We now begin the study of the last of the three stages in the battle
between paganism and idealism. Having seen something of its primitive
and classical forms, we took a cross section of it in the seventeenth
century, and now we shall review one or two of its phases in our own
time. The leap from the seventeenth century to the twentieth necessarily
omits much that is vital and interesting. The eighteenth century, in its
stately and complacent fashion, produced some of the most deliberate and
finished types of paganism which the world has seen, and these were
opposed by memorable antagonists. We cannot linger there, however, but
must pass on to that great book which sounded the loudest bugle-note
which the nineteenth century heard calling men to arms in this warfare.
Nothing could be more violent than the sudden transition from Samuel
Pepys, that inveterate tumbler in the masque of life, whose absurdities
and antics we have been looking at but now, to this solemn and
tremendous book. Great in its own right, it is still greater when we
remember that it stands at the beginning of the modern conflict between
the material and spiritual development of England. Every student of the
fourteenth century is familiar with two great figures, typical of the
two contrasted features of its life. On the one hand stands Chaucer,
with his infinite human interest, his good-humour, and his inexhaustible
delight in man's life upon the earth. On the other hand, dark in shadows
as Chaucer is bright with sunshine, stands Langland, colossal in his
sadness, perplexed as he faces the facts of public life which are still
our problems, earnest as death. There is no one figure which corresponds
to Chaucer in the modern age, but Carlyle is certainly the counterpart
of Langland. Standing in the shadow, he sends forth his great voice to
his times, now breaking into sobs of pity, and anon into shrieks of
hoarse laughter, terrible to hear. He, too, is bewildered, and he comes
among his fellows "determined to pluck out the heart of the
mystery"--the mystery alike of his own times and of general human life
and destiny.
The book is in a great measure autobiographical, and is drawn from deep
wells of experience, thought, and feeling. Inasmuch as its writer was a
very typical Scotsman, it also was in a sense a manifesto of the
national convictions which had made much of the noblest part of Scottish
history, and which have served to stiffen the new races with which
Scottish emigrants have blended, and to put iron into their blood. It is
a book of incalculable importance, and if it be the case that it finds
fewer readers in the rising generation than it did among their fathers,
it is time that we returned to it. It is for want of such strong meat as
this that the spirit of an age tends to grow feeble.
The object of the present lecture is neither to explain _Sartor
Resartus_ nor to summarise it. It certainly requires explanation, and it
is no wonder that it puzzled the publishers. Before it was finally
accepted by Fraser, its author had "carried it about for some two years
from one terrified owl to another." When it appeared, the criticisms
passed on it were amusing enough. Among those mentioned by Professor
Nichol are, "A heap of clotted nonsense," and "When is that stupid
series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?" A book which could
call forth such abuse, even from the dullest of minds, is certainly in
need of elucidation. Yet here, more perhaps than in any other volume one
could name, the interpretation must come from within. The truth which it
has to declare will appeal to each reader in the light of his own
experience of life. And the endeavour of the present lecture will simply
be to give a clue to its main purpose. Every reader, following up that
clue for himself, may find the growing interest and the irresistible
fascination which the Victorians found in it. And when we add that
without some knowledge of _Sartor_ it is impossible to understand any
serious book that has been written since it appeared, we do not
exaggerate so much as might be supposed on the first hearing of so
extraordinary a statement.
The first and chief difficulty with most readers is a very obvious and
elementary one. What is it all about? As you read, you can entertain no
doubt about the eloquence, the violent and unrestrained earnestness of
purpose, the unmistakable reserves of power behind the detonating words
and unforgettable phrases. But, after all, what is it that the man is
trying to say? This is certainly an unpromising beginning. Other great
prophets have prophesied in the vernacular; but "he that speaketh in an
unknown tongue speaketh not unto men but unto God; for no man
understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries." Yet
there are some things which cannot convey their full meaning in the
vernacular, thoughts which must coin a language for themselves; and
although at first there may be much bewilderment and even irritation,
yet in the end we shall confess that the prophecy has found its proper
language.
