The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Carlyle · a philosophical fiction in prose, in three books of eleven, ten and twelve chapters · written at Craigenputtock in 1830 to 1831, serialised in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834, first issued as a book at Boston in 1836 and at London in 1838 · scored on the book as published in 1838 and read since, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Philosophical fiction: a mock review and a mock biography framing a spiritual autobiography, a philosophy of clothes and a social prophecy
Mythos
The universe as the garment of God, taken from the Earth-Spirit of Faust and made the frame of the whole; the conversion as descent, death of self and rebirth; the foundling, the wanderer, the Phoenix that burns and rises from its ash
Phase
Written at Craigenputtock in 1830 to 1831, between the July Revolution and the first Reform Act, out of Fichte, Goethe and Jean Paul, and against an England of dandies and drudges
Presentation
Three books: I the treatise and the Professor (eleven chapters), II his life rebuilt from six bags of scraps (ten), III the treatise again with the Editor’s reflections (twelve)
Register
Carlylese: capitals, German compounds, coinages, apostrophe and exclamation, in two voices, the Professor’s rhapsody and the Editor’s dry and half-converted English
Scale
One inner life from a basket at Entepfuhl to the Everlasting Yea, and with it church, state, rank, labour and the two nations of England, held under one figure
Governing Proposition
An English Editor sets out to review a German treatise on clothes by a Professor of Things in General, and finds the philosophy bound up with a man he can know only from scraps that reach him in six paper bags. Out of that comic difficulty Carlyle builds a spiritual autobiography, a descent through despair to affirmation in three named stations, and a prophecy of a society whose institutions are garments worn out and waiting to be rewoven. The wager is that truth reaches us only through a vesture, and that a book made of vestures, an Editor’s English over a Professor’s German over a soul known only in fragments, can carry a creed in earnest without asserting it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title is Latin for the tailor retailored, and the book is a review that cannot get started. An unnamed English Editor has received from Germany a treatise, Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken, Clothes, their Origin and Influence, by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things in General at the University of Weissnichtwo, a town whose name means Know-not-where. The Editor admires it, is bewildered by it, and sets out to bring its philosophy to English readers. The Professor’s name means devil’s dung, and he is the book’s prophet.
The work is scored here as published in 1838 and read since: three books, of eleven, ten and twelve chapters. Carlyle wrote it at Craigenputtock in 1830 and 1831; the London publishers refused it in 1831; it ran in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834, and came out as a book first at Boston in 1836, through Emerson’s circle, and at London in 1838. It is prose in literary form, a philosophical fiction whose writing is the work, and Carlyle’s own English throughout; the German in it is his.
Book I is the treatise, and its Professor. The Editor reports Teufelsdröckh’s view that the whole visible world is clothing, quotes him, translates him, and comments. In Reminiscences he gives the Professor in his watchtower at midnight over the sleeping town, the thousands lying in their beds and he alone with the stars: the first height of the book, and the first sign that the Editor’s subject is a man and not a system. After it, the middle of Book I (Aprons, Miscellaneous-Historical, Adamitism) spends itself on a mock scholarship whose joke is made and made again.
Movement II
The philosophy comes bound up with the man, and the man’s life reaches the Editor through Hofrath Heuschrecke, not as a biography but as six paper bags of scraps, each marked with a sign of the zodiac. Book II is the life rebuilt from them, and the Editor’s labour of assembly is on the page: the disorder of the bags enacts the opacity of another life, and the struggle to make a biography of them is the book’s argument about how any soul is known.
The life begins with a foundling. A child of unknown origin is left in a basket with the Futterals at Entepfuhl, and they raise him. The chapters titled Genesis, Idyllic and Pedagogy carry him through childhood to a starved schooling and the university; Getting under Way sends him into the world. The pattern is old, the child from nowhere who must make himself, and here it is particular, a village and a family and a school.
Romance brings Blumine, whom he loves and loses to Herr Towgood, and the Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh that follow send him wandering. Each step is required by the next. Book II, alone in the work, cannot lose a chapter, and it is the part of the book that later readers carried with them: a life laid out as a passage through crisis, its stations named.
