Part 6

Brave Teufelsdröckh, who could tell what lurked in thee? In thine eyes, deep under thy shaggy brows, and looking out so still and dreamy, have we not noticed gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire? Our friend's title was that of Professor of Things in General, but he never delivered any course. We used to sit with him in his attic, overlooking the town; he would contemplate that wasp-nest or bee-hive spread out below him, and utter the strangest thoughts. "That living flood, pouring through these streets, is coming from eternity, going onward to eternity. These are apparitions. What else?" Thus he lived and meditated with Heuschrecke as Boswell for his Johnson.

"As Montesquieu wrote a 'Spirit of Laws,'" observes our professor, "so could I write a 'Spirit of Clothes,' for neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident, but the hand is ever guided by the mysterious operations of the mind." And so he deals with Paradise and fig-leaves, and proceeds to view the costumes of all mankind, in all countries, in all times.

The first purpose of clothes, he imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament. "Yet what have they not become? Increased security and pleasurable heat soon followed; divine shame or modesty, as yet a stranger to the anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under clothes, a mystic shrine for the holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; clothes have made men of us; they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us."

Teufelsdröckh dwells chiefly on the seams, tatters, and unsightly wrong-side of clothes, but he has also a superlative transcendentalism. To him, man is a soul, a spirit, and divine apparition, whose flesh and senses are but a garment. He deals much in the feeling of wonder, insisting that wonder is the only reasonable temper for the denizen of our planet. "Wonder," he says, "is the basis of worship," and that progress of science, which is to destroy wonder and substitute mensuration and numeration, finds small favour with him. "Clothes, despicable as we think them, are unspeakably significant."

_II.--Biography of Teufelsdröckh_

So far as we can gather from the disordered papers which have been placed in our hands, the genesis of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is obscure. We see nothing but an exodus out of invisibility into visibility. In the village of Entepfuhl we find a childless couple, verging on old age. Andreas Futteral, who has been a grenadier sergeant under Frederick the Great, is now cultivating a little orchard. To him and Gretchen his wife there entered one evening a stranger of reverend aspect, who deposited a silk-covered basket, saying, "Good people, here is an invaluable loan; take all heed thereof; with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back." Therein they found, as soon as he had departed, a little infant in the softest sleep. Our philosopher tells us that this story, told him in his twelfth year, produced a quite indelible impression. Who was his unknown father, whom he was never able to meet?

We receive glimpses of his childhood, schooldays, and university life, and then meet with him in that difficulty, common to young men, of "getting under way." "Not what I have," he says, "but what I do, is my kingdom; and we should grope throughout our lives from one expectation and disappointment to another were we not saved by one thing--our hunger." He had thrown up his legal profession, and found himself without landmark of outward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided belief, or inward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. So he sets out over an unknown sea; but a certain Calypso Island at the very outset falsifies his whole reckoning.

"Nowhere," he says, "does Heaven so immediately reveal itself to the young man as in the young maiden. The feeling of our young forlorn 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. And if, on a soul so circumstanced, some actual air-maiden should cast kind eyes, saying thereby, 'Thou too mayest love and be loved,' and so kindle him--good Heaven, what an all-consuming fire were probably kindled!"

Such a fire of romance did actually burst forth in Herr Diogenes. We know not who "Blumine" was, nor how they met. She was young, hazel-eyed, beautiful, high-born, and of high spirit, but unhappily dependent and insolvent, living perhaps on the bounty of moneyed relatives. "To our friend the hours seemed moments; holy was he and happy; the words from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on thirsty grass. At parting, the Blumine's hand was in his; in the balmy twilight, with the kind stars above them, he spoke something of meeting again, which was not contradicted; he pressed gently those soft, small fingers, and it seemed as if they were not hastily, not angrily withdrawn."

Poor Teufelsdröckh, it is clear to demonstration thou art smit! Flame-clad, thou art scaling the upper Heaven, and verging towards insanity, for prize of a high-souled brunette, as if the earth held but one and not several of these! "One morning, he found his morning-star all dimmed and dusky-red; doomsday had dawned; they were to meet no more!" Their lips were joined for the first time and the last, and Teufelsdröckh was made immortal by a kiss. And then--"thick curtains of night rushed over his soul, and he fell, through the ruins as of a shivered universe, towards the abyss."

