The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    family, and if there had, Carlyle at the time when his manner of writing was formed, would scarcely have sought to imitate them. Yet we could not conceive this stern, laborious, plebeian family of Lowland Scots—with its remote Teutonic affinities, its coarseness, its narrowness, its assertive inarticulate force—in any more fitting verbal translation than was given it by this its last son, the pathetic little figure with the face of a lost child, who wrote in a padded room and turned the rough muscular and reproductive activity of his fathers into more than half a century of eloquent chatter concerning Work and Silence, so writing his name in letters of gold on the dome of the British Museum.1 When we consider the characteristics not of the family 1 This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle's genius. That I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter (to my friend the late Rev. Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of Carlyle’s Reminiscences : “ This is not Carlylese, but it is finer. The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘ great prophet ’ notion. Carlyle is not (as we were once taught) a ‘ great moral teacher,’ but, in the high sense, a great comedian. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German Aristo¬ phanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long dis¬ tance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes, with the same mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. Flis humour is, too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there too). In his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not, like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was venerated ; it is now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest.