‘Custom’, as the central personage of Sartor Resartus says, ‘doth make dotards of us all.’ One of the first things overlooked by customary readings of the text as a secular scripture for the Victorians is the exuberant play of mind and trenchant insight. There is, for example, this en passant encapsulation of a complex process of historical change: ‘He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world; he had invented the Art of Printing.’ Or consider the chilling prediction concerning the ‘two Sects which … divide the more unsettled portion of the British People; and agitate that ever-vexed country’. The roots of these sects ‘extend through the entire structure of Society … striving to separate and isolate it into two contradictory, uncommunicating masses’, which ‘it seems probable … will one day part England between them; each recruiting itself from the intermediate ranks, till there be none left to enlist on either side’.

But the most important part of the process of recovery would involve the recognition that Sartor Resartus is essentially a work of imaginative fiction that demands a more sensitive and complex response than that in which its formal and stylistic husks are stripped away to reveal the doctrinal kernels. Carlyle would have seen the attempt to turn him into a literary artist, let alone a writer of imaginative fiction, as an impertinence. But this is exactly what must be done in the late twentieth century if Sartor Resartus, his one sustained and fully realized piece of imaginative fiction, is again to be recognized as one of the master-works of nineteenth-century English literature. When so considered, Sartor can be seen as a work that has less in common with such classic Victorian prose-of-thought texts as Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Ruskin’s Unto this Last, or even Carlyle’s own Past and Present and On Heroes and Hero-Worship than it does with such problematic fictions as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (in both works the informing Romantic content is severely qualified by the narratorial form through which it is presented to the reader); Melville’s Moby-Dick (both works employ uncertain, self-conscious narrators who are energetically and sometimes comically attempting to discover coherence and meaning in their material and to say something important about ultimate issues); Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (both works use an alienated anti-hero to launch attacks on Utilitarian beliefs and values); and even Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (the prophet figures of both works are rebellious and isolated, oscillate between constructive and destructive impulses towards society, and speak in a ‘hyperbolic hortatory voice’3).

[2]

The ‘Getting Under Way’ chapter in Book II of Sartor Resartus contains some shrewd observations concerning the problem of vocation in the nineteenth century: ‘To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward Capability specially is.’ By 1821, when he was 26, Thomas Carlyle, after much anxious reflection, had discovered his vocation. He would not be a clergyman, a lawyer or a teacher; he would be a writer: he ‘must live by Literature, at all hazards’.4 But there is a considerable difference between identifying a vocation and becoming launched in it; to quote again from Sartor: ‘Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference!’ Large questions remained: what would Carlyle write about and in what way? What would be his subjects, his style, and his form of expression?

One possibility that Carlyle began to explore was prose fiction. His father, a strict Calvinist, would not tolerate anything fictitious in books and had forbidden his children to read imaginative literature. But when young Thomas was sent away to school, he boarded with a family whose lending library included novels and romances; during the next years he read through Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Swift; and he later read Walter Scott’s novels as they appeared. By the time he decided on a career as a writer, Carlyle’s ambition was to write prose fiction, which (partly owing to his reading of Goethe and Schiller) he considered superior to history for the revelation of truth.

Carlyle’s first known attempt at fiction was ‘Cruthers and Johnson’, a tale of friendship set in the eighteenth century and recalling that century’s fiction in its narrative method and mood. The story was written early in 1822. In December of the same year, in a letter to Jane Welsh, Carlyle described his plans for a far more ambitious fiction, an epistolary novel in the mode of Wertherian romance. The hero of the projected novel would speak forth his sufferings—‘not in the puling Lake-style—but with a tongue of fire—sharp, sarcastic, apparently unfeeling’ yet at the same time revealing ‘a mind of lofty thoughts and generous affections smarting under the torment of its own overnobleness, and ready to break in pieces by the force of its own energies’. It would be evident that the hero ‘cannot long exist in this to him most blasted, waste and lonely world’. Carlyle proposed to Jane that he would supply the hero’s letters while she would indite those of his female interlocutor. But the scheme never got off the ground. One reason was circumstantial: Carlyle found that he and Jane needed to consult together every day, which they were unable to do. The other reason was subjective: ‘I grew affrighted and chilled at the aspect of the Public.’5

Carlyle’s next fictional project involved no incapacitating premonitions of the Public’s disapprobation: during 1823–4 he worked on a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The process of translating the novel proved laborious and irksome: ‘There are touches of the very highest most etherial genius in it; but diluted with floods of insipidity, which even I would not have written for the world.’ ‘There is poetry in the book, and prose, prose forever. When I read of players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the “moral world”, I render it into grammatical English—with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyaena. … [I] could sometimes fall down and worship [Goethe]; at other times I could kick him out of the room.’6 Both these comments suggest how uncongenial Carlyle found Goethe’s patient accumulation of realistic detail. As Henry James was to note in his 1865 review of a reissue of Carlyle’s translation: ‘In few other works is so profound a meaning enveloped in so common a form. The slow, irresistible action of this latent significance is an almost awful phenomenon.’7

That Carlyle was impatient with Goethe’s realistic method is clear from Wotton Reinfred, which novel he began writing in autumn 1826. The subject is similar to Goethe’s—a young hero’s search for transcendent wisdom—but the means are very different. Carlyle’s unfinished work is a didactic, fabular novel of ideas which eschews realistic modes of narrative and characterization in its impatience to air thematic issues of overriding import. It is not surprising that Carlyle broke off composition of Wotton and that another story (‘Illudo Chartis’) begun around this time, which has a Wertherian hero and employs the device of an editor as a frame for the narrative, was also abandoned. By the end of the 1820s Carlyle was having growing doubts about the status and efficacy of fiction, and thinking hard about alternative means through which to realize himself as a writer.

These doubts had hardened into dicta by 1832, when Carlyle wrote his essay, ‘Biography’. Even in the highest works of art, he argued, one’s interest was apt to be ‘strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort’. The same was true ‘through the whole range of what is called Literature’.