Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

Of course, literary historical importance does not of itself make a literary work intrinsically interesting, let alone a major achievement. In the case of
Sartor Resartus
, its extrinsic importance and tract-for-the-times aspects can even become serious obstacles to seeing the work for what it actually is—so serious that a process of defamiliarization may be necessary before Carlyle’s text can recover its freshness. ‘Custom’, as the central personage of
Sartor Resartus
says, ‘doth make dotards of us all.’ One of the first things overlooked by customary readings of the text as a secular scripture for the Victorians is the exuberant play of mind and trenchant insight. There is, for example, this
en passant
encapsulation of a complex process of historical change: ‘He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of
Movable Types
was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world; he had invented the Art of Printing.’ Or consider the chilling prediction concerning the ‘two Sects which … divide the more unsettled portion of the British People; and agitate that ever-vexed country’. The roots of these sects ‘extend through the entire structure of Society … striving to separate and isolate it into two contradictory, uncommunicating masses’, which ‘it seems probable … will one day part England between them; each recruiting itself from the intermediate ranks, till there be none left to enlist on either side’.

But the most important part of the process of recovery would involve the recognition that
Sartor Resartus
is essentially a work of imaginative fiction that demands a more sensitive and complex response than that in which its formal and stylistic husks are stripped away to reveal the doctrinal kernels. Carlyle would have seen the attempt to turn him into a literary artist, let alone a writer of imaginative fiction, as an impertinence. But this is exactly what must be done in the late twentieth century if
Sartor Resartus
, his one sustained and fully realized
piece of imaginative fiction, is again to be recognized as one of the master-works of nineteenth-century English literature. When so considered,
Sartor
can be seen as a work that has less in common with such classic Victorian prose-of-thought texts as Newman’s
Apologia pro Vita Sua
, Arnold’s
Culture and Anarchy
, Ruskin’s
Unto this Last
, or even Carlyle’s own
Past and Present
and
On Heroes and Hero-Worship
than it does with such problematic fictions as Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights
(in both works the informing Romantic content is severely qualified by the narratorial form through which it is presented to the reader); Melville’s
Moby-Dick
(both works employ uncertain, self-conscious narrators who are energetically and sometimes comically attempting to discover coherence and meaning in their material and to say something important about ultimate issues); Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
(both works use an alienated anti-hero to launch attacks on Utilitarian beliefs and values); and even Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(the prophet figures of both works are rebellious and isolated, oscillate between constructive and destructive impulses towards society, and speak in a ‘hyperbolic hortatory voice’
³
).

The ‘Getting Under Way’ chapter in Book II of
Sartor Resartus
contains some shrewd observations concerning the problem of vocation in the nineteenth century: ‘To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward Capability specially is.’ By 1821, when he was 26, Thomas Carlyle, after much anxious reflection, had discovered his vocation. He would not be a clergyman, a lawyer or a teacher; he would be a writer: he ‘must live by Literature, at all hazards’.
⁴
But there is a considerable difference between identifying a vocation and
becoming launched in it; to quote again from
Sartor:
‘Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference!’ Large questions remained: what would Carlyle write about and in what way? What would be his subjects, his style, and his form of expression?

One possibility that Carlyle began to explore was prose fiction. His father, a strict Calvinist, would not tolerate anything fictitious in books and had forbidden his children to read imaginative literature. But when young Thomas was sent away to school, he boarded with a family whose lending library included novels and romances; during the next years he read through Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Swift; and he later read Walter Scott’s novels as they appeared. By the time he decided on a career as a writer, Carlyle’s ambition was to write prose fiction, which (partly owing to his reading of Goethe and Schiller) he considered superior to history for the revelation of truth.

