FACSIMILES OF CARLYLE’S SIGNATURE
(Reproduced by kind
permission of Messrs.
Chapman & Hall)
It may be said that there is a certain inconsistency between these two justifications of Carlyle’s hero-worship: that we cannot at the same time respect a man because he is above us in a definite spiritual order, and because he is in what is popularly called a hole; that we cannot at once reverence Mirabeau because he was strong and because he was weak. This kind of inconsistency does exist in Carlyle; it is, I may say with all reverence and with all certainty, the eternal and inevitable inconsistency which characterises those who receive divine revelations. The larger world, which our systems attempt to explain and chiefly succeed in hiding, must, when it breaks through upon us, take forms which appear to be conflicting. The spiritual world is so rich that it is varied; so varied that it is inconsistent. That is why so many saints and great doctors of religion have pinned their faith to paradoxes like the “Credo Quia Impossibile,” the great theological paradoxes which are so much more dazzling and daring than the paradoxes of the modern flâneur. The supreme glory of Carlyle was that he heard the veritable voices of the Cosmos. He left it to others to attune them into an orchestra. Sometimes the truth he heard was this truth, that some men are to be commanded and some obeyed; sometimes that deeper and more democratic truth that all men are above all things to be pitied.
From a photo by J. Patrick, Edinburgh
CRAIGENPUTTOCK
Carlyle’s residence from 1828 to 1834
From a photo by J. Patrick, Edinburgh
PORTRAIT GROUP TAKEN AT KIRKCALDY