Classics From Carlyle
Two of the Most Celebrated Passages in “Sartor Resartus,” Penned By
the Great Scottish Philosopher in What He Called “The
Loneliest Nook in Britain.”
“The selections printed here are taken from what is regarded by nearly every one as the masterpiece of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Sartor Resartus” (The Tailor Retailored) is the title of a book which exhibits the very soul of Carlyle himself, with all its mingled scorn, lawlessness, humor, and pathos. He wrote in what he called “the loneliest nook in Britain”—a little Scottish farm at Craigenputtoch.
To this place Carlyle had taken his bride, Jane Welsh, a very brilliant woman, and there the two lived for years amid the most desolate surroundings and after the rudest fashion. They were a strange and ill-assorted couple—he in manner and appearance a gaunt and uncouth peasant; she a delicate and nervous woman of the world. Carlyle suffered tortures from dyspepsia, which often made him as savage as a wolf. His wife, who had married him less from love than because she thought he had a great career before him, suffered from his heedlessness and roughness, yet took her revenge upon him by the sharpness of her tongue, and by the burning record which she left of their mutual bitterness and spite.
It was in this lonely place that Carlyle wrote “Sartor Resartus,” which first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine (1833-1834). It is one of the strangest and most eccentric of literary productions. It has no form. Its language is often exclamatory, vociferous, and wild—interlarded also with foreign words, and words that Carlyle himself invented. It really sets forth the personal opinions, the fanciful speculations, and the mental writhings of its author; and it foreshadows the almost demoniac power wherewith Carlyle afterward wrote the story of the French Revolution, which he himself called “truth clad in hell-fire.”
Carlyle, as a man, was so erratic as to be almost impossible. His opinions were extreme, and he was fond of bellowing them forth in the fiercest and most furious words, insulting those who differed with him, eaten up by a colossal vanity, and yet unquestionably a genius of the first order.