Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) (42 page)

Teufelsdröckh’s School. His Education. How the ever-flowing Kuhbach speaks of Time and Eternity. The Hinterschlag Gymnasium: rude Boys; and pedant Professors. The need of true Teachers, and their due recognition. Father Andreas dies; and Teufelsdröckh learns the secret of his birth: His reflections thereon. The Nameless University. Statistics of Imposture much wanted. Bitter fruits of Rationalism: Teufelsdröckh’s religious difficulties. The young Englishman Herr Towgood. Modern Friendship.

The grand thaumaturgic Art of Thought. Difficulty in fitting Capability to Opportunity, or of getting under way. The advantage of Hunger and Bread-Studies. Teufelsdröckh has to enact the stern monodrama of
No object and no rest
. Sufferings as Auscultator. Given up as a man of genius. Zähdarm House. Intolerable presumption of young men. Irony and its consequences. Teufelsdröckh’s Epitaph on Count Zähdarm.

Teufelsdröckh gives up his Profession. The heavenly mystery of Love. Teufelsdröckh’s feeling of worship towards women. First and only love. Blumine. Happy hearts and free tongues. The infinite nature of Fantasy. Love’s joyful progress; sudden dissolution; and final catastrophe.

Teufelsdröckh’s demeanour thereupon. Turns pilgrim. A last wistful look on native Entepfuhl: Sunset amongst primitive Mountains. Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four. Thoughts on View-hunting. Wanderings and Sorrowings.

Loss of Hope, and of Belief. Profit-and-Loss Philosophy. Teufelsdröckh in his darkness and despair still clings to Truth and follows Duty. Inexpressible pains and fears of Unbelief. Fever-crisis: Protest against the Everlasting No: Baphometic Fire-baptism.

Teufelsdröckh turns now outwardly to the
Not-me
; and finds wholesomer food. Ancient Cities: Mystery of their origin and growth: Invisible inheritances and possessions. Power and virtue of a true Book. Wagram Battlefield: War. Great Scenes beheld by the Pilgrim: Great Events, and Great Men. Napoleon, a divine missionary, preaching
La carrière ouverte aux talens
. Teufelsdröckh at the North Cape: Modern means of self-defence. Gunpowder and Duelling. The Pilgrim, despising his miseries, reaches the Centre of Indifference.

Temptations in the Wilderness: Victory over the Tempter. Annihilation of Self. Belief in God, and love to Man. The Origin of Evil, a problem ever requiring to be solved anew: Teufelsdröckh’s solution. Love of Happiness a vain whim: A Higher in man than Love of Happiness. The Everlasting Yea. Worship of Sorrow. Voltaire: his task now finished. Conviction worthless, impossible, without Conduct. The true Ideal, the Actual: Up and work!

Conversion; a spiritual attainment peculiar to the modern Era. Teufelsdröckh accepts Authorship as his divine calling. The scope of the command
Thou shalt not steal
.—Editor begins to suspect the authenticity of the Biographical documents; and abandons them for the great Clothes volume. Result of the preceding ten Chapters: Insight into the character of Teufelsdröckh: His fundamental beliefs, and how he was forced to seek and find them.

Story of George Fox the Quaker; and his perennial suit of Leather. A man God-possessed, witnessing for spiritual freedom and manhood.

Church-Clothes defined; the Forms under which the Religious Principle is temporarily embodied. Outward Religion originates by Society: Society becomes possible by Religion. The condition of Church-Clothes in our time.

The benignant efficacies of Silence and Secrecy. Symbols; revelations of the Infinite in the Finite: Man everywhere encompassed by them; lives and works by them. Theory of Motive-millwrights, a false account of human nature. Symbols of an extrinsic value; as Banners, Standards: Of intrinsic value; as Works of Art, Lives and Deaths of Heroic men. Religious Symbols; Christianity. Symbols hallowed by
Time; but finally defaced and desecrated. Many superannuated Symbols in our time, needing removal.

Heuschrecke’s Malthusian Tract, and Teufelsdröckh’s marginal notes thereon. The true workman, for daily bread, or spiritual bread, to be honoured; and no other. The real privation of the Poor not poverty or toil, but ignorance. Over-population: With a world like ours and wide as ours, can there be too many men? Emigration.

Teufelsdröckh considers Society as
dead;
its soul (Religion) gone, its body (existing Institutions) going. Utilitarianism, needing little farther preaching, is now in full activity of destruction.—Teufelsdröckh would yield to the Inevitable, accounting that the best: Assurance of a fairer Living Society, arising, Phœnix-like, out of the ruins of the old dead one. Before that Phœnix death-birth is accomplished, long time, struggle, and suffering must intervene.

Courtesy due from all men to all men: The Body of Man a Revelation in the Flesh. Teufelsdröckh’s respect for Old Clothes, as the “Ghosts of Life.” Walk in Monmouth Street, and meditations there.

Destruction and Creation ever proceed together; and organic filaments of the Future are even now spinning. Wonderful connection of each man with all men; and of each generation with all generations, before and after: Mankind is One. Sequence and progress of all human work, whether of creation or destruction, from age to age.—Titles, hitherto derived from Fighting, must give way to others. Kings will remain and their title. Political Freedom, not to be attained by any mechanical contrivance. Hero-worship, perennial amongst men; the cornerstone of polities in the Future. Organic filaments of the New Religion: Newspapers and Literature. Let the faithful soul take courage!

Deep significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely miraculous course of human history.

