Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics)

by Carlyle, Thomas

  In understanding Teufelsdröckh’s thought, and in building a bridge between it and the British public, the Editor is keenly aware of the value of biography. The professor’s radically original thought and peculiar mode of expression must reflect his life-experience, and to know his ideas ‘without something of his personality’ is likely to ensure ‘entire misapprehension’. Since the Editor has visited Weissnichtwo he is able to supply some vivid descriptive details of Teufelsdröckh in later life: his standing up in a crowded coffee-house to propose a toast to the Cause of the Poor; his physical appearance (‘loose, ill-brushed, threadbare habiliments’, thick locks overlapping a grave face; eyes ‘deep under their shaggy brows’, in which are seen ‘gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire’); and his watch-tower, an attic room in the tallest house in the Wahngasse, from which he looks out on the living flood of humanity below while sitting in Byronic isolation ‘alone with the Stars’.

  These brief outside glimpses of the older Teufelsdröckh are supplemented in Book II by the much more extended inside views of his earlier years, which make up a spiritual biography charting his inner development from childhood to when his ‘spiritual majority … commences’; that is, to the threshold of adult life, the point at which Bildungsromane normally conclude. Essentially, Book II offers a highly stylized and schematic account of the development of a certain kind of Romantic hero. Most of its stages will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Wertherian and Byronic heroes, and with Wilhelm Meister. The ‘Idyllic’ chapter of Book II describes the ‘happy season of Childhood’ before the shades of the prison house begin to close. During this season the perceptual given is all-sufficient and existence is ‘a bright, soft element of Joy’. A sense of reverence and obedience is instilled in the child through his parents and their ‘simple version of the Christian Faith’. The limitation of this stage of development, however, is that the child remains in a state of passivity with his ‘Active Power’ still dormant. The birth pangs of this power come around the time of puberty when the ‘happy season of Childhood’ gives way to the ‘fervid season of youth’. The death of Teufelsdröckh’s father and the revelation that his father and mother were only foster parents bring the realization that ‘I was like no other’; this self-conscious awareness dissolves the childhood sense of oneness with what surrounds him.

  During the course of his higher education, Teufelsdröckh lays the foundation of a literary life; but his intellectual development at a ‘Rational University’ leaves him susceptible to the infection of religious doubt which soon develops into ‘the nightmare, Unbelief and causes a bifurcation between head and heart, between the doubting intelligence and emotional values and needs deeply rooted in the religious culture of childhood. The problem of vocation, of realizing one’s ‘maximum of Capability’, is closely related to this incapacitating split; to find one’s vocation means to find work that fosters an harmonious and mutually supportive development of all one’s faculties.

  First love is a dangerous time in late adolescence because it seems to offer a way to transcend psychic divisions and recover the transporting joy of childhood. The beloved other seems to hold in her hand ‘the invisible Jacob’s-ladder, whereby man might mount into very Heaven’. During Teufelsdröckh’s romance with Blumine, ‘Pale Doubt fled away to the distance; Life bloomed up with happiness and hope.’ But when ‘the gay silk Montgolfier’ balloon loses its air, Teufelsdröckh is plunged into the depths of an extravagantly exaggerated world-sorrow. Like Byron (in Arnold’s phrase), he carries across Europe the pageant of his bleeding heart. At one point during the ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’ chapter, he is found in the mountains gazing at silent and solitary peaks bathed in the evening sunlight. In their presence he begins to experience one of those moments of expanded consciousness and sense of oneness with the visible world that are the raison d’être of Romantic reverie. But this momentary renewal proves a false dawn because it is bathed in the light of the ego as well as of the setting sun. It is meant to be contrasted with the mature reintegration with the natural and human worlds that Teufelsdröckh experiences in the ‘Everlasting Yea’ chapter after he has gone through the three stages of the conversion experience that are the climax of his spiritual development.

  The ‘Everlasting No’ chapter describes Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual nadir. The universe has become ‘all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb’. The turning-point in this dark night is described rather than enacted; it comes in the Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris when ‘my whole ME’ stands up and says NO to negation: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ The peal of the Everlasting No is followed by the ‘Centre of Indifference’ chapter in which Teufelsdröckh’s attention is shown to be shifting away from his own sorrows to the world outside him—to towns and cities, the battlefield of Wagram, the lives of great men.

