'Amid the Muddle, Gold Nuggets'

“He can write truly wretched sentences, with capricious capitalization, puzzling punctuation, exotic vocabulary.” 

Some writers we swallow whole, unapologetically, at least at a first sitting. If we find enduring sustenance, we go on reading and rereading, sometimes for life. That describes Shakespeare for some of us, and Henry James. Other writers we wolf down greedily on first encounter, but never again. And some we pick at like between-meal snacks, with a mingling of greed and guilt. Such is Thomas Carlyle for this reader.

 

I came to him and Sartor Resartus by way of Herman Melville, who admired his “run-a-muck style.” The author of Moby-Dick also plumbed On Heroes and Hero-Worship, where he may have drawn on Carlyle’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell when creating Ahab. One reviewer of Moby-Dick noted the novel’s “Carlylism of phrase.” There’s often an artificially pumped-up feel to much of Carlyle’s prose, as though it had been raised on steroids, and I find now that a little goes a long way. Carlyle’s default mode is fulmination. Consider this, from a Nov. 2, 1831, entry in his Notebooks:

 

“Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom fool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms, and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for: more like a convulsion fit than natural systole and diastole. Besides he is now a confirmed shameless drunkard: asks vehemently for gin-and-water in strangers’ houses; tipples until he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!”

 

Though my loyalty to Lamb is offended, this is great fun to read, rather like the pleasure we take in observing road rage from a safe distance. The sentence at the top indicting Carlyle’s prose is from Joseph Epstein’s examination of Carlyle’s work in the May issue of Commentary. Epstein devotes most of his attention to a recent scholarly, three-volume edition of The French Revolution. He accomplishes something I previously thought impossible, and that any first-rate review ought to do: he makes me think about reading Carlyle again. He finds not just gigantism but traces of aphorism in Carlyle’s work:

 

“Amid the muddle, gold nuggets do turn up. ‘The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.’”

 

Epstein himself, of course, mints the occasional near-aphorism: “Would Carlyle have understood that the last great man, of thought and of action, of the 20th century was Winston Churchill, who met none of his qualifications?” Over the decades Epstein has patented a genre of his own -- part biography, part literary criticism, none of it academic or what I think of as Casaubon-like. A precursor who comes to mind is Stefan Zweig, who wrote popular brief lives of such figures as Montaigne and Balzac.

 

Give Carlyle the last word, from “The Hero as Man of Letters”:

 

“I find in [Dr.] Johnson’s Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great heart; — ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style, — the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them; — a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the avoidable kind! — Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.”