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Thomas Carlyle's Inverse Sublime and Early Canadian Humor

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Thomas Carlyle's Inverse Sublime and Early Canadian Humor University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor English Publications Department of English 2011 Thomas Carlyle's Inverse Sublime and Early Canadian Humor Andre Narbonne Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Narbonne, Andre. (2011). Thomas Carlyle's Inverse Sublime and Early Canadian Humor. Nineteenth- Century Studies, 25, 45-70. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub/36 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at Scholarship at UWindsor. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship at UWindsor. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Thomas Carlyle’s Inverse Sublime he Tory idealism of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) proved pe- and Early Canadian Humor, culiarly congenial to Canadian authors duringT the colonial period and in the first sixty years after Confederation (1867), one possible reason being that the 1836–1927 Canadian parliamentary system founded at Confederation was a projection and protector of the hierarchical and varied community that Carlyle’s principles em- braced. The earliest influence of his te- nets is particularly evident in emigrant ANDRÉ NARBONNE literature, and his social philosophies are integral to the United Empire Loyalist myth as promulgated by William Kirby (1817–1906). Canadian academics such as George Robert Parkin (1846–1922) and Archibald MacMechan (1862–1933) taught Carlylean doctrines in the classroom to students who included two Confedera- tion poets, Charles G. D. Roberts (1860– 1943) and Bliss Carman (1861–1929), and the humorist, L. Maud Montgomery (1874–1942). As a result of the influence of his doctrines on these as well as other ca- nonical writers, such as Archibald Lamp- man (1861–99) and Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), Carlyle’s sublime humor helped define Canada in the first years of the twentieth century. Carlyle’s discussion of forms in his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Nineteenth Century Studies 25 (2011): 93-118. © 2011 Nineteenth Century Studies Association. All rights reserved, 0893-7931/2011. Nineteenth Century Studies 93 Heroic in History (1841) is an index of the taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only major issues that inform both his social spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and and his comic visions: body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably signifi- It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion cant.”2 and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only hab- Because Carlyle held that “‘[c]us- itable one. The naked formlessness of Puri- tom . doth make dotards of us all,’”3 he tanism is not the thing I praise in the Puri- argued that old ideas that had become tans; it is the thing I pity, – praising only the mechanical needed to be stripped away spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All and new forms, natural forms, allowed to substances clothe themselves in forms: but grow. In Sartor Resartus, this stripping away there are suitable true forms, and then there is done with an almost surgical irony. To are untrue, unsuitable. As the briefest defini- underscore his technique and purpose, tion, one might say, Forms which grow round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will Carlyle has his Editor (who has charge correspond to the real nature and purport of of making sense of Teufelsdröckh’s pa- it, will be true, good; forms which are con- pers) remark that it is “[w]onderful . sciously put round a substance, bad.1 with what cutting words, now and then, he [Teufelsdröckh] severs asunder the According to Carlyle, all societies and confusion; shears down, were it furlongs individuals require political and social deep, into the true centre of the matter.”4 order. Form – or order – is what makes But despite its razor sharpness, the hu- a community habitable, a life livable; it mor Carlyle practiced is not the acerbic is the conqueror of shapelessness, chaos. wit of the rake; it is genial and inclusive. Furthermore, true forms, religious or The exposed form beneath, like the un- otherwise, are organic: they clothe with- dressed form of Puritanism in the lec- out being works of artifice and so are tures On Heroes, is to be pitied for its bare- complementary, not distorting. Carlyle ness and praised for its spirit. The style of arrived at his view of a naturally ordered comedy that Carlyle championed, then, society having eschewed what he re- blends humor and pathos to create sym- garded as the unnatural forms placed on pathetic laughter, not ridicule. The “fin- English society preceding and during the est” laughter, he explains in “The Hero as Victorian period. His ideal community Poet,” “is always a genial laughter.”5 This is, therefore, one in which individual re- harmonious humor, producing genial sponsibility is not legislated (social leg- laughter, was the comic expression of islation, he argues elsewhere, is the sign the same social vision that idealized an of an unhealthy community), and yet it is organic or whole community. one in which everyone plays a role. The The relationship between humor and community is whole and active. sociology was not lost on early Canadian While Carlyle is best described as a authors. Tory writers who saw Carlyle’s social critic, not a theorist (he disdained organic community as the promise of formulas), he was a literary theorist, and Confederation praised responsibility and his social philosophy is present in his labor. At a time when the creation of a theories on humor, harmony, and the Canadian literary canon was viewed as a inverse sublime. Carlyle’s first major national imperative, most Canadian hu- text, Sartor Resartus (1833–34), is a comic mor adhered to the theories of sympa- work in which he demonstrates how un- thetic humor expounded by Carlyle, es- natural forms – particularly, outdated pecially his concept of the inverse sublime. religious forms – disfigure rather than adorn society. The protagonist of Sartor HUMOR AND SOCIOLOGY Resartus, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, shares his author’s view of forms: In an 1830 review in Fraser’s Magazine, Car- lyle lamented that the “true fountain of “All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly comic inspiration has long since been dried up in England,” adding that the drought would continue with the result Carlyle’s Inverse Sublime that “the cursed and Typhonian influ- 94 ence of utilitarianism shall upset and de- In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of stroy all existing institutions, and society the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith explains should begin again, as it were, ‘ab ovo.’” 6 that the individual, “[b]y pursuing his The national comic vision was, of course, own interest[,] . frequently promotes not dead in England; as is the truth of all that of the society more effectually than nations, it was and is irrepressible. What when he really intends to promote it.”9 is, nevertheless, significant about Car- In the field of economics, laissez-faire lyle’s indictment of English humor is therefore operates on the principle that, his reference to the dampening effects socially, self-interest can serve the greater of utilitarianism in a statement about good. Also current in Victorian econom- comic inspiration. This was not mere ic and social thought was the Bentham- hyperbole. For Carlyle – as well as for ite belief that whatever causes the great- numerous other nineteenth-century lit- est happiness is for the greatest good. erary theorists – the humorous and the Carlyle’s reading of the story of Job did social were inseparable. Richard J. Dunn not suggest to him, however, that happi- has examined Carlyle’s oeuvre in terms ness is a meaningful standard for human of his comedy and his social ethos: “Ac- value. Like his friend and literary cor- cording to his theory, humour is more respondent, the American philosopher a philosophic attitude than a stylistic Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Carlyle device; it is ultimately the perspective felt it was more important for individu- which reconciles man’s laughter with his als to be self-reliant than to be happy, and more serious reflections; it gives mean- so he saw the ability to realize self-worth ing and purpose to laughter.”7 Carlyle’s through labor as a more responsible and philosophical attitude and, consequent- Christian basis for determining what ly, his sense of the type of literary com- might prove to serve the greatest good. munity needed to produce and endorse As a result of his conservative human- true humor led to his bitter statement in ism, Carlyle challenged the landed gen- Fraser’s that comedy was effectively dead try on the Corn Laws (1815–46), and yet in an England, where the utilitarian val- he also opposed working-class Chartism. ues of theorists such as Jeremy Bentham The fact that Carlyle, like Karl Marx (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) (1818–83), decried the abuses of Adam were in vogue. Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism did not At issue in much of Carlyle’s writing mean that he favored revolution. Despite during the most productive period of his sympathies for the common man, his prolific literary career (1827–43) is the Carlyle was neither a communist nor a human cost of the industrial revolution; radical. He was a Tory. The true hero in for this reason, Carlylean comedy regrets Carlylean philosophy is not the rebel per rather than endorses the growing mech- se (although his heroes included Oliver anization of society.8 His was a deeply Cromwell) but the individual who cre- conservative humor.
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