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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
During the four years preceding Carlyle's commencement of The French Revolution his ideas on history and historiography underwent a gradual but complete change. In 1830–32 the doctrine of natural supernaturalism convinced him that history was not what the Eighteenth Century had thought it: “Philosophy teaching by Examples,” but “the true Poetry,” “the sole Poetry possible,” —that history and poetry were the same thing. By 1833, in spite of certain ethical and aesthetic doublings, he managed to see with considerable clarity that these two were divine and that Poetry, History, and Religion were really fused into one, and wrote “The Diamond Necklace” as an historical experiment which should reflect this fusion.
1 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Centenary Edition, 5 volumes, iii, 45, 79.
2 Hill Shine, Carlyle's Fusion of Poetry, History, and Religion (Chapel Hill, 1938), pp. 62 ff. Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1826–36, ed. C. E. Norton (London, 1889), p. 378.
3 Professor Shine suggests that one of the things which at first prevented Carlyle from carrying out his new-conceived idea of poetic history was his lack of a “poetic technique in the writing of history.” Hill Shine, op. cit., p. 62.
4 Essays, iii, 57. See the diatribe against reviewing and criticism in “Characteristics,” Essays, iii, 18 ff. Also Letters of Carlyle to Mill, Sterling, and Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London, 1923), p. 59.
5 Letters to Mill, et al., p. 71; also p. 57.
6 The term history is unfortunately ambiguous, referring sometimes to the course of human and worldly events and sometimes to the written account of these events. The first, what Carlyle often calls Universal History, is already poetic, as he understands it; the second must be made so.
7 Essays, iii, 44–45, 325.
8 Letters to Mill, et al., p. 59.
9 Vividness and verisimilitude, then, are requisite. Rather than ask the question Why a thing was done Carlyle chooses to ask How it was done, and urges us to “understand that there verily a Scene of Universal History is being enacted, a little living Time-picture in the bosom of ETERNITY.” Essays, iii, 205.
10 Letters to Mill, et al., p. 59; also Carlyle's letter to John Carlyle, December 24, 1833, quoted in J. A. Froude's Thomas Carlyle, A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, 1795–1835, 2 volumes (London, 1882), ii, 386.
11 For an account of Carlyle's repudiation of fiction, see Carlisle Moore's “Carlyle and Fiction: 1822–34,” Nineteenth-Century Studies (Ithaca, 1940), pp. 131–177. Also Hill Shine, op. cit., pp. 39–56.
12 Though by 1833 he had repudiated fiction as a medium of truth, he admired the devices it employed for purposes of vividness and verisimilitude, and, finding these qualities missing in nearly all histories and biographies, he exempted certain fictional devices which would lend to historical narrative the “impressiveness” it needed.
13 See Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1814–26, ed. C. E. Norton (London, 1886), p. 260.
14 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton (New York: The Grolier Club, 1898), p. 124; Essays, ii, 88–89.
15 Letters, p. 376. Also Letters to Mill, et al., p. 76. The term narrative here meant more than the use of language to describe action; it included all the higher purposes of history. Instead of being “a mere chronicle of occurrences” (Essays, iii, 170; late 1832), it now signified the whole problem of making history poetic by giving it the solidity of experience and the verisimilitude of fiction.
16 In “Characteristics” (1831), written in “the aphoristic style,” he had found it hard to keep from becoming abstruse. (R. H. Shepherd's Life of Thomas Carlyle, 2 volumes [London, 1881], i, 94; and Two Note Books, p. 231). In Sartor (1831) he had spoken freely in his native Scottish idiom, lately colored and broadened by his German reading. While writing “Boswell's Johnson” (1832) he sought to strike “a more currente calamo style of writing,” and soon after declared that “Biography” was written “by way of experiment” in that style. (Two Note Books, pp. 230, 246.) For his freer style, recently developed in Sartor and “Cagliostro,” he was criticized by Mill, Emerson, and Sterling; but the currente calamo manner, though he was to employ it again (chiefly in his Life of Sterling and parts of Past and Present), was not fitted for the kind of historical narrative he wanted to write now.
17 See especially Sartor Resartus, ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston, 1900), Introduction, pp. xlii–k; and Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), Introduction, pp. lviii–lxii.
18 For example, this sentence about Madame de Lamotte as a young girl:
“There thou art, with thy quick lively glances, face of a certain piquancy, thy gossamer untamable character, snappish sallies, glib all-managing tongue; thy whole incarnated, garmented and so sharply appetent ‘spark of Life’; cast down alive into this World, without vote of thine (for the Elective Franchises have not as yet got that length); and wouldst so fain five there.” (Essays, iii, 357.)
19 Though as we shall see, Carlyle sought to write objectively, the vividness of his style was never impersonal, but derived, as Carlyle himself would have admitted, from his “entireness in believing” (D. A. Wilson, Life of Thomas Carlyle, 6 volumes [London, 1923–34], ii, 337), from his conviction that the scene appeared as he, not as anyone else, saw it.
20 Essays, iii, 350.
21 “But, indeed, what of Du Barry? A foul worm; hatched by royal heat, on foul composts, into a flaunting butterfly; now diswinged, and again a worm!” (Ibid., iii, 336.)
22 Ibid., iii, 366. Perhaps an even better example of this rhetorical narrative style is found on p. 341, about Abbé Georgel and his devotion to Cardinal Rohan.
23 Ibid., iii, 344; also “Cagliostro, gone from Strasburg, is as yet far distant, winging his way through dim space; will not be here for months.” (Ibid., iii, 365.)
24 Ibid., iii, 345. See also pp. 364, 368, 390, and 392–402 passim.
25 This is found so frequently in “The Diamond Necklace” that we may assume it to be a part of his style, almost a rhetorical device, which he hit upon and employed as unconsciously as he did other rhetorical figures. Though it does not always appear at the end of a paragraph, this is its usual position, and to end the paragraph effectively is its usual purpose.
26 Essays, iii, 371.
27 Ibid., iii, 367.
28 Ibid., iii, 381.
29 Ibid., iii, 377; also, “Dramatic scenes, in plenty, will follow of themselves; especially that Fourth and final Scene, spoken of above as by another author,—by Destiny itself.” (Ibid., iii, 384.) For other examples, see Ibid., iii, 338–339, 342 (end of first paragraph), 377 (end of second paragraph), and 380 (end of second paragraph).
30 Ibid., iii, 342.
31 Ibid., iii, 373. For the Schiller quotation see Carlyle's Life of Schiller (Centenary Edition), p. 202. Other examples of this type are:
“So good, so free, light-hearted; only sore beset with malicious Polignacs and others; —at times, also, short of money.” (Essays, iii, 362.)
“The starving method, singular as it may seem, brings no capitulation; brings only, after a month's waiting, our tutelary Countess, with a gilt Autograph, indeed, and ‘all wrapt in silk threads, sealed where they cross,‘—but which we read with curses.” (Ibid., iii, 387–388.)
32 Ibid., iii, 363–364. Further examples abound, with many variations. See Essays, iii, 330, 346, 383, 389 (tag ending missing, leaving sense unclear. Purpose: suspense); 355 (tag ending purposely vague, also for suspense); 364 (emphasis); 386 (emphasis).
33 57 out of 169.
34 In parts of Sartor, but more in “Cagliostro,” this temper had prevailed, and Mill, writing to Carlyle in September, 1833 (Wilson, ii, 337), mentioning both these works, asked “whether that mode of writing between sarcasm and irony and earnest be really deserving of so much honour,” to which Carlyle replied: “You are right about my style…. I think often of the matter myself; and see only that I cannot yet see. Irony is a sharp instrument; but ill to handle without cutting yourself. I cannot justify, yet can too well explain what sets me so often on it of late: it is my singularly anomalous position to the world,—and, if you will, my own singularly unreasonable temper. I never know or can even guess what or who my audience is, or whether I have any audience: thus too naturally I adjust myself on the Devil-may-care principle. Besides I have under all my gloom a genuine feeling of the ludicrous; and could have been the merriest of men, had I not been the sickliest and saddest.” (Letters to Mill, et al., p. 74; September 24, 1833.)
