The Reign of Sentimentality
After attending Thackeray’s lectures on The English Humourists, Thomas Carlyle remarked that “there is a great deal of talent in him, a great deal of sensibility,—irritability, sensuality, vanity without limit;—and nothing, or little, but sentimentalism and play-actorism to guide it all with.”1 Carlyle was the most articulate, widely read Victorian opponent of sentimentality, though there are deep currents within his work that run counter to or at least give a tug of ambivalence to his anti-sentimentality. Carlyle responded positively to some aspects of eighteenth-century sentimental literature to a greater extent than his principles would seem to sanction, and two elements within his writing have a sentimental base, his emphasis on his own feelings as innately moral and his idealization of the hero and the heroic. His voice, though, was more heard than listened to. Carlyle’s sentimentality, in the long run, confirmed rather than disputed the widespread view that human nature was being devalued, a devaluation to which, he believed, sentimentality was contributing. Unlike Dickens and Thackeray, he expressed the ambivalence and inconsistency of those Victorians who anticipated twentieth-century hostility to sentimentality without being immune to the feelings to. which sentimentality appeals or liberated from the needs which it fulfills.
Feeling itself is a troublesome element for Carlyle, mainly because it seemed to him that many of his contemporaries celebrated the value of feeling independent of moral action. Unlike most Victorians, he used the word sensibility rather than sentiment to refer to the vehicle of moral feeling. Sensibility, for Carlyle, is the capacity to respond to truth. Sentimentality is the application of sensibility to falsehood, to untruth. Sensibility, then, is the origin of all feeling, and sincere feeling that remains as close as possible to its fountainhead in the unconscious is a moral force. In Carlyle’s view, Thackeray’s sentimentality, and sentimentality in general, is sensibility warped by illusions, commingled with falsehoods, and without moral purpose or control.
Carlyle struggled persistently to close the gap between feeling and action. Both his Romantic and his religious background suggested to him that “sincerity” was the moral dimension of personality that provided the qualitative mechanism needed to unite feeling and action. Like Matthew Arnold, he was alert to the danger of feeling turned in upon itself, liberated from the responsibility to act that moral vision imposes. Without an effective controlling mechanism, sensibility threatened to become solipsism, a world of “I-eyty,” of the ego run wild. To combat such a threat, which had risen already to the level of a widespread condition in modern culture, Carlyle emphasized the importance of some controlling “other,” outside the self, either as physical reality, to be seen with one’s eyes, or as historical vision, to be reconstructed by the imagination, or as cosmic vision, to be perceived by the inner eye. For whatever is perceived through sensibility must be transformed into a moral structure—a substantive statement—by the power of sincerity and the clarity of moral vision.
Carlyle advocates the kind of “thrift” or economy in feeling that self-reflexive sensibilities rarely promote in order to distinguish further between his definition of sensibility and the widespread late eighteenth-century and Romantic notion of sensibility as the disposition to feel without moral or structural restraint. Whereas intellectual thriftlessness is a waste of logical motion, uneconomical emotional expenditure is a waste of spirit. “How much wasterfuller still,” Carlyle comments, “is it to feel about Feeling” (CME, vol. 4, p. 109). “Subjective” literature, Carlyle believes, embodies a self-consciousness about feeling that places expression of feeling at least one remove from the feelings themselves. This displacement produces the damaging self-consciousness of Romanticism as well as the moral falsity of sentimentality.
Since as a writer Carlyle himself participates in the self-consciousness about feeling that he condemns, his analysis is partly self-criticism. While he grants that it is the fate of all modern writers and writing to suffer from the disease of self-consciousness, he acknowledges that his own commitment to autobiography as the point of departure for literature increases the waste of spirit. In fact, that waste of spirit becomes part of his subject matter, and the central concern of Carlyle’s writing is the paradox of his own self-consciousness. From Sartor Resartus to Frederick the Great, he reveals himself struggling unsuccessfully to avoid being the kind of subjective writer he deplores. In writing about Rahel von Ense, whom he admired, he creates a critique that the modern reader, following Carlyle’s lead, might turn back upon him. Rahel’s letters
do not suit us at all. They are subjective letters … not objective; the grand material of them is endless depicturing of moods, sensations, miseries, joys and lyrical conditions of the writer; no definite picture drawn, or rarely any, of persons, transactions or events.… To what end, to what end? we always ask. Not by looking at itself, but by looking at things out of itself, and ascertaining and ruling these, shall the mind become known. (CME, vol. 4, p. 108)
Carlyle’s own capacity to create “pictures” of people and events served him well, and his criticism of Rahel functioned partly as self-warning and self-guidance.
