Автор: Пользователь скрыл имя, 06 Февраля 2011 в 17:07, реферат
It is not a part of the plan of this book to present any extended bibliography, but there are certain reference books to which the student's attention should be called.
It will probably
now be evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and volcanic power
of 'Sartor Resartus' (and the same is true of Carlyle's other chief
works) is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor. Carlyle is eccentric
and perverse--more so in 'Sartor Resartus' than elsewhere--but he is
on fire with his message and he is as confident as any Hebrew prophet
that it is the message most necessary for his generation. One may like
him or be repelled by him, but a careful reader cannot remain unmoved
by his personality and his ideas.
One of his
most striking eccentricities is the remarkable style which he deliberately
invented for 'Sartor Resartus' and used thenceforth in all his writings
(though not always in so extreme a form). Some of the specific peculiarities
of this style are taken over, with exaggeration, from German usage;
some are Biblical or other archaisms; others spring mainly from Carlyle's
own amazing mind. His purpose in employing, in the denunciation of shams
and insincerities, a form itself so far removed from directness and
simplicity was in part, evidently, to shock people into attention; but
after all, the style expresses appropriately his genuine sense of the
incoherence and irony of life, his belief that truth can be attained
only by agonizing effort, and his contempt for intellectual and spiritual
commonplaceness.
In 1834 Carlyle
moved to London, to a house in Cheyne (pronounced Cheeny) Row, Chelsea,
where he lived for his remaining nearly fifty years. Though he continued
henceforth in large part to reiterate the ideas of 'Sartor Resartus,'
he now turned from biography, essays, and literary criticism to history,
and first published 'The French Revolution.' He had almost decided in
despair to abandon literature, and had staked his fortune on this work;
but when the first volume was accidentally destroyed in manuscript he
proceeded with fine courage to rewrite it, and he published the whole
book in 1837. It brought him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor
Resartus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results in exaggeration
of characters and situations, and much fantasy and grotesqueness of
expression; but as a dramatic and pictorial vilification of a great
historic movement it was and remains unique, and on the whole no history
is more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. Here, as
in most of his later works, Carlyle throws the emphasis on the power
of great personalities. During the next years he took advantage of his
success by giving courses of lectures on literature and history, though
he disliked the task and felt himself unqualified as a speaker. Of these
courses the most important was that on 'Heroes and Hero-Worship,' in
which he clearly stated the doctrine on which thereafter he laid increasing
stress, that the strength of humanity is in its strong men, the natural
leaders, equipped to rule by power of intellect, of spirit, and of executive
force. Control by them is government by the fit, whereas modern democracy
is government by the unfit. Carlyle called democracy 'mobocracy' and
considered it a mere bad piece of social and political machinery, or,
in his own phrase, a mere 'Morrison's pill,' foolishly expected to cure
all evils at one gulp. Later on Carlyle came to express this view, like
all his others, with much violence, but it is worthy of serious consideration,
not least in twentieth century America.
Of Carlyle's
numerous later works the most important are 'Past and Present,' in which
he contrasts the efficiency of certain strong men of medieval Europe
with the restlessness and uncertainty of contemporary democracy and
humanitarianism and attacks modern political economy; 'Oliver Cromwell's
Letters and Speeches,' which revolutionized the general opinion of Cromwell,
revealing him as a true hero or strong man instead of a hypocritical
fanatic; and 'The History of Frederick the Great,' an enormous work
which occupied Carlyle for fourteen years and involved thorough personal
examination of the scenes of Frederick's life and battles. During his
last fifteen years Carlyle wrote little of importance, and the violence
of his denunciation of modern life grew shrill and hysterical. That
society was sadly wrong he was convinced, but he propounded no definite
plan for its regeneration. He had become, however, a much venerated
as well as a picturesque figure; and he exerted a powerful and constructive
influence, not only directly, but indirectly through the preaching of
his doctrines, in the main or in part, by the younger essayists and
the chief Victorian poets and novelists, and in America by Emerson,
with whom he maintained an almost lifelong friendship and correspondence.
Carlyle died in 1881.
