However, such a conscious, recognised groundplan, thetruest I had, _was_ beginning to be there, and by additionalexperiments might be corrected and indefinitely extended. '

Thus from poverty does the strong educe nobler wealth; thus in thedestitution of the wild desert does our young Ishmael acquire forhimself the highest of all possessions, that of Self-help. Nevertheless a desert this was, waste, and howling with savagemonsters. Teufelsdröckh gives us long details of his 'fever-paroxysmsof Doubt'; his Inquiries concerning Miracles, and the Evidences ofreligious Faith; and how 'in the silent night-watches, still darker inhis heart than over sky and earth, he has cast himself before theAll-seeing, and with audible prayers cried vehemently for Light, fordeliverance from Death and the Grave. Not till after long years, andunspeakable agonies, did the believing heart surrender; sink intospell-bound sleep, under the night-mare, Unbelief; and, in thishag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair living world for a pallid, vacantHades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain, 'continues he, 'it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead Letterof Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if theliving Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel-house, is toarise on us, newborn of Heaven, and with new healing under its wings. '

To which Purgatory pains, seemingly severe enough, if we add a liberalmeasure of Earthly distresses, want of practical guidance, want ofsympathy, want of money, want of hope; and all this in the fervidseason of youth, so exaggerated in imagining, so boundless in desires, yet here so poor in means, --do we not see a strong incipient spiritoppressed and overloaded from without and from within; the fire ofgenius struggling-up among fuel-wood of the greenest, and as yet withmore of bitter vapour than of clear flame?

From various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps, it isto be inferred that Teufelsdröckh, isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain established men are awareof his existence; and, if stretching-out no helpful hand, have atleast their eyes on him. He appears, though in dreary enough humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;--whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting thesebroken, unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, let us presentrather the following small thread of Moral relation; and therewith, the reader for himself weaving it in at the right place, conclude ourdim arras-picture of these University years. 

'Here also it was that I formed acquaintance with Herr Towgood, or, asit is perhaps better written, Herr Toughgut; a young person of quality(_von Adel_), from the interior parts of England. He stood connected, by blood and hospitality, with the Counts von Zähdarm, in this quarterof Germany; to which noble Family I likewise was, by his means, withall friendliness, brought near. Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakablyill-cultivated; with considerable humour of character: and, bating histotal ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a littleGrammar, showed less of that aristocratic impassivity, and silentfury, than for most part belongs to Travellers of his nation. To him Iowe my first practical knowledge of the English and their ways;perhaps also something of the partiality with which I have ever sinceregarded that singular people. Towgood was not without an eye, couldhe have come at any light. Invited doubtless by the presence of theZähdarm Family, he had travelled hither, in the almost frantic hope ofperfecting his studies; he, whose studies had as yet been those ofinfancy, hither to a University where so much as the notion ofperfection, not to say the effort after it, no longer existed! Oftenwe would condole over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how, after all our toil, we were to be turned-out into the world, withbeards on our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood;no existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that wecould so much as Believe. "How has our head on the outside a polishedHat, " would Towgood exclaim, "and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth ofVocables and Attorney-Logic! At a small cost men are educated to makeleather into shoes; but at a great cost, what am I educated to make?By Heaven, Brother! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thusfar, would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables. "--"Man, indeed, " I would answer, "has a Digestive Faculty, which must be keptworking, were it even partly by stealth. But as for our Mis-education, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in trampling onthistles because they have yielded us no figs. _Frisch zu, Bruder!_Here are Books, and we have brains to read them; here is a whole Earthand a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them: _Frisch zu!_"

'Often also our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We looked-out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at onceharlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered: motley, notunterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths. Formyself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this youngwarmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood I was even nearexperiencing the now obsolete sentiment of Friendship. Yes, foolishHeathen that I was, I felt that, under certain conditions, I couldhave loved this man, and taken him to my bosom, and been his brotheronce and always. By degrees, however, I understood the new time, andits wants. If man's _Soul_ is indeed, as in the Finnish Language, andUtilitarian Philosophy, a kind of _Stomach_, what else is the truemeaning of Spiritual Union but an Eating together? Thus we, instead ofFriends, are Dinner-guests; and here as elsewhere have cast awaychimeras. '

So ends, abruptly as is usual, and enigmatically, this littleincipient romance. What henceforth becomes of the brave Herr Towgood, or Toughgut? He has dived-under, in the Autobiographical Chaos, andswims we see not where. Does any reader 'in the interior parts ofEngland' know of such a man?

CHAPTER IV

GETTING UNDER WAY

'Thus, nevertheless, ' writes our autobiographer, apparently asquitting College, 'was there realised Somewhat; namely, I, DiogenesTeufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure (_Zeitbild_), occupying somecubic feet of Space, and containing within it Forces both physical andspiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; the whole wondrous furniture, inmore or less perfection, belonging to that mystery, a Man. Capabilities there were in me to give battle, in some small degree, against the great Empire of Darkness: does not the very Ditcher andDelver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and soleave a little Order, where he found the opposite? Nay your veryDaymoth has capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something(into its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; andof mute dead air makes living music, though only of the faintest, byhumming. 

'How much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who has learned, or begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of Thought! ThaumaturgicI name it; for hitherto all Miracles have been wrought thereby, andhenceforth innumerable will be wrought; whereof we, even in thesedays, witness some. Of the Poet's and Prophet's inspired Message, andhow it makes and unmakes whole worlds, I shall forbear mention: butcannot the dullest hear Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he notseen the Scottish Brassmith's IDEA (and this but a mechanical one)travelling on fire-wings round the Cape, and across two Oceans; andstronger than any other Enchanter's Familiar, on all hands unweariedlyfetching and carrying: at home, not only weaving Cloth, but rapidlyenough overturning the whole old system of Society; and, for Feudalismand Preservation of the Game, preparing us, by indirect but suremethods, Industrialism and the Government of the Wisest? Truly aThinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; everytime such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudderthrough the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, with newtactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him. 

'With such high vocation had I too, as denizen of the Universe, beencalled. Unhappy it is, however, that though born to the amplestSovereignty, in this way, with no less than sovereign right of Peaceand War against the Time-Prince (_Zeitfürst_), or Devil, and all hisDominions, your coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptreis so difficult to get at, or even to get eye on!'

By which last wiredrawn similitude does Teufelsdröckh mean no morethan that young men find obstacles in what we call 'getting underway'? 'Not what I Have, ' continues he, 'but what I Do is my Kingdom. To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outwardEnvironment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, acertain maximum of Capability. But the hardest problem were ever thisfirst: 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 notyet which is the main and true one. Always too the new man is in a newtime, under new conditions; his course can be the _fac-simile_ of noprior one, but is by its nature original. And then how seldom will theoutward Capability fit the inward: though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is worse thanall, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we gostupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch thewrong one: in this mad work must several years of our small term bespent, till the purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions ofdistance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their wholeterm, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappointment, shift fromenterprise to enterprise, and from side to side: till at length, asexasperated striplings of threescore-and-ten, they shift into theirlast enterprise, that of getting buried. 

'Such, since the most of us are too ophthalmic, would be the generalfate; were it not that one thing saves us: our Hunger. For on thisground, as the prompt nature of Hunger is well known, must a promptchoice be made: hence have we, with wise foresight, Indentures andApprenticeships for our irrational young; whereby, in due season, thevague universality of a Man shall find himself ready-moulded into aspecific Craftsman; and so thenceforth work, with much or with littlewaste of Capability as it may be; yet not with the worst waste, thatof time. Nay even in matters spiritual, since the spiritual artist toois born blind, and does not, like certain other creatures, receivesight in nine days, but far later, sometimes never, --is it not wellthat there should be what we call Professions, or Bread-studies(_Brodzwecke_), pre-appointed us? Here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or total blindness is no evil, the Bread-artist cantravel contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is forwardand forward; and realise much: for himself victual; for the world anadditional horse's power in the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill ofEconomic Society. For me too had such a leading-string been provided;only that it proved a neck-halter, and had nigh throttled me, till Ibroke it off. Then, in the words of Ancient Pistol, did the worldgenerally become mine oyster, which I, by strength or cunning, was toopen, as I would and could. Almost had I deceased (_fast wär ichumgekommen_), so obstinately did it continue shut. '

We see here, significantly foreshadowed, the spirit of much that wasto befall our Autobiographer; the historical embodiment of which, asit painfully takes shape in his Life, lies scattered, in dimdisastrous details, through this Bag _Pisces_, and those that follow. A young man of high talent, and high though still temper, like a youngmettled colt, 'breaks-off his neck-halter, ' and bounds forth, from hispeculiar manger, into the wide world; which, alas, he finds allrigorously fenced-in. Richest clover-fields tempt his eye; but to himthey are forbidden pasture: either pining in progressive starvation, he must stand; or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leapingagainst sheer stone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which onlylacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts andendurances, he, as if by miracle, clears his way; not indeed intoluxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain bosky wildernesswhere existence is still possible, and Freedom, though waited on byScarcity, is not without sweetness. In a word, Teufelsdröckh havingthrown-up his legal Profession, finds himself without landmark ofoutward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided Belief, orinward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. Necessity urges him on;Time will not stop, neither can he, a Son of Time; wild passionswithout solacement, wild faculties without employment, ever vex andagitate him. He too must enact that stern Monodrama, _No Object and noRest_; must front its successive destinies, work through to itscatastrophe, and deduce therefrom what moral he can. 

Yet let us be just to him, let us admit that his 'neck-halter' satnowise 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 Namelesscapital, as he emerges from its Nameless University, we can discernwell that it was far from enviable. His first Law-Examination he hascome through triumphantly; and can even boast that the _ExamenRigorosum_ need not have frightened him: but though he is hereby 'an_Auscultator_ of respectability, ' what avails it? There is next to noemployment to be had. Neither, for a youth without connexions, is theprocess of Expectation very hopeful in itself; nor for one of hisdisposition much cheered from without. 'My fellow Auscultators, ' hesays, 'were Auscultators: they dressed, and digested, and talkedarticulate words; other vitality showed they almost none. Smallspeculation in those eyes, that they did glare withal! Sense neitherfor the high nor for the deep, nor for aught human or divine, saveonly for the faintest scent of coming Preferment. ' In which words, indicating a total estrangement on the part of Teufelsdröckh, maythere not also lurk traces of a bitterness as from wounded vanity?Doubtless these prosaic Auscultators may have sniffed at him, with hisstrange ways; and tried to hate, and what was much more impossible, todespise him. Friendly communion, in any case, there could not be:already has the young Teufelsdröckh left the other young geese; andswims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is cygnet orgosling. 

Perhaps, too, what little employment he had was performed ill, at bestunpleasantly. 'Great practical method and expertness' he may brag of;but is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, onlythe deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have been popular. We figureto ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks withhis 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 notalso with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had beenappointed to struggle. ' Be this as it may, his progress from thepassive Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evidentlyof the slowest. By degrees, those same established men, once partiallyinclined to patronise him, seem to withdraw their countenance, andgive him up as 'a man of genius': against which procedure he, in thesePapers, loudly protests. 'As if, ' says he, 'the higher did notpresuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven, could not alsowalk post if he resolved on it! But the world is an old woman, andmistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being oftencheated, 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 skywardwithout return, is not too clear from these Documents. Good oldGretchen seems to have vanished from the scene, perhaps from theEarth; other Horn of Plenty, or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows forhim; so that 'the prompt nature of Hunger being well known, ' we arenot without our anxiety. From private Tuition, in never so manylanguages and sciences, the aid derivable is small; neither, to usehis own words, 'does the young Adventurer hitherto suspect in himselfany literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water wages, by hiswide faculty of Translation. Nevertheless, ' continues he, 'that Isubsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive. ' Which fact, however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind oldProverb, that 'there is always life for a living one, ' we must professourselves unable to explain. 

Certain Landlords' Bills, and other economic Documents, bearing themark of Settlement, indicate that he was not without money; but, likean independent Hearth-holder, if not House-holder, paid his way. Herealso occur, among many others, two little mutilated Notes, whichperhaps throw light on his condition. The first has now no date, orwriter's name, but a huge Blot; and runs to this effect: 'The(_Inkblot_), tied-down by previous promise, cannot, except by bestwishes, forward the Herr Teufelsdröckh's views on the Assessorship inquestion; and sees himself under the cruel necessity of forbearing, for the present, what were otherwise his duty and joy, to assist inopening the career for a man of genius, on whom far higher triumphsare yet waiting. ' The other is on gilt paper; and interests us like asort of epistolary mummy now dead, yet which once lived andbeneficently worked. We give it in the original: '_Herr Teufelsdröckhwird von der Frau Gräfinn, auf Donnerstag, zum_ ÆSTHETISCHEN THEE_schönstens eingeladen. _'

Thus, in answer to a cry for solid pudding, whereof there is the mosturgent need, comes, epigrammatically enough, the invitation to a washof quite fluid _Æsthetic Tea!_ How Teufelsdröckh, now at actualhandgrips with Destiny herself, may have comported himself among theseMusical and Literary Dilettanti of both sexes, like a hungry lioninvited to a feast of chickenweed, we can only conjecture. Perhaps inexpressive silence, and abstinence: otherwise if the lion, in suchcase, is to feast at all, it cannot be on the chickenweed, but only onthe chickens. For the rest, as this Frau Gräfinn dates from the_Zähdarm House_, she can be no other than the Countess and mistress ofthe same; whose intellectual tendencies, and good-will toTeufelsdröckh, whether on the footing of Herr Towgood, or on his ownfooting, are hereby manifest. That some sort of relation, indeed, continued, for a time, to connect our Autobiographer, though perhapsfeebly enough, with this noble House, we have elsewhere expressevidence. Doubtless, if he expected patronage, it was in vain; enoughfor him if he here obtained occasional glimpses of the great world, from which we at one time fancied him to have been always excluded. 'The Zähdarms, ' says he, 'lived in the soft, sumptuous garniture ofAristocracy; whereto Literature and Art, attracted and attached fromwithout, were to serve as the handsomest fringing. It was to the_Gnädigen Frau_ (her Ladyship) that this latter improvement was due:assiduously she gathered, dextrously she fitted-on, what fringing wasto be had; lace or cobweb, as the place yielded. ' Was Teufelsdröckhalso a fringe, of lace or cobweb; or promising to be such? 'With his_Excellenz_ (the Count), ' continues he, 'I have more than once had thehonour to converse; chiefly on general affairs, and the aspect of theworld, which he, though now past middle life, viewed in nounfavourable light; finding indeed, except the Outrooting ofJournalism (_die auszurottende Journalistik_), little to desideratetherein. On some points, as his _Excellenz_ was not uncholeric, Ifound it more pleasant to keep silence. Besides, his occupation beingthat of Owning Land, there might be faculties enough, which, assuperfluous for such use, were little developed in him. '

That to Teufelsdröckh the aspect of the world was nowise so faultless, and many things besides 'the Outrooting of Journalism' might haveseemed improvements, we can readily conjecture. With nothing but abarren Auscultatorship from without, and so many mutinous thoughts andwishes from within, his position was no easy one. 'The Universe, ' hesays, 'was as a mighty Sphinx-riddle, which I knew so little of, yetmust rede, or be devoured. In red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yetalso in the blackness of darkness, was Life, to my too-unfurnishedThought, unfolding itself. A strange contradiction lay in me; and I asyet knew not the solution of it; knew not that spiritual music canspring only from discords set in harmony; that but for Evil there wereno Good, as victory is only possible by battle. '

'I have heard affirmed (surely in jest), ' observes he elsewhere, 'bynot unphilanthropic persons, that it were a real increase of humanhappiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be coveredunder barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left tofollow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadderand wiser, at the age of twenty-five. With which suggestion, at leastas considered in the light of a practical scheme, I need scarcely saythat I nowise coincide. Nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, asyoung ladies (_Mädchen_) are, to mankind, precisely the mostdelightful in those years; so young gentlemen (_Bübchen_) do thenattain their maximum of detestability. Such gawks (_Gecken_) are they;and foolish peacocks, and yet with such a vulturous hunger forself-indulgence; so obstinate, obstreperous, vainglorious; in allsenses, so froward and so forward. No mortal's endeavour or attainmentwill, in the smallest, content the as yet unendeavouring, unattainingyoung gentleman; but he could make it all infinitely better, were itworthy of him. Life everywhere is the most manageable matter, simpleas a question in the Rule-of-Three: multiply your second and thirdterm together, divide the product by the first, and your quotient willbe the answer, --which you are but an ass if you cannot come at. Thebooby has not yet found-out, by any trial, that, do what one will, there is ever a cursed fraction, oftenest a decimal repeater, and nonet integer quotient so much as to be thought of. '

In which passage does not there lie an implied confession thatTeufelsdröckh himself, besides his outward obstructions, had aninward, still greater, to contend with; namely, a certain temporary, youthful, yet still afflictive derangement of head? Alas, on theformer side alone, his case was hard enough. 'It continues ever true, 'says he, 'that Saturn, or Chronos, or what we call TIME, devours allhis Children: only by incessant Running, by incessant Working, may you(for some threescore-and-ten years) escape him; and you too he devoursat last. Can any Sovereign, or Holy Alliance of Sovereigns, bid Timestand still; even in thought, shake themselves free of Time? Our wholeterrestrial being is based on Time, and built of Time; it is wholly aMovement, a Time-impulse; Time is the author of it, the material ofit. Hence also our Whole Duty, which is to move, to work, --in theright direction. Are not our Bodies and our Souls in continualmovement, whether we will or not; in a continual Waste, requiring acontinual Repair? Utmost satisfaction of our whole outward and inwardWants were but satisfaction for a space of Time; thus, whatso we havedone, is done, and for us annihilated, and ever must we go and doanew. O Time-Spirit, how hast thou environed and imprisoned us, andsunk us so deep in thy troublous dim Time-Element, that only in lucidmoments can so much as glimpses of our upper Azure Home be revealed tous! Me, however, as a Son of Time, unhappier than some others, wasTime threatening to eat quite prematurely; for, strive as I might, there was no good Running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved werethe feet. ' That is to say, we presume, speaking in the dialect of thislower world, that Teufelsdröckh's whole duty and necessity was, likeother men's, 'to work, --in the right direction, ' and that no work wasto be had; whereby he became wretched enough. As was natural: withhaggard Scarcity threatening him in the distance; and so vehement asoul languishing in restless inaction, and forced thereby, like SirHudibras's sword by rust, To eat into itself for lack Of something else to hew and hack!

But on the whole, that same 'excellent Passivity, ' as it has all alongdone, is here again vigorously flourishing; in which circumstance maywe not trace the beginnings of much that now characterises ourProfessor; and perhaps, in faint rudiments, the origin of theClothes-Philosophy itself? Already the attitude he has assumed towardsthe World is too defensive; not, as would have been desirable, a boldattitude of attack. 'So far hitherto, ' he says, 'as I had mingled withmankind, I was notable, if for anything, for a certain stillness ofmanner, which, as my friends often rebukingly declared, did but illexpress the keen ardour of my feelings. I, in truth, regarded men withan excess both of love and of fear. The mystery of a Person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the God-like. Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for myso-called Hardness (_Härte_), my Indifferentism towards men; and theseemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favourite dialect inconversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor Personmight live safe there, and in all friendliness, being no longerexasperated by wounds. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, thelanguage of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good asrenounced it. But how many individuals did I, in those days, provokeinto some degree of hostility thereby! An ironic man, with his slystillness, and ambuscading ways, more especially an ironic young man, from whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to society. Have we not seen persons of weight and name coming forward, withgentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as aninsignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (_balkenhoch_), and thencefall shattered and supine, to be borne home on shutters, not withoutindignation, when he proved electric and a torpedo!'

Alas, how can a man with this devilishness of temper make way forhimself in Life; where the first problem, as Teufelsdröckh too admits, is 'to unite yourself with some one and with somewhat (_sichanzuschliessen_)'? Division, not union, is written on most part of hisprocedure. Let us add too that, in no great length of time, the onlyimportant connexion he had ever succeeded in forming, his connexionwith the Zähdarm Family, seems to have been paralysed, for allpractical uses, by the death of the 'not uncholeric' old Count. Thisfact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain _Discourse onEpitaphs_, huddled into the present Bag, among so much else; of whichEssay the learning and curious penetration are more to be approved ofthan the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, ofwhat sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. 'By requestof that worthy Nobleman's survivors, ' says he, 'I undertook to composehis Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following;which however, for an alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yetfully visible to myself, still remains unengraven';--wherein, we maypredict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an Englishreader:

 HIC JACET

 PHILIPPUS ZAEHDARM, COGNOMINE MAGNUS, ZAEHDARMI COMES, EX IMPERII CONCILIO, VELLERIS AUREI, PERISCELIDIS, NECNON VULTURIS NIGRI EQUES. 

 QUI DUM SUB LUNA AGEBAT, QUINQUIES MILLE PERDICES

 PLUMBO CONFECIT:

 VARII CIBI

 CENTUMPONDIA MILLIES CENTENA MILLIA, PER SE, PERQUE SERVOS QUADRUPEDES BIPEDESVE HAUD SINE TUMULTU DEVOLVENS, IN STERCUS

 PALAM CONVERTIT. 

 NUNC A LABORE REQUIESCENTEM OPERA SEQUUNTUR. 

 SI MONUMENTUM QUÆRIS, FIMETUM ADSPICE. 

 PRIMUM IN ORBE DEJECIT [_sub dato_]; POSTREMUM [_sub dato_]. 

CHAPTER V

ROMANCE

'For long years, ' writes Teufelsdröckh, 'had the poor Hebrew, in thisEgypt of an Auscultatorship, painfully toiled, baking bricks withoutstubble, before ever the question once struck him with entire force:For what?--_Beym Himmel!_ For Food and Warmth! And are Food and Warmthnowhere else, in the whole wide Universe, discoverable?--Come of itwhat might, I resolved to try. '

Thus then are we to see him in a new independent capacity, thoughperhaps far from an improved one. Teufelsdröckh is now a man withoutProfession. Quitting the common Fleet of herring-busses and whalers, where indeed his leeward, laggard condition was painful enough, hedesperately steers-off, on a course of his own, by sextant and compassof his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Though neither Fleet, nor Traffic, nor Commodores pleased thee, still was it not _a Fleet_, sailing inprescribed track, for fixed objects; above all, in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans and borrowings, each could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in unknownseas; and for thyself find that shorter North-west Passage to thy fairSpice-country of a Nowhere?--A solitary rover, on such a voyage, withsuch nautical tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwithdiscover, a certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; andas it were falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning. 

'If in youth, ' writes he once, 'the Universe is majesticallyunveiling, and everywhere Heaven revealing itself on Earth, nowhere tothe Young Man does this Heaven on Earth so immediately reveal itselfas in the Young Maiden. Strangely enough, in this strange life ofours, it has been so appointed. On the whole, as I have often said, aPerson (_Persönlichkeit_) is ever holy to us: a certain orthodoxAnthropomorphism connects my _Me_ with all _Thees_ in bonds of Love:but it is in this approximation of the Like and Unlike, that suchheavenly attraction, as between Negative and Positive, first burns-outinto a flame. Is the pitifullest mortal Person, think you, indifferentto us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; tounite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or failingall these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more, in this case ofthe Like-Unlike! Here is conceded us the higher mystic possibility ofsuch a union, the highest in our Earth; thus, in the conducting mediumof Fantasy, flames-forth that _fire_-development of the universalSpiritual Electricity, which, as unfolded between man and woman, wefirst emphatically denominate LOVE. 

'In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there alreadyblooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve;nor, in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that Garden, is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if Cherubim and aFlaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, theimaginative stripling, only the view, not the entrance. Happy seasonof virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestialbarrier; and the sacred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into themean clay-hamlets of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infiniteand free!

'As for our young Forlorn, ' continues Teufelsdröckh, evidently meaninghimself, 'in his secluded way of life, and with his glowing Fantasy, the more fiery that it burnt under cover, as in a reverberatingfurnace, his feeling towards the Queens of this Earth was, and indeedis, altogether unspeakable. A visible Divinity dwelt in them; to ouryoung Friend all women were holy, were heavenly. As yet he but sawthem flitting past, in their many-coloured angel-plumage; or hoveringmute and inaccessible on the outskirts of _Æsthetic Tea_: all of airthey were, all Soul and Form; so lovely, like mysterious priestesses, in whose hand was the invisible Jacob's-ladder, whereby man mightmount into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever win forhimself one of these Gracefuls (_Holden_)--_Ach Gott!_ how could hehope it; should he not have died under it? There was a certaindelirious vertigo in the thought. 

'Thus was the young man, if all-sceptical of Demons and Angels such asthe vulgar had once believed in, nevertheless not unvisited by hostsof true Sky-born, who visibly and audibly hovered round him whereso hewent; and they had that religious worship in his thought, though asyet it was by their mere earthly and trivial name that he named them. But now, if on a soul so circumstanced, some actual Air-maiden, incorporated into tangibility and reality, should cast any electricglance of kind eyes, saying thereby, "Thou too mayest love and beloved"; and so kindle him, --good Heaven, what a volcanic, earthquake-bringing, all-consuming fire were probably kindled!'

Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actually burst-forth, withexplosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes;as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurativestyle, we might say, had now not a little carbonised tinder, ofIrritability; with so much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurousHumour enough; the whole lying in such hot neighbourhood, close by 'areverberating furnace of Fantasy': have we not here the components ofdriest Gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, toblaze-up? Neither, in this our Life-element, are sparks anywherewanting. Without doubt, some Angel, whereof so many hovered round, would one day, leaving 'the outskirts of _Æsthetic Tea_, ' flit nigher;and, by electric Promethean glance, kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a Firework, and flamed-off rocketwise, insuccessive beautiful bursts of splendour, each growing naturally fromthe other, through the several stages of a happy Youthful Love; tillthe whole were safely burnt-out; and the young soul relieved withlittle damage! Happy, if it did not rather prove a Conflagration andmad Explosion; painfully lacerating the heart itself; nay perhapsbursting the heart in pieces (which were Death); or at best, burstingthe thin walls of your 'reverberating furnace, ' so that it ragethenceforth all unchecked among the contiguous combustibles (whichwere Madness): till of the so fair and manifold internal world of ourDiogenes, there remained Nothing, or only the 'crater of an extinctvolcano!'

From multifarious Documents in this Bag _Capricornus_, and in theadjacent ones on both sides thereof, it becomes manifest that ourphilosopher, as stoical and cynical as he now looks, was heartily andeven frantically in Love: here therefore may our old doubts whetherhis heart were of stone or of flesh give way. He loved once; notwisely but too well. And once only: for as your Congreve needs a newcase or wrappage for every new rocket, so each human heart canproperly exhibit but one Love, if even one; the 'First Love which isinfinite' can be followed by no second like unto it. In more recentyears, accordingly, the Editor of these Sheets was led to regardTeufelsdröckh as a man not only who would never wed, but who wouldnever even flirt; whom the grand-climacteric itself, and _St. Martin'sSummer_ of incipient Dotage, would crown with no new myrtle-garland. To the Professor, women are henceforth Pieces of Art; of CelestialArt, indeed; which celestial pieces he glories to survey in galleries, but has lost thought of purchasing. 

Psychological readers are not without curiosity to see howTeufelsdröckh, in this for him unexampled predicament, demeanshimself; with what specialties of successive configuration, splendourand colour, his Firework blazes-off. Small, as usual, is thesatisfaction that such can meet with here. From amid these confusedmasses of Eulogy and Elegy, with their mad Petrarchan and Wertereanware lying madly scattered among all sorts of quite extraneous matter, not so much as the fair one's name can be deciphered. For, withoutdoubt, the title _Blumine_, whereby she is here designated, and whichmeans simply Goddess of Flowers, must be fictitious. Was her real nameFlora, then? But what was her surname, or had she none? Of whatstation in Life was she; of what parentage, fortune, aspect?Specially, by what Pre-established Harmony of occurrences did theLover and the Loved meet one another in so wide a world; how did theybehave in such meeting? To all which questions, not unessential in aBiographic work, mere Conjecture must for most part return answer. 'Itwas appointed, ' says our Philosopher, 'that the high celestial orbitof Blumine should intersect the low sublunary one of our Forlorn; thathe, looking in her empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper Sphere ofLight was come down into this nether sphere of Shadows; and findinghimself mistaken, make noise enough. '

We seem to gather that she was young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, and someone's Cousin; highborn, and of high spirit; but unhappily dependentand insolvent; living, perhaps, on the not-too-gracious bounty ofmonied relatives. But how came 'the Wanderer' into her circle? Was itby the humid vehicle of _Æsthetic Tea_, or by the arid one of mereBusiness? Was it on the hand of Herr Towgood; or of the Gnädige Frau, who, as ornamental Artist, might sometimes like to promote flirtation, especially for young cynical Nondescripts? To all appearance, it waschiefly by Accident, and the grace of Nature. 

'Thou fair Waldschloss, ' writes our Autobiographer, 'what strangerever saw thee, were it even an absolved Auscultator, officiallybearing in his pocket the last _Relatio ex Actis_ he would ever write, but must have paused to wonder! Noble Mansion! There stoodest thou, indeep Mountain Amphitheatre, on umbrageous lawns, in thy serenesolitude; stately, massive, all of granite; glittering in the westernsunbeams, like a palace of El Dorado, overlaid with precious metal. Beautiful rose up, in wavy curvature, the slope of thy guardian Hills;of the greenest was their sward, embossed with its dark-brown frets ofcrag, or spotted by some spreading solitary Tree and its shadow. Tothe unconscious Wayfarer thou wert also as an Ammon's Temple, in theLibyan Waste; where, for joy and woe, the tablet of his Destiny laywritten. Well might he pause and gaze; in that glance of his wereprophecy and nameless forebodings. '

But now let us conjecture that the so presentient Auscultator hashanded-in his _Relatio ex Actis_; been invited to a glass ofRhine-wine; and so, instead of returning dispirited and athirst to hisdusty Town-home, is ushered into the Gardenhouse, where sit thechoicest party of dames and cavaliers: if not engaged in Æsthetic Tea, yet in trustful evening conversation, and perhaps Musical Coffee, forwe hear of 'harps and pure voices making the stillness live. 'Scarcely, it would seem, is the Gardenhouse inferior in respectabilityto the noble Mansion itself. 'Embowered amid rich foliage, rose-clusters, and the hues and odours of thousand flowers, here satthat brave company; in front, from the wide-opened doors, fair outlookover blossom and bush, over grove and velvet green, stretching, undulating onwards to the remote Mountain peaks: so bright, so mild, and everywhere the melody of birds and happy creatures: it was all asif man had stolen a shelter from the Sun in the bosom-vesture ofSummer herself. How came it that the Wanderer advanced thither withsuch forecasting heart (_ahndungsvoll_), by the side of his gay host?Did he feel that to these soft influences his hard bosom ought to beshut; that here, once more, Fate had it in view to try him; to mockhim, and see whether there were Humour in him?

'Next moment he finds himself presented to the party; and especiallyby name to--Blumine! Peculiar among all dames and damosels glancedBlumine, there in her modesty, like a star among earthly lights. Noblest maiden! whom he bent to, in body and in soul; yet scarcelydared look at, for the presence filled him with painful yet sweetestembarrassment. 

'Blumine's was a name well known to him; far and wide was the fair oneheard of, for her gifts, her graces, her caprices: from all whichvague colourings of Rumour, from the censures no less than from thepraises, had our friend painted for himself a certain imperious Queenof Hearts, and blooming warm Earth-angel, much more enchanting thanyour mere white Heaven-angels of women, in whose placid veinscirculates too little naphtha-fire. Herself also he had seen in publicplaces; that light yet so stately form; those dark tresses, shading aface where smiles and sunlight played over earnest deeps: but all thishe had seen only as a magic vision, for him inaccessible, almostwithout reality. Her sphere was too far from his; how should she everthink of him; O Heaven! how should they so much as once meet together?And now that Rose-goddess sits in the same circle with him; the lightof _her_ eyes has smiled on him; if he speak, she will hear it! Nay, who knows, since the heavenly Sun looks into lowest valleys, butBlumine herself might have aforetime noted the so unnotable; perhaps, from his very gainsayers, as he had from hers, gathered wonder, gathered favour for him? Was the attraction, the agitation mutual, then; pole and pole trembling towards contact, when once brought intoneighbourhood? Say rather, heart swelling in presence of the Queen ofHearts; like the Sea swelling when once near its Moon! With theWanderer it was even so: as in heavenward gravitation, suddenly as atthe touch of a Seraph's wand, his whole soul is roused from itsdeepest recesses; and all that was painful and that was blissfulthere, dim images, vague feelings of a whole Past and a whole Future, are heaving in unquiet eddies within him. 

'Often, in far less agitating scenes, had our still Friend shrunkforcibly together; and shrouded-up his tremors and flutterings, ofwhat sort soever, in a safe cover of Silence, and perhaps of seemingStolidity. How was it, then, that here, when trembling to the core ofhis heart, he did not sink into swoons, but rose into strength, intofearlessness and clearness? It was his guiding Genius (_Dämon_) thatinspired him; he must go forth and meet his Destiny. Show thyself now, whispered it, or be forever hid. Thus sometimes it is even when youranxiety becomes transcendental, that the soul first feels herself ableto transcend it; that she rises above it, in fiery victory; and borneon new-found wings of victory, moves so calmly, even because sorapidly, so irresistibly. Always must the Wanderer remember, with acertain satisfaction and surprise, how in this case he sat not silent, but struck adroitly into the stream of conversation; whichthenceforth, to speak with an apparent not a real vanity, he may saythat he continued to lead. Surely, in those hours, a certaininspiration was imparted him, such inspiration as is still possible inour late era. The self-secluded unfolds himself in noble thoughts, infree, glowing words; his soul is as one sea of light, the peculiarhome of Truth and Intellect; wherein also Fantasy bodies-forth formafter form, radiant with all prismatic hues. '

It appears, in this otherwise so happy meeting, there talked one'Philistine'; who even now, to the general weariness, was dominantlypouring-forth Philistinism (_Philistriositäten_); little witting whathero was here entering to demolish him! We omit the series ofSocratic, or rather Diogenic utterances, not unhappy in their way, whereby the monster, 'persuaded into silence, ' seems soon after tohave withdrawn for the night. 'Of which dialectic marauder, ' writesour hero, 'the discomfiture was visibly felt as a benefit by most: butwhat were all applauses to the glad smile, threatening every moment tobecome a laugh, wherewith Blumine herself repaid the victor? Heventured to address her, she answered with attention: nay what ifthere were a slight tremor in that silver voice; what if the red glowof evening were hiding a transient blush!

'The conversation took a higher tone, one fine thought called forthanother: it was one of those rare seasons, when the soul expands withfull freedom, and man feels himself brought near to man. Gaily inlight, graceful abandonment, the friendly talk played round thatcircle; for the burden was rolled from every heart; the barriers ofCeremony, which are indeed the laws of polite living, had melted asinto vapour; and the poor claims of _Me_ and _Thee_, no longer partedby rigid fences, now flowed softly into one another; and Life lay allharmonious, many-tinted, like some fair royal champaign, the sovereignand owner of which were Love only. Such music springs from kindhearts, in a kind environment of place and time. And yet as the lightgrew more aërial on the mountain-tops, and the shadows fell longerover the valley, some faint tone of sadness may have breathed throughthe heart; and, in whispers more or less audible, reminded every onethat as this bright day was drawing towards its close, so likewisemust the Day of Man's Existence decline into dust and darkness; andwith all its sick toilings, and joyful and mournful noises sink in thestill Eternity. 

'To our Friend the hours seemed moments; holy was he and happy: thewords from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on thirstygrass; all better feelings in his soul seemed to whisper: It is goodfor us to be here. At parting, the Blumine's hand was in his: in thebalmy twilight, with the kind stars above them, he spoke something ofmeeting again, which was not contradicted; he pressed gently thosesmall soft fingers, and it seemed as if they were not hastily, notangrily withdrawn. '

Poor Teufelsdröckh! it is clear to demonstration thou art smit: theQueen of Hearts would see a 'man of genius' also sigh for her; andthere, by art-magic, in that preternatural hour, has she bound andspell-bound thee. 'Love is not altogether a Delirium, ' says he elsewhere;'yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather adiscerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; whichdiscerning again may be either true or false, either seraphic ordemoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as incommon Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on theso petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby tomove at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the trueHeaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the smalltemporary stage (_Zeitbühne_), whereon thick-streaming influences fromboth these far yet near regions meet visibly, and act tragedy andmelodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most countries, forsome eighteenpence a day; but for Fantasy planets and solar-systemswill not suffice. Witness your Pyrrhus conquering the world, yetdrinking no better red wine than he had before. ' Alas! witness alsoyour Diogenes, flame-clad, scaling the upper Heaven, and vergingtowards Insanity, for prize of a 'high-souled Brunette, ' as if theearth held but one and not several of these!

He says that, in Town, they met again: 'day after day, like hisheart's sun, the blooming Blumine shone on him. Ah! a little whileago, and he was yet in all darkness; him what Graceful (_Holde_) wouldever love? Disbelieving all things, the poor youth had never learnedto believe in himself. Withdrawn, in proud timidity, within his ownfastnesses; solitary from men, yet baited by night-spectres enough, hesaw himself, with a sad indignation, constrained to renounce thefairest hopes of existence. And now, O now! "She looks on thee, " criedhe: "she the fairest, noblest; do not her dark eyes tell thee, thouart not despised? The Heaven's-Messenger! All Heaven's blessings behers!" Thus did soft melodies flow through his heart; tones of aninfinite gratitude; sweetest intimations that he also was a man, thatfor him also unutterable joys had been provided. 

'In free speech, earnest or gay, amid lambent glances, laughter, tears, and often with the inarticulate mystic speech of Music: suchwas the element they now lived in; in such a many-tinted, radiantAurora, and by this fairest of Orient Light-bringers must our Friendbe blandished, and the new Apocalypse of Nature unrolled to him. Fairest Blumine! And, even as a Star, all Fire and humid Softness, avery Light-ray incarnate! Was there so much as a fault, a "caprice, "he could have dispensed with? Was she not to him in very deed aMorning-Star; did not her presence bring with it airs from Heaven? Asfrom Æolian Harps in the breath of dawn, as from the Memnon's Statuestruck by the rosy finger of Aurora, unearthly music was around him, and lapped him into untried balmy Rest. Pale Doubt fled away to thedistance; Life bloomed-up with happiness and hope. The past, then, wasall a haggard dream; he had been in the Garden of Eden, then, andcould not discern it! But lo now! the black walls of his prison meltaway; the captive is alive, is free. If he loved his Disenchantress?_Ach Gott!_ His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never hadhe named it Love: existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into aThought. '

Nevertheless, into a Thought, nay into an Action, it must be shaped;for neither Disenchanter nor Disenchantress, mere 'Children of Time, 'can abide by Feeling alone. The Professor knows not, to this day, 'howin her soft, fervid bosom the Lovely found determination, even on hestof Necessity, to cut-asunder these so blissful bonds. ' He even appearssurprised at the 'Duenna Cousin, ' whoever she may have been, 'in whosemeagre, hunger-bitten philosophy, the religion of young hearts was, from the first, faintly approved of. ' We, even at such distance, canexplain it without necromancy. Let the Philosopher answer this onequestion: What figure, at that period, was a Mrs. Teufelsdröckh likelyto make in polished society? Could she have driven so much as abrass-bound Gig, or even a simple iron-spring one? Thou foolish'absolved Auscultator, ' before whom lies no prospect of capital, willany yet known 'religion of young hearts' keep the human kitchen warm?Pshaw! thy divine Blumine when she 'resigned herself to wed somericher, ' shows more philosophy, though but 'a woman of genius, ' thanthou, a pretended man. 

Our readers have witnessed the origin of this Love-mania, and withwhat royal splendour it waxes, and rises. Let no one ask us to unfoldthe glories of its dominant state; much less the horrors of its almostinstantaneous dissolution. How from such inorganic masses, henceforthmadder than ever, as lie in these Bags, can even fragments of a livingdelineation be organised? Besides, of what profit were it? We view, with a lively pleasure, the gay silk Montgolfier start from theground, and shoot upwards, cleaving the liquid deeps, till it dwindleto a luminous star: but what is there to look longer on, when once, bynatural elasticity, or accident of fire, it has exploded? A haplessair-navigator, plunging amid torn parachutes, sand-bags, and confusedwreck, fast enough into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know thatTeufelsdröckh rose into the highest regions of the Empyrean, by anatural parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick perpendicularone. For the rest, let any feeling reader, who has been unhappy enoughto do the like, paint it out for himself: considering only that if he, for his perhaps comparatively insignificant mistress, underwent suchagonies and frenzies, what must Teufelsdröckh's have been, with afire-heart, and for a nonpareil Blumine! We glance merely at the finalscene:

'One morning, he found his Morning-Star all dimmed and dusky-red; thefair creature was silent, absent, she seemed to have been weeping. Alas, no longer a Morning-star, but a troublous skyey Portent, announcing that the Doomsday had dawned! She said, in a tremulousvoice, They were to meet no more. ' The thunder-struck Air-sailor isnot wanting to himself in this dread hour: but what avails it? We omitthe passionate expostulations, entreaties, indignations, since all wasvain, and not even an explanation was conceded him; and hasten to thecatastrophe. '"Farewell, then, Madam!" said he, not without sternness, for his stung pride helped him. She put her hand in his, she looked inhis face, tears started to her eyes: in wild audacity he clasped herto his bosom; their lips were joined, their two souls, like twodew-drops, rushed into one, --for the first time, and for the last!'Thus was Teufelsdröckh made immortal by a kiss. And then? Why, then--'thick curtains of Night rushed over his soul, as rose theimmeasurable Crash of Doom; and through the ruins as of a shiveredUniverse was he falling, falling, towards the Abyss. '

CHAPTER VI

SORROWS OF TEUFELSDRÖCKH

We have long felt that, with a man like our Professor, matters mustoften be expected to take a course of their own; that in so multiplex, intricate a nature, there might be channels, both for admitting andemitting, such as the Psychologist had seldom noted; in short, that onno grand occasion and convulsion, neither in the joy-storm nor in thewoe-storm, could you predict his demeanour. 

To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear thatthe so passionate Teufelsdröckh, precipitated through 'a shiveredUniverse' in this extraordinary way, has only one of three thingswhich he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writingSatanic Poetry; or blow-out his brains. In the progress towards any ofwhich consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravaganceenough; breast-beating, brow-beating (against walls), lion-bellowingsof blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages offurniture, if not arson itself?

Nowise so does Teufelsdröckh deport him. He quietly lifts his_Pilgerstab_ (Pilgrim-staff), 'old business being soon wound-up'; andbegins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe!Curious it is, indeed, how with such vivacity of conception, suchintensity of feeling, above all, with these unconscionable habits ofExaggeration in speech, he combines that wonderful stillness of his, that stoicism in external procedure. Thus, if his sudden bereavement, in this matter of the Flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Doomsdayand Dissolution of Nature, in which light doubtless it partly appearedto himself, his own nature is nowise dissolved thereby; but rather iscompressed closer. For once, as we might say, a Blumine by magicappliances has unlocked that shut heart of his, and its hidden thingsrush-out tumultuous, boundless, like genii enfranchised from theirglass phial: but no sooner are your magic appliances withdrawn, thanthe strange casket of a heart springs-to again; and perhaps there isnow no key extant that will open it; for a Teufelsdröckh, as weremarked, will not love a second time. Singular Diogenes! No soonerhas that heart-rending occurrence fairly taken place, than he affectsto regard it as a thing natural, of which there is nothing more to besaid. 'One highest hope, seemingly legible in the eyes of an Angel, had recalled him as out of Death-shadows into celestial Life: but agleam of Tophet passed-over the face of his Angel; he was rapt away inwhirlwinds, and heard the laughter of Demons. It was a Calenture, 'adds he, 'whereby the Youth saw green Paradise-groves in the wasteOcean-waters: a lying vision, yet not wholly a lie, for _he_ saw it. 'But what things soever passed in him, when he ceased to see it; whatragings and despairings soever Teufelsdröckh's soul was the scene of, he has the goodness to conceal under a quite opaque cover of Silence. We know it well; the first mad paroxysm past, our brave Gneschencollected his dismembered philosophies, and buttoned himself together;he was meek, silent, or spoke of the weather and the Journals: only bya transient knitting of those shaggy brows, by some deep flash ofthose eyes, glancing one knew not whether with tear-dew or with fiercefire, --might you have guessed what a Gehenna was within; that a wholeSatanic School were spouting, though inaudibly, there. To consume yourown choler, as some chimneys consume their own smoke; to keep a wholeSatanic School spouting, if it must spout, inaudibly, is a negativeyet no slight virtue, nor one of the commonest in these times. 

Nevertheless, we will not take upon us to say, that in the strangemeasure he fell upon, there was not a touch of latent Insanity;whereof indeed the actual condition of these Documents in_Capricornus_ and _Aquarius_ is no bad emblem. His so unlimitedWanderings, toilsome enough, are without assigned or perhapsassignable aim; internal Unrest seems his sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen on him, and hewere 'made like unto a wheel. ' Doubtless, too, the chaotic nature ofthese Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note ofpreparation, for example, we come upon the following slip: 'A peculiarfeeling it is that will rise in the Traveller, when turning somehill-range in his desert road, he descries lying far below, embosomedamong its groves and green natural bulwarks, and all diminished to atoybox, the fair Town, where so many souls, as it were seen and yetunseen, are driving their multifarious traffic. Its white steeple isthen truly a starward-pointing finger; the canopy of blue smoke seemslike a sort of Life-breath: for always, of its own unity, the soulgives unity to whatsoever it looks on with love; thus does the littleDwelling place of men, in itself a congeries of houses and huts, become for us an individual, almost a person. But what thousand otherthoughts unite thereto, if the place has to ourselves been the arenaof joyous or mournful experiences; if perhaps the cradle we wererocked in still stands there, if our Loving ones still dwell there, ifour Buried ones there slumber!' Does Teufelsdröckh, as the woundedeagle is said to make for its own eyrie, and indeed militarydeserters, and all hunted outcast creatures, turn as if by instinct inthe direction of their birthland, --fly first, in this extremity, towards his native Entepfuhl; but reflecting that there no help awaitshim, take but one wistful look from the distance, and then wendelsewhither?

Little happier seems to be his next flight: into the wilds of Nature;as if in her mother-bosom he would seek healing. So at least weincline to interpret the following Notice, separated from the formerby some considerable space, wherein, however, is nothing noteworthy:

'Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are Mountains seen in suchcombined majesty and grace as here. The rocks are of that sort calledPrimitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves inmasses of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, ishere tempered by a singular airiness of form, and softness ofenvironment: in a climate favourable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with lichens, shoots-up through a garment of foliage orverdure; and white, bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster round theeverlasting granite. In fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates withGrandeur: you ride through stony hollows, along straight passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rock; now windingamid broken shaggy chasms, and huge fragments; now suddenly emerginginto some emerald valley, where the streamlet collects itself into aLake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and it seems as ifPeace had established herself in the bosom of Strength. 

'To Peace, however, in this vortex of existence, can the Son of Timenot pretend: still less if some Spectre haunt him from the Past; andthe future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing. Reasonablymight the Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of thisworld's happiness inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope thatis not mad? Nevertheless, one may still murmur audibly, or in theoriginal Greek if that suit better: "Whoso can look on Death willstart at no shadows. "

'From such meditations is the Wanderer's attention called outwards;for now the Valley closes-in abruptly, intersected by a huge mountainmass, the stony water-worn ascent of which is not to be accomplishedon horseback. Arrived aloft, he finds himself again lifted into theevening sunset light; and cannot but pause, and gaze round him, somemoments there. An upland irregular expanse of wold, where valleys incomplex branchings are suddenly or slowly arranging their descenttowards every quarter of the sky. The mountain-ranges are beneath yourfeet, and folded together: only the loftier summits look down here andthere as on a second plain; lakes also lie clear and earnest in theirsolitude. No trace of man now visible; unless indeed it were he whofashioned that little visible link of Highway, here, as would seem, scaling the inaccessible, to unite Province with Province. Butsunwards, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world of Mountains, thediadem and centre of the mountain region! A hundred and a hundredsavage peaks, in the last light of Day; all glowing, of gold andamethyst, like giant spirits of the wilderness; there in theirsilence, in their solitude, even as on the night when Noah's Delugefirst dried! Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to ourWanderer. He gazed over those stupendous masses with wonder, almostwith longing desire; never till this hour had he known Nature, thatshe was One, that she was his Mother, and divine. And as the ruddyglow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun had nowdeparted, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one, asif the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had itsthrone in that splendour, and his own spirit were therewith holdingcommunion. 

'The spell was broken by a sound of carriage-wheels. Emerging from thehidden Northward, to sink soon into the hidden Southward, came a gayBarouche-and-four: it was open; servants and postillions worewedding-favours: that happy pair, then, had found each other, it wastheir marriage evening! Few moments brought them near: _Du Himmel!_ Itwas Herr Towgood and--Blumine! With slight unrecognising salutationthey passed me; plunged down amid the neighbouring thickets, onwards, to Heaven, and to England; and I, in my friend Richter's words, _Iremained alone, behind them, with the Night_. '

Were it not cruel in these circumstances, here might be the place toinsert an observation, gleaned long ago from the great _Clothes-Volume_, where it stands with quite other intent: 'Some time before Small-poxwas extirpated, ' says the Professor, 'there came a new malady of thespiritual sort on Europe: I mean the epidemic, now endemical, ofView-hunting. Poets of old date, being privileged with Senses, hadalso enjoyed external Nature; but chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cupwhich holds good or bad liquor for us; that is to say, in silence, orwith slight incidental commentary: never, as I compute, till after the_Sorrows of Werter_, was there man found who would say: Come let usmake a Description! Having drunk the liquor, come let us eat theglass! Of which endemic the Jenner is unhappily still to seek. ' Tootrue!

We reckon it more important to remark that the Professor's Wanderings, so far as his stoical and cynical envelopment admits us to clearinsight, here first take their permanent character, fatuous or not. That Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four seems to havewithered-up what little remnant of a purpose may have still lurked inhim: Life has become wholly a dark labyrinth; wherein, through longyears, our Friend, flying from spectres, has to stumble about atrandom, and naturally with more haste than progress. 

Foolish were it in us to attempt following him, even from afar, inthis extraordinary world-pilgrimage of his; the simplest record ofwhich, were clear record possible, would fill volumes. Hopeless is theobscurity, unspeakable the confusion. He glides from country tocountry, from condition to condition; vanishing and reappearing, noman can calculate how or where. Through all quarters of the world hewanders, and apparently through all circles of society. If in anyscene, perhaps difficult to fix geographically, he settles for a time, and forms connexions, be sure he will snap them abruptly asunder. Lethim sink out of sight as Private Scholar (_Privatisirender_), livingby the grace of God in some European capital, you may next find him asHadjee in the neighbourhood of Mecca. It is an inexplicablePhantasmagoria, capricious, quick-changing; as if our Traveller, instead of limbs and high-ways, had transported himself by somewishing-carpet, or Fortunatus' Hat. The whole, too, impartedemblematically, in dim multifarious tokens (as that collection ofStreet-Advertisements); with only some touch of direct historicalnotice sparingly interspersed: little light-islets in the world ofhaze! So that, from this point, the Professor is more of an enigmathan ever. In figurative language, we might say he becomes, not indeeda spirit, yet spiritualised, vaporised Fact unparalleled in Biography:The river of his History, which we have traced from its tiniestfountains, and hoped to see flow onward, with increasing current, intothe ocean, here dashes itself over that terrific Lover's Leap; and, asa mad-foaming cataract, flies wholly into tumultuous clouds of spray!Low down it indeed collects again into pools and plashes; yet only ata great distance, and with difficulty, if at all, into a generalstream. To cast a glance into certain of those pools and plashes, andtrace whither they run, must, for a chapter or two, form the limit ofour endeavour. 

For which end doubtless those direct historical Notices, where theycan be met with, are the best. Nevertheless, of this sort too thereoccurs much, which, with our present light, it were questionable toemit. Teufelsdröckh, vibrating everywhere between the highest and thelowest levels, comes into contact with public History itself. Forexample, those conversations and relations with illustrious Persons, as Sultan Mahmoud, the Emperor Napoleon, and others, are they not asyet rather of a diplomatic character than of a biographic? The Editor, appreciating the sacredness of crowned heads, nay perhaps suspectingthe possible trickeries of a Clothes-Philosopher, will eschew thisprovince for the present; a new time may bring new insight and adifferent duty. 

If we ask now, not indeed with what ulterior Purpose, for there was none, yet with what immediate outlooks; at all events, in what mood of mind, the Professor undertook and prosecuted this world-pilgrimage, --theanswer is more distinct than favourable. 'A nameless Unrest, ' says he, 'urged me forward; to which the outward motion was some momentarylying solace. Whither should I go? My Loadstars were blotted out; inthat canopy of grim fire shone no star. Yet forward must I; the groundburnt under me; there was no rest for the sole of my foot. I wasalone, alone! Ever too the strong inward longing shaped Fantasms foritself: towards these, one after the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A feeling I had, that for my fever-thirst there was and must besomewhere a healing Fountain. To many fondly imagined Fountains, theSaints' Wells of these days, did I pilgrim; to great Men, to greatCities, to great Events: but found there no healing. In strangecountries, as in the well-known; in savage deserts, as in the press ofcorrupt civilisation, it was ever the same: how could your Wandererescape from--_his own Shadow_? Nevertheless still Forward! I felt asif in great haste; to do I saw not what. From the depths of my ownheart, it called to me, Forwards! The winds and the streams, and allNature sounded to me, Forwards! _Ach Gott_, I was even, once for all, a Son of Time. '

From which is it not clear that the internal Satanic School was stillactive enough? He says elsewhere: 'The _Enchiridion of Epictetus_ Ihad ever with me, often as my sole rational companion; and regret tomention that the nourishment it yielded was trifling. ' Thou foolishTeufelsdröckh! How could it else? Hadst thou not Greek enough tounderstand thus much: _The end of Man is an Action, and not aThought_, though it were the noblest?

'How I lived?' writes he once: 'Friend, hast thou considered the"rugged all-nourishing Earth, " as Sophocles well names her; how shefeeds the sparrow on the house-top, much more her darling, man? Whilethou stirrest and livest, thou hast a probability of victual. Mybreakfast of tea has been cooked by a Tartar woman, with water of theAmur, who wiped her earthen kettle with a horse-tail. I have roastedwild-eggs in the sand of Sahara; I have awakened in Paris _Estrapades_and Vienna _Malzleins_, with no prospect of breakfast beyond elementalliquid. That I had my Living to seek saved me from Dying, --by suicide. In our busy Europe, is there not an everlasting demand for Intellect, in the chemical, mechanical, political, religious, educational, commercial departments? In Pagan countries, cannot one write Fetishes?Living! Little knowest thou what alchemy is in an inventive Soul; how, as with its little finger, it can create provision enough for the body(of a Philosopher); and then, as with both hands, create quite otherthan provision; namely, spectres to torment itself withal. '

Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying with Hunger always parallel to him; and awhole Infernal Chase in his rear; so that the countenance of Hunger iscomparatively a friend's! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew, --save only that he feels himself notguilty and but suffering the pains of guilt, --wend to and fro withaimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the Earth (byfootprints), write his _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_; even as the greatGoethe, in passionate words, had to write his _Sorrows of Werter_, before the spirit freed herself, and he could become a Man. Vain trulyis the hope of your swiftest Runner to escape 'from his own Shadow'!Nevertheless, in these sick days, when the Born of Heaven firstdescries himself (about the age of twenty) in a world such as ours, richer than usual in two things, in Truths grown obsolete, and Tradesgrown obsolete, --what can the fool think but that it is all a Den ofLies, wherein whoso will not speak Lies and act Lies, must stand idleand despair? Whereby it happens that, for your nobler minds, thepublishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an Altercationwith the Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byronpublishes his _Sorrows of Lord George_, in verse and in prose, andcopiously otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his _Sorrows ofNapoleon_ Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music ofcannon-volleys, and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights arethe fires of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp ofembattled Hosts and the sound of falling Cities. --Happier is he who, like our Clothes-Philosopher, can write such matter, since it must bewritten, on the insensible Earth, with his shoe-soles only; and alsosurvive the writing thereof!

CHAPTER VII

THE EVERLASTING NO

Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has nowshrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is neverthelessprogressive, and growing: for how can the 'Son of Time, ' in any case, stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state ofcrisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solution intoaimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation;wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolveitself?

Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moultsis sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the oldone upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individualacts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever ofanarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed, bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heartmight desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worstinstance, offered and then snatched away. Ever an 'excellentPassivity'; but of useful, reasonable Activity, essential to theformer as Food to Hunger, nothing granted: till at length, in thiswild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of bitterness, which hadbeen filling drop by drop, ever since that first 'ruddy morning' inthe Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; and then with thatpoison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs over, andeven hisses over in a deluge of foam. 

He himself says once, with more justice than originality: 'Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession butHope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope. ' What, then, was our Professor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, butvaguely all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant withearthquake and tornado. 

Alas, shut-out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost alltidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least ofreligiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides notthat, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: 'Doubt had darkenedinto Unbelief, ' says he; 'shade after shade goes grimly over yoursoul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black. ' To suchreaders as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man'slife, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-lossPhilosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is _not_ synonymouswith Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, 'that, for man's well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame andthe cross; and without it, worldlings puke-up their sick existence, bysuicide, in the midst of luxury': to such it will be clear that, for apure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss ofeverything. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continuedDestitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, allwounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not itslife-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way:'Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and_see_ing it go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty nodivine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made-up ofDesire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Dr. Graham'sCelestial-Bed? Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul ofTarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that _he_ was"the chief of sinners"; and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit(_wohlgemuth_), spend much of his time in fiddling? FoolishWord-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthlymechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtuefrom the husks of Pleasure, --I tell thee, Nay! To the unregeneratePrometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation ofhis wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himselfthe victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is theheroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion; some bubble of theblood, bubbling in the direction others _profit_ by? I know not: onlythis I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then arewe all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors ofConscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but onCookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing ourfrying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, andlive at ease on the fat things _he_ has provided for his Elect!'

Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, andreceive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fairworld of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild-beasts, or theshrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To suchlength has the spirit of Inquiry carried him. 'But what boots it (_wasthut's_)?' cries he: 'it is but the common lot in this era. Not havingcome to spiritual majority prior to the _Siècle de Louis Quinze_, andnot being born purely a Loghead (_Dummkopf_), thou hadst no otheroutlook. The whole world is, like thee, sold to Unbelief; their oldTemples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rainproof, crumble down; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes neversaw him?'

Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call ourDiogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at noera of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, theServant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence. 'Onecircumstance I note, ' says he: 'after all the nameless woe thatInquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love ofTruth, had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved Truth, and wouldbate no jot of my allegiance to her. "Truth"! I cried, "though theHeavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood! though a wholecelestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy. " In conduct it wasthe same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculousHandwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me _This thoushalt do_, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would Ihave done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, inspite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-LossPhilosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they hadbrought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me:living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterlybereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, andHis heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there. '

Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritualdestitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured!'The painfullest feeling, ' writes he, 'is that of your own Feebleness(_Unkraft_); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the truemisery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Betweenvague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what adifference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly inus; which only our Works can render articulate and decisivelydiscernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first seesits natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossiblePrecept, _Know thyself_; till it be translated into this partiallypossible one, _Know what thou canst work-at_. 

'But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net-result ofmy Workings amounted as yet simply to--Nothing. How then could Ibelieve in my Strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in?Ever did this agitating, yet, as I now perceive, quite frivolousquestion, remain to me insoluble: Hast thou a certain Faculty, acertain Worth, such even as the most have not; or art thou thecompletest Dullard of these modern times? Alas! the fearful Unbeliefis unbelief in yourself; and how could I believe? Had not my first, last Faith in myself, when even to me the Heavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all-too cruelly belied? The speculativeMystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to me: neither in thepractical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, but beeneverywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast-out. A feebleunit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to havenothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me fromall living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could presstrustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock uponmy lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety ofso-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry soulsFriendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, yourresource is to talk little, and that little mostly from theNewspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I thenlived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were butFigures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that theywere not merely automatic. In midst of their crowded streets andassemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in hisjungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, havefancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as Iimagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful:but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has beenpulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me theUniverse was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even ofHostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rollingon, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Livingbanished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil;nay, unless the Devil is your God'?

A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as theworst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of aTeufelsdröckh threaten to fail? We conjecture that he has knownsickness; and, in spite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness ofthe chronic sort. Hear this, for example: 'How beautiful to die ofbroken-heart, on Paper! Quite another thing in practice; every windowof your Feeling, even of your Intellect, as it were, begrimed andmud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole Drugshop inyour inwards; the fordone soul drowning slowly in quagmires ofDisgust!'

Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we notfind in the following sentences, quite in our Professor's still vein, significance enough? 'From Suicide a certain aftershine (_Nachschein_)of Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence ofcharacter; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach?Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some onenow, at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the other World, or other No-World, by pistol-shot, --how were it?On which ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged citiesand other death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falsely enough, for courage. '

'So had it lasted, ' concludes the Wanderer, 'so had it lasted, as inbitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart withinme, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear;or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust'sDeathsong, that wild _Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet_ (Happywhom _he_ finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this lastFriend even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom menot to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were itof Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise tome, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangelyenough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if allthings in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as ifthe Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouringmonster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. 

'Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the wholeFrench Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after muchperambulation, toiling along the dirty little _Rue Saint-Thomas del'Enfer_, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and overpavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless myspirits were little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a Thoughtin me, and I asked myself: "What _art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, likea coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering andtrembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst thatlies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hastthou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as aChild of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thyfeet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it anddefy it!" And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire overmy whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I wasstrong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from thattime, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrowwas it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. 

'Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (_das ewige Nein_) pealed authoritativelythrough all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it thatmy whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasisrecorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transactionin Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychologicalpoint of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: "Behold, thou are fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's)";to which my whole Me now made answer: "_I_ am not thine, but Free, andforever hate thee!"

'It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be aMan. '

CHAPTER VIII

CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE

Though, after this 'Baphometic Fire-baptism' of his, our Wanderersignifies that his Unrest was but increased; as, indeed, 'Indignationand Defiance, ' especially against things in general, are not the mostpeaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was nolonger a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had at least afixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptised soul, long soscathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feelingis its Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it hasthus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards fromwhich the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, willdoubtless by degrees be conquered and pacificated. Under anotherfigure, we might say, if in that great moment, in the _RueSaint-Thomas de l'Enfer_, the old inward Satanic School was not yetthrown out of doors, it received peremptory judicial notice toquit;--whereby, for the rest, its howl-chantings, Ernulphus-cursings, and rebellious gnashings of teeth, might, in the meanwhile, becomeonly the more tumultuous, and difficult to keep secret. 

Accordingly, if we scrutinise these Pilgrimings well, there is perhapsdiscernible henceforth a certain incipient method in their madness. Not wholly as a Spectre does Teufelsdröckh now storm through theworld; at worst as a spectre-fighting Man, nay who will one day be aSpectre-queller. If pilgriming restlessly to so many 'Saints' Wells, 'and ever without quenching of his thirst, he nevertheless finds littlesecular wells, whereby from time to time some alleviation isministered. In a word, he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to'eat his own heart'; and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-MEfor wholesomer food. Does not the following glimpse exhibit him in amuch more natural state?

'Towns also and Cities, especially the ancient, I failed not to lookupon with interest. How beautiful to see thereby, as through a longvista, into the remote Time; to have, as it were, an actual section ofalmost the earliest Past brought safe into the Present, and set beforeyour eyes! There, in that old City, was a live ember of Culinary Fireput down, say only two thousand years ago; and there, burning more orless triumphantly, with such fuel as the region yielded, it has burnt, and still burns, and thou thyself seest the very smoke thereof. Ah!and the far more mysterious live ember of Vital Fire was then also putdown there; and still miraculously burns and spreads; and the smokeand ashes thereof (in these Judgment-Halls and Churchyards), and itsbellows-engines (in these Churches), thou still seest; and its flame, looking out from every kind countenance, and every hateful one, stillwarms thee or scorches thee. 

'Of Man's Activity and Attainment the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in Tradition only: such are his Forms ofGovernment, with the Authority they rest on; his Customs, or Fashionsboth of Cloth-habits and of Soul-habits; much more his collectivestock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired ofmanipulating Nature: all these things, as indispensable and pricelessas they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but mustflit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles, from Father to Son; if youdemand sight of them, they are nowhere to be met with. VisiblePloughmen and Hammermen there have been, ever from Cain and Tubalcaindownwards: but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself onthe atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and by Vision); itis a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort. In likemanner, ask me not, Where are the LAWS; where is the GOVERNMENT? Invain wilt thou go to Schönbrunn, to Downing Street, to the PalaisBourbon: thou findest nothing there but brick or stone houses, andsome bundles of Papers tied with tape. Where, then, is that samecunningly-devised almighty GOVERNMENT of theirs to be laid hands on?Everywhere, yet nowhere: seen only in its works, this too is a thingaeriform, invisible; or if you will, mystic and miraculous. Sospiritual (_geistig_) is our whole daily Life: all that we do springsout of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; only like a littleCloud-image, or Armida's Palace, air-built, does the Actual bodyitself forth from the great mystic Deep. 

'Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon-up to theextent of three: Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals; then tilledFields, to either or to both of which divisions Roads with theirBridges may belong; and thirdly----Books. In which third truly, thelast invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others. Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book. Not like a dead city ofstones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilledfield, but then a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, let merather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we haveBooks that already number some hundred-and-fifty human ages); andyearly comes its new produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Political Systems; or were it only Sermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which is talismanic andthaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. O thou who art able to write aBook, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man giftedto do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressiblypity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art aConqueror and Victor: but of the true sort, namely over the Devil:thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be awonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and PropheticMount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim. --Fool! whyjourneyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze onthe stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These standthere, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three-thousand years: but canst thounot open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, or even Luther's Version thereof?'

No less satisfactory is his sudden appearance not in Battle, yet onsome Battle-field; which, we soon gather, must be that of Wagram; sothat here, for once, is a certain approximation to distinctness ofdate. Omitting much, let us impart what follows:

'Horrible enough! A whole Marchfeld strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; stragglersstill remaining not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps: ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and Virtue hasbeen blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed-down out ofsight, like blown Egg-shells!--Did Nature, when she bade the Donaubring down his mould-cargoes from the Carinthian and CarpathianHeights, and spread them out here into the softest, richestlevel, --intend thee, O Marchfeld, for a corn-bearing Nursery, whereonher children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit, wherein they might themore commodiously be throttled and tattered? Were thy three broadHighways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made forAmmunition-wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so manyready-built Casemates, wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter withartillery, and with artillery be battered? König Ottokar, amid yonderhillocks, dies under Rodolf's truncheon; here Kaiser Franz fallsa-swoon under Napoleon's: within which five centuries, to omit theothers, how has thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced and defiled! Thegreensward is torn-up and trampled-down; man's fond care of it, hisfruit-trees, hedgerows, and pleasant dwellings, blown-away withgunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies a desolate, hideous Place ofSculls. --Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall thesePowder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all thatgore and carnage will be shrouded-in, absorbed into manure; and nextyear the Marchfeld will be green, nay greener. Thrifty unweariedNature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thyown, --how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring Lifefor the Living!

'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport andupshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five-hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there aresuccessively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodiedmen: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: shehas, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, andeven trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stoneavoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they areselected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fedthere till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in likemanner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two partiescome into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given:and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixtybrisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which itmust bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy asthe Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were theentirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. Howthen? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and, instead ofshooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheadsshoot. --Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all otherlands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks mustpay the piper!"--In that fiction of the English Smollet, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth;where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another'sfaces, till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may stilldivide us!'

Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away fromhis own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and pertinently enoughnote what is passing there. We may remark, indeed, that for the matterof spiritual culture, if for nothing else, perhaps few periods of hislife were richer than this. Internally, there is the most momentousinstructive Course of Practical Philosophy, with Experiments, goingon; towards the right comprehension of which his Peripatetic habits, favourable to Meditation, might help him rather than hinder. Externally, again, as he wanders to and fro, there are, if for thelonging heart little substance, yet for the seeing eye sights enough:in these so boundless Travels of his, granting that the Satanic Schoolwas even partially kept down, what an incredible knowledge of ourPlanet, and its Inhabitants and their Works, that is to say, of allknowable things, might not Teufelsdröckh acquire!

'I have read in most Public Libraries, ' says he, 'including those ofConstantinople and Samarcand: in most Colleges, except the ChineseMandarin ones, I have studied, or seen that there was no studying. Unknown Languages have I oftenest gathered from their naturalrepertory, the Air, by my organ of Hearing; Statistics, Geographics, Topographics came, through the Eye, almost of their own accord. Theways of Man, how he seeks food, and warmth, and protection forhimself, in most regions, are ocularly known to me. Like the greatHadrian, I meted-out much of the terraqueous Globe with a pair ofCompasses that belonged to myself only. 

'Of great Scenes why speak? Three summer days, I lingered reflecting, and even composing (_dichtete_), by the Pinechasms of Vaucluse; and inthat clear Lakelet moistened my bread. I have sat under the Palm-treesof Tadmor; smoked a pipe among the ruins of Babylon. The great Wall ofChina I have seen; and can testify that it is of gray brick, coped andcovered with granite, and shows only second-rate masonry. --Great Events, also, have not I witnessed? Kings sweated-down (_ausgemergelt_) intoBerlin-and-Milan Customhouse-Officers; the World well won, and theWorld well lost; oftener than once a hundred-thousand individuals shot(by each other) in one day. All kindreds and peoples and nationsdashed together, and shifted and shovelled into heaps, that they mightferment there, and in time unite. The birth-pangs of Democracy, wherewith convulsed Europe was groaning in cries that reached Heaven, could not escape me. 

'For great Men I have ever had the warmest predilection; and canperhaps boast that few such in this era have wholly escaped me. GreatMen are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine BOOKOF REVELATIONS, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named HISTORY; to which inspired Texts your numeroustalented men, and your innumerable untalented men, are the better orworse exegetic Commentaries, and wagonload of too-stupid, heretical ororthodox, weekly Sermons. For my study the inspired Texts themselves!Thus did not I, in very early days, having disguised me astavern-waiter, stand behind the field-chairs, under that shady Tree atTreisnitz by the Jena Highway; waiting upon the great Schiller andgreater Goethe; and hearing what I have not forgotten. For----'

----But at this point the Editor recalls his principle of caution, some time ago laid down, and must suppress much. Let not thesacredness of Laurelled, still more, of Crowned Heads, be tamperedwith. Should we, at a future day, find circumstances altered, and thetime come for Publication, then may these glimpses into the privacy ofthe Illustrious be conceded; which for the present were little betterthan treacherous, perhaps traitorous Eavesdroppings. Of Lord Byron, therefore, of Pope Pius, Emperor Tarakwang, and the 'WhiteWater-roses' (Chinese Carbonari) with their mysteries, no notice here!Of Napoleon himself we shall only, glancing from afar, remark thatTeufelsdröckh's relation to him seems to have been of very variedcharacter. At first we find our poor Professor on the point of beingshot as a spy; then taken into private conversation, even pinched onthe ear, yet presented with no money; at last indignantly dismissed, almost thrown out of doors, as an 'Ideologist. ' 'He himself, ' says theProfessor, 'was among the completest Ideologists, at leastIdeopraxists: in the Idea (_in der Idee_) he lived, moved and fought. The man was a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; andpreached, through the cannon's throat, that great doctrine, _Lacarrière ouverte aux talens_ (The Tools to him that can handle them), which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can libertylie. Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and firstMissionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothyrant; yet as articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetratedforests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirelyforbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom, notwithstanding, the peaceful Sower will follow, and, as he cuts the boundless harvest, bless. '

More legitimate and decisively authentic is Teufelsdröckh's appearanceand emergence (we know not well whence) in the solitude of the NorthCape, on that June Midnight. He has 'a light-blue Spanish cloak'hanging round him, as his 'most commodious, principal, indeed soleupper garment'; and stands there, on the World-promontory, lookingover the infinite Brine, like a little blue Belfry (as we figure), nowmotionless indeed, yet ready, if stirred, to ring quaintest changes. 

'Silence as of death, ' writes he; 'for Midnight, even in the Arcticlatitudes, has its character: nothing but the granite cliffsruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in the utmost North the great Sun hangs low and lazy, as ifhe too were slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson andcloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous fire-pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, andhide itself under my feet. In such moments, Solitude also isinvaluable; for who would speak, or be looked on, when behind him liesall Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the watchmen; and beforehim the silent Immensity, and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sunis but a porch-lamp?

'Nevertheless, in this solemn moment comes a man, or monster, scrambling from among the rock-hollows; and, shaggy, huge as theHyperborean Bear, hails me in Russian speech: most probably, therefore, a Russian Smuggler. With courteous brevity, I signify myindifference to contraband trade, my humane intentions, yet strongwish to be private. In vain: the monster, counting doubtless on hissuperior stature, and minded to make sport for himself, or perhapsprofit, were it with murder, continues to advance; ever assailing mewith his importunate train-oil breath; and now has advanced, till westand both on the verge of the rock, the deep Sea rippling greedilydown below. What argument will avail? On the thick Hyperborean, cherubic reasoning, seraphic eloquence were lost. Prepared for suchextremity, I, deftly enough, whisk aside one step; draw out, from myinterior reservoirs, a sufficient Birmingham Horse-pistol, and say, "Be so obliging as retire, Friend (_Er ziehe sich zurück, Freund_), and with promptitude!" This logic even the Hyperborean understands;fast enough, with apologetic, petitionary growl, he sidles off; and, except for suicidal as well as homicidal purposes, need not return. 

'Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all menalike tall. Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer than I, if thou have more_Mind_, though all but no Body whatever, then canst thou kill mefirst, and art the taller. Hereby, at last, is the Goliath powerless, and the David resistless; savage Animalism is nothing, inventiveSpiritualism is all. 

'With respect to Duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things, inthis so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. Two littlevisual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in themidst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, verysoon, --make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirlround; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode oneanother into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant!Deuce on it (_verdammt_), the little spitfires!--Nay, I think with oldHugo von Trimberg: "God must needs laugh outright, could such a thingbe, to see his wondrous Manikins here below. "'

 * * * * *

But amid these specialties, let us not forget the great generality, which is our chief quest here: How prospered the inner man ofTeufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting? Does Legion still lurkin him, though repressed; or has he exorcised that Devil's Brood? Wecan answer that the symptoms continue promising. Experience is thegrand spiritual Doctor; and with him Teufelsdröckh has now been long apatient, swallowing many a bitter bolus. Unless our poor Friend belongto the numerous class of Incurables, which seems not likely, some curewill doubtless be effected. We should rather say that Legion, or theSatanic School, was now pretty well extirpated and cast out, but nextto nothing introduced in its room; whereby the heart remains, for thewhile, in a quiet but no comfortable state. 

'At length, after so much roasting, ' thus writes our Autobiographer, 'I was what you might name calcined. Pray only that it be not rather, as is the more frequent issue, reduced to a _caput-mortuum_! But inany case, by mere dint of practice, I had grown familiar with manythings. Wretchedness was still wretched; but I could now partly seethrough it, and despise it. Which highest mortal, in this inaneExistence, had I not found a Shadow-hunter, or Shadow-hunted; and, when I looked through his brave garnitures, miserable enough? Thywishes have all been sniffed aside, thought I: but what, had they evenbeen all granted! Did not the Boy Alexander weep because he had nottwo Planets to conquer; or a whole Solar System; or after that, awhole Universe? _Ach Gott_, when I gazed into these Stars, have theynot looked down on me as if with pity, from their serene spaces; likeEyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man!Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have beenswallowed-up of Time, and there remains no wreck of them any more; andArcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining intheir courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted themin the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little Dog-cage ofan Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art stillNothing, Nobody: true; but who, then, is Something, Somebody? For theethe Family of Man has no use; it rejects thee; thou art wholly as adissevered limb: so be it; perhaps it is better so!'

Too-heavy-laden Teufelsdröckh! Yet surely his bands are loosening; oneday he will hurl the burden far from him, and bound forth free andwith a second youth. 

'This, ' says our Professor, 'was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had nowreached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to thePositive must necessarily pass. '

CHAPTER IX

THE EVERLASTING YEA

'Temptations in the Wilderness!' exclaims Teufelsdröckh: 'Have we notall to be tried with such? Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged inus by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is compassed round withNecessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, _Workthou in Welldoing_, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean PropheticCharacters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, tillit be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, avisible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, _Eatthou and be filled_, at the same time persuasively proclaims itselfthrough every nerve, --must not there be a confusion, a contest, beforethe better Influence can become the upper?

'To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when suchGod-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Claymust now be vanquished, or vanquish, --should be carried of the spiritinto grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battlewith him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Nameit as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the naturalDesert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert ofselfishness and baseness, --to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom thatdivine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in truesun-splendour; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapours!--Our Wilderness isthe wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long yearsof suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness ofBattle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty isleft. To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariestwanderings, to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes--of thatMountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!'

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, oncefor all, natural to him: 'Has not thy Life been that of mostsufficient men (_tüchtigen Männer_) thou hast known in thisgeneration? An out-flush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the firstfallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs: this allparched away, under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave rise toDoubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial! If I have had asecond-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit underumbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, bethe Heavens praised, I am not without examples, and even exemplars. '

So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a 'gloriousrevolution': these mad shadow-hunting and shadow-hunted Pilgrimings ofhis were but some purifying 'Temptation in the Wilderness, ' before hisApostolic work (such as it was) could begin; which Temptation is nowhappily over, and the Devil once more worsted! Was 'that high momentin the _Rue de l'Enfer_, ' then, properly the turning-point of thebattle; when the Fiend said, _Worship me or be torn in shreds_; andwas answered valiantly with an _Apage Satana_?--SingularTeufelsdröckh, would thou hadst told thy singular story in plainwords! But it is fruitless to look there, in those Paper-bags, forsuch. Nothing but innuendoes, figurative crotchets: a typical Shadow, fitfully wavering, prophetico-satiric; no clear logical Picture. 'Howpaint to the sensual eye, ' asks he once, 'what passes in theHoly-of-Holies of Man's Soul; in what words, known to these profanetimes, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?' We ask in turn: Whyperplex these times, profane as they are, with needless obscurity, byomission and by commission? Not mystical only is our Professor, butwhimsical; and involves himself, now more than ever, ineye-bewildering _chiaroscuro_. Successive glimpses, here faithfullyimparted, our more gifted readers must endeavour to combine for theirown behoof. 

He says: 'The hot Harmattan wind had raged itself out; its howl wentsilent within me; and the long-deafened soul could now hear. I pausedin my wild wanderings; and sat me down to wait, and consider; for itwas as if the hour of change drew nigh. I seemed to surrender, torenounce utterly, and say: Fly, then, false shadows of Hope; I willchase you no more, I will believe you no more. And ye too, haggardspectres of Fear, I care not for you; ye too are all shadows and alie. Let me rest here: for I am way-weary and life-weary; I will resthere, were it but to die: to die or to live is alike to me; alikeinsignificant. '--And again: 'Here, then, as I lay in that CENTRE OFINDIFFERENCE; cast, doubtless by benignant upper Influence, into ahealing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke toa new Heaven and a new Earth. The first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (_Selbst-tödtung_), had been happilyaccomplished; and my mind's eyes were now unsealed, and its handsungyved. '

Might we not also conjecture that the following passage refers to hisLocality, during this same 'healing sleep'; that his Pilgrim-stafflies cast aside here, on 'the high table-land'; and indeed that therepose is already taking wholesome effect on him? If it were not thatthe tone, in some parts, has more of riancy, even of levity, than wecould have expected! However, in Teufelsdröckh, there is always thestrangest Dualism: light dancing, with guitar-music, will be going onin the fore-court, while by fits from within comes the faintwhimpering of woe and wail. We transcribe the piece entire:

'Beautiful it was to sit there, as in my skyey Tent, musing andmeditating; on the high table-land, in front of the Mountains; overme, as roof, the azure Dome, and around me, for walls, fourazure-flowing curtains, --namely, of the Four azure winds, on whosebottom-fringes also I have seen gilding. And then to fancy the fairCastles that stood sheltered in these Mountain hollows; with theirgreen flower-lawns, and white dames and damosels, lovely enough: orbetter still, the straw-roofed Cottages, wherein stood many a Motherbaking bread, with her children round her:--all hidden andprotectingly folded-up in the valley-folds; yet there and alive, assure as if I beheld them. Or to see, as well as fancy, the nine Townsand Villages, that lay round my mountain-seat, which, in stillweather, were wont to speak to me (by their steeple-bells) with metaltongue; and, in almost all weather, proclaimed their vitality byrepeated Smoke-clouds; whereon, as on a culinary horologe, I mightread the hour of the day. For it was the smoke of cookery, as kindhousewives at morning, midday, eventide, were boiling their husbands'kettles; and ever a blue pillar rose up into the air, successively orsimultaneously, from each of the nine, saying, as plainly as smokecould say: Such and such a meal is getting ready here. Notuninteresting! For you have the whole Borough, with all itslove-makings and scandal-mongeries, contentions and contentments, asin miniature, and could cover it all with your hat. --If, in my wideWayfarings, I had learned to look into the business of the World inits details, here perhaps was the place for combining it into generalpropositions, and deducing inferences therefrom. 

'Often also could I see the black Tempest marching in anger throughthe Distance: round some Schreckhorn, as yet grim-blue, would theeddying vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy, and flow down likea mad witch's hair; till, after a space, it vanished, and, in theclear sunbeam, your Schreckhorn stood smiling grim-white, for thevapour had held snow. How thou fermentest and elaboratest, in thygreat fermenting-vat and laboratory of an Atmosphere, of a World, ONature!--Or what is Nature? Ha! why do I not name thee GOD? Art notthou the "Living Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it, in very deed, HE, then, that ever speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?

'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, andBeginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter thanDayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah, like the mother'svoice to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknowntumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperatedheart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, acharnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's!

'With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my fellow man; with aninfinite Love, an infinite Pity. Poor, wandering, wayward man! Artthou not tired, and beaten with stripes, even as I am? Ever, whetherthou bear the royal mantle or the beggar's gabardine, art thou not soweary, so heavy-laden; and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O myBrother, my Brother, why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipeaway all tears from thy eyes! Truly, the din of many-voiced Life, which, in this solitude, with the mind's organ, I could hear, was nolonger a maddening discord, but a melting one; like inarticulatecries, and sobbings of a dumb creature, which in the ear of Heaven areprayers. The poor Earth, with her poor joys, was now my needy Mother, not my cruel Stepdame; Man, with his so mad Wants and so meanEndeavours, had become the dearer to me; and even for his sufferingsand his sins, I now first named him Brother. Thus was I standing inthe porch of that "_Sanctuary of Sorrow_;" by strange, steep ways hadI too been guided thither; and ere long its sacred gates would open, and the "_Divine Depth of Sorrow_" lie disclosed to me. '

The Professor says, he here first got eye on the Knot that had beenstrangling him, and straightway could unfasten it, and was free. 'Avain interminable controversy, ' writes he, 'touching what is atpresent called Origin of Evil, or some such thing, arises in everysoul, since the beginning of the world; and in every soul, that wouldpass from idle Suffering into actual Endeavouring, must first be putan end to. The most, in our time, have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough Suppression of this controversy; to a few someSolution of it is indispensable. In every new era, too, such Solutioncomes-out in different terms; and ever the Solution of the last erahas become obsolete, and is found unserviceable. For it is man'snature to change his Dialect from century to century; he cannot helpit though he would. The authentic _Church-Catechism_ of our presentcentury has not yet fallen into my hands: meanwhile, for my ownprivate behoof, I attempt to elucidate the matter so. Man'sUnhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is becausethere is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannotquite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers andUpholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, injointstock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannotaccomplish it, above an hour or two; for the Shoeblack also has a Soulquite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: _God's infinite Universe altogether to himself_, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus: speak not ofthem; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is yourocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of bettervintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he setsto quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declareshimself the most maltreated of men. --Always there is a black spot inour sunshine: it is even as I said, the _Shadow of Ourselves_. 

'But the whim we have of Happiness is somewhat thus. By certainvaluations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sortof average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, andof indefeasible right. It is simple payment of our wages, of ourdeserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint; only such _overplus_as there may be do we account Happiness; any _deficit_ again isMisery. Now consider that we have the valuation of our own desertsourselves, and what a fund of Self-conceit there is in each of us, --doyou wonder that the balance should so often dip the wrong way, andmany a Blockhead cry: See there, what a payment; was ever worthygentleman so used!--I tell thee, Blockhead, it all comes of thyVanity; of what thou _fanciest_ those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wiltfeel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to behanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. 

'So true is it, what I then say, that _the Fraction of Life can beincreased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as bylessening your Denominator_. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, _Unity_ itself divided by _Zero_ will give _Infinity_. Make thy claimof wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well didthe Wisest of our time write: "It is only with Renunciation(_Entsagen_) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin. "

'I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thouhast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, onaccount of? Say it in a word: is it not because thou art not HAPPY?Because the THOU (sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovingly cared for? Foolish soul! What Actof Legislature was there that _thou_ shouldst be Happy? A little whileago thou hadst no right to _be_ at all. What if thou wert born andpredestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing otherthan a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking aftersomewhat to _eat_; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough isnot given thee? Close thy _Byron_; open thy _Goethe_. '

'_Es leuchtet mir ein_, I see a glimpse of it!' cries he elsewhere:'there is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do withoutHappiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not topreach-forth this same HIGHER that sages and martyrs, the Poet and thePriest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and howin the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspiredDoctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and brokenwith manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite, and learn it! O, thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yetremain: thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to beannihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out thedeep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaringbillows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azureof Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, itis well with him. '

And again: 'Small is it that thou canst trample the Earth with itsinjuries under thy feet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee: thou canstlove the Earth while it injures thee, and even because it injuresthee; for this a Greater than Zeno was needed, and he too was sent. Knowest thou that "_Worship of Sorrow_"? The Temple thereof, foundedsome eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; ina low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altarstill there, and its sacred Lamp perennially burning. '

Without pretending to comment on which strange utterances, the Editorwill only remark, that there lies beside them much of a still morequestionable character; unsuited to the general apprehension; naywherein he himself does not see his way. Nebulous disquisitions onReligion, yet not without bursts of splendour; on the 'perennialcontinuance of Inspiration;' on Prophecy; that there are 'truePriests, as well as Baal-Priests, in our own day:' with more of thelike sort. We select some fractions, by way of finish to this farrago. 

'Cease, my much-respected Herr von Voltaire, ' thus apostrophises theProfessor: 'shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seemsfinished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religionlooks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand otherquartos and folios, and flying sheets or reams, printed before andsince on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little! Butwhat next? Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of thatReligion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that ourSouls, otherwise too like perishing, may live? What! thou hast nofaculty in that kind? Only a torch for burning, no hammer forbuilding? Take our thanks, then, and--thyself away. 

'Meanwhile what are antiquated Mythuses to me? Or is the God present, felt in my own heart, a thing which Herr von Voltaire will dispute outof me; or dispute into me? To the "_Worship of Sorrow_" ascribe whatorigin and genesis thou pleasest, _has_ not that Worship originated, and been generated; is it not _here_? Feel it in thy heart, and thensay whether it is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion, --forwhich latter whoso will let him worry and be worried. '

'Neither, ' observes he elsewhere, 'shall ye tear-out one another'seyes, struggling over "Plenary Inspiration, " and suchlike: try ratherto get a little even Partial Inspiration, each of you for himself. OneBIBLE I know, of whose Plenary Inspiration doubt is not so much aspossible; nay with my own eyes I saw the God's-Hand writing it:thereof all other Bibles are but leaves, --say, in Picture-Writing toassist the weaker faculty. '

Or, to give the wearied reader relief, and bring it to an end, let himtake the following perhaps more intelligible passage:

'To me, in this our life, ' says the Professor, 'which is aninternecine warfare with the Time-spirit, other warfare seemsquestionable. Hast thou in any way a Contention with thy brother, Iadvise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is. If thou gauge itto the bottom, it is simply this: "Fellow, see! thou art taking morethan thy share of Happiness in the world, something from _my_ share:which, by the Heavens, thou shall not; nay I will fight theerather. "--Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a beggarlymatter, truly a "feast of shells, " for the substance has been spilledout: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective humanspecies clutching at them!--Can we not, in all such cases, rather say:"Take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additionalfraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest;take it with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee!"--IfFichte's _Wissenschaftslehre_ be, "to a certain extent, AppliedChristianity, " surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We havehere not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely the Passivehalf: could we but do it, as we can demonstrate it!

'But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless tillit convert itself into Conduct. Nay properly Conviction is notpossible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only by a felt indubitable certaintyof Experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashionitself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that"Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action. " On whichground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertainlight, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay thisother precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service:"_Do the Duty which lies nearest thee_, " which thou knowest to be aDuty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer. 

'May we not say, however, that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisementis even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has beendimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomesrevealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lothario in _Wilhelm Meister_, that your "America is here ornowhere"? The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was neveryet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere isthy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thyCondition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of:what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Formthou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in theimprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for akingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thingthou seekest is already with thee, "here or nowhere, " couldst thouonly see!

'But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning ofCreation is--Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are inbonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once overthe wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever tothe greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous andGod-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest andleast. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbledconflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deepsilent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault withits everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, wehave a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World. 

'I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, oreven Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullestinfinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tisthe utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoeverthy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it iscalled Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work. '

CHAPTER X

PAUSE

Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in suchcircumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdröckh 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;'rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come tolight in our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. TheOld World knew nothing of Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, theyhad only some _Choice of Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress inthe Moral Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to thebosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, andto Socrates a 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 Teufelsdröckhcommences: we are henceforth to see him 'work in well-doing, ' with thespirit 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 threefingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron's Rod went out ofpractice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool:greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. Forstrangely in this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is incontinual restless flux, it is appointed that _Sound_, to appearancethe most fleeting, should be the most continuing of all things. TheWORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a _Fiat_. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee;what God has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away. Highertask than that of Priesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but themeanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honour enough therein tospend and be spent?

'By this Art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into ahandicraft, ' adds Teufelsdröckh, 'have I thenceforth abidden. Writingsof mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am _I_?), have fallen, perhaps not altogether void, into the mighty seed-field of Opinion;fruits of my unseen sowing gratifyingly meet me here and there. Ithank the Heavens that I have now found my Calling; wherein, with orwithout perceptible result, 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, it without doubt was; from some Idea, in some single Head, it didfirst of all take beginning: why not from some Idea in mine?' DoesTeufelsdröckh here glance at that 'SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OFPROPERTY (_Eigenthums-conservirende Gesellschaft_), ' of which so manyambiguous notices glide spectre-like through these inexpressiblePaper-bags? 'An Institution, ' hints he, 'not unsuitable to the wantsof the time; as indeed such sudden extension proves: for already canthe Society number, among its office-bearers or corresponding members, the highest Names, if not the highest Persons, in Germany, England, France; and contributions, both of money and of meditation, pour-infrom all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining Integrity ofthe world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it roundthis Palladium. ' Does Teufelsdröckh mean, then, to give himself out asthe originator of that so notable _Eigenthums-conservirende_('Owndom-conserving') _Gesellschaft_; and if so, what, in the Devil'sname, is it? He again hints: 'At a time when the divine Commandment, _Thou shalt not steal_, wherein truly, if well understood, iscomprised the whole Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgus'sConstitutions, Justinian's Pandects, the Code Napoléon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities, Moralities whatsoever, that man has hithertodevised (and enforced with Altar-fire and Gallows-ropes) for hissocial guidance: at a time, I say, when this divine Commandment hasall-but faded away from the general remembrance; and, with littledisguise, a new opposite Commandment, _Thou shalt steal_, iseverywhere promulgated, --it perhaps behooved, in this universal dotageand deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves andrally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right ofProperty, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, aresanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has livedto hear it asserted that _we have no Property in our very Bodies, butonly an accidental Possession and Life-rent_, what is the issue to belooked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baitedfall-traps, keep-down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, exceptperhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against wholemeat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors? If, therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written _Program_ in the PublicJournals, with its high _Prize-Questions_ and so liberal _Prizes_, could have proceeded, --let him now cease such wonder; and, withundivided faculty, betake himself to the _Concurrenz_ (Competition). '

We ask: Has this same 'perhaps not ill-written _Program_, ' or anyother authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign ordomestic? If so, what are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the termsof Competition, and when and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, nofarther light of any sort, to be met with in these Paper-bags! Or isthe whole business one other of those whimsicalities and perverseinexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdröckh, meaning much ornothing, is pleased so often to play fast-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;paralysing any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered histhorny Biographical task a labour of love. It is a suspicion groundedperhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the moreand more discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdröckh, in whom underground humours and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheelwithin wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that theseAutobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many aso-called Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had nodirect Camera-obscura Picture of the Professor's History; but onlysome more or less fantastic Adumbration, symbolically, perhapssignificantly enough, shadowing-forth the same! Our theory begins tobe that, in receiving as literally authentic what was buthieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruplenot to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of, and set adrift tomake fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that a man soknown for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdröckh, would all at oncefrankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a GermanHofrath; and not rather deceptively _in_lock both Editor and Hofrathin the labyrinthic tortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel(having enticed them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, howthe 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 notice, and with effort decipher, thefollowing: 'What are your historical Facts; still more yourbiographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, bystringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts? The Man is thespirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became. Facts areengraved Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key. And then howyour Blockhead (_Dummkopf_) studies not their Meaning; but simplywhether they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral!Still worse is it with your Bungler (_Pfuscher_): such I have seenreading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistakingthe ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile. ' Wasthe Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the presentboasts himself, might mistake the Teufelsdröckh Serpent-of-Eternity inlike manner? For which reason it was to be altered, not withoutunderhand satire, into a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of hishalf-sophisms, half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of aFigure, he cares not whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; andindeed, so strange is the Professor, can never say. If our suspicionbe wholly unfounded, let his own questionable ways, not our necessarycircumspectness, bear the blame. 

But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhaustedEditor determines here to shut these Paper-bags for the present. Letit suffice that we know of Teufelsdröckh, so far, if 'not what he did, yet what he became:' the rather, as his character has now taken itsultimate bent, and no new revolution, of importance, is to be lookedfor. The imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoever be its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complexgyrations (flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere externalLife element, Teufelsdröckh reaches his University Professorship, andthe Psyche clothes herself in civic Titles, without altering her nowfixed nature, --would be comparatively an unproductive task, were weeven unsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false andimpossible one. His outward Biography, therefore, which, at theBlumine Lover's-Leap, we saw churned utterly into spray-vapour, mayhover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here. Enough thatby survey of certain 'pools and plashes, ' we have ascertained itsgeneral direction; do we not already know that, by one way and other, it _has_ long since rained-down again into a stream; and even now, atWeissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the _Philosophy ofClothes_, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon? Over muchinvaluable matter, that lies scattered, like jewels amongquarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs we may have occasion toglance back, and somewhat will demand insertion at the right place: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 yetthey drift straggling on the Flood; how far they will reach, when oncethe chains are straightened and fastened, can, at present, only bematter of conjecture. 

So much we already calculate: Through many a little loop-hole, we havehad glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdröckh; 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 hissomewhat peculiar view of Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes toNature. How all Nature and Life are but one _Garment_, a 'LivingGarment, ' woven and ever a-weaving in the 'Loom of Time;' is not here, indeed, the outline of a whole _Clothes-Philosophy_; at least thearena it is to work in? Remark, too, that the Character of the Man, nowise without meaning in such a matter, becomes less enigmatic: amidso much tumultuous obscurity, almost like diluted madness, do not acertain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem toloom-forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all therest were based and built?

Nay further, may we not say that Teufelsdröckh's Biography, allowingit even, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, asit were preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Showsof things into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The'Passivity' given him by birth is fostered by all turns of hisfortune. Everywhere cast out, like oil out of water, from mingling inany Employment, in any public Communion, he has no portion butSolitude, and a life of Meditation. The whole energy of his existenceis directed, through long years, on one task: that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows of things oppresshim, withstand him, threaten him with fearfullest destruction: only byvictoriously penetrating into Things themselves can he find peace anda stronghold. But is not this same looking through the Shows, orVestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to a _Philosophyof Clothes_? Do we not, in all this, discern some beckonings towardsthe true higher purport of such a Philosophy; and what shape it mustassume with such a man, in such an era?

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-Grottoes through which, as is our lot withTeufelsdröckh, he must wander, will there be wanting between whilessome twinkling of a steady Polar Star. 

BOOK THIRD

CHAPTER I

INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY

As a wonder-loving and wonder-seeking man, Teufelsdröckh, from anearly part of this Clothes-Volume, has more and more exhibitedhimself. Striking it was, amid all his perverse cloudiness, with whatforce of vision and of heart he pierced into the mystery of the World;recognising in the highest sensible phenomena, so far as Sense went, only fresh or faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a celestial Essencethereby rendered visible: and while, on the one hand, he trod the oldrags of Matter, with their tinsels, into the mire, he on the othereverywhere exalted Spirit above all earthly principalities and powers, and worshipped it, though under the meanest shapes, with a truePlatonic Mysticism. What the man ultimately purposed by thus castinghis Greek-fire into the general Wardrobe of the Universe; what such, more or less complete, rending and burning of Garments throughout thewhole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to; therather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, likeRousseau, recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a returnto the savage state: all this our readers are now bent to discover;this is, in fact, properly the gist and purport of ProfessorTeufelsdröckh's Philosophy of Clothes. 

Be it remembered, however, that such purport is here not so muchevolved, as detected to lie ready for evolving. We are to guide ourBritish Friends into the new Gold-country, and show them the mines;nowise to dig-out and exhaust its wealth, which indeed remains for alltime inexhaustible. Once there, let each dig for his own behoof, andenrich himself. 

Neither, in so capricious inexpressible a Work as this of theProfessor's can our course now more than formerly be straightforward, step by step, but at best leap by leap. Significant Indicationsstand-out here and there; which for the critical eye, that looks bothwidely and narrowly, shape themselves into some ground-scheme of aWhole: to select these with judgment, so that a leap from one to theother be possible, and (in our old figure) by chaining them together, a passable Bridge be effected: this, as heretofore, continues our onlymethod. Among such light-spots, the following, floating in much wildmatter about _Perfectibility_, has seemed worth clutching at:

'Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History, ' saysTeufelsdröckh, 'is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle ofAusterlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incidentpassed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with somedegree of ridicule by others: namely, George Fox's making to himself asuit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade aShoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, theDivine Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself; and, acrossall the hulls of Ignorance and earthly Degradation, shine through, inunspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, on their souls: whotherefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced. Sitting in his stall; working ontanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and anameless flood of rubbish, this youth had, nevertheless, a LivingSpirit belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, throughwhich, as through a window, it could look upwards, and discern itscelestial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even withsome prospect of victuals, and an honourable Mastership inCordwainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, asthe crown of long faithful sewing, --was nowise satisfaction enough tosuch a mind: but ever amid the boring and hammering came tones fromthat far country, came Splendours and Terrors; for this poorCordwainer, as we said, was a Man; and the Temple of Immensity, wherein as Man he had been sent to minister, was full of holy mysteryto him. 

'The Clergy of the neighbourhood, the ordained Watchers andInterpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with unaffectedtedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of suchdoubts, to "drink beer and dance with the girls. " Blind leaders of theblind! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what weretheir shovel-hats scooped-out, and their surplices and cassock-apronsgirt-on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth, --if Man werebut a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grandReality? Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back tohis Leather-parings and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higherthan Ætna, had been heaped over that Spirit: but it was a Spirit, andwould not lie buried there. Through long days and nights of silentagony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man's force, to be free: howits prison-mountains heaved and swayed tumultuously, as the giantspirit shook them to this hand and that, and emerged into the light ofHeaven! That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier placethan any Vatican or Loretto-shrine. --"So bandaged, and hampered, andhemmed in, " groaned he, "with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move: not my ownam I, but the World's; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, andHell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Whynot; what binds me here? Want, want!--Ha, of what? Will all theshoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light?Only Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods:the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild-berries feed me; and forClothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather!"

'Historical Oil-painting, ' continues Teufelsdröckh, 'is one of theArts I never practised; therefore shall I not decide whether thissubject were easy of execution on the canvas. Yet often has it seemedto me as if such first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, moreand more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him inits hindrances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur thereis in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye andunderstanding heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when hespreads-out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhides byunwonted patterns, and stitches them together into one continuousall-including Case, the farewell service of his awl! Stitch away, thounoble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pricking into theheart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god. Thy elbowsjerk, and in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing theeacross the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse andRagfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is inbroad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he!

'Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest height;and for the Poor also a Gospel has been published. Surely if, asD'Alembert asserts, my illustrious namesake, Diogenes, was thegreatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then bystronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Moderns; and greaterthan Diogenes himself: for he too stands on the adamantine basis ofhis Manhood, casting aside all props and shoars; yet not, inhalf-savage Pride, undervaluing the Earth; valuing it rather, as aplace to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heavenward from hisEarth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with a stillStrength, such as the Cynic's Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was that Tub; a temple from which man's dignity and divinity wasscornfully preached abroad: but greater is the Leather Hull, for thesame sermon was preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love. '

 * * * * *

George Fox's 'perennial suit, ' with all that it held, has been wornquite into ashes for nigh two centuries: why, in a discussion on the_Perfectibility of Society_, reproduce it now? Not out of blindsectarian partisanship: Teufelsdröckh himself is no Quaker; with allhis pacific tendencies, did not we see him, in that scene at the NorthCape, with the Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?

For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in thispassage than meets the ear. At the same time, who can avoid smiling atthe earnestness and Boeotian simplicity (if indeed there be not anunderhand satire in it), with which that 'Incident' is here broughtforward; and, in the Professor's ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps ashe durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended to imitation! Does Teufelsdröckhanticipate that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class ofthe community, by way of testifying against the 'Mammon-god, ' andescaping from what he calls 'Vanity's Workhouse and Ragfair, ' wheredoubtless some of them are toiled and whipped and hoodwinkedsufficiently, --will sheathe themselves in close-fitting cases ofLeather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay asideits robes of state, and Beauty its frills and train-gowns, for asecond-skin of tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield andManchester, and Coventry and Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, werereduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day and Martin could profit. Forneither would Teufelsdröckh's mad daydream, here as we presumecovertly intended, of levelling Society (_levelling_ it indeed with avengeance, into one huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining thepolitical effects of Nudity without its frigorific or otherconsequences, --be thereby realised. Would not the rich man purchase awaterproof suit of Russia Leather; and the high-born Belle step-forthin red or azure morocco, lined with shamoy: the black cowhide beingleft to the Drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the oldDistinctions be re-established?

Or has the Professor his own deeper intention; and laughs in hissleeve at our strictures and glosses, which indeed are but a partthereof?

CHAPTER II

CHURCH-CLOTHES

Not less questionable is his Chapter on _Church-Clothes_, which hasthe farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume. We heretranslate it entire:

'By Church-Clothes, it need not be premised that I mean infinitelymore than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the merehaberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it!Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the _Vestures_, under which men have at various periods embodied and represented forthemselves the Religious Principle; that is to say, invested TheDivine Idea of the World with a sensible and practically active Body, so that it might dwell among them as a living and life-giving WORD. 

'These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures andgarnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and woven, I maysay, by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it is still only when"two or three are gathered together, " that Religion, spirituallyexistent, and indeed indestructible, however latent, in each, firstoutwardly manifests itself (as with "cloven tongues of fire"), andseeks to be embodied in a visible Communion and Church Militant. Mystical, more than magical, is that Communing of Soul with Soul, bothlooking heavenward: here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; foronly in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not inlooking earthward, does what we can call Union, mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain myBelief gains quite _infinitely_ the moment I can convince another mindthereof"! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes whereplays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the luridconflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightwayinvoluntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate oneach other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracingLove, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculousvirtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all thethick-plied hulls of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of theDivine Life we speak, and inmost ME is, as it were, brought intocontact with inmost ME!

'Thus was it that I said, the Church-Clothes are first spun and wovenby Society; outward Religion originates by Society, Society becomespossible by Religion. Nay, perhaps, every conceivable Society, pastand present, may well be figured as properly and wholly a Church, inone or other of these three predicaments: an audibly preaching andprophesying Church, which is the best; second, a Church that strugglesto preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come;and third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which onlymumbles delirium prior to dissolution. Whoso fancies that by Church ishere meant Chapterhouses and Cathedrals, or by preaching andprophesying, mere speech and chanting, let him, ' says the oracularProfessor, 'read on, light of heart (_getrosten Muthes_). 

'But with regard to your Church proper, and the Church-Clothesspecially recognised as Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlessly enough, that without such Vestures and sacred Tissues Society has not existed, and will not exist. For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKINof the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; andall your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or ofhead, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying_under_ such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;--then is Religionthe inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life andwarm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue theBones and Muscles (of Industry) were inert, or animated only by aGalvanic vitality; the SKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, orfast-rotting raw-hide; and Society itself a dead carcass, --deserving tobe buried. Men were no longer Social, but Gregarious; which latterstate also could not continue, but must gradually issue in universalselfish discord, hatred, savage isolation, and dispersion;--whereby, aswe might continue to say, the very dust and dead body of Society wouldhave evaporated and become abolished. Such, and so all-important, all-sustaining, are the Church-Clothes to civilised or even to rationalmen. 

'Meanwhile, in our era of the World, those same Church-Clothes havegone sorrowfully out-at-elbows; nay, far worse, many of them havebecome mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure orSpirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, inhorrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares onyou with its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life, --somegeneration-and-half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and inunnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith toreappear, and bless us, or our sons or grandsons. As a Priest, orInterpreter of the Holy, is the noblest and highest of all men, so isa Sham-priest (_Schein-priester_) the falsest and basest; neither isit doubtful that his Canonicals, were they Popes' Tiaras, will one daybe torn from him, to make bandages for the wounds of mankind; or evento burn into tinder, for general scientific or culinary purposes. 

'All which, as out of place here, falls to be handled in my SecondVolume, _On the Palingenesia, or Newbirth of Society_; which volume, as treating practically of the Wear, Destruction, and Retexture ofSpiritual Tissues, or Garments, forms, properly speaking, theTranscendental or ultimate Portion of this my work _on Clothes_, andis already in a state of forwardness. '

And herewith, no farther exposition, note, or commentary being added, does Teufelsdröckh, and must his Editor now, terminate the singularchapter on Church-Clothes!

CHAPTER III

SYMBOLS

Probably it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscureutterances, if we here insert somewhat of our Professor's speculationson _Symbols_. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond ourcompass: nowhere is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of'Fantasy being the organ of the God-like;' and how 'Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the small Visible, does neverthelessextend down into the infinite deeps of the Invisible, of whichInvisible, indeed, his Life is properly the bodying forth. ' Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter, study toglean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what littleseems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degreeof coherence as it will assume. By way of proem, take the followingnot injudicious remarks:

'The benignant efficacies of Concealment, ' cries our Professor, 'whoshall speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raisedto them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselvestogether; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. NotWilliam the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babbleof what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own meanperplexities, do thou thyself but _hold thy tongue for one day_: onthe morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreckand rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, whenintrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as theFrenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quitestifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscriptionsays: _Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden_ (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is ofTime, Silence is of Eternity. 

'Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work exceptin Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thyleft hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prateeven to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all. " Is not Shame(_Schaam_) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and goodmorals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root behidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, naydo but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no flowerwill glad thee. O my Friends, when we view the fair clustering flowersthat over-wreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man'slife with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smitethe foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in! Men speakmuch of the Printing-Press with its Newspapers: _du Himmel!_ what arethese to Clothes and the Tailor's Goose?'

'Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, andconnected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of_Symbols_. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: heretherefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a doublesignificance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silencefit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many apainted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands-outto us proclaimed with quite new emphasis. 

'For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into thesmall prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. Inthe Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more orless distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of theInfinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, tostand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised assuch or not recognised: the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God;nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; isnot all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mysticgod-given force that is in him; a "Gospel of Freedom, " which he, the"Messias of Nature, " preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a Huthe builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bearsvisible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendentalsense, symbolical as well as real. '

'Man, ' says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast withthese high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on theverge of the inane, 'Man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if weconsider it, is that of your actually existing Motive-Millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough man has played, in his time; has fanciedhimself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of Glass; butto fancy himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasureson, was reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, hisUniverse one huge Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighedagainst each other; and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil!spectres are appointed to haunt him: one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priestridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any Nightmaredid; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind ofDigestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can seenothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothingelse: the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathomthe Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanisethem to grind the other way?

'Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had butto bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man's history, or the history of any man, went onby calculated or calculable "Motives"? What make ye of yourChristianities, and Chivalries, and Reformations, and MarseilleseHymns, and Reigns of Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinderhimself been _in Love_? Did he never stand so much as a contestedElection? Leave him to Time, and the medicating virtue of Nature. '

'Yes, Friends, ' elsewhere observes the Professor, 'not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I mightsay, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; our Magician and Wizardto lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what isSense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Everin the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or ofMadness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), thatgleams-in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its ownhues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with itscolour-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself knownfive-hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece ofglazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it atany market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did notthe whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirredAtlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an Implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value littlediffering from a horse-shoe? It is in and through _Symbols_ that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: thoseages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognisesymbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of theGodlike?

'Of Symbols, however, I remark farther, that they have both anextrinsic and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, forinstance, was in that clouted Shoe, which the Peasants bore aloft withthem as ensign in their _Bauernkrieg_ (Peasants' War)? Or in theWallet-and-staff round which the Netherland _Gueux_, glorying in thatnickname of Beggars, heroically rallied and prevailed, though againstKing Philip himself? Intrinsic significance these had none: onlyextrinsic; as the accidental Standards of multitudes more or lesssacredly uniting together; in which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and borrowing of the Godlike. Under alike category, too, stand, or stood, the stupidest heraldicCoats-of-arms; military Banners everywhere; and generally all nationalor other Sectarian Costumes and Customs: they have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired an extrinsicone. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of aDivine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Ideaof Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right. Nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, theCross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one. 

'Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsicmeaning, and is of itself _fit_ that men should unite round it. Letbut the Godlike manifest itself to Sense; let but Eternity look, moreor less visibly, through the Time-Figure (_Zeitbild_)! Then is it fitthat men unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and sofrom day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness. 

'Of this latter sort are all true works of Art: in them (if thou knowa Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternitylooking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may anextrinsic value gradually superadd itself: thus certain _Iliads_, andthe like, have, in three-thousand years, attained quite newsignificance. But nobler than all in this kind, are the Lives ofheroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work of Art is so divine? InDeath too, in the Death of the Just, as the last perfection of a Workof Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinelytransfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the beloved face whichnow knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) the confluenceof Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through. 

'Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has riseninto Prophet, and all men can recognise a present God, and worship thesame: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been suchreligious Symbols, what we call _Religions_; as men stood in thisstage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body-forththe Godlike: some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many withonly an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it inthis manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, andhis Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher hasthe human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity andChristendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character: whosesignificance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew mademanifest. 

'But, on the whole, as time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, solikewise in his progress he at length defaces or even desecrates them;and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer's Epos hasnot ceased to be true; yet it is no longer _our_ Epos, but shines inthe distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star. It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to bereinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so muchas know that it _was_ a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the RunicThor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an AfricanMumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have theirrise, their culmination, their decline. '

'Small is this which thou tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but apiece of gilt-wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, andtruly, as Ancient Pistol thought, "of little price. " A right Conjurormight I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden toolsthe divine virtue they once held. '

'Of this thing, however, be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy andHeart; wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then plant into hisshallow superficial faculties, his Self-love and ArithmeticalUnderstanding, what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, andPontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker;who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire fromHeaven to fix it there. Such too will not always be wanting; neitherperhaps now are. Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we accounthim Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a Symbol hasgrown old, and gently remove it. 

