[In the following essay, Watson examines the events in Carlyle's life which led him to the philosophy presented in Sartor Resartus. Watson then studies that philosophy as Carlyle reveals it through the course of Sartor, noting that Carlyle's vision is a religious one, without the concept of a personal God, a vision in which it becomes essential to recognize the power of symbols and to be able to see through them.]

Carlyle occupies a unique place in British cultural history. As a social historian, he was possessed by a vision of human fate which was essentially poetic. As a nineteenth-century intellectual, his impatient and iconoclastic mind created nothing less than an early version of modern semiotic study which claimed a role of crucial intellectual and social importance for what had hitherto been the rather less urgent avocation of essayist or 'man of letters'. As a 'Victorian sage', Carlyle speaks with Dostoevsky, Turner, Whitman, Nietzsche and Yeats as among the first of the Modernists, and indeed, many of the strengths—and the failings—of his vision were to become those of modernism itself. No doubt it was this potential that Walt Whitman glimpsed when his obituary for the old and 'altogether Gothic' Scotsman maintained that 'as a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din and its struggling parturition periods . . .'^l

It was Sartor Resartus which brought Carlyle to the stage of such potential and to his mature fame. Undoubtedly The French Revolution confirmed his public stature as spokesperson for the universe as a place of unseen forces—-driven by ideas, and not by steam—a place newly revealed as the ever-changing locus of threat and excitement and dynamic change; but the special force of Carlyle's peculiar genius belongs to the earlier book. It is a difficult text to define, unique in its day for conflating philosophy, social satire, poetic insight and deeper truth-telling, all through the odd convention of a tongue-in-cheek fictionalised critical biography. Such an approach may be more familiar to post-modernist readers—in the spirit of Borges or Umberto Eco, perhaps—but even today it seems a rare and taxing book.

The title itself speaks for a certain wayward opacity: Sartor Resartus, (the tailor re-tailored, or, more properly, the old-clothes mender patched-up again) purports to be a nameless editor's summary, with the help of a German colleague, of the life and theories of Herr Dr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (devil's dung), Professor of 'Things-in-General' at the University of Weissnichtwo.

Teufelsdröckh's philosophy proposes that all human structures are merely 'clothes', or vestments of our animating minds, and like clothes, our ideas and symbols and institutions go out of fashion, or lose their usefulness, and must be remade. We need to 'see through' such conventions until they become 'transparent'. The main burden of Carlyle's argument is often taken to be an insistence—derived from German Idealism—that everything is fundamentally the product of mind or spirit; but in fact the intellectual wit and the social focus of his argument throws as much or more light on the nature of our dependence on 'clothes'. Our social and political conventions and symbols have no intrinsic value at all, he argues, for everything is extrinsic, acquired or constructed ('tailored') by us. In the early nineteenth century, in the pride of materialism, utilitarianism, imperial confidence and the 'railway age', such views were potentially upsetting, to say the least.

At least one early reviewer was sufficiently caught-up by the narrative's intellectual conviction and its various 'editorial' devices to spend some effort in doubting the literal existence of its scholarly hero. In fact such combinations of literary mystification and—apparent—facticity (Teufelsdrockh's autobiographical writings turn out to be six large paper bags filled with random jottings, philosophical memos and laundry lists), were a not uncommon device among Romantic writers at the time. (Carlyle admired Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, while Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling purported to be scattered fragments reclaimed by a rather reluctant editor. The German author ET A Hoffmann played similarly teasing games in the presentation of his tales of mystery and the supernatural,² while James Hogg set his Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824, within a similar framework of editorial comment and parallel 'documentary' narratives, just as R L Stevenson was to do for Jekyll and Hyde over sixty years later.) What is striking about Carlyle's book is that such a mock-ponderous fictive device should have been chosen as the vehicle for a passionately serious critical thesis, not to mention a thinly-veiled account of the author's own deepest and most painful moments of spiritual crisis. Sartor Resartus encompasses and prefigures so much of Carlyle's unique intellectual force that it makes the most appropriate focus for this chapter on one of the most original and controversial minds of the nineteenth century.

