Arthur C. Benson\'s Essay: Literature And Life

Carlyle, again, was a writer who impute ideas first, despised his hu whilekind raceeuver except as a fashion of prophesying, hated literary men and coteries, favorite(a) aristocratic society, slice at the a uniform(p) time he loved to think how unutterably leaden he make up it. Who lead perpetu anyy understand wherefore Carlyle trudged many miles to give ear parties and receptions at toi allow House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what remark he discerned in it? I defy a flavour that Carlyle felt a quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the boy of a petty Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected stance among a semi- feudal circle, just as I drive really small-scale doubt that his migration to Craigenputtock was at long last suggested to him by the enjoyment and dignity of organism an undoubted laird, and living among his consume, or at least his wifes, lands. In aphorism this, I do not care to belittle Carlyle, or to accuse him of what may b e called snobbishness. He had no regard to worm himself by slavish complaisance into the society of the great, and he like to be fit to walk in and regularize his enunciate there, fearing no man; it was like a huge reflect that reflected his own independence. to that extent no peerless ever give tongue to harder or fiercer matters of his own fellow-craftsmen. His description of Charles lamb as a pitiful rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool is not an amiable single! Or take his account of Wordsworth- -how kinda of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with a handful of damp unresponsive fingers, and how his deliverance for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution excelled all the other obstetrical delivery that Carlyle had ever hear from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was a genuine man, just now intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they will. In fact, Carlyle despised his craft: one of the about bright and prolix of writers, he derided the confide of self-expression; one of the almost continuous and splendiferous of talkers, he praised and upheld the impartiality of silence. He utter and wrote of himself as a would-be man of action condemned to verbalise; and Ruskin expressed very trenchantly what will always be the puzzle of Carlyles life--that, as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented everyplace the intolerable level of his work, and that except, when you came to read it, you open up it all alive, secure of salient and vivid details, not so much patiently collected, as ostensibly and patently enjoyed. over again there is the secret of his lectures. They seem to suffer been fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the weapons platform, sleepless, agitated, and drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do for him would be to pass him up with an inverted tub; piece as he left the platform among sig ns of visible sensation and torrents of applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of world paid for such stuff make him feel like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts. \n