Professor Teufelsdröckh, when we knew him at Weissnichtwo, lived a still and self-contained life, devoted to the higher philosophies and to a certain speculative radicalism. The last words that he spoke in our hearing were to propose a toast in the coffee-house—"The cause of the poor, in heaven's name and the devil's." But we looked for nothing moral from him, still less anything didactico-religious.
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!"