INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

B

Y this time, seven years after Carlyle's death, further criticism of the book which most vividly expresses him in the heat and strength of his youth

and earlier manhood, is not wanted.

The Sartor Resartus has been more discussed than any other of his works, as he himself has been more talked of than any other writer of our time, and it will be of little use to add to the discussion here. There is, however, one addition which may be usefully made to the book,—those passages, namely, from the Life and Reminiscences, which bear on the creation of Teufelsdröckh, and on the trying adventures of the book, when finished, before it succeeded in finding a publisher and publisher and an audience. Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, of Weissnichtwo, is nothing if he is not Carlyle in disguise, the projection of the Scotchman's individuality upon a half humorous, half philosophical, German background; and one feels a singular interest in tracing the original features under

the mask.

Without going into the details of the exact correspondence between the two, it will be enough to point to the obvious translation of Ecclefechan into Entepfuhl, and Edinburgh into Weissnichtwo, as indications of the personal aspect of the whole. The various memoirs of Carlyle, and his Reminiscences, discover many similar striking instances of the way in which the Sartor Resartus took form and substance out of its author's life.

At first, however, the conception from which the book was to be presently wrought into the shape in which we now have it was probably less tinged with external autobiographical colour, and it must not be overlooked that the whole work is as distinctly the outcome of Carlyle's intellectual enthusiasm for the German school of thought as it is of his outward life as a Scotch student. The subject is first mentioned in one of the journals which he kept at Craigenputtock. On October 28 [1830] he announces briefly"Written a strange piece 'On Clothes;' know not what will come of it." It was evidently too strange for the London magazine editors, for on February 7, 1831, he writes again-" Sent to Jack to liberate my 'Teufelsdröckh' from editorial durance in London, and I am seriously thinking to make a book of it. The thing is not right—not art; yet perhaps a nearer approach to art than I have yet made. We ought to try. I want to get it done, and then translate

'Faust,' as I have partially promised to Goethe. Through 'Teufelsdröckh' I am yet far from seeing my way; nevertheless, materials are partly forthcoming." From this, it is clear that the "strange piece On Clothes was assuming the larger proportion of the book, Sartor Resartus. "The Teufelsdröckh,'" says Mr. Froude, "which we have seen seeking in vain for admission into London magazines, was but a first rude draft. Parts of this perhaps survive as they were originally written, in the opening chapters. The single article, when it was returned to him, first expanded into two: then he determined to make a book of it, into which he could project his entire self."

Carlyle was now, it must be remembered, thirty-six years of age, and beginning to consider somewhat desperately the chances of gaining the ear of his generation for the ideas which burned in him for speech. All his balked intellectual energy, all his feeling for truth and his bitter revolt against convention and the hundred mists of prejudice which hide the Ideal from men, found an outlet in the presentation of Teufelsdröckh and his Clothes-Philosophy; and the presentation had the more force because behind it lay the hard reality of Carlyle's own defeats and material difficulties. The Sartor

might well seem a final throw in the great literary game of speculation, to decide whether the

"It is a

literary life was for him worth living or not, and it may be imagined, therefore, with what feeling for past and future he at last finished the book, and decided to set out for London with it. He went sustained by his wife's unaffected verdict. work of genius, dear!" she said when she had read it, before he started, but this was almost the only consoling word it was to bring him at this juncture. He wrote back to her from London on August 22, 1831: -"On Saturday morning I set out for Albemarle Street. Murray, as usual, was not in; but an answer lay for me my poor 'Teufelsdröckh,' wrapped in new paper, with a letter stuck under the packthread. I took it with a silent fury and walked off. The letter said he regretted exceedingly, etc." A visit to Fraser, next undertaken, was equally unfortunate. Fraser wanted £150 for publishing it, and of course Carlyle, who had not as many pence to spare, declined. "Spurning at destiny," he continues, “yet in the mildest terms taking leave of Fraser, I strode through the streets, carrying Teufelsdröckh openly in my hand. I took a pipe and a glass of water, and counsel with myself." And so the game goes on, with one or two illusive signs of better fortune, but only to make the final unsuccess the more disheartening. The whole episode ended in Carlyle's returning defeated, with the unfortunate "Teufelsdröckh" manuscript, to his patient wife at Craigenputtock;