Widely famous in his own lifetime, Carlyle's popular reputation has wavered ever since between over-reverent accounts of him as 'the Sage of Chelsea' and denunciations of his work as wilfully iconoclastic or crypto-fascist. It is not our purpose to follow every trial and detail of this stormy career, and a brief summary will have to suffice. He had great difficulty, for example, in placing Sartor, which was completed in 1831, but Fraser's Magazine in London eventually published it in three parts, between 1833 and 1834. An American edition prefaced by Emerson (who had visited the Carlyles in Scotland) was published two years later, but the first British edition did not appear until 1838, a year after the success of The French Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic had made its author well known at last, and financially secure for the first time, at the age of 42. The French Revolution was written in Chelsea—then an unfashionable part of London—where Carlyle and his wife had moved in 1834. Public lectures were undertaken on a variety of subjects, and the publication of 'Chartism' (1839), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), and Past and Present (1843) soon followed. Carlyle became internationally known, and his many new friends and contacts included Emerson, J S Mill, Lockhart, Dickens, Tennyson, Arthur Clough, Thomas Arnold and Sir Robert Peel.

J A Froude (Carlyle's contemporary and first biographer) summarised his friend's reputation at this time, and also something of his notoriety:

Past and Present completes the cycle of writings which were in his first style, and by which he most influenced the thought of his time. He was a Bedouin, as he said of himself, a rough child of the desert. His hand had been against every man, and every man's hand against him. He had offended men of all political parties, and every professor of a recognised form of religion. He had offended Tories by his Radicalism, and Radicals by his scorn of their formulas. He had offended High Churchmen by his Protestantism, and Low Churchmen by his evident unorthodoxy. No sect or following could claim him as belonging to them; if they did some rough utterance would soon undeceive them. Yet all acknowledged that here was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and of inflexible veracity. If his style was anomalous, it was brilliant. No such humourist had been known in England since Swift . . .'³

The analogy with Swift is a fitting one, for in Sartor Resartus Carlyle had described the absurdities of war with his most savage ridicule:

Straightway the world 'Fire!' is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? . . . not the smallest! . . . How then? Simpleton! Their Governors had fallen-out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot. (Sartor Resartus, 'Centre of Indifference')

In 'Chartism' and Past and Present he had used an even darker Swiftean irony to expose contemporary complacencies about the freedom of the individual in a society where the labouring classes are condemned to work or not to work (to eat or not to eat) according to capitalist laws of 'free' supply and demand. By the 1850s, however, Carlyle's Calvinist penchant for excoriating the worldly failings of his time had slipped into a harsher and narrower preaching of the most misanthropic sort. Thus the would-be ironical tone of many of the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) is in fact wildly unstable, as is his notoriously racist defence of slavery as both a philosophical and an economic concept in 'Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question' from the previous year.

It is as if Carlyle could no longer cope with his earlier and essentially Romantic vision of the universe as a place in constant flux, redefining its truths with every generation, and all under the final existential absurdity implied by the surrounding infinitudes of space, time and extinction. Constant striving, individual freedom of the most radically scathing sort and the passionate conviction of 'heroic' lives, had seemed to be the most valid response to such a condition, and indeed his own stoutly puritan roots had early led him to admire the unrelenting drive behind such figures as Mahomet, Luther, Knox and Cromwell—unlikely heroes for sophisticated London. In later years, however, the arc described by such exceptional careers led Carlyle to conclusions about the rule of the fittest and the exercise of individual authority for its own sake, while the initial intensities of his visionary assurance slipped into a strained and raucous intolerance instead.

The Calvinistic elements in such a progression are not far to seek, and it will be necessary to return to Carlyle's early years in order to show how much both the genius and the failings of the vision behind Sartor Resartus can be derived from his particular Scottish roots.

Carlyle was brought up in Ecclefechan as a member of the 'New Licht' Burghers a long standing sub-branch of the Seceders who had parted from the established Church of Scotland on the grounds that it was too little committed to the finely legalistic details of the old Covenant against patronage and state interference in matters religious. His father, James Carlyle, was a taciturn, irascible man, little read but given to absolute faith in the Bible and the virtues of manual labour at his trade as a stonemason, and later as a small farmer. Carlyle admired him greatly, and honoured his memory in the papers which were collected posthumously as his Reminiscences. But he confessed, too, that he 'was ever more or less awed or chilled before him', and that 'my heart and tongue played freely only with my mother.'⁴ Like so many of their following, the family had hopes that Thomas would enter the Church, and indeed this was considered to be the ultimate aim when he left home in his fourteenth year (not unusual at the time) to study at Edinburgh University.

