CHAPTER X.

PURE REASON.

It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of 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. For our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen,' and the Kings being thrown: dissect them with scalpels,' says 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 ' understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of unstable and stable equili'brium, with other branches of waggon-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 every where '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 Bogs 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 rivetting 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 de

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grade man below most animals, except those jacketted Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the gods.

To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? 'An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, 'and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, 'there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; 'whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with 'them in UNION and Division; and sees and fashions for 'himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and 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 SHEKINAH is Man:" where else is the GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our 'hearts, as in our fellow man?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the 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.

For

Such tendency to Mysticism is every where traceable in this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings : thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and CharlemagneMantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad and GipsyBlanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. 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, ' unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright?' Under which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

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

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

'Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a

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

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

cesses.

'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the 'small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind become an 'Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which the scientific 'head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin, to keep it alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart,—but one 'other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too 'noble an organ ? I mean that Thought without Re