Thomas Carlyle and the Emergence of the Concept of Romanticism: “Signs of the Times” and Sartor Resartus

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that the emergence of the narrow sense of British Romanticism, which prevailed in Romantic Studies up until the 1980s, can be attributed to historicist thinking. Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Signs of the Times” (1829) and his early (and only) novel Sartor Resartus (1836) bear witness to the origins of thinking about literature in terms of literary ages. In a conservative fashion, these texts present an image of Romanticism that concentrates solely on subjectivity, creativity, genius, and the imagination. This portrayal omits other characteristics that were instrumental in defining the era, and crucially overlooks female authors. With the emergence of historicism, a vibrant intellectual environment is thus reduced to a narrow set of aesthetic features.

1. Introduction

The term “Romanticism” was not used in reference to the British context until several decades after the relevant time period.¹ The characteristics of British Romanticism as a distinct set of aesthetic traits, however, were defined much earlier. In this article, I explore the emergence of the theoretical conception and definition of British Romanticism not as a Victorian event but rather as an active intervention by authors writing in the late 1820s—the end of the Romantic era. During these years, a number of British authors defined the characteristics of the literary “age,” reducing the vibrant and diverse scene of the decades around 1800 to a recognizable (and decidedly male) set of aesthetic ideals. I will focus on the early works of the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, particularly the essay “Signs of the Times” (1829) and the novel Sartor Resartus (1836).² In his appropriation of German philosophy, aesthetics, and literature, Carlyle constructed and defined an aesthetic ideal that helped to promote the idea of a unified concept of British Romanticism—a concept, however, that excludes a wide range of works written between 1780 and 1830 in favor of a rather narrow set of character traits. As Sartor Resartus is itself a novel, this intervention takes the form of a complex meta-reflection on the state of literature and philosophy.

The emergence of historicism in the nineteenth century is crucial to understanding this specific concept of history, particularly in relation to literature and culture. Carlyle’s early works are part of a series of texts reflecting literature and culture in historical terms, as expressions of a distinctive and historically precise “spirit.” During the 1820s, essays entitled “Spirit of the Age” (Hazlitt; Mill) or indeed “Signs of the Times” (Carlyle) bear witness to this tendency.³ They share a view of the age in predominantly historical terms, as John Stuart Mill put it: “never before was [history] itself the dominant idea of any age” (51). These essays should be situated in the context of the rise of nineteenth-century historicism by the likes of Leopold von Ranke and others in later decades—a philosophical way to see the world, and in this instance literature and culture in particular, through a historical lens. At the same time, this focus on history and not on a systematic exploration of aesthetic ideals indicates that the attempt to flesh out the spirit of an age is already a nostalgic construction. The texts from the 1820s constructed the previous age in an idealized form.

In this essay, I argue that the focus on a unified set of aesthetic principles was not constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century, but indeed much earlier. It began to emerge in the 1820s, a time that perceived itself to be in a state of severe crisis. The narrow definition of Romanticism is the result of the perceived ending of an age. At the same time, a new sense of temporality emerged and heralded a new way of thinking about culture and literature in historicist terms. Carlyle, whose works are rarely discussed in the context of Romanticism, is of pivotal importance in this context. As the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841) and Past and Present (1843), he is thoroughly associated with the Victorian Age, Victorian conservatism, and a focus on the great individual rather than on structural progress. In his satirical work Sartor Resartus, his only published novel, however, Carlyle not only discussed but appropriated key Romantic aesthetic ideals. This tendency is preceded by his earlier essays in which he attempted to introduce German idealism and particularly Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophy, Novalis’s poetry, and Jean Paul’s satirical writings to a wider British reading public. As the first and one of the most important translators of the works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, having published the English version of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1824, he was already known to be one of the most significant mediators between German and English literature.⁴

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is widely recognized as a defining work in the shift from the Romantic to the Victorian era. It acts as a mediator between European aesthetic ideals and British culture, which the novel portrays as being heavily influenced by common-sense philosophy and Utilitarianism. In appropriating, and critically reflecting on, earlier German philosophical ideals, Sartor Resartus retrospectively creates an aesthetic conceptualization of British Romanticism. In effect, Carlyle constructs an aesthetic and philosophical concept informed by German literature and philosophy, which would give rise to the historical concept of British Romanticism. Looking back at the intellectual and imaginative productions of recent decades, as well as looking forward to the Victorian period, Carlyle’s novel, translations from German, and essays on literary criticism contribute to the retrospective image of British Romanticism by portraying a cohesive, albeit simplified, picture of the past.

2. History and Romantic self-reflection

Thinking about literature in terms of literary periods and literary canons is always a paradoxical endeavor. While literary eras and collections of canonical works are recognized as historical constructs established by conventions, their heuristic value cannot be denied either. These concepts assist readers in comprehending developments and patterns, as well as identifying similarities and differences. Hence, in addition to constructivist positions, crucial arguments for the systematic integrity of literary periods need to be taken into account as well. The Romantic period is no exception in this regard. For the past decades, many endeavors have been made to show that the traditional concept of Romanticism, with its focus on subjectivity, genius, or the imagination, which dominated much of the twentieth century, was constructed in retrospect.⁵ The discourse history of the term supports this argument. Contrary to Germany, no British school or group of authors identified themselves as members of a unified literary movement called Romanticism. Romanticism in Britain was not a term used to signify the differences between rivaling schools of thought—such as Goethe and Schiller’s Classicism and Schlegel and Novalis’s Romanticism in Germany. Instead, the application of the term “Romantic school” to English writers did not occur until 1863, when Hippolyte Taine used it in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise. As a result, highly regarded poets such as Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, John Clare, Thomas Moore, or Felicia Hemans were excluded from the canon in favor of a small number of male poets. Subsequently, this process of canon formation became the quasi-natural embodiment of Romanticism. Matthew Arnold, for instance, in his Essays in Criticism (second edition, 1888), wrote exclusively on Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats in the sections concerned with the turn of the nineteenth century. A very diverse literary landscape was thus effectively transformed into a predominantly male affair focusing on individual subjectivity. The social and political context of the poetry was effectively eliminated from the literary scene. The declared objective of New Historicism (see McGann) and Feminist Criticism (see Mellor) since the 1980s has been to correct this distorted image of the Romantic era.

This iconoclastic position taken in the 1980s has been re-evaluated subsequently. Recent criticism has convincingly argued that “‘Romanticism’ is not simply a retrospective critical construct (although the term was not used in Britain at the time), but an observable phenomenon whose historical development can be traced and at least partially explained” (Duff, Oxford Handbook 1). This point, made by David Duff, is indeed important, not least because the writers associated with Romanticism merged historical thinking about the present in which they wrote with aesthetic practices that they considered to be characteristic of the age. In the 1820s, Duff argues, the historicization of an aesthetic philosophy finds its outlet in a series of self-reflexive and historically aware texts:

This self-mapping along the contours of contemporary history was part of the historical consciousness of Romanticism, but there were at least two other kinds of self-periodisation at work. One involved the emergence of a larger sense of period, the idea of an overarching age of literature that linked these historical phases, or micro-periods, and the disparate cultural phenomena they encompassed. (“Phases” 230)

Revolutionary thinking during the age of Romanticism, fundamentally implanted in the culture due to the influence of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, he further maintains, created the sense that change and transformation were ultimately possible and desired.

According to Nicholas Halmi, it is important to view the emergence of historical thinking about culture itself historically: “Periodisation is so deeply embedded conceptually and institutionally in our historical understanding and historiographical practice that we do not easily recognise it to be itself the product of historical developments” (234). It is quite significant for an understanding of the period of Romanticism that what today is considered to be its end, i.e. the late 1820s, also coincides with the rise of historicism and thus with the very idea of thinking about literature in terms of eras or ages. The emergence of the concept of Romanticism thus concurs with the advent of the underlying idea of periodization. Hilary Fraser observes:

The past as we know it was largely created by the Victorians. Historical terms and concepts such as the Renaissance, the Augustan, Modernity, the Zeitgeist—indeed, the very coinage “Victorian,” and even the idea of periodicity itself, were nineteenth-century inventions. Moreover, we have inherited from the nineteenth century a modern historical consciousness, and historiographical methods, for it was during this period that the modern discipline was defined and professionalized, that the counterclaims of empiricists and idealists were first articulated. (108)

Considering the actual characterization of the period, Duff identifies a coexistence of traditional and revolutionary tendencies:

Romanticism was a retro movement as well as a revolutionary one, an aesthetic of archaism and innovation, delighting both in the antique (actual or invented) and the thoroughly modern. Moreover, as well as being immersed in the past it was a future-orientated movement, which saw literature, the “romantic poem,” in a state of becoming, progressive and perfectible but never perfected or completed. The Romantics had an acute sense of contemporaneity, of the distinctiveness of their own historical moment, but they were not content to remain in it, instead projecting themselves imaginatively into other periods, past and future, and dissolving temporal boundaries. (“Phases” 232)

The idea of periodization, hence, links the idea of historical progress with aesthetic qualities associated with the past. Halmi maintains that

a period … is supposed to possess a unifying set of dominant characteristics, or what Wellek calls “a system of norms,” which allows it to be distinguished from other periods. In broader historical usage, such a system of norms would constitute what was first conceptualised in the eighteenth century—most explicitly by Johann Gottfried Herder—as a zeitgeist: “the prevailing views, manners, and customs” of an age. (237)

When considering the rise of literary history as the dominant view of literature, it is evident that the Romantic period was the last one to emerge without considering itself as part of a historical continuum. Its initial rejection of neoclassical ideals—as most prominently expressed by Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads—is systematic and not progressive by nature. At the end of the Romantic period in the 1820s, however, there occurs a noticeable shift from looking at art in a systematic manner to considering it in historical terms. History in the eighteenth century was predominantly concerned with politics, and historical writings of the eighteenth century—from David Hume’s History of England (1754–1761), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), to Charlotte Smith’s History of England (1806) written for children—focused primarily on social and political events. The essays written in the 1820s, which investigate the spirit of the age, moved into a different direction. These texts began to apply historical thinking to culture. This is in line with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, which historicized any form of understanding. The essays investigating the spirit of the age applied historical thinking to cultural and literary texts and thus began to look at literature, art, and culture in historical terms. As an effect, culture and art began to be considered as historical events, and literature was investigated in terms of literary history.

This turn towards looking at culture and literature in historical terms can be linked to a change in the political landscape. While Romanticism began as a revolutionary and progressive era, conservative and even reactionary positions became more prominent towards its end. In other words, the way that Romanticism as a retrospective concept began to take shape is ultimately connected to a change in political outlook. In the early 1820s, the most important publications were still progressive in tone, while at the end of the decade, a much more conservative sentiment gained the upper hand, paving the way for future Victorian conservatism. One of the first writers to look at the age in historical and periodizing terms is, as Duff notes, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Famously, he described the French Revolution in a letter to Byron as “the master theme of the epoch in which we live” (Letters 1: 504). In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley rejected the conception of literary history as the perpetual decline that Thomas Love Peacock had expressed in his The Four Ages of Poetry, and instead “presents a progressive vision of literature” (Duff, “Phases” 233).

Arguably the most important essay collection taking stock of the age, William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age (1825), is still progressive and left-leaning. Nonetheless, Hazlitt reduces the literary landscape to a handful of portraits of male writers, ignoring any female contributions. The narrowing down of a vibrant and diverse literary scene had already begun. Towards the end of the 1820s, reflections on periodization were increasingly influenced by a sense of crisis and tended to be more conservative. The repeal of the Test Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 created a feeling of menace to conservative writers, including Carlyle. This sentiment was also expressed in the self-reflexive essays of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Considered from this angle, the reflexive periodization at the end of the Romantic period can be described by Halmi as “retrospective self-mythologisation” (238). In view of the perceived crisis and the atmosphere of conservatism, Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” has to be seen as a contribution that prepared the ground for the Victorian interpretation of Romanticism, based on just a few typical features, including nature, imagination, subjectivity, and symbol, represented by a small and exclusively male group of authors. The act of historicizing Romanticism, defining the period, and gradually shaping its literary canon tended to prioritize inwardness over political class awareness. Understood in this manner, the idea of Romanticism was established in an inherently conservative act that would shape Romantic Studies well into the latter half of the twentieth century. In what follows, I will read Carlyle’s 1829 essay “Signs of the Times” as symptomatic of this conservative introspective shift that neglected the diverse, progressive, and particularly female contributions of the Romantic period.

3. Carlyle’s conservative construction of Romanticism in “Signs of the Times”

“Signs of the Times” can be described as a harbinger of Carlyle’s later Victorian efforts (see Harris). In this essay, he fiercely criticizes his age, characterizing it as being in a severe crisis. In his attack on industrialism, empiricism, and Utilitarianism, he eventually calls for a reformation not of society or the economy, but rather of the inner self. Just like Matthew Arnold’s defense of an emphatic concept of culture that he would propose some fifty years later in Culture and Anarchy, Carlyle turns to literature—and not religion—to achieve this aim. The reason for the turn is the severe crisis of the Anglican Church that Carlyle identifies in the late 1820s. “Signs of the Times” thus paves the way for beliefs that would become prominent in the Victorian era; and, at the same time, it is a text looking back. Just like in his other essays written at the time, Carlyle aims at introducing German Romantic aesthetic and philosophical thought to Britain, particularly that by the likes of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

In the essay, Carlyle famously describes the 1820s as a “mechanical age.” The focus of his criticism lies on a pervasive materialism that he identifies as characteristic of his era. The tendency to describe materialism as a dangerous threat goes back to the British opposition to French Enlightenment thinking in the wake of Julien de la Mettrie’s L’homme machine or the Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la nature. Particularly after the French Revolution, materialism was closely associated with republicanism and thus with political radicalism (see Haekel, “Towards the Soul” 670). It is therefore slightly surprising that Carlyle draws a connection between materialism and Utilitarianism. Yet what is at the heart of the essay is not the fear of revolution but rather a crisis of religion. Although it takes some time until the essay openly addresses this crisis, it is present right from the start, as when Carlyle quotes from the Gospel of Matthew in the very title of the essay: “Oye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (Matt. 16.3). Carlyle hence describes the contemporary state in purely negative terms as a crisis of faith and of religion.⁶

“Signs of the Times” was published originally in June 1829 in the Edinburgh Review, a time characterized by significant political and social changes. A series of laws passed in the second half of the seventeenth century had effectively disenfranchised Dissenters and Roman Catholics from taking public roles. The repeal of the Test Acts in 1828, and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which relieved them of these disabilities, seemed to conservative Anglicans to be a potentially dangerous reversal. The pace with which fundamental constitutional reform seemed to be taking place led to a febrile religious and political atmosphere:

How often have we heard, for the last fifty years, that the country was wrecked, and fast sinking; whereas, up to this date, the country is entire and afloat. The “State in Danger” is a condition of things, which we have witnessed a hundred times; and as for the Church, it has seldom been out of “danger” since we can remember it.

All men are aware that the present is a crisis of this sort; and why it has become so. The repeal of the Test Acts, and then of the Catholic disabilities, has struck many of their admirers with an indescribable astonishment. Those things seemed fixed and immovable; deep as the foundations of the world; and lo, in a moment they have vanished, and their place knows them no more! (Carlyle, “Signs” 57–58)

This profound criticism of an age described as on the verge of the Apocalypse encompasses all aspects of society, not only Utilitarian thought and discourses on the industrialization but also religion and thus the realm of faith and the inner self. Carlyle profoundly criticizes the state of culture in general, and knowledge production in particular. The scope of his criticism is indeed astonishing, as the supposed triumph of materialism and mechanization not only refers to aspects touched by transformations in the wake of the industrial revolution, such as urbanization and the changes in the realm of labor, but extends also to the realms of culture and literature. Carlyle’s verdict seems to be directed not against what is generally considered as the outcome of industrialism—industrial hubs, poverty, or inequality—but rather against the state of knowledge and knowledge production:

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. (59)

In particular, Carlyle attacks modern forms of knowledge production and dissemination as the outcome of a system that neglects the ingenious and “natural” insights of the individual. In a way, Carlyle’s argument amounts to a dismissal of progressive Enlightenment and liberal thought. In the context of the 1820s, his attack is directed against a network or media ecology that encompasses all forms of knowledge production and educational institutions:

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery. Thus we have machines for Education: Lancastrian machines; Hamiltonian machines; monitors, maps and emblems. … Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless; a colony of Hindoo weavers squatting in the heart of Lancashire. Mark, too, how every machine must have its moving power, in some of the great currents of society; every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine. (60–61)

The universal nature of this attack includes more than the dissemination of knowledge through the ever-growing impact of print and serial publication. Indeed, it includes any form of systematic organization of culture:

With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little. No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation, and till his field with their oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, “to live, signifies to unite with a party, or to make one.” Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple; but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters, and galvanic piles imperatively “interrogates Nature,”—who, however, shows no haste to answer. In defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music. (61–62)

To make his point, Carlyle evokes a nostalgic past in which an individual genius did not require these institutions but instead relied on their own ingenuity. To be more precise: Carlyle creates an idealized past as a distinctive historical period, and thus uses nostalgia to support his conservative vision for a different future.

Opposed to what Carlyle describes as a mechanical society characterized by systems, institutions, and societies (including learned societies, Royal academies, and museums) is a “dynamic” understanding of culture and the individual science of the mind. Carlyle sets the empty and outward mechanism of institutions against the plea for a turn towards inwardness and spirituality. This needs to be seen in the context of Carlyle’s efforts to introduce German idealist philosophy to the English cultural context. In German Romantic literature and metaphysics, and Kantian idealism in particular, he sees a philosophical path to a decidedly interior and immaterial science of the mind. Therefore, he devises an ideal for British Romanticism that relies on German idealism, with philosophy and poetry based on interior values at its core. Ultimately, the argument is grounded in the dichotomy between the ideal of an inner self and the perceived mechanical nature of society, wherein all forms of thinking are reduced to mere mechanics:

Equally mechanical, and of equal simplicity, are the methods proposed by both parties for completing or securing this all-sufficient perfection of arrangement. It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws. Thus is the Body-politic more than ever worshipped and tendered; but the Soul-politic less than ever. (67)

In order to emphasize his cultural criticism, Carlyle fabricates an image and a narrative of decline. What is remarkable, however, is that this decline is thoroughly historicized:

The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us. (74, my emphasis)

He repeatedly conceives of his time as an era, thus constructing it at the same time. It is my contention that this argument of decline helps to create a concept of literature that focusses on the very values he champions. These are exactly those aspects—subjectivity, selfhood, inner freedom associated with the imagination—that would later come to be seen as defining the canon of British Romanticism.

As the state of poetry is also part of the general narrative of decline, Carlyle depicts Romanticism as a bygone era: “Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition” (76). Such a definition of poetry, which focusses chiefly on the concepts of the male genius and original creation, excludes almost all other experimental forms of poetry, including those based on scientific insights. It is little wonder, then, that experimental works like Joanna Baillie’s Plays of the Passion or Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head were excluded from the literary canon for more than a century. Carlyle’s historical construction of Romanticism as literary is ultimately based on a limited and exclusive (and exclusively male) understanding of literature.

In the section discussing the decline of literature, Carlyle effectively creates such a narrow understanding. First, Carlyle puts literature in the place of religion: “Literature too, if we consider it, gives similar testimony. At no former era has Literature, the printed communication of Thought, been of such importance as it is now” (77). A few lines later he excludes popular forms of literature in favor of a narrow idealist understanding of the art of poetry: “let us look at the higher regions of Literature, where, if anywhere, the pure melodies of Poesy and Wisdom should be heard” (77). Carlyle finally criticizes genres like the Gothic in favor of the poetics of the genius, and he emphasizes the individual author (in this case Byron) as opposed to a broad and diverse literary landscape:

How widely this veneration for the physically Strongest has spread itself through Literature, any one may judge who reads either criticism or poem. We praise a work, not as “true,” but as “strong”; our highest praise is that it has “affected” us, has “terrified” us. All this, it has been well observed, is the “maximum of the Barbarous,” the symptom, not of vigorous refinement, but of luxurious corruption. It speaks much, too, for men’s indestructible love of truth, that nothing of this kind will abide with them; that even the talent of a Byron cannot permanently seduce us into idol-worship; that he too, with all his wild siren charming, already begins to be disregarded and forgotten. (78)

Taking stock of British literature and culture, Carlyle’s analysis is both pessimistic and conservative. He associates his concept of the age, which emphasizes the inner self, genius, and higher or otherworldly themes, with the narrative of decline. By applying historical thought to aesthetic, Carlyle portrays the age as innately conservative and devoid of a revolutionary or progressive outlook. In the next section, I want to show how the particular influence of German literature and philosophy shapes his extraordinary experimental novel Sartor Resartus.

4. Conservatism and revolutionary form: Sartor Resartus

Sartor Resartus is often seen as a work that marks the shift from the Romantic to the Victorian era (see Rundle 169). It is a highly complex and complicated work of art that adopts German idealist philosophy not merely in terms of content but particularly in the form of the novel (see Toremans, “Perpetual Remnant” 210–15). As a literary work, it is both conservative in content and revolutionary in its experimental form. The impact of Carlyle’s thinking about literature in cultural-historical terms is particularly important in this context, especially regarding the dichotomy between progressive and conservative views of culture. The tension between revolutionary politics and Carlyle’s conservative reading of German idealism is evident in the novel’s first chapter:

But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessing that, in these revolutionary times, there should be one country where abstract Thought can still take shelter; that while the din and frenzy of Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris, deafen every French and every English ear, the German can stand peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, struggling multitude here and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of cowhorn, emit his Höret ihr Herren und lasset’s Euch sagen; in other words, tell the Universe, which so often forgets that fact, what o’clock it really is. (Carlyle, Sartor 4)

Tom Toremans, commenting on this passage, highlights this tension:

The concrete historical-political degeneration of the time can only be remedied by the transcendentalist, universalist voice of German idealist philosophy. This double vision, at once aesthetic and political, converges in the notion of Bildung … and its peculiar blend of radical reform and conservatism. (“One Step” 29)

The history of the time is therefore constructed from a negative angle, as the sign of the times, to be redeemed by the aesthetics of idealism adapted from the German context.

The novel itself is dense, complex, and multi-layered. A nameless narrator receives a German book entitled Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence), written by a German professor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, originally published by “Stillschweigen und Co^gnie” [“Remain Quiet and Company”] in “Weissnichtwo” [“Knownotwhere”]. Die Kleider is evidently influenced by German transcendental idealism; yet the very title as well as the names of the publisher and place betray a burlesque intention. Furthermore, the subtitle The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh is an obvious reference to Laurence Sterne, the great comic novelist of the eighteenth century, and his masterpiece The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Another formative influence is the German author Jean Paul Richter.

At its heart, the Clothes Philosophy contains much of Carlyle’s own aesthetic and poetic philosophy, but, nevertheless, it takes the form of a parody. In a way, it is a satirical expansion of the, in itself reflexive, genre of the review essay (see Tennyson 284). Also in 1829, Carlyle had published a review essay on Novalis which bears striking similarities in both content and structure. The essay presents Novalis as opaque and difficult, and Carlyle positions himself as a mediator between a difficult author and a readership who may need instruction and guidance. This creates ambiguity and also a sense of distance not entirely unrelated to Schlegel’s notion of Romantic irony, but with a much sharper sense of satire. In a word, the reader is asked to take the philosophy presented at face value, while at the same time retaining a skeptical distance created by parody. This dialectic, I argue, is at the heart of the theoretical and philosophical self-reflection that characterizes the novel as a whole, and it finds its expression in a whole range of other features of the text.

The meta-reflexive dimension of the novel is already suggested by the title. Sartor Resartus literally means “the tailor retailored,” which hints at the process of translating and editing Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy of clothes. But since clothes as woven texture are among the oldest metaphors of writing a text (an early example would be Penelope weaving a shroud by day for Laertes, one which she unravels at night to win time [see Sullivan Kruger 79–82]), the novel’s title indicates that it is about writing (and re-writing) literature. Moreover, the entire endeavor is also a work of history that looks at the past while simultaneously constructing it: the editorial process establishes a posterior coherence that Teufelsdröckh’s original work lacked.

The author of Die Kleider remains an enigma: he is referred to as “Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft, or as we would say in English, ‘Professor of Things in General,’” (Carlyle, Sartor 14), yet he does not teach at a university. The name Teufelsdröckh is a slightly altered rendition of Teufelsdreck, which literally means devil’s dung or dirt but is also the name of a foully stinking plant, Asafoetida. His given name, Diogenes, may refer to the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, renowned for living in a tub, who was one of the founders of the philosophy of cynicism. These details indicate that this is a highly meta-fictional and theoretical novel with many intertextual references that call up contexts ranging from satire to German idealism.

That the concept of rewriting is part of the novel’s theoretical conception can also be seen in the very structure of the narrative. The novel is subdivided into three books, which trace a dialectic conversion story from the material world via the immaterial world to “natural supernaturalism” (193). The conversion story is the basis for interpretations of the novel as a Bildungsroman and thus being about Bildung, which translates as both education and spiritual and moral development (see Lamb; Toremans, “One Step”). The role model for this genre is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which Carlyle had translated prior to his writing Sartor. The conversion story is mirrored internally in Teufelsdröckh’s biography (the subject matter of the second book) in the three chapters that are often considered to be at the heart of the novel: “The Everlasting No,” “Centre of Indifference,” and “The Everlasting Yea.”

Yet the conversion story can be slightly misleading, as the novel is not solely concerned with Teufelsdröckh’s narrative or the translation of his fictional philosophy. Rather, it is a documentation of an editorial process. The editor, who is also the intra- and homodiegetic narrator, can hardly be called reliable (see Ryan), as he is a typical English representative of empiricist and Utilitarian philosophy, which Carlyle fiercely criticized in “Signs of the Times.” Therefore, the novel can be regarded as the editor’s attempt to understand what he is about to translate, order, and publish: “To bring what order we can out of this Chaos shall be part of our endeavour” (Carlyle, Sartor 27). In this respect, the novel is a hermeneutical endeavor in the sense of Friedrich Schleiermacher. This is significant with regards to the topic of history, as Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics were the philosophical and theological attempt to historicize epistemology, and thus all forms of understanding. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss or reject the editor as a comical figure merely because his philosophical position is opposed to Carlyle’s own. After all, he represents the majority of what were to be the novel’s expected readers in Britain. In a way, the novel traces the conversion not only of Teufelsdröckh and the editor, but also of the targeted actual readership of the novel. In that sense, the novel is a performative depiction of the attempt to understand and interpret the meaning of the utterly strange, chaotic, and dark Clothes Philosophy; hence, it is a novel about hermeneutics put into practice.

In the first book, the editor professes his inability to understand the chaos that is the system of Die Kleider in a manner that is also true for Sartor itself:

Rightly considered, it is in this peculiarity, running through his whole system of thought, that all these shortcomings, over-shootings, and multiform perversities, take rise: if indeed they have not a second source, also natural enough, in his Transcendental Philosophies, and humour of looking at all Matter and Material things as Spirit; whereby truly his case were but the more hopeless, the more lamentable. (23)

Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy of clothes seems to be solely concerned with the world of ideas, the divine, and transcendence. Since this philosophy adds clothing to a traditional body-and-mind dualism, clothes come to represent semiotics. Within the novel, clothes stand for a material language that symbolically refers to the immaterial and transcendental world. In the Platonic tradition, this transcendental world of ideas is identical with eternal reality, which is opposed to the time-bound and hence transient earthly existence. However, by exhibiting the process of a doomed form of hermeneutic understanding, a literary interpretation remaining perpetually incomplete, the novel’s very form highlights the linguistic materiality—figuratively speaking, its clothes. In the words of Teufelsdröckh, quoted by the editor, this philosophy is explicated in the following manner:

All visible things are Emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King’s mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful;—the rather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye? (55–56)

A few sentences on, the novel is even clearer about the correlation between language and clothing. Just as clothes hide the essence, language hides meaning that must be deciphered:

Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? (56)

At a later stage of the novel, book three presents a definition of the symbol that bears a close resemblance to the famous concepts of Goethe and Coleridge:

In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched: He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized: the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a “Gospel of Freedom,” which he, the “Messias of Nature,” preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real. (162–63)

It is evident from this quotation that the entire system of philosophy, idealism, and literary theory has an underlying religious dimension. The novel’s complexity stems from the fact that it simultaneously undermines its own conception. In this sense, it is the exact antithesis of an artwork that meets all its own theoretical demands. It is, and it remains, a chaotic, unrestricted work of art that only alludes to its aesthetic ideals—and those proposed in “Signs of the Times”—and hence does not embody them. Yet, this is not an aesthetic failure; the very modernity of the novel stems from its emphasis on the immanence of literature in all of its incoherence and chaotic arrangements. It is a much more radical work of art than Carlyle himself proposed as the ideal of Romantic literature. Through parody, multiple layers of narration and genre, and finally by incorporating the very process of reading, understanding, and interpreting, the novel transcends the Romantic aim of an organic work of art and foregrounds the linguistic materiality of literature. Sartor Resartus constructs a Romantic aesthetic ideal, yet it simultaneously undermines and creatively surpasses these founding principles.

The early Victorian break with the past is also highlighted by the culture-critical dimension of Sartor, which takes the form of a religious argument (see Holloway 23). The conversion in “The Everlasting Yea” is described in explicitly religious terms:

To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,—should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,—to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendour; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapours!—Our Wilderness is the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end. (Carlyle, Sartor 140)

Yet the religious dimension goes beyond the level of content or histoire to refer to the level of discours, or the structural and, hence, to the theoretical dimension of the novel. At a time characterized by the rise of secularism, Carlyle conceives of literature as a substitute for religion: “‘But there is no Religion?’ reiterates the Professor. ‘Fool! I tell thee, there is. Hast thou well considered all that lies in this immeasurable froth-ocean we name Literature?’” (191). This concept of literature predates Arnold’s concept of culture as a substitute for religion by several decades. At the same time, it is identical with Carlyle’s narrow definition of Romantic aesthetics based on German idealist philosophy as proposed in “Signs of the Times.” Hence, this passage has to be seen in the context of Carlyle’s 1829 essay and the negative perception of culture at the end of the Romantic period. One can hardly speak of literature more emphatically, and it is this dimension of Sartor that emphasizes its relevance for the whole of Victorian literature and culture. Tennyson describes this blending of German idealism and religion in an apotheosis of literature in the following terms: “Carlyle conceived of the task of literature as both critical and religious, since he saw the destiny of literature in its replacement of organized religion. All this is remarkable enough and well supports the threefold design of Sartor” (167). In brief, at the end of the Romantic period and the beginning of the Victorian era, Carlyle writes a novel in which he combines and transforms all the elements of German Frühromantik, his fascination with Goethe, and, in particular, German philosophy. In this sense, his novel explores all the facets of the Romantic period that he had envisioned in his cultural-historical essay of 1829. However, Carlyle does not stop there. He does not follow the path taken by Schlegel and Novalis in the composition of their novels Lucinde and Heinrich von Ofterdingen respectively, but he writes a novel about the (failing) hermeneutical understanding of any kind of literary and philosophical endeavor. Sartor Resartus is, therefore, not only a theoretical novel but also a novel that reflects on its own theoretical status, thus creating an aesthetic ideal of the past and acting as a harbinger and first example of Victorian and Modern literature and theory.

Considering the philosophical and theoretical dimension of Sartor Resartus, it is not surprising that the novel has left its mark on later theoretical discussions. In an essay reviewing the history of Carlyle criticism, Toremans highlights “the awkward position of Sartor Resartus within the continued critical occupation with his works” (“Perpetual Remnant” 207). After discussing the impact of G. R. Tennyson’s 1965 book Sartor “Called” Resartus, which he describes as a landmark study, he turns to the history of the reception of the novel in poststructuralist theory. Emphasizing “Sartor’s relevance for literary theory” (215), Toremans shows how Carlyle’s novel not only triggered important readings, but also inspired theoretical reflections through its meta-theoretical dimension.

In 1980, for instance, Geoffrey Hartman describes Sartor as “the Age of Criticism producing—out of itself as it were—a fiction” (49). Hartman illustrates how the multi-layered form of the narrative and the multiple levels of mediation render access to an original essence impossible:

The “Clothes Philosophy” of Sartor stresses mediation: it distances humanity from nakedness, nature, even from the textual source (Teufelsdröckh’s German manuscript, supposedly discovered by the “editor”), which is presented in Sartor only in an excerpted or retailored (“resartus”) form. … Carlyle’s disgust, moreover, at this potentially infinite regress of mediation—even though it provides a saving distance from absolute inwardness or solipsism—is quite obvious. His solution is to foreground the mediatory process, to make the writer’s distance from any source so palpable that the retailored text is endowed with a factitious presence of its own. (48)

As a result, theory becomes literature and literature theory, but in a way that is distanced from the Romantic ideal of an organic work of art representing, to use Coleridge’s famous formula, Multëity in Unity:

The formal effect, in any case, is a fading of the distinction between original and commentary. Quotation is king, yet everything is quotation. In Sartor criticism has found its carnival colors. Carlylese, instead of being a metalanguage, merges with the idiom of its source: its originality is its impurity, the contamination of gloss and original. (Hartman 49)

Hartman’s reading highlights the notion that the emergence of the system of Literature (with a capital L) in the nineteenth century depends on its inherent theoretical reflection. In the context of my reading of the novel, both rely on historical understanding of literature as well.

J. Hillis Miller, in 1989, stresses not the medial but the ornamental quality of the novel, describing it as “an hieroglyphical work about hieroglyphs” (8). In a deconstructionist manner, he reaches the following conclusion:

Once any symbol of the infinite is seen as transient and as having that sort of inadequacy which is intrinsic to any catachresis, or name for the unnameable, then there is no way in which Carlyle can affirm one version of his doctrine of hieroglyphic truth without at the same time affirming the counter version. (18)

Wolfgang Iser, finally, focusses on the topic of translation in the novel as a “transposition of cultures” and stresses the readers’ response inscribed into the text as an empty space:

Although dealing with a philosophical system, it is not cast as a treatise. Instead, we have an English Editor receiving from Germany several bags of notes and fragments from which he gets a rather disorderly glimpse of a highly speculative work: “Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken,” written by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. This very introduction serves as a point of departure for exfoliating the density of a system in narrative terms which make Sartor Resartus almost appear to be a novel. The narration, however, is constantly punctured by systematic expositions of this transcendental philosophy, which inhibit the narrative from unfolding. With the form of the treatise suspended and the narrative thwarted by arguments of philosophical disquisitions, Sartor Resartus pivots around an empty space that makes narrating and arguing constantly interchange. (249)

Like Hartman and Hillis Miller before him, Iser concludes that the work, although ostensibly concerned with transcendence and the divine, ultimately exhibits and foregrounds its form and hence its immanence:

In this respect the Philosophy of Clothes can be confined neither to imitation nor to depiction. Instead, it anatomizes the process of translatability itself which, more often than not, is glossed over when imitation or depiction is the overriding concern of representation. Translatability is in itself something intangible; it does not have the nature of a pregiven object and hence can be tackled only by metaphors, as evinced in the Philosophy of Clothes. (255)

These readings all conclude that “the work was intentionally hermetic, and therefore meant to provoke, even to foreclose definitive readings” (Fischer 670).

What these readings demonstrate is that Sartor positions itself as a theoretical novel about the status and function of literature itself. Moreover, it contributes to the construction of an aesthetic ideal of its age, which was termed Romanticism only much later. At the same time, its radical form undermines any uniform conservative concept of art or literature. It is nevertheless very much involved in the construction of Romanticism as a theoretical and historical concept. This way it is in line with the waves of essays written at the close of the Romantic period. At the end of the 1820s, the theoretical and historical view of the present as an age or a period paves the way for a conception of literature in terms of historical periodization. Carlyle contributes to the definition of the literary canon of Romanticism by defining a set of aesthetic features at its core, including subjectivity, imagination, and the symbol. These characteristics emerge out of the attempt to apply idealist philosophy to literature and its cultural function. The context of Carlyle’s previous essays and his subsequent historical writings reveals that it constitutes an active intervention in shaping Romanticism as a distinct and definable literary era.

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is a novel that follows the German Romantic project in its attempt to merge theory and literature in an active involvement with idealist philosophy in the wake of Immanuel Kant. The novel’s modernity, however, resides in the fact that it also reflects the theoretical consequences of this amalgamation. Its focus on transcendence ultimately only highlights its immanence and materiality. Eventually, the endeavor leads to the construction and deconstruction of the canonical idea of Romanticism in that Sartor Resartus creates an aesthetic ideal of the Romantic age and undermines it at the same time.

5. Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that the historical concept of Romanticism is a construct that, as an active intervention, first took shape in a series of essays written in the 1820s. These essays, which held an increasingly pessimistic view of literature and culture, coincide with the emergence of the tendency to view literature as literary history, i.e. in terms of works deemed to be canonical or specific to a particular time period. Carlyle is one of the most significant contributors to this debate. This intervention is the result of several converging factors. First, there is a tendency towards cultural pessimism amongst the Anglican supremacy elicited by the Catholic Emancipation and the political atmosphere preceding the Great Reform Bill in 1832. This coincides with an inclination to view the present and the immediate past through a historical lens, thus conceptualizing the period as an “age” or an “era.” Together, these two tendencies—conservatism and the historicization of culture—contribute to a restrictive and politically reactionary aesthetic ideal. In the case of Carlyle, this ideal is based on German idealist philosophy with an emphasis on what later became typical aspects of British Romanticism: genius, originality, and the subjective self. This marks the first appearance of Romanticism as a distinct age in literary history, and the canonical aesthetic ideals of this age would form the basis of the definition of the literary canon. This formation of literary history and canon creation would continue to influence the idea of literature and literary history for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In his essays, particularly “Signs of the Times,” Carlyle retrospectively fleshes out an aesthetic ideal that draws on German idealism. This ideal also forms the basis of his novel Sartor Resartus. The conception of Romanticism as a historical age is only partly based on the works of the wide range of authors writing between 1780 and 1830 and is instead heavily shaped by a nostalgic look at an imaginary past untouched by mechanization, modern forms of media networks, and knowledge production as based on systematic organization. Carlyle’s analysis can be read as a conservative intervention against the signs of the times, against a period characterized by a fundamental shift in knowledge formation. Through the growth of periodical publishing and the development of scientific disciplines, knowledge had become part of a complex media ecology, a network consisting of media, institutions, and practices. Opposed to this, Carlyle creates an ideal of the individual effort as the only and true source of greatness, thus forging a highly ideological and reactionary idea of the solitary genius as a cultural ideal. As an antidote to what he perceives as a mechanization of culture indebted to revolutionary thought, Carlyle invents an a-political form of Romanticism. In his novel Sartor Resartus, however, Carlyle radically challenges the uniform concept of literature. The novel’s complex composition both incorporates and contradicts the conservative ideals he expresses in his essays, making it a challenging and ambiguous work of art that pushes boundaries. Thus, Thomas Carlyle’s early works mark the beginning of a view of Romanticism as a historical period that would become characteristic for most of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. Simultaneously, Carlyle has also provided the greatest possible theoretical and artistic challenge for this concept in his groundbreaking novel Sartor Resartus.

Notes

1 The history of the retrospective definition of the concept of Romanticism from the late nineteenth century via Lovejoy and Wellek to the revisionist studies by McGann and Mellor is well known. For an overview of the historical development see Faflak and, in a very brief form, my “Romanticism and Theory” (2–7).

2 Sartor Resartus was first published in serial form in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834; it was published in book form in America in 1836. The first English edition appeared in 1838.

3 For an overview of the main tendencies of the 1820s, see Esterhammer.

4 For a thorough investigation of Carlyle’s engagement with German philosophy and literature, see Vida.

5 For the traditional approach perspective, see Abrams’s book Natural Supernaturalism, which quotes Carlyle in its title. For the revisionist approach in the 1980s, see McGann, who also initiated the New Historicist approach to Romantic Studies.

6 Harris comes to a different conclusion in his reading of “Signs of the Times”; although he too stresses the conservative tone, he also points out that the essay is relatively “moderate in tone” (453).