Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 2

glaring defects of the great German writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves among the mere minuti? of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; as in the many amusing criticisms which are passed upon Teufelsdr?ckh's volume as a sort of "mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded;" in the burlesque parade of the professor's "omniverous reading" (e.g., Book I, Chap. V); and in the whole amazing episode of the "six considerable paper bags," out of the chaotic contents of which the distracted editor in search of "biographic documents" has to make what he can. Nor is this quite all. Teufelsdr?ckh is further utilised as the mouthpiece of some of Carlyle's more extravagant speculations and of such ideas as he wished to throw out as it were tentatively, and without himself being necessarily held responsible for them. There is thus much point as well as humour in those sudden turns of the argument, when, after some exceptionally wild outburst on his eidolon's part, Carlyle sedately reproves him for the fantastic character or dangerous tendency of his opinions.
It is in connection with the dramatic scheme of the book that the third element, that of autobiography, enters into its texture, for the story of Teufelsdr?ckh is very largely a transfigured version of the story of Carlyle himself. In saying this, I am not of course thinking mainly of Carlyle's outer life. This, indeed, is in places freely drawn upon, as the outer lives of Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoi are drawn upon in "David Copperfield," "The Mill on the Floss," "Anna Karénina." Entepfuhl is only another name for Ecclefechan; the picture of little Diogenes eating his supper out-of-doors on fine summer evenings, and meanwhile watching the sun sink behind the western hills, is clearly a loving transcript from memory; even the idyllic episode of Blumine may be safely traced back to a romance of Carlyle's youth. But to investigate the connection at these and other points between the mere externals of the two careers is a matter of little more than curious interest. It is because it incorporates and reproduces so much of Carlyle's inner history that the story of Teufelsdr?ckh is really important. Spiritually considered, the whole narrative is, in fact, a "symbolic myth," in which the writer's personal trials and conflicts are depicted with little change save in setting and accessories. Like Teufelsdr?ckh, Carlyle while still a young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he had been bred; like Teufelsdr?ckh, he had thereupon passed into the "howling desert of infidelity;" like Teufelsdr?ckh, he had known all the agonies and anguish of a long period of blank scepticism and insurgent despair, during which, turn whither he would, life responded with nothing but negations to every question and appeal. And as to Teufelsdr?ckh in the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer in Paris, so to Carlyle in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, there had come a moment of sudden and marvellous illumination, a mystical crisis from which he had emerged a different man. The parallelism is so obvious and so close as to leave no room for doubt that the story of Teufelsdr?ckh is substantially a piece of spiritual autobiography.
This admitted, the question arises whether Carlyle had any purpose, beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiences for the human setting of his philosophy. It seems evident that he had. As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than a merely personal interest and meaning. He wrote of himself because he saw in himself a type of his restless and much-troubled epoch; because he knew that in a broad sense his history was the history of thousands of other young men in the generation to which he belonged. The age which followed upon the vast upheaval of the Revolution was one of widespread turmoil and perplexity. Men felt themselves to be wandering aimlessly "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." The old order had collapsed in shapeless ruin; but the promised Utopia had not been realised to take its place. In many directions the forces of reaction were at work. Religion, striving to maintain itself upon the dogmatic creeds of the past, was rapidly petrifying into a mere "dead Letter of Religion," from which all the living spirit had fled; and those who could not nourish themselves on hearsay and inherited formula