'When, as the last English Coronation[3] was preparing, ' concludesthis wonderful Professor, 'I read in their Newspapers that the"Champion of England, " he who has to offer battle to the Universe forhis new King, had brought it so far that he could now "mount his horsewith little assistance, " I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbolwell-nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not thetatters and rags of superannuated worn-out symbols (in this Ragfair ofa World) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tetheryou; nay, if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, andperhaps produce suffocation?'

 [3] That of George IV. --ED. 

CHAPTER IV

HELOTAGE

At this point we determine on adverting shortly, or rather reverting, to a certain Tract of Hofrath Heuschrecke's, entitled _Institute forthe Repression of Population_; which lies, dishonourable enough (withtorn leaves, and a perceptible smell of aloetic drugs), stuffed intothe Bag _Pisces_. Not indeed for the sake of the Tract itself, whichwe admire little; but of the marginal Notes, evidently inTeufelsdröckh's hand, which rather copiously fringe it. A few of thesemay be in their right place here. 

Into the Hofrath's _Institute_, with its extraordinary schemes, andmachinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so muchas glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a discipleof Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine, that his zeal almostliterally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses theHofrath; something like a fixed-idea; undoubtedly akin to the morediluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in that quarter of his intellectualworld, is there light; nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger; openmouths opening wider and wider; a world to terminate by thefrightfullest consummation: by its too dense inhabitants, famishedinto delirium, universally eating one another. To make air for himselfin which strangulation, choking enough to a benevolent heart, theHofrath founds, or proposes to found, this _Institute_ of his, as thebest he can do. It is only with our Professor's comments thereon thatwe concern ourselves. 

First, then, remark that Teufelsdröckh, as a speculative Radical, hashis own notions about human dignity; that the Zähdarm palaces andcourtesies have not made him forgetful of the Futteral cottages. Onthe blank cover of Heuschrecke's Tract we find the followingindistinctly engrossed:

'Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman thatwith earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makesher man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; whereinnotwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of theSceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, allweather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is theface of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thyrudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thystraight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, onwhom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For inthee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded;encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements ofLabour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toilon, toil on: _thou_ art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thoutoilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily bread. 

'A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who is seen toilingfor the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread ofLife. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards inward Harmony;revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inwardendeavour are one: when we can name him Artist; not earthly Craftsmanonly, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquersHeaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must notthe high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, haveGuidance, Freedom, Immortality?--These two, in all their degrees, Ihonour: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither itlisteth. 

'Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignitiesunited; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world knowI nothing than a Peasant Saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see thesplendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of Earth, like a light shining in great darkness. '

And again: 'It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor:we must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which isworse; no faithful workman finds his task a pastime. The poor ishungry and a-thirst; but for him also there is food and drink: he isheavy-laden and weary; but for him also the Heavens send Sleep, and ofthe deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest envelopshim, and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted Dreams. But what I domourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray ofheavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit him; but only, inthe haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation bear himcompany. Alas, while the Body stands so broad and brawny, must thesoul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated! Alas, wasthis too a Breath of God; bestowed in Heaven, but on earth never to beunfolded!--That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity forKnowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twentytimes in the minute, as by some computations it does. The miserablefraction of Science which our united Mankind, in a wide Universe ofNescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, impartedto all?'

Quite in an opposite strain is the following: 'The old Spartans had awiser method; and went out and hunted-down their Helots, and spearedand spitted them, when they grew too numerous. With our improvedfashions of hunting, Herr Hofrath, now after the invention offire-arms, and standing-armies, how much easier were such a hunt!Perhaps in the most thickly-peopled country, some three days annuallymight suffice to shoot all the able-bodied Paupers that hadaccumulated within the year. Let Governments think of this. Theexpense were trifling: nay the very carcasses would pay it. Have themsalted and barrelled; could not you victual therewith, if not Army andNavy, yet richly such infirm Paupers, in workhouses and elsewhere, asenlightened Charity, dreading no evil of them, might see good to keepalive?'

'And yet, ' writes he farther on, 'there must be something wrong. Afull-formed Horse will, in any market, bring from twenty to as high astwo-hundred Friedrichs d'or: such is his worth to the world. Afull-formed Man is not only worth nothing to the world, but the worldcould afford him a round sum would he simply engage to go and hanghimself. Nevertheless, which of the two was the more cunningly-devisedarticle, even as an Engine? Good Heavens! A white European Man, standing on his two Legs, with his two five-fingered Hands at hisshackle-bones, and miraculous Head on his shoulders, is worth, Ishould say, from fifty to a hundred Horses!'

'True, thou Gold-Hofrath, ' cries the Professor elsewhere: 'too crowdedindeed! Meanwhile, what portion of this inconsiderable terraqueousGlobe have ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more?How thick stands your Population in the Pampas and Savannas ofAmerica; round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; onboth slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central Platform of Asia; inSpain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare? One man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him Earth, will feedhimself and nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alaricsof our still-glowing, still-expanding Europe; who, when their home isgrown too narrow, will enlist, and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwardsthose superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour; equipped, notnow with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steam-engine andploughshare? Where are they?--Preserving their Game!'

CHAPTER V

THE PHOENIX

Putting which four singular Chapters together, and alongside of themnumerous hints, and even direct utterances, scattered over theseWritings of his, we come upon the startling yet not quite unlooked-forconclusion, that Teufelsdröckh is one of those who consider Society, properly so called, to be as good as extinct; and that only thegregarious feelings, and old inherited habitudes, at this juncture, hold us from Dispersion, and universal national, civil, domestic andpersonal war! He says expressly: 'For the last three centuries, aboveall for the last three quarters of a century, that same PericardialNervous Tissue (as we named it) of Religion, where lies theLife-essence of Society, has been smote-at and perforated, needfullyand needlessly; till now it is quite rent into shreds; and Society, long pining, diabetic, consumptive, can be regarded as defunct; forthose spasmodic, galvanic sprawlings are not life; neither indeed willthey endure, galvanise as you may, beyond two days. '

'Call ye that a Society, ' cries he again, 'where there is no longerany Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Home, butonly of a common over-crowded Lodging-house? Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutcheswhat he can get, and cries "Mine!" and calls it Peace, because, in thecut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a farcunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, hasbecome an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper isa smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priesthas no tongue but for plate-licking: and your high Guides andGovernors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionatelyproclaimed: _Laissez faire_; Leave us alone of _your_ guidance, suchlight is darker than darkness; eat you your wages, and sleep!

'Thus, too, ' continues he, 'does an observant eye discern everywherethat saddest spectacle: The Poor perishing, like neglected, founderedDraught-Cattle, of Hunger and Over-work; the Rich, still morewretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Over-growth. The Highest inrank, at length, without honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with alittle mouth-honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it inthe bill. Once-sacred Symbols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereofmen grudge even the expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATEshrunken into a Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!'

We might ask, are there many 'observant eyes, ' belonging to practicalmen in England or elsewhere, which have descried these phenomena; or isit only from the mystic elevation of a German _Wahngasse_ that suchwonders are visible? Teufelsdröckh contends that the aspect of a'deceased or expiring Society' fronts us everywhere, so that whoso runsmay read. 'What, for example, ' says he, 'is the universally-arrogatedVirtue, almost the sole remaining Catholic Virtue, of these days? Forsome half century, it has been the thing you name "Independence. "Suspicion of "Servility, " of reverence for Superiors, the very dogleechis anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your Superiors worthy to govern, andyou worthy to obey, reverence for them were even your only possiblefreedom. Independence, in all kinds, is rebellion; if unjust rebellion, why parade it, and everywhere prescribe it?'

But what then? Are we returning, as Rousseau prayed, to the state ofNature? 'The Soul Politic having departed, ' says Teufelsdröckh, 'whatcan follow but that the Body Politic be decently interred, to avoidputrescence! Liberals, Economists, Utilitarians enough I see marchingwith its bier, and chanting loud pæans, towards the funeral-pile, where, amid wailings from some, and saturnalian revelries from themost, the venerable Corpse is to be burnt. Or, in plain words, thatthese men, Liberals, Utilitarians, or whatsoever they are called, willultimately carry their point, and dissever and destroy most existingInstitutions of Society, seems a thing which has some time ago ceasedto be doubtful. 

'Do we not see a little subdivision of the grand Utilitarian Armamentcome to light even in insulated England? A living nucleus, that willattract and grow, does at length appear there also; and under curiousphasis; properly as the inconsiderable fag-end, and so far in the rearof the others as to fancy itself the van. Our European Mechanisers area sect of boundless diffusion, activity, and co-operative spirit: hasnot Utilitarianism flourished in high places of Thought, here amongourselves, and in every European country, at some time or other, within the last fifty years? If now in all countries, except perhapsEngland, it has ceased to flourish, or indeed to exist, amongThinkers, and sunk to Journalists and the popular mass, --who sees notthat, as hereby it no longer preaches, so the reason is, it now needsno Preaching, but is in full universal Action, the doctrine everywhereknown, and enthusiastically laid to heart? The fit pabulum, in thesetimes, for a certain rugged workshop intellect and heart, nowisewithout their corresponding workshop strength and ferocity, itrequires but to be stated in such scenes to make proselytesenough. --Admirably calculated for destroying, only not for rebuilding!It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennelwill be rabid: then woe to the Huntsmen, with or without their whips!They should have given the quadrupeds water, ' adds he; 'the water, namely, of Knowledge and of Life, while it was yet time. '

Thus, if Professor Teufelsdröckh can be relied on, we are at this hourin a most critical condition; beleaguered by that boundless 'Armamentof Mechanisers' and Unbelievers, threatening to strip us bare! 'Theworld, ' says he, 'as it needs must, is under a process of devastationand waste, which, whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or openquicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enoughannihilate the past Forms of Society; replace them with what it may. For the present, it is contemplated that when man's whole SpiritualInterests are once _divested_, these innumerable stript-off Garmentsshall mostly be burnt; but the sounder Rags among them be quiltedtogether into one huge Irish watchcoat for the defence of the Bodyonly!'--This, we think, is but Job's-news to the humane reader. 

'Nevertheless, ' cries Teufelsdröckh, 'who can hinder it; who is therethat can clutch into the wheel-spokes of Destiny, and say to theSpirit of the Time: Turn back, I command thee?--Wiser were it that weyielded to the Inevitable and Inexorable, and accounted even this thebest. '

Nay, might not an attentive Editor, drawing his own inferences fromwhat stands written, conjecture that Teufelsdröckh individually hadyielded to this same 'Inevitable and Inexorable' heartily enough; andnow sat waiting the issue, with his natural diabolico-angelicalIndifference, if not even Placidity? Did we not hear him complain thatthe World was a 'huge Ragfair, ' and the 'rags and tatters of oldSymbols' were raining-down everywhere, like to drift him in, andsuffocate him? What with those 'unhunted Helots' of his; and theuneven _sic-vos-non-vobis_ pressure and hard-crashing collision he ispleased to discern in existing things; what with the so hateful 'emptyMasks, ' full of beetles and spiders, yet glaring out on him, fromtheir glass eyes, 'with a ghastly affectation of life, '--we feelentitled to conclude him even willing that much should be thrown tothe Devil, so it were but done gently! Safe himself in that 'Pinnacleof Weissnichtwo, ' he would consent, with a tragic solemnity, that themonster UTILITARIA, held back, indeed, and moderated by nose-rings, halters, foot-shackles, and every conceivable modification of rope, should go forth to do her work;--to tread down old ruinous Palacesand Temples with her broad hoof, till the whole were trodden down, that new and better might be built! Remarkable in this point of vieware the following sentences. 

'Society, ' says he, 'is not dead: that Carcass, which you call deadSociety, is but her mortal coil which she has shuffled off, to assumea nobler; she herself, through perpetual metamorphoses, in fairer andfairer development, has to live till Time also merge in Eternity. Wheresoever two or three Living Men are gathered together, there isSociety; or there it will be, with its cunning mechanisms andstupendous structures, overspreading this little Globe, and reachingupwards to Heaven and downwards to Gehenna: for always, under one orthe other figure, it has two authentic Revelations, of a God and of aDevil; the Pulpit, namely, and the Gallows. '

Indeed, we already heard him speak of 'Religion, in unnoticed nooks, weaving for herself new Vestures';--Teufelsdröckh himself being one ofthe loom-treadles? Elsewhere he quotes without censure that strangeaphorism of Saint-Simon's, concerning which and whom so much were tobe said: _L'âge d'or, qu'une aveugle tradition a placé jusqu'ici dansle passé, est devant nous_; The golden age, which a blind traditionhas hitherto placed in the Past, is Before us. '--But listen again:

'When the Phoenix is fanning her funeral pyre, will there not besparks flying! Alas, some millions of men, and among them such as aNapoleon, have already been licked into that high-eddying Flame, andlike moths consumed there. Still also have we to fear that incautiousbeards will get singed. 

'For the rest, in what year of grace such Phoenix-cremation will becompleted, you need not ask. The law of Perseverance is among thedeepest in man: by nature he hates change; seldom will he quit his oldhouse till it has actually fallen about his ears. Thus have I seenSolemnities linger as Ceremonies, sacred Symbols as idle-Pageants, tothe extent of three-hundred years and more after all life andsacredness had evaporated out of them. And then, finally, what timethe Phoenix Death-Birth itself will require, depends on unseencontingencies. --Meanwhile, would Destiny offer Mankind, that after, say two centuries of convulsion and conflagration, more or less vivid, the fire-creation should be accomplished, and we too find ourselvesagain in a Living Society, and no longer fighting but working, --wereit not perhaps prudent in Mankind to strike the bargain?'

Thus is Teufelsdröckh content that old sick Society should bedeliberately burnt (alas! with quite other fuel than spicewood); inthe faith that she is a Phoenix; and that a new heaven-born young onewill rise out of her ashes! We ourselves, restricted to the duty ofIndicator, shall forbear commentary. Meanwhile, will not the judiciousreader shake his head, and reproachfully, yet more in sorrow than inanger, say or think: From a _Doctor utriusque Juris_, titularProfessor in a University, and man to whom hitherto, for his services, Society, bad as she is, has given not only food and raiment (of akind), but books, tobacco and gukguk, we expected more gratitude tohis benefactress; and less of a blind trust in the future, whichresembles that rather of a philosophical Fatalist and Enthusiast, thanof a solid householder paying scot-and-lot in a Christian country. 

CHAPTER VI

OLD CLOTHES

As mentioned above, Teufelsdröckh, though a sansculottist, is inpractice probably the politest man extant: his whole heart and lifeare penetrated and informed with the spirit of politeness; a noblenatural Courtesy shines through him, beautifying his vagaries; likesunlight, making a rosy-fingered, rainbow-dyed Aurora out of mereaqueous clouds; nay brightening London-smoke itself into gold vapour, as from the crucible of an alchemist. Hear in what earnest thoughfantastic wise he expresses himself on this head:

'Shall Courtesy be done only to the rich, and only by the rich? InGood-breeding, which differs, if at all, from High-breeding, only asit gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefullyinsists on its own rights, I discern no special connexion with wealthor birth: but rather that it lies in human nature itself, and is duefrom all men towards all men. Of a truth, were your Schoolmaster athis post, and worth anything when there, this, with so much else, would be reformed. Nay, each man were then also his neighbour'sschoolmaster; till at length a rude-visaged, unmannered Peasant couldno more be met with, than a Peasant unacquainted with botanicalPhysiology, or who felt not that the clod he broke was created inHeaven. 

'For whether thou bear a sceptre or a sledgehammer, art thou notALIVE; is not this thy brother ALIVE? "There is but one temple in theworld, " says Novalis, "and that temple is the Body of Man. Nothing isholier than this high Form. Bending before men is a reverence done tothis Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our handson a human Body. "

'On which ground, I would fain carry it farther than most do; andwhereas the English Johnson only bowed to every Clergyman, or man witha shovel-hat, I would bow to every Man with any sort of hat, or withno hat whatever. Is not he a Temple, then; the visible Manifestationand Impersonation of the Divinity? And yet, alas, such indiscriminatebowing serves not. For there is a Devil dwells in man, as well as aDivinity; and too often the bow is but pocketed by the _former_. Itwould go to the pocket of Vanity (which is your clearest phasis of theDevil, in these times); therefore must we withhold it. 

'The gladder am I, on the other hand, to do reverence to those Shellsand outer Husks of the Body, wherein no devilish passion any longerlodges, but only the pure emblem and effigies of Man: I mean, toEmpty, or even to Cast Clothes. Nay, is it not to Clothes that mostmen do reverence: to the fine frogged broadcloth, nowise to the"straddling animal with bandy legs" which it holds, and makes aDignitary of? Who ever saw any Lord my-lorded in tattered blanketfastened with wooden skewer? Nevertheless, I say, there is in suchworship a shade of hypocrisy, a practical deception: for how oftendoes the Body appropriate what was meant for the Cloth only! Whosowould avoid falsehood, which is the essence of all Sin, will perhapssee good to take a different course. That reverence which cannot actwithout obstruction and perversion when the Clothes are full, may havefree course when they are empty. Even as, for Hindoo Worshippers, thePagoda is not less sacred than the God; so do I too worship the hollowcloth Garment with equal fervour, as when it contained the Man: nay, with more, for I now fear no deception, of myself or of others. 

'Did not King _Toomtabard_, or, in other words, John Baliol, reignlong over Scotland; the man John Baliol being quite gone, and only the"Toom Tabard" (Empty Gown) remaining? What still dignity dwells in asuit of Cast Clothes! How meekly it bears its honours! No haughtylooks, no scornful gesture: silent and serene, it fronts the world;neither demanding worship, nor afraid to miss it. The Hat stillcarries the physiognomy of its Head: but the vanity and the stupidity, and goose-speech which was the sign of these two, are gone. TheCoat-arm is stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modestsimplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; theWaistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirstnow dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, orpurified Apparition, visiting our low Earth. 

'Often, while I sojourned in that monstrous tuberosity of CivilisedLife, the Capital of England; and meditated, and questioned Destiny, under that ink-sea of vapour, black, thick, and multifarious asSpartan broth; and was one lone soul amid those grindingmillions;--often have I turned into their Old-Clothes Market toworship. With awe-struck heart I walk through that Monmouth Street, with its empty Suits, as through a Sanhedrim of stainless Ghosts. Silent are they, but expressive in their silence: the past witnessesand instruments of Woe and Joy, of Passions, Virtues, Crimes, and allthe fathomless tumult of Good and Evil in "the Prison men call Life. "Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom Old Clothes are notvenerable. Watch, too, with reverence, that bearded JewishHigh-priest, who with hoarse voice, like some Angel of Doom, summonsthem from the four winds! On his head, like the Pope, he has threeHats, --a real triple tiara; on either hand are the similitude ofwings, whereon the summoned Garments come to alight; and ever, as heslowly cleaves the air, sounds forth his deep fateful note, as ifthrough a trumpet he were proclaiming: "Ghosts of Life, come toJudgment!" Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he will purify you in hisPurgatory, with fire and with water; and, one day, new-created yeshall reappear. O, let him in whom the flame of Devotion is ready togo out, who has never worshipped, and knows not what to worship, paceand repace, with austerest thought, the pavement of Monmouth Street, and say whether his heart and his eyes still continue dry. If FieldLane, with its long fluttering rows of yellow handkerchiefs, be aDionysius' Ear, where, in stifled jarring hubbub, we hear theIndictment which Poverty and Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that ithas left them there cast-out and trodden under foot of Want, Darknessand the Devil, --then is Monmouth Street a Mirza's Hill, where, inmotley vision, the whole Pageant of Existence passes awfully beforeus; with its wail and jubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bellsand gallows-ropes, farce-tragedy, beast-godhood, --the Bedlam ofCreation!'

 * * * * *

To most men, as it does to ourselves, all this will seem overcharged. We too have walked through Monmouth Street; but with little feeling of'Devotion': probably in part because the contemplative process is sofatally broken in upon by the brood of money-changers who nestle in thatChurch, and importune the worshipper with merely secular proposals. Whereas Teufelsdröckh might be in that happy middle state, whichleaves to the Clothes-broker no hope either of sale or of purchase, and so be allowed to linger there without molestation. --Something wewould have given to see the little philosophical figure, with itssteeple-hat and loose flowing skirts, and eyes in a fine frenzy, 'pacing and repacing in austerest thought' that foolish Street; whichto him was a true Delphic avenue, and supernatural Whispering-gallery, where the 'Ghosts of Life' rounded strange secrets in his ear. O thouphilosophic Teufelsdröckh, that listenest while others only gabble, and with thy quick tympanum hearest the grass grow!

At the same time, is it not strange that, in Paper-bag Documentsdestined for an English work, there exists nothing like an authenticdiary of this his sojourn in London; and of his Meditations among theClothes-shops only the obscurest emblematic shadows? Neither, inconversation (for, indeed, he was not a man to pester you with hisTravels), have we heard him more than allude to the subject. 

For the rest, however, it cannot be uninteresting that we here findhow early the significance of Clothes had dawned on the now sodistinguished Clothes-Professor. Might we but fancy it to have beeneven in Monmouth Street, at the bottom of our own English 'ink-sea, 'that this remarkable Volume first took being, and shot forth itssalient point in his soul, --as in Chaos did the Egg of Eros, one dayto be hatched into a Universe!

CHAPTER VII

ORGANIC FILAMENTS

For us, who happen to live while the World-Phoenix is burning herself, and burning so slowly that, as Teufelsdröckh calculates, it were ahandsome bargain would she engage to have done 'within two centuries, 'there seems to lie but an ashy prospect. Not altogether so, however, does the Professor figure it. 'In the living subject, ' says he, 'change is wont to be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its oldskin, the new is already formed beneath. Little knowest thou of theburning of a World-Phoenix, who fanciest that she must first burn-out, and lie as a dead cinereous heap; and therefrom the young one start-upby miracle, and fly heavenward. Far otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of theOld are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spinthemselves: and amid the rushing and the waving of theWhirlwind-Element come tones of a melodious Deathsong, which end notbut in tones of a more melodious Birthsong. Nay, look into theFire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see. ' Let us actuallylook, then: to poor individuals, who cannot expect to live twocenturies, those same organic filaments, mysteriously spinningthemselves, will be the best part of the spectacle. First, therefore, this of Mankind in general:

'In vain thou deniest it, ' says the Professor; 'thou _art_ my Brother. Thy very Hatred, thy very Envy, those foolish lies thou tellest of mein thy splenetic humour: what is all this but an inverted Sympathy?Were I a Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies ofme? Not thou! I should grind all unheeded, whether badly or well. 

'Wondrous truly are the bonds that unite us one and all; whether bythe soft binding of Love, or the iron chaining of Necessity, as welike to choose it. More than once have I said to myself, of someperhaps whimsically strutting Figure, such as provokes whimsicalthoughts: "Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered-up withinthe largest imaginable Glass-bell, --what a thing it were, not forthyself only, but for the world! Post Letters, more or fewer, from allthe four winds, impinge against thy Glass walls, but have to dropunread: neither from within comes there question or response into anyPostbag; thy Thoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thyManufacture into no purchasing hand: thou art no longer a circulatingvenous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving, circulatest throughall Space and all Time: there has a Hole fallen-out in theimmeasurable, universal World-tissue, which must be darned-up again!"

'Such venous-arterial circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paperand other Packages, going out from him and coming in, are ablood-circulation, visible to the eye: but the finer nervouscirculation, by which all things, the minutest that he does, minutelyinfluence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curseswhomso it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or newcursing: all this you cannot see, but only imagine. I say, there isnot a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with hissquaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price ofbeaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebblefrom my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe. 

'If now an existing generation of men stand so woven together, notless indissolubly does generation with generation. Hast thou evermeditated on that word, Tradition: how we inherit not Life only, butall the garniture and form of Life; and work, and speak, and eventhink and feel, as our Fathers, and primeval grandfathers, from thebeginning, have given it us?--Who printed thee, for example, thisunpretending Volume on the Philosophy of Clothes? Not the HerrenStillschweigen and Company; but Cadmus of Thebes, Faust of Mentz, andinnumerable others whom thou knowest not. Had there been noMoesogothic Ulfila, there had been no English Shakspeare, or adifferent one. Simpleton! it was Tubalcain that made thy very Tailor'sneedle, and sewed that court-suit of thine. 

'Yes, truly; if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, muchmore is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, withoutwhich Nature were not. As palpable life-streams in that wondrousIndividual Mankind, among so many life-streams that are not palpable, flow on those main-currents of what we call Opinion; as preserved inInstitutions, Polities, Churches, above all in Books. Beautiful it isto understand and know that a Thought did never yet die; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the wholePast, so thou wilt transmit it to the whole Future. It is thus thatthe heroic heart, the seeing eye of the first times, still feels andsees in us of the latest; that the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers; andthere is a living, literal _Communion of Saints_, wide as the Worlditself, and as the History of the World. 

'Noteworthy also, and serviceable for the progress of this sameIndividual, wilt thou find his subdivision into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind: Death and Birth arethe vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and torise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has made, the Soncan make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thusall things wax, and roll onwards; Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing. Newton has learned to seewhat Kepler saw; but there is also a fresh heaven-derived force inNewton; he must mount to still higher points of vision. So too theHebrew Lawgiver is, in due time, followed by an Apostle of theGentiles. In the business of Destruction, as this also is from time totime a necessary work, thou findest a like sequence and perseverance:for Luther it was as yet hot enough to stand by that burning of thePope's Bull; Voltaire could not warm himself at the glimmering ashes, but required quite other fuel. Thus likewise, I note, the English Whighas, in the second generation, become an English Radical; who, in thethird again, it is to be hoped, will become an English Rebuilder. FindMankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, inprogress faster or slower: the Phoenix soars aloft, hovers withoutstretched wings, filling Earth with her music; or, as now, shesinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame, that shemay soar the higher and sing the clearer. '

Let the friends of social order, in such a disastrous period, lay thisto heart, and derive from it any little comfort they can. We subjoinanother passage, concerning Titles:

'Remark, not without surprise, ' says Teufelsdröckh, 'how all highTitles of Honour come hitherto from fighting. Your _Herzog_ (Duke, _Dux_) is Leader of Armies; your Earl (_Jarl_) is Strong Man; yourMarshal cavalry Horse-shoer. A Millennium, or reign of Peace andWisdom, having from of old been prophesied, and becoming now dailymore and more indubitable, may it not be apprehended that suchFighting-titles will cease to be palatable, and new and higher need tobe devised?

'The only Title wherein I, with confidence, trace eternity, is that ofKing. _König_ (King), anciently _Könning_, means Ken-ning (Cunning), or which is the same thing, Can-ning. Ever must the Sovereign ofMankind be fitly entitled King. '

'Well, also, ' says he elsewhere, 'was it written by Theologians: aKing rules by divine right. He carries in him an authority from God, or man will never give it him. Can I choose my own King? I can choosemy own King Popinjay, and play what farce or tragedy I may with him:but he who is to be my Ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was chosen for me in Heaven. Neither except in such Obedience to theHeaven-chosen is Freedom so much as conceivable. '

 * * * * *

The Editor will here admit that, among all the wondrous provinces ofTeufelsdröckh's spiritual world, there is none he walks in with suchastonishment, hesitation, and even pain, as in the Political. How, with our English love of Ministry and Opposition, and that generousconflict of Parties, mind warming itself against mind in their mutualwrestle for the Public Good, by which wrestle, indeed, is ourinvaluable Constitution kept warm and alive; how shall we domesticateourselves in this spectral Necropolis, or rather City both of the Deadand of the Unborn, where the Present seems little other than aninconsiderable Film dividing the Past and the Future? In those dimlongdrawn expanses, all is so immeasurable; much so disastrous, ghastly; your very radiances and straggling light-beams have asupernatural character. And then with such an indifference, such aprophetic peacefulness (accounting the inevitably coming as alreadyhere, to him all one whether it be distant by centuries or only bydays), does he sit;--and live, you would say, rather in any other agethan in his own! It is our painful duty to announce, or repeat, that, looking into this man, we discern a deep, silent, slow-burning, inextinguishable Radicalism, such as fills us with shudderingadmiration. 

Thus, for example, he appears to make little even of the ElectiveFranchise; at least so we interpret the following: 'Satisfyyourselves, ' he says, 'by universal, indubitable experiment, even asye are now doing or will do, whether FREEDOM, heavenborn and leadingheavenward, and so vitally essential for us all, cannot peradventurebe mechanically hatched and brought to light in that same Ballot-Boxof yours; or at worst, in some other discoverable or devisable Box, Edifice, or Steam-mechanism. It were a mighty convenience; and beyondall feats of manufacture witnessed hitherto. ' Is Teufelsdröckhacquainted with the British Constitution, even slightly?--He says, under another figure: 'But after all, were the problem, as indeed itnow everywhere is, To rebuild your old House from the top downwards(since you must live in it the while), what better, what other, thanthe Representative Machine will serve your turn? Meanwhile, however, mock me not with the name of Free, "when you have but knit-up mychains into ornamental festoons. "'--Or what will any member of thePeace Society make of such an assertion as this: 'The lower peopleeverywhere desire War. Not so unwisely; there is then a demand forlower people--to be shot!'

Gladly, therefore, do we emerge from those soul-confusing labyrinthsof speculative Radicalism, into somewhat clearer regions. Here, looking round, as was our hest, for 'organic filaments, ' we ask, maynot this, touching 'Hero-worship, ' be of the number? It seems of acheerful character; yet so quaint, so mystical, one knows not what, orhow little, may lie under it. Our readers shall look with their owneyes:

'True is it that, in these days, man can do almost all things, onlynot obey. True likewise that whoso cannot obey cannot be free, stillless bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing, can be thesuperior of nothing, the equal of nothing. Nevertheless, believe notthat man has lost his faculty of Reverence; that if it slumber in him, it has gone dead. Painful for man is that same rebelliousIndependence, when it has become inevitable; only in lovingcompanionship with his fellows does he feel safe; only in reverentlybowing down before the Higher does he feel himself exalted. 

'Or what if the character of our so troublous Era lay even in this:that man had forever cast away Fear, which is the lower; but not yetrisen into perennial Reverence, which is the higher and highest?

'Meanwhile, observe with joy, so cunningly has Nature ordered it, thatwhatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey. Before no faintestrevelation of the Godlike did he ever stand irreverent; least of all, when the Godlike showed itself revealed in his fellow-man. Thus isthere a true religious Loyalty forever rooted in his heart; nay in allages, even in ours, it manifests itself as a more or less orthodox_Hero-worship_. In which fact, that Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among Mankind, mayest thou discernthe corner-stone of living-rock, whereon all Polities for the remotesttime may stand secure. '

Do our readers discern any such corner-stone, or even so much as whatTeufelsdröckh is looking at? He exclaims, 'Or hast thou forgottenParis and Voltaire? How the aged, withered man, though but a Sceptic, Mocker, and millinery Court-poet, yet because even he seemed theWisest, Best, could drag mankind at his chariot-wheels, so thatprinces coveted a smile from him, and the loveliest of France wouldhave laid their hair beneath his feet! All Paris was one vast Templeof Hero-worship; though their Divinity, moreover, was of feature tooapish. 

'But if such things, ' continues he, 'were done in the dry tree, whatwill be done in the green? If, in the most parched season of Man'sHistory, in the most parched spot of Europe, when Parisian life was atbest but a scientific _Hortus Siccus_, bedizened with some ItalianGumflowers, such virtue could come out of it; what is to be looked forwhen Life again waves leafy and bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shallhave nothing apelike, but be wholly human? Know that there is in man aquite indestructible Reverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or evenplausibly counterfeits such holding. Show the dullest clodpole, showthe haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself isactually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down andworship. '

Organic filaments, of a more authentic sort, mysteriously spinningthemselves, some will perhaps discover in the following passage:

'There is no Church, sayest thou? The voice of Prophecy has gone dumb?This is even what I dispute: but in any case, hast thou not stillPreaching enough? A Preaching Friar settles himself in every village;and builds a pulpit, which he calls Newspaper. Therefrom he preacheswhat most momentous doctrine is in him, for man's salvation; and dostnot thou listen, and believe? Look well, thou seest everywhere a newClergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some almostbare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teach and preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the love of God. These break inpieces the ancient idols; and, though themselves too often reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be, mark out the sites of new Churches, where the true God-ordained, that are to follow, may find audience, and minister. Said I not, Before the old skin was shed, the new hadformed itself beneath it?'

Perhaps also in the following; wherewith we now hasten to knit-up thisravelled sleeve:

'But there is no Religion?' reiterates the Professor. 'Fool! I tellthee, there is. Hast thou well considered all that lies in thisimmeasurable froth-ocean we name LITERATURE? Fragments of a genuineChurch-_Homiletic_ lie scattered there, which Time will assort: nayfractions even of a _Liturgy_ could I point out. And knowest thou noProphet, even in the vesture, environment, and dialect of this age?None to whom the God-like had revealed itself, through all meanest andhighest forms of the Common; and by him been again propheticallyrevealed: in whose inspired melody, even in these rag-gathering andrag-burning days, Man's Life again begins, were it but afar off, to bedivine? Knowest thou none such? I know him, and name him--Goethe. 

'But thou as yet standest in no Temple; joinest in no Psalm-worship;feelest well that, where there is no ministering Priest, the peopleperish? Be of comfort! Thou art not alone, if thou have Faith. Spakewe not of a Communion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal, accompanyingand brother-like embracing thee, so thou be worthy? Their heroicSufferings rise up melodiously together to Heaven, out of all lands, and out of all times, as a sacred _Miserere_; their heroic Actionsalso, as a boundless everlasting Psalm of Triumph. Neither say thatthou hast now no Symbol of the Godlike. Is not God's Universe a Symbolof the Godlike; is not Immensity a Temple; is not Man's History, andMen's History, a perpetual Evangel? Listen, and for organ-music thouwilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing together. '

CHAPTER VIII

NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM

It is in his stupendous Section, headed _Natural Supernaturalism_, that the Professor first becomes a Seer; and, after long effort, suchas we have witnessed, finally subdues under his feet this refractoryClothes-Philosophy, and takes victorious possession thereof. Phantasmsenough he has had to struggle with; 'Cloth-webs and Cob-webs, ' ofImperial Mantles, Superannuated Symbols, and what not: yet still didhe courageously pierce through. Nay, worst of all, two quitemysterious, world-embracing Phantasms, TIME and SPACE, have everhovered round him, perplexing and bewildering: but with these also henow resolutely grapples, these also he victoriously rends asunder. Ina word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hulls and garnitures have all melted away; and now, to hisrapt vision, the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed. 

Here, therefore, properly it is that the Philosophy of Clothes attainsto Transcendentalism; this last leap, can we but clear it, takes ussafe into the promised land, where _Palingenesia_, in all senses, maybe considered as beginning. 'Courage, then!' may our Diogenes exclaim, with better right than Diogenes the First once did. This stupendousSection we, after long painful meditation, have found not to beunintelligible; but, on the contrary, to grow clear, nay radiant, andall-illuminating. Let the reader, turning on it what utmost force ofspeculative intellect is in him, do his part; as we, by judiciousselection and adjustment, shall study to do ours:

'Deep has been, and is, the significance of Miracles, ' thus quietlybegins the Professor; 'far deeper perhaps than we imagine. Meanwhile, the question of questions were: What specially is a Miracle? To thatDutch King of Siam, an icicle had been a miracle; whoso had carriedwith him an air-pump, and vial of vitriolic ether, might have worked amiracle. To my Horse, again, who unhappily is still more unscientific, do not I work a miracle, and magical "_Open sesame!_" every time Iplease to pay twopence, and open for him an impassable _Schlagbaum_, or shut Turnpike?

'"But is not a real Miracle simply a violation of the Laws of Nature?"ask several. Whom I answer by this new question: What are the Laws ofNature? To me perhaps the rising of one from the dead were noviolation of these Laws, but a confirmation; were some far deeper Law, now first penetrated into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the resthave all been, brought to bear on us with its Material Force. 

'Here too may some inquire, not without astonishment: On what groundshall one, that can make Iron swim, come and declare that therefore hecan teach Religion? To us, truly, of the Nineteenth Century, suchdeclaration were inept enough; which nevertheless to our fathers, ofthe First Century, was full of meaning. 

'"But is it not the deepest Law of Nature that she be constant?" criesan illuminated class: "Is not the Machine of the Universe fixed tomove by unalterable rules?" Probable enough, good friends: nay I, too, must believe that the God, whom ancient inspired men assert to be"without variableness or shadow of turning, " does indeed never change;that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can beprevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterablerules. And now of you, too, I make the old inquiry: What those sameunalterable rules, forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature, maypossibly be?

'They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in theaccumulated records of Man's Experience?--Was Man with his Experiencepresent at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have anydeepest scientific individuals yet dived-down to the foundations of theUniverse, and gauged everything there? Did the Maker take them into Hiscounsel; that they read His groundplan of the incomprehensible All; andcan say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, notin anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where wealso are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deepthat is infinite, without bottom as without shore. 

'Laplace's Book on the Stars, wherein he exhibits that certainPlanets, with their Satellites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rateand in a course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like ofhim have succeeded in detecting, --is to me as precious as to another. But is this what thou namest "Mechanism of the Heavens, " and "Systemof the World"; this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and allHerschel's Fifteen-thousand Suns per minute, being left out, somepaltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been--looked at, nicknamed, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can nowprate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their What, being hidfrom us, as in the signless Inane?

'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Natureremains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; andall Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuriesand measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this ourlittle fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us: but who knowswhat deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (ofcauses) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every crannyand pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek mayhave become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tidesand periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon'sEclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time to time (_un_miraculously enough), be quite oversetand reversed? Such a Minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; hisOcean the immeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents themysterious Course of Providence through Æons of Æons. 

'We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is, --whoseAuthor and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much aswell know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and granddescriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out throughSolar Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is aVolume written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing;of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line andthere a line. As for your Institutes, and Academies of Science, theystrive bravely; and, from amid the thick-crowded, inextricablyintertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick-out, by dextrous combination, some Letters in the vulgar Character, and therefrom put together thisand the other economic Recipe, of high avail in Practice. That Natureis more than some boundless Volume of such Recipes, or huge, well-nighinexhaustible Domestic-Cookery Book, of which the whole secret will inthis manner one day evolve itself, the fewest dream. 

 * * * * *

'Custom, ' continues the Professor, 'doth make dotards of us all. Consider well, thou wilt find that Custom is the greatest of Weavers;and weaves air-raiment for all the Spirits of the Universe; wherebyindeed these dwell with us visibly, as ministering servants, in ourhouses and workshops; but their spiritual nature becomes, to the most, forever hidden. Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it;that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, areoftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom;an ever-renewed effort to _transcend_ the sphere of blind Custom, andso become Transcendental?

'Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of Custom: butof all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us thatthe Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means we live; for man must work as well as wonder: andherein is Custom so far a kind nurse, guiding him to his true benefit. But she is a fond foolish nurse, or rather we are false foolishnurslings, when, in our resting and reflecting hours, we prolong thesame deception. Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two-hundred, or two-million times?There is no reason in Nature or in Art why I should: unless, indeed, Iam a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were noother than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine; apower whereby Cotton might be spun, and money and money's worthrealised. 

'Notable enough too, here as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency ofNames; which indeed are but one kind of such custom-woven, wonder-hiding Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What isMadness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain amysterious-terrific, altogether _infernal_ boiling-up of the NetherChaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, whichswims thereon, which we name the Real. Was Luther's Picture of theDevil less a Reality, whether it were formed within the bodily eye, orwithout it? In every the wisest Soul lies a whole world of internalMadness, an authentic Demon Empire; out of which, indeed, his world ofWisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as onits dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind. 

 * * * * *

'But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as formany other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-envelopingAppearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us frombefore Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, andyet to blind it, --lie all embracing, as the universal canvas, or warpand woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall youendeavour to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunderfor moments, and look through. 

'Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, which when he put on, and wishedhimself Anywhere, behold he was There. By this means had Fortunatustriumphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for him there was noWhere, but all was Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself, in theWahngasse of Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for allmankind, what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, onthe opposite side of the street, another Hatter establish himself; andas his fellow-craftsman made Space-annihilating Hats, makeTime-annihilating! Of both would I purchase, were it with my lastgroschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap-on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Any_where_, straightway to be _There_!Next to clap-on your other felt, and, simply by wishing that you wereAny_when_, straightway to be _Then_! This were indeed the grander:shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to itsFire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically inthe Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls andSenecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time!

'Or thinkest thou it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Pastannihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or onlyfuture? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, alreadyanswer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blindedsummonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though as yetdarkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both_are_. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: thatTime and Space are not God, but creations of God: that with God as itis a universal HERE, so is it an everlasting NOW. 

'And seest thou therein any glimpse of IMMORTALITY?--O Heaven! Is thewhite Tomb of our Loved One, who died from our arms, and had to beleft behind us there, which rises in the distance, like a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheeredmiles we have journeyed on alone, --but a pale spectral Illusion! Isthe lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Heremysteriously, with God!--Know of a truth that only the Time-shadowshave perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, _is_ even now and forever. This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayest ponder at thy leisure;for the next twenty years, or the next twenty centuries: believe itthou must; understand it thou canst not. 

'That the Thought-forms, Space and Time, wherein, once for all, we aresent into this Earth to live, should condition and determine our wholePractical reasonings, conceptions, and imagines or imaginings, --seemsaltogether fit, just, and unavoidable. But that they should, furthermore, usurp such sway over pure spiritual Meditation, and blindus to the wonder everywhere lying close on us, seems nowise so. AdmitSpace and Time to their due rank as Forms of Thought; nay even, ifthou wilt, to their quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how their thin disguises hide from us the brightestGod-effulgences! Thus, were it not miraculous, could I stretch forthmy hand and clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth myhand and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it hither andthither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle liesin miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not tosee that the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force toclutch aught therewith? Innumerable other of this sort are thedeceptions, and wonder-hiding stupefactions, which Space practises onus. 

'Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your grand anti-magician, anduniversal wonder-hider, is this same lying Time. Had we but theTime-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should seeourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authenticThaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone. But unhappily we havenot such a Hat; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantilyhelp himself without one. 

'Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, builtthe walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his Lyre? Yet tell me, Whobuilt these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning-out all the sandstonerocks, to dance along from the _Steinbruch_ (now a huge TroglodyteChasm, with frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves intoDoric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses and noble streets? Wasit not the still higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilising Man? Ourhighest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago: hissphere-melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravishedsouls of men; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows andsounds, though now with thousandfold accompaniments, and richsymphonies, through all our hearts; and modulates, and divinely leadsthem. Is that a wonder, which happens in two hours; and does it ceaseto be wonderful if happening in two million? Not only was Thebes builtby the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspiredOrpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories-in ever done. 

'Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance, if thou hast eyes, from thenear moving-cause to its far-distant Mover: The stroke that cametransmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less astroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? O, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct fromthe Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thyheart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawestthou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, theglory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is theTime-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from thefoolish. 

'Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authenticGhost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but couldnot, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, andtapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eyeas well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide ofhuman Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? Thegood Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish;well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress thethreescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else arewe? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into anAppearance; and that fade-away again into air and Invisibility? Thisis no metaphor, it is a simple scientific _fact_: we start out ofNothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round theveriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years andæons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestialharp-strings, like the Song of beautified Souls? And again, do not wesqueak and jibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings andrecriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar(_poltern_), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead, --till the scentof the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Nightbecomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does thesteel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even asperturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats andAusterlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt;which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?--Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand-million walking theEarth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. 

'O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not onlycarry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-bloodwith its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-systemgathered round our ME; wherein, through some moments or years, theDivine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on hisstrong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in hisarm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealedForce, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were afirm substance: fool! the earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, andwarrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's?Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they werenot; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not. 

'So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; andforth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. WhatForce and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill ofIndustry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights ofScience; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in warwith his fellow:--and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthlyVesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven'sArtillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, inlong-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from theInane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge againinto the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filledup, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardestadamant some footprint of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the hostwill read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?--O Heaven, whither?Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery toMystery, from God and to God. 

 "We _are such stuff_ As Dreams are made of, and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep!"'

CHAPTER IX

CIRCUMSPECTIVE

Here, then, arises the so momentous question: Have many BritishReaders actually arrived with us at the new promised country; is thePhilosophy of Clothes now at last opening around them? Long andadventurous has the journey been: from those outmost vulgar, palpableWoollen-Hulls of Man; through his wondrous Flesh-Garments, and hiswondrous Social Garnitures; inwards to the Garments of his very Soul'sSoul, to Time and Space themselves! And now does the Spiritual, eternal Essence of Man, and of Mankind, bared of such wrappages, beginin any measure to reveal itself? Can many readers discern, as througha glass darkly, in huge wavering outlines, some primeval rudiments ofMan's Being, what is changeable divided from what is unchangeable?Does that Earth-Spirit's speech in _Faust_, --

 ''Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the Garment thou see'st Him by';

or that other thousand-times repeated speech of the Magician, Shakspeare, --

 'And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloudcapt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces, The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind';

begin to have some meaning for us? In a word, do we at length standsafe in the far region of Poetic Creation and Palingenesia, where thatPhoenix Death-Birth of Human Society, and of all Human Things, appearspossible, is seen to be inevitable?

Along this most insufficient, unheard-of Bridge, which the Editor, byHeaven's blessing, has now seen himself enabled to conclude if notcomplete, it cannot be his sober calculation, but only his fond hope, that many have travelled without accident. No firm arch, overspanningthe Impassable with paved highway, could the Editor construct; only, as was said, some zigzag series of rafts floating tumultuouslythereon. Alas, and the leaps from raft to raft were too often of abreakneck character; the darkness, the nature of the element, all wasagainst us!

Nevertheless, may not here and there one of a thousand, provided witha discursiveness of intellect rare in our day, have cleared thepassage, in spite of all? Happy few! little band of Friends! bewelcome, be of courage. By degrees, the eye grows accustomed to itsnew Whereabout; the hand can stretch itself forth to work there: it isin this grand and indeed highest work of Palingenesia that ye shalllabour, each according to ability. New labourers will arrive; newBridges will be built; nay, may not our own poor rope-and-raft Bridge, in your passings and repassings, be mended in many a point, till itgrow quite firm, passable even for the halt?

Meanwhile, of the innumerable multitude that started with us, joyousand full of hope, where now is the innumerable remainder, whom we seeno longer by our side? The most have recoiled, and stand gazing afaroff, in unsympathetic astonishment, at our career: not a few, pressingforward with more courage, have missed footing, or leaped short; andnow swim weltering in the Chaos-flood, some towards this shore, sometowards that. To these also a helping hand should be held out; atleast some word of encouragement be said. 

Or, to speak without metaphor, with which mode of utteranceTeufelsdröckh unhappily has somewhat infected us, --can it be hiddenfrom the Editor that many a British Reader sits reading quitebewildered in head, and afflicted rather than instructed by thepresent Work? Yes, long ago has many a British Reader been, as now, demanding with something like a snarl: Whereto does all this lead; orwhat use is in it?

In the way of replenishing thy purse, or otherwise aiding thydigestive faculty, O British Reader, it leads to nothing, and there isno use in it; but rather the reverse, for it costs thee somewhat. Nevertheless, if through this unpromising Horn-gate, Teufelsdröckh, and we by means of him, have led thee into the true Land of Dreams;and through the Clothes-screen, as through a magical _Pierre-Pertuis_, thou lookest, even for moments, into the region of the Wonderful, andseest and feelest that thy daily life is girt with Wonder, and basedon Wonder, and thy very blankets and breeches are Miracles, --then artthou profited beyond money's worth; and hast a thankfulness towardsour Professor; nay, perhaps in many a literary Tea-circle wilt openthy kind lips, and audibly express that same. 

Nay farther, art not thou too perhaps by this time made aware that allSymbols are properly Clothes; that all Forms whereby Spirit manifestsitself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes;and thus not only the parchment Magna Charta, which a Tailor was nighcutting into measures, but the Pomp and Authority of Law, thesacredness of Majesty, and all inferior Worships (Worthships) areproperly a Vesture and Raiment; and the Thirty-nine Articlesthemselves are articles of wearing-apparel (for the Religious Idea)?In which case, must it not also be admitted that this Science ofClothes is a high one, and may with infinitely deeper study on thypart yield richer fruit: that it takes scientific rank besideCodification, and Political Economy, and the Theory of the BritishConstitution; nay rather, from its prophetic height looks down on allthese, as on so many weaving-shops and spinning-mills, where theVestures which _it_ has to fashion, and consecrate and distribute, are, too often by haggard hungry operatives who see no farther thantheir nose, mechanically woven and spun?

But omitting all this, much more all that concerns NaturalSupernaturalism, and indeed whatever has reference to the Ulterior orTranscendental portion of the Science, or bears never so remotely onthat promised Volume of the _Palingenesie der menschlichenGesellschaft_ (Newbirth of Society), --we humbly suggest that noprovince of Clothes-Philosophy, even the lowest, is without its directvalue, but that innumerable inferences of a practical nature may bedrawn therefrom. To say nothing of those pregnant considerations, ethical, political, symbolical, which crowd on the Clothes-Philosopherfrom the very threshold of his Science; nothing even of those'architectural ideas, ' which, as we have seen, lurk at the bottom ofall Modes, and will one day, better unfolding themselves, lead toimportant revolutions, --let us glance for a moment, and with thefaintest light of Clothes-Philosophy, on what may be called theHabilatory Class of our fellow-men. Here too overlooking, where somuch were to be looked on, the million spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, washers, and wringers, that puddle and muddle in their darkrecesses, to make us Clothes, and die that we may live, --let us butturn the reader's attention upon two small divisions of mankind, who, like moths, may be regarded as Cloth-animals, creatures that live, move and have their being in Cloth: we mean, Dandies and Tailors. 

In regard to both which small divisions it may be asserted withoutscruple, that the public feeling, unenlightened by Philosophy, is atfault; and even that the dictates of humanity are violated. As willperhaps abundantly appear to readers of the two following chapters. 

CHAPTER X

THE DANDIACAL BODY

First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientificstrictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearingMan, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearingof Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person isheroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clotheswisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a German Professor of unequalledlearning and acumen, writes his enormous Volume to demonstrate, hassprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without effort, like aninstinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth. WhatTeufelsdröckh would call a 'Divine Idea of Cloth' is born with him;and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, orwring his heart asunder with unutterable throes. 

But, like a generous, creative enthusiast, he fearlessly makes hisIdea an Action; shows himself in peculiar guise to mankind; walksforth, a witness and living Martyr to the eternal worth of Clothes. Wecalled him a Poet: is not his body the (stuffed) parchment-skinwhereon he writes, with cunning Huddersfield dyes, a Sonnet to hismistress' eyebrow? Say, rather, an Epos, and _Clotha Virumque cano_, to the whole world, in Macaronic verses, which he that runs may read. Nay, if you grant, what seems to be admissible, that the Dandy has aThinking-principle in him, and some notions of Time and Space, isthere not in this Life-devotedness to Cloth, in this so willingsacrifice of the Immortal to the Perishable, something (though inreverse order) of that blending and identification of Eternity withTime, which, as we have seen, constitutes the Prophetic character?

And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and evenProphecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, we maysay, that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be aliving object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing thatwill reflect rays of light. Your silver or your gold (beyond what theniggardly Law has already secured him) he solicits not; simply theglance of your eyes. Understand his mystic significance, or altogethermiss and misinterpret it; do but look at him, and he is contented. Maywe not well cry shame on an ungrateful world, which refuses even thispoor boon; which will waste its optic faculty on dried Crocodiles, andSiamese Twins; and over the domestic wonderful wonder of wonders, alive Dandy, glance with hasty indifference, and a scarcely concealedcontempt! Him no Zoologist classes among the Mammalia, no Anatomistdissects with care: when did we see any injected Preparation of theDandy in our Museums; any specimen of him preserved in spirits? LordHerringbone may dress himself in a snuff-brown suit, with snuff-brownshirt and shoes: it skills not; the undiscerning public, occupied withgrosser wants, passes by regardless on the other side. 

The age of Curiosity, like that of Chivalry, is indeed, properlyspeaking, gone. Yet perhaps only gone to sleep: for here arises theClothes-Philosophy to resuscitate, strangely enough, both the one andthe other! Should sound views of this Science come to prevail, theessential nature of the British Dandy, and the mystic significancethat lies in him, cannot always remain hidden under laughable andlamentable hallucination. The following long Extract from ProfessorTeufelsdröckh may set the matter, if not in its true light, yet in theway towards such. It is to be regretted, however, that here, as sooften elsewhere, the Professor's keen philosophic perspicacity issomewhat marred by a certain mixture of almost owlish purblindness, orelse of some perverse, ineffectual, ironic tendency; our readers shalljudge which:

 * * * * *

'In these distracted times, ' writes he, 'when the Religious Principle, driven-out of most Churches, either lies unseen in the hearts of goodmen, looking and longing and silently working there towards some newRevelation; or else wanders homeless over the world, like adisembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organisation, --into how manystrange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it nottentatively and errantly cast itself! The higher Enthusiasm of man'snature is for the while without Exponent; yet does it continueindestructible, unweariedly active, and work blindly in the greatchaotic deep: thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, bodiesitself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis. 

'Chiefly is this observable in England, which, as the wealthiest andworst-instructed of European nations, offers precisely the elements(of Heat, namely, and of Darkness), in which such moon-calves andmonstrosities are best generated. Among the newer Sects of thatcountry, one of the most notable, and closely connected with ourpresent subject, is that of the _Dandies_; concerning which, whatlittle information I have been able to procure may fitly stand here. 

'It is true, certain of the English Journalists, men generally withoutsense for the Religious Principle, or judgment for its manifestations, speak, in their brief enigmatic notices, as if this were perhapsrather a Secular Sect, and not a Religious one; nevertheless, to thepsychologic eye its devotional and even sacrificial character plainlyenough reveals itself. Whether it belongs to the class ofFetish-worships, or of Hero-worships or Polytheisms, or to what otherclass, may in the present state of our intelligence remain undecided(_schweben_). A certain touch of Manicheism, not indeed in the Gnosticshape, is discernible enough: also (for human Error walks in a cycle, and reappears at intervals) a not-inconsiderable resemblance to thatSuperstition of the Athos Monks, who by fasting from all nourishment, and looking intensely for a length of time into their own navels, cameto discern therein the true Apocalypse of Nature, and Heaven Unveiled. To my own surmise, it appears as if this Dandiacal Sect were but a newmodification, adapted to the new time, of that primeval Superstition, _Self-worship_; which Zerdusht, Quangfoutchee, Mohamed, and others, strove rather to subordinate and restrain than to eradicate; and whichonly in the purer forms of Religion has been altogether rejected. Wherefore, if any one chooses to name it revived Ahrimanism, or a newfigure of Demon-Worship, I have, so far as is yet visible, noobjection. 

'For the rest, these people, animated with the zeal of a new Sect, display courage and perseverance, and what force there is in man'snature, though never so enslaved. They affect great purity andseparatism; distinguish themselves by a particular costume (whereofsome notices were given in the earlier part of this Volume); likewise, so far as possible, by a particular speech (apparently some broken_Lingua-franca_, or English-French); and, on the whole, strive tomaintain a true Nazarene deportment, and keep themselves unspottedfrom the world. 

'They have their Temples, whereof the chief, as the Jewish Temple did, stands in their metropolis; and is named _Almack's_, a word ofuncertain etymology. They worship principally by night; and have theirHighpriests and Highpriestesses, who, however, do not continue forlife. The rites, by some supposed to be of the Menadic sort, orperhaps with an Eleusinian or Cabiric character, are held strictlysecret. Nor are Sacred Books wanting to the Sect; these they call_Fashionable Novels_: however, the Canon is not completed, and someare canonical and others not. 

