The Pythia’s Drunken Song: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and the Style Problem in German Idealist Philosophy

86 Pages·1978·2.936 MB·English

by  Jerry A. Dibble (auth.)

THE PYTHIA'S DRUNKEN SONG
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
Series Minor
19
JERRY A. DIBBLE
THE PYTHIA'S DRUNKEN SONG
THOMAS CARLYLE'S SARTOR RESARTUS AND THE STYLE PROBLEM
IN GERMAN IDEALIST PHILOSOPHY
Directors; P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington Univ., St. Louis)
Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabel (Paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T.E. Jessop (Hull);
P.O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles);
S. Lindroth (Upsala); J. Orcibal (Paris); I.S. Revaht (Paris); Wolfgang Rod (Miinchen);
J. Roger (Paris); G.S. Rousseau (Los Angeles); H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.J.); c.B. Schmitt
(Warburg Institute, London); G. Sebba (Emory Univ., Atlanta); R. Shackleton (Oxford);
J. Tans (Groningen); G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.).
THE PYTHIA'S
DRUNKEN SONG
THOMAS CARLYLE'S SARTOR RESARTUS
AND THE STYLE PROBLEM
IN GERMAN IDEALIST PHILOSOPHY
by
JERRY A. DIBBLE
•
1978
MARTIN US NIJHOFF
THE HAGUE! BOSTON! LONDON
© 1978 by Martinus Nijhojj; The Hague, Netherlands
Solkover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1978
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-2011-8 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-9672-4
001: 10.1007/978-94-009-9672-4
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements VII
I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF Sartor Resartus
I. The Kantian Compromise 7
2. Kant, Fichte, and the Dilemma of Idealism 15
II. Sartor Resartus AND THE HISTORICITY OF IDEALISM 35
I. The Style of Dogmatic Idealism 37
2. Carlyle's "British Reader" and the Structure of Sartor Resartus 50
III. CARLYLE AND HEGEL 57
List of Texts Cited 76
Index 77
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank Stanford University and the German Academic
Exchange Service for research grants which made this study possible, and
Professor Helmut Bonheim and the staff of the Englisches Seminar,
Universitat zu K61n, for their unfailing hospitality during the academic
year 1967-68. I also owe my thanks to Professors Lucio Ruotolo, Kurt
Muller-Vollmer, and David Halliburton of Stanford University, without
whose interest and encouragement the study would never have been
begun, and to my former colleagues, Professors David Erdman, Thomas
Maresca, and Gerald Nelson of SUNY Stony Brook for their patient and
helpful criticism of the finished manuscript. Most of all, however, I am
indebted to Barbara, Sam, and my parents, for their love, unceasing good
cheer, and loyal support in the face of adversity.
Portions of this study originally appeared in the pages of the Bulletin of
the New York Public Library and Texas Studies in Language and
Literature, to whose editors I am grateful for permission to reprint them
here.
Clarence Center, New York
May; 1977
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF
SARTOR RESARTUS
He is writing a book on metaphysics, and is really cut out for it; the
clearness with which he thinks he understands things and his total
inability to express what little he knows will make his fortune as a
philosopher.
W.K. Clifford
These men, dissimilar in almost all else, agreed in being closet-students
- secluded in a peculiar degree, by circumstances and character, from
the business and intercourse of the world: and both were, through a
large portion of their lives, regarded by those who took the lead in
opinion (when they happened to hear of them) with feelings akin to
contempt. But they were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind
by every age, and always disregarded - to show that speculative
philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the
business of life and the outward interests of man, is in reality the thing
on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears
every other influence save those which it must itself obey.
John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge
As Carlyle's friend John Sterling was the first to point out, the proper
context for understanding the style of Sartor Resartus is not the swirl of
contemporary events, important as they are to the work itself, but the
dilemma of serious literature in an age of radical dissent and impending
social disorganization. For Carlyle, indeed, the question of style was so
closely tied to the problematic character of the age that he never discussed
one without reference to the other, and rarely mentioned either without
referring to the whole of the modem period - which he and other Victorians
saw as a vast stretch of time between the Middle Ages and the present,
between an idealized remote age of belief, authority, and social order and
the crumbling precarious edge of an agonizing succession of epochs of
progress and fragmentation.
2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SARTOR RESARTUS
Thus, while present-day critics have made much of the differences
between the styles of Carlyle and of Johnson, the picture of Johnson which
emerges from Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship and from his essay on
Boswell's Life ofJ ohnson is not that of a stylistic antagonist; it is the portrait
of a literary companion in arms, a lonely man fighting a rearguard action
against spiritual emptiness and the perennial problems of the modern man
of letters - incipient poverty, commercial pressure, and audience prejudice
born of confusion and uncertainty. Carlyle recognizes that Johnson's
"wondrous buckram style," based on literary values "long since obsolete,"
is radically different from his own; his interest, however, is in the historical
environment that gave rise to the two styles, and that, as Carlyle describes it,
remains exactly the same:
It was a wholly divided age, that of Johnson. Unity existed nowhere in its Heaven or in its
Earth. Society through every fibre, was rent asunder: all things, it was then becoming visible,
but could not then be understood, were moving onwards, with an impulse received ages before,
yet now first with a decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic gulf, where, whether in the
shape of French Revolutions, Reform Bills, or what shape soever, bloody or bloodless, the
descent and engulfment assume, we now see them weltering and boiling.'
For Carlyle, the impulse which had begun the engulfment of social order
was clearly skepticism. And in the wake of skepticism, as he saw it, had
followed a host of other social and intellectual evils: wonder and awe before
the things of the world had degenerated into lifeless materialism; communal
purpose and religious feeling had given way to mutual distrust and the
anxiety of self-consciousness; the stability of monarchy, once revered, had
been threatened, in one instance altogether replaced, by the anarchy of an
uncontrolled, unenlightened democracy. Nor had the writer and his
profession escaped their share of the general blight; for where literature had
once pleased by its power to express the beliefs men held in common, it now
lay languishing and paralyzed under a night of dissension and unbelief. Like
most nights identified by Victorian writers, however, this one, too, was not
without the glimmer of a new day. And the horizon on which Carlyle
believed he could detect the first rays of the coming dawn was - Germany.
Carlyle had read little of Kant, probably no more than the first 150 pages
of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. But he knew enough about the principal
ideas of the critical philosophy to see clearly its connection with the
resurgence of German literature - a literature, as he described it, of such
"calm, harmonious strength" that it had not only managed to absorb into
1 Thomas Carlyle, Works, ed. H.D. Traill (New York, 1904), XXVIII, 104. Subsequent
references to Carlyle's essays are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SARTOR RESARTUS 3
itself the truth of science and skepticism, but had done so without sacrificing
the old nobleness and sense of purpose that had elsewhere been lost sight of
250 years before. Not surprisingly, then, we find the majority of Carlyle's
energies during the period preceding the publication of Sartor Resartus
(1833-34) absorbed by repeated attempts, in the form of essays, reviews, and
translations, to bring home to his countrymen the achievement of deep
thinking Germany.
There were nevertheless certain inherent difficulties involved in trans
planting the fragile bloom of German idealism to the soil of an England
still very much under the influence of Locke and the Empiricist tradition.
