Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

effects that are confused with causes. In Scotland, religious discussions were common, and it is worth remembering that Edinburgh, like Geneva, was one of the capitals of Calvinism in Europe. The essential aspect of Calvinism is the belief in predestination, based on the Biblical passage “many are called, but few are chosen.”
    Carlyle studied at the parish church in his town, then at the University of Edinburgh, and when he was around twenty, he underwent some kind of spiritual crisis or mystical experience that he described in the strangest of his books,
SartorResartus
.
Sartor Resartus
in Latin means “The Mended Tailor” or “The Darned Tailor.” We will soon see why he chose this strange title. The fact is that Carlyle had reached a state of melancholy provoked undoubtedly by the neurosis that haunted him his whole life. Carlyle had become an atheist; he did not believe in God. But the melancholy of Calvinism continued to haunt him even when he thought he had left it behind—the idea of a universe without hope, a universe in which the vast majority of its inhabitants are condemned to Hell. And then one night he had a kind of revelation, one that did not free him from this pessimism, from his melancholy, but did lead him to the conviction that man can be saved through work. Carlyle did not believe that any human labor had any lasting value. He thought that anything aesthetic or intellectual man did was despicable and ephemeral. But at the same time he believed that the fact of working, the fact of doing something, even if that
thing
was despicable, was not despicable. There is a German anthology of his work, which was published during the First World War and titled
Work and Do Not Despair
. 3 This is one of the effects of Carlyle’s thought.
    Once Carlyle decided to devote his life to literature, he began to acquire a vast and miscellaneous culture. For example, he and his wife, JaneWelsh, studied Spanish without teachers, and every day they read one chapter of
DonQuixote
in the original Spanish. There is a passage in Carlyle in which he contrasts the fate of Cervantes andByron. He considers Byron—a good-looking, athletic aristocrat, a man of fortune, who nevertheless felt inexplicably melancholic. And he considers the hard life of Cervantes—a soldier and a prisoner—who nevertheless wrote a book, not full of complaints but rather full of private and sometimes hidden joys,
Don Quixote
.
    Carlyle moves to London—he had already been a schoolteacher and had collaborated on an encyclopedia, the
Edinburgh Encylcopaedia
—and there he contributes to periodicals. 4 He publishes articles, but we must remember that an article then was what we would today call a book or a monograph. Now an article is usually about five to ten pages long; then, an article was usually more or less one hundred pages long. So, Carlyle’s andMacaulay’s articles were truly monographs, and some were even two hundred pages long. Today, they would be books.
    A friend of Carlyle’s recommended that he study German. Because of political circumstances, after the victory at Waterloo, the English and the Prussians became brothers-in-arms, and England was discovering Germany, and discovering after centuries its affinity with other Germanic nations, with Germany, Holland, and of course with the Scandinavian countries. Carlyle studied German, was excited bySchiller’s work, and published—this was his first book—a biography of Schiller written in a correct, and rather ordinary, style. 5 Then he read a German romantic writer, Johann PaulRichter, a writer we could call soporific, who recounted slow and sometimes languid, mystical dreams. 6 Richter’s style is full of compound words and long clauses, and this style influenced Carlyle’s style, except that Richter leaves one with a pleasant impression. On the other hand, Carlyle was an essentially ardent man, so he was a dreary writer. Carlyle also discovered the works ofGoethe, who was then unknown outside his own country except in a very fragmentary fashion, and he believed he found his master in Goethe. I say “believed he found” because it is difficult to think of two more different writers: the Olympic—as the Germans call him—and serene Goethe, and Carlyle, tormented as befits a Scot by his ethical preoccupations.
    Carlyle was also an infinitely more impetuous and more extravagant writer than Goethe. Goethe began as a romantic, then repented of his initial romanticism and