intercourse with the higher classes. Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigour, a true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from Jove's head; a rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene !' 'On the whole,' he continues,-and here the keen and caustic analysis discloses itself even more obviously as self-criticism,— 'Professor Teufelsdröckh is not a cultivated writer.' 'Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed-up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered.' Fascinating however as the hunt for autobiographical touches in Sartor Resartus may be to the reader of to-day, it had of course no interest for the reader of sixty years ago. He was thrown back on the thought, the poetry, the humour, the general drift and purpose of the book, and he had to make what he could of it in that way. In many cases probably the unfortunate man endeavoured to read it for the story,' though if the effect of attacking Sir Charles Grandison in that spirit would have been as Johnson held, to drive the student to suicide, the study of Sartor Resartus on the same principle would assuredly seem the path of madness. It may be that a grim sense of the comedy of this mystification led Carlyle to exaggerate his obscurity, perversity, eccentricity, of malice prepense. He had as we know an immense admiration for Sterne, and the notion of applying the method of Tristram Shandy' on a cosmic scale so to speak, may well have jumped with his sardonic humour. And that, no doubt, is why to the genuine lovers not merely of the dramatically comic in Sterne's masterpiece (which is his sole attraction for most readers), but of the subjectively fantastic in Sterne himself (which is not near so extensively appreciated), the very manner and arrangement of Sartor Resartus contribute to its charm. Its central conception, its grund-idee, as Professor Teufelsdröckh would have called it, lends itself with admirable aptitude to the Sternian style of treatment. For the Clothes Philosophy, as formulated by Carlyle, through the mouth of the Professor, affords perpetual opportunities of the abruptest transit from the infinitely great to the infinitesimally little. The constant suggestion of gigantic incongruity-its perpetual temptation to the author, after lifting his reader into the transcendental empyrean, suddenly to 'dump him down' on the flattest flats of the earthlyignoble world, has often proved irresistible to many a lesser humorist than Carlyle. But, with him it is never resisted: nor can any judicious critic desire that it should be. For, even if we were to deduct from Sartor Resartus the pure poetic, the pure picturesque, the eloquence, passion, and profoundity with which the book abounds, it would still remain a monument of 'worldhumour,' such as has been rarely raised in such Titanic dimensions in the world's history. This would be so, even if the humoristic treatment of the idea were less richly imaginative than it is. To have carried the 'Clothes Philosophy from earth to heavenfrom the uniform of the Dandiacal Body' to the lebendiges Kleid der Gottheit; to have traced the principle of the symbolic from its highest to its lowest manifestations, and to have so displayed all matter as the mere vesture of spirit that the mind at once recognises the essential affinity between the visible Cosmos and the beadle's cocked hat-this was an achievement in the transcendental-humorous, which in itself deserves to be held in everlasting remembrance, not only in the record of literature, but in the history of human thought. How could such a thesis have been methodically treated? If its treatment had not partaken of the vast incongruity of the subject it would have been artistically amiss. Worthy, but too serious souls have striven, and will no doubt for ever strive to find in Sartor Resartus a consistent and continuously developed 'argument'; but in vain! You may construct a theory of the matter which will carry you along for a time; but it will 'throw' you in the end. Book II. for instance, contains no doubt the fairly straightforward and consecutive 'Story of a Soul,'—Carlyle's or another's, in all probability Carlyle's; and encouraged by its coherence a sanguine reader attacks the third and last Book, in full belief that here at least the bearing' of the Professor's 'remarks' will be found to lie in the application of them.' But alas! the Professor is 'neither to hold nor to bind.' After three chapters of sufficiently plain sailing on the decay of creeds and churches, Teufelsdröckh is off in Chapter IV. in hot pursuit of a Socialistic hare. In the fifth he is eloquently describing the rise of a new Society, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old, and in the Sixth he is in Monmouth Street moralising over its cast clothes! Then, in the next chapter but one to that masterpiece of solemnly sustained burlesque, we are being borne along through the wonderful chapter on 'Natural Supernaturalism 'to its magnificent close, perhaps the grandest and most awe-inspired exercise on the everlasting theme 'O World, O Life, O Time!' that exists in human language. And then-well then, within three pages, we are revelling in the broad buffoonery of 'The Dandiacal Body,' and the sardonic irony of the plea for Tailors. After which-Chapter the Last and Farewell. No! Let the commentator too enamoured of method desist from his useless labours and leave Sartor Resartus to stand for what it is a fantastic but splendid rhapsody, laden with thought, glowing with imagination and passion, pungent with irony; to the prosaic a stumbling-block, and to the humourless foolishness, but to all who bring to the reading of it some slight share of its own qualities an unfailing source of spiritual refreshment and intellectual delight. H. D. TRAILL. |