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:

3

(The man who cannot wonder,1 who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mécanique Céleste 2 and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let 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 AttorneyLogic; and "explain" all, "account" for all, or believe nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; 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 15 Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gender? Thou thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thou not die? "Explain "

6

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

1 The man who cannot wonder, etc. Cf. p. 297; On Heroes, p. 64. "An undevout Astronomer is mad" (Young, Night Thoughts, ix. 771). 2 Mécanique Céleste. Vide p. 296, note.

3 Hegel's Philosophy. Vide p. 57, note.

4 Mystic. In 1827, after the publication of Carlyle's essays on Jean Paul" and the "State of German Literature," the papers "took to denouncing" the " Mystic School," i.e. Carlyle. The term, as used at that time, included Kantists. For Carlyle's views on "Mysticism," vide Essays, I. 59.

5 Armer Teufel ! "Poor devil!"

6 Doth not thy cow calve. Cf. Job xxi. 10; xxxix. I.

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 2 lava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows,3 or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth? 4

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

'Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist : 5 "If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the universe, God is there." Thou thyself, O cultivated reader, who too probably art no Psalmist, but a Prosaist, knowing GOD only by tradition, knowest thou any corner of the

1 Elysian brightness. Gleams from Elysium, the bright abode of happy souls after death. Virgil, Eneid, vi. 638-641.

2 Pandemonian. Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 756; x. 424.

3 Asphodel meadows. Where the spirits of departed heroes dwelt. Homer, Odyssey, xi. 539.

4 Yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth. Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 296. Marl, a clay soil containing carbonate of lime, was dug from pits in England as early as the thirteenth century, to be used as manure.

5 Hebrew Psalmist. Psalm cxxxix. 9.

world where at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but tomorrow thou findest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force, and utterly dead?

'As I rode through the Schwarzwald,1 I said to myself: That little fire which glows star-like across the dark-growing (nachtende) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horse-shoe,—is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off from the whole Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the Dogstar; 2 therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far stranger Force of Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of Force brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious Altar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingy Priest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one little textlet 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 separa1 Schwarzwald. The Black Forest in Germany.

2 Dogstar. Sirius, in the Constellation Canis Major, 123 billion miles distant from the earth. Light takes twenty years to travel the distance. 3 Bosom of the All. "How is each so solitary in the wide burialO Father! where is thy infinite bosom, . . .?” Vide Essays, iii. 57).

vault of the All!

(Jean Paul, The Dead Christ.

4 Detached, separated! "All men make up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind" (p. 50). "Sacred philosophies, theologies, bodies of Science, recorded heroisms have all been amassed by little and little. Poor insignificant transitory bipeds. . . have ant-wise accumulated them all." These and similar passages should be read as militating against the extreme doctrine of Hero- Worship which Carlyle occasionally adopted.

tion nothing hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order; else how could it rot? 1 Despise not the rag from which man makes Paper, or the litter from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic 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 its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful;-the rather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye?

'Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing 2 or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light-particle,

1 Else how could it rot? So Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, vol. i. p. 63. 2 What is Man himself, but... a Clothing. "What is man himself but a micro-coat, or rather a complete suit of clothes with all its trimmings?. Is not religion a cloak, honesty a pair of shoes, self-love a surtout, vanity a shirt, and conscience a pair of breeches?" (Swift, Tale of a Tub, sec. ii.).

...

down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body.

'Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures 1 in the Flesh-Garment, Language, then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style 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 quite pallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking ; while others again glow in the flush of health and vigorous. self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mäntel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole hampers, and burn them.'

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

'Why multiply instances? It is written,3 the Heavens

1 Osseous fixtures. Cf. Language is "fossil poetry" and "'fossil history" (Trench, On the Study of Words).

"

In order to get the full sense of a word, we should first present to our minds the visual image that forms its primary meaning. There are

cases, in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word, than by the history of a campaign" (Coleridge). 2 Attention (Lat.) ad-tendo, to stretch the neck towards. 3 It is written. Goethe's method of scriptural quotation : ben steht " (from Matt. iv. 4).

"" Geschrie