CHAPTER X.

PAUSE.

THUS have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdröckh through the various successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as Conversion. 'Blame 'not the word,' says he; 'rejoice rather that such a "word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew nothing of Con' version: instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained 6 progress in the Moral Development of man: hereby ' has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the ' most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and ' certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists.'

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It is here then that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdröckh commences: we are henceforth to see him ' work in well-doing,' with the spirit and clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so panted for, is even this same Actual illfurnished Workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself: Tools? Thou hast

no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, " now alive but has tools. The basest of created 'animalcules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, ' and warping-mill, and power-loom, within its head: the stupidest of Oysters has a Papin's-Digester, ' with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being 'that can live can do something; this let him do.— Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished, furnish'able with some glimmerings of Light; and three 'fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron's

Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was 'there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than ' all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which 'nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is ap'pointed that Sound, to appearance the most fleeting, 'should be the most continuing of all things. The 'WORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world; Iman, thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what 'God has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of Priesthood was

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allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest ' in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honour enough 'therein to spend and be spent?

By this Art, which whoso will may sacrilegiously degrade into a handicraft,' adds Teufelsdröckh, have I thenceforth abidden. Writings of mine, not indeed known as mine (for what am I?), have 'fallen, perhaps not altogether void, into the mighty 'seedfield of Opinion; fruits of my unseen sowing ' gratifyingly meet me here and there. I thank the 'Heavens that I have now found my Calling; where

'in, with or without perceptible result, I am minded diligently to persevere.

Nay how knowest thou,' cries he, but this ' and the other pregnant Device, now grown to be 'a world-renowned far-working Institution; like a grain of right mustard-seed once cast into the right soil, and now stretching out strong boughs to the 'four winds, for the birds of the air to lodge in,

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may have been properly my doing? Some one's doing, it without doubt was; from some Idea, in 'some single Head, it did first of all take beginning: 'why not from some Idea in mine?' Does Teufelsdröckh here glance at that SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (Eigenthums-conservirende Gesellschaft),' of which so many ambiguous notices glide spectre-like through these inexpressible Paperbags? An Institution,' hints he, 'not unsuitable to 'the wants of the time; as indeed such sudden ex'tension proves: for already can the Society number, ' among its office-bearers or corresponding members, 'the highest Names, if not the highest Persons, in Germany, England, France; and contributions, both ' of money and of meditation, pour in from all quar'ters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining Integrity ' of the 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 com'prised 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 behøved, 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 conceivable, are sanc'tioned 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 Life-rent, what is the issue 'to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may,

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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 meat-devouring and. man-devour'ing 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).'

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 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 a 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,