1795, Born at Ecclefechan, Annandale, Dumfriesshire. 1800, at the Village School. 1806–1809, at the Grammar School, Annan. 1809, enters Edinburgh University. 1814–1815, Teacher of Mathematics at Annan. 1816–1818, Master at Kirkcaldy; friendship with Edward Irving. 1818–1820, at Edinburgh; divinity and law; writes first articles for Brewster’s Encyclopædia; begins the study of German literature. 1821, his “New Birth;” visits Haddington with Irving; meets Miss Jane Welsh. 1822, tutor to the Bullers; writes “Life of Schiller” for the London Magazine. 1824, translates “Wilhelm Meister;” first visit to London with the Bullers; meets Coleridge at Highgate; visits Paris; correspondence with Goethe begun. 1825, at home, Hoddam Hill. 1826, marries Jane Welsh, and settles at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; meets Jeffrey; writes “Jean Paul” for the Edinburgh Review. 1827–1831, removes to the Welshs’ Manor, Craigenputtock; “Essay on Burns” in the Edinburgh Review; contributes magazine articles now published under “Miscellanies;” writes “Sartor Resartus.” 1831, removes to London; his father’s death. 1832–1833, returns to Craigenputtock; visit from Emerson; “Sartor Resartus” published in Fraser’s Magazine; winter in Edinburgh. 1834, settles at Cheyne Row (Chelsea), London. 1837, lectures in London on German Literature; “The French Revolution.” 1839, “Chartism.” 1841, lectures in London on heroes; “Heroes and Hero Worship” published. 1843, “Past and Present.” 1845, “Cromwell.” 1850, “Latter-Day Pamphlets.” 1851, “Life of Sterling.” 1858–1865, “History of Frederick the Second.” 1866, elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University; address on the Choice of Books; death of Mrs. Carlyle. 1874, order of merit from the German Emperor. 1875, “The Early Kings of Norway.” 1881, death; “Reminiscences,” J. A. Froude, Ed. 1882, “Thomas Carlyle,” J. A. Froude, Ed. 1883, “Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle,” J. A. Froude, Ed. 1883, “Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson,” C. E. Norton, Ed. 1886, “Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle,” C. E. Norton, Ed. 1887, “Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle,” C. E. Norton, Ed.

Personal

  Carlyle breakfasted with me, and I had an interesting morning with him. He is a deep-thinking German scholar, a character, and a singular compound. His voice and manner, and even the style of his conversation, are those of a religious zealot, and he keeps up that character in his declamations against the anti-religious. And yet, if not the god of his idolatry, at least he has a priest and prophet of his church in Goethe, of whose profound wisdom he speaks like an enthusiast. But for him, Carlyle says, he should not now be alive. He owes everything to him! But in strange union with such idolatry is his admiration of Bonaparte. Another object of his eulogy is—Cobbett, whom he praises for his humanity and love of the poor! Singular, and even whimsical, combinations of love and reverence these.

  I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interested us most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature (say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called “Characteristics,” pointed? He replied that he was not competent to state even to himself,—he waited rather to see. My own feeling was that I had met men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends…. He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon the treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; ’tis so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society.

  I found time to make a visit to Carlyle, and to hear one of his lectures. He is rather a small, spare, ugly Scotchman, with a strong accent, which I should think he takes no pains to mitigate. His manners are plain and simple, but not polished, and his conversation much of the same sort. He is now lecturing for subsistence, to about a hundred persons, who pay him, I believe, two guineas each…. To-day he spoke—as I think he commonly does—without notes, and therefore as nearly extempore as a man can who prepares himself carefully, as it was plain he had done. His course is on Modern Literature, and his subject to-day was that of the eighteenth century; in which he contrasted Johnson and Voltaire very well, and gave a good character of Swift. He was impressive, I think, though such lecturing could not well be very popular; and in some parts, if he were not poetical, he was picturesque. He was nowhere obscure, nor were his sentences artificially constructed, though some of them, no doubt, savored of his peculiar manner.

  His manners and conversation are as unformed as his style; and yet, withal, equally full of genius. In conversation, he piles thought upon thought and imagining upon imagining, till the erection seems about to topple down with its weight. He lives in great retirement,—I fear almost in poverty. To him, London and its mighty maze of society are nothing; neither he nor his writings are known.

  Attended Carlyle’s lecture, “The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet,” on which he descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only a conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him.

  We had fine fun with Carlyle, who talked broad Scotch, and utter nonsense without end. His nostrums respecting law reform did not go unscathed. His presumption, his dictatorial and positive manner, combined with his utter weakness, excited in my mind contempt. Yet this is a great star in these times of darkness.

  Carlyle’s conversation and general views are curiously dyspeptic, his indigestion coloring everything. There was something particularly engaging in his reprobation of a heartless caricature of the execution of poor Louis XVI., which he desired us not to look at, but introduced a beautiful one of himself smoking in his tub, which John Sterling compares to one of Michael Angelo’s prophets. He stood at the window with his pipe to help us draw a comparison.

  Some one writes about “notes for a biography” in a beggarly “Spirit of the Age” or other rubbish basket—rejected nem. con. What have I to do with their “Spirits of the Age?” To have my “life” surveyed and commented on by all men even wisely is no object with me, but rather the opposite; but how much less to have it done unwisely! The world has no business with my life; the world will never know my life, if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it even are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone of created men. The “goose goodness” which they call “Fame!” Ach Gott!

  Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse: only harangues…. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority—raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the habit of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and over-bearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness—no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror, it is his nature and the untameable energy that has given him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near. He seems, to me, quite isolated,—lonely as the desert,—yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally, near the beginning, hits upon some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row. For the higher kind of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigour.

  Carlyle seems in better health than usual and talks away lustily, and there is always something to take one’s attention in his talk, and often a sort of charm in it; but less instructive talk I never listened to from any man who had read and attempted to think. His opinions are the most groundless and senseless opinions that it is possible to utter; or rather they are not opinions, for he will utter the most opposite and contradictory and incompatible opinions in the most dogmatic and violent language in the course of half an hour. The real truth is that they are not opinions, but “shams.” And I think it is the great desire to have opinions and the incapacity to form them which keeps his mind in a constant struggle and gives it over to every kind of extravagance. It is wonderful that a man of no opinions should exercise such an influence in the world as he appears to do; but I suppose it is an influence of concussion and subversion rather than any other.

  Thomas Carlyle is really a notable monster, and to be respected for the many noble thoughts he has elaborated and for the words of wisdom which he has flung abroad to bear divine fruit among foolish-hearted men; but I can’t help thinking, face to face in a small parlour he is rather terrible, and I fancy prophets are best exhibited in the pulpit or in the wilderness.

  What shall I say of Carlyle? Perhaps it will be childish to say anything of him after no more acquaintance than an hour’s conversation. Of my impressions accept a few words. I confess to being very much pleased and a little disappointed. Pleased that the appearance of the man was so much more loveable, and disappointed that it was rather less great than I had expected. I was prepared for a face, manner and expression less tender but more profound. Not in the vulgar sense of mystic alchemical fakir profundity, I don’t mean that. If there be any truth in his theory of “Wudtan”—if there be divinity in movement—then is Carlyle divine. Body, hands, eyes, lips, eyebrows—almost cheeks, for even they seem mutable—did you ever see such a personification of motion? I felt, in seeing and hearing, that I could love the man as few men can be loved; but I went away hoping and trusting less—though I never trusted much—in the sage. We had a long talk (he was very kind to me), and if I had been blindfolded and heard it in the street I could have sworn at once to the speaker. But it made me melancholy to see how hopeless—no affectation of despair, but heartfelt black hopelessness—he is of himself and all mankind.

  Here, also, I became acquainted with Thomas Carlyle, one of the kindest and best, as well as most eloquent of men; though in his zeal for what is best he sometimes thinks it incumbent on him to take not the kindest tone, and in his eloquent demands of some hearty uncompromising creed on our parts, he does not quite set the example of telling us the amount of his own. Mr. Carlyle sees that there is a good deal of rough work in the operations of nature: he seems to think himself bound to consider a good deal of it devilish, after the old Covenanter fashion, in order that he may find something angelical in giving it the proper quantity of vituperation and blows; and he calls upon us to prove our energies and our benevolence by acting the part of the wind rather than the sun, of warring rather than peace-making, of frightening and forcing rather than conciliating and persuading…. I believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe further, that if the fellow-creature were suffering only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life, which put him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation toward his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle.

  Are you aware that Carlyle traveled with us to Paris? He left a deep impression with me. It is difficult to conceive of a more interesting human soul, I think. All the bitterness is love with the point reversed. He seems to me to have a profound sensibility—so profound and turbulent that it unsettles his general sympathies.

  Carlyle dresses so badly, and wears such a rough outside, that the flunkies are rude to him at gentlemen’s doors.

  I have seen Carlyle’s face under all aspects, from the deepest gloom to the most reckless or most genial mirth; and it seemed to me that each mood would make a totally different portrait. The sympathetic is by far the finest, in my eyes. His excess of sympathy has been, I believe, the master-pain of his life. He does not know what to do with it, and with its bitterness, seeing that human life is full of pain to those who look out for it: and the savageness which has come to be a main characteristic of this singular man is, in my opinion, a mere expression of his intolerable sympathy with the suffering. He cannot express his love and pity in natural acts, like other people; and it shows itself too often in unnatural speech. But to those who understand his eyes, his shy manner, his changing colour, his sigh, and the constitutional pudeur which renders him silent about everything that he feels the most deeply, his wild speech and abrupt manner are perfectly intelligible…. Yellow as a guinea, with downcast eyes, broken speech at the beginning, and fingers which nervously picked at the desk before him, he could not for a moment be supposed to enjoy his own effort; and the lecturer’s own enjoyment is a prime element of success. The merits of Carlyle’s discourses were however so great that he might probably have gone on year after year till this time, with improving success, and perhaps ease: but the struggle was too severe. From the time that his course was announced till it was finished, he scarcely slept, and he grew more dyspeptic and nervous every day; and we were at length entreated to say no more about his lecturing, as no fame and no money or other advantage could counterbalance the misery which the engagement caused him.

  Something was said of Carlyle the author. Thackeray said “Carlyle hates everybody that has arrived—if they are on the road, he may perhaps treat them civilly.” Mackintosh praised the description in the “French Revolution” of the flight of the King and Queen (which is certainly one of the most living pictures ever painted with ink), and Thackeray agreed with him, and spoke of the passages very heartily.

  He is a Samuel Johnson, a Coleridge, and a Teufelsdröckh, in one. It is curious to listen to the strong prejudice, mixed with the lofty and noble thoughts, clothed in that weird and grotesque phrase of his, fall from his lips in high-pitched Scotch patois, full of intense energy and power.

  Of Mr. Carlyle’s conversation I cannot call up a more accurate idea than by describing his talk as of the same character as his writings. Always forcible, often quaint and peculiar; felicitous in his occasional touches of fancy; not unfrequently sarcastic.

  In a few minutes after the doors were opened, [at Rectorial Address] the large hall was filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look, nor had it—as we soon learned—touched his Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful—the countenance of a man on whom “the burden of the unintelligible world” had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair was yet almost dark; his mustache and short beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about Mr. Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon—a man to set his mark on the world—a man on whom the world could not set its mark…. Amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr. Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe—which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to him—advanced to the table, and began to speak in low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his playfellows must have been familiar long ago. So self-centered was he, so impregnable to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life could not impair, even in the slightest degree, that.

  A strong-faced and strange weird-looking man of seventy-seven summers, who, notwithstanding he had passed by so many years the Psalmist’s threescore and ten, still carried his medium-sized and well-knit figure erect. His face was dark, ruddy, and wrinkled, with bold brows and wonderfully bright blue eyes. I needed no one to tell me that I stood in the presence of Thomas Carlyle, certainly one of the most celebrated and original writers of the nineteenth century.

  I have no doubt he would have played a Brave Man’s Part if called on; but, meanwhile, he has only sat pretty comfortably at Chelsea, scolding all the world for not being Heroic, and not always very precise in telling them how. He has, however, been so far heroic, as to be always independent, whether of Wealth, Rank, and Coteries of all sorts: nay, apt to fly in the face of some who courted him. I suppose he is changed, or subdued, at eighty: but up to the last ten years he seemed to me just the same as when I first knew him five and thirty years ago. What a Fortune he might have made by showing himself about as a Lecturer, as Thackeray and Dickens did; I don’t mean they did it for Vanity: but to make money: and that spend generously. Carlyle did indeed lecture near forty years ago before he was a Lion to be shown, and when he had but few readers. I heard his “Heroes” which now seems to me one of his best Books. He looked very handsome then, with his black hair, fine Eyes, and a sort of crucified Expression.

  A residence of more than forty years in London has not modified the strong Scottish enunciation which Carlyle brought with him from his native Dumfriesshire. The vowels come out broad and full; the gutturals—which are so sadly clipped in modern English speech, depriving it of all masculine vigor—have their due prominence. His manner in talking is striking and peculiar; now bursting into Titanic laughter at some odd conceit; now swelling into fierce wrath at some meanness or wrong; now sinking into low tones of the tenderest pathos; but running through all is a rhythmic flow, a sustained recitative, like that in which we may imagine old Homer to have chanted his long-resounding hexameters.

  Those who have listened to the wonderful conversation of Carlyle know well its impressiveness and its charm: the sympathetic voice now softening to the very gentlest, tenderest tone as it searched far into some sad life, little known or regarded, or perhaps evil spoken of, and found there traits to be admired, or signs of nobleness,—then rising through all melodies in rehearsing the deeds of heroes; anon breaking out with illumined thunders against some special baseness or falsehood, till one trembled before the Sinai smoke and flame, and seemed to hear the tables break once more in his heart: all these, accompanied by the mounting, fading fires in his cheeks, the light of the eye, now serene as heaven’s blue, now flashing with wrath, or presently suffused with laughter, made the outer symbols of a genius so unique that to me it had been unimaginable had I not known its presence and power. His conversation was a spell; when I had listened and gone into the darkness, the enchantment continued; sometimes I could not sleep till the vivid thoughts and narratives were noted in writing.

  It is not easy, it is not possible, to say the last word about Mr. Carlyle. Posterity will regard him with deep sympathy and reverence, as one of the greatest of literary forces; thwarted, like Byron, by self-will; torn, like Swift, by sæva indignatio; and all his life vexed, almost physically, by a fierce hunger and thirst after righteousness.

  Think of the simplicity and frugality of his life, the nobility of his heart, the sublimity of his purposes. I have known many good and great men. I have never known one so strong and straight, so sturdy and striking as Thomas Carlyle—strong and straight like a pyramid, a mystery to the common crowd of travellers, and certainly not to be measured in its width and breadth, in its height and depth, by the small pocket-rule of “common sense.”

  Although in common with many others, I believe that the literary pretensions of Carlyle have been vastly overstated, and that as a thinker and philosopher he possessed no such spiritual method as is likely to make his influence either precious or permanent, I would gladly, at this juncture, think of nothing less pleasant than his rugged yet charming personality.

  He was constantly intolerant of those who differed from him; never by any chance imagining the possibility that they might be right and he wrong. Always proclaiming in his books the infinite virtues of patience and silence, he made no attempt whatever to practise as he preached. The least illness, the least personal inconvenience, such as getting his tea too weak or his coffee too cold, made him complain as if all the world had been going headlong to ruin, and he himself were the only righteous man left alive. His temper, which he was at no particular pains to curb, was harsh and violent. Altogether he was, as his mother well observed, “gey ill to live wi’.”

  In the grave matters of the law he walked for eighty-five years unblemished by a single moral spot. There are no “sins of youth” to be apologised for. In no instance did he ever deviate even for a moment from the strictest lines of integrity. He had his own way to make in life, and when he had chosen his profession, he had to depend on popularity for the bread which he was to eat. But although more than once he was within sight of starvation he would never do less than his very best. He never wrote an idle word, he never wrote or spoke any single sentence which he did not with his whole heart believe to be true. Conscious though he was that he had talents above those of common men, he sought neither rank nor fortune for himself. When he became famous and moved as an equal among the best of the land, he was content to earn the wages of an artisan, and kept to the simple habits in which he had been bred in his father’s house. He might have had a pension had he stooped to ask for it; but he chose to maintain himself by his own industry, and when a pension was offered him it was declined. He despised luxury; he was thrifty and even severe in the economy of his own household; but in the times of his greatest poverty he had always something to spare for those who were dear to him. When money came at last, and it came only when he was old and infirm, he added nothing to his own comforts, but was lavishly generous with it to others. Tender-hearted and affectionate he was beyond all men whom I have ever known. His faults, which in his late remorse he exaggerated, as men of noblest natures are most apt to do, his impatience, his irritability, his singular melancholy, which made him at times distressing as a companion, were the effects of temperament first, and of a peculiarly sensitive organisation; and secondly of absorption in his work and of his determination to do that work as well as it could possibly be done. Such faults as these were but as the vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the man. They have to be told because without them his character cannot be understood, and because they affected others as well as himself. But they do not blemish the essential greatness of his character, and when he is fully known he will not be loved or admired the less because he had infirmities like the rest of us.

