Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

Edmund J. Sullivan's depiction of Mr Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is deemed by many to be the great masterpiece of philosophical English in the XIXth century and a work of surpassing profundity. It is, in any case, Mr Carlyle's personal masterpiece; strange, dense, cryptic, convoluted, but the essential Carlyle. It is among the numerous obscure works listed as Out of Phase reading in the relevant section of this web journal, see here. The present author relates there that he attempted to read Sartor Resartus in his teens but found the task overwhelming. It is a strange book, indeed; one like no other. Even for a mature and educated reader it poses a considerable challenge. For a start, the narrator - an anonymous English reviewer of uneven temper - affects a so-called 'German' style and much of the book is supposedly being translated from the German. The XXIst century reader has no way of knowing that, in Carlyle's time, 'German' was an exact synonym for 'mysterious' and to write English in the 'German' style was meant to impart a tone of mystery and deliberate obscurity to a text. 

So here we have a work, written by Thomas Carlyle in Carlylean prose - which is to say, already torturous and obscure and florid as it is - affected to be 'German' since Mr Carlyle was by then Britain's greatest admirer of the Germanic arts and intellect. Today, this makes the style of Sartor Resartus especially inaccessible and perplexing. Carlyle is dense: Carlyle affecting an early XIXth century German English - with all things 'German' understood to be beyond understanding - is exceedingly tricky. 

Why bother? Because this is an extraordinary work of philosophical fiction. The title means 'Tailor Patched' - the text as a patchwork of woven cloth - but the title also introduces the central philosophical metaphor throughout, namely clothes as the forms which the Spirit weaves and wears in manifestation and by which,"it both conceals itself in shame and reveals itself in grace." Carlyle has written a novel in which clothes are a metaphysical symbol. The reader needs to understand this from the outset. It is a book about clothes - or rather a book about a book about clothes. (Carlyle - master of the metanarrative!) And clothes are a symbol of the many forms (appearances) taken by the incarnate spirit of man. The spirit clothes itself in matter. The whole work is an exploration of that metaphor.

Nevertheless, it is not an easy book to appreciate. They say it is autobiographical. The plot: the hero is rejected in matrimony which provokes a spiritual crisis in him and so he sets out to travel and reflect and thereby frames his philosophy of life. This was Carlyle's fate in a romance prior to his marriage. But the autobiography is buried deep under layers of narrative devices and distancing. Mrs Carlyle does not seem to have noticed that it concerns the author's loss of a love prior to her, and after reading it is reported to have said, "It's a work of genius, dear." Others agreed. In the United States it was embraced enthusiastically by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendalists and published under their auspices.

The work, deep with satire, consists of three parts, three books. An English reviewer, the narrator, considers a work by a German philosopher on the philosophy of clothes. In the first part the narrator gives an account of this philosophy but admits to finding it perplexing. In the second part, the narrator, hoping that the biography of the author might shed light on this philosophy, gives an account of the life of the German philosopher concerned. In the third part, returning to the format of the first part, the narrator reconsiders the philosophy in light of the philosopher's life. 

The second part, then, is autobiographical in relation to Carlyle, while the first and third sections give an account of his philosophy. In this it is not systematic: it is, as the title intimates, a patchwork, like a garment patched by a tailor. What we are given here is the philosophy of a man who had once been crushed in love and who thereafter wandered in the world in sorrow and contemplation. Importantly, the work grows as it is told. The Editor (narrator) becomes engrossed in this case and pursues it further and further.

There are many curious complexities to the work. For example, in the final chapter of the first book the narrator receives material concerning the person of the German philosopher (Who's name is Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.) It arrives in a set of bags arranged according to the signs of the Zodiac and in the bags are scraps of paper on which the philosopher has scribbled loose, unconnected pieces and fragments of autobiography. The biography of the philosopher that makes up the second book is thus assembled from these fragments. Thus does Carlyle supply readers with a marvellous cosmology. Its precedent is in the relevant articles of Plato's Timaeus where the elements of matter are said to be "stoicheon" (letters of the alphabet) and so the cosmos is compared to a written text. The Zodiac supplies bags of text which constitute a lived life. Mr Carlyle's symbolism reaches far and deep. Text as 'woven cloth' is a symbolism as old as the Vedas, integral to the Indo-European mind, even the source of 'surah' (weaving) as a name for the chapters of the Mahometan Koran. 

The novel begins in typical Carlyle style, replete in irony:

Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,—it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.

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The finest edition of Sartor Resartus is that featuring some seventy-eight illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan. This was Mr Sullivan's greatest undertaking as an illustrator. He had illustrated other works, but not of such high repute. The original publication of the book was in Fraser's Magazine where it was serialised and presented without any indication to readers that it is a work of fiction. The work's first readers, that is, were under the impression that the entire account is true. The original full edition of Sartor Resartus sold some 30,000 copies - a huge readership at that time. Edmund J. Sullivan's 1898 edition also sold in great numbers. It is remarkable that such a work, once so celebrated, is now rated as irredeemably obscure. Carlyle is reviled; Sartor Resartus is forgotten.

Reproductions of Mr Sullivan's illustrations follow:

The Schoolmaster of the Future

The Bedlam of Creation

The Everlasting Yea

Chaos

Attorney Logic

The Old Adam and Eve

The Aboriginal Savage

A Fool's Paradise

Teufelsdröckh's Reverence for Empty Clothes

Blumine

According to the scraps of paper with autobiographical notes supplied to the narrator, in his circles of German nobility, the hero Teufelsdröckh encounters a beautiful woman named Blumine, a name meaning Goddess of Flowers. The tragic tale of Herr Teufelsdröckh has him smitten, giving up his teaching post in order to pursue her, and then to be rejected for a British aristocrat named Towgood. In this crisis, Teufelsdröckh flees and wanders around Europe, but even there - tormented - he encounters Blumine and her new husband on their honeymoon.

The philosophical adventure described in Sartor Resartus goes in three stages: the hero comes first to the Everlasting No. He eventually escapes this place of despair and comes to the Centre of Indifference. Then, finally, he accomplishes affirmation; he comes to the Everlasting Yea. It is a philosophy with a happy ending. 

The most interesting illustration by Edmund J. Sullivan is this one, above, entitled The Real and Its Ideal. In a philosophy where clothes are the central metaphor nakedness must therefore have a special significance. It is an interesting illustration because it violates the conventions of the nude. Here we see a naked woman with her nakedness juxtaposed with clothing. The classical nude, though, is an abstraction kept apart from the reality of clothing. This illustration by Sullivan raised eyebrows because the female figure is not 'nude' but 'naked', as indicated by the contrast of the clothing. What does the caption 'The Real and Its Ideal' do to the illustration? What exactly is being said about nakedness and clothing - reality, appearance, purity, exposure, society, convention, nature? Such is the symbolical and altogether indirect manner by which Mr Carlyle imparts his philosophy in this quite extraordinary work. 

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Yours

Harper McAlpine Black