Recapitulation. Editor congratulates the few British readers who have accompanied Teufelsdröckh through all his speculations. The true use of the
Sartor Resartus
, to exhibit the Wonder of daily life and common things; and to show that all Forms are but Clothes, and temporary. Practical inferences enough will follow.

The Dandy defined. The Dandiacal Sect a new modification of the primeval superstition Self-Worship: How to be distinguished. Their Sacred Books (Fashionable Novels) unreadable. Dandyism’s Articles of Faith.—Brotherhood of Poor-Slaves; vowed to perpetual Poverty; worshippers of Earth; distinguished by peculiar costume and diet. Picture of a Poor-Slave Household; and of a Dandiacal. Teufelsdröckh fears these two Sects may spread, till they part all England between them, and then frightfully collide.

Injustice done to Tailors, actual and metaphorical. Their rights and great services will one day be duly recognised.

Teufelsdröckh’s strange manner of speech, but resolute, truthful character: His purpose seemingly to proselytise, to unite the wakeful earnest in these dark times. Letter from Hofrath Heuschrecke announcing that Teufelsdröckh has disappeared from Weissnichtwo. Editor guesses he will appear again. Friendly Farewell.

A
N
exhaustively annotated edition of
Sartor Resartus
, with its vast vocabulary and dense allusiveness, would require thousands of notes. To keep the notes to this edition within reasonable bounds we have, in general, annotated words only if not found in the
Concise Oxford Dictionary;
foreign terms only if not already translated in the text; and allusions only when the context calls attention to them. We have also noted the more significant revisions made in editions of
Sartor
after the
Fraser’s Magazine
version; see the Note on the Text, above. A separate glossary of people and places is designed to reduce the number of annotations required.

We are much indebted to several previous editors of
Sartor Resartus
: Archibald MacMechan (1896), J. A. S. Barrett (1897), P. C. Parr (1913), Clark S. Northup (1921), William Savage Johnson (1924), and Charles Frederick Harrold (1937).

Mein Vermächtniss … die Zeit
: one of the epigraphs to Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels
(1821–9); in one of Carlyle’s translations: ‘My inheritance, how wide and fair! / Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir.’

How the apples were got in
: allusion to John Wolcot’s satirical poem on George III, ‘The Apple Dumplings and a King’ (
The Works of Peter Pindar
[1812]); unable to find any seam in a dumpling, the monarch asks, ‘How, how the devil got the Apple in?’

Social Contract … Standard of Taste
: Rousseau’s
Social Contract
appeared in 1762; Hume’s
Of the Standard of Taste
in 1757. The other subjects mentioned here had also been treated in various ‘disquisitions’.

Shakespeare says: Hamlet
, IV. iv. 37.

Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris
: three political
causes célèbres
of the late 1820s and early 1830s. A bill to remove civil disabilities from Catholics was passed by Parliament in 1829. The Reform Bill of 1832 largely abolished rotten boroughs, that is, electoral districts which had come to
contain very few voters but which continued to send representatives to Parliament. The Revolt of Paris refers to the three-day revolution of July 1830, which overthrew Charles X.

Höret ihr Herren und lasset’s Euch sagen
: ‘Listen, gentlemen, and let it be told you’; the first line of a folk-song, supposed to be uttered by the bellman on his nightly rounds.

Our Humorist … pots of ale
: Samuel Butler,
Hudibras
(1663–78), 1. i. 121–2.

vigorously enough
: ‘vigorously’ in later editions.

Many shall run … increased
: Daniel 12: 4.

stinted
: ‘stunted’ in later editions.

Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo
: ‘Professor Devil’s-excrement of Know-not-where.’

von Diog…. Weissnichtwo, 1833
: ‘by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh [Born-of-God Devil’s-excrement], Juris Utriusque Doctor [Doctor of Civil and Canon Law], etc., Silence and Co., Know-not-where, 1833.’ In later editions, 1833 is changed to 1831.

Weissnichtwo’sche Anzeiger
: ‘Weissnichtwo Advertiser.’

Möchte es … auch im Brittischen Boden gedeihen
: ‘May it also thrive on British soil.’

whose seedfield … is Time
: adapted from a phrase (’mein Acker ist die Zeit’) in one of the epigraphs to Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels
. See above, note to the epigraph on
Sartor
.

the whole Parties of
: ‘all party-divisions in’ in later editions.

Waterloo-Crackers
: large fire-crackers made to celebrate the British victory over France in 1815.
Fraser’s Magazine
was noted for its irreverence and satirical pyrotechnics.

Hofrath Heuschrecke
: ‘Councillor Grasshopper.’

the Family, the National
: both these publications were typical of a number of ‘libraries’, encyclopaedic or periodical in character, some of which were published under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

Oliver Yorke
: pseudonym of William Maginn (1793–1842), editor of
Fraser’s Magazine
. But footnotes signed ‘O. Y.’ are presumably by Carlyle himself.

wear
: weir.

Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas
: ‘Plato is a friend, but truth is a greater friend.’

Zum Grünen Ganse
: ‘The Green Goose’; changed to ‘Zur Grünen Gans’ in later editions.

Bleibt doch ein echter Spass- und Galgen-vogel
: ‘He will always be a true joker and a gallows-bird.’

Wo steckt der Schalk?
: ‘Where is the rascal hiding?’ In later editions, ‘Wo steckt doch’ (Where on earth).

Sansculottism
: philosophical radicalism; literally, ‘without breeches’. During the French Revolution the term was used to describe radical republicans among the Paris poor who gave up the knee-breeches associated with the
ancien régime
and adopted trousers as a symbol of the new era.