Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) (5 page)

Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from
need
, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that … [Carlyle]
requires
noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself—that is his
proprium;
in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English … At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be one.
²⁰

There is really no need to go outside the pages of
Sartor Resartus
to call attention to a factitious strain in Teufelsdröckh. Carlyle has placed within his text a number of features designed to do just that—chief among them the ever-doubting Editor. In the last chapter of
Sartor
, the Editor asks a blunt question: ‘How could a man occasionally of keen insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely on the absurd?’ On the literal level, the question concerns Teufelsdröckh and the strange book, an ‘enormous, amorphous Plumpudding, more like a Scottish Haggis’, he has ‘kneaded for his fellow mortals’. But it is also apparent that through the Editor, the Scottish author of
Sartor Resartus
is challenging the reader to think about his experience of the text and to seek satisfactory answers to the question.

Traditional readers of
Sartor Resartus
have had no difficulty in providing answers that presuppose a constructive and communicative authorial intention. C. F. Harrold, for example, argued that Carlyle’s method was of great value for several practical reasons: it ‘permitted him to indulge the wayward, boisterously ironic freedom of his genius’; it enabled him to present the unpopular and misunderstood subject of German transcendentalism ‘without the formidable apparatus and the appearance of metaphysical inquiry’; and it united ‘the didactic aim of the philosophic discourse with the human interest of the biographical novel’.
²¹
Others have argued that
Sartor’s
extravagant style, the ‘rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, [and] quaint tricksy turns’, is the appropriate linguistic vehicle for a thematic tenor concerned with the need for a revolution of consciousness, in which Fantasy would overthrow the tyranny of rational modes of thought and discourse. It has also been urged that the hoax aspect of
Sartor
and its other bizarre features do not destroy the serious import of Carlyle’s message, but make it more effective ‘for the very simple reason that it is not a bleakly expressed, dull, moralizing
statement’.
²²
Similarly, the ‘humorous’ tone of the book has been said persistently to defeat ‘any potential movement toward despair. The humor, the essentially friendly and sympathetic rather than satiric laughter that Teufelsdröckh and his Editor inspire, keeps the reader constantly in mind of the fact that the ultimate aim of the book is not Denial but Affirmation.’
²³

The strategies of reconstruction and recuperation, which might be called examples of the husk-and-kernel approach to
Sartor Resartus
, are more positive answers to the question posed by the Editor than the one he himself goes on to posit. Why did Teufelsdröckh resolve to emit his thoughts ‘in a shape bordering so closely on the absurd’?

Our conjecture has sometimes been that perhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it. Seems it not conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor’s, where so much bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone, Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with his characteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and ever without success, he at last desperately dashes his brush, full of all colours, against the canvass, to try whether it will paint Foam? With all his stillness, there were perhaps in Teufelsdröckh desperation enough for this.

This answer stresses the expressive rather than the communicative nature of Teufelsdröckh’s utterance, which is said to be prompted by internal necessity rather than by conscious artistic choice. Any hesitation one might have in taking the Editor’s conjecture about
Die Kleider
as simultaneously an authorial comment on
Sartor Resartus
is dispelled by Carlyle’s comments about his book in letters to two of its most sympathetic early readers. Could it be, Emerson asked his Scottish friend, that ‘this humour’ of Teufelsdröckh’s ‘proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience’? Carlyle replied that he spoke correctly: ‘I have no known public, am
alone
under the Heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly Space; add only
that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I in these mad times could conveniently hit upon.’
²⁴
When John Stuart Mill wrote to Carlyle about
Sartor
he wondered whether his ‘mode of writing, between sarcasm or irony and earnest’, should have been so unrelievedly employed. Could not things be ‘as well or better said in a more direct way? The same doubt has occasionally occurred to me respecting much of your phraseology.’ Carlyle’s answer was that

You are right about my style … I think often of the matter myself; and
see
only that I cannot yet see. Irony is a sharp instrument; but ill to handle without cutting
yourself
. I cannot justify, yet can too well explain what sets me so often on it of late: it is my singularly anomalous position to the world,—and, if you will, my own singularly unreasonable temper. I never know or can even guess what or who my audience is, or whether I have any audience: thus too naturally I adjust myself on the Devil-may-care principle. Besides I have under all my gloom genuine feeling of the ludicrous; and could have been the merriest of men,
had I not
been the sickest & saddest.
²⁵

Both these answers serve as reminders that the 1820s and 1830s were difficult times for writers who wished to combat the increasing dominance of the rational scientific intellect and of Utilitarian modes of thought and feeling with the great Romantic positives of Fantasy and Intuition. In his essay on Milton of 1825, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay had observed that in the modern age Romantic prophets were doomed to isolation and probably to derangement. ‘As civilisation advances’, said Macaulay, ‘poetry’, that is, the creative and imaginative faculties of the mind, ‘almost necessarily declines.’ These faculties flourished during the childhood of the race and, like children, visionaries had the ability ‘to abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion’. In modern society, however, the truth essential to poetry could only be ‘the truth of madness’, requiring ‘a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect’:

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority … And it is well if, after all his sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time great talents, intense labour, and long meditation, employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.
²⁶

