_Much Ado About Nothing_. Act III.
Sc. 3. L. 148.
Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;
In short, my deary, kiss me! and be quiet.
LADY M.W. MONTAGU--_Summary of
Lord Littelton's Advice_.
Classics From Carlyle.
Two of the Most Celebrated Passages in "Sartor Resartus," Penned By
the Great Scottish Philosopher in What He Called "The
Loneliest Nook in Britain."
"The selections printed here are taken from what is regarded
by nearly every one as the masterpiece of Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881). "Sartor Resartus" (The Tailor Retailored) is
the title of a book which exhibits the very soul of Carlyle
himself, with all its mingled scorn, lawlessness, humor, and
pathos. He wrote in what he called "the loneliest nook in
Britain"--a little Scottish farm at Craigenputtoch.
To this place Carlyle had taken his bride, Jane Welsh, a
very brilliant woman, and there the two lived for years amid
the most desolate surroundings and after the rudest fashion.
They were a strange and ill-assorted couple--he in manner
and appearance a gaunt and uncouth peasant; she a delicate
and nervous woman of the world. Carlyle suffered tortures
from dyspepsia, which often made him as savage as a wolf.
His wife, who had married him less from love than because
she thought he had a great career before him, suffered from
his heedlessness and roughness, yet took her revenge upon
him by the sharpness of her tongue, and by the burning
record which she left of their mutual bitterness and spite.
It was in this lonely place that Carlyle wrote "Sartor
Resartus," which first appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_
(1833-1834). It is one of the strangest and most eccentric
of literary productions. It has no form. Its language is
often exclamatory, vociferous, and wild--interlarded also
with foreign words, and words that Carlyle himself invented.
It really sets forth the personal opinions, the fanciful
speculations, and the mental writhings of its author; and it
foreshadows the almost demoniac power wherewith Carlyle
afterward wrote the story of the French Revolution, which he
himself called "truth clad in hell-fire."
Carlyle, as a man, was so erratic as to be almost
impossible. His opinions were extreme, and he was fond of
bellowing them forth in the fiercest and most furious words,
insulting those who differed with him, eaten up by a
colossal vanity, and yet unquestionably a genius of the
first order.
Night View of a City.
"Ah, my dear friend," said he once, at midnight, when we had returned from
the coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell
here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and
thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night,
what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire?
"That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the
chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant
streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch
for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds,
are abroad; that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick
Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and
putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies
simmering and hid!
"The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are
being born; men are praying--on the other side of a brick partition, men
are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night.
"The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes
within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers
hunger-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cellars,
_Rouge-et-Noir_ languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry
Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting and playing their high
chess game, the pawns being Men.
"The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready, and she, full of
hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders; the Thief,
still more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowbars, or lurks in wait
till the watchmen first snore in their boxes.
"Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and
music and high-swelling hearts; but in the Condemned Cells the pulse of
life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the
darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last
morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; comes no hammering from
the Raven's Rock?--their gallows must even now be a-building.
"Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie
around us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full
of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in
his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over
her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now
moisten--all these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but carpentry
and masonry between them--crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel--or
weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each
struggling to get its _head above_ the others; _such_ work goes on under
that smoke-counterpane! But I sit above it all; I am alone with the
Stars."
In Nature's Wilds.
"Mountains were not new to him; but rarely are Mountains seen in such
combined majesty and grace as here. The rocks of that sort called
Primitive by the mineralogists, which always arrange themselves in masses
of a rugged, gigantic character; which ruggedness, however, is here
tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment; in a
climate favorable to vegetation, the gray cliff, itself covered with
lichens, shoots-up through a garment of foliage or verdure; and white,
bright cottages, tree-shaded, cluster around the everlasting granite. In
fine vicissitude, Beauty alternates with Grandeur; you ride through stony
hollows, along strait passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high
walls of rock; now winding amid broken, shaggy chasms, and huge fragments;
now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where the streamlet
collects itself into a Lake, and man has again found a fair dwelling, and
it seems as if Peace had established herself in the bosom of Strength.
"To Peace, however, in this vortex of existence can the Son of Time not
pretend; still less if some Specter haunt him from the Past; and the
Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, specter-bearing. Reasonably might the
Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of this world's Happiness
inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope that is not mad?
Nevertheless, one may still murmur audibly, or in the original Greek if
that suit thee better: 'Whoso can look on death will start no shadows.'
"From such meditations is the Wanderer's attention called outward; for now
the valley closes in abruptly, intersected by a huge mountain mass, the
stony, water-worn ascent of which is not to be accomplished on horseback.
Arrived aloft, he finds himself again lifted into the evening sunset
light; and cannot but pause, and gaze round him, some moments there.
"An upland, irregular expanse of wold, where valleys in complex branchings
are suddenly or slowly arranging their descent toward every quarter of the
sky. The mountain-ranges are beneath your feet, and folded together; only
the loftier summits look down here and there as on a second plain; lakes
also lie clear and earnest in their solitude.
"No trace of man now visible; unless indeed it were he who fashioned that
little visible link of Highway, here, as would seem, scaling the
inaccessible, to unite Province with Province.
"But sunward, lo you! how it towers sheer up, a world of Mountains, the
diadem and center of the mountain region! A hundred and a hundred savage
peaks, in the last light of Day; all glowing, of gold and amethyst, like
giant spirits of the wilderness; there in their silence, in their
solitude, even as on the night when Noah's Deluge first dried!
"Beautiful, nay solemn, was the sudden aspect to our Wanderer. He gazed
over those stupendous masses with wonder, almost with longing desire;
never till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was
his Mother and divine.
"And as the ruddy glow was fading into clearness in the sky, and the Sun
had now departed, a murmur of Eternity and Immensity, of Death and of
Life, stole through his soul; and he felt as if Death and Life were one,
as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its
throne in that splendor, and his own spirit were therewith holding
communion.
"The spell was broken by a sound of carriage-wheels. Emerging from the
hidden Northward, to sink soon into the hidden Southward, came a gay
Barouche-and-four; it was open; servants and postilions wore
wedding-favors; that happy pair, then, had found each other, it was their
marriage evening! Few moments brought them near; _Du Himmel!_ It was Herr
Towgood and--Blumine!
"With slight unrecognizing salutation they passed me; plunged down amid
the neighboring thickets, onward, to Heaven, and to England; and I, in my
friend Richter's words, _I remained alone, behind them, with the Night_!"