Carlyle believed that a science of mind is impossible, partly because the self is contained within the mind and not the mind within the self, partly because his definition of mind is so all-inclusive that a comprehension of mind in its totality is beyond our capability. But we can know a portion of our minds, that portion that is synonymous with the self. And we know that portion of the mind that is the self through those innate responses of the self to the self and to the external world. Such innate responses are basic to our human nature. They are intuitive, spontaneous, and the function of feeling or sensibility rather than thought. Such unmediated, spontaneous knowing of the self through sensibility should lead to action, to the narrowing, even the elimination, of the potential gap between feeling and action. Sensibility has its dangers, of course, as in Rahel’s case: an overly keen sensibility may separate itself from the moral imperative that directs feeling toward social concerns and cosmic truths. Such self-reflexive and uncontrolled sensibilities are readily debased into sentimentality, prone to mistake keenness of feeling for moral essence and to trust not in some higher good but in the goodness of human nature.
Carlyle, who read widely in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, suffered through much of his youth the burden of recognizing the brilliance of many eighteenth-century arguments against Christianity. He derived the strength to reject the dominant eighteenth-century view of human nature partly from its very integrity and cogency and partly from his energizing awareness of what power he would need to overcome such formidable opponents. But his rejection was not primarily of the particulars of moral conduct but of the tone and the view of human potential that moral philosophy promoted. Like the moral philosophers, Carlyle believed that the feelings are the source of values and conduct. He struggled through to the position, consistent with Dickens and Thackeray, that social conditioning counted less in mankind’s affairs than did innate qualities of human nature. But he defined human nature, emphatically in opposition to Hume and Smith, as a battleground where good and evil struggle vigorously for a victory which good has the likelier chance to achieve. Human nature is not innately good. It is variegated, complicated, mysterious, beyond categories and formulas. Sensibility, the capacity for sincere response through and of the feelings, one among a number of basic elements in human nature, needed to be encouraged to flourish, and then, flourishing, it needed mechanisms of control in life and in literature. Sentimentality seemed to Carlyle reductive, intent on defining man only in human terms, reducing human nature to one of its aspects, making formulas out of mysteries and driving God out of man.
Carlyle struggled against sentimentality, partly because he recognized the overlap between sensibility and sentimentality and the dangerous tendency of sensibility to reject moral control; partly because eighteenth-century moral philosophers, especially Hume, seemed brilliant, even incontrovertible, on the rational level; partly because the dominant tone of pre-and early Victorian Whig culture, in opposition to which he came to intellectual manhood, was eighteenth-century rationalism; and partly because as a young man he had responded warmly to eighteenth-century writers, particularly the novelists, who were strong advocates of sentimental values. The aesthetic and intellectual pleasure he derived from Enlightenment literature extended to Enlightenment ideas. Though he read German and Italian writers, he read most widely in the French writers of the period, a crucial experience in the development of his mild Francophobia. The most odious form of nineteenth-century sentimentality he regarded as an infection that had originated in France and had spread to Britain in the guise of the French novel and “Phallus-worship.”2
To the extent that sentimentality was an Enlightenment phenomenon, it seemed to Carlyle hopelessly devitalized by mechanism, particularly by deism and natural religion. The limitations of eighteenth-century culture had prevented its potential heroes, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, from becoming the Cromwells they might have been. Mechanism had devitalized Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, and even Samuel Johnson’s titanic powers could not fully overcome the dominant tendencies of the age. Like William Blake, Carlyle had no use for subtleties and qualifications in his broad condemnation of the culture whose values he detested. He judged all eighteenth-century European culture to be corrosively tarnished with the language and values of mechanism, whose ultimate strength was like sand thrown into the power of the divine storm through whose force “Israel’s tents do shine so bright.”3 Since sentimentality attempted to define human nature in a language and according to principles derived from Enlightenment assumptions, Carlyle, with a broad brush, painted sentimentality and mechanism the same unattractive color.
His broad brush also condemned Benevolence. Carlyle believed that eighteenth-century moral philosophy had contaminated Victorian culture with a mistaken notion of social responsibility, part of the Enlightenment’s “windy sentimentality” (HHW, chap. 5, p. 176). Though Carlyle thought Benevolence a secularization, and consequently a corruption, of charity, he also considered even traditional Pauline charity a rationalization for evading social responsibility. In a community in which there was widespread unemployment, poverty, and disease, Christian charity, in Carlyle’s view, provided an unsound, ineffective substitute for the government-sponsored and -administered social programs he believed were necessary to deal with national and international misery. Personal and private charity could not deal with, and in fact become an excuse to avoid dealing with, “the Irish Giant” called “Despair.”
Carlyle’s detestation of Benevolence was motivated mainly, though, by his belief that “universal” projects for “the good of the species” suffer the inherent futility of failing to focus on the important field of action, the individual. Benevolence, he told Mill, is the doctrine of
Socinian Preachers [who believe that the universe is rational and material].… I cannot so much as imagine any peace or solid foundation of improvement in human things till this universal scheme of procedure go out of men’s heads again, and each take to what alone is practicable for himself—mending of his own ways;—where-from Benevolence enough, and infinitely better things, will be sure enough to result.4
The philanthropic tendency to devote resources to improving other people and countries, satirized by Dickens in his portrait of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, usually encourages evasion of the primary responsibility to improve oneself. But Dickens’ criticism of benevolence ends where Carlyle’s begins, for, like Thackeray, Dickens does not connect sentimentality to moral irresponsibility and laissez-faire capitalism. Within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, sentiment is presented with little regard to actual social conditions, and Dickens’ benevolent avatars, like Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Brownlow, are admirable citizens whose private charities define the limits of their social consciousness. Whereas Carlyle finds the eighteenth-century influence a cultural burden, Dickens envisions it at worst as a benign, conservative anachronism, only dangerous if we try to travel on a stagecoach in an age of steam.
How strongly eighteenth-century views influenced the Victorians is revealed in how fully Thackeray embraces and Carlyle rejects them, the former a representative of Victorian middle-of-the-road Anglican conservatism, the latter a representative of Victorian radical Puritan conservatism. Thackeray popularized the previous century’s literature at a time when more narrow standards of propriety made the “humourists” less widely read. His supreme puppet show, Vanity Fair, advocated the value of sentimentality based on the doctrine of the moral sentiments. Carlyle, associating the moral sentiments and sentimentality with eighteenth-century mechanism, which lacked seriousness and was spiritually blind, found his Puritan imagination haunted by these destructive ghosts. Against the grain of personal fondness, he questioned Thackeray’s moral sincerity and found his sentimentality either cynical or recklessly uncontrolled.
Carlyle also associated sentimentality with what he believed to be two dangerous aspects of Romanticism, popular Byronism and Romantic and post-Romantic sensuality. Actually, Carlyle’s own “Byronism,” particularly within Sartor Resartus though actually lifelong, provides a counterbalance to his notorious request that his readers close their copies of Byron and open their copies of Goethe.5 To Carlyle, Byron represented the willful modern iconoclast elevating the Self into both the worshipper and the worshipped, while Goethe represented the modern spiritual pilgrim searching for fundamental truths that transcend the limitations of the Self. Carlyle spent much of his early career struggling with these competing influences. Though Byron left his mark, Carlyle rejected the Byronic mode of the Self liberated from traditional moral and social control. Popular Byronism, in Carlyle’s judgment, perverted sensibility into ego-sensibility, elevating the Self into a god and divorcing feeling from moral control and moral action. Carlyle, like numbers of Thackeray’s contemporaries, took strong “objection … to the manner in which” Thackeray “exalted sentiment above duty” and feared that sentimentality in general was infected by such a disposition.6
Sentimentality also seemed to Carlyle a primary lubricant of Romantic sensuality, greasing the wheels that travel to George Sandism and Phallus-worship. Much of his hostility to sentimentality derived from his conviction that a doctrine of the primacy of the feelings is inseparable from a doctrine of the primacy of sex. Aware of the erotic potential of language, Carlyle decried the widespread modern effort to liberate language from its traditional moral mission. Conveniently, the main eighteenth-century propagators of the sexual revolution were French, not English, and among the philosophical sentimentalists, Rousseau was primarily responsible for legitimizing literary eroticism.
His Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy.…[His] sensuality … combined with such an intellectual gift … makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre, and down onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary “Literature of Desperation.” (HHW, chap. 5, p. 187)
England was being exposed to a plague of French literary sensuality. Though a thousand and one minor French novelists and English imitators flourished, two of whom, George Henry Lewes and Geraldine Jewsbury, were friends of the Carlyles, the most prominent perpetrator of this venereal disease was George Sand, the chief goddess of the new Phallus-worship. Literary sentimentality was both vehicle and shrine of the “New Sand Religion.”7
By modern standards, Lewes’s Ranthorpe (1845) and Jewsbury’s Zoe, The History of Two Lives (1845), to take two representative examples that Carlyle read, hardly descend to the level of even soft-core pornography.8 Nevertheless, the “rosepink” sensuality of the language describing the feelings and the activities of the novels’ main characters seemed to Carlyle unacceptably erotic, exemplifying the spread of the George Sand disease from France to England. In Carlyle’s view, the rise of democracy, the decline of religious standards and authority, the elimination of the sacred from daily life, and the transformation of provincial nations into an international European community rendered British Victorian culture especially susceptible to French literary eroticism. By nature and natural right, Carlyle believed, Britain and the other northern European countries were a bastion of moral integrity, “white sunlight” rather than “rosepink,” a providential nation. “Look at a Shakespeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott,” he urged, comparing them to Rousseau and George Sand. Protestant north European culture traditionally could distinguish “the True from the Sham-True,” the spiritual from the sensual (HHW, chap. 5, p. 187). But such moral vision was on the decline, even in Britain, increasingly blinded as it was by the “rosepink” eroticism spread by the sentimental novel.
Carlyle granted that Dickens and Thackeray had avoided George Sandism in its most virulent form. Though he recognized the difference, however, he could not separate the doctrine of the sentiments as moral from fictional representations of the sentiments as pleasurable. Within the sentimental tradition, as modified by literary realism, the novel, even the novel he most deeply admired, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, suffered the necessity of dramatizing the tactile experiences of daily life. The very nature of fiction promoted the dangers of sensuality, especially novels that emphasized the sentiments associated with loving and being in love, with romantic attachments.
Altogether false and damnable that love should be represented as spreading itself over our whole existence, and constituting one of the grand interests of it; whereas love—the thing people call love—is confined to a very few years of man’s life; to, in fact a quite insignificant fraction of it, and even then is but one thing to be attended to among many infinitely more important things.9
Carlyle also opposed “the reign of Sentimentality” because he thought its self-consciousness about “virtue” and “doing good” was self-evidently “unhealthy,” an instance of the disease of self-consciousness in the modern world. In his influential essay “Characteristics” (1831), he grants that unselfconsciousness, the spontaneous expression of one’s innate spiritual feelings, is an ideal, unrealizable state. Yet that is “ever the goal towards which our actual state of being strives; which it is the more perfect the nearer it can approach” (CME, vol. 3, p. 8). Like the moral philosophers, Carlyle believed that people have innate “generous affections.” But he also believed that they are part of a larger energy field with diverse elements, some of which demand mechanisms of control, and part of a struggle in which the Hobbesian view of man as a creature who sometimes must be controlled by authority for the good of the commonwealth has its place. For Carlyle, human nature is a dynamic entity, a constant part of process, transcending reason and mechanism. The ultimate authority is the self-authenticating divine nature within human beings which provides the moral ideals that people strive to fulfill. In the striving, Carlyle suggests, is our moral essence.
Like Dickens, Carlyle considers the possibility that personal and social corruption have been historically determined (both writers define historical determinism as the influence of the past on the present rather than as inevitable patterns within historical process). Neither, though, accepts the claim that people are the victims rather than the perpetrators of history. “Life,” Carlyle argues, “is not given us for the mere sake of Living, but always with an ulterior external Aim.” Though we may have limited knowledge of what that aim is and cannot know whether there will be a transcendent reward, we can have some certainty about the conduct that defines the worth of the means by which we strive toward it (CME, vol. 3, p. 8). The highest effort expresses innate, non-self-conscious moral energy, whose absence in modern culture Carlyle himself demonstrates in the self-conscious essay that laments the absence.
The eighteenth century and its Victorian extension Carlyle labels
the reign of Sentimentality … when the generous Affections have become well nigh paralytic. The greatness, the profitableness, at any rate the extremely ornamental nature of high feeling, and the luxury of doing good; charity, love, self-forgetfulness, devotedness and all manner of godlike magnanimity,—are everywhere insisted on. [But] were the limbs in right walking order, why so much demonstrating of motion? The barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist.… Does he not lie there as a perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian impotence? He is emphatically a Virtue that has become, through every fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick … it can do nothing [except] keep itself alive. (CME, vol. 3, pp. 9-10)
Sentimentality manifests the illness of moral reason rather than the health of moral instinct. The inevitable result of attempting to de-mystify is to destroy mystery itself. The antidote is “Nature … the bottomless boundless Deep.”
Of the Romantic poets, Carlyle, like Dickens, most respected Wordsworth. “The thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” seemed an expression of the poet’s innate moral nature, and Wordsworth’s sentimentality had none of the infection of the sensual that Carlyle detected in other Romantic writers. Though cool to Wordsworth the man, whom he thought excessively vain and solipsistic, Carlyle respected Wordsworth’s poetry. In contrast, he detested Coleridge on grounds irrelevant to his work. In The Life of John Sterling (1851), Carlyle depicted Coleridge’s opium addiction and financial dependence as repugnantly immoral, devaluing the artist and human nature. Though as a young man he had studied Byron intently, Carlyle as an adult measured his own maturity by how effective he had been in rejecting Byronic heroism and accepting moral heroism and spiritual hero worship. He thought little of Shelley and less of Keats. Shelley seemed too insubstantial, an airy creature of lyric moonshine and subjective “sensations.” Keats seemed erotically obsessed with sensual language, with tactile feeling as self-definition. In most valuing Wordsworth, Carlyle reflected the dominant Victorian preference, and it made no difference that Wordsworth drew much of his tone, rhetoric, and substance about the sentiments from the moral philosophy that Carlyle thought pernicious.
Carlyle was aware that sentimentality in the eighteenth century had divided into two main currents, one associated with sensibility, the other with moral philosophy. By the late part of the century, nurtured by novels such as Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, sensibility had become an independent value without any necessary moral content, contributing substantially to the Romantic ethos in poetry and in prose. Actually, Carlyle believed, the sentimental element in Romantic sensibility had nothing to do with Benevolence and moral sentiment. It stressed the heightening of feeling through emotive language in order to authenticate feeling as an affirmation of imagination and being. For Carlyle, only Wordsworth among the Romantics stressed the moral content of feeling, and in terms that had both communal and spiritual dimensions. Wordsworth’s moral sensibility had its roots in the poetic tradition—most honored by Carlyle and represented by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton—in which the poet had the moral courage of the hero and the spiritual wisdom of the prophet. Sensibility, then, was spiritual potential, the fountainhead of moral energy, the ability to respond to the mysterious truths of “natural supernaturalism,” of the divine transcendent force that inheres in ourselves and our world. Wordsworth’s sensibility seemed to Carlyle bardic in the great tradition of the poet as seer. The sensibility of the eighteenth-century novelists and the other Romantic poets was self-indulgent, uncontrolled by transcendent forces, a doctrine of feeling for pleasure and self-assertion rather than for religious vision. Carlyle, of course, recognized that Richardson and Fielding had moral aims, and his favorite eighteenth-century novelist, Smollett, had additional virtues. But Carlyle judged the eighteenth century by what he thought both its worst and its dominant temper, and, like Thackeray, he found that in Sterne and Rousseau.
Of the Victorian poets, Carlyle, again like Dickens, most admired Tennyson, especially the early Tennyson. The late Tennyson he thought, among other things, sentimental, particularly Idylls of the King, in which “the finely elaborated execution” did not disguise “the inward perfection of vacancy … tho the lollipops were so superlative.”10 Though Tennyson did not think of himself or his poetry as sentimental at all, many of his contemporaries defined his strengths and weaknesses in that light. Certainly modern readers have taken one aspect of sentimentality as a touchstone of Tennyson’s art. Tennyson thought the accusation absurd, and himself deplored Dickens’ sentimentality, writing to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1846 that he declined an invitation to accompany Dickens on holiday in Switzerland because “if I went, I should be entreating him to dismiss his sentimentality, & so we should quarrel & part, & never see one another any more.”11
The early Tennyson seemed to Carlyle in the bardic tradition, his sensibility in the service of mystic experience, of higher truths. When in the 1840s the two writers became friends, they argued intensely about personal immortality, in which Tennyson deeply believed. But they never disagreed beyond the common ground of a visionary rhetoric that demanded that poetry be both moral exemplar and transcendental experience and that the poet’s sensibility be in the service of cosmic truth. The true poet is of the hero type, soaring above sensual gratification and rational formulas. The language of poetry has the potential for generating cosmic visions and the optimism of a regenerative belief system. What Carlyle most admired about Dickens was his cosmic cheerfulness, though it seemed insufficiently connected to a transcendental overview. Thackeray seemed to Carlyle unredeemed by either transcendental vision or cosmic confidence. The balance sheet, of course, was complicated. Carlyle clearly preferred Thackeray’s social satire to Dickens’, judging Thackeray the more intellectually perceptive of the two. But neither Dickens nor Thackeray, in Carlyle’s judgment, had heroic qualities in the bardic tradition, as Tennyson did. Neither of them was a transcendent artist. They practiced, in Victorian eyes, the flawed craft of the common day.
Carlyle strongly expressed his disapproval of those aspects of Tennyson’s later poetry in which sensibility expresses itself in a language that is both without deep moral feeling and selfconsciously self-congratulatory. The Victorians widely acknowledged Tennyson’s mastery of sound in poetry, elevating him into a rival of Shakespeare and an equal of Keats. While the comparison with Shakespeare did him no damage, the association with Keats was an unwelcome one. For Carlyle, any significant gap between the appeal of language as sound and the appeal of poetry as moral wisdom created sentimentality in the worst sense, feeling in excess of what the dramatic situation supports and sensuality without appropriate moral content. Carlyle admired Tennyson’s Poems of 1842, particularly “Ulysses,” because he felt the consonance between the poetic language and the moral content. To Tennyson’s mid-Victorian audience, his great gifts seemed in the service of the highest ideals, duty, heroic striving, and moral responsibility. They thought “Ulysses,” whatever ambivalence modern critics may read into it, a brilliant presentation of the dialectic between stasis and movement, a celebration of patriarchal authority, generational continuity, and responsible work. Tennyson celebrated the Victorian worker in the vineyard of the Lord, and the poet as worker defined his sensibility as both mystic and moral.
That Tennyson’s popularity actually increased after the publication of his domestic idylls and during the publication of Idylls of the King seemed to Carlyle unfortunate evidence that his contemporaries had lost whatever sharpness of judgment, standards of poetry, and heroic values they had had. Tennyson’s later poems appealed to sentimentality rather than sensibility, substituting the moral sentiments for transcendent moral vision. Tennyson became, in Carlyle’s view, more like Dickens and Thackeray than like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Attempting to create epic poetry based on Arthurian materials, he created domestic poetry. Attempting to create narrative poetry, he created sentimental tales whose definitions of human nature derived from simplistic theories of natural goodness. In Carlyle’s judgment, the moral base for action had become separated from the visionary perception of cosmic mystery.
Sincerity, the ultimate virtue that precedes all others, is, for Carlyle, the enemy of sentimentality. The discourse of eighteenth-century life and literature was, in Carlyle’s judgment, insincere. At best it was contaminated by the imperception of an age of disbelief. In Carlyle’s terms, one cannot be a rationalist and also be sincere, unless one defines sincerity in the limited sense of “honesty.” Samuel Johnson was honest, deeply so. But sincerity necessitates spiritual depth, and in this regard Johnson’s honesty could not possibly take him deep enough. Sincerity is like an electric current; its power source is spiritual vision and cosmic mystery. All good literature, Carlyle proposes, is “honest.” But great literature is sincere as well.
On the basis of his doctrine of sincerity, Carlyle created a theory of literature that gives primacy to the consonance between the power of language and moral action. It is based on a revitalization of the traditional claim that in the beginning was the word; the word was not separated or disassociated from action. In fact, language was action, articulation was identical to and subject to the same principles as deed. Consequently, the words of the Bard, instinctively sincere, part of the mystic energy of the world, were active forces, doing work in the world. Sincerity, of course, means moral vision and moral action inseparably together. For Carlyle, sentimentality is insincerity, moral feeling without moral action, either simply insufficient—the result of not trying hard enough—or dishonest, or, at worst, perversely evil and unnatural. “Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere Action. Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in Speech, in Thought, whereof Speech is the Shadow, and precipitates itself therefrom. The Kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of Action you will get from him” (PP, Part II, p. 151).
Carlyle believed that literature is a self-reflexive language expression that must be simultaneously word and act, speech and action. For literature’s mission is to bring language and belief into consonance, to establish their true, original unity, to rid the world of falsehood. Sincerity, then, inheres in the relationship between the words and the belief system that the words enact and that demands enactment. But how can one distinguish sincerity from insincerity? How can one identify the degree of consistency between the words and the intent to act on their import that will make the words acts, that will enable one to distinguish between sincerity as an identifiable virtue and degrees of sincerity that are less than absolute? With characteristic radicalism, Carlyle demands the absolute as the minimum level. All utterance that is not absolutely sincere fails in sincerity, though not all insincere speech is dishonest since not all belief systems are equal. To the extent that an author attempts to unify language and a false belief system, he may at least be “honest,” the unwitting victim of his society’s delusions. Such an artist can never be fully sincere since he has been given flawed, false materials to work with. Carlyle, though, chafes at the conclusion that cultural givens absolutely control our potential for sincerity, that there can be no prophets in an age of reason and during the “reign of sentimentality.” Without fully relieving Johnson of his cultural disability, Carlyle, in “The Hero as Man of Letters,” “allows that this great victim, “whose ideas are fast becoming obsolete,” had the greatest amount of sincerity that his age could permit. “It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet” (HHW, chap. 5, p. 180).
In Carlyle’s view, the writer always practices a discipline of action more problematic in regard to its sincerity than that of the priest and the king, partly because the writer cannot avoid self-consciousness. The novelist in particular confronts special difficulties. The Hero as Priest has a sanctioned liturgy and text by which the consonance between his speech and belief can readily be tested. The Hero as King, who must focus on the realities of the physical world, synthesizes word and act in the dramatic spotlight of public assessment. The modern writer, however, whether novelist or poet, constantly runs the danger, in a secular world of fragmented belief systems, of being honest rather than sincere and of not having the means to know the difference. Consequently, Carlyle promotes, in the modern crisis, total reliance on instinct rather than craft or kunst, on the assumption that the Hero has inherent within him, as Samuel Johnson had, some portion of divinity that not even a secular, mechanistic culture can fully repress. But the novelist, who deals with the tactile details of daily life, runs the special risk of depicting the material world as self-sufficient or of interpreting its details as manifestations of a false ideology or of taking refuge in the solipsism of feeling or sentimentality in which feeling is separated from moral structure and control. Since the novelist has a special mandate to mediate between concrete particulars and moral idealizations, it is more difficult for the novelist in the nineteenth century than for the poet or the writer of nonfictional prose to be sincere in the way that Carlyle believes sincerity is the essence of greatness.
Carlyle’s tolerance for sentimentality was greater in fact than his principles would seem to permit. Two elements within his writing are noticeably sentimental, his emphasis on his own feelings as self-evidently moral and his creation of moral ideals in his concept of the heroic. The Victorians in general did not consciously label their commitment to heroic models as an idealization or an affirmation of the innate moral nature of human nature. But Carlyle would not have been puzzled at an extrapolation from a belief in the heroic as innately good that concludes that there is a primal, innate goodness within human nature that makes it capable of responding to heroic models. Actually, though goodness is a word he uses frequently, Carlyle is not comfortable with the concept, primarily because it promotes a rhetoric, a set of problems, and a definition of human nature that do not suit his temperament or his vision. The idealized characters of the literature of moral philosophy are good in the ethical sense that Carlyle rejects. It is not at all sentimental, he believes, to create idealizations whose heroic dimensions express the spiritual forces of nature and the cosmos. But it is pejoratively sentimental to create characters whose totality can be encompassed within the boundaries of ethics. Carlyle deals with an upper case, Dickens and Thackeray with a lower case, Universe. For Carlyle, it is not our goodness that we have lost contact with but our divinity.
Carlyle, then, had as much trouble with the novel as a literary form as he had with any specific work of that genre, a work such as Vanity Fair, for example, which announced itself as “A Novel Without A Hero.” A perceptive literary critic, he was sufficiently aware of genre assumptions and demands to realize that the novel could not function effectively without being solidly anchored in the social world. But, though he admired the brilliant satiric anatomy of society in Vanity Fair, he attached more value to the moral allegory and spiritual vision of Pilgrim’s Progress, the work from which the title of the novel derived, than to Thackeray’s depiction of the faulty machinery of society. What Carlyle did not hear in the novel as a genre was the cosmic voice, the voice of ultimate sincerity, beyond goodness because it was beyond ethics, the divine voice that speaks in man. Such a voice expresses unconscious primal nature, the strongest innate element of human nature, the ultimate model for all life which in its creative mysteries contains both life and death. To deny that voice is to be insincere, a sham, a falsity. Not to hear it at all is to have lost the faculty of hearing or to have had one’s hearing diminished by a false culture’s noise and static. The primal voice can hardly be heard in the modern novel, Carlyle maintains, because the form itself limits the hearing, decreasing the full range of decibels, and those who have been attracted to the form have become successful practitioners precisely because of the consonance between their personal disabilities and the genre’s limitations. Only if we listen intently, Carlyle suggests, will we be able to perceive just slightly the distant ranges of the cosmic voice in certain novels, so powerfully and irrepressibly primal is that voice to the language of genius.
Carlyle believed, as did Dickens and Thackeray, that the greatest danger to the human community was the increasing devaluation of human nature, either in mechanical, secular, or biological forms. The result was a loss of confidence in the innate goodness or divinity—or both—of human nature. Of course, it made considerable difference to many sectarian Victorians, including Carlyle, whether the assertion of the human capacity to act well takes its force from moral philosophy or from spiritual vision, whether it is expressed within the boundaries of realistic fiction or within the limitlessness of a transcendent cosmos.
Still, there was general agreement that the opponents of moral sentiment and religious vision, in the process of creating the social and physical sciences, defined mankind as the product of either historical environment or random physical forces; and that repressive social conditions were narrowing moral responsiveness, grinding it in the secular mills and casting it aside contemptuously as the illusion of the Sabbath rather than the reality of the weekday. The Victorian sentimentalists, and particularly Dickens and Thackeray, affirmed the fragile hope that human beings, in their instinctive natures, innately know right from wrong, and that at the level of innate response they take pleasure in the triumph of goodness and the defeat of evil in literature and in life. These Victorian sentimentalists trusted that the source of “sacred tears” was the moral spring of human nature. It would water flowers no matter how arid the soil.
