When Carlyle
began authoring his own works in the 1830s, he made the search for authority in
an era of revolution his major theme. His first attempt to resolve the problem,
Sartor Resartus, led to the crisis of authority displayed in
"The Reminiscence of James Carlyle." In reaction, he reformulated his
poetics and produced a work that directly addressed the problem of authority in
an era of revolution, The French Revolution. But this masterpiece in turn
opened up a new realm of revolutionary discourse, leading him to the conclusion
that writing alone would never recover the domestic idyll.
"Sartor
Resartus" and the Revolution of 1830
Carlyle watched
with interest when, on July 27, 1830,
a second French revolution overturned the Bourbon monarchy.
Although Carlyle was living in relative isolation in southwestern Scotland, he
followed these events closely in the newspapers (see CL, 5:130, 161, 216). In
late August, he would have seen Mill's letters on the revolution, which
appeared anonymously in the Examiner (Mill, Earlier Letters,
12:59-67). In England, parliamentary elections
earlier the same month had begun to raise the issues that led to the passage of
the Reform Bill in 1832. Throughout the month of August, almost certainly
inspired by his reflections on the sansculottes — "men
without trousers" — Carlyle began to develop in his letters and notebooks
the clothing metaphor of Sartor Resartus. On August 6, less than
two weeks after the revolution began, he was advising his brother that "Men
are but poor spindle-shanked wiffling wonners [wonders] when you clutch them
thro' the mass of drapery they wear" (CL ,
5:130; see 133). By September, he had begun writing the first draft of Sartor
Resartus, "Thoughts on Clothes" (see TNB
, 176, 177). Carlyle informed his brother on September 18 that he was
planning to "write something of [his] own," and, on October 10, he
spoke of actually being at work on it (CL, 5: 164, 170
Carlyle completed the long
essay that was eventually to become Sartor Resartus on October 28,
just two weeks before Wellington resigned [40/41] as prime minister, making way
for a Whig ministry and parliamentary reform. The July elections had returned
the Tories, but Wellington
could not suppress the demand for reform in Parliament. The events in France
convinced many that reform was the only alternative to
revolution. When Grey succeeded Wellington
that autumn, Carlyle shared the general expectation that radical change was
imminent: "The Whigs in office, and Baron Brougham Lord Chancellor!
Hay-stacks and corn-stacks burning over all the South and Middle of England!
Where will it end? Revolution on the back of Revolution for a
century yet?" (TNB , 178-79).
If Carlyle had reservations about Whig
reform, it was because it did not go far enough, not because, as the Tories
argued, it was too revolutionary (Briggs, 237). Carlyle, who considered that
the Whigs, like the Tories, were already "done" for, agreed with the
radicals that England
required a more fundamental, a more truly revolutionary, alteration of its
social structure: "All Europe is in a
state of disturbance, of Revolution.... Their Part. Reforms, and all that, are of small moment; a beginning ... nothing
more. The whole frame of Society is rotten and must go for
fuel-wood" (TNB , 186, 183-84).
Although he distrusted the utilitarian principles of the philosophic radicals,
he shared their desire for radical reform, following the course of events in
the Examiner, which he considered the "cleverest of all Radicals" (CL , 5:201; see 249, 270).
In January, Carlyle read
the first of a series of articles in the Examiner, entitled
"Spirit of the Age," that seemed to support the ideas he had set
forth in the first draft of "Thoughts on Clothes." Like Carlyle, its
author was concerned with the problem of finding "authority which commands
confidence" during an "era of transition" (Newspaper
Writings, 244). He also shared Carlyle's sense that they were living in
an era of revolution, that "the times are pregnant with change; and that
the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the
greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance"
(230). He even employed the clothing metaphor to make the point that revolution
is the process by which society throws off outmoded institutions and
"renovate[s]" itself: "Mankind have outgrown old institutions
and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we
intend to prejudge nothing. A man may not be either better or happier at
six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which
fitted him then, will not fit [41/42] him now" (230). On January 21 (the
article appeared on January 9), Carlyle wrote his brother praising "Spirit
of the Age"-he discovered in reply that its author was John Stuart
Mill-and outlining for the first time his plans for extensively revising his
essay on clothes (CL , 5:215-16, 235). Mill's essay seems to have
encouraged him to expand "Thoughts on Clothes" and to seek a more
serious outlet for it than Fraser's satirical literary magazine, to which he
had originally submitted it. In March, while Parliament began considering the
reform bill, he began to rework "Thoughts on Clothes," and in late
July, while Parliament still sat in a state of indecision, he took the revised
manuscript to London.
Like "The Spirit of
the Age," Sartor Resartus addresses itself to and analyzes
Carlyle's "revolutionary times," its opening chapter alluding
directly to the Revolt of Paris and the British agitation for Reform (6). Sartor
Resartus inscribes its origins in the Paris Revolt in its fictional
frame where the "British Editor," who transcribes and narrates the
life and opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, completes his work just at the
moment when the "Parisian Three Days" begins (296). Furthermore, its
central figure, the German clothes philosopher, is a "Radical"
"Sansculottist" (63, 59) Other details
indicate Teufelsdröckh's sympathy with the revolution. The Editor suggests he
may be headed for London,
where the reform agitation was under way; Teufelsdröckh responds to news of the
July revolution with a German version of the revolutionary song, "c'a
ira," and we are also told that he has been communicating with the
revolutionary St. Simonians. On the relationship between what Carlyle himself
said of the St. Simonians and this passage, see CL, 5:136, and TNB,
158-59. Sartor Resartus represents a world in which ideas can
"overturn . . . the whole old system of Society," in which a
sansculottic philosopher can tailor or author a new suit of social clothing
(118).
Carlyle could hardly have
chosen a more appropriate figure than clothing to represent an era of
revolution. Not only did the metaphor have a long religious and literary
history and an association with political revolution through the term sansculotte,
but clothing was also the chief product of the industrial revolution. The
textile industry was the first to be extensively mechanized and brought under
the factory system, and the social disruptions wrought by these changes played
a major role in producing the social unrest that led to the movement for
reform. Hard hit by the decline in the value of their labor-between 1814 and
1829, the price of a piece of handmade calico dropped from 6s. 6d. to 1s. 1d.-- hand-loom weavers
were among the most active participants in the intermittent riots and mob
activities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Ashton, 81;
Logue, 194). Carlyle sympathized with the "poor wretches" who
threatened to strike and riot in Glasgow
in late 1819 and early 1820 (CL, 1: 242; see also 212, 2 18,
224-25, 252-53, 254; Rem., 212-13, 222). He may even have had firsthand
experience of these riots, since one occurred in Edinburgh in August 1812, a summer that he
spent mostly there (Logue, 33, 41; Kaplan, 32). Carlyle perceived the fine
irony that the glut of cloth produced by the industrial revolution would not
serve to clothe the nation but to strip it naked, that weavers of cloth were
being pushed toward sansculottism. [42/43]
Carlyle, via his clothes
philosopher Teufelsdröckh, uses the weaving of cloth, or the sewing of a suit
of clothes, to represent the process of authoring beliefs and institutions. His
emphasis on clothing as woven textile plays on the root of the word text
— texere, to weave. It also elaborates the familiar notion of the
"fabric" of society (see 62). On the general notion of the tissue of
society and social interconnectedness, see the chapter "Organic
Filaments" and 52, 53, 60, 70, 71, 89, 95, 132, 245. Transcendental authority
authors, weaves, or sews together the institutions and beliefs that constitute
human society. Clothes are the medium through which the transcendental becomes
visible in the finite world of human history: "Church-Clothes are, in our
vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods
embodied and represented for themselves the Religious
Principle" (214). At the moment of their creation, clothes adequately
represent or reveal the transcendental. Insofar as beliefs and institutions
possess transcendental authority, they unite the authority to compel belief and
to compel obedience, but because clothes, beliefs, and institutions are
historical, they gradually lose their ability to manifest or represent
transcendental authority. Carlyle represents this aspect of clothing by
emphasizing that cloth is an organic material subject to wear and decay. The
rags of old customs must be discarded in the "laystall," where they
will decompose and become fertilizer for the "organic filaments" from
which new cloth can be woven.
The clothing metaphor thus
represents the fundamental historicity of cultural institutions and the
inevitability of periodic revolution (see Dale, Victorian Critic,
299; Vanden Bossche, "Revolution and Authority," 277). Since nothing
can prevent the processes of decay that destroy old clothing, Sartor's
pervasive organic imagery suggests that revolution and historical change are
natural, noncataclysmic processes. arlyle was aware,
however, that many of his contemporaries thought it possible to patch up the
old suits of clothing, to revive old beliefs and institutions instead of
creating new ones. This patching up, however, would only repress the forces of
change that would eventually break out in violent, rather than peaceful,
revolution. Carlyle also uses the clothing metaphor to suggest the dangers that
arise when clothing becomes customary or habitual.
"Custom," Teufelsdröckh writes, persuades us that "the
Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous . . . thus let but a
Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases
to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable" (259, 57). Puns on
habit and costume appear throughout Sartor (35, 59, 72-73, 171,
223, 260-61, 266; see also the chapter on symbols, esp. 218). While clothing is
theoretically transparent to the authority it reveals, it also covers and
conceals it. Sartor Resartus suggests that the organic process
that wears out clothes increases their opacity. When clothes become impediments
to the recognition of authority rather than revelations of it, one is justified
in stripping away and destroying them so that they can be replaced with new
clothing. Teufelsdröckh does not flinch at the thought of destroying worn-out
[43/44] clothing. In fact, he positively delights in the sansculottic vision in
which "the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees,
Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand
straddling there, not a shirt on them" (61).
Yet vision in Sartor
Resartus seeks to make the transcendental manifest through new clothes,
not just to pierce through and destroy clothing. One might expect that
stripping away the clothing that conceals transcendental authority would be the
surest way of recovering that authority. This is the position of
"Adamites," antinomian sects that seek to recover paradise by living,
like Adam, without clothes and without laws. But, for the Carlyle of Sartor
Resartus, the fall into history makes the divine inaccessible except
through clothing. Consequently, while Teufelsdröckh is a
"Sansculottist," he is no "Adamite" (60). The antinomian
Adamites of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had argued that human law
cannot displace divine law and therefore wanted to discard human law, to go
naked; but Teufelsdröckh insists that only through clothing can we produce
social order, that "Society is founded upon Cloth," that
"without clothes" there would be no "Politeness, Polity, or even
Police" (51, 64; see 41, 60). In fact, the sansculottes, modern-day
Adamites, have left society naked, stripped of the beliefs and institutions
that constitute the social order. Organic clothing, alive with transcendental
presence, produces just social relationships in a world otherwise subject to
the amoral and purely mechanical laws of raw nature, a universe that is
"one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead
indifference, to grind [one] limb from limb. O the vast,
gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of
Death" (164; emphasis added). The metaphor of the mill-punning on
the name of the leading utilitarian philosopher, James Mill, a
"Motive-Millwright"-connects the natural order to the laissez-faire
economics espoused by the utilitarians (159, 220-21; see 68, 117, 232). Human
beings, without the social order provided by custom, would tear one another to
pieces. In The French Revolution, Carlyle will represent this as
the sansculottic tendency toward cannibalism, and already in Sartor
Resartus he is concerned with the Malthusian anxiety that we will end up
"universally eating one another" (SR, 227). He also frequently
complains that the utilitarian "Profit-andLoss Philosophy" replaces
the soul with the stomach (e.g., 232). When human law no longer manifests transcendental
authority, it cannot simply be destroyed: it must be replaced. Voltaire rightly
destroys the "Mythus of the Christian Religion" because it is no
longer a vital system of belief, but he falls into the Adamite heresy when he
fails to "embody the divine Spirit of " Christianity "in a new
Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture" (163, 194).
