British and Irish Literature Archives - Page 6 of 10

The “Free” and Fragile World of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters.

Introduction to the Characters

At Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed.

Shaky Foundations

Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top.

Technology and Squirrels

Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. She describes the people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, who can “neither live in the world nor out of it”. These people, who are looking for a way to make their “spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish”, are disappointed by the growing bureaucratised, technological world that was becoming ever more dominant in the years after the Second World War. They head to the lay community as an act of flight. It’s not clear what they want, so much as what they don’t want. For example, many of them see farming in much the same way as does Wendell Berry, aiming to use only horses and the simplest tools to provide for their own sustenance.

Michael, meanwhile, wants to purchase “a mechanical cultivator”. He doesn’t understand why they cannot make use of the good bits of the outside world – the technology – while avoiding the bad. For many of the others, the work loses its dignity when a machine is involved. Another argument breaks out of the squirrels and pigeons of the community. These and other pests have been eating the crops and fruits of the garden, and Nick and others have been shooting them. Long before tractors were invented, farmers defended their wealth from winged and furry intruders. But the community is divided yet again – Catherine does not want to see any of the animals getting hurt. Although they all want a bounteous garden in their utopia, nobody can agree on how to achieve it. They are united more than anything else by their desire to escape the world. Murdoch asks if that is truly enough.

Christianity – various interpretations

Murdoch was not a Christian, but she was, from what I gather, what we might term “spiritual” these days, and she has a lot of sympathy for the religion of the majority of the characters depicted in The Bell. At the same time, it is religion that must also bear part of the blame for the fragility of the world of the novel. Just as people retreat from the world for different reasons, so too do they believe completely differently in the same religion. This is exemplified in the two sermons recounted in the story, one by James and one by Michael. James’s sermon talks of the need to “live without any image of oneself” in order to achieve the good life. Personality, he thinks, gets in the way of goodness. James’s vision of the community is one of order and – for some, stifling – conformity.

Michael’s sermon, given later, essentially says the opposite. His speech, as introduced, begins just as James’s had, with the phrase “the chief requirement of the good life”. But Michael argues that the secret is that “one should have some conception of one’s capacities”. Instead of destroying personality, we must work within it, using it to better live according to God’s wishes. Michael’s view is influenced by his actions earlier in the novel, in particular by his guilt over his love for Toby and Nick. He convinces himself that God would not have made him the way he is without a purpose, and that in his love there is a great value, however wrong the love is.

Bells themselves help make clear to the reader the conflicting interpretations of Christianity that Michael and James offer. Each of them uses the image of the bell in their sermons, but reach a completely different result thereby. Photo by I, Randal.J. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both sermons sound, at least to a layperson like myself, sufficiently Christian. And both I think have merit too – for anyone who has found the evil in themselves will inevitably oscillate between these two views about how to exorcise it, through the destruction of the personality that contains the evil, or through the transformation of that evil into good through force of personality. Yet these two sermons make it clear that Christianity, at least as most of us understand it, is full of contradictions. Dostoevsky, at this moment, would step up and say that that is the point. Only Christianity is capable of offering a way of life that can deal with human contradictions, thanks to its own contradictions – any other ideology will inevitably disappoint. However we look at it, though, within the context of The Bell religion has an ambivalent role, being another site where a supposedly united community divides.

Are Murdoch’s Characters Free?

I remember reading a comment from James Wood, a critic I like, that although Murdoch “again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist … her own characters never have this freedom”. There are some excellent things in The Bell, but I cannot help but agree with Wood’s assessment. Murdoch’s characters are intelligent, they have their own personalities, but they are not at all free. Not in the sense that they are bound by external forces, like class – that kind of unfreedom is de rigueur for a realist novelist. Nor are they unfree in the sense that Bakhtin thinks Tolstoy’s characters are unfree – that they all, consciously or not, reflect Tolstoy’s way of thinking and force the reader into it. Murdoch’s characters are unfree in the sense that they do not escape her.

In preparation for this piece I watched an interview with Murdoch that I enjoyed a great deal, but one thing that struck me was the way that she emphasised just how much planning goes into her novels. The whole book is planned in great detail, even on the level of chapters and dialogues, long before she begins to write. It is perfectly reasonable to plan things, but I think that in this lies the unfreedom of her characters. They always feel incapable of spontaneity, even if they are supposed to be spontaneous, because any spontaneous actions have been meticulously planned out already. Whatever freedom they have is structurally insincere, and we feel that, reading the book. Murdoch is hostile to things like the “machinery of sin and repentance” that govern the characters’ personalities, but she seems to have overlooked the machinery of control that her own writing places upon them.