  He was not constitutionally arrogant; he was a man of real modesty; he was even, I think, constitutionally diffident. He was a man, in short, whom you could summer and winter with, without ever having your self-respect wantonly affronted as it habitually is by mere conventional men and women. He was, to be sure, a very sturdy son of earth, and capable at times of exhibiting the most helpless natural infirmity. But he would never ignore nor slight your human fellowship because your life or opinions exposed you to the reproach of the vain, the frivolous, the self-seeking. He would of course curse your gods ever and anon in a manful way, and scoff without mercy at your tenderest intellectual hopes and aspirations; but upon yourself personally, all the while,—especially if you should drink strong tea and pass sleepless nights, or suffer from tobacco, or be menaced with insanity, or have a gnawing cancer under your jacket,—he would have bestowed the finest of his wheat. He might not easily have forgiven you if you used a vegetable diet, especially if you did so on principle; and he would surely have gnashed his teeth upon you if you should have claimed any scientific knowledge or philosophic insight into the social problem,—the problem of man’s coming destiny upon the earth. But within these limits you would have felt how truly human was the tie that bound you to this roaring, riotous, most benighted, yet not unbenignant brother.

  From personal intercourse, extending over many years, we, in common with all who came into close contact with him, know that Carlyle himself was truthful to the core; and, also, that he devoutly and reverently accepted the essential truths of the Christian religion. True, that, in earlier student days, unduly influenced, as he himself admitted, by his boundless admiration for Goethe, he had wavered somewhat in regard to certain outward matters of form; but, though still admiring the great German poet, he soon lived through that phase, and, looking back, wrote those verses comparing himself to a moth that had singed its wings by fluttering too near the candle-flame. The root belief in saving truth, to which he firmly clung down to the end of his days, was substantially that which his godly mother had taught him. Her strong faith was also his, though rarely, and then somewhat enigmatically, formulated by him. As he himself repeatedly and emphatically told us, he held fast by the grand old Bible truths, revealed from heaven, as the only eternal and veritable realities on which a man could safely lean with all his weight. In regard to Carlyle’s religious belief, Mr. Froude did not, and, unfortunately, from different upbringing, could not, understand him…. One of the greatest thinkers and teachers of the century, Carlyle’s heart was pure, loving, tender, and true; and, even had certain opinions, peculiar, personal traits, or eccentricities of temperament—which, in some form or other, would seem to be inseparable from great originality of mind—actually been the very grave faults which his traducers mistakenly try to make them, these, calmly viewed in the light of his great veracity and sterling virtues, can only be regarded as spots on the sun.

  No one who knew Carlyle but must have noticed how instantaneously he was affected or even agitated by any case of difficulty or distress in which he was consulted or that was casually brought to his cognisance, and with what restless curiosity and exactitude he would inquire into all the particulars, till he had conceived the case thoroughly, and as it were, taken the whole pain of it into himself. The practical procedure, if any was possible, was sure to follow. If he could do a friendly act to any human being, it was sure to be done; if the case required exertion, or even continued and troublesome exertion, that was never wanting…. There were, I say, infinite depths of tenderness in this rugged man. Not even in the partner of his life whom he so bewailed and commemorated, woman though she was, and one of the most brilliant of her sex, and the most practically and assiduously benevolent, were there such depths and dissolutions of sheer tenderness as there were in him.

  His life, the prey of biographers and the stumbling-block of fools, had chiefly literary eventfulness.

  It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle. Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists, all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose personality, especially in the case of the first and last of the trio, still interests us,—Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their descendants…. Each oracle denies his predecessor, each magician breaks the wand of the one who went before him. There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and buried it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again. It is rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral sensibilities on coming in contact with American rocks and currents, with which neither had any special occasion to concern himself, and which both had a great deal better have steered clear of. But here I stand once more before the home of the long-suffering, much-laboring, loud-complaining Heraclitus of his time, whose very smile had a grimness in it more ominous than his scowl. Poor man! Dyspeptic on a diet of oatmeal porridge; kept wide awake by crowing cocks; drummed out of his wits by long-continued piano-pounding; sharp of speech, I fear, to his high-strung wife, who gave him back as good as she got! I hope I am mistaken about their everyday relations, but again I say, poor man!—for all his complaining must have meant real discomfort, which a man of genius feels not less, certainly, than a common mortal.

  We found Mr. Carlyle at home [1852]…. We were shown into a comfortable room on the ground floor, which I suppose must have been the dining-room, and presently we heard Mr. Carlyle descending from the upper regions. He gave us a cordial welcome, and sat down at a little distance on a rather straight-backed chair…. I remember the strong impression made on my mind by the interview was that Mr. Carlyle’s conversation was very like his books, and much of it as good as almost anything I had ever read in them. The new impression derived from the slight personal intercourse was of his real kindness of heart, the deep latent sympathy of his nature. There was a peculiar gentleness in his tone, an accent of deep and sincere feeling in his voice, in speaking of Sir W. Hamilton, and especially in referring to his crippled condition arising from the serious stroke of paralysis that had partially disabled him a few years before.

  Doctor Pessimist Anticant, in Anthony Trollope’s novel “Warden,” is intended for Thomas Carlyle.

  In Switzerland I live in the immediate presence of a mountain, noble alike in form and mass. A bucket or two of water, whipped into a cloud, can obscure, if not efface that lordly peak. You would almost say that no peak could be there. But the cloud passes away, and the mountain, in its solid grandeur, remains. Thus, when all temporary dust is laid, will stand out, erect and clear, the massive figure of Carlyle.

  How well Kingsley understood the chief characteristics of Carlyle is evident from the life-drawing he gives of him in the person of Sandy Mackaye, though, strangely enough, Carlyle failed to recognize himself in this portrait.

  It has been a personal pain to me in recent times to find among honourable and cultivated people a conviction that Carlyle was hard, selfish, and arrogant. I knew him intimately for more than an entire generation—as intimately as one who was twenty years his junior, and who regarded him with unaffected reverence as the man of most undoubted genius of his age, probably ever did. I saw him in all moods and under the most varied conditions, and often tried his impatient spirit by dissent from his cherished convictions, and I found him habitually serene and considerate, never, as so many have come to believe of his ordinary mood, arrogant or impatient of contradiction. I was engaged for nearly half the period in the conflict of Irish politics, which from his published writings one might suppose to be utterly intolerable to him; but the readers of these letters will find him taking a keen interest in every honest attempt to raise Ireland from her misery, reading constantly, and having sent after him, wherever he went, the journal which embodied the most determined resistance to misgovernment from Westminister, and throwing out friendly suggestions from time to time how the work, so far as he approved of it, might be more effectually done. This is the real Carlyle; a man of generous nature, sometimes disturbed on the surface by trifling troubles, but never diverted at heart from what he believed to be right and true.

  The opulent originality, vigour, and picturesqueness of Carlyle’s talk astonished all who heard it. What he said might be wise, or only half-wise, or, as sometimes happened, wholly unwise, but it was always striking, never commonplace. It is true that both as a host and as a guest he was too fond of engrossing the conversation, that with him dialogue too often became monologue, that his prophet-like denunciations of the present, in season and out of season, were occasionally wearisome in their monotonous vehemence and iteration and reiteration long-drawn-out. But it was not always thus with him. In the society of two or three friends, if he could not help being emphatic, he could be calm, and reasonable, take as well as give, and listen patiently to the expression of opinions opposite to his own. It was in such a gathering that he was most satisfactory, if not most astonishing. There was, moreover, one gift, that of oral narration, which he possessed in a more remarkable degree than any man of his generation, and his exhibition of it was always acceptable, combining as it did epic detail with lyrical emotion. I have heard of a distinguished company at a dinner-party suspending, at an early stage of the meal, the process of deglutition, to listen with rapt attention while Carlyle, starting from some chance remark by a fellow guest, gave a vivid account of John Sobieski’s defence of Vienna against the Turk. Never surely was there an eminent man of letters—not Macaulay himself, for even he had brilliant flashes of silence—to whom, as to this Apostle of Silence, it seemed in so great a degree a necessity of his nature to be always either speaking or writing.

  I believe that what Mr. Carlyle absolutely needed above all things on earth was somebody to put on the gloves with him metaphorically about once a day, and give and take a few thumping blows; nor do I believe that he would have shrunk from a tussle à la Choctaw, with biting, gouging, tomahawk and scalper, for he had an uncommonly dour look about the eyes, and must have been a magnificent fighter when once roused.

  I never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men who knew him personally, and therefore had means which I did not possess of estimating him aright. To me his books and himself represented an anomalous sort of human fruit. The original stock was a hard and thorny Scotch peasant-character, with a splendid intellect superadded. The graft was not wholly successful. A flavor of the old acrid sloe was always perceptible in the plum.

  The greatest Englishman of letters of this century found it indispensable for his contentment to belittle almost every man of real importance whom he met.

  In a somewhat shabbily furnished room, (but on the walls there was a large copy of the Berlin picture of Frederick the Great dressed as a drummer-boy; and on the table a number of Frederick’s snuff-boxes were strewn about) in a dingy little street in Chelsea, an old man, worn, and tired, and bent, with deeply lined, ascetic features, a firm underjaw, tufted grey hair, and tufted grey and white beard, and sunken and unutterably sorrowful eyes, returned from the fireplace, where with trembling fingers he had been lighting his long clay pipe, and resumed his place in front of the reading-desk…. Now, in endeavoring to place on paper, a few of Carlyle’s obiter dicta, it is impossible to convey to the reader how immeasurably they lose in the process. Carlyle did not talk Scotch—not any dialect of it; but he spoke with a strong South-of-Scotland insistence of emphasis; then he had a fine abundance of picturesque phraseology; and, above all, he liked to wind up a sentence with something—a wild exaggeration, it might be, or a sardonic paradox, or a scornful taunt—but, anyhow, with something that sounded like the crack of a whip.

  Mr. Bancroft had given me a letter to Carlyle [1869], and we diligently drove to Cheyne Walk; but the sage was out walking. I think he always was, when Americans called.

  Whenever a chance offered itself, we called on the Carlyles. My father would say, “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoy life together, else they would not have chaffed one another so heartily.” Carlyle made a point of not unfrequently paying his respects to my mother, who he knew could not go to see him; and the last time he called my nephew, “golden-haired Ally,” was brought in to the great man. Carlyle put his hands on the little fellow’s head and said solemnly, “Fair fall thee, little man, in this world, and the next.” Upon which my father said to me: “Carlyle is the most reverent and most irreverent man I know.”

  Much has been made of his brusque manner. Truth is, he could not bear inanity or even the semblance of it. Yet he was tolerant in a high degree to honest worth. Emerson observed that “Carlyle worshipped a man that manifested any truth in him.” To hold his attention one had to be thorough. He rushed at the stranger mind, and sometimes, too, by a byway, probing deeply, and all the time with flashing eyes—these small, pupiled orbs, that, although dreamy-looking in repose, seemed, in his eager questioning attitudes, to leave their places and dart meteor-like towards yours. I will ever see those eyes on their way to mine during our first tussling interview. The fancy is as strong as fact, and still felt to be as real as truth itself. I have seen him in many moods, and began to learn that his silence was at times a compliment to all about him. The silence of others, too, was a stern necessity of his supersensitive nature. Indeed, without quietude life to him was intolerable. His nature was the very antipodes of that of Gibbon, who managed to sit as a mute for eight sessions in the House of Commons! Nothing annoyed him more than noisy platitudes, no matter where or by whom they were echoed.

  I did not see Carlyle until he was an old man, after the death of his wife, living in retirement. A more dignified, courteous, and friendly senior it was impossible to imagine. He sate by his simple fireside, in the house in which he lived for forty-six years, and poured out “Latter-day Pamphlets” with great energy and strong Lowland accent. The effect was startling. He was exactly like all his portraits—the Whistler is the best both in art and in likeness—the words were strangely the same as he used in his fiercest hour, nay even exceeding this, for he wished that many people and things “might all be dawmed doun to hale”—so that it seemed an illusion, as if some wraith of Sartor had been summoned up to give a mocking presentation of the prophet. He said what he had often said, till it seemed to me as if he were repeating thoughts which were graven in his memory. His bonhommie, his fire, his friendly manners struck me deeply.

  Thirty years afterward, in June, 1872, I felt an irrepressible desire to see the grand old man once more, and I accordingly addressed him a note requesting the favor of a few minutes’ interview…. After we had waited some time, a feeble, stooping figure, attired in a long blue flannel gown, moved slowly into the room. His gray hair was unkempt, his blue eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous, and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man launched out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet, Jeremiah, was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him…. He amused us with a description of half a night’s debate with John Bright on political economy, while he said, “Bright theed and thoud with me for hours, while his Quaker wife sat up hearin’ us baith. I tell ye, John Bright got as gude an he gie that night;” and I have no doubt that he did. Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his own amusement as for ours.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

	And I sit here thinking, thinking,
	How your life was one long winking
	At poor Thomas’ faults and failings, and his undue share of bile!
	Won’t you own, dear, just between us,
	That this living with a genius
	Isn’t, after all, so pleasant,—is it,
	Jeannie Welsh Carlyle?

  Now we have him in his Jane’s letters, as we have seen something of him before in the Reminiscences: but a yet more tragic Story; so tragic that I know not if it ought not to have been withheld from the Public: Assuredly, it seems to me, ought to have been but half of the whole that now is. But I do not the less recognize Carlyle far more admirable than before—if for no other reason than his thus furnishing the world with weapons against himself which the World in general is glad to turn against him.

  I suppose you have read by this time Mrs. Carlyle’s “Correspondence.” A very painful book in more ways than one. There are disclosures there that never should have been made, as if they had been caught up from the babblings of discharged housemaids. One blushes in reading, and feels like a person caught listening at the keyhole.

  Had she even shared to the full, the literary interests of the man of genius whose overwhelming personality left her so lonely, she would doubtless have entered the lists as a brilliant and successful authoress. But her share seemed, for the most part, limited to the listening to Carlyle’s tremendous denunciations of all people, things, and systems, since the creation of the world. On her sofa she lay, night after night, exhausted, with nerves “all shattered to pieces,” and gave her word of sympathy when she could. To the casual visitor these fierce and powerful monologues of Carlyle’s were fascinating—to her, they must have been almost intolerable at times. Had she been placed in a congenial companionship, with a man many degrees less intellectual than Thomas Carlyle—a man with whom the deeper sympathies of a woman’s heart had met full response—we cannot doubt that the world would have known Jane Welsh Carlyle as a writer. But that career was closed to her, and all connected with literature seemed interwoven with the loneliness and disappointment of her own lot.

  Mr. Froude has been severely censured as painting in too dark colors Carlyle’s grim, savage humour, his thoughtless cruelty to his wife, and her unhappiness; but the documentary evidence he has presented fully justifies him. Mrs. Carlyle said herself, not long before her death: “I married for ambition. Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him; and I am miserable.” Her husband, indeed, appreciated her talents and found pleasure in her society but he never seems to have experienced for her the passion of love as it is commonly understood. The pair had no children, and, as Mr. Froude tells us, when Carlyle was busy his wife rarely so much as saw him save when she would steal into his dressing-room in the morning while he was shaving…. Whether Mrs. Carlyle would have been happier with Irving for a husband instead of Carlyle is doubtful. That Irving would have been to her most tender, loving and considerate, his treatment of the woman he married, not from love, but from a sense of duty, compels us to believe; but whether his failure in his career, and the want of that gratification of her pride and satisfaction of her ambition which she got with Carlyle, would not have been as sore a trial to her as Carlyle’s harshness is not so sure.

  Mrs. Carlyle did not, like her husband, write books, but in her own way she was, to use a favourite expression of his, as “articulate” as her husband. She was too bright and clever a talker not to enjoy practising her gift. Naturally she shone more in conversation when her husband was absent than when he was present. Sometimes, when the company in the little house at Chelsea was miscellaneous, the claims of the hostess to be heard conflicted with those of the host, and there was between her and one or other of their guests a cross-fire of conversation which sadly irritated Carlyle. It was better, at least if they were at home, when they talked successively rather than simultaneously, but her husband did not always allow her that alternative. She once repeated to me, with quiet glee, a remark dropped by Samuel Rogers at one of his breakfast parties, at which Carlyle and she were among the guests. When Carlyle’s thunder had been followed by his wife’s sparkle, their sardonic host said in a half-soliloquy which was intended to be audible: “As soon as that man’s tongue stops, that woman’s begins.”

  I do not want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle; but in spirit it is somewhat hard to keep one’s hand off him, as we reconstitute those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock. There is a little detail in one scene which adds a deeper horror. I have said that Mrs. Carlyle had to scrub the floors; and as she scrubbed them, Carlyle would look on smoking,—drawing in from tobacco pleasant comfortableness and easy dreams—while his poor drudge panted and sighed over the hard work, which she had never done before. Do you not feel that you would like to break the pipe in his mouth, to shake him off the chair, and pitch him on to the floor, to take a share of the physical burden which his shoulders were so much better able to bear?

