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Sartor Resartus and the Problem of Carlyle's “Conversion”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Carlisle Moore
Carlisle Moore*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon, Eugene
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Extract

One of the things which mark Carlyle as a Romantic is the way he had of seeing the world in his own magnified image. When dyspepsia tormented him, he suffered like Prometheus, for all mankind. In the face of religious doubts he first complained bitterly, then fought like a panther, and the struggle, as fold in Sartor Resartus, was magnificent. Everywhere in Carlyle's writings, in his published works, his notebooks, and his letters, there is a playing-up of the specific to the general, the immediately personal to the universal. Small wonder if the student of his writings grows suspicious of Matilda crying Fire! And wonders whether many of the things which look autobiographical may not be, after all, largely imaginary, the products of a fertile romantic imagination. Consequently, against his steady complaints of ill health it has been observed, by Norwood Young, that Carlyle “never had a day's serious illness in his life.” And against the autobiographic character of Teufelsdroeckh's religious and moral crisis, described in Sartor, it was argued by Frederick W. Roe that Carlyle's “religious life underwent no convulsive transformation” at Leith-Walk. Finally, despite, the three chapters in Sartor and despite what Carlyle said on the subject, “The Everlasting Yea” itself may be denied, as when Sir Herbert Grierson declared in 1940 that Carlyle never really got beyond “The Everlasting No.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1955 , pp. 662 - 681
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

Note 1 in page 662 Carlyle: His Rise and Fall (London, 1927), p. 37.

Note 2 in page 662 Roe, Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature (New York, 1910), p. 19.

Note 3 in page 662 “Thomas Carlyle,” Proc. Brit. Acad., 1940 (London, 1940), p. 311.

Note 4 in page 662 A Century of Hero-Worship (Philadelphia, 1944), p. 21.

Note 5 in page 662 Thomas Carlyle (London, 1952), p. 71. Not only the nature of the “conversion,” but the date of its occurrence, have been disputed. Froude, thinking it must have been precipitated by Carlyle's recent meeting with Jane Welsh, placed it in June 1821. His date, followed by Richard Garnett, John Nichol, and other early biographers, was condemned as “only a guess, and not a very good one” by Alexander Carlyle (The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, ed. Alexander Carlyle [London, 1909], ii, 381), who placed it a year later. His date (late July–early August 1822) is still commonly accepted. As for the belief that the Leith Walk experience was an instantaneous and complete conversion, Froude has been blamed for this too, by Alexander Carlyle, and even by C. F. Harrold, who misquotes Froude as saying that Carlyle then “achieved finally the convictions” of the Everlasting Yea, whereas Froude wrote that from this point Carlyle “began to achieve” those convictions (Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 [New Haven, 1934], p. 41; J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, A History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795–1835 [New York, 1882], i 57–58). Like many later biographers of Carlyle, Froude yielded to the temptation to dress his description of the crisis in Sartorial terms, quoting long passages without interpretive comment, and thus implying a more definitive change than he intended.

Note 6 in page 664 Lone Letters, ii, 380–381. The same passage is quoted by Froude in First Forty Years, i, 58, but without the last 2 sentences.

Note 7 in page 664 Although possible, Froude's “guess” is made improbable by the fact that during the summer of 1821 Carlyle was living at 16 Carnegie St., far from the shore. Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle: 1814–1826, ed. C. E. Norton (London, 1886), p. 173.

Note 8 in page 664 Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, p. 44. Carlyle pushed ahead with his study of German literature, he translated Faust's Curse, he wrote and (later) published a short story called “Cruthers and Jonson,” and, early in 1823, he began his Life of Schiller. But it is equally true that Carlyle had been active before this time. David Brewster, who had already (in 1819) commissioned him to translate a French paper on chemistry and had hired him (in 1820) to write a number of short biographies for his Edinburgh Encyclopedia, commissioned him in 1821 to translate Legendre's Elements of Geometry, to which Carlyle added his own essay on Proportion. In Oct. he wrote and published his first article, a review of Joanna Baillie's Metrical Legends, in the New Edinburgh Renew. At the same time, he was reading 17th-century authors and planning a book on Milton. In March 1822 he began writing the notebooks which reveal so much of his thought and development. Finally he wrote another article for the New Edinburgh Review, in two weeks, on Goethe's Faust (published April 1822).

Note 9 in page 665 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton (New York, 1898), p. 65.

Note 10 in page 666 Whether this silence is eloquent of increased unhappiness or of new-found happiness cannot be asserted. If the latter, then it was brief. In any event, such a gap should indicate a state of mind hostile in some way to either complaint or reflection. Another gap, occurring before his marriage, presumably indicates happiness.

Note 11 in page 667 The influence of Goethe was now in full force, and of Schiller. He had been affected by his reading of Schiller's The Robbers, where (iv.vi) Karl Moor is confronted by the same issue of moral courage, and makes essentially the same decision that Teufelsdroeckh makes. Carlyle quoted the appropriate passage in his essay on Schiller (written Dec. 1829) : “Shall I give wretchedness the victory over me?—No, I will endure it… . Let misery blunt itself on my pride 11 will go through with it” (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [London: Chapman and Hall, 1899], ii, 206; and Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold [New York, 1937], p. 167). The similarity of this to the reaction of Teufelsdroeckh is significant. Schiller encouraged Carlyle to dramatize his own experience; 8 years later it appeared to him as cataclysmic.

Note 12 in page 667 Letters of Thomas Carlyle: 1826-1836, ed. C. E. Norton (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp. 183, 365.

Note 13 in page 668 Love Letters, i, 123–124.

Note 14 in page 668 Thomas Carlyle (London and New York, 1892), p. 32.

Note 15 in page 668 The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London, 1931), p. 130.

Note 16 in page 668 Die religiöse Wurzel von Carlyles lilerarischer Wirksamkeit (Halle, 1922), pp. 45–46.

Note 17 in page 669 Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (London, 1892), p. 299.

Note 18 in page 670 Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton (London: Everyman's Library, 1932), pp. 281–282.

Note 19 in page 670 William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H. Allingham & D. Redford (London, 1907), p. 253.

Note 20 in page 671 German Romance (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898), i, 261.

Note 21 in page 672 Love Letters, ii, 200; Early Letters, p. 347.

Note 22 in page 673 Lace Letters, i, 355. It should not be surprising that this is a wrenching of Aristotle's meaning, which was that in moral matters it is not enough to mean well; one must do well (Ethics x.9.i). For Carlyle the idea was not so much an anti-intellectual one as it was an expression of his desire to teach, to put his own ideas (when he had found them) into action, in print.

Note 23 in page 674 Wilhelm Meister (London; Chapman and Hall, 1899), i, 386–387.

Note 24 in page 674 The Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (New York, 1892), p. 13.

Note 25 in page 676 See C. F. Harrold, “Carlyle and Novalis,” SP, xxvii (1930), 47–63; and “The Mystical Element in Carlyle,” MP, xxix (1932), 459–475.

Note 26 in page 677 See Prof. Hill Shine's edition of the fragment: Carlyle's Unfinished History of German Literature (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1951). Carlyle seems to have been content to leave it unfinished because he was then at the threshold of Sartor.

Note 27 in page 678 In July 1830 he received the surprise package in the mail coming from France containing Saint-Simonian books and articles. In these Carlyle found, from a most unexpected quarter, a confirmation of many of his own ideas, as well as some very gratifying praise. In his excellent treatment of Carlyle's indebtedness to the Saint-Simonians with regard to the concept of historical periodicity, Hill Shine observes that “More than once his long gropings were finally polarized by the discovery of his desideratum lucidly expressed, and by his adoption of the expression that he found. Perhaps the most familiar examples are his gropings in Wertherism, which were polarized by Goethe, and his gropings in Calvinism, which were polarized by Fichte” (Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941], p. 69). The Saint-Simonians may well have helped to polarize these ideas in Carlyle's mind.

Note 28 in page 678 See Letters, pp. 138, 202, 207, for references to “The syren melodies of Hope, which are only melodies of Sloth.”

Note 29 in page 680 Two Note Books, p. 183; also Letters, p. 199.

Note 30 in page 680 Letters, pp. 246, 285; Two Notebooks, p. 253. Not until 1834 would he admit that he was studying for a book on the French Revolution. No such thought lay in his mind now, but in Jan. 1832 he agreed to write an article on Diderot for the Foreign Quarterly and in March he began reading for it, and also, as it turned out, for an understanding of the French Revolution as a whole. “Diderot,” completed in Oct., represents Carlyle's first direct approach to his new subject, and his first attempt to apply the ideas expressed in Sartor to historical materials. A comparison with the earlier, and non-historical, “Voltaire” (1829) will show the change.