“[T]here is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.”  

George Eliot, “Thomas Carlyle” (1855)@ “Thomas Carlyle.” Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 213. 


Amidst the eruption of workers’ strikes on the one hand and the hedonistic calculus of British industrialists, on the other, Thomas Carlyle observed that a Benthamite dependence upon external reward ultimately led to a loss of hope and a subsequent surrender to what he considered the greatest evil: the inertia of despair. Consequently, Carlyle urged belief in an inevitable earthly justice. Through such determinism, he sought to diminish the two extremes of temptation: to secure profit by corrupt means and to succumb to the paralysis of frustration, envy, and anger.

Carlyle lays out his ethic in Sartor Resartus—or The Tailor Retailored, where he points to a collective transcendent spirit embodied by fluctuating circumstances, as the allusion to Psalm 102 that his title indicates: “As a vesture you shall change them [the earth and heavens], and they shall be changed.”@ Psalm 102: 2. King James 2000 Bible. Robert A. Couric. 2000, 2003. Carlyle grounds his “philosophy” in “reason,” not as a faculty of logic, but rather, as a faculty of inexplicable intuition that he culls from the Kantian notion of pure reason. Carlyle teaches that gifted seers receive direct access to the eternal truths and contribute to the inevitable unfolding of cosmic progress through active work, setting a path for others to follow through faith in the seers. By altering the historical details of Savonarola’s life in her novel Romola, George Eliot portrays Carlyle’s view of work as man’s contribution to eternalizing the human race and reveals how the personal conviction of one’s inner divinity activates the will to duty through which the Divine Idea evolves. In so doing, Eliot fleshes out the dangerous implications of an ethic grounded in intuition and the limited nature of the transformation it procures.

Thomas Carlyle did not look to resolve the economic crises with changes of laws but with changes of moral resolve. In 1829, upon noting that each “living artisan [had been] driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one,” Carlyle penned his essay "Signs of the Times" to call for change: “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”@ “Signs of the Times." Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. v. 2, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858), 342. Four years later, in “Characteristics,” Carlyle laments the circumstances of those seeking to rise above the struggle for survival and points to their alternatives:

In the next decade, just three years before the repeal of the Corn Laws, Carlyle authored Past and Present as an apocalyptic call to England following Manchester strikes and labor riots. Denouncing utilitarianism, Carlyle warns that “Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast becoming a rather unhappy one…. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.”@ Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943, rev. 1965), 156-57. In this 1843 book, Carlyle warns Master Workers to reevaluate their success, echoing Proverbs 29:18: “In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied” (PP, 11). Carlyle urges wealthy landowners, enterprising industrialists, and Chartist workers seeking universal suffrage to battle the hypocrisies of capitalism by following the unforgiving, unchanging cosmic law of justice that incorporates nature’s physical laws.@ For studies on Carlyle’s cultural influence upon the notion of work for such Victorians as Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and Charles Dickens, see Martin A. Danahay’s Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (2005), the first chapter of Rob Breton’s Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell (2005: 34-93), and Chris Louttit’s Dickens’s Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality (2009). Carlyle hopes for ethical regeneration not through legislative changes nor through institutional fluctuations but through what he calls an eternal law of nature for which God becomes a metaphor. Faith, in these terms, offers for Carlyle the ultimate resolution to England’s calamity. Assessing idleness and doubt as the greatest threats to cultural progress, the social theorist bids citizens to unveil their godlike spirits by aspiring to self-fulfillment through heroic conquests of nature.

When Thomas Carlyle found his society engulfed in utilitarianism at the onset of British industrialization, he did not return to the piety of his childhood nor to the Biblical faith of his seminary years. Instead, he retained his Calvinistic sense of duty while looking to the German idealists for a philosophy. After studying German for a few years and settling in Scotland with his new wife Jane Welsh, he began fulfilling the mission proposed to him by Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review: to “Germanize the public.”@ The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, v. 4, ed. C.R. Sanders and K.J. Fielding (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970), 228. He read philosophers such as Kant and Fichte, wrote a biography of Friedrich Schiller, and published lengthy essays on Werner, Goethe, Novalis, and “The State of German Literature.” As he explains at the opening of Sartor Resartus, his identification with and adaptation of the thought of such writers shaped the “Clothes Philosophy”@ eds. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford, OUP: 1987), 4-7. which pervades not only that book, but also Past and Present and his lectures On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.