  The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when he married Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent to John Knox, who had some property, who had a genius of her own, and who was also the more determined to marry a man of genius. She had hesitated between Irving and Carlyle, and whatever came of it, there can be no doubt that she was right in preferring the somewhat uncouth and extremely undeveloped tutor who had taught her several things,—whether love in the proper sense was among them or not will always be a moot point…. It is certain that Carlyle—springing from the lower ranks of society, educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion—was not a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband’s and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being “wife to a man of genius,” and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost farthing.

Essay on Burns, 1828

  It is one of the very best of his essays, and was composed with an evidently peculiar interest, because the outward circumstances of Burns’s life, his origin, his early surroundings, his situation as a man of genius born in a farmhouse not many miles distant, among the same people and the same associations as were so familiar to himself, could not fail to make him think often of himself while he was writing about his countryman.

  Worth all that every one else has ever said about Burns put together.

  The essay on Burns is the very voice of Scotland, expressive of all her passionate love and tragic sorrow for her darling son. It has paragraphs of massy gold, capable of being beaten out into volumes, as indeed they have been. Unlike some of Carlyle’s essays, it is by no means open to the charge of mysticism, but is distinguished by the soundest good sense.

  Let no student come to the reading of this little book with the purpose merely of finding certain facts in the life of the poet; for while the facts are there, they are incidental and subsidiary to the revelation of the mind and soul of the poet. To know the mind and soul of the poet,—that should be the aim of the student. Reading thus, Carlyle will be found to be the revealer of

	“The light that never was, on sea nor land;
	The consecration and the Poet’s dream.”

And surely that should redeem the reader from slavery to a mere literary task,—a compelled service performed in slave-like fashion. It should, it must, suffuse his heart with the glow of sympathy. In such a frame, he will find Carlyle to be an inspirer, breathing into his soul many a sweet and pure suggestion, many a strong and purposeful sentiment; so helping him, as high literature ever should, to make his own life and action more noble.

  His first, and perhaps greatest, critical work was upon a brother Scot—Burns. By him Burns received his first sympathetic interpretation.

Sartor Resartus, 1834

  The only thing about the work, tending to prove that it is what it purports to be, a commentary on a real German treatise, which is a sort of Babylonish dialect, not destitute, it is true, of richness, vigor, and at times a sort of singular felicity of expression, but very strongly tinged throughout with the peculiar idiom of the German language. This quality in the style, however, may be a mere result of a great familiarity with German literature, and we cannot, therefore, look upon it as in itself decisive, still less as outweighing so much evidence of an opposite character…. The work before us is a sort of philosophical romance in which the author undertakes to give, in the form of a review of a German treatise on dress, and a notice of the life of the writer, his own opinions upon Matters and Things in General. The hero, Professor Teufelsdröckh, seems to be intended for a portrait of human nature as affected by the moral influences to which, in the present state of society, a cultivated mind is naturally exposed…. Contains, under a quaint and singular form, a great deal of deep thought, sound principle, and fine writing. It is, we believe, no secret in England or here, that it is the work of a person to whom the public is indebted for a number of articles in the late British Reviews, which have attracted great attention by the singularity of their style, and the richness and depth of their matter. Among these may be mentioned particularly those on “Characteristics” and the “Life of Burns” in the Edinburgh Review, and on “Goethe” in the Foreign Quarterly…. We take pleasure in introducing to the American Public a writer, whose name is yet in a great measure unknown among us, but who is destined, we think, to occupy a large space in the literary world. We have heard it intimated, that Mr. Carlyle has it in contemplation to visit this country, and we can venture to assure him, that, should he carry his intention into effect, he will meet with a cordial welcome.

  This consists of two intertwisted threads, though both spun off the same distaff, and of the same crimson wool. There is a fragmentary, though, when closely examined, a complete biography of a supposed German professor, and, along with it, portions of a supposed treatise of his on the philosophy of clothes. Of the three books, the first is preparatory, and gives a portrait of the hero and his circumstances. The second is the biographical account of him. The third under the rubric of extracts from his work, presents us with his picture of human life in the nineteenth century. How so unexampled a topic as the philosophy of clothes can be made the vehicle for a philosophy of man, those will see who read the book. But they must read with the faith that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, it is the jest which is a pretence, and that the real purport of the whole is serious, yea, serious as any religion that ever was preached, far more serious than most battles that have ever been fought since Agamemnon declared war against Priam…. In this book that strange style appears again before us in its highest oddity. Thunder peals, flute-music, the laugh of Pan and the nymphs, the clear disdainful whisper of cold stoicism, and the hurly-burly of a country fair, succeed and melt into each other. Again the clamour sinks into quiet, and we hear at last the grave, mild hymn of devotion, sounding from a far sanctuary, though only in faint and dying vibrations. So from high and low, from the sublime to the most merely trivial, fluctuates the feeling of the poet.

  His soul is a shrine of the brightest and purest philanthropy, kindled by the live coal of gratitude and devotion to the Author of all things. I should observe that he is not orthodox.

  We think “Sartor Resartus” the finest of Mr. Carlyle’s works in conception, and as a whole. In execution he is always great; and for graphic vigour and quantity of suggestive thought, matchless: but the idea, in this book, of uncovering the world—taking off all the clothes—the cloaks and outsides—is admirable.

  “Sartor Resartus” appears to me to be at the same time the most profound and the most brilliant glance that has been thrown upon our century, upon its tendencies and its desires.

  “Ah, Thomas Carlyle, you have much to answer for, in sending adrift upon the fog-banks such raw and inexperienced boys as I was when your mighty genius found me out. Many a day of miserable doubt and night of morbid wretchedness have you caused me. Yet, for all that, I owe you more and love you better than any author of the time. ‘Sartor Resartus’ first fell in my way while I was living in Washington, and I much question if Christopher Columbus was more transported by the discovery of America, than I was in entering the new realm which this book opened to me. Everything was novel, huge, grotesque or sublime: I must have read it twenty times over, until I had it all by heart. It became a sort of touchstone with me. If a man had read ‘Sartor,’ and enjoyed it, I was his friend; if not, we were strangers. I was as familiar with the everlasting ‘nay,’ the center of indifference, and the everlasting ‘yea,’ as with the sidewalk in front of my house. From Herr Teufelsdröckh I took the Teutonic fever, which came nigh costing me so dear.” And happily the number is not few of those who can add, in the words of the same writer, “Years have passed since he lead me forth to the dance of ghosts, and I have learned to read him with a less feverish enthusiasm; but, I believe, with a more genuine appreciation of his rare and extraordinary powers. He did me harm, but he has helped me to far more good. With all his defects, to me he stands first among the men of this generation.”

  You may have the strongest conviction that you ought to like an author; you may be ashamed to confess that you don’t like him; and yet you may feel that you detest him. For myself, I confess with shame, and I know the reason is in myself, I cannot for my life see anything to admire in the writings of Mr. Carlyle. His style, both of thought and language, is to me insufferably irritating. I tried to read “Sartor Resartus,” and could not do it. So if all people who have learned to read English were like me, Mr. Carlyle would have no readers.

  When Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” first appeared, as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine, the publisher would have discontinued it, in despair, but for the letters of earnest appreciation received from two men, one of whom was Ralph Waldo Emerson. This was in 1835; and in 1870 the same work, in a cheap popular edition, reached a sale of 40,000 copies.

  A work which, with all its affectations, obscurities (I do not hesitate to add, insincerities), has taken a strong hold on the imaginations of that large section of the public which does not go to the poets for its edification, but prefers the fashioners of “mystical” prose…. In “Sartor Resartus,” the traces of literary conventionalism were kicked over altogether. The work might be called a wild hotchpotch of German mysticism, Lowland Scotch, broad caricature, and literal autobiography. In its long-windedness, in the zeal with which the one solitary idea, or “Clothes” theory, was worked to death, it was certainly very German. But with all its defects,—or rather perhaps, in consequence of its defects,—it was a work of genius.

  Out of his discontent, out of his impatience with the hard circumstances which crossed, thwarted, and pressed him, there was growing in his mind “Sartor Resartus.” He had thoughts fermenting in him struggling to be uttered. He had something real to say about the world, and man’s position in it to which, could it but find fit expression, he knew that attention must be paid. The “Clothes Philosophy,” which had perhaps been all which his first sketch contained, gave him the necessary form. His own history, inward and outward, furnished substance; some slight substance being all that was needed to disguise his literal individuality; and in the autumn of the year he set himself down passionately to work. Fast as he could throw his ideas upon paper the material grew upon him. The origin of the book is still traceable in the half fused, tumultuous condition in which the metal was poured into the mould. With all his efforts in calmer times to give it artistic harmony he could never fully succeed. “There are but a few pages in it,” he said to me, “which are rightfully done.” It is well perhaps that he did not succeed. The incompleteness of the smelting shows all the more the actual condition of his mind. If defective as a work of art, “Sartor” is for that very reason a revelation of Carlyle’s individuality.

  The most stimulating quasi-philosophical book that I ever read is “Sartor Resartus.” It came into my hands before I knew much about its author, and it made me greedy for several of his subsequent works, though, after the Carlylese dialect became current among the horde of imitative sciolists, I ceased to enjoy it in its source. I must have imbibed and assimilated all that is best in “Sartor Resartus,” for when I took it up anew a year or two ago, I found in it for the most part but the reflection of my own familiar thought and sentiment, and the very portions of it that I had most admired seemed to me, though true, trite and stale. This must be the fate of every book in advance of its time in the legitimate line of progress, and the surest test of the actual worth of the ethical and philosophical works that flashed fresh surprises on the last generation is that they now appear commonplace and superflous, because their contents have become the property of the general mind.

  I bought Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,” first edition, and read it through forty times ere I left college, of which I “kept count.”

  Is unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest and most lyrical of his productions.

  A very large part of the book owes nothing at all to Swift. In the second portion, the story of Teufelsdröckh’s life, his clothes philosophy sinks out of sight altogether; and such chapters as the fifth and eighth of the third book are too weighty and earnest to be really part and parcel of what was in the first instance a jest. The influence of Swift’s thought is strongest in the first or original portion. The rest is really made up of Carlyle’s own experience of life and his brooding over all problems that can engage the active brain, from the reality of the universe and the existence of God to the condition of the poor and the phenomenon of the man of fashion. The book is to be regarded as the epitome of all that Carlyle thought and felt in the course of the first thirty-five years of his residence on this planet. Many things which he wishes to say that cannot be ranged under any rubric of the philosophy of clothes, such as his criticism of duelling, are, notwithstanding, given room. This position I hope to make good.

  Nearly four fifths of the book, I should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat, if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just read the story of an educated tramp who carried the book in his blanket thousands of miles, and knew it nearly by heart.

  It is to “Sartor Resartus” we must turn for the fullest disclosure of Carlyle’s religious history and beliefs. In that book, written among the solitudes of Craiggenputtock, we have a revelation of his own interior life, though to some extent veiled and symbolical. Herr Teufelsdröckh is the spiritual counterpart of Carlyle himself, and the work partakes of the nature of an autobiography. Through its pages we get a vivid insight into the mental struggles, heart sorrows, and soul-conflicts of an earnest and thoughtful man, groping his way through the thick darkness of scepticism out into the daylight of faith and liberty. Autobiographies are a species of literature in whose favour we are not much prepossessed, they are so often stilted and artificial, and so manifestly got up for effect. But no such suspicions can possibly attach to “Sartor,” which is undoubtedly the product of a sincere and unaffected soul, and enjoys the reputation of being “one of the truest self-revelations ever penned.”

  He knew that he had put into the book the best that was in him, and he knew its worth. His wife had said to him when she finished reading the last page, “It is a work of genius, dear.” But neither of them knew the long and bitter struggle that must be gone through before the world would recognize its worth. What more pitiful than the thought of Carlyle, hawking about that masterpiece among the publishers, who would have none of it?

  But “Sartor” is nothing if not a semi-prophetic book, as prophecy goes nowadays: it is in this aspect that it appeals to or repels us; it is its gleams and rifts of truth that focus the attention. For here also Carlyle is every way the reverse of equable and self-contained, moving by stormful and uncertain energies, with sudden swirling sunward rushes, whence he swerves with baffled and beating pinions to collect himself for another upward dart. His teaching, tempestuous and fitful, abounds in cloven profundities of gloom, and luminous interpaces of height. By these, in the main, we must gauge him. Nor must we attribute to him more than he claimed for himself, or deny his limitations.

  Like Byron, Carlyle is in romantic revolt against convention; like Wordsworth and Shelley, though in a very different way than either, he seeks for some positive ideal upon which to construct a habitable moral world in place of the uninhabitable one he has striven to destroy. “Sartor Resartus,” which is both destructive and constructive, is pre-eminent in doctrinal interest among all his books. It is also extremely ingenious in plan, and is written with a wonderful mingling of wild sardonic humor, keen pathos, and an eloquence and imaginative elevation almost biblical.

The French Revolution, 1837

  He left us [John Stuart Mill] in a relapsed state, one of the pitiablest. My dear wife has been very kind, and has become dearer to me. The night has been full of emotion, occasionally of sharp pain (something cutting or hard grasping me round the heart) occasionally of sweet consolation. I dreamt of my father and sister Margaret alive; yet all defaced with the sleepy stagnancy, swollen hebetude of the grave, and again dying as in some strange rude country: a horrid dream, the painfullest too when you wake first. But on the whole should I not thank the Unseen? For I was not driven out of composure, hardly for moments. “Walk humbly with thy God.” How I longed for some psalm or prayer that I could have uttered, that my loved ones could have joined me in! But there was none. Silence had to be my language. This morning I have determined so far that I can still write a book on the French Revolution, and will do it. Nay, our money will still suffice. It was my last throw, my whole staked in the monstrosity of this life—for too monstrous, incomprehensible, it has been to me. I will not quit the game while faculty is given me to try playing. I have written to Fraser to buy me a “Biographie Universelle” (a kind of increasing the stake) and fresh paper: mean to huddle up the Fête des Piques and look farther what can be attempted.

  This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years…. We need not fear to prophesy that the suffrages of a large class of the very best qualified judges will be given, even enthusiastically, in favor of the volumes before us; but we will not affect to deny that the sentiment of another large class of readers (among whom are many entitled to the most respectful attention on other subjects) will be far different; a class comprehending all who are repelled by quaintness of manner. For a style more peculiar than that of Mr. Carlyle, more unlike the jog-trot characterless uniformity which distinguishes the English style of this age of periodicals, does not exist. Nor indeed can this style be wholly defended even by its admirers. Some of its peculiarities are mere mannerisms, arising from some casual association of ideas, or some habit accidentally picked up; and what is worse, many sterling thoughts are so disguised in phraseology borrowed from the spiritualist school of German poets and metaphysicians, as not only to obscure the meaning, but to raise, in the minds of most English readers, a not unnatural or inexcusable presumption of there being no meaning at all. Nevertheless, the presumption fails in this instance (as in many other instances); there is not only a meaning, but generally a true, and even a profound meaning, and, although a few dicta about the “mystery” and the “infinitude” which are in the universe and in man, and such like topics, are repeated in varied phrases greatly too often for our taste, this must be borne with, proceeding as one cannot but see, from feelings the most solemn, and the most deeply rooted which can lie in the heart of a human being. These transcendentalisms, and the accidental mannerisms excepted, we pronounce the style of this book to be not only good, but of surpassing excellence; excelled, in its kind, only by the great masters of epic poetry; and a most suitable and glorious vesture for a work which is itself, as we have said, an epic poem.

  After perusing the whole of this extraordinary work, we can allow, almost to their fullest extent, the high qualities with which Mr. Carlyle’s idolaters endow him.

  By the way, have you read Carlyle’s extraordinary History of that wonderful period? Does it offend your classical taste? It finds great favour with many intelligent people here. They seem to think that the muses of History and Poetry have struck up a truce, and are henceforth to go on lovingly together. I must confess myself much interested. Carlyle seems to be an example of the old proverb of “the prophet without honour in his own country.”

  Carlyle does offend my classical taste; but the worst of it is that I have been absolutely riveted to his first volume, which I have this minute finished, and that I am hungering for the next. A very extraordinary writer certainly, and though somewhat, I must think, of a jargonist, and too wordy and full of repetition, yet sagacious, if not profound, and wonderfully candid. I think, too, that he shows an exactness and extent of knowledge of his subject which very advantageously distinguishes him from poetical historians in general. I assure you he is not without enthusiastic admirers here.

  People say the book is very deep: but it appears to me that the meaning seems deep from lying under mystical language. There is no repose, nor equable movement in it: all cut up into short sentences half reflective, half narrative; so that one labours through it as vessels do through what is called a short sea—small, contrary going waves caused by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides, etc.

  Of all books in the English language which the present age has given birth to, it is that which, most surprising and disheartening men at first sight, seems afterwards, so far as can be judged from the very many known experiments, the most forcibly to attract and detain them. The general result appears to be an eager, wide ebullience of the soul, issuing in manifold meditations, and in an altered and deepened feeling of all human life. The book has made no outward noise, but has echoed on and on within the hearts of men.

  I commend to your notice, if it comes in your way, Carlyle on the French Revolution. A queer, tiresome, obscure, profound and original work. The writer has not very clear principles and views, I fear, but they are very deep.

