Since, as Carlyle says in On History Again, history is ‘the only articulate communication … which the Past can have with the Present’, the task of the historian, and it is an extremely urgent one, must be to isolate the message from the irrelevant matter by which it is obscured:

… To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what no longer reaches to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more.

(Oliver Cromwell, Introduction, Ch. 1)

History, then, must be relevant, and history must concern itself with the lives of men, since these are the ultimate reality. First and foremost, of course, it must concern itself with the lives of Heroes, but it does not deal with them in isolation since

… Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men’s Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

(On History)

It is understandable that Carlyle’s obsession with the Hero should have received so much attention, but in that it had a radical effect on his historical technique it is perhaps this emphasis on ‘innumerable biographies’ that is the most interesting aspect of Carlyle’s approach to history to us today. Certainly the great central characters of his dramas remain in our memory – Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre and Danton in The French Revolution; Frederick, and his father, Frederick Wilhelm, in Frederick the Great – but they play out their parts against the ceaseless activity of the multitudionus extras in the cast, and it is this ceaseless activity that remains as our most durable impression.

Carlyle was aware from the first of the methodological problems which his conception of history involved. In a letter to Mill in 1833 he insisted, discussing the art of history, that ‘the first indispensable condition of conditions is that we see the things transacted’, but the problem of translating that vision to the reader is no simple one since, as he points out in On History, the actual process of recording events destroys their vitality:

The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the series of his own impressions: his observation, therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous … It is not in acted, as it is in written History: actual events are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are; every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new: it is an ever living, ever working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements,

and finally, in a McLuhanesque flourish:

Narrative is linear, Action is solid.

For all his contempt for ‘Dryasdust’, Carlyle was an assiduous researcher where his own projects were concerned and for each of his three major historical works he undertook substantial preparation. To cope with the problems of recapturing the actual texture of events themselves he devised a unique method of deploying the labours of his research, converting the actual sources which he consulted into a reconstituted and revitalized artistic medium. In The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell the method is fairly straightforward, if original at the time: the story of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth is told in Cromwell’s own words with the assistance of interspersed editorial comment. In The French Revolution, however, and in Frederick the Great, the method is far more complex. In each of these works Carlyle creates from his sources a vast historical collage, all the time quoting from them either directly or obliquely, and indeed if necessary quoting himself in an attempt to avoid the impersonality of the authorial voice. At its worst the technique is disjointed, confusing and ultimately tedious: this is most obviously the case in long sections of Frederick the Great, where Carlyle, disillusioned both by the work in hand and by the consciousness of failure in the prophetic role in which he had cast himself, was unable to summon up the reserves of energy and concentration that his method demands. In The French Revolution, however, written when Carlyle was at the height of his powers, the method is a triumphant success; inspired by Carlyle’s conviction of the significance of his theme and underpinned by a firmly held narrative line, it vindicates as far as anything can his inspirational concept of history.

A distinguished Professor, now long since retired, was reputed to indicate the impending conclusion of his lectures with the words, ‘now for a few poetic touches’. No discussion of Carlyle can evade the problem of his style, but if it is introduced at this point as a phenomenon on its own that is not because it is felt that it can be treated in any way as an afterthought. Carlyle’s style is part and parcel of his apocalyptic message, as he himself indicated when he observed to Sterling that he saw ‘the whole structure of Johnsonian English breaking up from its foundations, revolutions there as visible as anywhere else!’ The peculiar feverishness of Carlyle’s mode of expression, the sense which the reader gets of the ink not having been given time to dry on the page, is a direct consequence of his relentless emphasis on the need to be constantly active:

I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesmal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it then. Up, Up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.

That passage comes at the conclusion of the climactic chapter on ‘The Everlasting Yea’ in Sartor Resartus; the man who wrote it can scarcely have seen literary style as a conscious adornment of the content of his work.

Nevertheless Carlyle’s style – what critics have come to call ‘Carlylese’ – is so remarkably unlike anything else in English literature that it has seemed impenetrable to many readers. Indeed the difficulties which it poses, one suspects, contributed much at one time to his appeal as ‘literature’ (one remembers Leonard Bast, in Howards End, attempting to form his prose style on the model of Ruskin: ‘he understood him to be the greatest master of English prose’). The chief characteristic of the style, however, is rhetorical rather than literary, a direct consequence of that impulse which led to his parents’ aspirations that Carlyle might one day occupy a Presbyterian pulpit.

Carlyle’s prose aims above all at involving, and indeed implicating, the reader in the unending battle against the false gods of nineteenth-century England. It is declamatory, gymnastically aggressive, and cares little for the nuances of reason and sensitivity. Its devices are legion, but one can, I think, distinguish three particular features which contribute to its hortatory effect: in the first place there is a deliberate distortion of conventional sentence structure which attracts the reader by its very virtuosity; secondly there is the repetition of particularly distinctive phrases, sometimes coinages of Carlyle’s own making; and finally there is the extensive deployment of a range of allusions, the impact of which lies as much in their general rhetorical suggestiveness as in their specific meaning. At a fairly elementary level all three techniques can be seen in the following paragraph from Chartism:

Another thing, which the British reader often reads and hears in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment: That Society ‘exists for the protection of property.’ To which it is added, that the poor man also has property, namely, his ‘labour,’ and the fifteen-pence or three-and-six-pence a-day he can get for that. True enough, O friends, ‘for protecting property;’ most true: and indeed, if you will once sufficiently enforce that Eighth Commandment, the whole ‘rights of man’ are well cared for; I know no better definition of the rights of man. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not be stolen from: what a Society were that; Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia mere emblems of it! Give every man what is his, the accurate price of what he has done and been, no man shall any more complain, neither shall the earth suffer any more. For the protection of property, in very truth, and for that alone!

Here we have an explicit approach to the reader at the start of the paragraph, reinforced later by the apostrophe ‘O friends’, which includes in fact both the reader and all those who accept the commonplace which is about to be redefined. The sentence structure is deliberately manipulated to emphasize the key phrase of the passage, ‘protection of property’, and this is repeated, with deliberate adjustments, and set against the other repeated catchphrase ‘rights of man’ in a way which suggests unseen implications in the supposedly conventional equation. Finally we have the references to the Bible, supported by the semi-biblical rhythms of the passage itself, and to ‘Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia’, all of which suggest the scale against which the ‘rights of man’ should really be measured. By the end of the paragraph the phrase ‘protection of property’, which Carlyle originally instanced as a cliché, has a weight of implication as yet undefined.

The basic movement of the prose in this instance is one of accumulation and progress: read in context (this edition p. 164) the paragraph can be seen to prepare for Carlyle’s own definition of ‘property’ in the paragraph which follows. In Carlyle’s later work the movement of his prose tends to be circular and self-enclosed, more often than not leading the reader back to the point from which he started, and it is tempting to detect in the development of Carlyle’s style a deterioration corresponding with the increasing repugnance of his ideas. Such an argument, while perhaps supportable in general terms, involves a selective approach to the evidence, however, and in an essay entitled ‘The Use and Abuse of Carlylese’ (reprinted in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed.