bottom' grammar school, a fake German name ried his friend Towgood. His distress is pictured in invented by Carlyle. the preceding chapter, titled 'Sorrows of Teufels
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speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.' What, then, was our Professor's possession1? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into 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 lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: 'Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,' says he; 'shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean3 black.' To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, 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's well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful;4 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, in the midst of luxury': to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, 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Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: 'Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made- up of Desire and Fear, of emanations from the Gallows and from Dr. Graham's Celestial- Bed?5 Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that he was 'the chief of sinners';6 and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (Wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling?7 Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,8?I tell thee, Nay! To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus9 of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Moral
3. Of Tartarus, the lowest region of the classical underworld, where the wicked were punished. 4. Luke 10.42. 5. James Graham (1745?1794), a quack doctor, had invented an elaborate bed that was supposed to cure sterility in couples using it. In this passage, the bed is apparently a symbol of sexual desires. 6. Paraphrase of 1 Timothy 1.15. 7. Nero (37-68 C.E.; Roman emperor, 54?68) was rumored to have recited his poems and played his lyre during a great fire in 64 C.E. that destroyed much of Rome; thus the familiar saying 'Nero fiddled while Rome burned.'
8. Here, as in his earlier reference to 'Profit-andloss Philosophy,' Carlyle attacks the Utilitarian concepts of Jeremy Bentham (1748?1832), who argued that the Good is whatever brings the greatest happiness (or pleasure) to the greatest number of people. 9. I.e., Prometheus Bound; this is also the title of a play by Aeschylus depicting the sufferings of a hero who defied Zeus.
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ity, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying- pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live 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,1 and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild-beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night,2 any longer guides the Pilgrim. To such length has the spirit of Inquiry carried him. 'But what boots it (was thut's)}' cries he: 'it is but the common lot in this era. Not having come to spiritual majority prior to the Siecle de Louis Quinze,3 and not being born purely a Loghead (Dummkopf ), thou hast no other outlook. The whole world is, like thee, sold to Unbelief, their old Temples of the Godhead, which for long have not been rainproof, crumble down; and men ask now: Where is the Godhead; our eyes never saw him?'
Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are,4 perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God's existence. 'One circumstance I note,' says he: 'after all the nameless woe that Inquiry, which for me, what it is not always, was genuine Love of Truth, had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot5 of my allegiance to her. 'Truth!' I cried, 'though the Heavens crush me for following her: no Falsehood! though a whole celestial Lubberland6 were the price of Apostasy.' In conduct it was the same. Had a divine Messenger from the clouds, or miraculous Handwriting on the wall, convincingly proclaimed to me This thou shalt do, with what passionate readiness, as I often thought, would I have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere see Him, nevertheless in my heart He was present, and His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.'
Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, 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 true misery.7 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. Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference! A certain inarticulate Self- consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first
1. An allusion to Virgil's Aeneid 6.36ff.; there (1715-74). Aeneas questions the Cumaean Sibyl, who fore-4. An allusion to Matthew 25.20 and Luke 17.7? tells the future. 10. 2. Exodus 13.21. 5. Would hold back no part. 3. The Century of Louis XV (French), allusion to 6. Land of Plenty. Precis du Siecle de Louis XV (1768), Voltaire's his-7. Paradise Lost 1.157: 'Fallen cherub, to be weak tory of the skeptical and inquiring spirit of 18th-is miserable.' century France during the reign of Louis XV
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sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself ;8 till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.
