by Simon Schama
What Carlyle has done here – and in all his historical writing – is to replace what he takes to be the falsely contrived persona of the dispassionately Olympian narrator with the impassioned oracular poet-bard, a modern Herodotus or Livy- a persona unembarrassed to become part of the action himself; a protean companion in written speech who, by turn, may dissolve himself into the protagonist (in this case Desmoulins), only to re-emerge as either choric stage-director – ‘So hangs it, dubious, fateful in the sultry days of July’, or ‘On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all your throats of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty’ – or (this about the September massacres and the uneasy relationship between atrocity and the words that must inadequately convey their report) as judicial interlocutor: ‘That a shriek of inarticulate horror rose over this thing, not only from French Aristocrats and Moderates, but from all Europe, and has prolonged itself to the present day, was most natural and right. The thing lay done, irrevocable; a thing to be counted besides some other things, which lie very black in our Earth’s Annals, yet which will not erase therefrom . . . Well may mankind shriek, inarticulately anathematising as they can. There are actions of such emphasis that no shrieking can be too emphatic for them. Shriek ye; acted have they.’
Carlyle described The French Revolution as a revolution of a book in itself, which, having heard a lot of it now, you might for better or worse agree, depending on how you feel about revolutions; a book, he said, thinking of the incendiary ordeal he had to go through to write it, ‘born out of blackness and sorrow’. Its stuttering diction, its whirling, convulsive shakes and spasms, were meant to trample on the literary complacencies, but also of course to present the writer in some sort of mysterious deep kinship with his subject. The historian posturing as hero did not preclude moments of selective self-effacement. Much of this alternation between egotism and self-annihilation Carlyle took from his German Romantics. His early biography of Schiller, published in 1825, was, at the same time, a genuine effort to sketch a portrait of Promethean loneliness, but also mapping the journey that writing ought to take, from examining the surface of the world into its more invisible wellsprings. Sartor Resartus was his retort to what he called ‘the gospel according to Richard Arkwright’ – or, in ‘Signs of the Times’, the mechanical age. Vocation was to isolate the cladding of the external world, ‘the flowery earth-rind’, but then to peel it away to expose the elements that truly mattered; the infinite rolling ocean of existence, within which the external world was a mere islet. In this manner, it was what the French Revolution revealed when it tore away the politeness of the world, what Carlyle called ‘the age of Imposture’, that was both horrifying and exalting, but which, above all, was real.
That journey from exterior surfaces and commonplace responses, towards something more impalpable, bonded Carlyle not just to the German romantics but to American transcendentalists like Emerson, with whom Carlyle became an improbably close friend and correspondent. More than once in response to Emerson’s adoring blandishments Carlyle seriously considered making a journey, like so many of his literary contemporaries, to the United States, only to pull back when he suspected himself of doing it for precisely the base mercenary reasons he deplored in everyone else. And, besides, despite the good Transcendentalist of Concord, Mass., Carlyle in the end suspected America to be supremely the land of low appetites and money-grubbing, only a bit more successful at those enterprises than the British. What he failed to see – and this is partly bcause in his formative years American writing meant, mostly, Washington Irving, and for him (for all of us), worse, Fenimore Cooper, whom he wrote off as a Leatherstocking Walter Scott – was the histrionic strangeness of that country’s literature; the entitlement that Hawthorne, Melville (Moby Dick and The French revolution could have been written by the same hand I sometimes think) and the ejaculatory Walt Whitman gave themselves to cut absolutely free from British presumptions about what strong writing was. Whether or not Carlyle ever read them (and there’s no evidence that he did), their own oracular, broken, encyclopedically heterogeneous manner; their gift for re-making or ignoring syntax; their embedding poetic meter in the heart of prose, certainly owed something to the way they read him.
The most eloquent tribute of this unlikely kinship, the sense that Carlyle had freed them from deference to English politeness, came from Henry David Thoreau, who actually read the Complete Works to that date while living in his sylvan hermitage on Walden Pond between 1845 and 1847.
Emerson had given him the books and had told Thoreau how badly received many of them had been, Sartor Resartus above all. Thoreau wrote that he knew very well the kind of ‘aged and critical eye’ that could not make head or tail of Carlyle’s style, which to them ‘seems to abound only in obstinate mannerisms, germanisms and whimsical ravings of all kinds . . . we hardly know an old man to whom these volumes are not hopelessly sealed.’ But Thoreau took Carlyle’s language as natural as the rough New England countryside to which he compared it. (It was, he implied, the only thing worthwhile to have come out of England since Wordsworth and Coleridge). ‘The language they say is foolishness and a stumbling block to them, but to many a clear-headed boy they are plainest English and dispatched with such hasty relish as bread and milk’ . . . ‘Not one obscure line or half line did he ever write. His meaning lies plain as the daylight, and he who runs may read; indeed, only he who runs and can read can keep up with the meaning’. What Thoreau found deeply moving, so American, in Carlyle was his populist enlargement of the literary voice; to cover a whole world of sound – ‘He can reduce to writing most things – gestures, winks, nods, significant looks, patois, brogue, accent, pantomime, and how much that had passed for silence before does he represent by written words. The countryman who puzzled the city lawyer, requiring him to write among other things his call to horses, would hardly have puzzled him; he would have found a word for it, all right and classical, that would have started the team for him.’
What Thoreau appreciated about Carlyle was his ability to liberate language from its gentility; and make its ideas seem ‘but freshly living, even the body of it not having passed through the ordeal of death . . . the smallest particles and pronouns all alive within it’. But also, of course, Carlyle’s heroic Gothic rudeness; the humour ‘vigorous and titanic’, the challenging, not to say confrontational, relationship with the reader, ‘O beloved blockhead brother of mine’. And possibly, more than anything else, the sense that Carlyle’s writing was never ever mechanical, stamped and pressed from any sort of die; that it reached back into the humus-damp earth and had the sappy vigour of a young tree.
Thoreau’s perception of what Carlyle wanted to do with the language, but also to literary culture in the Anglophone world, was accurate. In 1838, the year after The French Revolution appeared, Carlyle published a long essay on Scott, ostensibly a review of John Gibson Lockhart’s seven-volume biography and vindication of his father-in-law. It was a mostly merciless put down of Lockhart (whose book on Burns he had praised), whose pointless copiousness provoked Carlyle to comment, ‘There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write’ (in which case, of course, Carlyle would have been worse off than he was). Then the damning verdict, defining faint praise: ‘he has accomplished the work he schemed for himself in a creditable workmanlike manner. It is true his notion of what the work was, does not seem to have been very elevated. To picture-forth the life of Scott, according to any rules of art or composition so that a reader . . . might say to himself “There is Scott, there is the physiognomy and meaning of Scott’s appearance and transit on this earth, such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on the world” . . . this was by no manner of means Mr Lockhart’s plan.’ But then Carlyle went on to skewer poor dead Scott as an exemplum of what a serious writer and serious writing should not be. Scott, in effect, was irredeemably prosaic, led by ambitions that were entirely worldly, content to live
on the surface. ‘His power of representing things . . . his poetic power, like his moral power, was a genius in extenso, and we may say not intenso. In action, speculation, broad as he was, he rose nowhere high, productive without measure as to quantity, in quality he for the most part transcended but a little way the region of commonplace. It has been said “no man has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted.” Winged words were not his vocation’. What could be said on Scott’s behalf was that he knew what he was, was free of cant, and had a ‘sunny current of true humour and humanity, a joyful sympathy . . . the truth is, our best definition of Scott were perhaps that if he was no great man then something much pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy and withal very prosperous and victorious man’.
He was, Carlyle implies, a perfect fit for the age, but the age of veneer which called out for attack-writing to strip it away. Better by far to separate oneself from its anodyne pseudo-accomplishments, aim for something else entirely, something rugged, shambling, unco-ordinated, and do so in a tongue that would shake the reader awake into new vision; to have writing, just so much paper and printer’s ink, nonetheless force the reader into the urgent immediacy of his or her own fate.
The way, then, that Carlyle talked to Britain was to summon the past to upbraid the present for its vain, shallow, sense of time; to attack the vainglorious quality of its self-admiration which he diagnosed as moral indolence; a failure of the shared imagination.
If Carlyle’s verbosity has, I fear, proved infectious, to the point of making the no less verbose Ruskin disappear, I want, at any rate, to finish with him. It’s the right way round, I think, to take Carlyle first because, without him, there is no question that Ruskin would not have come to his own unembarrassed poetic diction; would not have waged war on the desiccated conventions of art writing, thank you Sir Joshua Reynolds (Hazlitt always honorably excepted, although Ruskin didn’t), just as Carlyle waged war on the empty nostrums of history. They shared much of the bigger enterprise, the preaching of the salvation of handwork over machine manufacture; the mistrust of classicism; the sanctification of profuse ornament as embodying the connection of man and nature, a connection threatened by the tyranny of mensuration; a sense that the ultimate enterprise was to make the sheer plenitude of human existence (as well as the transcendence of landscape) the expression of God’s benevolence (or, in Carlyle’s case, his stern sovereignty).
But instead of making himself the embodiment of arduous creativity, constantly playing to the gallery, Ruskin in Modern Painters of course displaced all that Promethean recklessness, obstinacy and suffering onto the slightly surprised shoulders of his god Turner. There is, you’ll doubtless be happy to hear, no time to talk about this in any detail – many have before me – Robert Hewison, Wolfgang Kemp, and others. But what sometimes seems to me to get taken for granted is the performative quality of Ruskin’s writing in Modern Painters. He’s after the same thing as Carlyle’s French Revolution; namely, unparalleled immediacy; the sense of Being There, but the ‘There’ is not just, or sometimes not at all, a reproduction of Turner’s making of the work so much as Ruskin’s personal unmediated encounter with it. But that’s an encounter at a level of almost madness-inducing intensity and total immersion, to the point at which Ruskin – how consciously we’ll never know, since, unlike Carlyle, he seldom if ever feels he must answer for his style – writes exactly as he supposes Turner must paint; with a kind of gorgeously incontinent abandon. When he wrote about Turner’s Land’s End in the last book of Volume One of Modern Painters, he deluded himself into thinking that what he was doing was analytical description, dense ekphrasis, if you like. But what he was actually doing was word painting, word singing in Carlyle’s sense, in which the rhythmic music of the paragraph is everything. If it’s a poem, it’s a tone poem – Ruskin the impassioned conductor controlling the orchestra of alliteration, assonance, allusion, sudden metaphor, the words and the water they describe rolling over each other. It’s hard to remember when you hear this that he is just describing a picture – and in some senses of course he isn’t; or rather, the picture is of the storm-tossed author’s nerve endings:
. . . the Land’s End, the entire order of the surges where every one of them, divided and entangled among promontories as it rolls in and beaten back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, throwing all behind it into disorder, breaking up the succeeding waves into vertical ridges which, in their turn, yet more totally shattered upon the shore, retire in more hopeless confusion, until the whole surface of the sea becomes one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected rage, bounding and crashing and coiling in an anarchy of enormous power, subdivided into myriads of waves of which every one is not, be it remembered, a separate surge but part and portion of a vast one, actuated by internal power, and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of impetuous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in the wind, overwhelming the one and piercing the other with the form, fury and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire . . .
STOP! STOP! you cry, and, dear, patient, fellow London Library Readers, I actually have.
A History of Britain: A Response
American Historical Review, June 2009
If I confess to some astonishment at writing this response, it is only because I am even more astonished – and moved – that the American Historical Review judged a fifteen-part television series worthy of sustained critical consideration in the pages of an AHR Forum. I would be churlish not to preface my comments by first thanking all three commentators for the intellectual generosity with which they approached their subject, and for the marked absence of condescension towards a project which, had they tackled it themselves, they would, I believe, have discovered to be every bit as exacting as any more conventionally scholarly project.
It is eleven years since I started work on A History of Britain, nine years since the first film shoot in Orkney, and six years since the last episodes were broadcast on terrestrial channels in Britain and the United States. (Although, gratifyingly, the series has had a continuing life on cable broadcasts and on DVDs, both as an educational tool and as popular entertainment.) So looking back on the enterprise from this distance is, for me at any rate, something of an exercise in cultural history itself. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the part that the television documentary plays in diffusing historical knowledge; provoking debate and enriching the common culture with a sensibility informed by the past could not be more timely. For the scholarly community is surely at a crossroads in considering the forms by which history is communicated within and beyond the academy. The digital moment is no less pregnant with consequences for the survival of the interpreted past than was the transition from oral to written word in antiquity, and from written to print culture in the Renaissance. Whether we like it or not (and I have my own load of mixed feelings), we are unquestionably at the beginning of the end of the long life of the paper-and-print history book. The exigencies of economic austerity are likely to only hasten a process that is already under way. Print books will of course survive their eventual demise in the marketplace of knowledge, and monographs custom-printed from digital sources will doubtless endure as physical objects, perhaps even on library shelves. But in shorter order than the profession has yet taken in, most history will be consumed, especially beyond the academy, in digital forms: on interactive websites; as uploadable films; from electronic museum sites, archives and libraries – a prospect towards which most university scholars seem (at best) cool, and to which we are taking precious few steps to acclimatise future generations of historians.
While I was working on A History of Britain, moved by the possibility of passing on some insight to students about the ways in which scholarly history might be popularised for much broader audiences without compromising its integrity, I was rash enough to propose an optional graduate seminar called ‘History beyond the Academy’. I tho
ught I might actually offer instruction on script-writing, on developing treatments and budgets for a variety of hypothetical projects: radio documentaries, digital textbooks, interactive public exhibitions, children’s books, films. Further, I imagined that along with disciplined practical instruction about these skills, such a class would debate the long and complicated history of the relationship between scholarly and popular writing. I have always tried to preach what I have practised: that the two lives of a historian, within and without the academy, are mutually sustaining, each necessary for the other to flourish, and that without their interdependence we are doomed to an intellectual half-life, cut off from the nourishment of, and responsibility to tend the curiosity of, the non-academic world. The proposal was greeted in some quarters with polite dismay as an act of pedagogical subversion. ‘Do you want to create second-class citizens among the students?’ was one rhetorical question put to me by way of dissuasion. (For the record, I persisted and, some years later, though only once, taught the course as planned.)
It was from this conviction that our calling not only invites us but requires us to reach beyond the academy that I undertook, with great trepidation – and exhilaration – A History of Britain. Although it is sometimes referred to as ‘The BBC History of Britain’, my cautionary resort to the indefinite article was of course not casual. Whatever the outcome of the series, my role as narrator and interpreter presupposed the provisional, candidly subjective character of the project. I have never pretended otherwise. In fact, it was, I confess, a slight impatience with the assumption (in, for example, Ken Burns’s documentaries) that a multiplicity of voices somehow guarantees balance or authentically interpretative pluralism that provoked me, perhaps perversely, to raise the hermeneutic stakes by offering one historian’s vision. As all the commentators have pointed out, there were many inherent dangers in the approach, not least narrative arrogance. But I deliberately set out to challenge what seemed to me the unexamined assumptions of pseudo-balance presupposed by the choir of talking heads approach.