'Of such Sacred Books I, not without expense, procured myself somesamples; and in hope of true insight, and with the zeal which beseemsan Inquirer into Clothes, set to interpret and study them. But whollyto no purpose: that tough faculty of reading, for which the world willnot refuse me credit, was here for the first time foiled and set atnaught. In vain that I summoned my whole energies (_mich weidlichanstrengte_), and did my very utmost; at the end of some short space, I was uniformly seized with not so much what I can call a drumming inmy ears, as a kind of infinite, unsufferable, Jews-harping andscrannel-piping there; to which the frightfullest species of MagneticSleep soon supervened. And if I strove to shake this away, andabsolutely would not yield, there came a hitherto unfelt sensation, asof _Delirium Tremens_, and a melting into total deliquium: till atlast, by order of the Doctor, dreading ruin to my whole intellectualand bodily faculties, and a general breaking-up of the constitution, Ireluctantly but determinedly forbore. Was there some miracle at workhere; like those Fire-balls, and supernal and infernal prodigies, which, in the case of the Jewish Mysteries, have also more than oncescared-back the Alien? Be this as it may, such failure on my part, after best efforts, must excuse the imperfection of this sketch;altogether incomplete, yet the completest I could give of a Sect toosingular to be omitted. 

'Loving my own life and senses as I do, no power shall induce me, as aprivate individual, to open another _Fashionable Novel_. But luckily, in this dilemma, comes a hand from the clouds; whereby if not victory, deliverance is held out to me. Round one of those Book-packages, whichthe _Stillschweigen'sche Buchhandlung_ is in the habit of importingfrom England, come, as is usual, various waste printed-sheets(_Maculatur blätter_), by way of interior wrappage: into these theClothes-Philosopher, with a certain Mohamedan reverence even forwaste-paper, where curious knowledge will sometimes hover, disdainsnot to cast his eye. Readers may judge of his astonishment when onsuch a defaced stray-sheet, probably the outcast fraction of someEnglish Periodical, such as they name _Magazine_, appears somethinglike a Dissertation on this very subject of _Fashionable Novels_! Itsets out, indeed, chiefly from a Secular point of view; directingitself, not without asperity, against some to me unknown individualnamed _Pelham_, who seems to be a Mystagogue, and leading Teacher andPreacher of the Sect; so that, what indeed otherwise was not to beexpected in such a fugitive fragmentary sheet, the true secret, theReligious physiognomy and physiology of the Dandiacal Body, is nowiselaid fully open there. Nevertheless, scattered lights do from time totime sparkle out, whereby I have endeavoured to profit. Nay, in onepassage selected from the Prophecies, or Mythic Theogonies, orwhatever they are (for the style seems very mixed) of this Mystagogue, I find what appears to be a Confession of Faith, or Whole Duty of Man, according to the tenets of that Sect. Which Confession or Whole Duty, therefore, as proceeding from a source so authentic, I shall herearrange under Seven distinct Articles, and in very abridged shape laybefore the German world; therewith taking leave of this matter. Observe also, that to avoid possibility of error, I, as far as may be, quote literally from the Original:

'ARTICLES OF FAITH. 

'"1. Coats should have nothing of the triangle about them; at the sametime, wrinkles behind should be carefully avoided. 

'"2. The collar is a very important point: it should be low behind, and slightly rolled. 

'"3. No license of fashion can allow a man of delicate taste to adoptthe posterial luxuriance of a Hottentot. 

'"4. There is safety in a swallow-tail. 

'"5. The good sense of a gentleman is nowhere more finely developedthan in his rings. 

'"6. It is permitted to mankind, under certain restrictions, to wearwhite waistcoats. 

'"7. The trousers must be exceedingly tight across the hips. "

'All which Propositions I, for the present, content myself withmodestly but peremptorily and irrevocably denying. 

'In strange contrast with this Dandiacal Body stands another BritishSect, originally, as I understand, of Ireland, where its chief seatstill is; but known also in the main Island, and indeed everywhererapidly spreading. As this Sect has hitherto emitted no CanonicalBooks, it remains to me in the same state of obscurity as theDandiacal, which has published Books that the unassisted humanfaculties are inadequate to read. The members appear to be designatedby a considerable diversity of names, according to their variousplaces of establishment: in England they are generally called the_Drudge_ Sect; also, unphilosophically enough, the _White Negroes_;and, chiefly in scorn by those of other communions, the_Ragged-Beggar_ Sect. In Scotland, again, I find them entitled_Hallanshakers_, or the _Stook of Duds_ Sect; any individualcommunicant is named _Stook of Duds_ (that is, Shock of Rags), inallusion, doubtless, to their professional Costume. While in Ireland, which, as mentioned, is their grand parent hive, they go by aperplexing multiplicity of designations, such as _Bogtrotters_, _Redshanks_, _Ribbonmen_, _Cottiers_, _Peep-of-Day Boys_, _Babes ofthe Wood_, _Rockites_, _Poor-Slaves_; which last, however, seems to bethe primary and generic name; whereto, probably enough, the others areonly subsidiary species, or slight varieties; or, at most, propagatedoffsets from the parent stem, whose minute subdivisions, and shades ofdifference, it were here loss of time to dwell on. Enough for us tounderstand, what seems indubitable, that the original Sect is that ofthe _Poor-Slaves_; whose doctrines, practices, and fundamentalcharacteristics pervade and animate the whole Body, howsoeverdenominated or outwardly diversified. 

'The precise speculative tenets of this Brotherhood: how the Universe, and Man, and Man's Life, picture themselves to the mind of an IrishPoor-Slave; with what feelings and opinions he looks forward on theFuture, round on the Present, back on the Past, it were extremelydifficult to specify. Something Monastic there appears to be in theirConstitution: we find them bound by the two Monastic Vows, of Povertyand Obedience; which Vows, especially the former, it is said, theyobserve with great strictness; nay, as I have understood it, they arepledged, and be it by any solemn Nazarene ordination or not, irrevocably consecrated thereto, even _before_ birth. That the thirdMonastic Vow, of Chastity, is rigidly enforced among them, I find noground to conjecture. 

'Furthermore, they appear to imitate the Dandiacal Sect in their grandprinciple of wearing a peculiar Costume. Of which Irish Poor-SlaveCostume no description will indeed be found in the present Volume; forthis reason, that by the imperfect organ of Language it did not seemdescribable. Their raiment consists of innumerable skirts, lappets andirregular wings, of all cloths and of all colours; through thelabyrinthic intricacies of which their bodies are introduced by someunknown process. It is fastened together by a multiplex combination ofbuttons, thrums and skewers; to which frequently is added a girdle ofleather, of hempen or even of straw rope, round the loins. To strawrope, indeed, they seem partial, and often wear it by way of sandals. In head-dress they affect a certain freedom: hats with partial brim, without crown, or with only a loose, hinged, or valve crown; in theformer case, they sometimes invert the hat, and wear it brimuppermost, like a University-cap, with what view is unknown. 

'The name Poor-Slaves seems to indicate a Slavonic, Polish, or Russianorigin: not so, however, the interior essence and spirit of theirSuperstition, which rather displays a Teutonic or Druidical character. One might fancy them worshippers of Hertha, or the Earth: for they digand affectionately work continually in her bosom; or else, shut-up inprivate Oratories, meditate and manipulate the substances derived fromher; seldom looking-up towards the Heavenly Luminaries, and then withcomparative indifference. Like the Druids, on the other hand, theylive in dark dwellings; often even breaking their glass-windows, wherethey find such, and stuffing them up with pieces of raiment, or otheropaque substances, till the fit obscurity is restored. Again, like allfollowers of Nature-Worship, they are liable to outbreakings of anenthusiasm rising to ferocity; and burn men, if not in wicker idols, yet in sod cottages. 

'In respect of diet, they have also their observances. All Poor-Slavesare Rhizophagous (or Root-eaters); a few are Ichthyophagous, and useSalted Herrings: other animal food they abstain from; except indeed, with perhaps some strange inverted fragment of a Brahminical feeling, such animals as die a natural death. Their universal sustenance is theroot named Potato, cooked by fire alone; and generally withoutcondiment or relish of any kind, save an unknown condiment named_Point_, into the meaning of which I have vainly inquired; the victual_Potatoes-and-Point_ not appearing, at least not with specificaccuracy of description, in any European Cookery-Book whatever. Fordrink, they use, with an almost epigrammatic counterpoise of taste, Milk, which is the mildest of liquors, and _Potheen_, which is thefiercest. This latter I have tasted, as well as the English_Blue-Ruin_, and the Scotch _Whisky_, analogous fluids used by theSect in those countries: it evidently contains some form of alcohol, in the highest state of concentration, though disguised with acridoils; and is, on the whole, the most pungent substance known tome, --indeed, a perfect liquid fire. In all their ReligiousSolemnities, Potheen is said to be an indispensable requisite, andlargely consumed. 

'An Irish Traveller, of perhaps common veracity, who presents himselfunder the to me unmeaning title of _The late John Bernard_, offers thefollowing sketch of a domestic establishment, the inmates whereof, though such is not stated expressly, appear to have been of thatFaith. Thereby shall my German readers now behold an Irish Poor-Slave, as it were with their own eyes; and even see him at meat. Moreover, inthe so-precious waste-paper sheet above mentioned, I have found somecorresponding picture of a Dandiacal Household, painted by that sameDandiacal Mystagogue, or Theogonist: this also, by way of counterpartand contrast, the world shall look into. 

'First, therefore, of the Poor-Slave, who appears likewise to havebeen a species of Innkeeper. I quote from the original:

_Poor-Slave Household_

'"The furniture of this Caravansera consisted of a large iron Pot, twooaken Tables, two Benches, two Chairs, and a Potheen Noggin. There wasa Loft above (attainable by a ladder), upon which the inmates slept;and the space below was divided by a hurdle into two Apartments; theone for their cow and pig, the other for themselves and guests. Onentering the house we discovered the family, eleven in number, atdinner: the father sitting at the top, the mother at the bottom, thechildren on each side, of a large oaken Board, which was scooped-outin the middle, like a trough, to receive the contents of their Pot ofPotatoes. Little holes were cut at equal distances to contain Salt;and a bowl of Milk stood on the table: all the luxuries of meat andbeer, bread, knives and dishes were dispensed with. " The Poor-Slavehimself our Traveller found, as he says, broad-backed, black-browed, of great personal strength, and mouth from ear to ear. His Wife was asun-browned but well-featured woman; and his young ones, bare andchubby, had the appetite of ravens. Of their Philosophical orReligious tenets or observances, no notice or hint. 

'But now, secondly, of the Dandiacal Household; in which, truly, thatoften-mentioned Mystagogue and inspired Penman himself has his abode:

_Dandiacal Household_

'"A Dressing-room splendidly furnished; violet-coloured curtains, chairs and ottomans of the same hue. Two full-length Mirrors areplaced, one on each side of a table, which supports the luxuries ofthe Toilet. Several Bottles of Perfumes, arranged in a peculiarfashion, stand upon a smaller table of mother-of-pearl: opposite tothese are placed the appurtenances of Lavation richly wrought infrosted silver. A wardrobe of Buhl is on the left; the doors of which, being partly open, discover a profusion of Clothes; Shoes of asingularly small size monopolise the lower shelves. Fronting thewardrobe a door ajar gives some slight glimpse of a Bathroom. Folding-doors in the background. --Enter the Author, " our Theogonist inperson, "obsequiously preceded by a French Valet, in white silk Jacketand cambric Apron. "

 * * * * *

'Such are the two Sects which, at this moment, divide the moreunsettled portion of the British People; and agitate that ever-vexedcountry. To the eye of the political Seer, their mutual relation, pregnant with the elements of discord and hostility, is far fromconsoling. These two principals of Dandiacal Self-worship orDemon-worship, and Poor-Slavish or Drudgical Earth-worship, orwhatever that same Drudgism may be, do as yet indeed manifestthemselves under distant and nowise considerable shapes: nevertheless, in their roots and subterranean ramifications, they extend through theentire structure of Society, and work unweariedly in the secret depthsof English national Existence; striving to separate and isolate itinto two contradictory, uncommunicating masses. 

'In numbers, and even individual strength, the Poor-Slaves or Drudges, it would seem, are hourly increasing. The Dandiacal, again, is bynature no proselytising Sect; but it boasts of great hereditaryresources, and is strong by union; whereas the Drudges, split intoparties, have as yet no rallying-point; or at best only co-operate bymeans of partial secret affiliations. If, indeed, there were to arisea _Communion of Drudges_, as there is already a Communion of Saints, what strangest effects would follow therefrom! Dandyism as yet affectsto look-down on Drudgism: but perhaps the hour of trial, when it willbe practically seen which ought to look down, and which up, is not sodistant. 

'To me it seems probable that the two Sects will one day part Englandbetween them; each recruiting itself from the intermediate ranks, tillthere be none left to enlist on either side. Those DandiacalManicheans, with the host of Dandyising Christians, will form onebody: the Drudges, gathering round them whosoever is Drudgical, be heChristian or Infidel Pagan; sweeping-up likewise all manner ofUtilitarians, Radicals, refractory Potwallopers, and so forth, intotheir general mass, will form another. I could liken Dandyism andDrudgism to two bottomless boiling Whirlpools that had broken-out onopposite quarters of the firm land: as yet they appear onlydisquieted, foolishly bubbling wells, which man's art might cover-in;yet mark them, their diameter is daily widening: they are hollow Conesthat boil-up from the infinite Deep, over which your firm land is buta thin crust or rind! Thus daily is the intermediate landcrumbling-in, daily the empire of the two Buchan-Bullers extending;till now there is but a foot-plank, a mere film of Land between them;this too is washed away: and then--we have the true Hell of Waters, and Noah's Deluge is outdeluged!

'Or better, I might call them two boundless, and indeed unexampledElectric Machines (turned by the "Machinery of Society"), withbatteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism thePositive: one attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all thePositive Electricity of the nation (namely, the Money thereof); theother is equally busy with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent. Hitherto you see only partial transientsparkles and sputters: but wait a little, till the entire nation is inan electric state; till your whole vital Electricity, no longerhealthfully Neutral, is cut into two isolated portions of Positive andNegative (of Money and of Hunger); and stands there bottled-up in twoWorld-Batteries! The stirring of a child's finger brings the twotogether; and then--What then? The Earth is but shivered intoimpalpable smoke by that Doom's-thunderpeal; the Sun misses one of hisPlanets in Space, and thenceforth there are no eclipses of theMoon. --Or better still, I might liken'--

Oh! enough, enough of likenings and similitudes; in excess of which, truly, it is hard to say whether Teufelsdröckh or ourselves sin themore. 

We have often blamed him for a habit of wire-drawing and over-refining;from of old we have been familiar with his tendency to Mysticism andReligiosity, whereby in everything he was still scenting-out Religion:but never perhaps did these amaurosis-suffusions so cloud and distorthis otherwise most piercing vision, as in this of the _Dandiacal Body_!Or was there something of intended satire; is the Professor and Seernot quite the blinkard he affects to be? Of an ordinary mortal weshould have decisively answered in the affirmative; but with aTeufelsdröckh there ever hovers some shade of doubt. In the meanwhile, if satire were actually intended, the case is little better. There are not wanting men who will answer: Does your Professor take usfor simpletons? His irony has overshot itself; we see through it, andperhaps through him. 

CHAPTER XI

TAILORS

Thus, however, has our first Practical Inference from theClothes-Philosophy, that which respects Dandies, been sufficientlydrawn; and we come now to the second, concerning Tailors. On thislatter our opinion happily quite coincides with that of Teufelsdröckhhimself, as expressed in the concluding page of his Volume, to whom, therefore, we willingly give place. Let him speak his own last words, in his own way:

 * * * * *

'Upwards of a century, ' says he, 'must elapse, and still the bleedingfight of Freedom be fought, whoso is noblest perishing in the van, andthrones be hurled on altars like Pelion on Ossa, and the Moloch ofIniquity have his victims, and the Michael of Justice his martyrs, before Tailors can be admitted to their true prerogatives of manhood, and this last wound of suffering Humanity be closed. 

'If aught in the history of the world's blindness could surprise us, here might we indeed pause and wonder. An idea has gone abroad, andfixed itself down into a wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors area distinct species in Physiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of aMan. Call any one a _Schneider_ (Cutter, Tailor), is it not, in ourdislocated, hood-winked, and indeed delirious condition of Society, equivalent to defying his perpetual fellest enmity? The epithet_schneider-mässig_ (tailor-like) betokens an otherwise unapproachabledegree of pusillanimity: we introduce a _Tailor's-Melancholy_, moreopprobrious than any Leprosy, into our Books of Medicine; and fable Iknow not what of his generating it by living on Cabbage. Why should Ispeak of Hans Sachs (himself a Shoemaker, or kind of Leather-Tailor), with his _Schneider mit dem Panier_? Why of Shakspeare, in his _Tamingof the Shrew_, and elsewhere? Does it not stand on record that theEnglish Queen Elizabeth, receiving a deputation of Eighteen Tailors, addressed them with a "Good morning, gentlemen both!" Did not the samevirago boast that she had a Cavalry Regiment, whereof neither horsenor man could be injured; her Regiment, namely, of Tailors on Mares?Thus everywhere is the falsehood taken for granted, and acted-on as anindisputable fact. 

'Nevertheless, need I put the question to any Physiologist, whether itis disputable or not? Seems it not at least presumable, that, underhis Clothes, the Tailor has bones and viscera, and other muscles thanthe sartorious? Which function of manhood is the Tailor notconjectured to perform? Can he not arrest for debt? Is he not in mostcountries a tax-paying animal?

'To no reader of this Volume can it be doubtful which conviction ismine. Nay if the fruit of these long vigils, and almost preternaturalInquiries, is not to perish utterly, the world will have approximatedtowards a higher Truth; and the doctrine, which Swift, with the keenforecast of genius, dimly anticipated, will stand revealed in clearlight: that the Tailor is not only a Man, but something of a Creatoror Divinity. Of Franklin it was said, that "he snatched the Thunderfrom Heaven and the Sceptre from Kings": but which is greater, I wouldask, he that lends, or he that snatches? For, looking away fromindividual cases, and how a Man is by the Tailor new-created into aNobleman, and clothed not only with Wool but with Dignity and a MysticDominion, --is not the fair fabric of Society itself, with all itsroyal mantles and pontifical stoles, whereby, from nakedness anddismemberment, we are organised into Polities, into nations, and awhole co-operating Mankind, the creation, as has here been oftenirrefragably evinced, of the Tailor alone?--What too are all Poets andmoral Teachers, but a species of Metaphorical Tailors? Touching whichhigh Guild the greatest living Guild-brother has triumphantly askedus: "Nay if thou wilt have it, who but the Poet first made Gods formen; brought them down to us; and raised us up to them?"

'And this is he, whom sitting downcast, on the hard basis of hisShopboard, the world treats with contumely, as the ninth part of aman! Look up, thou much-injured one, look up with the kindling eye ofhope, and prophetic bodings of a noble better time. Too long hast thousat there, on crossed legs, wearing thy ankle-joints to horn; likesome sacred Anchorite, or Catholic Fakir, doing penance, drawing downHeaven's richest blessings, for a world that scoffed at thee. Be ofhope! Already streaks of blue peer through our clouds; the thick gloomof Ignorance is rolling asunder, and it will be Day. Mankind willrepay with interest their long-accumulated debt: the Anchorite thatwas scoffed at will be worshipped; the Fraction will become not anInteger only, but a Square and Cube. With astonishment the world willrecognise that the Tailor is its Hierophant and Hierarch, or even itsGod. 

'As I stood in the Mosque of St. Sophia, and looked upon theseFour-and-Twenty Tailors, sewing and embroidering that rich Cloth, which the Sultan sends yearly for the Caaba of Mecca, I thought withinmyself: How many other Unholies has your covering Art made holy, besides this Arabian Whinstone!

'Still more touching was it when, turning the corner of a lane, in theScottish Town of Edinburgh, I came upon a Signpost, whereon stoodwritten that such and such a one was "Breeches-Maker to his Majesty";and stood painted the Effigies of a Pair of Leather Breeches, andbetween the knees these memorable words, SIC ITUR AD ASTRA. Was notthis the martyr prison-speech of a Tailor sighing indeed in bonds, yetsighing towards deliverance, and prophetically appealing to a betterday? A day of justice, when the worth of Breeches would be revealed toman, and the Scissors become forever venerable. 

'Neither, perhaps, may I now say, has his appeal been altogether invain. It was in this high moment, when the soul, rent, as it were, andshed asunder, is open to inspiring influence, that I first conceivedthis Work on Clothes: the greatest I can ever hope to do; which hasalready, after long retardations, occupied, and will yet occupy, solarge a section of my Life; and of which the Primary and simplerPortion may here find its conclusion. '

CHAPTER XII

FAREWELL

So have we endeavoured, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdröckh had kneaded forhis fellow mortals, to pick-out the choicest Plums, and present themseparately on a cover of our own. A laborious, perhaps a thanklessenterprise; in which, however, something of hope has occasionallycheered us, and of which we can now wash our hands not altogetherwithout satisfaction. If hereby, though in barbaric wise, some morselof spiritual nourishment have been added to the scanty ration of ourbeloved British world, what nobler recompense could the Editor desire?If it prove otherwise, why should he murmur? Was not this a Task whichDestiny, in any case, had appointed him; which having now done with, he sees his general Day's-work so much the lighter, so much theshorter?

Of Professor Teufelsdröckh it seems impossible to take leave without amingled feeling of astonishment, gratitude and disapproval. Who willnot regret that talents, which might have profited in the higher walksof Philosophy, or in Art itself, have been so much devoted to arummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often to a scraping in kennels, where lost rings and diamond-necklaces are nowise the sole conquests?Regret is unavoidable; yet censure were loss of time. To cure him ofhis mad humours British Criticism would essay in vain: enough for herif she can, by vigilance, prevent the spreading of such amongourselves. What a result, should this piebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical style of writing, not to say of thinking, becomegeneral among our Literary men! As it might so easily do. Thus has notthe Editor himself, working over Teufelsdröckh's German, lost much ofhis own English purity? Even as the smaller whirlpool is sucked intothe larger, and made to whirl along with it, so has the lesser mind, in this instance, been forced to become portion of the greater, andlike it, see all things figuratively: which habit time and assiduouseffort will be needed to eradicate. 

Nevertheless, wayward as our Professor shows himself, is there anyreader that can part with him in declared enmity? Let us confess, there is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, whichalmost attaches us. His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that ofa man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thoucanst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man whohad manfully defied the 'Time-prince, ' or Devil, to his face; nayperhaps, Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth tothat warfare, and now stood minded to wage the same, by all weapons, in all places, at all times. In such a cause, any soldier, were he buta Polack Scythe-man, shall be welcome. 

Still the question returns on us: How could a man occasionally of keeninsight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts tocommunicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely onthe absurd? Which question he were wiser than the present Editor whoshould satisfactorily answer. Our conjecture has sometimes been, thatperhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it. Seems it notconceivable that, in a Life like our Professor's, where so muchbountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone, Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with hischaracteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and everwithout success, he at last desperately dashes his sponge, full of allcolours, against the canvas, to try whether it will paint Foam? Withall his stillness, there were perhaps in Teufelsdröckh desperationenough for this. 

A second conjecture we hazard with even less warranty. It is, thatTeufelsdröckh is not without some touch of the universal feeling, awish to proselytise. How often already have we paused, uncertainwhether the basis of this so enigmatic nature were really Stoicism andDespair, or Love and Hope only seared into the figure of these!Remarkable, moreover, is this saying of his: 'How were Friendshippossible? In mutual devotedness to the Good and True: otherwiseimpossible; except as Armed Neutrality, or hollow Commercial League. Aman, be the Heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet wereten men, united in Love, capable of being and of doing what tenthousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield toman. ' And now in conjunction therewith consider this other: 'It is theNight of the World, and still long till it be Day: we wander amid theglimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are asif blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISYand ATHEISM, with the Gowl, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth, and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existenceis a shallow Dream. '

But what of the awestruck Wakeful who find it a Reality? Should notthese unite; since even an authentic Spectre is not visible toTwo?--In which case were this enormous Clothes-Volume properly anenormous Pitchpan, which our Teufelsdröckh in his lone watch-tower hadkindled, that it might flame far and wide through the Night, and manya disconsolately wandering spirit be guided thither to a Brother'sbosom!--We say as before, with all his malign Indifference, who knowswhat mad Hopes this man may harbour?

Meanwhile there is one fact to be stated here, which harmonises illwith such conjecture; and, indeed, were Teufelsdröckh made like othermen, might as good as altogether subvert it. Namely, that while theBeacon-fire blazed its brightest, the Watchman had quitted it; that nopilgrim could now ask him: Watchman, what of the Night? ProfessorTeufelsdröckh, be it known is no longer visibly present atWeissnichtwo, but again to all appearance lost in space! Some timeago, the Hofrath Heuschrecke was pleased to favour us with anothercopious Epistle; wherein much is said about the'Population-Institute'; much repeated in praise of the Paper-bagDocuments, the hieroglyphic nature of which our Hofrath still seemsnot to have surmised; and, lastly, the strangest occurrencecommunicated, to us for the first time, in the following paragraph:

'_Ew. Wohlgeboren_ will have seen from the public Prints, with whataffectionate and hitherto fruitless solicitude Weissnichtwo regardsthe disappearance of her Sage. Might but the united voice of Germanyprevail on him to return; nay, could we but so much as elucidate forourselves by what mystery he went away! But, alas, old Lieschenexperiences or affects the profoundest deafness, the profoundestignorance: in the Wahngasse all lies swept, silent, sealed up; thePrivy Council itself can hitherto elicit no answer. 

'It had been remarked that while the agitating news of those ParisianThree Days flew from mouth to mouth, and dinned every ear inWeissnichtwo, Herr Teufelsdröckh was not known, at the _Gans_ orelsewhere, to have spoken, for a whole week, any syllable except oncethese three: _Es geht an_ (It is beginning). Shortly after, as _Ew. Wohlgeboren_ knows, was the public tranquillity here, as in Berlin, threatened by a Sedition of the Tailors. Nor did there wantEvil-wishers, or perhaps mere desperate Alarmists, who asserted thatthe closing Chapter of the Clothes-Volume was to blame. In thisappalling crisis, the serenity of our Philosopher was indescribable;nay, perhaps through one humble individual, something thereof mightpass into the _Rath_ (Council) itself, and so contribute to thecountry's deliverance. The Tailors are now entirely pacificated. --

'To neither of these two incidents can I attribute our loss: yet stillcomes there the shadow of a suspicion out of Paris and its Politics. For example, when the _Saint-Simonian Society_ transmitted itsPropositions hither, and the whole _Gans_ was one vast cackle oflaughter, lamentation and astonishment, our Sage sat mute; and at theend of the third evening said merely: "Here also are men who havediscovered, not without amazement, that Man is still Man; of whichhigh, long-forgotten Truth you already see them make a falseapplication. " Since then, as has been ascertained by examination ofthe Post-Director, there passed at least one Letter with its Answerbetween the Messieurs Bazard-Enfantin and our Professor himself; ofwhat tenor can now only be conjectured. On the fifth night following, he was seen for the last time!

'Has this invaluable man, so obnoxious to most of the hostile Sectsthat convulse our Era, been spirited away by certain of theiremissaries; or did he go forth voluntarily to their head-quarters toconfer with them and confront them? Reason we have, at least of anegative sort, to believe the Lost still living; our widowed heartalso whispers that ere long he will himself give a sign. Otherwise, indeed, his archives must, one day, be opened by Authority; wheremuch, perhaps the _Palingenesie_ itself, is thought to be reposited. '

 * * * * *

Thus far the Hofrath; who vanishes, as is his wont, too like an IgnisFatuus, leaving the dark still darker. 

So that Teufelsdröckh's public History were not done, then, or reducedto an even, unromantic tenor; nay, perhaps the better part thereofwere only beginning? We stand in a region of conjectures, wheresubstance has melted into shadow, and one cannot be distinguished fromthe other. May Time, which solves or suppresses all problems, throwglad light on this also! Our own private conjecture, now amountingalmost to certainty, is that, safe-moored in some stillest obscurity, not to lie always still, Teufelsdröckh is actually in London!

Here, however, can the present Editor, with an ambrosial joy as ofover-weariness falling into sleep, lay down his pen. Well does heknow, if human testimony be worth aught, that to innumerable Britishreaders likewise, this is a satisfying consummation; that innumerableBritish readers consider him, during these current months, but as anuneasy interruption to their ways of thought and digestion; andindicate so much, not without a certain irritancy and even spokeninvective. For which, as for other mercies, ought not he to thank theUpper Powers? To one and all of you, O irritated readers, he, withoutstretched arms and open heart, will wave a kind farewell. Thou too, miraculous Entity, who namest thyself YORKE and OLIVER, and with thyvivacities and genialities, with thy all-too Irish mirth and madness, and odour of palled punch, makest such strange work, farewell; long asthou canst, fare-_well!_ Have we not, in the course of Eternity, travelled some months of our Life-journey in partial sight of oneanother; have we not existed together, though in a state of quarrel?

APPENDIX

TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS

 This questionable little Book was undoubtedly written among the mountain solitudes, in 1831; but, owing to impediments natural and accidental, could not, for seven years more, appear as a Volume in England;--and had at last to clip itself in pieces, and be content to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous _Magazine_ that offered. Whereby now, to certain idly curious readers, and even to myself till I make study, the insignificant but at last irritating question, What its real history and chronology are, is, if not insoluble, considerably involved in haze. 

 To the first English Edition, 1838, which an American, or two American had now opened the way for, there was slightingly prefixed, under the title '_Testimonies of Authors_, ' some straggle of real documents, which, now that I find it again, sets the matter into clear light and sequence;--and shall here, for removal of idle stumbling-blocks and nugatory guessings from the path of every reader, be reprinted as it stood. (_Author's Note of 1868. _)

TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS

I. HIGHEST CLASS, BOOKSELLER'S TASTER

_Taster to Bookseller. _--"The Author of _Teufelsdröckh_ is a person oftalent; his work displays here and there some felicity of thought andexpression, considerable fancy and knowledge: but whether or not itwould take with the public seems doubtful. For a _jeu d'esprit_ ofthat kind it is too long; it would have suited better as an essay orarticle than as a volume. The Author has no great tact; his wit isfrequently heavy; and reminds one of the German Baron who took toleaping on tables, and answered that he was learning to be lively. _Is_ the work a translation?"

_Bookseller to Editor. _--"Allow me to say that such a writer requiresonly a little more tact to produce a popular as well as an able work. Directly on receiving your permission, I sent your _MS. _ to agentleman in the highest class of men of letters, and an accomplishedGerman scholar: I now inclose you his opinion, which, you may relyupon it, is a just one; and I have too high an opinion of your goodsense to" &c. &c. --_MS. _ (_penes nos_), _London, 17th September 1831_. 

II. CRITIC OF THE SUN

"_Fraser's Magazine_ exhibits the usual brilliancy, and also the" &c. "_Sartor Resartus_ is what old Dennis used to call 'a heap of clottednonsense, ' mixed however, here and there, with passages marked bythought and striking poetic vigour. But what does the writer mean by'Baphometic fire-baptism'? Why cannot he lay aside his pedantry, andwrite so as to make himself generally intelligible? We quote by way ofcuriosity a sentence from the _Sartor Resartus_; which may be readeither backwards or forwards, for it is equally intelligible eitherway. Indeed, by beginning at the tail, and so working up to the head, we think the reader will stand the fairest chance of getting at itsmeaning: 'The fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own freedom; which feeling is its Baphometic baptism:the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, andwill keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battering, will doubtless by degrees beconquered and pacificated. ' Here is a"--. . . . --_Sun Newspaper_, _1stApril 1834_. 

III. NORTH-AMERICAN REVIEWER

. . . "After a careful survey of the whole ground, our belief is that nosuch persons as Professor Teufelsdröckh or Counsellor Heuschrecke everexisted; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptionsand multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon thePhilosophy of Clothes; and that the _Sartor Resartus_ is the onlytreatise that has yet appeared upon that subject;--in short, that thewhole account of the origin of the work before us, which the supposedEditor relates with so much gravity, and of which we have given abrief abstract, is, in plain English, a _hum_. 

"Without troubling our readers at any great length with our reasonsfor entertaining these suspicions, we may remark, that the absence ofall other information on the subject, except what is contained in thework, is itself a fact of a most significant character. The wholeGerman press, as well as the particular one where the work purports tohave been printed, seems to be under the control of _Stillschweigenand Co. _, --Silence and Company. If the Clothes-Philosophy and itsauthor are making so great a sensation throughout Germany as ispretended, how happens it that the only notice we have of the fact iscontained in a few numbers of a monthly Magazine published at London?How happens it that no intelligence about the matter has come outdirectly to this country? We pique ourselves here in New England uponknowing at least as much of what is going on in the literary way inthe old Dutch Mother-land as our brethren of the fast-anchored Isle;but thus far we have no tidings whatever of the 'extensiveclose-printed close-meditated volume, ' which forms the subject of thispretended commentary. Again, we would respectfully inquire of the'present Editor' upon what part of the map of Germany we are to lookfor the city of _Weissnichtwo_, --'Know-not-where, '--at which place thework is supposed to have been printed, and the Author to have resided. It has been our fortune to visit several portions of the Germanterritory, and to examine pretty carefully, at different times and forvarious purposes, maps of the whole; but we have no recollection ofany such place. We suspect that the city of _Know-not-where_ might becalled, with at least as much propriety, _Nobody-knows-where_, and isto be found in the kingdom of _Nowhere_. Again, the village of_Entepfuhl_--'Duck-pond, ' where the supposed Author of the work issaid to have passed his youth, and that of _Hinterschlag_, where hehad his education, are equally foreign to our geography. Duck-pondsenough there undoubtedly are in almost every village in Germany, asthe traveller in that country knows too well to his cost, but anyparticular village denominated Duck-pond is to us altogether _terraincognita_. The names of the personages are not less singular thanthose of the places. Who can refrain from a smile at the yokingtogether of such a pair of appellatives as Diogenes Teufelsdröckh? Thesupposed bearer of this strange title is represented as admitting, in hispretended autobiography, that 'he had searched to no purpose through allthe Heralds' books in and without the German empire, and through allmanner of Subscribers'-lists, Militia-rolls, and other Name-catalogues, 'but had nowhere been able to find the 'name Teufelsdröckh, except asappended to his own person. ' We can readily believe this, and we doubtvery much whether any Christian parent would think of condemning a son tocarry through life the burden of so unpleasant a title. That of CounsellorHeuschrecke--'Grasshopper, ' though not offensive, looks much more like apiece of fancy work than a 'fair business transaction. ' The same may besaid of _Blumine_--'Flower-Goddess'--the heroine of the fable; and soof the rest. 

"In short, our private opinion is, as we have remarked, that the wholestory of a correspondence with Germany, a university ofNobody-knows-where, a Professor of Things in General, a CounsellorGrasshopper, a Flower-Goddess Blumine, and so forth, has about as muchfoundation in truth as the late entertaining account of Sir JohnHerschel's discoveries in the moon. Fictions of this kind are, however, not uncommon, and ought not, perhaps, to be condemned withtoo much severity; but we are not sure that we can exercise the sameindulgence in regard to the attempt, which seems to be made to misleadthe public as to the substance of the work before us, and itspretended German original. Both purport, as we have seen, to be uponthe subject of Clothes, or dress. _Clothes, their Origin andInfluence_, is the title of the supposed German treatise of ProfessorTeufelsdröckh, and the rather odd name of _Sartor Resartus_--theTailor Patched, --which the present Editor has affixed to his pretendedcommentary, seems to look the same way. But though there is a gooddeal of remark throughout the work in a half-serious, half-comic styleupon dress, it seems to be in reality a treatise upon the greatscience of Things in General, which Teufelsdröckh is supposed to haveprofessed at the university of Nobody-knows-where. Now, withoutintending to adopt a too rigid standard of morals, we own that wedoubt a little the propriety of offering to the public a treatise onThings in General, under the name and in the form of an Essay onDress. For ourselves, advanced as we unfortunately are in the journeyof life, far beyond the period when dress is practically a matter ofinterest, we have no hesitation in saying, that the real subject ofthe work is to us more attractive than the ostensible one. But this isprobably not the case with the mass of readers. To the younger portionof the community, which constitutes everywhere the very greatmajority, the subject of dress is one of intense and paramountimportance. An author who treats it appeals, like the poet, to theyoung men and maidens--_virginibus puerisque_, --and calls upon them, by all the motives which habitually operate most strongly upon theirfeelings, to buy his book. When, after opening their purses for thispurpose, they have carried home the work in triumph, expecting to findin it some particular instruction in regard to the tying of theirneckcloths, or the cut of their corsets, and meet with nothing betterthan a dissertation on Things in General, they will, --to use themildest term--not be in very good humour. If the last improvements inlegislation, which we have made in this country, should have foundtheir way to England, the author, we think, would stand some chance ofbeing _Lynched_. Whether his object in this piece of _supercherie_ bemerely pecuniary profit, or whether he takes a malicious pleasure inquizzing the Dandies, we shall not undertake to say. In the latterpart of the work, he devotes a separate chapter to this class ofpersons, from the tenour of which we should be disposed to conclude, that he would consider any mode of divesting them of their propertyvery much in the nature of a spoiling of the Egyptians. 

"The only thing about the work, tending to prove that it is what itpurports to be, a commentary on a real German treatise, is the style, which is a sort of Babylonish dialect, not destitute, it is true, ofrichness, vigour, and at times a sort of singular felicity of expression, but very strongly tinged throughout with the peculiar idiom of the Germanlanguage. This quality in the style, however, may be a mere result ofa great familiarity with German literature, and we cannot, therefore, look upon it as in itself decisive, still less as outweighing so muchevidence of an opposite character. "--_North-American Review_, _No. 89_, _October 1835_. 

IV. NEW ENGLAND EDITORS

"The Editors have been induced, by the express desire of many persons, to collect the following sheets out of the ephemeral pamphlets[4] inwhich they first appeared, under the conviction that they contain inthemselves the assurance of a longer date. 

 [4] _Fraser's_ (London) _Magazine_, 1833-4. 

"The Editors have no expectation that this little Work will have asudden and general popularity. They will not undertake, as there is noneed, to justify the gay costume in which the Author delights to dresshis thoughts, or the German idioms with which he has sportivelysprinkled his pages. It is his humour to advance the gravestspeculations upon the gravest topics in a quaint and burlesque style. If his masquerade offend any of his audience, to that degree that theywill not hear what he has to say, it may chance to draw others tolisten to his wisdom; and what work of imagination can hope to pleaseall? But we will venture to remark that the distaste excited by thesepeculiarities in some readers is greatest at first, and is soonforgotten; and that the foreign dress and aspect of the Work are quitesuperficial, and cover a genuine Saxon heart. We believe, no book hasbeen published for many years, written in a more sincere style ofidiomatic English, or which discovers an equal mastery over all theriches of the language. The Author makes ample amends for theoccasional eccentricity of his genius, not only by frequent bursts ofpure splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him. 

"But what will chiefly commend the Book to the discerning reader isthe manifest design of the work, which is, a Criticism upon the Spiritof the Age, --we had almost said, of the hour, --in which we live;exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspects ofReligion, Politics, Literature, Arts, and Social Life. Under all hisgaiety the Writer has an earnest meaning, and discovers an insightinto the manifold wants and tendencies of human nature, which is veryrare among our popular authors. The philanthropy and the purity ofmoral sentiment, which inspire the work, will find their way to theheart of every lover of virtue. "--_Preface to Sartor Resartus_:_Boston_, 1836, 1837. 

 SUNT, FUERUNT VEL FUERE. 

LONDON, _30th June 1838_. 

SUMMARY

BOOK I

CHAP. I. _Preliminary_

 No Philosophy of Clothes yet, notwithstanding all our Science. Strangely forgotten that Man is by nature a _naked_ animal. The English mind all-too practically absorbed for any such inquiry. Not so, deep-thinking Germany. Advantage of Speculation having free course. Editor receives from Professor Teufelsdröckh his new Work on Clothes (p. 1). 

CHAP. II. _Editorial Difficulties_

 How to make known Teufelsdröckh and his Book to English readers; especially _such_ a book? Editor receives from the Hofrath Heuschrecke a letter promising Biographic Documents. Negotiations with Oliver Yorke. _Sartor Resartus_ conceived. Editor's assurances and advice to his British reader (p. 5). 

CHAP. III. _Reminiscences_

 Teufelsdröckh at Weissnichtwo. Professor of Things in General at the University there: Outward aspect and character; memorable coffee-house utterances; domicile and watch-tower: Sights thence of City-life by day and by night; with reflections thereon. Old 'Liza and her ways. Character of Hofrath Heuschrecke, and his relation to Teufelsdröckh (p. 9). 

CHAP. IV. _Characteristics_

 Teufelsdröckh and his Work on Clothes: Strange freedom of speech: transcendentalism; force of insight and expression; multifarious learning: Style poetic, uncouth: Comprehensiveness of his humour and moral feeling. How the Editor once saw him laugh. Different kinds of Laughter and their significance (p. 20). 

CHAP. V. _The World in Clothes_

 Futile cause-and-effect Philosophies. Teufelsdröckh's Orbis Vestitus. Clothes first invented for the sake of Ornament. Picture of our progenitor, the Aboriginal Savage. Wonders of growth and progress in mankind's history. Man defined as a Tool-using Animal (p. 25). 

CHAP. VI. _Aprons_

 Divers Aprons in the world with divers uses. The Military and Police Establishment Society's working Apron. The Episcopal Apron with its corner tucked in. The Laystall. Journalists now our only Kings and Clergy (p. 31). 

CHAP. VII. _Miscellaneous-Historical_

 How Men and Fashions come and go. German Costume in the fifteenth century. By what strange chances do we live in History! The costume of Bolivar's Cavalry (p. 34). 

CHAP. VIII. _The World out of Clothes_

 Teufelsdröckh's Theorem, "Society founded upon Cloth"; his Method, Intuition quickened by Experience. --The mysterious question, Who am I? Philosophic systems, all at fault: A deeper meditation has always taught, here and there an individual, that all visible things are appearances only; but also emblems and revelations of God. Teufelsdröckh first comes upon the question of Clothes: Baseness to which Clothing may bring us (p. 37). 

CHAP. IX. _Adamatism_

 The universal utility of Clothes, and their higher mystic virtue, illustrated. Conception of Mankind stripped naked; and immediate consequent dissolution of civilised Society (p. 43). 

CHAP. X. _Pure Reason_

 A Naked World possible, nay actually exists, under the clothed one. Man, in the eye of Pure Reason, a visible God's Presence. The beginning of all wisdom, to look fixedly on Clothes till they become transparent. Wonder, the basis of Worship: Perennial in man. Modern Sciolists who cannot wonder: Teufelsdröckh's contempt for, and advice to them (p. 47). 

CHAP. XI. _Prospective_

 Nature not an Aggregate, but a Whole. All visible things are emblems, Clothes; and exist for a time only. The grand scope of the Philosophy of Clothes. --Biographic Documents arrive. Letter from Heuschrecke on the importance of Biography. Heterogeneous character of the documents: Editor sorely perplexed; but desperately grapples with his work (p. 52). 

BOOK II

CHAP. I. _Genesis_

 Old Andreas Futteral and Gretchen his wife: their quiet home. Advent of a mysterious stranger, who deposits with them a young infant, the future Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. After-yearnings of the youth for his unknown Father. Sovereign power of Names and Naming. Diogenes a flourishing Infant (p. 61). 

CHAP. II. _Idyllic_

 Happy Childhood! Entepfuhl: Sights, hearings and experiences of the boy Teufelsdröckh; their manifold teaching. Education; what it can do, what cannot. Obedience our universal duty and destiny. Gneschen sees the good Gretchen pray (p. 68). 

CHAP. III. _Pedagogy_

 Teufelsdröckh's School. His Education. How the ever-flowing Kuhbach speaks of Time and Eternity. The Hinterschlag Gymnasium; rude Boys; and pedant Professors. The need of true Teachers, and their due recognition. Father Andreas dies: and Teufelsdröckh learns the secret of his birth: His reflections thereon. The Nameless University. Statistics of Imposture much wanted. Bitter fruits of Rationalism: Teufelsdröckh's religious difficulties. The young Englishman Herr Towgood. Modern Friendship (p. 76). 

CHAP. IV. _Getting under Way_

 The grand thaumaturgic Art of Thought. Difficulty in fitting Capability to Opportunity, or of getting underway. The advantage of Hunger and Bread-Studies. Teufelsdröckh has to enact the stern mono-drama of _No object and no rest_. Sufferings as Auscultator. Given up as a man of genius, Zähdarm House. Intolerable presumption of young men. Irony and its consequences. Teufelsdröckh's Epitaph on Count Zähdarm (p. 90). 

CHAP. V. _Romance_

 Teufelsdröckh gives up his Profession. The heavenly mystery of Love. Teufelsdröckh's feeling of worship towards women. First and only love. Blumine. Happy hearts and free tongues. The infinite nature of Fantasy. Love's joyful progress; sudden dissolution; and final catastrophe (p. 101). 

CHAP. VI. _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_

 Teufelsdröckh's demeanour thereupon. Turns pilgrim. A last wistful look on native Entepfuhl: Sunset amongst primitive Mountains. Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four. Thoughts on View-hunting. Wanderings and Sorrowings (p. 112). 

CHAP. VII. _The Everlasting No_

 Loss of Hope, and of Belief. Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, Teufelsdröckh in his darkness and despair still clings to Truth and follows Duty. Inexpressible pains and fears of Unbelief. Fever-crisis: Protest against the Everlasting No: Baphometic Fire-baptism (p. 121). 

CHAP. VIII. _Centre of Indifference_

 Teufelsdröckh turns now outwardly to the _Not-me_; and finds wholesomer food. Ancient Cities: Mystery of their origin and growth: Invisible inheritances and possessions. Power and virtue of a true Book. Wagram Battlefield: War. Great Scenes beheld by the Pilgrim: Great Events, and Great Men. Napoleon, a divine missionary, preaching _La carrière ouverte aux talens_. Teufelsdröckh at the North Cape: Modern means of self-defence. Gunpowder and duelling. The Pilgrim, despising his miseries, reaches the Centre of Indifference (p. 128). 

CHAP. IX. _The Everlasting Yea_

 Temptations in the Wilderness: Victory over the Tempter. Annihilation of Self. Belief in God, and love to Man. The origin of Evil, a problem ever requiring to be solved anew: Teufelsdröckh's solution. Love of Happiness a vain whim: A Higher in man than Love of Happiness. The Everlasting Yea. Worship of Sorrow. Voltaire: his task now finished. Conviction worthless, impossible, without Conduct. The true Ideal, the Actual: Up and work! (p. 138). 

CHAP. X. _Pause_

 Conversion; a spiritual attainment peculiar to the modern Era. Teufelsdröckh accepts Authorship as his divine calling. The scope of the command _Thou shalt not steal_. --Editor begins to suspect the authenticity of the Biographical documents; and abandons them for the great Clothes volume. Result of the preceding ten Chapters: Insight into the character of Teufelsdröckh: His fundamental beliefs, and how he was forced to seek and find them (p. 149). 

BOOK III

CHAP. I. _Incident in Modern History_

 Story of George Fox the Quaker; and his perennial suit of Leather. A man God-possessed, witnessing for spiritual freedom and manhood (p. 156). 

CHAP. II. _Church-Clothes_

 Church-Clothes defined; the Forms under which the Religious principle is temporarily embodied. Outward Religion originates by Society: Society becomes possible by Religion. The condition of Church-Clothes in our time (p. 161). 

CHAP. III. _Symbols_

 The benignant efficacies of Silence and Secrecy. Symbols; revelations of the Infinite in the Finite: Man everywhere encompassed by them; lives and works by them. Theory of Motive-millwrights, a false account of human nature. Symbols of an extrinsic value; as Banners, Standards: Of intrinsic value; as Works of Art, Lives and Deaths of Heroic men. Religious Symbols; Christianity. Symbols hallowed by Time; but finally defaced and desecrated. Many superannuated Symbols in our time, needing removal (p. 163). 

CHAP. IV. _Helotage_

 Heuschrecke's Malthusian Tract, and Teufelsdröckh's marginal notes thereon. The true workman, for daily bread, or spiritual bread, to be honoured; and no other. The real privation of the Poor not poverty or toil, but ignorance. Over-population: With a world like ours and wide as ours, can there be too many men? Emigration (p. 170). 

CHAP. V. _The Phoenix_

 Teufelsdröckh considers Society as _dead_; its soul (Religion) gone, its body (existing Institutions) going. Utilitarianism, needing little farther preaching, is now in full activity of Destruction. --Teufelsdröckh would yield to the Inevitable, accounting that the best: Assurance of a fairer Living Society, arising, Phoenix-like, out of the ruins of the old dead one. Before that Phoenix death-birth is accomplished, long time, struggle, and suffering must intervene (p. 174). 

CHAP. VI. _Old Clothes_

 Courtesy due from all men to all men: The Body of Man a Revelation in the Flesh. Teufelsdröckh's respect for Old Clothes, as the 'Ghosts of Life. ' Walk in Monmouth Street, and meditations there (p. 179). 

CHAP. VII. _Organic Filaments_

 Destruction and Creation ever proceed together; and organic filaments of the Future are even now spinning. Wonderful connection of each man with all men; and of each generation with all generations, before and after: Mankind is One. Sequence and progress of all human work, whether of creation or destruction, from age to age. --Titles, hitherto derived from Fighting, must give way to others. Kings will remain and their title. Political Freedom, not to be attained by any mechanical contrivance. Hero-worship, perennial amongst men; the cornerstone of polities in the Future. Organic filaments of the New Religion: Newspapers and Literature. Let the faithful soul take courage! (p. 183). 

CHAP. VIII. _Natural Supernaturalism_

 Deep significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely miraculous course of human history (p. 191). 

CHAP. IX. _Circumspective_

 Recapitulation. Editor congratulates the few British readers who have accompanied Teufelsdröckh through all his speculations. The true use of the _Sartor Resartus_, to exhibit the Wonder of daily life and common things; and to show that all Forms are but Clothes, and temporary. Practical inferences enough will follow (p. 201). 

CHAP. X. _The Dandiacal Body_

 The Dandy defined. The Dandiacal Sect a new modification of the primeval superstition Self-worship: How to be distinguished. Their Sacred Books (Fashionable Novels) unreadable. Dandyism's Articles of Faith. --Brotherhood of Poor-Slaves: vowed to perpetual Poverty; worshippers of Earth; distinguished by peculiar costume and diet. Picture of a Poor-Slave Household; and of a Dandiacal. Teufelsdröckh fears these two Sects may spread, till they part all England between them, and then frightfully collide (p. 204). 

CHAP. XI. _Tailors_

 Injustice done to Tailors, actual and metaphorical. Their rights and great services will one day be duly recognised (p. 216). 

CHAP. XII. _Farewell_

 Teufelsdröckh's strange manner of speech, but resolute, truthful character: His purpose seemingly to proselytise, to unite the wakeful earnest in these dark times. Letter from Hofrath Heuschrecke announcing that Teufelsdröckh has disappeared from Weissnichtwo. Editor guesses he will appear again, Friendly Farewell (p. 219). 

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

LECTURE I

THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY

[_Tuesday, 5th May 1840_]

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, theirmanner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shapedthemselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, whatwork they did;--on Heroes, namely, and on their reception andperformance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatmentthan we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, anillimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in thisworld, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general massof men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standingaccomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, thepractical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in theGreat Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly itis a topic we shall do no justice to in this place!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitablecompany. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as akindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by thegift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native originalinsight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;--in whose radiance all soulsfeel that it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever, you will notgrudge to wander in such neighbourhood for a while. These Six classesof Heroes, chosen out of widely-distant countries and epochs, and inmere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we lookfaithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could we see_them_ well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of theworld's history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such timesas these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divinerelation (for I may well call it such) which in all times unites aGreat Man to other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all events, I must make theattempt. 

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chieffact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion Ido not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles offaith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not thiswholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds ofprofessed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth orworthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I callreligion, this profession and assertion; which is often only aprofession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mereargumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing aman does practically believe (and this is often enough _without_asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a mandoes practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning hisvital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destinythere, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creativelydetermines all the rest. That is his _religion_; or it may be, hismere scepticism and _no-religion_: the manner it is in which he feelshimself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; andI say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extentwhat the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or ofa nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had?Was it Heathenism, --plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation ofthis Mystery of Life, and for chief recognised element thereinPhysical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not asreal only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest momentof it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by anobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty andinquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life excepta mad one;--doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial?Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of theman or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actionsthey did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was theunseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward andactual;--their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. Inthese Discourses, limited as we are, it will be good to direct oursurvey chiefly to that religious phasis of the matter. That once knownwell, all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our series, Odin the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us of amost extensive province of things. Let us look for a little at theHero as Divinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism. 

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almostinconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungleof delusions, confusions, falsehoods and absurdities, covering thewhole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity, --for truly it is not easy tounderstand that sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of doctrines. That men should haveworshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, and not him only, butstocks and stones, and all manner of animate and inanimate objects;and fashioned for themselves such a distracted chaos of hallucinationsby way of Theory of the Universe: all this looks like an incrediblefable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideousinextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, wemay pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that arein man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attainedto. Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too. 

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Paganreligion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no saneman ever did believe it, --merely contrived to persuade other men, notworthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our dutyto protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings andhistory; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it inreference to Paganism, and to all other _isms_ by which man has everfor a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all hada truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery anddupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanceddecaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: butquackery was never the originating influence in such things; it wasnot the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sureprecursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. Itseems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birthto any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing;gives death to all things. We shall not see into the true heart ofanything, or if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do notreject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, withwhich our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweepthem out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is theborn enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind oftruth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical MrTurner's _Account of his Embassy_ to that country, and see. They havetheir belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends downalways an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom somebelief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there isa _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, weought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This isthe truth of Grand Lamaism; the 'discoverability' is the only errorhere. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering whatMan is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but arethey so much worse than our methods, --of understanding him to bealways the eldest born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficultthing to find good methods for!--We shall begin to have a chance ofunderstanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers itwas, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain thatmen did believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, menmade altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, shouldhave believed in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things toAllegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; ashadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visualform, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, stilleverywhere observably at work, though in less important things, Thatwhat a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak-out of him, to seerepresented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of lifeand historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, andit is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt thatit did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis whichascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a littlemore respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would _we_ believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, anallegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we shouldrequire. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to dieis not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was astern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the waytowards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. PaganReligion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knewabout the Universe; and all Religions are Symbols of that, alteringalways as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, andeven _in_version, of the business, to put that forward as the originand moving cause, when it was rather the result and termination. Toget beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want ofmen; but to know what they were to believe about this Universe, whatcourse they were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life oftheirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The_Pilgrim's Progress_ is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and seriousone: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have _preceded_ theFaith it symbolises! The Faith had to be already there, standingbelieved by everybody;--of which the Allegory could _then_ become ashadow; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a _sportful_ shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact andscientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. TheAllegory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; notin Bunyan's, nor in any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we havestill to inquire, Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent ofsuch a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How wasit, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend 'explaining, ' in thisplace, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distantdistracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism, --more like a cloudfield thana distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloudfieldwas once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that duperyand deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idlesongs, never risked their soul's life on allegories; men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detectingquacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both thequack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionateattention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannotascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact atthe heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturityin some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper airto see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishmentat the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free opensense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heartwould be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to beGodlike, his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just sucha childlike greatness was in the primitive nations. The first PaganThinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, wasprecisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet withthe depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; hehad not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like, --and so with a name dismiss it from us. To thewild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names orformulas; it stood naked, flashing-in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophetit forever is, _preter_natural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;--that great deepsea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; theblack cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hailand rain; what _is_ it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we cannever know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escapethe difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our_want_ of insight. It is by _not_ thinking that we cease to wonder atit. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is awrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere _words_. We call that fire ofthe black thundercloud 'electricity, ' and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but _what_ is it? Whatmade it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much forus; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deepsacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, onwhich all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, afterall our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, _magical_ and more, to whosoever will _think_ of it. 

