It’s just the greatest thing that ever was! - Kipling's Great Man, and Carlyle's

Kipling writes seven fine chapters on ordinary life in the cod fisheries, extraordinary only because so risky.  He has to wrap the book up, though.  The hold is full of fish; our hero Harvey returns to shore; his parents learn that he is not dead.  For thematic reasons as well as elementary story-telling, Harvey, having lost his callowness at the hands of a substitute father, the sea captain, Captain Courageous #1, needs some sort of scene with his father, the self-made millionaire, Captain Courageous #2.  Thus the odd plural title.

Mr. Cheyne is in San Diego and needs to get to Gloucester, Massachusetts.  He will travel by private rail car – we get a scene where he and his secretary plan the necessary connections and couplings:

The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing; despatches and crews of every one of those said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and sixteen firemen would be needed – each and every one the best available.  Two and one half minutes would be allowed for changing engines, three for watering, and two for coaling. (Ch. IX)

And then we see the trip unfold just as planned.  The entire section, of roughly six pages and two thousand words, is “a classic of railway literature,” as a Wikipedist succinctly describes it.  Of trainspotting literature, says I.  The intricacies of private intercontinental rail travel have a mild interest, and I was anxious for Harvey’s parents to reunite with their lost son – I’m not a monster! – but the whole thing is baffling.  Nothing is at stake.  At least Phileas Fogg was trying to win a bet.  So a connection is missed and the reunion is twelve hours late.  So what.  Some vague attempts are made to symbolically mix the father’s rail journey with the son’s sea voyage, the effects of which are vitiated by the next scene, the one suffused with the ideology of Thomas Carlyle.

The depth of Carlyle’s influence continues to astound me.  Here we are, fifty-five years after the publication of Past and Present, and a writer as strong as Kipling has nothing more original to offer than Carlyle’s idea that the Captains of Industry are (or at least should be) the new Great Men of history, filling the roles of Frederick the Great and Oliver Cromwell and Odin (yes, the Norse god – see On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1840). Harvey’s father tells the story of his rise to wealth and power (“Harvey gasped.  ‘It’s just the greatest thing that ever was!’ said he.”), and offers Harvey a choice:  he can be a layabout or a lawyer.  Useful or useless, labor or laziness.  I spent the book watching Harvey develop, so I know that he will choose to produce! produce!

Captains Courageous does thus modify the boys’ book formula.  Harvey does not just learn through adversity how to be a man, but how to be a Great Man, a Carlylean hero.  The idea that he might be inspired to become, I don’t know, an ichthyologist, that never comes up.  The novel demonstrates how an other-made man can becomes just as heroically useful as a self-made man.

It’s the dangedest thing, and between that and the railroad nonsense almost staves in the end of the book.  Luckily, there is one more scene.

I enjoyed the style of A Tale of Two Cities

Prof. Maitzen recently wrote a little something about Thomas Carlyle’s staggering and enormous second novel, The French Revolution (1837), including a generous excerpt on the execution of Louis XVI that gives the flavor of the thing.  Here is Carlyle on the aftermath of the sacking of the Bastille:

A declining sun; the need of victuals, and of telling news, will bring assuagement, dispersion: all earthly things must end.

Along the streets of Paris circulate Seven Bastille Prisoners, borne shoulder-high; seven Heads on pikes; the Keys of the Bastille; and much else…

But so does the twilight thicken; so must Paris, as sick children, and all distracted creatures do, brawl itself finally into a kind of sleep.  (I.1.vii)

It’s strange stuff for history, either built out of metaphor (Paris as “sick children”) or turning historical material into metaphor, which is what Carlyle is signaling with his odd capitalization (which is probably also a Germanophile’s affectation) – the number seven plays a strange recurring role in the novel, as in his use of the story of the seven sleepers, of which the seven prisoners are somehow versions.  As Carlyle piles up these metaphors and substitutes, the novel becomes increasingly tangled.  The reader beginning somewhere in the middle might well find it incomprehensible, as might many readers who start at the beginning.

Did I say novel?  The French Revolution is, of course, a work of history, non-fiction.  I should fix that.

How does Dickens end the same scene in A Tale of Two Cities (1859)?  With an homage:

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken hearts, - and such, and such-like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint Antoine escort through  the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.  Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her life!  For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once stained red.  (II.21.)

The letter of the broken-hearted prisoner is from Carlyle, too; it is concealed behind the ellipses up above.  Dickens has to expand on Carlyle’s “much else” for plot purposes – keep an eye on those discovered letters – and deftly slips a couple of his own themes into the passage.  The heads, for example, need to be gory as part of the red \ blood \ wine theme, which he hits again at the end of the paragraph.  That wine cask broke way back in chapter V, about 25 pages into the book.  I do have some doubts about the mixed metaphor of the “headlong” feet, but they come from six pages earlier, from the morning of July 14:

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.

Mad footsteps; raging footsteps; hard to clean footsteps.  As if I’m complaining!  The rhetorical excesses of Victor Hugo,* of Thomas Carlyle, and of Charles Dickens are thrilling.  Watching them fly out of control, even escape into incomprehensibility, is part of the pleasure.

