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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Carlyle's Laugh, and Other Surprises," Thomas Wentworth Higginson adeptly weaves an intricate tapestry of essays that explore the interplay between humor and the profound weight of existential inquiry. The collection showcases Higginson's trademark literary style that blends sharp wit with poignant insights, earning a place within the rich tradition of 19th-century American essayists. Through his engagement with figures like Thomas Carlyle, Higginson not only reflects on the societal and philosophical currents of his time but also challenges prevailing notions of seriousness in literature, inviting readers to find levity in the gravitas of life. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a prominent figure in American literature and a passionate advocate for social reform, deeply influenced by his engagement with abolitionism and women's rights. His role as a mentor to the literary genius Emily Dickinson further enriched his perspective on individuality and expression. These experiences undoubtedly shaped Higginson's understanding that humor can serve as a necessary counterbalance to the weighty issues of existence, encouraging a reevaluation of both literature and life. This collection is an essential read for those intrigued by the nuances of 19th-century thought and the role of humor in literature. Higginson's blend of erudition and amusement offers timeless revelations that resonate with contemporary readers, making it a vital addition to any literary enthusiast's library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises
Table of Contents
Introduction
Greatness often reveals itself in the smallest and most unexpected of human gestures, and this collection invites readers to look closely enough to notice. Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises by Thomas Wentworth Higginson gathers finely observed essays that linger over telling details and the meanings they disclose. Rather than offering grand systems or sweeping narratives, the book finds significance in moments that might otherwise pass unremarked. Its title signals both a focal portrait and a method: a single trait can illuminate an entire character, and a series of such illuminations can map a world of intellect, temperament, and tone.
This is a work of literary essays and reminiscences composed in a mature phase of the author’s career, first appearing in the early twentieth century. While not centered on a single setting, the collection moves within the cultural spaces of nineteenth-century letters and their afterglow, drawing on encounters, readings, and public talk. Its publication context positions it alongside reflective volumes of the period that sought to make sense of a waning century’s figures and ideas. Readers can expect an urbane, historically conscious vantage, attentive to both American and transatlantic currents without tethering itself to one locale.
The premise is simple and capacious: by attending to striking particulars—an expression, a habit, a turn of phrase—the essays reveal character, influence, and the texture of a life of reading. The title essay uses a distinct, memorable sound as a lens on a renowned thinker, and the “other surprises” widen the lens to encompass many facets of literary culture. Higginson’s voice is poised rather than polemical, favoring measured wit and anecdotal clarity over theoretical apparatus. The mood is companionable and steady, with a cadence that encourages lingering. It is a book to browse as much as to read straight through.
Among its central themes are the tension between public image and private manner, the ethics of judgment in literary appraisal, and the ways memory edits and refines experience. The essays ask what we really know about celebrated figures and how we know it, proposing that personality often discloses itself obliquely. They also explore the craft of attention: the discipline of noticing without haste, of letting small details accumulate into insight. Without revealing outcomes or plot—there are none to spoil—the collection builds an argument for humane curiosity, showing how civility and precision can coexist with incisive critique.
Stylistically, the book balances anecdote with reflection, using concrete episodes as stepping stones toward broader observations. The prose is clear and rhythmic, avoiding ornament when a clean line will do, yet finding room for quiet humor. Assertions are tempered and carefully supported; disagreements are framed as invitations to reconsider, not pronouncements. This approach gives the essays a conversational texture, the sense of an experienced reader thinking aloud in good faith. The structure of individual pieces tends to spiral outward from a vivid center, allowing an arresting detail to lead toward larger implications without exhausting the initial charm.
For readers today, the collection speaks to enduring questions: how to read famous lives without mythologizing, how to argue with generosity, and how to recover depth in a hurried culture. Its focus on small, revealing moments counters the flattening effects of summary and spectacle. The essays also model a cross-generational conversation with the past that resists nostalgia while honoring achievement. In an age saturated with commentary, Higginson’s restraint and precision feel bracing. The short forms make the book welcoming to busy readers, while the cumulative intelligence rewards sustained attention and re-reading.