Let us go back to the time in which the book was written. In the late
twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century a quite
exceptional group of men and women were writing books. It was one of
those galaxies that now and then over-crowd the literary heavens with
stars. To mention only a few of the famous names, there were Byron,
Scott, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Brownings. It fills one
with envy to think of days when any morning might bring a new volume
from any one of these. Emerson was very much alive then, and was already
corresponding with Carlyle. Goethe died in 1832, but not before he had
found in Carlyle one who "is almost more, at home in our literature than
ourselves," and who had penetrated to the innermost core of the German
writings of his day.
At that time, too, momentous changes were coming upon the industrial and
political life of England. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway
was opened, and in 1832 the Reform Bill was passed. Men were standing in
the backwash of the French Revolution. The shouts of acclamation with
which the promise of that dawn was hailed, had been silenced long ago by
the bloody spectacle of Paris and the career of Napoleon Buonaparte. The
day of Byronism was over, and polite England was already settling down
to the conventionalities of the Early Victorian period. The romantic
school was passing away, and the new generation was turning from it to
seek reality in physical science. But deep below the conventionality and
the utilitarianism alike there remained from the Revolution its legacy
of lawlessness, and many were more intent on adventure than on
obedience.
It was in the midst of this confused _mêlée_ of opinions and impulses
that Thomas Carlyle strode into the lists with his strange book. On the
one hand it is a Titanic defence of the universe against the stage
Titanism of Byron's _Cain_. On the other hand it is a revolt of reality
against the empire of proprieties and appearances and shams. In a
generation divided between the red cap of France and the coal-scuttle
bonnet of England Carlyle stands bareheaded under the stars. Along with
him stand Benjamin Disraeli, combining a genuine sympathy for the poor
with a most grotesque delight in the aristocracy; and John Henry Newman,
fierce against the Liberals, and yet the author of "Lead, kindly Light."
The book was handicapped more heavily by its own style than perhaps any
book that ever fought its way from neglect and vituperation to
idolatrous popularity. There is in it an immense amount of gag and
patter, much of which is brilliant, but so wayward and fantastic as to
give a sense of restlessness and perpetual noise. The very title is
provoking, and not less so is the explanation of it--the pretended
discovery of a German volume upon "Clothes, their origin and influence,"
published by Stillschweigen and Co., of Weissnichtwo, and written by
Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. The puffs from the local newspaper, and the
correspondence with Hofrath "Grasshopper," in no wise lessen the odds
against such a work being taken seriously.
Again, as might be expected of a Professor of "Things in General," the
book is discursive to the point of bewilderment. The whole progeny of
"aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial devils" breaks loose upon us just as
we are about to begin such a list of human apparel as never yet was
published save in the catalogue of a museum collected by a madman. A dog
with a tin kettle at his tail rushes mad and jingling across the street,
leaving behind him a new view of the wild tyranny of Ambition. A great
personage loses much sawdust through a rent in his unfortunate nether
garments. Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above. The book is
everywhere, and everywhere at once. The _asides_ seem to occupy more
space than the main thesis, whatever that may be. Just when you think
you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display of
these fireworks distracts your attention. It is not dark enough to see
their full splendour, yet they confuse such daylight as you have.
Yet the main thesis cannot long remain in doubt. Through whatever
amazement and distraction, it becomes clear enough at last. Clothes,
which at once reveal and hide the man who wears them, are an allegory of
the infinitely varied aspects and appearances of the world, beneath
which lurk ultimate realities. But essential man is a naked animal, not
a clothed one, and truth can only be arrived at by the most drastic
stripping off of unreal appearances that cover it. The Professor will
not linger upon the consideration of the lord's star or the clown's
button, which are all that most men care to see: he will get down to the
essential lord and the essential clown. And this will be more than an
interesting literary occupation to him, or it will not long be that.
Truth and God are one, and the devil is the prince of lies. This
philosophy of clothes, then, is religion and not _belles lettres_. The
reason for our sojourn on earth, and the only ground of any hope for a
further sojourn elsewhere, is that in God's name we do battle with the
devil.
The quest of reality must obviously be wide as the universe, but if we
are to engage in it to any purpose we must definitely begin it
_somewhere_. A treatise on reality may easily be the most unreal of
things--a mere battle in the air. So long as it is a discussion of
theories it has this danger, and the first necessity is to bring the
search down to the region of experience and rigorously insist on its
remaining there. For this end the device of biography is adopted, and we
see the meaning of all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and
of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book
I. The second book is wholly biographical. It is in human life and
experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to
reality; and Carlyle constructs a typical and immortal biography.
To the childless old people, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, leading
their sweet orchard life, there comes, in the dusk of evening, a
stranger of reverend aspect--comes, and leaves with them the "invaluable
Loan" of the baby Teufelsdröckh. Thenceforward, beside the little
Kuhbach stream, we watch the opening out of a human life, from infancy
to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood. The story has been told a
million times, but never quite in this fashion before. For rough
delicacy, for exquisitely tender sternness, the biography is unique.
From the sleep of mere infancy the child is awakened to the
consciousness of creatorship by the gift of tools with which to make
things. Tales open up for him the long vistas of history; and the
stage-coach with its slow rolling blaze of lights teaches him geography,
and the far-flung imaginative suggestiveness of the road; while the
annual cattle-fair actually gathers the ends of the earth about his
wondering eyes, and gives him his first impression of the variety of
human life.
Childhood brings with it much that is sweet and gentle, flowing on like
the little Kuhbach; and yet suggests far thoughts of Time and Eternity,
concerning which we are evidently to hear more before the end. The
formal education he receives--that "wood and leather education"--calls
forth only protest. But the development of his spirit proceeds in spite
of it. So far as the passive side of character goes, he does
excellently. On the active side things go not so well. Already he begins
to chafe at the restraints of obedience, and the youthful spirit is
beating against its bars. The stupidities of an education which only
appeals to the one faculty of memory, and to that mainly by means of
birch-rods, increase the rebellion, and the sense of restraint is
brought to a climax when at last old Andreas dies. Then "the dark
bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale
kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and
generations, stood before him; the inexorable word NEVER! now
first showed its meaning."
The youth is now ready to enter, as such a one inevitably must, upon the
long and losing battle of faith and doubt. He is at the theorising stage
as yet, not having learned to make anything, but only to discuss things.
And yet the time is not wasted if the mind have been taught to think.
For "truly a Thinking Man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can
have."
The immediate consequence and employment of this unripe time of
half-awakened manhood is, however, unsatisfactory enough. There is much
reminiscence of early Edinburgh days, with their law studies, and
tutoring, and translating, in Teufelsdröckh's desultory period. The
climax of it is in those scornful sentences about Aesthetic Teas, to
which the hungry lion was invited, that he might feed on chickweed--well
for all concerned if it did not end in his feeding on the chickens
instead! It is an unwholesome time with the lad--a time of sullen
contempt alternating with loud rebellion, of mingled vanity and
self-indulgence, and of much sheer devilishness of temper.
Upon this exaggerated and most disagreeable period, lit by "red streaks
of unspeakable grandeur, yet also in the blackness of darkness," there
comes suddenly the master passion of romantic love. Had this adventure
proved successful, we should have simply had the old story, which ends
in "so they lived happily ever after." What the net result of all the
former strivings after truth and freedom would have been, we need not
inquire. For this is another story, equally old and to the end of time
ever newly repeated. There is much of Werther in it, and still more of
Jean Paul Richter. Its finest English counterpart is Longfellow's
_Hyperion_--the most beautiful piece of our literature, surely, that has
ever been forgotten--in which Richter's story lives again. But never has
the tale been more exquisitely told than in _Sartor Resartus_. For one
sweet hour of life the youth has been taken out of himself and pale
doubt flees far away. Life, that has been but a blasted heath, blooms
suddenly with unheard-of blossoms of hope and of delight. Then comes the
end. "Their lips were joined, their two souls, like two dewdrops, rushed
into one,--for the first time, and for the last! Thus was Teufelsdröckh
made immortal by a Kiss. And then? Why, then--thick curtains of Night
rushed over his soul, as rose the immeasurable Crash of Doom; and
through the ruins as of a shivered Universe was he falling, falling,
towards the Abyss."
