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Orbis Litterarum 2001: 56, 183–204 Copyright C Munksgaard 2001 Printed in Denmark . All rights reserved ISSN 0105-7510 Thomas Carlyle and the ‘‘Characteristics’’ of Nineteenth-Century English Literature C. Schatz-Jakobsen, University of Southern Denmark The place of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in nin...

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Thomas Carlyle and the "Characteristics" of NineteenthCentury English Literature Claus Schatz-Jakobsen Orbis Litterarum

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Orbis Litterarum 2001: 56, 183–204 Printed in Denmark . All rights reserved

Copyright C Munksgaard 2001

ISSN 0105-7510

Thomas Carlyle and the ‘‘Characteristics’’ of Nineteenth-Century English Literature C. Schatz-Jakobsen, University of Southern Denmark The place of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in nineteenth-century English literary history is as uncertain as the nature and genreaffiliation of early writings like ‘‘Characteristics’’ (1831) and Sartor Resartus (1833–34). The question of whether Carlyle war ‘really’ a Romantic or a Victorian runs parallel to the question of the kind of ground, rhetorical or conceptual, on which his texts rest. While a sufficiently close (rhetorical) reading of ‘‘Characteristics’’ may provide an answer to the second question, it may be the same token render the first question, and the period-terms resorted in its formulation, irrelevant.

I. Introduction: Thomas Carlyle – Romantic or Victorian? Often regarded as the most Victorian of Victorians, Thomas Carlyle was first of all a romantic. Coeval with Keats, he developed his full literary powers later than any of the other romantics, but wrote some of his most original and durable works, Sartor Resartus and the early essays, before 1832, and went on through an active career of nearly threescore years to outlive such great Victorians as Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, Mill, and George Eliot.1

So said Carlisle Moore in 1966 in an MLA-report on the state of the art in Thomas Carlyle-studies. Not that Moore was – or pretended to be – the first to address the curious fact that Thomas Carlyle, born in 1795, the same year as John Keats and only three years after P. B. Shelley, was not only contemporary with the second generation of English Romantics, he was indeed spiritually in league with them. Moore himself referred to several significant precedents in this respect: Basil Willey’s Nineteenth Century Studies (1949), Ernest Bernbaum’s Guide Through the Romantic Movement (1949), and Norman Foerster’s ‘‘The Critical Study of the Victorian Age’’ (1950). For Willey there had been no doubt that Carlyle was a Romantic, though of the special kind who had the misfortune to survive ‘‘into the latter-days of the nineteenth century,’’ for he had seen his visions and dreamt his dreams in the days of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge [....]. Carlyle was a man with a message, if there ever was one, and the

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Claus Schatz-Jakobsen message was essentially that of the great Romantic poets and thinkers, applied to the condition of England in the days of Chartism and the dismal science.2

Bernbaum had likewise numbered Carlyle among the canonical Romantics, but treated only the early half of his work, up to and including Past and Present (1843): His [Carlyle’s] earlier life and works [.....] are closely connected with the Romantic Movement, and to omit them would be to ignore a very forceful and important manifestation of the Romantic spirit.3

Foerster argued that either one must go along with Bernbaum’s suggestion of keeping the first half of Carlyle with the Romantics, or else one must regard him as ‘‘a Victorian misfit.’’4 Forster speculated further what would have happened if the later Romantics, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, had lived as long as Wordsworth: ‘‘Had they lived, it is possible that our textbooks would have had no Victorian era but would simply have described the conflict between Romanticism and Realism, as they describe the previous conflict between neo-classicism and Romanticism.’’5 One of the most characteristic features of the above-mentioned studies is the extent to which they let themselves be swayed by the intimidating precedence and presence of such constructions, of dates, years, events, movements, generations – indeed, of all the paraphernalia of historical chronology, the contractual, binding presence of the machinery of traditional literary historical scholarship. It seems a matter of some urgency for them to get Carlyle aboard one of the rearmost wagons of the Romantic train before it leaves the platform altogether in 1832, a year that figures so decisively in these studies that even to begin to think about discarding it as a marker of the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period seems sacrilegious. The affiliation between Moore and his critical precursors notwithstanding, there is a difference between his introduction and the studies on which he otherwise relies, in that he implicitly criticizes Bernbaum by emphasizing that he himself will treat the whole of Carlyle’s work rather than only the earlier part of it. At a time when lines of demarcation between literary and historical periods are being blotted out and when the romantic sensibility, instead of disappearing in 1832, is being traced throughout the century and into our own time, it seems fitting to conclude this volume with a figure who serves not only to bridge but, in many ways, to unite the two periods and to illustrate the persistence of romantic ideas and attitudes.6

