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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 Carlyle’s 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 Teufelsdröckh, 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 encyclopædic 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 philosopher’s life and character. Thus the work took the form of a “Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh,” and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic title—“Sartor 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, Teufelsdröckh and his 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 professor’s 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 Carlyle’s 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 Teufelsdröckh’s 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 minutiæ 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 Teufelsdröckh’s volume as a sort of “mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded;” in the burlesque parade of the professor’s “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 documents” has to make what he can. Nor is this quite all. Teufelsdröckh is further utilised as the mouthpiece of some of Carlyle’s 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 eidolon’s 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 Teufelsdröckh is very largely a transfigured version of the story of Carlyle himself. In saying this, I am not of course thinking mainly of Carlyle’s 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 Karénina.” 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 Carlyle’s 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 Carlyle’s inner history that the story of Teufelsdröckh is really important. Spiritually considered, the whole narrative is, in fact, a “symbolic myth,” in which the writer’s personal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save in setting and accessories. Like Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle while still a young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he had been bred; like Teufelsdröckh, he had thereupon passed into the “howling desert of infidelity;” like Teufelsdröckh, 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 Teufelsdröckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris, so to Carlyle in Leith Walk, 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 Teufelsdröckh is substantially a piece of spiritual autobiography.

This admitted, the question arises whether Carlyle had any purpose, beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiences for the human setting of his philosophy. It seems evident that he had. As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than a merely personal interest and meaning. He wrote of himself because he saw in himself a type of his restless and much-troubled epoch; because he knew that in a broad sense his history was the history of thousands of other young men in the generation to which he belonged. The age which followed upon the vast upheaval of the Revolution was one of widespread turmoil and perplexity. Men felt themselves to be wandering aimlessly “between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” The old order had collapsed in shapeless ruin; but the promised Utopia had not been realised to take its place. In many directions the forces of reaction were at work. Religion, striving to maintain itself upon the dogmatic creeds of the past, was rapidly petrifying into a mere “dead Letter of Religion,” from which all the living spirit had fled; and those who could not nourish themselves on hearsay and inherited formula knew not where to look for the renewal of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy on many hearts.

It was for the men of this “sad time” that Carlyle wrote Teufelsdröckh’s story; and he wrote it not merely to depict the far-reaching consequences of their pessimism but also to make plain to them their true path out of it. He desired to exhibit to his age the real nature of the strange malady from which it was suffering in order that he might thereupon proclaim the remedy.

What, then, is the moral significance of Carlyle’s “symbolic myth”? What are the supreme lessons which he uses it to convey?

We must begin by understanding his diagnosis. For him, all the evils of the time could ultimately be traced back to their common source in what may be briefly described as its want of real religion. Of churches and creeds there were plenty; of living faith little or nothing was left. Men had lost all vital sense of God in the world; and because of this, they had taken up a fatally wrong attitude to life. They looked at it wholly from the mechanical point of view, and judged it by merely utilitarian standards. The “body-politic” was no longer inspired by any “soul-politic.” Men, individually and in the mass, cared only for material prosperity, sought only outward success, made the pursuit of happiness the end and aim of their being. The divine meaning of virtue, the infinite nature of duty, had been forgotten, and morality had been turned into a sort of ledger-philosophy, based upon calculations of profit and loss.

It was thus that Carlyle read the signs of the times. In such circumstances what was needed? Nothing less than a spiritual rebirth. Men must abandon their wrong attitude to life, and take up the right attitude. Everything hinged on that. And that they might take up this right attitude it was necessary first that they should be convinced of life’s essential spirituality, and cease in consequence to seek its meaning and test its value on the plane of merely material things.

