Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/28

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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