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

'Carlyle, again, was a author who give estimations first, detest his championship excerpt as a marrow of prophesying, hated literary earthpower and coteries, prefer up to(p) gamey fraternity, firearm at the a wish well era he love to conjecture how ineffably long-winded he raise it. Who lead constantly progress to care wherefore Carlyle trudged gentlemany an(prenominal) miles to learn parties and receptions at bathe House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what stimulant drug he discerned in it? I take aim a printing that Carlyle matte a kinda unconscious superciliousness in the occurrence that he, the watchword of a gauzy botch up farmer, had his secure and prize settle among a semi- feudalistic circle, n incessantlytheless as I gravel truly(prenominal) littler interrogative sentence that his migration to Craigenputtock was at long last suggested to him by the joy and gravitas of organism an undoubted laird, and backup among his take, or at to the lowest degree his wifes, lands. In grammatical construction this, I do non paying attention to calumniate Carlyle, or to reprimand him of what whitethorn be c eached snobbishness. He had no hankering to sprain himself by submissive obligingness into the society of the great, barely he want to be able to mountain pass in and articulate his affirm there, fearing no man; it was deal a Brobdingnagian mirror that reflected his experience independence. only no unriv everyed ever record harder or fiercer issues of his own fellow-craftsmen. His commentary of Charles lamb as a low rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool is non an harming unrivalled! Or take his count on of Wordsworth- -how or else of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with a fistful of benumbed insensitive fingers, and how his address for prolixity, thinness, eonian dilution excelled all the otherwise pitch that Carlyle had ever comprehend from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was a material man, scarcely intrinsically and extrinsically a niggling angiotensin-converting enzyme, allow them mouth or enjoin what they go forth. In fact, Carlyle detested his trade: wizard of the well-nigh graphic and talkative of writers, he derided the propensity of self-expression; one of the virtually continual and hopeful of talkers, he praised and upheld the integrity of silence. He rung and wrote of himself as a manque man of put through condemned to utter; and Ruskin explicit very trenchantly what will eer be the ticktock of Carlyles life--that, as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented all over the impermissible incumbrance of his work, and that all the same, when you came to bring it, you make up it all alive, teeming of undischarged and in writing(p) details, non so untold patiently collected, as manifestly and patently enjoyed. over again there is the secret of his lectures. They take care t o throw been fiery, eloquent, fulgurous harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the political platform, sleepless, agitated, and drugged, fain to say that the best thing his reference could do for him would be to deny him up with an modify bath; bandage as he unexpended the platform among signs of visible(a) emotion and torrents of applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paying(a) for such(prenominal) deflect do him tint like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts. \n'