Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  Introduction, Note on the Text, Bibliography, Chronology, Explanatory Notes, Glossary

  © Peter Sabor and Kerry McSweeney 1987

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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1987

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Carlyle, Thomas, 1795–1881.

  Sartor resartus

  (Oxford world’s classics)

  Bibliography: p.

  I. McSweeney, Kerry, 1941–.

  II. Sabor, Peter.

  III. Title.

  PR4429.A2M37 1987 824′.8 87–5753

  ISBN 0–19–283673–0

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd.

  Reading, Berkshire

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THOMAS CARLYLE

  Sartor Resartus

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  KERRY McSWEENEY

  and

  PETER SABOR

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  SARTOR RESARTUS

  THOMAS CARLYLE was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, a small market village in Dumfriesshire. He studied for the ministry, enrolled in law classes, and taught briefly before deciding on a career as a writer. During the 1820s, his essays and translations helped to introduce German literature and thought to a British audience. Sartor Resartus, his one full-scale work of imaginative fiction, was first published periodically in 1833-4. In 1826 Carlyle had married Jane Welsh. In 1834 they moved from Scotland to London and settled at Cheyne Row, Chelsea. It was here that Carlyle wrote the works that confirmed his position as the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets: The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Past and Present (1843), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and the six-volume history of Frederick the Great (1858–65). His Reminiscences were published shortly after his death, in 1881.

  KERRY MCSWEENEY is Molson Professor at McGill University in Montreal. His publications include the World’s Classics edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists, Four Contemporary Novelists, Moby Dick: Ishmael’s Mighty Book, George Eliot: A Literary Life, The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, and Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry.

  PETER SABOR is Professor of English at Laval University, Quebec. His other editions for Oxford World’s Classics are Burney’s Cecilia (with Margaret Anne Doody) and The Wanderer (with Doody and Robert Mack), and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. He has also edited Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and Remarks on Clarissa, and Burney’s Complete Plays, and published two books on Horace Walpole: Horace Walpole: A Reference Guide, and Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Thomas Carlyle

  SARTOR RESARTUS

  BOOK I

  1 Preliminary

  2 Editorial Difficulties

  3 Reminiscences

  4 Characteristics

  5 The World in Clothes

  6 Aprons

  7 Miscellaneous—Historical

  8 The World out of Clothes

  9 Adamitism

  10 Pure Reason

  11 Prospective

  BOOK II

  1 Genesis

  2 Idyllic

  3 Pedagogy

  4 Getting under Way

  5 Romance

  6 Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh

  7 The Everlasting No

  8 Centre of Indifference

  9 The Everlasting Yea

  10 Pause

  BOOK III

  1 Incident in Modern History

  2 Church Clothes

  3 Symbols

  4 Helotage

  5 The Phœnix

  6 Old Clothes

  7 Organic Filaments

  8 Natural Supernaturalism

  9 Circumspective

  10 The Dandiacal Body

  11 Tailors

  12 Farewell

  Appendix I: Carlyle to James Fraser, May 1833

  Appendix II: Maginn’s Portrait of Carlyle, June 1833

  Appendix III: Carlyle to Emerson, August 1834

  Appendix IV: Carlyle to John Sterling, June 1835

  Appendix V: Carlyle’s Supplementary Material to the 1869 Edition

  Explanatory Notes

  Glossary

  INTRODUCTION

  [I]

  Sartor Resartus has long been recognized as a work of the foremost literary historical importance. For one thing, it marks the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian periods as sharply as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads marks that between the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. And unlike Wordsworth’s manifesto, Carlyle’s book enacts within itself
the dislocations of the passage. For another, Sartor Resartus, which was first published in book form in Boston in 1836 with an enthusiastic preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important stimulus to the great mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American literature. Poe may have loathed the book, as he did everything of Carlyle’s; but it was a key influence, both thematic and formal, on two of the master-works of the American Renaissance—Melville’s Moby-Dick and Whitman’s Song of Myself.

  Most importantly, Sartor Resartus is the seminal expression of the thought of the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets. The fundamental Carlylean doctrines are all articulated, or at least adumbrated, here: the horrors of Utilitarianism; the religious basis of society; the pattern of conversion—from the Everlasting No, through the Centre of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea—which showed that, in the words of Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology’;1 the importance of vocation—of an individual’s finding his ‘maximum of Capability’; the superiority of renunciation to the pursuit of happiness; the moral imperatives of work, duty, and reverence; the need for heroes; and the social vision that saw contemporary Britain divided into the two nations of rich and poor. As such, Sartor Resartus is of quintessential importance for understanding the literature and the moral and intellectual culture of Victorian Britain. ‘For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation’, George Eliot observed in 1855, ‘that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings… The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their minds.’2

  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).

  [2]

  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