'Gasping, Staggering, Stammering Tom Fool '

I fancy myself the mild-mannered sort but I enjoy vituperation in others, especially if it’s caustic, unfair and articulate, and you can almost see the spit flying. The master of this mode in literature is Thomas Carlyle. An old-fashioned word comes to mind when describing him: churlish. Consider this from a November 2, 1831, entry in his Notebooks. It makes me laugh every time I read it: 

“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!”

 

Carlyle’s verbal convulsion works because you don’t have to agree with him (I don’t) while admiring his mental dexterity. He was a masterful writer of prose. Angry people too often sputter and substitute obscenities for vitriol. The best put-downs are funny, intentionally or otherwise.

 

One can hardly imagine two specimens of Homo sapiens less compatible than Lamb and Carlyle, though I love them both. Carlyle turned sputtering rage into an art form, while Lamb boasted: “Anything awful makes me laugh.” On another occasion, Carlyle referred to Lamb and his mentally ill sister Mary as “a very sorry pair of phenomena” and characterized Charles’ conversation as “diluted insanity” and the man himself as an “emblem of imbecility bodily and spiritually.”