Mrs. Carlyle died on April 21st, 1866
But a definite defect there is, as I have suggested, in Carlyle, considered as an historian, and it flows directly from that real moral defect in his nature, an impatience with other men’s ideas. In judging of men as men, he was not only quick and graphic and correct, but in the main essentially genial and magnanimous. Only a very superficial critic will think that Carlyle was misanthropic because he was surly. There is very much more real sympathy with human problems and temptations in a page of this shaggy old malcontent than in whole libraries of constitutional history by dapper and polite rationalists, who treat men as automata, and put their virtues and vices into separate pigeonholes. If I had made a mistake or committed a sin that had any sort of human character about it, I would very much rather fall into the hands of Carlyle than into the hands of Mr. Hallam or Mr. James Mill. But while Carlyle did realise the fact that every man carries about with him his own life and atmosphere, he did not realise that other truth, that every man carries about with him his own theory of the world. Each one of us is living in a separate Cosmos. The theory of life held by one man never corresponds exactly to that held by another. The whole of a man’s opinions, morals, tastes, manners, hobbies, work back eventually to some picture of existence itself which, whether it be a paradise or a battle-field, or a school or a chaos, is not precisely the same picture of existence which lies at the back of any other brain. Carlyle had not fully realised that it was a case of one man, one Cosmos. Consequently, he devoted himself to asking what place any man, say Robespierre or Shelley, occupied in Carlyle’s Cosmos. It never occurred to him sufficiently clearly to ask what place Shelley occupied in Shelley’s Cosmos, or Robespierre in Robespierre’s Cosmos. Not feeling the need of this, he never studied, he never really listened to, Shelley’s philosophy or Robespierre’s philosophy. Here, after a somewhat long circuit, we have arrived at the one serious deficiency in Carlyle’s histories, a neglect to realise the importance of theory and of alternative theories in human affairs.
From the portrait painted by Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A., for Mr. J. A. Froude in 1877
THOMAS CARLYLE
In the National Portrait Gallery. Rischgitz Collection.
THE GROUND-FLOOR ROOMS AT 5, CHEYNE ROW (1900)
(Reproduced from Reginald Blunt’s “Historical Handbook to Chelsea,” by kind permission of the author)
