Sotavento: Isn’t this great proof that genius, or talent, or whatever you want to call it, can transform anything into art? The name in the title means almost nothing. Worse, perhaps. If you know Carlyle, it may suggest some naval officer or some dictatorial politician. When you see it’s a third-tier writer, you’re not precisely encouraged. So the feat is impressive.
Estribor: Style. Distended and mannered, but style. Were an Isaacson at the helm of this particular life, you would throw it into the neighborhood’s public bookcase.
Sotavento: “But here, as in his former schools, his studies and inquiries, diligently prosecuted I believe, were of the most discursive wide-flowing character; not steadily advancing along beaten roads towards College honors, but pulsing out with impetuous irregularity now on this tract, now on that, towards whatever spiritual Delphi might promise to unfold the mystery of this world, and announce to him what was, in our new day, the authentic message of the gods.” That is a delightful way of saying that Sterling was a slacker.
Estribor: Representative: hyphenation, capitalization, alliteration.
Babor: I differ. This passage justifies the book’s odd place within Carlyle’s oeuvre. It is subdued yet distinctive.
Estribor: “Over the wild-surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,—though visibly it is but a Chinese lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying in the heart of it.” Same book.
Babor: No writer can shed his fundamental approach to language. Taking this into account, we must acknowledge Carlyle does admirably well. He is rarely led into the excess of sonorous phrasing exemplified in that second passage. The famous chapter on Coleridge displays the zenith of Carlyle’s restrained execution.
Estribor: You are being misled by the material he’s using. He can’t really make a whirlwind out of a student’s restive habits. Carlyle is similar to Nabokov in this respect. They filter everything in sight through their highly idiosyncratic version of English. Only the matter at hand establishes a limit.
Sotavento: Are you saying Nabokov exerts little control over his style? Come on, be serious.
Estribor: I am not part of the swooning customers who take him at his word. What Wood said of Updike applies equally well to Nabokov: “He is a writer for whom different subjects have the same sensuous textures, whether a vagina, an air-conditioner or a petal. All is ‘more matter’ for his prose, all can be given the same beautiful finish, the same equalising enamel.” Maybe I should change the terms and go with "a murder, a toilet, or an aquarelle."
Sotavento: I didn’t even agree with the Carlyle comparison, and now this. I’ve never been an expert at anything, yet it’s abundantly clear to me that Nabokov unites many of the qualities that we seek for in literature. He is . . . how was it? An enchanter, a professor, and a raconteur.
Estribor: You’re confused. I very much like Nabokov, and it is precisely because of his polyhued prose. I also enjoy Updike. The number of colors on the palette is the only significant difference between them. As to Carlyle, well, the trouble is in the brush. He has colors to spare.
Babor: Nichol says in his biography of Carlyle that he has “a pen almost as magical as Turner’s brush.”
Sotavento: No, no. Carlyle and Nabokov shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence. They’re the complete opposite! Imagine Speak, Memory sprinkled with maxims. It wouldn’t be the same book. Somehow it would be diminished. So would The Life of Sterling if it were filled with sensuous hymns.
Estribor: The painters with the painters. Nabokov: “A waving grassy region; cut with innumerable ragged lanes; dotted with sleepy unswept human hamlets, old ruinous castles with their ivy and their daws, gray sleepy churches with their ditto ditto: for ivy everywhere abounds; and generally a rank fragrant vegetation clothes all things; hanging, in rude many-colored festoons and fringed odoriferous tapestries, on your right and on your left, in every lane.” Carlyle: “Fragile clouds floated through the tender, sunny sky. The earth receded, quivery, light-green, covered with scudding shadows and the fiery splashes of trees. Far below some toy horsemen hurtled past—but soon the sphere rose out of sight. The hen kept peering downward with one little eye.” Do you not see it?
Sotavento: Ha! The last detail gives away your cheap trick. Carlyle is rather myopic in that regard.
Babor: There is undoubtedly a great difference in sensibility. Nabokov is playful: “fiery splashes of trees,” “some toy horsemen,” “one little eye.” Carlyle is brusque: “sleepy unswept human hamlets,” “rank fragrant vegetation,” “fringed odoriferous tapestries.”