He quietly lifts his pilgrim-staff, and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous globe. We find him in Paris, in Vienna, in Tartary, in the Sahara, flying with hunger always parallel to him, and a whole infernal chase in his rear. He traverses mountains and valleys with aimless speed, writing with footprints his sorrows, that his spirit may free herself, and he become a man. Vain truly is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow! We behold him, through these dim years, in a state of crisis, of transition; his aimless pilgrimings are but a mad fermentation, wherefrom, the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolve itself.

Man has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the "Place of Hope"; yet our professor, for the present, is quite shut out from hope. As he wanders wearisomely through this world he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. "Doubt," says he, "had darkened into unbelief." It is all a grim desert, this once fair world of his; and no pillar of cloud by day, and no pillar of fire by night, any longer guides the pilgrim. "Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of enchantment, divided me from all living; was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, no, there was none! To me the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and mill of death!

"Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French capital or suburbs, was I, one sultry dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were a little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself, 'What _art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the devil and man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatever it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base fear away from me for ever. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance.

"Thus had the _Everlasting No_ pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my _Me_; and then was it that my whole _Me_ stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. The Everlasting No had said, 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is mine, the devil's'; to which my whole _Me_ now made answer, 'I am not thine, but free, and for ever hate thee!'

"It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual new-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a man."

Our wanderer's unrest was for a time but increased. "Indignation and defiance are not the most peaceable inmates," yet it was no longer a quite hopeless unrest. He looked away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and few periods of his life were richer in spiritual culture than this. He had reached the Centre of Indifference wherein he had accepted his own nothingness. "I renounced utterly, I would hope no more and fear no more. To die or to live was to me alike insignificant. Here, then, as I lay in that Centre of Indifference, cast by benignant upper influence into a healing sleep, the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new heaven and a new earth. I saw that man can do without happiness and instead thereof find blessedness. Love not pleasure; love God. This is the _Everlasting Yea_, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. In this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free! Produce! produce! Work while it is called to-day."

_III.--The Volume on Clothes_

In so capricious a work as this of the professor's, our course cannot be straightforward, but only leap by leap, noting significant indications here and there. Thus, "perhaps the most remarkable incident in modern history," he says, "is George Fox's making to himself a suit of leather, when, desiring meditation and devout prayer to God, he took to the woods, chose the hollow of a tree for his lodging and wild berries for his food, and for clothes stitched himself one perennial suit of leather. Then was there in broad Europe one free man, and Fox was he!"

Under the title "Church-Clothes," by which Teufelsdröckh signifies the forms, the vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and represented for themselves the religious principle, he says, "These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and garnitures of human existence. Church-clothes are first spun and woven by society; outward religion originates by society; society becomes possible by religion."

Of "symbols," as means of concealment and yet of revelation, thus uniting in themselves the efficacies at once of speech and of silence, our professor writes, "In the symbol proper there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the finite; to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there. Of this sort are all true works of art; in them, if thou know a work of art from a daub of artifice, wilt thou discern eternity looking through time; the God-like rendered visible. But nobler than all in this kind are the lives of heroic God-inspired men, for what other work of art is so divine?" And again, "Of this be certain, wouldst thou plant for eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart; wouldst thou plant for year and day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his self-love and arithmetical understanding."

As for Helotage, or that lot of the poor wherein no ray of heavenly nor even of earthly knowledge visits him, Teufelsdröckh says, "That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the minute."

In another place, our professor meditates upon the awful procession of mankind. "Like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit-host, we emerge from the inane; haste stormfully across the astonished earth; then plunge again into the inane. But whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God and to God.

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep!"

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

Concerning Friendship

The dialogue "Concerning Friendship" was composed immediately after the assassination of Julius Cæsar, and was suggested by the conduct of certain friends of the mighty dead, who were trying, in the name of friendship, to inflame the populace against the cause of the conspirators. (Cicero biography, see Vol. IX, p. 155, and also p. 274 of the present volume.)

