Section 2, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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Underlying the traditional satire against avarice -- particularly the satire against the swindler, with his tricks and sophisms and disguises -- [196/197] lies the perception that money is a mode of signifying opposed to a prior, "natural" mode. This, of course, is the point of the opening scene of Volpone, where the miser worships his money as if it were a saint or god and Mosca opposes riches and fortune to wisdom and nature ("Riches are in fortune/A greater good than wisdom is in nature"). Jonson's complaint against money is substantially the same as Marx's well-known remarks, more than two centuries later, in his meditation on Timon of Athens: money "changes fidelity to infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, stupidity into intelligence and intelligence into stupidity.... it is the universal confusion and transposition of all things, the inverted world." Money can transpose values because its relationship to things is arbitrary, or as Marx puts it, "abstract," and from this idea it is a small step to the attack, in another fragment of 1844, to abstract thinking itself: "The philosophical mind is nothing but the alienated world-mind thinking within the bounds of its self-alienation, i.e., conceiving itself in an abstract manner. Logic is the money of the mind, the speculative thought-value of man and of nature . . ., thought which is alienated and abstract and ignores real nature and man." Just as the mental counterpart of the commercial economy of Jonson's time is a form of tricksterlike transposition, the mental counterpart of the industrial economy of Marx's time is an abstract and systematized logic set over against concrete experience in the same way that the system of capitalist production is set over against the concrete needs of the laborers and the works of their hands. To put it in a different way, human beings become units in a system, means toward a perpetually deferred end so divorced from concrete experience that the system seems but a monstrous and aimless functioning. "Machinery," Carlyle's term for systematized alienation, derives from the Greek for "means" or "contrivance." Although Carlyle tends to base his critique of machinery on scientific rather than economic thought, the two primary associations of his key word -- the machine as a synecdoche of industrial civilization [197/198] (Dickens's Moloch-like Idol) and Newtonian mechanics -- suggest the conformity between social and mental structures implied in Marx's sentences about alienated thought.
In its broadest range, Carlyle's critique of nineteenth-century civilization treats mechanical thinking as one symptom of a pervasive system of false significances, which (in Sartor Resartus) he calls "old clothes" or "dead metaphors." Appropriately, the biographical section of the book, which is a cultural myth as well, contains an account of the fall into alienated language that Teufelsdröckh must redeem through the clothing philosophy -- and which Ruskin must also redeem in the language of a moral science. According to Carlyle, the infant Teufelsdröckh lived in unity with nature and experienced natural objects directly as incarnate Words. But when the child went off to Hinterschlag Academy, he entered the main street of his new home and
saw its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and Schuldthurm (Tail), and the aproned or disaproned Burghers moving-in to breakfast: a little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for some human imps had tied a tin-kettle to its tail; thus did the agonised creature, louddingling, career through the whole length of the borough, and become notable enough. Fit emblem of many a Conquering Hero, to whom Fate . . . has malignantly appended a tin-kettle of Ambition, to chase him on; which the faster he runs, urges him the faster, the more loudly and more foolishly! (29)
Each image -- clock, jail, labor, and spanked dog -- refers metaphorically to school and to the larger condition of which school is in turn a metaphor. "Steeple-clock" and Schuldthurm (the German word combines "guilt" with "steeple," or "tower") repeat the connections implied in the image of the dog, which as a figure for ambition combines spanking and time to suggest that the lessons of Hinterschlag ("back-slap") begin in guilt, as human life begins in Original Sin. This passage comes from the bag of fragments Teufelsdröckh has labeled "Scorpio," the eighth sign of the zodiac, represented by the animal that stings itself. To exist in time, then, is to be driven through life by the Devil, who is the Time Spirit of this World. Later suggestions in the book reverse this image to make man himself the tail or detachable appendage dropped by the Devil. (Teufelsdröckh's manner of appearing to his adopted parents and, of course, his name reinforce this idea.) Carlyle here draws close to Freud's vision of human society in Civilization and Its Discontents, according to which the instinctual renunciation necessary to economic life, experienced as guilt or unconscious aggression against the self, becomes one of the driving forces of social energy and the principal cause of organized aggression. But Carlyle also shows how the personal experience of guilt and helplessness is projected onto [198/199] the cosmos as well. The youth's betrayal by Blumine and Towgood (or Toughgut) repeats the idea of expulsion and leads to his nightmare of a mechanical universe, in the face of which life itself is but an excrescence. The "spanking" of guilt is apotheosized into the machine-as-history, a chain of ineluctable necessity. This breaking of the human relations with nature and other humans has its counterpart in the subject matter of Hinterschlag -- the dead languages with which the logicians stuff their students. Severed from their referents, words also become a mere lifeless structure.
But Teufelsdröckh's reconstituted faith provides a circular return to childhood by reasserting in different form the union of the human and the natural and of words and their referents. When in "The Everlasting Yea" the leaden bonds of necessity are recognized as the golden bonds of duty, Teufelsdröckh undoes his expulsion by becoming part of the whole, now experienced as an organism taking a human image. Man becomes the symbol of the All, and the aim of human effort is to manifest divine laws as the set of living metaphors that are human culture. Human speech, rightly used and understood, is also an organic system of metaphor evolving through time, for in Carlylean idealism, words are deeds, and deeds words, generating in turn the structures of social and economic life. For example, all Rothschilds and English national debts and the entire money economy spring from the moment an "old-world Grazier," sick of lugging his ox around, decided to stamp the figure of an ox (pecus) on a piece of leather to call it pecunia. (Tennyson, 266)
In his fine analysis of this passage, G. B. Tennyson compares Carlyle's argument in Wotton Reinfred that the metaphorical origin of words strengthens rather than weakens their power to shadow forth truth, since all thought is metaphorical and abstractions are but faded metaphors. "What metaphor does for Carlyle is to illuminate relationships, to reveal connections between things not at first evident, and thus to suggest some vast and meaningful scheme in the universe." It follows that in a society based on false verbal relationships, human connections will be lost. The isolation that for Carlyle is the most poignant symptom of the nineteenth-century malaise figures itself in a world of blank messages manipulated by "rulers" who are in actuality impotent paper pushers and jabberers -- a world of paper money, paper parliaments, seas of ink, handbills, un-laws, doctrines, and a generalized "vague janglement," as he calls it in Past and Present. In this sense Sartor Resartus is a satire against pedantry and its eiron is Teufelsdröckh, a hermetic pedant who is in truth the one person in the book not a pedant because he is able to interpret things in their profound symbolic interrelationship.
[199/200] Unto This Last adopts these and other features of Carlylean satire: it opposes the mechanical conception of society to the organic, adopts a stance at once prophetic and ironic, and converts the objects of its attack into the stock figures of the malignant pedant and the false preacher. And it begins with a position already defined by Carlyle, proving first of all that the dismal science is in fact a disguised value system in competition with other "gospels," particularly that professed by his audience. Political economy, Ruskin writes, is a
systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion. The writings which we (verbally) esteem as divine, not only denounce the love of money as the source of all evil, and as an idolatry abhorred of the Deity, but declare Mammon service to be the accurate and irreconcilable opposite of God's service; and, whenever they speak of riches absolute, and poverty absolute, declare woe to the rich, and blessing to the poor. Whereupon we forthwith investigate a science of becoming rich, as the shortest road to national prosperity. [XVII, 75-76]
The contradiction between profession and practice Ruskin takes to be definitive of his public (and indeed, the audience that could respond to such a statement -- an audience largely middle class and fervently Christian -- is more or less the Victorian audience). Ruskin seized his occasion with exquisite instinct (the rage of his opposition shows that he hit home), but in his larger task of fashioning a language common to Christian ethics and social analysis, the moment of his opportunity is also a moment of great difficulty. Carlyle sought to teach his audience how to read phenomena as moral metaphors, but Ruskin had also to construct a moral science that could prove the political economists to be false on their own terms as well. His audience owed a double allegiance to the true gospels, but one was becoming increasingly persuasive, while the other had been neutralized into platitudinous familiarity. How could he rescue religious language from the context of hypocritical evasiveness? This task is precisely that of Coleridge in The Statesman's Manual, and Ruskin's argument is similar. He must show that the Bible, accurately read and imaginatively experienced, is the truest guide to modern economics. He does so by overthrowing abstractions and constructing a mode of thought that is at once concrete, metaphorical, and scientifically valid -- a new language that turns out to be the old language of religious myth.
Carlye, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Everyman Edition, London: Dent, 1967.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982.
Sherburne, James. Ruskin, or, The Ambiguities of Abundance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Tennyson, G. B. Sartor Called "Resartus". Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Last modified December 2000