Carlyle thus throws passionate emphasis upon religion as the only saving power. But it must be noted that he does not suggest a return to any of the dogmatic creeds of the past. Though once the expression of a living faith, these were now for him mere lifeless formulas. Nor has he any new dogmatic creed to offer in their place. That mystical crisis which had broken the spell of the Everlasting No was in a strict sense—he uses the word himself—a conversion. But it was not a conversion in the theological sense, for it did not involve the acceptance of any specific articles of faith. It was simply a complete change of front; the protest of his whole nature, in a suddenly aroused mood of indignation and defiance, against the “spirit which denies;” the assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which had so long kept him trembling and whimpering before the facts of existence. But from that change of front came presently the vivid apprehension of certain great truths which his former mood had thus far concealed from him; and in these truths he found the secret of that right attitude to life in the discovery of which lay men’s only hope of salvation from the unrest and melancholy of their time.

From this point of view the burden of Carlyle’s message to his generation will be readily understood. Men were going wrong because they started with the thought of self, and made satisfaction of self the law of their lives; because, in consequence, they regarded happiness as the chief object of pursuit and the one thing worth striving for; because, under the influence of the current rationalism, they tried to escape from their spiritual perplexities through logic and speculation. They had, therefore, to set themselves right upon all these matters. They had to learn that not self-satisfaction but self-renunciation is the key to life and its true law; that we have no prescriptive claim to happiness and no business to quarrel with the universe if it withholds it from us; that the way out of pessimism lies, not through reason, but through honest work, steady adherence to the simple duty which each day brings, fidelity to the right as we know it. Such, in broad statement, is the substance of Carlyle’s religious convictions and moral teaching. Like Kant he takes his stand on the principles of ethical idealism. God is to be sought, not through speculation, or syllogism, or the learning of the schools, but through the moral nature. It is the soul in action that alone finds God. And the finding of God means, not happiness as the world conceives it, but blessedness, or the inward peace which passes understanding.

The connection between the transfigured autobiography which serves to introduce the directly didactic element of the book and that element itself, will now be clear. Stripped of its whimsicalities of phraseology and its humorous extravagances, Carlyle’s philosophy stands revealed as essentially idealistic in character. Spirit is the only reality. Visible things are but the manifestations, emblems, or clothings of spirit. The material universe itself is only the vesture or symbol of God; man is a spirit, though he wears the wrappings of the flesh; and in everything that man creates for himself he merely attempts to give body or expression to thought. The science of Carlyle’s time was busy proclaiming that, since the universe is governed by natural laws, miracles are impossible and the supernatural is a myth. Carlyle replies that the natural laws are themselves only the manifestation of Spiritual Force, and that thus miracle is everywhere and all nature supernatural. We, who are the creatures of time and space, can indeed apprehend the Absolute only when He weaves about Him the visible garments of time and space. Thus God reveals Himself to sense through symbols. But it is as we regard these symbols in one or other of two possible ways that we class ourselves with the foolish man or with the wise. The foolish man sees only the symbol, thinks it exists for itself, takes it for the ultimate fact, and therefore rests in it. The wise man sees the symbol, knows that it is only a symbol, and penetrates into it for the ultimate fact or spiritual reality which it symbolises.

Remote as such a doctrine may at first sight seem to be from the questions with which men are commonly concerned, it has none the less many important practical bearings. Since “all Forms whereby Spirit manifests itself to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are Clothes,” civilisation and everything belonging to it—our languages, literatures and arts, our governments, social machinery and institutions, our philosophies, creeds and rituals—are but so many vestments woven for itself by the shaping spirit of man. Indispensable these vestments are; for without them society would collapse in anarchy, and humanity sink to the level of the brute. Yet here again we must emphasise the difference, already noted, between the foolish man and the wise. The foolish man once more assumes that the vestments exist for themselves, as ultimate facts, and that they have a value of their own. He, therefore, confuses the life with its clothing; is even willing to sacrifice the life for the sake of the clothing. The wise man, while he, too, recognises the necessity of the vestments, and indeed insists upon it, knows that they have no independent importance, that they derive all their potency and value from the inner reality which they were fashioned to represent and embody, but which they often misrepresent and obscure. He therefore never confuses the life with the clothing, and well understands how often the clothing has to be sacrificed for the sake of the life. Thus, while the utility of clothes has to be recognised to the full, it is still of the essence of wisdom to press hard upon the vital distinction between the outer wrappings of man’s life and that inner reality which they more or less adequately enfold.

