CHAPTER X.

PAUSE.

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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 no'thing of Conversion: instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained 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 cer'tain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their 'Pietists and Methodists.'

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 ill-furnished 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 stupid'est 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 prac

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'tice, 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 neverthe'less is in continual restless flux, it is appointed 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; man, thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, 'arise! Speak forth what is in thee; 'what the Devil shall not take away. 'Priesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest ' in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honour enough therein to spend and be spent?

what God has given thee, Higher task than that of

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 seed'field of Opinion; fruits of my unseen sowing gratifyingly meet 'me here and there. I thank the Heavens that I have now found 'my Calling; wherein, 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-work'ing 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,—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 be'ginning 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 unsuita'ble to the wants of the time; as indeed such sudden extension '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 con'tributions, both of money and of meditation, pour in from all quarters; to, if possible, enlist the remaining Integrity of the

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'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 di-¦ 'vine Commandment, Thou shalt not steal, wherein truly, if well 'understood, is comprised the whole Hebrew Decalogue, with 'Solon's and Lycurgus's Constitutions, Justinian's Pandects, the 'Code Napoleon, and all Codes, Catechisms, Divinities, Moral'ities 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 behoved in this universal dotage and 'deliration the sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves 'and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that di'vine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, ' and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Prop'erty in our very Bodies but only an accidental Possession, and Liferent, what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catch'poles may, 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-devouring 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 lib'eral Prizes, could have proceeded,-let him now cease such 'wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to the Concurrenz (Competition).'

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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, indeed, that a man so known for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdröckh, would all at once frankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not rather deceptively inlock both Editor and Hofrath, in the labyrinthic tortuosities and covered ways of said citadel (having enticed them thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look ?

Of one fool, however, the Herr Professor will perhaps find himself short. On a small slip formerly thrown aside as blank, the ink being all but invisible, we lately notice, and with effort decipher, the following: What are your historical Facts; still 'more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all, a 'Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest 'Facts? The man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, 'but what he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which

'the fewest have the key. And then how your Blockhead (Dumm'kopf) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether they are 'well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worse is 'it with your Bungler (Pfüscher): such I have seen reading some 'Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the 'ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous Reptile.' Was the Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself, might mistake the Teufelsdröckh Serpentof-Eternity in like manner? For which reason it was to be altered, not without underhand satire, into a plainer Symbol? Or is this merely one of his half-sophisms, half-truisms, which if he can but set on the back of a Figure, he cares not whither it gallop? We say not with certainty; and indeed, so strange is the Professor, can never say. If our Suspicion be wholly unfounded let his own questionable ways, not our necessary circumspectness, bear the blame.

But be this as it will, the somewhat exasperated and indeed exhausted Editor determines here to shut these Paperbags, for the present. Let it suffice that we know of Teufelsdröckh, so far, if 'not what he did, yet what he became :' the rather, as his character has now taken its ultimate bent, and no new revolution of importance is to be looked for. The imprisoned Chrysalis is now a winged Psyche: and such, wheresoever be its flight, it will continue. To trace by what complex gyrations (flights or involuntary waftings) through the mere external Life-element, Teufelsdrockh reaches his University Professorship, and the Psyche clothes himself in civic Titles, without altering her now fixed nature, would be comparatively an unproductive task, were we even unsuspicious of its being, for us at least, a false and impossible one. His outward Biography, therefore, which, at the Blumine Lover's-Leap, we saw churned utterly into spray-vapour, may hover in that condition, for aught that concerns us here. Enough that, by survey of certain 'pools and plashes,' we have ascertained its general direction: do we not already know that, by one way and other, it has long since rained down again into a stream; and even now, at Weissnichtwo, flows deep and still, fraught with the Philosophy of Clothes, and visible to whoso will cast eye thereon? Over much invaluable matter that lies scat