again only upon an aesthetic basis." Like Ruskin, Walter Pater, and other "Victorian prophets," Carlyle "mixed perception and sensation into a new kind of sensibility," according to Bloom—one that depended on an "increasing internalization of the self." Albert J. LaValley likewise treats Carlyle as an early exponent of the "idea of the modern" and identifies the "quest for the self' as the unifying theme of his work. Carlyle was most effective, LaValley thinks, when he "abandoned the chimera of messages" and concerned himself with the "aesthetic bases" of thought. The French Revolution should be read as an "epic," Past and Present as a "poem" in praise of the "aesthetic fulfillment of continuous creation," and Sartor Resartus as an "aesthetic act of self-discovery," a book that offered a "solution ... almost entirely aesthetic."

By replacing political, ethical, and religious categories with aesthetic categories, literary historians have attempted to modernize Carlyle, to divert attention from his embarrassing "messages," and to make him acceptable to an audience that believes only in "myths" and "metaphors." Carlyle's "new religious myth," LaValley argues, has to be understood "simply" as a form of self-expression, not as an account of the nature of things accompanied by the ethical injunction that submission to the nature of things is the only course of action that brings peace of mind. "Myth for Carlyle and the modern mind becomes a pattern that one creates out of the depths of the self rather than a pattern to which one submits oneself." Carlyle may have clung to the curious notion that "God" refers to "something outside the self," just as he clung to his Puritan prejudice against art, but it was just "this distrust of the aesthetic activity of his own writing and vision," according to LaValley, that drove him into "extremes and confusion."

A. Abbott Ikeler comes to a similar conclusion in his study of Carlyle's "literary vision." Puritan "gloom and pessimism" kept Carlyle from fully accepting the new religion of art. "The whole weight of the Calvinist tradition came down against the artist." Even Eric Bentley, who finds some value in Carlyle's ideas (as opposed to his literary "sensibility"), rebukes him for pouring the "new wine of historical imagination" into "old Calvinist bottles." The real value of Carlyle's "doctrine of heroworship," Bentley maintains, was aesthetic. It encouraged men and women "to seek the excellent in an age of the average." But Carlyle's ideas cannot be torn out of their moral and religious context, it seems to

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