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Moore’s introduction is characteristic of the scholarly climate of the 1960s and early ‘70s, when it was good form to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and to claim, e.g. with M.H. Abrams, that ‘‘modern writers, who were earlier praised on the grounds that they were anti-Romantic, are in fact latter-day exemplars of Romantic innovations.’’7 In the 1960s and ’70s, historians of English literature typically predated the emergence of literary and cultural modernity to around 1800, often in express opposition to early twentieth-century Modernism’s understanding of itself as a watershed in European literature and culture. They considered, in Paul de Man’s trenchant phrasing in an essay from the mid 1960s, that with romanticism it is a matter of ‘‘the interpretation of a phenomenon that we can only consider from the temporal perspective of a period of time that we have ourselves experienced,’’ even to the extent that we carry it ‘‘within ourselves as the experience of an act in which, up to a certain point, we ourselves have participated.’’8 That to draw a too rigid dividing line between the Romantic and later periods of English literature is to shut oneself off from one’s own literary and cultural infancy is a lesson which, after having paid due attention to Carlyle’s texts, recent generations of Carlyle-critics seem to have heeded, though not by simply erasing the line altogether. I shall give two examples, but confine myself to quoting for the moment from the latter: Janice L. Haney’s ‘‘Shadow-Hunting: Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism’’ (1978), and Chris Vanden Bossche’s ‘‘Revolution and Authority: The Metaphors of Language and Carlyle’s Style’’ (1983). Bossche’s generally (post-) structuralist approach reflects on his concluding remarks about Carlyle’s literary-historical status by creating the conditions for a demolition or deconstruction of traditional period-terms. He argues that Carlyle’s symbolism ‘‘demonstrates both what binds and divides Romantic and Victorian consciousness.’’ For Bossche, Carlyle’s work is neither wholly Romantic nor exclusively Victorian, it is both and neither, for in the final analysis, ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ do not apply as period-terms. Bossche consequently ends up landing Carlyle in a midway position

between Romanticism and Victorianism that enables him to articulate the problematics of both modes. His presence as the author who holds together strained analogies distances him from the Romantic mode just as his non-fiction prose reveals the fictionality of language and of the realistic novel.9

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For Bossche, Carlyle speaks from a historical void or vacuum, and his work is the Other of Romanticism and Victorianism alike, the failure of either to coincide with itself.

II. Carlyle and/as the Aporia of Nineteenth-Century English Literature. The ongoing history of Carlyle criticism and the continued interpretation of his work raise the issue of whether we should rely on what earlier generations of critics have proposed by way of answer to the question whether Carlyle was a Romantic or a Victorian. Least of all, perhaps, should we trust Carlyle’s own authority, considering his ambiguous attitude towards the intellectual achievements of early nineteenth-century England, consisting as it did of equal measures of personal hostility towards many of the English Romantics (e.g. William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb) as expressed in his notebooks and literary remains, and, as Harold Bloom has demonstrated, of his status as a belated Romantic, ‘‘Byronic in verse, Coleridgean in prose.’’10 Rather than taking on trust what Carlyle himself has said on this issue or the conceptual or historical schemes devised by such critics as have been mentioned earlier, each new critic must carefully close-read, over again, the texts by Carlyle that previous generations of readers have laboriously plodded through, and try to work out for him- or herself what those texts say. Paul de Man has remarked in several places on the reading habits of earlier critical generations and their shying away from ‘‘the analysis of semantic structures’’ while feeling more ‘‘at home with problems of psychology or of historiography.’’11 Intellectual historians as well as ‘‘critics of consciousness,’’ he claims, ‘‘favor aesthetic and existential values over the intricacies of close reading. They paraphrase prior to reading, preferring the blanket understanding and identification on the level of received ideas to the actual complications of the texts.’’12 However, their successors, that is, the critical generation for which de Man stood as a father-figure, discovered that the writing of literary history and the reading of literary texts are not easily compatible. My generation adopted as a matter of course the historical schemes that had been worked out by its predecessors, but found that elements in the texts which did not fit these conclusions had been systematically, though unconsciously, overlooked.13