Estribor: Highly invested in pigments, nonetheless.
Sotavento: What writer isn’t to some degree?
Estribor: Writing is rich in parallels to other arts. Some writers obsess over color, others over music; some writers obsess over a monumental finish, others over “unseen spiritual grace.”
Barlovento: You’re not getting anywhere with such a flimsy classification.
Sotavento: I want examples.
Estribor: The painters imprint, willingly or unwillingly, sharp outlines in the imagination. Readers can even feel they’re following instructions. Isn't Nabokov’s “First Love” an exquisite manual? The musicians are, in general, vague, for they sacrifice sense to cadence. There is a long tradition of comparing Milton’s verse and prose to an organ. If you wish to see the sacrifice of sense, read Samson Agonistes. The sculptors, above all others, are static and stately. They can be more oppressive than the painters. It occurs to me that Richardson is a fine instance: color and cadence matter little when they serve a concrete, clear, durable icon. Finally, what to say about the dancers? Listen to Symons: “Enigmatically smiling, / In the mysterious night, / She dances for her own delight, / A shadow smiling / Back to a shadow in the night.”
Barlovento: Richardson as sculptor? Preposterous. Take Ruskin’s definition: “The reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an intended shape.” Reduction.
Sotavento: Reduction, Richardson. Yeah, something’s gone amiss.
Estribor: Asphyxiating view. I prefer Gaudier’s “appreciation of masses in relation.”
Barlovento: Even so. Pamela doesn’t fit the formalist connotations. Wouldn’t Tristram Shandy help you out?
Estribor: No. Scale is relevant. Richardson amasses detail to such an extent that there are numberless intricacies of relation for the discriminating eye.
Barlovento: Pales in comparison to Sterne.
Estribor: It is not my fault that you require shadowing the artisan as he models the clay. I relish the finished sculpture—distant yet multifaceted in its call for my attention. And I should not let my first observation pass unnoticed: Sterne does not carve; he lacks the sturdy concept of permanence.
Barlovento: By doing so, he has reached posterity alive. I can’t say the same for Richardson.
Estribor: One way or another you are reaching posterity. It is best to arrive serenely.
Sotavento: So Sterne is also related to sculpture, huh? I would’ve chosen dance! Isn’t it all too neat? “Matter grows under our hands.” Have you considered hybrids?
Estribor: Of course. Very few writers, however, feel comfortable traversing beyond their cherished ability.
Babor: Interesting. There is Diderot, with his Religieuse “à la manière de Richardson” or his Sternian Jacques. Where do we leave an eminently intellectual writer like him?
Estribor: Outside the realm of art.
Sotavento: Don’t you love Henry James?
Estribor: If you cannot see his place, you are hopeless.
Sotavento: Carlyle is an excellent portraitist, then. I’ll give you that. Sterling seems to appear complete before us. And there is no need to cram the book with gossip, a staple nowadays.
Babor: One shouldn’t discount it so readily. Remember Dryden: “You may behold a Scipio and a Lelius gathering Cockle-shells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones with Boyes; and Agesilaus riding on a Hobby-Horse among his Children. The Pageantry of Life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable Animal, as naked as ever Nature made him.”
Sotavento: That’s not exactly gossip. It’s good for some intimate facts to appear. I’m talking more about the type of biography that has set as its objective diminishing the author. There are a lot of those. Updike complained about them.
Estribor: Biography is make-believe. Nobody can disclose the actual person behind the figure. Who knows whether it exists in that metaphysical way we cherish? To help with reconstruction, we have textual evidence, testimonies, and the writer. Textual evidence is somewhat reliable, specifically the works. There must be a measure of autobiography in all genuine creation, and if the events are particularly obscure, we still have the significance of certain choices in subjects and styles. Nothing quite pristine here; I don’t suppose any of you have a clear image of Shakespeare the man. Yet this method preserves a shred of integrity. When we go to testimonies, we have wandered into the labyrinth of rationalization. If affection is alive, family will bathe in glitter every single nondescript action; friends will find meaning in otherwise annoying behaviors; lovers will add a layer of mystery to typical companionship. If hatred is alive, the opposite extreme: god help the unsuspecting who falters in the privacy of a shared room. Finally, there is the figure itself. Is there ever a writer who doesn’t mythologize? Would you want glaring instances of everything I’ve said? Goethe. Byron. Wilde. Shaw. Paz. Fuentes. Plath. De Beauvoir. And Nabokov, indeed.
Sotavento: History can help. No one is above it.
Estribor: If you are interested in commonalities. The artist, unfortunately, does not excel at being commonplace.
Babor: This is an awfully reductive and pessimistic view of biography. At most, you have captured the vulgar type: sensationalist, mythical, and awestruck. It is written either immediately after the writer’s death or much later, when reputation seems to have consolidated. Jeffrey Meyers and Henri Troyat are good representatives of the latter. The former is crowded with amateurs, one-time acquaintances, and journalists.
Barlovento: Meyers and Troyat are insufferable. They’re in the business of challenging the dead. I detest their novelizations.
Babor: Yes, yes, biography at its worst. Even so, it isn’t worthless.
Estribor: How ecumenical. Are you now lecturing me on the greatness of Plutarch, Vasari, Boswell, Lewes, Ellmann, Lee, and Jackson Bate? Babor: The type of biography I just mentioned is a corruption of nobler endeavors: Walton on Donne comes to mind. He vindicates but does not cross over to the realm of mythology. Walton has an earnest tone and tries his utmost to establish authoritative parallels when broaching unaccountable events. Here he is on Donne’s vision of his dead child: “But if the unbelieving will not allow the believing reader of this story a liberty to believe that it may be true, then I wish him to consider, that many wise men have believed that the ghost of Julius Caesar did appear to Brutus, and that both St. Austin, and Monica his mother, had visions in order to his conversion.” Later on you have Sprat on Cowley, and there is a glimmer of our contemporary ways. He justifies through the prerogatives of genius Cowley’s retirement from public life, whereas we know the cause to be a political slight. Thus we move forward and the very human motives that compel us all are increasingly ignored in favor of intricate and infallible intuitions. But even this corruption tells us something about the figure. If hundreds of diverse motives have been brought forth to explain Goethe’s conduct, do they not say something about the man?
Estribor: No one should bother with books that, in essence, wish to add a floor to the mausoleum.
Sotavento: Do you think Carlyle’s Sterling does that?
Estribor: Impossible. Sterling is far too insignificant. Perhaps biography should limit itself to his millions of peers. There you would have a grain of honesty: "Oh, no, he always forgot how to spell words with triphthongs. He also mixed up dates and names. Aside from the occasional misremembered quotation, there was nothing special in his talk. Awkward, yes, but not particularly ill-equipped to socialize when necessary. A genius? By no means. Perhaps talented under duress."
Babor: Now I believe you are misled. Carlyle is simply attending to the great tradition of Plutarch: he wishes to reveal character. With his personal philosophy, to be sure: “Of these millions of living men each individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;—from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same!” I could enumerate the classics, as you have partly done, but there is a neglected collection that marvels through its consistently high standard: English Men of Letters. James’s Hawthorne was written for it.
Barlovento: A parade of Victorian morality—James included.
Babor: It may not suit a garish palate, but it is characterized by judiciousness, vigor, and irony. See Nichol: “Carlyle’s constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron.” Or Stephen: “Far from being habitually coarse, he pushed fastidiousness to the verge of prudery. It is one of the superficial paradoxes of Swift’s character that this very shrinking from filth became perverted into an apparently opposite tendency.” Or James himself: “This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's work—his constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”
Sotavento: Severe. I like it. I do wonder, though, whether you’d include the scholarly bios in that tradition. You know the ones: Marchand’s Byron, Edel’s James, Parker’s Melville, Boyle’s Goethe.
Babor: Yes, of course. The insights into character are still there.
Barlovento: Collapsing under the weight of indiscriminate detail.
Babor: Are you also opposed to biography?