  Finally comes the ‘Everlasting Yea’, the advent of which is neither described nor enacted. Teufelsdröckh simply says that ‘the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth’. The enabling condition of this culminating phase of spiritual development, ‘the first preliminary moral Act’, is said to be ‘Annihilation of Self’. Its hallmarks are a ‘Divine Depth of Sorrow”, the renunciation of happiness in favour of doing ‘the Duty which lies nearest thee’, and recognizing that the ideal is not out there or up there, but ‘in thyself’: ‘America is here or nowhere.’ ‘Love not Pleasure; love God’, urges Teufelsdröckh: ‘This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved.’ The God he describes is a presence ‘felt in my own Heart’. Such a feeling ‘is Belief; all else is Opinion’. Thus the antagonism between head and heart is resolved through the demotion of the former: ‘all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only, by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience’ does the human personality ‘find any centre to revolve round’. And thus, too, is the importance of spiritual biography underlined; for truth is grounded not in any universal axioms of reason, but in personal subjective experience authenticated by the feeling self.

  In Book III the Editor returns to expounding the thought of Die Kleider, especially the key concepts of symbols, Helotage, organic filaments, and Natural Supernaturalism. There is clearly a close parallel between Teufelsdröckh’s predictions of social regeneration and the process of his individual regeneration described in Book II. As Carlyle had put it in his letter of 1831 to his brother John, the material in the two books is ‘in the same vein’. But this means that his social diagnosis and prescription are subjective in origin and can no more be intellectually justified or perhaps even understood than can the personal beliefs of Book II. They, too, must be felt in the heart. For this reason, it is especially important in Book III to notice the reactions of the Editor, who is the reader’s surrogate. Will the empirically minded English Editor, who respects the ‘Institutions of our Ancestors’, come to a felt acceptance of the radical social views of the German Philosopher?

  During the course of Sartor Resartus, it is noticeable that the Editor becomes increasingly involved with the material on which he is working. In Book I he had admitted that great efforts, ‘partly of intellect, partly of imagination’, had to be made if Teufelsdröckh’s life and work were to be sympathetically understood and ‘a firm bridge’ constructed for the British reader. In the first two books, the Editor experienced repeated difficulties in becoming habituated to Teufelsdröckh’s idiom and ideas. But by Book III, one notices a certain degree of convergence of Editor and subject. At the opening of the book, for example, the Editor admits that he has adopted his subject’s method of proceeding ‘leap by leap’ rather than ‘straightforward, step by step’; and he subsequently admits that Teufelsdröckh’s mode of utterance has, unhappily, somewhat affected his own. He also affirms that after ‘long painful meditation’ he has found the corne
rstone of Teufelsdröckh’s thought, the ‘stupendous Section, headed Natural Supernaturalism’, not unintelligible, ‘but on the contrary to grow clear, nay radiant, and all-illuminating’.

  At the same time, however, residual doubts and uncertainties continue to plague the Editor throughout his labours. ‘Up to this hour’, he exclaims in Book I, ‘we have never fully satisfied ourselves’ whether there is in Die Kleider ‘a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of Genius, or some remote echo of mere Insanity and Inanity’. At the end of Book II he confesses to a painful suspicion that the autobiographical documents on which he has relied for Teufelsdröckh’s life history are partly a deliberate mystification. Near the end of Book III he repeats once again that with Teufelsdröckh ‘there ever hovers some shade of doubt’ concerning his sincerity and his intentions. And while the Editor does feel that he has been successful in constructing a bridge between the German philosopher and the British Public, he has to admit that it is ‘no firm arch, overspanning the Impassable with paved highway’, but only a ‘zigzag series of rafts floating tumultuously thereon’.

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  Is the reader of Sartor Resartus meant to share the Editor’s doubts, or to regard them as examples of the Editor’s imperfect comprehension of his subject? The question is crucially important in connection with the reader’s reception of the text. In considering the question, it is important to realize that Teufelsdröckh’s philosophical beliefs are essentially a simplified version of the leading themes of German Idealist philosophy, especially as it contrasts with an equally simplified version of eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy, the nineteenth-century name for which was Utilitarianism. The fundamental premise of Teufelsdröckh’s thought is the epistemological distinction between the understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft). The former mental faculty is essentially passive, containing impressions ultimately derived from sense experience. Such empirical knowledge is strictly bounded by the containers of space and time, by ‘WHERE, with its brother, WHEN’, as Teufelsdröckh puts it, and can supply knowledge only of the appearances of things, never of things in themselves. Such knowledge can be objective and accurate, even scientific; and it can certainly be useful; but it can never tell one anything about things-in-themselves or about noumenal (as opposed to phenomenal) objects of thought. The existence of God, an after-life, or the soul can never be established by the empirical understanding.

  Noumenal knowledge is supplied by the intuitive faculty of the Reason (or the Fantasy, as Teufelsdröckh sometimes calls it). Reason, the organ of spiritual and imaginative insight, can reveal to man supersensible realities undetectable by the understanding. ‘To the eye of vulgar Logic’, asks Teufelsdröckh, ‘what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.’ ‘Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us,’ he insists in another place. ‘The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina.’ Space and Time are no barriers for the Reason, for both are modes of the understanding, and as such ‘superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought’. Reason can pierce through Where and When to the ‘celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER’, to ‘the universal HERE’ and ‘the everlasting Now’.

  According to Teufelsdröckh, the progress of science, that is, the increasing power and dominance of the faculty of the understanding, has led to the destruction of wonder and its replacement by mensuration and numeration. The more this power waxes, the more the intuitive power of the Reason wanes. In the wintry light of the understanding, soul has become synonymous with stomach, and happiness has become the aim of man, who, in the hedonistic calculus of the Utilitarians (the ‘Motive-Millwrights’), has become ‘a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on’. What is needed is a restoration to its rightful kingly place in the human personality of Reason, Fantasy, Intuition, and Wonder. Love, Duty, and a sense of the sacred nature of social bonds can only flourish in the light of the Reason, which can give man a saving sense of the infinite within the finite, of the religious nature of human life, and of the miraculous potential of any aspect of creation.

  As such, Teufelsdröckh’s thought closely answers to M. H. Abrams’s description of ‘the central enterprise common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth[:] to join together the “subject” and “object” that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate man in a world which had become alien to him’.15 One can go even further and place Teufelsdröckh’s thought in the larger context of a perennially recurrent human effort to restore a sacred and transcendent dimension to human existence. In Living and Dying, for example, Robert Jay Lifton has spoken of the importance of a ‘symbolizing process’ that can provide ‘forms and images adequate to guide behaviour and render it meaningful’.16 Like Teufelsdröckh, Lifton has analysed the profound psychological and psycho-historical dislocations that cause systems of symbols (clothes) to lose their power to generate a sustaining sense of what he calls symbolic immortality. One might further point out that Teufelsdröckh’s chief concern in his book is the same as that of Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane: to convey a sense of what the total experience of life is like for someone living through symbols in a sacred universe, in comparison with the impoverished experience of those living without religious feeling in a completely ‘profane world’, a wholly ‘desacralized cosmos’.17

  It would be misleading, however, to leave the subject of Teufelsdröckh’s thought without remarking on certain features of it that will give careful readers pause. One of them concerns the extraordinary number of Christian and biblical allusions embedded in his utterances. Keeping the connotations while changing the denotations of Christian images and concepts is a common aspect of Romantic rhetoric. But this feature of Sartor is so insistently present in the text as to suggest a deliberate attempt to blur the differences between traditional Christian beliefs and the subjectivity of Romantic regeneration. A second trouble spot is Teufelsdröckh’s insistence on the moral imperative of duty: ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.’ Such an imperative, as he says, cannot be grounded in ‘Speculation’, only in ‘felt … Experience’. But in the highly schematized and rhetorical account of Teufelsdröckh’s conversion experience in Book II, one is only told about, never convincingly shown, his inner transformation. As a result, the reader cannot feel with Teufelsdröckh. At best he can give only notional assent to the professor’s moral injunctions; at worst he may come to find them factitious. An overemphasis on moral conduct, triggered by the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs, was a leading feature of the Victorian temper. The syndrome was memorably encapsulated in George Eliot’s solemn observation that while God was inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, Duty was ‘peremptory and absolute’.18 What Nietzsche said apropos of George Eliot in Twilight of the Idols could be equally well applied to Teufelsdröckh: ‘They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality … We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident … it stands and falls with faith in God.’19

  There are other aspects of Teufelsdröckh’s thinking that seem less perennial than distinctively Victorian. One of them is instanced in the climactic passage of the climactic chapter of Sartor. Teufelsdröckh’s exposition of ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ culminates in an attempt to finesse the question that was to become of pre-eminent concern to many Victorian writers: the question of immortality, of a life after death. ‘Is the white Tomb of our Loved One’, he asks, but a ‘pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with God!’ The answer is that o
nly the ‘Time-shadows’ have perished and that ‘the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever … believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not’. It is hard not to regard this passage as rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the term, and as an attempt to substitute the wish for the deed. Why must we believe? Not because one is assured of a life after death; but precisely because one is not. One must believe because it is too demoralizing not to. ‘Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all’, as Emily Dickinson wryly remarked in her little poem on the breakdown of traditional Christian beliefs during the nineteenth century. In this passage, as in other utterances of Teufelsdröckh, one is once again reminded of Twilight of the Idols, this time of what Nietzsche said about Teufelsdröckh’s creator:

  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

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  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.