  He has done no more than give us tableaux, wonderful in execution, but nothing in conception, without connection, without a bearing. His book is the French Revolution illustrated—illustrated by the hand of a master, we know, but one from whom we expected a different labour…. The eternal cursus et recursus inexorably devours ideas, creeds, daring, and devotedness. The Infinite takes, to him, the form of Nihilation. It has a glance of pity for every set of enthusiasms, a smile, stamped with scepticism for every act of great devotedness to ideas. Generalities are odious to it; detail is its favorite occupation, and it there amuses itself as if seeking to lay at rest its inconsolable cares.

  In these times there have appeared in Europe few works so worthy of attention; few so notable at once for their repulsive and attractive qualities. If your glance stops at the surface, and external singularities repel you, do not read this strange book. The mystic and obscure form chosen by Carlyle will soon fatigue you, and you will chafe at so many disguises which are not even transparent. If you are charmed by purity of diction, if you are accustomed to the Anglo-Gallic style of Addison, to the brief, incisive, altogether British sentences of Bacon, to the energetic and robust periods of Southey, Carlyle will displease you…. If you are an historian of fact, and pride yourself above all on a practical study of events and circumstances, you will be still more annoyed; for facts are badly told by him, sometimes magnified as to their importance, sometimes heaped together or scattered apart, always without that clear arrangement which constitutes history. But if you are a philosopher, that is to say a sincere observer of mankind, you will re-read his work more than once. It will specially charm you, if you dare lift yourself above parties, and the prejudices of the day. It is neither a well-written book, nor an exact history of the French Revolution. It is not an eloquent dissertation,—still less a transmutation of events and men into romantic narrative. It is a philosophic study, mingled with irony and drama, nothing more…. In writing it, the author concerned himself much more with the thought than the expression; he has thought more of the work than he has elaborated it. He has almost always seen clearly; he has often spoken badly. His narrative has all the glow of a present and actual scene. He has found himself profoundly isolated in England. This misfortune for his life is auspicious for his glory. He has sacrificed nothing to party. He has been the man of his own thought, and the expression of his own character.

  Mr. Carlyle has written too well himself on the unconsciousness of man’s highest faculty not to be aware that however dramatic a work should be, no showman is required to stand by and interrupt the course of the action by perpetually appearing on the stage. This is the great fault of his “French Revolution.” It would be idle to complain that it is not a history; for probably (notwithstanding its title-page), it never seriously pretended to such a character. But looking on it as a series of scenes and pictures, and fragmentary sketches of remarkable events etched out in a bold, rough, Callot-like outline, they do possess this singular defect, that everywhere the shadow of the writer himself comes across and perplexes the eye. We are speaking now solely of the composition. Of the historical views contained in the work we may speak elsewhere. But this personal appearance of the writer is to be noticed, because it is unhappily too much in accordance with the general practice and a very bad practice—of our modern literature. It is egotistical. Until it ceases to be egotistical, it will achieve nothing great or good. Shakespeare painted all things but himself.

  I prefer his history of the French Revolution to all those we have ourselves produced; I find it quite as dramatic, and I will venture to say more profound.

  The last great book published in his lifetime, wherein he recognized at once the presence of a new literary potentate, was Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Never had he read a history, he declared, which interested him so much; and doubtless all the more because of the emotion which the tremendous course of events it describes had excited in him, when, in his own and Landor’s youth, he read of them day by day. Not a few opinions, indeed, he found rising to the surface of that book to which he hardly knew what reception to give; but with wisdom and with feeling he found it to be full to overflowing, nor could he rest satisfied till he had seen and spoken with the author.

  He saw nothing but evil in the French Revolution. He judges it as unjustly as he judges Voltaire, and for the same reasons. He understands our manner of acting no better than our manner of thinking. He looks for Puritan sentiment; and, as he does not find it, he condemns us. The idea of duty, the religious spirit, self-government, the authority of an austere conscience, can alone, in his opinion, reform a corrupt society; and none of all these are to be met with in French society.

  So overmastering is the interest of the story, that it is only by an effort that the supreme intellectual feat implied in the creation of such a work can be realised. To consult all authorities, however insignificant, which could throw light on the events, to keep the thread of narrative and chain of circumstances distinct in the mind, and weld all into one well-balanced piece of artistic work, nowhere marred by undue insistance on trivial points, or insufficient examination of important ones—this could be accomplished only by the possessor of an unexampled historic imagination. It is small wonder that such a history as this was hailed by the leading minds of England and America as the production of a great man of genius.

  That it is worthy of the position which, in England at least, is generally assigned it, of the best of its author’s works, judged from all points of view, I have no doubt…. It is the most practically serviceable in the education of the citizen and the man of letters, and above all, it is the first sprightly running of its author’s mind in the direction of practical and historical application of an original, if partial and one-sided, view of human life and human affairs.

  Carlyle’s book on the French Revolution has been called the great modern epic, and so it is—an epic as true and germane to this age, as Homer’s was to his…. Of all Carlyle’s works, his “French Revolution” is, no doubt, the greatest, that by which he will, probably, be longest remembered. It is a thoroughly artistic book, artistically conceived, and artistically executed. On it he expended his full strength, and he himself felt that he had done so.

  This is truly a marvellous book. But it is not so much a history as a succession of pictures, or perhaps a succession of poems in prose. It is pervaded with Carlyle’s philosophy, and is probably his most brilliant work. He finds abundance of demons to hate, and a few heroes to admire. Mirabeau and Danton seem to be his favorites, while Lafayette and Bailly are treated with a more or less obvious contempt. He gives us a picture of pandemonium, interspersing it with judgments that seem sometimes preposterous and sometimes inspired. Every student of the Revolutionary period should read the book; but he will gain his chief advantage from it after his studies have already made him master of the leading facts of the history. Though it is probably the most remarkable work ever written on the Revolution, it will prove unsatisfactory to nearly every student unless it be studied in connection with a work of more commonplace merits.

  Mr. Carlyle’s Revolution is more and more felt to be a literary picture, and less and less a historical examination. It is based on an idea now recognised to be thoroughly inadequate; it is saturated with doctrines for which the author himself no longer retained any trust or hope; and it leads us to a conclusion which all that is manly and true in our generation rejects with indignation.

  Carlyle wrote the last word of “The French Revolution” as the clock was striking ten and the supper of oatmeal porridge was coming up. He naturally felt the house too narrow, and went forth into the night. Before departing he said to his wife, “I know not whether this book is worth anything, nor what the world will do with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to do, as is likeliest: but this I could tell the world: You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man. Do what you like with it, you.” After which oration, the hall-door closed upon the most angry and desperate man of genius then in the flesh; with cause, had he known it, to have been the most thankful and hopeful.

  But by-and-bye another book opened up a new world to me. Fond of historical reading, in the later years of my university life I had drenched myself with French memoirs, largely connected with the Revolution period. In those days they might be picked up on stalls, cheap, from Arthur Young’s travels down to the malicious gossip of the Duchesse d’Abrantes. But they left a very confused impression on one’s mind. It happened to me now, however, happily to get hold of Carlyle. Had I been a true Carlylean, of course I should have been absorbed in “Sartor Resartus,” and, from that starting point, gone on to see all things in the light of the clothes’ philosophy. But I did not read “Sartor” till years after, and not then, I fear, with proper appreciation. The “French Revolution,” however, I devoured eagerly, being sufficiently versed in the story already really to profit by its vivid pictures and singular insight. I found it to be the epic poem of our age, with the vision of a seer and the moral power of a Hebrew poet, even though I had to protest against some of its verdicts. If Coleridge gave me clear guiding lights in the realm of theology, Carlyle introduced me to deeper and broader views of human life and history. I did not, indeed, accept all his judgments; yet the book was like a revelation to me, and still remains, of all his works, the one I read oftenest, and never weary of reading. Certainly it is an era in one’s life when one gets rid of Dryasdust, and comes face to face with the grand poetic justice of Providence. An epic poem, and yet a great history! But must not a great history be always an epic?

  Even Carlyle, rugged and harsh in his John-Knox nature, could have been a poet, as his “Heroes and Hero Worship,” Burns’s “Essay,” and “French Revolution” prove. In no poem ever written was there more use of what is to be felt for what is to be known than in the last-named work. As history it is, of course, a failure; but that is true of other attempts than his, and oftener because there is too little feeling than too much. The man who writes only generalizations, without giving first the facts, writes history to as little purpose as Carlyle. If we are first to know the facts before we read our history, Carlyle’s volumes are as good as Green’s, and, as interpretative literature, far better.

  One of the first literary distinctions of Queen Victoria’s reign was the publication of this book…. The perfection at once of that new grandiose yet rugged voice, which broke every law of composition and triumphed over them all, which shocked and bewildered all critics and authorities, yet excited and stirred the whole slumbrous world of literature, and rang into the air like a trumpet,—and of a new manner altogether of regarding the events of history, a great pictorial representation, all illuminated by the blaze, sometimes lurid, sometimes terrible, of the highest poetic genius and imagination,—were fully displayed in this astonishing work…. Carlyle seized the reality of the most lamentable, the most awful, the most influential of recent epochs. It is no mere record, but a great drama passing before our eyes…. A book more interesting than any romance, which those who took it up could not lay down, and which was far too impressive in its general character, too powerful and novel in its art, to be mistaken or overlooked.

  His “French Revolution” is not history in the proper sense of the word. It is a set of lurid pictures illustrative of that great event, by an artist of singular power, pictures which bring out its real significance in a quite unique manner.

  Its passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of ineffaceable pictures, place it undoubtedly at the head of all the pictorial histories of modern times.

  Probably nowhere is there a history which in every chapter, and almost in every sentence, breathes the artistic purpose as Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution” does. It has been frequently called the “epic” of the Revolution. In point of fact, as Froude justly says, the conception is rather dramatic, and the best comparison is to Æschylus.

Chartism, 1840

  I will tell you some good things to read—though not sure they are quite in your way: viz., Carlyle’s “Chartism.”… Carlyle is a very striking writer; full of a sort of grim humour:—the grin-horribly-a-ghastly-smile kind of style; the subject, too, being one which develops such a power well. This is not an inviting or flowery description to give of an author; but for a variety he is wonderfully impressive.

  We pass through the book as through a journey of many ways and many objects, brilliantly illuminated and pictured in every direction, but without arriving at any clear conclusion, and without gathering any fresh information on the main subject, during the progress. By his not very clear argument about “might” and “right,” he has enabled any despot to show some sort of reasoning for any violent act.

  I prefer his little book called “Chartism” to all the descriptions of social maladies and all the statistics that have been bestowed upon us in these latter times.

  “Chartism,” Carlyle’s next book, is the briefest, and also the most simple, direct, and business-like of any of his works. The splendours of diction which characterised his previous efforts were now, as in his account of Luther, rigorously laid aside, as if he had resolved that he would have practical belief or nothing. No one could read this little book with any intelligence, and think of it as a mere literary performance: it is his first distinct effort as a Social Reformer. German Transcendentalism retires into the Divine Silences, and English practically comes to the front. It must be understood that “Chartism” was published long before the Corn Laws were repealed, and that it made a very deep impression at the time of its appearance. How much of the subsequent practical legislation may have been directly or indirectly influenced by it, it is perhaps impossible now to determine. All we can say is, that from this time legislation did begin, in various directions, to take the practical tone Carlyle here strove to initiate.

  A little book, but a great one. Wildly declamatory, truth without soberness, it contains some of Carlyle’s finest writings, and is as fresh to-day as the day it was published; nor is it intolerant like its more modern representatives.

Heroes and Hero Worship, 1841

  Have you read poor Carlyle’s raving book about heroes? Of course you have, or I would ask you to buy my copy. I don’t like to live with it in the house. It smoulders. He ought to be laughed at a little. But it is pleasant to retire to the Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy, and Horace Walpole, after being tossed on his canvas waves. This is blasphemy. Dibdin Pitt of the Coburg could enact one of his heroes.

  Carlyle’s “Hero-worship” trembled in my hand like a culprit before a judge; and as the book is very full of paradoxes, and has some questionable matter in it, this shaking seemed rather symbolical. But, oh! it is a book fit rather to shake (take it all in all) than to be shaken. It is very full of noble sentiments and wise reflections, and throws out many a suggestion which will not waste itself like a blast blown in a wilderness, but will surely rouse many a heart and mind to a right, Christian-like way of acting and of dealing with the gifted and godlike in man and of men.

  “Heroes and Hero Worship”—was its author’s chief, if not his only, bid for popularity, and has, perhaps, remained the most popular of his works.

  However the matter may have stood in 1841, in 1887 “Hero Worship” is likely to be read with great admiration but little astonishment. The stars in their courses have fought for Carlyle. The influence of great or reputed great men upon politics and thought has been so enormous, the impotence of the most respectable causes without powerful representatives has been so notorious, that the personal element in history has regained all the importance of which it has been deprived by the study of general laws. The problem of harmonizing it with the truth of general laws remains without solution from Carlyle. He simply ignores these laws, and assumes that the hero appears when God pleases, and acts as pleases himself. It is also difficult to square the truth of “Hero Worship” with the truth of “Sartor Resartus.”

  He was more alive than any man since Swift to the dark side of human nature. The dullness of mankind weighed upon him like a nightmare. “Mostly fools” is his pithy verdict upon the race at large. Nothing then could be more idle than the dream of the revolutionists that the voice of the people could be itself the voice of God. From millions of fools you can by no constitutional machinery extract anything but folly. Where then is the escape? The millions, he says (essay on Johnson), “roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led;” they seem “all sightless and slavish,” with little but “animal instincts.” The hope is that, here and there, are scattered the men of power and of insight, the heaven-sent leaders; and it is upon loyalty to them and capacity for recognizing and obeying them that the future of the race really depends. This was the moral of the lectures on “Hero-Worship.” Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Cromwell, and Napoleon, are types of the great men who now and then visit the earth as prophets or rulers. They are the brilliant centers of light in the midst of the surrounding darkness; and in loyal recognition of their claims lies our security for all external progress. By what signs, do you ask, can they be recognized? There can be no sign. You can see the light if you have eyes; but no other faculty can supply the want of eyesight. And hence arise some remarkable points both of difference from and coincidence with popular beliefs.

Past and Present, 1843

  Father Saurteig,—Thanks to thee for thy new work—a real piece of work such as even thou hadst not before given us the like of—not even in “Sartor Resartus.” I could wish thou hadst not put forth more of this at once than the two or three first books, and that the first had been placed last of these. Thou shouldst have begun assuredly with thy true revivification of the men of St. Edmundsburg. Neither can I agree with my teacher in what he more than once proclaimeth as his judgment general, touching Oliver of Tyburn; nor, indeed, am I very sure that I leap as yet contentedly to any of thy distinct conclusions, save one—namely, that we are all wrong and all like to be damned. But I thank thee for having made me conscious of life and feeling for sundry hours by thy pages, whether figurative, or narrative, or didactic. Thou hast done a book such as no other living man could do or dream of doing.

  His finest work, as matter of political philosophy, is undoubtedly his “Past and Present.” In this work he is no longer the philosopher of the circle. He allows the world a chance.

  “Past and Present” is at once a monument of the keen practical spirit of the man and of what may be called his literary flair, or scent. Ecclesiological mediævalism was at its very height, and in itself Mr. Carlyle hated it, or regarded it with a partly unutterable sense of sarcastic astonishment. Yet he managed, out of a book published to interest readers who read in this spirit, to make something quite different,—to expound his own views, preach his own gospel, and illustrate his own fancies…. A unique book, which no one, perhaps, but its author could have written, neither the like of it will any other man write.

  It is at once the most tender and pathetic picture of the Past and the most unsparing indictment of the Present that exists in modern English literature.

  With my memory of the Preston riots still vivid, I procured “Past and Present,” and read it perseveringly. It was far from easy reading; but I found in it strokes of descriptive power unequalled in my experience, and thrills of electric splendour which carried me enthusiastically on. I found in it, moreover, in political matters, a morality so righteous, a radicalism so high, reasonable, and humane, as to make it clear to me that without truckling to the ape and tiger of the mob, a man might hold the views of a radical.

  Of the book itself, considered as a piece of literature and not as a message from a modern prophet, it is easy to say harsh things. Like all Carlyle’s works, it is very wordy and diffuse, and there is much chaff hiding the solid grain. There is the usual exaggeration in his style of writing and speaking, and the usual striving after effect by the use of extraordinary nicknames and similes…. The greatest fault in the book is not its style or the want thereof, but a certain absence of any clear connexion between the world of the nineteenth century and that of Abbot Samson, even as contrasts. Only here and there is the link between them hinted at; it is the contrast that strikes us most.

  He has left us in “Past and Present” our truest and most sympathetic picture of mediæval monasticism at its high water mark, a picture which no Catholic writer can hope to rival. He understood what those monks of St. Edmundsbury felt and thought, with perfect comprehension. Yet was he a student of the Middle Ages? Far from it, but he was a student of man.