*  I had promised Rohan Maitzen a “Hugo and Carlyle, rhetoric of” comparison post, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.  It’s a good idea, though.  They share a wild-eyed enthusiasm, among other things.  No idea if they knew of even the existence of each other’s work.

Produce! Produce!

Eh, not today.

Happy Labor Day!

An almost total want of arrangement - all courses had been confounded - tasty Sartor Resartus

As I plan out my writing, I realize I’m working with a concept: it’s Books Few People Should Read Week.  Thank goodness it’s not Blog Sweeps Week, or I’d be sunk.

I’m not sure about Friday’s entry, but Sartor Resartus is a great Book Few People Should Read.  The reader has to care about prose, though, about prose and rhetoric.  The argument of the book is, roughly, an attempt to bring Kant’s ideas into the English-speaking world.   Who cares.  I’ve learned plenty from Carlyle, but why do I really value him?  It’s how he writes.  How does he write?

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement.  In this remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of Time produces, through the Narrative portions, a certain show of outward method; but of true logical method and sequence there is too little...  Many sections are of a debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnamable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invited to help itself. (1.4)

If everyone wrote like this, I would give up literature for scrimshaw, but with books as with food, I am a gourmand.  Variety, please.  But this dish may be too rich for some diets.  It is fat-full, gluten-full, and was processed in a facility that contained at least one nut.

The passage is immediately preceded by the scene where Herr Teufelsdröckh laughs, the single time the editor observes his laughter “tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air.”  The editor continues with the theme, anatomizing laughter – some do not laugh but “wear an everlasting barren simper,” others “produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good.”  I believe Carlyle is defining his ideal reader.  He wants readers whose laugh is “not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel.”

The book ends with – Stefanie noted this yesterday – a "friendly farewell" to Carlyle's “irritated readers.”  Yes and no.  How many other writers wrote with such a wild spill of words, such wastefulness, even?  How many wanted to make sure there was something interesting in every sentence he wrote?*  How many vowed to exterminate the prosaic?

I’ll bet bibliographing nicole can think of one more.  Tomorrow, Books Few People Should Read Week joins up with the Clarel pilgrimage.

* I mean, to be clear, how many writers of Carlyle’s time.  Rabelais, The Anatomy of Melancholy, A Tale of a Tub, Sir Thomas Browne, Tristram Shandy, a number of Germans – Carlyle has predecessors.  And what predecessors!

Produce! Produce! - Thomas Carlyle and the slogan of Wuthering Expectations

Since I started Wuthering Expectations, I’ve had this mass of overheated gibberish dragging along at the bottom of the blog:

I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin.  Produce!  Produce!  Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!  'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.  Up, up!  Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.  Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.

This is Thomas Carlyle, the end of Book 2, Chapter 9 of the literary staple Sartor Resartus (1833-4).  It’s the, or a, climax of the book, the point where Herr Teufelsdröckh, having said No! to the EVERLASTING NO, says Yea! To the EVERLASTING YEA.

As with any writing by Carlyle, this passage is at once serious – I mean, I think it contains some genuine wisdom – and ridiculous, self-mocking.  A Worldkin?  Or that “Produce! Produce!”  Laughable.  And the wisest wisdom is borrowed:

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work (John 9:4, both from the King James Version)

The red ink in my Bible reminds me that the last line is spoken by Christ himself, so Carlyle has bent the idea just a bit.  Or perhaps not.  Carlyle’s favorite rhetorical methods in Sartor Resartus are paradox and, his own word, nonsense.  The book is deliberately packed with joyous nonsense.

Stefanie at So Many Books has just written about Sartor Resartus, as a Scottish challenge book, and as part of her continued study of Emerson and his world.  Her description of the book is exactly accurate.  She provides a list of predecessors – Sterne, Goethe – which is also correct, and a logical place to look for help with such a strange, difficult book.

I’ve now read Sartor Resartus twice, and parts of it several times.  Thirty pages or so were assigned in my Brit Lit II class, many years ago, the pieces in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, Fifth edition.  I’m looking at them now.  I dutifully read each word and turned each onion-skin page, and was surprised, irritated, to discover, at the end, that I had understood nothing at all.  An insight, a new one to me: I began again.  I reread the assignment.  Ah – a young man has a spiritual crisis, but is somehow able to rouse himself enough not to discover meaning but to reject meaninglessness:

‘What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death?” (Book 2, Ch. 7)

Meaning follows, but slowly, imperfectly, always imperfectly.  Produce!  Produce!  I really do say that to myself, on the days when I’m wondering not just what to write, but why.  So I produce something now, my pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, and save the meaning of it all for later.  The struggle against Chaos is never-ending.

I want work, and it is my right. I want work. - Mary Barton, Thomas Carlyle, and work

This is "Work" (1852-65) by Ford Madox Brown, available for perusal in the City Art Gallery, Manchester.  Image, with much other information, from The Victorian Web.

I know there is too much detail in this complicated image to see what's going on.  In the center, we have some honorable, ordinary workmen, and, for some reason, several dogs.  Behind the workers are a number of representatives of the non-working class, the poshies - a mounted gentleman and his wife, a cute girl in a pretty dress, another woman distributing religious tracts.  To the left is a ragged flower-seller.  And to the right - see the smiling fellow with the hat and cane and beard? - is Thomas Carlyle himself, Victorian patron saint of Work.

It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;' a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby.

I’m in Chapter XI of Past and Present (1843), “Labour.”  Since the passage was written by Thomas Carlyle, it goes on for a while like this, in substance repetitive but in rhetoric variable and inventive, ending: 

The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

I think it is fair to replace the exclamation with a question mark and reply “Um, no.”  But for now, I won’t argue with Carlyle.  Work is inherently virtuous and meaningful, even heroic.

Mary Barton, published in 1848, is set during the economic hard times of 1839, the period of central Carlyle works like “Chartism” and Past and Present, his diagnosis of the Condition of England.  Not that Gaskell does not have her own ideas, but Mary Barton is suffused with Carlyle.  Carlyle provided one key to understanding what, exactly, Gaskell wanted, or wanted her readers to want.

Mary Barton’s father, John, is a factory weaver.  A fire at the mill, combined with an economic downturn, leaves Barton unemployed.  Gaskell is a keen observer of unemployment, and her psychology of the unemployed is consistent with the way sociologists treat the subject today – this is one of the ways in which Mary Barton is oddly modern.  A picture of the unemployed John Barton:

Once, when she asked him as he sat, grimed, unshaven, and gaunt, after a day's fasting, over the fire, why he did not get relief from the town, he turned round, with grim wrath, and said, "I don't want money, child! D--n their charity and their money! I want work, and it is my right. I want work." (Ch. 10, 115)

The lack of work eventually perverts and destroys John.  A quite different lack of work also ruins a young gentleman who pursues the pretty Mary Barton – he can dally with her not simply because he is rich, but because he is “unfettered by work-hours” (Ch. 7, 80).

The Carlylean echo here is not simply the celebration of work itself, but its separation from money.  Gaskell brings out the Marxist in me at this point, the pure materialist – higher pay for the workers, I say!  But I’m less convinced of the inherent meaning of work, and Gaskell and Carlyle believe, I think, that whatever material changes are necessary will follow the spiritual changes, somehow. 

The argument is made unnovelistically explicit at the very end of the book, when it is claimed that what John really wanted from his employers was not money, or improved working conditions, but that they would care about him, really care.  He wanted nothing more than sympathy.  “Sympathy” is the guiding word of Mary Barton.  It’s all about sympathy.  More sympathy tomorrow.

Page numbers from the Penguin Classics edition, by the way.

A Longfellow jug and a Carlyle vase - literary bric-a-brac at the Peabody Essex Museum

I saw such odd things in the Decorative Arts section of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Just below the Hawthorne portrait, and a bit to the right, are a couple of Wedgwood memorial pieces, a Thomas Carlyle vase from 1882 and a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - what is it? a milk jug? - from 1883, both produced a year after the death of each author. * (See correction below)

The Longfellow whatsit is on the left. I can't find, and didn't take, a picture of the Carlyle vase. For some reason, the Longfellow souvenir does not seem nearly as ridiculous as the Carlyle knickknack, which featured the scowling author and a thistle motif, presumably because Carlyle was himself a sort of human thistle. I wish I had a picture of it.

The back of the Longfellow piece features a chunk of his long poem "Keramos" (1878):

Turn, turn, my wheel? Turn round and round
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
Far some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!

It's a poem about ceramics, printed on a piece of ceramics! How about that. And it's about death. Everything in one package. No idea why that question mark is there.

If the jug is not kitschy enough, take a look at this thing, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John," (1892) a plaster rendering of a scene from "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Big devil, maybe a foot high, more. I don't know what to make of these objects. They're a glimpse of a lost world, that's for certain. I do not regret that we no longer appreciate our authors in this manner.

The Peabody Essex Museum is not a conventional art museum. It is founded on the collections of early 19th century Salem merchants and ship captains, many of whom specialized in trade with China, Polynesia, and, eventually, Japan, and who did not necessarily have what would now be considered the best possible taste. Although many of the museum's pieces are of high aesthetic interest, many others are more like specimens. The museum does not attempt to hide this either. Their key collection is labeled "Asian Export Art."

And this is aside from objects like the first stuffed penguin ever exhibited in North America. Ratty thing. I'd love to spend more time in the museum, piecing together the story of who collected what and why.

* I misread the date somewhere. The Longfellow jug, as a friendly commenter points out, was produced in 1880, while Longfellow was alive. For more information, see Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, 2002, John Hopkins University Press.

The knights drew sword, the ladies scream'd - the heroic Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold wrote a lot of heroic poems, imitations of old stories and old forms. They are not pastiches, or updates, but are more like fake translations. His play Merope, for example, is a convincing imitation of Euripides, as if Arnold had translated a newly discovered play. Or "Sohrab and Rustam," a long episode from Firdawsi's epic Shahnameh - if it were labeled a translation from the Persian, I would believe the label, but it's in fact a convincing rewrite.

"Balder Dead" is a from the Norse Eddas. "The Forsaken Merman" is a Danish folktale. There's a compressed "Tristram and Iseult," and a couple of good ballads:

"'-I am no knight,' he answered;
'From the sea-waves I come.'-
The knights drew sword, the ladies scream'd,
The surpliced priest stood dumb."