Given the (rhetorical) reading strategies introduced by de Man and others,

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the large overviews on which traditional history depends are no longer possible. The general ideas become shadowy and begin to fall apart, the material becomes too unwieldy for synthesis or for definition [....] no discussion of generations, movements, or specific experiences of consciousness is any longer conceivable.14

Another way of putting this would be to say that only texts can be relied on as truth-witnesses in matters of (literary) history, a consequence of which may be that the question of whether Carlyle was a Romantic or a Victorian will need rephrasing. The question of whether Carlyle belongs by right to the Romantic or the Victorian age will thus turn into a question – raised by a scrupulously close reading of Carlyle’s early review-essay, ‘‘Characteristics’’ (1831), which will be the subject of the second half of this essay – whether Romanticism and Victorianism ever existed as separate units of literary history in the first place. If, then, the predicament and the question of Carlyle’s literary-historical status seems nowhere closer to having been resolved today, by focusing on the dividing line between the Romantic and the Victorian period rather than on what is actually kept apart by that line, that is, the unifying features and defining characteristics of the periods themselves, recent scholarly and critical studies of Carlyle (such as Haney and Vanden Bossche’s) have differed from earlier studies and have prepared the ground for a heightened understanding of literary history, historical periodization, and the nature of historical periods. What is the ontological status of those stretches of land which literary-historical scholarship has parcelled out from that immense landscape, the entire literary and cultural history of mankind, as so many smaller regions, so many periods or ages? Should they be thought of as metaphysical realities? Or are they, on the other hand, to be considered as constructions or ‘‘necessary fictions,’’ to quote the literary (meta-)historian David Perkins, necessary because ‘‘one cannot write history or literary history without periodizing,’’15 that is, because the very enterprise of literary history depends entirely on them, and yet of such an ephemeral conventional nature that, having been constructed to serve a certain political or other ideological interest, they can be discarded when other interests come to prevail?16 In answer to such questions, consider for a moment the fact that in the sixth edition (1993) of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume two, the year 1830 has replaced the year 1832, which in all the earlier editions, up to and including the fifth (1962–86), had marked the end of the Romantic

