Volume 11, Number 7 · October 24, 1968
Pale Fire
By Christopher Ricks
Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern
by Albert J. LaValley
Yale, 351 pp., $8.50
Sartor Called Resartus
by G.B. Tennyson
Princeton, 354 pp., $8.50
For Thomas Carlyle, the feast on the Champ de Mars during the French Revolution came to little more than 'an effervescence that has effervesced….' And Carlyle himself, that effervescer? After his death, his friend Alfred Tennyson celebrated him—and repudiated the biographical revelations made by J. A. Froude—in a poem called 'The Dead Prophet.' Is that prophet now doubly dead? Albert LaValley's Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern is an attempt to show that Carlyle still lives: 'Studies in Carlyle's Prophetic Literature and Its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, and Others.' It is a good book—sane and firm, not palliating the fascistic implications of some of Carlyle, and not stretching 'the idea of the modern' into a mere rubber-band for its index cards. By reassessing Carlyle's late Life of John Sterling, and by relating Carlyle's stylistic hysteria to his increasing sense of powerlessness, it should do much to win readers for the least companionable of the Victorian sages. In only one important respect does Mr. LaValley fail: his style is—in Beckett's uncompromising word—corpsed. 'He argues for a breakthrough of surfaces'; 'how closely he weighs his insights by Christian touchstones'—such stumblings are disconcerting in the vicinity of a sage himself no sure-footed stylist. But Carlyle would have liked the unwitting tribute to the pervasiveness of clothes in Mr. LaValley's remark about Sartor Resartus: 'An overall view of the book reveals clearly that the movement of the Clothes Philosophy is organic.'
Review, 2679 words
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