Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), his only creative work, is a mixture of philosophy and romance, of wisdom and nonsense,—­a chaotic jumble of the author’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences during the first thirty-five years of his life.  The title, which means “The Tailor Patched-up,” is taken from an old Scotch song.  The hero is Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, a German professor at the University of Weissnichtwo (don’t know where); the narrative concerns this queer professor’s life and opinions; and the central thought of the book is the philosophy of clothes, which are considered symbolically as the outward expression of spirit.  Thus, man’s body is the outward garment of his soul, and the universe is the visible garment of the invisible God.  The arrangement of Sartor is clumsy and hard to follow.  In order to leave himself free to bring in everything he thought about, Carlyle assumed the position of one who was translating and editing the old professor’s manuscripts, which are supposed to consist of numerous sheets stuffed into twelve paper bags, each labeled with a sign of the zodiac.  The editor pretends to make order out of this chaos; but he is free to jump from one subject to another and to state the most startling opinion by simply using quotation marks and adding a note that he is not responsible for Teufelsdroeckh’s crazy notions,—­which are in reality Carlyle’s own dreams and ideals.  Partly because of the matter, which is sometimes incoherent, partly because of the style, which, though picturesque, is sometimes confused and ungrammatical, Sartor is not easy reading; but it amply repays whatever time and study we give to it.  Many of its passages are more like poetry than prose; and one cannot read such chapters as “The Everlasting No,” “The Everlasting Yea,” “Reminiscences,” and “Natural Supernaturalism,” and be quite the same man afterwards; for Carlyle’s thought has entered into him, and he walks henceforth more gently, more reverently through the world, as in the presence of the Eternal.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.  Concerning Carlyle’s style there are almost as many opinions as there are readers.  This is partly because he impresses different people in widely different ways, and partly because his expression varies greatly.  At times he is calm, persuasive, grimly humorous, as if conversing; at other times, wildly exclamatory, as if he were shouting and waving his arms at the reader.  We have spoken of Macaulay’s style as that of the finished orator, and we might reasonably speak of Carlyle’s as that of the exhorter, who cares little for methods so long as he makes a strong impression on his hearers.  “Every sentence is alive to its finger tips,” writes a modern critic; and though Carlyle often violates the rules of grammar and rhetoric, we can well afford to let an original genius express his own intense conviction in his own vivid and picturesque way.