Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, pat terns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of man contrived to do or to attain.
A subsequent paragraph abbreviates this to “The History of the World was the Biography of Great Men.” For determinists, the hero is, above all, a consequence; for Carlyle, he is a cause.
Herbert Spencer observes that although Carlyle believed he had abjured the faith of his fathers, his concepts of the world, man, and ethics prove he never ceased to be a rigid Calvinist. His dark pessimism, his doctrine of the select few (the heroes) and the almost infinite multitudes of the damned (the rabble) are an obvious Presbyterian legacy, though he once declared during an argument that the immortality of the soul is “old Jewish rags” and, in an 1847 letter, that the faith of Christ has degenerated into a vile, cloying religion of cowards.
More important than Carlyle’s religion is his political theory. His contemporaries did not understand it, but it can now be summed up in a single household word: Nazism. This was substantiated by Bertrand Russell in his study The Ancestry of Fascism (1935) and by Chesterton in The End of the Armistice (1940). Chesterton’s lucid pages speak of the astonishment and even stupefaction produced in him by his first contact with Nazism, a new doctrine that brought back touching childhood memories. Writes G. K. C.:
That in my normal journey towards the grave this sudden reappearance of all that was bad and barbarous and stupid and ignorant in Carlyle, without a touch of what was really quaint and humorous in him, should suddenly start up like a specter in my path strikes me as some thing quite incredible. It is as incredible as seeing Prince Albert come down from the Albert Memorial and walk across Kensington Gardens.
There is an ample supply of texts to prove it: Nazism (insofar as it is not merely the expression of certain racial vanities we all darkly possess, especially the blockheads and thugs among us) is a reedition of the wraths of the Scottish Carlyle, who, in 1843, wrote that democracy is the despair of not finding heroes to lead us. In 1870, he celebrated the victory of “noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany” over “vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and over-sensitive France.” He praised the Middle Ages, denounced parliamentary windbags, and defended the memory of the god Thor, William the Bastard, Knox, Cromwell, Frederick II, the taciturn Dr. Francia, and Napoleon; he was pleased that every community had its barracks and its jail; he yearned for a world that was not “chaos equipped with ballot urns”; he thought about hatred; he thought about the death penalty; he abhorred the abolition of slavery; he proposed that statues—”horrendous bronze solecisms”—be converted into useful bronze bathtubs; he declared that a tortured Jew is preferable to a millionaire Jew; he said that any society that is neither dead nor rushing toward death is a hierarchy; he defended Bismarck, and venerated, and may have invented, the Germanic Race. Those who feel in need of further pronouncements by Carlyle—I have barely begun to glean them here—may examine Past and Present (1843) and the tumultuous Latter-Day Pamphlets of the year 1850. In the present book they abound, particularly in the final lecture, which, with arguments that are worthy of a South American dictator, defends the dissolution of the English Parliament by Cromwell’s musketeers.
The concepts I have just detailed are not illogical. Once the hero’s divine mission has been postulated, it is inevitable that we deem him (and that he deem himself) free of human obligation, like Dostoevsky’s most famous protagonist, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham. It is also inevitable that any political adventurer will consider himself a hero and will reason that his own excesses are reliable proof of that.
In the first book of the Pharsalia, Lucan has engraved this sharp line: “Victrix causa diisplacuit, sed victa Catoni” [The victor’s cause was pleasing to the gods, but that of the vanquished, to Cato], which posits that a man can be right against the universe. For Carlyle, on the contrary, history is conflated with justice. Those who deserve victory will triumph: a principle that reveals to students of history that Napoleon’s cause was irreproachable until the morning of Waterloo, and unjust and hateful by ten o’clock that night.
Such corroborations do not invalidate Carlyle’s sincerity. No one has felt as strongly as he did that this world is unreal (unreal as a nightmare, and as ghastly). From this general phantasmality, he salvages one thing: work. Not its result, which is mere vanity, mere image, but its execution. He writes that the works of mankind are transitory, small and insignificant in themselves; only the worker and the spirit that inhabits him have meaning.
A little over a hundred years ago, Carlyle believed he perceived the disintegration of an outmoded world taking place around him, and he saw no other remedy than the abolition of all parliaments and the unconditional surrender of power to strong, silent men.83 Russia, Germany and Italy have drunk the benefits of this universal panacea to the dregs; the results are servility, fear, brutality, mental indigence, and treachery.
Much has been said of the influence of Jean-Paul Richter on Carlyle, who rendered Richter’s Das Leben des Quintus Fixlein into English; no one, however distracted, could possibly confuse a single page with the translator’s original work. Both are labyrinthine, but Richter is labyrinthine out of sentimentalism, languor, sensuality; Carlyle, because passion belabors him.
In August 1833, the youthful Emerson visited the Carlyles in the solitudes of Craigenputtock. (That same afternoon, Carlyle pondered Gibbon’s history and called it the splendid bridge between the ancient world and the new.) In 1847, Emerson returned to England and gave the lectures that form Representative Men, whose outline is identical to that of Carlyle’s series. I suspect that Emerson cultivated this formal likeness to make the essential differences stand out all the more.
Heroes, for Carlyle, are intractable demigods who—with some slight military frankness and foul language—rule a subaltern humanity; Emerson, on the contrary, venerates them as splendid examples of the possibilities that exist in every man. Pindar, for him, is proof of my poetic faculties; Swedenborg or Plotinus, of my capacity for ecstasy. “In every work of genius,” he writes, “we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” In another essay he observes: “It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world; such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single, all-knowing master.” And in another: ‘‘An everlasting Now reigns in Nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the Chaldean in their hanging-gardens.”
The foregoing lines will suffice to establish the fantastic philosophy professed by Emerson: monism. Our destiny is tragic because we are, irreparably, individuals, restricted by time and by space; there is nothing, consequently, more favorable than a faith that eliminates circumstances and declares that every man is all men and that there is no one who is not the universe. Those who profess such a doctrine are generally unfortunate or mediocre, avid to annul themselves in the cosmos; despite a pulmonary disorder, Emerson was instinctively happy. He encouraged Whitman and Thoreau; he was a great intellectual poet, a skilled maker of aphorisms, a man who delighted in the varieties of being, a generous and sensitive reader of the Celts and the Greeks, the Alexandrians and the Persians.
The Latinists nicknamed Solinus “Pliny’s monkey”; toward 1873, the poet Swinburne believed himself to have been injured by Emerson, and sent him a letter which includes these curious words, and others I do not wish to recall: “You, sir, are a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle.” In 1897, Groussac dispensed with the zoological simile but not with the imputation:
As for the transcendental and symbolic Emerson, it is well known that he was a sort of American Carlyle, without the Scotchman’s acute style or prodigious historic vision. Carlyle often becomes obscure by rea
son of his profundity, but I fear that at times Emerson appears profound by reason of his obscurity; in any case, he was never able to shake off the fascination that he who was exercised over he who could have been; and only the ingenuous vanity of his countrymen could place the modest disciple on the same level as the master, the disciple who to the end, in that master’s regard, retained something of the respectful attitude of Eckermann before Goethe.
With or without the baboon, both accusations are mistaken; Emerson and Carlyle have almost no other trait in common than their enmity for the eighteenth century. Carlyle was a romantic writer, of plebeian vices and virtues; Emerson, a classical writer and a gentleman.
In an otherwise unsatisfactory article in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Paul Elmer More considers him “the outstanding figure in American letters”; previously, Nietzsche had written: “To no other book have I felt as close as to the books of Emerson; I do not have the right to praise them.”
Through time, through history, Whitman and Poe, as inventors, as the founders of sects, have overshadowed Emerson’s glory; line by line, they are greatly inferior to him.