The sorrows of Teufelsdröckh are but too well known. Flung back upon his
former dishevelment of mind from so great and calm a height, the crash
must necessarily be terrible. Yet he will not take up his life where he
left it to follow Blumine. Such an hour inevitably changes a man, for
better or for worse. There is at least a dignity about him now, even
while the "nameless Unrest" urges him forward through his darkened
world. The scenes of his childhood in the little Entepfuhl bring no
consolation. Nature, even in his wanderings among her mountains, is
equally futile, for the wanderer can never escape from his own shadow
among her solitudes. Yet is his nature not dissolved, but only
"compressed closer," as it were, and we watch the next stage of this
development with a sense that some mysteriously great and splendid
experience is on the eve of being born.
Thus we come to those three central chapters--chapters so fundamental
and so true to human life, that it is safe to prophesy that they will be
familiar so long as books are read upon the earth--"The Everlasting No,"
"Centre of Indifference" and "The Everlasting Yea."
In "The Everlasting No" we watch the work of negation upon the soul of
man. His life has capitulated to the Spirit that denies, and the
unbelief is as bitter as it is hopeless. "Doubt had darkened into
Unbelief; shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have
the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." "Is there no God, then; but at
best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the
outside of his Universe, and _seeing_ it go? Has the word Duty no
meaning?"
"Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done,
shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and
receive no Answer but an Echo." Faith, indeed, lies dormant but alive
beneath the doubt. But in the meantime the man's own weakness paralyses
action; and, while this paralysis lasts, all faith appears to have
departed. He has ceased to believe in himself, and to believe in his
friends. "The very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as
believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose,
of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable
Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind men limb
from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!"
He is saved from suicide simply by the after-shine of Christianity.
The religion of his fathers lingers, no longer as a creed, but as a
powerful set of associations and emotions. It is a small thing to cling
to amid the wrack of a man's universe; yet it holds until the appearance
of a new phase in which he is to find escape from the prison-house. He
has begun to realise that fear--a nameless fear of he knows not
what--has taken hold upon him. "I lived in a continual, indefinite,
pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous." Fear affects men in widely
different ways. We have seen how this same vague "sense of enemies"
obsessed the youthful spirit of Marius the Epicurean, until it cleared
itself eventually into the conscience of a Christian man. But
Teufelsdröckh is prouder and more violent of spirit than the sedate and
patrician Roman, and he leaps at the throat of fear in a wild defiance.
"What _art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever
pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! What
is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death:
and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may,
will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a Heart; canst thou not
suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast,
trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it
come, then; I will meet it and defy it!"
This is no permanent or stable resting-place, but it is the beginning of
much. It is the assertion of self in indignation and wild defiance,
instead of the former misery of a man merely haunted by himself. This is
that "Baphometic Fire-baptism" or new-birth of spiritual awakening,
which is the beginning of true manhood. The Everlasting No had said:
"Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the
Devil's); to which my whole Me now made answer: I am not thine, but
Free, and forever hate thee!"
The immediate result of this awakening is told in "Centre of
Indifference"--_i.e._, indifference to oneself, one's own feelings, and
even to fate. It is the transition from subjective to objective
interests, from eating one's own heart out to a sense of the wide and
living world by which one is surrounded. It is the same process which,
just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in _Paracelsus_ and
_Sordello_. Once more Teufelsdröckh travels, but this time how
differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of
himself, he sees the world full of vital interests--cities of men,
tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the
world--the true meanings alike of peace and war--claim his interest. The
great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his
astonished eyes. "Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals,
look away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and
pertinently enough note what is passing there." He has
reached--strangely enough through self-assertion--the centre of
indifference to self, and of interest in other people and things. And
the supreme lesson of it all is the value of _efficiency_. Napoleon "was
a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached, through the
cannon's throat, that great doctrine, _La carrière ouverte aux talens_
(the tools to him that can handle them)."