As in the early poems of Tennyson and Browning, which also date from the early 1830s, one finds in
Sartor Resartus
and in Carlyle’s comments about the work an intense and brooding self-consciousness, a sense of isolation, and a demoralizing awareness of the lack of any fit audience. One also finds frames and other distancing devices employed to distract attention from the deeply personal and subjective content of the utterance. What is being enacted in these texts is part of a complex shift in sensibility that is ultimately the mutation of Romantic into Victorian literature.
²⁷
Sartor Resartus
itself, as George Levine has argued, ‘marks a transition from the Romantics to the Victorians because it adds one quality to the Romantic vision which had not yet become dominant—desperation’. Carlyle ‘could not establish himself as a sage in
Sartor
because, though like the Romantics in having won through to a deeply personal affirmation and discovery of his identity, he was not able to see the experience as anything but personal in a world obviously inimical’.
²⁸
No wonder then that after
Sartor
, Carlyle, like the speaker of Browning’s first poem,
Pauline
(also published in 1833), resolved to ‘look within no more’, but to turn to biography and history for his subjects.

The best recent critical accounts of
Sartor Resartus
, sensitive to the historical moment out of which it comes, make use of methodologies more sophisticated than that of the husk-and-kernel approach. Janice L. Haney, for example, has argued that
the last three chapters of
Sartor
(in which Teufelsdröckh’s removal from Weissnichtwo to London is mentioned) show a turning away from an outmoded Romantic vision towards a Victorian social actuality and ‘an emerging Victorian mode of making meaning’. Carlyle, says Haney, pits ‘an empirical self’ against ‘a metaphysical and aesthetic self; together the two ‘compose a book about the quest for meaning’.
²⁹
And in her
English Romantic Irony
, Anne Mellor presents
Sartor
as a ‘self-consuming artifact’ that ‘does not preach the truth, but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves’.
Sartor Resartus
is a fictional work ‘designed to consume itself by revealing the limitations both of its own symbolic language and of language as such. It is intended not as a monument of truth but as a goad to action.’
³⁰

This critical reorientation is a welcome reminder that when he wrote
Sartor Resartus
Carlyle had not yet become Carlylean, and had not yet successfully substituted biography, history, and social prophecy for imaginative fiction. It was perhaps for this reason that John Stuart Mill always regarded
Sartor Resartus
as Carlyle’s ‘best and greatest work’. Its distinction, however, was not immediately apparent to Mill any more than to most first-time readers, who may take heart from Mill’s experience. When first shown the manuscript by Carlyle, he ‘made little of it’; but by the time it appeared in
Fraser’s Magazine
two years later he had grown sufficiently advanced in ‘new modes of thought’ to read
Sartor Resartus
‘with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight’.
³¹

W
E
are much indebted to colleagues and friends who have assisted us in various ways: James Critchley, Catherine Harland, Robert Holton, Ross Kilpatrick, Marie Legroulx, George Logan, Susanne McSweeney, Emmi Sabor, M. G. Wiebe, and Gary Wihl. For financial assistance we are grateful to the Advisory Research Committee of the School of Graduate Studies, Queen’s University; and to the Humanities Research Grants Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, McGill University.

The letters from Carlyle to James Fraser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Sterling in Appendices I, III, and IV are reprinted from vols. 6, 7, and 8 of the Duke—Edinburgh Edition of
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
, ed. C. R. Saunders
et al
., by kind permission of Duke University Press. We have incorporated in the Explanatory Notes three corrections made by K. J. Fielding in his review of the edition.

Sartor Resartus
first appeared, anonymously, in the monthly issues of
Fraser’s Magazine
from November 1833 to August 1834, with gaps in January and May. These instalments were stitched into book form by Fraser’s for an edition of fifty-eight copies, privately issued in August 1834; this was not reset, but the necessary transference of blocks of type occasioned some typographical errors. The first edition of
Sartor
sold to the public was that published in Boston in 1836, with an unsigned preface by Emerson. Here Carlyle’s name first appears on the title-page; there are also many changes in paragraphing, spelling, and typography for which Carlyle was not responsible. A second American edition followed in 1837.

For the first English edition of 1838, Carlyle added a subtitle to
Sartor Resartus: ‘the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh’
. He also included the ‘Testimonies of Authors’ (see Appendix V below) and made some minor revisions to the text, although he claimed in a letter to his brother John of 14 July 1838 that ‘there is no change in
Teufk
from the genuine Fraser Copy’ (
Collected Letters
, x. 121). Subsequent editions published in Carlyle’s lifetime contain further minor revisions; and the 1869 edition contains a new Author’s Note, Summary, and Index (see Appendix V below).

The cumulative effect of these revisions is to make
Sartor Resartus
a less exotic, more familiar-seeming work. On numerous occasions, capitals are changed to lower case at the beginning of normally uncapitalized nouns; large numbers of hyphens are inserted to make compound words seem less unusual; and the punctuation, which had followed an individual, highly rhetorical system, is made to conform more closely to conventional usage. There are also about one hundred substantive revisions, the more significant of which are indicated in our notes. Many of the minor revisions follow specific patterns: ‘must’, for example, is often changed to ‘had to’, ‘has to’, etc.; ‘whatso’ and ‘whereso’ are changed to ‘whatsoever’ and ‘wheresoever’; and word order is altered for greater elegance.