From a photo in possession of W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
MRS. CARLYLE ABOUT 1864
And this spiritual impatience of Carlyle has left its peculiar mark in the only defect which can really be found in his historical works. Of the astonishing power and humour and poignancy of those historical works I think it scarcely necessary to speak. A man must have a very poor literary sense who can read one of Carlyle’s slighter sketches, such as “The Diamond Necklace,” and not feel that he has at the same time to deal with one of the greatest satirists, one of the greatest mystics, and incomparably one of the finest story-tellers in the world. No historian ever realised so strongly the recondite and ill-digested fact that history has consisted of human beings, each isolated, each vacillating, each living in an eternal present; or, in other words, that history has not consisted of crowds, or kings, or Acts of Parliament, or systems of government, or articles of belief. And Carlyle has, moreover, introduced into the philosophy of history one element which had been absent from it since the writing of the Old Testament—the element of something which can only be called humour in the just government of the universe. “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh them to scorn, the Lord shall have them in derision,” is a note that is struck again in Carlyle for the first time after two thousand years. It is the note of the sarcasm of Providence. Any one who will read those admirable chapters of Carlyle on Chartism will realise that, while all other humanitarians were insisting upon the cruelty or the inconsistency or the barbarism of neglecting the problem of labour, Carlyle is rather filled with a kind of almost celestial astonishment at the absurdity of neglecting it.
From a photo by G. G. Napier M.A.
CARLYLE’S GRAVE AT ECCLEFECHAN
Thomas Carlyle died on February 5th, 1881
From a photo by J. F. Gordon, Haddington
MRS. CARLYLE’S GRAVE IN HADDINGTON CHURCH