Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

One of the most vital and pregnant books in our modern literature, Sartor Resartus is also, in structure and form, one of the most daringly original. It defies exact classification. It is not a philosophic treatise. It is not an autobiography. It is not a romance. Yet in a sense it is all these combined. Its underlying purpose is to expound in broad outline certain ideas which lay at the root of Carlyles whole reading of life. But he does not elect to set these forth in regular methodic fashion, after the manner of one writing a systematic essay. He presents his philosophy in dramatic form and in a picturesque human setting. He invents a certain Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrckh, an erudite German professor of Allerley-Wissenschaft, or Things in General, in the University of Weissnichtwo, of whose colossal work, Die Kleider, Ihr Werden und Wirken (On Clothes: Their Origin and Influence), he represents himself as being only the student and interpreter. With infinite humour he explains how this prodigious volume came into his hands; how he was struck with amazement by its encyclopdic learning, and the depth and suggestiveness of its thought; and how he determined that it was his special mission to introduce its ideas to the British public. But how was this to be done? As a mere bald abstract of the original would never do, the would-be apostle was for a time in despair. But at length the happy thought occurred to him of combining a condensed statement of the main principles of the new philosophy with some account of the philosophers life and character. Thus the work took the form of a Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrckh, and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic titleSartor Resartus, or the Tailor Patched: the tailor being the great German Clothes-philosopher, and the patching being done by Carlyle as his English editor. As a piece of literary mystification, Teufelsdrckh and viiihis treatise enjoyed a measure of the success which nearly twenty years before had been scored by Dietrich Knickerbocker and his History of New York. The question of the professors existence was solemnly discussed in at least one important review; Carlyle was gravely taken to task for attempting to mislead the public; a certain interested reader actually wrote to inquire where the original German work was to be obtained. All this seems to us surprising; the more so as we are now able to understand the purposes which Carlyle had in view in devising his dramatic scheme. In the first place, by associating the clothes-philosophy with the personality of its alleged author (himself one of Carlyles splendidly living pieces of characterisation), and by presenting it as the product and expression of his spiritual experiences, he made the mystical creed intensely human. Stated in the abstract, it would have been a mere blank -ism; developed in its intimate relations with Teufelsdrckhs character and career, it is filled with the hot life-blood of natural thought and feeling. Secondly, by fathering his own philosophy upon a German professor Carlyle indicates his own indebtedness to German idealism, the ultimate source of much of his own teaching. Yet, deep as that indebtedness was, and anxious as he might be to acknowledge it, he was as a humourist keenly alive to certain glaring defects of the great German writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves among the mere minuti of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions close-bordering on the impalpable inane; to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of Sartor Resartus is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; as in the many amusing criticisms which are passed upon Teufelsdrckhs volume as a sort of mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded; in the burlesque parade of the professors omniverous reading (e.g., Book I, Chap. V); and in the whole amazing episode of the six considerable paper bags, out of the chaotic contents of which the distracted editor in search of biographic ixdocuments has to make what he can. Nor is this quite all. Teufelsdrckh is further utilised as the mouthpiece of some of Carlyles more extravagant speculations and of such ideas as he wished to throw out as it were tentatively, and without himself being necessarily held responsible for them. There is thus much point as well as humour in those sudden turns of the argument, when, after some exceptionally wild outburst on his eidolons part, Carlyle sedately reproves him for the fantastic character or dangerous tendency of his opinions. It is in connection with the dramatic scheme of the book that the third element, that of autobiography, enters into its texture, for the story of Teufelsdrckh is very largely a transfigured version of the story of Carlyle himself. In saying this, I am not of course thinking mainly of Carlyles outer life. This, indeed, is in places freely drawn upon, as the outer lives of Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoi are drawn upon in David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karnina. Entepfuhl is only another name for Ecclefechan; the picture of little Diogenes eating his supper out-of-doors on fine summer evenings, and meanwhile watching the sun sink behind the western hills, is clearly a loving transcript from memory; even the idyllic episode of Blumine may be safely traced back to a romance of Carlyles youth. But to investigate the connection at these and other points between the mere externals of the two careers is a matter of little more than curious interest. It is because it incorporates and reproduces so much of Carlyles inner history that the story of Teufelsdrckh is really important. Spiritually considered, the whole narrative is, in fact, a symbolic myth, in which the writers personal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save in setting and accessories. Like Teufelsdrckh, Carlyle while still a young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he had been bred; like Teufelsdrckh, he had thereupon passed into the howling desert of infidelity; like Teufelsdrckh, he had known all the agonies and anguish of a long period of blank scepticism and insurgent despair, during which, turn whither he would, life responded with nothing but negations to every question and appeal. And as to Teufelsdrckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de lEnfer in Paris, so to Carlyle in Leith xWalk, Edinburgh, there had come a moment of sudden and marvellous illumination, a mystical crisis from which he had emerged a different man. The parallelism is so obvious and so close as to leave no room for doubt that the story of Teufelsdrckh is substantially a piece of spiritual autobiography. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 20585
Author: Carlyle, Thomas
Release Date: Feb 15, 2007
Format: eBook
Language: English