The son of a peasant, hard-up, shy and socially awkward, the young Carlyle was never to meet or mix in the literary circles of Burns and Scott. Despising all affectation, he was noted among fellow students for his impatient, impassioned seriousness and they learned to be wary of his caustic tongue. His best subject was mathematics, a field properly fitted for the total certainties which he seemed to crave. Having finished his course in the Arts, Carlyle had to support himself for the further years required of a student in Divinity. He took various teaching posts in mathematics, though he came to hate teaching, and busied himself, like his alter ego Teufelsdröckh, with intensive reading in a wide range of subjects.

Carlyle continued his studies in law, but by now a career in the Church did not appeal. He was entering 'the three most miserable years of my life'. Solitary, depressed, a martyr to dyspepsia and his own hypochondriac fears, he was suffering a crisis of faith in the religion of his childhood, and a crisis of self-confidence about his own vocation. Having early confessed to 'the wish of being known', he had yet to find a professional calling which seemed worthy of such an intensely cerebral nature. By the early 1820s, Carlyle seems to have come to something like the existential crux he later described in Sartor Resartus:

. . . the net-result of my Workings amounted as yet to—Nothing. How then could I believe in my Strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in? . . . Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living . . . 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 me limb from limb. (Sartor, 'The Everlasting No')

For eighteenth-century thinkers the universe as a well-made clock had seemed a cheerful argument for the existence of some divine Maker. On the other side of the industrial revolution, however, the metaphor has become a steam engine, and for Carlyle, like Dickens later,⁵ that meant a 'Mill of Death'—powerful, mindless, insensate and automatic. The solution was to redefine the primacy of spirit and the power of mind, and that meant for him (as it was for Teufelsdröckh) a new conception of what his vocation was to be.

Carlyle described Sartor as 'symbolical myth', but he did attest to the personal authenticity, at least in essence, of the crisis he gave to Teufelsdrockh. This response was somewhere between a religious conversion to 'the light', and an existential leap of faith. Faced with universal nullity, he asserted a fundamental sense of individual freedom:

The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou are 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!'

Where before the world had seemed to be the grimmest of places, alien to the very possibility of any Ideal, now it could be a realm of endless potential, for eyes that could see it thus:

. . . here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein even now thou standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal . . . Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself . . . O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see! (Sartor, 'The Everlasting Yea')

What Carlyle saw was his vocation—a vocation which would allow his critical eye to decode the world itself, to read the text of the Actual now that he had turned from both the Bible and his books of law.

There are other factors in this renewal of confidence, of course, as there always are. He had begun courting Jane Welsh Carlyle, who was to become his devoted and lifelong companion after their marriage in 1826; his finances were improving; and his studies in German had led to translations of Goethe and Schiller, and various critical articles and the beginnings of a reputation in literary circles.⁶ Even so, Carlyle was still his father's son, and a modest literary fame was not quite enough for one brought up to believe 'that man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream'.⁷ There had to be a further calling, more worthy perhaps of James Carlyle's Spartan ideal of meaningful labour and his horror of redundant words.

That labour took Carlyle out of Edinburgh to Craigenputtoch, an isolated farm-house from his wife's inheritance, where the couple managed a frugal life together for the six years before their move to London. Here Carlyle assembled his library and, surrounded by the bleakest of moors, did more than any individual in his day to introduce German literature to British readers. Key essays for his intellectual development also stem from this period, most especially 'Signs of the Times' (1829) and 'On History' (1830). Here too, wrestling with his health and his peace of mind, he set about the writing of Sartor Resartus, determined to 'speak out what is in me . . . I have no other trade, no other strength, or portion in this Earth.'⁸

In the 'symbolic myth' of Sartor, Teufelsdröckh's commitment to the Actual provides us with the model for his creator's discovery, or rather for his invention of his own vocation. Carlyle may have lost faith in the form of his father's Christianity, but, against the nullity of that 'Everlasting No', he had never doubted the need for faith nor the crucial importance to himself of a more than merely materialistic vision of the world. No Scottish Presbyterian divine would have quarrelled with the German professor's strictures on the need for work—existentially derived, perhaps—but also taken directly from Ecclesiastes:

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. (Sartor, 'The Everlasting Yea')

