^{Note 1 in page 234} G. ?. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965). On p. 271 appears the following: “Emphasis and insight also inform Carlyle's notorious visual devices. While these are initially the most arresting features of his style, they are also the most readily explained. Clearly they emphasize, much as the emblematic poems of a Herbert or a Quarles do.” On p. 280 of the same work there is a lengthy passage of Carlyle cited, followed by the comment that here we have an instance of Carlyle's “Swiftian irony.” The relevance, I suggest, of Herbert, Quarles, or Swift (or for that matter of James Joyce, p. 272) to a profitable placing of Carlyle is minimal, to say the least of it. One would go very far to find authors less like him, in fact. For another example of Tennyson's muddled efforts to raise Carlyle's status, see note 10 below.

^{Note 2 in page 234} Since I wrote this essay, it has been pointed out to me that in one of my arguments I have been anticipated by R. H. Super: “Arnold was always well aware of Carlyle's impact on his thinking; if he spoke slightingly of Carlyle's lack of balance, he was merely saying what is clearly enough perceived today: Arnold has survived while Carlyle is unread. A thoroughly interesting study of their intellectual kinship in the decade of the sixties is D. J. DeLaura's 'Arnold and Carlyle,' PMLA, LXXIX (March 1964), 10429, though its author might have spared turning Arnold's clear-sighted awareness of the difference between Carlyle and himself into a 'fixed need to depreciate Carlyle, combined with something very close to concealment of his influence.' ” The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, v (Culture and Anarchy), (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), 414.

^{Note 3 in page 234} An honorable exception is George Levine in his well-argued “The Use and Abuse of Carlylese,” in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 101–26. Levine sees the mannerism as a “reflex of the substance” (p. 104), and attempts fairly effectively to defend the view that Carlyle's early style was more appropriate to what he wanted to say than many, including myself, would think.

^{Note 4 in page 234} Chartism, p. 151. All references to Carlyle are to the thirty-volume centenary edition of his Works, ed. H. D. Traill (London, 1897–1901). Titles of individual works are abbreviated as follows: Sartor Resartus, SR; French Revolution, FR; Heroes & Hero-Worship, HHW; Chartism, Ch; Past & Present, P&P; Life of John Sterling, LS.

^{Note 5 in page 234} Basil Willey, “Thomas Carlyle,” in Nineteenth Century Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949); John Hollo way, “Carlyle,” in The Victorian Sage (London: Macmillan, 1953); Raymond Williams, “Thomas Carlyle,” in Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958).

^{Note 6 in page 234} J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), i, 323. Indeed this quotation would support my disagreement with Levine when he writes, “the passion one recognizes in the prose is, undoubtedly, genuine” (p. 105), and with G. B. Tennyson when he asserts that “the style has an unexampled vitality, a quite individual energy” (p. 250). There does indeed seem to be more passion in the man than vitality in the style, I would say, but a great deal of empty rant must be got out of the way before one can distinguish either passion or vitality.

^{Note 7 in page 234} See Holloway, p. 33, and Williams, p. 86.

^{Note 8 in page 234} Willey, p. 121.

^{Note 9 in page 234} I have been taken to task by a learned colleague who insists that the comparison is far from fantastic and that, for example, in the chapter “Natural Supernaturalism” in Sartor Resartus there are clear instances of this advocation of wonder and reverence. I can only reply that the motivation behind, and the emotional assertiveness of, that chapter strike me as something that one could very well use to illustrate the essential difference between what Carlyle and Wordsworth are doing. Both advocate wonder, no doubt, as does D. H. Lawrence, but it is only if put as simply as that that they can be related at all. If the fuller contexts are taken into account, as they must be, then it is the differences that become significant. It is the old story of Browning and Spinoza both being optimists—as though that told us anything.

^{Note 10 in page 234} G. B. Tennyson writes, “Most of the time, indeed, the reader is being called a fool. Whether he likes it or not, the reader is compelled into involvement, and much of the distinctiveness of Carlyle's style lies in that involvement of the reader” (p. 255). Does the reader who becomes so involved submit to being called a fool, one would like to ask, or is his involvement exasperated, or doesn't it matter ? And if the distinctiveness of Carlyle's style lies in the involvement of the reader, is his style in this respect different from Shakespeare's, Arnold's, or John Stuart Mill's ? And in what sense is the reader's involvement affected by the fact that Carlyle's style is “fatiguing,” as Tennyson admits on p. 240.

^{Note 11 in page 234} That he indulged his anger may be illustrated by the scenes he created, throughout his life, over physical discomforts and minor ailments. To his brother Alexander, for example, he wrote in 1824 with characteristic exaggeration, “My heart is burnt with fury and indignation when I think of being cramped and shackled and tormented as never man till me was” (Froude, i, 208).

^{Note 12 in page 235} Such as a brief perusal of any of his works will show. From Chartism, for instance, we can cull such Germanisms as, “there must a changed Aristocracy enter” (pp. 162–63), and “there could no rest come till then” (p. 170); and unnecessary words such as “irrecognisable” (p. 123), “im-methodic” (p. 137), “traditionary” (p. 140), “guillotine-ment” (p. 168), “bemurmured” (p. 173). There is something of a defiant affectation in this sort of thing.

^{Note 13 in page 235} The relevant quotes here are: “The sincere alone can recognise sincerity” (HHW, p. 216), and “the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at” (SR, p. 132).

^{Note 14 in page 235} Another “proof” of this pervasive influence in the 1860's is what looks like Arnold's very Carlylean emphasis on “duty” and “rights” in Culture and Anarchy. Once again, though, one cannot but draw attention to Arnold's father in whom these same emphases were apparent.

^{Note 15 in page 235} Froude, ii, 412.

^{Note 16 in page 235} On the authority of the British Council, for instance, we are told that Carlyle “is more than a great Victorian writer, he is one of our great national prophets, and as such, a writer whose message is still full of import to living men and women.” David Gascoyne, Thomas Carlyle, Writers and their Work, No. 23 (London : Longmans, Green &Co., 1952), p. 8.