Showing posts with label Thomas Carlyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Carlyle. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on Difficulties and Progress)
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on Silence and Speech)
"Under all speech that is good for anything
there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is
shallow as Time."—Scottish historian-essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881),
“On Sir Walter Scott” (1838)
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on ‘The Man Who Cannot Laugh’)
“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.”—Scottish historian-essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Sartor Resartus (1833)Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on Books and the ‘Audible Voice of the Past’)
"In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time;
the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance
of it has altogether vanished like a dream." —Scottish historian, essayist
and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841)Thursday, April 1, 2010
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on Courage)
“The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.”—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (A favorite quote of JFK’s, used in Profiles in Courage)
Thursday, November 26, 2009
This Day in Literary History (Dickens’ “Tale of 2 Cities” in Boffo Final Installment)
November 26, 1859—As thousands of readers devoured the last serial installment of Charles Dickens’ latest novel, A Tale of Two Cities, they quickly committed to memory the dying words on the scaffold of hero Sydney Carton: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done…”
Dickens must have felt the exact same way. An actor wannabe and, by financial necessity, a careful watcher of his income, he had spent the last two decades fulfilling audience expectations and peering over publishers’ shoulders concerning his business rights.
On the Saturday that his story of the French Revolution came out in its seventh and eighth installment in the inexpensive magazine he edited, All the Year Round, the indefatigable author could have, if he were so inclined, paused to rest and smile at the reception he was receiving. But I doubt if he did.
After all, he had to be up and making a success of his new magazine—soliciting, editing, even rewriting contributions from others, writing essays of his own, and, when the muse bid him to do so, serializing his next novel, Great Expectations, there, too. You’d do the same thing, I guess, if you owned 75% of the venture, as Dickens did.
Melodrama had been shaping Dickens’ approach both to his work and his life. He loved to act, and in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities he noted that he first conceived the idea for the novel while performing in his friend Wilkie Collins’ melodrama The Frozen Deep.
My post from yesterday on Collins’ The Woman in White touched briefly on a clandestine relationship that began while Dickens appeared in The Frozen Deep: the one with actress Ellen Ternan. But the play also got him to think about recreating his own version of the self-sacrificing hero in that melodrama.
The novel was Dickens’ 12th, but only his second set outside his own period. (His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, had as its backdrop the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.) While Collins inspired Tale’s denouement, another friend, Thomas Carlyle, provided essential materials for historical background—his own work, The French Revolution, plus materials used in researching that history.
In a famous essay on his indebtedness to D.W. Griffith and Dickens, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein credited the British novelist with planting the ideas of the close-up and “parallel montage”—i.e., a "shifting of the story from one group of characters to another." It was perhaps forced by circumstance, as Dickens puzzled increasingly over how to maintain interest, from one installment to the next, while ensuring that his novels, when appearing in book form, cohered from beginning to end.
Daniel Pool’s Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters points to the turning point in Dickens’ development as a novelist: his 1848 agreement with publisher Bradbury & Evans that he would be paid for his full 20 “numbers” or installments.
Without having to write self-contained installments, as he had been forced to do previously (lest lack of reader interest induced the publishers to pull the plug on the novel), he could now integrate his books more strongly. “Notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole,” he wrote aspiring novelist Jane Brookfield, specifically citing A Tale of Two Cities.
He might have been a master entertainer who knew how to make readers laugh, cry, and hunger for his next work, but Dickens didn’t provide similar happiness to those who worked with him. His dispute with Bradbury & Evans, over their refusal to publish his letter denying improprieties with Ellen Ternan, led to a parting of the ways. They had to watch as he returned to his old publisher Chapman & Hall, naming them the distributor of All the Year Round.
A Tale of Two Cities also marked Dickens’ last collaboration with longtime illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882) — better known simply as "Phiz." (One of his illustrations from the book is in the link accompanying this post.) While monthly editions of All the Year Round continued to have illustrations by Phiz, the cheap weekly editions of the magazine made publishing this work impracticable.