  No one has made mediævalism more attractive. “Past and Present” is a very notable book. The reconstitution of mediæval life in the picture he makes out of the chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond is vivid and telling—especially telling in contrast with certain sides of modern life with its “thirty thousand distressed needlewomen in London alone” and its “cash payment the sole nexus between men.” The book is, of course, inspired by the desire of exhibiting this contrast—a desire which, of course, impairs its veracity. It is in fact a pamphlet.

Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell, 1845

  We do not quarrel with Mr. Carlyle for his enthusiasm, if he feels it; but he really must not call people “flunkeys” and “canting persons” if they do not share it with him. He has thrown himself for the present on Oliver’s own account of himself, and is content to stand by in the humble posture of direction post, or, at the highest, of showman. He shows us Oliver; an engraving of his portrait, very characteristic and striking; his letters and his speeches, equally full of character. We are left alone with the great man, to form our own judgment of him. Mr. Carlyle ought not to complain if his own interjectional bursts of rapture, and orders to love Oliver, produce less effect than the sight he presents to us. We do not grudge Puritanism its great man any more than its temporary triumph. It earned what it won by good means as well as bad…. His book labours and struggles, and leaves only impressions which counteract one another. Its parts do not adjust themselves naturally; fact pulls against commentary; elucidation falls dead upon the latter; and between them the living image of Cromwell drops through. Mr. Carlyle’s own idea does not rise of itself out of his documents; he has to protect and foster it. There is a painful effort, a monotonous, impatient bluster, to keep up the reader’s heroic mood…. We believe that he meant to bring out a genuinely English idea of excellence, to portray a man of rude exterior and speech, doing great things in a commonplace and unromantic way. But he must match his ideal with something better than Cromwell’s distorted and unreal character, his repulsive energy, his dreary and ferocious faith, his thinly veiled and mastering selfishness.

  The style of the book on Cromwell is occasionally a trial even to the lovers of Carlyle’s picturesque and shaggy diction, and few men can pronounce some of the sentences aloud without running the risk of being throttled. To follow the course of his thought through the sudden turns, and down the abrupt declivities of his style, exposes one at times to the danger of having his eyes put out of joint.

  Many will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion, the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He despises his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He bullies his predecessors; when he speaks of Cromwell’s biographers, he takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an ill-taught plebian…. Carlyle’s masterpiece is but a collection of letters and speeches, commented on and united by a continuous narrative. The impression which they leave is extraordinary. Grave constitutional histories hang heavy after this compilation. The author wishes to make us comprehend a soul, the soul of Cromwell, the greatest of the Puritans, their chief, their abstract, their hero, and their model.

  This book is, in my opinion, by far the most important contribution to English history, which has been made in the present century. Carlyle was the first to break the crust which has overlaid the subject of Cromwell since the Restoration, and to make Cromwell and Cromwell’s age again intelligible to mankind. Anyone who will read what was written about him before Carlyle’s work appeared, and what has been written since, will perceive how great was the achievement. The enthusiast, led away by ambition, and degenerating into the hypocrite, the received figure of the established legend, is gone for ever. We may retain each our own opinion about Cromwell, we may think that he did well or that he did ill, that he was wise or unwise; but we see the real man. We can entertain no shadow of doubt about the genuineness of the portrait; and, with the clear insight of Oliver himself, we have a new conception of the Civil War and of its consequences.

  Though containing some of his finest descriptions and battle-pieces, conspicuously that of “Dunbar”—it is the least artistic of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in extract.

  His “Cromwell” is essentially the portrait of a soul: a very skillfully constructed autobiography with connecting narrative and reflections, exhibiting its subject with a vividness never surpassed, so far as I know, in that species of composition.

  On the whole, we may count the “Cromwell” as the greatest of Carlyle’s effective products. With his own right hand, alone and by a single stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy, fashion, literature, and wit, had for two centuries combined to falsify history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen. And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and forever reversed this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the Protestant movement. There are few examples in the history of literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice. At the same time, it is well to remember that the “Cromwell” is not a literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of art. It is not the “Life” of Cromwell: it was not so designed, and was never so worked out. It is his “Letters and Speeches,” illustrated by notes.

  Carlyle’s “Cromwell” is, more than either of the other histories, an illustration of his own doctrine of heroes, and less than either of the others is it a history of a nation as well as of a man. Cromwell to a great extent speaks for himself, and Carlyle expounds and comments on his uncouth and sometimes obsolete manner of expression. The commentary is free and even ample, yet there is less of Carlyle himself in this than in any other of his works. The great features of it are its delineation of the man Cromwell and the proof it presents of Carlyle’s skill in the use of documents. Carlyle has not converted everybody to his own view of Cromwell, but he has at least coloured the opinion of everybody who has since studied the period.

Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850

  Have you read Carlyle’s “Pamphlets?” The last, called “The Stump Orator,” contains some good things, and the Guardian can not sneer it down, with all its talent at sneering. People affect to despise its truisms, when I believe, in fact, at heart they are galled by some of its bold, broad truths, expressed with a graphic force and felicitous humor which it is easier to rail at than to hide under a bushel. Put what bushel over it they may, it will shine through, and indeed burn up the designed extinguisher, as the fire eats up a scroll of paper.

  When I speak of the Latter Day Prophet, I conclude you have read, or heard of, Carlyle’s Pamphlets so designed. People are tired of them and of him: he only foams, snaps, and howls, and no progress, people say: this is almost true: and yet there is vital good in all he has written.

  It is with some consternation that I approach the subject of Carlyle’s politics. One handles them as does an inspector of police a parcel reported to contain dynamite. The “Latter-Day Pamphlets” might not unfitly be labelled “Dangerous Explosives.”

  As was natural, the “Latter-Day Pamphlets” were treated as a series of political ravings. For that estimate Carlyle himself was largely responsible. He deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers by the violence of his invective and the lack of discrimination in his abuse. Much of what Carlyle said is to be found in Mill’s “Representative Government,” said, too, in a quiet, rational style, which commands attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle, was a believer in mob rule. He did not think that the highest wisdom was to be had by the counting of heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not deem it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies. They suggested remedies on the lines of these tendencies. They did not try to put back the hands on the clock of time; they sought to remove perturbing influences. Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by political methods what should not be done by these methods. Carlyle’s idea that Government should do this, that, and the other thing has wrought mischief, inasmuch as it has led to an undue belief in the virtues of Government interference. His writings are largely responsible for the evils he predicted.

  In spite of their variety of subjects—“Stump Orator,” “Jesuitism,” “Model Prisons,” etc.—leave the definite sensation of a prolonged and scarcely modulated shriek.

Life of John Sterling, 1851

  These bricks from Babylon convey but scanty intimation of the varied interest of the book. However the readers of it may differ from its opinions, they cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle’s misjudgments and prejudices, ample matter for serious reflection: for if he misjudges, it is generally because he is looking too intently at a single truth, or a single side of a truth; and such misjudgments are more suggestive than the completest propositions of a less earnest, keen-sighted, and impassioned thinker.

  Well, the book has come at last, and, notwithstanding the evil animus of parts of it, a milder, more tender, and more pleasant gossiping little volume we have not read for many a day. The mountain has been in labor, and lo! a nice lively field-mouse, quite frisky and good-humored, has been brought forth. It is purely ridiculous and contemptible to speak, with some of our contemporaries, of this volume as Mr. Carlyle’s best, or as, in any sense, a great work. The subject, as he has viewed it, was not great, and his treatment of it, while exceedingly graceful and pleasant, is by no means very powerful or very profound.

  Far the most pleasant as well as one of the truest of his books.

  I have always felt, notwithstanding a great affection and admiration for Carlyle, that his “Life of Sterling” has in it a breath of Mephistopheles, something of the mocking scornful spirit, satirically superior to all a young man’s hereditary beliefs, and with a careless pleasure in pursuing and stripping him of these but weakly founded non-individual religious views which had built up the outer fabric of his life, such as hurts the moral sense, wonderful as is the almost lyrical strain of its lament and praise.

  One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and certain of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets;” but I found I could not, and thanked my stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a spirited but bony horse bareback. There was tremendous go in the beast; but oh, the bruises from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But the “Life of Sterling” I have found I can re-read with delight; it has a noble music.

  One recoils at much of Carlyle’s expression in this work, but, with all its blemish of pity and Philistinism and pessimism, it stands remarkable, a monument built by such hands,—I will not say planned by such a mind, for the mind protested; but nevertheless the hands, obedient to the spirit, built it with the best they could bring in gratitude to helpful love whose sunlight had reached an imprisoned soul.

History of Friedrich II, 1868–64

  Infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written,—a book that one would think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oak-leaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to England, in acknowledgment of this donation,—a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;—the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with undertones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective. With its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modelled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times. And this book makes no noise; I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas has been instructed to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration. But the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these.

  In conclusion, after saying, as honest critics must, that “The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick the Great” is a book to be read in with more satisfaction than to be read through, after declaring that it is open to all manner of criticism, especially in point of moral purpose and tendency, we must admit with thankfulness, that it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be. With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, the most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen…. The figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out through any hole that criticism may tear in them, but Carlyle’s are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed. He seems a little wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, with the multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily; but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the Only, and such episodes as that of Voltaire would make the fortune of any other writer. Though not the safest of guides in politics or practical philosophy, his value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be over-estimated.

  While Carlyle showed in this History his marvellous power at its height, there is no book of his that defines more clearly the limitations of his power, or more frequently chafes the reader by the twists and wrenches given to our mother tongue.

  The first effect of the book in England was to weaken its author’s moral influence, for the Christian conscience of the country revolted against its teaching, and was shocked by the pictures of Frederick and his father. It was only as the book receded from view, and its author’s previous writings were reverted to, that the painful impression wore off. That feeling was only too well founded. Though he did not magnify Frederick, in whom Force without Righteousness was incarnate, as he had magnified Cromwell, it cannot be denied that he treats this unspeakable monster with a deference to which he was in no way entitled; and at times it would almost appear as if he loved him for his unendurable brutality, while he has actually the hardihood to charge other historians with injustice in not recognising the candour with which Frederick owned that his seizure of Silesia was one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated.

  The industry of research displayed in the ten volumes of this long history is marvellous. Taken as a whole, it may be called wearisome, as the writer himself confessed; though his highest powers of humourous and graphic portraiture find exercise in many passages.

  A work of superlative genius, which defies every canon of criticism and sets at nought every rule of historical composition. It is a succession of startling flashes and detonations. In no one of Carlyle’s works do the peculiar qualities of his genius show themselves with more intensity. There is scarcely a paragraph that does not contain in itself either a poem or a picture. The book is founded on the most exhaustive study and the most careful observation. The author even visited the more important of Frederick’s battle-fields, and had surveys made in the interests of absolute accuracy. Every scrap of German writing that would throw light upon the reign appears to have been examined and weighed. The result is one of the most remarkable books in the English language, and one which, all things considered, is unquestionably the best history of Frederick the Great in any language.

  No ancient or modern character rivalled Cromwell in Carlyle’s affection. His not unmixed satisfaction in the progress of the Life of Frederick was qualified by an imperfect sympathy with his hero. The disproportionate space which is allotted to the king’s rough and narrow-minded father may, perhaps, indicate a lingering reluctance to enter on the principal subject. The history of Prussia and of Germany, which occupies the greater part of the first volume, is in clearness, in skilful brevity, and in fulness of knowledge, a literary masterpiece. Voltaire himself could not have condensed the story of several centuries into happier units, nor would he have shown the same conscientious industry in collecting his materials. Carlyle’s elaborate apology for Frederick William has caused great offence in England, though the paradoxes in which it abounds are explained and to a great extent modified by the incipient play of satirical and sympathetic humour.

  Just at the time when the first instalment of Carlyle’s “Life of Frederick” was published, I found him [Macaulay] engaged in the perusal of the opening chapters. His wrath—I can use no milder word—against Carlyle’s style was boundless. He read aloud to me four or five of the most Carlylean sentences, and then, throwing the book on the library table, exclaimed, “I hold that no Englishman has the right to treat his mother-tongue after so unfilial a fashion.”… Before a week had elapsed I was again at Holly Lodge, and he at once recurred to Carlyle’s history. “Pray read it,” he said, “as soon as you can find time. Of course I have not got, and never shall get, reconciled to his distortions and contortions of language; but there are, notwithstanding, passages of truly wonderful interest and power, and in the infinite variety of new historical facts, and in the delight and instruction they afford, if my first feeling has been that of annoyance at the strange way of telling the story, my second and permanent feeling is one of gratitude that—even in such a way—the story has been told.”

  Although in the prophetic sight of the writer that most remarkable book may, at the moment it was written, have borne a conscious reference to events which were still future, but have since most wonderfully illustrated its great theme, the world in general recognized nothing of the sort in it. The author, if he knew himself to be a vox clamantis at the time, must have been astonished at the rapidity with which his Gospel of Force triumphed as soon as it had its chance. Some of us shook our heads over it, one great man amongst us, whose place I am proud to occupy, I dare not say to fill, did not hesitate to speak words of summary condemnation; but the doctrine itself was esoteric, the words, like much else of Carlyle’s, were φωνᾷντα συνέτοισιν, but συνέτοισιν only; to the ears of the many they required the sacred interpreter.

  The book oftenest in my hand of late years is certainly Carlyle’s “Frederick.”

  His “Frederick” appeals to us chiefly as a comedy of humours, and I, for my part, always regret that its author lavished so much time over military details, now of little interest save to professional warriors.

  It is not a book at all, but an encyclopædia of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau? What a welter of dull garbage! In what dust-heaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdröckh! O, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders?

  By this later work Carlyle outstripped, in the judgment of serious critics, his only possible rival, Macaulay, and took his place as the first scientific historian of the early Victorian period. His method in this class of work is characteristic of him as an individualist; he endeavours, in all conjunctions, to see the man moving, breathing, burning in the glow and flutter of adventure. This gives an extraordinary vitality to portions of Carlyle’s narrative, if it also tends to disturb the reader’s conception of the general progress of events.

Correspondence and Reminiscences

  The hasty and ill-advised publication of the “Reminiscences,” abounding in unfortunate matter, given to the world with feminine zeal but without even the pretence of clear-headed editorial supervision, has certainly let loose the full tongue of detraction.

  It was the lot of the present writer to read nearly all the obituary notices of him which appeared in the leading journals after his death. With not an exception they were extremely eulogistic, praising his works and applauding in the highest terms the dignity and stern conscientiousness of his life. But when, about three weeks later, the “Reminiscences” were published by Mr. Froude, the tide took a turn. They were found to be full of harsh, and, as in the case of Charles Lamb, even cruel and heartless judgments; and Carlyle’s faults of temper, his malice, and his uncharitableness began to be sharply commented on. A few of the more sturdy admirers of the Seer of Chelsea protested that the “Reminiscences” did not give any idea of the real Carlyle at all; that nothing could be more unjust than to form an estimate of his character from angry passages written in his old age, when weak health and agonising sorrow had rendered him scarcely responsible for his utterances. This defence proved to be but a refuge of lies.

	Sweet heart, forgive me for thine own sweet sake,
	Whose kind blithe soul such seas of sorrow swam,
	And for my love’s sake, powerless as I am
	For love to praise thee, or like thee to make
	Music of mirth where hearts less pure would break,
	Less pure than thine, our life-unspotted Lamb.
	Things hatefullest thou hadst not heart to damn,
	Nor wouldst have set thine heel on this dead snake.
	Let worms consume its memory with its tongue,
	The fang that stabbed fair Truth, the lip that stung
	Men’s memories uncorroded with its breath.
	Forgive me, that with bitter words like his
	I mix the gentlest English name that is,
	The tenderest held of all that know not death.

  Carlyle takes his place among the first of English, among the very first of all letter-writers. All his great merits come out in this form of expression; and his defects are not felt as defects, but only as striking characteristics and as tones in the picture. Originality, nature, humor, imagination, freedom, the disposition to talk, the play of mood, the touch of confidence—these qualities, of which the letters are full, will, with the aid of an inimitable use of language,… preserve their life for readers even further removed from the occasion than ourselves, and for whom possibly the vogue of Carlyle’s published writings in his day will be to a certain degree a subject of wonder.

  Reluctantly, and only when he found that his wishes would not and could not be respected, Carlyle requested me to undertake the task which he had thus described as hopeless; and placed materials in my hands which would make the creation of a true likeness of him, if still difficult, yet no longer as impossible as he had declared it to be. Higher confidence was never placed by any man in another. I had not sought it, but I did not refuse to accept it. I felt myself only more strictly bound than men in such circumstances usually are, to discharge the duty which I was undertaking with the fidelity which I knew to be expected from me. Had I considered my own comfort or my own interest, I should have sifted out or passed lightly over the delicate features in the story. It would have been as easy as it would have been agreeable for me to construct a picture, with every detail strictly accurate, of an almost perfect character. An account so written would have been read with immediate pleasure. Carlyle would have been admired and applauded, and the biographer, if he had not shared in the praise, would at least have escaped censure. He would have followed in the track marked out for him by a custom which is all but universal…. Had I taken the course which the “natural man” would have recommended, I should have given no faithful account of Carlyle. I should have created a “delusion and a hallucination” of the precise kind which he who was the truest of men most deprecated and dreaded; and I should have done it not innocently and in ignorance, but with deliberate insincerity, after my attention had been specially directed by his own generous openness to the points which I should have left unnoticed. I should have been unjust first to myself—for I should have failed in what I knew to be my duty as a biographer. I should have been unjust secondly to the public.