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other: the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all theUniverse swim like exhalations, like apparitions which _are_, and then_are not_: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strikeus dumb, --for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ahme--what could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That itis a Force, and thousandfold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is_not we_. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from_us_. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Forcein the centre of that. 'There is not a leaf rotting on the highway buthas Force in it: how else could it rot?' Nay surely, to the AtheisticThinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, thishuge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here;never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What isit? God's creation, the religious people answer; it is the AlmightyGod's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientificnomenclatures, experiments and what-not, as if it were a poor deadthing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but thenatural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply hissense, proclaims it to be a living thing, --ah, an unspeakable, godlikething; towards which the best attitude for us, after never so muchscience, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul; worship ifnot in words, then in silence. 

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires aProphet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poorundevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays, ---this, theancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did foritself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was thendivine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare beforeit face to face. 'All was Godlike or God:'--Jean Paul still finds itso; the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of hearsays: butthere then were no hearsays. Canopus shining-down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-likebrightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce intothe heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding throughthe solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no _speech_ for any feeling, it may seem a little eye, thatCanopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealingthe inner Splendour to him. Cannot we understand how these men_worshipped_ Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping thestars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship istranscendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit ormeasure; that is worship. To these primeval men, all things andeverything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some God. 

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not a God madevisible, if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship in thatway now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a'poetic nature, ' that we recognise how every object has a divinebeauty in it; how every object still verily is 'a window through whichwe may look into Infinitude itself'? He that can discern theloveliness of things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does, --in theirown fashion. That they did it, in what fashion soever, was a merit:better than what the entirely stupid man did, what the horse and cameldid, --namely, nothing!

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to usof the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man such anemblem. You have heard of St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying inreference to the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation ofGod, among the Hebrews: "The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is evenso: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence of ourbeing, the mystery in us that calls itself "I, "--ah, what words havewe for such things?--is a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being revealshimself in _man_. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is itnot all as a vesture for that Unnamed? 'There is but one Temple in theUniverse, ' says the devout Novalis, 'and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. Bending before men is areverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven whenwe lay our hand on a human body!' This sounds much like a mereflourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it willturn out to be a scientific fact; the expression, in such words as canbe had, of the actual truth of the thing. _We_ are the miracle ofmiracles, --the great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understandit, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if welike, that it is verily so. 

Well; these truths were once more readily felt than now. The younggenerations of the world, who had in them the freshness of youngchildren, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think thatthey had finished-off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely givingthem scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with aweand wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man andNature;--they, without being mad, could _worship_ Nature, and man morethan anything else in Nature. Worship, that is, as I said above, admire without limit: this, in the full use of their faculties, withall sincerity of heart, they could do. I consider Hero-worship to bethe grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What Icalled the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out ofmany roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root ofall; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest werenourished and grown. 

And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in it, how muchmore might that of a Hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendentadmiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I saythere is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling thanthis of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast ofman. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence inman's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but farhigher and truer religions, --all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man, --is not that the germ ofChristianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One--whom we do notname here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you willfind it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man'swhole history on earth. 

Or coming into lower, less _un_speakable provinces, is not all Loyaltyakin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspiredTeacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded onHero-worship. All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a _Hero_archy (Government of Heroes), --or aHierarchy, for it is 'sacred' enough withal! The Duke means _Dux_, Leader; King is _Kön-ning_, _Kan-ning_, Man that _knows_ or _cans_. Society everywhere is some representation, not _in_supportablyinaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes;--reverence and obediencedone to men really great and wise. Not _in_supportably inaccurate, Isay! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, allrepresenting gold;--and several of them, alas, always are _forged_notes. We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even;but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to comerevolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty, and Equality, and Iknow not what:--the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for_them_, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any!--'Gold, ' Hero-worship, _is_ nevertheless, asit was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himselfceases. 

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I callHero-worship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, isan age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies thedesirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther forexample, they begin to what they call 'account' for him; not toworship him, but take the dimensions of him, --and bring him out to bea little kind of man! He was the 'creature of the Time, ' they say; theTime called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing--but whatwe the little critic could have done too! This seems to me butmelancholy work. The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times _call_loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called!He was not there; Providence had not sent him; the Time, _calling_ itsloudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would notcome when called. 

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could ithave _found_ a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom todiscern truly what the Time wanted, valour to lead it on the rightroad thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken commonlanguid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with theirlanguid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotentlycrumbling-down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;--all thisI liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven thatshall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out ofGod's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing wordwhich all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has oncestruck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks arethought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as tocalling him forth--!--Those are critics of small vision, I think, whocry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proofcan be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in greatmen. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such generalblindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap ofbarren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In allepochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to havebeen the indispensable saviour of his epoch;--the lightning, withoutwhich the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, Isaid already, was the Biography of Great Men. 

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universalspiritual paralysis; but happily they cannot always completelysucceed. In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enoughto feel that they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. Andwhat is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate outof living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence forGreat Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim andperverted it may be. Hero-worship endures for ever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenthcentury. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; andburst-out round him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last actof his life when they 'stifle him under roses. ' It has always seemedto me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity bethe highest instance of Hero-worship, then we may find here inVoltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life was that of a kind ofAntichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. Nopeople ever were so little prone to admire at all as those French ofVoltaire. _Persiflage_ was the character of their whole mind;adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferneycomes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life inopposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocritesin high places;--in short that _he_ too, though in a strange way, hasfought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if _persiflage_ bethe great thing, there never was such a _persifleur_. He is therealised ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting tobe; of all Frenchmen the most French. _He_ is properly theirgod, --such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from theQueen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they notworship him? People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maître de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postillion, "_Vabon train_; thou art driving M. De Voltaire. " At Paris his carriage is'the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets. ' The ladiespluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. Therewas nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all France, that did notfeel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler. 

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divineFounder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, inall times and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever beso. We all love great men; love, venerate, and bow down submissivebefore great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doingreverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessedfeeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering toconsider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerityand aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy this nobleinborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of unbelief, whichsoon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowfuldecay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, Iseem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlastingadamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary thingscannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashingand tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get downso far; _no_ farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which theycan begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense orother, worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must everreverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid allrushings-down whatsoever;--the one fixed point in modern revolutionaryhistory, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless. 

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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but thespirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; theHero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to setforth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interestingthan any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued inthese regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight-hundred yearsago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interestingalso as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs inour veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange:they did believe that, while we believe so differently. Let us look alittle at this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. We have tolerablemeans to do it; for there is another point of interest in theseScandinavian mythologies: that they have been preserved so well. 

In that strange island Iceland, --burst-up, the geologists say, by firefrom the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava;swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wildgleaming beauty in summer-time; towering up there, stern and grim, inthe North Ocean; with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-poolsand horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field ofFrost and Fire;--where of all places we least looked for Literature orwritten memorials, the record of these things was written down. On theseaboard of this wild land is a rim of grassy country, where cattlecan subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; andit seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts inthem, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, hadIceland not been burst-up from the sea, not been discovered by theNorthmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland. 

Sæmund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had alingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagansongs, just about becoming obsolete then, --Poems or Chants of amythic, prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is whatNorse critics call the _Elder_ or Poetic _Edda_. _Edda_, a word ofuncertain etymology, is thought to signify _Ancestress_. SnorroSturleson, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Sæmund's grandson, took in hand next, near a centuryafterwards, to put together, among several other books he wrote, akind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; elucidated by newfragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really with greatingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art;altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this isthe _Younger_ or Prose _Edda_. By these and the numerous other_Sagas_, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gainsome direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion;let us look at it as old Thought, and try if we cannot sympathise withit somewhat. 

The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find tobe Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simplerecognition of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing whollymiraculous, stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion. The darkhostile powers of Nature they figure to themselves as '_Jötuns_, 'Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jötuns. The friendly powers again, asSummer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The empire of this Universe is dividedbetween these two; they dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud. The Gods dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities;Jötunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the Jötuns. 

Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at thefoundation of it! The power of _Fire_, or _Flame_, for instance, whichwe designate by some trivial chemical name, thereby hiding fromourselves the essential character of wonder that dwells in it as inall things, is with these old Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle_Demon_, of the brood of the Jötuns. The savages of the LadronesIslands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they neverhad seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when youtouched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no Chemistry, ifit had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a wonder. What _is_ Flame?--_Frost_ the old Norse Seer discerns to be amonstrous hoary Jötun, the Giant _Thrym_, _Hrym_: or _Rime_, the oldword now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signifyhoar-frost. _Rime_ was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but aliving Jötun or Devil; the monstrous Jötun _Rime_ drove home hisHorses at night, sat 'combing their manes, '--which Horses were_Hail-Clouds_, or fleet _Frost-Winds_. His Cows--No, not his, but akinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are _Icebergs_: this Hymir 'looks atthe rocks' with his devil-eye, and they _split_ in the glance of it. 

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it wasthe God Donner (Thunder) or Thor, --God also of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is thedrawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out ofHeaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urgeshis loud chariot over the mountain-tops, --that is the peal: wrathfulhe 'blows in his red beard, '--that is the rustling storm-blast beforethe thunder begin. Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, thejust and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found toresemble Christ), is the Sun--beautifulest of visible things; wondroustoo, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs! Butperhaps the notablest god we hear tell-of is one of whom Grimm theGerman Etymologist finds trace: the God _Wünsch_, or Wish. The God_Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this thesincerest yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The _rudest_ idealthat man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms ofour spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that theGod _Wish_ is not the true God. 

Of the other Gods or Jötuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jötun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Jötun;--andnow to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottinghambargemen, when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind ofback-water, or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it_Eager_; they cry out, "Have a care, there is the _Eager_ coming!"Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The_oldest_ Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God Aegir. Indeed, our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather, atbottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except asuperficial one, --as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But allover our Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper, --from theincessant invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greaterproportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, inthe North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, theSpeech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelandic;its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are'Normans, ' Northmen, --if that be any great beauty!--

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present somuch; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is:a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personalAgencies, --as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is theinfant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on thisever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse System somethingvery genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old GreekPaganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; thegenuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to thethings about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of thethings, --the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; acertain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rudesincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautifulApollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the NorseGods 'brewing ale' to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jötun;sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jötun country;Thor, after many adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a hugehat, and walking off with it, --quite lost in it, the ears of the Potreaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkwardgianthood, characterises that Norse System; enormous force, as yetaltogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. The Gods, havinggot the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by 'warm wind, ' and muchconfused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire, --determined onconstructing a world with him. His blood made the sea; his flesh wasthe Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgardtheir Gods'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagianbusiness! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous;--to be tamed indue time into the compact greatness, not giant-like, but godlike andstronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!--Spirituallyas well as bodily these men are our progenitors. 

I like, too, that representation they have of the Tree Igdrasil. AllLife is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree ofExistence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death;its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the wholeUniverse: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in theDeath-kingdom, sit three _Nornas_, Fates, --the Past, Present, Future;watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its 'boughs, ' with theirbuddings and disleafings, --events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes, --stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leafof it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs areHistories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of HumanExistence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of HumanPassion rustling through it;--or stormtost, the stormwind howlingthrough it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree ofExistence. It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; 'the infinite conjugation of theverb _To do_. ' Considering how human things circulate, eachinextricably in communion with all, --how the word I speak to youto-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from allmen since the first man began to speak, --I find no similitude so trueas this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The'_Machine_ of the Universe, '--alas, do but think of that in contrast!

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Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; differentenough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, onewould not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we maysay: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, aboveall, of the _first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse 'man of genius, ' as we should call him! Innumerablemen had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlesslyinquiring wonder, such as men only feel;--till the great Thinker came, the _original_ man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes theslumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with theThinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far fromsaying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as frompainful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, evenso! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night; _is_ it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from deathinto life? We still honour such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and soforth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker ofmiraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!--Thoughtonce awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System ofThought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, --tillits full stature is reached, and _such_ System of Thought can grow nofarther, but must give place to another. 

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, wefancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; aHero, of worth _im_measurable; admiration for whom, transcending theknown bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulateThinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundlessgratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for themthe sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of theirown destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodiousby him; he first has made Life alive!--We may call this Odin, theorigin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First NorseThinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universeonce promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds itlay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word itstarts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, thegreat event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinkerin the world!--

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, theconfusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System ofThought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems. All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung-out for us, in onelevel of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the samecanvas, does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather atall manner of distances and depths, of successive generations sincethe Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first ofthem, contributed to the Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-newelaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. Whathistory it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker'scontribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we seeit under in the _Edda_, no man will now ever know: _its_ Councils ofTrebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunkwithout echo in the dark night! Only that it had such a history we canall know. Wheresoever a thinker appeared, there in the thing hethought-of was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made. Alas, the grandest 'revolution' of all, the one made by the man Odinhimself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of Odin whathistory? Strange rather to reflect that he _had_ a history! That thisOdin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, hisrude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features;--intrinsically all one as we: and did such awork! But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to thename. "_Wednes_day, " men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin thereexists no history; no document of it; no guess about it worthrepeating. 

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief businessstyle, writes down, in his _Heimskringla_, how Odin was a heroicPrince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great peoplestraitened for room. How he led these _Asen_ (Asiatics) of his out ofAsia; settled them in the North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest;invented Letters, Poetry and so forth, --and came by and by to beworshipped as Chief God by these Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers madeinto Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like himself: Snorro has no doubt ofthis. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out a historical factin every individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial eventin Denmark or elsewhere. Torfæus, learned and cautious, some centurieslater, assigns by calculation a _date_ for it: Odin, he says, cameinto Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as groundedon mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need say nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, wholeterrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us foreverinto unknown thousands of years. 

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any manOdin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word _Wuotan_, whichis the original form of _Odin_, a word spread, as name of their chiefDivinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, whichconnects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin _vadere_, with theEnglish _wade_ and suchlike, --means primarily _Movement_, Source ofMovement, Power; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of anyman. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, Germanand all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify_divine_, _supreme_, or something pertaining to the chief god. Likeenough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us considerit fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force of _Movement_. And nowstill, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and_Mover_, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formedfrom it, --did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration forLope, get into the habit of saying 'a Lope flower, ' a 'Lope _dama_, 'if the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, _Lope_ would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying_godlike_ also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in his _Essay on Language_, surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in thatway: some very green thing chiefly notable for its greenness, got theappellative name _Green_, and then the next thing remarkable for thatquality, a tree for instance, was named the _green_ tree, --as we stillsay 'the _steam coach_, ' 'four-horse coach, ' or the like. All primaryadjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at firstsubstantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologieslike that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely theremust have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; noadjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of alltradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thoughtwill teach one about it, to assure us of this. 

How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--thatsurely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatise upon. I havesaid, his people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they hadas yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generousheart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ allbounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought!Or what if this man Odin, --since a great deep soul, with the afflatusand mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows notwhence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder tohimself, --should have felt that perhaps _he_ was divine; that _he_ wassome effluence of the 'Wuotan, ' '_Movement_, ' Supreme Power andDivinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awfulFlame-image; that some effluence of _Wuotan_ dwelt here in him! He wasnot necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest heknew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not _what_ heis, --alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act onone another, help to determine one another. With all men reverentlyadmiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardours andaffections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; adivine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no manto whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?"Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a manwas great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What anenormous _camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows inthe human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and allthat lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in thedarkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great manwould grow _mythic_, the contemporaries who had once seen him, beingall dead. And in three-hundred years, and three-thousand years--!--Toattempt _theorising_ on such matters would profit little: they arematters which refuse to be _theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logicought to know that she _cannot_ speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real lightshining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image; todiscern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but asanity and something. 

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse mind, darkbut living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of thewhole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrousthousandfold expansion spread itself, in forms and colours, dependsnot on _it_, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. Thecolours and forms of your light will be those of the _cut-glass_ ithas to shine through. --Curious to think how, for every man, any thetruest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said, The earnestman, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated what seemedto him a _fact_, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in whichsuch Appearance or fact shaped itself, --what sort of _fact_ it becamefor him, --was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, forevery man, is the Phantasy of Himself; this world is the multiplex'Image of his own Dream. ' Who knows to what unnameable subtleties ofspiritual law all these Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number_Twelve_, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, partedinto three, into six, the most remarkable number, --this was enough todetermine the _Signs of the Zodiac_, the number of Odin's _Sons_, andinnumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumour of number had a tendencyto settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too, --with no notion of building-up'Allegories'! But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would beprompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and wholly opento obey these. Schiller finds in the _Cestus of Venus_ an everlastingæsthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious:--but he iscareful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists had any notion oflecturing about the 'Philosophy of Criticism'!----On the whole we mustleave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Odin was areality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought, --we will not believe that our Fathers believedin these. 

 * * * * *

Odin's _Runes_ are a significant feature of him. Runes, and themiracles of 'magic' he worked by them, make a great feature intradition. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to havebeen the inventor of Letters, as well as 'magic, ' among that people!It is the greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking downthe unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kindof second speech, almost as miraculous as the first. You remember theastonishment and incredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian King; how hemade the Spanish Soldier who was guarding him scratch _Dios_ on histhumb-nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to ascertainwhether such a miracle was possible. If Odin brought Letters among hispeople, he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Norsemen:not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tellsus farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, aswell as that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves intothe early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light ofour Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a greatsunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child'sthoughts, in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature;and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with hiswild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring anddoing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet, greatdevout Thinker and Inventor, --as the truly Great Man ever is. A Herois a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. Agreat heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Lifehere, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his ownrude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we stilladmire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made of him! To them, as yetwithout names for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God;_Wuotan_, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak orspell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have been ofthe same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great thought inthe wild deep heart of him! The rough words he articulated, are theynot the rudimental roots of those English words we still use? Heworked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a _light_ kindled init; a light of Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the only kind oflights we have yet; a Hero, as I say: and he had to shine there, andmake his obscure element a little lighter, --as is still the task of usall. 

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom thatrace had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst-up into _boundless_admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many greatthings; the fruit of him is found growing, from deep thousands ofyears, over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as Isaid, is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin grew into England too, these are still leaves fromthat root! He was the Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; theirPattern Norseman;--in such way did _they_ admire their PatternNorseman; that was the fortune he had in the world. 

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this hugeShadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History ofhis People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understandwell that the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itselfaltogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. Whatthis Odin saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, thewhole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way ofthought became their way of thought:--such, under new conditions, isthe history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confusedlineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown upwardsfrom the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole NorthernHeaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort thePortraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of _his_ naturalface, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in thatmanner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives invain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men. 

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure ofHeroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of aHero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblestof feelings, and a feeling in some shape or other perennial as manhimself. If I could show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a longtime now, That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of man'shistory here in our world, --it would be the chief use of thisdiscoursing at present. We do not now call our great men Gods, noradmire _without_ limit; ah, no, _with_ limit enough! But if we have nogreat men, or do not admire at all, --that were a still worse case. 

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse way of lookingat the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructiblemerit for us. A rude childlike way of recognising the divineness ofNature, the divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike; betokening what a giant of a man this child would growto!--It was a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifledvoice of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, calling outof the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their blood still runs:"This then, this is what _we_ made of the world: this is all the imageand notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of a Lifeand Universe. Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to largefree scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, yournotion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one: thatmatter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend; after thousands of years of ever-new expansion, man willfind himself but struggling to comprehend again a part of it: thething is larger than man, not to be comprehended by him; an Infinitething!"

 * * * * *

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincerecommunion of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen atwork in the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerelydone in the Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity isthe great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior)consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, Ithink, is better than grace. I feel that these old Northmen werelooking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest;childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depthand freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A rightvaliant, true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds tobe the chief element of Paganism: recognition of Man, and his MoralDuty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief elementonly in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinctionand epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religiousdevelopment of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Natureand her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a laterepoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point isthe distinction for him of Good and Evil, of _Thou shalt_ and _Thoushalt not_. 

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the _Edda_, I willremark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probablythey must have been of much newer date; most probably, even from thefirst, were comparatively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were akind of Poetic sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I saidabove, cannot be religious Faith; the Faith itself must first bethere, then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit bodyround its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like otherFaiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, andhad not yet much to say about itself, still less to sing. 

Among those shadowy _Edda_ matters, amid all that fantastic congeriesof assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the mainpractical belief a man could have was probably not much more thanthis: of the _Valkyrs_ and the _Hall of Odin_; of an inflexible_Destiny_; and that the one thing needful for a man was _to be brave_. The _Valkyrs_ are Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, whichit is useless trying to bend or soften, has appointed who is to beslain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer;--as indeedit is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for aNapoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is thewoof out of which his whole system of thought is woven. The _Valkyrs_;and then that these _Choosers_ lead the brave to a heavenly _Hall ofOdin_; only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, into therealms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have been the soul ofthe whole Norse Belief. They understood in their heart that it wasindispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favour for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider toowhether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. _Valour_ isstill _value_. The first duty of a man is still that of subduing_Fear_. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. Aman's acts are slavish, not true but specious: his very thoughts arefalse, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fearunder his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must marchforward, and quit himself like a man--trusting imperturbably in theappointment and _choice_ of the upper Powers; and, on the whole, notfear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fearwill determine how much of a man he is. 

It is doubtless very savage that kind of valour of the old Northmen. Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die inbattle; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cutwounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the shipsent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out atsea, it might blaze-up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily theold hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valour; yetvalour of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kingstoo, what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as Ifancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying thewild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;--progenitors ofour own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; butAgamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, tosome of them;--to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or RolloDuke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing Englandat this hour. 

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling, through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the_strongest_ kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among theNorthland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title_Wood-cutter_; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose atbottom many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, thoughthe Skalds talk mainly of the latter, --misleading certain critics nota little; for no nation of men could ever live by fighting alone;there could not produce enough come out of that! I suppose the rightgood fighter was oftenest also the right good forest-feller, --theright good improver, discerner, doer and worker in every kind; fortrue valour, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. Amore legitimate kind of valour that; showing itself against theuntamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature forus. In the same direction have not we their descendants since carriedit far? May such valour last forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with animpressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importanceof Valour, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feelinga response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for tellingit them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the NorseReligion, from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow, --how strangely! I called it a small light shining and shaping inthe huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was_alive_; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructedMind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, togo on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows, grows;--like a Banyan-tree; the first _seed_ is the essential thing:any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; andso, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, oneseed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some sense, what we called 'the enormous shadow ofthis man's likeness'? Critics trace some affinity in some Norsemythuses, of the Creation and suchlike, with those of the Hindoos. TheCow Adumbla, 'licking the rime from the rocks, ' has a kind of Hindoolook. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probablyenough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have akindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought doesnot die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think inthis Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the secondman, and the third man:--nay, every true Thinker to this hour is akind of Odin, teaches men _his_ way of thought, spreads a shadow ofhis own likeness over sections of the History of the World. 

 * * * * *

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology Ihave not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wildProphecies we have, as the _Völuspa_ in the _Elder Edda_; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunctof the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter, theselater Skalds; and it is _their_ songs chiefly that survive. In latercenturies, I suppose, they would go on singing, poeticallysymbolising, as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer fromthe innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is everywhereto be well kept in mind. 

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notionof it;--any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomypalace of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Graygives it us: no; rough as the North Rocks, as the Iceland deserts, itis; with a heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humour androbust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The strong oldNorse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities; they had not timeto tremble. I like much their robust simplicity; their veracity, directness of conception. Thor 'draws down his brows' in a veritableNorse rage; 'grasps his hammer till the _knuckles grow white_. 'Beautiful traits of pity too, an honest pity. Balder 'the white God'dies; the beautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod. They try all Naturefor a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, his mother, sends Hermoder toseek or see him: nine days and nine nights he rides through gloomydeep valleys, a labyrinth of gloom; arrives at the Bridge with itsgold roof: the Keeper says, "Yes, Balder did pass here; but theKingdom of the Dead is down yonder, far towards the North. " Hermoderrides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate: does see Balder, and speakwith him: Balder cannot be delivered. Inexorable! Hela will not, forOdin or any God, give him up. The beautiful and gentle has to remainthere. His Wife had volunteered to go with him, to die with him. Theyshall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin; Nanna his wifesends her _thimble_ to Frigga, as a remembrance--Ah me!--

For indeed Valour is the fountain of Pity too;--of Truth, and all thatis great and good in man. The robust homely vigour of the Norse heartattaches one much, in these delineations. Is it not a trait of righthonest strength, says Uhland, who has written a fine _Essay_ on Thor, that the Old Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-god? That itis not frightened away by his thunder; but finds that Summer-heat, thebeautiful noble summer, must and will have thunder withal! The Norseheart _loves_ this Thor and his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thor isSummer-heat; the god of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He isthe Peasant's friend; his true henchman and attendant is Thialfi, _Manual Labour_. Thor himself engages in all manner of rough manualwork, scorns no business for its plebeianism; is ever and anontravelling to the country of the Jötuns, harrying those chaoticFrost-monsters, subduing them, at least straitening and damaging them. There is a great broad humour in some of these things. 

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jötun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron, that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his greybeard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance ofhis eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it onhis head; the 'handles of it reach down to his heels. ' The Norse Skaldhas a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignaggenius, --needing only to be tamed-down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse work, --Thor theThunder-god changed into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that madeit is here yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die!There are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse Belief stillcuriously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery, with hismiraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one. _Hynde Etin_, and still more decisively _Red Etin ofIreland_, in the Scottish Ballads, these are both derived fromNorseland; _Etin_ is evidently a _Jötun_. Nay, Shakspeare's _Hamlet_is a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, _Amleth_, I find, is really a mythic personage; and hisTragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it aDanish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That isa twig of the world-tree that has _grown_, I think;--by nature oraccident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a _truth_ in them, an inwardperennial truth and greatness, --as, indeed, all must have that canvery long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not ofmere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is asublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. Agreat free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to haveseen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men inall ages, That this world is after all but a show, --a phenomenon orappearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that, --the HindooMythologist, the German Philosopher, --the Shakspeare, the earnestThinker, wherever he may be:

 'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the _Outer_ Garden, central seatof Jötun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with him, and Loke. After various adventures they entered upon Giant-land;wandered over plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones andtrees. At nightfall they noticed a house; and as the door, whichindeed formed one whole side of the house, was open, they entered. Itwas a simple habitation; one large hall, altogether empty. They stayedthere. Suddenly in the dead of the night loud noises alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; stood in the door, prepared for fight. Hiscompanions within ran hither and thither in their terror, seeking someoutlet in that rude hall; they found a little closet at last, and tookrefuge there. Neither had Thor any battle: for, lo, in the morning itturned-out that the noise had been only the _snoring_ of a certainenormous but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, who lay peaceablysleeping near by; and this that they took for a house was merely his_Glove_, thrown aside there; the door was the Glove-wrist; the littlecloset they had fled into was the Thumb! Such a glove;--I remark toothat it had not fingers as ours have, but only a thumb, and the restundivided: a most ancient, rustic glove!

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, had hisown suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined at nightto put an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck downinto the Giant's face a right thunderbolt blow, of force to rendrocks. The Giant merely awoke; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leaffall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; a better blowthan before: but the Giant only murmured, Was that a grain of sand?Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the 'knuckles white' Isuppose), and seemed to dint deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merelychecked his snore, and remarked, There must be sparrows roosting inthis tree, I think; what is that they have dropt?--At the gate ofUtgard, a place so high that you had to 'strain your neck bending backto see the top of it, ' Skrymir went his ways. Thor and his companionswere admitted; invited to take share in the games going on. To Thor, for his part, they handed a drinking-horn; it was a common feat, theytold him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, threetimes over, Thor drank; but made hardly any impression. He was a weakchild, they told him; could he lift that Cat he saw there? Small asthe feat seemed, Thor with his whole godlike strength could not; hebent-up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could at the utmost raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said theUtgard people; there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you! Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old Woman; but could not throwher. 

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the Chief Jötun, escorting thempolitely a little way, said to Thor: "You are beaten then:--yet be notso much ashamed; there was deception of appearance in it. That Hornyou tried to drink was the _Sea_: you did make it ebb; but who coulddrink that, the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted, --why, thatis the _Midgard-snake_, the Great World-serpent, which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps-up the whole created world; had you torn that up, theworld must have rushed to ruin! As for the Old Woman, she was _Time_, Old Age, Duration; with her what can wrestle? No man nor no god withher; gods or men, she prevails over all! And then those three strokesyou struck, --look at these _three valleys_; your three strokes madethese!" Thor looked at his attendant Jötun: it was Skrymir;--it was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky _Earth_ in person, and thatglove-_house_ was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; Utgardwith its skyhigh gates, when Thor grasped his hammer to smite them, had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking: "Bettercome no more to Jötunheim!"--

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not of theprophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus is there not realantique Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough from the Mimerstithy, than in many a famed Greek Mythus _shaped_ far better! A great broadBrobdignag grin of true humour is in this Skrymir; mirth resting onearnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a rightvaliant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humour of our own BenJonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for onecatches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of the AmericanBackwoods. 

That is also a very striking conception, that of the _Ragnarök_, Consummation, or _Twilight of the Gods_. It is in the _Völuspa_ Song;seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jötuns, the divinePowers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partialvictory by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracingwrestle and duel; World-serpent against Thor, strength againststrength; mutually extinctive; and ruin, 'twilight' sinking intodarkness, swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with itsGods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to be a new Heavenand a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to reign among men. Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law written in man'sinmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers intheir rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet alldeath is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater andthe Better! It is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made ofTime, living in this Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it;may still see into it. 

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the _last_ mythus ofthe appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest indate of all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance ofChristianity, --set forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has been harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducingChristianity; surely I should have blamed him far more for anunder-zeal in that! He paid dear enough for it; he died by the revoltof his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, nearthat Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of the North has now stoodfor many centuries, dedicated gratefully to his memory as _Saint_Olaf. The mythus about Thor is to this effect. King Olaf, theChristian Reform King, is sailing with fit escort along the shore ofNorway, from haven to haven; dispensing justice, or doing other royalwork: on leaving a certain haven, it is found that a stranger, ofgrave eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robust figure, has steptin. The courtiers address him; his answers surprise by theirpertinency and depth: at length he is brought to the King. Thestranger's conversation here is not less remarkable, as they sailalong the beautiful shore; but after some time, he addresses King Olafthus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the sun shining on itthere; green, fruitful, a right fair home for you, and many a sore dayhad Thor, many a wild fight with the rock Jötuns, before he could makeit so. And now you seem minded to put away Thor. King Olaf, have acare!" said the stranger, drawing-down his brows;--and when theylooked again, he was nowhere to be found. --This is the last appearanceof Thor on the stage of this world!

Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, withoutunveracity on the part of any one? It is the way most Gods have cometo appear among men: thus, if in Pindar's time 'Neptune was seen onceat the Nemean Games, ' what was this Neptune too but a 'stranger ofnoble grave aspect, ' _fit_ to be 'seen'! There is something pathetic, tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor is vanished, thewhole Norse world has vanished; and will not return ever again. Inlike fashion to that pass away the highest things. All things thathave been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have tovanish, we have our sad farewell to give them. 

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive_Consecration of Valour_ (so we may define it), sufficed for these oldvaliant Northmen. Consecration of Valour is not a _bad_ thing! We willtake it for good, so far as it goes. Neither is there no use in_knowing_ something about this old Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined with higher things, it is in _us_ yet, that old Faith withal! To know it consciously, brings us into closerand clearer relation with the Past--with our own possessions in thePast. For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession ofthe Present; the Past had always something _true_, and is a preciouspossession. In a different time, in a different place, it is alwayssome other _side_ of our common Human Nature that has been developingitself. The actual True is the _sum_ of all these; not any one of themby itself, constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these ThreeReligions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!" answers the other: "To all the Three: for they bytheir union first constitute the True Religion. "

LECTURE II

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET: ISLAM

[_Friday, 8th May 1840_]

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandinavians in theNorth, we advance to a very different epoch of religion, among a verydifferent people: Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change; what achange and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition andthoughts of men!

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellowmen; but as oneGod-inspired, as a prophet. It is the second phasis of Hero-worship;the first or oldest, we may say, has passed away without return; inthe history of the world there will not again be any man, never sogreat, whom his fellowmen will take for a god. Nay we might rationallyask, Did any set of human beings ever really think the man they _saw_there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhapsnot: it was usually some man they remembered, or _had_ seen. Butneither can this any more be. The Great Man is not recognisedhenceforth as a god any more. 

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yetlet us say that it is at all times difficult to know _what_ he is, orhow to account of him and receive him! The most significant feature inthe history of an epoch is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts of men, there is something godlike in him. Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what theyshall take him to be? that is ever a grand question; by their way ofanswering that, we shall see, as through a little window, into thevery heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at bottom the GreatMan, as he comes from the hand of nature, is ever the same kind ofthing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear thatthese are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world'sreception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they soimmeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us--to fallprostrate before the Great Man, into _deliquium_ of love and wonderover him, and feel in their hearts that he was a denizen of the skies, a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burnsas we did, was that what we can call perfect? The most precious giftthat Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of 'genius' as we call it:the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with aGod's-message to us--this we waste away as an idle artificialfirework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck andineffectuality: _such_ reception of a Great Man I do not call veryperfect either! Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhapscall that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadderimperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself!To fall into mere unreasoning _deliquium_ of love and admiration, wasnot good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love atall is perhaps still worse!--It is a thing forever changing, this ofHero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is todo it well. 

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet, but as the onewe are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets;but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of ourbecoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him Ijustly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try tounderstand what _he_ meant with the world; what the world meant andmeans with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our currenthypotheses about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehoodincarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, whichwell-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful toourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof wasof that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that therewas no proof! It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this manspoke has been the life-guidance now of a hundred-and-eighty millionsof men these twelve-hundred years. These hundred-and-eighty millionswere made by God as well as we. A greater number of God's creaturesbelieve in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other wordwhatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spirituallegerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have livedby and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. Iwill believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at aloss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and weresanctioned here. 

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain toknowledge of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve themwholly! They are the product of an Age of Scepticism; they indicatethe saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls ofmen: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in thisEarth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build abrick house! If he do not know and follow _truly_ the properties ofmortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no house that hemakes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, tolodge a hundred-and-eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A manmust conform himself to Nature's laws, _be_ verily in communion withNature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not atall! Speciosities are specious--ah, me!--a Cagliostro, manyCagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank-note; they get it passed out of_their_ worthless hands: others, not they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts-up in fire-flame, French Revolutions and suchlike, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged. 

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that itis incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to me theprimary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this. NoMirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincereman. I should say _sincerity_, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, isthe first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. Not thesincerity that calls itself sincere; ah, no, that is a very poormatter indeed;--a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; oftenestself-conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind hecannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is consciousrather of _in_sincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the lawof truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himselfsincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: Iwould say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannothelp being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Flyas he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful andwonderful, real as Life, real as death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, hecannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares-in upon him; undeniable, there, there!--I wish you to take this as my primary definition of aGreat Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men thatGod has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it. 

Such a man is what we call an _original_ man: he comes to us atfirst-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown withtidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;--in one way orother, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man'swords. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;--he lives, and has tolive, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him;he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; _it_ glares-inupon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of'revelation;'--what we must call such for want of some other name? Itis from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of theprimal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this mantoo, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The'inspiration of the Almighty giveth _him_ understanding:' we mustlisten before all to him. 

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity andTheatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceivehim so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; anearnest confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were notfalse, nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fierymass of Life cast-up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To_kindle_ the world; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither canthe faults, imperfections, insincerities even, of Mahomet, if suchwere never so well proved against him, shake this primary fact abouthim. 

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the businesshide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I shouldsay, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, onewould think, might know better. Who is called there 'the man accordingto God's own heart'? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sinsenough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon theunbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's ownheart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What arefaults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret ofit, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-endedstruggle of it, be forgotten? 'It is not in man that walketh to directhis steps. ' Of all acts, is not, for a man, _repentance_ the mostdivine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same superciliousconsciousness of no sin;--that is death; the heart so conscious isdivorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is 'pure' asdead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us inthose Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given ofa man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls willever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soultowards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, withtears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor humannature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: 'a successionof falls'? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a Life, he hasto struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle againstill onwards. That his struggle _be_ a faithful unconquerable one:that is the question of questions. We will put-up with many saddetails, if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will neverteach us what it is. I believe we misestimate Mahomet's faults even asfaults: but the secret of him will never be got by dwelling there. Wewill leave all this behind us; and assuring ourselves that he did meansome true thing, ask candidly what it was or might be. 

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These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people. Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternatingwith beautiful strips of verdure: wherever water is, there isgreenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. Youare all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a fierce sunblazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great deepHeaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, andyet most meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Persiansare called the French of the East, we will call the Arabs OrientalItalians. A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, andof iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as onehaving right to all that is there; were it his worst enemy, he willslay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred hospitality forthree days, will set him fairly on his way;--and then, by another lawas sacred, kill him if he can. In words too, as in action. They arenot a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted whenthey do speak. An earnest truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly terrible earnestness of theJews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is notJewish. They had 'Poetic contests' among them before the time ofMahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there wereyearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising was done, Poets sangfor prizes:--the wild people gathered to hear that. 

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome of many or of allhigh qualities; what we may call religiosity. From of old they hadbeen zealous workers, according to their light. They worshipped thestars, as Sabeans; worshipped many natural objects, --recognised themas symbols, immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It waswrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works are still in a sensesymbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit torecognise a certain inexhaustible significance, 'poetic beauty' as wename it, in all natural objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, andhonoured, for doing that, and speaking or singing it, --a kind ofdiluted worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers each tohis tribe, each according to the light he had. But indeed, have we notfrom of old the noblest of proofs, still palpable to every one of us, of what devoutness and noblemindedness had dwelt in these rusticthoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our own _Book ofJob_ was written in that region of the world. I call that, apart fromall theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written withpen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a nobleuniversality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reignsin it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statementof the never-ending Problem, --man's destiny, and God's ways with himhere in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand inits sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose ofreconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understandingheart. So _true_ everywhere; true eyesight and vision for all things;material things no less than spiritual; the Horse, --'hast thou clothedhis neck with _thunder_?'--he '_laughs_ at the shaking of the spear!'Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublimereconciliation: oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind;--sosoft, and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seasand stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out ofit, of equal literary merit. --

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal objects ofworship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building called Caabahat Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions this Caabah in a way not to bemistaken, as the oldest, most honoured temple in his time; that is, some half-century before our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there is somelikelihood that the Black Stone is an aerolite. In that case, some onemight _see_ it fall out of Heaven! It stands now beside the WellZemzem; the Caabah is built over both. A Well is in all places abeautiful affecting object, gushing out like life from the hardearth;--still more so in these hot dry countries, where it is thefirst condition of being. The Well Zemzem has its name from thebubbling sound of the waters, _zem-zem_; they think it is the Wellwhich Hagar found with her little Ishmael in the wilderness: theaerolite and it have been sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, forthousands of years. A curious object, that Caabah! There it stands atthis hour, in the black cloth-covering the Sultan sends it yearly;'twenty-seven cubits high;' with circuit, with double circuit ofpillars, with festoon-rows of lamps and quaint ornaments: the lampswill be lighted again _this_ night, --to glitter again under the stars. An authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the _Keblah_ of allMoslem: from Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerablepraying men are turned towards _it_, five times, this day and alldays: one of the notablest centres in the Habitation of Men. 

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah Stone andHagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither, that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town once, though muchdecayed now. It has no natural advantage for a town; stands in a sandyhollow amid bare barren hills, at a distance from the sea; itsprovisions, its very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrimsneeded lodgings: and then all places of pilgrimage do, from the first, become places of trade. The first day pilgrims meet, merchants havealso met: where men see themselves assembled for one object, they findthat they can accomplish other objects which depend on meetingtogether. Mecca became the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed thechief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there was between theIndian and Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It had at onetime a population of 100, 000; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern andWestern products; importers for their own behoof of provisions andcorn. The government was a kind of irregular aristocratic republic, not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen insome rough way, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The Koreish were the chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family wasof that tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut-asunder bydeserts, lived under similar rude patriarchal governments by one orseveral: herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally robbers too; beingoftenest at war one with another, or with all: held together by noopen bond, if it were not this meeting at the Caabah, where all formsof Arab Idolatry assembled in common adoration;--held mainly by the_inward_ indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. In this wayhad the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by the world: a people ofgreat qualities, unconsciously waiting for the day when they shouldbecome notable to all the world. Their Idolatries appear to have beenin a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and fermentationamong them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event evertransacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man inJudea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasurable change to allpeople in the world, had in the course of centuries reached intoArabia too; and could not but, of itself, have produced fermentationthere. 

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It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 ofour Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family ofHashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected withthe chief persons of his country. 

Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six years hisMother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense: he fellto the charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old. Agood old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngestfavourite son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, acentury old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that was left ofAbdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly; used to say, Theymust take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing in their kindredwas more precious than he. At his death, while the boy was still buttwo years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of theUncles, as to him that now was head of the house. By this Uncle, ajust and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet was brought-upin the best Arab way. 

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys andsuchlike; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following hisUncle in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys isone we find noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to theFairs of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with a quiteforeign world, --with one foreign element of endless moment to him: theChristian Religion. I know not what to make of that 'Sergius, theNestorian Monk, ' whom Abu Thaleb and he are said to have lodged with;or how much any monk could have taught one still so young. Probablyenough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahometwas only fourteen; had no language but his own: much in Syria musthave been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to him. But the eyes ofthe lad were open; glimpses of many things would doubtless betaken-in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in astrange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. Thesejourneys to Syria were probably the beginning of much to Mahomet. 

One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had noschool-learning; of the thing we call school-learning none at all. Theart of writing was but just introduced into Arabia; it seems to be thetrue opinion that Mahomet never could write! Life in the Desert, withits experiences, was all his education. What of this infinite Universehe, from his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, so much and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we will reflecton it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see forhimself, or hear of by uncertain rumour of speech in the obscureArabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been beforehim or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good asnot there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons throughso many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this greatsoul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; hasto grow up so, --alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. 

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. Hiscompanions named him '_Al Amin_, The Faithful. ' A man of truth andfidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. Theynoted that _he_ always meant something. A man rather taciturn inspeech; silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. Thisis the only sort of speech _worth_ speaking! Through life we find himto have been regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even;--a good laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh isas untrue as anything about them; who cannot laugh. One hears ofMahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest face, brown floridcomplexion, beaming black eyes;--I somehow like too that vein on thebrow, which swelled-up black when he was in anger: like the'_horse-shoe_ vein' in Scott's _Redgauntlet_. It was a kind of featurein the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomethad it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yetjust, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light: of wildworth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of theDesert there. 

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, andtravelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managedall, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how hergratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage isaltogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arabauthors. He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. Heseems to have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome waywith this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. Itgoes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived inthis entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked ofany mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his'ambition, ' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his'fame, ' the mere good opinion of neighbours that knew him, had beensufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurientheat of his life all burnt out, and _peace_ growing to be the chiefthing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career ofambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-upas a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longerenjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that. 

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming blackeyes and open social deep soul, had other thoughts in him thanambition. A silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot _but_ bein earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere. Whileothers walk in formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, this man could not screen himself in formulas; he was alone with hisown soul and the reality of things. The great Mystery of Existence, asI said, glared-in upon him, with its terrors, with its splendours; nohearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, "Here am I!" Such_sincerity_, as we named it, has in very truth something of divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. Mendo and must listen to that as to nothing else;--all else is wind incomparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings andwanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What _is_ thisunfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life;what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocksof Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancingstars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and whatof God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; which we too haveto ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of _infinite_ moment;all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon ofargumentative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routineof Arab Idolatry, there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through theshows of things into _things_. Use and wont, respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all these are good, or are not good. There issomething behind and beyond all these, which all these must correspondwith, be the image of, or they are--_Idolatries_: 'bits of black woodpretending to be God;' to the earnest soul a mockery and abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish, will donothing for this man. Though all men walk by them, what good is it? Thegreat Reality stands glaring there upon _him_. He there has to answerit, or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else through all Eternitynever! Answer it; _thou_ must find an answer. --Ambition? What could allArabia do for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of PersianChosroes, and all crowns in the Earth;--what could they all do for him?It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the Heavenabove and of the Hell beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where would _they_ in a few brief years be? To be Sheik of Mecca orArabia, and have a bit of gilt wood put into your hand, --will that beone's salvation? I decidedly think, not. We will leave it altogether, this impostor hypothesis, as not credible; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly of dismissal by us. 

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan, into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; apraiseworthy custom, which such a man, above all, would find naturaland useful. Communing with his own heart, in the silence of themountains; himself silent; open to the 'small still voices:' it was aright natural custom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when havingwithdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in prayer, and meditation on those great questions, he one day told his wife Kadijah, who with his household was with himor near him this year, That by the unspeakable special favour ofHeaven he had now found it all out; was in doubt and darkness nolonger, but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formulas werenothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was One God in and overall; and we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is great;and that there is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idolsare not real; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we andall things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling theEternal Splendour. '_Allah akbar_, God is great;'--and then also'_Islam_, ' That we must _submit_ to God. That our whole strength liesin resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it death and worsethan death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign ourselves toGod. --'If this be _Islam_, ' says Goethe, 'do we not all live in_Islam_?' Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so. Ithas ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submitto Necessity, --Necessity will make him submit, --but to know andbelieve well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was thewisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his franticpretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction ofa brain; to know that it _had_ verily, though deep beyond hissoundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;--that his part init was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silencefollow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. 

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right andinvincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, preciselywhile he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite ofall superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-losscalculations; he is victorious while he coöperates with that greatcentral Law, not victorious otherwise:--and surely his first chance ofcoöperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know withhis whole soul that it _is_; that it is good, and alone good! This isthe soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;--for Islamis definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity notbeen, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood;give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that weknow nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what itseems; that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from Godabove, and say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. " Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven hasrevealed to our Earth. 

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of thiswild Arab soul. A confused dazzling, splendour as of life and Heaven, in the great darkness which threatened to be death: he called itrevelation and the angel Gabriel;--who of us yet can know what to callit? It is the 'inspiration of the Almighty that giveth usunderstanding. ' To _know_; to get into the truth of anything, is evera mystic act, --of which the best Logics can but babble on the surface. 'Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?' says Novalis. --ThatMahomet's whole soul, set in flame with this grand Truth vouchsafedhim, should feel as if it were important and the only important thing, was very natural. That Providence had unspeakably honoured _him_ byrevealing it, saving him from death and darkness; that he thereforewas bound to make known the same to all creatures: this is what wasmeant by 'Mahomet is the Prophet of God;' this too is not without itstrue meaning. --

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, withdoubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was _true_ this that he said. One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of allthe kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earneststruggling word he now spoke was the greatest. 'It is certain, ' saysNovalis, 'my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul willbelieve in it. ' It is a boundless favour. --He never forgot this goodKadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his young favourite wife, a woman whoindeed distinguished herself among the Moslem, by all manner ofqualities, through her whole long life; this young brilliant Ayeshawas, one day, questioning him: "Now am not I better than Kadijah? Shewas a widow; old, and had lost her looks: you love me better than youdid her?"--"No, by Allah!" answered Mahomet: "No, by Allah! Shebelieved in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I hadbut one friend, and she was that!"--Seid, his Slave, also believed inhim; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his firstconverts. 

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the most treated itwith ridicule, with indifference; in three years, I think, he hadgained but thirteen followers. His progress was slow enough. Hisencouragement to go on, was altogether the usual encouragement thatsuch a man in such a case meets. After some three years of smallsuccess, he invited forty of his chief kindred to an entertainment;and there stood-up and told them what his pretension was: that he hadthis thing to promulgate abroad to all men; that it was the highestthing, the one thing: which of them would second him in that? Amid thedoubt and silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of the silence, started-up, and exclaimed in passionatefierce language, That he would! The assembly, among whom was AbuThaleb, Ali's Father, could not be unfriendly to Mahomet; yet thesight there, of one unlettered elderly man, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an enterprise against all mankind, appearedridiculous to them; the assembly broke-up in laughter. Nevertheless itproved not a laughable thing; it was a very serious thing! As for thisyoung Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as heshows himself, now and always afterwards; full of affection, of fierydaring. Something chivalrous in him; brave as a lion; yet with agrace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood. He diedby assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned by hisown generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others: he said, If the wound proved not unto death, they must pardon the Assassin; butif it did, then they must slay him straightway, that so they two inthe same hour might appear before God, and see which side of thatquarrel was the just one!

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers of the Caabah, superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of influence had joinedhim: the thing spread slowly, but it was spreading. Naturally, he gaveoffence to everybody: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than weall; that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood! AbuThaleb the good Uncle spoke with him: Could he not be silent about allthat; believe it all for himself, and not trouble others, anger thechief men, endanger himself and them all, talking of it? Mahometanswered: If the Sun stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left, ordering him to hold his peace, he could not obey! No: there wassomething in this Truth he had got which was of Nature herself; equalin rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature had made. It wouldspeak itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite ofSun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. It must do that, and could do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, 'burst intotears. ' Burst into tears: he felt that Abu Thaleb was good to him;that the task he had got was no soft, but a stern and great one. 

He went on speaking to who would listen to him; publishing hisDoctrine among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca; gaining adherentsin this place and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, open orsecret danger attended him. His powerful relations protected Mahomethimself; but by and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had toquit Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The Koreishgrew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore oaths among them, to putMahomet to death with their own hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the goodKadijah was dead. Mahomet is not solicitous of sympathy from us; buthis outlook at this time was one of the dismalest. He had to hide incaverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and thither; homeless, incontinual peril of his life. More than once it seemed all-over withhim; more than once it turned on a straw, some rider's horse takingfright or the like, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine had not endedthere, and not been heard of at all. But it was not to end so. 

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all bandedagainst him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to takehis life, and no continuance possible at Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gainedsome adherents; the place they now call Medina, or '_Medinat al Nabi_, the City of the Prophet, ' from that circumstance. It lay some 200miles off, through rocks and deserts; not without great difficulty, insuch mood as we may fancy, he escaped thither, and found welcome. Thewhole East dates its era from this Flight, _Hegira_ as they name it:the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty-third ofMahomet's life. He was now becoming an old man; his friends sinkinground him one by one: his path desolate, encompassed with danger:unless he could find hope in his own heart, the outward face of thingswas but hopeless for him. It is so with all men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish his Religion by the way ofpreaching and persuasion alone. But now, driven foully out of hisnative country, since unjust men had not only given no ear to hisearnest Heaven's-message, the deep cry of his heart, but would noteven let him live if he kept speaking it, --the wild Son of the Desertresolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish willhave it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite momentto them and all men, they would not listen to these; would tramplethem down by sheer violence, steel and murder: well, let steel try itthen! Ten years more this Mahomet had: all of fighting, of breathlessimpetuous toil and struggle; with what result we know. 

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the ChristianReligion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preachingand conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of thetruth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every newopinion, at its starting, is precisely in a _minority of one_. In oneman's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the wholeworld believes it; there is one man against all men. That _he_ take asword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. Youmust first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itselfas it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that italways disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne'sconversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about thesword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, withany sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We willlet it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestiritself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that itwill, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to beconquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but onlywhat is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and cando no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call_truest_, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last. 

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and hissuccess, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what agreatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You takewheat to cast into the Earth's bosom: your wheat may be mixed withchaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish;no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows thewheat, --the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds _it_ in, saysnothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the goodEarth is silent about all the rest, --has silently turned all the restto some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere inNature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, andmotherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it _be_genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbour to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or evercame into the world? The _body_ of them all is imperfection, anelement of light _in_ darkness: to us they have to come embodied inmere Logic, in some merely _scientific_ Theorem of the Universe; which_cannot_ be complete; which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies; andyet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new andever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is the waywith Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it begenuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point atNature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure or impure, is not with herthe final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you haveany wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pureenough; but you are chaff, --insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality;you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all;you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_ nothing, Naturehas no business with you. 

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if welook at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laidto heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserableSyrian Sects, with their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and_Homoousion_, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty anddead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood;but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: itsucceeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a livingkind; with a heart-life in it: not dead, chopping barren logic merely!Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumours and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with hiswild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashingnatural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry isnothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, 'ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on them, '--these are wood, I tell you! They can donothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a horrorand abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power;He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: '_Allah akbar_, God isgreat. ' Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoeversore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you arebound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no otherthing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with theirfiery hearts laid hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came tothem, I say it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or theother, I say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed by allmen. Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this World;coöperating with them, not vainly withstanding them: I know, to thisday, no better definition of Duty than that same. All that is _right_includes itself in this of coöperating with the real Tendency of theWorld; you succeed by this (the World's Tendency will succeed), youare good, and in the right course there. _Homoiousion_, _Homoousion_, vain logical jangle, then or before or at any time, may jangle itselfout, and go whither and how it likes: this is the _thing_ it allstruggles to mean, if it would mean anything. If it do not succeed inmeaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions, logicalPropositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that livingconcrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the importantpoint. Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think hadright to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart ofNature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was notequally real, had to go up in flame, --mere dead _fuel_, in varioussenses, for this which was _fire_. 

 * * * * *

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially afterthe Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his SacredBook, which they name _Koran_, or _Reading_, 'Thing to be read. ' Thisis the Work he and his disciples made so much of, asking all theworld, Is not that a miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with areverence which few Christians pay even to their Bible. It is admittedeverywhere as the standard of all law and all practice; the thing tobe gone-upon in speculation and life: the message sent direct out ofHeaven, which this Earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing tobe read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it for the light of their life. They have mosques where it isall read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, getthrough the whole each day. There, for twelve-hundred years, has thevoice of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding through the ears andthe hearts of so many men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had readit seventy-thousand times!

Very curious: if one sought for 'discrepancies of national taste, 'here surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can readthe Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fairone. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. Awearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportablestupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry anyEuropean through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in theState-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we mayget some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it underdisadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet'sfollowers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had beenwritten-down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, onshoulder-blades of mutton, flung pellmell into a chest: and theypublished it, without any discoverable order as to time orotherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in thatway, lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were theshortest. Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be sobad. Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chantingsong, in the original. This may be a great point; much perhaps hasbeen lost in the Translation here. Yet with every allowance, one feelsit difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as aBook written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-writtenbook, or indeed as a _book_ at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody;_written_, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book everwas. So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of taste. 

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might solove it. When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly offyour hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential typeof it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quiteother than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it willcontrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of smallamount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran isthat of its _genuineness_, of its being a _bonâ-fide_ book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries;chapter after chapter got-up to excuse and varnish the author'ssuccessive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really itis time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's continualsincerity: who is continually sincere? But I confess I can makenothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit_prepense_; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;--stillmore, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writingthis Koran as a forger and juggler would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confusedferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot evenread; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself inwords. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utterhimself; the thoughts crowd on him pellmell: for very multitude ofthings to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in himshapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;--they are not _shaped_ at all, these thoughts ofhis; flung-out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in theirchaotic inarticulate state. We said 'stupid:' yet natural stupidity isby no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is naturaluncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the hasteand pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himselfinto fit speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a manstruggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is themood he is in! A headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, hecannot get himself articulated into words. The successive utterancesof a soul in that mood, coloured by the various vicissitudes ofthree-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse: this is theKoran. 

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreishand Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his ownwild heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowingrest no more. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul ofthe man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of adecision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; _any_ making-up ofhis mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem theinspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and juggler? No, no! This great fieryheart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not ajuggler's. His life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awfulFact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an unculturedsemi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging tohim: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, ahungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practising for a mess ofpottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not andcannot take him. 