Conclusion

That her characters feel unfree is not, however, as big a criticism as it might seem. There are fewer free characters in fiction than it seems at first glance. It is only when characters claim to be free – as they do here – but are not, that we have a problem. Murdoch’s planning does so much good for The Bell that I do not want to seem like I am criticising it. The work is extremely intelligent, at times funny, very well written, worthy of analysis, and – what is far more important anyway – worthy of thought. Whether or not the characters are ultimately free and real is secondary to this. It deals with these simple, but rather important questions – of how we should live, what we should believe, and how to be good and free – in such an effective manner that I do not mind its one, rather small, fault.

The Bell is a novel I can certainly recommend, from an author I know I will read more of.

Our “heroic” forebears – Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians

On the very first page of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians he manages to get a date wrong. For any normal work of biography this would be a death sentence. But Eminent Victorians is not a normal work of biography – it comes to me, via the wonderful Richard Holmes, as an Oxford World’s Classic. This collection of four biographical portraits – of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon – is a brilliantly written takedown of the great mythic figures of Victorian Britain. Empire, Church, and Public School are rent asunder. We should read this book not for the facts – which, to be fair, are generally accurate – but for the feelings, for the mood. In this conflict between visions of the world – Strachey’s ironic modern view, and the earnestness of the Victorians – lies its great interest. And the prose is the most brilliant vehicle for bringing it all to us.

Introduction to the Players

Of the list – Manning, Nightingale, Arnold, and Gordon – I knew Gordon and Nightingale before I started reading. Manning was one of the most famous converts from Anglicanism, the state religion of England, to Roman Catholicism. His story centres around the finer points of religious doctrine, and the power politics of the Church. Florence Nightingale -perhaps the most famous nurse of all time – we know her particularly for her work in the Crimean War, but Strachey explores the whole of her long and rich life in his piece. Dr Arnold I should probably have known – he was a great reformer of the public school, Rugby. Gordon, Gordon of Khartoum, is one of Britain’s greatest Imperial heroes – which is perhaps not as great an honour now as it once was. Gordon’s claim to posthumous fame was dramatically dying in the Sudan while protecting British interests.

I shall go through each piece briefly, highlighting both its interest to the modern reader – after all, who cares about the finer points of Anglican doctrine? – and its sparkling prose.

Cardinal Manning

I am not entirely familiar with the finer points of church doctrine. One thing that strikes one, reading Eminent Victorians, is just how obsessed all of these people were over religion. Already by Strachey’s time one has the impression that people did not care. But back then, there were real crises of faith, real discussions – and dissentions – over baptism and all the rest of it. This Manning fellow was terrified by God from the age of four. He grew up well connected, was friends with Gladstone. “Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches?” – what more, indeed, even today does an Englishman need? But Manning’s family ran out of money, and the ambitious young man had to settle with becoming a churchman, rather than a politician.

Anglicanism is often divided in High Church and Low Church. These two terms refer to its interpretation – are we to be closer to the Protestants, or to the Roman Catholics? The former term denotes a preference for Rome, the latter a preference for Geneva. Manning was always a High Churchman at heart, but this position always leaves one open to the temptation to go all the way – to become, in short, a Papist. This is what happens. Manning becomes convert, manipulates the workings of power at the Vatican, and raises himself through the ranks, all while continuing to be tormented by his bad conscience. At one point he appears to be on the verge of becoming pope but refuses to let his ambition get the better of him.

How strange all this reads to us, in our godless age. Not that these people were any different from us. If anything, Strachey’s account reveals that the petty power politics of the church are just the same as they are anywhere else. But their concerns seem so distant from our own. It’s hard to imagine these days the horror that swept over Europe when Papal Infallibility was affirmed and explained in 1870. But so it was. The whole piece, rather too long, is still an interesting window into another world.

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale is another one of the Eminent Victorians who was religiously insane. The popular image of her heroically giving up a life of riches and privilege to be a nurse is, to Strachey’s mind, slightly inaccurate. Instead, “A Demon possessed her”. Nightingale’s story I feel is particularly relevant to our own age, where activism often drives people to self-destruction. For she was an activist who knew no limits. She had been born into great wealth and privilege, but she also suffered from a religious mania. Strachey notes that “she could not bear to smile or to be gay, ‘because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin’”. And so she works, and she works hard. Admittedly, “it sometimes happens that the plans of Providence are a little difficult to follow”, but with the Crimean War all was plain.

