The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

Napoleon by no means seems to me so great a man as Cromwell. His enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but as the high stilts on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort.

"False as a bulletin," became a proverb in Napoleon's time. Yet he had a sincerity, a certain instinctive, ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any basis. He had an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His companions, we are told, were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God; they had proved it by all manner of logic. Napoleon, looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made all that?" The atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great fact stares him in the face. So, too, in practice; he, as every man that can be great, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter, and drives straight towards that.

Accordingly, there was a faith in him, genuine so far as it went. That this new, enormous democracy is an insuppressible fact, which the whole world cannot put down—this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? La carrière ouverte aux talents—"the implements to him who can handle them"—this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution or any revolution could mean. It is a great, true message from our last great man.

Sartor Resartus

"Sartor Resartus," first published in "Frazer's Magazine" in 1833–34, is Thomas Carlyle's most popular work, and is largely autobiographical.

I.—The Philosophy of Clothes

Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the torch of science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect, for five thousand years and upwards, it is surprising that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of philosophy or history, has been written on the subject of clothes. Every other tissue has been dissected, but the vestural tissue of woollen or other cloth, which man's soul wears as its outmost wrappage, has been quite overlooked. All speculation has tacitly figured man as a clothed animal, whereas he is by nature a naked animal, and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in clothes.

But here, as in so many other cases, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. The editor of these sheets has lately received a new book from Professor Teufelsdröckh, of Weissnichtwo, treating expressly of "Clothes, their Origin and Influence" (1831). This extensive volume, a very sea of thought, discloses to us not only a new branch of philosophy, but also the strange personal character of Professor Teufelsdröckh, which is scarcely less interesting. We were just considering how the extraordinary doctrines of this book might best be imparted to our own English nation, when we received a letter from Herr Hofrath Heuschrecke, our professor's chief associate, offering us the requisite documents for a biography of Teufelsdröckh. This was the origin of our "Sartor Resartus," now presented in the vehicle of "Frazer's Magazine."