The use which Carlyle makes of this doctrine in his interpretation of the religious history of the world and of the crisis in thought of his own day, will be anticipated. All dogmas, forms and ceremonials, he teaches, are but religious vestments—symbols expressing man’s deepest sense of the divine mystery of the universe and the hunger and thirst of his soul for God. It is in response to the imperative necessities of his nature that he moulds for himself these outward emblems of his ideas and aspirations. Yet they are only emblems; and since, like all other human things, they partake of the ignorance and weakness of the times in which they were framed, it is inevitable that with the growth of knowledge and the expansion of thought they must presently be outgrown. When this happens, there follows what Carlyle calls the “superannuation of symbols.” Men wake to the fact that the creeds and formulas which have come down to them from the past are no longer living for them, no longer what they need for the embodiment of their spiritual life. Two mistakes are now possible, and these are, indeed, commonly made together. On the one hand, men may try to ignore the growth of knowledge and the expansion of thought, and to cling to the outgrown symbols as things having in themselves some mysterious sanctity and power. On the other hand, they may recklessly endeavour to cast aside the reality symbolised along with the discredited symbol itself. Given such a condition of things, and we shall find religion degenerating into formalism and the worship of the dead letter, and, side by side with this, the impatient rejection of all religion, and the spread of a crude and debasing materialism. Religious symbols, then, must be renewed. But their renewal can come only from within. Form, to have any real value, must grow out of life and be fed by it.

The revolutionary quality in the philosophy of “Sartor Resartus” cannot, of course, be overlooked. Everything that man has woven for himself must in time become merely “old clothes”; the work of his thought, like that of his hands, is perishable; his very highest symbols have no permanence or finality. Carlyle cuts down to the essential reality beneath all shows and forms and emblems: witness his amazing vision of a naked House of Lords. Under his penetrating gaze the “earthly hulls and garnitures” of existence melt away. Men’s habit is to rest in symbols. But to rest in symbols is fatal, since they are at best but the “adventitious wrappages” of life. Clothes “have made men of us”—true; but now, so great has their influence become that “they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us.” Hence “the beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes … till they become transparent.” The logical tendency of such teaching may seem to be towards utter nihilism. But that tendency is checked and qualified by the strong conservative element which is everywhere prominent in Carlyle’s thought. Upon the absolute need of “clothes” the stress is again and again thrown. They “have made men of us.” By symbols alone man lives and works. By symbols alone can he make life and work effective. Thus even the world’s “old clothes”—its discarded forms and creeds—should be treated with the reverence due to whatever has once played a part in human development. Thus, moreover, we must be on our guard against the impetuosity of the revolutionary spirit and all rash rupture with the past. To cast old clothes aside before new clothes are ready—this does not mean progress, but sansculottism, or a lapse into nakedness and anarchy.

The lectures “On Heroes and Hero-Worship,” here printed with “Sartor Resartus,” contain little more than an amplification, through a series of brilliant character-studies, of those fundamental ideas of history which had already figured among Teufelsdröckh’s social speculations. Simple in statement and clear in doctrine, this second work needs no formal introduction. It may, however, be of service just to indicate one or two points at which, apart from its set theses, it expresses or implies certain underlying principles of all Carlyle’s thought.

In the first place, his philosophy of history rests entirely on “the great man theory.” “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in the world,” is for him “at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” This conception, of course, brings him into sharp conflict with that scientific view of history which was already gaining ground when “Heroes and Hero-Worship” was written, and which since then has become even more popular under the powerful influence of the modern doctrine of evolution. A scientific historian, like Buckle or Taine, seeks to explain all changes in thought, all movements in politics and society, in terms of general laws; his habit is, therefore, to subordinate, if not quite to eliminate, the individual; the greatest man is treated as in a large measure the product and expression of the “spirit of the time.” For Carlyle, individuality is everything. While, as he is bound to admit, “no one works save under conditions,” external circumstances and influences count little. The Great Man is supreme. He is not the creature of his age, but its creator; not its servant, but its master. “The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men.”

Anti-scientific in his reading of history, Carlyle is also anti-democratic in the practical lessons he deduces from it. He teaches that our right relations with the Hero are discipular relations; that we should honestly acknowledge his superiority, look up to him, reverence him. Thus on the personal side he challenges that tendency to “level down” which he believed to be one alarming result of the fast-spreading spirit of the new democracy. But more than this. He insists that the one hope for our distracted world of to-day lies in the strength and wisdom of the few, not in the organised unwisdom of the many. The masses of the people can never be safely trusted to solve for themselves the intricate problems of their own welfare. They need to be guided, disciplined, at times even driven, by those great leaders of men, who see more deeply than they see into the reality of things, and know much better than they can ever know what is good for them, and how that good is to be attained. Political machinery, in which the modern world had come to put so much faith, is only another delusion of a mechanical age. The burden of history is for him always the need of the Able Man. “I say, Find me the true Könning, King, Able Man, and he has a divine right over me.” Carlyle thus throws down the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democratic movements of his time. His pronounced antagonism to the modern spirit in these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily in mind in our study of him.

Finally, we have to remember that in the whole tone and temper of his teaching Carlyle is fundamentally the Puritan. The dogmas of Puritanism he had indeed outgrown; but he never outgrew its ethics. His thought was dominated and pervaded to the end, as Froude rightly says, by the spirit of the creed he had dismissed. By reference to this one fact we may account for much of his strength, and also for most of his limitations in outlook and sympathy. Those limitations the reader will not fail to notice for himself. But whatever allowance has to be made for them, the strength remains. It is, perhaps, the secret of Carlyle’s imperishable greatness as a stimulating and uplifting power that, beyond any other modern writer, he makes us feel with him the supreme claims of the moral life, the meaning of our own responsibilities, the essential spirituality of things, the indestructible reality of religion. If he had thus a special message for his own generation, that message has surely not lost any of its value for ours. “Put Carlyle in your pocket,” says Dr. Hal to Paul Kelver on his starting out in life. “He is not all the voices, but he is the best maker of men I know.” And as a maker of men, Carlyle’s appeal to us is as great as ever.

William Henry Hudson.

Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823–4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement published in the People’s Edition, 1873). Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship, 1824. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry (from the French of Legendre), 1824. German Romance, 1827. Sartor Resartus (Fraser’s Mag., 1833–4), 1835 (Boston), 1838. French Revolution, 1837, 1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1839, 1840, 1847, 1857. (In these were reprinted Articles from Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine, London and Westminster Review, Keepsake Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times). Chartism, 1840. Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841. Past and Present, 1843. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations, 1845. Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser). Original Discourses on the Negro Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853. Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850. Life of John Sterling, 1851. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, 1858–65. Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866. Shooting Niagara: and After? 1867 (from “Macmillan”). The Early Kings of Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.

There were also contributions to Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopædia, vols. xiv., xv., and xvi.; to New Edinburgh Review, 1821, 1822; Fraser’s Magazine, 1830, 1831; The Times, 19 June, 1844 (“Mazzini”); 28 November, 1876; 5 May, 1877; Examiner, 1848; Spectator, 1848.

First Collected Edition of Works, 1857–58 (16 vols.).

Reminiscences, ed. by Froude in 1881, but superseded by C. E. Norton’s edition of 1887. Norton has also edited two volumes of Letters (1888), and Carlyle’s correspondence with Emerson (1883) and with Goethe (1887). Other volumes of correspondence are New Letters (1904), Carlyle Intime (1907), Love Letters (1909), Letters to Mill, Sterling, and Browning (1923), all ed. by Alexander Carlyle. See also Last Words of Carlyle, 1892.

The fullest Life is that by D. A. Wilson. The first of six volumes appeared in 1923, and by 1934 only one remained to be published.