One must believe because it is too demoralizing not to. ‘Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all’, as Emily Dickinson wryly remarked in her little poem on the breakdown of traditional Christian beliefs during the nineteenth century. In this passage, as in other utterances of Teufelsdröckh, one is once again reminded of Twilight of the Idols, this time of what Nietzsche said about Teufelsdröckh’s creator:

Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that … [Carlyle] requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself—that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English … At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be one.20

[6]

There is really no need to go outside the pages of Sartor Resartus to call attention to a factitious strain in Teufelsdröckh. Carlyle has placed within his text a number of features designed to do just that—chief among them the ever-doubting Editor. In the last chapter of Sartor, the Editor asks a blunt question: ‘How could a man occasionally of keen insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely on the absurd?’ On the literal level, the question concerns Teufelsdröckh and the strange book, an ‘enormous, amorphous Plumpudding, more like a Scottish Haggis’, he has ‘kneaded for his fellow mortals’. But it is also apparent that through the Editor, the Scottish author of Sartor Resartus is challenging the reader to think about his experience of the text and to seek satisfactory answers to the question.

Traditional readers of Sartor Resartus have had no difficulty in providing answers that presuppose a constructive and communicative authorial intention. C. F. Harrold, for example, argued that Carlyle’s method was of great value for several practical reasons: it ‘permitted him to indulge the wayward, boisterously ironic freedom of his genius’; it enabled him to present the unpopular and misunderstood subject of German transcendentalism ‘without the formidable apparatus and the appearance of metaphysical inquiry’; and it united ‘the didactic aim of the philosophic discourse with the human interest of the biographical novel’.21 Others have argued that Sartor’s extravagant style, the ‘rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, [and] quaint tricksy turns’, is the appropriate linguistic vehicle for a thematic tenor concerned with the need for a revolution of consciousness, in which Fantasy would overthrow the tyranny of rational modes of thought and discourse. It has also been urged that the hoax aspect of Sartor and its other bizarre features do not destroy the serious import of Carlyle’s message, but make it more effective ‘for the very simple reason that it is not a bleakly expressed, dull, moralizing statement’.22 Similarly, the ‘humorous’ tone of the book has been said persistently to defeat ‘any potential movement toward despair. The humor, the essentially friendly and sympathetic rather than satiric laughter that Teufelsdröckh and his Editor inspire, keeps the reader constantly in mind of the fact that the ultimate aim of the book is not Denial but Affirmation.’23

The strategies of reconstruction and recuperation, which might be called examples of the husk-and-kernel approach to Sartor Resartus, are more positive answers to the question posed by the Editor than the one he himself goes on to posit. Why did Teufelsdröckh resolve to emit his thoughts ‘in a shape bordering so closely on the absurd’?

Our conjecture has sometimes been that perhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it. Seems it not conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor’s, where so much bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone, Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with his characteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and ever without success, he at last desperately dashes his brush, full of all colours, against the canvass, to try whether it will paint Foam? With all his stillness, there were perhaps in Teufelsdröckh desperation enough for this.

This answer stresses the expressive rather than the communicative nature of Teufelsdröckh’s utterance, which is said to be prompted by internal necessity rather than by conscious artistic choice. Any hesitation one might have in taking the Editor’s conjecture about Die Kleider as simultaneously an authorial comment on Sartor Resartus is dispelled by Carlyle’s comments about his book in letters to two of its most sympathetic early readers. Could it be, Emerson asked his Scottish friend, that ‘this humour’ of Teufelsdröckh’s ‘proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience’? Carlyle replied that he spoke correctly: ‘I have no known public, am alone under the Heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly Space; add only that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I in these mad times could conveniently hit upon.’24 When John Stuart Mill wrote to Carlyle about Sartor he wondered whether his ‘mode of writing, between sarcasm or irony and earnest’, should have been so unrelievedly employed. Could not things be ‘as well or better said in a more direct way? The same doubt has occasionally occurred to me respecting much of your phraseology.’ Carlyle’s answer was that

You are right about my style … I think often of the matter myself; and see only that I cannot yet see. Irony is a sharp instrument; but ill to handle without cutting yourself. I cannot justify, yet can too well explain what sets me so often on it of late: it is my singularly anomalous position to the world,—and, if you will, my own singularly unreasonable temper. I never know or can even guess what or who my audience is, or whether I have any audience: thus too naturally I adjust myself on the Devil-may-care principle. Besides I have under all my gloom genuine feeling of the ludicrous; and could have been the merriest of men, had I not been the sickest & saddest.25

Both these answers serve as reminders that the 1820s and 1830s were difficult times for writers who wished to combat the increasing dominance of the rational scientific intellect and of Utilitarian modes of thought and feeling with the great Romantic positives of Fantasy and Intuition. In his essay on Milton of 1825, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay had observed that in the modern age Romantic prophets were doomed to isolation and probably to derangement. ‘As civilisation advances’, said Macaulay, ‘poetry’, that is, the creative and imaginative faculties of the mind, ‘almost necessarily declines.’ These faculties flourished during the childhood of the race and, like children, visionaries had the ability ‘to abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion’. In modern society, however, the truth essential to poetry could only be ‘the truth of madness’, requiring ‘a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect’:

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority … And it is well if, after all his sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or a modern ruin.