That's from "The Neckan," also about a merman, who is miraculously converted to Christianity. What is the deal with Arnold and mermen? Seems kind of silly, now that I look at it again. Anyway.

This all adds up to 40% or so of the Oxford Poetical Works; a lot. What was Arnold trying to accomplish? Maybe I should first say that although the poetic quality varies, I enjoyed most of these poems. The Euripidean Merope seems like a botch, and the philosophical pastoral "Empedocles on Etna" is over my head, but "Sohrab and Rustam" is vivid and exciting and "The Forsaken Merman" has a lot of good descriptive lines and some interesting uses of line length. "Balder Dead" is excellent, and has an ending that I think is Arnold's own, except that I suspect it's really a dramatization of Goethe's notion of resignation. The imagery is good, too; here's the very end (Hermod has tried and failed to release the dead Balder from Hell):

"And as a stork which idle boys have trapp'd,
And tied him in a yard, at autumn sees
Flocks of his kind pass flying o'er his head
To warmer lands, and coasts that keep the sun;--
He strains to join their flight, and from his shed
Follows them with a long complaining cry--
So Hermod gazed, and yearn'd to join his kin.

At last he sigh'd, and set forth back to Heaven." (559-566)

In the preface to the 1853 Poems: First Series, Arnold makes his case for these poems, although I suspect misdirection. "A great human action of a thousand years ago is more interesting to it [our nature, our passions] than a smaller human action of to-day, even though upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to all our transient feelings and interests."

As evidence, says Arnold, "I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, The Excursion, leave the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido," because "the action is greater," and not because the Goethe and Byron poems are deliberate anti-epics and Wordsworth's Excursion is almost indescribably dull (The Prelude might too obviously challenge his argument).

Arnold proceeds to deny the value of praising individual lines in a poem, rather than the overall effect, and points to Faust, King Lear, and Keats as exemplary modern failures! Eh, enough - it's a lot of smoke.

Arnold was an immensely skilled and intelligent writer with little sense of poetic purpose. The subjects, at least, of the heroic poems are purposeful, although what they mean in a modern context becomes a problem. The problem of poetic form is similarly solved by the choice of subject. I assume that Tennyson, in The Idylls of the King, and William Morris had to deal with the same problem, and I don't know what answers they found. I'm pretty sure that Arnold found no answers at all, just frustration, empty perfection.

I associate Arnold's rummaging through antique poetry's box of heroes with Thomas Carlyle's call for hero-worship a decade earlier. Undergraduate Arnold even won a prize for a long poem on Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle's great shining perfect hero (it's one of the poems I skipped). The irony is that, among all of these slightly sterile experiments, Arnold did write one poem about a genuinely modern hero figure. But I'll save "The Scholar Gypsy" for tomorrow.

What dost thou in this living tomb! - not a quotation from a Gothic novel by Matthew Arnold, but from "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"

While an older generation of poets - Tennyson, Browning, and so on - spent their youth absorbing Shelley and Keats, Matthew Arnold jumped back a generation, to William Wordsworth. Hints and scraps of Wordsworth are all over Arnold's poems, the "Switzerland" sequence (1852), for example.* If I were better at this, I might find some specific examples, echoes of "Tintern Abbey" and whatnot. I can sure hear them, but my memory's not that good, and tracking them down would be real work, and really all I would need to do would be to get a book where someone else has already done it. Where was I?

Right. Arnold actually retraces Wordsworth's actual steps in some of his poems, fifty years later. In the 1850 Prelude, ll. 418+, Wordsworth writes of his visit, circa 1790, to the severe Carthusian Monastery in Switzerland. Arnold's poem on the same subject, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," is from 1855:

"The silent courts, where night and day
Into their stone-carved basins cold
The splashing icy fountains play -
The humid corridors behold!
Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,
Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white." (31-6)

Why is Arnold there? Good question; Arnold was wondering the same thing:

"For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?" (67-72)

One of those "rigorous teachers" was Arnold's own father. The poem is, like "Dover Beach," in the "faith and doubt" genre. Arnold compares his visit to the monastery to an ancient Greek visiting a "fallen Runic stone," a remnant of a dead faith. But, if Arnold is like the Greek, and the religion of the Greek is also long dead, then what value, what future, has Arnold's own faith? Arnold asks to be left with the:

"Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent - the best are silent now." (112-4)

I think I have a basic grasp of the "faith and doubt" stuff, an early formulation of a modern problem. Maybe not the next step, though, where things get interesting, and puzzling. "The kings of modern thought are dumb," Arnold writes, "Silent they are, though not content." A footnote in my Norton anthology suggests that this may refer to Newman or Carlyle, for which I will take its word, I guess (Silent? Newman and Carlyle? Silent!?!).**

Then comes the Hall of Heroes - stanzas about Byron, Shelley, and French Romantic novelist Senancour, specifically about how Arnold and his generation "learnt your lore too well," resulting in melancholy, torpor, and a general sense of the pointlessness of effort. An army passes the monastery, and calls for the monks to join it (this is a weird inversion of Wordsworth, where the troops expel the monks from their home). The monks, and I guess Arnold, reply that it is too late, "Too late for us your call ye blow \ Whose bent was taken long ago" (197-8).

