Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority.

Clubbe, John

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Ohio State UP, 1991), pp. x +234, $35.00 cloth.

Chris R. Vanden Bossche offers to assess Carlyle's achievement through "an analysis of his rhetorical technique with an understanding of the rhetorical contexts in which he wrote, the immediate concerns, both private and public, to which his works were addressed." In a concerted attempt to fill this tall order, Vanden Bossche surveys Carlyle's entire career as a historian of times past and present. Using the search for authority as a beacon to illumine Carlyle, Vanden Bossche asserts that "Carlyle's career as a man of letters was largely a career of frustration." This is a questionable call on an author whose seminal writings and vigorous personality exerted vast influence in England and America. Although the search for authority undoubtedly occupies a place in Carlyle's mind and work, Vanden Bossche's dogged pursuit of it blinkers his vision of Carlyle's art and achievement.

Chapter I ("The Crisis of Authority and the Critique of Political Economy") takes up Carlyle within the context of Burke and Coleridge, a legitimate approach, though the discussion might have benefitted from the Carlyle chapter in Charles Richard Sanders' major study, Coleridge and Broad Church Movement (1942). More promisingly, in Chapter II ("Becoming an Author: 1820-1830") Vanden Bossche persuasively argues that Carlyle shaped his essays on German writers after patterns in his own life. Central to this autobiographical projection, as Vanden Bossche intelligently demonstrates, was Carlyle's reminiscence of the initial authority figure in his own life, his father James. Chapter III ("Revolution and Authority: 1830-1837") reveals Carlyle modelling Diogenes Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus on, among others, Goethe and Schiller. Vanden Bossche, in an excellent discussion, omits one significant model, however, the Naturphilosoph Lorenz Oken, about whom Carlyle learned from his brother John. A stark contrast to Carlyle's father is the arch-quack Cagliostro, the subject of a long essay that Vanden Bossche perceptively ties both to the James Carlyle reminiscence and to Sartor Resartus.

The analysis of Carlyle's masterpiece The French Revolution (1837) has perceptive, though not particularly original, pages on Carlyle's interest in epic. Vanden Bossche's strict adherence to his thesis of a Carlyle forever seeking authority prevents him from responding fully to the The French Revolution's teeming life and somewhat blinds him to its greatness. For example, he faults Carlyle for failing to bring off "epic closure." But Carlyle in "finis" says "Homer's Epos ... merely ceases." Carlyle here labors to conclude his epic by alluding to other epic ventures--the Old Testament, the Aeneid, and Paradise Lost--and, in effect, argues that his Prophecy has been fulfilled, especially through the incarnated word of his text. Furthermore, epic achievement, whether classical or in the looser nineteenth-century form, depends less on the presence or absence of closure than on depiction of character, narrative drive and energy, mythological depth, drama, power of language. By any or all of these criteria Carlyle's prose poem is a decided triumph.

Vanden Bossche's overall discussion regarding Carlyle's lifelong interest in epic to some extent parallels what I sketched out in a 1985 article, "Carlyle as an Epic Historian," an argument independently developed and expanded by Mark Cumming in his outstanding A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle's French Revolution (1988). For Vanden Bossche, however, The French Revolution "demonstrates the impossibility of epic." He sees failure and frustration everywhere, or rather degrees of failure and frustration, as Carlyle, it seems, in his "search for authority" never quite manages to get his epic intent right or find a satisfactory focus for it. Vanden Bossche's own thesis here strikes me as narrowly based and deeply flawed. Of the nineteenth-century's numerous works with epic pretensions, The French Revolution stands out as one that, from start to finish, successfully realizes epic vision.

Carlyle and the Search for Authority is more original and convincing for the period after 1837, where Carlyle has been imperfectly and incompletely charted, than for the period before, which has garnered most of the scholarly attention. Chapter IV ("Authoring the Polity: 1838-1850") considers Chartism, Heroes and Hero-Worship, Cromwell, and Latter-Day Pamphlets. Vanden Bossche ably handles Carlyle's rhetorical adaptability to audience in Chartism. But his assumption that the omission of Goethe in Heroes suggests that Carlyle "had lost faith in Goethe's authority, particularly in his ability to create a new social order through his art," is misleading. Carlyle's interest in Goethe went far beyond interest in his "authority." Though German influence on Carlyle undoubtedly declined over the 1830s, decline does not necessarily imply rejection. The Germans helped to shape him, and even as he moved in other directions Carlyle continued to draw upon Goethe. Although Carlyle's excuse that the English knew too little of Goethe may not carry total conviction, had he not, perhaps, already said all he wished to say about Goethe?

Vanden Bossche's study is at its strongest in the long subsection "From the 'Irish Question' to the 'Nigger Question.'" This period, from 1846 to 1850, has not yet found its ideal interpreter, and it demands the full-scale reconsideration that Vanden Bossche cannot give here. These were tumultuous years, in England and in Europe, and for Carlyle they were full of projects begun but not completed. Vanden Bossche makes good use of unpublished and recently published manuscripts in tracing Carlyle's complex literary activity during this time. He analyzes well Carlyle's newfound ambivalence toward the Captains of Industry he had hailed as recently as Past and Present (1843). And his summary of Carlyle's at times offensive racial attitudes can hardly be bettered: "The problem in discussions of Carlyle's racial attitudes is that it is incorrectly assumed by his defenders that an absence of racial hatred is incompatible with the presence of racial prejudice. Carlyle was not being inconsistent; the claim that one loves one's inferiors is the foundation of paternalism."

