THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES.
If in the Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdrockh,
discussing merely the _Werden_ (Origin and successive Improvement) of
Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the
Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their _Wirken_, or
Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of
his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes
commences: all untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; in
venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to
know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the
footing is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere
cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdrockh undertakes no less than to expound
the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes
to make manifest, in its thousand-fold bearings, this grand Proposition,
that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttoned together, and
held up, by Clothes." He says in so many words, "Society is founded upon
Cloth;" and again, "Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a
Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the
Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless
depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in either case be no more."
By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this
grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are
drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our
Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where
the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but
at best that of practical Reason' proceeding by large Intuition over whole
systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity,
almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture
of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay
we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call
mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim:
Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems
as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it
were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is
only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at
wide-enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated,
that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine.
Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favor us with their
most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and
not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon
there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands,
perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail
thither?--As exordium to the whole, stand here the following long
citation:--
"With men of a speculative turn," writes Teufelsdrockh, "there come
seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you
ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say
'I' (_das Wesen das sich ICH nennt_)? The world, with its loud
trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings,
and stonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the
living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your
Existence sits surrounded,--the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and
you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one
mysterious Presence with another.
"Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;--some
embodied, visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind? _Cogito, ergo sum_. Alas,
poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and
lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around,
written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and
wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where
is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield
articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and
Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies
not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-colored visions flit
round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and
Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not.
Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun
that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream,
how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest
while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems
is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where
divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars,
with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the
Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what
we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if
they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they
know nothing.
"Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly
unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret:
a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death,
the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and
Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly
built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein,
however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _The whole is greater than the
part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors a vacuum_: how exceedingly
false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can act but where it is_: with all
my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave of Words: is not the
Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it,
Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that
same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the first the master-colors of
our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof)
whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not
a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE
and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but
superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern
them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have
not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing
in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find
that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_
no Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating
in the ether of Deity!
"So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our
ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production and
destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy of our
Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living visible
Garment of God_:--
"'In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living:
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.'
Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the
_Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning
thereof?
"It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high
speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange
enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and
Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the
girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the
noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his own
boot-maker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys,
with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth and
easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been
considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color, featly
appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While I--good
Heaven!-- have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the
bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the
felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with
shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would
have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself
anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its
thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed
off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been
brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rat-grinder, get new
material to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I
too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass
of tailors' and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly articulated,
homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?
"Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest
facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in
the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a
blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and
consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute lawgiver;
mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising
of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen _twice_, and it ceases
to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a
lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or
generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his
Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that _he_ is naked,
without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and
button them.
"For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and how,
reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and demoralizes
us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind; almost as one
feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing
deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped sacking), in the
meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something great in the moment when
a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees indeed that
he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forked straddling animal with bandy
legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries."