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

his
own teaching. Yet, deep as that indebtedness was, and anxious as he
might be to acknowledge it, he was as a humourist keenly alive to
certain glaring defects of the great German writers; to their frequent
tendency to lose themselves among the mere minutiæ 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
Teufelsdröckh'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.
Teufelsdröckh 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
Teufelsdröckh 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 Teufelsdröckh 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 Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle while still
a young man had broken away from the old religious creed in which he
had been bred; like Teufelsdröckh, he had thereupon passed into the
"howling desert of infidelity;" like Teufelsdröckh, 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
Teufelsdröckh 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 Teufelsdröckh 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