Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  But even had Parliament not burned, The French Revolution, would have been a work of spontaneous literary combustion, because of course, it did. Behind all of Carlyle’s obsession with flames lay the trauma of his own manuscript being literally consumed by them. On the evening of 6 March 1835, John Stuart Mill, friend and kindly, if often baffled, review editor, paid an unannounced late visit to Cheyne Row, along with his beloved Harriet Taylor, and stood distraught on the doorstep barely able to get any words out (even more unusual for Mill than Carlyle). This was entirely understandable, since what he had to say was that the only manuscript of Volume One of The French Revolution (up to the Flight from Varennes) had been accidentally destroyed by a maidservant at his – or it wasn’t clear – Mrs Taylor’s house. The servant had apparently thought it was fire-kindling. Now it says a lot for Carlyle’s genuine affection for Mill that he didn’t immediately think there was something fishy about this account – unfinished though the manuscript was, it was still mighty big, and how much paper do you need, after all, to start a fire in a middle-class London parlour? Jane Welsh Carlyle had her suspicions that Harriet Taylor might have had a hand in this and that Mill was gallantly taking responsibility for her disaster, but they were rejected out of hand as unworthy and unlikely by her husband. Carlyle even unconvincingly claimed that it had actually been a relief to hear Mill’s news, as he had initially thought he had come to announce that he had run off with Mrs Taylor.

  But a night of great anguish followed in which Carlyle felt ‘something cutting or hard grasp me around the heart’. In the morning he resolved to persevere and – shortly after – to accept Mill’s anguished offer of money to sustain him through the unexpected additional time that he would need to complete the work. Again one has the impression that Carlyle, more feeling than he sometimes let on, did this at least as much out of a wish to be tender to Mill’s burden of guilt as of a need to pay his bills (though that need was certainly always exigent). He proceeded to write the first section of Volume Two and then, the hard part, go back to the beginning and start over with Volume One. Like any of us faced with such a Sisyphean task, he suffered terrible ordeals of doubt; idealising what had been lost for ever to the flames as the irrecoverable original, hundreds of pages of mots justes, beside which the remembered version he was now actually writing was a pallid simulacrum, the impostor of necessity. He would write feverishly but then become blocked by panic; during one period lasting many weeks, capable only of reading low romances on the couch, ‘the trashiest heap of novels available’. In late spring he consigned the rewrite to a drawer, calling it ‘a mass of unformed rubbish’. With the summer of 1835 came a renewed burst of energy to replace what he always described to his brother Jack (who, possibly unfeelingly, gave Carlyle a vivid description of the eruption of Pompeii) as his ‘poor burnt manuscript’. By the end of August he’d finished, went to see his family in Scotland, watched the flame-tail of Halley’s comet and sent the manuscript to Mill (who’d kept his distance from Cheyne Row for some time) to read.

  Mill would indeed read it and praise the ‘prose-poem’ to the skies both to Carlyle and in print when he reviewed its publication in 1837. How much this was an act of reparation or the truthful candid judgement of friend and editor, neither of them would ever be able to judge. But for both of them the saga of destruction in the flame, and rebirth as Word-Phoenix, had a very particular significance. While we will never know what the first manuscript of Volume One was like, it seems unlikely that the book as written was some sort of pale ghost of its original, for it spoke with unrepentant literary aggression against the conventions, even Romantic conventions, of the day: the weird sublimity, the drug-rush hyperbole, the manifold transgressions against grammar, syntax, word order, the confrontational lapel-grabbing relationship with the reader (‘O beloved brother blockhead’); the ecstatic ejaculations and fulminations; the wild and wandering digressions, all of which had already made Carlyle unsellably notorious or at the very least an acquired taste.How about this for the procession of the Estates General:

  Yes in that silent marching mass there lies Futurity enough. No symbolic Ark like the old Hebrews do these men bear: yet with them too is a Covenant; they too preside over a new Era in the History of Men. The whole Future is over there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it, in the hearts and unshaped thoughts of these men, it lies illegible, inevitable. Singular to think they have it in them, yet not they, not mortal, only the Eye above can read it – as it shall unfold itself in fire and thunder, in siege and field artillery, in the rustling of battle banners, the tramp of hosts, in the glow of burning cities, in the shriek of strangled nations!

  Steady ON, you might yourselves be saying, and it was Mill who, after reading Sartor Resartus, which it’s safe to say was almost certainly not his cup of tea, and after trying to edit Carlyle’s long essays on Cagliostro and the Diamond Necklace, tried to do so himself in ways more likely to appeal to the author than the literary Lord Jeffrey’s advice that he should simply ‘try and write like a gentleman’. Here is a typical passage from ‘Cagliostro’:

  Meanwhile gleams of muddy light will occasionally visit all mortals, every living creature (according to Milton, the very Devil) has some more or less faint resemblance of a Conscience; must make inwardly certain auricular confessions, absolutions, professions of faith – were it only that he does not yet quite loathe and so proceed to hang himself. What such a Porcus as Cagliostro might specially feel and think and be were difficult in any case to say, much more when contradiction and mystification designed and unavoidable so involve the matter . . .