Carlyle was
a strange combination of greatness and narrowness. Like Macaulay, he
was exasperatingly blind and bigoted in regard to the things in which
he had no personal interest, though the spheres of their respective
enthusiasms and antipathies were altogether different. Carlyle viewed
pleasure and merely esthetic art with the contempt of the Scottish Covenanting
fanatics, refusing even to read poetry like that of Keats; and his insistence
on moral meanings led him to equal intolerance of such story-tellers
as Scott. In his hostility to the materialistic tendencies so often
deduced from modern science he dismissed Darwin's 'Origin of Species'
with the exclamation that it showed up the capricious stupidity of mankind
and that he never could read a page of it or would waste the least thought
upon it. He mocked at the anti-slavery movement in both America and
the English possessions, holding that the negroes were an inferior race
probably better off while producing something under white masters than
if left free in their own ignorance and sloth. Though his obstinacy
was a part of his national temperament, and his physical and mental
irritability in part a result of his ill-health, any candid estimate
of his life cannot altogether overlook them. On the whole, however,
there is no greater ethical, moral, and spiritual force in English Literature
than Carlyle, and so much of his thought has passed into the common
possession of all thinking persons to-day that we are all often his
debtors when we are least conscious of it.
JOHN RUSKIN.
Among the other
great Victorian writers the most obvious disciple of Carlyle in his
opposition to the materialism of modern life is John Ruskin. But Ruskin
is much more than any man's disciple; and he also contrasts strongly
with Carlyle, first because a large part of his life was devoted to
the study of Art--he is the single great art-critic in English Literature--and
also because he is one of the great preachers of that nineteenth century
humanitarianism at which Carlyle was wont to sneer.
Ruskin's parents
were Scotch, but his father, a man of artistic tastes, was established
as a wine-merchant in London and had amassed a fortune before the boy's
birth in 1819. The atmosphere of the household was sternly Puritan,
and Ruskin was brought up under rigid discipline, especially by his
mother, who gave him most of his early education. He read, wrote, and
drew precociously; his knowledge of the Bible, in which his mother's
training was relentlessly thorough, of Scott, Pope, and Homer, dates
from his fifth or sixth year. For many years during his boyhood he accompanied
his parents on long annual driving trips through Great Britain and parts
of Europe, especially the Alps. By these experiences his inborn passion
for the beautiful and the grand in Nature and Art was early developed.
During seven years he was at Oxford, where his mother lived with him
and watched over him; until her death in his fifty-second year she always
continued to treat him like a child, an attitude to which, habit and
affection led him to submit with a matter-of-course docility that his
usual wilfulness and his later fame render at first sight astonishing.
At Oxford, as throughout his life, he showed himself brilliant but not
a close or careful student, and he was at that time theologically too
rigid a Puritan to be interested in the Oxford Movement, then in its
most intense stage.
His career
as a writer began immediately after he left the University. It falls
naturally into two parts, the first of about twenty years, when he was
concerned almost altogether with Art, chiefly Painting and Architecture;
and the second somewhat longer, when he was intensely absorbed in the
problems of society and strenuously working as a social reformer. From
the outset, however, he was actuated by an ardent didactic purpose;
he wrote of Art in order to awake men's spiritual natures to a joyful
delight in the Beautiful and thus to lead, them to God, its Author.
The particular
external direction of Ruskin's work in Art was given, as usual, more
or less by accident. His own practice in water-color drawing led him
as a mere youth to a devoted admiration for the landscape paintings
of the contemporary artist J.M.W. Turner. Turner, a romantic revolutionist
against the eighteenth century theory of the grand style, was then little
appreciated; and when Ruskin left the University he began, with characteristic
enthusiasm, an article on 'Modern Painters,' designed to demonstrate
Turner's superiority to all possible rivals. Even the first part of
this work expanded itself into a volume, published in 1843, when Ruskin
was only twenty-four; and at intervals during the next seventeen years
he issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged study both
of Nature and of almost all the great paintings in Europe. The completed
book is a discursive treatise, the various volumes necessarily written
from more or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects,
general and technical, of all art, literary as well as pictorial. For
Ruskin held, and brilliantly demonstrated, that the underlying principles
of all the Fine Arts are identical, and 'Modern Painters' contains some
of the most famous and suggestive passages of general literary criticism
ever written, for example those on The Pathetic Fallacy and The Grand
Style. Still further, to Ruskin morality and religion are inseparable
from Art, so that he deals searchingly, if incidentally, with those
subjects as well. Among his fundamental principles are the ideas that
a beneficent God has created the world and its beauty directly for man's
use and pleasure; that all true art and all true life are service of
God and should be filled with a spirit of reverence; that art should
reveal truth; and that really great and good art can spring only from
noble natures and a sound national life. The style of the book is as
notable as the substance. It is eloquent with Ruskin's enthusiastic
admiration for Beauty and with his magnificent romantic rhetoric (largely
the result, according to his own testimony, of his mother's exacting
drill in the Bible), which here and elsewhere make him one of the greatest
of all masters of gorgeous description and of fervid exhortation. The
book displays fully, too, another of his chief traits, an intolerant
dogmatism, violently contemptuous of any judgments but his own. On the
religious side, especially, Ruskin's Protestantism is narrow, and even
bigoted, but it softens as the book proceeds (and decidedly more in
his later years). With all its faults, 'Modern Painters' is probably
the greatest book ever written on Art and is an immense storehouse,
of noble material, and suggestion.