Rejecting Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith’s mechanistic approach to human aspiration, Carlyle claims to base his own view of happiness upon Aristotle’s understanding of ethics. While the forerunner of utilitarianism, Thomas Hobbes, explicitly rejects the Aristotelian notion of the Summum Bonum,@ ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), ch. 11, ¶1. Carlyle alludes to and adjusts the teleological aim set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics in both his essay “Characteristics” (340) and his novel Sartor Resartus: “Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest?” (SR, 120). Ironically, Carlyle opposes action and contemplation, whereas Aristotle considers contemplation a form of action.@ Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing R. Pullins Co., 2002). Carlyle conflates Aristotle’s discussion on happiness as the end of action with Aristotle’s account of the inexperienced youth who habitually follows his passions and does not profit from knowledge (I.7, I.3). For Aristotle, thought is not an end but an essential means to the ultimate end of human life:

With this in mind, Aristotle deems virtuous activity to be the aim of life, and the most comprehensive virtue, active contemplation, to be the highest human good. Although Carlyle, like Aristotle (NE, 1177a11-1177a18), does consider life’s aim to be blessedness rather than pleasure (SR, 146), he concedes to Hobbes’ dismissal of metaphysics as a channel for discerning the final purpose of mankind because he denies the ability of the mind to consider the nature of any being, much less to rationally infer the existence of God. Consequently, Carlyle does not perceive human flourishing in terms of virtuous activity of the soul in accord with reason, as the Stagarite understands reason; nor ultimately in accord with the contemplation of a transcendent Good.

For Carlyle, virtuous activity follows not from logical reasoning but from intuition, a notion that he adapts from Kant’s concept of pure reason. Margaret Storrs explains in The Relation of Carlyle to Kant and Fichte the following stages through which Carlyle transforms Immanuel Kant’s epistemology.@ Dissertation (Bryn Mawr, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970), 27-52. Carlyle first adjusts Kant’s understanding that space and time condition perception and constitute universal contingencies of thought while possessing the same scope as the mind does. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines space as “the form of all appearances of outer sense” and time as “the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state.”@ trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 71, 77. Carlyle reduces this notion of space and time to a more subjective one, denying them existence outside of thought. Carlyle thus considers the world an illusory construction of the senses: where “there is no Space and Time, WE are—we know not what; —light-sparkles floating in the aether of Deity” (SR, 44). Carlyle overlaps the division that Kant makes between the relative world of phenomena apprehended by human understanding and the unchanging world of noumena, things in and of themselves normally inaccessible to the finite mind. Carlyle sees objective reality as an infinite unity of spirit that the intellect projects as incomplete fragments divided by space and time.

Likewise, Carlyle restructures the three tiers of cognition that Kant delineates as: images processed by the senses; concepts formed by understanding this sense material; and ideas that emerge, not from knowledge of experience but from the mind itself engaged in what Kant terms “practical reason.” Reason, for Kant, recognizes the certainty of responsibility to a moral law as well as of freedom to fulfill such duty. “All other concepts (God and Immortality) now attach themselves to this concept, and by it obtain consistence and objective reality.”@ Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T.K. Abbott (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1898), 88; cf. Storrs, 39. The intellect further deduces from this a priori principle practical applications of the moral law that cannot be verified as are those of physical law. Carlyle extends this concept of reason to an intuitive capacity to discern in the world of appearances “the divine force acting in universal law” and “the fundamental unity, harmony, and permanence beneath apparent diversity, discord, and change” (Storrs, 40). Associated with the heart rather than the mind, Carlyle’s reason captures the “purposeful meaning and direction of the cosmos, and of the divine significance of the human soul,” assuring one’s moral freedom and responsibility (Storrs, 40). For Carlyle, though, unlike for Kant, all genuine knowledge is channeled through this intuitive faculty of reason, rather than through both reason and understanding; Carlyle believes that only one realm of authentic knowledge exists, and it cannot be reached by logic.

Carlyle adopts Kant’s categorical imperative, a moral law that Kant thinks all people use to some extent for decision-making, although not all are conscious of it: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”@ Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T.K. Abbott, ed. with revisions Lara Denis. Orchard Park (NY: Broadview Press, 2005), 38; cf. Storrs, 49. Awareness of this criterion, according to Kant, fosters independence from external pressures and advocates action according to the moral laws deemed valid for all times and places. Such laws often oppose the attractions of the senses and inclinations and cannot be rationally explained, only revered. But because they originate from the person’s mind, they do not threaten but impel. “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requires submission, and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind… a law before which all inclinations are dumb” (CPrR, 180; cf. Storrs, 52).

Carlyle upholds Kant’s imperative, but rather than seeing it as a moral law emerging from reason alone, Carlyle views it as an obligation that God, a term for cosmic justice, imposes upon humanity: “The Maker’s Laws… are the Laws of God: transcendent, everlasting, imperatively demanding obedience from all men…. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust” (PP, 227). He considers each person to be the channel for the “Voice of Eternity” that should be heeded with silence and work (PP, 228). Believing that the moral law embodies the ideal but not necessarily the current state of mankind, Kant posits that the afterlife will balance out the rewards and punishments. Carlyle, on the other hand, who considers only the noumenal world to be real and the phenomenal world to be illusory, attributes apparent discrepancies of earthly justice to the limitations of the human intellect rather than to reality itself. While Kant believes that no member of the phenomenal world fully participates in the noumenal world, but that all may glimpse at it through reason, Carlyle teaches that gifted seers receive direct access to the eternal truths and contribute to the inevitable unfolding of cosmic progress through active work, setting a path for others to follow through faith in the seers:

Because Carlyle identifies reason with intuition, he articulates his ideas not as disputation but as revelation by employing the genre of an “Evangel” (SR, 136, 143, 160), even though he seeks cultural rather than spiritual reform. Paralleling the Judeo-Christian collection of sacred texts through its structure and allusions, Sartor Resartus invites belief in its narrative, but as a mythical rather than historical account. Like believers who claim that God is both the primary author, or source of inspiration, and the protagonist of Scripture, the narrator of Sartor Resartus presents Professor Teufelsdröckh as both the writer and protagonist of the book. Reminiscent of Providence guiding mankind from their creation in the flesh to their re-creation in the spirit and eventual union of body and soul with Himself, Teufelsdröckh actualizes his inner divinity—under the name of Diogenes-- and transforms his machine-like existence fueled by learning (88) into an organic one sustained by “fire” within his heart (89-91, 113). Modern society takes the place of a fallen angel in luring Teufelsdröckh away from obeying “creative instinct” (71) and into conflict with it (76). Consequently, Teufelsdröckh precedes his chapter entitled “Genesis” with an entire book that describes the defect of society, the entity that Teufelsdröckh calls the “Prince of Darkness,” “Time-Prince, or Devil” (92): a distorted perspective that regards “Clothes as a property, not [as] an accident” (4). Within this first book, “clothes” signifies any entity that somehow envelops another, such as a name or, most significantly, the concept of time. “Genesis” describes the mysterious beginning of Teufelsdröckh’s life before adoption, how no archives held any information of his parentage or place of birth and how he soon became associated with the high priest “Melchizedek, without father or mother” (14).@ Joseph Sigman’s article, “Adam-Kadmon, Nifl, Muspel, and the Biblical Symbolism of Sartor Resartus” examines Sartor Resartus not in light of genre but in light of the significance of its biblical images, such as this one. The article ultimately shows how the symbols point to salvation of the self through “imaginative vision and the creative act” (ELH 41.2 [1974]: 254). Melchizedek traditionally prefigured the “eternal” origin of Christ who possesses Authority in himself.

The first five chapters of Book Two convey how time, alluded to as a “Philistine,” a member of the Old Testament people who dominated Israel for more than forty years (Judges 13),@ The first two definitions of Philistine in the OED refer to this anti-Semitic group and to a foe. The third definition comes from the German Philister: An uneducated or unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace or material; a person who is not a connoisseur. An unenlightened or uncultured person; = Philistine; (spec. in German universities) a townsperson, a non-student.Carlyle also employed this usage of the term in his writings. In an 1831 essay entitled “A Survey of German Poetry” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essaysv. 3 (1872, 241), Carlyle writes: “Mr. Taylor is simply what they [sc. Germans] call a Philister; every fibre of him is Philistine.” enslaves Teufelsdröckh’s pedagogues and himself as he attempts to prepare for, to determine and to carry out his vocation “to unite [himself] with someone and with somewhat” (SR, 101). He entertains the hopes of understanding the universe and of attaining happiness (142).

The final five chapters of the second book depict the gradual conversion of Teufelsdröckh’s eyes and heart through refashioned Gospel teachings. He recognizes how the bankruptcy of religious belief reduces duty and virtue to the satisfaction of desire, or elimination of fear, and how reason becomes a tool to rationalize behavior toward that end in order to acquire the “Happiness of an approving conscience” (124). Restless upon sensing the “Infinite nature of Duty” (126), despite his inability to testify to the existence of God without having seen Him, Teufelsdröckh perceives the “Universe … void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, …[a] Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb” (127), a devilish “Everlasting No” threatening to possess his being (128). After confronting the worst of his fears, death, Teufelsdröckh defies it and finds within himself “unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god” (129). He receives in that act his “Fire-baptism,” evoking the fire with which Christ baptizes, the flames of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and the renunciation which John the Baptist preaches (129, Acts of the Apostles 2:3, Luke 3:16).

After this baptism, Teufelsdröckh senses renewed vision and freedom, so he seeks meaning outside of himself by wandering, like the “Son of Man” in the wilderness, around old cities and fields, amidst the ravages of war. He, too, experiences “some purifying Temptation… before his apostolic work… could begin” (SR, 141), one similar to his earlier whim of living to merely “Eat … and be filled”: to resign his ambition to necessity and aspire to no more than being “swallowed up of Time,” as all heroes eventually are (139), without struggling to “Work … in Welldoing” (140). Here, at the Center of Indifference, after distancing himself from “false shadows of hope” (142) while refusing to yield to despair, Teufelsdröckh fancies the hidden activities of nearby dwellers and meditates upon the changes in weather before he addresses Nature with a new insight: “Art thou not the ‘Living Garment of God?’” since through it, He speaks, and the same One “loves in thee, that lives and loves in me” (143). Rather than seeing the atmosphere as “dead and demoniacal,” he recognizes the universe as “god-like, and my Father’s” (143); he feels love and pity for all persons since they, like him, cannot bury the “Infinite [with]in … under the Finite” (144).

