however, Teufelsdrockh, composed himself, and sank into his old stillness;
on his inscrutable countenance there was, if anything, a slight look of
shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again. Readers who have any
tincture of Psychology know how much is to be inferred from this; and that
no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether
irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith
we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in
the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to
laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger
from the throat outwards; or at best, produce some whiffling husky
cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes
good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems,
and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdrockh has one scarcely pardonable
fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement. In this
remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of Time
produces, through the Narrative portions, a certain show of outward method;
but of true logical method and sequence there is too little. Apart from
its multifarious sections and subdivisions, the Work naturally falls into
two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but
falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic
combination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through
the other. Many sections are of a debatable rubric, or even quite
nondescript and unnamable; whereby the Book not only loses in
accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein
all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid,
oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one
huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invited to help itself. To
bring what order we can out of this Chaos shall be part of our endeavor.