She went to the wretched hospitals of Constantinople and Crimea and fought the most deadly enemy of all – the British bureaucracy. She introduced many and serious improvements to the administration of these hospitals and cared for soldiers’ mental wellbeing just as much as for their physical one. But then we are finished with Crimea – the life we know as legend has ended, and Strachey keeps going. We learn of her tireless work back in Britain, to reform the army, then the hospitals of India, and hospitals more broadly.

We meet the great enemies of progress, such as Lord Panmure, for whom “duty was paramount; and he set himself, with a sigh of resignation, to the task of doing as little of it as he possibly could” and Ben Hawes, “a man remarkable even among civil servants for adroitness in baffling inconvenient inquires, resource in raising false issues, and, in short, a consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud”.

We learn that her great successes were not only thanks to her devotion to the cause, but also due to class. Yes, she was from the highest steps of society, and that counts for something. She may be a woman, but class can balance that out somewhat. We learn that Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, happened to have been a neighbour of her father’s in the New Forest. Nightingale was a success, but she had plenty of help.

And then there is the matter of how she treated those nearest to her. She was an invalid for much of her life, even though it barely stopped her from working the whole time. Still, she was dependent upon the help of others. Sidney Herbert, perhaps her closest friend, falls ill because of her demands of him. But she keeps demanding, and soon enough she breaks his spirit and he dies. Her friends draw away from her, but still, she keeps working. Strachey notes that “when the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplace of the moral judgement are better left unmade”. But of course, that is not the case – he knows it too.

Nightingale’s words on receiving the Order of Merit, “too kind – too kind” sum up her life. She made the mistake we all are vulnerable to, of forgetting the individual in one’s duty to the whole. Failing to care for those closest to her rather makes her drive, her “demon”, a little suspect. She did good, yes, but at what cost?

Dr Arnold

Ah, school! Dr Arnold was made headmaster of Rugby at a time when public schools like Eton or Winchester were dens of depravity and lawlessness – but still the place to be, if you wanted to make a Cabinet Minister. Arnold was as religious as the rest of our Victorians, but he had an ingenious solution to the problems of faith – he ignored them. The result was that “he soon found himself blessed with a perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.” In those days, “sheer force of character” was key to being a head man at a public school, those “very seats and nurseries of vice”, as Mr Bowdler, from whom we get the word Bowdlerize, described them, and Arnold certainly had something like that.

Arnold had a chance to reform public education. But in Strachey’s view, he messed up. Instead of broadening children’s minds, bringing them into contact with educated men and women, or building an enlightened community, he focused on making the school “a place of really Christian education”. School became a theocracy, “the boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race”. All this is very funny, but not what people want. Once, Arnold even makes a newspaper – “the paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone”. Strachey enjoys pointing out that these religious people have a rather poor understanding of what people actually want from life.

Even the religious-educational side of things did not really work. Arnold, who naturally preached to the children often enough, like my own dear headmaster at my old public school, managed to make something of a cult around himself. Strachey leaves the whole thing smelling of idolatry and children, not knowing better, drawn in by a strong character. Arnold failed in his reforms, and he failed to reform man himself too. Oh well. At least the piece is hilarious.

General Gordon

My favourite of the Eminent Victorians Gordon of Khartoum. How could it be otherwise? Gordon’s story reads like a curious mixture of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. We are introduced to a wanderer in Palestine, a man with childish sincerity in his eyes and the “sunburnt brick-red complexion” of any Englishman abroad. Strachey warns us immediately that the man’s peace – he has spent the year reading the Bible and solving millennia-old riddles – will soon be broken, and he will be destroyed. Conrad here, for sure, is visible in the murky style Strachey employs – “one catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last – so it almost seems – like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe”. Yes, here is Conrad – the smallness of the individual, the unknowability of the truth, the sense of doom.

But who was Gordon? Like the others, he was a fanatic. Not for Empire, like the monstrous Cecil Rhodes, but for God. He feared His retribution, was all-too-aware of his own fallenness. But he was an adventurer and an Englishman, all the same. He fought in China, he destroyed the slave trade in Sudan (“the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a government monopoly in ivory was to be established”), helped the government accidentally annex Egypt.

What one gets from Gordon’s story is a sense of the bankruptcy of Empire. Gordon is a chess piece, played among different members of the Liberal Party back in Britain – some wanting still more Empire, the others trying to leash the dogs of war. The press, too, play a role in demanding war, in puffing up Gordon, in forcing the government to let him get to work. Gordon goes to the Sudan a second, final, time, to deal with a religious rebellion that is threatening the government in Egypt. Ironically, his abolition of the slave trade helped foment this rebellion to begin with – and the only way he can put it down is by reinstating the trade. A lesser evil, he might have said. Once he is there, in Sudan, Gordon is Gordon Pasha anyway. Like Lord Jim, he has become a new person, free from the old world.

In Khartoum, Gordon is besieged. Communication lines are cut, and he has to hold out. He goes increasingly insane – no small feat, since he didn’t exactly seem normal earlier. He is convinced that Ernest Renan – the author of the ground-breaking Life of Jesus – is out in the desert, waiting for him. He continues noting down ramblings directed to God. They run out of food, morale wavers. Two days before a relief force arrives, Gordon is killed. If the government had acted sooner – and Strachey shows wonderfully the workings of government with the telling phrase “surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late” – he would have survived. Instead, he became history.

Things work themselves out. Really, “it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”. For the individuals like Sir Evelyn, the villain of the story, the lives of the Arabs do not matter. Indeed, nobody matters except themselves and increasing the amount of British pink upon the map. Strachey both tells the story of a heroic life, but as with all the rest, it is one that is consumed by madness of a certain sort, given up in service of something not entirely good on retrospect. But hey, it’s a cracking story.

Conclusion

One comes away from Eminent Victorians with a sense of the sheer power of these men and woman’s convictions, and the sheer irrelevance of most of them. If only they put their energies into bettering the world by our modern standards. But we should not judge them too harshly. Did they not, at least, have faith and convictions – the things most of us lack these days? They were manic, many of them, yes. But even through Strachey’s irony it is impossible to avoid the sensation that these were people who would crush us now by their sheer force of character. The Victorians may have been prudes, but they had their power. Indeed, they have it still.

For another Victorian character not spared a certain madness, I have written on Thomas Carlyle here.

Thomas Carlyle, Prophet or Petty Pamphleteer?

There are, it seems, two ways of coming to Thomas Carlyle. The first, and tamest, is through the likes of Borges, who praised Carlyle’s experimental novel Sartor Resartus as a model to be emulated. The second route is far less innocent. Carlyle is perhaps the best known these days for his “fascism”. Carlyle’s dates obviously don’t have anything to do with fascism – he was born in 1795 and died in 1881. However, the man’s politics have aged extraordinarily badly. We may overlook or even, unthinkingly, admire his theory of Great Men, at least from a distance, but as soon as his authoritarianism comes out in his writing it only gets louder and louder, and less and less reasonable or coherent.

I have spent a few weeks with the Penguin edition of Carlyle’s Selected Writings, and in this post I suppose my goal is simply to suggest why there might be a reason to read this side of Carlyle, however reprehensible it may be.

Why read him?

One way to read Carlyle is less as a thinker so much as a character. Carlyle was a Scot. His parents wanted him to be a preacher but he ended up losing his faith. Nevertheless, there’s a strong prophetic tone to his writing that is impossible to avoid. Carlyle is completely incapable of writing in clear English. Not prophecy, but “vaticination”, not a standard sentence but all sorts of inversion. There are plenty of allusions, lists, and terrible images. From the back of my book – “Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal… for it is the hour!”

One gets the sense that Carlyle was rather disappointed to be born after the French Revolution, the subject of his major historical work. He has a certain relish for chaos that is distinctly Romantic. And indeed, it’s best to think of Carlyle as a Romantic, one born to late and who lived too long. His fearful view of technology, his praise of the individual and their genius, his loathing for the conforming masses, are all in their essence Romantic. In particular, Carlyle takes a lot from the German Romantics, and was a huge fan of Goethe (seemingly without noticing that Goethe renounced Romanticism later in his life). And these German Romantics were, it must be said, politically suspect. Aside from their support of Revolution, the sheer anti-rationality of the likes of Novalis has left a painful legacy in the intellectual history of the world.

Out of the Romantics grew Carlyle’s views of Great Men. In “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” Carlyle laid out his view of Great Men as those who take the “dry dead fuel” of “common languid Times” and exploit it to achieve great things. Their conviction is at the heart of their strength. Except, wait a moment, haven’t we by this point in human history noticed that conviction often is little indication of goodness? Stalin, of course, had his convictions, as did Hitler. Generally I disapprove of bringing in these two, because they are classic examples which end up stifling arguments. But in Carlyle’s case the comparison really is appropriate. When he writes that the average man is nothing more than a “dumb creature” saying in “inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!”” we see a man who has so little respect for the average human being as to approve of any authority capable of guiding them, without ever questioning their true nature.

So, Carlyle was a fool. That’s no reason to read him, for there have been plenty of fools in history. But I think as a character, he’s interesting. The introduction to my copy is heavy with irony – a particular favourite line is “nothing is more remarkable in Carlyle than the way in which he simply stopped thinking.” But once we get beyond such humour, there’s a sense of sadness in Carlyle’s gradual collapse into authoritarianism. Friends and admirers, even philosophical opponents such as J. S. Mill, turned their backs on him as he grew more and more extreme. Conservatives rejected him for his distrust of the landowners and new money, while those on the side of progress had no time for him at all, even though much of what he said – the criticism of his world – was in line with their own ideas.

Ah, it is not easy, this apologetics business! Carlyle’s works speak for themselves, and not altogether to his credit. The gradual turning inwards of their creator, his isolation, his sense of being outside of time and in a hostile, incorrect world – these are more interesting in a novel’s main character, than in a writer of tracts who had real influence. Carlyle is not without his similarities to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, which I looked at last week. But still we should read him, I think, and not just because we should always try to engage with ideas we do not call our own. For one, he was incredibly influential in his day, and he has a rather unique style (I shan’t call it good). But most importantly, his criticisms are powerful, however inadequate are his solutions.

Through a look at the essays “Signs of the Times” and “Chartism” I’ll try to demonstrate Carlyle’s worth as a thinker as well as a character.

Thomas Carlyle, in all his glory. What is there in those eyes?

Signs of the Times

“Signs of the Times”, written in 1829, begins by criticising of the world Carlyle was living in. It is a world of prophecy, rather than living in the moment. Nations and thinkers were all in an apocalyptic frame of mind – whether the Utilitarians in Britain under Bentham or the Millenarians who predicted the return of Christ to earth and its somewhat rapid end thereafter. Carlyle’s main problem with all this constant prophesying is that it’s a symptom of an unhealthy age – an “Age of Machinery”. And not just in the simple sense, of spinning jennies and railway engines and steam – things every British schoolchild, even me, manages to learn about. No, if it were only that, perhaps Carlyle would not have to complain, though he does have sympathy for the weavers who lose their jobs to “iron fingers”, or the sailors who are replaced by steam’s “vaporous wings”.

Instead, the “Age of Machinery” is really about what we might nowadays call systems. It is an age of “adapting means to ends” which at first leads to great advances in wellbeing, as machines come into mass use. But then we start becoming so goal-orientated that people become means in themselves, rather than ends. “The internal and spiritual” side of us is overtaken by this thinking. We lose our spontaneity, our sense of individuality. The Romanticism is visible in Carlyle’s idea that instead of a genius weaver, we now only have talented machine users. Skill, which can be made to a pattern, replaces whatever lies deeply inside of us.

Our institutions, whether the church or the arts or the sciences, are all affected by this way of thinking. Christianity, Carlyle enjoys reminding us, spread because of the force of its “Idea” and the passion of missionaries. It did not spread because everyone was organising meetings or giving our pamphlets. In sum, his enemy is a materialism, a belief in science far greater than even the previous century had had. But it is also a hugely destructive belief, for we end up turning our backs on and denying all that “cannot be investigated and understood mechanically”. The spiritual side of human beings is denied in favour a simple happiness – the sort that lets itself be measured.

However appealing this is on the surface, I have a great deal of hesitation about it. It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at human value. One says that the goal of any theory should be the happiness of the many, while the other looks only at the peak of human achievement, vaguely defined. The former is utilitarian, while the latter is Carlylean (or Nietzschean). The danger is that in pursuing personal human achievement, we achieve general human degradation. Nietzsche’s solution, and I suspect Carlyle’s, is simply not to care about the masses. But it’s not a view which I myself much enjoy, even as I agree with Carlyle that any theory that deflates the spiritual side of humanity is pretty awful too.

This essay is interesting, of course, because the problems have not gone away. In our own age we are under the thumb of great systems, with nary a thought given to our spiritual, internal workings. Indeed, much of what Carlyle says seems in line with contemporary thought about capitalism’s effects on the individual. And when Carlyle speaks of the power of passion, of the Idea, to break through the stultifying frames of these systems, it’s a view that appeals. Carlyle’s piece ends with a muted optimism, a sense that out of this conflict between old and new a better world will be born. Alas, it’s taking a long time to come.

Chartism

“Chartism” was written ten years after “Signs of the Times” and is an altogether less pleasant essay to read. All the same, again there are some things here that are pretty sensible. It was written during a time of great working-class upheaval in Britain and asks what the solution is to the problem. Although the Chartists – the group in revolt – had a charter (it’s in the name), Carlyle does not trust them to know what they want – “these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!” Still, he still less trusts the politicians of the day to know what is wrong.

Carlyle is scathing of Britain’s political elite, and also of the “statisticians”. There is an impressive paragraph when he takes statisticians to task for asking the wrong questions. Impressive because Carlyle lists all of the things that one would need to measure, from social mobility to stability of work, to actually know whether the condition of the working class was good. Simply saying that wages are rising is not enough – that fact alone does not mean that things are getting better. It is a criticism that has lost none of its force. Charitably speaking, there are too many of us unconsciously thinking that a healthy “economy” is the solution to all of the world’s woes, without thinking about such questions as how that wealth is actually distributed or accessed. It’s impressive that Carlyle does not miss this point.

And just as importantly, he sees that an overreliance on statistics is bad in another way, because it devalues life, and reduces us to just a number. Carlyle sees that workers – and human beings – struggle for “just wages” not just in the sense of money, but in terms of dignity too. But just when he seems to be saying something sensible, Carlyle gets started on the Irish. “The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated.” Yeah, I’m not going to defend this rubbish. Nor what Carlyle says about the Irish spreading bad values like a contagion into Britain itself.

Carlyle talks about dignity, and for him it comes down to justice. But where he goes from there is pretty ridiculous. Might is apparently right. Anyone who has governed a place we must believe is a just ruler, because otherwise they would not have been able to continue ruling. England is fine for Ireland because the Irish haven’t overthrown us (they did). Secret police, guards on every street corner, and a military presence have absolutely nothing to do with control – justice is the reason we continue to rule. “Might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same”. Carlyle, of course, did not live in the twentieth century. His heart, I am sure, never left the eighteenth. But it must be said that if anything, might has very rarely equalled right, and he’s very much mistaken to think that it ever has.

So, anyway, what do we do with the working class, and with England? Though Carlyle complains that the solutions to poverty in Britain (the “Poor Law”) was a simple solution to a complex problem, and a disaster, his own solutions are no more complex. We do not exterminate the Irish – we merely deport them. Mr Carlyle has heard there’s plenty of land over in Canada where we could send them. As for the British, a bit of forced emigration wouldn’t go amiss either, alongside some education. Now, it is the case that we have some political problems in this country too, so we’d better get a “real aristocracy”. No, Carlyle doesn’t want any of that democracy trash. Strong leaders, powerful Ideas! Man, what a great ideologue Carlyle would have made.

Carlyle, clearly, was struggling for people to support him. In chapter eight he invents (!) a fake book, “History of the Teuton Kindred”, which he quotes for several pages, to support his own ideas. Again, if Carlyle were a literary creation, this would be funny – a little postmodern flourish. As it happens, he was a man, and this just suggests a kind of sad isolation. “Chartism” begins so well, with its diagnosis of the times and how they short-change the individual, but it ends so badly. It was rejected by all the journals of the day and Carlyle had to publish it himself.

Conclusion

Alan Shelston, who penned my edition’s introduction, ultimately gives up on trying to defend Carlyle’s politics and just says they the result of “not ideological belief but rather psychological disturbance and intellectual deterioration”. Maybe. Any belief is the result of something, but finding the correct origin doesn’t change the belief itself. Carlyle is a strange writer. Full of good ideas and bad, unlike a poet or fiction writer it’s much harder to overlook the bad in him. As a man of his time, he is fascinating, but as a thinker, he is deeply concerning. I keep coming back to this idea of him as a character in some postmodern adventure. Ultimately, I think that’s the best way to approach him. Carlyle is someone to look at from a distance, to analyse from one’s armchair, but not to emulate, not to love. That, I think, is fair.