Criticism of Civilization in the Structure of Sartor Resartus

Abstract

"Nothing in Sartor Resartus is fact," says Carlyle; "symbolical myth all...." That seems sufficient justification for examining the structure and meaning of the work in terms of mythical design as well as in terms of philosophy or biography. Carlyle himself gives the reader a characteristic nudge: "Apart from its multifarious sections and subdivisions," he says, "the Work naturally falls into two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through the other" (34). Taine takes a less charitable view; his Gallic love of order outraged by such a spectacle, he protests as many another reader has protested, that "the symmetrical constructions of human art and thought, dispersed and upset, are piled under his hands into a vast mass of shapeless ruins, from the top of which he gesticulates and fights, like a conquering savage." Carlyle, of course, has ironically built such criticisms of his "one scarcely pardonable fault ... an almost total want of arrangement" (34) into his own book. "Our Professor," says his earnest English editor, "like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do" (71). The apparently confused structure and chaotic jumble of ideas and experiences in Sartor, however, are a true symbolic reflection of the world, an objectification of the problems Teufelsdröckh, or mankind, faces and which he must understand in order to feel that he bears any significant relationship to it. As Carlyle sees them, the symmetrical constructions of human art and thought are indeed falling into shapeless ruins: "In our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief," he says, "the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil" (164).