35 Essays, iii, 248–249; C. F. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (New Haven, 1934), pp. 174–176.
36 Essays, iii, 250–260.
37 Ibid., iii, 368–369.
38 Dr. Maginn and others writing for periodicals like Fraser's Magazine might play hide-and-seek with the reader, but the historian was expected to maintain a dignified reserve. Even the writer of fiction felt that he should not intrude far into the world he was depicting. There were some notable exceptions: Fielding, in Tom Jones; Sterne, in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Rabelais, in Gargantua; Jean Paul Richter, in Quintus Fixlein —who had overstepped the traditional traces and addressed themselves familiarly to the reader or to the characters. Of these authors, Richter provided most support for Carlyle, but none of them can be said to have exerted a direct influence upon him in this matter. They corroborated but did not teach him.
39 “Now for all such purposes, high, low, ephemeral, eternal, the first indispensable condition of conditions, is that we see the things transacted, and picture them out wholly as if they stood before our eyes.” (Letters to Mill, et al., p. 83; December 17, 1833.)
40 Essays, ii, 89–90.
41 Ibid., iii, 379–380. The second paragraph of Chapter xii is a good example of his success in this effort.
42 In the passage about Cardinal Rohan's apparently increasing favor with the Queen, Carlyle is all three:
“But will she not, perhaps, in some future priceless Interview, speak a good word for thee? Thy self shall speak it, happy Eminence; at least, write it: our tutelary Countess will be the bearer!—On the 21st of March goes off that long exculpatory imploratory Letter: it is the first Letter that went off from Cardinal to Queen; to be followed, in time, by ‘above two hundred others’; which are graciously answered by verbal Messages, nay, at length by Royal Autographs on gilt paper,—the whole delivered by our tutelary Countess. The tutelary Countess comes and goes, fetching and carrying; with the gravity of a Roman Augur, inspects those extraordinary chicken-bowels, and draws prognostics from them. Things are in fair train: the Dauphiness took some offence at Monseigneur, but the Queen has nigh forgotten it. No inexorable Queen; ah no!” (Ibid., iii, 361–362.)
43 Ibid., iii, 381. The preceding and complementary passage, on p. 365 (Chapter viii, paragraph 2), also illustrates this. Both, it will be noticed, are recounted from the point of view of Cardinal Rohan. Also p. 382 (Chapter xiii, paragraph 3).
44 Examples: to Boehmer, Essays, iii, 337; to Cardinal Rohan, ibid., 361, 365; to Countess de Lamotte, ibid., 368; to the Queen, ibid., 363, 364. There is also apostrophe to the Necklace, ibid., 367.
45 Ibid., iii, 386; see also the brief exchange of words between Carlyle and Boehmer, p. 332.
46 Ibid., iii, 358.
47 Ibid., iii, 352.
48 Ibid., iii, 250.
49 Ibid., iii, 402.
50 Ibid., iii, 349, 364.
51 It may be well to distinguish between episode and anecdote. An episode is a well-built unit of highly concentrated narrative whose primary aim is vividness. The anecdote is the same thing carrying some philosophic or didactic message. The two are essentially the same in narrative method: anecdote differs from episode only in that it points a moral or illustrates a general truth. Of the ten leading incidents in “The Diamond Necklace,” seven are not anecdotes, but rather “real-poetic Exhibitions”—i.e., episodes that advance the narrative but point no moral. Taken in historical perspective, the Necklace Affair itself might be regarded as an incident which he fashioned into a large anecdote, pointing the moral clearly enough. Only the form of “The Diamond Necklace” precludes this assumption. The truth is that, because all the component events pointed toward the one final truth, the incident as a whole did not furnish many anecdotes. Since from the point of view of the narrative, anecdote and episode are indistinguishable, all that is said about episode in the subsequent paragraphs may be taken to refer also to anecdote.
52 Ibid., iii, 370.
53 Ibid., iii, 378.
54 Ibid., iii, 359.
55 There is one attempt at it, done in the most farcical of moods. In Chapter ix we saw Rohan ostensibly met by the Queen herself at night in the Park of Versailles. Although the spirit of burlesque that pervades the passage immediately exposes the deception to the reader, the figure of the “white Juno” is not openly admitted to be false, and Carlyle urges the reader “to repress that too insatiable scientific curiosity of thine” until the scene shall have been acted through. In the next chapter the secret is elaborately “discovered.” Though this method involves no suspense, and does not fool the reader, it does mockingly glorify the Countess's dramaturgic prowess—which was Carlyle's purpose.
