Prophetic Utterances

Abstract

One of the fascinating features of this period in Carlyle’s career is the emphasis he gives to speech; his letters to Emerson indicate that public speaking has now become an ‘art’: ‘I found’, he writes to Emerson, ‘… that extempore speaking … is an art [he then apparently realises the full implication of what he has said] or craft, and requires an apprenticeship’. He then tells Emerson he wants to go to America to speak, and DeLaura comments: ‘Obviously, Carlyle does in some sense conceive of himself as a prophet, and “inspired,” and he wishes to conquer a broad public on both sides of the Atlantic’ (DeLaura, p. 713). Again, irony predominates; some years earlier Carlyle had, in fact, considered oratory in conjunction with art. In his Journal for 1831 he had followed his thoughts on Goethe’s and Schiller’s ideas on Art and Religion with his own comments on ‘oral’ teaching: ‘What are the uses, what is the special province of oral teaching at present? Wherein superior to the written or printed mode, and when?—’. He had at that time dismissed that specific mode: ‘For one thing, as I can see, London is fit for no higher Art than that of Oratory: they understand nothing of Art’ (2NB, p. 212).