Yet the main thesis cannot long remain in doubt.  Through whatever amazement and distraction, it becomes clear enough at last.  Clothes, which at once reveal and hide the man who wears them, are an allegory of the infinitely varied aspects and appearances of the world, beneath which lurk ultimate realities.  But essential man is a naked animal, not a clothed one, and truth can only be arrived at by the most drastic stripping off of unreal appearances that cover it.  The Professor will not linger upon the consideration of the lord’s star or the clown’s button, which are all that most men care to see:  he will get down to the essential lord and the essential clown.  And this will be more than an interesting literary occupation to him, or it will not long be that.  Truth and God are one, and the devil is the prince of lies.  This philosophy of clothes, then, is religion and not belles lettres.  The reason for our sojourn on earth, and the only ground of any hope for a further sojourn elsewhere, is that in God’s name we do battle with the devil.

The quest of reality must obviously be wide as the universe, but if we are to engage in it to any purpose we must definitely begin it somewhere.  A treatise on reality may easily be the most unreal of things—­a mere battle in the air.  So long as it is a discussion of theories it has this danger, and the first necessity is to bring the search down to the region of experience and rigorously insist on its remaining there.  For this end the device of biography is adopted, and we see the meaning of all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book I. The second book is wholly biographical.  It is in human life and experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to reality; and Carlyle constructs a typical and immortal biography.

To the childless old people, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, leading their sweet orchard life, there comes, in the dusk of evening, a stranger of reverend aspect—­comes, and leaves with them the “invaluable Loan” of the baby Teufelsdroeckh.  Thenceforward, beside the little Kuhbach stream, we watch the opening out of a human life, from infancy to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood.  The story has been told a million times, but never quite in this fashion before.  For rough delicacy, for exquisitely tender sternness, the biography is unique.

From the sleep of mere infancy the child is awakened to the consciousness of creatorship by the gift of tools with which to make things.  Tales open up for him the long vistas of history; and the stage-coach with its slow rolling blaze of lights teaches him geography, and the far-flung imaginative suggestiveness of the road; while the annual cattle-fair actually gathers the ends of the earth about his wondering eyes, and gives him his first impression of the variety of human life.