CHAPTER IV.

GETTING UNDER WAY.

'THUS nevertheless,' writes our Autobiographer, apparently as quitting College,' was there realised Somewhat; namely, I, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh: a visible Temporary Figure (Zeitbild), occupying some cubic feet of Space, and containing within it Forces 'both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; the whole 'wondrous furniture, in more 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 and Delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little Order, where he found 'the opposite? Nay your very Daymoth has capabilities in this kind; and ever organises something (into its own Body, if no otherwise), which was before Inorganic; and of mute dead air 'makes living music, though only of the faintest, by humming.

'How much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who has learned, or begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of Thought! Thaumaturgic I name it; for hitherto all Miracles ' have been wrought thereby, and henceforth innumerable will be wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some. Of the 'Poet's and Prophet's inspired Message, and how it makes and 'unmakes whole worlds, I shall forbear mention: but cannot the dullest hear Steam-engines clanking around him? Has he not seen the Scottish Brassmith's IDEA (and this but a mechanical one) travelling on fire-wings round the Cape, and across two Oceans; and stronger than any other Enchanter's Familiar, on 'all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at home, not only weaving Cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society; and, for Feudalism and Preservation of the Game, preparing us, by indirect but sure methods, Industrialism and the Government of the Wisest? Truly a Thinking Man is 'the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time 'such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire; and new Emissaries are trained, ' with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him.

'With such high vocation had I too, as denizen of the Universe, been called. Unhappy it is, however, that though born to 'the amplest Sovereignty, in this way, with no less than sovereign 'right of Peace and War against the Time-Prince (Zeitfürst), or

'Devil, and all his Dominions, your coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre is so difficult to get at, or even to get eye on !'

By which last wiredrawn similitude, does Teufelsdröckh mean no more than that young men find obstacles in what we call 'getting under way?' 'Not what I Have,' continues he, but what I 'Do is my Kingdom. To each is given a certain inward Talent, a ' certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest com'bination of these two, a certain maximum of Capability. But the ' hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of your'self, 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 not yet which is the 'main and true one. Always too the new man is in a new time, ' under new conditions; his course can be the fac-simile of no prior one, but is by its nature original. And then how seldom will the ' outward Capability fit the inward: though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay what 'is worse than all, we are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, ' and often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work, must several 'years of our small term be spent, till the purblind Youth, by prac'tice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ' ever-new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and 'from side to side: till at length, as exasperated striplings of threescore-and-ten, they shift into their last enterprise, that of getting • buried.

Such, since the most of us are too ophthalmic, would be the general fate; were it not that one thing saves us: our Hunger. 'For on this ground, as the prompt nature of Hunger is well known, 'must a prompt choice be made: hence have we, with wise foresight, Indentures and Apprenticeships for our irrational young; 'whereby, in due season, the vague universality of a Man shall find ' himself ready-moulded into a specific Craftsman; and so thence'forth work, with much or with little waste of Capability as it may 'be; yet not with the worst waste, that of time. Nay even in mat 'ters spiritual, since the spiritual artist too is born blind, and does not, like certain other creatures, receive sight in nine days, but 'far later, sometimes never,-is it not well that 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 can travel contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is forward and for

'ward; and realise much: for himself victual; for the world an additional horse's power in the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill of Eco'nomic Society. For me too had such a leading-string been provided; only that it proved a neck halter, and had nigh throttled me, till I broke it off. Then, in the words of Ancient Pistol, did 'the world generally become mine oyster, which I, by strength or cunning, was to open, as I would and could. Almost had I de'ceased (fast wär ich umgekommen), so obstinately did it continue • shut.'

We see here, significantly foreshadowed, the spirit of much that was to befall our Autobiographer; the historical embodiment of which, as it painfully takes shape in his Life, lies scattered, in dim disastrous details, through this Bag Pisces, and those that follow. A young man of high talent, and high though still temper, like a young mettled colt, breaks-off his neck-halter,' and bounds forth, from his peculiar manger, into the wide world; which, alas, he finds all rigorously fenced-in. Richest clover-fields tempt his eye; but to him they are forbidden pasture: either pining in progressive starvation, he must stand; or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leaping against sheer stone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which only lacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts and endurances, he, as if by miracle, clears his way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain bosky wilderness where existence is still possible, and Freedom though waited on by Scarcity is not without sweetness. In a word, Teufelsdröckh having thrown-up his legal Profession, finds himself without landmark of outward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided Belief, or inward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. Necessity urges him on; Time will not stop, neither can he, a Son of Time; wild passions without solacement, wild faculties without employment, ever vex and agitate him. He too must enact that stern Monodrama, No Object and no Rest; must front its successive destinies, work-through to its catastrophe, and deduce therefrom what moral he can.