It's really quite a good poem. I've no idea if these excerpts convey that - I've skipped, for example, all of the descriptive parts. This poem was particularly helpful for whatever understanding of Arnold I might have gained. More on Arnold and his heroes tomorrow.

* Prof. Novel Reading singles out the final line of "To Marguerite - Continued," one of the "Switzerland" poems, as an all-time favorite:

"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

** I do not, at all, understand Carlyle's whole "Worship of Silence" thing. "Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all else is small," etc., On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Ch. VI. Maybe he means everyone else should be silent?

The angel would eat too much gingerbread - Emerson cracks a joke

Somewhere on Wuthering Expectations, although heck if I can remember where, I included Ralph Waldo Emerson in a list of writers I considered humorless. Having read more deeply - or more shallowly? - anyway, more something - in Emerson, I am happy to retract the charge.

In his essay "Nominalist and Realist" (1844), Emerson reminds us that even Great Men are imperfect: "I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity."

That's, I say, that's a joke, son. I didn't say it was necessarily funny, but an angel stuffing himself with gingerbread is comic. Still deflating the Great Men, he varies the joke in the "Napoleon" chapter of Representative Men (1850) when listing Napoleon's bad qualities:

"He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it."

OK, "that he was caught at it," not bad.

I have been reading Emerson in something like chronological order. I think he gets funnier as he ages, although I may have only now learned to identify his comic tone. He becomes a bit sour, even, but there's an accompanying recognition of the ridiculousness of things that is very genial. This is easier to see in his journal than in his essays, but traces begin to appear everywhere.

Don't get me wrong - the default Emerson style is "earnest gasbag", but there's a lot of variation around that. Look at this defense of earnestness, in "Montaigne; or the Skeptic":

"The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers."

This is immediately followed by a parody of his "subtle and admirable friend" Thomas Carlyle, a heavy mocker, who becomes "San Carlo." Again, not exactly funny, but comic, and the only example of Emersonian parody that I have come across, or anyway recognized.

As enjoyable as it is to find this side of Emerson, there is no excuse for this journal entry from December 1850:

"How could the children of Israel sustain themselves for forty days in the desart?
Because of the sand-which-is there."

On him they could not calculate - a note on Thoreau, Emerson, and Reverend King

"Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his sons to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax."

July 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal, Emerson in His Journals, pp. 358-9.

This is a tricky passage, full of irony. Webster is the great Senator, a hero of Emerson's. Here we see an early warning of the complete disillusionment that will come a few years later when Webster voted for the Fugitive Slave Act.

Another irony is that neither Emerson or Thoreau are really protesting the Mexican War in and of itself. They are opposed to the war because they believed it was waged in the interests of expanding slavery. Thoreau wrote about his protest in the 1849 "Civil Disobedience" essay, which eventually leads us to Rev. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Thoreau's protest was an unusually productive one.

But yet another irony is that Emerson was one of the abolitionists who paid the tax. He didn't go to jail. Emerson was fully aware of this irony.

Yet another: Emerson and Thoreau were both intellectually indebted to Thomas Carlyle. Around the time Thoreau published "Civil Disobedience," Carlyle was vigourously defending black slavery. This is why intellectual history is so interesting - ideas move around in such mysterious ways. One of the many strands of history that lead to our new President made an important stop in that jail cell in Concord.

I have been reading a lot of Emerson lately; I think I'll spend the week with him.

Work - work - work! - a Carlylean Christmas poem from Thomas Hood

In case readers of The Chimes were hankering for more Thomas Carlyle in their Christmas, here's the beginning, and then some more, of Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt:

With fingers weary and worn,
  With eyelids heavy and red,
A Woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
  Plying her needle and thread -
    Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!'

***

"Work — work — work!
  My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
  A crust of bread — and rags.
That shattered roof — this naked floor —
  A table — a broken chair —
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
  For sometimes falling there!

And there's more, though not a lot more. This was a Christmas poem, in a December 1843 issue of the comic magazine Punch. My understanding is that it was genuinely popular, reprinted many times. The part that really links it to Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present dates from just a few months earlier) is that "Work -- work -- work!" line, echoing Carlyle's emphasis on labor.

The most reductive message of A Christmas Carol (published at the same time as this poem) or The Chimes is "Remember the Poor at Christmas." Punch published something similar every Christmas, by many different poets. I'm going to get out my credit card now and remember the poor.

The value of A Christmas Carol

I have a semi-crazy quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus permanently stuck at the bottom of Wuthering Expectations:

"Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!"

I love the hysterical tone, and accept the goading, though I'll never Produce! Produce! like some of the great 19th century phenomena. Balzac and Dumas and Hugo; James and Twain; Trollope and Dickens. Unbelievable shelves of books. But of course any number of nearly forgotten writers have written just as much to less purpose. Some of those fractions of a Product really are infinitesimal.

I have been thinking about the example of A Christmas Carol in these utilitarian terms. It must be among the most economically valuable stories written in modern times. It did well enough for Dickens, especially when he began performing a 70 minute version of it. Since his time, think of the plays, the movies, the lazy television parodies. Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Burns. I myself, in the 9th grade, played Young Scrooge, a formative role. Actually, all I remember about it was my utter failure to learn to waltz decently, even for 30 seconds.