Accepting life as a “Worship of Sorrow” rather than a hope for “Happiness,” Teufelsdröckh expresses an “Everlasting Yea” to the “Godlike” in himself, the “only” source of “Strength and Freedom” (146). With his “eyes…unsealed” by “the beginning of Creation…--Light”-- and a “heart” ready to “convert [Conviction] into Conduct” (142, 147-48), Teufelsdröckh wills the “Ideal” that is in himself (149) and ventures forth “to embody the divine Spirit of [the Christian] Religion in a new Mythus” since the past eighteen centuries have left it in “ruins” (146-47). He works toward his salvation in a Fichtean manner: “through an active, creative seizing of the Not-Me [of surrounding matter] in an effort to know himself” (Harrold 102). What he lives on thereafter is the “spirit he worked in, what he became” rather than his specific accomplishments (153).

Like the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Letters, Book Three shows and explains the process by which converts become lights for future generations and how they are received. Teufelsdröckh considers the greatest event in modern history to be the manifestation of the “Divine Idea of the Universe” as it “shine[s] through” vulgar matter to dignify them as “Prophets, God-possessed; or even Gods” (158). He describes “Mankind [as] thunder and flame” since “like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane” (201), leaving “[o]n the hardest adamant some foot-print of us” (202). Thus, “the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest; that the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers; and there is a living, literal Communion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World” (187). According to Teufelsdröckh, divine revelation is not definitive but shifts as it continues through persons of each generation who discover the god within and elicit worship as heroes (187, 190), as did Jesus of Nazareth, the “divinest Symbol” or “Work of Art” who has most “bod[ied] forth the Godlike,” since “[h]igher has the human Thought not yet reached” (169). The body of Teufelsdröckh does not ascend, like that of Jesus, but mysteriously vanishes, as his supposed editor recounts in the final chapter of Sartor Resartus. The “Phoenix Death-Birth” of society (180) comes through “Tailors” with whom Carlyle identifies Teufelsdröckh himself. According to Teufelsdröckh’s documents, “the Tailor is not only a Man, but something of a Creator or Divinity,” the poet who “‘first made Gods for men; brought them down to us; and raised us up to them’” (219). Imagination replaces dogmas and creeds in shaping the moral conscience. Through Sartor Resartus, Carlyle ultimately points to his own power as writer to bring about not a spiritual resurrection but a cultural one through the new religion of letters facilitated by the printing press.

Carlyle’s evangel places himself at the center and uses Judeo-Christian Scriptures as a platform for the heroism of geniuses, particularly of his own heroism. Jesus, who is never referred to as Christ in Sartor Resartus and is alluded to but never named in Past and Present, appears as only one of many human heroes who happen to possess a divine spark of genius. As the revolutionary thought and cult of the godlike change with the times, history shows a gradual progression from external form, whether in prayer or custom, to free-spirited action. Carlyle writes Past and Present in a similar evangelic form but presents revelation through the life of a monk rather than through nature. Carlyle figures himself again at the center of the evangel as a man of letters, “an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood” (PP, 289). In Past and Present, Carlyle advocates silence that fosters indiscriminate tolerance of all beliefs, no matter how contradictory. Work, which embodies the individual spirit, alone remains permanent and becomes the clothing through which past heroes live on as illustrations of the same revelatory process.

Through his “man of reason” whose “Intellect is like light” subduing “the Chaos … under it” (1869: 194),@ “Chartism,” Thomas Carlyle's Works: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, v. 3 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), 319. Carlyle individualizes Fichte’s concept of the progressive unfolding of Divine self-realization. Although this Divine Idea may be perceived by a seer at any moment of history, “each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another.” (1864: 26). Carlyle illustrates in Teufelsdröckh and in the monk Samson how intuition leads heroes to transcend institutions of their era as they progress from submission to law to a freedom of spirit above the law and become “a beacon among the nations” (SR, 217). George Eliot’s Savonarola lives out this spirit of Carlyle’s heroes.

In Romola, Savonarola preaches and demands a puritanical renunciation of aesthetic pleasure in veneration of Divine Law. Later, though, as he identifies his own political preferences and visions as God’s will and believes in them more than in external acts of God, Savonarola authorizes his own disobedience to the Church: “the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law…” (553). Through her partially fictional portrayal of Savonarola, Eliot illustrates Carlyle’s conception of work as informed by intuition and reveals its implications and limitations for eternalizing humanity.

For Carlyle, utilitarianism fails to account for what he associates with Aristotle’s final cause or purpose of mankind, action. Benthamite dependence upon external reward, in his view, leads to a loss of trust in cosmic retribution and consequent desperation. His notion of inevitable justice thus functions not as an end in itself but as an escape from despair and a stimulus to work for self-preservation. Intuition, in Carlyle’s view, signals one’s own godlike authority as a source of eternal laws that transcend the cash “nexus” (PP, 170) and alerts one to injustices to be defied (SR, 129). The faculty of intuition tells a person what work to do and inspires him to value work as worship. The will, by thus enacting a self-annihilating “worship of sorrow” through the fulfillment of duty (140-146), resolves the disparity between human desire for infinite justice and the finitude of earthly existence. The fulfillment of such duty abrogates the need for self-knowledge; rather than effecting a personal, ontological transformation, it propels activity that gives new form to an eternal “Spirit” (147), enacting a new “Mythus” (147) through which the Divine Idea may pass (151).