  Mill in response: ‘About that Cagliostro and that Teufelsdreck, by the way, it has frequently occurred to me of late to ask of myself, and also of you, whether that mode of writing between sacrcasm or irony and earnest be really deserving of so much honour as you give it by making use of it so frequently. The same doubt has occasionally occurred to me respecting much of your phraseology, which fails to bring home your meaning to the comprehension of most readers so well as would perhaps be done by commoner and more familiar phrases . . . the style would often tell better on the reader if what is said in abrupt exclamatory interjectional manner were said in the ordinary grammatical mode of nominative and verb’. ‘No surgeon can touch the sore places in a softer hand than you do’, Carlyle wrote back to Mill, and continued poignantly that ‘I daily reflect on this with great sorrow, but it is not a quarrel of my seeking. I mean that the common English mode of writing has to do with what I call the hearsay of things and the great business for me in which I alone feel any comfort is recording the presence, bodily concrete coloured presence, of things for which the Nominative and verb as I find it here and Now refuses to stand me in stead.’

  What Carlyle was aiming at, he made clear to Mill, was to write prose poetry; because the matter of history was too profound, too cosmically disorderly to be confined to the utilitarian neatness habitual to those whom Carlyle derisively called the ‘cause and effect’ people. The ‘right history of the French Revolution’, Carlyle wrote to Mill in 1833, would be ‘the grand poem of our times’, and the ‘man who could write the Truth of that were worth all other writers and singers’. Mill warned Carlyle that if he persisted he would face a rough ride, for ‘the prejudices of our utilitarians are at least as strong against some of your writings as those of any other person whatever’. But Carlyle protested that this was the only way he knew and the only way he wished to impart, and enact, history. He knew he would offend every convention of literary decency but in the spirit of the Gothic Romantics he revered, like Schiller, Jean Paul Richter and Schlegel, unruly violent energy registered the upheavals that shaped historical outcomes. He told himself that ‘if the things come out from the right place, I say to myself it will go to the right place. It is a simple plan this but a desperate one.’

  In the end Mill accepted Carlyle’s reinvention of historical voice to the extent of using, in his enthusiastic review of The French Revolution, precisely
the term – ‘epic prose poem’ – that had made him scratch his head in the first place. But other guardians of the way history – and prose writing more generally – ought to be written, like John Sterling (usually a friend), remained decidedly unentranced, objecting to the ‘headlong capriciousness . . . the lawless oddity and strange heterogeneous combination of allusion’. Carlyle’s style was ‘positively barbarous’ and among his neologisms, Stirling, editor of The Atheneum, in particular, hated ‘environment’, ‘complected’ and ‘visualise’ as the affectations of a wilful obscurantist. Carlyle wrote back that ‘if one has thoughts not hitherto uttered in English books, I see nothing for it but that you must use words not found there, you must make words.’

  Stirling, like many other critics, thought it was Carlyle’s immersion in German literature that produced the interminable sentences, the prodigious superabundance of expression which gives harshness and strangeness; the ‘. . . jerking and spasmodic violence; the painful subjective excitement’.

  Those thoughts, demanding heightened forms of utterance, began as Carlyle in his twenties began to dip into history himself: the usual suspects, Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon and Smollett’s Complete History of England. Gibbon’s style he found intermittently entertaining, but in the end the self-conscious orotundity, the ironic polish, seemed to him more to do with a kind of self-admiring verbal strut than a true effort to embody the matter at hand. And it mattered a great deal, I think, that the young Carlyle was reading the canon of ‘philosophical history’ – in Edinburgh and then beginning to write in Craigenputtoch, for those were two quite different Scotlands. It was exactly Enlightenment Scotland, with its eirenic cultural climate; its commitment to universal truths unproblematically discoverable through rational inquiry, which were somehow a thin medium with which to represent the drive of much history. Unless, that is, the whole point of history was, as the rationalists and empiricists claimed, ‘philosophy teaching by experience’. But that was to make history no more than a demonstration of propositions arrived at a priori in the logic chamber. The choice of prose for such exercises would certainly be classically Johnsonian: grave or witty, balanced, restrained, never exclamatory.