This bracing doctrine carries us at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is
not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an
interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That might transform
him simply into a curious but heartless dilettante, a mere tourist of
the spirit, whose sole desire is to see and to take notes. But that
could never satisfy Carlyle; for that is but self-indulgence in its more
refined form of the lust of the eyes. It was not for this that the
Everlasting No had set Teufelsdröckh wailing, nor for this that he had
risen up in wrath and bidden defiance to fear. From his temptation in
the wilderness the Son of Man must come forth, not to wander
open-mouthed about the plain, but to work his way "into the higher
sunlit slopes of that Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is
in Heaven only."
In other words, a great compassion for his fellow-men has come upon him.
"With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my fellow-man: with an
infinite Love, an infinite Pity. Poor, wandering, wayward man! Art thou
not tried, and beaten with stripes, even as I am? Ever, whether thou
bear the royal mantle or the beggar's gabardine, art thou not so weary,
so heavy-laden; and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O my Brother, my
Brother, why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe away all tears
from thy eyes!" The words remind us of the famous passage, occurring
early in the book, which describes the Professor's Watchtower. It was
suggested by the close-packed streets of Edinburgh's poorer quarter, as
seen from the slopes of the hills which stand close on her eastern side.
Probably no passage ever written has so vividly and suggestively massed
together the various and contradictory aspects of the human tragedy.
One more question, however, has yet to be answered before we have solved
our problem. What about happiness? We all cry aloud for it, and make its
presence or absence the criterion for judging the worth of days.
Teufelsdröckh goes to the heart of the matter with his usual directness.
It is this search for happiness which is the explanation of all the
unwholesomeness that culminated in the Everlasting No. "Because the
THOU (sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honoured, nourished,
soft-bedded, and lovingly cared-for? Foolish soul! What Act of
Legislature was there that _thou_ shouldst be Happy? A little while ago
thou hadst no right to _be_ at all. What if thou wert born and
predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other
than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after
somewhat to _eat_; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not
given thee? Close thy _Byron_; open thy _Goethe_." In effect, happiness
is a relative term, which we can alter as we please by altering the
amount which we demand from life. "Fancy that thou deservest to be
hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot:
fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a
luxury to die in hemp."
Such teaching is neither sympathetic enough nor positive enough to be of
much use to poor mortals wrestling with their deepest problems. Yet in
the very negation of happiness he discovers a positive religion--the
religion of the Cross, the Worship of Sorrow. Expressed crudely, this
seems to endorse the ascetic fallacy of the value of self-denial for its
own sake. But from that it is saved by the divine element in sorrow
which Christ has brought--"Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the
EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein
whoso walks and works, it is well with him."
This still leaves us perilously near to morbidness. The Worship of
Sorrow might well be but a natural and not less morbid reaction from the
former morbidness, the worship of self and happiness. From that,
however, it is saved by the word "works," which is spoken with emphasis
in this connection. So we pass to the last phase of the Everlasting Yea,
in which we return to the thesis upon which we began, viz., that "Doubt
of any sort cannot be removed except by action." "Do the Duty which
_lies nearest thee_, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty
will already have become clearer.... Yes here, in this poor, miserable,
hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or
nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live,
be free.... Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal
fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou
hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the
Night cometh, wherein no man can work."
Thus the goal of human destiny is not any theory, however true; not any
happiness, however alluring. It is for practical purposes that the
universe is built, and he who would be "in tune with the universe" must
first and last be practical. In various forms this doctrine has
reappeared and shown itself potent. Ritschl based his system on
practical values in religion, and Professor William James has proclaimed
the same doctrine in a still wider application in his Pragmatism. The
essential element in both systems is that they lay the direct stress of
life, not upon abstract theory but upon experience and vital energy.
This transference from theorising and emotionalism to the prompt and
vigorous exercise of will upon the immediate circumstance, is Carlyle's
understanding of the word Conversion.
When it comes to the particular question of what work the Professor is
to do, the answer is that he has within him the Word Omnipotent, waiting
for a man to speak it forth. And here in this volume upon Clothes, this
_Sartor Resartus_, is his deliberate response to the great demand. At
first he seems here to relapse from the high seriousness of the chapters
we have just been reading, and to come with too great suddenness to
earth again. Yet that is not the case; for, as we shall see, the rest of
the volume is the attempt to reconstruct the universe on the principles
he has discovered within his own experience. The story to which we have
been listening is Teufelsdröckh's way of discovering reality; now we are
to have the statement of it on the wider planes of social and other
philosophy. This we shall briefly review, but the gist of the book is in
what we have already found. To most readers the quotations must have
been old and well-remembered friends. Yet they will pardon the
reappearance of them here, for they have been amongst the most powerful
of all wingéd words spoken in England for centuries. The reason for the
popularity of the book is that these biographical chapters are the
record of normal and typical human experience. This, or something like
this, will repeat itself so long as human nature lasts; and men, grown
discouraged with the mystery and bewilderment of life, will find heart
from these chapters to start "once more on their adventure, brave and
new."
This, then, is Teufelsdröckh's reconstruction of the world; and the
world of each one of us requires some such reconstruction. For life is
full of deceptive outward appearances, from which it is the task of
every man to come back in his own way to the realities within. The
shining example of such reconstruction is that of George Fox, who sewed
himself a suit of leather and went out to the woods with it--"Every
stitch of his needle pricking into the heart of slavery, and
world-worship, and the Mammon god." The leather suit is an allegory of
the whole. The appearances of men and things are but the fantastic
clothes with which they cover their nakedness. They take these clothes
of theirs to be themselves, and the first duty and only hope of a man is
to divest himself of all such coverings, and discover what manner of man
he really is.
This process of divesting, however, may yield either of two results. A
man may take, for the reality of himself, either the low view of human
nature, in which man is but "a forked straddling animal with bandy
legs," or the high view, in which he is a spirit, and unutterable
Mystery of Mysteries. It is the latter view which Thomas Carlyle
champions, through this and many other volumes, against the
materialistic thought of his time.
The chapter on Dandies is a most extraordinary attack on the keeping up
of appearances. The Dandy is he who not only keeps up appearances but
actually worships them. He is their advocate and special pleader. His
very office and function is to wear clothes. Here we have the illusion
stripped from much that we have taken for reality. Sectarianism is a
prominent example of it, the reading of fashionable novels is another.
In the former two are seen the robes of eternity flung over one very
vulgar form of self-worship, and in the latter the robe of fashionable
society is flung over another. The reality of man's intercourse with
Eternity and with his fellow-men has died within these vestures, but the
eyes of the public are satisfied, and never guess the corpse within.
Sectarianism and Vanity Fair are but common forms of self-worship, in
which every one is keeping up appearances, and is so intent upon that
exercise that all thought of reality has vanished.
A shallower philosopher would have been content with exposing these and
other shams; and consequently his philosophy would have led nowhere.
Carlyle is a greater thinker, and one who takes a wider view. He is no
enemy of clothes, although fools have put them to wrong uses and made
them the instruments of deception. His choice is not between worshipping
and abandoning the world and its appearances. He will frankly confess
the value of it and of its vesture, and so we have the chapter on
Adamitism, in defence of clothes, which acknowledges in great and
ingenious detail the many uses of the existing order of institutions.
But still, through all such acknowledgment, we are reminded constantly
of the main truth. All appearance is for the sake of reality, and all
tools for expressing the worker. When the appearance becomes a
substitute for the reality, and the tools absorb the attention that
should be devoted to the work for whose accomplishment they exist, then
we have relapsed into the fundamental human error. The object of the
book is to plunge back from appearance to reality, from clothes to him
who wears them. "Who am I? What is this ME?... some embodied,
visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind."
This swift retreat upon reality occurs at intervals throughout the whole
book, and in connection with every conceivable department of human life
and interest. In many parts there is little attempt at sequence or
order. The author has made voluminous notes on men and things, and the
whole fantastic structure of _Sartor Resartus_ is a device for
introducing these disjointedly. In the remainder of this lecture we
shall select and displace freely, in order to present the main teachings
of the book in manageable groups.