[1949] [EA]
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
In the second century of our era, Lucian of Samosata composed a True History that includes, among other marvels, a description of the Selenites, who (according to the truthful historian) card and spin metals and glass, remove and replace their eyes, and drink air-juice or squeezed air; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto imagined a hero who discovers on the moon all that has been lost on earth, the tears and sighs of lovers, the time wasted on games, the fruitless attempts and the unfulfilled desires; in the seventeenth century, Kepler wrote a Somnium Astronomicum that purports to be a transcription of a book read in a dream, whose pages reveal at great length the appearance and habits of the lunar snakes, which take shelter in deep caves during the heat of the day and venture out at nightfall. Between the first and the second of these imaginary voyages there is one thousand three hundred years, and between the second and the third a hun dred; the first two are, nevertheless, free and capricious inventions, and the third is dulled by an urge for verisimilitude. The reason is clear. For Lucian and Ariosto, a trip to the moon was a symbol or archetype of the impossible, as a black swan was for the former; for Kepler, it was a possibility, as it is for us. Did not John Wilkins, inventor of a universal language, publish at that time his A Discovery of a New World; or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, that ‘tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in the Moon: with a Discourse Concerning the Probability of a Passage Thither? In Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights we read that Archytas the Pythagorean constructed a wooden dove that could fly through the air; Wilkins predicted that a vehicle with a similar mechanism or shape would one day take us to the moon.
In its character of anticipating a possible or probable future, the Somnium Astronomicum prefigures, if I am not mistaken, the new narrative genre which the Americans of the North call “science-fiction” or “scientifiction,” of which a notable example is these Chronicles. Its subject is the conquest and colonization of the planet Mars. This arduous enterprise by the men of the future seems destined for its time, but Ray Bradbury has chosen to employ (without, perhaps, attempting to do so, and through the secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. The Martians, who at the beginning of the book are terrifying, become worthy of pity as they are annihilated. Mankind triumphs, and the author takes no delight in their victory. He announces with sadness and disappointment the future expansion of the human race to the red planet—which his prophecy reveals to us is a desert of shifting blue sands, with ruins of grid-patterned cities and yellow sunsets and ancient boats for traveling over the sand.
Other authors stamp a future date, and we don’t believe them, for we know that it is merely a literary convention; Bradbury writes “2004,” and we feel the gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and shifting accumulation of the past—Shakespeare’s “dark backward and abysm of Time.” As the Renaissance observed, through the words of Giordano Bruno and Bacon, we are the true ancients, not the people of Genesis or Homer.
What has this man from Illinois created—I ask myself, closing the pages of his book—that his episodes of the conquest of another planet fill me with such terror and solitude?
How can these fantasies move me, and in such an intimate manner? All literature (I would dare to answer) is symbolic; there are a few fundamental experiences, and it is unimportant whether a writer, in transmitting them, makes use of the “fantastic” or the “real,” Macbeth or Raskolnikov, the invasion of Belgium in August 1914 or an invasion of Mars. What does it matter if it this is a novel, or novelty, of science fiction? In this outwardly fantastic book, Bradbury has set out the long empty Sundays, the American tedium, and his own solitude, as Sinclair Lewis did in Main Street.
Perhaps “The Third Expedition” is the most alarming story in this volume. Its horror (I suspect) is metaphysical; the uncertain identity of Captain John Black’s guests disturbingly insinuates that we too do not know who we are, nor what we look like in the eyes of God. I would also like to note the episode entitled “The Martian,” which includes a moving variation on the myth of Proteus.
Around 1909 I read, with fascination and distress, in the dim light of a huge house that no longer exists, Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Thanks to these Chronicles, though different in conception and execution, I was able, in the last days of the autumn of 1954, to relive that delicious terror.
[1955] [EW]
Film Reviews and Criticism
The Cinematograph, the Biograph
A film was once called a “biograph”; now we generally say “cinematograph.” The first term died, perhaps because fame required more clamor, perhaps because the implication of Boswell or Voltaire made it threateningly lofty. I would not lament that demise (similar to thousands of others in the con tinuing necrology of semantics) if words were indifferent symbols. I doubt that they are, for they traffic in similarities, opinions, condemnations. Every word implies an argument that may be a sophistry. Here, without entering into a discussion of which is the best, it is easy to observe that the word cinematograph is better than biograph. The latter, if my intuitive grasp of Greek does not betray me, means “life-writing”; the former refers solely to motion. The two ideas, although dialectically reducible to the same thing, imply different orientations, variations that entitle me to distinguish them and to assign one meaning to cinematograph and another to biograph. Let me assure my reader that such a distinction, limited to this article, is not of major significance.