Carlyle’s first known attempt at fiction was ‘Cruthers and Johnson’, a tale of friendship set in the eighteenth century and recalling that century’s fiction in its narrative method and mood. The story was written early in 1822. In December of the same year, in a letter to Jane Welsh, Carlyle described his plans for a far more ambitious fiction, an epistolary novel in the mode of Wertherian romance. The hero of the projected novel would speak forth his sufferings—‘not in the puling Lake-style—but with a tongue of fire—sharp, sarcastic, apparently unfeeling’ yet at the same time revealing ‘a mind of lofty thoughts and generous affections smarting under the torment of its own overnobleness, and ready to break in pieces by the force of its own energies’. It would be evident that the hero ‘cannot long exist in this to him most blasted, waste and lonely world’. Carlyle proposed to Jane that he would supply the hero’s letters while she would indite those of his female interlocutor. But the scheme never got off the ground. One reason was circumstantial: Carlyle found that he and Jane needed to consult together every day, which they were unable to do. The other reason was subjective: ‘I grew affrighted and chilled at the aspect of the Public.’
⁵

Carlyle’s next fictional project involved no incapacitating premonitions of the Public’s disapprobation: during 1823–4 he worked on a translation of Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
. The process of translating the novel proved laborious and irksome: ‘There are touches of the very highest most etherial genius in it; but diluted with floods of insipidity, which even
I
would not have written for the world.’ ‘There is poetry in the book, and prose, prose forever. When I read of players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the “moral world”, I render it into grammatical English—with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyaena. … [I] could sometimes fall down and worship [Goethe]; at other times I could kick him out of the room.’
⁶
Both these comments suggest how uncongenial Carlyle found Goethe’s patient accumulation of realistic detail. As Henry James was to note in his 1865 review of a reissue of Carlyle’s translation: ‘In few other works is so profound a meaning enveloped in so common a form. The slow, irresistible action of this latent significance is an almost awful phenomenon.’
⁷

That Carlyle was impatient with Goethe’s realistic method is clear from
Wotton Reinfred
, which novel he began writing in autumn 1826. The subject is similar to Goethe’s—a young hero’s search for transcendent wisdom—but the means are very different. Carlyle’s unfinished work is a didactic, fabular novel of ideas which eschews realistic modes of narrative and characterization in its impatience to air thematic issues of overriding import. It is not surprising that Carlyle broke off composition of
Wotton
and that another story (‘Illudo Chartis’) begun around this time, which has a Wertherian hero and employs the device of an editor as a frame for the narrative, was also abandoned. By the end of the 1820s Carlyle was having growing doubts about the status and efficacy of fiction, and thinking hard about alternative means through which to realize himself as a writer.

These doubts had hardened into dicta by 1832, when Carlyle
wrote his essay, ‘Biography’. Even in the highest works of art, he argued, one’s interest was apt to be ‘strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort’. The same was true ‘through the whole range of what is called Literature’. The entire thrust of history, for example, was biographic, and when one came to consider ‘the whole class of Fictitious Narratives, from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakespeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose in the Fashionable Novel’, one found that all these were ‘but so many mimic Biographies’. The problem with fiction was that it inevitably partook ‘of the nature of
lying’;
and therefore inevitably possessed an ‘in some degree, unsatisfactory character’. What was important and significant was ‘
Reality’
. Even if ‘the
probable
be well adhered to’ in works of fiction, the evil, while ‘much mended, [was] nowise completely cured’. Here and there, ‘a
Tom Jones
, a
Meister
, a
Crusoe
, will yield no little solacement to the minds of men; though still immeasurably less than a
Reality
would’. As for the varieties of literature, including the ‘Ship-loads of Fashionable Novels’: they were ‘the foam of penny-beer’ because ‘there is no
Reality
in them’. One had to realize ‘how impressive the smallest historical
fact
may become, as contrasted with the grandest
fictitious event;
what an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur.’
⁸