Movement III
The first station is despair. Teufelsdröckh, wandering, comes to know the universe as dead and mechanical. The book anatomises the state with care: it is not grief for what was lost but a sense that nothing anywhere answers. The book names it the Everlasting No, and its account of it was written before there was a word for it.
It is met not by an argument but by an act. On a dog-day walk through the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer the Professor turns on the No and defies it, and the book treats that defiance as a new birth in fire. Nothing has been proved; something has been refused. The scene is one of the book’s summits, and the comedy of the frame does not reach it.
Then the Centre of Indifference: a pause between denial and affirmation, in which the self that despaired is let go and nothing has yet replaced it. The No, the Indifference and the Yea are three stations in sequence, which later readers took as a map of their own crises, and the book’s claim is that they cannot be taken in another order.
Movement IV
The Everlasting Yea is the turn of the book. The Professor gives up the claim to happiness, and with it the Romantic posture of grievance: “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” The affirmation is stated plainly and in capitals: “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA.” The remedy is work and renunciation, and its maxim is the most portable sentence in the book: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.”
Here the frame does its work. The Yea is not preached by Carlyle in his own name. It reaches the reader through the Editor, who reports it, doubts it, defends it, and is half converted by it, and through scraps whose author the Editor never meets. It arrives as something won rather than asserted. Carlylese, the invented instrument of capitals, compounds and apostrophe, here joins wit and conviction in one movement.
The doctrine itself is not new, and the book does not hide its sources: Fichte and Goethe, passed through Jean Paul, and above them the Earth-Spirit of Faust, whose song makes the universe the garment of God. What is new is the form that carries it. Pause, the last chapter of Book II, closes the life, and the Editor returns to the treatise.
Movement V
Book III is the philosophy of clothes applied to the world. Church-Clothes and Symbols make every institution a garment over something not itself; Old Clothes and The Phoenix show the garment wearing out and a new one woven, the old order burning and rising from its ash; Organic Filaments makes history a fabric. Helotage and The Dandiacal Body set the two nations of England side by side, the idle and the starving, the dandies with Bulwer’s Pelham for their sacred book and the Irish poor, a decade before the condition-of-England novels. Here the book is at its most prophetic and its most repetitive: twelve chapters circle one thesis, and in parts of them the Editor’s distance collapses and Carlyle preaches.
Natural Supernaturalism is the summit of the third book. Custom blinds us to the miraculous in the ordinary; the generations of mankind rise and pass, and the chapter ends on Prospero’s words on the stuff of dreams. Then the Editor turns to the dandies and the tailors, and in the Farewell reports that Teufelsdröckh has vanished from Weissnichtwo after the July Revolution of 1830. The prophet leaves as the old clothes of Europe begin to tear.
The book was read without a break through the nineteenth century, by readers who reshaped their lives by it. Emerson arranged its American edition, and the Transcendentalists took much of their language from it; Thoreau and Whitman read it; Dickens dedicated Hard Times to its author; Ruskin called him master. Carlyle’s reputation fell in the twentieth century with his later politics, which are not in this book. Its formal line, the invented source and the ironic editor, runs late and indirectly to Borges and Pale Fire, and the suit it retailored has kept its shape.
