racterisation), and by
presenting it as the product and expression of his spiritual
experiences, he made the mystical creed intensely human. Stated in the
abstract, it would have been a mere blank _-ism_; developed in its
intimate relations with Teufelsdroeckh's character and career, it is
filled with the hot life-blood of natural thought and feeling.
Secondly, by fathering his own philosophy upon a German professor
Carlyle indicates his own indebtedness to German idealism, the
ultimate source of much of his own teaching. Yet, deep as that
indebtedness was, and anxious as he might be to acknowledge it, he was
as a humourist keenly alive to certain glaring defects of the great
German writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves among
the mere minutiae of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and
the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds
rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in
regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too
conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery
of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is
made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar
characteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; as in the
many amusing criticisms which are passed upon Teufelsdroeckh's volume
as a sort of "mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded;"
in the burlesque parade of the professor's "omniverous reading"
(_e.g._, Book I, Chap. V); and in the whole amazing episode of the
"six considerable paper bags," out of the chaotic contents of which
the distracted editor in search of "biographic documents" has to make
what he can. Nor is this quite all. Teufelsdroeckh is further utilised
as the mouthpiece of some of Carlyle's more extravagant speculations
and of such ideas as he wished to throw out as it were tentatively,
and without himself being necessarily held responsible for them. There
is thus much point as well as humour in those sudden turns of the
argument, when, after some exceptionally wild outburst on his
_eidolon's_ part, Carlyle sedately reproves him for the fantastic
character or dangerous tendency of his opinions.

It is in connection with the dramatic scheme of the book that the
third element, that of autobiography, enters into its texture, for the
story of Teufelsdroeckh is very largely a transfigured version of the
story of Carlyle himself. In