In Romola, Eliot embodies in Savonarola Carlyle’s worker whose ultimate source of duty lies in the self, in the intuition of means to be employed to contend against corruption. Basing her delineation of character upon Pasquale Villari’s biography of Savonarola,@ Life and Times of Savonarola, trans. Linda Villari (London, 1899). Eliot depicts Savonarola initially revering external mandates and gradually acquiring a freedom of spirit above the law. The spirit metaphorically becomes, in the friar’s words, “a beacon among the nations”@ ed. Andrew Brown (New York: OUP, 1994), 217. —an equivalent of Carlyle’s everlasting “Loadstar” (PP, 41). He exemplifies what Carlyle describes as the hero as priest: “The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voice from the unseen Heaven; interpreting…—the "open secret of the Universe,"—which so few have an eye for! He is … the enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in all times.”@ Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Boston: Standard Publishing, 1899), 111. Presuming himself to be the source of this light, rather than its channel, Savonarola and his follower Romola begin to notice its transience and look to artificial methods of maintaining its radiance. I shall examine how, through her delineation of these two characters, Eliot demonstrates the roles of intuition, will and light in Carlyle’s ethic and thereby reveals the limited nature of the transformation that his conception of work can effect. Conveying Carlyle’s call to duty through his “Mythus” or allegory, she highlights the propensity of empathy prompted by the imagination to dispose a person to duty while preserving that person’s independence of will, a far cry from the spiritual conversion historically attributed to Savonarola.

Like Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh who professes the hollowness of duty based on the satisfaction of desire, elimination of fear, or approval of conscience (SR, 123-149), Eliot depicts the futility of such. Through Romola’s husband, Tito, Eliot shows that a sense of duty to satisfy impulses eventually devolves into a self-destructive cycle. Tito’s tendency to self-gratification consistently overrides his filial gratitude, his loyalty to his wife, and his commitment to his own word. After promising himself that he would sell his adoptive father’s rings to ransom the elderly man, he decides to retain the money and convince himself of his father’s death. Shame, though, indicates the inability of his will to obliterate reason (R, 97). When his father surfaces, safety becomes Tito’s highest and only priority; he decides to break his commitment to preserve the library of Romola’s late father in order to purchase armor, a weapon, and a means of escape with the unwitting Tessa whom he has drawn into a secret mock marriage. Because duty does not bind him to anything more stable than emotion, Tito’s love for others, even for those he deems worthy of sacrifice, dwindles into an exchange for what he estimates as their optimal contribution to his comfort. For example, despite his gratitude to his father, he uses utilitarian tactics to rationalize the “sum of pleasure,” “not for himself only, but for others,” which could be rendered from the price of his father’s rings and contrasts it with the sterile contentment the old man might enjoy upon survival (111). Likewise, since his growing guilt abates the “loving awe” he once experienced “in the presence of [Romola’s] noble womanhood” (91), he mentally dismisses her as having “ceased to belong to the desireable furniture of his life; there was no possibility of an easy relation between them without genuineness on his part,” but that “implied confession…, and confession, involved a change of purpose” (393). Tito’s reduction of all bonds to a matter of feeling--and his final loss, even of identity, after dying in a fight with his father-- illustrate how the dictation of impulse progressively incurs the betrayal of one’s closest relations and even of pleasure since it converts all endeavors into schemes of fearful calculation.

Tito’s duplicitous duty to impulse contrasts the single-hearted dedication of Romola’s father and brother. The choices of these two men reveal how duty toward an ideal removed from the world eliminates possibilities for reforming that world. Both Bardo and his son perceive the universal significance of what each learns through his own channel to truth, but, out of fear of impurity, they evade the task of disseminating it. Bardo devotes himself to intellectually penetrating the “meaning” of ancient poets, “which is closely akin to the mens divinior of the poet himself” (48), so that he might increase “that far-stretching, lasting light which spreads over centuries of thought” (49). Stoically valuing his work above honor and luxury, he refrains from conversing with contemporaries whom he considers “dispossessed of true feeling and intelligence” (49); and from publishing, to avoid risking plagiarism of his ideas (53) and false admiration (182). In the wake of such a reclusive undertaking, he leaves to his daughter innumerable debts which are paid off with the sale of what had been the aim of his scholarly endeavors: a Florentine research library to be established in his memory. Fra Luca likewise hopes that the doctrine by which he lives shall reach all cultures (150), but his self-renunciation, too, involves measures that counter the fulfillment of this desire. Choosing to live in the eternal “Unseen Perfectness” (150), Fra Luca abstains from ties that would wed him “to that which passeth away” (150) and grounds his asceticism in lessons he discerns from visions that he passively receives, a guarantee for him of their divine origin. However, upon dying, he yearns to transmit to his sister what he infers to be a “heavenly warning” manifested to him in a repeated vision (151). During this encounter with Romola, though, his indifference to the affection and concerns of his family angers her, causing her “heart… to close against him while he was speaking” (171). The exclusivity of Fra Luca’s zeal retards her belief in his exhortation against her marriage; only after she enters the nuptial bond does she recognize the need to flee. Bardo and Fra Luca’s distrust of each other’s influence, as well as the influence of the world at large, arrests the ultimate purpose of their efforts to learn, whether from studies or visions. Each one’s fears of hypocrisy narrow the scope of his interest to his own perfection and paralyze his will to promote truth as intrinsically good apart from his own possession of it.