Chapter V ("The Return of the Father: 1851-1865") deals largely with Carlyle's last major epic venture, the six-volume history of Frederick the Great. Expectedly, Vanden Bossche sees Carlyle failing once again in his quest to impose his epic vision upon recalcitrant materials. Here we may concur: As an epic Frederick is deeply flawed. But within its three-thousand pages, often unread even by Carlyle specialists, we can discover one of the most exhilarating books ever written. Who would guess, from Vanden Bossche's discussion, why Emerson, upon finishing volumes I and II, thought Frederick "infinitely the wittiest book that was ever written"? In his persistent search for authority, Vanden Bossche argues that Carlyle "ascribes the same characteristics to Friedrich Wilhelm that he has ascribed to his father in the 'Reminiscence of James Carlyle'": An enormous oversimplification, hardly less a misstatement than the claim that Frederick had by career's end become "more like Friedrich Wilhelm than Friedrich Wilhelm himself."

Vanden Bossche rides his hobby-horses hard and often. Closely related to the quest for authority is the belief that Carlyle's career was a series of recurrent attempts "to recover the domestic idyll of his youth," the most sustained of these attempts being the six-year sojourn at Craigenputtock. Even after moving to London in 1834 Carlyle, according to Vanden Bossche, never stilled his yearning for a pastoral existence. Indeed, every year, or almost every year, he left the metropolis for an extended visit to his family in Scotland. This is true enough, but we would never know from Vanden Bossche's account that Carlyle was the most urban of Victorians, one who for forty years wrote powerfully and brilliantly about London. Like everyone else, he needed occasional change; but no one forced him to live in London, and after 1834 he never seriously considered living anywhere else.

Carlyle and the Search for Authority needed more editorial work than it received. Vanden Bossche's ample quotations from Carlyle's works, sometimes two or three per sentence, are often awkwardly integrated and interrupt narrative flow. The result is a constant disjunction between Carlyle's vivid expression, laced with particulars and metaphors, and the author's workaday prose, often abstract and solemn. In fact, the Carlylean bits in Vanden Bossche's sentences tend to implode them. More paraphrases and synthesizing sentences might have smoothed the argument. Strings of abbreviated references in parentheses, often adding up to a line or more of type, end many sentences and paragraphs. In the interest of a more presentable page, Vanden Bossche could have tucked the abbreviated references into his already hefty endnotes. The presentation, in short, reflects indifference to the "closure" whose lack Vanden Bossche laments in Carlyle's books. And many references are not helpful: What do we do, for example, with "see Hartman"?

The book is generally accurate and faithful to Carlyle's career as presently known. There are a few slips, e.g., Carlyle needed more than "just a few months," as Edwin Marrs long ago pointed out, to write Past and Present, and he began preparation for Frederick in 1852, not 1855. Misspellings or typos include "Entephul" for "Entepfuhl." Vanden Bossche likes to use "authority," "authorize," "author," often in the same sentence, the last frequently (and irritatingly) as a verb.

Carlyle and the Search for Authority fails to convey a sense of the excitement that responsive readers still find in Carlyle. The book never quite catches fire. In Vanden Bossche's single-minded pursuit of authority, we gain little awareness of Carlylean variety: The Carlyle of compelling narratives, radical ideas, startling metaphors, dramatic overstatements, and wild humor. In fact, to Carlyle's humor Vanden Bossche seems impervious. He takes literally Carlyle's chronic and bitter complaints about all and sundry, without cognizance either of Carlyle's habitual and deliberate exaggeration or of the outrageous paradoxes that marked his mode of expression. Despite Carlyle's frequently expressed irritation at the world's ways, he was genial in both the sense of the word as used today and in the root sense. But his own advice to others--to "consume their own smoke"--he rarely heeded himself. Irascible he could indeed be, and often enough, but he was also a wonderful self-dramatist. Contemporaries found him hugely interesting to listen to and to read. A century and more later, we may also respond to the intense energy of his mind, the sweep of his narratives, the splendor and magnificence of his language.

This conscientious but somewhat lifeless study--a skeleton lacking flesh or muscle--Carlyle might have termed "dryasdustical." It bears little relation to our actual experience of reading Carlyle. We take up Carlyle today chiefly because he was a great literary artist, but of this artistry Vanden Bossche has little to say. Carlyle and the Search for Authority will not gain Carlyle new readers, though professional Carlyleans and Victorians may find its analyses useful. The dust jacket caricature of Carlyle from Vanity Fair depicts an ancient, bent, skinny, leering Carlyle, aged seventy-four, cane in hand, career about over, the "Sage of Chelsea." Similarly does this book, in its well-intentioned and scholarly way, caricature Carlyle's achievement.

John Clubbe

University of Kentucky