  I hardly know, in all literature, a more pathetic book than the volume of “Reminiscences.”

  Every one agrees with you as to Froude and Carlyle, but there is no doubt that one of the bad effects of Froude’s extraordinary proceedings has been to tire people of Carlyle, and discipline them from occupying themselves any more with him, for the present at any rate.

  Mr. Froude has done his worst or his best, and it cannot be undone. Even Mr. Eliot Norton’s brilliant re-editing cannot undo it. And what is the result? Simply that we must thank either Mr. Froude or his blunder for enabling us to understand how great Carlyle really was…. Carlyle, as we know him now, is more real, and immeasurably more impressive than the Carlyle we knew before. The literary small-talkers may say the idol is shattered; but those to whom Carlyle was never an idol, but an instructor and inspirer, must be glad and not sorry that he has become so real to them.

  He was no sooner dead—this great, universally honoured chief of literature in England, a man against whom no one had a word to say, to whom the nation itself, amid all its huge business and interests, gave a moment’s pause of respectful silence to acknowledge his greatness—than the book of his fiery grief, the “Reminiscences,” which had given outlet to his passion and misery, and of which he remembered only that it was to be anxiously revised or not published at all, was flung just as it was, like a red-hot stone in the face of the country which mourned for Carlyle.

  The indiscretions of a biographer who thought it his duty to let “the many-headed beast know” everything, even the most private details of the life of one of the most whimsical and dyspeptic of men,—a biographer, I may add, who misjudged his hero, as a man without humour was sure to misjudge one who was full of it, by taking all his extravagant statements au pied de la lettre. Perhaps too much has been made of the indiscretion of a writer, who, so far as indiscreet publication was concerned, seems not to have gone much beyond what he was commissioned or allowed to do by Carlyle himself. But it is worth while to remark that there are many details of a man’s life, which gain an undue importance by being revived after the lapse of years, and when it is no longer possible to supply the necessary explanation of the words and action that express only the feelings of the passing hour.

  One of the details of these Memoirs has been to make us understand that the woman whom the mighty genius and the arrogant selfishness of Carlyle so overshadowed, was almost his equal in literary gifts, and vastly his superior in courage, in unselfishness, and generally in character.

  Breach of trust, and breach of such a trust! And all to provide some readable paragraphs for a book which no mere bookseller’s success could ever render other than a failure. From bewildered theologians Mr. Froude had early learned that Jesuitical “doctrine of devils” that the end justifies the means; and so, thinking no man would ever know it, and solacing his uneasy conscience with the delusion that his work would be of permanent value in elucidating the character of the noblest man of modern times, he apparently decided to act on this bad rule for once, and opened and read the love-letters which it was his duty not to read, and printed matter which it was his duty not to print. Never did Providence more swiftly and visibly refute that same “doctrine of devils” which has never in the long run profited any man. Mr. Froude’s work defaced for a time the memory of Carlyle by multiplying delusions and mistakes, and the only thing likely to be permanently remembered is the breach of faith which it was hoped would never be known.

  What he felt, he thought; and what he thought, he wrote. The denunciatory mood was frequent with Carlyle, and it would be easy to collect enough of his secular anathemas for a droll sort of commination service. Men, women, children, if they disturbed him, came in for his curse. All annoyances spoke to Carlyle and his wife through a megaphone, and were proclaimed by them through a still larger variety of the same instrument. Every cock that crowed near their house was a clarion out of tune, and the “demon-fowls” were equaled by dogs, of which each had to their ears the barking power of Cerberus. When Carlyle traveled, fierce imprecations upon everything viatic were wafted back from every stage to the poor “Goody” in Cheyne Row, often while she was facing alone the problem of fresh paint and paper. On the only occasion I can now recall of Carlyle himself being at home during repairs, they were to him what a convulsion of nature would be to most of us, and his outcries were of cosmic vehemence and shrillness. In these wild splutterings of genius, a maid servant was a “puddle,” a “scandalous randy,” or even a “sluttish harlot;” a man servant was a “flunkey;” and, if he waked Carlyle too early in the morning, he was a “flunkey of the devil.” Rank, wealth, and worldly respectability were, it need not at this day be said, no defence against these grotesque indictments.

  The “Reminiscences” and the volumes that succeeded them gave, in many quarters apparently, the coup de grâce to Carlyle’s vogue. Vogue of their own they notoriously had in a true succès de scandale, and Carlyle’s friends could only denounce his chosen executor and biographer. But this was of course extremely transient, and the result was an immense weariness with the whole subject. Carlyle’s own writings fell speedily into a neglect as complete probably as has ever happened to a writer of anything like his power.

  Carlyle preached nothing more persistently than heroism and reverence for heroes. As an author, if not as a husband, he made it manifest that he was himself a hero, great as his own Luther, Knox, or Cromwell. That quality of nobility in labour, joined almost to an unconsciousness of it, gave his reminiscences rare interest, and the fame of them after two decades has scarcely dimmed.

General

  When I recollect how the “Edinburgh Reviewers” treated my works not many years since, and when I now consider Carlyle’s merits with respect to German literature, I am astonished at the important step for the better…. The temper in which he works is always admirable. What an earnest man he is! and how he has studied us Germans! He is almost more at home in our literature than ourselves. At any rate, we cannot vie with him in our researches in English literature.

  Few writers of the present time have risen more rapidly into popularity than Mr. Carlyle, after labouring through so long a period of comparative neglect. Whatever judgment critics may be pleased to pass on him, it is certain that his works have attracted of late no common share of attention. His little school of sectaries has expanded into a tolerably wide circle of admirers. His eccentricity of style has become the parent of still greater eccentricities in others, with less genius to recommend them; and his mannerism has already infected, to a certain extent, the fugitive literature of the day…. The great merit of Mr. Carlyle as a writer, and the great pleasure which his writings give, arise from their suggestive character. He is always furnishing hints for thought; a slight sentence, a passing observation, often seem to open long vistas for reflection; but he rarely thinks out a subject for his reader: he never weighs, and reasons, and arrives at balanced conclusions. His brief outlines first arrest the attention, and then provoke objection: we feel tempted to debate and argue every point with him, proposition by proposition; but it is wonderful on how much more cordial terms we part with a companion of this description—angered though we may have felt at times by mutual contradiction—than with one of those formal and useful guides who fall under the general denomination of historian—to which, in plain truth, Mr. Carlyle has no title whatever.

  Carlyle, with all his ideality and power of words, never creates an ideal character, rather the test of a poet; he is never affected, as a prophet,—he dare not be so, it would neutralize his earnestness and reforming energy.

  Mr. Carlyle formerly wrote for the [Edinburgh] Review,—a man of talents, though, in my opinion, absurdly overpraised by some of his admirers. I believe, though I do not know, that he ceased to write because the oddities of his diction and his new words compounded à la Teutonique drew such strong remonstrances from Napier.

  Mr. Carlyle is obscure only; he is seldom, as some have imagined him, quaint. So far he is right; for although quaintness, employed by a man of judgment and genius, may be made auxiliary to a poem, whose true thesis is beauty, and beauty alone, it is grossly, and even ridiculously, out of place in a work of prose. But in his obscurity it is scarcely necessary to say that he is wrong. Either a man intends to be understood, or he does not. If he write a book which he intends not to be understood, we shall be very happy indeed not to understand it; but if he write a book which he means to be understood, and, in this book, be at all possible pains to prevent us from understanding it, we can only say that he is an ass—and this, to be brief, is our private opinion of Mr. Carlyle, which we now take the liberty of making public.

  I cannot find that Carlyle leads us directly to a centre; but I do find that he makes us despair for want of one, and that he expresses the indistinct wailings of men in search of it better than all the other writers of our day.

  Who does not understand German nowadays, who is not acquainted with German literature since Lessing? Always excepting Mr. Carlyle.

  I never read any of his books, for though divers people profess to understand and admire them, the few passages I have looked at seem always such absurd and unintelligible rant that I feel no desire to go on further. They say that his style is formed on German writers, and that an acquaintance with the language would make me appreciate them, but I do not see what is gained by that so long as the affected ass professes to talk English.

  Not one obscure line, or half-line did he ever write. His meaning lies plain as the daylight, and he who runs may read; indeed, only he who runs can read, and keep up with the meaning. It has the distinctness of a picture to his mind, and he tells us only what he sees printed in largest English type upon the face of things. He utters substantial English thoughts in plainest English dialects; for it must be confessed, he speaks more than one of these…. His felicity and power of expression surpass even his special merit as historian and critic. Therein his experience has not failed him, but furnished him with such a store of winged, ay and legged words, as only a London life, perchance, could give account of. We had not understood the wealth of the language before. Nature is ransacked, and all the resorts and purlieus of humanity are taxed, to furnish the fittest symbol for his thought. He does not go to the dictionary, the word-book, but to the word-manufactory itself, and has made endless work for the lexicographers.

	There are persons, mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,
	Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him [Emerson] and Carlyle;
	To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,
	Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;
	He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,
	If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;
	That he’s more of a man you might say of the one,
	Of the other he’s more of an Emerson;
	C.’s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,—
	E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;
	The one’s two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,
	Where the one’s most abounding, the other’s to seek;
	C.’s generals require to be seen in the mass,—
	E.’s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass;
	C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues,
	And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,—
	E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,
	And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense;
	C. shows you how every-day matters unite
	With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,—
	While E., in a plain, preternatural way,
	Makes mysteries matters of mere every day;
	C. draws all his characters quite à la Fuseli,—
	Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy,
	He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse,
	They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews.

  I like Carlyle better and better. His style I do not like, nor do I always concur in his opinions, nor quite fall in with his hero worship; but there is a manly love of truth, an honest recognition and fearless vindication of intrinsic greatness, of intellectual and moral worth, considered apart from birth, rank, or wealth, which commands my sincere admiration.

  I cannot say what I personally owe to that man’s writings.

  Mr. Carlyle adopted a peculiar semi-German style, from the desire of putting thoughts on his paper instead of words, and perhaps of saving himself some trouble in the process. I feel certain that he does it from no other motive; and I am sure he has a right to help himself to every diminution of trouble, seeing how many thoughts and feelings he undergoes. He also strikes an additional blow with the peculiarity, rouses man’s attention by it, and helps his rare and powerful understanding to produce double its effect. It would be hard not to dispense with a few verbs and nominative cases, in consideration of so great a result. Yet, if we were to judge him by one of his own summary processes, and deny him the benefit of his notions of what is expedient and advisable, how could we exculpate this style, in which he denounces so many “shams,” of being itself a sham? of being affected, unnecessary, and ostentatious? a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance, and reproduce endless German talk under the guise of novelty?

  While all Europe admired only independence, Carlyle has passed his life in glorifying obedience and faith; he has understood and he has declared that docility was, under another name, the faculty of learning and of profiting by the science of others. All his works are, in a word, a homage rendered to the invisible protection that the intelligence of the wise extends to the masses, and a plea and a prayer that their kingdom may come. In his eyes the lights diffused among communities can profit them only on one condition; each one must do his business, each must exercise the aptitudes he possesses, and instead of deciding on everything, learn to leave things to the judgment of those who know more than himself.

  Carlyle’s “Pantheism” is not like that of Oersted or any philosopher, and is, I fear, an unmanageable object of attack. It is so wholly unsystematic, illogical, wild, and fantastic, that thought finds nothing in it to grapple with. How can one refute the utterances of an oracle or the spleen of a satirist? His power over intellectual men appears to me not unlike that of Joe Smith the prophet over the Mormons; dependent on strength of will and massive effrontery of dogma persevered in amid a universal incertitude weakening other men. The sick and anxious always like best the physician who has most assurance; they are comforted by the presence of so much force,—just as poor prostrate France will believe in rifles and eagles after ceasing to believe in anything else. Carlyle’s influence appears to spring much less from what he says, estimated by its own persuasiveness, than from the mere consideration that such a man as he thinks all moral and religious doctrine just so much unbelievable trash. I know not how such an influence can be met, except by a positiveness as powerful and as gifted.

  So much for Mr. Carlyle, who has had the double misfortune of writing according to the humor—that is, the ill-humor, of the moment, without the slightest regard to consistency and truth, and to be surrounded by none but admirers, or listeners borne down by mere noise. In England his fashion is waning rapidly, and I have no doubt but that, like most overrated men, he will live to share the common fate of idols knocked down by his former worshippers in revenge of their own idolatry.

  I am a great advocate for hero-worship, and when you have looked closely into Carlyle you may discover him to be quite as much of a hero as Cromwell.

  The melancholy Polyphemus of Chelsea.

  There can be no doubt that Mr. Carlyle’s is a somewhat peculiar style, and some few of its peculiarities may have been borrowed from the German. But his mind is a strongly original one; and he would certainly have thought and expressed himself in a way of his own if no such thing as the language or literature of Germany had ever been heard of. Let the attempt be made to re-write one of his more characteristic passages in other words and another manner, and the result will probably surprise the sceptical experimenter. It will not be easy to find anything which could be changed for the better without a loss of part of the meaning or effect designed to be conveyed. For, unquestionably, a more careful writer, one more attentive to all the minutiæ of expression, is not to be found in the language. And this rapid, elliptical, richly allusive style will be found to be, with all its startling qualities, one of the most exactly grammatical in our literature. In this respect it ranks with that of Sterne and that of Rabelais.

  The young Crown Princess of Prussia (Princess Royal of England) was here for three days a little while ago…. She spoke of Carlyle’s last work—I mean his “History of Frederick the Great.” I said that Carlyle’s other works seemed to me magnificent, wonderful monuments of poetry and imagination, profound research, and most original humour. But that I thought him a most immoral writer, from his exaggerated reverence for brute force, which he was so apt to confound with wisdom and genius. A world governed à la Carlyle would be a pandemonium.

  The contradictions belong to the time: we may find them in ourselves. And they cannot be resolved, as you fancy they may, into the mere worship of might. That comes uppermost at times; often he recoils from it with the intensest horror, and affirms and feels justice to be the one ruler in heaven and earth. The infinite wail for a real and not a nominal father, for a real and not an imaginary king, comes out in Carlyle more than in any man I know, and I am shocked at myself when I feel how I have been refusing to hear it, and only interpreting it by the devil’s cry, “What have I to do with thee?” which mingles in it.

  He writes biography like a showman. He stands in front of his heroes, as it were, with a long stick, pointing out their peculiarities with a grin, and describing their habits in the well-known phraseology of the van. His mere diction far outweighs in impertinence whatever it may win in power.

  Mr. Carlyle has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion. Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt as something barbarous,—a savage ornament which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery of language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. He is a preacher and a prophet,—anything you will,—but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always the knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never the perfect and balanced tree…. So long as he was merely an exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, and such splendor of illustration as only he could give; but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and political philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to inquire into his qualifications and his defects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs from others except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better recommendation than the superior advertising powers of a mountebank of genius…. Mr. Carlyle seems to be in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and must increase his dose from day to day as the senses become dulled under the spur. He began by admiring strength of character and purpose, and the manly self-denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone on till mere strength has become such washy weakness that there is no longer any titillation in it; and nothing short of downright violence will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement…. Since “Sartor Resartus” Mr. Carlyle has done little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning has steadily heated toward denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding.

  We honestly confess that, right or wrong, we believe it would have been better for the world and for himself if Mr. Carlyle never had written a line, than that he should write as he is writing now. We flatter ourselves that, as there was much noble thinking done before he was born, there would have been enough noble thinking to carry humanity on to its goal if Mr. Carlyle had never appeared. Providence has not left the race dependent on any teacher; and Providence could hardly have furnished a better illustration of the danger of pinning our faith on any teacher, however wise or illustrious, than by permitting Thomas Carlyle to become in his old age the apostle of violence, the despiser and reviler of those whom God has left dependent for their happiness and security on the justice and humanity of their more richly gifted fellows.

  His books opened anywhere show him berating the wrong he sees, but seldom the means of removing. There is ever the same melancholy advocacy of work to be done under the dread master: force of strokes, the right to rule and be ruled, the dismal burden. He rides his Leviathan as fiercely as did his countryman,—Hobbes; can be as truculent and abusive. Were he not thus fatally in earnest, we should take him for the harlequin he often seems, not seeing the sorrowing sadness thus playing off its load in this grotesque mirth, this scornful irony of his; he painting in spite of himself his portraits in the warmth of admiration, the blaze of wrath, giving us mythology for history mostly.

  The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning one of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived. Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange bedfellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method, and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of them thought is an inspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a retrogression. In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody else to fire men’s hearts with a feeling for right and an eager desire for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a firmer spiritual self-possession to have added another name to the noble gallery of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an imaginative and highly emotional manner…. Though Mr. Carlyle has written about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament, and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is not one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it, which we could fairly put a finger upon as saugrenu, indecently absurd and unreasonable. Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?