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

Carlyle's philosophy has been called 'Calvinism without theology', and his friend and early admirer John Sterling was one of the first to note that although Teufelsdröckh retained an essentially religious vision of the universe, he lacked any conception of a personal God.⁹ Even so, an Old Testament spirit abounds in Sartor, and this is more than just a matter of Carlyle's habitual use of Biblical allusions, or his rough but vividly oral style of writing, as if he truly were speaking from some pulpit. In fact the echoes from Ecclesiastes are revealing, for as a favoured text in the Scottish canon it is much given to reflections on the vanity of human affairs, with little to say about a personal God. Equally telling is its awareness of the endless cycle of life and the ever-present certainty of death, which is a vision very close to Carlyle's own, as is its account of a crisis of faith such as Teufelsdrockh had to undergo:

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:11)

The parallels can be taken much further, for the very spirit of 'Chartism' is to be found in lines such as:

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt. (Ecclesiastes 5: 12 and 13)

Teufelsdröckh knows that man is a prey to death when he reminds us that 'TIME, devours all his Children: only by incessant Running, by incessant Working, may you (for some threescore-and-ten years) escape him; and you too he devours at last' (Sartor, 'Getting Under Way'); and the Preacher, too, has much the same to say on the same theme:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9: 11)

Faced with such certainty, what can we hope for? The universe is a 'Sphinx-riddle' for Teufelsdröckh, and although Ecclesiastes believes that wisdom is good, he has to admit that we will never know the work of God under the sun 'because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it.' (8: 17). Yet neither accept despair, and if their predicament cannot be escaped, at least it can be greatly eased by a clear-sighted recognition of it.

Hence both the German professor and the Old Testament preacher accept 'light' as their salvation in the end, even if so few get the chance to see it, and its only achievement is to assure them of the ever-present darkness:

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 11:7 and 8)

. . . the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see! But it is with man's soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds. (Sartor, 'The Everlasting Yea')

It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor: we must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing) . . . But what I do mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit him . . . That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy . . . (Sartor, 'Helotage')

Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. (Ecclesiastes 9: 16)

Ecclesiastes' 'light' revealed the vanity of the world and the coming judgement of God; what it showed to Teufelsdröckh was a much more complex and sophisticated thing, fully illustrative of the originality and the striking modernity of Carlyle's thinking.

In 'Signs of the Times', the very first of his social essays, Carlyle had set out to chastise the Victorian world for its complacent materialism and the mechanistic implications of its love affairs with Utilitarianism. He believed that 'the great truth' is 'that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us.' As opposed to this, he felt that thinkers such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham were set on redefining human nature along the materialistic (and hence mechanically applicable) principles of enlightened self-interest. Thirty-five years later, Dostoevsky was to make an identical attack on the 'mathematical certainties' and 'the laws of nature' to which all such systems pretended, noting that

. . . a man, whoever he is, always and everywhere likes to act as he chooses, and not at all according to the dictates of reason and self-interest. . . where did all the sages get the idea that a man's desires must be normal and virtuous? Why did they imagine that he must inevitably will what is reasonable and profitable? What a man needs is simply and solely independent volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.¹⁰

Notes from Underground championed the freedom of the spirit against all would-be rational social controls and the limitations of easy definition, and, as with Carlyle, Dostoevsky's creed leads to an essentially modernist account of the universe as a place of restless and dynamic change. (In this respect Carlyle's vision also prefigured much in the work of Hugh MacDiarmid.)

The Russian argued from the psychological standpoint of a perverse but convincing individual, but Carlyle's essay takes a more abstract line based on a subtle understanding of the importance of language. Thus in opposition to the new fashion for speaking of society as a 'machine', the Scot sets up the deliberately insubstantial metaphors of 'foam' and 'fire' and 'light' and 'sparks', (the very stuff of Turner's paintings—another great Romantic precursor of the modern sensibility), pointing out that 'man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.' Well versed in German Idealism, Carlyle insists that mind and spirit are primary: which is all the more reason to choose our social metaphors with care, for if we speak too carelessly of 'the Machine of Society', then all too easily '"foam hardens itself into a shell" and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.' ('Signs of the Times'). This is not high-flown idealism, but a real and subtle understanding of how human perception is controlled by the terms within which we choose to frame it.