  But Carlyle belonged to an entirely different Scotland – that of the Presbyterian Calvinism of the south-west border country, and, to him, the most natural diction was Scripture and the first true history the Bible of the Authorised Version. Scripture, with all its thunderings, exordia, calls to judgement, and prophetic passion, which he felt had a more archaic and therefore more instinctively direct connection to that which it narrated than the decorously Augustan forms in which most contemporary historical writing seemed lengthily marinaded. Then Carlyle read Homer, and his convictions about the polite artificiality of most eighteenth-century history only strengthened. In part this was because he believed that the recounting of history was an instinctive, ubiquitous and even involuntary human act. ‘A talent for history may be said to be born with us, as our chief inheritance. In a certain sense all men are historians. Is not every memory written quite full with Annals where joy and mourning, conquest and loss, manifoldly alternate . . . ?’ There is no recounting of an hour, a day, a year, Carlyle thought, which does not take the form of historical narration, be the subject paltry or grand. ‘Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate, not in imparting what they have thought, which is indeed often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone and seen, which is a quite unlimited one. Cut us off from narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls . . . Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it.’ Since our lives are constructed in such narrations of a verbal, improvised, and undecorous kind, so should the history of public deeds and great matters preserve that spark of naturally untutored report.

  Conventionally decorous prose was, Carlyle believed, the opposite from the broken-faceted literary vitalism he was groping his way towards; being just the serviceable prose of cerebral self-confirmation. It would be writers who abandoned themselves more freely to the flux of history, and to the dense plenitude of the human past – its ungovernable commotions – and who somehow battled their way to a style that registered that inchoate turbulence, who would more easily bring together the magic moment and the rolling of the aeons. In 1830, two years after Thomas de Quincey had pronounced the art of rhetoric in English prose writing dead, Carlyle published the first of two essays on history, setting out what might be expected of it. Above all, he attacked the self-referentiality of most historical language; its mistaken supposition that submitting the partiular to some pre-determined notion of the general was tantamount to the assignment of significance:

  Alas, do our chains and chainlets of causes and effects which we so assiduously track through certain hand-breadths, years, square miles, when the whole is a broad deep immensity, each atom ‘chained’ and complected with all. Truly, if it is Philosophy teaching by experience, the writer fitted to compose it is hitherto an unknown man . . . better it were that mere earthly histories should lower such pretensions more suitable for Omniscience than human science . . . and aiming only at some picture of things acted, which picture itself will at best be a poor approximation . . .

  In the disingenuous guise of a turn towards methodological modesty, the satisfaction of merely painting ‘a picture of things acted’, Carlyle was in fact, of course, proposing a titanic ambition: to reinvent history entirely. For if the first job was dense picturing, the Enlightenment loftiness would have to go. When you read Gibbon you heard him and only him. To be sure you certainly heard Thomas Carlyle in his work, but when he got to work using every tool in the repertoire of sensuous memory – music, smell, colour, texture – you heard everyone else too, and the din was transporting.

  See Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table; the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering: Friends, shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where there is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be well-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To Arms! To Arms! yell responsive the innumerable voices: like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn into madness. In such, or fitter words does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers in this great moment . . . – Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! Cockades, green ones – the colour of Hope! As with the flight of locusts, these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops, all green things are snatched and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table, stifled with embraces, wetted with tears: has a bit of green riband handed him, sticks it in his hat.

  Now, aside from Carlyle’s cosmic interpellations, which come fast and furious, this long passage does everything he promises in his new history: it propels the reader abruptly into the immediate physical presence of the event. It heightens the effect by conscious use of poetic devices – the aspirate alliteration of the ‘hunted hare’ (spondees were a speciality, though not here); the inversions and repetitions that convey precisely the breathless, deathless self-dramatisation of the revolutionary protagonists’ ‘Alive they shall not take him, not they alive, him alive’ – we by the way have to supply the commas that make voiced sense of that; but which also re-enact Desmoulins’s imperfect conversion from stammerer into orator; the melodramatic sententiousness: ‘swift death or deliverance forever’ (absolutely authentic to the moment, then, and the place – remember, the Palais Royal where all this is unfolding is a site of theatres and burlesques as well as
speech making); Carlyle’s unmatched feel for expressive etymology, his cunning in its deconstruction so that he italicises the well in ‘well-come’, preserving and reinforcing the precise semantic load of ‘bien-venu’. And, then, not least there is the organic vitalism, by metaphorical indirection; a spectacular vision, at once close up and panoramic, of the city swarm, a huge sudden pullulation, the snatch of leaves to use as cockades, an unstoppable mass of voracious creatures taking to the air, ‘the flight of locusts’. (And one could go on ad infinitum within this single passage, and on almost every page, with close readings that would reveal a richness of utterance and complexity of poetic strategy that make comparisons with his idols, Milton and Dante, not entirely ridiculous.)