_A Dialogue_

FANNIUS: I agree with you, Lælius; never was man better known for justice or for glory than Scipio Africanus. That is why everyone in Rome is looking to you; everyone is asking me, and Scævola here, how the wise Lælius is bearing the loss of his dead friend. For they call you wise, you know, in the same sense as the oracle called Socrates wise, because you believe that your happiness depends on yourself alone, and that virtue can fortify the soul against every calamity. May we know, then, how you bear your sorrow?

SCÆVOLA: He says truly; many have asked me the same question. I tell them that you are composed and patient, though deeply touched by the death of your dearest friend, and one of the greatest of men.

LÆLIUS: You have answered well. True it is that I sorrow for a friend whose like I shall never see again; but it is also true that I need no consolations, since I believe that no evil has befallen Scipio. Whatever misfortune there is, is my misfortune, and any immoderate distress would show self-love, not love for him. What a man he was! Well, he is in heaven; and I sometimes hope that the friendship of Scipio and Lælius may live in human memory.

FANNIUS: Yes--your friendship: what do you believe about friendship?

SCÆVOLA: That's what we want to know.

LÆLIUS: Who am I, to speak on such a subject all on a sudden? You should go to these Greek professionals, who can spin you a discourse on anything at a moment's notice. For my part, I can only advise this--prize friendship above all earthly things. We seem to be made for friendship; it is our great stand-by whether in weal or woe. Yet I can say this too: friendship cannot be except among the good. I don't mean a fantastical and unattainable pitch of goodness such as the philosophers prate about; I mean the genuine, commonplace goodness of flesh and blood, that actually exists. I mean such men as live in honour, justice, and liberality, and are consistent, and are neither covetous nor licentious, nor brazen-faced; such men are good enough for us, because they follow Nature as far as they can.

Friendship consists of a perfect conformity of opinion upon all subjects, divine and human, together with a feeling of kindness and attachment. And though some prefer riches, health, power, honours, or even pleasure, no greater boon than friendship, with the single exception of wisdom, has been given by the gods to man. It is quite true that our highest good depends on virtue; but virtue inevitably begets and nourishes friendship. What a part, for instance, friendship has played in the lives of the good men we have known--the Catos, the Galli, the Scipios, and the like!

How manifold, again, are its benefits! What greater delight is there than to have one with whom you may talk as if with yourself? One who will joy in your good fortune, and bear the heaviest end of your burdens! Other things are good for particular purposes, friendship for all; neither water nor fire has so many uses. But in one respect friendship transcends everything else: it throws a brilliant gleam of hope over the future, and banishes despondency. Whoever has a true friend sees in him a reflection of himself; and each is strong in the strength and rich in the wealth of the other.

If you consider that the principle of harmony and benevolence is necessary to the very existence of families and states, you will understand how high a thing is friendship, in which that harmony and benevolence reach their perfect flower. There was a philosopher of Agrigentum who explained the properties of matter and the movements of bodies in terms of affection and repulsion; and however that may be, everyone knows that these are the real forces in human life. Who does not applaud the friendship that shares in mortal dangers, whether in real life or in the play?

SCÆVOLA: You speak highly of friendship. What are its principles and duties?

LÆLIUS: Do we desire a friend because of our own weakness and deficiency, in order that we may obtain from him what we lack ourselves, repaying him by reciprocal service? Or is all that only an incident of friendship, and does the bond derive from a remoter and more beautiful origin, in the heart of Nature herself? For my part, I take the latter view. Friendship is a natural emotion, and not an arrangement of convenience. Its character may be recognised even in the lower animals, and much more plainly in the love of human parents for their children, and, most of all, in our affection for a congenial friend, whom we see in an atmosphere of virtue and worth.