1. _Language and Thought._--Language is the natural garment of thoughts,
and while sometimes it performs its function of revealing them, it often
conceals them. Many people's whole intellectual life is spent in dealing
with words, and they never penetrate to the thoughts at all. Still more
commonly, people get lost among words, especially words which have come
to be used metaphorically, and again fail to penetrate to the thought.
Thus the _Name_ is the first garment wrapped around the essential
ME; and all speech, whether of science, poetry, or politics, is
simply an attempt at right naming. The names by which we call things are
apt to become labelled pigeon-holes in which we bury them. Having
catalogued and indexed our facts, we lose sight of them thenceforward,
and think and speak in terms of the catalogue. If you are a Liberal, it
is possible that all you may know or care to know about Conservatism is
the name. Nay, having catalogued yourself a Liberal, you may seldom even
find it necessary to inquire what the significance of Liberalism really
is. If you happen to be a Conservative, the corresponding risks will
certainly not be less.
The dangers of these word-garments, and the habit of losing all contact
with reality in our constant habit of living among mere words, naturally
suggest to Carlyle his favourite theme--a plea for silence. We all talk
too much, and the first lesson we have to learn on our way to reality is
to be oftener silent. This duty of silence, as has been wittily
remarked, Carlyle preaches in thirty-seven volumes of eloquent English
speech. "SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them (were
this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the
element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at
length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of
Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.... Nay, in thy own mean
perplexities, do thou thyself but _hold thy tongue for one day_: on the
morrow how much clearer are thy purposes and duties." Andreas, in his
old camp-sentinel days, once challenged the emperor himself with the
demand for the password. "Schweig, Hund!" replied Frederich; and
Andreas, telling the tale in after years would add, "There is what I
call a King."
Yet silence may be as devoid of reality as words, and most minds require
something external to quicken thought and fill up the emptiness of their
silences. So we have symbols, whose doctrine is here most eloquently
expounded. Man is not ruled by logic but by imagination, and a thousand
thoughts will rise at the call of some well-chosen symbol. In itself it
may be the poorest of things, with no intrinsic value at all--a clouted
shoe, an iron crown, a flag whose market value may be almost nothing.
Yet such a thing may so work upon men's silences as to fill them with
the glimmer of a divine idea.
Other symbols there are which _have_ intrinsic value--works of art,
lives of heroes, death itself, in all of which we may see Eternity
working through Time, and become aware of Reality amid the passing
shows. Religious symbols are the highest of all, and highest among these
stands Jesus of Nazareth. "Higher has the human Thought not yet reached:
this is Christianity and Christendom; a symbol of quite perennial,
infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew
enquired into, and anew made manifest." In other words, Jesus stands for
all that is permanently noble and permanently real in human life.
Such symbols as have intrinsic value are indeed perennial. Time at
length effaces the others; they lose their associations, and become but
meaningless lumber. But these significant works and personalities can
never grow effete. They tell their own story to the succeeding
generations, blessing them with visions of reality and preserving them
from the Babel of meaningless words.
2. _Body and Spirit._--Souls are "rendered visible in bodies that took
shape and will lose it, melting into air." Thus bodies, and not spirits,
are the true apparitions, the souls being the realities which they both
reveal and hide. In fact, body is literally a garment of flesh--a
garment which the soul has for a time put on, but which it will lay
aside again. One of the greatest of all the idolatries of appearance is
our constant habit of judging one another by the attractiveness of the
bodily vesture. Many of the judgments which we pass upon our fellows
would be reversed if we trained ourselves to look through the vestures
of flesh to the men themselves--the souls that are hidden within.
The natural expansion of this is in the general doctrine of matter and
spirit. Purely material science--science which has lost the faculty of
wonder and of spiritual perception--is no true science at all. It is but
a pair of spectacles without an eye. For all material things are but
emblems of spiritual things--shadows or images of things in the
heavens--and apart from these they have no reality at all.
