Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/29

Rh (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 earthly-ignoble 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 'world-humour,' 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 heaven—from 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