56 Ibid., iii, 355. This love of indirection and suggestion is closely linked with Carlyle's figurativeness. Wolsey “could journey, it is said, without strait-waistcoat, to his monastery; and there telling beads, look forward to a still longer journey.” (Ibid., iii, 345.) The Necklace vanished “through the Horn Gate of Dreams.” (Ibid., iii, 381.) After midnight the Countess can “gradually sink into needful slumber, perhaps not unbroken by dreams.” (Ibid., iii, 379.)
57 Ibid., iii, 367; also 376–378, 385.
58 “… the historical eye beholds him, bowing low, with plenteous smiles, in the plush Saloon of Audience. Will it please Monseigneur, then, to do the ne-plus-ultra of Necklaces the honour of looking at it? A piece of Art, which the Universe cannot parallel, shall be parted with (Necessity compels Court-Jewellers) at that ruinously low sum….” (Ibid., iii, 379–380. See also 341, 347, 382.)
59 “Is the Queen's Majesty at heart desirous of it; but again, at the moment, too poor? Our tutelary Countess answers vaguely, mysteriously;—confesses at last, under oath of secrecy, her own private suspicion that the Queen wants this same Necklace, of all things; but dare not, for a stingy husband, buy it.” (Ibid., iii, 368; also 332.)
60 The following paragraph is written from the point of view of Rohan; it contains contributed speech and direct discourse; and the last sentence breaks the spell with a brilliant observation.
“Hark! Clang of opening doors! She issues, like the Moon in silver brightness, down the Eastern steeps. La Reine vientl What a figure! I (with the aid of glasses) discern her. O Fairest, Peerless! Let the hum of minor discoursing hush itself wholly; and only one successive rolling peal of Vive la Reine, like the movable radiance of a train of fire-works, irradiate her path.—Ye Immortals! She does, she beckons, turns her head this way!—‘Does she not?‘ says Countess de Lamotte.—Versailles, the Oeil-de-Boeuf, and all men and things are drowned in a Sea of Light; Monseigneur and that high beckoning Head are alone, with each other in the Universe.” (Ibid., iii, 383.)
61 C. F. Harrold, “The Method and Sources of Carlyle's French Revolution,” unpublished thesis, 2 volumes [Yale, 1925], i, 191–204.
62 Ibid., i, 200, note 1.
63 Essays, iii, 388.
64 Ibid., iii, 363–364. See also Ibid., iii, 310, 338, 366, 382–383.
65 Two Note Books, pp. 187–188.
66 Essays, iii, 176.
67 Though uncommon in the historical works Carlyle was familiar with, the device could have been suggested to him by rhetoric, poetry, or the novel. Figures of comparison and antithesis, with respect both to time and place, were employed in oratory to arouse the passions of pity, fear, and wonder (see Quintilian's Institutio Oratorio, Loeb Classical Library, Bk. vi, chs. i, ii. The 
of the Greeks seem to have been much like Carlyle's synoptic views. Ibid., Bk. vi, ch. i, section 29). In the traditional elegy, from Theocritus onward, it was conventional for the poet to compare the happy past with the unhappy present (“For we were nurst upon the self-same hill…”); and in the novel a kind of temporal or spatial contrast was commonplace. But the synthesizing tendency of Carlyle's mind was encouraged most of all by his Calvinist-Transcendentalist view of history, according to which chronology had little value and the picture of Truth had often to be pieced together from scenes out of past, present, and future.
68 Essays, iii, 259–260.
69 Ibid., iii, 260.
70 This is no place to discuss the correctness of Carlyle's account of the Necklace Affair. His sources, the best available to him, were certainly inadequate, and it is probably true that “the chief correction which Michelet's greater command of documents enabled him to make on Carlyle's facts concerns the episode of the Diamond Necklace.” (Wilson, Life of Carlyle, iii, 417–118.) But the truth of that episode is not even now established beyond dispute (J. D. Charnier, The Dubious Tale of the Diamond Necklace [N. Y., 1939], Preface), and Carlyle's account, concurring broadly with Frantz Funck-Brentano's, still represents the most commonly accepted view.
