Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh

by Thomas Carlyle

  CHAPTER VII. THE EVERLASTING NO.

  Under the strange nebulous envelopment, wherein our Professor has nowshrouded himself, no doubt but his spiritual nature is neverthelessprogressive, and growing: for how can the "Son of Time," in any case,stand still? We behold him, through those dim years, in a state ofcrisis, of transition: his mad Pilgrimings, and general solutioninto aimless Discontinuity, what is all this but a mad Fermentation;wherefrom the fiercer it is, the clearer product will one day evolveitself?

  Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults issickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old oneupon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual actsand motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever ofanarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as,indeed, how could there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed,bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart mightdesire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst instance,offered and then snatched away. Ever an "excellent Passivity;" but ofuseful, reasonable Activity, essential to the former as Food to Hunger,nothing granted: till at length, in this wild Pilgrimage, he mustforcibly seize for himself an Activity, though useless, unreasonable.Alas, his cup of bitterness, which had been filling drop by drop, eversince that first "ruddy morning" in the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was atthe very lip; and then with that poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Bluminebusiness, it runs over, and even hisses over in a deluge of foam.

  He himself says once, with more justness than originality: "Men is,properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope;this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope." What, then, wasour Professor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut outfrom Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all roundinto a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.

  Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of!For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lostall tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least ofreligiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides notthat, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened intoUnbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, tillyou have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as havereflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happilydiscovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy,speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach;who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, "that, for man'swell-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it,Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross;and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, inthe midst of luxury:" to such it will be clear that, for a pure moralnature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything.Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution,the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy sogenial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth beenwithdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: "Is there no God,then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the firstSabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and _see_ing it go? Has theword Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger andGuide, but a false earthly Phantasm, made up of Desire and Fear, ofemanations from the Gallows and from Doctor Graham's Celestial-Bed?Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whomadmiring men have since named Saint, feel that _he_ was 'the chief ofsinners;' and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (_wohlgemuth_), spend muchof his time in fiddling? Foolish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who inthy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, andwouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,--I tellthee, Nay! To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is everthe bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious ofVirtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but ofinjustice. What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but somePassion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others_profit_ by? I know not: only this I know, If what thou namest Happinessbe our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and soundDigestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unimaginativedays, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not onMorality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishingour frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, andlive at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect!"

  Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done,shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, andreceive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fairworld of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or theshrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day,and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. To suchlength has the spirit of Inquiry carried him. "But what boots it (_wasthut's_)?" cries he: "it is but the common lot in this era. Not havingcome to spiritual majority prior to the _Siecle de Louis Quinze_, andnot being born purely a Loghead (_Dummkopf_ ), thou hadst no otheroutlook. The whole world is, like thee, sold to Unbelief; their oldTemples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rain-proof, crumbledown; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?"

  Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call ourDiogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no eraof his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servantof God, than even now when doubting God's existence. "One circumstance Inote," says he: "after all the nameless woe that Inquiry, which forme, what it is not always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me! Inevertheless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my allegianceto her. 'Truth!' I cried, 'though the Heavens crush me for followingher: no Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price ofApostasy.' In conduct it was the same. Had a divine Messenger from theclouds, or miraculous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimedto me _This thou shalt do_, with what passionate readiness, as I oftenthought, would I have done it, had it been leaping into theinfernal Fire. Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, and MechanicalProfit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucinationthey had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly presentto me: living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterlybereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing,could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and Hisheaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there."

  Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritualdestitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured!"The painfullest feeling," writes he, "is that of your own Feebleness(_Unkraft_); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the truemisery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling,save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Betweenvague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what adifference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimlyin us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisivelydiscernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees itsnatural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept,_Know thyself_; till it be translated into this partially possible one,_Know what thou canst work at_.

  "But for me, so strangely unprosperous had I been, the net-result of myWorkings amounted as yet simply to--Nothing. How then could I believe inmy Strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in? Ever did thisagitating, yet, as I now perceive, quite frivolous question, remain tome insoluble: Hast thou a certain Faculty, a certain Worth, such evenas the most have not; or art thou the completest Dullard of these moderntimes? Alas, the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself; and how couldI believe? Had not my first, last Faith in myself, when even to me theHeavens seemed laid open, and I dared to love, been all too cruellybelied? The speculative Mystery of Life grew ever more mysterious to me:neither in the pract
ical Mystery had I made the slightest progress, butbeen everywhere buffeted, foiled, and contemptuously cast out. A feebleunit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothinggiven me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yetimpenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: wasthere, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully tomine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: whyshould I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends,in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but anincredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little,and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it wasa strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, evenspeaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten thatthey were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst oftheir crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except asit was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also,as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I,like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil;for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, weremore frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the veryDevil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. Tome the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even ofHostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rollingon, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, thevast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Livingbanished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil;nay, unless the Devil is your God?"

  A prey incessantly to such corrosions, might not, moreover, as theworst aggravation to them, the iron constitution even of a Teufelsdrockhthreaten to fail? We conjecture that he has known sickness; and, inspite of his locomotive habits, perhaps sickness of the chronic sort.Hear this, for example: "How beautiful to die of broken-heart, on Paper!Quite another thing in practice; every window of your Feeling, even ofyour Intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that nopure ray can enter; a whole Drug-shop in your inwards; the fordone souldrowning slowly in quagmires of Disgust!"

  Putting all which external and internal miseries together, may we notfind in the following sentences, quite in our Professor's still vein,significance enough? "From Suicide a certain after-shine (_Nachschein_)of Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence ofcharacter; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach?Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some one now,at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into theother World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot,--how were it? On whichground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and otherdeath-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falselyenough, for courage."

  "So had it lasted," concludes the Wanderer, "so had it lasted, as inbitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart withinme, unvisited by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous,slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear;or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Death-song,that wild _Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet_ (Happy whom _he_finds in Battle's splendor), and thought that of this last Friend evenI was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die.Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man orof Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could theArch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that Imight tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I livedin a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous,apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in theHeavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavensand the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I,palpitating, waited to be devoured.

  "Full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole FrenchCapital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation,toiling along the dirty little _Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer_, amongcivic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hotas Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were littlecheered; when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I askedmyself: 'What _art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dostthou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicablebiped! 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 andMan may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thounot suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast,trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let itcome, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, thererushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fearaway from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit,almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed:not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyedDefiance.

  "Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (_das ewige Nein_) pealed authoritativelythrough all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it thatmy whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasisrecorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction inLife, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological pointof view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou artfatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);' to whichmy whole Me now made answer: '_I_ am not thine, but Free, and foreverhate 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 aMan."