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period and the beginning of the Victorian. While it may not seem like a major revolution in English literary historiography, such a change does after all spell a departure from an old-style, culturally high-brow view of literary history as hinging on the occurrence of historically significant events (wars, revolutions, parliamentary acts, etc.) and on the life, opinions, and death of ‘great’ men, a view which had ruled hegemonically since the first editions of the Norton Anthology. When seen against the year of the death of Sir Walter Scott and the passing of the First Reform Bill in 1832, 1830 may appear to be a less eventful year, less pregnant with history, at least when ‘history’ is understood as something made up of violent, cataclysmic events and turningpoints. However, considering that the year 1830 saw the ‘Captain Swing’ rising, extensive food riots, machine-breakings, the opening of the Manchester-Liverpool railway line, indeed, a whole series of popular stirrings and risings, it will seem from the point of view of recent historicizing criticism (feminist, new historicist, neo-Marxist, etc.) as a no less relevant mark of the transition from a Romantic literature of conservative reaction and displacement to a Victorian literature of democratic compromise and the surfacing of political and social issues.17 Still, whether 1832 or 1830 is called upon to effect the Victorian break with Romanticism, to agree on the reality of a break seems of essential importance for historicizing critics who argue in the name of reasoned progress that Victorianism is a significant advance for humankind beyond Romanticism, that is, beyond the historical climax of solipsism, of the human mind’s self-indulgent, promethean, but ultimately illusory belief in its own powers. In such a perspective, Victorianism reads like the awakening of the national consciousness from Romantic night-thoughts and illusions to broad daylight and socio-historical actuality, to the ordinary day-to-day affairs of ordinary men and women who, far from striving for transcendence, live realistic, recognizable lives in a realistic, recognizable world. Nor has it taken a twentieth century perspective to see the contours of such an exemplary history of intellectual progress. A critique of Romanticism of the kind adumbrated here was launched by the Victorians themselves against their overreaching Romantic forebears and is implied, for example, in Matthew Arnold’s charge – in ‘‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’’ (1865) – that the Romantics, ‘‘with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough.’’18 I observed earlier that by focusing on the dividing line between the Romantic and the Victorian periods (rather than on the periods themselves), recent

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studies of Carlyle have made a difference and have rendered us better able to understand the skepticism voiced in many quarters today about the practicability of literary history.19 What is at stake here is a deconstruction of the dividing line between Romanticism and Victorianism; this will turn out, however, to be less the work of recent criticism than a Carlylean act of self deconstruction. We have seen Chris Vanden Bossche locate Carlyle in literary historical no man’s land, between Romanticism and Victorianism. In that other article on Carlyle which I mentioned earlier but omitted to quote, Janice Haney’s ‘‘Shadow-Hunting’’: Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism,’’ the dividing line between Romanticism and Victorianism is not only focused on, its ontological nature is even described. The line is drawn by – indeed is – a text, Carlyle’s philosophic novel and major claim to literary fame, Sartor Resartus (1834). I quote here from the beginning of Haney’s article: If one text creates Victorian Romanticism as both a formal and historical moment, then that text is Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. In the classroom or in literary histories, we often use Sartor to introduce the Victorian way and then to relate that way to an earlier Romanticism. Indeed, Sartor seems to capture an historical moment; at the same time, it creates it. Consequently, it functions in two ways: as a transitional text that helps us navigate the passage between those two historical periods we call Romantic and Victorian and as a founding text that initiates us into a Victorian frame of mind. Something about Sartor makes it historically significant.20

To think of the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian period in textual rather than historical, thematic, or aesthetic terms is almost tantamount to saying that the foundation of nineteenth century English literary history, that which allows for its periodization, is itself partly immune to analysis in its own terms, that is, in terms of (political, moral, religious etc.) ideas, aesthetic forms, genres, movements, etc., and should rather be analysed in terms of language, rhetoric, or trope, that is, in terms of something which may not be entirely reducible to meaning. We may note that Haney’s introduction treats Sartor Resartus in two almost completely irreconcilable ways, as simultaneously a ‘‘transitional’’ and a ‘‘founding’’ text, as both fluid and fixed. One way for her is to treat it as cultural documentation of a significant moment in English (literary) history: one pictures the text standing on the side-line of history, coolly registering what is happening as the Romantic age yields to the Victorian. On the other hand, she also treats it as participating in that history, indeed, as being itself an historical agent, a creator of history: ‘‘Sartor seems to capture an historical moment; at the same time, it creates

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it.’’ We may want to know how a text like Sartor Resartus can at the same time capture an historical moment and create it, and, indeed, what it is about texts that makes them ‘‘historically significant.’’ It is not within the scope of the present essay to submit Sartor Resartus to the kind of detailed textual analysis that would be required if one were to fully demonstrate its ambiguous literary-historical character, and why it may be said, finally, to play havoc with historical terms and categories. However, as announced earlier, I shall subject to detailed analysis a shorter text by Thomas Carlyle, his early review-essay, ‘‘Characteristics,’’ which was first published in th...