When it comes to discovering who has
authority to make new clothing, however, Sartor Resartus becomes
ambiguous, divided between a [44/45] Goethe who would author a new mythus and a
Napoleon who preaches his doctrine "through the cannon's throat"
(178). The figure of the king, whose "authority from God" enables him
to rule by "divine right," combines the authority to compel belief and
to compel obedience because he excels in "Ken-ning (Cunning), or which is
the same thing, Can-ning" (249). Because Sartor Resartus
privileges "kenning," that is, knowledge and belief, from which
"canning," social action and law, derives, the king is more likely to
be a man of letters like Goethe than a politician like Napoleon. Indeed, in his
notebook, Carlyle had claimed that the "only Sovereigns in this world in
these days are the Literary men," and when he introduces the idea of
"Hero-worship" in Sartor Resartus, he gives as an example
of the hero, not a political figure, but Voltaire (TNB , 184; SR
, 251)
Yet the figure of Voltaire
raises the problem of how the man of letters can act ("can") as well
as know ("ken"). Throughout Sartor Resartus, Carlyle
expresses the anxiety that Teufelsdröckh's vocation will lead him to emulate,
not Goethe, but Voltaire and Byron (192, 194). Employing the metaphor of
building to describe the creation of a new social structure, Sartor
Resartus articulates an opposition between those writers who create and
those who destroy. While England
needs a "Rebuilder" or an "Architect," not a
"hodman," English utilitarianism is "calculated for destroying
... not for rebuilding" (248, 105, 234). From
"The State of German Literature" (1827) forward, Carlyle depicts as
mere hodmen authors who do not treat literature as religion (CME,
1: 59; 184; see CL, 4:271, 5:152-53, 6:329; TNB,
144). He also contrasts those who build (e.g., Goethe) with those who burn or
destroy (e.g., Voltaire; see WM, 1: 28). The masonry metaphor can
be found throughout Sartor Resartus (see especially 54, 250, 263).
Similarly, Voltaire fails because he possesses "Only a torch for burning,
no hammer for building" (163). This suggests that already in Sartor
Resartus, Carlyle was beginning to doubt whether the man of letters
could build, could replace the man of religion. To become a man of letters was
to participate in the industrial revolution-journalism as the industry of
literature-that was undermining rather than establishing authority. About 1830,
his insistence that literature will be the new liturgy receives an ironic twist
when he begins saying that "journalism," which he always despised,
rather than "literature," is the new religion. Teufelsdröckh writes,
for example, that "Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy,"
for the liturgy of journalism is an ironic one that destroys "ancient
idols" rather than producing a new belief (45, 252; see CME,
2:77; TNB, 263; HGL, 5).
Because the man of letters
"kens" but cannot "can," Carlyle is attracted to the
political hero, the Napoleon, who "can" but does not "ken."
Although a sansculotte, Teufelsdröckh is also concerned with social control,
with the ability to enforce belief in order to guarantee a just social order.
This tendency of hero-worship to slide toward authoritarianism, or at least
hierarchy, remains muted in Sartor Resartus because Sartor
frames its analysis of the era of revolution in terms of the problem of
religious belief, not, as the later works would, in terms of the institution of
democracy. Although Teufelsdröckh is a sansculotte interested in
social reform, he articulates his concern for [45/46] reform through a
religious medium, the problem of the loss and recovery of faith. Although
Carlyle became increasingly concerned with discovering heroic leadership rather
than establishing religious belief, he would never fully abandon the idea that
there could be "no permanent beneficent arrangement of affairs" until
"Religion, the cement of Society," was reestablished (TNB , 179). Furthermore, he would always be
haunted by the question that arose even as he introduced the idea of
hero-worship in Sartor Resartus: "Kings do reign by divine
right, or not at all. The King that were
God-appointed, would be an emblem of God, and could demand all obedience from
us. But where is that King? (TNB , 185;
emphasis added in last sentence).
© http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/vandenbossche/3a.html#napoleon
Other
articles written about Thomas Carlyle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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