6 'lect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as 6 a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelope myself; that so my own poor Person might live safe there, and in all friendli'ness, being no longer exasperated by wounds. Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason 'I have, long since, as good as renounced it. But how many 'individuals did I, in those days, provoke into some degree of 'hostility thereby! An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ' ambuscading ways, more especially an ironic young man, from 'whom it is least expected, may be viewed as a pest to society. 'Have we not seen persons of weight and name, coming forward, 'with gentlest indifference, to tread such a one out of sight, as 'an insignificancy and worm, start ceiling-high (balkenhoch); 'and thence fall shattered and supine, to be borne home on 'shutters, not without indignation, when he proved electric and 'a torpedo!' Alas, how can a man with this devilishness of temper make way for himself in Life; where the first problem, as Teufelsdröckh too admits, is 'to unite yourself with some one, and with somewhat (sich anzuschliessen)?' Division, not union, is written on most part of his procedure. Let us add too that, in no great length of time, the only important connexion he had ever succeeded in forming, his connexion with the Zähdarm Family, seems to have been paralysed, for all practical uses, by the death of the 'not uncholeric' old Count. This fact stands recorded, quite incidentally, in a certain Discourse on Epitaphs, huddled into the present Bag, among so much else; of which Essay the learning and curious penetration are more to be approved of than the spirit. His grand principle is, that lapidary inscriptions, of what sort soever, should be Historical rather than Lyrical. By request of that worthy Nobleman's survivors,' says he, I undertook to compose his Epitaph; and not unmindful of my own rules, produced the following; which, however, for an 'alleged defect of Latinity, a defect never yet fully visible to 'myself, still remains unengraven ;'-wherein, we may predict, there is more than the Latinity that will surprise an English reader: HIC JACET PHILIPPUS ZAEHDARM, COGNOMINE MAGNUS, ZAEHDARMI COMES, EX IMPERII CONCILIO, VELLERIS AUREI, PERISCELIDIS, NECNON VULTURIS NIGRI EQUES. QUI DUM SUB LUNA AGEBAT, QUINQUIES MILLE PERDRICES PLUMBO CONFECIT : VARII CIBI CENTUMPONDIA MILLIES CENTENA MILLIA, IN STERCUS PALAM CONVERTIT. NUNC A LABORE REQUIESCENTEM OPERA SEQUUNTUR. SI MONUMENTUM QUÆRIS, FIMETUM ADSPICE. PRIMÙM IN ORBE DEJECIT [sub dato]; POSTREMUM [sub dato]. CHAPTER V. ROMANCE. 'FOR long years,' writes Teufelsdröckh, ' had the poor Hebrew, in this Egypt of an Auscultatorship, painfully toiled, baking 'bricks without stubble, before ever the question once struck him 'with entire force: For what?-Beym Himmel! For Food and 'Warmth! And are Food and Warmth nowhere else, in the 'whole wide Universe, discoverable ?-Come of it what might, I ' resolved to try.' Thus then are we to see him in a new independent capacity, though perhaps far from an improved one. Teufelsdröckh is now a man without Profession. Quitting the common Fleet of herring-busses and whalers, where indeed his leeward, laggard condition was painful enough, be desperately steers off, on a course of his own, by sextant and compass of his own. Unhappy Teufelsdröckh! Though neither Fleet, nor Traffic, nor Commodores pleased thee, still was it not a Fleet, sailing in prescribed track, for fixed objects; above all, in combination, wherein, by mutual guidance, by all manner of loans and borrowings, each could manifoldly aid the other? How wilt thou sail in unknown seas; and for thyself find that shorter North-west Passage to thy fair Spice-country of a Nowhere?—A solitary rover on such a voyage, with such nautical tactics, will meet with adventures. Nay, as we forthwith discover, a certain Calypso-Island detains him at the very outset; and as it were falsifies and oversets his whole reckoning. 'If in youth,' writes he once, 'the Universe is majestically un'veiling, and everywhere Heaven revealing itself on Earth, no'where to the Young Man does this Heaven on Earth so imme'diately reveal itself as in the Young Maiden. Strangely 'enough, in this strange life of ours, it has been so appointed. 