Act III · The Twelve
The centre is compelled. Book II cannot lose a chapter: the foundling in the Futterals’ basket at Entepfuhl, the starved schooling, the love for Blumine and its loss to Herr Towgood, the wandering, then the three stations, the Everlasting No, the Centre of Indifference and the Everlasting Yea, each required by the next. The frame is required too, since the book’s doctrine is that truth arrives only through a vesture. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the subtractive test at both ends. Book I spends chapters (Aprons, Miscellaneous-Historical) on a mock scholarship whose joke is made once and then again; Book III circles one thesis in sermon after sermon, and The Dandiacal Body and Tailors could go with little loss. A third of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The book states things that hold. That every human institution, church, state, rank, law, even language, is a garment woven over something not itself, which wears out and must be rewoven, is put with a force that made it common property (Church-Clothes, Old Clothes, The Phoenix). It anatomises, before there was a word for it, a despair that is not grief but the sense of a universe dead and mechanical, met not by argument but by an act of defiance. It sees that custom blinds us to the miraculous in the ordinary, and, in Helotage and The Dandiacal Body, England’s two nations, idle and starving, a decade before the condition-of-England novels. Charged: much of the metaphysics is Fichte and Goethe passed through Jean Paul, and the remedy, “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee”, is a creed delivered more than a condition disclosed.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The book rises often and from far. Teufelsdröckh in his watchtower at midnight over the sleeping town, the thousands in their beds and he alone with the stars; the dog-day walk through the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer and the defiance that follows it; the turn of the Everlasting Yea, “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe”, and “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA”; and the close of Natural Supernaturalism, where the generations of mankind rise and vanish and the chapter ends on Prospero’s words on the stuff of dreams. These are real heights, cold and warm. Charged: the sublime is set inside a comic frame that undercuts it by design, the Editor deflating each flight, and long stretches of Books I and III do not rise at all.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The governing figure, the universe as the garment of God, is taken from the Earth-Spirit’s song in Faust and made the load-bearing structure of the book: the body is the soul’s clothing, society is clothing, the text is clothing on its German original, and the book itself is the old suit retailored. Book II builds the pattern of conversion, descent, death of self and rebirth, as the spine of a life, in three named stations that later readers took as a map of their own crises. The foundling of unknown origin, the wandering exile, the Phoenix reborn from its ash, a devil’s name (Teufelsdröckh, devil’s dung) on a prophet: all particular, all bearing weight. Held below the gate because the figures are expounded more than enacted; the myth lives in argument rather than story.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The departure is large and was paid for. In 1831 there was no English form for this: a fictional review of a treatise that does not exist, a biography assembled from paper bags, a spiritual autobiography told at two removes by an editor who half mocks it, in an English bent into German syntax, capitals and compounds. It had ancestors, and they limit the axis: Swift’s A Tale of a Tub had already made a philosophy of clothes and a mock editorial apparatus, Sterne had made digression a form, and Jean Paul had given Carlyle the manner. But no one had used the frame to carry a creed in earnest. The cost was real: the manuscript went round the London publishers in 1831 and came back, and it appeared as a book first in Boston, by the efforts of Emerson’s circle, five years after it was written.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its thesis is that truth reaches us only through vestures, through symbols; its form makes the reader do exactly that, looking through the Editor’s English, through Teufelsdröckh’s German, to a soul known only from scraps in bags. The irony of the frame is the instrument by which Carlyle can say what he believes without asserting it in his own name: the Everlasting Yea is reported, doubted and defended, and so reaches the reader as something won rather than preached. The disorder of the six bags enacts the opacity of another life; the Editor’s labour to assemble a biography is the book’s argument about how any soul is known. Charged: the same frame licenses the longueurs of Books I and III; the form explains them but does not need them.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Nearly two centuries of return, in two yields of unequal depth. Read for its doctrine, the book exhausts: the gospel of work and renunciation, the philosophy of clothes as a thesis, can be stated in a paragraph, and was, by a century of Victorian sermons. Read for its form, it keeps yielding: the unreliable Editor, the fictive source, the question of who is speaking, Carlyle, the Editor or the Professor, and how much of the creed is ironised; the book’s account of itself as a garment; its relation to the reader it trains. Criticism has found in it a theory of the symbol, a work about translation, a forerunner of metafiction and a record of depression and recovery, and each holds. Deep in its form; shallower in its thought than its rhetoric claims.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is English prose of the nineteenth century, fiction and non-fiction together. The intrinsic force is high: a new kind of book, the philosophical fiction with a fictive source and an ironic editor, a new English prose, and the first and lasting map of the Victorian crisis of faith in three stations, No, Indifference and Yea. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Emerson arranged its American publication, and New England Transcendentalism took much of its language from it; Thoreau and Whitman read it; Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle; Ruskin called him master; the gospel of work became a Victorian commonplace. Held below the gate by a hair: part of that reach belongs to Carlyle’s whole work rather than this book, and its formal line, to the invented sources of Borges and Pale Fire, is delayed and indirect.