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 Boötes 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.