  When you ask Englishmen, especially those under forty, who amongst them are the thinking men, they first mention Carlyle; but at the same time they advise you not to read him, warning you that you will not understand him at all. Then, of course, we hasten to get the twenty volumes of Carlyle—criticism, history, pamphlets, fantasies, philosophy; we read them with very strange emotions, contradicting every morning our opinion of the night before. We discover at last that we are in presence of an extraordinary animal, a relic of a lost family, a sort of mastodon, lost in a world not made for him. We rejoice in this zoological good luck, and dissect him with minute curiosity, telling ourselves that we shall probably never find another animal like him…. We are at first put out. All is new here—ideas, style, tone, the shape of the phrases, and the very vocabulary. He takes everything in a contrary meaning, does violence to everything, expressions and things. With him paradoxes are set down for principles; common sense takes the form of absurdity. We are, as it were, carried unto an unknown world, whose inhabitants walk head downwards, feet in the air, dressed in motley, as great lords and maniacs, with contortions, jerks, and cries; we are grievously stunned by these extravagant and discordant sounds; we want to stop our ears, we have a headache, we are obliged to decipher a new language…. Carlyle is a Puritan seer, before whose eyes pass scaffolds, orgies, massacres, battles, and who, besieged by furious or bloody phantoms, prophesies, encourages, or curses. If you do not throw down the book from anger or weariness, you will lose your judgment; your ideas depart, nightmare seizes you, a medley of contracted and ferocious figures whirl about in your head; you hear the howls of insurrection, cries of war; you are sick; you are like those listeners to the Covenanters, whom the preaching filled with disgust or enthusiasm, and who broke the head of their prophet, if they did not take him for their leader…. From the sublime to the ignoble, from the pathetic to the grotesque, is but a step with Carlyle. With the same stroke he touches the two extremes. His adorations end in sarcasms…. He leaps in unimpeded jerks from one end of the field of ideas to the other; he confounds all styles, jumbles all forms, heaps together pagan allusions, Bible reminiscences, German abstractions, technical terms, poetry, slang, mathematics, physiology, archaic words, neologies…. Carlyle takes religion in the German manner, after a symbolical fashion. This is why he is called a Pantheist, which in plain language means a madman or a rogue.

  His command of words must be pronounced to be of the highest order. Among the few that stand next to Shakespeare he occupies a very high place. As his peculiar feelings are strongly marked, so are the special regions of his verbal copiousness. As a matter of course, he was specially awake to, and specially retained, expressions suiting his peculiar vein of strength, rugged sublimity, and every form of ridicule and contempt down to the lowest tolerable depths of coarseness…. He is not an exact writer. Hating close analysis, his aim always is to give the broad general features rather than the minute details. He has little of the hair-splitting, dividing and distinguishing mania of De Quincey; no desire to sift his opinions on a topic, and say distinctly what they are and what they are not.

  I have already mentioned Carlyle’s earlier writings as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves, would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism; utilitarianism, the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see the same truths through media more suited to my mental constitution, that I recognised them in his writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only saw things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of us both—who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I—whose own mind and nature included his, and infinitely more.

  Mr. Carlyle’s style, which is at first repulsive, becomes in the end very attractive. His humor, although grave, is not saturnine. Some of his graver epigrams, indeed, pierce at once to the very heart of a subject. He worships the hero; yet he is in general thoroughly radical. He loves the poor worker in letters, the peasant, the farmer with his horny hand, the plain speaker, the bold speaker; yet he has no pity for the negro, who, he says, should submit to slavery because he is not fit for freedom.

  In Mr. Carlyle’s writings humour of every sort abounds; he is a great idealist and humourist; the spectacle of startling contradictions, the grotesque exaggerations, are presented side by side in too grim a form for laughter, and yet there is a dreadful Rabelaisian merriment.

  In Carlyle’s wit and humour there are many peculiar characteristics. His wit is a heavy, thumping kind, like the battering ram of old, hammering away with “thunderlike percussion” at some old abuse or timeworn institution. He reminds us of the heathen tradition of one of the gods, who is described as “all hands, all eyes, all feet,” to seek out, overtake, and punish falsehood and wrongs. His humour is often of such a kind as makes us laugh through tears, and laughs itself in its most savage words. It has in it a wild, grim fancy, with something of the fierce, grotesque, and fiery earnestness of Hogarth, with the free, daring caricature of Cruikshank. A rough, rugged, vehement spirit is in him, as well as a hearty humour, which ever and anon breaks out, sporting with the foibles, fancies and manners of the age.

  It was from a man still living, Thomas Carlyle, that the English public was to learn the value of this literature which had suddenly grown up to a place near their own. He knew how dense was the English ignorance about the Germans, and he set himself busily to work to give his fellow-countrymen information which might remove their prejudices, and by means of his translations to supply them with the means of corroborating or refuting what he said in praise of these newly discovered writers.

  Mr. Carlyle plays with his electrical battery upon the will…. It is not the intellect alone, or the imagination alone, which can become sensible of the highest virtue in the writings of Mr. Carlyle. He is before all else a power with reference to conduct…. Mr. Carlyle is a mystic in the service of what is nobly positive, and it is easy to see how his transcendental worship of humanity, together with his reverence for duty, might condense and materialize themselves for the needs of a generation adverse to transcendental ways of thought, into the ethical doctrines of Comte…. Mr. Carlyle is so deeply impressed by the fact that truthfulness, virtue, rectitude of a certain kind, the faithful adaptation of means to ends, are needful in order to bring anything to effect, that where ends are successfully achieved, he assumes some of the virtuous force of the world to have been present. With this falls in his sense of the sacredness of fact; to recognize fact, to accept conditions, and thereby to conquer,—such is the part of the hero who would be a victor. Add to all this, the stoical temper, a sternness in Mr. Carlyle’s nature, which finds expression in his scorn for mere happiness, and we shall understand how his transcendentalism makes us acquainted with strange heroes.

  From 1835 to 1860 there was not in England any more remarkable man of letters than Thomas Carlyle; none who had more influence or more power over men’s minds. He was at once a writer, a historian and a thinker; the writer was admired and formed a school, the historian was read with vivacity, a circle was formed round the thinker, and his disciples took his sentences for oracles. However, if it is true that the characteristic of a great writer is to have as many different styles as he had subjects to treat, Carlyle was not a great writer. He has always had only one style, well suited, truly, to himself, that of Carlyle. Into every subject he carried the oratorical style, tone, accent, and even the gesticulation, for he gesticulates much. He was prodigal of his exclamation, he carried to excess apostrophe and prosopopœia. When one has read much of him, it is a blessing to read again three or four pages of Voltaire, without even troubling to select them; oracles are often admirable, but they disturb too much; one tires soon of dealings with them and their eloquent gesticulation. Neither was Carlyle a great historian. One can never study his commentary on Cromwell’s speeches, his French Revolution, and his Frederick II. without gaining much benefit; but what makes the historian is the power of understanding everything, and the absence of parti-pris, and Carlyle was less solicitous to understand than to praise that which he loved, and to paint in black that which he did not like. He has not told us about Cromwell, he has celebrated him; he has not explained the French Revolution, he has chanted it on his lyre, to which, for the occasion, he added a brazen string which made the sounds truly diabolic…. If Carlyle can be reckoned neither among the great prose writers, nor among the great historians, nor among the great thinkers, it must be admitted that he had in him the stuff of a great poet, and we must accuse nature which in dowering him with the most brilliant imagination, had denied him the gift of rhythm and cadenced speech.

  As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than Carlyle. He belongs to our own branch of the stock, too; neither Latin nor Greek, but altogether Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself more a French Revolution than any of his volumes…. As launching into the self-complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock, is Carlyle’s final value…. The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery. The show were still a gay rich one—Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more—horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying—but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the train’d soldier, and that settles fate and victory, would be lacking.

  I never much liked Carlyle. He seemed to me to be “carrying coals to Newcastle,” as our proverb says; preaching earnestness to a nation which had plenty of it by nature, but was less abundantly supplied with several other useful things.

  Anything that I can do to help in raising a memorial to Carlyle shall be most willingly done. Few men can have dissented more strongly from his way of looking at things than I; but I should not yield to the most devoted of his followers in gratitude for the bracing wholesome influence of his writings when, as a very young man, I was essaying without rudder or compass to strike out a course for myself.

  To sum up, if I had to characterize the moral and intellectual influence exercised by Carlyle, I should say that he seems to me to have, above all things, helped to loosen the fetters of positive creed in which thought was imprisoned among his countrymen. Carlyle was a mystic, and mysticism here, as elsewhere, discharged the function which belongs to it in the chain of systems: to wit, that of dissolving dogma under pretence of spiritualizing it, of shattering faith under pretence of enlarging it. When men heard Carlyle speak so much of divinity and eternity, of mystery and adoration, they hailed him as the preacher of a religion higher and wider than current belief. In vain did orthodoxy, more keen-sighted, point out the negations which lay hid under the writer’s formulas. It is so pleasant to free oneself without appearing to break too sharply with consecrated words and institutions. Since then speculation has made much way in England. The universal mysteries of our author have been exchanged for exact research, precise definitions, rigorous ascertainments. I do not know whether Carlyle was aware of it, but he lived long enough to see his influence exhausted, his teaching out of date. It is true that, as consolation, he could take himself to witness that he had served as the transition between the past and the present, and that this is in the long run the best glory to which a thinker can pretend here below.

  In this he was akin to all the prophets, one of their brotherhood,—that he maintained the spiritual and dynamic forces in man as against the mechanical. While so many, listening to the host of materialising teachers, are always succumbing to the visible, and selling their birthright for the mess of pottage which this world offers, Carlyle’s voice appealed from these to a higher tribunal, and found a response in those deeper recesses which lie beyond the reach of argument and analysis. This he did with all his powers, and by doing so rendered a great service to his generation, whether they have listened to him or not.

  In his clearer moments, when he lays aside his wrath and addresses himself to his nobler work of edifying exhortation, he commands a lofty soul-piercing language, which seems to extinguish all ignoble desires, and call forth their opposites by a sort of celestial affinity…. His literary faculty, if not perfect—very few are perfect—was extraordinary and magnificent in the extreme. His supreme gift is his penetrating imagination, of seeing as it were into the heart of things in a moment, and reproducing them in words which it is impossible to forget…. In this respect he well deserves the epithet of poet, much more than many metrical and musical persons…. And he sees so much and so well outside himself, because he has so much inside, because, by his own richness of thought and feeling, he comes ready prepared to observe, to note, to recognize things when they present themselves…. Carlyle’s depth of insight into character was owing to the depth and capacity of his own nature. He had lived the lives of a dozen men before he put pen to paper, by reason of the passions with which he had become intimate in his own breast. In the next place, his hard peasant life, his education in the school of poverty, had made him acquainted with fact at first hand. He had not been shielded, like the unfortunate rich, from wholesome collision with realities…. The combined result of his natural endowment and his stimulating training was to make him the most figurative and imaginative prose writer in our language. All nature seems under his sway for colours and image—seems to offer him, as it were, the right suggestive thing to express his thought.

  To say that Carlyle is not a great writer, or, more than that, a supreme literary artist, is to me like denying that Angelo and Rembrandt were great painters, or that the sea is a great body of water. His life of Herculean labor was entirely given to letters, and he undoubtedly brought to his tasks the greatest single equipment of pure literary power English prose has ever received.

  Carlyle cannot be killed by an epigram, nor can the many influences that moulded him be referred to any single source. The rich banquet his genius has spread for us is of many courses…. Carlyle’s eye was indeed a terrible organ: he saw everything…. He may be a great philosopher, a useful editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like to call him, except a great historian…. By nature he was tolerant enough; so true a humourist could never be a bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a child might lead him. His judgments are gracious, chivalrous, tinged with a kindly melancholy and divine pity. But this mood is never for long. Some gadfly stings him: he seizes his tomahawk and is off on the trail. It must sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of opposition and indigestion, of fierce warfare with cooks and Philistines, spoilt his temper, never of the best, and made him too often contemptuous, savage, unjust.

  The world’s final judgment upon Carlyle, we feel certain, will be that he was himself above all a man of letters. He had the graphic faculty more than any other. He could not help putting pen to paper. The “pictured page” came forth from him naturally, and grew under his hand irresistibly—yet always under the impulse of a high ideal. This is the explanation of the different ways in which he speaks—or at least it is the chief explanation—for no doubt also mere mood sometimes swayed him. Literature was to him “the wine of life.” It should not be converted “into daily food.” Above all, it must not be confounded with the “froth ocean of printed speech, which we loosely call literature.” This must be said for Carlyle—no less than for Milton—that he never ceased to claim a high ideal for literature, and to vindicate for its theme “whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, and in virtue amiable and grave.” In this respect Carlyle’s influence has been good without exception.

  One of the most interesting pieces of autobiography [“Essay on Walter Scott”] and one of the worst pieces of literary criticism in the English language.

  Thomas Carlyle was a great spiritual force in his best day; but he long outlived his best day, and the objects whereon his prime force was expended. He was a great writer of history, a fiery kindler of the historical sense in men. He was a wonderful literary artist; and this is the really distinctive note of him, though his art at the best was somewhat abnormal, falling short of the serene level of perfect art. Thinker, prophet, or judge he was not. It was the long mistake of his life to imagine himself thinker, prophet and judge; to mistake literary mastery for philosophic power. And it is the same mistake in his few devoted followers which exaggerated the value of his latter-day deliverances, and has given to the world those unworthy jottings of his least heroic moods.

	Thou wert a Titan, but a Titan tossed
	With wild tumultuous heavings in thy breast,
	And fancy-fevered, and cool judgment lost
	In mighty maelstroms of divine unrest.
	What souls were drugged with doubt in sceptic time
	Thy cry disturbed into believing life,
	And fools that raved in prose or writhed in rhyme
	Were sharply surgeoned by thy needful knife:
	But, if there were who in this storm of things
	Sighed for sweet calm, and in this dark for light,
	And in this jar for the wise Muse that sings
	All wrong into the ordered ranks of right,
	They thanked not thee, who didst assault their brain
	With thunder-claps and water-spouts for rain.

  St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea…. The Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of “golden silence”—whose own speech, it may be admitted, was “quite other” than “silvern”—is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty.

  The great Silence-monger.

  His style, whether learned at home or partly acquired under the influence of Irving and Richter (see Froude, i., 396), faithfully reflects his idiosyncrasy. Though his language is always clear, and often pure and exquisite English, its habitual eccentricities offended critics, and make it the most dangerous of models. They are pardonable as the only fitting embodiment of his graphic power, his shrewd insight into human nature, and his peculiar humor, which blends sympathy for the suffering with scorn for fools. His faults of style are the result of the perpetual straining for emphasis of which he was conscious, and which must be attributed to an excessive nervous irritability seeking relief in strong language, as well as to a superabundant intellectual vitality. Conventionality was for him the deadly sin. Every sentence must be alive to its finger’s end. As a thinker he judges by intuition instead of calculation. In history he tries to see the essential fact stripped of the glosses of pedants; in politics, to recognize the real forces masked by constitutional mechanism, in philosophy, to hold the living spirit untrammelled by the dead letter.

  The only influence that Carlyle ever exercised upon me was through Emerson, as I never could endure Carlyle’s immense pretension and conceit.

  What he despised, and would teach others to despise, viz. earth’s treasures, pleasures, fashions, forms, manners, shams, cant, and all oppression and wrong. What he loved was God above all, and his fellow man, pity for distress, industry in work, sacrifice of self, honesty of purpose, truth in word and deed, purity of heart, good works anywhere and everywhere.

  Carlyle always seemed to me to frame a new humbug for every humbug he plucked down, and a humbug quite as dangerous to the times present as the one demolished. It was the commonplace rather than the false which he attacked, and he substituted for it the extravagant and the grotesque. His perpetual and oftentimes petty explosives of words, phrases, thoughts, were wearisome to me: a package of crackers fired off in a barrel.

  I came under the power of Carlyle’s genius a year before I commenced Goethe. He was a great assistance to me in the way of emancipation from the spell of those earlier writings of which I have spoken…. I read first the “Hero Worship” in 1857, finding it somewhat dull reading. Having acquired some familiarity with his style of expression and with this leading thought I took up the “Miscellanies,” and the author soon became fascinating. As I grew in capacity to understand him he gained more and more power over me, until I could only pity my former self, who had found anything of Carlyle’s dull. I suppose that I caught less than one in five of the ideas of the “Sartor Resartus” on first reading. I struggled with the ponderous and complex art-form of the work, and finally extracted the chief thought and many minor reflections of exceeding value to me. But I returned again and again to the book in after years, with the vain hope of discovering any affirmative significance in his “everlasting yea.” In my latter years I have come to believe that Carlyle’s solution of the problem of life, at least in that early work, was rendered nugatory by the very terms in which he stated it. In other words, he presupposed the impossibility of an affirmative answer.