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what hadrendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the firstand last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds, --nay, atbottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what wemight almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book ismade-up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiasticextempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of theProphets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet afterProphet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribeand to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them evenas he Mahomet was, --which is a great solace to him. These things herepeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again with wearisomeiteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, inhis forlorn garret, might con-over the Biographies of Authors in thatway! This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through allthis, comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with a certaindirectness and rugged vigour, he brings home still, to our heart, thething his own heart has been opened to. I make but little of hispraises of Allah, which many praise; they are borrowed I supposemainly from the Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed there. But theeye that flashes direct into the heart of things, and _sees_ the truthof them; this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's owngift; which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thousanddoes not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision;the test of a sincere heart. 

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can workno miracles. I? 'I am a Public Preacher;' appointed to preach thisdoctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had reallyfrom of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly 'a sign toyou, ' if your eyes were open! This Earth, God made it for you:'appointed paths in it;' you can live in it, go to and fro on it. --Theclouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet they are verywonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the deep bosom of the UpperImmensity, where do they come from! They hang there, the great blackmonsters; pour-down their rain deluges 'to revive a dead earth, ' andgrass springs, and tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clustershanging round. Is not that a sign?' Your cattle too, --Allah made them;serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you haveyour clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come rankinghome at evening-time, 'and, ' adds he, 'and are a credit to you!' Shipsalso, --he talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, theyspread-out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind driving them; anon they lie motionless, God haswithdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? crieshe; what miracle would you have? Are not you yourselves there? Godmade _you_, 'shaped you out of a little clay. ' Ye were small once; afew years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, 'ye have compassion on one another. ' Old age comes-on you, and grayhairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and againare not. 'Ye have compassion on one another:' this struck me much:Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another, --howhad it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance atfirst-hand into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poeticgenius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. Astrong untutored intellect: eyesight, heart; a strong wild man, --mighthave shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero. 

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rudeScandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation of God's power andpresence, --a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite;nothing more. The Mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, theyshall dissipate themselves 'like clouds;' melt into the Blue as cloudsdo, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tellsus, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are seton that to _steady_ it. At the Last Day they shall disappear 'likeclouds;' the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off intowreck, and as dust and vapour vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws hishand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendour, and a Terrornot to be named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all thingswhatsoever, was continually clear to this man. What a modern talks-ofby the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure asa divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough, --saleable, curious, good for propelling steamships!With our Sciences and Cyclopædias, we are apt to forget the_divineness_, in these laboratories of ours. We ought not to forgetit! That once well forgotten, I know not what else were worthremembering. Most sciences, I think, were then a very dead thing;withered, contentious, empty;--a thistle in late autumn. The bestscience, without this, is but as the dead _timber_; it is not thegrowing tree and forest, --which gives ever-new timber, among otherthings! Man cannot _know_ either, unless he can _worship_ in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise. 

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet'sReligion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, whichhe permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practised, unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was tocurtail them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. HisReligion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strictcomplex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not 'succeed by being an easy religion. ' As if indeed anyreligion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is acalumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, --sugar-plums of any kind, in this worldor the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. Thepoor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his 'honour of asoldier, ' different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. Itis not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, andvindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that thepoorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, thedullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who sayhe is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, deathare the _allurements_ that act on the heart of man. Kindle the innergenial life of him, you have a flame that burns-up all lowerconsiderations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees thiseven in the frivolous classes, with their 'point of honour' and thelike. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroicthat slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers. 

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not asensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a commonvoluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, --nay on enjoyments ofany kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common dietbarley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire oncelighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mendhis own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-providedman; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I shouldsay; something better in him than _hunger_ of any sort, --or these wildArab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, inclose contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! Theywere wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds offierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could havecommanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood thereface to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery; visiblyclouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what kind of a manhe _was_, let him be _called_ what you like! No emperor with histiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. Duringthree-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of averitable Hero necessary for that, of itself. 

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heartstruggling-up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot saythat his religion made him _worse_; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded of him: when he lost his Daughter, thething he answers is, in his own dialect, everyway sincere, and yetequivalent to that of Christians, 'The Lord giveth, and the Lordtaketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord. ' He answered in likemanner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the second of thebelievers. Seid had fallen in the War of Tabûc, the first of Mahomet'sfightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well; Seid had donehis Master's work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all wellwith Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the body;--theold gray-haired man melting in tears! "What do I see?" said she. --"Yousee a friend weeping over his friend. "--He went out for the last timeinto the mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he had injuredany man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? Avoice answered, "Yes, me three drachms, " borrowed on such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid: "Better be in shame now, " said he, "than at the Day of Judgment. "--You remember Kadijah, and the "No, byAllah!" Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of usall, brought visible through twelve centuries, --the veritable Son ofour common Mother. 

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a roughself-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he isnot. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he gomuch upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes ofhis own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, GreekEmperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough, abouthimself, 'the respect due unto thee. ' In a life-and-death war withBedouins, cruel things could not fail; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and generosity wanting. Mahomet makes no apologyfor the one, no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate ofhis heart; each called-for, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man! Acandid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him; he does not mincematters! The War of Tabûc is a thing he often speaks of: his menrefused, many of them, to march on that occasion: pleaded the heat ofthe weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that. Yourharvest? It lasts for a day. What will become of your harvest throughall Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot; 'but Hell will be hotter!'Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns-up: He says to the unbelievers, Yeshall have the just measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They willbe weighed-out to you; ye shall not have short weight!--Everywhere hefixes the matter in his eye; he _sees_ it: his heart, now and then, isas if struck dumb by the greatness of it. 'Assuredly, ' he says: thatword, in the Koran, is written-down sometimes as a sentence by itself:'Assuredly. '

No _Dilettantism_ in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation andSalvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnestabout it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind ofamateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this isthe sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists inthe heart and soul of the man never having been _open_ toTruth;--'living in a vain show. ' Such a man not only utters andproduces falsehoods, but _is_ himself a falsehood. The rational moralprinciple, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quietparalysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer thanthe truths of such a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times and places: inoffensive, says nothing harshto anybody; most _cleanly_, --just as carbonic acid is, which is deathand poison. 

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of thesuperfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendencyto good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aimingtowards what is just and true. The sublime forgiveness ofChristianity, turning of the other cheek when the one has beensmitten, is not here: you _are_ to revenge yourself, but it is to bein measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam, like any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is aperfect equaliser of men: the soul of one believer outweighs allearthly kingships; all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Mahometinsists not on the propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity ofit; he marks-down by law how much you are to give, and it is at yourperil if you neglect. The tenth part of a man's annual income, whatever that may be, is the _property_ of the poor, of those that areafflicted and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Naturespeaks _so_. 

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one andthe other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in us. Butwe are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, inwhatever he changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worstsensualities, too, are the work of doctors, followers of his, not hiswork. In the Koran there is really very little said about the joys ofParadise; they are intimated rather than insisted on. Nor is itforgotten that the highest joys even there shall be spiritual; thepure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely transcend allother joys. He says, 'Your salutation shall be, Peace. ' _Salam_, HavePeace!--the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainlyhere below, as the one blessing. 'Ye shall sit on seats, facing oneanother: all grudges shall be taken away out of your hearts. ' Allgrudges! Ye shall love one another freely; for each of you, in theeyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven enough!

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality, the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said;which it is not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only Ishall make, and therewith leave it to your candour. The first isfurnished me by Goethe; it is a casual hint of his which seems wellworth taking note of. In one of his Delineations, in _Meister'sTravels_ it is, the hero comes-upon a Society of men with very strangeways, one of which was this: "We require, " says the Master, "that eachof our people shall restrict himself in one direction, " shall go rightagainst his desire in one matter, and _make_ himself do the thing hedoes not wish, "should we allow him the greater latitude on all othersides. " There seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying thingswhich are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of ourmoral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man assert withal that heis king over his habitudes; that he could and would shake them off, oncause shown: this is an excellent law. The Month Ramadhan for theMoslem, much in Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life, bears inthat direction; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of moralimprovement on his part, then by a certain healthy manful instinct, which is as good. 

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan Heaven andHell. This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, theyare an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well rememberedelsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flamingHell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on:what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is illfor us too if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature ofDuty? That man's actions here are of _infinite_ moment to him, andnever die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reachesupwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescoreyears of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: allthis had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arabsoul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with afierce savage sincerity, halt, articulating, not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths. Itis venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man herebelow? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might putsome of _us_ to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, takeRight and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasureof the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition andsubtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Rightdoes not preponderate considerably? No, it is not _better_ to do theone than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death, --asHeaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowiseleft undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: theone is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. BenthameeUtility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to adead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kindof Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and painson:--If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier andfalser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, It is not Mahomet!----

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kindof Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highestlooking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. TheScandinavian God _Wish_, the god of all rude men, --this has beenenlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacredDuty, and to be earned by faith and welldoing, by valiant action, anda divine patience which is still more valiant. It is ScandinavianPaganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call itnot false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidanceof the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily _believed_. These Arabs believe theirreligion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stoodby their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs, --believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchmanon the streets of Cairo when he cries "Who goes?" will hear from thepassenger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God. " _Allahakbar, Islam_, sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, ofthese dusky millions. Zealous missionaries preach it abroad amongMalays, black Papuans, brutal Idolaters;--displacing what is worse, nothing that is better or good. 

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabiafirst became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roamingunnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: aHero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe:see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grownworld-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada onthis hand, at Delhi on that;--glancing in valour and splendour and thelight of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great sectionof the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nationbecomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes. TheseArabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, --is it not as if a sparkhad fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeablesand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-highfrom Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as lightningout of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then theytoo would flame. 

LECTURE III

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKSPEARE. 

[_Tuesday, 12th May 1840_]

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of oldages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certainrudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientificknowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a worldvacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their lovingwonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking withthe voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to seeour Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, characterof Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figurebelonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he isproduced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and willproduce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; inno age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet. 

Hero, Prophet, Poet, --many different names, in different times andplaces, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note inthem, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remarkagain, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that thedifferent _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts ofmen. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroicwarrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancythere is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he isall these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that greatglowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tearsthat were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and educationled him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of GreatMan; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are likeAusterlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poeticalmen withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity andgeniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the cleardeep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what provincesoever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio diddiplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it;they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a giftedsong-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare, --oneknows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree. 

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make allgreat men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varietiesof aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and faroftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as withcommon men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vaguecapability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make himinto a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth thatand nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see astreet-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near athand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth andsmall Whitechapel needle, --it cannot be considered that aptitude ofNature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, towhat shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to becomeConqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complexcontroversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read theworld and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read. What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, the most important fact about the world. --

 * * * * *

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ meansboth Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, wellunderstood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed theyare still the same; in this most important respect especially, Thatthey have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of theUniverse; what Goethe calls 'the open secret. ' "Which is the greatsecret?" asks one. --"The _open_ secret, "--open to all, seen by almostnone! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'theDivine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom ofAppearance, ' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from thestarry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance ofMan and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders itvisible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; andthe Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as therealised Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplacematter, --as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which someupholsterer had put together! It could do no good at present, to_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we donot know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournfulpity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hitherto make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;he is to reveal that to us, --that sacred mystery which he more thanothers lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knowsit;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent askedof _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Oncemore, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this mantoo could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in theshows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in thevery fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first ofall, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the 'open secret, ' are one. 

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we mightsay, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Goodand Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germanscall the æsthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we maycall a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are tolove. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannotbe disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: howelse shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice everheard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field;they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory wasnot arrayed like one of these. " A glance, that, into the deepest deepof Beauty. 'The lilies of the field, '--dressed finer than earthlyprinces, springing-up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful_eye_ looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! Howcould the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looksand is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a sayingof Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: 'TheBeautiful, ' he intimates, 'is higher than the Good: the Beautifulincludes in it the Good. ' The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I havesaid somewhere, 'differs from the _false_ as Heaven does fromVauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet andProphet. --

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who areaccounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only anillusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A veinof Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogetherof Poetry. We are all poets when we _read_ a poem well. The'imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante, ' is not that the samefaculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare canembody, out of _Saxo Grammaticus_, the story of _Hamlet_ as Shakspearedid: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every oneembodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Wherethere is no specific difference, as between round and square, alldefinition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has _so_ muchmore of the poetic element developed in him as to have becomenoticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbours. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics inthe same way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poetswill, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought todo. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made ofthat. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblestShakspeare or Homer of them can be remembered _forever_;--a day comeswhen he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between truePoetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On thispoint many things have been written, especially by late GermanCritics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an_Unendlichkeit_, a certain character of 'infinitude, ' to whatsoever hedelineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter isworth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually befound in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the oldvulgar distinction of Poetry being _metrical_, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might saythis as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically_musical_, musical, not in word only, but in heart and substance, inall the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not. --Musical: how much lies inthat! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetratedinto the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony ofcoherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious;naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Whois there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has onus? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to theedge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song init: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythmor _tune_ to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say!Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of theirown, --though they only _notice_ that of others. Observe too how allpassionate language does of itself become musical, --with a finer musicthan the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous angerbecomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehowthe very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were butwrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of allthings. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies; it was the feeling theyhad of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voicesand utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call_musical Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. Atbottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerityand depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and yousee musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if youcan only reach it. 

The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems tohold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; hisfunction, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. TheHero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Herotaken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the GreatMan, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take himfirst for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stageof it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognitionthat he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, orsuchlike!--It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it isnot so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man stillthere is the _same_ altogether peculiar admiration for the HeroicGift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was. 

I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, itis that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain ofSplendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; notaltogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested inour like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. ScepticalDilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not lastforever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, asin all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, allcrippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight, hardly recognisable. Men worship the shows of great men; the mostdisbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. Thedreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would literallydespair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon!A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_: yet ishe not obeyed, _worshipped_ after his sort, as all the Tiaraed andDiademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, andostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strangefeeling dwelling in each that they had never heard a man like this;that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of thesepeople it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accreditedway of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black browsand flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, isof a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us, --as, byGod's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows ofthings entirely swept-out, replaced by clear faith in the _things_, sothat a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the othernon-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these pages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante areSaints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonised_, so thatit is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at suchresult. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, ina kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in thegeneral feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory asof complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonised, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite ofevery perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still ourindestructible reverence for heroism. --We will look a little at theseTwo, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare: what little it ispermitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrangeitself in that fashion. 

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Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and hisBook; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as itwere, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; andthe most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. Afterall commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. TheBook;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all facesthat I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, withthe simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, theknown victory which is also deathless;--significant of the wholehistory of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever waspainted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentleaffection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharpcontradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A softethereal soul looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, asfrom imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdainof the thing that is eating-out his heart, --as if it were withal amean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture andstrangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, andlife-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection allconverted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks-out as in a kind of_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? Thisis Dante: so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries, ' and singsus 'his mystic unfathomable song. '

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough withthis Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upperclass of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best thengoing; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latinclassics, --no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clearcultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; the best fruit ofeducation he had contrived to realise from these scholastics. He knowsaccurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well whatwas distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gonethrough the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldierfor the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifthyear, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of theChief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certainBeatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distantintercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting accountof this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded toanother, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure inDante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of allbeings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at lastin the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his wholestrength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; butit seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnestman, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to makehappy. 

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with himas he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever theycall it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours, --and the worldhad wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florencewould have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumbcenturies continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries(for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ tohear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed forthis Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death andcrucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice ofhis happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable. 

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or someother confused disturbance rose to such a height, that Dante, whoseparty had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedlyforth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe andwandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had thefiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sightof God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried evenby warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; badonly had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant inthe Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to beburnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civicdocument. Another curious document, some considerable number of yearslater, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, writtenin answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return oncondition of apologising and paying a fine. He answers, with fixedstern pride: "If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I willnever return, _nunquam revertar_. "

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patronto patron, from place to place; proving in his own bitter words, 'Howhard is the path, _Come è duro calle_. ' The wretched are not cheerfulcompany. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, withhis moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reportsof him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day forhis gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. DellaScala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulonesac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, hesaid: "Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himselfso entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, andhave nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like toLike_;"--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was notmade to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to himthat he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in thisearth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; noliving heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was nosolace here. 

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with itsFlorences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florencethou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shaltsurely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Lifealtogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thouand all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, madeits home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally histhoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodiedor bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; heno more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there withits gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself shouldsee it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we wentthither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it inspeechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mysticunfathomable song;' and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkableof all modern Books, is the result. 

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could dothis work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him fromdoing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, thatit was great; the greatest a man could do. 'If thou follow thy star, _Se tu segui tua stella_, '--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, inhis extreme need, still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thoushalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labour of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; hesays, This Book, 'which has made me lean for many years. ' Ah yes, itwas won, all of it, with pain and sore toil, --not in sport, but ingrim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has beenwritten, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his wholehistory, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, atthe age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He liesburied in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorrisab oris. _ The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I Dante laid, shut-outfrom my native shores. "

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it 'a mysticunfathomable Song;' and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find asentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body andsoul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer'sand the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly noPoem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines, --to the greatinjury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for mostpart! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he hadany: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it outplainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion ofmelody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, thatwe can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, andlisten to him as the Heroic of Speakers, --whose speech _is_ Song. Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it isfor most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to berhymed;--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what itwas aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among seriousmen, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we lovethe true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shallwe hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thinghollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing. 

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ thatit is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it thereis a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, hissimple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads alongnaturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not beotherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselvesrhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes itsmusical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inwardsymmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of thecharacter of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_, look-out on one another like compartments of a greatedifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be themeasure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The peopleof Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l'uom ch' è stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was inHell!" Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severesorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not thedaughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are 'to become perfect through _suffering_. '--But, as Isay, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It hasall been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had madehim 'lean' for many years. Not the general whole only; everycompartment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in itsplace, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is thesoul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, renderedforever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intenseone: but a task which is _done_. 

Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not comebefore us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow and evensectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, butpartly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentered itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-greatnot because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Throughall objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I knownothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with theoutermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He hasa great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presentsthat and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of theHall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, redhot cone of iron glowing through thedim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once andforever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is abrevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, morecondensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It isstrange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likenessof a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, theblustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is 'as the sailssink, the mast being suddenly broken. ' Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the _cotto aspetto_, 'face _baked_, ' parched brown and lean; andthe 'fiery snow, ' that falls on them there, a 'fiery snow withoutwind, ' slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs;square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with itsSoul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at theDay of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and howCavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense '_fue_'!The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sortof painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent 'pale rages, 'speaks itself in these things. 

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of aman, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it isphysiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you alikeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner ofdoing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he couldnot have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may call, _sympathised_ with it, --had sympathyin him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you thelikeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy andtrivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say thatintellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning whatan object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will comeout here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted manis he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside assurplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, thathe discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of thething he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kindof insight we get of anything; 'the eye seeing in all things what itbrought with it the faculty of seeing'! To the mean eye all things aretrivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. Nomost gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In thecommonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take-away withhim. 

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividnessas of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everywaynoble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, whatqualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground ofeternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, intoour very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too; _della bellapersona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is asolace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl themaway again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friendof this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat uponthe Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yetalso infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dantediscerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his_Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged-upon on earth! Isuppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of anyman, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pityeither. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic, --sentimentality, orlittle better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that ofDante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: likethe wail of Æolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;--andthen that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towardshis Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing inher pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death solong, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the song of angels;it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the verypurest, that ever came out of a human soul. 

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into theessence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion tooas reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning ofall. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? '_A Diospiacenti ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies ofGod:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; '_Nonragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass. ' Orthink of this; 'They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza dimorte_. ' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart ofDante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would fullsurely _die_; 'that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die. 'Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he isnot to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we mustgo into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there. 

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Suchpreference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, andis like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellentthan it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, 'Mountain ofPurification'; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sinis so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet inRepentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_ that'trembling' of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavysorrow. The obscure sojourn of dæmons and reprobate is underfoot; asoft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne ofMercy itself. "Pray for me, " the denizens of that Mount of Pain allsay to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, " my daughter Giovanna;"I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by thatwinding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of a building, ' some ofthem, --crushed-together so 'for the sin of pride'; yet nevertheless inyears, in ages and æons, they shall have reached the top, which isHeaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy tooof all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentanceand got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a nobleembodiment of a true noble thought. 

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, areindispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulatemusic to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, asfigured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forevermemorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It wasperhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as inthis of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-dayreality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, wefind ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as amongthings palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitelyhigher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_-natural asthe other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, butis one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believesit, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I sayagain, is the saving merit, now as always. 

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematicrepresentation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in afuture age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceasedaltogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an 'Allegory, 'perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, ofthe soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge worldwidearchitectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil tobe the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns;that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the other, butby incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellentand high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna andthe Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, witheverlasting Pity, --all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages hadit, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems;was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of theirbeing emblems? Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heartof man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhereconfirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believean Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, whoconsiders this of Dante to have been all got-up as an Allegory, willcommit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognised as a veraciousexpression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards theUniverse; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one greatdifference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; thedestinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men inthis world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Lawof Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance ofthe _first_ Thought of men, --the chief recognised virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, butfor the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!--

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And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a verystrange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante'swriting; yet in truth _it_ belongs to ten Christian centuries, onlythe finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, thesmith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunningmethods, --how little of all he does is properly _his_ work! All pastinventive men work there with him;--as indeed with all of us, in allthings. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought theylived by stands here in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation ofall the good men who had gone before him. Precious they; but also isnot he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb; notdead, yet living voiceless. 

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this Mystic Song, at once of oneof the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe hadhitherto realised for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, isanother than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than 'BastardChristianism' half-articulately spoken in the Arab Desertseven-hundred years before!--The noblest _idea_ made _real_ hithertoamong men, is sung, and emblemed-forth abidingly, by one of thenoblest men. In the one sense and in the other, are we not right gladto possess it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands ofyears. For the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man'ssoul, differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. Theouter is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, today andforever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on thisDante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of histhoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity;they will feel that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon inSaint-Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer. Theoldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men'shearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder if it werepredicted that his Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europehas yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. Allcathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangementnever so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomableheart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still ofimportance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognisablecombinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;great cities, great empires, encyclopædias, creeds, bodies of opinionand practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought. Homer yet _is_, veritably present face to face with every open soul ofus; and Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life andexistence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of KingAgamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the _words_ it spoke, is not. 

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his 'uses. ' A humansoul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, andsung-forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of ourexistence; feeding through long times the life-_roots_ of allexcellent human things whatsoever, --in a way that 'utilities' will notsucceed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by thequantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of novalue. One remark I may make: the contrast in this respect between theHero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as wesaw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seemto be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante'seffect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is farmore restricted: but also it is far nobler, clearer;--perhaps not lessbut more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in thecoarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and therewith good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he growobsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed therein the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindlethemselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world foruncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. Inthis way the balance may be made straight again. 

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on theworld by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and hiswork are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ hiswork; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow itsown fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and ArabianConquests, so that it 'fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers, ' andall Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or notembodied so at all;--what matters that? That is not the real fruit ofit! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, wassomething. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how manyscimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and what uproarand blaring he made in this world--he was but a loud-sounding inanityand futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honour the greatempire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which we do_not_ jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men! It isperhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in theseloud times. ----

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As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musicallythe Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the OuterLife of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking atthe world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;so in Shakspeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modernEurope was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante hasgiven us the Faith or soul; Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, hasgiven us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have: a manwas sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry way oflife had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breakingdown into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, thisother sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singingvoice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record ofit. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light ofthe world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had thehonour of producing the other. 

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is thisShakspeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him fordeer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woodsand skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enoughfor this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole EnglishExistence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come asof its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' buds and withers by its ownlaws, --too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, andevery bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a SirThomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and notsufficiently considered: how everything does coöperate with all; not aleaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar andstellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withalout of all men, and works sooner or later, recognisably orirrecognisably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap andinfluences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with thelowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portionof the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in theKingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highestHeaven!--

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era withits Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had precededit, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. TheChristian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had producedthis Practical Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vitalfact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, thatMiddle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliamentcould abolish it, before Shakspeare, the noblest product of it, madehis appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at herown time, with Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent himforth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament. King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers. Acts ofParliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise theymake. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustingsor elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakspeare into being? Nodining at Freemasons' Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling ofshares, and infinite other jangling and true or false endeavouring!This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and blessedness, camewithout proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakspeare wasthe free gift of Nature; given altogether silently;--receivedaltogether silently, as if it had been a thing of little account. Andyet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One should look at thatside of matters too. 

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears alittle idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think thebest judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, isslowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of allPoets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, hasleft record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I knownot such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take allthe characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his sotrue and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart fromall other 'faculties' as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is nota truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if wetried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramaticmaterials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems allso fit, --everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own lawand the nature of things, --we forget the rude disorderly quarry it wasshaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herselfhad made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than anyother man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows as byinstinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, whathis own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitoryglance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination ofthe whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, inshort. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, willconstruct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he willgive of it, --is the best measure you could get of what intellect is inthe man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; whichunessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true _beginning_, thetrue sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole forceof insight that is in the man. He must _understand_ the thing;according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of hisanswer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; doesthe spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilmentbecomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be light; andout of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is _light_ in himself, will he accomplish this. 

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare isgreat. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It isunexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but itsinmost heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in lightbefore him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thingsufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows ofitself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is notShakspeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness;his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph oversuch obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world! No_twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with itsown convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that isto say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to allthings and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how thisgreat soul takes-in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, anOthello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in theirround completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _NovumOrganum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quitesecondary order; earthly, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the samerank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Ofhim too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himselfsays of Shakspeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-platesof transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and theinward mechanism also is all visible. '

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped-up in theseoften rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eyethat something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? Youcan laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way orother genially relate yourself to them;--you can, at lowest, hold yourpeace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, tillthe hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! Atbottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he haveintellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; orfailing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write atall; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend onaccidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, --perhaps onhis having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in hisboyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heartof things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever existshas a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together andexist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift ofNature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sortsoever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, _See_. Ifyou cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet;there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, inaction or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed oldSchoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, "But areye sure he's _not a dunce_?" Why, really one might ask the same thingin regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and considerit as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person. 

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is acorrect measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included allunder that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if theywere distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c, as he has hands, feet and arms. That is acapital error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature, 'and of his 'moral nature, ' as if these again were divisible, andexisted apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such formsof utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are tospeak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. Itseems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for the most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; thatman's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, isessentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the samePower of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might knowall of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he isand works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may seehow a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, orwant of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion hehas formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is _one_; andpreaches the same Self abroad in all these ways. 

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it, --without morality, intellect were impossible for him; athoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know athing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing, sympathise with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he havenot the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, thecourage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall heknow? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and thepusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature ismean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely. --But doesnot the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows wherethe geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in theworld, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, itshould be considered, too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at thegeese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on hisown misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and soforth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and othersuitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may sayof the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the samedimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpinelife!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them actswith manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations, modifications they require, your own candour will supply. 

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of Intellects, Ihave said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakspeare'sintellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconsciousintellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his areProducts of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truthin this saying. Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth ofit is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows-up from the deepsof Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies with theinfinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man. ' This welldeserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simplegreat soul, that he get thus to be a _part of herself_. Such a man'sworks, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethoughtshall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the unknown deepsin him;--as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom, as themountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded onNature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much inShakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known tohimself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all; like_roots_, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; butSilence is greater. 

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will notblame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but truebattle, --the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakspeare greaterthan Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, hehad his own sorrows: those _Sonnets_ of his will even testifyexpressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling forhis life;--as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems tome a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on thebough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles ofother men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travelforward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and notfall-in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a mandelineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroichearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?--And now, incontrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuineoverflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words thatpierce and burn, are to be found in Shakspeare; yet he is always inmeasure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'goodhater. ' But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heapsall manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say, withhis whole heart laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it isalways a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty;never. No man who _can_ laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh atthese things. It is some poor character only _desiring_ to laugh, andhave the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; goodlaughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot. ' Even atstupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise thangenially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we dismissthem covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor fellowsonly the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on wellthere, and continue Presidents of the City-watch. Such laughter, likesunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me. 

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We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual works; thoughperhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as _Hamlet_, in _WilhelmMeister_, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August WilhelmSchlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and theothers, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of NationalEpic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History butwhat he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look toit, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirablyseized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; itis, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a greatthinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle ofAgincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description of the two hosts:the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, whenthe battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: "Ye goodyeomen, whose limbs were made in England!" There is a noble Patriotismin it, --far other than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear ascribedto Shakspeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, throughthe whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better forthat. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too hada right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no fullimpress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His worksare so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world thatwas in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here andthere a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are thatcome upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, "That is _true_, spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an openhuman soul, that will be recognised as true!" Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to write forthe Globe Play-house: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with usall. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set hisown free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate itinto the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. _Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man. 

 * * * * *

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognise that hetoo was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to theProphetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed tothis man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven: 'Weare such stuff as Dreams are made of!' That scroll in WestminsterAbbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any seer. But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dantethe melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not callShakspeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism, the 'Universal Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrowsuperstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness orperversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfoldhidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all menworship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises akind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to makeitself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmonywith these, if we understood them, but in harmony!--I cannot call thisShakspeare a 'Sceptic, ' as some do; his indifference to the creeds andtheological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neitherunpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was thefruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grandsphere of worship (we may call it such): these other controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him. 

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right gloriousthing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? Formyself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the factof such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it notperhaps far better that this Shakspeare, everyway an unconscious man, was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially wasthe 'Prophet of God:' and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion ofMahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood: and has come down to usinextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with itsuch a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it aquestionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, thatMahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitiouscharlatan, perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Evenin Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself andbecome obsolete, while this Shakspeare, this Dante may still beyoung;--while this Shakspeare may still pretend to be a Priest ofMankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Æschylus orHomer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last likethem? He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to theuniversal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had beenbetter for him _not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all thathe was _conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality, --asindeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious:that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak-out withthat great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to begreat, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great!His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do notbelieve, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, asalways, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in himsprings-up from the inarticulate deeps. 

 * * * * *

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager ofa Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl ofSouthampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, manythanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not accounthim a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point therewere much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite ofthe sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakspearehas actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in thisland of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give-up ratherthan the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highestDignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing wehave yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament toour English Household, what item is there that we would not surrenderrather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give-up yourIndian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English; never have had anyIndian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really it were agrave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in officiallanguage; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare!Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare doesnot go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give-up our Shakspeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, thisIsland of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: inAmerica, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, therewill be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, whatis it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, sothat they do not fall-out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlikeintercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as thegreatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties andgovernments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplishthis? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call itnot fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is anEnglish King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination ofParliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, incrowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yetstrongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable inthat point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? Wecan fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, athousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: "Yes, this Shakspeare is ours; weproduced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kindwith him. " The most common-sense politician too, if he pleases, maythink of that. 

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulatevoice; that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what theheart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unityat all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced itsDante; Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong, with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat inkeeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yetspeak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has hadno voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn tospeak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossackswill all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is stillaudible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumbRussia can be. --We must here end what we had to say of the_Hero-Poet_. 

LECTURE IV

THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION: KNOX; PURITANISM. 

[_Friday, 15th May 1840_]

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We haverepeatedly endeavoured to explain that all sorts of Heroes areintrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open tothe Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit tospeak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in agreat, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, --theoutward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment hefinds himself in. The priest too, as I understand it, is a kind ofProphet; in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration, aswe must name it. He presides over the worship of the people; is theUniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spiritual Captain ofthe people; as the Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains:he guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through this Earth and itswork. The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voicefrom the unseen Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and ina more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseenHeaven, --the 'open secret of the Universe, '--which so few have an eyefor! He is the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendour; burning withmild equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in alltimes. One knows very well that, in reducing ideals to practice, greatlatitude of tolerance is needful; very great. But a Priest who is notthis at all, who does not any longer aim or try to be this, is acharacter--of whom we had rather not speak in this place. 

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did faithfullyperform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us betterhere to consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather asReformers than Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equallynotable, in calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leaderof Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a lightfrom Heaven into the daily life of their people; leading them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But whenthis same _way_ was a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, thespiritual Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to us wholive under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any other. Heis the warfaring and battling Priest; who led his people, not to quietfaithful labour as in smooth times, but to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a more perilous service, and a morememorable one, be it higher or not. These two men we will account ourbest Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a _Priest_ first ofall? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visibleforce; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He isa believer in the divine truth of things; a _seer_, seeing through theshows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divinetruth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, hewill never be good for much as a Reformer. 

Thus, then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, buildingup Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theoriesof Life worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by aShakspeare, --we are now to see the reverse process; which also isnecessary, which also may be carried on in the Heroic manner. Curioushow this should be necessary; yet necessary it is. The mild shining ofthe Poet's light has to give place to the fierce lightning of theReformer: unfortunately the Reformer too is a personage that cannotfail in History! The Poet indeed, with his mildness, what is he butthe product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy with itsfierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaïd Eremites, there hadbeen no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavour, Scandinavian andother, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabledShakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is asymptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished;that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed. 

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of_music_; be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures wereby their Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic _musical_ way, howgood were it could we get so much as into the _equable_ way; I mean, if _peaceable_ Priests, reforming from day to day, would alwayssuffice us! But it is not so; even this latter has not yet beenrealised. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to time, aneedful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting: thevery things that were once indispensable furtherances becomeobstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us, --abusiness often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, whichonce took in the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory inall parts of it to the highly-discursive acute intellect of Dante, oneof the greatest in the world, --had in the course of another centurybecome dubitable to common intellects; become deniable; and is now, toevery one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin's Theorem! ToDante, human Existence, and God's ways with men, were all wellrepresented by those _Malebolges_, _Purgatorios_; to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but Luther'sProtestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will _continue_. 

I do not make much of 'Progress of the Species, ' as handled in thesetimes of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough;nay we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature ofthings. Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learnerbut a doer: he learns with the mind given him what has been; but withthe same mind he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat ofhis own. Absolutely without originality there is no man. No manwhatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfatherbelieved: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of theUniverse, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe, --which is an_infinite_ Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally byany view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlargessomewhat, I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfatherincredible to him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing hehas discovered or observed. It is the history of every man; and in thehistory of Mankind we see it summed-up into great historicalamounts, --revolutions, new epochs. Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does_not_ stand 'in the ocean of the other Hemisphere, ' when Columbus hasonce sailed thither! Men find no such thing extant in the otherHemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world, --all Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these. 

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain, Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miserieseverywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough forrevolution. At all turns, a man who will _do_ faithfully, needs tobelieve firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage;if he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his ownsuffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to himwill be _mis_done. Every such man is a daily contributor to theinevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eyeto the outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new misery tosomebody or other. Offences accumulate till they become insupportable;and are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and defacedstill worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to betorn asunder by a Luther; Shakspeare's noble feudalism, as beautifulas it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution. Theaccumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally _exploded_, blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periodsbefore matters come to a settlement again. 

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of thematter, and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely thefact that they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death!At bottom, it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of thebody, not of the essence or soul; all destruction, by violentrevolution or howsoever it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was _Valour_; Christianism was _Humility_, a nobler kind ofValour. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart ofman but _was_ an honest insight into God's truth on man's part, and_has_ an essential truth in it which endures through all changes, aneverlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand, what amelancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in allcountries and times except our own, as having spent their life inblind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generationsof men were lost and wrong, only that this present little section of ageneration might be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world, like the Russiansoldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill-up the ditchwith their dead bodies, that we might march-over and take the place!It is an incredible hypothesis. 

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierceemphasis; and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect ofindividual men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towardssure victory: but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimateinfallible credo, sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, whatwas to be said?--Withal, it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own insight as final, and goes upon it assuch. He will always do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but itmust be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men thatlive, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, underHeaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the Empire ofDarkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another, fight notagainst the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference ofuniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiantmen. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor'sstrong hammer smiting down _Jötuns_, shall be welcome. Luther'sbattle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are all under one Captain, soldiers of the samehost. --Let us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kindof battle it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too wasof our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time. 

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps bein place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongsto all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It isthe grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idolsas the Divinity, is a thing they cannot away-with, but have todenounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is thechief of all the sins they see done under the sun. This is worthnoting. We will not enter here into the theological question aboutIdolatry. Idol is _Eidolon_, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether any the mostbenighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he didnot think that the poor image his own hands had made _was_ God; butthat God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or another. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever aworship by Symbols, by _eidola_, or things seen? Whether _seen_, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye; or visibleonly to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: thismakes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still aThing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritanhas his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divinethings, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possiblefor him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions thatfitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense _eidola_, thingsseen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:--wemay say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only_more_ idolatrous. 

Where, then, lies the evil of it? some fatal evil must lie in it, orearnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why isIdolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worshipof those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked theProphet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, wasnot exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out ofhim in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen thatworshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, wassuperior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was akind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what isstill meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless _divine_beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortalworshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be anobject of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannotsurely be an object of hatred. Let his heart _be_ honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in oneword, let him entirely _believe_ in his Fetish, --it will then be, Ishould say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily bemade to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there. 

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the eraof the Prophets, no man's mind _is_ any longer honestly filled withhis Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing throughit, knows it to be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubtthat it was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is _insincere_ Idolatry. Doubt has eaten-out the heart of it: a human soul is seen clingingspasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half-feels now tohave become a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest sights. Soulsare no longer _filled_ with their Fetish; but only pretend to befilled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled. "Youdo not believe, " said Coleridge; "you only believe that you believe. "It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the suresymptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we callFormulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours. No moreimmoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the beginningof all immorality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth of anymorality whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralysed thereby, cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer _sincere_ men. I donot wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutesit with unextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good and it, are atdeath-feud. Blamable Idolatry is _Cant_, and even what one may callSincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort ofWorship ends with this phasis. 

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any otherProphet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax, were not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made ofsheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back toreality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. Accordingas he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechlessthought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows ofthings, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes orConclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism too isthe work of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century. Thefirst stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false andidolatrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine!--

At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were entirelydestructive to this that we call Hero-worship, and represent as thebasis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind. Oneoften hears it said that Protestantism introduced a new era, radicallydifferent from any the world had ever seen before: the era of 'privatejudgment, ' as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every manbecame his own Pope; and learnt, among other things, that he mustnever trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more! Whereby, isnot spiritual union, all hierarchy and subordination among men, henceforth an impossibility? So we hear it said. --Now I need not denythat Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, Popesand much else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revoltagainst earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that theenormous French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby allsovereignties earthly and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished ormade sure of abolition. Protestantism is the grand root from which ourwhole subsequent European History branches out. For the spiritual willalways body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritualis the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry iseverywhere for Liberty and Equality, Independence and so forth:instead of _Kings_, Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages; it seemsmade out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever fromthe world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. One of mydeepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without sovereigns, truesovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but ananarchy: the hatefulest of things. But I find Protestantism, whateveranarchic democracy it have produced, to be the beginning of newgenuine sovereignty and order. I find it to be a revolt against_false_ sovereigns; the painful but indispensable first preparativefor _true_ sovereigns getting place among us! This is worth explaininga little. 

Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of 'privatejudgment' is, at bottom, not a new thing in the world, but only new atthat epoch of the world. There is nothing generically new or peculiarin the Reformation; it was a return to Truth and Reality in oppositionto Falsehood and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genuineTeaching are and have been. Liberty of private judgment, if we willconsider it, must at all times have existed in the world. Dante hadnot put-out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he was at home inthat Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in it, if many a poorHogstraten, Tetzel and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty ofjudgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could evercompel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his ownindefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believethere, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by somekind of _conviction_, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His'private judgment' indicated that, as the advisablest step _he_ couldtake. The right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true man _believes_ with his wholejudgment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in him, and has always so believed. A false man, only struggling to 'believethat he believes, ' will naturally manage it in some other way. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe! and to the former, Well done!At bottom, it was no new saying; it was a return to all old sayingsthat ever had been said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it. Mahomet believed with his whole mind; Odin with hiswhole mind, --he, and all _true_ Followers of Odinism. They, by theirprivate judgment, had 'judged'--_so_. 

And now, I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment, faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfishindependence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the oppositeof that. It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-belief and untruth that make it. A man protestingagainst error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men thatbelieve in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believeonly in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power ofsympathy even with _things_, --or he would believe _them_ and nothearsays. No sympathy even with things; how much less with hisfellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in aworld of sincere men is unity possible;--and there, in the longrun, itis as good as _certain_. 

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or ratheraltogether lost sight of, in this controversy: That it is notnecessary a man should himself have _discovered_ the truth he is tobelieve in, and never so _sincerely_ to believe in. A Great Man, wesaid, was always sincere, as the first condition of him. But a manneed not be great in order to be sincere; that is not the necessity ofNature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs ofTime. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;--and with boundless gratitude tothat other! The merit of _originality_ is not novelty; it issincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever hebelieves, he believes it for himself, not for another. Every son ofAdam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense; nomortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole ages, what we call agesof Faith, are original; all men in them, or the most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every worker, in allspheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance; every workissues in a result: the general sum of such work is great; for all ofit, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is _additive_, noneof it subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty, alltrue and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth can produceblessedness for men. 

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, orwhat we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposinghim to reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes, necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's deadformulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyesopen, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them beforehe can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a rightgratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who hasdelivered him out of darkness into light. Is not such a one a trueHero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster, Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his valour;it was he that conquered the world for us!--See, accordingly, was notLuther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, _being_verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty andSovereignty are everlasting in the world:--and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but onrealities and sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your 'privatejudgment;' no, but by opening them, and by having something to see!Luther's message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes andPotentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuineones. 

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independenceand so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sadenough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty ofsins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that arecoming. In all ways, it behoved men to quit simulacra and return tofact; cost what it might, that did behove to be done. With spuriousPopes, and Believers having no private judgment, --quacks pretending tocommand over dupes, --what can you do? Misery and mischief only. Youcannot make an association out of insincere men; you cannot build anedifice except by plummet and level, --at _right_-angles to oneanother! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantismdownwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolitionof Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean _sincere man_, why may not every one of us be a Hero? Aworld all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like willagain be, --cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippersfor Heroes: never could the truly Better be so reverenced as where allwere True and Good!--But we must hasten to Luther and his Life. 

 * * * * *

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the worldthere on the 10th of November 1483. It was an accident that gave thishonour to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-labourers in a village ofthat region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in thetumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, foundrefuge in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTINLUTHER. Strange enough to reflect upon it. This poor Frau Luther, shehad gone with her husband to make her small merchandisings; perhaps tosell the lock of yarn she had been spinning, to buy the smallwinter-necessaries for her narrow hut or household; in the wholeworld, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-lookingpair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were allEmperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon overlong centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and itshistory was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leadsus back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, EighteenHundred years ago, --of which it is fit that we _say_ nothing, that wethink only in silence; for what words are there! The Age of Miraclespast? The Age of Miracles is forever here!--

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth, anddoubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding overhim and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought-up poor, one of the poorest of men. He had to beg, as the schoolchildren inthose times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy's companion; no man norno thing would put-on a false face to flatter Martin Luther. Amongthings, not among the shows of things, had he to grow. A boy of rudefigure, yet with weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of allfaculty and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task toget acquainted with _realities_, and keep acquainted with them, atwhatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world back to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance! A youth nursed-up in wintrywhirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that he maystep-forth at last from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian Odin, --a right Thor once more, with histhunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough _Jötuns_ andGiant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that deathof his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther hadstruggled-up through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in spiteof all hindrances, the largest intellect, eager to learn: his fatherjudging doubtless that he might promote himself in the world, set himupon the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther, with littlewill in it either way, had consented: he was now nineteen years ofage. Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people at Mansfeldt;were got back again near Erfurt, when a thunderstorm came on; the boltstruck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What is this Life ofours?--gone in a moment, burnt-up like a scroll, into the blankEternity! What are all earthly preferments, Chancellorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together--there! The Earth has opened onthem; in a moment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to theheart, determined to devote himself to God and God's service alone. Inspite of all dissuasions from his father and others, he became a Monkin the Augustine Convent at Erfurt. 

This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther, hispurer will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the present, it was still as one light-point in an element all of darkness. He sayshe was a pious monk, _ich bin ein frommer Mönch gewesen_; faithfully, painfully struggling to work-out the truth of this high act of his;but it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened; had rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries he had to do, asnovice in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work, were not hisgrievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into all mannerof black scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely to diesoon, and far worse than die. One hears with a new interest for poorLuther that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakablemisery; fancied that he was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it notthe humble sincere nature of the man? What was he, that he should beraised to Heaven! He that had known only misery, and mean slavery: thenews was too blessed to be credible. It could not become clear to himhow, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's soul couldbe saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had to wanderstaggering as on the verge of bottomless Despair. 

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Biblewhich he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had neverseen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fastsand vigils. A brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful. Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but bythe infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He graduallygot himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate theBible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as theWord of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined tohold by that; as through life and to death he firmly did. 

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph overdarkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most importantof all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness;that, unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, heshould rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be foundmore and more useful in all honest business of life, is a naturalresult. He was sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man oftalent and fidelity fit to do their business well: the Elector ofSaxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, hadcast his eye on him as a valuable person; made him Professor in hisnew University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in bothwhich capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in thepeaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem withall good men. 

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sentthither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius theSecond, and what was going-on at Rome, must have filled the mind ofLuther with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne ofGod's Highpriest on Earth; and he found it--what we know! Manythoughts it must have given the man; many which we have no record of, which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, thisscene of false priests, clothed not in the beauty of holiness, but infar other vesture, is _false_: but what is it to Luther? A mean manhe, how shall he reform a world? That was far from his thoughts. Ahumble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the world? Itwas the task of quite higher men than he. His business was to guidehis own footsteps wisely through the world. Let him do his own obscureduty in it well; the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is inGod's hand, not in his. 

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had RomanPopery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wastefulorbit, and not come athwart his little path, and force him to assaultit! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held hispeace about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, todeal with them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attackirreverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to dohis own duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, andsave his own soul alive. But the Roman Highpriesthood did come athwarthim: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honestyfor it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck-at, struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This isworth attending to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. Wecannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence inthe shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march throughthis world was the Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in afew years, he should either have attained that, or lost it forever! Wewill say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, ofits being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk againstthe Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and producedthe Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it, if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought bywhich it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man likeLuther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing withyou. 

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by LeoTenth, --who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the restseems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he wasanything, --arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous tradethere. Luther's flock bought Indulgences: in the confessional of hisChurch, people pleaded to him that they had already got their sinspardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, afalse sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space ofground that was his own and no other man's, had to step-forth againstIndulgences, and declare aloud that _they_ were a futility andsorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by _them_. Itwas the beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went;forward from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day ofOctober 1517, through remonstrance and argument;--spreading everwider, rising ever higher; till it became unquenchable, and envelopedall the world. Luther's heart's-desire was to have this grief andother griefs amended; his thought was still far other than that ofintroducing separation in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom. --The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about thisMonk and his doctrines; wished, however, to have done with the noiseof him: in a space of some three years, having tried various softermethods, he thought good to end it by _fire_. He dooms the Monk'swritings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound toRome, --probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had endedwith Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginablepromises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man:they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon 'three-feet wide, six-feethigh, seven-feet long;' _burnt_ the true voice of him out of thisworld; choked it in smoke and fire. That was _not_ well done!

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against thePope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled intonoble just wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. Thebravest, if also one of the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on Earth, andsave men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, answer them by thehangman and fire? You will burn me and them, for answer to theGod's-message they strove to bring you? _You_ are not God'svicegerent; you are another's than his, I think I take your Bull, asan emparchmented Lie, and burn _it_. You will do what you see goodnext: this is what I do. --It was on the 10th of December 1520, threeyears after the beginning of the business, that Luther, 'with a greatconcourse of people, ' took this indignant step of burning the Pope'sfire-decree 'at the Elster-Gate of Wittenberg. ' Wittenberg looked on'with shoutings;' the whole world was looking on. The Pope should nothave provoked that 'shout'! It was the shout of the awakening ofnations. The quiet German heart, modest, patient of much, had atlength got more than it could bear. Formulism, Pagan Popeism, andother Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had ruled long enough: and hereonce more was a man found who durst tell all men that God's worldstood not on semblances but on realities; that Life was a truth, andnot a lie!

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a ProphetIdol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function ofgreat men and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are wood;you put wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are notGod, I tell you, they are black wood! Luther said to the Pope, Thisthing of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit ofrag-paper with ink. It _is_ nothing else; it, and so much like it, isnothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritualFatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth andparchment? It is an awful fact. God's Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand on this, since you driveme to it. Standing on this, I a poor German monk am stronger than youall. I stand solitary, friendless, but on God's Truth; you with yourtiaras, triple-hats, with your treasuries and armories, thundersspiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil's Lie, and are not sostrong!--

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern EuropeanHistory; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history ofcivilisation takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritualand temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer forhimself, whether he will recant or not. The world's pomp and powersits there on this hand: on that, stands-up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company offriends rode-out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; heanswered, "Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on. " The people, on the morrow, as he went to the Hall of theDiet, crowded the windows and housetops, some of them calling out tohim, in solemn words, not to recant: "Whosoever denieth me beforemen!" they cried to him, --as in a kind of solemn petition andadjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition ofthe whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul, paralysed under ablack spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera, calling itselfFather in God, and what not: "Free us; it rests with thee; desert usnot!"

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguisheditself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive towhatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any morethan that. His writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derivedfrom the Word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity enteredinto it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which itwere a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to whatstood on sound truth and the Word of God, he could not recant it. Howcould he? "Confute me, " he concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or elseby plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neithersafe nor prudent to do ought against conscience. Here stand I; I cando no other: God assist me!"--It is, as we say, the greatest moment inthe Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and itsParliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries; FrenchRevolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of itall lay there: had Luther in that moment done other, it had all beenotherwise! The European World was asking him: Am I to sink ever lowerinto falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be curedand live?--

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Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation;which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk andcrimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but after all what has Luther or his cause to do withthem? It seems strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with allthis. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Augeas'sstables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted was considerableall around: but I think it was not Hercules's blame; it was someother's blame! The Reformation might bring what results it liked whenit came, but the Reformation simply could not help coming. To allPopes and Popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and accusing, theanswer of the world is: Once for all, your Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good you say it is, we cannot believeit; the light of our whole mind, given us to walk-by from Heavenabove, finds it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believeit, we will not try to believe it, --we dare not! The thing is_untrue_; we were traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durstpretend to think it true. Away with it; let whatsoever likes come inthe place of it: with _it_ we can have no farther trade!--Luther andhis Protestantism is not responsible for wars; the false Simulacrathat forced him to protest, they are responsible. Luther did whatevery man that God has made has not only the right, but lies under thesacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dostthou believe me?--No!--At what cost soever, without counting of costs, this thing behoved to be done. Union, organisation spiritual andmaterial, a far nobler than, any Popedom or Feudalism in their truestdays, I never doubt, is coming for the world; sure to come. But onFact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either tocome, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, andordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, letus not be unjust to the Old. The Old _was_ true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding, or otherdishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay thereis in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of 'No Popery' isfoolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on theincrease, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one of theidlest ever started. Very curious: to count-up a few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings, --to much dull-droning, drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say: See, Protestantism is _dead_; Popeism is more alive than it, will be aliveafter it!--Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselvesProtestant are dead; but _Protestantism_ has not died yet, that I hearof! Protestantism, if we will look, has in these days produced itsGoethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and the French Revolution;rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom, what else is alive_but_ Protestantism? The life of most else that one meets is agalvanic one merely, --not a pleasant, not a lasting sort of life!

Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Poperycannot come back, any more than Paganism can, --_which_ also stilllingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, aswith the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for _minutes_ you cannot tell how it is going;look in half an hour where it is, --look in half a century where yourPopehood is! Alas, would there were no greater danger to our Europethan the poor old Pope's revival! Thor may as soon try to revive. --Andwithal this oscillation has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will notdie away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may say, the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul ofgood that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New. While a good work remains capable of being done by the Romish form;or, what is inclusive of all, while a _pious life_ remains capable ofbeing led by it, just so long, if we consider, will this or the otherhuman soul adopt it, go about as a living witness of it. So long itwill obtrude itself on the eye of us who reject it, till we in ourpractice too have appropriated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no charm more for any man. Itlasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it can. --

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Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars andbloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as hecontinued living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long ashe was there. To me it is proof of his greatness in all senses, thisfact. How seldom do we find a man that has stirred-up some vastcommotion, who does not himself perish, swept-away in it! Such is theusual course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rankor function soever, looking much to him for guidance: and he held itpeaceable, continued firm at the centre of it. A man to do this musthave a kingly faculty: he must have the gift to discern at all turnswhere the true heart of the matter lies, and to plant himselfcourageously on that, as a strong true man, that other true men mayrally round him there. He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's clear deep force of judgment, his force of all sorts, of_silence_, of tolerance and moderation, among others, are very notablein these circumstances. 

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguisheswhat is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very muchas it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a ReformedPreacher, 'will not preach without a cassock. ' Well, answers Luther, what harm will a cassock do the man? 'Let him have a cassock to preachin; let him have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!' Hisconduct in the matter of Karlstadt's wild image-breaking; of theAnabaptists; of the Peasants' War, shows a noble strength, verydifferent from spasmodic violence. With sure prompt insight hediscriminates what is what: a strong just man, he speaks-forth what isthe wise course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's WrittenWorks give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculationsis now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singularattraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legibleenough; Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest; hisdialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quiteother than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a morerobust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. Arugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense andstrength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomaticphrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humourtoo, nay tender affection, nobleness, and depth: this man could havebeen a Poet too! He had to _work_ an Epic Poem, not write one. I callhim a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokensthat. 

Richter says of Luther's words, 'his words are half-battles. ' They maybe called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fightand conquer; that he was a right piece of human Valour. No morevaliant man, no mortal heart to be called _braver_, that one hasrecord of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character isvalour. His defiance of the 'Devils' in Worms was not a mere boast, asthe like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's that therewere Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns-up; and a most small sneer hasbeen grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sattranslating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall;the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translatingone of the Psalms; he was worn-down with long labour, with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous indefinableImage, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Lutherstarted-up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monumentof several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what weare to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense: but the man'sheart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, cangive no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail beforeexists not on this Earth or under it. --Fearless enough! 'The Devil isaware, ' writes he on one occasion, 'that this does not proceed out offear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George, 'of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, 'Duke George is not equal to oneDevil, '--far short of a Devil! 'If I had business at Leipzig, I wouldride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke-Georges for nine daysrunning. ' What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into!--

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's couragewas ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as manydo. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises fromthe absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred andstupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! WithLuther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust thanthis of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentleheart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heartever is. The tiger before a _stronger_ foe--flies: the tiger is notwhat we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things moretouching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a child's ora mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure aswater welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that downpressedmood of despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but theoutcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen andfine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak man;modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction ofhim. It is a noble valour which is roused in a heart like this, oncestirred-up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze. 

In Luther's _Table-Talk_, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayingscollected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Booksproceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays ofthe man, and what sort of nature he had. His behaviour at the deathbedof his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among themost affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene shoulddie, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;--follows, inawe-struck thought, the flight of her little soul through thoseunknown realms. Awe-struck; most heartfelt, we can see; andsincere, --for after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels whatnothing it is that we know, or can know: His little Magdalene shall bewith God, as God wills; for Luther too that is all; _Islam_ is all. 

Once, he looks-out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg, inthe middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights ofclouds sailing through it, --dumb, gaunt, huge:--who supports all that?"None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported. " God supportsit. We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, wherewe cannot see. --Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by thebeauty of the harvest-fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and wavingthere, --the meek Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it onceagain; the bread of man!--In the garden at Wittenburg one evening atsunset, a little bird was perched for the night: That little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet ithas folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in itshome: the Maker of it has given it too a home!--Neither are mirthfulturns wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. Thecommon speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feelshim to be a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wildunutterability he spoke-forth from him in the tones of his flute. TheDevils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call these the twoopposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things hadroom. 