What other writers have created something so economically enduring? The Austen Industry is worth a lot now, although I think that's recent phenomenon. Meine Frau reminds me that performances of The Nutcracker are the means of survival for many ballet companies, so E. T. A. Hoffmann should get some credit for that. I'm amazed how little-read "The Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King" actually is. It's as good as A Christmas Carol, which I unfortunately can't quite say about Dickens's other Christmas books.

Which reminds me to encourage reading of The Chimes. Commentary at The Valve begins Deember 19 or so. Only 100 pages! Be sure to get a copy with the illustrations.

Cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms - Carlyle in The Chimes

One reason I haven't mentioned for reading Carlyle's Past and Present is that it is about Hard Times, and since we are in the middle of some Hard Times now, I thought the perspective would be interesting.

Our Hard Times are certainly nothing like those of mid-19th century England - massive unemployment with a minimal safety net, riots, and then, in 1845, the beginning of a true disaster, the Irish Famine. Remember that Carlyle was writing in 1843. Things got worse, and in some respects, he must have seemed prophetic.

What I really wanted to know, being a practical, utilitarian sort of fellow, was, what does Carlyle want people to do, what's his solution to it all. Well, how about this (the Morrison's Pill is a cure-all, of which, says Carlyle, with wisdom, there is none):

"If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis, What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh." (Ch. 4)

This is probably wise advice whether Times are Hard or Soft. I'm not sure it would have the salutary effects Carlyle expected, though.

Not just Carlyle. If I understand this correctly, and if I understand The Chimes correctly, this is exactly the lesson Dickens has poor Trotty learn after his ghostly vision of the future. I was puzzled by what Trotty was supposed to learn. Scrooge, after all, is rich and powerful. When he reforms, he can actually do something, like buy a big turkey for his clerk. Trotty is powerless. Well, Trotty ceases to be a hollow-sounding shell and resuscitates his soul and conscience. No small thing.

The Chimes is in some ways a direct response to Carlyle. The red-faced gentleman who was nostalgic for the Middle Ages was actually my first clue, since the first half of Past and Present is an examination of life in a medieval abbey. By the end of The Chimes, though, there seems to be some direct connection to Carlyle's ideas.

I'll have to pay more attention to this in the future. I have been detecting a Carlylean strain in some of Dickens' writing, but since Dickens employed such a wide range of rhetorical moods and was a gifted mimic, I had thought it was parody. Which it may well be, but there is more contact with at least a certain strain of Carlyle than I had imagined.

I clearly need to read Hard Times. And Elizbeth Gaskell. And William Morris. And...

Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for! - Carlyle's terrible ideas

I had this idea that I was going to make some sort of argument about Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. It's too late; I'm too tired. So instead I'll just describe Carlyle's arguments, as I understand them.

The aristocracy should be our rulers. But the current aristocracy is completely useless. What people do, what they produce, is central to Carlyle's vision of the world. The aristocracy produces fox tails, which they nail to their stable doors. Carlyle does not see this as useful.

Maybe the new Captains of Industry will be able to fill the role of the aristocracy. Get moving, says Carlyle.

The rule of the people, democracy as such, is a joke, a phase England will pass through before the return of true heroic leadership.

Heroic leadership = Oliver Cromwell. Or the Norse chief who was eventually deified as Odin. Or the poet Robert Burns. Ha ha! No, Carlyle is kind of serious about that.

Everyone adores Gurth, the lovable serf in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, who has a brass collar affixed around his neck as a symbol of his servitude. Doesn't his life basically seem pretty nice? Most people would be better off as serfs. Or, if they're Africans, slaves.

Enough of this. I've made Carlyle sound sufficiently horrible. If I'm unfair, it's because I have some idea of how Carlyle's ideas evolve, and I may be reading his later authoritarianism into Past and Present. Or knowing his later ideas may help me see how they were already present. Let's look at Scott's Gurth again:

"Gurth, a mere swineherd, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did get some parings of the pork. Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for! How often must I remind you? There is not a horse in England, able and willing to work, but has due food and lodging; and goes about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart." (Ch. 3)

Here's a more humanist idea side by side with a rather different kind. People ought to be treated at least as well as pigs and horses. Possibly better.

Carlyle is very hard to place in his politics. Past and Present was influential with radicals - Marx and Engels, for example - and with more mainstream reformers. Some of his ideas seem fascistic, while others are more classically liberal.

I think he's a greater artist - writer, rhetorician - than a thinker, but I read him for both reasons. His prose is fascinating; his ideas are challenging. Tomorrow, let's see if I can bring Dickens back into this.

Thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads - or, the Condition-of-England is not good.

In the 1840s, the condition of England was pretty terrible for a lot of people. England was going through the same sort of transition that we see in China, for example, today – agricultural workers were moving in massive numbers out of the countryside to work in manufacturing and mining. Combine this with the growth in railroads, steamships, and related industries, and the beginnings of a poorly understood population explosion. Massive changes everywhere.

The change must have been bewildering to many people, and the costs incredibly high. The working class, on average, lost ground during the 1830s and 1840s. The average height of working class adults born at this time, for example, declined substantially, meaning that they had received fewer calories as children or expended more in work, or both (the answer turns out to be: both). The same thing happened in the northern United States around the same time. I don’t know what was going on in Germany or France, but the events of 1848 make me suspect things can’t have been any better.

This is all from memory, I’m afraid. It would be fun (fun for me!) to include graphs of coal and iron production, for example, or railroad miles over time, and a lot less fun, but instructive, to see the trends in height or pauperization. But I’ll restrain myself.

Thomas Carlyle, at this point a genuinely popular writer due to the success of this 1837 history of the French Revolution, called the question of working class poverty “the condition-of-England question,” which seems unwieldy to me, but the name is still used by scholars today. I think he introduced the phrase in Chartism (1839), Ch. 1, “Condition-of-England Question.” I would include a quotation, except that I find Chartism nearly incomprehensible.

I can hardly believe that Carlyle was allowed by other journalists and reformers to take the lead on this issue. He is such a strange writer. His rhetoric is exhausting, and his continual irony makes him difficult to interpret.

Here are the first two sentences of his 1843 Past and Present, which are pretty clear for Carlyle:

“The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition.”

We’re so rich; why are so many so poor? Fair enough. What, then, to make of this, from Chapter 3:

“Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man; alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows.”

Complaining that Milton was underpaid 150 years earlier seems like a strange issue to bring up at all in the context of today’s impoverished factory workers. The passage continues:

“Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish; it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads; and he did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from it;--and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and ridicule from all manner of men.” (Ch. 3)

Did anyone actually read all of that? Well, it’s actually part of why I read Carlyle – that’s some prose , all right. The point, a point, is that people are not properly rewarded for their work, not in the 17th century, and not now. Carlyle is going to spend the rest of the book arguing for a sort of religion of work. Boy, his book is full of bad ideas. Tomorrow, I’ll try to see what some of them are.

I was inspired to read Past and Present, by the way by So Many Books’ notes on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notes on the book.

I can prove it, by tables - in which I discover that The Chimes is about something other than what I thought it would be about

In The Chimes (1844), an old porter, Trotty Veck, has an eventful New Year's Eve. As a result of either supernatural forces or a combination of stress and indigestion, he is shown a horrible vision of the future which leads him to reform his selfish ways.

This sounds a bit, just a bit, like A Christmas Carol, published the Christmas before, with two minor changes. First, Trotty, unlike Scrooge, is poor, and second, he's a fine fellow with no selfish ways whatsoever. Maybe these are not such minor differences. They sure do muddle the story, although not to the extent of the last Dickens Christmas novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), which approaches incomprehensibility. I suspect that running a poor man through Scrooge's trials was a challenge Dickens set for himself in The Chimes. Anyway, it allowed him to get at something else, something obscured in A Christmas Carol.

Early in the story, Trotty meets the three fellows to the left; Trotty's the one with the rumpled hat. The three gentlemen are investigating Trotty's supper of tripe.

"'But who eats tripe?' said Mr. Filer, looking round. 'Tripe is without exception the least economical, and the most wasteful article of consumption that the markets of this country can by possibility produce... I find that the waste on that amount of tripe , if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over. The Waste, the Waste!'" (Ch. 1 aka "First Quarter")

Ah ha, Mr. Filer seems to be some sort of Utilitarian. The second fellow is another kind of reformer - a magistrate who is determined, whatever the problem, starvation, young mothers, suicide, to Put It Down. And the third is perhaps a nostalgist, or perhaps something else:

"'The good old times, the good old times,' repeated the gentleman.' What times they were! They were the only times. It's of no use talking about any other times, or discussing what the people are in these times. You don't call these, times, do you? I don't. Look into Strutt's Costumes, and see what a Porter used to be, in any of the good old English reigns.'

'He hadn't, in his very best circumstances, a shirt to his back, or a stocking to his foot; and there was scarcely a vegetable in all England for him to put into his mouth,' said Mr. Filer. 'I can prove it, by tables.'"

You tell him, Filer! I was actually planning to save my tables for later in the week. This talk of how things were better in the olden days by the unnamed gentleman with the red face and blue coat* sounds suspiciously like it was drawn from another book from the previous year, Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. Which means - and there's more evidence than just this - that The Chimes is not just about charity or compassion or combatting one's selfishness.

No, this is a topical novel. A novel about social issues. A Condition-of-England novel! That's what Carlyle called England's Hard Times, the Condition-of-England question. For some reason, it stuck, and scholars still use it. I felt perfectly happy floundering around in the swamp - no, mire - no, no, cesspool - strike all that, crystalline fountain - of Victorian religion last week, and since many countries seem to be facing a new round of Hard Times, why not test my ignorance about the Condition-of-England question. Tomorrow: what exactly is Thomas Carlyle going on and on and on about?

* A little mystery with this fellow. He's never named, and later in the book only mentioned once more. My first question for The Valve: who is he?

I hope I'm attracting people to the Chimes event at The Valve, rather than scaring them away. I think those passages up there are hilarious.

Carlyle the lecturer - That was not well done!