In the intervals
of this work Ruskin published others less comprehensive, two of which
are of the first importance. 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' argues
that great art, as the supreme expression of life, is the result of
seven moral and religious principles, Sacrifice, Truth, Power, and the
like. 'The Stones of Venice' is an, impassioned exposition of the beauty
of Venetian Gothic architecture, and here as always Ruskin expresses
his vehement preference for the Gothic art of the Middle Ages as contrasted
with the less original and as it seems to him less sincere style of
the Renaissance.
The publication
of the last volume of 'Modern Painters' in 1860 roughly marks the end
of Ruskin's first period. Several influences had by this time begun
to sadden him. More than ten years before, with his usual filial meekness,
he had obeyed his parents in marrying a lady who proved uncongenial
and who after a few years was divorced from him. Meanwhile acquaintance
with Carlyle had combined with experience to convince him of the comparative
ineffectualness of mere art-criticism as a social and religious force.
He had come to feel with increasing indignation that the modern industrial
system, the materialistic political economy founded on it, and the whole
modern organization of society reduce the mass of men to a state of
intellectual, social, and religious squalor and blindness, and that
while they continue in this condition it is of little use to talk to
them about Beauty. He believed that some of the first steps in the necessary
redemptive process must be the education of the poor and a return to
what he conceived (certainly with much exaggeration) to have been the
conditions of medieval labor, when each craftsman was not a mere machine
but an intelligent and original artistic creator; but the underlying
essential was to free industry from the spirit of selfish money-getting
and permeate it with Christian sympathy and respect for man as man.
The ugliness of modern life in its wretched city tenements and its hideous
factories Ruskin would have utterly destroyed, substituting such a beautiful
background (attractive homes and surroundings) as would help to develop
spiritual beauty. With his customary vigor Ruskin proceeded henceforth
to devote himself to the enunciation, and so far as possible the realization
of these beliefs, first by delivering lectures and writing books. He
was met, like all reformers, with a storm of protest, but most of his
ideas gradually became the accepted principles of social theory. Among
his works dealing with these subjects may be named 'Unto This Last,'
'Munera Pulveris' (The Rewards of the Dust--an attack on materialistic
political economy), and 'Fors Clavigera' (Fortune the Key-Bearer), the
latter a series of letters to workingmen extending over many years.
To 1865 belongs his most widely-read book, 'Sesame and Lilies,' three
lectures on the spiritual meaning of great literature in contrast to
materialism, the glory of womanhood, and the mysterious significance
of life.
From the death
of his mother in 1871 Ruskin began to devote his large inherited fortune
to 'St. George's Guild,' a series of industrial and social experiments
in which with lavish generosity he attempted to put his theories into
practical operation. All these experiments, as regards direct results,
ended in failure, though their general influence was great. Among other
movements now everywhere taken for granted 'social settlements' are
a result of his efforts.
All this activity
had not caused Ruskin altogether to abandon the teaching of art to the
members of the more well-to-do classes, and beginning in 1870 he held
for three or four triennial terms the newly-established professorship
of Art at Oxford and gave to it much hard labor. But this interest was
now clearly secondary in his mind.
Ruskin's temper
was always romantically high-strung, excitable, and irritable. His intense
moral fervor, his multifarious activities, and his disappointments were
also constant strains on his nervous force. In 1872, further, he was
rejected in marriage by a young girl for whom he had formed a deep attachment
and who on her death-bed, three years later, refused, with strange cruelty,
to see him. In 1878 his health temporarily failed, and a few years later
he retired to the home, 'Brantwood,' at Coniston in the Lake Region,
which he had bought on the death of his mother. Here his mind gradually
gave way, but intermittently, so that he was still able to compose 'Praterita'
(The Past), a delightful autobiography. He died in 1900.