Although Kant's critical philosophy, for example, had been recognized and
discussed in England since the year of Carlyle's birth, its reception had been
almost universally poor. In part, the lukewarm English response was
attributable to a series of incomplete and inadequate translations, which,
coupled with some equally inadequate and wrong-headed commentaries,
had conspired to produce a generally mistaken notion as to the value and
purpose of the first Critique. A more significant obstacle, however, was the
character of German idealism itself, a school of metaphysics which, as one
reviewer of Coleridge's Statesman's Manual put it, was "foreign equally to
our language and philosophy." Just how foreign can be gathered from the
reviewers' response to Coleridge's philosophical writings. "Mystical lan
guage," "metaphysical jargon," "incomprehensible metaphysics," "mys
ticism," "German metaphysics, or metaphysics, if possible, still more
obscure and unintelligible" - these and other such phrases appeared time
after time, interrupted on rare occasions by a voice of reason, pointing out
that it was less than fair to link Kant with Jacob B6hme and Swedenborg
under the common heading of "mystics," or that there might be some reason
to question the English notion, enshrined since the beginning of the
eighteenth century, that any true philosophy ought to be firmly enough
based on common sense to be readily understood by one's cook.2
The general state of affairs had not improved markedly ten years later,
when Carlyle'S first essays began to appear in periodicals like the Edinburgh
Review and the Foreign Review. If anything, it had worsened somewhat in
response to social disturbances like those that led to Peterloo, and the
general xenophobia occasioned by the talk of impending reform. (In 1828,
for example, one translator felt it necessary to assure his readers that the
critical philosophy had collapsed in the face of superior English moral
training and that there was consequently "little reason to apprehend that
2 The reviews in which the quoted phrases and comments appear have been collected and
reprinted, together with other early reviews of Coleridge's work, in J.R. de J. Jackson, ed.,
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1970).
4 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SARTOR RESARTUS
any evil can arise in our country from the principles or writings of Kant. ")3
It is to Carlyle's credit that he was among the first to confront publicly the
problem of English hostility to German culture and to identify accurately
the basic sources of the antagonism. Part of the problem, he notes in "The
State of German Literature" (r827), resulted from notions of German
literary production based on too much familiarity with Kotzebue and the
sensational horrors of Gothic fiction and on too little knowledge of the
work of writers such as Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis. Partly responsible,
too, are prevailing conceptions of the Germans as semi-barbarous, rude,
and delighting in coarse excitements - in short, generally wanting in tact and
good taste. But most of all, the problem can be traced to the accusation of
"mysticism," which as Carlyle rightly perceived was less an attempt at
classification than a way of rejecting out of hand philosophical ideas
uncongenial to one's own way of thinking. So long as one is dealing with the
material and visible objects of everyday experience, Carlyle notes, the few
obstacles to communication are easily overcome. It is a different matter,
however, when one deals with an "invisible idea," especially when the idea
expressed is different from, and perhaps even at war with, the ordinary
conception of things;
Here it will require long, patient and skilful effort, both from the writer and the reader, before
the two can so much as speak together; before the former can make known to the latter, not how
the matter stands, but even what the matter is, which they have to investigate in concert. He
must devise new means of explanation, describe conditions of mind in which this invisible idea
arises, the false persuasions that eclipse it, the false shows that may be mistaken for it, the
glimpses of it that appear elsewhere; in short, strive by a thousand well-devised methods, to
guide his reader up to the perception of it; in all which, moreover, the reader must faithfully and
toilsomely cooperate with him, if any fruit is to come of their mutual endeavour. Should the
latter take up his ground too early, and affirm to himself that now he has seized what he still has
not seized; that this and nothing else is the thing aimed at by his teacher, the consequences are
plain enough: disunion, darkness and contradiction between the two; the writer has written for
another man, and this reader, after long provocation, quarrels with him finally, and quits him
as a mystic. (XXVI, 72)
Under the circumstances, the apologist for Germany was clearly in need of a
special kind of rhetorical strategy, one which would work toward com
munication and persuasion and yet, paradoxically, would also manage to
delay full comprehension until the whole of the writer's message could be set
fairly before his audience. Moreover, considering the strength of English
prejudices against German metaphysics, even the most sensitive attempt at
communication was bound to prove a failure unless a way could be found to
3 Charles Hodge, in the Preface to his translation of Phillip Albrecht Stapfer's Life ofK ant.
Cited in Rene Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England (Princeton, 1931), p. 246.