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world, and, defensively and with forethought, marshal it round this Palladium.' Does Teufelsdröckh mean, then, to give himself out as the originator of that so notable Eigenthums-conservirende (Owndom-conserving') Gesellschaft; and, if so, what, in the Devil's name, is it? He again hints: 'At a time when the divine Commandment, Thou shalt not steal, wherein truly, if well understood, is comprised the whole Hebrew Decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgus's Constitutions, Justinian's Pandects, the Code Napoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities, Moralities whatsoever, that man has hitherto devised (and enforced with Altar-fire and Gallows-ropes) for his social guidance at a time, I say, when this divine Commandment has all but faded away from the general remembrance; and, with little disguise, a new opposite Commandment, Thou shalt steal, is everywhere promulgated, it perhaps behoved in this universal dotage and deliration the sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves ' and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or con'ceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, ' and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies but only an accidental Possession, and Liferent, what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catch'poles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin: but what, except perhaps some such 'Universal Association, can protect us against whole meatdevouring 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 Public Journals, with its high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes, could have proceeded,-let him now cease such wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to the Concurrenz (Competition).'

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We ask Has this same 'perhaps not ill-written Program,' or any other authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal, foreign or domestic? If so, what are those Prize-Questions ; what are the terms of Competition, and when and where? No printed Newspaper leaf, no farther light of any sort, to be met

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with in these Paperbags! Or is the whole business one other of those whimsicalities, and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdröckh, meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play fast and loose with us?

Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to s painful suspicion which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him; paralysing any little enthusiasm, that might still have rendered his thorny Biographical task a labour of love. It is a suspicion grounded perhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more and more discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdröckh, in whom underground humours. and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel within wheel, defy all reckoning a suspicion in one word, that these Autobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had no direct Camera-obscura Picture of the Professor's History; but only some more or less fantastic Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly enough, shadowing forth the same! Our theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally authentic what was but hieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruple not to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of and set adrift to make fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that a man so known for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdröckh, would all at once frankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not rather deceptively inlock both Editor and Hofrath, in the labyrinthic tortuosities and covered ways of said citadel (having enticed them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look?

Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short. On a small slip formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but invisible, we lately notice, and with effort decipher, the following: What are your historical Facts; still 'more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all, a 'Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest 'Facts? The man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, 'but what he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which

'the fewest have the key. And then how your Blockhead (Dumm'kopf) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether they are 'well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worse is 'it with your Bungler (Pfuscher): such I have seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous Reptile.' Was the Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself, might mistake the Teufelsdröckh Serpentof-Eternity in like manner? For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, into a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms, half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is the Professor, can never say. If our Suspicion be wholly unfounded let his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness, bear the blame.

But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted Editor determines here to shut these Paperbags, for the present. Let it 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 its ultimate bent, and no new revolution of importance is to be looked for. The imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche and such, wheresoever be its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations (flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life-element, Teufelsdrockh reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes himself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature, would be comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false and impossi ble one. His outward Biography, therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, we saw churned utterly into spray-vapour, may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here. Enough that, by survey of certain 'pools and plashes,' we have ascertained its general 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, at Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the Philosophy of Clothes, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon? Over much invaluable matter that lies scat

tered, like jewels among quarry-rubbish, in those Paper-catacombs, we may have occasion to glance 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 whst our degree of progress, during these Ten Chapters, has been. towards right understanding of the Clothes-Philosophy, let not our discouragement become total. To speak in that old figure of the Hell-gate Bridge over Chaos, a few flying pontoons have perhap been added, though as yet they drift straggling on the Flood; how far they will reach, when once the chains are straightened and fastened, can, at present, only be matter of conjecture.

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So much we already calculate: Through many a little loop hole, we have had glimpses into the internal world of Teufels dröckh; his strange mystic, almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME, which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligible with such, may by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhat peculiar view of Nature; the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature How all Nature and Life are but one Garment, a Living Gar ment,' woven and ever a-weaving in the Loom of Time;' is not here, indeed, the outline of a whole Clothes-Philosophy; at least the arena it is to work in? Remark too that the Character of the man, nowise without meaning in such a matter, becomes less enigmatic amid so much tumultuous obscurity almost like diluted madness, do not a certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem to loom forth, as the two mountain-summits on whose rock-strata all the rest were based and built?

Nay, further, may we not say that Teufelsdröckh's Biography, allowing it even, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man as it were preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows of things into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The 'Passivity' given him by birth is fostered by all turns of his fortune. Everywhere cast out, like oil out of water, from mingling in any Employment, in any public Communion, be has no portion buf Solitude and a life of Meditation. The whole energy of his existence is directed, through long years, on one

task; that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows of things oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with fearfulest destruction; only by victoriously penetrating into Things themselves, can he find peace and a stronghold. But is not this same looking through the Shows, or Vestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to a Philosophy of Clothes? Do we not, in all this, discern some beckonings towards the true higher purport of such a Philosophy; and what shape it must assume with such a man, in such an era?

Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly without guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all the fantastic Dream-Grottoes through which, as is our lot with Teufelsdröckh, he must wander, will there be wanting between whiles some twinkling of a steady Polar Star.

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