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraitsI find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-likebrows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost arepulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silentsorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fineaffections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughterwas in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears alsowere appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life wasSadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs andvictories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considersthat God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, andthat perhaps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs forone thing: that God would release him from his labour, and let himdepart and be at rest. They understand little of the man who cite thisin _dis_credit of him!--I will call this Luther a true Great Man;great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of ourmost lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as anAlpine mountain, --so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting-up to begreat at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ahyes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yetin the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! Aright Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature andFact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will bethankful to Heaven. 

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes, especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's owncountry Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not areligion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it scepticalcontention: which indeed has jangled more and more, down toVoltaireism itself, --through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onward toFrench-Revolution ones! But in our Island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and NationalChurch among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of theheart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In somesenses, one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that evergot to the rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication withHeaven, and of exhibiting itself in History as such. We must spare afew words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still moreimportant as Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider him tobe, of the Faith that became Scotland's, New England's, OliverCromwell's. History will have something to say about this, for sometime to come!

We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose, but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men, may understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes bywager-of-battle in this world; that _strength_, well understood, isthe measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it isa right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little Factof the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from DelftHaven in Holland! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were, we hadfound a Poem here; one of Nature's own Poems; such as she writes inbroad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginningof America: there were straggling settlers in America before, somematerial as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven-out of their country, not able well to live inHolland, determine on settling in the New World. Black untamed forestsare there, and wild savage creatures; but not so cruel as Starchamberhangmen. They thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilledhonestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch there too, overhead;they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living wellin this world of Time; worshipping in what they thought the true, notthe idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together; hired aship, the little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail. 

In Neal's _History of the Puritans_[5] is an account of the ceremonyof their departure: solemnity, we might call it rather, for it was areal act of worship. Their minister went down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they were to leave behind; all joined insolemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and _go_with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, Hewas there also as well as here. --Hah! These men, I think, had a work!The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it bea true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; butnobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons andsinews; it has fire-arms, war-navies; it has cunning in its tenfingers, strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;--it is one of the strongest things under the sun atpresent!

 [5] Neal (London, 1755), i. 490. 

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch: wemay say it contains nothing of world-interest at all but thisReformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness anddestitution, little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungryfierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with eachother _how to divide_ what they fleeced from these poor drudges; butobliged, as the Columbian Republics are at this day, to make of everyalteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hangingthe old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of novery singular significance! 'Bravery' enough, I doubt not; fiercefighting in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of theirold Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; _whose_ exploits we have notfound worth dwelling on! It is a country as yet without a soul:nothing developed in it but what is rude, external, semi-animal. Andnow at the Reformation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward material death. A cause, the noblest ofcauses kindles itself, like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yetattainable from Earth;--whereby the meanest man becomes not a Citizenonly, but a Member of Christ's visible Church; a veritable Hero, if heprove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole 'nation of heroes;' a _believing_nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs agod-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be agreat soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be againseen, under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lastinggood done till then. --Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not_been_, in this world, as a practised fact? Did Hero-worship fail inKnox's case? Or are we made of other clay now? Did the WestminsterConfession of Faith add some new property to the soul of man? God madethe soul of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as aHypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with thefatal work and fruit of such!----

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may reallycall a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; butit was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been farrougher. On the whole, cheap at any price;--as life is. The peoplebegan to _live_: they needed first of all to do that, at what cost andcosts soever. Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; JamesWatt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find Knox and theReformation acting in the heart's core of every one of these personsand phenomena; I find that without the Reformation they would not havebeen. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that ofEngland, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburghspread into a universal battle and struggle over all theserealms;--there came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we callthe '_Glorious_ Revolution, ' a _Habeas-Corpus_ Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!--Alas, is it not too true what we said, That many menin the van do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch ofSchweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear maypass over them dry-shod and gain the honour? How many earnest ruggedCromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenants, wrestling, battling forvery life, in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, andfall, greatly censured, _bemired_, --before a beautiful Revolution ofEighty-eight can step-over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, with universal three-times-three!

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now afterthree-hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before theworld; intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was thenpossible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poorHalf-and-half, he could have crouched into the corner, like so manyothers; Scotland had not been delivered; and Knox had been withoutblame. He is the one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country andthe world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would forgive himfor having been worth to it any million 'unblamable' Scotchmen thatneed no forgiveness! He bared his breast to the battle; had to row inFrench galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms; wascensured, shot-at through his windows; had a right sore fighting life:if this world were his place of recompense, he had made but a badventure of it. I cannot apologise for Knox. To him it is veryindifferent, these two-hundred-and-fifty years or more, what men sayof him. But we, having got above all those details of his battle, andliving now in clearness on the fruits of his victory, we, for our ownsake, ought to look through the rumours and controversies envelopingthe man, into the man himself. 

For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nationwas not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had gota college education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, andseemed well content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowiseunduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen'sfamilies; preaching when any body of persons wished to hear hisdoctrine: resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth whencalled to do it; not ambitious of more; not fancying himself capableof more. In this entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty;was with the small body of Reformers who were standing siege in StAndrew's Castle, --when one day in their chapel, the Preacher afterfinishing his exhortation to these fighters in the forlorn hope, saidsuddenly, That there ought to be other speakers, that all men who hada priest's heart and gift in them ought now to speak;--which gifts andheart one of their own number, John Knox the name of him, had: Had henot? said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience: what then is_his_ duty? The people answered affirmatively; it was a criminalforsaking of his post, if such a man held the word that was in himsilent. Poor Knox was obliged to stand-up; he attempted to reply; hecould say no word;--burst into a flood of tears, and ran out. It isworth remembering, that scene. He was in grievous trouble for somedays. He felt what a small faculty was his for this great work. Hefelt what a baptism he was called to be baptised withal. He 'burstinto tears. '

Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, appliesemphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatevermight be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truthalone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptivenonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that andthat only _can_ he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St Andrew's wastaken, had been sent as Galley-slaves, --some officer or priest, oneday, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, requiring thatthey, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? Motherof God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother ofGod: this is 'a _pented bredd_, '--a piece of wood, I tell you, withpaint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for beingworshipped, added Knox, and flung the thing into the river. It was notvery cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing toKnox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a_pented bredd_; worship it he would not. 

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage;the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; thewhole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it isalone strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, arefitter to swim than to be worshipped!--This Knox cannot live but byfact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. Heis an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic:it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honestintellectual talent, no transcendent one;--a narrow, inconsiderableman, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherenceto truth, in _sincerity_, as we say, he has no superior; nay, onemight ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophetcast. "He lies there, " said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "whonever feared the face of man. " He resembles, more than any of themoderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in thename of God to all that forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in theguise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are totake him for that; not require him to be other. 

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in herown palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Suchcruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading theactual narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are notso coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as thecircumstances would permit! Knox was not there to do the courtier; hecame on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his withthe Queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to adelicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of themaltogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with theQueen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause ofScotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made ahunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the Cause of Godtrampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause, hadno method of making himself agreeable! "Better that women weep, " saidMorton, "than that bearded men be forced to weep. " Knox was theconstitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles of thecountry, called by their station to take that post, were not found init; Knox had to go or no one. The hapless Queen;--but the still morehapless Country, if _she_ were made happy! Mary herself was notwithout sharpness enough, among her other qualities: "Who are you, "said she once, "that presume to school the nobles and sovereign ofthis realm?"--"Madam, a subject born within the same, " answered he. Reasonably answered! If the 'subject' have truth to speak, it is notthe 'subject's' footing that will fail him here. --

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that eachof us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talkthere is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has totolerate the _un_essential; and to see well what that is. Tolerancehas to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it cantolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here totolerate! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We donot 'tolerate' Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten onus; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We arehere to extinguish Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some wiseway! I will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thingis our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant. 

A man sent to row in French Galleys, and suchlike, for teaching theTruth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humour! I amnot prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that hehad what we call an ill-temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest affections dwell in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he _could_ rebuke Queens, and had such weightamong those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough whatever else theywere; and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual Presidency andSovereignty in that wild realm, he who was only 'a subject born withinthe same:' this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close athand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They blame himfor pulling-down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a seditiousrioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact, inregard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wanted nopulling-down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness to bethrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element; it was thetragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much inthat. Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it:but what then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the generalsum-total of _Dis_order. Order is _Truth_, --each thing standing on thebasis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together. 

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him;which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has atrue eye for the ridiculous. His _History_, with its roughearnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidlyup, take to hustling one another, twitching one another's rochets, andat last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a greatsight for him everyway! Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone; thoughthere is enough of that too. But a true, loving, illuminating laughmounts-up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would say, alaugh in the _eyes_ most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man;brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathywith both. He has his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we find, in that oldEdinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with faces that lovedhim! They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type ofcharacter we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonictaciturnity is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than hehimself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over manythings which do not vitally concern him, --"They? what are they?" Butthe thing which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of;and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear: all the moreemphatic for his long silence. 

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!--He had a sorefight of an existence: wrestling with Popes and Principalities; indefeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?"they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. Helifted his finger, 'pointed upwards with his finger, ' and so died. Honour to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never. 

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivableoffence in him is, that he wished to set-up Priests over the head ofKings. In other words he strove to make the Government of Scotland a_Theocracy_. This indeed is properly the sum of his offences, theessential sin; for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, hedid, at bottom, consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, orGovernment of God. He did mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, and allmanner of persons, in public or private, diplomatising or whateverelse they might be doing, should walk according to the Gospel ofChrist, and understand that this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realised; and the Petition, _ThyKingdom come_, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when hesaw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; whenhe expostulated that it was not secular property, that it wasspiritual property, and should be turned to _true_ churchly uses, education, schools, worship;--and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders, "It is a devout imagination!" This wasKnox's scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavoured after, to realise it. If we think this scheme of truth was too narrow, wasnot true, we may rejoice that he could not realise it; that itremained after two centuries of effort, unrealisable, and is a 'devoutimagination' still. But how shall we blame _him_ for struggling torealise it? Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing to bestruggled for! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for thatpurpose. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought forit; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous men, whethercalled Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else called, do essentiallywish, and must wish? That right and truth, or God's Law, reign supremeamong men, this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time, andnamable in all times, a revealed 'Will of God') towards which theReformer will insist that all be more and more approximated. All trueReformers, as I said, are by the nature of them Priests, and strivefor a Theocracy. 

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at whatpoint our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, isalways a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introducethemselves as far as they can contrive to do it! If they are the truefaith of men, all men ought to be more or less impatient always wherethey are not found introduced. There will never be wanting RegentMurrays enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, "A devoutimagination!" We will praise the Hero-priest, rather, who does what isin _him_ to bring them in; and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

LECTURE V

THE HERO AS A MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS. 

[_Tuesday, 19th May 1840_]

Hero-gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belongto the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some ofthem have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more showthemselves in this world. The Hero as _Man of Letters_, again, ofwhich class we are to speak today, is altogether a product of thesenew ages; and so long as the wondrous art of _Writing_, or ofReady-writing which we call _Printing_, subsists, he may be expectedto continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon. 

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the worldyet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figureof a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavouring tospeak-forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and findplace and subsistence by what the world would please to give him fordoing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its ownbargain in the marketplace; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soulnever till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights andcopy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (forthis is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations andgenerations who would, or would not, give him bread while living, --isa rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be moreunexpected. 

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strangeshapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, soforeign is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such, some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wisegreat Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idlenon-descript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a fewcoins and applauses thrown in, that he might live thereby; _this_perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasisof things!--Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always thatdetermines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must beregarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teachers, the whole world will do andmake. The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significantfeature of the world's general position. Looking well at his life, wemay get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the lifeof those singular centuries which have produced him, in which weourselves live and work. 

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kindthere is a genuine and a spurious. If _Hero_ be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging afunction for us which is ever honourable, ever the highest; and wasonce well known to be the highest. He is uttering-forth, in such a wayas he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case, cando. I say _inspired_; for what we call 'originality, ' 'sincerity, ''genius, ' the heroic quality we have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under theTemporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, byact or speech as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. His life, aswe said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself:all men's life is, --but the weak many know not the fact, and areuntrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations nameda man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do. 

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago atErlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject:'_Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten_, On the Nature of the Literary Man. 'Fichte, in conformity with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which hewas a distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which wesee or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and allpersons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that underall there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the 'Divine Ideaof the World;' this is the Reality which 'lies at the bottom of allAppearance. ' To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognisable inthe world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there isanything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hitherspecially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itselfin a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Suchis Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his wayof naming what I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly toname; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable DivineSignificance, full of splendour, of wonder and terror, that lies inthe being of every man, of every thing, --the Presence of the God whomade every man and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin inhis: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one dialect oranother, are here to teach. 

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as heprefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike tomen: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life; that all'Appearance, ' whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture forthe 'Divine Idea of the World, ' for 'that which lies at the bottom ofAppearance. ' In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledgedor not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; theworld's Priest:--guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its darkpilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharpzeal the _true_ Literary Man, what we here call the _Hero_ as Man ofLetters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not whollyin this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as forthe one good, to live wholly in it, --he is, let him live where else helike, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a 'Bungler, _Stümper_. ' Or at best, if he belong to theprosaic provinces, he may be a 'Hodman;' Fichte even calls himelsewhere a 'Nonentity, ' and has in short no mercy for him, no wishthat _he_ should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion ofthe Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we heremean. 

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, byfar the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call alife in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divinemystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged oncemore as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendour as of Mahomet, but in mildcelestial radiance;--really a Prophecy in these most unprophetictimes; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosenspecimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it werea very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for Iconsider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, andperhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me anoble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keepingsilence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no mancapable of affording such, for the last hundred-and-fifty years. 

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you would remainproblematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realised. Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, threegreat figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state ofcircumstances, will suit us better here. Three men of the EighteenthCentury; the conditions of their life far more resemble what those ofours still are in England, than what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains ofimpediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, orvictorious interpretation of that 'Divine Idea. ' It is rather the_Tombs_ of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There arethe monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We willlinger by them for a while. 

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call thedisorganised condition of society: how ill many arranged forces ofsociety fulfil their work; how many powerful forces are seen workingin a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just acomplaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books andthe Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary ofall other disorganisation;--a sort of _heart_, from which, and towhich, all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering whatBook-writers do in the world, and what the world does withBook-writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the worldat present has to show. --We should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it forthe sake of our subject. The worst element in the life of these threeLiterary Heroes was, that they found their business and position sucha chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it issore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path through theimpassable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking ofman to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywherein the civilised world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner ofcomplex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a manwith the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. Theyfelt that this was the most important thing; that without this therewas no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautifulto behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, isnot he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day orthat, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the lastimportance that _he_ do his work right, whoever do it wrong;--that the_eye_ report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray!Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or doit at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains tothink of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for hisbooks, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by whathe might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident insociety. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he isas the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things manhas devised. Odin's _Runes_ were the first form of the work of a Hero;_Books_, written words, are still miraculous _Runes_, of the latestform! In Books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time; the articulateaudible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of ithas altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, --theyare precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the manyAgamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to someruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books ofGreece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives;can be called-up again into life. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than aBook. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lyingas in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosenpossession of men. 

Do not Books still accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do?They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages but will help toregulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolishgirls. So 'Celia' felt, so 'Clifford' acted: the foolish Theorem ofLife, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practiceone day. Consider whether any _Rune_ in the wildest imagination ofMythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, someBooks have done! What built St Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart ofthe matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK, --the word partly of theman Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousandyears ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest ofthings, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of whichPrinting is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificantcorollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. Itrelated, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, thePast and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and allplaces with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered formen; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else. 

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too ismodified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while aman, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in thosecircumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he shoulddo it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was anecessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you mustgo and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty-thousand, wentto hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for anyother teacher who had something of his own to teach, there was a greatconvenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were alreadyassembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. Forany third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, themore teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took noticeof this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schoolsinto one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, andnamed it _Universitas_, or School of all Sciences: the University ofParis, in its essential characters, was there. The model of allsubsequent Universities; which down even to these days, for sixcenturies now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, wasthe origin of Universities. 

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility ofgetting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottomwere changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed allUniversities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gathermen personally round him, that he might _speak_ to them what he knew:print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, hadit each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learnit!--Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writersof Books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speakalso, --witness our present meeting here! There _is_, one would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province forSpeech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all thingsthis must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of thetwo have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put inpractice: the University which would completely take-in that great newfact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footingfor the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that aUniversity, or final highest School can do for us, is still but whatthe first School began doing, --teach us to _read_. We learn to _read_, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet andletters of all manner of Books. But the place where we go to getknowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! Itdepends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have donetheir best for us. The true University of these days is a Collectionof Books. 

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in itspreaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church isthe working recognised Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those whoby wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing or _Printing_, the preaching ofthe voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now withBooks!--He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not hethe Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England?I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these _are_ the real working effective Church of a modern country. Naynot only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it tooaccomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which agifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melodyinto our hearts, --is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, inthis confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in anyway, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields isbeautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain ofall Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the greatMaker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, alittle verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he whosings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the nobledoings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He hasverily touched our hearts as with a live coal _from the altar_. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic. 

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an 'apocalypse of Nature, 'a revealing of the 'open secret. ' It may well enough be named, inFichte's style; a 'continuous revelation' of the Godlike in theTerrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endurethere; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with variousdegrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignationof a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay thewithered mockery of a French sceptic, --his mockery of the False, alove and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of aShakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral-music of a Milton! They aresomething too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns, --skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of thenature of worship; as indeed all true _working_ may be said tobe, --whereof such _singing_ is but the record, and fit melodiousrepresentation, to us. Fragments of a real 'Church Liturgy' and 'Bodyof Homilies, ' strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be foundweltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely callLiterature! Books are our Church too. 

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberatedand decided; what we were to _do_ as a nation. But does not, thoughthe name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, _out_ ofParliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates inParliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a _FourthEstate_ more important far than they all. It is not a figure ofspeech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, --very momentous to usin these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, whichcomes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent toDemocracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing bringsPrinting; brings universal every-day extempore Printing, as we see atpresent. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomesa power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight inlaw-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is, that he have atongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more isrequisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in thenation: Democracy is virtually _there_. Add only, that whatsoeverpower exists will have itself, by and by, organised; working secretlyunder bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till itget to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtuallyextant will insist on becoming palpably extant. --

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the thingswhich man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits ofrag-paper with black ink on them;--from the Daily Newspaper to thesacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they notdoing!--For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits ofpaper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, thehighest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the _Thought_of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all thingswhatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of aThought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;--ahuge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to _think_of the making of that brick. --The thing we called 'bits of paper withtraces of black ink, ' is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man canhave. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest. 

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man ofLetters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degreesuperseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the _Senatus Academicus_ and muchelse, has been admitted for a good while; and recognised often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. Itseems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to thePractical. If Men of Letters _are_ so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even fromday to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will notalways wander like unrecognised unregulated Ishmaelites among us!Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power willcastoff its wrappages, bandages, and step-forth one day with palpablyarticulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite another:there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. Andyet, alas, the _making_ of it right, --what a business, for long timesto come! Sure enough, this that we call Organisation of the LiteraryGuild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner ofcomplexities. If you asked me what were the best possible organisationfor the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement offurtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actualfacts of their position and of the world's position, --I should beg tosay that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man'sfaculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring-out even an approximate solution. What the bestarrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is theworst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpirein it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet along way. 

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants ofmoney are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men ofLetters stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will dolittle towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearingabout the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuineman, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Menpoor, --to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to _beg_, were instituted in the ChristianChurch; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit ofChristianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress andDegradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, andlearned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has misseda good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarsewoollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all theworld, was no beautiful business;--nor an honourable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honoured of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest ofit, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for beingpoor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outwardprofit, that success of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in hisheart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast-out of hisheart, --to be, with whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth fromit, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made-out evenless than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same 'bestpossible organisation' as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as animportant element? What if our Men of Letters, Men setting-up to beSpiritual Heroes, were still _then_, as they now are, a kind of'involuntary monastic order;' bound still to this same uglyPoverty, --till they had tried what was in it too, till they hadlearned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, butit cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it; andeven spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther. 

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, thefit assigner of them, all settled, --how is the Burns to be recognisedthat merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. _This_ ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called LiteraryLife; this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the ideathat a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upperregions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men areborn there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, andmust constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men ofLetters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle?There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy ofblind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other;one of the thousand arriving saved, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lostby the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, orharnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-heartedas a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindlingFrench Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearlyenough the _worst_ regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, asyet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they doinfallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; andrest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplishedthat. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes atpresent extant in the world, there is no class comparable forimportance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a factwhich he who runs may read, --and draw inferences from. "Literaturewill take care of itself, " answered Mr Pitt, when applied-to for somehelp for Burns. "Yes, " adds Mr Southey, "it will take care of itself;_and of you too_, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; theyare but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; theycan struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But itdeeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ onhigh places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter itin all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore!Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head ofthe world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be thebest world man can make it. I call this anomaly of a disorganicLiterary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product andparent; some good arrangement for that would be as the _punctumsaliens_ of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, insome European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces somebeginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating thegradual possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that itwill have to be possible. 

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one onwhich we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endlesscuriosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt tomake their Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this was done, or with what degree of success itwas done. All such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a smalldegree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! Theredoes seem to be, all over China, a more or less active searcheverywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the younggeneration. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort oftraining, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves inthe lower school are promoted into favourable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves, --forward and forward:it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipientGovernors, are taken. These are they whom they _try_ first, whetherthey can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they arethe men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have notgoverned or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is nodoubt they _have_ some Understanding, without which no man can!Neither is Understanding a _tool_, as we are too apt to figure; 'it isa _hand_ which can handle any tool. ' Try these men: they are of allothers the best worth trying. --Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I knowof in this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of allconstitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the man oftrue intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the nobleheartedman withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get _him_ forgovernor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutionsplentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there isnothing yet got!--

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonlyspeculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these thingswill require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to bein some way put in practice. These and many others. On all hands ofus, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire ofRoutine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason forits continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen intodecay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in everysociety of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by thethings which have been. When millions of men can no longer by theirutmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third man forthirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes, ' thethings which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!--Iwill now quit this of the organisation of Men of Letters. 

 * * * * *

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ourswas not the want of organisation for Men of Letters, but a far deeperone; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for theLiterary Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, takenrise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos, --and to leave his own lifeand faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards _pushing_some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been soperverted and paralysed, he might have put up with, might haveconsidered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery wasthe _spiritual paralysis_, so we may name it, of the Age in which hislife lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half-paralysed!The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century; in which little word thereis a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means notintellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of _in_fidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that onecould specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism moredifficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith, --an age of Heroes!The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formallyabnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The 'age of miracles' hadbeen, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effeteworld; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;--in oneword, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time, --comparednot with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old PaganSkalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died-out into the clanking of aWorld-MACHINE. 'Tree' and 'Machine': contrast these two things. I, formy share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does notgo by wheel-and-pinion 'motives, ' self-interests, checks, balances;that there is something far other in it than the clank ofspinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all!--The old Norse Heathen had a truernotion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the oldHeathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But for these poor Sceptics therewas no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the numberof votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity waspossible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am notI sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanicallife, was the characteristic of that century. For the common man, unless happily he stood _below_ his century and belonged to anotherprior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to workhimself half-loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, mosttragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, asthe chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to besaid! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of oneDiscourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century andits ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now callScepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against whichall teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directeditself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-endingbattle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish tospeak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay ofold ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better andwider ways, --an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; wewill lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction ofold _forms_ is not destruction of everlasting _substances_; thatScepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but abeginning. 

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham'stheory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly onethan Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, thatsuch is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence againstthe man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Benthamhimself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparativelyworthy of praise. It is a determinate _being_ what all the world, in acowardly, half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have thecrisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was alaying down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is adead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; letus see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of toothand pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true;you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its _eyes_ put out! Itis the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in thehalf-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in thatEighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and alllip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courageand honesty. Benthamism is an _eyeless_ Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, claspsconvulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, butultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm. 

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in thefatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That allGodhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seemsto me precisely the most brutal error, --I will not disparageHeathenism by calling it a Heathen error, --that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinksso will think _wrong_ about all things in the world; this original sinwill vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it themost lamentable of delusions, --not forgetting Witchcraft itself!Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil: but this worships adead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil!--Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywherein life a despicable _caput-mortuum_; the mechanical hull, all soulfled out of it. How can a man act heroically? The 'Doctrine ofMotives' will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, ofapplause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimatefact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;--which does indeed frightfullypunish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man;this god-like Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working bymotives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in thedetestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he thepoor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysteriousindescribable process, that of getting to believe;--indescribable, asall vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may caviland argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear beliefand understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed toact. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rushout, clutch-up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that!All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Greek: skepsis] as it is named, aboutall manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is themystic working of the mind, on the object it is _getting_ to know andbelieve. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the treefrom its hidden _roots_. But now if, even on common things, we requirethat a man keep his doubts _silent_, and not babble of them till theyin some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more inregard to the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all!That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating andlogic (which means at best only the manner of _telling_ us yourthought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph andtrue work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should_overturn_ the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves, and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned-up into the air, --and no growth, only death and misery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; It is moralalso; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives bybelieving something; not by debating and arguing about many things. Asad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is somethinghe can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat anddigest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in whichhe gets so low the mournfulest, sickest, and meanest of all ages. Theworld's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole?Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dextrousSimilitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, theworld's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, whichalso was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, soabounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth! Consider them, with theirtumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence, --the wretchedQuack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were withoutquackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient andamalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down tothe House, all wrapt and bandaged; he 'has crawled out in great bodilysuffering, ' and so on;--_forgets_, says Walpole, that he is acting thesick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, andoratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives thestrangest mimetic life, half hero, half quack, all along. For indeedthe world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the _world's_suffrage! How the duties of the world will be done in that case, whatquantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow andmisery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in allprovinces of the world's business, we need not compute. 

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world'smaladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; agodless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that thewhole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, andwhat not, have derived their being, their chief necessity to be. Thismust alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My onehope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at themiseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here and there onedoes now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead orparalytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man onceknowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. Itlies there clear, for whosoever will take the _spectacles_ off hiseyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man, the UnbelievingCentury, with its unblessed Products, is already past: a new centuryis already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solidas they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this andthe other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole worldhuzzahing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thouart not _true_; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way!--Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheisticInsincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelievingEighteenth Century is but an exception, --such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become _sincere_; a believingworld: with _many_ Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be avictorious world; never till then!

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too muchabout the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own tolead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; nosecond chance to us forevermore! It were well for _us_ to live not asfools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's beingsaved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. Weshould look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the 'duty ofstaying at home'! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of'worlds' being 'saved' in any other way. That mania of saving worldsis itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windysentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the_world_ I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look alittle to my own saving, which I am more competent to!--In brief, forthe world's sake, and for our own, we will rejoice greatly thatScepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all theirpoison-dews, are going, and as good as gone. --

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that ourMen of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truthin life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, nottrying to speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk ofthe world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any FrenchRevolution, --which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truthclad in hellfire! How different was the Luther's Pilgrimage, with itsassured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulaswere of 'wood waxed and oiled, ' and could be _burnt_ out of one's way:poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn. --The strong man willever find _work_, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure ofhis strength. But to make-out a victory, in those circumstances of ourpoor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorganisation, Bookseller Osborne andFourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his ownsoul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what isthat to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not wonder that noneof those Three men rose to victory. That they fought truly is thehighest praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if notthree living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallenHeroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There are themountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of theGiants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lieburied. 

 * * * * *

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly orincidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not bespoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular_Prophets_ of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and theaspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, mightlead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Menmore or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling tobe genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poorartificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to beconsidered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, asProphets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself, a noble necessitywas laid on them to be so. They were men of such magnitude that theycould not live on unrealities, --clouds, froth and all inanity gave-wayunder them: there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no restor regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To acertain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age ofArtifice; once more, Original Men. 

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one ofour great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much leftundeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might henot have been, --Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a manmust not complain of his 'element, ' of his 'time, ' or the like; it isthriftless work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there tomake it better!--Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, verymiserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any thefavourablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have beenother than a painful one. The world might have had more of profitable_work_ out of him, or less; but his _effort_ against the world's workcould never have been a light one. Nature, in return for hisnobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and eveninseparably connected with each other. At all events, poor Johnson hadto go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritualpain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on him, whichshoots-in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to bestript-off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner _he_ had tolive. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his greatgreedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful asa stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing hecould come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, ifthere were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England;and provision made for it of 'fourpence-halfpenny a day. ' Yet a giantinvincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of theshoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitorstalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn-out; how thecharitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door;and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, withhis dim eyes, with what thoughts, --pitches them out of window! Wetfeet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannotstand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulnesswithal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching-away of theshoes. An original man;--not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as weourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly onthat;--on the reality and substance which Nature gives _us_, not onthe semblance, on the thing she has given another than us!--

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help was thereever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what wasreally higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. Icould not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That thesincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World ofHeroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of_originality_ is not that it be _new_: Johnson believed altogether inthe old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; andin a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study inregard to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than amere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. Hestood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could sostand: but in all formulas that _he_ could stand by, there needed tobe a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, thegreat Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonised hisFormulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: thatis a thing worth seeing. A thing 'to be looked at with reverence, withpity, with awe. ' That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still_worshipped_ in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place. 

It was in virtue of his _sincerity_, of his speaking still in somesort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificialdialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects'artificial'? Artificial things are not all false;--nay every trueProduct of Nature will infallibly _shape_ itself; we may say allartificial things are, at the starting of them, _true_. What we call'Formulas' are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is _method_, habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulasfashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading towardssome sacred or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds-out a way of doingsomewhat, --were it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was neededto do that, a _poet_; he has articulated the dim-struggling thoughtthat dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing that;these are his footsteps, the beginning of a 'Path. ' And now see: thesecond man travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it isthe _easiest_ method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet withimprovements, with changes where such seem good; at all events withenlargements, the Path ever _widening_ itself as more travel it;--tillat last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may traveland drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality todrive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome! Whenthe City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner allInstitutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come intoexistence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being_full_ of substance; you may call them the _skin_, the articulationinto shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there:_they_ had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are notidolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper'sheart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us isignorant withal of the high significance of _true_ Formulas; that theywere, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of ourhabitation in this world. ----

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity. ' He has nosuspicion of his being particularly sincere, --of his beingparticularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or'scholar' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honestlivelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live--without stealing!A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not 'engrave _Truth_ on hiswatch-seal;' no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and livesby it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature hasappointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with thatopenness to Nature which renders him incapable of being _in_sincere!To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsayis hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let himacknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or denyit, is ever present to _him_, --fearful and wonderful, on this hand andon that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognised, because neverquestioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard-of have this as the primarymaterial of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, aretalking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they havelearned by logic, by rote, at secondhand: to that kind of man all thisis still nothing. He must have truth; truth which _he_ feels to betrue. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, inall ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noblenecessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world isnot mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognise the everlastingelement of heart-_sincerity_ in both; and see with pleasure howneither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as _chaff_sown; in both of them is something which the seed-field will _grow_. 

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them, --asall like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describeas a kind of Moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, andlittle is to be known, ' see how you will _do_ it! A thing well worthpreaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to beknown:' do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses ofDoubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;--you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you _do_ or work at all? Such Gospel Johnsonpreached and taught;--coupled, theoretically and practically, withthis other great Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade withCant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be inyour own _real_ torn shoes: 'that will be better for you, ' as Mahometsays! I call this, I call these two things _joined together_, a greatGospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time. 

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, arenow, as it were, disowned by the young generation. It is notwonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but hisstyle of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never becomeobsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of agreat intellect and great heart:--ever welcome, under whatobstructions and perversions soever. They are _sincere_ words, thoseof his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style, --the besthe could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or ratherstalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes atumid _size_ of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it:all this you will put-up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, hasalways _something within it_. So many beautiful styles and books, with_nothing_ in them;--a man is a _male_factor to the world who writessuch! _They_ are the avoidable kind!--Had Johnson left nothing but his_Dictionary_, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuineman. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best ofall Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; itstands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it. 

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. Hepasses for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in manysenses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remainnoteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited manof his time, approaching in such awestruck attitude the great dustyirascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverencefor Excellence; a _worship_ for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroesnor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem exist always, and a certain worship of them! We will also take the liberty to denyaltogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to hisvalet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but theValet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean _valet_-soul! He expects hisHero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trainsborne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, No man can be a _Grand-Monarque_ to his valet-de-chambre. Strip yourLouis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there _is_ left nothing but a poorforked radish with a head fantastically carved;--admirable to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requiresa kind of _Hero_ to do that;--and one of the world's wants, in _this_as in other senses, is for the most part want of such. 

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was wellbestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy ofbending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnsontoo, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it_well_, like a right-valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship bytrade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, inlife-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust anddimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he hadstill a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set onthat, he would change his course for nothing in these confusedvortices of the lower sea of Time. 'To the Spirit of Lies, bearingdeath and hunger, he would in no wise strike his flag. ' Brave oldSamuel: _ultimus Romanorum_!

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Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what Icall a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not 'the talent of Silence, ' aninvaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort inthese times, excel in! The suffering man ought really 'to consume hisown smoke;' there is no good in emitting _smoke_ till you have made itinto _fire_, --which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke iscapable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm forcefor difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. Afundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man isnot strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold himthen. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in theseloud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who cannot_hold his peace_, till the time come for speaking and acting, is noright man. 

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrowcontracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, straight-set eyes, inwhich there is something bewildered-looking, --bewildered, peering withlynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and alsoof the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by _intensity_: the face of what is called a Fanatic, --asadly _contracted_ Hero! We name him here because, with all hisdrawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chiefcharacteristic of a Hero: he is heartily _in earnest_. In earnest, ifever man was; as none of these French Philosophes were. Nay, one wouldsay, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, ratherfeeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into thestrangest incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas _possessed_ him like demons;hurried him so about, drove him over steep places!--

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a singleword _Egoism_; which is indeed the source and summary of all faultsand miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victoryover mere Desire; a mean hunger, in many sorts, was still the motiveprinciple of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for thepraises of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She took JeanJacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito, --"_He_would not be seen there for the world!" The curtain did happennevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognised Jean Jacques, buttook no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation;gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glibCountess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at beingseen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature ofthe man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fiercemoody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank fromthe country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day, findsJean Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humour. "Monsieur, "said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. Youcome to see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot thatis boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound ofmeat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the wholeworld that, if you like, Monsieur!"--A man of this sort was far gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions andcontortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughingor theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator:the crowded amphitheatre looks-on with entertainment; but thegladiator is in agonies and dying. 

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals toMothers, with his _Contrat-social_, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to hisTime. As _he_ could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all thatdefacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmostheart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, outof the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism andPersiflage, there has arisen in that man the ineradicable feeling andknowledge that this Life of ours is _true_; not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made thatrevelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spokenout; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly, --as clearly as hecould. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even thosestealings of ribbons aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if wewill interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlements andstaggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One shouldhave tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what hewill do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man. 

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among hiscountrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what Icall unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality inRousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makespictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are notgenuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kindof rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it isuniversal, among the French since his time. Madame de Staël hassomething of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the presentastonishing convulsionary 'Literature of Desperation, ' it iseverywhere abundant. That same _rosepink_ is not the right hue. Lookat a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has onceseen into this, has seen the difference of the True from theSham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards. 

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under alldisadvantages and disorganisations, can accomplish for the world. InRousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evilwhich, under such disorganisation, may accompany the good. Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughtsand Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feeldeeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It wasexpedient, if anyway possible, that such a man should _not_ have beenset in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in hiscage;--but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. Hissemi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, thepreferability of the savage to the civilised, and suchlike, helpedwell to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you maywell ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do withsuch a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could dowith him! What he could do with them is unhappily clearenough, --_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau. 

 * * * * *

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving, secondhandEighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificialpasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places, --like a suddensplendour of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not whatto make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work;alas, it _let_ itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, asin bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a falsereception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-dramawas enacted under the sun. 

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place merited constituteperverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse thanBurns's. Among those secondhand acting-figures, _mimes_ for most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original man; one ofthose men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank withthe Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. Thelargest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of ahard-handed Scottish Peasant. 

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeedin any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor asthe Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, 'which threw us all into tears. ' The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelterfor _them_. The letters 'threw us all into tears:' figure it. The braveFather, I say always;--a _silent_ Hero and Poet; without whom the sonhad never been a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards toLondon, learnt what good society was; but declares that in no meetingof men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of thispeasant. And his poor 'seven acres of nursery-ground, '--not that, northe miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a livingby, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerableman;--swallowing-down how many sore sufferings daily into silence;fighting like an unseen Hero, --nobody publishing newspaper paragraphsabout his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was notlost: nothing is lost. Robert is there; the outcome of him, --and indeedof many generations of such as him. 

This Burns appears under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, bornonly to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in arustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the countryhe lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the generallanguage of England, I doubt not he had already become universallyrecognised as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. Thathe should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk ofthat dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from commonwithin it. He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing todo so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxondialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspectionof this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men ofthe Eighteenth century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strongas the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;--rock, yet withwells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passionand faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling inthe heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest;true simplicity of strength: with its lightning-fire, with its softdewy pity;--like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!--

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told methat Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, wasusually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats inthe bog, or suchlike, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can wellbelieve it. This basis of mirth ('_fond gaillard_, ' as old MarquisMirabeau calls it), a primal-element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the mostattractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells inhim; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. Heshakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking 'dew-drops from his mane;' as theswift-bounding horse, that _laughs_ at the shaking of the spear. --Butindeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not theoutcome properly of warm generous affection, --such as is the beginningof all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted Britishsoul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day iscoming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he _did_ under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment ofhim. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true ofall Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particularfaculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mindexpressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed inconversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds ofgifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highestfire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings ofaffection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech 'led them offtheir feet. ' This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that whichMr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, Howthe waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and comecrowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:--they too weremen, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but oneof the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerablegentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished byalways _having something in it_. "He spoke rather little than much, "this old man told me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as inthe company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it wasto throw new light on the matter. " I know not why any one should everspeak otherwise!--But if we look at his general force of soul, hishealthy _robustness_ everyway, the rugged down-rightness, penetration, generous valour and manfulness that was in him, --where shall wereadily find a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as ifBurns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. Theydiffer widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is thesame burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;--built, in bothcases, on what the old Marquis calls a _fond gaillard_. By nature, bycourse of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more ofbluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic ofMirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true _insight_, superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering. Itis a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these menspeak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifestingthemselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of thetwo men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated inNational Assemblies; politicised, as few could. Alas, the couragewhich had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in theSolway Frith; in keeping _silence_ over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowedforth Ushers de Brézé and the like; and made itself visible to allmen, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorableepochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: 'You are to work, not think. ' Of your _thinking_-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beerthere; for that only are _you_ wanted. Very notable;--and worthmentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As ifThought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places andsituations of the world, precisely the thing that _was_ wanted. Thefatal man, is he not always the _un_thinking man, the man who cannotthink and _see_; but only grope, and hallucinate, and _mis_see thenature of the thing he works with? He missees it, mis_takes_ it as wesay; takes it for one thing, and it _is_ another thing, --and leaveshim standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterablyfatal, put in the high places of men. --"Why complain of this?" saysome: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from ofold. " Doubtless; and the worse for the _arena_, answer I!_Complaining_ profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That aEurope, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need ofa Burns except for gauging beer, --is a thing I, for one, cannot_rejoice_ at!--

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the_sincerity_ of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The Song hesings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there;the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragicsincerity. A sort of savage sincerity, --not cruel, far from that; butwild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, thereis something of the savage in all great men. 

Hero-worship, --Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were notwithout a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has thatgot into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about thedoor, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doingunconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell forworshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him inhis mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poormoonstruck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the twoends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tablesof grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot evenget his music copied. "By dint of dining out, " says he, "I run therisk of dying by starvation at home. " For his worshippers too a mostquestionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test ofvital wellbeing or illbeing to a generation, can we say that _these_generations are very first-rate?--And yet our heroic Men of Letters doteach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them;intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. Theworld _has_ to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The worldcan alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuoussummer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado, --withunspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it isvery alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by anypower under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world cantake its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, orwhat we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: thereit all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it;believing it, we shall have to do it. What _name_ or welcome we givehim or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. _It_, the newTruth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verilyof the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itselfobeyed. --

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history, --hisvisit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanour therewere the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuinemanhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could belaid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common _Lionism_, whichruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleonhad been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the ArtilleryLieutenancy in the Regiment La Fère. Burns, still only in histwenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying tothe West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is aruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone fromhim: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing downjewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity issometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the wayin which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, wasever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness noraffectation: he feels that _he_ there is the man Robert Burns; thatthe 'rank is but the guinea-stamp;' that the celebrity is but thecandle-light, which will show _what_ man, not in the least make him abetter or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, makehim a _worse_ man; a wretched inflated wind-bag, --inflated till he_burst_ and become a _dead_ lion; for whom, as some one has said, 'there is no resurrection of the body;' worse than a livingdog!--Burns is admirable here. 

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters werethe ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossiblefor him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered hisindustry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get hisLionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls intodiscontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever moredesolate for him; health, character, peace of mind all gone;--solitaryenough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to _see_him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. Theycame to get a little amusement: they got their amusement;--and theHero's life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra, there is a kind of'Light-chafers, ' large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, andilluminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thustravel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honourto the Fire-flies! But--!--

LECTURE VI

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN REVOLUTIONISM. 

[_Friday, 22nd May 1840_]

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship. The Commander over men; he to whose will our wills are to besubordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfarein doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He ispractically the summary for us of _all_ the various figures ofHeroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritualdignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to_command_ over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, totell us for the day and hour what we are to _do_. He is called _Rex_, Regulator, _Roi_: our own name is still better; King, _Könning_, whichmeans _Can_-ning, Ableman. 

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, andindeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most ofwhich we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. AsBurke said that perhaps fair _Trial by Jury_ was the Soul ofGovernment, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentarydebating, and the rest of it, went on, in 'order to bring twelveimpartial men into a jury-box;'--so, by much stronger reason, may Isay here, that the finding of your _Ableman_ and getting him investedwith the _symbols of ability_, with dignity, worship (_worth_-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that _he_ may actuallyhave room to guide according to his faculty of doing it, --is thebusiness, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoeverin this world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find inany country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise _him_ to thesupreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfectgovernment for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever canimprove it a whit. It is in the perfect state: an ideal country. TheAblest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the NoblestMan: what he _tells us to do_ must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhow learn;--the thing which it will inall ways behove us, with right loyal thankfulness, and nothingdoubting, to do! Our _doing_ and life were then, so far as governmentcould regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal ofconstitutions. 

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodiedin practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we willright thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerableapproximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously'measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality' inthis poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we willesteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the otherhand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if theybe not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck!Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall _perfectly_ perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree ofperpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, whomust have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway _toomuch_ from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and levelquite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as itcomes to hand--! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. _He_ hasforgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to acton him; he and his wall rush-down into confused welter of ruin!--

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, socialexplosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too _Un_ableman at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessitywhatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as itmay and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, _quack_, in a word, mustadjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of humanthings;--which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting intounmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, andin the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch-out the handfor their due supply, and it is not there. The 'law of gravitation'acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserablemillions burst-forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort ofmadness; bricks and bricklayers lie as a fatal chaos!--

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the'Divine right of Kings, ' moulders unread now in the Public Librariesof this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process bywhich it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in thoserepositories! At the same time, not to let the immense rubbish gowithout leaving us, as it ought, some soul of it behind--I will saythat it did mean something; something true, which it is important forus and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever man youchose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him);and clapt a round piece of metal on the head of, and calledKing, --there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that _he_became a kind of God, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty andright to rule over you to all lengths: this, --what can we do with thisbut leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will saywithal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god-created canform among each other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else aDiabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two! For it is falsealtogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this worldis a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look-out from all ruling andobedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moralbetween men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claimsobedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is!God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: thereis a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claimthat one man makes upon another. 

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations oflife it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and thechecking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that, in short, thereis nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still moredespicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, thanthat of a 'divine right' in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me thetrue _Könning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right overme. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and thatall men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this isprecisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has eversomething of the Pontiff in him, --guide of the spiritual, from whichall practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_is head of the _Church_. --But we will leave the Polemic stuff of adead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves. 

 * * * * *

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to_seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That isthe world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times ofRevolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, nolonger heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was notthe French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It weretruer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in theReformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itselfChristian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went aboutpretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to domuch else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ nowdo: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outwardwent ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder _cast away_ his plummet; said to himself, "Whatis gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not stillsound strange to many of us, the assertion that there is a God's truthin the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an 'expediency, ' diplomacy, one knows not what!--

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled_Papa_, you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom Iknow not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to theshout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Auxarmes!_" when the people had burst-up against _all_ manner ofChimeras, --I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, sofrightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice ofawakened nations; starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out ofdeath-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; thatGod's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;--yes, sincethey would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial orterrestrial!--Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease;--sincerity ofsome sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors ofFrench Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is aTruth, as I said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not buthave it so!--

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England andelsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as itwere gone _mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act ofinsanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of theworld into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was amadness and nonentity, --gone now happily into the region of Dreams andthe Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days ofJuly 1830 must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the FrenchNation risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting andbeing shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons andgrandsons of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: theydo not disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselvesshot, if it be not made good! To philosophers who had made-up theirlife-system on that 'madness' quietus, no phenomenon could be morealarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor andHistorian, fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we canbelieve it, and died of the Three Days! It was surely not a veryheroic death;--little better than Racine's, dying because LouisFourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood someconsiderable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survivethe Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them!The Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad asit might look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but agenuine product of this Earth where we all live; that it was verily aFact, and that the world in general would do well everywhere to regardit as such. 

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to makeof an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, asshipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise allof baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more thatNature is _preter_natural; if not divine, then diabolic; thatSemblance is not reality; that it has to become reality, or the worldwill take-fire under it, --burn _it_ into what it is, namely Nothing!Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are thewisest who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before itbe learned; peace impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do _his_ work, in the midst of that. Sentence ofDeath is written down in Heaven against all that; sentence of Death isnow proclaimed on the Earth against it: this he with his eyes may see. And surely, I should say, considering the other side of the matter, what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, inall countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressingon, --he may easily find other work to do than labouring in theSansculottic province at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of 'Hero-worship' becomes a factinexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the worldat present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management ofthe world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies thatmen ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty ofHeroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroeswhen sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration. 

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers andfighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; notany hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear inthe world! Nature, turned into a 'Machine, ' was as if effete now;could not any longer produce Great Men:--I can tell her, she maygive-up the trade altogether, then; we cannot do without GreatMen!--But neither have I any quarrel with that of 'Liberty andEquality;' with the faith that, wise great men being impossible, alevel immensity of foolish small men would suffice. It was a naturalfaith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no Authority needed anylonger. Hero-worship, reverence for _such_ Authorities, has provedfalse, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such_forgeries_, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coinspassing in the market, the belief has now become common that no goldany longer exists, --and even that we can do very well without gold!" Ifind this, among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty andEquality; and find it very natural, as matters then stood. 

And yet surely it is but the _transition_ from false to true. Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;--the product ofentire sceptical blindness, as yet only _struggling_ to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; itextends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions oflife. 'Bending before men, ' if it is not to be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed with than practised, is Hero-worship, --a recognitionthat there does dwell in that presence of our brother somethingdivine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a 'revelation inthe Flesh. ' They were Poets too, that devised all those gracefulcourtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood orgrimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible; nay still inevitable. 

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have workedrather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, everygenuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder?It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. Heseems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy doesencumber him at every step, --him to whose whole soul anarchy ishostile, hateful. His mission is Order; every man's is. He is here tomake what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He isthe missionary of Order. Is not all work of man in this world a_making of Order_? The carpenter finds rough trees: shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and use. We are allborn enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be concerned inimage-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, _more_ a man thanwe, it is doubly tragical. 

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and mustwork towards Order. I say, there is not a _man_ in them, raging in thethickest of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His very life means that; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos but it seeks a _centre_ to revolve round. While man isman, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of aSansculottism. --Curious: in those days when Hero-worship was the mostincredible thing to every one, how it does come-out nevertheless, andassert itself practically, in a way which all have to credit. Divine_right_, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine _might_withal! While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere intodestruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselvesindestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems deadand abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step-forth again as Kings. Thehistory of these men is what we have now to look at, as our lastphasis of Heroism. The old ages are brought back to us; the manner inwhich Kings were made, and Kingship itself first took rise, is againexhibited in the history of these Two. 

 * * * * *

We have had many civil-wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses, wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable. But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to noone of the others. Trusting to your candour, which will suggest on theother side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section oncemore of that great universal war which alone makes-up the true Historyof the World, --the war of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of menintent on the real essence of things, against men intent on thesemblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many, seem meresavage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were more justto call them haters of _untrue_ Forms. I hope we know how to respectLaud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me to have beenweak and ill-starred, not dishonest; an unfortunate Pedant rather thananything worse. His 'Dreams' and superstitions, at which they laughso, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like aCollege-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notionis that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placedsuddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of his, at the headnot of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complexdeep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the olddecent regulations; nay that their salvation will lie in extending andimproving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemencetowards his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice ofprudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by hisCollegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starredPedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of thatkind, and the world _was not_ that. Alas, was not his doom sternenough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avengedon him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturallyclothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the onlyhabitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing Ipraise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity, --praising only thespirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothethemselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then thereare untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which _grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. Iinvite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false inCeremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all humanthings. 

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In thecommonest meeting of men, a person making, what we call, 'setspeeches, ' is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoevercourtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous realitywithin, are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it weresome matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as DivineWorship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excessof feeling, knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, andpreferred formless silence to any utterance there possible, --whatshould we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for youin the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man, --let him departswiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunatelyoffers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!Such mummery is not only not to be accepted, --it is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called 'Idolatry, 'worshipping of hollow _shows_; what all earnest men do and willreject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. Lauddedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have itdescribed; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal _Pedant_, intenton his 'College-rules, ' than the earnest Prophet, intent on theessence of the matter!

Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on suchforms;--we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather thansuch! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but theBible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ intothe earnest _souls_ of men: is not this virtually the essence of allChurches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, ispreferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it willclothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by, if it be real. No fearof that; actually no fear at all. Given the living _man_, there willbe found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes. But thesuit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--!--Wecannot 'fight the French' by three-hundred-thousand red uniforms;there must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, mustactually _not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do, --why thenthere must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has becomea lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and thePuritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battleover England in that age; and fought-out their confused controversy toa certain length, with many results for all of us. 

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In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their causeor themselves were little likely to have justice done them. CharlesSecond and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set tojudge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. Thatthere could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what thesepoor Rochesters, and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on gibbets, --like the bones of the leadingPuritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All truework of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must andwill accomplish itself. We have our _Habeas-Corpus_, our freeRepresentation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, thatall men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call _free_men;--men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not ontradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part andmuch besides this, was the work of the Puritans. 

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the characterof the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one afteranother, taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of themare now, in these days, as good as canonised. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nayLudlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes;political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe whatmakes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designatethese men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find theirapologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them byearnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poorCromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no heartyapologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of greatwickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth:but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; afierce, coarse, hypocritical _Tartufe_; turning all that nobleStruggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for hisown benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole forhimself, and ruined into a futility and deformity. 

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of acentury like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of theSceptic: He does not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expectedpurple mantles, gilt sceptres, body-guards and flourishes of trumpets:the Sceptic of the Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectableFormulas, 'Principles, ' or what else he may call them; a style ofspeech and conduct which has got to seem 'respectable, ' which canplead for itself in a handsome articulate manner, and gain thesuffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth century! It is, atbottom, the same thing that both the Valet and he expect: thegarnitures of some _acknowledged_ royalty, which _then_ they willacknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged _un_formulisticstate shall be no King. 

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word ofdisparagement against such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym; whom Ibelieve to have been right worthy and useful men. I have readdiligently what books and documents about them I could come at;--withthe honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes;but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with veryindifferent success! At bottom, I found that it would not do. They arevery noble men, these; step along in their stately way, with theirmeasured euphemisms, philosophies, parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, _Monarchies of Man_; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold before them; thefancy alone endeavours to get-up some worship of them. What man'sheart does, in reality, break-forth into any fire of brotherly lovefor these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! One breaks-downoften enough in the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym, with his 'seventhly and lastly. ' You find that it may be theadmirablest thing in the world, but that it is heavy, --heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay; that, in a word, for you there is little ornothing now surviving there! One leaves all these Nobilities standingin their niches of honour: the rugged out-cast Cromwell, he is the manof them all in whom one still finds human stuff. The great savage_Baresark_: he could write no euphemistic _Monarchy of Man_; did notspeak, did not work with glib regularity; had no straight story totell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemisticcoat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of manfor one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sortsof men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that arenot good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of theEighteenth century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a verygreat matter. One might say, it is but a piece of Formulism andScepticism, like the rest. They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing toconsider that the foundation of our English Liberties should have beenlaid by 'Superstition. ' These Puritans came forward with Calvinisticincredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to _worship_ in theirown way. Liberty to _tax_ themselves: that was the thing they shouldhave demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful Ignoranceof Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other thing!--Liberty to_tax_ oneself? Not to pay-out money from your pocket except on reasonshown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixedon that as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, Ajust man will generally have better cause than _money_ in what shapesoever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is amost confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see anykind of Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner; andhere in England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great manytaxes which _he_ can see very small reason in, it will not go wellwith him, I think! He must try some other climate than this. Taxgatherer? Money? He will say: "Take my money, since you _can_, andit is so desirable to you; take it, --and take yourself away with it;and leave me alone to my work here. _I_ am still here; can still work, after all the money you have taken from me!" But if they come to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie; pretend to say you are worshipping God, when you are not doing it: believe not the thing that _you_ find true, but the thing that I find, or pretend to find true!" He will answer:"No; by God's help, no! You may take my purse; but I cannot have mymoral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meetme with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; itis not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt againstyou, and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusationsand confusions, in defence of that!"--

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting, this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts amongmen. Not _Hunger_ alone produced even the French Revolution: no, butthe feeling of the insupportable all-pervading _Falsehood_ which hadnow embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity andNonentity, and thereby become _indisputably_ false in the eyes of all!We will leave the Eighteenth century with its 'liberty to tax itself. 'We will not astonish ourselves that the meaning of such men as thePuritans remained dim to it. To men who believe in no reality at all, how shall a _real_ human soul, the intensest of all realities, as itwere the Voice of this world's Maker still speaking to _us_, --beintelligible? What it cannot reduce into constitutional doctrinesrelative to 'taxing, ' or other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense, such a century will needs reject as anamorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms, and Ship-money will be thetheme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid;--whichwill glitter, if not as fire does, then as _ice_ does: and theirreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of 'madness, ''hypocrisy, ' and much else. 

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From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity hasbeen incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Manwhatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfishmen; but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us, unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could haveexisted at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eyebut for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notionsof Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a _conscience_ init, the essence of all _real_ souls, great or small?--No, we cannotfigure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him andhis career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is noevidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains ofcalumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as thevery prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, butalways some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet havebeen one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, andno lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It islike Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet'sPigeon? No proof!--Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, aschimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they aredistracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness. 