Barlovento: All great artists are more than the sum of their days. As Reyes put it, a “providential constant” always intervenes with them.
Sotavento: Not only great artists. Carlyle struggles to convey how much of Sterling’s finer qualities are lost in the relating of them. I mean, maybe everyone is more than the sum of their days.
Babor: A matter close to Hazlitt’s heart: “It is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years, spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing!”
Barlovento: I am not one to disparage Hazlitt, but even he missed the miraculous comings and goings within. You could condemn the very greatest to sit still for the length of their lives and it would make no difference: that other world would remain boundless and untraceable.
Sotavento: No need to condemn them, though. They’ll do it themselves.
Babor: A variation on Estribor’s pessimism. I believe no one would argue we can access the whole person. But by the accumulation of perspectives, we can get reasonably closer. In any case, biographies are a tonic and widen our horizon. We understand that we have never been alone in our despair. We understand that we are only somewhat unique.
Sotavento: I’m reminded of Bate’s Keats: “We have a natural hunger to learn what qualities of mind or character, and what incidents in a man’s life encourage—or at least permit—an achievement so compelling when, at the same time, so little is apparently given at the start.”
Estribor: I am frequently satiated. If I ever enjoy a biography, it is on account of the artistry. But it is still a lesser form of fiction—the author believes his story.
Sotavento: There is abundant artistry in Carlyle’s Sterling.
Babor: Saintsbury had a very high opinion of it: “I have seldom been able to begin it again or even to consult it for a casual reference, without following it right through.”
Estribor: I suspect the artistry is accomplished enough to give us another Teufelsdröckh. Or, perhaps more precisely, another Wotton Reinfred. It should have been a novel.
Sotavento: Make your mind already. Is it or isn’t it possible to throw light on the person?
Estribor: I spoke of the only available integrity. Does Carlyle concentrate on Sterling’s work?
Sotavento: Memorably so: “Sterling's verses had a monotonous rub-a-dub, instead of tune; no trace of music deeper than that of a well-beaten drum; to which limited range of excellence the substance also corresponded; being intrinsically always a rhymed and slightly rhythmical speech, not a song.”
Estribor: He is slighting, but deals with generalities for the most part. When he praises Sterling’s Coeur-de-Lion as his best, there is no quotation in sight.
Sotavento: Sterling left it unfinished. I am sure this stopped Carlyle. He quotes quite a bit from The Election, for example.
Estribor: Hardly. Carlyle wrote one fine novel, and afterwards his guilt forced him into more “serious” work, but he remained a novelist to the end. Past and Present, The French Revolution, and The Life of Sterling are all accomplished novels, yes, yes. I still feel that he should have remained true to his bent. The facts of history constrained his excessively passionate spirit, a rare case in which limits did more harm than good.
Sotavento: Thought you hated the Romantics.
Estribor: Carlyle was disciplined and exacting with his craft. I’ve never seen as posturing his disdain for Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the like. Look at his loves: Swift, Rabelais, Browne, Montaigne, Shakespeare. He is made of sturdier material than the Romantics, but he did not flourish. His Calvinism is partly to blame. Had he indulged fiction proper, we would have far greater works than Sartor Resartus. Notice the plural.
Babor: I cannot see the constraint in his portraits. His description of Sterling’s father is expansive and amusing: “In fact his talk, ever ingenious, emphatic and spirited in detail, was much defective in earnestness, at least in clear earnestness, of purport and outcome; but went tumbling as if in mere welters of explosive unreason; a volcano heaving under vague deluges of scoriae, ashes and imponderous pumice-stones, you could not say in what direction, nor well whether in any. Not till after good study did you see the deep molten lava-flood, which simmered steadily enough, and showed very well by and by whither it was bound.” Moreover, by dealing in the role of historian with hundreds of divergent opinions, Carlyle developed an uncompromising eye that shines through this biography.
Estribor: No, no. That is Carlyle the novelist. It is always Carlyle the novelist. “An uncompromising eye” would have dropped the metaphor.
