Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/26

xviii move and delight mankind, Carlyle's place in the admiration of posterity will be secure.

It would be superfluous in this place, I think, to attempt anything like a complete biography of Carlyle, in however condensed a form. The main incidents of his life, and in particular the history of his middle and later years, must be already too familiar to most readers not only from Mr. Froude's pages, but from the flood of studies, sketches, letters, reminiscences, and the like, which has poured forth in such unbroken volume since his death. It will be more to the purpose of an introduction to the first volume of this new edition of his works, to confine myself mainly to such details of the author's life as are to be gathered from those passages of Sartor Resartus, which can with reasonable certainty be identified as autobiographical. In a sense, no doubt, it might be said that this remarkable work—by some admirers regarded as the greatest, and by none denied to be the most characteristic, of all his writings—is autobiographical from first to last. It is unquestionably a minute and faithful history of Carlyle's intellectual and spiritual experiences, which, of course, is the main thing. There can be no doubt, for instance, that Pedagogy (Book II., chap. iii.) records the author's bitter memories of what he deemed his perverse and unintelligent schooling, and barren University course. We know as a fact, that the three great chapters in this same Book II. 'The Everlasting No,' 'Centre of Indifference,' and 'The Everlasting Yea,' give the history of the shipwreck of his early faith, his fierce struggle in the waters of blank materialism, and his ultimate winning to that bleak, but at least habitable, island of the Stoics whereon he spent the remainder of his days. We know, or believe ourselves to know the exact date and place of these memorable wrestlings; that their crisis occurred in the month of June 1821, in Edinburgh (the so-called 'French Capital' of Book II., chap. vii.) and that the Rue Saint-Thomas d'Enfer, in which the wrestler 'shook base fear away from him for ever,' is no other than Leith Walk in that city.