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a verydifferent hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of hisearlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does itnot all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? Hisnervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness toodeep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre inbroad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we arenot bound to believe much;--probably no more than of the other blackSpectre, or Devil in person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sellhimself before Worcester Fight! But the mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humour of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwiseindisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwickhimself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was fullof hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had fancies aboutthe Town-cross. " These things are significant. Such an excitabledeep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is notthe symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite otherthan falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to havefallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth;but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. 'Hepays-back what money he had won at gambling, ' says the story;--he doesnot think any gain of that kind could be really _his_. It is veryinteresting, very natural, this 'conversion, ' as they well name it;this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to seeinto the awful _truth_ of things;--to see that time and its shows allrested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the thresholdeither of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St Ives or Ely, as asober industrious Farmer, is it not altogether as that of a true anddevout man? He has renounced the world and its ways; _its_ prizes arenot the thing that can enrich him. He tills the earth; he reads hisBible; daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. Hecomforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay can himselfpreach, --exhorts his neighbours to be wise, to redeem the time. In allthis what 'hypocrisy, ' 'ambition, ' 'cant, ' or other falsity? The man'shopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim toget well _thither_, by walking well through his humble course in_this_ world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do for him?'Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye. '

It is striking, too, how he comes-out once into public view; he, sinceno other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. Imean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to lawwith Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, hereturns back into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. 'Gaininfluence'? His influence is the most legitimate; derived frompersonal knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable anddetermined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old age isnow in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death and Eternity; itwas at this point that he suddenly became 'ambitious'! I do notinterpret his Parliamentary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honestsuccesses of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him, more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; hisspoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, andcarried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world allset in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar;through the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the'crowning mercy' of Worcester Fight: all this is good and genuine fora deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelievingCavaliers, worshipping not God but their own 'lovelocks, ' frivolitiesand formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living_without_ God in the world, need it seem hypocritical. 

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him incondemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But ifyou once go to war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else liesthere. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is heto die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generallyadmitted that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had noway of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterianparty, apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to doso; anxious indeed as for their own existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, showshimself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not _understand_:--whose thought didnot in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter; nayworse, whose _word_ did not at all represent his thought. We may saythis of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather: but it is true andundeniable. Forsaken there of all but the _name_ of Kingship, hestill, finding himself treated with outward respect as a King, fanciedthat he might play-off party against party, and smuggle himself intohis old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both _discovered_ that hewas deceiving them. A man whose _word_ will not inform you at all whathe means or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must getout of that man's way, or put him out of yours! The Presbyterians, intheir despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: "For all our fighting, "says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?" No!--

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical _eye_ ofthis man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable; has agenuine insight into what _is_ fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences: the true man is needed to discern evenpractical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, earlyin the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsyriotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in thework, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man who _saw_. Factanswers, if you see into Fact. Cromwell's _Ironsides_ were theembodiment of this insight of his; men fearing God; and without anyother fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod thesoil of England, or of any other land. 

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; whichwas so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill theKing. " Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before aHigher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting '_for_the King;' but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it isno dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death andearnest. They have brought it to the calling-forth of _War_; horridinternecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed rage, --the_infernal_ element in man called forth, to try it by that! _Do_ thattherefore; since that is the thing to be done. --The successes ofCromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot inbattle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eyeto see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post, from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, bywhatever name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man inEngland, virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explainit!--

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall intoScepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know a Sinceritywhen they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is sofatal? The heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellectremains is merely the _vulpine_ intellect. That a true _King_ be sentthem is of small use; they do not know him when sent. They sayscornfully, Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty inbootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which isall; but for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wildrude Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from thewitness-box; in your small-debt _pie-powder_ court, he is scouted as acounterfeit. The vulpine intellect 'detects' him. For being a manworth any thousand men, the response, your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries, whether he was a man at all. God'sgreatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculoustalisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as acommon guinea. 

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remediedin some measure, there is nothing remedied. 'Detect quacks'? Yes do, for Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted!Till we know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even somuch as 'detect'? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself tobe knowledge, and 'detects' in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupesindeed are many: but, of all _dupes_, there is none so fatallysituated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped. The worlddoes exist; the world has truth in it or it would not exist! Firstrecognise what is true, we shall _then_ discern what is false; andproperly never till then. 

'Know the men that are to be trusted:' alas, this is yet, in thesedays, very far from us. The sincere alone can recognise sincerity. Nota Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of_Valets_;--the Hero comes almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, it isfar from us: but it must come; thank God, it is visibly coming. Tillit do come, what have we? Ballot-boxes, suffrages, FrenchRevolutions:--if we are as Valets, and do not know the Hero when wesee him, what good are all these? A heroic Cromwell comes; and for ahundred-and-fifty years he cannot have a vote from us. Why, theinsincere, unbelieving world is the _natural property_ of the Quack, and of the Father of quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, unveracity are alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter the_figure_ of our Quack; but the substance of him continues. TheValet-World _has_ to be governed by the Sham-Hero, by the King merely_dressed_ in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, one of twothings: We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor andCaptain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forevergoverned by the Unheroic;--had we ballot-boxes clattering at everystreet-corner, there were no remedy in these. 

Poor Cromwell, --great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet whocould not _speak_. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, withhis savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didacticChillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull ofchaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almostsemi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's-energy working inthe heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlightand fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, _un_formed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, whatwas it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness ofhis wild affections: the quantity of _sympathy_ he had withthings, --the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart ofthings, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was hishypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came ofhis greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful _black_ envelopinghim, --wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a manwith his whole soul _seeing_, and struggling to see. 

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusionof speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but thematerial with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. Hehad _lived_ silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all hisdays; and in his way of life little call to attempt _naming_ oruttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power ofaction, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, andspeak fluently enough:--he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully allthings you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking andlogicising; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, _Vir-tus_, manhood, _hero_-hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first ofall, what the Germans well name it, _Tugend_ (_Taugend_, _dow_-ing or_Dough_-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to _do_. This basis of thematter Cromwell had in him. 

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he might _preach_, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might begreat in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances ofwhat is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is anotable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced withprayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and heused to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till somedefinite resolution rose among them, some 'door of hope, ' as theywould name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in ferventprayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make Hislight shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they feltthemselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who had drawnthe sword against a great black devouring world not Christian, butMammonish, Devilish, --they cried to God in their straits, in theirextreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His. The light whichnow rose upon them, --how could a human soul, by any means at all, getbetter light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely thebest, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more? Tothem it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendour in thewaste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guidethem on their desolate perilous way. _Was_ it not such? Can a man'ssoul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method thanintrinsically by that same, --devout prostration of the earneststruggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such_prayer_ a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one?There is no other method. 'Hypocrisy'? One begins to be weary of allthat. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They wentabout balancing expediences, plausibilities; gathering votes, advices;they never were alone with the _truth_ of a thing at all. --Cromwell'sprayers were likely to be 'eloquent, ' and much more than that. His wasthe heart of a man who _could_ pray. 

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly soineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakersaim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, fromthe first, had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he wasalways understood to _mean_ something, and men wished to know what. Hedisregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke alwayswithout premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have been singularly candid; and to have giventhe Printer precisely what they found on their own notepaper. Andwithal, what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being thepremeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before theworld, That to the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! Howcame he not to study his words a little, before flinging them out tothe public? If the words were true words, they could be left to shiftfor themselves. 

But with regard to Cromwell's 'lying, ' we will make one remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. Allparties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him tobe meaning _this_, heard him even say so, and behold he turns-out tohave been meaning _that_! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. Butnow, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not of afalse man in such times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man musthave _reticences_ in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleevefor daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is no usefor any man's taking-up his abode in a house built of glass. A manalways is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show toother men; even to those he would have work along with him. There areimpertinent inquiries made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer_un_informed on that matter; not, if you can help it, _mis_informed;but precisely as dark as he was! This, could one hit the right phraseof response, is what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer insuch a case. 

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of smallsubaltern parties; uttered to them a _part_ of his mind. Each littleparty thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to findhim not of their party, but of his own party! Was it his blame? At allseasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how, ifhe explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either haveshuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compacthypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have workedin his province any more; nay perhaps they could not now have workedin their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great manamong small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seeneverywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which toyou is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an _error_. Butwould it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, todisturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, standsonly on some thin traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths!"I might have my hand full of truth, " said Fontenelle, "and open onlymy little finger. "

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more inall departments of practice! He that cannot withal _keep his mind tohimself_ cannot practise any considerable thing whatever. And we callit 'dissimulation, ' all this? What would you think of calling thegeneral of an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporaland private soldier, who pleased to put the question, what histhoughts were about everything?--Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. Anendless vortex of such questioning 'corporals' rolled confusedly roundhim through his whole course; whom he did answer. It must have been asa great true-seeing man that he managed this too. Not one provedfalsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that ever wound himselfthrough such a coil of things will you say so much?--

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But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert tothe very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; abouttheir 'ambition, ' 'falsity, ' and such-like. The first is what I mightcall substituting the _goal_ of their career for the course andstarting point of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies thathe had determined on being Protector of England, at the time when hewas ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay allmapped-out: a program of the whole drama; which he then step by stepdramatically unfolded, with all manner of cunning, deceptivedramaturgy, as he went on, --the hollow, scheming [Greek: Hypokritês], or Play-actor that he was! This is a radical perversion; all butuniversal in such cases. And think for an instant how different thefact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short wayahead of us it is all dim; an _un_wound skein of possibilities, ofapprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwellhad _not_ his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which heneeded then, with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enactdramatically, scene after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him itwas in no measure so. What absurdities would fall-away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by History!Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view;--butlook whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in thisCromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds of Historyonly remember it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorousperfection, as in the fact it _stood_, requires indeed a rare faculty;rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or more thanShakspeare; who could _enact_ a brother-man's biography, see with thebrother-man's eyes at all points of his course what things _he_ saw;in short, _know_ his course and him, as few 'Historians' are like todo. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort ourimage of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as try torepresent them so; in sequence, as they _were_; not in the lump, asthey are thrown-down before us. 

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers tothis same 'ambition' itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men;we mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious inthat sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine theman who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; whogoes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts andclaims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybodyfor God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over theheads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seenunder this sun. A _great_ man? A poor morbid prurient empty man;fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. Iadvise you to keep-out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths;unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs abouthim, he cannot live. It is the _emptiness_ of the man, not hisgreatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirststhat you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe nogreat man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and realsubstance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented inthis way. 

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be 'noticed' by noisycrowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, wasalready there; no notice would make _him_ other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was allseen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurablematter _how_ it went, --he had been content to plough the ground, andread his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in giltcarriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with bundles of papershaunting him, "Decide this, decide that, " which in utmost sorrow ofheart no man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do forthis man? From of old, was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendour as of Heaven itself? His existence there asman set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment and Eternity:these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which nospeech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets ofthat time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man 'ambitious, ' to figure him as the prurient windbagdescribed above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man willsay: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tapeclerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave mealone, leave me alone; there is _too much of life_ in me already!" OldSamuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was notambitious. 'Corsica Boswell' flaunted at public shows with printedribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. Theworld-wide soul wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;--what couldparadings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great _silent_ men! Looking round on thenoisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions withlittle worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of _Silence_. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in hisdepartment; silently thinking, silently working; whom no MorningNewspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A countrythat has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which hadno _roots_; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;--which mustsoon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what wecan _show_, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higherthan the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great;all else is small. --I hope we English will long maintain our _grandtalent pour le silence_. Let others that cannot do without standing onbarrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivatespeech exclusively, --become a most green forest without roots! Solomonsays, There is a time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Ofsome great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnsonsays he was, by _want of money_, and nothing other, one might ask, "Why do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system, foundyour sect?" "Truly, " he will answer, "I am _continent_ of my thoughthitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, nocompulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is not forpromulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live by. Thatis the great purpose of it to me. And then the 'honour'? Alas, yes;--but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum ofyours, may it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"--

But, now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say thatthere are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blamable, the otherlaudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silentSamuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine overothers, let it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. 'Seekestthou great things, seek them not:' this is most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himselfaccording to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak-out, to act-out, what Nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for aman. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consistingin this: To unfold your _self_, to work what thing you have thefaculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law ofour existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to_speak_ by this necessity it feels. --We will say therefore: To decideabout ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to takeinto view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness of theman for the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place was_his_; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to seekthe place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall weblame it, if he were 'the only man in France that could have done anygood there'? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly _felt_ how muchgood he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and hadeven felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted becausethey had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbonmourn over him. --Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silentgreat man shall strive to speak withal; _too_ amply, rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to dopriceless divine work for his country and the whole world. That theperfect Heavenly Law might be made law on this earth; that the prayerhe prayed daily, 'Thy kingdom come, ' was at length to be fulfilled! Ifyou had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful silent Samuel was called to take apart in it! Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed up into adivine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act;casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting allaffliction and contradiction small, --the whole dark element of hisexistence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? Itwere a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was withCromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealouspreachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whipt, set on pillories, their ears cropt off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of theunworthy: all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he hadlooked upon it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth;trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come, --thatsuch a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And nowbehold the dawn of it; after twelve years silent waiting, all Englandstirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right willget a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has comeagain into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a memberof? Cromwell threw down his ploughs and hastened thither. 

He spoke there, --rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and allelse, --on and on, till the Cause _triumphed_, its once so formidableenemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had becomeclear light of victory and certainty. That _he_ stood there as thestrongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all England, --whatof this? It was possible that the law of Christ's Gospel could nowestablish itself in the world! The Theocracy which John Knox in hispulpit might dream of as a 'devout imagination, ' this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared toconsider as capable of being _realised_. Those that were highest inChrist's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: insome considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not_true_, God's truth? And if _true_, was it not then the very thing todo? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes!This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, In its own dialect, thenoblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For aKnox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his greatsound sense and experience of what our world _was_, --History, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminatingpoint of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that 'Faith in theBible' was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it weremade manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremelyvictorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, asthe highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the _vulpine_ intellect, with its knowingness, itsalertness and expertness in 'detecting hypocrites, ' seems to me arather sorry business. We have had one such Statesman in England; oneman, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him anysuch purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years;and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten;opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him, --why, then, England might have been a _Christian_ land! As it is, vulpineknowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world ofKnaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'--how cumbrous aproblem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places!Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's greatgrace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming toall men a _palpably_ hopeless one. --

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But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes: Hume and a multitudefollowing him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell _was_sincere at first; a sincere 'Fanatic' at first, but gradually became a'Hypocrite' as things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocriteis Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since, --to Mahomet andmany others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; notmuch, not all, very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sink inthis miserable manner. The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefullyincrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sunat all, but a mass of Darkness! I will venture to say that such neverbefell a great, deep Cromwell; I think, never. Nature's ownlion-hearted Son! Antæus-like, his strength is got by _touching theEarth_, his Mother; lift him up from the Earth, lift him up intoHypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We will not assert thatCromwell was an immaculate man; that he fell into no faults, noinsincerities among the rest. He was no dilettante professor of'perfections, ' 'immaculate conducts. ' He was a rugged Orson, rendinghis rough way through actual true _work_, --doubtless with many a_fall_ therein. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily andhourly: it was too well known to him; known to God and him! The Sunwas dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting for death, are those of aChristian heroic man. Broken prayers to God, that He would judge himand this Cause, He since man could not, in justice yet in pity. Theyare most touching words. He breathed out his wild great soul, itstoils and sins all ended now, into the presence of his Maker, in thismanner. 

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite! Hypocrite, mummer, thelife of him a mere theatricality; empty barren quack, hungry for theshouts of mobs? The man had made obscurity do very well for him tillhis head was gray; and now he _was_, there as he stood recognisedunblamed, the virtual King of England. Cannot a man do without King'sCoaches and Cloaks? Is it such a blessedness to have clerks foreverpestering you with bundles of papers in red tape? A simple Diocletianprefers planting of cabbages; a George Washington, no veryimmeasurable man, does the like. One would say, it is what any genuineman could do; and would do. The instant his real work were out in thematter of Kingship, --away with it!

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a _King_ is, inall movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very War, whatbecomes of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemiescan. The Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealousand of one mind about it, as in this English end of the Island was farfrom being the case. But there was no great Cromwell among them; poortremulous, hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and suchlike; none of themhad a heart true enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to thetruth. They had no leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in thatcountry had one: Montrose, the noblest of all the Cavaliers; anaccomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call theHero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand subjects without aKing; on the other a King without subjects! The subjects without Kingcan do nothing; the subjectless King can do something. This Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much asguns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wildwhirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, fromthe field before him. He was at one period, for a short while, masterof all Scotland. One man; but he was a man: a million zealous men, but_without_ the one; they against him were powerless! Perhaps of all thepersons in that Puritan struggle, from first to last, the singleindispensable one was verily Cromwell. To see and dare, and decide; tobe a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;--a King among them, whether they called him so or not. 

 * * * * *

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His otherproceedings have all found advocates, and stand generally justified;but this dismissal of the Rump Parliament and assumption of theProtectorship, is what no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown tobe King in England; Chief Man of the victorious party in England: butit seems he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself toperdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this was. 

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of thePuritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be donewith it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in awondrous way has given-up to your disposal? Clearly those hundredsurviving members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supremeauthority, cannot continue for ever to sit. What _is_ to be done?--Itwas a question which theoretical constitution-builders may find easyto answer; but to Cromwell, looking there into the real practicalfacts of it, there could be none more complicated. He asked of theParliament, What it was they would decide upon? It was for theParliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula, they who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed tothem that they also should have something to say in it! We will not"For all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper. " Weunderstand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us hasgiven the victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in theears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhapsno Parliament could in such case make any answer but even that oftalk, talk! Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. Yousixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the wholenation, whom the nation already calls Rump Parliament, _you_ cannotcontinue to sit there: who or what then is to follow? 'FreeParliament, ' right of Election, Constitutional Formulas of one sort orthe other, --the thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which we mustanswer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate ofConstitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to killyour King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish by the law ofthe stronger whosoever would not let your Cause prosper: there are butfifty or three-score of you left there, debating in these days. Tellus what we shall do; not in the way of Formula, but of practicableFact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligentGodwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could notdissolve and disperse; that when it came to the point of actuallydispersing, they again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjournedit, --and Cromwell's patience failed him. But we will take thefavourablest hypothesis ever started for the Parliament; thefavourablest, though I believe it is not the true one, but toofavourable. 

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell andhis Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty RumpMembers on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump inits despair _was_ answering in a very singular way; that in theirsplenetic envious despair, to keep-out the army at least, these menwere hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill, --Parliament tobe chosen by the whole of England; equable electoral division intodistricts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, orindeed for _them_ an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill, free suffrageof Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced indeed but notexterminated, perhaps out_number_ us; the great numerical majority ofEngland was always indifferent to our Cause, merely looked at it andsubmitted to it. It is in weight and force, not by counting of heads, that we are the majority! And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely won by our swords, shall again launch itselfto sea; become a mere hope, and likelihood, _small_ even as alikelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it is a certainty, which wehave won, by God's strength and our own right hands, and do now hold_here_. Cromwell walked down to these refractory Members; interruptedthem in that rapid speed of their Reform Bill;--ordered them tobegone, and talk there no more. --Can we not forgive him? Can we notunderstand him? John Milton, who looked on it all near at hand, couldapplaud him. The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it. Ifancy, most men who were realities in England might see into thenecessity of that. 

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas andlogical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuinefact of this England, Whether it will support him or not? It iscurious to see how he struggles to govern in some constitutional way;find some Parliament to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one they call Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a_Convocation of the Notables_. From all quarters of England theleading Ministers and chief Puritan Officials nominate the men mostdistinguished by religious reputation, influence and attachment to thetrue Cause: these are assembled to shape-out a plan. They sanctionedwhat was past; shaped as they could what was to come. They werescornfully called _Barebones's Parliament_, the man's name, it seems, was not _Barebones_, but Barbone, --a good enough man. Nor was it ajest, their work; it was a most serious reality, --a trial on the partof these Puritan Notables how far the Law of Christ could become theLaw of this England. There were men of sense among them, men of somequality; men of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. Theyfailed, it seems, and broke down, endeavouring to reform the Court ofChancery! They dissolved themselves, as incompetent; delivered-uptheir power again into the hands of the Lord-General Cromwell, to dowith it what he liked and could. 

What _will_ he do with it? The Lord-General Cromwell, 'Commander-inChief of all the Forces raised and to be raised;' he hereby seeshimself, at this unexampled juncture, as it were the one availableAuthority left in England, nothing between England and utter Anarchybut him alone. Such is the undeniable Fact of his position andEngland's, there and then. What will he do with it? Afterdeliberation, he decides that he will _accept_ it; will formally, withpublic solemnity, say and vow before God and men, "Yes, the Fact isso, and I will do the best I can with it!" Protectorship, Instrumentof Government, --these are the external forms of the thing; worked-outand sanctioned as they could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading Official people, 'Council of Officers and Persons ofinterest in the Nation:' and as for the thing itself, undeniablyenough, at the pass matters had now come to, there _was_ noalternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might accept it ornot; but Puritan England was, in real truth, saved from suicidethereby!--I believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful and real way, accept thisanomalous act of Oliver's; at least, he and they together made itgood, and always better to the last. But in their Parliamentary_articulate_ way, they had their difficulties, and never knew fullywhat to say to it!--

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his _first_ regular Parliament, chosen by the rule laid-down in the Instrument of Government, didassemble, and worked;--but got, before long, into bottomless questionsas to the Protector's _right_, as to 'usurpation, ' and so forth; andhad at the earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concludingSpeech to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his thirdParliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere helpless man; not used to _speak_ thegreat inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessnessof utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about'births of Providence:' All these changes, so many victories andevents, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of_me_ or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in callingthem so! He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had beenplaying, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had _foreseen_it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppetshow by woodand wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man couldtell what a day would bring forth: they were 'births of Providence, 'God's finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height ofvictory, God's Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as aParliament could assemble together, and say in what manner all thiscould be _organised_, reduced into rational feasibility among theaffairs of men. You were to help with your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England everhad. " Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure madethe Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idlepedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings andquestionings about written laws for _my_ coming here;--and would sendthe whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary'sparchment, but only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for beingPresident among you! That opportunity is gone; and we know not when itwill return. You have had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. "God be judge between youand me!" These are his final words to them: Take you yourconstitution-formulas in your hand; and I my _in_formal struggles, purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between you and me!"--

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printedSpeeches of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, saythe most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon!To me they do not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the firstglimpses I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay intothe possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, searchlovingly what that may be: you will find a real _speech_ lyingimprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in thegreat heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for the first time, begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories andBiographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow scepticalgenerations that could not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more _obscure_ than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through themonly into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. 'Heats andJealousies, ' says Lord Clarendon himself: 'heats and jealousies, ' merecrabbed whims, theories and crochets; these induced slow sober quietEnglishmen to lay down their ploughs and work; and fly into red furyof confused war against the best-conditioned of Kings! _Try_ if youcan find that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have greatgifts; but it is really _ultra vires_ there. It is Blindnesslaying-down the Laws of Optics. --

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Everthe constitutional Formula: How came _you_ there? Show us some Notaryparchment! Blind pedants:--"Why, surely the same power which makes youa Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If myProtectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is yourParliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?--

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way ofDespotism. Military Dictators, each with his district, to _coerce_ theRoyalists and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act ofParliament, then by the sword. Formula shall _not_ carry it, while theReality is here! I will go on, protecting oppressed Protestantsabroad, appointing just judges, wise managers, at home, cherishingtrue Gospel ministers; doing the best I can to make England aChristian England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of ProtestantChristianity; I, since you will not help me; I while God leaves melife!--Why did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, sincethe Law would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where theymistake. For him there was no giving of it up! Prime Ministers havegoverned countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a lawwhile it held: but this Prime Minister was one that _could not getresigned_. Let him once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cavalierswaited to kill him; to kill the Cause _and_ him. Once embarked, thereis no retreat, no return. This Prime Minister could _retire_ nowhitherexcept into his tomb. 

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessantof the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he mustbear till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old battle-mate, coming to see him on someindispensable business, much against his will, --Cromwell 'follows himto the door, ' in a most fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begsthat he would be reconciled to him, his old brother in arms; says howmuch it grieves him to be misunderstood, deserted by truefellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: the rigorous Hutchinson, cased in his republican formula, sullenly goes his way. --And the man'shead now white; his strong arm growing weary with its long work! Ithink always too of his poor Mother, now very old, living in thatPalace of his; a right brave woman: as indeed they lived all an honestGod-fearing Household there: if she heard a shot go off, she thoughtit was her son killed. He had to come to her at least once a day, thatshe might see with her own eyes that he was yet living. The poor oldMother!----What had this man gained; what had he gained? He had a lifeof sore strife and toil, to his last day. Fame, ambition, place inHistory? His dead body was hung in chains; his 'place inHistory, '--place in History forsooth!--has been a place of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, this day, who knows ifit is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured topronounce him not a knave and a liar, but a genuinely honest man!Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us?_We_ walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step-over hisbody sunk in the ditch there. We need not _spurn_ it, as we step onit!--Let the Hero rest. It was not to _men's_ judgment that heappealed; nor have men judged him very well. 

 * * * * *

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itselfhushed-up into decent composure, and its results made smooth in 1688, there broke-out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult tohush-up, known to all mortals, and like to be long known, by the nameof French Revolution. It is properly the third and final act ofProtestantism; the explosive confused return of Mankind to Reality andFact, now that they were perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call ourEnglish Puritanism the second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; letus go by the Bible!" "In Church, " said Luther; "In Church and State, "said Cromwell, "let us go by what actually is God's Truth. " Men haveto return to reality; they cannot live on semblance. The FrenchRevolution, or third act, we may well call the final one; for lowerthan that savage _Sansculottism_ men cannot go. They stand there onthe nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons andcircumstances; and may and must begin again confidently to build-upfrom that. The French explosion, like the English one, got itsKing, --who had no Notary parchment to show for himself. We have stillto glance for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern King. 

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. Hisenormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abodemainly in our little England, are but as the high _stilts_ on whichthe man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not alteredthereby. I find in him no such _sincerity_ as In Cromwell; only a farinferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with the AwfulUnnamable of this Universe; 'walking with God, ' as he called it; andfaith and strength in that alone: _latent_ thought and valour, contentto lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of Heaven's lightning!Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaningof all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to beginnot out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical_Encyclopédies_. This was the length the man carried it. Meritoriousto get so far. His compact, prompt, everyway articulate character isin itself perhaps small, compared with our great chaotic inarticulateCromwell's. Instead of '_dumb_ Prophet struggling to speak, ' we have aportentous mixture of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of theFanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much betterto Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like, --whereindeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. An element ofblamable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets thevictory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin. 

'False as a bulletin' became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makeswhat excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead theenemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. Ithad been, in the long-run, _better_ for Napoleon too if he had nottold any. In fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hourand day, meant to be found extant _next_ day, what good can it ever beto promulgate lies? The lies are found-out; ruinous penalty is exactedfor them. No man will believe the liar next time even when he speakstruth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The oldcry of wolf!--A Lie is _no_-thing; you cannot of nothing makesomething; you make _nothing_ at last, and lose your labour into thebargain. 

Yet Napoleon _had_ a sincerity; we are to distinguish between what issuperficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outermanoeuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctiveineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, solong as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than hisculture was. His _savans_, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage toEgypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be noGod. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner oflogic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but _who made_ all that?" The Atheistic logic runs-off fromhim like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who made allthat?" So too in Practice: he, as every man that can be great, or havevictory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practicalheart of the matter; drives straight towards that. When the steward ofhis Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipt one of thegold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walkedon. Some days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to thehorror of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! InSaint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists onthe practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, whyquarrel with one another? There is no _result_ in it; it comes tonothing that one can _do_. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" Hespeaks often so, to his poor discontented followers; he is like apiece of silent strength in the middle of their morbid querulousnessthere. 

And accordingly was there not what we can call a _faith_ in him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy assertingitself here in the French Revolution is an insuppressible Fact, whichthe whole world, with its old forces and institutions cannot put down;this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasmalong with it, --a _faith_. And did he not interpret the dim purport ofit well? '_La carrière ouverte aux talens_, The implements to him whocan handle them:' this actually is the truth, and even the wholetruth; it includes whatever the French Revolution, or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. Andyet by the nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knewthat Democracy, if it were a true thing at all could not be ananarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twentieth ofJune (1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house, as the mobrolled by: Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons inauthority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth ofAugust he wonders why there is no man to command these poor Swiss;they would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, yethatred of Anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all his greatwork. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards to the Peace ofLeoben, one would say, his inspiration is: 'Triumph to the FrenchRevolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra thatpretend to call it a Simulacrum!' Withal, however, he feels, and has aright to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolutioncannot prosper or last without such. To bridle-in that greatdevouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to _tame_ it, so that itsintrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become _organic_, andbe able to live among other organisms and _formed_ things, not as awasting destruction alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do?Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph, --he triumphed sofar. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. Herose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he _was_ such. Thecommon soldiers used to say on the march: "These babbling _Avocats_, up at Paris; all talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong? Weshall have to go and put our _Petit Caporal_ there!" They went, andput him there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe;--till the poor Lieutenant of _LaFère_, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the greatest of all menthat had been in the world for some ages. 

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upperhand. He apostatised from his old Faith in Facts: took to believing inSemblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly tobe false;--considered that _he_ would found "his Dynasty" and soforth; that the enormous French Revolution meant only that! The manwas 'given-up to strong delusion, that he should believe a lie;' afearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now whenhe looked at them, --the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding tountruth of heart. _Self_ and false ambition had now become his god:_self_-deception once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions follownaturally more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatricalpaper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapt his own greatreality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollowPope's-_Concordat_, pretending to be a re-establishment ofCatholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, "_lavaccine de la religion_:" his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations bythe old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame, --"wanting nothing to completethe pomp of it, " as Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million ofmen who had died to put an end to all that"! Cromwell's Inaugurationwas by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera: were notthese the _real_ emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration andinsignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretendedto stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed toomuch in the _Dupeability_ of men; saw no fact deeper in men thanHunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a man that should build uponcloud; his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out ofthe world. 

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and _might_ bedeveloped, were the temptation strong enough. 'Lead us not intotemptation'! But it is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thinginto which it enters as a cognisable ingredient is doomed to bealtogether transitory; and, however huge it may _look_, is in itselfsmall. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what was it with all the noiseit made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a blazing-up as of dryheath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame;but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its old mountainsand streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there. 

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; thisNapoleonism was _unjust_, a falsehood, and could not last. It is truedoctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding ittyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I amnot sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, orhad his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor GermanBookseller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous injustice, which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could make-out to be other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it;suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought ofit, --waiting their day! Which day _came_: Germany rose roundhim. --What Napoleon _did_ will in the long-run amount to what he did_justly_; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of realitywas in him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke andwaste. _La carrière ouverte aux talens_: that great true Message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in amost inarticulate state. He was a great _ébauche_, a rude-draughtnever completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in _too_ rudea state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffectedsurprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung-out on the rockhere, and the World is still moving on its axis. France is great, andall-great; and at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is byNature only an appendage of France; "another Isle of Oleron toFrance. " So it was _by Nature_, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look howin fact, --HERE AM I! He cannot understand it: inconceivablethat the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; thatFrance was not all-great, that he was not France. 'Strong delusion, 'that he should believe the thing to be which _is_ not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, whichhe once had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbidatmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to betrodden-down underfoot; to be bound into masses, and built together, as _he_ liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had quiteother purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had goneher way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless inVacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as manseldom did; and break his great heart, and die, --this poor Napoleon: agreat implement too soon wasted, till it was useless: our last GreatMan!

 * * * * *

_Our_ last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide roamings ofours through so many times and places, in search and study of Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry for it: there was pleasure for me in thisbusiness, if also much pain. It is a great subject, and a most graveand wide one, this which, not to be too grave about it, I have named_Hero-worship_. It enters deeply, as I think, into the secret ofMankind's ways and vitalest interests in this world, and is well worthexplaining at present. With six months, instead of six days, we mighthave done better. I promised to break-ground on it; I know not whetherI have even managed to do that. I have had to tear it up in the rudestmanner in order to get into it at all. Often enough, with these abruptutterances thrown-out isolated, unexplained, has your tolerance beenput to the trial. Tolerance, patient candour, all-hoping favour andkindness, which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished anddistinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best inEngland, have listened patiently to my rude words. With many feelings, I heartily thank you all; and say, Good be with you all!

INDEX

ABDALLAH, father of Mahomet, 286

Abelard, theology of, 389

Abu Thaleb, uncle of Mahomet, 286, 387, 294

Action the true end of Man, 119, 121

Actual, the, the true Ideal, 148, 149

Adamitism, 43

Afflictions, merciful, 145

Agincourt, Shakspeare's battle of, 341

Alexis, Luther's friend, his sudden death, 359

Ali, young, Mahomet's kinsman and convert, 293

Allegory, the sportful shadow of earnest faith, 243, 267

Ambition, Fate's appendage of, 78; foolish charge of, 447; laudable ambition, 449

Apprenticeships, 92

Aprons, use and significance of, 31

Arabia and the Arabs, 282, 310

Art, all true Works of, symbolic, 163

BALDER, the white Sungod, 255, 271

Baphometic Fire-baptism, 128

Barebone's Parliament, 456

Battle-field, a, 131

Battle, Life-, our, 65; with Folly and Sin, 94, 97

Being, the boundless Phantasmagoria of, 39

Belief and Opinion, 146, 147

Belief, the true god-announcing miracle, 292, 311, 375, 401; war of, 430. _See_ Religion, Scepticism. 

Benthamism, 309, 400

Bible of Universal History, 134, 146

Biography, meaning and uses of, 56; significance of biographic facts, 152

Blumine, 104; her environment, 105; character and relation to Teufelsdröckh, 106; blissful bonds rent asunder, 109; on her way to England, 116

Bolivar's Cavalry-uniform, 37

Books, miraculous influence of, 130, 149, 388, 392; our modern University, Church and Parliament, 390

Boswell, his reverence for Johnson, 410

Banyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, 244

Burns, Gilbert, 417

Burns, Robert, his birth, and humble heroic parents, 415; rustic dialect of, 416; the most gifted British soul of his century, 417; his resemblance to Mirabeau, 418; his sincerity, 419; his visit to Edinburgh, 420; Lion-hunters the ruin and death of, 421

CAABAH, the, with its Black Stone and Sacred Well, 284, 285

Canopus, the worship of, 247

Charles I. Fatally incapable of being dealt with, 439

Childhood, happy season of, 68; early influences and sports, 69

China, literary governors of, 397

Christian Faith, a good Mother's simple version of the, 75; Temple of the, now in ruins, 145; Passive-half of, 147

Christian Love, 143, 145

Church. _See_ Books. 

Church-Clothes, 161; living and dead Churches, 162; the modern Church, and its Newspaper-Pulpits, 189

Circumstances, influence of, 71

Clergy, the, with their surplices and cassock-aprons girt-on, 32, 158

Clothes, not a spontaneous growth of the human animal, but an artificial device, 2; analogy between the Costumes of the body and the Customs of the spirit, 25; Decoration the first purpose of Clothes, 28; what Clothes have done for us, and what they threaten to do, 30, 43; fantastic garbs of the Middle Ages, 34; a simple costume, 35; tangible and mystic influences of Clothes, 36, 45; animal and human Clothing contrasted, 41; a Court-Ceremonial _minus_ Clothes, 45; necessity for Clothes, 47; transparent Clothes, 49; all Emblematic things are Clothes, 54, 203; Genesis of the modern Clothes-Philosopher, 61; Character and conditions needed, 153, 156; George Fox's suit of Leather, 159; Church-Clothes, 161; Old-Clothes, 179; practical inferences, 203

Codification, 50

Combination, value of, 101, 221

Commons, British House of, 31

Concealment. _See_ Secrecy. 

Constitution, our invaluable British, 187

Conversion, 149

Courtesy, due to all men, 179

Courtier, a luckless, 36

Cromwell, 430; his hypochondria, 437, 442; early marriage and conversion, 437; an industrious farmer, 438; his victories and participation in the King's death, 439; practicalness of, 440; his Ironsides, 440; his speeches, 444, 459; his 'ambition' and such-like, 446; a 'Fanatic, ' but gradually became a 'Hypocrite, ' 452; his dismissal of the Rump Parliament, 456; Protectorship and Parliamentary Futilities, 457; his last days, and closing sorrows, 460

Custom the greatest of Weavers, 194

DANDY, mystic significance of the, 204; dandy worship, 206; sacred books, 208; articles of faith, 209; a dandy household, 213; tragically undermined by growing Drudgery, 214

Dante and his Book, 318; biography in his Book, and Portrait, 319; his birth, education and early career, 319, 320; his love for Beatrice Portinari, 320; unhappy marriage, 320; banishment, 321; uncourtier-like ways of, 321; his _Divina Commedia_ genuinely a song, 322; the Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, 329; the 'uses' of Dante, 332

David, the Hebrew King, 281

Death, nourishment even in, 81, 127

Della Scala, the court of, 321

Devil, internecine war with the, 9, 90, 128, 139; cannot now so much as believe in him, 127

Dilettantes and Pedants, 52; patrons of Literature, 96

Diodorus Siculus, 284

Diogenes, 159

Divine Right of Kings, 424

Doubt can only be removed by Action, 147. _See_ Unbelief. 

Drudgery contrasted with Dandyism, 210; 'Communion of Drudges, ' and what may come of it, 214

Duelling, a picture of, 136

Duty, no longer a divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, 122, 123; infinite nature of, 147, 309; definition of, 267, 298; sceptical spiritual paralysis, 398

EDDA, the Scandinavian, 253

Editor's first acquaintance with Teufelsdröckh and his Philosophy of Clothes, 4; efforts to make known his discovery to British readers, 7; admitted into the Teufelsdröckh watch-tower, 14, 25; first feels the pressure of his task, 37; his bulky Weissnichtwo Packet, 55; strenuous efforts to evolve some historic order out of such interminable documentary confusion, 59; partial success, 67, 76, 117; mysterious hints, 152, 177; astonishment and hesitation, 163; congratulations, 201; farewell, 219

Education, influence of early, 71; insignificant portion depending on Schools, 77; educational Architects, 79; the inspired Thinker, 171

Eighteenth Century, the sceptical, 398, 404, 433

Eisleben, the birthplace of Luther, 358

Eliot, 433, 434

Elizabethan Era, the, 334

Emblems, all visible things, 54

Emigration, 173

Eternity, looking through Time, 15, 55, 168

Evil, Origin of, 143

Eyes and Spectacles, 51

FACTS, engraved Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key, 153

Faith, the one thing needful, 122

Fantasy, the true Heaven-gate or Hell-gate of man, 109, 165

Fashionable Novels, 208

Fatherhood, 65

Faults, his, not the criterion of any man 281

Feebleness, the true misery, 124

Fichte's theory of literary men, 385

Fire, and vital fire, 53, 129; miraculous nature of, 254

Force, universal presence of, 53

Forms, necessity for, 431

Fortunatus' Wishing-hat, 195, 197

Fox's, George, heavenward aspirations and earthly independence, 159

_Fraser's Magazine_, 6, 227

Frederick the Great, symbolic glimpse of, 61

Friendship, now obsolete, 89; an incredible tradition, 125, 174; how it were possible, 161, 221

Frost. _See_ Fire. 

Futteral and his Wife, 61

Future, organic filaments of the, 183

GENIUS, the world's treatment of, 94

German speculative thought, 2, 9, 20, 24, 41; historical researches, 26, 56

Gerund-grinding, 80

Ghost, an authentic, 198

Giotto, his portrait of Dante, 319

God, the unslumbering, omnipresent, eternal, 40; God's presence manifested to our eyes and hearts, 49; an absentee God, 122

Goethe's inspired melody, 190; 'characters, ' 337; notablest of literary men, 386

Good, growth and propagation of, 75

Graphic, secret of being, 325

Gray's misconception of Norse lore, 270

Great Men, 134. _See_ Man. 

Grimm the German Antiquary, and Odin, 260

Gullibility, blessings of, 84

Gunpowder, use of, 29, 136

HABIT, how, makes dullards of us all, 42

Hagar, the Well of, 284, 285

Half-men, 139

Hampden, 433, 434

Happiness, the whim of, 144

Hegira, the, 295

Heroes, Universal History of the united biographies of, 139, 266; how 'little critics' account for great men, 250; all Heroes fundamentally of the same stuff, 265, 277, 312, 346, 383, 418; Intellect the primary outfit, 338; Heroism possible to all, 358, 375; no man a hero to a valet-soul, 411, 433, 441

Hero-worship, the corner-stone of all Society, 189; the tap-root of all Religion, 248-252, 277; perennial in man, 252, 317, 357, 428

Heuschrecke and his biographic documents, 7; his loose, zigzag, thin-visaged character, 18; unaccustomed eloquence, and interminable documentary superfluities, 56; bewildered darkness, 223

History, all-inweaving tissue of, 15; by what strange chances do we live in, 36; a perpetual Revelation, 134, 148, 190

Homer's Iliad, 169

Hope, this world emphatically the place of, 122; false shadows of, 140

Horse, his own tailor, 41

Hutchinson and Cromwell, 433, 460

ICELAND, the home of Norse Poets, 253

Ideal, the, exists only in the Actual, 148, 149

Idolatry, 351; criminal only when insincere, 353

Igdrasil, the Life-Tree, 257, 334

Imagination. _See_ Fantasy. 

Immortality, a glimpse of, 196

Imposture, statistics of, 84

Independence, foolish parade of, 175, 188

Indifference, centre of, 128

Infant intuitions and acquirements, 68; genius and dulness, 71

Inspiration, perennial, 147, 157, 190

Intellect, the summary of man's gifts, 338, 397

Invention, 29, 120

Invisible, the, Nature the visible Garment of, 41; invisible bonds, binding all Men together, 45; the Visible and Invisible, 49, 164

Irish, the, Poor-Slave, 213

Islam, 291

Isolation, 81

JESUS OF NAZARETH, our divinest Symbol, 168, 171

Job, the Book of, 284

Johnson's difficulties, poverty, hypochondria, 405, 406; rude self-help; stands genuinely by the old formulas, 406; his noble unconscious sincerity, 408; twofold Gospel, of Prudence and hatred of Cant, 409; his _Dictionary_, 410; the brave old Samuel, 411, 450

Jötuns, 254, 272

Julius the Second, Pope, 361

KADIJAH, the good, Mahomet's first Wife, 288, 292

King, our true, chosen for us in Heaven, 187; the, a summary of all the various figures of Heroism, 424; indispensable in all movements of men, 453

Kingdom, a man's, 91

Know thyself, and what thou canst work at, 124

Knox's influence on Scotland, 374; the bravest of all Scotchmen, 376; his unassuming career, 377; is sent to the French Galleys, 377; his colloquies with Queen Mary, 378; vein of drollery, 380; a brother to high and to low, 380; his death, 381

Koran, the, 298

Koreish, the, Keepers of the Caabah, 293, 294, 354

Kranach's portrait of Luther, 372

LABOUR, sacredness of, 171

Ladrones Islands, what the natives of, thought regarding Fire, 254

Lamaism, Grand, 242

Land-owning, trade of, 96

Language, the Garment of Thought, 54; dead vocables, 80

Laughter, significance of, 24

Leo X. , the elegant Pagan Pope, 363

Liberty and Equality, 357, 428

Lieschen, 17

Life, Human, picture of, 14, 115, 129, 141; life-purpose, 101; speculative mystery of, 125, 181, 198; the most important transaction in, 128; nothingness of; 138, 139

Light the beginning of all Creation, 148

Literary Men, 383; in China, 397

Literature, chaotic condition of, 387; not our heaviest evil, 398

Logic-mortar and wordy Air-Castles, 40; underground workshop of Logic, 50, 166

Louis XV. , ungodly age of, 123

Love, what we emphatically name, 102; pyrotechnic phenomena of, 103, 166; not altogether a delirium, 109; how possible, in its highest form, 145, 161, 221

Ludicrous, feeling and instances of the, 36, 136

Luther's birth and parentage, 358; hardship and rigorous necessity; death of his friend Alexis, 359; becomes a monk; his religious despair; finds a Bible, 360; his deliverance from darkness; at Rome, 361; Tetzel, 362; burns the Pope's Bull, 363, 364; at the Diet of Worms, 364; King of the Reformation, 368; 'Duke Georges for nine days running, ' 370; his little daughter's deathbed; his solitary Patmos, 371; his Portrait, 372

MAGNA CHARTA, 203

Mahomet's birth, boyhood, and youth, 286; marries Kadijah, 288; quiet, unambitious life, 288; divine commission, 290; the good Kadijah believes him, 292; Seid, his slave, 293; his Cousin Ali, 293; his offences and sore struggles, 293; flight from Mecca; being driven to take the sword, he uses it, 295; the Koran, 298; a veritable Hero, 305; Seid's death, 306; freedom from cant, 306; the infinite nature of duty, 309

Malthus's over-population panic, 170

Man, by nature _naked_, 2, 42, 46; essentially a tool-using animal, 30; the true Shekinah, 49; a divine Emblem, 54, 165, 167, 180, 199; two men alone honourable, 171. _See_ Thinking Man. 

Mary, Queen, and Knox, 378

Mayflower, sailing of the, 373

Mecca, its rise, 285; Mahomet's flight from, 294, 295

Metaphors, the stuff of Language, 54

Metaphysics inexpressibly unproductive, 40, 51

Middle Ages, represented by Dante and Shakspeare, 329, 333

Milton, 124

Mirabeau, his ambition, 450

Miracles, significance of, 191, 197

Monmouth Street, and its 'Ou' clo'' Angels of Doom, 181

Montrose, the Hero-Cavalier, 453, 454

Mother's, a, religious influence, 75

Motive-Millwrights, 166

Mountain scenery, 115

Musical, all deep things, 317

Mystery, all-pervading domain of, 51

NAKEDNESS and hypocritical Clothing, 42, 47; a naked Court-Ceremonial, 45; a naked Duke addressing a naked House of Lords, 46

Names, significance and influence of, 65, 195

Napoleon and his Political Evangel, 135; compared with Cromwell, 461; a portentous mixture of Quack and Hero, 462; his instinct for the practical, 463; his democratic _faith_ 463; his hatred of Anarchy, 464; apostatised from his old faith in Facts, and took to believing in Semblances, 464, 465; this Napoleonism was _unjust_, and could not last, 466

Nature, the God-written Apocalypse of, 39, 49; not an Aggregate but a Whole, 52, 116, 185, 193; Nature alone antique, 79; sympathy with, 115, 135; the 'Living Garment of God, ' 142; Laws of Nature, 192; all one great Miracle, 245, 302, 371; a righteous umpire, 296

Necessity, brightened into Duty, 74

Newspaper Editors, 33; our Mendicant Friars, 189, 190

Nothingness of life, 138, 139

Nottingham bargemen, 255, 256

Novalis, on Man, 248; on Belief, 292; on Shakspeare, 339

OBEDIENCE, the lesson of, 74, 75

Odin, the first Norse 'man of genius, ' 258; historic rumours and guesses, 259; how he came to be deified, 261; invented 'runes, ' 263; Hero, Prophet, God, 264

Olaf, King, and Thor, 275

Original man the _sincere_ man, 280, 356

Orpheus, 197

Over-population, 170

Own, conservation of a man's, 151

PAGANISM, Scandinavian, 241; not mere Allegory, 243; Nature-worship, 245, 266; Hero-worship, 248; creed of our fathers, 253, 272, 274; Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature, 254; contrasted with Greek Paganism, 256; the first Norse Thinker, 258; main practical Belief; indispensable to be brave, 267; hearty, homely, rugged Mythology, 270; Balder and Thor, 271; Consecration of Valour, 276

Paradise and Fig-leaves, 27; prospective Paradises, 102, 110

Parliaments superseded by Books, 392; Cromwell's Parliaments, 454

Passivity and Activity, 74, 121

Past, the, inextricably linked with the Present, 129; forever extant, 196; the whole, the possession of the Present, 277

Paupers, what to do with, 173

Peace-Era, the much-predicted, 133

Peasant Saint, the, 172

_Pelham_, and the Whole Duty of Dandies, 209

Perseverance, law of, 178

Person, mystery of a, 48, 101, 103, 179

Philosophies, Cause-and-Effect, 26

Phoenix Death-birth, 178, 183, 201

Pitt, Mr. , his reply when asked for help to Burns, 396

Plato, the child-man of, 245

Poet, the, and Prophet, 313, 332, 342

Poetry and Prose, distinction of, 315, 323

Popery, 367

Poverty, advantages of, 334

Priest, the true, a kind of Prophet, 346

Printing, consequences of, 392

Private judgment, 354

Progress of the Species, 349

Property, 150

Prose. _See_ Poetry. 

Proselytising, 6, 221

Protestantism, the root of Modern European History, 364; not dead yet, 367; its living fruit, 373, 425

Purgatory, noble Catholic conception of, 328

Puritanism, founded by Knox, 373; true beginning of America, 373; the one epoch of Scotland, 374; Theocracy, 381; Puritanism in England, 430, 432, 453

Pym, 433, 434

QUACKERY originates nothing, 242, 279; age of, 403; Quacks and Dupes, 441

RADICALISM, Speculative, 10, 20, 47, 188

Ragnarök, 275

Raleigh's, Sir Walter, fine mantle, 36

Ramadhan, the month of, 290

Raphael, the best of Portrait-Painters, 326

Reformer, the true, 347

Religion, dead letter and living spirit of, 87; weaving new vestures, 162, 207; a man's, the chief fact with regard to him, 240; based on Hero-worship, 248; propagating by the sword, 295; cannot succeed by being 'easy, ' 304

Reverence, early growth of, 75; indispensability of, 188

Revolution, 423; the French, 423, 461

Richter, 24, 369

Right and Wrong, 309, 329

Rousseau, not a strong man, 411; his Portrait; egoism, 412; his passionate appeals, 413; his books, like himself, unhealthy; the Evangelist of the French Revolution, 414

Runes, 263, 264, 388

SABEANS, the worship of, 247, 283

Sæmund, an early Christian priest, 253, 254

St. Clement Danes, Church of, 407

Saints, living Communion of, 185, 190

Sarcasm, the panoply of, 99

_Sartor Resartus_, genesis of, 7; its purpose, 201

Saturn or Chronos, 98

Savage, the aboriginal, 28

Scarecrow, significance of the, 46

Sceptical goose-cackle, 51

Scepticism, a spiritual paralysis, 398-405, 433

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 341

School education, insignificance of, 78, 80; tin-kettle terrors and incitements, 78; need of Soul-Architects, 80

Science, the Torch of, 1; the Scientific Head, 51

Scotland awakened into life by Knox, 374

Secrecy, benignant efficacies of, 164

Secret, the open, 313

Seid, Mahomet's slave and friend, 293, 306

Self-activity, 20

Self-annihilation, 141

Shakspeare and the Elizabethan Era, 334; his all-sufficing intellect, 335, 338; his Characters, 337; his Dramas, a part of Nature herself, 340; his joyful tranquillity, and overflowing love of laughter, 340; his hearty Patriotism, 342; glimpses of the world that was in him, 342; a heaven-sent Light-Bringer, 343; a King of Saxondom, 345

Shame, divine, mysterious growth of, 30; the soil of all Virtue, 165

Shekinah, Man the true, 247

Silence, 135; the element in which all great things fashion themselves, 164; the great empires of, 333, 449

Simon's, Saint-, aphorism of the golden age, 178; a false application, 223

Sincerity, better than gracefulness, 267; the first characteristic of heroism and originality, 280, 289, 356, 358, 384

Smoke, advantage of consuming one's, 114

Snorro, his description of Odin, 260, 264, 268

Society founded upon Cloth, 38, 45, 47; how Society becomes possible, 162; social Death and New-Birth, 163, 178, 183, 201; as good as extinct, 174

Solitude. _See_ Silence. 

Sorrow-pangs of Self-deliverance, 115, 120, 121; divine depths of Sorrow, 143; Worship of Sorrow, 146

Southey, and Literature, 396

Space and Time, the Dream-Canvas upon which Life is imaged, 40, 49, 192, 195

Spartan wisdom, 172

Speculative intuition, 38. _See_ German. 

Speech, great, but not greatest, 164

Sphinx-riddle, the Universe a, 97

Star worship, 247, 283

Stealing, 151, 172

Stupidity, blessings of, 123

Style, varieties of, 54

Suicide, 126

Summary, 231

Sunset, 70, 116

Swallows, migrations and co-operative instincts of, 72

Swineherd, the, 70

Symbols, 163; wondrous agency of, 164; extrinsic and intrinsic, 167; superannuated, 169, 175

TABÛC, the War of, 306

Tailors, symbolic significance of, 217

Temptations in the wilderness, 138

Testimonies of Authors, 227

Tetzel, the Monk, 362, 363

Teufelsdröckh's Philosophy of Clothes, 4; he proposes a toast, 10; his personal aspect, and silent deep-seated Sansculottism, 11; thawed into speech, 13; memorable watch-tower utterances, 14; alone with the Stars, 16; extremely miscellaneous environment, 17; plainness of speech, 21; universal learning, and multiplex literary style, 22; ambiguous-looking morality, 23; one instance of laughter, 24; almost total want of arrangement, 25; feeling of the ludicrous, 36; speculative Radicalism, 47; a singular Character, 58; Genesis properly an Exodus, 62; unprecedented Name, 65; infantine experience, 66; Pedagogy, 76; an almost Hindoo Passivity, 76; schoolboy jostling, 79; heterogeneous University Life, 83; fever-paroxysms of Doubt, 87; first practical knowledge of the English, 88; getting under way, 90; ill success, 94; glimpse of high life, 96; casts himself on the Universe, 101; reverent feeling towards Women, 102; frantically in love, 104; first interview with Blumine, 106; inspired moments, 108; short of practical kitchen-stuff, 111; ideal bliss and actual catastrophe, 112; sorrows and peripatetic stoicism, 113; a parting glimpse of his Beloved on her way to England, 116; how he overran the whole earth, 118; Doubt darkened unto Unbelief, 122; love of Truth, 124; a feeble unit, amidst a threatening Infinitude, 125; Baphometic Fire-baptism, 128; placid indifference, 129; a Hyperborean intruder, 136; Nothingness of life, 138; Temptations in the wilderness, 138; dawning of a better day, 141; the Ideal in the Actual, 148; finds his true Calling, 149; his Biography a symbolic Adumbration, significant to those who can decipher it, 152; a wonder-lover, seeker and worker, 156; in Monmouth Street among the Hebrews, 181; concluding hints, 219; his public History not yet done, perhaps the better part only beginning, 223

Theocracy, a, striven for by all true Reformers, 382, 451

Thinking Man, a, the worst enemy of the Prince of Darkness, 91, 150; true Thought can never die, 185

Thor, and his adventures, 255, 271-274; his last appearance, 275

Thought, miraculous influence of, 258, 266, 393; _musical_ Thought, 316

Thunder. _See_ Thor. 

Time, the great mystery of, 246

Time-Spirit, life-battle with the, 65, 98; Time, the universal wonder-hider, 197

Titles of Honour, 186

Tolerance, true and false, 368, 379

Tools, influence of, 30; the Pen, most miraculous of tools, 150

Trial by Jury, Burke's opinion of, 422

Turenne, 312

UNBELIEF, era of, 86, 112; Doubt darkening into, 121; escape from, 139

Universities, 83, 389

Utgard, Thor's expedition to, 273, 274

Utilitarianism, 121, 176

VALKYRS, the, 267, 268

Valour, the basis of all virtue, 268, 271; Norse consecration of, 276; Christian Valour, 351

_Vates_, the, 313, 314, 317

View-hunting and diseased Self-consciousness, 117

Voltaire, 146; the Parisian Divinity, 189; Voltaire-worship, 251, 252

WAR, 131

Wisdom, 50

Wish, the Norse god, 255; enlarged into a heaven by Mahomet, 310

Woman's influence, 102

Wonder the basis of Worship, 50; region of, 51

Words, slavery to, 40; Word-mongering and Motive-grinding, 123

Workshop of Life, 149. _See_ Labour. 

Worms, Luther at, 364

Worship, transcendent wonder, 247. _See_ Hero-worship. 

YOUNG Men and Maidens, 97

ZEMZEM, the sacred Well, 284

THE END