Carlyle had begun to think about historical subject-matter as the outlet for his literary talents as early as 1822 when he had read Milton and histories of the English Civil War in the hope of finding a subject to write upon. But it was not until 1833, after almost a decade of attempting to write fiction, that he became fully convinced that the (mainly biographical) subject-matter of the French Revolution could furnish material for a historical work that might become a masterpiece, perhaps even ‘the grand Poem of our Time’.
⁹
The ‘Biography’ essay, however, itself suggests that it was not so easy for Carlyle to escape contamination by fiction as he seemed to think. For in the
middle of his essay Carlyle had introduced a fictional device, a book by a non-existent German professor—Doctor Gottfried Sauerteig’s
Aesthetische Springwurzeln
—and inserted into a long quotation from the Professor’s work his argument concerning the mendacious character of all fiction. This was the very same fictional device that Carlyle had used two years previously in
Sartor Resartus
, which opens as a review article of a learned book on clothes—
Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken
—by a non-existent German professor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. It was in
Sartor Resartus
, which is simultaneously his one full-length work of imaginative fiction and his farewell to fiction, that Carlyle finally found a way to record the story of his earlier life, including its Wertherian anxieties, to express the social and religious vision he had been forging during the preceding decade, and pre-emptively to dramatize his affrighted premonition of ‘the aspect of the Public’.

The first reference to what became
Sartor Resartus
appears in Carlyle’s journal for September 1830: ‘I am going to write—Nonsense. It is on “Clothes.” Heaven be my comforter!’ A month later he wrote to his brother John: ‘For myself here [in Craigenputtock] I am leading the stillest life…. What I am writing at is the strangest of all things: begun as an Article for
Fraser;
then found to be too long (except it were divided into two); now sometimes looking almost, as if it would swell into a Book. A very singular piece, I assure you! It glances from Heaven to Earth & back again in a strange satirical frenzy whether
fine
or not remains to be seen.’ The piece was called
Teufelsdreck (Devil’s Shit)
after its principal character. Early in November this ‘singular piece’ was sent to
Fraser’s Magazine
. To its author’s great disappointment his bizarre submission was rejected. When the manuscript was back in his hands Carlyle determined to expand it into a book. He outlined his plans in a letter to John of January 1831: ‘I have taken a notion that I can make rather a good
Book
of it, and one above all likely to produce some desirable impression on the world even now … I can devise some more Biography for Teufelsdreck; give a
second deeper part, in the same vein, leading thro’ Religion and the nature of Society, and Lord knows what.’ Carlyle worked on his book from January to late July 1831, when it was finished. The original two-part article had become Book I of the completed work; the biography of Teufelsdröckh formed Book II; and the ‘deeper part, in the same vein’, concerning ‘Religion and the nature of Society’, became Book III. At long last, more than a decade after determining that the vocation of writer was the means of realizing his powers to the full, Carlyle had succeeded in writing a book. But he now had to endure the frustration of being unable to find a publisher. Eventually, he had to return to
Fraser’s Magazine
, and offer to ‘slit’ his manuscript ‘up into stripes, and send it forth in the Periodical way’. The work was accepted for serial publication and finally appeared in print under the title
Sartor Resartus
(
The Tailor Retailored
) between November 1833 and August 1834.
¹⁰

Between its original conception as
Teufelsdreck
and its eventual publication as
Sartor Resartus
, Carlyle considered a third title for his work, ‘Thoughts on Clothes; or Life and Opinions of Herr. D. Teufelsdröckh D.U.J.’,
¹¹
and in the ‘Editorial Difficulties’ chapter of Book I the Editor characterizes his book as ‘properly a “Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh”’. The allusion is to an eighteenth-century precursor of
Sartor Resartus
, Sterne’s
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1760—7), one of Carlyle’s favourite fictional works. A more direct reference follows in the ‘Adamitism’ chapter of Book I, which concludes with a quotation from ‘Yorick Sterne’s’ novel. Both
Tristram Shandy
and
Sartor
are fictions concerned with the making of biographies; both are steeped in the tradition of learned wit, deriving from Rabelais and Cervantes; and both provide dazzling displays of linguistic inventiveness, making frequent use of neologisms and borrowings from a variety of languages. Both are, at least in part, playful works, like Carlyle’s earlier, abandoned fiction ‘Illudo Chartis’ (‘I play on paper’). C. F. Harrold rightly noted over fifty years ago that
while Carlyle’s ideas are profoundly indebted to those of German thinkers, his formal debts are primarily to English experimentalists such as Sterne, whom Carlyle termed our ‘best, our finest, if not our strongest’ humorist.
¹²