'On the whole, as I have often said, a Person (Personlichkeit) is ever holy to us; a certain orthodox Anthropomorphism connects my Me with all Thees in bonds of Love: but it is in this approximation of the Like and Unlike, that such heavenly attraction, as between Negative and Positive, first burns out into a flame. Is the pitifulest mortal Person, think you, indifferent to us? Is 'it not rather our heartfelt wish to be made one with him; to 'unite him to us, by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear; or 'failing all these, unite ourselves to him? But how much more, ' in this case of the Like-Unlike! Here is conceded us the higher 'mystic possibility of such a union, the highest in our Earth; 'thus, in the conducting medium of Fantasy, flames forth that 'fire-development of the universal Spiritual Electricity, which, as 'unfolded between man and woman, we first emphatically denom'inate LOVE. 'In every well-conditioned stripling, as I conjecture, there al'ready blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some 'fairest Eve; nor, in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage ' of that Garden, is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in 'the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all 'footsteps of men; and grant him, the imaginative stripling, only 'the view, not the entrance. Happy season of virtuous youth, 'when Shame is still an impassable celestial barrier; and the sa'cred air-cities of Hope have not shrunk into the mean clay-ham'lets of Reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free! 'As for our young Forlorn,' continues Teufelsdröckh, evidently meaning himself, in his secluded way of life, and with his 'glowing Fantasy, the more fiery that it burnt under cover, as in ' a reverberating furnace, his feeling towards the Queens of this 'Earth was, and indeed is, altogether unspeakable. A visible 'Divinity dwelt in them; to our young Friend all women were 'holy, were heavenly. As yet he but saw them flitting past, in 'their many-coloured angel-plumage; or hovering mute and inac 'cessible on the outskirts of Esthetic Tea: all of air they were, all 'Soul and Form; so lovely, like mysterious priestesses, in whose 'hand was the invisible Jacob's-ladder, whereby man might mount 'into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever win 'for himself one of these Gracefuls (Holden) Ach Gott! how could เ 'he hope it; should he not have died under it? There was a ⚫ certain delirious vertigo in the thought. Thus was the young man, if all sceptical of Demons and An'gels such as the vulgar had once believed in, nevertheless not 'unvisited by hosts of true Sky-born, who visibly and audibly 'hovered round him whereso he went; and they had that reli'gious worship in his thought, though as yet it was by their mere 'earthly and trivial name that he named them. But now, if on a 'soul so circumstanced, some actual Air-maiden, incorporated into tangibility and reality, should cast any electric glance of kind eyes, saying thereby, "Thou too mayest love and be loved ;” and 'so kindle him,-good Heaven, what a volcanic, earthquake-bring'ing, all-consuming fire were probably kindled !' 6 Such a fire, it afterwards appears, did actually burst forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurative style, we might say, had now not a little carbonised tinder, of Irritability; with so much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurous Humour enough; the whole lying in such hot neighbourhood, close by a reverberating furnace of Fantasy:' have we not here the components of driest Gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze up? Neither, in this our Life-element, are sparks anywhere wanting. Without doubt, some Angel, whereof so many hovered round, would one day, leaving the outskirts of Esthetic Tea,' flit nigher; and, by electric Promethean glance, kindie no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a Firework, and flamed off rocket-wise, in successive beautiful bursts of splendour, each growing naturally from the other, through the several stages of a happy Youthful Love; till the whole were safely burnt out; and the young soul relieved, with little damage! Happy, if it did not rather prove a Conflagration and mad Explosion; painfully lacerating the heart itself; nay perhaps bursting the heart in pieces (which were Death); or at best, bursting the thin walls of your reverberating furnace,' so that it rage thenceforth all unchecked among the contiguous combustibles (which were Madness): till of the so fair and manifold internal world of our Diogenes, there remained Nothing, or only the crater of an extinct volcano !' |