On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History is a collection of lectures Thomas Carlyle gave in 1840, on the theory and practice of Great Men – Napoleon, obviously, but also religious figures like Mohammed, Luther, and Odin(!?), and writers like Shakespeare and Rousseau. The lectures were enormously successful, greatly increasing Carlyle’s reputation and cash flow.

It is very hard for me to imagine what they were like. Based on the page count, they must have been at least an hour and a half long. And they were difficult. Complicated, sometimes obscure, always pure Carlyle. For example, in the lecture on Luther, Carlyle describes the efforts of Pope Leo X to suppress Luther’s teachings, which leads him to digress on the earlier religious reformer Jan Huss:

“He [Leo X] dooms the Monk’s writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,- probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon ‘three-feet wide, six-feet high, seven-feet long;’ burnt the true voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done!” (p. 363)

This gives an idea why Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution is still read – his history writing is vivid, opinionated, original. “A short argument, fire”. There’s a lot of information packed in that sentence. I think it’s a great passage. But hearing it an hour into a lecture, I might think “Wait, who burned Luther?”

And how about this one:

“In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte’s countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery; and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendour as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;” and on like that, unstoppably. (p. 386)

Sorry, that’s terrible. Call in a chemist to identify the exact composition of the gas. How many people were really able to follow this? I’ve wondered the same thing about Coleridge’s muddled lectures on Shakespeare, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures on anything, or even William Hazlitt’s lectures, which have a much more straightforward style. What were these events really like? What did their audiences understand? What would I have understood? Carlyle’s lectures are not as high on my time-traveling list as seeing Dickens perform his seventy-minute reading of A Christmas Carol, but I’m curious.

Bonus book-related epigrams from On Heroes:

“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.” (p. 390)

“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possessions of men.” (p. 388)

All references are to the old Everyman’s Library edition of On Heroes.

Jane Austen, Great Man of History

Thomas Carlyle, at the beginning of the lectures titled On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841):

“For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” (p. 239, Everyman’s Library edition)

This is a strong statement. One odd thing about it is that I swear Carlyle says the exact opposite in his 1830 essay “On History”, arguing that what is really needed is a bottom-up history of ordinary people.*

I’m more sympathetic with the older Carlyle, the prophet of what we now call social history. But I’m no dogmatist. “Social forces” of all sorts are, intellectual, political, and economic, to me, sufficient causes of, for example, the Reformation or the French Revolution. But within those limits, the specific actions of Martin Luther and Napoleon were consequential. They explain why things happened when they did, instead of fifty years sooner or later, and they direct the “social forces” in specific directions. I sound like a Marxist. Superstructure, vanguard, etc.

Lovers of literature, readers of old books, at least, must all have at least some belief in the Great Man theory. For the reader, the specific work, the exact combination of words, is important. If Jane Austen had died a year earlier, Persuasion would be gone; if a little before that, Emma and Mansfield Park would never have existed. No combination of social forces, no changes in political or economic conditions, would have brought them into existence without her.

It’s easy, in fact, to imagine the social conditions that preclude any Jane Austen novels at all – social breakdown in England (just look at the sad state of literature in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France), or a society so rigidly patriarchal that Austen never received an education. This is the power, at least to me, of Woolf’s invocation of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister in A Room of One’s Own. I imagine all of the wonderful books that could have been.

* For example: "Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies." ("On History", 5th paragraph). Although I remember a stronger statement somewhere else.

His rejected screech-owl Oration

Why read an antique, long, semi-accurate history of the French Revolution? Because Carlyle was a great writer.

A great stylist, really. He wrote at a very high rhetorical pitch, full of epic similes and exclamation points. Some passages sound like they should be declaimed. Except the weight is undercut by his irony and humor, to the extent that it’s often hard to tell if he means to be taken entirely seriously. (Or, as I suspect is the case with Sartor Resartus, it’s all meant seriously, and the irony is meant not to undercut the ideas but to conceal their outrageousness). Carlyle’s essay on Mirabeau, written around the same time as The French Revolution, is an extreme example of his style – one does not so much read as decode it.

An example of Carlyle at his best. It is the evening of the 8th of Thermidor. Robespierre and most of his allies will be dead within 48 hours. Here’s Carlyle:

“Robespierre, for his part, glides over at evening to his Jacobin House of Lords; unfolds there, instead of some adequate resolution, his woes, his uncommon virtues, incorruptibilities; then secondly, his rejected screech-owl Oration; - reads this latter over again; and declares that he is ready to die at a moment’s warning. Thou shalt not die! shouts Jacobinism from its thousand throats. ‘Robespierre, I will drink the hemlock with thee’, cries Painter David, ‘Je boirai la cigue avec toi’; - a thing not essential to do, but which, in the fire of the moment, can be said.”

Why look, there’s everything I mentioned. E.g., the epic similes: the “Jacobin House of Lords” in place of the Hall of the Jacobin Society, and “Jacobinism”, not an –ism at all but some group of assembled Jacobinists, certainly with fewer than 1,000 throats. The novelistic characterization is good, with Robespierre’s pettiness, ego, and self-pity deftly sketched. The last line is unusually zingy, almost an aphorism. Or a punchline.

I can read this sort of stuff at length with great gusto.

Modern Library edition, p. 692.