“Cinematography” is the writing of motion, signifying in its emphasis rapidity, solemnity, turmoil. This mode of operation pertains to its origins, whose only material is speed; ridiculous in the unhappy bewilderment of those who only knew how to carry on with stages and sets, epic in the dust storm of a cowboy picture. It is also peculiar, by the malicious paradox of things, to the so-called avant-garde cinema; an institution reduced to nour ishing, with more enriched means, the same old fluster. The original specta tor would be amazed by a single horseman; today’s equivalent needs many men or the superimposed vision of a railroad train, a column of workers, a ship. The substance of the emotion is the same: bourgeois shock at the dev ilish antics produced by machines, as invented with an excessive name, “magic lantern,” for the toy Athanasius Kircher presented in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae. For the spectator, it is mere frightening technological stupidity; for the fabricator, it is lazy invention, taking advantage of the fluency of visual images. His inertia is comparable precisely to that of metrical poets, who are aided by the continuity of syntax and the linked inference from one phrase to another. The gaucho troubadours also make use of that continuity. I say this without the slightest contempt; it cannot be decisively proven that thinking—ours, Schopenhauer’s, Shaw’s—is more freely determined; a doubt I possess thanks to Fritz Mauthner.
Having eliminated, to our relief, the cinematograph, what follows is the biograph. How should we see it, entangled as it is with an inferior crowd? The quickest procedure is to look for the names of Charlie Chaplin, Emil Jannings, George Bancroft, or of a few afflicted Russians. An efficient way, but too contemporary, too circumstantial. We may formulate a general application (though not, like the other, predictive) as follows: The biograph reveals to us individual lives; it presents souls to the soul. The definition is brief; its proof (feeling a presence, a human rapport, or not) is an elementary act. It is the reaction we all use to judge books of imagination. A novel presents the fates of many; a poem or an essay, one single life. (The poet or essayist is a novelist of one character: Heinrich Heine’s twelve volumes are only inhabited by Heinrich Heine, Unamuno’s works by Unamuno. The dramatic poets—Browning, Shakespeare—and the narrative essayists—Lytton Strachey, Macaulay—are completely novelists, the only difference being their less hidden passions.) I repeat: the biograph is that which adds people. The other, the non-biograph, the cinematograph, is deserted, without any other connection to human lives except through factories, machinery, palaces, cavalry charges, and other allusions to reality or easy generalities. It is an inhospitable, oppressive zone.
To go back to Chaplin as the perfect defense of the biograph is an obligation that delights me. I cannot think of more lovely inventions. There is his tremulous epic The Gold Rush-a title well translated into French, La Ruée ver l’or [The Rush toward Gold], and badly into Spanish, La quimera del oro [The Chimera of Gold]. Recall a few of its moments. Chaplin, a fine little Jewish fellow, walks vertiginously along a narrow path, with the mountain wall on one side and a deep ravine on the other. A big bear emerges and follows him. Chaplin, angelically absentminded, has not noticed. They continue in this manner a few more suspenseful seconds: the beast almost sniffing at his heels, the man keeping his balance with his cane, his ill-fitting top hat, and almost with his straight black mustache. The spectator expects Chaplin to be smacked by a paw at any moment and frightfully awakened. At that moment the bear comes upon and enters his cave and the man continues on his way, without having seen anything. The situation has been resolved—or dissolved—magically. Two were absentminded instead of just one; God, this time, has been no less delicate than Chaplin. I will describe another incident, also constructed upon absent mindedness. Chaplin, in a frock coat, uncomfortable, returns as a millionaire from Alaska. The danger is that we will feel he is too triumphant, too identified with his dollars. He is received by a steamship whose crew appears to consist exclusively of fawning photographers. On deck, Chaplin strolls between admiring rows of onlookers. Suddenly, uncouth angel that he is, he notices a twisted cigarette butt on the floor, bends over, and picks it up. Is he not absentminded to an almost saintly degree? Each scene of The Gold Rush is equally intense. Moreover, Chaplin’s is not the only story—which distinguishes this film from others, pure monologues by their inventor, such as The Kid and The Circus—Jim, who discovered a mountain of gold and no longer knows where it is, tramps around the brothels with that perturbed memory and impervious oblivion; Georgina, the dancer, faithful only to her imperious beauty, light-footed on earth; Larsen, the man whose greeting is a gunshot, resigned to being the bad guy, possessed by the mortal innocence of depravity: all of these are complete stories.