3. _Society and Social Problems._--It follows naturally that a change
must come upon our ways of regarding the relations of man to man. If
every man is indeed a temple of the divine, and therefore to be revered,
then much of our accepted estimates and standards of social judgment
will have to be abandoned. Society, as it exists, is founded on class
distinctions which largely consist in the exaltation of idleness and
wealth. Against this we have much eloquent protest. "Venerable to me is
the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning
virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable
too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude
intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living man like." How far away
we are from all this with our mammon-worship and our fantastic social
unrealities, every student of our times must know, or at least must have
often heard. He would not have heard it so often, however, had not
Thomas Carlyle cried it out with that harsh voice of his, in this and
many others of his books. It was his gunpowder, more than any other
explosive of the nineteenth century, that broke up the immense
complacency into which half England always tends to relapse.
He is not hopeless of the future of society. Society is the true
Phoenix, ever repeating the miracle of its resurrection from the ashes
of the former fire. There are indestructible elements in the race of
man--"organic filaments" he calls them--which bind society together, and
which ensure a future for the race after any past, however lamentable.
Those "organic filaments" are Carlyle's idea of Social Reality--the real
things which survive all revolution. There are four such realities which
ensure the future for society even when it seems extinct.
First, there is the fact of man's brotherhood to man--a fact quite
independent of man's willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood.
Second, there is the common bond of tradition, and all our debt to the
past, which is a fact equally independent of our willingness to
acknowledge it. Third, there is the natural and inevitable fact of man's
necessity for reverencing some one above him. Obedience and reverence
are forthcoming, whenever man is in the presence of what he _ought_ to
reverence, and so hero-worship is secure.
These three bonds of social reality are inseparable from one another.
The first, the brotherhood of man, has often been used as the watchword
of a false independence. It is only possible on the condition of
reverence and obedience for that which is higher than oneself, either in
the past or the present. "Suspicion of 'Servility,' of reverence for
Superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your
Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them
were even your only possible freedom." These three, then, are the social
realities, and all other social distinctions and conventionalities are
but clothes, to be replaced or thrown away at need.
But there is a fourth bond of social reality--the greatest and most
powerful of all. That reality is Religion. Here, too, we must
distinguish clothes from that which they cover--forms of religion from
religion itself. Church-clothes, indeed, are as necessary as any other
clothes, and they will harm no one who remembers that they are but
clothes, and distinguishes between faith and form. The old forms are
already being discarded, yet Religion is so vital that it will always
find new forms for itself, suited to the new age. For religion, in one
form or in another, is absolutely essential to society; and, being a
grand reality, will continue to keep society from collapse.
4. From this we pass naturally to the great and final doctrine in which
the philosophy of clothes is expounded. That doctrine, condensed into a
single sentence, is that "the whole Universe is the Garment of God."
This brings us back to the song of the _Erdgeist_ in Goethe's _Faust_:--
"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living:
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."
This is, of course, no novelty invented by Goethe. We find it in Marius
the Epicurean, and he found it in ancient wells of Greek philosophy.
Carlyle's use of it has often been taken for Pantheism. In so mystic a
region it is impossible to expect precise theological definition, and
yet it is right to remember that Carlyle does not identify the garment
with its Wearer. The whole argument of the book is to distinguish
appearance from reality in every instance, and this is no exception.
"What is Nature? Ha! why do I not name thee God? Art thou not the
'living garment of God'? O Heavens, is it in very deed He, then, that
ever speaks through thee? that lives and loves in thee, that lives and
loves in me?... The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house
with spectres: but godlike and my Father's." "This fair Universe, were
it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City
of God; through every star, through every grass-blade, and most
through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But
Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise,
hides Him from the foolish."
Such is some very broken sketch of this great book. It will at least
serve to recall to the memory of some readers thoughts and words which
long ago stirred their blood in youth. No volume could so fitly be
chosen as a background against which to view the modern surge of the
age-long battle. But the charm of _Sartor Resartus_ is, after all,
personal. We go back to the life-story of Teufelsdröckh, out of which
such varied and such lofty teachings sprang, and we read it over and
over again because we find in it so much that is our own story too.