Carlyle calls Sartor Resartus a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of God." He teaches us to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:—
"It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel
will be rabid."
The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of Sartor
Resartus; but they responded to its effective presentation of the
gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy.
Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:—
"Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer… The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of …"
The French Revolution.—In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third volume of his historic masterpiece, The French Revolution, he handed the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a French hunter, if a nobleman, "to kill not more than two serfs."
Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes; the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames. We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.
Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy that seems to be acted before our very eyes.
He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a mass of material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and picturesque incidents.
Carlyle's "Real Kings."—Carlyle believed that "universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the lives of the world's great geniuses.
In his course of lectures entitled Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), he considers The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as Priest, and The Hero as King, and shows how history has been molded by men like Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is such men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside whom "emperors," "popes," and "potentates" are as nothing. He believed that there was always living some man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such a kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government.