Sartor Resartus a consistent and continuously developed 'argument'; but in vain! You may construct a theory of the matter which will carry you along for a time; but it will 'throw' you in the end. Book II. for instance, contains no doubt the fairly straightforward and consecutive 'Story of a Soul,'—Carlyle's or another's, in all probability Carlyle's; and encouraged by its coherence a sanguine reader attacks the third and last Book, in full belief that here at least 'the bearing' of the Professor's 'remarks' will be found to 'lie in the application of them.' But alas! the Professor is 'neither to hold nor to bind.' After three chapters of sufficiently plain sailing on the decay of creeds and churches, Teufelsdröckh is off in Chapter IV. in hot pursuit of a Socialistic hare. In the fifth he is eloquently describing the rise of a new Society, Phœnix-like, from the ashes of the old, and in the Sixth he is in Monmouth Street moralising over its cast clothes! Then, in the next chapter but one to that masterpiece of solemnly sustained burlesque, we are being borne along through the wonderful chapter on 'Natural Supernaturalism' to its magnificent close, perhaps the grandest and most awe-inspired exercise on the everlasting theme 'O World, O Life, O Time!' that exists in human language. And then—well then, within three pages, we are revelling in the broad buffoonery of 'The Dandiacal Body,' and the sardonic irony of the plea for Tailors. After which—Chapter the Last and Farewell.
No! Let the commentator too enamoured of method desist from his useless labours and leave Sartor Resartus to stand for what it is—a fantastic but splendid rhapsody, laden with thought, glowing with imagination and passion, pungent with irony; to the prosaic a stumbling-block, and to the humourless foolishness, but to all who bring to the reading of it some slight share of its own qualities an unfailing source of spiritual refreshment and intellectual delight.