Approach this volume as a series of encounters: each essay offers a new threshold, a fresh angle, a humanizing surprise. You will not find scandal or definitive biographies but rather finely shaded portraits and considered judgments. The pleasure lies in the steady accumulation of insight, the way a laugh, a gesture, or a habit opens into questions of influence, style, and moral temper. Without demanding specialized knowledge, the book trusts the reader’s patience and curiosity. In return, it offers an intimate education in looking and listening—a disciplined delight that makes familiar names feel newly, vividly present.
Synopsis (Selection)
Carlyle's Laugh, and Other Surprises is a late nineteenth century collection of essays by Thomas Wentworth Higginson that gathers brief studies, portraits, and observations under a unifying theme of the unexpected. The title piece presents Thomas Carlyle’s laugh as a small, vivid token that revises an imposing reputation, setting the method for what follows. Across the volume, Higginson arranges literary sketches, social scenes, and travel notes so that each essay uncovers an unanticipated feature within the familiar. The narrative progression moves from close portraits of eminent figures toward broader reflections on reading, society, nature, reform, and memory, maintaining a calm, descriptive focus throughout.
The opening essays concentrate on personalities. They examine how a single gesture, voice, or habit can complicate the public image of celebrated writers and speakers. Instead of retelling famous achievements, the pieces foreground human details that suggest balance, limitation, or hidden warmth. The approach is comparative, shifting from British to American figures, and from lecture halls to quiet conversations, to show how context alters perception. The recurring point is that character is composite and often misread at a distance. By gathering such particulars, the section builds a measured argument for patient observation as the surest path to understanding influence and temperament.
From portraits, the book turns to the crafts of reading and writing. Essays consider the uses of humor in serious thought, the maintenance of clear style, and the living elasticity of language as it travels between readers and eras. Surprise is treated as a technique that keeps attention awake, rescuing familiar subjects from routine. The pieces offer practical counsel on choosing books, reading with fairness, and recognizing the limits of dogmatic criticism. Rather than laying down rigid rules, they assemble examples, showing how tone, analogy, and unexpected connections can illuminate an argument while preserving accuracy, proportion, and restraint.
The focus then broadens to American social life. Higginson sketches parlors and sidewalks, public meetings and small gatherings, attending to the gestures by which communities define themselves. He notes where custom yields to innovation and where habit quietly resists change, presenting civility as a practice learned through daily encounters. The surprises here are modest yet telling, arising from mismatches between reputation and behavior, or between inherited forms and current needs. Without dramatizing conflict, the essays trace the rhythms of a society negotiating modernity, highlighting how public spirit, local eccentricity, and shared courtesy coexist within towns and cities.
Nature and the body occupy a central stretch of the volume. Outdoor sketches linger on seasons, coastlines, birds, and the steadying work of exercise, suggesting that careful looking trains judgment. A walk, a swim, or a day by the shore becomes an occasion for attention, and attention invites minor revelations that clarify larger patterns. The theme of surprise remains practical: the smallest deviation in weather or habit may refresh perception. The pieces balance observation and classification with an accessible plainness, linking physical vigor to mental steadiness, and placing urban rhythms in dialogue with the restorative cycles of natural surroundings.
Essays on reform and citizenship follow, shaped by the author’s experience in antislavery work and public service. They treat questions of equity, education, and participation as ongoing tasks rather than settled programs. Progress appears uneven, often arriving in oblique ways, with advances and reversals that instruct patience. Institutions such as schools, churches, and newspapers are presented as laboratories where change is tested and refined. The guidance is procedural rather than doctrinal, stressing steadiness, courtesy, and factual grounding. Surprise here identifies openings for improvement in unexpected places, and cautions against both despair and triumphalism by favoring incremental, accountable action.
A series of travel pieces compares American habits with those abroad, especially in England and on the Continent. Museums, parks, and street scenes supply examples of how tradition and novelty intermix differently in older and newer nations. The essays use contrast to clarify, not to rank, proposing that a foreign vantage can correct local assumptions without undermining attachment to home. Surprise functions as a corrective to stereotype, disrupting easy judgments and inviting closer study of manners, institutions, and tastes. The result is a cosmopolitan perspective that measures differences accurately while drawing practical lessons for civic life and cultural development.
Later chapters turn to memory and transmission. Anecdotes of teachers, comrades, and acquaintances illustrate how time reorders earlier impressions, often revealing the significance of events once thought minor. The pieces map the movement from vignette to inference, showing how a carefully kept note or recollection can consolidate a broader conclusion. Literature, in this framing, serves as a vessel for preserving nuance rather than a stage for verdicts. The treatment of the past is methodical and sparing, valuing evidence over flourish. These essays gather the book’s threads, placing surprise within a longer arc of learning and measured remembrance.
The closing section returns to the emblem announced at the start. Carlyle’s laugh stands for any detail that loosens preconception and enlarges judgment. The final essays restate the book’s argument in practice rather than in theory: cultivate receptivity, watch closely, and let small truths amend large opinions. Surprise is neither a trick nor a pose, but a discipline that keeps perception honest in literature, society, nature, and public duty. Without urging grand programs, the volume concludes by affirming attention, proportion, and good faith as durable guides, suggesting that steady openness is the most reliable source of understanding.
Historical Context
Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Carlyle’s Laugh, and Other Surprises (published in 1909) is a late-life collection rooted in the mid- to late-nineteenth century Atlantic world. Its scenes and recollections trace New England reform circles—Boston, Worcester, and Cambridge—during the antebellum crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and extend to the Victorian milieu in Britain evoked through Thomas Carlyle. The work returns to moments shaped by the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), street confrontations in Boston, and the military and social laboratory of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Written after the nadir of Reconstruction, it frames earlier decades from a retrospective vantage, allowing Higginson to assess how civic ideals, religion, law, and popular protest collided in the United States and were debated across the Atlantic.
The abolitionist crisis in the 1850s forms essential background. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled free states to aid in the recapture of enslaved people, nationalizing slaveholder power and provoking mass resistance. In Boston, the Anthony Burns case (May–June 1854) became a defining confrontation: abolitionists attempted to storm the federal courthouse on May 26; federal troops lined the streets to return Burns to slavery on June 2. Massachusetts soon tightened Personal Liberty Laws (1855). Higginson, active in these conflicts, used the lawcourt melee and its moral repercussions to illustrate the radicalization of Northern opinion. The book mirrors this transformation, treating such episodes as crucibles where conscience confronted statute.
John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (October 16–18), looms as the pivotal shock that accelerated disunion. Brown’s small force seized the federal armory to ignite a slave uprising; U.S. Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee, with Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart as intermediary, stormed the engine house and captured Brown. Convicted of treason, murder, and inciting servile insurrection, Brown was executed at Charles Town on December 2, 1859. The raid reverberated nationally: many Southerners saw it as proof of Northern aggression; many Northerners reassessed the moral calculus of antislavery resistance. Around Brown stood a circle of Northern supporters later dubbed the “Secret Six”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith. Investigations pursued them after the raid; Parker died in Italy in 1860, Smith briefly entered an asylum, and Sanborn was nearly abducted by federal agents in Concord on April 3, 1860, before local citizens and a Massachusetts court intervention secured his release. Higginson’s role—moral encouragement, fundraising, and efforts to explore rescue possibilities—exemplified the boundary between advocacy and insurrection that antislavery activists confronted. In the collection, Brown functions less as a romantic martyr than as a referendum on the means of justice when law defends injustice. Higginson’s recollections connect precise locales—Harpers Ferry, Boston parlors, and Concord streets—with the cascading political outcomes: the polarizing election of 1860, secession beginning in December 1860, and civil war in April 1861. His portrayal links private deliberations to public cataclysm, arguing that the raid’s shock clarified the stakes of citizenship, federal authority, and moral duty in a slave republic.
The Civil War transformed antislavery into emancipation and military policy. After the Militia Act (July 17, 1862) and the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), the United States sanctioned Black enlistment; the Bureau of Colored Troops was established on May 22, 1863. Higginson became colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (African Descent), organized among freed people in the Union-occupied Sea Islands after the Port Royal victory (November 7, 1861). The regiment conducted raids along South Carolina and Georgia waterways and tested new labor, schooling, and citizenship arrangements known as the Port Royal Experiment. Approximately 180,000 Black soldiers served the Union. The book reconsiders this laboratory of freedom, depicting how military service, wages, and discipline forged civic claims.
The women’s rights movement frames another axis of reform that Higginson chronicled. The Seneca Falls Convention (New York, 1848) issued the Declaration of Sentiments; the postwar suffrage split produced the American Woman Suffrage Association (1869), co-founded by Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Higginson, alongside the rival National Woman Suffrage Association. The Woman’s Journal began publication in Boston in 1870 as the AWSA’s voice. Campaigns for municipal and school suffrage in New England during the 1870s–1880s kept the question publicly alive. In the collection, Higginson’s portraits of reformers and practical politics situate woman suffrage within a larger civic revolution initiated by antislavery, underscoring continuity among rights claims.
Reconstruction’s rise and retreat supply the book’s sobering horizon. The Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments abolished slavery, defined national citizenship, and protected male voting rights, while the Reconstruction Acts (1867) reorganized Southern governance. White supremacist violence—exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1866)—provoked the Enforcement Acts (1870–1871). The Compromise of 1877 ended federal occupation, and Supreme Court decisions, including the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), legitimated segregation and narrowed federal protections. Higginson’s retrospective stance registers this arc from promise to betrayal. His wartime experiences with Black soldiers lend empirical weight to arguments for enduring federal responsibility and the dangers of abandoning equal citizenship.
The book also opens a transatlantic window through Thomas Carlyle, a towering figure in Victorian public debate. Britain’s social upheavals—Chartist mobilizations (1838–1848, with the Kennington Common demonstration in April 1848) and the Second Reform Act (1867) extending the urban franchise—provoked Carlyle’s skeptical commentary, notably Shooting Niagara: And After? (1867). His earlier Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (1849) exposed a racial and imperial worldview antithetical to American abolitionism. Higginson’s treatment of “Carlyle’s laugh” juxtaposes British moral pessimism and hierarchy with U.S. reformist optimism, using named events and dates to place ideas under the pressure of history. The essay thus reads Victorian conservatism against the empirical record of emancipation and democratic expansion.
As social and political critique, the collection exposes the collision between law and justice in a slaveholding republic, the limits of gradualism, and the costs of retreat from egalitarian commitments. By tracing concrete events—fugitive slave renditions, insurrection, wartime service of Black troops, Reconstruction amendments, and suffrage campaigns—it indicts institutional inertia, racial hierarchy, and gender exclusion. Higginson sets establishment voices, including Carlyle’s, against experiences drawn from courts, streets, and camps, revealing how class privilege and imperial ideology rationalized inequality. The book presses readers to evaluate civic courage, the legitimacy of resistance, and the obligations of the nation-state toward enfranchisement, protection, and the broadening of citizenship.
Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises
ICARLYLE’S LAUGH
CARLYLE’S LAUGH
None of the many sketches of Carlyle that have been published since his death have brought out quite distinctly enough the thing which struck me more forcibly than all else, when in the actual presence of the man; namely, the peculiar quality and expression of his laugh. It need hardly be said that there is a great deal in a laugh[1q]. One of the most telling pieces of oratory that ever reached my ears was Victor Hugo’s vindication, at the Voltaire Centenary in Paris, of that author’s smile. To be sure, Carlyle’s laugh was not like that smile, but it was something as inseparable from his personality, and as essential to the account, when making up one’s estimate of him. It was as individually characteristic as his face or his dress, or his way of talking or of writing. Indeed, it seemed indispensable for the explanation of all of these. I found in looking back upon my first interview with him, that all I had known of Carlyle through others, or through his own books, for twenty-five years, had been utterly defective,—had left out, in fact, the key to his whole nature,—inasmuch as nobody had ever described to me his laugh.
It is impossible to follow the matter further without a little bit of personal narration. On visiting England for the first time, in 1872, I was offered a letter to Carlyle, and declined it. Like all of my own generation, I had been under some personal obligations to him for his early writings,—though in my case this debt was trifling compared with that due to Emerson,—but his “Latter-Day Pamphlets” and his reported utterances on American affairs had taken away all special desire to meet him, besides the ungraciousness said to mark his demeanor toward visitors from the United States. Yet, when I was once fairly launched in that fascinating world of London society, where the American sees, as Willis used to say, whole shelves of his library walking about in coats and gowns, this disinclination rapidly softened. And when Mr. Froude kindly offered to take me with him for one of his afternoon calls on Carlyle, and further proposed that I should join them in their habitual walk through the parks, it was not in human nature—or at least in American nature—to resist.
We accordingly went after lunch, one day in May, to Carlyle’s modest house in Chelsea, and found him in his study, reading—by a chance very appropriate for me—in Weiss’s “Life of Parker.” He received us kindly, but at once began inveighing against the want of arrangement in the book he was reading, the defective grouping of the different parts, and the impossibility of finding anything in it, even by aid of the index. He then went on to speak of Parker himself, and of other Americans whom he had met. I do not recall the details of the conversation, but to my surprise he did not say a single really offensive or ungracious thing. If he did, it related less to my countrymen than to his own, for I remember his saying some rather stern things about Scotchmen. But that which saved these and all his sharpest words from being actually offensive was this, that, after the most vehement tirade, he would suddenly pause, throw his head back, and give as genuine and kindly a laugh as I ever heard from a human being. It was not the bitter laugh of the cynic, nor yet the big-bodied laugh of the burly joker; least of all was it the thin and rasping cackle of the dyspeptic satirist. It was a broad, honest, human laugh, which, beginning in the brain, took into its action the whole heart and diaphragm, and instantly changed the worn face into something frank and even winning, giving to it an expression that would have won the confidence of any child. Nor did it convey the impression of an exceptional thing that had occurred for the first time that day, and might never happen again. Rather, it produced the effect of something habitual; of being the channel, well worn for years, by which the overflow of a strong nature was discharged. It cleared the air like thunder, and left the atmosphere sweet. It seemed to say to himself, if not to us, “Do not let us take this too seriously; it is my way of putting things. What refuge is there for a man who looks below the surface in a world like this, except to laugh now and then?” The laugh, in short, revealed the humorist; if I said the genial humorist, wearing a mask of grimness, I should hardly go too far for the impression it left. At any rate, it shifted the ground, and transferred the whole matter to that realm of thought where men play with things. The instant Carlyle laughed, he seemed to take the counsel of his old friend Emerson, and to write upon the lintels of his doorway, “Whim.”
Whether this interpretation be right or wrong, it is certain that the effect of this new point of view upon one of his visitors was wholly disarming. The bitter and unlovely vision vanished; my armed neutrality went with it, and there I sat talking with Carlyle as fearlessly as if he were an old friend. The talk soon fell on the most dangerous of all ground, our Civil War, which was then near enough to inspire curiosity; and he put questions showing that he had, after all, considered the matter in a sane and reasonable way. He was especially interested in the freed slaves and the colored troops; he said but little, yet that was always to the point, and without one ungenerous word. On the contrary, he showed more readiness to comprehend the situation, as it existed after the war, than was to be found in most Englishmen at that time. The need of giving the ballot to the former slaves he readily admitted, when it was explained to him; and he at once volunteered the remark that in a republic they needed this, as the guarantee of their freedom. “You could do no less,” he said, “for the men who had stood by you.” I could scarcely convince my senses that this manly and reasonable critic was the terrible Carlyle, the hater of “Cuffee” and “Quashee” and of all republican government. If at times a trace of angry exaggeration showed itself, the good, sunny laugh came in and cleared the air.
We walked beneath the lovely trees of Kensington Gardens, then in the glory of an English May; and I had my first sight of the endless procession of riders and equipages in Rotten Row. My two companions received numerous greetings, and as I walked in safe obscurity by their side, I could cast sly glances of keen enjoyment at the odd combination visible in their looks. Froude’s fine face and bearing became familiar afterwards to Americans, and he was irreproachably dressed; while probably no salutation was ever bestowed from an elegant passing carriage on an odder figure than Carlyle. Tall, very thin, and slightly stooping; with unkempt, grizzly whiskers pushed up by a high collar, and kept down by an ancient felt hat; wearing an old faded frock coat, checked waistcoat, coarse gray trousers, and russet shoes; holding a stout stick, with his hands encased in very large gray woolen gloves,—this was Carlyle. I noticed that, when we first left his house, his aspect attracted no notice in the streets, being doubtless familiar in his own neighborhood; but as we went farther and farther on, many eyes were turned in his direction, and men sometimes stopped to gaze at him. Little he noticed it, however, as he plodded along with his eyes cast down or looking straight before him, while his lips poured forth an endless stream of talk. Once and once only he was accosted, and forced to answer; and I recall it with delight as showing how the unerring instinct of childhood coincided with mine, and pronounced him not a man to be feared.
We passed a spot where some nobleman’s grounds were being appropriated for a public park; it was only lately that people had been allowed to cross them, and all was in the rough, preparations for the change having been begun. Part of the turf had been torn up for a road-way, but there was a little emerald strip where three or four ragged children, the oldest not over ten, were turning somersaults in great delight. As we approached, they paused and looked shyly at us, as if uncertain of their right on these premises; and I could see the oldest, a sharp-eyed little London boy, reviewing us with one keen glance, as if selecting him in whom confidence might best be placed. Now I am myself a child-loving person; and I had seen with pleasure Mr. Froude’s kindly ways with his own youthful household: yet the little gamin dismissed us with a glance and fastened on Carlyle. Pausing on one foot, as if ready to take to his heels on the least discouragement, he called out the daring question, “I say, mister, may we roll on this here grass?” The philosopher faced round, leaning on his staff, and replied in a homelier Scotch accent than I had yet heard him use, “Yes, my little fellow, r-r-roll at discraytion!” Instantly the children resumed their antics, while one little girl repeated meditatively, “He says we may roll at discraytion!”—as if it were some new kind of ninepin-ball.
Six years later, I went with my friend Conway to call on Mr. Carlyle once more, and found the kindly laugh still there, though changed, like all else in him, by the advance of years and the solitude of existence. It could not be said of him that he grew old happily, but he did not grow old unkindly, I should say; it was painful to see him, but it was because one pitied him, not by reason of resentment suggested by anything on his part. He announced himself to be, and he visibly was, a man left behind by time and waiting for death. He seemed in a manner sunk within himself; but I remember well the affectionate way in which he spoke of Emerson, who had just sent him the address entitled “The Future of the Republic.” Carlyle remarked, “I’ve just noo been reading it; the dear Emerson, he thinks the whole warrld’s like himself; and if he can just get a million people together and let them all vote, they’ll be sure to vote right and all will go vara weel”; and then came in the brave laugh of old, but briefer and less hearty by reason of years and sorrows.
One may well hesitate before obtruding upon the public any such private impressions of an eminent man. They will always appear either too personal or too trivial. But I have waited in vain to see some justice done to the side of Carlyle here portrayed; and since it has been very commonly asserted that the effect he produced on strangers was that of a rude and offensive person, it seems almost a duty to testify to the very different way in which one American visitor saw him. An impression produced at two interviews, six years apart, may be worth recording, especially if it proved strong enough to outweigh all previous prejudice and antagonism.
In fine, I should be inclined to appeal from all Carlyle’s apparent bitterness and injustice to the mere quality of his laugh, as giving sufficient proof that the gift of humor underlay all else in him. All his critics, I now think, treat him a little too seriously. No matter what his labors or his purposes, the attitude of the humorist was always behind. As I write, there lies before me a scrap from the original manuscript of his “French Revolution,”—the page being written, after the custom of English authors of half a century ago, on both sides of the paper; and as I study it, every curl and twist of the handwriting, every backstroke of the pen, every substitution of a more piquant word for a plainer one, bespeaks the man of whim. Perhaps this quality came by nature through a Scotch ancestry; perhaps it was strengthened by the accidental course of his early reading. It may be that it was Richter who moulded him, after all, rather than Goethe; and we know that Richter was defined by Carlyle, in his very first literary essay, as “a humorist and a philosopher,” putting the humorist first. The German author’s favorite type of character—seen to best advantage in his Siebenkäs of the “Blumen, Frucht, und Dornenstücke”—came nearer to the actual Carlyle than most of the grave portraitures yet executed. He, as is said of Siebenkäs, disguised his heart beneath a grotesque mask, partly for greater freedom, and partly because he preferred whimsically to exaggerate human folly rather than to share it (dass er die menschliche Thorheit mehr travestiere als nachahme). Both characters might be well summed up in the brief sentence which follows: “A humorist in action is but a satirical improvisatore” (Ein handelnder Humorist ist blos ein satirischer Improvisatore). This last phrase, “a satirical improvisatore,” seems to me better than any other to describe Carlyle.
IIA SHELLEY MANUSCRIPT
A SHELLEY MANUSCRIPT
Were I to hear to-morrow that the main library of Harvard University, with every one of its 496,200 volumes, had been reduced to ashes, there is in my mind no question what book I should most regret. It is that unique, battered, dingy little quarto volume of Shelley’s manuscript poems, in his own handwriting and that of his wife, first given by Miss Jane Clairmont (Shelley’s “Constantia”) to Mr. Edward A. Silsbee, and then presented by him to the library. Not only is it full of that aroma of fascination which belongs to the actual handiwork of a master, but its numerous corrections and interlineations make the reader feel that he is actually traveling in the pathway of that delicate mind. Professor George E. Woodberry had the use of it; he printed in the “Harvard University Calendar” a facsimile of the “Ode to a Skylark” as given in the manuscript, and has cited many of its various readings in his edition of Shelley’s poems. But he has passed by a good many others; and some of these need, I think, for the sake of all students of Shelley, to be put in print, so that in case of the loss or destruction of the precious volume, these fragments at least may be preserved.
There occur in this manuscript the following variations from Professor Woodberry’s text of “The Sensitive Plant”—variations not mentioned by him, for some reason or other, in his footnotes or supplemental notes, and yet not canceled by Shelley:—
[Moon is clearly morn in the Harvard MS.]
[The prefatory And is not in the Harvard MS.]
[The word brambles appears for mandrakes in the Harvard MS.]
These three variations, all of which are interesting, are the only ones I have noted as uncanceled in this particular poem, beyond those recorded by Professor Woodberry. But there are many cases where the manuscript shows, in Shelley’s own handwriting, variations subsequently canceled by him; and these deserve study by all students of the poetic art. His ear was so exquisite and his sense of the balance of a phrase so remarkable, that it is always interesting to see the path by which he came to the final utterance, whatever that was. I have, therefore, copied a number of these modified lines, giving, first, Professor Woodberry’s text, and then the original form of language, as it appears in Shelley’s handwriting, italicizing the words which vary, and giving the pages of Professor Woodberry’s edition. The cancelation or change is sometimes made in pen, sometimes in pencil; and it is possible that, in a few cases, it may have been made by Mrs. Shelley.
