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Summary
Thomas Carlyle was a great literary figure in the Victorian age. His work burns with ethical enthusiasm and incisive force that exerted a great influence on the idealistic reaction against the superficiality and materialism of the Victorian age. Sartor Resartus is a German professor who has written a philosophical book on clothes, their origin, and their influence. Book I attacks scientific contentions and their basis in empirical philosophy. Matter, Carlyle asserts (Paraphrasing the German philosopher, Fichte) is not man's master but his servant. Book III describes Carlyle's spiritual journey from "The everlasting No" through "The Centre of Indifference" to "The Everlasting Yea". Initially, he was a slave to impersonal meaningless materialism. He comes to realize that the physical body is simply the clothing of cosmic divinity. Book I further observes that institutions of society are but the clothing of "the social idea". Such institutions (Church, State, economic system) have been revered in their outward garments, while men forget the ideal truth behind them. Carlyle prophesies the disappearance of these outworn, superficial institutions, with a new Golden Age rising like Phoenix from the ashes.
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Critical Analysis
Carlyle, like Coleridge, was impatient with the cause and effect philosophy of the eighteenth century and both of them valued German idealism as providing the basis of vital and practical religion. The idea of Sartor Resartus is from Swift (whose Tale of a Tub supplies the tailor metaphor). But Carlyle makes use of it to express the doctrines of German transcendentalism. He is concerned to pierce through the exterior to the inward essence. The whole book is written in a tone of intense and imaginative irony. Carlyle's prose style is eccentric and powerful. There are several elements borrowed from German, but on the whole, it is personal. This powerful style recalling that of the Hebrew prophets were surprised by its lyrical charm, its continual coining of new words and expressions, its personification of abstract qualities. It is imbued with an intense, life animated by rugged humor and by the gift of comic exaggeration.