There was also the matter of Dickens’ evolution as an artist to consider. Like Anton Chekhov and Woody Allen, Dickens began, in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, as a humorous writer, before mingling in far more serious elements as time went on.
Dickens must have felt the exact same way. An actor wannabe and, by financial necessity, a careful watcher of his income, he had spent the last two decades fulfilling audience expectations and peering over publishers’ shoulders concerning his business rights.
On the Saturday that his story of the French Revolution came out in its seventh and eighth installment in the inexpensive magazine he edited, All the Year Round, the indefatigable author could have, if he were so inclined, paused to rest and smile at the reception he was receiving. But I doubt if he did.
After all, he had to be up and making a success of his new magazine—soliciting, editing, even rewriting contributions from others, writing essays of his own, and, when the muse bid him to do so, serializing his next novel, Great Expectations, there, too. You’d do the same thing, I guess, if you owned 75% of the venture, as Dickens did.
Melodrama had been shaping Dickens’ approach both to his work and his life. He loved to act, and in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities he noted that he first conceived the idea for the novel while performing in his friend Wilkie Collins’ melodrama The Frozen Deep.
My post from yesterday on Collins’ The Woman in White touched briefly on a clandestine relationship that began while Dickens appeared in The Frozen Deep: the one with actress Ellen Ternan. But the play also got him to think about recreating his own version of the self-sacrificing hero in that melodrama.
The novel was Dickens’ 12th, but only his second set outside his own period. (His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, had as its backdrop the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.) While Collins inspired Tale’s denouement, another friend, Thomas Carlyle, provided essential materials for historical background—his own work, The French Revolution, plus materials used in researching that history.
In a famous essay on his indebtedness to D.W. Griffith and Dickens, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein credited the British novelist with planting the ideas of the close-up and “parallel montage”—i.e., a "shifting of the story from one group of characters to another." It was perhaps forced by circumstance, as Dickens puzzled increasingly over how to maintain interest, from one installment to the next, while ensuring that his novels, when appearing in book form, cohered from beginning to end.
Daniel Pool’s Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters points to the turning point in Dickens’ development as a novelist: his 1848 agreement with publisher Bradbury & Evans that he would be paid for his full 20 “numbers” or installments.
Without having to write self-contained installments, as he had been forced to do previously (lest lack of reader interest induced the publishers to pull the plug on the novel), he could now integrate his books more strongly. “Notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole,” he wrote aspiring novelist Jane Brookfield, specifically citing A Tale of Two Cities.
He might have been a master entertainer who knew how to make readers laugh, cry, and hunger for his next work, but Dickens didn’t provide similar happiness to those who worked with him. His dispute with Bradbury & Evans, over their refusal to publish his letter denying improprieties with Ellen Ternan, led to a parting of the ways. They had to watch as he returned to his old publisher Chapman & Hall, naming them the distributor of All the Year Round.
A Tale of Two Cities also marked Dickens’ last collaboration with longtime illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882) — better known simply as "Phiz." (One of his illustrations from the book is in the link accompanying this post.) While monthly editions of All the Year Round continued to have illustrations by Phiz, the cheap weekly editions of the magazine made publishing this work impracticable.
There was also the matter of Dickens’ evolution as an artist to consider. Like Anton Chekhov and Woody Allen, Dickens began, in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, as a humorous writer, before mingling in far more serious elements as time went on.
Phiz’ strength—rambunctious humor—was of increasingly marginal interest to the serious Victorian audience Dickens was now courting. The novelist decided, without explanation, to end a partnership that had greatly enhanced the reception of his work. This was hardly the manner of the lovable entertainer that his public had gotten into the habit of bringing into their home every year like a friend--especially Christmas, when one of his magazine's issues had one of his contributions about the importance of kindness and thinking about other things besides money.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on “Clever Men”)
“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”—Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), “Goethe,” Edinburgh Review (1828)
Monday, January 21, 2008
This Day in World History
January 21, 1793 – In a point of no return for the infant republic, King Louis XVI of France was executed through a recent invention, the guillotine—embraced by revolutionaries as a more humane means of death than previous methods.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood argued cogently for the transformative nature of that conflict and its implications for the world. Nevertheless, the prototype for later revolutions, especially those that convulsed the 20th century, was the one that occurred in France. Its pattern has become all too familiar: the overturning not only of a governing official but also a social order and religious institutions; powerful reactionary forces; and a dictatorship meant to quell rising disorder.
Over a year and a half before the execution, the King, increasingly chafing at his superfluous status as a constitutional monarch, had made an ill-advised secret dash with the royal family for the Austrian border before being apprehended. The move marked him as an enemy of the republic, and war with Austria—the native country of his queen, Marie Antoinette—led all outsiders such as himself to be marked for death. (It didn’t help that Marie had been charged with writing letters giving away to Austria the troop movements of the Revolutionary Army.)
Nevertheless, the decision of the Convention, the republic’s new governing body, represented a reversal of their own ideals. A number of the radical Jacobins—including the rising advocate for repressive tactics against enemies of the republic, Robespierre – had once bitterly denounced capital punishment and its multiple and capricious manifestations under the ancient regime. Now, they had called for its use to stamp out internal enemies.
The dethroned king had endured four separate votes before coming to this pass, with the Convention deciding whether he was guilty of treason; whether the sentence should be final, or ratified by the people; what the nature of the punishment should be; and whether the punishment should be delayed.
Thomas Paine, the British-born radical pamphleteer who had championed the American Revolution in Common Sense before advocating for the French against British conservative Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man, had argued unsuccessfully that Louis should be deported to the United States, where he would have the opportunity for “rehabilitation.”
Paine’s plea (through an interpreter) for mercy and friendship with the more moderate Girondin faction in the Convention later led to his own imprisonment by the revolutionaries.
Louis (now, shorn of his title, known as Louis Capet rather than Louis XVI) was allowed only 24 hours, not the three days he had requested, to say goodbye to his family and make peace with God. After a nearly two-hour final parting with his family, Louis huddled with his confessor, Henry Essex Edgeworth, a native of County Longford, Ireland better known as “L’Abbe Edgeworth de Firmont.”
In high school and college, while taking a couple of courses on world history that touched on the French Revolution, I was never required to read the history that was once the major analysis of the conflict: The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle.
While understandable in certain ways, given a style that would now be considered florid and references that might seem obscure to modern readers (Carlyle’s book was published only some 60 years after the events), there are far worse histories of the period. My particular edition— from Heritage Press, with an introduction by Cecil Brown and illustrations by Bernard Lamotte—offers a particularly attractive way of perusing this demonstration of the definition of “classic” as a book that people no longer read.
At his best, Carlyle offers all the drama such a cataclysmic epoch deserves, as in his narration of Louis’ dreary processional to the scaffold, once the site of a statue to his predecessor, Louis XVI:
“At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of pitiful women: “Grace! Grace! Grace!” Through the rest of the streets there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there; the armed, did any pity, dare not express it, each man overawed by his neighbors. All windows are down, none seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty-thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or movement; it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone: one carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying; clattering of this death-march falls sharp on the ear, in the great silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the Earth.”
On the scaffold, Louis’ final words—his proclamation of innocence and forgiveness of his enemies—were quickly muffled by the drumroll of the guards. He was struck down by the guillotine at shortly after 10 am, 38 years old.
“At home this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies,” noted Carlyle. Shocked at the execution, England and Spain declared war. The resulting conflict would last, off and on, for more than 20 years, producing a strongman for the young republic, the Emperor Napoleon.