Ruskin, like
Carlyle, was a strange compound of genius, nobility, and unreasonableness,
but as time goes on his dogmatism and violence may well be more and
more forgotten, while his idealism, his penetrating interpretation of
art and life, his fruitful work for a more tolerable social order, and
his magnificent mastery of style and description assure him a permanent
place in the history of English literature and of civilization.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Contemporary
with Carlyle and Ruskin and fully worthy to rank with them stands still
a third great preacher of social and spiritual regeneration, Matthew
Arnold, whose personality and message, however, were very different
from theirs and who was also one of the chief Victorian poets. Arnold
was born in 1822, the son--and this is decidedly significant--of the
Dr. Thomas Arnold who later became the famous headmaster of Rugby School
and did more than any other man of the century to elevate the tone of
English school life. Matthew Arnold proceeded from Rugby to Oxford (Balliol
College), where he took the prize for original poetry and distinguished
himself as a student. This was the period of the Oxford Movement, and
Arnold was much impressed by Newman's fervor and charm, but was already
too rationalistic in thought to sympathize with his views. After graduation
Arnold taught Greek for a short time at Rugby and then became private
secretary to Lord Lansdoune, who was minister of public instruction.
Four years later, in 1851, Arnold was appointed an inspector of schools,
a position which he held almost to the end of his life and in which
he labored very hard and faithfully, partly at the expense of his creative
work. His life was marked by few striking outward events. His marriage
and home were happy. Up to 1867 his literary production consisted chiefly
of poetry, very carefully composed and very limited in amount, and for
two five-year terms, from 1857 to 1867, he held the Professorship of
Poetry at Oxford. At the expiration of his second term he did not seek
for reappointment, because he did not care to arouse the opposition
of Gladstone--then a power in public affairs--and stir up religious
controversy. His retirement from this position virtually marks the very
distinct change from the first to the second main period of his career.
For with deliberate self-sacrifice he now turned from poetry to prose
essays, because he felt that through the latter medium he could render
what seemed to him a more necessary public service. With characteristic
self-confidence, and obeying his inherited tendency to didacticism,
he appointed himself, in effect, a critic of English national life,
beliefs, and taste, and set out to instruct the public in matters of
literature, social relations, politics and religion. In many essays,
published separately or in periodicals, he persevered in this task until
his death in 1888.
As a poet Arnold
is generally admitted to rank among the Victorians next after Tennyson
and Browning. The criticism, partly true, that he was not designed by
Nature to be a poet but made himself one by hard work rests on his intensely,
and at the outset coldly, intellectual and moral temperament. He himself,
in modified Puritan spirit, defined poetry as a criticism of life; his
mind was philosophic; and in his own verse, inspired by Greek poetry,
by Goethe and Wordsworth, he realized his definition. In his work, therefore,
delicate melody and sensuous beauty were at first much less conspicuous
than a high moral sense, though after the first the elements of external
beauty greatly developed, often to the finest effect. In form and spirit
his poetry is one of the very best later reflections of that of Greece,
dominated by thought, dignified, and polished with the utmost care.
'Sohrab and Rustum,' his most ambitious and greatest single poem, is
a very close and admirable imitation of 'The Iliad.' Yet, as the almost
intolerable pathos of 'Sohrab and Rustum' witnesses, Arnold is not by
any means deficient, any more than the Greek poets were, in emotion.
He affords, in fact, a striking example of classical form and spirit
united with the deep, self-conscious, meditative feeling of modern Romanticism.
In substance
Arnold's poetry is the expression of his long and tragic spiritual struggle.
To him religion, understood as a reverent devotion to Divine things,
was the most important element in life, and his love of pure truth was
absolute; but he held that modern knowledge had entirely disproved the
whole dogmatic and doctrinal scheme of historic Christianity and that
a new spiritual revelation was necessary. To his Romantic nature, however,
mere knowledge and mere modern science, which their followers were so
confidently exalting, appeared by no means adequate to the purpose;
rather they seemed to him largely futile, because they did not stimulate
the emotions and so minister to the spiritual life. Further, the restless
stirrings of his age, beginning to arouse itself from the social lethargy
of centuries, appeared to him pitifully unintelligent and devoid of
results. He found all modern life, as he says in 'The Scholar-Gypsy,'
a 'strange disease,' in which men hurry wildly about in a mad activity
which they mistake for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked
wistfully back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young'
and could express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection.
The exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by
his own statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old
faith was (as he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our
own generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore,
is to be viewed as largely the expression, monotonous but often poignantly
beautiful, of a temporary mood of questioning protest. But if his conclusion
is not positive, it is at least not weakly despairing. Each man, he
insists, should diligently preserve and guard in intellectual and moral
integrity the fortress of his own soul, into which, when necessary,
he can retire in serene and stoical resignation, determined to endure
and to 'see life steadily and see it whole.' Unless the man himself
proves traitor, the littlenesses of life are powerless to conquer him.