For Carlyle, these terms are all we have. He needs no abstruse argument to prove that all is spirit, for sub specie aeternitatis, as he sees it, nothing else remains:

. . . sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade-away again into air and Invisibility? That is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact . . . . (Sartor, 'Natural Supernaturalism')

So history is the record of how that spirit passed, but like Ecclesiastes's works of God under the sun, it may never be possible to see it fully. This is what Carlyle understood in his essay 'On History', when he noted that 'Narrative is linear', but

. . . actual events are nowise so simply related to each other . . . every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new: it is an everliving, everworking Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length!

Hence Carlyle concludes that 'History is a real Prophetic manuscript, and can be fully interpreted by no man.' Such a vision of simultaneity and flux places Carlyle once again among the precursors of modernism, as does his understanding of the relativity and the transience of all established opinion—'Thus all things wax, and roll onwards; Arts, Establishments, Opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing.' (Sartor, 'Organic Filaments'.)

Thus it follows that each age must recreate its own version of the truth, for systems and sacred texts and symbols, 'like all terrestrial Garments, wax old,' and 'the Solution of the last era has become obsolete, and is found unserviceable.' (Sartor, 'The Everlasting Yea'.) Such a point of view must have been a considerable comfort to Carlyle, as a young intellectual who had lost faith in his father's church, but had not lost the desire to put himself to some worthy and needful task. Thus was born the Professor of 'Things in General' and his Clothes-philosophy. Behind the droll facade of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, we can see Carlyle struggling to define a valid role for himself—very much like Milton's search to find 'some graver subject'. Literature and literary criticism do not impinge enough on the world of affairs (and we recall that the elder Carlyle held a very low opinion of fiction and poetry—even the verse of Burns), while the conventions of university philosophy could scarcely satisfy the Romantic drive of Carlyle's poetic vision of the instability of the universe. What he did was to define the world itself as a text, and to appoint himself the critic (or prophet) uniquely suited to decode the 'celestial hieroglyphs', even if they can be discerned in only a line or two here and there.

The model is not exclusively literary, of course, for Biblical exegesis is the true forerunner of all such practice. Indeed, one of Carlyle's favourite metaphors is that history is a text 'whose Author and Writer is God . . . With its Words, Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages . . . spread out through Solar Systems and Thousands of Years . . .'¹¹ It was just this sense of scale which Carlyle found in his readings in German Idealism, along with his belief in an ultimate cosmic unity in which spirit is the only reality.

. . . this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand fold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy of our Dream' . . . the living visible Garment of God. (Sartor, 'The World Out of Clothes')

He did not believe, however, that man was created to 'dream' alone, and the key concept in his idealism lies in that phrase about the world also being 'the reflex of our own inward Force'. For him the spirit expresses itself through work and the world is no less than the fruits of our labour (spirit) made manifest. If the world is ultimately God's book, we too can still make books, we too can make history and create reality, we too can become critics or little Creators:

So spiritual [geistig] is our whole daily life: all that we do springs out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force . . . Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon up to the extent of three: Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals; then tilled Fields . . . and thirdly—Books. (Sartor, 'Centre of Indifference')

Carlyle's insight can be compressed and summarised as follows: everything is spirit: the spirit manifests itself in mind and the mind expresses itself through work: work can be seen all around us: truly nothing is insignificant. Cities may crumble, but books—because they are the expression of mind—can last much longer, each with a different 'produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Political Systems; or were it only Sermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays)' for each of the ages they pass through. Thus for Carlyle, thought never dies (though it may evolve) and the scholar can achieve a kind of immortality. Indeed 'the Wise man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers; and there is a living, literal Communion of the Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World.' (Sartor, 'Organic Filaments'.) The use of words such as 'witness' and 'communion', reveals how fully Carlyle has remodelled the calling of his father's faith to fit his vocation as a culture critic, a new kind of intellectual hero, a reader of the world and all its symbols—the first semiotician of Victorian Britain.

For such a man everything is symbolic, and nothing, however mean, is without illumination: 'Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself (Sartor, 'Prospective'.) Teufelsdröckh's task is to show that if the final reality is spirit and spirit alone, then everything else in this world is merely a matter of 'garments'. In the last analysis our clothes, houses and political institutions are merely how we 'dress' ourselves, and our bodies and our senses and even language itself are merely 'garments' of flesh and thought.¹² Yet this is not to dismiss such garments as trivial or beneath serious attention. On the contrary, the burden of Teufelsdröckh's whole philosophy—presented to us through an eccentric persona, and qualified by his 'biographer' as it may be—is to take the analysis of surface symbols very seriously indeed, and to use such subtle practice towards a cultural and political critique in an age otherwise wholly dedicated to stoutly practical, 'mechanistic', and materialistic ends. In other words, to invent semiotics.

This is not to say that Carlyle does not enjoy the fun of upsetting established priorities, and many of his propositions are as intellectually playful as anything written by Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco:

'Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modem History,' says Teufelsdröckh, 'is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incident passed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with some degree of ridicule by others: namely, George Fox's making to himself of a suit of Leather.' (Sartor, 'Incident in Modern History')

Teufelsdröckh's name and his strange origin, the autobiography in six paper bags, his Romantic 'Sorrows', and his 'editor's' asides and doubts about his 'sansculottism', all these speak for textual playfulness and perhaps a certain defensive irony in Carlyle's case. But there is no mistaking the intent behind his deconstruction of the nature of war, (in 'Centre of Indifference'); the passionate indignation behind his attack on the values of the landed classes (in 'Helotage'); nor the pointed satire of his vision of a naked House of Lords (in 'Adamitism'); nor his hatred for all the outworn ideas and dead symbols which continue to rule our lives—the 'old clothes' of an unexamined existence, ' . . . with its wail and jubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bells and gallows-ropes, farce-tragedy, beast-godhood,—the Bedlam of Creation!' (in 'The Phoenix' and 'Old Clothes').

Carlyle's understanding of the power of symbols and how important it is to see through them, 'to look fixedly on Clothes . . . till they become transparent', goes further still, for he recognises the arbitrary nature of perception and even language itself—how we are governed by how we choose to see and to say things. If symbols 'have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired an extrinsic one', it follows that we should choose them with care, or look closely at those we have inherited to be sure that they are worthy of us. This is the first task of the culture-critic, for 'are not the tatters and rags of superannuated worn-out symbols (in this Rag-fair of a world) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation?' (Sartor, 'Symbols'.) The culture-critic's second task is to be alert to the emergence of new symbols, and these two terms go far towards defining Carlyle's approach to history, and most especially to his treatment of the French Revolution.

The point about the world of clothes is that fashions change and styles of dress go in and out of favour with great regularity. We have seen that this metaphor holds true for Carlyle's vision of the Universe as a place of constant flux, and of society, too, as a structure in 'perpetual metamorphosis'—phoenix-like—as new forces and new symbols within it rise and fall and rise again. Such is the text of the world which Teufelsdröckh has set himself to decipher for us. It is entirely fitting, then, that his own text should show something of that dynamic energy too, and it is here that the presumed identity between Carlyle and his German professor is most clearly demonstrated. 'Le style c'est l'homme', and Carlyle's prose is unique.

He was much criticised, even by admirers, for the self-assertive roughnesses, the repetitive insistence, the odd allusions, constant exclamations, and the generally unclassical lawlessness of his writing. But Carlyle defended himself, for surely this was not the time for 'Purism of Style', and after all, style is a product of 'all that lies under it . . . not to be plucked off without flaying and death.'¹³

Indeed, Carlyle's style is very much the mirror of the raw energy and the dynamic tensions within himself, which he identified as the condition of the world all around him. Carlyle had much admired the rough earnestness of his own father's speech, 'flowing free from the untutored Soul' (Reminiscences), and this oral insistence is central to his own written prose. True to his earliest experiences of exposition in the Burgher Church, Carlyle stands before the text of God (except that in his case the book is not the Bible, but History itself) and preaches the word.

Of course Carlyle's prose has long been recognised as an essentially (and sometimes exhausting) form of rhetorical address—full of sermon-like locutions, exclamations, and asides to the reader—while his punctuation and sentence structures make full use of dashes and sudden associative digressions.¹⁴ Nevertheless, this is not simply the style of a self-appointed demagogue, despite its later decay into intolerance and insistence, for Carlyle was right to maintain that the mental set behind Johnsonian English was collapsing under the new apprehensions of the Romantic age, and right, too, in his conviction that his style, like the skin of an animal, is integral to 'the exact type of the nature of the beast'.¹⁵

Thus it is in his choice of metaphors, ('foam', 'fountains', 'sparks'), and in the very structure of his sentences, that Carlyle seeks to demonstrate his passionate apprehension of life as a fully dynamic state. Hence the turmoil of history is evoked at great length and by an extraordinary effort of the imagination in the recurring historical present tense of the prose in The French Revolution—a book that cost him the most desperate effort to write. It is fitting, too, that most of his sources were drawn from the memoirs of participants themselves, another recognition of Carlyle's commitment to the importance of lived experience and point of view in history. Again and again Carlyle's prose seeks to engage us in the whirl of events as they evolve from the experience, the plans and the half-formed apprehensions of his protagonists:

Still crueller was the fate of poor Bailly, First National President, First Mayor of Paris: doomed now for Royalism, Fayettism; for that Red-Flag Business of the Champ-de-Mars;—one may say in general, for leaving his Astronomy to meddle with Revolution. It is the 10th of November 1793, a cold bitter drizzling rain, as poor Bailly is led through the streets; howling Populace covering him with curses, with mud; waving over his face a burning or smoking mockery of a red Flag. Silent, unpitied, sits the innocent old man. Slow faring through the sleety drizzle, they have got to the Champ-de-Mars: Not there! vociferates the cursing Populace; such blood ought not to stain an Altar of the Fatherland: not there; but on that dung-heap by the River-side! So vociferates the cursing Populace; Officiality gives ear to them. The Guillotine is taken down, though with hands numbed by the sleety drizzle; is carried to the River-side; is there set up again, with slow numbness; pulse after pulse still counting itself out in the old man's weary heart. For hours long; amid curses and bitter frost-rain! 'Bailly, thou tremblest,' said one. 'Mon ami, it is for cold,' said Bailly, 'c 'est de froid.' Crueller end had no mortal. (The French Revolution, Part III, Book V, 'Death')

Despite Carlyle's talent for dramatic recreation and his dependence on contemporary memoirs, later historians have verified the accuracy of much of this work. Furthermore, his sources have a different and more theoretical kind of validity as well, for however fallible and biased they may be, in their own way they are fully part of the flux of their times—immediate and, in a sense, oral too.

Carlyle's conviction about the spontaneity, the fluidity, and the power of human impulse as it operates, evolves and clothes itself in different ways within the flux of history, meets its proper correlative in his style. In so far as this prose is a 'voice' he can recognise the uniqueness and the relativity of all opinion, and yet at the same time he can also demonstrate its living, persuasive power across the centuries in that 'communion of saints' he longed to join. Carlyle's voice may be speaking to us from another century, yet, with all the force of literature—grammatically, rhetorically, ironically—his vision of lost times and the never-ending turbulence of human experience becomes immediately and palpably present. The closing lines of The French Revolution speak openly for the poignancy of this condition, but they also note its potential for endless growth and renewal:

And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence, but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacredness sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnated Word.' Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.

These words do not speak for the historian alone, for they recognise the fragility, and the intimacy, and the crucial importance of all discourse between all readers and all writers, when the world becomes text and the text becomes a voice.

Notes

¹ Walt Whitman, 'Death of Thomas Carlyle' (1881), in Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage, J P Seigel (ed) (London, 1971), p. 456.

² Hoffmann was among a number of writers translated by Carlyle for his four volume book Specimens of German Romance, 1827.

³Froude's Life of Carlyle, abridged and edited by J Clubbe (London, 1979), p 417.

⁴ From 'James Carlyle', in Reminiscences (1881).

⁵Hard Times (1854), was dedicated to Carlyle.

⁶ His reading of Goethe had been very influential, especially Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, as a semi-autobiographical development novel about a similarly ardent young spirit at large in banal society. (Carlyle's translation of it appeared in 1824.)

⁷ From 'James Carlyle', in Reminiscences.

⁸ Letter from Carlyle to his brother John, 17 July 1831.

⁹ John Sterling, letter to Carlyle, 29 May 1835, The Critical Heritage, pp 31-3.

¹⁰ Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864), Chapter One. 'The Underground'.

¹¹Sartor Resartus. 'Natural Supernaturalism'; see also ' . . . all history is a Bible . . .' a rejected MS quoted in Fronde's Life, pp 224-6.

¹²Sartor, 'The World out of Clothes' and 'Pure Reason'.

¹³ This debate is touched on in Froude's Life, pp 339-41; see also Critical Heritage, pp 26-33.

¹⁴ Recent research has shown that Carlyle's editors set out to regularise his punctuation in subsequent editions of his work. It is worth noting that the rather diffident delivery of his early lectures was much at odds with the considerable force of his written prose.

¹⁵ Letter to John Sterling, 9 June 1837.