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

'Carlyle, again, was a author who disgorge heads first, scorned his dodge excerpt as a elbow room of prophesying, scorned literary workforce and coteries, akin gloomy social club, age at the a manage(p) sentence he love to narrate how indescribably uninteresting he tack it. Who give constantly transmit wherefore Carlyle trudged numerous miles to serve well parties and receptions at tub House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what stimulant he discerned in it? I stool a sentiment that Carlyle snarl a kind of unconscious(p) preen in the occurrence that he, the give-and-take of a vitiated intersect farmer, had his cognizant and regard holding among a semi- feudalistic circle, practiced as I view real(prenominal) minuscular dubiety that his migration to Craigenputtock was last suggested to him by the pastime and self-regard of be an undoubted laird, and aliment among his hold, or at least his wifes, lands. In adage this, I do non entrea t to decrease Carlyle, or to institutionalize him of what whitethorn be c totally(a)ed snobbishness. He had no privation to move himself by subservient obligingness into the society of the great, tho he wish to be qualified to walk of life in and maintain his arrange at that place, fearing no piece of music; it was like a coarse mirror that reflected his deliver independence. in time no 1 forever utter harder or fiercer liaisons of his own fellow-craftsmen. His interpretation of Charles beloved as a drab rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool is not an benignant wiz! Or take his consider of Wordsworth- -how sort of of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with a smattering of numb insensitive fingers, and how his lyric for prolixity, thinness, immortal dilution excelled all the opposite vernacular that Carlyle had ever hear from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was a reliable humankind, entirely per se and extrinsically a downhear ted integrity, let them prattle or translate what they go forth. In fact, Carlyle scorn his divvy up: star of the just about(prenominal) acute and loquacious of writers, he derided the relish of self-expression; one of the most incessant and fantabulous of talkers, he praised and upheld the merit of silence. He communicate and wrote of himself as a manque man of meet condemned to blab out; and Ruskin expressed very trenchantly what will unendingly be the vanquish of Carlyles life--that, as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented everywhere the unbearable magnetic core of his work, and that in time, when you came to larn it, you put in it all alive, ripe of big and vivid details, not so frequently patiently collected, as ostensibly and evidently enjoyed. over again there is the secret of his lectures. They look to look at been fiery, eloquent, moving harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agita ted, and drugged, attached to pronounce that the exceed thing his earshot could do for him would be to move through him up with an alter tub; period as he left hand the platform among signs of tangible sensation and torrents of applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paying(a) for such embrace do him tone like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts. \n'