In Past and Present the sage's opening gambit draws the reader's attention to "one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest" phenomena:

England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvest; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" (10.1)

In several ways this passage serves as a fitting paradigm of the sage's first move or opening technique, because in it Carlyle simultaneously proclaims his subject, indicates its importance to his audience, and suggests, in part by the power of his rhetoric, a confidence in his ability to answer the questions he has raised by pointing to the subject in the first place. Furthermore, lending his voice to that "baleful fiat" -- to whatever has caused such human want in the midst of such abundance -- Carlyle makes explicit one of the sage's chief techniques: he acts as a ventriloquist, providing an eloquent voice for inanimate phenomena and inarticulate masses. The sage proceeds by turning "dumb facts" into speaking voices.

In addition, Carlyle, who frequently calls the reader's attention to this first crucial stage in his enterprise, also implies that he serves as a second Daniel, interpreting writing on the wall, and as a second (though pre-Freudian) Oedipus. These metaphors for the sage's interpretations, which he draws from classical mythology and the Old Testament, emphasize the essential importance to the community of his acts of interpretation. Chartism, for instance, presents the longed-for interpreter of contemporary political phenomena as Oedipus confronting the Sphinx when he asks: "What are the rights, what are the mights of the discontented Working Classes in England at this epoch? He were an Oedipus, and deliverer from sad social pestilence, who could resolve us fully!" (29.123). Oedipus, we recall, rid Thebes of the Sphinx by solving her riddle. "What walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?" she demanded, and the hero responded that the answer is man, who crawls upon all four limbs as a baby, walks erect as an adult, and totters about with the aid of a cane in the evening of life. Upon hearing Oedipus's solution to her riddle, the Sphinx, who had plagued Thebes, hurled herself to her death. The Greek hero thus saved a community by comprehending the nature of man. In essence every sage attempts to do the same, for no matter what his point of departure, no matter what phenomenon he interprets, he ends up trying to define some crucial aspect of the human.

In yet another Carlylean metaphor events appear as fire-letters or writing on the wall: "France is a pregnant example in all ways. Aristocracies that do not govern, Priesthoods that do not preach; the misery of that, and the misery of altering that, -- are written in Belshazzar fire-letters on the history of France" (29.161-62). Then again the sage appears as an Understanding Eye, as society's organ of understanding the mysteriously encoded, for as he explains, "Events are written lessons, glaring in huge hieroglyphic picture-writing, that all may read and know them: the terror and horror they inspire is but the note of preparation for truth they are to teach; a mere waste of terror if that not be learned" (29.155). Carlyle alludes, of course, to the Book of Daniel, in which the prophet comes forth to read the undecipherable letters of judgment that have appeared on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. The fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel relates that on the night that Belshazzar made a feast for a thousand of his lords, there "came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote ... upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace" (5:5). When his astrologers and soothsayers cannot read the writing upon the wall, Belshazzar in desperation calls for Daniel, who reminds him that God had raised Nebuchadnezzar, his father, above other kings and then hurled him low when he became proud and arrogant. After telling the king that the same judgment has come to him, he interprets the meaning of the mysterious writing:

And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians. (5:25-28)

Daniel's reading of the divine sentence of course does not function as a warning to the king since Belshazzar has so sinned that he put himself beyond salvation. Daniel's prophetic interpretations, which verses 30 and 31 reveal to have been accurate, authenticate his stature as a prophet at the same time that they convey a generalizable divine warning: God punishes with terrible destruction all those who fall from his way. Furthermore, because nineteenth-century exegetes read the Book of Daniel as an Old Testament analogue to the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine, they generally found that its situations had been divinely intended to prefigure those of their own time; and Carlyle, who had been trained as a minister, plays with such expectations.

In thus citing a nonbiblical event as a modern example of writing on the wall, Carlyle made the same use of this situation that Victorian preachers did F. D. Maurice wrote, for example: "If the earthquake of Lisbon swept away hundreds and thousands, of whom we cannot pronounce that they were worse than we are, -- at least we may hear in it a voice denouncing those same sins which brought death upon Korah and his company; the ambition and falsehood of priests leading to the unbelief, sensuality, godlessness of a people. It was a handwriting on the wall addressed to all Europe. The attempts of the seers and soothsayers of the age to decypher it, showed that they felt it to he so" ("The Rebellion of Korah," The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament [London Macmillan, 1892], p. 214). Maurice next asserts that the French Revolution similarly served as handwriting on the wall.

[Initial "S" based on an image from by Edmund J. Sullivan's illustrated edition of Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, London: George Bell, 1898.]

Last modified 2000