Sartor Resartus [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION [I] Sartor Resartus has long been recognized as a work of the foremost hterary historical importance. For one thing, it marks the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian periods as sharply as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads marks that between the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. And unlike Wordsworth's manifesto, Carlyle's book enacts within itself the dislocations of the passage. For another. Sartor Resartus, which was first published in book form in Boston in 1836 with an enthusiastic preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important stimulus to the great mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American literature. Poe may have loathed the book, as he did everything of Carlyle's; but it was a key influence, both thematic and formal, on two of the master-works of the American Renaissance—Melville's Moby-Dick and Whitman's Song of Myself. Most importantly. Sartor Resartus is the seminal expression of the thought of the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets. The fundamental Carlylean doctrines are all articulated, or at least adumbrated, here: the horrors of Utilitarianism; the religious basis of society; the pattern of conversion— from the Everlasting No, through the Centre of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea—which showed that, in the words of Thomas Henry Huxley, 'a deep sense of rehgion was compatible with the entire absence of theology';' the importance of vocation—of an individual's finding his 'maximum of Capabi-Hty'; the superiority of renunciation to the pursuit of happiness; the moral imperatives of work, duty, and reverence; the need for heroes; and the social vision that saw contemporary Britain divided into the two nations of rich and poor. As such. Sartor Resartus is of quintessential importance for understanding the literature and the moral and intellectual culture of Victorian Britain. 'For there is hardly a superior or acdve mind of this ' Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley (New York, 1900), i. 237.