Yet let us be just to him, let us admit that his 'neck-halter' sat nowise 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 Nameless capital, as he emerges from its Nameless University, we can discern well that it was far from enviable. His first Law-Examination he has come-through triumphantly; and can even boast that the Examen Rigorosum need not have frightened him: but though he is hereby an Auscultator of respectability,' what avails it? There is next to no employment to be had. Neither, for a youth without connexions, is the process of Expectation verv hope

ful in itself; nor for one of his disposition much cheered from without. My fellow Auscultators,' he says, were Auscultators: 'they dressed, and digested, and talked articulate words; other vitality showed they almost none. Small speculation in those 6 eyes, that they did glare withal! Sense neither for the high nor for the deep, nor for aught human or divine, save only for the 'faintest scent of coming Preferment.' In which words, indicating a total estrangement on the part of Teufelsdröckh, may there not also lurk traces of a bitterness as from wounded vanity? Doubt less these prosaic Auscultators may have sniffed at him, with his strange ways; and tried to hate, and what was much more impos sible, to despise him. Friendly communion, in any case, there could not be already has the young Teufelsdröckh left the other young geese; and swims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is cygnet or gosling.

Perhaps too what little employment he had was performed ill, at best unpleasantly. 'Great practical method and expertness' he may brag of; but is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, only the deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have been popular. We figure to ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks with his 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 not also 'with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been ap pointed to struggle.' Be this as it may, his progress from the passive Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evi dently of the slowest. By degrees, those same established men, once partially inclined to patronise him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up as a man of genius:' against which procedure he, in these Papers, loudly protests. 'As if,' says he, ' the higher did not presuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven, could not also walk post if he resolved on it! But the 'world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold 'coin; whereby being often cheated, 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 skyward without return, is not too clear from these Documents. Good old Gretchen seems to have vanished from the scene, perhaps from the Earth; other Horn of Plenty, or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows for him; so that the prompt nature of Hunger being well known,' we are not without our anxiety. From private Tuition, in never so many languages and sciences, the aid deriv able is small; neither, to use his own words, 'does the young

Adventurer hitherto suspect in himself any literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water wages, by his wide faculty of Translation. Nevertheless,' continues he, that I subsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive.' Which fact, however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind old Proverb, that there is always life for a living one,' we must profess ourselves unable to explain.

Certain Landlords' Bills, and other economic Documents, bearing the mark of Settlement, indicate that he was not without money; but, like an independent Hearth-holder, if not Householder, paid his way. Here also occur, among many others, two little mutilated Notes, which perhaps throw light on his condition. The first has now no date, or writer's name, but a huge Blot; and runs to this effect: The (Inkblot), tied-down by previous promise, 'cannot, except by best wishes, forward the Herr Teufelsdröckh's ' views on the Assessorship in question; and sees himself under 'the cruel necessity of forbearing, for the present, what were • otherwise his duty and joy, to assist in opening the career for a man of genius, on whom far higher triumphs are yet waiting.' The other is on gilt paper; and interests us like a sort of epistolary mummy now dead, yet which once lived and beneficently worked. We give it in the original: Herr Teufelsdröckh wird von der Frau Gräfinn, auf Donnerstag, zum ÆSTHETISCHEN THEE ' schönstens eingeladen.'

Thus, in answer to a cry for solid pudding, whereof there is the most urgent need, comes, epigrammatically enough, the invitation to a wash of quite fluid. Esthetic Tea! How Teufelsdröckh, now at actual handgrips with Destiny herself, may have comported himself among these Musical and Literary Dilettanti of both sexes, like a hungry lion invited to a feast of chickenweed, we can only conjecture. Perhaps in expressive silence, and abstinence : otherwise if the lion, in such case, is to feast at all, it cannot be on the chickenweed, but only on the chickens. For the rest, as this Frau Gräfinn dates from the Zähdarm House, she can be no other than the Countess and mistress of the same; whose intellectual tendencies, and good-will to Teufelsdröckh, whether on the footing of Herr Towgood, or on his own footing, are hereby manifest. That some sort of relation, indeed, continued, for a time, to connect our Autobiographer, though perhaps feebly enough, with this noble House, we have elsewhere express evidence. Doubtless, if he expected patronage, it was in vain; enough for 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