CHAPTER X.

PURE REASON.

For

It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and bladders with dried peas.' To linger among such speculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about 'Kings wrestling naked on the " green with Carmen,' and the Kings being thrown: 'dissect them with scalpels,' says Teufelsdröckh; 'the same viscera, tissues, 'livers, lights, and other life-tackle, are there: examine their ⚫ spiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, and 'little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who under'stands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the ' laws of unstable and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly gifted of the two. Whence 'then, their so unspeakable difference? From Clothes.' Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan and My Lady, and how it would be everywhere 'Hail fellow well met,' and Chaos were come again: all which to any one that has once fairly pictured-out the grand mother-idea, Society in a state of Nakedness, will spontaneously suggest itself. Should some sceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:

'Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master

organ, soul's seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a Purse ?'

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdröckh; at worst, one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though, in looking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers, there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdröckh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods.

'To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? An ' omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure 'Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. 'Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom ' of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for ' himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Gar'ment; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the ' centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does 'not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through? Well 'said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, "the true SHE'KINAH is Man:" where else is the God's-PresenCE mani'fested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our 'fellow-man ?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental

element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapour and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love; though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in is man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne- Mantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gipsy - Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, 'un imaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright'? Under which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

'The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent. "The Philosopher," says the wisest of this age, "must station himself in the middle :" how true! The Philosopher is he to 'whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest has mounted 'up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

'Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether 'woven in Arkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our imagination? Or, on the other 'hand, what is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God?

'Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the 'woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper 'Clothes) into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this ' or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Di'gestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, ' in the meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!'

For the rest, as is natural to a man of this kind, he deals much in the feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and

L

high worth of universal Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable temper for the denizen of so singular a Planet as ours. 'Wonder,' says he, 'is the basis of Worship: the reign ' of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only at certain 'stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a reign in 'partibus infidelium.' That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter processes.

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'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the small 'chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which 'the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the 'Doctor's in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart,—but one other of 'the mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scien'tific Head (having a Soul in it) is too noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at best, dies like cookery with the day that called it 'forth; does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase 'to all Time.'

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In such wise does Teufelsdröckh deal hits, harder or softer, according to ability; yet ever, as we would fain persuade ourselves, with charitable intent. Above all, that class of 'Logicchoppers, and treble-pipe Scoffers, and professed Enemies to • Wonder; who, in these days, so numerously patrol as night'constables about the Mechanics' Institute of Science, and 'cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their 'Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illumi'nated Sceptics, walk abroad into peaceable society, in full daylight, with rattle and lantern, and insist on guiding you and 'guarding you therewith, though the Sun is shining, and the 'street populous with mere justice-loving men :' that whole class is inexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what uncommon animation he perorates:

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'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually

wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mécanique Céleste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Ob'servatories with their results, in his single head,—is but a Pair ' of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.

'Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk 'through thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic; and "explain" all, "account" for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, 'thou wilt attempt aughter; whoso recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is everywhere ' under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe 'is an Oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattle'stall, he shall be a delirious Mystic; to him thou, with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer thy hand-lamp, and shriek, ' as one injured, when he kicks his foot through it?—Armer Teufel! Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gender? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thou not die? Explain" me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it 'up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's 'world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto 'art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.'

CHAPTER XI.

PROSPECTIVE.

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