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Updated: May 19, 2025
Differ as they may in other respects, they are all brethren in that; and yet I am by no means disposed to take a Carlylese view of my actual fellow-creatures.
And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable "Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!" we are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even Culture itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.
For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this time of day, pathetic to remember.
Does he show any marked appreciation of Burns's power as a lyric poet? What is Carlyle's idea of history as shown in Heroes and Hero Worship? What experiences of his own life are reflected in Sartor Resartus? What was Carlyle's message to his age? What is meant by a "Carlylese" style? Macaulay. In what respects is Macaulay typical of his age? Compare his view of life with that of Carlyle.
My own belief about the matter is this. When the Secession began, there were two sects among the English partisans of the South: the Carlylese apologists of slavery, a very small sect; and the political advocates of Secession, who, partly with full conviction, partly as a mere matter of unchallenged use and wont, repudiated slavery, a very large sect.
The merit of such a style as W.H. Hudson's or George Moore's is that it does with ease and economy what the language is always trying to do. Carlylese, though individual and vigorous, is yet not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism. Nor is the prose of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English; it is semi-Latin done into magnificent English words.
"They forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, "the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the Birthmark in Hawthorne's romance.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads!
Even in his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism written in English, and not in Carlylese his sense of spirit is always more lively than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to maintain half-seriously the paradox that Shakspere would have done better to write in prose.
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