The other is not an ignoble theory, but it leaves us in the difficulty that if it were true, the weakest, meanest, and poorest of humanity would be the most inclined to friendship. But it is the strong, rich, independent, and self-reliant man, deeply founded in wisdom and dignity, who makes great friendships. What did Africanus need of me, or I of him? Advantages followed, but they did not lead. But there are people who will always be referring everything to the one principle of self-advantage; they have no eyes for anything great and god-like. Let us leave such theorists alone; the plain fact is, that whenever worth is seen, love for it is enkindled. Associations founded upon interest presently dissolve, because interest changes; but Nature never changes, and therefore true friendships are imperishable.

Scipio used to say that it was exceedingly difficult to carry on a friendship to the end of life, because the paths of interest so often diverge. There may be competition for office, or a dishonorable request may be refused, or some other accident may be fatal to the bond. This refusal to join in a nefarious course of action is often the end of a friendship, and it is worth inquiring how far the claims of affection ought to extend. Tiberius Gracchus, when he troubled the state, was deserted by almost all his friends; one of them who had assisted him told me that he had such high regard for Gracchus that he could refuse him nothing. "But what," said I, "if he had asked you to set fire to the capitol?" "I would have done it!"

What an infamous confession! No degree of friendship can justify a crime; and since virtue is the foundation of friendship, crime must inevitably undermine it. Let this, then, be the rule of friendship--never to make disgraceful requests, and never to grant them when they are made.

Among the perverse, over-subtle ideas of certain Greek philosophers is the maxim that we should be very cool in the matter of friendship. They say that we have enough to do with our own affairs, without taking on other people's affairs too; and that our minds cannot be serenely at leisure if we are liable to be tortured by the sorrows of a friend. They advise, also, that friendships should be sought for the sake of protection, and not for the sake of kindliness. O noble philosophy! They put out the sun in the heavens, and offer us instead a freedom from care that is worse than worthless. Virtue has not a heart of stone, but is gentle and compassionate, rejoicing with the joyful and weeping with those who mourn. True virtue is never unsocial, never haughty.

With regard to the limits of friendship, I have heard three several maxims, but disapprove them all. First, that we ought to feel towards our friend exactly as we feel towards ourselves. That would never do; for we do many things for our friends that we should never think of doing for ourselves. We ask favours and reprehend injuries for a friend, where we would not solicit for, or defend, ourselves. Secondly, that our kindness to a friend should be meted out in precise equipoise to his kindness to us. This is too miserable a theory: friendship is opulent and generous. The third is, that we should take our friend's own estimate of himself, and act upon it. This is the worst principle of the three; for if our friend is over-humble, diffident or despondent, it is the very business of friendship to cheer him and urge him on. But Scipio used to condemn yet another principle that is worse still. Some one--he thought it must have been a bad man--once said that we ought to remember in friendship that some day the friend might be an enemy. How, in that state of mind, could one be a friend at all?

A sound principle, I think, is this. In the friendship of upright men there ought to be an unrestricted communication of every interest, every purpose, every inclination. Then, in any matter of importance to the life or reputation of your friend, you may deviate a little from the strictest line of conduct so long as you do not do anything that is actually infamous. Then, with regard to the choice of friends, Scipio used to say that men were more careful about their sheep and goats than about their friends. Choose men of constancy, solidity, and firmness; and until their trustworthiness has been tested, be moderate in your affection and confidence. Seek first of all for sincerity. Your friend should also have an open, genial, and sociable temper, and his sympathies should be the same as yours. He must not be ready to believe accusations. Lastly, his talk and manner should be debonair; we don't want austerities and solemnities in friendship.

I have heard it suggested that we ought perhaps to prefer new friends to old, as we prefer a young horse to an old one. Satiety should have no place in friendship. Old wines are the best, and so are the friends of many years. Do not despise the acquaintance that promises to ripen into something better; but do not sacrifice for it the deeply rooted intimacy. Even inanimate things take hold of our hearts by long custom; we love the mountains and forests of our youth.

There is often a great disparity in respect of rank or talent between intimate friends. Whenever that is so, let the superior place himself on the level of the inferior; let him share all his advantages with his friend. The best way to reap the full harvest of genius, or of merit, or of any other excellence, is to encourage all one's kindred and associates to enjoy it too. But if the superior ought to condescend to the inferior, so the inferior ought to be free from envy. And let him not make a fuss about such services as he has been able to render.