  The young men of the days immediately before me in college had been greatly affected by Wordsworth. I have heard Henry Bellows say that his acquaintance with Wordsworth was a new life to him. But the first wave, so to speak, the fresh rush, of Wordsworth’s poetry had passed, before we of my time were old enough to read poetry. And it was another wizard who was to startle us from the proprieties of our boyhood. This was Carlyle. I have an odd association with “Sartor Resartus,” which serves me as an aid to memory about the first knowledge of the “Sartor” papers here. When I entered college, in 1835, I had to go to my uncle, in a real and not in a metaphorical sense. I was to ask him “to sign my bond”—the bond required by the college, that it might be sure we paid our bills. I found him reading “Sartor Resartus,” in “Fraser,” I think. He laid it down, showed it to me, and asked me if I knew what sartor resartus meant. As I had entered college with a certain distinction in Latin, I was rather mortified that I had to confess that the Latin school, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Cicero, had passed me by, and left me innocent of any knowledge of the meaning of either word. But we soon learned our Carlyle well, whatever we knew or did not know in Latin. It is not one man or two, in that generation, it is every one who wrote or read English, who was under his power, and the critics of future times will be able to show very accurately how and where that tide-wave struck the voyage of every man of letters who lived in the middle of this century.

  Among the great writers who, without attempting to found sects, have profoundly influenced modern thought, Carlyle undoubtedly occupies the foremost place. With all his extravagances and eccentricities, he was essentially a Hebrew prophet in modern guise, preaching a true gospel—that of sincerity.

  That supremely self-conscious preacher of unconsciousness.

  Isaiah of the nineteenth century.

  The man, however, whose teaching did most to rouse the age to a sense of the insufficiency of its work was Thomas Carlyle, whose “Sartor Resartus” began to appear in 1833, and who detested alike the middle-class Parliamentary government dear to Macaulay, and the Democratic government dear to Grote and Mill. He was a prophet of duty. Each individual was to set himself resolutely to despise the conventions of the world, and to conform to the utmost of his power to the divine laws of the world. Those who did this most completely were heroes, to whom and not to Parliamentary majorities or scientific deductions, reverence and obedience were due. The negative part of Carlyle’s teaching—its condemnation of democracy and science—made no impression. The positive part fixed itself upon the mind of the young, thousands of whom learnt from it to follow the call of duty, and to obey her behests.

  Whatever else may be said about Carlyle, no one can question that he took his literary vocation most seriously. He was for a long time a very poor man, but he never sought wealth by advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by veiling most unpalatable beliefs. In the vast mass of literature which he has bequeathed to us there is no scamped work, and every competent judge has recognised the untiring and conscientious accuracy with which he verified and sifted the minutest fact. His standard of truthfulness was extremely high, and one of his great quarrels with his age was that it was an age of half-beliefs and insincere professions…. A firm grasp of facts, he maintained, was the first characteristic of an honest mind; the main element in all honest, intellectual work. His own special talent was the gift of insight, the power of looking into the heart of things; piercing to essential facts, discerning the real characters of men, their true measure of genuine, solid worth…. In his writings, amid much that has imperishable value, there is, I think, much that is exaggerated, much that is one-sided, much that is unwise. But no one can be imbued with his teaching without finding it a great moral tonic, and deriving from it a nobler, braver, and more unworldly conception of life.

  The grand old iron-worker in literature, the brawny blacksmith of letters.

  Carlyle’s own brightness now makes him shine as a fixed star in our literary firmament. His radiance may be obscured; quenched it cannot be. His faults and foibles are manifest, yet is he esteemed in spite of them, and by too many because of them. His prejudices are vexatious, at least occasionally. So are those of De Quincey, at his best the best English prose-writer of this century. Amid all Carlyle’s prejudices, amid all his denunciations of men and things to be condemned, we see him capable of hope; we feel he sympathizes with his fellow-creatures. Beneath a mask of ferocity love beams from his countenance.

  For the thunders and roarings of Carlyle have united with the calm delicacy of Ruskin to promote an influence for good in the discussion of social questions that is none the less real because it has not been so direct as that of men more prominent as practical social reformers. One is more inclined to look at these two as historian and art-critic; yet to ignore their reforming influence in modern England would be to fail in recognizing some of the most important factors of social amelioration in the present century. Both Carlyle and Ruskin will live in our history as true prophets, for they have been the two greatest inspires and awakeners of the mind of England in an age in which the mental and spiritual faculties of our race have sometimes seemed in danger of succumbing to the material.

  The general verdict on Carlyle’s literary career assigns to him the first place among the authors of his time. No writer of our generation, in or out of England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the irregularities and eccentricities of this style are bound up with its richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must distinguish between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answers must be few. This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, or rather of the nature of his mind.

  Certainly I remember that the finest appreciation of Carlyle—a man whom every critic among English-speaking races had picked to pieces and discussed and reconstructed a score of times—was left to be uttered by an inspired loafer in Camden, New Jersey.

  The dominant stratum of Carlyle’s character was morality, hard Scotch granite, out of which the sweetest waters could break, and on whose top soil the tenderest seedlings could thrive—humor, pathos, poetry, the most subduing gentleness, all were there; but the main formation of his mind was all the same vehement sternness, with more than a touch of the Pharisaism that metes and judges, and swears by the law rather than the Gospel. He had little love of music, no love of art, and considerable contempt for any poetry but the poetry of action. To him it was inconceivable that any human creature should claim any dignity or reverence as a minister of the beautiful.

  The demand for poetical form is to Carlyle what the vase is to the imprisoned Genie, abolish it and the mighty figure overshadows land and sea. When no longer required to write as a poet, Carlyle first becomes the poet; the ear so insensible to metrical harmony develops a fine sense for the voluminous harmonies of prose; he is not only sublime but rhythmical. Unfortunately the plan of this collection excludes Carlyle the poet; we can only exhibit Carlyle the verse writer cramped and shorn for want of the special endowment of which he denied the existence. Yet he could write nothing wholly uninteresting, and in the least successful of his metrical experiments there is a something which the world will not let die. It is significant that the most successful of his acknowledged attempts should be his rendering of Goethe’s Helena in the twelve syllabled iambics of the original, in our language a stately, but stilted metre, absolutely devoid of every variety of rhythm.

  Carlyle’s most orderly paragraphs belong to the period of his life when Goethe’s influence over him was freshest and strongest. For order in the paragraph is due largely to an ascendency of the intellectual element over the emotional; and Carlyle’s emotions were never so well-tempered—or least ill-tempered—as when he saw most clearly the mastery that Goethe had of his own nature. Thus the “Life of Schiller” is sequent and orderly in a degree surprising to the reader who has of late fed on the “French Revolution.” In this early time Carlyle saw life steadily and achromatically. But as his egotism waxed strong with his days, as his impatience of the world increased and his hopes of reforming it decreased, he became subject to starts of the wildest incoherence. In such papers as the “Latter Day Pamphlets” he is wholly under the influence of his habitually strongest emotions; he raves…. In his historical writing Carlyle is a great master of the law of proportion, as concerns both the paragraph and the whole composition. He combines Hume’s power of making a paragraph illustrate a given philosophical idea, and Macaulay’s power of heightening that impression by pictorial means. He moulds his material, fuses his facts, emphasizes the salient, subordinates the unimportant. In elaborating large plans, he constantly reduces his macrocosm to microcosm to be sure of making his point; he reiterates his central truth; he does not disdain numerous formal but living summaries.

  No sweating smith ever groaned more at his task than did this greatest of modern English literary artists. He fairly grovelled in toil, bemoaning himself and smiting his fellow-man in sheer anguish of spirit; producing his masterpieces to an accompaniment of passionate but unprofane curses on the conditions under which, and the task upon which, he worked. This, however, was the artisan, not the artist, side of the great writer; it was the toil-worn, unrelenting Scotch conscience astride his art and riding it at times as Tam o’ Shanter spurred his gray mare, Meg, on the ride to Kirk Alloway.

  To me, profoundly averse to autocracy, Carlyle’s political doctrines had ever been repugnant. Much as I did, and still do, admire his marvellous style and the vigour, if not the truth, of his thought—so much so that I always enjoy any writing of his, however much I disagree with it—intercourse with him soon proved impracticable. Twice or thrice, in 1851–2, I was taken to see him by Mr. G. H. Lewes; but I soon found that the alternatives were—listening in silence to his dogmas, sometimes absurd, or getting into a hot argument with him, which ended in our glaring at one another; and as I did not like either alternative I ceased to go.

  Of the Power, which through thought and opinion is shaping the future of mankind in all varieties, perhaps the most forcible expression in the nineteenth Christian century is to be found in the work of Thomas Carlyle. He spoke as one having authority, and not as the Scribes: his appeal is therefore direct to the sense of truth in man, and to no other court. That sense of truth he knew to be an inheritance from the past—the product of the struggles, efforts, thoughts, and teaching of former generations. Charles Darwin did not believe more firmly that in the individual we were to look for the advance of the species; Ernst Haeckel does not declare more decisively that we are the results of the past—that in us and through us creation is still going on.

  Carlyle’s mission was not merely to destroy: he shattered error in order that the clogged fountain of truth might once more gush forth. Before eyes long dimmed with gazing on insincerity he would hold up shining patterns of sincerity; souls groping for guidance, he would stay and comfort by precedents of strength; hearts pursuing false idols, he would chasten by examples of truth. Men talked—and nowhere more pragmatically than in the churches—as if God, after having imparted his behests to a few Hebrews ages ago, had retired into some remote empyrean, and busied himself no more with the affairs of men. But to Carlyle the immanence of God was an ever-present reality, manifesting itself throughout all history and in every individual conscience, but nowise more clearly than in the careers of great men.

  Carlyle was probably never at his best when he gave himself to the study of a particular author. His genius rather lay in the more general aspects of his work, and in the force with which he gave an entirely new turn to the currents of English criticism.

  Carlyle, the apostle of agnostic stoicism.

  How far exaggeration could go, and how far unquestionable genius could find contorted diction, and every conceivable antic of phraseology, a worthy and convenient means of picturesque description or impressive moralising, can never be seen in more striking manifestation than in the style which Carlyle deliberately adopted, and as tenaciously maintained. Genius must make its own laws; and however severe the strain upon our faith or upon our sense of proportion and harmony, we must hesitate to question the validity of these laws in their personal application. We may, however, be permitted to regret that the resources of such genius were not sufficient to find expression at less expense of uncouth phrase and ejaculatory emphasis, and could not more frequently hold its course in that more serene stream of language which Carlyle can occasionally achieve, where the effect of the restraint and restfulness is perhaps not less picturesque than that of the hurtle and passion of words, and where the impression, if less startling, is certainly not less lasting.

  Conceiving imaginations, however, are of two kinds. For the one kind the understanding serves as a lamp of guidance; upon the other the understanding acts as an electric excitant, a keen irritant. Bagehot’s was evidently of the first kind; Carlyle’s conspicuously of the second. There is something in common between the minds of these two men as they conceive society. Both have a capital grip upon the actual; both can conceive without confusion the complex phenomena of society; both send humourous glances of searching insight into the hearts of men. But it is the difference between them that most arrests our attention. Bagehot has the scientific imagination, Carlyle the passionate. Bagehot is the embodiment of witty common sense; all the movements of his mind illustrate that vivacious sanity which he has himself called “animated moderation.” Carlyle, on the other hand, conceives men and their motives too often with a hot intolerance; there is heat in his imagination,—a heat that sometimes scorches and consumes. Life is for him dramatic, full of fierce, imperative forces. Even when the world rings with laughter, it is laughter which, in his ears, is succeeded by an echo of mockery; laughter which is but a defiance of tears.

  From the point of view, in fact, of the historian of letters, the formative work of Macaulay in prose stands side by side with that of Tennyson in poetry as the two most important phenomena of the last seventy years. As regards its effect upon expression—upon the form as distinct from the matter of English literature—the career of Macaulay reduces that of Carlyle to the proportion of a mere meteoric episode.

  The place which was occupied by Swift in the eighteenth century is held by Carlyle in the nineteenth, and though every line that he has written should cease to be read, he will still be remembered as the greatest of literary figures in an age of great men of letters.

  It was the greatness of Carlyle that the fiery naturalism of the Revolution, which had become prophetic in Shelley, was in him enriched by that relative and organic apprehension of life, art, and history, which had grown up among the foes of revolution. In poetry as in ethics, truth was his last word; but few of its preachers have insisted so powerfully that truth has infinitely various accents, and that the poetry which is not original is naught.

  Surely there is human interest in these sketches, “exercises” though they be. They are certainly not Carlyle’s highest possible even at that time. But they are human, sympathetic, soulfully remunerative work. And doubtless the task of reading for them led him insensibly into the wider fields of the Essays, and ultimately perhaps gave us “Heroes and Hero Worship” and “The French Revolution.” Also I find in most of them touches of the coming greatness. Sparks from the flint tell of the latent fire. Accents of ironic scorn come to our ears with something of the sting of that stormy Annandale voice which afterwards broke in upon so many babbling controversies, like the eagle’s scream dispersing the chatter of a jay convention. And after all preface of derogation, these Essays remain fragments of honest, clear-lined, honourable workmanship. I like to think of the young author writing them in the peasant’s but-and-ben, and especially of his father beginning to respect him more when he showed him one after the other good Sir David Brewster’s fifteen-guinea cheques, and bought for him that pair of marvellous spectacles with the first. I have the greater fellow-feeling, that I know one man who never expects to be happier than when he threw his first hard-earned ten-pound-note into his mother’s lap.

  Carlyle also was God’s prophet—a seer stormy indeed and impetuous, with a great hatred for lies and laziness, and a mighty passion for truth and work; lashing our shams and hypocrisies; telling our materialistic age that it was going straight to the devil, and by a vulgar road at that; pointing out the abyss into which luxury and licentiousness have always plunged. Like Elijah of old, Carlyle loved righteousness, hated cant, and did ever plead for justice, and mercy, and truth. If his every sentence was laden with intellect, it was still more heavily laden with character. To the great Scotchman God gave the prophet’s vision and the seer’s sympathy and scepter.

  In spite of all his magniloquent dreaming, Carlyle is true or means to be true to the uncompromising facts of life; he dreams only that he may the more victoriously labor; and in his Gospel of Work and his doctrine of Hero-worship he returns from the misty regions of transcendentalism and confronts the practical concerns of common life. No one is more contemptuous than Carlyle of dilettante webspinning, or of idle playing with emotion.

  Carlyle, like Rousseau or Shelley, was an imaginative setter forth of abstract principles. It was only by such a writer that Rousseau could at all be combated in the long run. But there was this difference between the Frenchman and the Scot, that while the abstractions of the one were either purely fanciful inventions, with no experience whatever to support them, or at best abstractions from groups of facts looked at imperfectly, the abstractions of the other were derived from very definite facts contemplated with the utmost exactitude of rigorous observation; or, if invented in the first instance as mere theories, were verifiable and subjected to the most rigid verification of fact. One of Carlyle’s favourite ideas, the danger of shams,—that is, of worn-out institutions and doctrines—and also of mere blind amiability in human affairs, was a lesson learnt directly from the Revolution. From other historical examples, studied more precisely than the “ancient classical concern” was by Rousseau, he evolved the doctrine embodied in the ringing phrase “might is right.”… This was Carlyle’s most powerful weapon, the Talus flail with which he laid about him among the shams, the new as well as the old, the deceptive but enticing ideals that floated over the world from the kingdom of the Celts, and certain sturdier ones of native growth, smashing them alike unsparingly.

  The resemblance between Ruskin and Carlyle seems to me to have been purely superficial, and the frequent bracketing of their names—less frequent than it was, and growing daily rarer—is based upon a misconception of the real natures of both of these extraordinary men…. Ruskin did, all the same, verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself. Ruskin’s impatience was of a noble kind, Carlyle’s of an ignoble. Ruskin was grieved that the generation with which his life was cast should deny God. Carlyle was violently angry that anybody should deny Carlyle, or should presume to think otherwise than he thought…. Ruskin’s religion came from his heart, Carlyle’s from his liver…. Carlyle broke his wife’s heart, and I have never heard of any living soul to whom he gave a sixpence or for whose help or comfort he would have walked a mile…. Nobody should read Carlyle’s books till he is of an age to bring his own experience of the world as a necessary counter-poison, till he can smile at their atrabilious denunciations of things in general, and relish their one truly valuable quality—literary excellence.

  As a man of letters he had the supreme faculty of vision, and was able to discern the inmost facts of a scene, an event, or of a life; and, more than all, he had the gift of the word, the genius for vivid description…. Carlyle’s literary faculty was his undoing as a sociologist; for he was wont to prophesy without data in experience. And lacking clairvoyancy, unable to see any other outcome for a society rapidly democratizing save anarchy and chaos, he was prevented from uttering the creative word that might have inaugurated a new epoch. Mistaken in nearly all points relating to political democracy, he was always right in discussing questions of industry, and his dream of “some chivalry of labor” is even now being realized—the complete democratizing of labor, which Carlyle actually feared, being reserved for a distant future.

  I have said all that is to be said against Carlyle’s work almost designedly; for he is one of those who are so great that we rather need to blame them for the sake of our own independence than praise them for the sake of their fame. He came and spoke a word, and the chatter of rationalism stopped, and the sums would no longer work out and be ended. He was a breath of Nature turning in her sleep under the load of civilisation, a stir in the very stillness of God to tell us he was still there.