Clubbe: Froude’s Life of Carlyle

Froude’s Life of Carlyle

Abridged and Edited by John Clubbe

Perhaps no biographer has ever had so much manuscript material by and about his subject as did James Anthony Froude when he undertook to write the life of Thomas Carlyle. The four-volume work that resulted from his labors attests that he drew heavily on the mass of letters, journals, and reminiscences that Carlyle left him.

The biography’s formidable length and the criticisms leveled against it on publication in 1882 and 1884 that it was inaccurate and slipshod, that it presented a flawed portrait of Carlyle, have served over the years to discourage all but the most dedicated students of the Victorian period from tackling it. Professor Clubbe regrets that the allegations against Froude have never been satisfactorily answered and that the biography has been relegated to undeserved obscurity. His introduction by focusing on Froude’s art and technique offers, in effect, a substantially new interpretation of the author’s purpose in writing the biography. It is Professor Clubbe’s opinion that Froude’s Life is one of the two or three truly great biographies in the English language.

This abridgment reduces by more than one-half the nearly two thousand pages of the original through judicious pruning of the lengthy quotations from Carlyle and others (one extract alone runs to almost thirty pages) that the conventions of Victorian biographical practice led Froude to include and that disrupt the otherwise smooth flow of the narrative. Happily, too, Professor Clubbe is able to demonstrate conclusively that though Froude often got punctuation wrong and copied words incorrectly, he rarely distorted the sense of what he quoted: almost all quoted passages that remain are given in accurate texts. The shrill protests of Carlye’s niece and nephew notwithstanding. Froude’s assessment of his subject’s character is intelligent, informed, and responsible—weighted, no doubt, by sympathy for Mrs. Carlyle, but not malicious, nor essentially unjust to Carlyle.

In a real sense, then, Professor Clubbe has restored to literature and to our appreciation a masterpiece long hidden. His notes clarify obscure matters, indicate discoveries of later scholarship, and try to answer obvious questions that the reader is likely to have. By freeing Froude’s text (almost all of which he retains) from the excessive documentation of the Victorian “life and letters,” he makes it accessible to the modern reader, who will find, to his profit and perhaps to his surprise, that whether his interest is in biography as a genre, the nineteenth century in general, or specifically in Carlyle, few books have more to teach him than Froude’s Life of that most eminent of Victorians.

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Soellner: Timon of Athens

Timon of Athens

Shakespeare’s Pessimistic Tragedy

Rolf Soellner

Perhaps the most problematical of Shakespeare’s tragedies opens on a distinctly ominous if nonetheless casual note. A poet and painter meet and, after exchanging greetings, the former asks, “How goes the world?” Whereupon the painter replies, “It wears, sir, as it grows”—to which the poet responds, as to a cliché, “Ay, that’s well known.”

The notion of the world’s decay, a survivor of the contempus mundi of medieval philosophy, with its groundings in conceptions of the Fall and Last Judgment, achieved a renewed ascendancy in the darkening climate of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And it is, Professor Soellner points out, only in the mood and tenor engendered by this pervasive pessimism, which many critics of Timon have found uncongenial, that we can come fully to understand Shakespeare’s misanthrope, who has been much maligned as the inferior of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, but who is, if not entirely their equal, an authentic tragic hero in his own right.

Professor Soellner accepts Timon as a tragedy, albeit one that does not necessarily satisfy standard definitions; and though he readily concedes that there are sporadic textual deficiencies, he finds in the structure of the play, its characterization, imagery, and thematic development, the imprint of Shakespeare’s incomparable genius and the indisputable evidence of the drama’s having been meticulously worked out in conformity with a controlling and high tragic design. Indeed, having chosen to treat the difficult subject of an uncompromising and tragic misanthropy, Dr. Soellner argues, Shakespeare anchored the play more deliberately and securely in the pessimistic intellectual tradition than has heretofore been supposed, and made the superbly right decision of presenting Timon’s rejection of a depraved mankind and his contempt for a morally decadent world as an absolute pessimism that is both micro- and macrocosmic.

In delineating his hero’s misanthropy as a tragic predicament, Shakespeare made of it a recognizably human response to a glaring act of ingratitude by a rapacious and exploitative society. Therefore, Timon’s misanthropy is not merely the obverse of his flawed idealism and equally unacceptable, but constitutes also an awakening to the real evil around him. His metamorphosis signals indeed, somewhat paradoxically, an improvement in his character and an enhancement of his stature; for it imposes on his perceptions a closer congruence with the truth of a world that is both corrupted and corrupting, and produces in us, the audience, the amazement, the awe, and even the respect—indeed the pity and fear—that mark the customary response to the tragic hero.

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Gregory: Vox Populi

Vox Populi

Violence and Popular Involvement in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century A.D.

Timothy E. Gregory

It was one of the most characteristic if puzzling phenomena of the later Roman Empire that the man in the street commonly engaged in open and heated debate of complex theological questions that seemingly had no immediate relevance to his daily life. According to one contemporary commentator, Gregory of Nyssa, “If you ask the price of bread, you are told, ‘The Father is greater and the Soun inferior.’” And the passionate arguments that raged in all the cities of the East did not, in every case, end with mere words, but led often to acts of anger and violence. Church4es were burned in the night, and cities were drenched in blood. The emperor himself was frequently forced to turn aside from political and military affairs to put down factionalism within the cities, where, on one occasion alone, over three thousand lives were lost in a single assault.

Ancient authors, borrowing their models, perhaps, from Thucydides or Tacitus, recognized the danger inherent in urban upheaval and popular unrest; but with a general disregard for the substantive issues that provoked dispute, they were inclined to attribute them simply and wholly to a natural perversity on the part of crowds that caused them to resort to violence and foster rebellion for their own sakes. Consequently, judgments of the motives behind insurgent acts of the sordida plebs were summarily reached on the basis of a single criterion. If, as usually was the case, the crowd did something of which upper-class literary observers disapproved, its incentive was condemned as base. But if, as it rarely did, an action of the populace gained approval, its inspiration was praised as a rare instance of collective wisdom and the love of truth.

Historiographic progress beyond this rudimentary scheme, Professor Gregory finds, was not made in the centuries that followed, when it remained the prevalent view that the powerful in society were the proper subjects of historical inquiry. It was not, indeed, until the beginning of the present century that, largely as a result of the influence of Marxist thought, historians began to pay serious attention to the role of the crowd in antiquity.

After discussing the reasons serving to explain why individuals accepted one theological position over another, Professor Gregory turns to the complex question of why the inhabitants of the late Roman cities became involved in religious disputes in the first place and gained thereby some measure of political force. He concludes that the uneducated populace of, for example, Constantinople, could not possibly have understood either the nature of populist power or the philosophical basis of a dispute over complex theological questions concerning the unity of divine and human elements in the person of Christ. But what the sailor and the shopkeeper who participated in that formal debate did understand was the personal importance of the controversy itself. They took sides in it, not because they were recalcitrant by nature and simply like a good fight, but because they recognized that on its resolution depended their personal salvation.

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