Through her protagonist, Eliot reveals that loyalty to a person rather than to an an ideal may motivate selfless consistency in the performance of duty, but the term of obligation fluctuates according to the person’s moral worth. Romola dedicates her youth to the intellectual needs of her blind and aged father, surrendering her opportunities for social life in Florence. Her work as his secretary appears to emulate what Eliot’s proem describes as “the highest [type], which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice” (10). Romola conforms her wishes to her father’s preferences: when her brother forsakes her father to become a hermit, Romola disowns Dino in her heart; as Tito gains her father’s filial favor, she opens her heart to him, accepts his proposal, and strives “to subdue her nature to her husband’s” (235). Upon her father’s death, she clings to his memory and senses “a sacramental obligation” (233) to safeguard his manuscripts. When Tito disregards such promises, she maintains her nuptial allegiance through discretion but, having followed “the law of her affections” rather than “any adopted maxims,” her indignation at Tito’s treachery turns her love for him into “repulsion” (305) as she resigns all hopes for happiness and deserts her household, seeking out the learned Cassandra to help her “rescue her father’s name from oblivion” (307). She fancies freedom from her freely professed vows to pursue a self-chosen plan that underscores, as Savonarola points out, her desire for submission to nothing other than the “rule” of her “own will” (338).

By highlighting, in the characters we have just seen, a self-interest that often underlies apparent duties to feelings, ambitions, or persons, Eliot champions a Carlylean sense of duty that does not arise from passing circumstances and that aims at more than self-satisfaction. The Dominican preacher Savonarola preaches and obeys laws he intuits apropos of the common good: he discourages indulgence in consolations that weaken the will to fight political corruption; he rebukes offerings of riches to the Church rather than to impoverished citizens (8, 323, 325); and he scorns attachments to beauty, whether in gems or poetry, for the sake of pleasures that induce vice (8, 399). Initially, Savonarola’s words seem to move people not by the newness of his message, but ‘“by some power over and above his prophetic visions”’ (161). Witnesses conclude that his ‘“pure life and strong faith’” seem to ‘“stamp him as a messenger of God’” (161). As his “fervent belief in an unseen Justice” enflames him with “indignation at the sight of wrong” within the Church and the land (199), Savonarola sees himself as an Old Testament prophet warning of a divine scourge to descend upon the Church and Florence and publicly offers his life to appease it. In the eyes of the Italians, the march of the French King and his army into Florence on their way to reclaiming Naples confirms Savonarola’s prophecy of the arrival of a divine instrument to correct wrongs.

Eliot’s narrator, voicing Savonarola’s thoughts, points to “reason” as the origin of the preacher’s belief in the advent of divine punishment. Like Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh, who identifies reason not with knowledge but with an intuition of the oneness of spirit animating all of reality-- “a deeper meditation” teaching “that the Where and When… are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought” (SR, 43), Savonarola associates reason with a revelation of conscience that ordains the direction of ordinary and societal affairs. Having left the world for the cloister, Savonarola witnessed corruption within the Church and, after seeking answers in Scripture, trusted that “reason itself declared that vengeance was imminent, for what else would suffice to turn men from their obstinacy in evil?” (R, 199). This belief in divine mediation had been “reflected in [his] visions” from childhood. Savonarola’s faculty of reason differs from Fra Luca’s visionary conscience, which resembles the Kantian faculty for isolating the noumenal world of eternal realities from terrestrial existence. Instead, Savonarola’s intuition unites the two worlds by dismissing Time and Space as illusory and worshipping a divinity within, presuming what Teufelsdröckh articulates as “our Me [to be] the only reality: and Nature… but the reflex of our own inward Force” (SR, 44). Like Carlyle’s repeated warning about “Heaven’s invisible Justice…on Earth” (PP, 19), Savonarola insistently professes his belief in the intervention of “unseen Justice” (R, 199). While Carlyle’s alarm translates into exhortations against “mammonism,” idleness, and democracy, Savonarola’s censure is directed at riches, profane arts or distractions from obligation, and political parties other than that of the Great Council. For example, the preacher interrupts Romola’s flight from Tito with the claim that “I have a command from God to stop you” (338) and advises her to return to her “true place in life” in order to correspond to her divinely “appointed” duties. Unlike Fra Luca, Savonarola convinces Romola because his “glance” transmits “interest…and care for her apart from any personal feeling” (339). He directs Romola to renounce her own will and follow a higher law, that of emulating “a Supreme Offering” (342) by acknowledging her debt to Florence and serving the poor. For Savonarola, as for Carlyle, “divinely wrought intuitions” (493) indicate specific deeds to be done rather than virtues to be lived.

