Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 3

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 knew not where to look for the renewal
of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian
enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the
revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed,
and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and
denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and
thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy on many hearts.
It was for the men of this "sad time" that Carlyle wrote Teufelsdröckh's
story; and he wrote it not merely to depict the far-reaching
consequences of their pessimism but also to make plain to them their
true path out of it. He desired to exhibit to his age the real nature of the
strange malady from which it was suffering in order that he might
thereupon proclaim the remedy.
What, then, is the moral significance of Carlyle's "symbolic myth"?
What are the supreme lessons which he uses it to convey?
We must begin by understanding his diagnosis. For him, all the evils of
the time could ultimately be traced back to their common source in
what may be briefly described as its want of real religion. Of churches
and creeds there were plenty; of living faith little or nothing was left.

Men had lost all vital sense of God in the world; and because of this,
they had taken up a fatally wrong attitude to life. They looked at it
wholly from the mechanical point of view, and judged it by merely
utilitarian standards. The "body-politic" was no longer inspired by any
"soul-politic." Men, individually and in the mass, cared only for
material prosperity, sought only outward success, made the pursuit of
happiness the end and aim of their being. The divine meaning of virtue,
the infinite nature of duty, had been forgotten, and morality had been
turned into a sort of ledger-philosophy, based upon calculations of
profit and loss.
It was thus that Carlyle read the signs of the times. In such
circumstances what was needed? Nothing less than a spiritual rebirth.
Men must abandon their wrong attitude to life, and take up the right
attitude. Everything hinged on that. And that they might take up this
right attitude it was necessary first that they should be convinced of
life's essential spirituality, and cease in consequence to seek its
meaning and test its value on the plane of merely material things.
Carlyle thus throws passionate emphasis upon religion as the only
saving power. But it must be noted that he does not suggest a return to
any of the dogmatic creeds of the past. Though once the expression of a
living faith, these were now for him mere lifeless formulas. Nor has he
any new dogmatic creed to offer in their place. That mystical crisis
which had broken the spell of the Everlasting No was in a strict
sense--he uses the word himself--a conversion. But it was not a
conversion in the theological sense, for it did not involve the
acceptance of any specific articles of faith. It was simply a complete
change of front; the protest of his whole nature, in a suddenly aroused
mood of indignation and defiance, against the "spirit which denies;" the
assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which had so long kept
him trembling and whimpering before the facts of existence. But from
that change of front came presently the vivid apprehension of certain
great truths which his former mood had thus far concealed from him;
and in these truths he found the secret of that right attitude to life in the
discovery of which lay men's only hope of salvation from the unrest
and melancholy of their time.

From this point of view the burden of Carlyle's message to his
generation will be readily understood. Men were going wrong because
they started with the thought of self, and made satisfaction of self the
law of their lives; because, in consequence, they regarded happiness as
the chief object of pursuit and the one thing worth striving for; because,
under the influence of the current rationalism, they tried to escape from
their spiritual perplexities through logic and speculation. They had,
therefore, to set themselves right upon all these matters. They had to
learn that not self-satisfaction but self-renunciation is the key to life
and its true law; that we have no prescriptive claim to happiness and no
business to quarrel with the universe if it withholds it from us; that the
way out of pessimism lies, not through reason, but through honest work,
steady adherence to the simple duty which each day