71 A close comparison of “The Diamond Necklace” with its sources confirms Professor C. F. Harrold's observations in his article on “Carlyle's General Method in the French Revolution,” PMLA, xxiii, 1150–70. In “The Diamond Necklace” Carlyle acknowledged thirteen sources; though if he read other accounts of the Necklace Affair in the Advocates' Library, in the Barjarg Library, or among the books Mill lent him, their influence cannot be detected in his work. Of the thirteen, the most important were the memoirs of Abbé Georgel, Madame Campan, and the “Countess” de Lamotte, and a collection of twenty-one testimonials called Affaire du Collier (Paris, 1785). None of them were in the least “poetic,” or even graphic; hence no stylistic influence is to be found, though Carlyle admires the Countess's talent for anecdote. In his generalized (running) narrative style, he usually compressed his sources, “packed into one paragraph perhaps the gist of ten or a dozen accounts” (C. F. Harrold, op. cit., pp. 1152–53). It is perhaps not enough to say, however, that “Excerpted passages were thus subjected to stylistic changes and to a general fusion into a larger whole, rather than entirely assimilated … to produce a … new narrative” (ibid., p. 1167). The narrative of “The Diamond Necklace” is in every sense Carlyle's own, not merely a fusion of others' works. Especially in the detailed narrative of the dramatic episodes he often expanded and, recreating the scene imaginatively, wrote independently of the sources. Compare, for example, the paragraph quoted above, note 60, with the passage on which it was based:
“… le lendemain, jour de la purification, le grand-aumônier, se trouvant près de l'oeil de boeuf, crut remarquer distinctement le signe qu'on lui avoit indiqué. C'est ainsi que l'esprit de séduction arrivoit à ses fins.” (Mémoires pour servir â l'histoire des événemens de la fin du dixkuitième siècle … par … L'Abbé Georgel, 2 volumes [Paris, 1820], ii, 65.)
72 Quoted by C. F. Harrold, “Carlyle and Novalis,” Studies in Philology, xxvii, 58.
73 Essays, iii, 402. This device may have been suggested to Carlyle by the parabases of Thucydides and other classical historians, who often spoke to the reader in long speeches containing their own views on personal or state matters, which were put into the mouths of actual historical personages.
74 Letters to Mill, et al., p. 123.
75 Fiction might have played another rôle in “The Diamond Necklace.” Though never realized, the idea illustrates how reluctantly Carlyle's practice followed after his theoretical dislike of all but one kind of fiction, and how his love of hoax persisted side by side with a hatred of lying. In September, 1834, still unable to sell “The Diamond Necklace,” he wrote to Mill for advice on how and where to offer it for publication. At the same time he proposed to palm it off as a translation “From the French of Potdevin. With Notes. By T. Carlyle,” and added: “I will speak of it as being ‘in rhyme in the original’ (which partly it was), and so forth; and give it a kind of quizzical garniture, thro’ which the true authorship may peer out clearly enough. What think you of ‘Potdevin’ (Pot-of-wine, Into-the-bargain) ! I can give criticisms of him …” (Letters to Mill, et al., pp. 104–105). One regrets that Potdevin was never brought to life. Carlyle refused to let Mill publish it at his own expense, and the matter was dropped when Fraser agreed to take it and release it shortly before the appearance of The French Revolution.
76 Ibid., iii, 44–45; see also Two Note Books, p. 188 (February, 1831), where Carlyle first suggests the idea interrogatively.
77 If history were rightly composed, the interpretation would take care of itself—would be visible in the picture. Carlyle was not a realist. When he wrote to Mill that he had tried in “The Diamond Necklace” to achieve the poetic “by sticking actually to the realities of the thing,” he referred only to those parts of it that seemed realities to him, When he spoke of describing events as they actually were, he was not committing himself to objectivity: interpretation was included. What he paints for us is not the thing as it is, but the thing as he sees it.
78 Essays, iii, 330.
79 Carlyle rarely expressed satisfaction with his own works, though he may have felt it. “The Diamond Necklace,” he wrote in his journal (January 11, 1834), was “a singular sort of thing … very far from pleasing me,” though to his brother John he had written that it was done “with the strictest fidelity, yet in a kind of musical way.” (Froude, Thomas Carlyle … 1795–1835, ii, 386, 403.) To Emerson he declared that he had “not yet got to the limitations of” the idea that “the only Poetry is History,” and implied that though “The Diamond Necklace” had not wholly solved his problem it had helped considerably. (The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–72, 2 volumes [Boston, 1883], i, 24–25.)