The renunciation of claims to happiness practiced by both Savonarola and Romola parallels the protest of Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh against despair and false hopes. While Teufelsdröckh’s protest awakens consciousness of a divine inner strength and freedom, the self-denial of Savonarola and Romola strengthens their resolve of will to attend to public needs. However, through Savonarola’s later sermons that begin to touch current affairs more directly, Eliot indicates that his “reason” emerges not from divine contact but from a psychological merging of quick reasoning and sympathy. He identifies the public good with a particular party (299, 464), and he delivers homilies with “the interest of a political bulletin” (223). He soon receives from Rome a mandate to cease preaching, and he obeys until state authorities request that he calm the people suffering from famine (350). In order to convince the Italians of the advent of divine aid against the spreading plague, he risks and undergoes excommunication (430-31). His initial obedience to laws of a larger entity, the Church, for the sake of the common good evolves into defiance of such authority as corrupt; he “dare[s] to act on [his] own warrant, … without external law to appeal to” (442, 497). Unmoved by personal suffering, like that of Romola’s convicted uncle waiting to be executed, Savonarola works upon “theoretic conviction” that fills him with a sense of “preeminence” and belief in his eventual “triumph” over iniquity (472, 539). When Romola rejects her hope for escape and “cease[s] to think that her lot could be happy” (366), she “submit[s] her mind” to Savonarola’s as if his were “a rope suspended securely by her path” (367) and senses that his “burning indignation against the abuses and oppression…of the Church…had kindled the ready fire in her too” (366-67). However, her “belief in a heroism struggling for sublime ends” (416), like Savonarola’s adherence to the Church, loses significance for her as she loses her trust in him as the ultimate authority.

Romola gradually chooses to follow the preacher’s path, though, and comes to hold intuition above established norms. Left without any alternative external ground for her sense of duty (471), she perceives her situation to be like his when “the sacredness of obedience ended” and “the sacredness of rebellion began” (442) and resigns herself to suicide before surfacing at a village where she risks her life to care for plague victims. Reflection upon her attempt to break a sacred bond fills her with compunction, but she rebukes such doubts, which arise in idle moments, and confides in her intuited motive of revolt (528-29). She, like Savonarola before his final colloquy, embodies Carlyle’s advice: “Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself;… know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules!” (PP, 196). Romola and Savonarola’s strength of will corresponds to what Carlyle defines as the divine “Me” which admits of no contrition, no avowal of the heart’s wayward tendencies. Rejecting all points of reference for self-examination outside of their own intuited mandates and authority, both Romola and Savonarola obviate self-knowledge and seek salvation through action rather than virtue.

As Romola and Savonarola become conscious that their desires are never to be fulfilled, they accept a life devoid of joy; they adopt an attitude much like Teufelsdröckh’s worship of sorrow when he realizes that the physical world cannot accommodate his god-like spirit. After returning from the village, Romola no longer seeks the gladness of alleviating pain and spurns her despair with confidence in the conviction that “[i]f everything else is doubtful, this suffering that I can help is certain” (527). She echoes Teufelsdröckh’s profession that “‘Doubt…cannot be removed except by Action’” (SR, 148). Before closing the epilogue with Romola’s instruction of Tessa’s children, Eliot reveals the final surrender of hope that loss upon loss has elicited from her protagonist: Romola’s “eyes were fixed absently on the distant mountains”; “the finely moulded cheek had sunk a little[,]… but there was a placidity in Romola’s face which had never belonged to it in youth” (546). Her will to suppress disappointment upon actively accepting the changing conditions of her state mirrors that of Savonarola who, when the Florentines call for a divine sign of his validity, pleads that fire consume him if his preaching is false (479). Like Teufelsdröckh’s poet and other workers who “willing[ly] sacrifice … the Immortal to the Perishable” (207), Savonarola and Romola surrender their expansive desires of spirit to the duty of the moment.

However, the focus on justice alone is not enough to sustain Savonarola and Romola. As Savonarola hears from “Sadness” in his final “colloquy with divine purity,” “Thy heart was lifted up at the beauty of thy own deeds[;]….thy pride and vainglory… scandalized all the world” (540). Both he and Romola lack an ultimate good to which to bend their wills. Eliot shows that with no principle above and beyond the intuition to serve, two choices remain: either, like Romola, to cede to a frustrated will and let passion vanish or, like Savonarola in exchanging doctrine for political preferences, to identify intuited means of justice with one’s personal will and to lord it over others in the name of duty. Hence, like Carlyle, Eliot confides not in the possibility of inner change but, rather, in the external adaptation to new duties and roles, a ‘retailoring,” as Carlyle entitles Teufelsdröckh’s biography.