Moreover, it would lead to the concept of a nation in arms—not only mass conscription, but also the enlistment of the entire populace behind the war effort, in the form of sacrifices on the homefront that blurred the former distinction between soldier and civilian that underlay traditional concepts of the Christian “just war.” This is the necessary precondition for the idea of total war, which begins to take shape in the American Civil War but evolves to its present shape in World Wars I and II.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood argued cogently for the transformative nature of that conflict and its implications for the world. Nevertheless, the prototype for later revolutions, especially those that convulsed the 20th century, was the one that occurred in France. Its pattern has become all too familiar: the overturning not only of a governing official but also a social order and religious institutions; powerful reactionary forces; and a dictatorship meant to quell rising disorder.
Over a year and a half before the execution, the King, increasingly chafing at his superfluous status as a constitutional monarch, had made an ill-advised secret dash with the royal family for the Austrian border before being apprehended. The move marked him as an enemy of the republic, and war with Austria—the native country of his queen, Marie Antoinette—led all outsiders such as himself to be marked for death. (It didn’t help that Marie had been charged with writing letters giving away to Austria the troop movements of the Revolutionary Army.)
Nevertheless, the decision of the Convention, the republic’s new governing body, represented a reversal of their own ideals. A number of the radical Jacobins—including the rising advocate for repressive tactics against enemies of the republic, Robespierre – had once bitterly denounced capital punishment and its multiple and capricious manifestations under the ancient regime. Now, they had called for its use to stamp out internal enemies.
The dethroned king had endured four separate votes before coming to this pass, with the Convention deciding whether he was guilty of treason; whether the sentence should be final, or ratified by the people; what the nature of the punishment should be; and whether the punishment should be delayed.
Thomas Paine, the British-born radical pamphleteer who had championed the American Revolution in Common Sense before advocating for the French against British conservative Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man, had argued unsuccessfully that Louis should be deported to the United States, where he would have the opportunity for “rehabilitation.”
Paine’s plea (through an interpreter) for mercy and friendship with the more moderate Girondin faction in the Convention later led to his own imprisonment by the revolutionaries.
Louis (now, shorn of his title, known as Louis Capet rather than Louis XVI) was allowed only 24 hours, not the three days he had requested, to say goodbye to his family and make peace with God. After a nearly two-hour final parting with his family, Louis huddled with his confessor, Henry Essex Edgeworth, a native of County Longford, Ireland better known as “L’Abbe Edgeworth de Firmont.”
In high school and college, while taking a couple of courses on world history that touched on the French Revolution, I was never required to read the history that was once the major analysis of the conflict: The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle.
While understandable in certain ways, given a style that would now be considered florid and references that might seem obscure to modern readers (Carlyle’s book was published only some 60 years after the events), there are far worse histories of the period. My particular edition— from Heritage Press, with an introduction by Cecil Brown and illustrations by Bernard Lamotte—offers a particularly attractive way of perusing this demonstration of the definition of “classic” as a book that people no longer read.
At his best, Carlyle offers all the drama such a cataclysmic epoch deserves, as in his narration of Louis’ dreary processional to the scaffold, once the site of a statue to his predecessor, Louis XVI:
“At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of pitiful women: “Grace! Grace! Grace!” Through the rest of the streets there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there; the armed, did any pity, dare not express it, each man overawed by his neighbors. All windows are down, none seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty-thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or movement; it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone: one carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying; clattering of this death-march falls sharp on the ear, in the great silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the Earth.”
On the scaffold, Louis’ final words—his proclamation of innocence and forgiveness of his enemies—were quickly muffled by the drumroll of the guards. He was struck down by the guillotine at shortly after 10 am, 38 years old.
“At home this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies,” noted Carlyle. Shocked at the execution, England and Spain declared war. The resulting conflict would last, off and on, for more than 20 years, producing a strongman for the young republic, the Emperor Napoleon.
Moreover, it would lead to the concept of a nation in arms—not only mass conscription, but also the enlistment of the entire populace behind the war effort, in the form of sacrifices on the homefront that blurred the former distinction between soldier and civilian that underlay traditional concepts of the Christian “just war.” This is the necessary precondition for the idea of total war, which begins to take shape in the American Civil War but evolves to its present shape in World Wars I and II.
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