The essay on History was a protest against the scientific view of history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.  “Wonder,” he wrote in Sartor Resartus, “is the basis of all worship.”  He defined history as “the essence of innumerable biographies.”  “Mr. Carlyle,” said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, “comprehends only the individual.  The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus.”  This trait comes out in his greatest book, The French Revolution, 1837, which is a mighty tragedy enacted by a few leading characters—­Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon.  He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material.  The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself, in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and “view-hunting.”

But Carlyle’s epoch-making book was Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), published in Fraser’s Magazine for 1833-1834, and first reprinted in book form in America.  This was a satire upon shams, conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of the soul.  It purported to be the life and “clothes-philosophy” of a certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor der Allerlei Wissenschaft—­of things in general—­in the University of Weissnichtwo.  “Society,” said Carlyle, “is founded upon cloth,” following the suggestions of Lear’s speech to the naked bedlam beggar:  “Thou art the thing itself:  unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art;” and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a paragraph in Swift’s Tale of a Tub:  “A sect was established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop.”  In Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go.  It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic.  There was something monstrous in the combination—­the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany.  It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and “mysticism.”  Nevertheless even the thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry, deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.

[Illustration:  Geo. Eliot, Froude, Browning, Tennyson.]

Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is strewn over his pages.  He flung about the resources of the language with a giant’s strength, and made new words at every turn.  The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere’s, or any other single writer’s in the English tongue.  His style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity and repose.  It astonishes, but it also fatigues.