Like Teufelsdröckh, whose productive conduct reflects not a stable, intrinsic principle of transformation but “the Divine Essence” for “some moments or years” (SR 201), Eliot’s friar and young woman come to realize that the spirit embodied by their activity is transient. Romola wonders how “to keep alive that flame of unselfish emotion by which a life of sadness might still be a life of active love” (R, 367), and Savonarola interprets the “warm radiance” that “thrilled through…[his] frame” after his public prayer as a sign of “divine strength” (480) and the absence of “glory in the light that fell on him” after denouncing the trial by fire as a denied “blessing” or “smile of heaven” (506). Without faith in the transformative cooperation between the external Source of divine grace and the human struggle for virtue, Romola and Savonarola see themselves and others as external agents of alteration.

Eliot shows them to be what Carlyle calls “Tailors”: they promote external change by refashioning history with a new mythos. Upon confronting Romola, Savonarola vividly forecasts a “regeneration of Florence” that depends upon her active sacrifice through “a new worship” there: work (344-45). Romola, in turn, enkindles the desires of Tessa’s children to “act nobly” (547) by revering Savonarola with liturgical rites associated with saints. Like the luster of his deeds, which has dimmed, natural light does not reach his portrait. She thus procures light to shine on him by placing tapers below his image and praising him on Carlyle’s terms: for his battle “against powerful wrong” in the attempt “to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of” (547). Echoing Eliot’s admiration of Carlyle’s “reverence for the great and god-like under every sort of earthly mummery!” (“Thomas Carlyle,” 215), Romola dismisses the validity of “Sadness’s” final accusation that vanity has reduced Savonarola’s worthiness, as well as of the need for Savonarola’s contrition manifested by his “heart bowed in penitence” (R, 541). In her eyes, Savonarola became a “martyr” “not because of his sins, but because of his greatness” (541).

Rather than teaching Tessa’s children to seek a spiritual union which the historical Savonarola ultimately won through correspondence with the Source of his intuitions, Romola challenges them to imitate the fictional Savonarola’s strength of will. Like Savonarola’s abstract references in the novel to Christ’s crucifixion and his prophecies of the scourge, Romola’s stories of Tito and this friar in the Epilogue are exemplars that catalyze action by awakening pity and fear. Cathartic emotions fall short, though, of the metanoia the historical Savonarola experienced through the grace won by Christ’s sacrifice, as manifested in his final, defenseless disposition of humility.@ Girolamo Savonarola, Prison Meditations on Psalms 51 and 31, trans. and ed. John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., Reformation Texts with Translation (1350-1650), general editor, Kenneth Hagen, Series Biblical Studies, vol. 1 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 105. The Renaissance preacher gradually came to rely upon the corroboration of reason with external sources of authority. Perhaps for this reason, after reading Romola in January of 1865, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend Edward Urquhart that “The author of Romola from being pagan, clever as she is, does not understand him” (Jan. 6).@ Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (Oxford: OUP, 1956), 18. He points to the flat picture of Savonarola in Eliot’s source, Villari’s biography, and recommends the rendering of Savonarola’s “poetical” mind in A.F. Rio’s The Poetry of Christian Art.@ ed. T. Bosworth: London, 1854. Rio depicts Savonarola rationally shaping the Christian imagination of his congregation by refining rather than denying their aesthetic tastes; creatively employing nature to explain doctrine and reforming secular music and art, Savonarola leads them not to himself but back to the Scriptures, liturgy and creeds of the Church. Rio records that Savonarola’s execution was plotted by the “bankers, usurers, and merchants” (269) during the papacy of Alexander VI, and his reputation for sanctity was proclaimed during the following reign of Pope Julius II. Since Eliot’s Savonarola interprets history and tradition in light of intuition rather than intuition in light of history and tradition, as does Rio’s, the preacher’s ambition soon colors his sense of duty. Romola thus chooses to purify her version by focusing on the preacher’s desires, not for his own honor but for that of others.

Like her protagonist, Eliot “retailors” the righteousness of her characters, including Romola herself, by associating them with mythical figures. As Romola works in the streets of Florence, townspeople call her “The Mother of God” (R, 365), and, “illuminated” by “sun-rays” on the island where she carries an orphaned Jewish child, the people acclaim her the “Holy Mother with the Babe” (522-25). Such verbal re-creations of a suicidal young woman do not reflect interior growth but Carlylean work, that of Eliot herself who, after disclosing characters’ flaws, disregards them to reshape identities, often through the imagination of other characters. Her biographer Rosemarie Bodenheimer remarks that the ‘“widening of sympathy’ central to George Eliot’s philosophy of art is… a transformation that… involves the absorption of a shocked recognition of the intractability of others, who are then to be re-seen, perhaps succored, in their narrowness.”@ The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans George Eliot Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994). Having lost faith in an absolute source of goodness, she, like Carlyle, constructs transformations through which a character’s new role or work, as well as the author’s craft, becomes what Carlyle calls “a new vehicle and vesture” of spirit (SR, 147). In her discourse on narrative in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, Eliot likens her impetus for writing novels to that of “the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.”@ ed. Esther Wood (NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901), 154. With human empathy but without hope in the effects of any sort of divine grace, Eliot and Carlyle aim at motivating admirable action by altering reality because they, like their heroes, confide in the power of imagination over the power of truth.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing R. Pullins Co., 2002.