In fact, the invincible courage of the thoroughly disciplined spirit
in the midst of doubt and external discouragement has never been, more
nobly expressed than by Arnold in such poems as 'Palladium' and (from
a different point of view) 'The Last Word.'
There is a
striking contrast (largely expressing an actual change of spirit and
point of view) between the manner of Arnold's poetry and that of his
prose. In the latter he entirely abandons the querulous note and assumes
instead a tone of easy assurance, jaunty and delightfully satirical.
Increasing maturity had taught him that merely to sit regarding the
past was useless and that he himself had a definite doctrine, worthy
of being preached with all aggressiveness. We have already said that
his essays fall into four classes, literary, social, religious, and
political, though they cannot always be sharply distinguished. As a
literary critic he is uneven, and, as elsewhere, sometimes superficial,
but his fine appreciation and generally clear vision make him refreshingly
stimulating. His point of view is unusually broad, his chief general
purpose being to free English taste from its insularity, to give it
sympathetic acquaintance with the peculiar excellences of other literatures.
Some of his essays, like those on 'The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time,' 'Wordsworth,' and 'Byron,' are among the best in English,
while his 'Essays on Translating Homer' present the most famous existing
interpretation of the spirit and style of the great Greek epics.
In his social
essays, of which the most important form the volume entitled 'Culture
and Anarchy,' he continues in his own way the attacks of Carlyle and
Ruskin. Contemporary English life seems to him a moral chaos of physical
misery and of the selfish, unenlightened, violent expression of untrained
wills. He too looks with pitying contempt on the material achievements
of science and the Liberal party as being mere 'machinery,' means to
an end, which men mistakenly worship as though it possessed a real value
in itself. He divides English society into three classes: 1. The Aristocracy,
whom he nick-names 'The Barbarians,' because, like the Germanic tribes
who overthrew the Roman Empire, they vigorously assert their own privileges
and live in the external life rather than in the life of the spirit.
2. The Middle Class, which includes the bulk of the nation. For them
he borrows from German criticism the name 'Philistines,' enemies of
the chosen people, and he finds their prevailing traits to be intellectual
and spiritual narrowness and a fatal and superficial satisfaction with
mere activity and material prosperity. 3. 'The Populace,' the 'vast
raw and half-developed residuum.' For them Arnold had sincere theoretical
sympathy (though his temperament made it impossible for him to enter
into the same sort of personal sympathy with them as did Ruskin); but
their whole environment and conception of life seemed to him hideous.
With his usual uncomplimentary frankness Arnold summarily described
the three groups as 'a materialized upper class, a vulgarized middle
class, and a brutalized lower class.'
For the cure
of these evils Arnold's proposed remedy was Culture, which he defined
as a knowledge of the best that has been thought and done in the world
and a desire to make the best ideas prevail. Evidently this Culture
is not a mere knowledge of books, unrelated to the rest of life. It
has indeed for its basis a very wide range of knowledge, acquired by
intellectual processes, but this knowledge alone Arnold readily admitted
to be 'machinery.' The real purpose and main part of Culture is the
training, broadening, and refining of the whole spirit, including the
emotions as well as the intellect, into sympathy with all the highest
ideals, and therefore into inward peace and satisfaction. Thus Culture
is not indolently selfish, but is forever exerting itself to 'make the
best ideas'--which Arnold also defined as 'reason and the will, of God'--'prevail.'
Arnold felt
strongly that a main obstacle to Culture was religious narrowness. He
held that the English people had been too much occupied with the 'Hebraic'
ideal of the Old Testament, the interest in morality or right conduct,
and though he agreed that this properly makes three quarters of life,
he insisted that it should be joined with the Hellenic (Greek) ideal
of a perfectly rounded nature. He found the essence of Hellenism expressed
in a phrase which he took from Swift, 'Sweetness and Light,' interpreting
Sweetness to mean the love of Beauty, material and spiritual, and Light,
unbiased intelligence; and he urged that these forces be allowed to
have the freest play. He vigorously attacked the Dissenting denominations,
because he believed them to be a conspicuous embodiment of Philistine
lack of Sweetness and Light, with an unlovely insistence on unimportant
external details and a fatal blindness to the meaning of real beauty
and real spirituality. Though he himself was without a theological creed,
he was, and held that every Englishman should be, a devoted adherent
of the English Church, as a beautiful, dignified, and national expression
of essential religion, and therefore a very important influence for
Culture.