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!
CHAPTER 10: PAUSE
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.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I: INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY
Story of George Fox the Quaker; and his perennial suit of Leather. A man God-possessed, witnessing for spiritual freedom and manhood.
CHAPTER 2: CHURCH-CLOTHES
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.
CHAPTER 3: SYMBOLS
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.
CHAPTER 4: HELOTAGE
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.
CHAPTER 5: THE PHŒNIX
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.
CHAPTER 6: OLD CLOTHES
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.
CHAPTER 7: ORGANIC FILAMENTS
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!
CHAPTER 8: NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM
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.
CHAPTER 9: CIRCUMSPECTIVE
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.
CHAPTER 10: THE DANDIACAL BODY
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.
CHAPTER II: TAILORS
Injustice done to Tailors, actual and metaphorical. Their rights and great services will one day be duly recognised.
CHAPTER 12: FAREWELL
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.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
AN 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).
BOOK I
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-excr
ement], 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.
Wandering Jew: legendary figure; having refused Christ permission to rest at his house while carrying the Cross, he was condemned to wander until Judgement Day.
Allgemeine Zeitung: ‘Universal Gazette.’
Wahngasse: ‘Fantasy-lane.’
Orte … Airts: points of the compass.
speculum or watch-tower: presumably an error. Speculum is Latin for mirror; specula for watch-tower.
Schlosskirche: ‘Castle church.’
Ach, mein Lieber: ‘Ah, my dear sir.’
Boötes … Hunting Dogs: northern constellations; Boötes: a man with a crook.
coverlid: ‘coverlet’ in later editions.
Rouge-et-Noir: a card game played at a table with red and black compartments.
Rabenstein: raven’s stone; the gallows.
mein Werther: literary for ‘my good friend’; after Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
Blücher Boots: half-boots named after the Prussian general Gebhard von Blücher.
Erdbebungen: literally ‘earth-vibrations’; changed to the standard ‘Erdbeben’ in later editions.
Das glaub’ ich: ‘I believe that.’
Pedro Garcia’s … Bag of Doubloons: in an anecdote told in the preface to Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715–35), two students chance upon a stone bearing the inscription ‘Here lies interred the soul of… Pedro Garcia’. One of them laughs at what he takes to be a joke. The other digs beneath the stone and finds a bag containing a hundred pieces of gold and a card appointing the finder the heir of Pedro Garcia. Lesage advises the reader to keep this story in mind in reading the adventures of Gil Blas and not to miss the moral concealed beneath the surface of the narrative.
Baptist … wild honey: John the Baptist; Matthew 3: 4.
remote echo: ‘echo’ in later editions.
Chancery suitors: those petitioning the court of the Lord Chancellor, until 1873 the second highest court in England.
Seven Sleepers: seven Christian youths of Ephesus who were said to have slept in a cave for nearly two hundred years, thus escaping the persecutions of the third and fourth centuries.
Esprit des Lois … Esprit de Coutumes … Esprit de Costumes: ‘Spirit of the Laws … Spirit of Customs … Spirit of Costumes.’
Cause-and-effect Philosophy: allusion to British empirical thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Adam-Kadmon: ‘the first man’, a cabbalistic term.
Nifl and Muspel … of the antique North: i.e. of Scandinavian mythology.
Orbis Pictus: ‘The World in Pictures’, an illustrated school-book by Amos Comenius, was published in Nuremberg in 1658; Orbis Vestitus: ‘The World in Clothes’.
King Nibelung: hero of a German epic of the Middle Ages; twelve days should be four.
chlamides … philibegs … Gallia Braccata … fardingales: short cloaks worn by Greek soldiers; kilts; Gauls wearing breeches; farthingales (hooped petticoats).
Liverpool Steam-carriages: the second English railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, had been opened in 1830.
Teusinke: a bell-shaped girdle.
Faust’s Mantle: in Goethe’s Faust, part I (1808), Faust is carried through the air on a mantle provided by Mephistopheles (scene iv).
the Apostle’s Dream: Acts 10: 9–18.
too, must we: ‘also, we have to’ in later editions.
Fortunate Islands: in Greek mythology, islands to which heroes passed without suffering death.
Cogito ergo sum: ‘I think, therefore I am’; the famous phrase of René Descartes, in his Discours de la méthode (1637).
Moscow Retreats: Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812.
the Sphinx’s secret: the Sphinx, a fabulous monster, put to death all who could not answer her riddle: ‘what animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?’ When Oedipus gave the correct answer—man—the Sphinx killed herself.
the Living: ‘Living’ in later editions.
In Being’s floods … seest Him by: Goethe’s Faust, 1. i. 501–9.
a forked straddling animal with bandy legs: The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), ch. 11; by Swift and his fellow Scriblerians.
a Buck, or Blood, or Macaroni, or Incroyable, or Dandy: as used here, more or less synonymous terms for modish young men.
Haupt- und Staats-Action … Pickleherring-Farce: stock German tragedy and comedy of the seventeenth century.
the tables … are dissolved: Horace, Satires, 11. i. 86.
infandum! infandum!: ‘unspeakable, unspeakable.’
Bed of Justice: the Lit de Justice was the throne upon which the King of France sat when he attended Parliament, at which time he would compel the registration of his edicts.
benefit of clergy: the right of the clergy to be tried by an ecclesiastical court; later extended to anyone who could read.
Yorick Sterne’s words: words in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–7), v. vii.
Descendentalism: a coinage, to express the antithesis of Transcendentalism.
Shekinah: Talmudic name for the symbol of the divine presence.
Charlemagne-Mantle: the magnificent robe of the Emperor Charlemagne (c.742–814), said to be preserved at St Peter’s, Rome.
the wisest of this age: Goethe; the quotation is from Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, ch. x.
in partibus infidelium: ‘in the country of the unbelievers.’
the Arabian Tale: ‘The Greek King and Douban the Physician’, in the Arabian Nights.
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