A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881)

1. His Life. Carlyle, who was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, was the son of a stonemason. He was educated at Annan and at Edinburgh University, and, giving up his intention of entering the Church, became for a time a schoolteacher in Kirkcaldy. After a few years’ teaching, during which he saved a little money, he abandoned the profession and removed to Edinburgh, where he did literary hack-work for a living. At this time (1818) he was poor in means and wretched in health, and his spiritual and bodily torments are revealed in Sartor Resartus. In 1828 he married Jane Welsh, an able woman who possessed a little property of her own; and after a brief spell of married life in Edinburgh they removed to Craigenputtock, a small estate in the wilds of Dumfriesshire owned by Mrs. Carlyle. Here they lived unhappily enough, but here Carlyle wrote some of his best-known books. In 1834 they removed to London, and settled permanently in Chelsea. Carlyle’s poverty was still acute, and as a means of alleviating it he took to lecturing. He was moderately successful in the effort. Then his books, at first received with complete indifference or positive amazement and disgust, began to find favor, and for the last twenty years of his life he was prominent among the intellectual leaders of the time. His wife died in 1866, and in his latter years he was much afflicted with illness and by his deep concern for the state of public affairs. He died at Chelsea, and was buried among his own people at Ecclefechan.

2. His Works. Carlyle’s earliest work consisted of translations, essays, and biographies. Of these the best are his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1824), his Life of Schiller (1825), and his essays on Burns and Scott. Then Sartor Resartus (1833) appeared piecemeal in Fraser’s Magazine. It is an extraordinary book, pretending to contain the opinions of a German professor; but under a thin veil of fiction Carlyle discloses his own spiritual struggles during his early troubled years. The style is violent and exclamatory, and the meaning is frequently obscured in a torrent of words, but it has an energy and a rapturous ecstasy of revolt that quite take the breath away. Carlyle then turned to historical writing, which he handled in his own unconventional fashion. His major historical works are The French Revolution (1837), a series of vivid word-pictures rather than sober history, but full of audacity and color; Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), a huge effort relieved from tedium only by Carlyle’s volcanic methods; The Life of John Sterling (1851), a slight work, but more genial and humane than his writing usually is; and The Life of Frederick II (1865), enormous in scale and heavy with detail. His works dealing with contemporary events are numerous, and include Chartism (1839), Past and Present (1843), and Latter-day Pamphlets (1850). The series of lectures he delivered in 1837 was published as Heroes and Hero-worship (1840).

3. Features of his Works. (a) His Teaching. It is now a little difficult to understand why Carlyle was valued so highly as a sage in moral and political affairs. Throughout his works there is much froth and thunder, but little of anything that (to a later age) is solid and capable of analysis. Carlyle, however, was a man of sterling honesty, of sagacious and powerful mind, which he applied without hesitation to the troubles of his time. His influence, therefore, was rather personal, like that of Dr. Johnson, and cannot be accurately gauged from his written works. His opinions were widely discussed and widely accepted, and his books had the force of ex cathedra pronouncements. In them he sometimes contradicted himself, but he did great service in his denunciation of shams and tyrannies, and in his tempestuous advocacy of hard work and clear thinking.

(b) His Historical Method. Carlyle’s method was essentially biographical—he sought out the “hero,” the superman who could benevolently dominate his fellows, and compel them to do better. Such were his Cromwell and his Frederick. His other aim was to make history alive. He denounced the “Dryasdust” who killed the living force in history. To achieve his purpose he sought out and recorded infinite detail of life and opinion, and by means of his own masculine imagination and pithy style he brought the subject vividly before his reader’s eye.

(c) His style is entirely his own. At the first glance a typical passage seems rude and uncouth: with many capital letters in the German fashion, with broken phrases and ejaculations, he proceeds amid a torrent of whirling words. Yet he is flexible to a wonderful degree: he can command a beauty of expression that wrings the very heart: a sweet and piercing melody, with a suggestion, always present, yet always remote, of infinite regret and longing. In such divine moments his style has the lyrical note that requires only the lyrical meter to become great poetry.[223]

The following are two specimens of his style. The first, based on German models, is in his cruder early manner; the second is more matured and restrained. Note in this the quizzical humor.

(1) “Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!” cries he elsewhere: “there is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach-forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite, and learn it! O, thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain: thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.”

Sartor Resartus

(2) The good man,[224] he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in cork-screw fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching,—you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his “object” and “subject,” terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province, and how he sang and snuffled them into “om-m-mject,” “sum-m-mject,” with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising.

The Life of John Sterling