“thus nevertheless,” writes our autobiographer, apparently as quitting college, “was there realized somewhat; namely, i, diogenes teufelsdrockh: a visible temporary figure (zeitbild), occupying some cubic feet of space, and containing within it forces both physical and spiritual; hopes, passions, thoughts; the whole wondrous furniture, in more or less perfection, belonging to that mystery, a man. capabilities there were in me to give battle, in some small degree, against the great empire of darkness: does not the very ditcher and delver, with his spade, extinguish many a thistle and puddle; and so leave a little order, where he found the opposite? nay your very day-moth has capabilities in this kind; and ever organizes something (into its own body, if no otherwise), which was before inorganic; and of mute dead air makes living music, though only of the faintest, by humming.
“how much more, one whose capabilities are spiritual; who has learned, or begun learning, the grand thaumaturgic art of thought! thaumaturgic i name it; for hitherto all miracles have been wrought thereby, and henceforth innumerable will be wrought; whereof we, even in these days, witness some. of the poet’s and prophet’s inspired message, and how it makes and unmakes whole worlds, i shall forbear mention: but cannot the dullest hear steam-engines clanking around him? has he not seen the scottish brass-smith’s idea (and this but a mechanical one) travelling on fire-wings round the cape, and across two oceans; and stronger than any other enchanter’s familiar, on all hands unweariedly fetching and carrying: at home, not only weaving cloth; but rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of society; and, for feudalism and preservation of the game, preparing us, by indirect but sure methods, industrialism and the government of the wisest? truly a thinking man is the worst enemy the prince of darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, i doubt not, there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained, with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap him, and hoodwink and handcuff him.
“with such high vocation had i too, as denizen of the universe, been called. unhappy it is, however, that though born to the amplest sovereignty, in this way, with no less than sovereign right of peace and war against the time–prince (zeitfurst), or devil, and all his dominions, your coronation-ceremony costs such trouble, your sceptre is so difficult to get at, or even to get eye on!”
by which last wire-drawn similitude does teufelsdrockh mean no more than that young men find obstacles in what we call “getting under way”? “not what i have,” continues he, “but what i do is my kingdom. to each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment of fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of capability. but the hardest problem were ever this first: to find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward capability specially is. for, alas, our young soul is all budding with capabilities, and we see not yet which is the main and true one. always too the new man is in a new time, under new conditions; his course can be the fac-simile of no prior one, but is by its nature original. and then how seldom will the outward capability fit the inward: though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay what is worse than all, we are foolish. thus, in a whole imbroglio of capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work must several years of our small term be spent, till the purblind youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing man. nay, many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side: till at length, as exasperated striplings of threescore-and-ten, they shift into their last enterprise, that of getting buried.
“such, since the most of us are too ophthalmic, would be the general fate; were it not that one thing saves us: our hunger. for on this ground, as the prompt nature of hunger is well known, must a prompt choice be made: hence have we, with wise foresight, indentures and apprenticeships for our irrational young; whereby, in due season, the vague universality of a man shall find himself ready-moulded into a specific craftsman; and so thenceforth work, with much or with little waste of capability as it may be; yet not with the worst waste, that of time. nay even in matters spiritual, since the spiritual artist too is born blind, and does not, like certain other creatures, receive sight in nine days, but far later, sometimes never, — is it not well that there should be what we call professions, or bread-studies (brodzwecke), preappointed us? here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or total blindness is no evil, the bread-artist can travel contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is forward and forward; and realize much: for himself victual; for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill of economic society. for me too had such a leading-string been provided; only that it proved a neck-halter, and had nigh throttled me, till i broke it off. then, in the words of ancient pistol, did the world generally become mine oyster, which i, by strength or cunning, was to open, as i would and could. almost had i deceased (fast war ich umgekommen), so obstinately did it continue shut.”
we see here, significantly foreshadowed, the spirit of much that was to befall our autobiographer; the historical embodiment of which, as it painfully takes shape in his life, lies scattered, in dim disastrous details, through this bag pisces, and those that follow. a young man of high talent, and high though still temper, like a young mettled colt, “breaks off his neck-halter,” and bounds forth, from his peculiar manger, into the wide world; which, alas, he finds all rigorously fenced in. richest clover-fields tempt his eye; but to him they are forbidden pasture: either pining in progressive starvation, he must stand; or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leaping against sheer stone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which only lacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts and endurances, he, as if by miracle, clears his way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain bosky wilderness where existence is still possible, and freedom, though waited on by scarcity, is not without sweetness. in a word, teufelsdrockh having thrown up his legal profession, finds himself without landmark of outward guidance; whereby his previous want of decided belief, or inward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. necessity urges him on; time will not stop, neither can he, a son of time; wild passions without solacement, wild faculties without employment, ever vex and agitate him. he too must enact that stern monodrama, no object and no rest; must front its successive destinies, work through to its catastrophe, and deduce therefrom what moral he can.
yet let us be just to him, let us admit that his “neck-halter” sat nowise easy on him; that he was in some degree forced to break it off. if we look at the young man’s civic position, in this nameless capital, as he emerges from its nameless university, we can discern well that it was far from enviable. his first law–examination he has come through triumphantly; and can even boast that the examen rigorosum need not have frightened him: but though he is hereby “an auscultator of respectability,” what avails it? there is next to no employment to be had. neither, for a youth without connections, is the process of expectation very hopeful in itself; nor for one of his disposition much cheered from without. “my fellow auscultators,” he says, “were auscultators: they dressed, and digested, and talked articulate words; other vitality showed they almost none. small speculation in those eyes, that they did glare withal! sense neither for the high nor for the deep, nor for aught human or divine, save only for the faintest scent of coming preferment.” in which words, indicating a total estrangement on the part of teufelsdrockh may there not also lurk traces of a bitterness as from wounded vanity? doubtless these prosaic auscultators may have sniffed at him, with his strange ways; and tried to hate, and what was much more impossible, to despise him. friendly communion, in any case, there could not be: already has the young teufelsdrockh left the other young geese; and swims apart, though as yet uncertain whether he himself is cygnet or gosling.
perhaps, too, what little employment he had was performed ill, at best unpleasantly. “great practical method and expertness” he may brag of; but is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, only the deeper-seated? so shy a man can never have been popular. we figure to ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks with his independence, and so forth: do not his own words betoken as much? “like a very young person, i imagined it was with work alone, and not also with folly and sin, in myself and others, that i had been appointed to struggle.” be this as it may, his progress from the passive auscultatorship, towards any active assessorship, is evidently of the slowest. by degrees, those same established men, once partially inclined to patronize him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up as “a man of genius” against which procedure he, in these papers, loudly protests. “as if,” says he, “the higher did not presuppose the lower; as if he who can fly into heaven, could not also walk post if he resolved on it! but the world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.”
how our winged sky-messenger, unaccepted as a terrestrial runner, contrived, in the mean while, to keep himself from flying skyward without return, is not too clear from these documents. good old gretchen seems to have vanished from the scene, perhaps from the earth; other horn of plenty, or even of parsimony, nowhere flows for him; so that “the prompt nature of hunger being well known,” we are not without our anxiety. from private tuition, in never so many languages and sciences, the aid derivable is small; neither, to use his own words, “does the young adventurer hitherto suspect in himself any literary gift; but at best earns bread-and-water wages, by his wide faculty of translation. nevertheless,” continues he, “that i subsisted is clear, for you find me even now alive.” which fact, however, except upon the principle of our true-hearted, kind old proverb, that “there is always life for a living one,” we must profess ourselves unable to explain.
certain landlords’ bills, and other economic documents, bearing the mark of settlement, indicate that he was not without money; but, like an independent hearth-holder, if not house-holder, paid his way. here also occur, among many others, two little mutilated notes, which perhaps throw light on his condition. the first has now no date, or writer’s name, but a huge blot; and runs to this effect: “the (inkblot), tied down by previous promise, cannot, except by best wishes, forward the herr teufelsdrockh’s views on the assessorship in question; and sees himself under the cruel necessity of forbearing, for the present, what were otherwise his duty and joy, to assist in opening the career for a man of genius, on whom far higher triumphs are yet waiting.” the other is on gilt paper; and interests us like a sort of epistolary mummy now dead, yet which once lived and beneficently worked. we give it in the original: “herr teufelsdrockh wird von der frau grafinn, auf donnerstag, zum aesthetischen thee schonstens eingeladen.”
thus, in answer to a cry for solid pudding, whereof there is the most urgent need, comes, epigrammatically enough, the invitation to a wash of quite fluid aesthetic tea! how teufelsdrockh, now at actual hand-grips with destiny herself, may have comported himself among these musical and literary dilettanti of both sexes, like a hungry lion invited to a feast of chickenweed, we can only conjecture. perhaps in expressive silence, and abstinence: otherwise if the lion, in such case, is to feast at all, it cannot be on the chickenweed, but only on the chickens. for the rest, as this frau grafinn dates from the zahdarm house, she can be no other than the countess and mistress of the same; whose intellectual tendencies, and good-will to teufelsdrockh, whether on the footing of herr towgood, or on his own footing, are hereby manifest. that some sort of relation, indeed, continued, for a time, to connect our autobiographer, though perhaps feebly enough, with this noble house, we have elsewhere express evidence. doubtless, if he expected patronage, it was in vain; enough for him if he here obtained occasional glimpses of the great world, from which we at one time fancied him to have been always excluded. “the zahdarms,” says he, “lived in the soft, sumptuous garniture of aristocracy; whereto literature and art, attracted and attached from without, were to serve as the handsomest fringing. it was to the gnadigen frau (her ladyship) that this latter improvement was due: assiduously she gathered, dexterously she fitted on, what fringing was to be had; lace or cobweb, as the place yielded.” was teufelsdrockh also a fringe, of lace or cobweb; or promising to be such? “with his excellenz (the count),” continues he, “i have more than once had the honor to converse; chiefly on general affairs, and the aspect of the world, which he, though now past middle life, viewed in no unfavorable light; finding indeed, except the outrooting of journalism (die auszurottende journalistik), little to desiderate therein. on some points, as his excellenz was not uncholeric, i found it more pleasant to keep silence. besides, his occupation being that of owning land, there might be faculties enough, which, as superfluous for such use, were little developed in him.”
that to teufelsdrockh the aspect of the world was nowise so faultless, and many things besides “the outrooting of journalism” might have seemed improvements, we can readily conjecture. with nothing but a barren auscultatorship from without, and so many mutinous thoughts and wishes from within, his position was no easy one. “the universe,” he says, “was as a mighty sphinx-riddle, which i knew so little of, yet must rede, or be devoured. in red streaks of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness of darkness, was life, to my too-unfurnished thought, unfolding itself. a strange contradiction lay in me; and i as yet knew not the solution of it; knew not that spiritual music can spring only from discords set in harmony; that but for evil there were no good, as victory is only possible by battle.”
“i have heard affirmed (surely in jest),” observes he elsewhere, “by not unphilanthropic persons, that it were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five. with which suggestion, at least as considered in the light of a practical scheme, i need scarcely say that i nowise coincide. nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, as young ladies (madchen) are, to mankind, precisely the most delightful in those years; so young gentlemen (bubchen) do then attain their maximum of detestability. such gawks (gecken) are they, and foolish peacocks, and yet with such a vulturous hunger for self-indulgence; so obstinate, obstreperous, vain-glorious; in all senses, so froward and so forward. no mortal’s endeavor or attainment will, in the smallest, content the as yet unendeavoring, unattaining young gentleman; but he could make it all infinitely better, were it worthy of him. life everywhere is the most manageable matter, simple as a question in the rule-of-three: multiply your second and third term together, divide the product by the first, and your quotient will be the answer, — which you are but an ass if you cannot come at. the booby has not yet found out, by any trial, that, do what one will, there is ever a cursed fraction, oftenest a decimal repeater, and no net integer quotient so much as to be thought of.”
in which passage does not there lie an implied confession that teufelsdrockh himself, besides his outward obstructions, had an inward, still greater, to contend with; namely, a certain temporary, youthful, yet still afflictive derangement of head? alas, on the former side alone, his case was hard enough. “it continues ever true,” says he, “that saturn, or chronos, or what we call time, devours all his children: only by incessant running, by incessant working, may you (for some threescore-and-ten years) escape him; and you too he devours at last. can any sovereign, or holy alliance of sovereigns, bid time stand still; even in thought, shake themselves free of time? our whole terrestrial being is based on time, and built of time; it is wholly a movement, a time-impulse; time is the author of it, the material of it. hence also our whole duty, which is to move, to work, — in the right direction. are not our bodies and our souls in continual movement, whether we will or not; in a continual waste, requiring a continual repair? utmost satisfaction of our whole outward and inward wants were but satisfaction for a space of time; thus, whatso we have done, is done, and for us annihilated, and ever must we go and do anew. o time–spirit, how hast thou environed and imprisoned us, and sunk us so deep in thy troublous dim time–element, that only in lucid moments can so much as glimpses of our upper azure home be revealed to us! me, however, as a son of time, unhappier than some others, was time threatening to eat quite prematurely; for, strive as i might, there was no good running, so obstructed was the path, so gyved were the feet.” that is to say, we presume, speaking in the dialect of this lower world, that teufelsdrockh’s whole duty and necessity was, like other men’s, “to work, — in the right direction,” and that no work was to be had; whereby he became wretched enough. as was natural: with haggard scarcity threatening him in the distance; and so vehement a soul languishing in restless inaction, and forced thereby, like sir hudibras’s sword by rust,
“to eat into itself, for lack
of something else to hew and hack;”
but on the whole, that same “excellent passivity,” as it has all along done, is here again vigorously flourishing; in which circumstance may we not trace the beginnings of much that now characterizes our professor and perhaps, in faint rudiments, the origin of the clothes–philosophy itself? already the attitude he has assumed towards the world is too defensive; not, as would have been desirable, a bold attitude of attack. “so far hitherto,” he says, “as i had mingled with mankind, i was notable, if for anything, for a certain stillness of manner, which, as my friends often rebukingly declared, did but ill express the keen ardor of my feelings. i, in truth, regarded men with an excess both of love and of fear. the mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike. often, notwithstanding, was i blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for my so-called hardness (harte), my indifferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone i had adopted, as my favorite dialect in conversation. alas, the panoply of sarcasm was but as a buckram case, wherein i had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor person might live safe there, and in all friendliness, 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 (balkenhock), 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 teufelsdrockh 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 connection he had ever succeeded in forming, his connection with the zahdarm family, seems to have been paralyzed, 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 perdices
plumbo confecit:
varii cibi
centumpondia millies centena millia,
per se, perque servos quadrupedes bipedesve,
haud sine tumult devolvens,
in stercus
palam convertit.
nunc a labore requiescentem
opera sequuntur.
si monumentum quaeris,
fimetum adspice.
primum in orbe dejecit [sub dato]; postremum [sub dato].