Barlovento: Only artists can write a biography of significance. The altogether different purpose awakens dormant parts of their sensibility. Carlyle shows a great deal of sympathy for his friend and therefore adds a melancholy tinge to his prose: “All that remains, in palpable shape, of John Sterling's activities in this world are those Two poor Volumes; scattered fragments gathered from the general waste of forgotten ephemera by the piety of a friend: an inconsiderable memorial; not pretending to have achieved greatness; only disclosing, mournfully, to the more observant, that a promise of greatness was there. Like other such lives, like all lives, this is a tragedy; high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and impediments, ever-new nobleness of valiant effort;—and the result death, with conquests by no means corresponding.” This is not Carlylese. Your quibbling is wholly beside the point.
Estribor: It saddens me to interfere with a unanimous approval. Barlovento: I’ve always had a greater appreciation for Ruskin and Browning—to name two close contemporaries. Their vision is unaccountably vast, and the shifting forms of their work testify to it. Still, I respect Carlyle for trying to play all notes at his disposal, few as they are.
Sotavento: Before this, I had only read his lectures on heroes. Borges has a great translation, and he elsewhere expressed what I felt back then: “Those writers who dazzle you, who seem like the prototype of the writer, tend to end up being overwhelming.” So I’m rather surprised at my enjoyment. There is something to Barlovento’s idea. Carlyle seems to forget himself at various points, and I find that a strength. Didn’t he praise this quality in his heroes? Estribor: I take Goethe’s protean reputation to be a symbol of the bumbling artist. He tried his hand at novels, plays, essays, scientific treatises—and the merit that lies in the wreckage always depends on his extraordinary talent for lyric poetry. This also explains the beauty of his aphorisms. Every time he attempts a grand construction, he disfigures the finish of the whole. Indeed, Goethe resembles Bruegel the Elder: the latter’s sprawling canvases seem peopled to the point of indistinctness, but when you approach the isolated details, the artist reveals himself. Imagine Dante wasting his genius for poetry in frame stories—as silly as Boccaccio trying to rival Dante with his Amorosa Visione. All artists of stature build magnificently within their well-defined province. The rest scatter their materials and leave a trail of potentialities.
Barlovento: Dante has the Convivio. A potentiality if there ever was one.
Estribor: The prosimetrum was a fantastic medium for Dante’s training. You will also find it in the Vita Nuova. But that is the crux: you train, you grow conscious of your strength, and you exploit it. Vita Nuova, Convivio, Commedia. You assuredly don’t pout and insist on showing the world nothing is beyond you.
Sotavento: “With or without encouragement, he was resolute to persevere in Poetry, and did persevere. When I think now of his modest, quiet steadfastness in this business of Poetry; how, in spite of friend and foe, he silently persisted, without wavering, in the form of utterance he had chosen for himself; and to what length he carried it, and vindicated himself against us all;—his character comes out in a new light to me, with more of a certain central inflexibility and noble silent resolution than I had elsewhere noticed in it.” I share Carlyle’s opinion.
Estribor: Focused on his actual talent, however, he would have gone further. Ease is no mean thing. Spiritus precipitandus est.
Babor: I do not doubt that perhaps this stern concentration is fruitful for some. But the play with all manner of forms seems more advisable. Arnold had criticism for recreation; Lawrence, poetry; Shelley, the drama; Graves, the novel. Their development is grounded on these excursions. Hazlitt says in a spirited essay that artists “should have one principal pursuit, which may be both agreeably and advantageously diversified with other lighter ones, as the subordinate parts of a picture may be managed so as to give effect to the centre group.”
Estribor: If you are comfortable in the company of minor artists, that is the way forward. For the heights, nothing but your strengths.
Barlovento: You and your gymnastic spirit. It won’t do. A daemon guides the artist, and it is only by surrender that a long, rich trajectory can be achieved. Sometimes the daemon asks the novelist for an epic in verse; sometimes it asks the poet for a critical treatise; sometimes it asks the playwright for a book of aphorisms; sometimes it asks for silence. There is in the request an inscrutable promise of expansion. Carlyle was asked. As a true artist, he listened: “I imagine I had a commission higher than the world's, the dictate of Nature herself, to do what is now done.”
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