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Some one hundred and ninety years since its serial and book publication, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. The text is whole, never lost and never in doubt, and the form is legible and intact. Presence is charged. Through the nineteenth century the book was read without a break and very widely, in Britain and America, by readers who reshaped their lives by it. Since about the 1920s, with Carlyle’s reputation damaged by his politics, the hero-worship and the later pamphlets held against him after 1933, it has been read mainly in the academy, and its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the Dandiacal sect with Bulwer’s Pelham as its sacred book, the Saint-Simonians, the July Revolution. It is not neglected; it stays in print and in teaching. One tenth below the step.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Carlylese is an invented instrument, and Carlyle commands it: the capitals, the German compounds, apostrophe and exclamation, the hyphenated coinages (“Tool-using Animal”, the Centre of Indifference), the sentence that swells, breaks off and turns on the reader. He controls two voices with it, the Professor’s rhapsody and the Editor’s dry, fussing, half-converted English, and the play between them is often exact comedy. The turn of the Everlasting Yea shows the method at its best, wit and conviction in one movement. Charged: command includes restraint, and the book often has none. The mannerism hardens into tic, chapters of Book III are padded, and the satire on the dandies is laboured. Invention is credited under The Swerve; here what is weighed is command, and a command that cannot stop itself for whole chapters is charged.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Editor’s comic bewilderment over paper bags labelled with the signs of the zodiac, and the Everlasting Yea; or the mock scholarship on aprons and the vision of the generations in Natural Supernaturalism. They obey one law: everything visible is a garment over the invisible, and the garment is both comic, since it is only cloth, and sacred, since it is the only way the invisible appears. Book II is the philosophy of clothes applied to one soul; Book III applies it to church and society; the frame applies it to the text itself. The range is wide, farce, satire, autobiography, sermon, prophecy and prose poem under one physics. Charged: the irony is not held evenly, and in parts of Book III the Editor’s distance collapses and Carlyle preaches in his own voice, breaking the book’s own law.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Much is held, and held under one figure. Consciousness: a whole inner life from infancy to conversion. The family: the foundling and the Futterals who take him in. Love: Blumine. Schooling and the university. Labour: the human being as a “Tool-using Animal”, and the gospel of work. Class: dandies and drudges, the Irish poor of Helotage. The church, the state and revolution, with July 1830 at the close; history as a fabric of Organic Filaments; the natural order and the sacred, in Natural Supernaturalism. What holds the axis at 8.0 is the manner of the holding: largely as thesis. Society appears in sketch and diatribe, not in lives; only one human being is rendered from within, and even he is a voice. Integrated and wide, thin in its rendering.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, then The Living Form at 8.5. A text whole and never in doubt for nearly two centuries; a form without an English precedent for its earnest use, paid for in rejection and a five-year wait; a map of the crisis of faith, No, Indifference and Yea, that a century took for its own, with a reach through Emerson and the Transcendentalists that is named and particular; and a frame that is the instrument of the book’s knowledge, truth seen only through vestures.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.4: Book II and the frame are compelled, but the mock scholarship of Book I and the circling sermons of Book III, The Dandiacal Body and Tailors among them, could lose a third of the book with little loss. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.0, much held but held as thesis, and The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.2: heights undercut by the frame, a doctrine that exhausts while the form keeps yielding, and a command of Carlylese that cannot restrain itself.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, The Made at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 and The Unconcealment at 8.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, below 7.5; every other axis clears it, the lowest of them at 8.2, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.3, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the unmet cap and gate would withhold the summit in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sartor Resartus, scored as the book published at London in 1838 and read since: three books, of eleven, ten and twelve chapters, written at Craigenputtock in 1830 to 1831, refused by the London publishers in 1831, serialised in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834, and first issued as a book at Boston in 1836. Carlyle’s English throughout; the German words in it are his, and no translation question arises. The structure, the frame and its persons, the arc of Book II and the most quoted passages are known closely; the twelve chapters of Book III are known less closely in their order of argument, and the middle chapters of Book I in outline. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; English is quoted only where its words are certain. Matters not verified or contested are not given: the length of the book, the share of it given as the Professor’s words, which signs of the zodiac mark the bags, the wording of the Professor’s defiance, of the Earth-Spirit’s song in Carlyle’s verse, of the account of symbols and of the fraction of life in the Everlasting Yea, the Professor’s parting words, the complaints of the magazine’s readers, and particular debts beyond those named. Melville’s rhetoric in Moby-Dick is often argued to carry the book’s manner; how far is contested.