The Lamp of Heroism: Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau

Abstract

We must return once more to the room: Proust’s adult bedroom this time, at 45, Rue de Courcelles, from which on 10 February 1905 he wrote to his English friend and Ruskin co-translator Marie Nordlinger: ‘Tell your friend that in my scrupulously bare bedroom there is but one artistic reproduction: an admirable photograph of Whistler’s “Carlyle” with its overcoat of serpentine folds like the robe in “His Mother”’ (Cor, v, 41). A bare room; a coat with serpentine folds: once more the starkness (for the adult Proust could control his surroundings) upon which, a lone transposition, hangs this noble picture of Carlyle (Plate 2b) with its complicated mantle reminiscent in Proust’s mind, as apparently in the mind of the artist, of Whistler’s other emotional excess: the portrait of Mrs Whistler (Plate 2a), greeted by hostile critics upon its appearance in 1871 as a refutation of a entire painterly method, austerity and leanness foundering amid the claims of sentiment.