STATUE OF CARLYLE
By Sir J. E. Boehm, R.A. In the Gardens on the Chelsea Embankment Rischgitz Collection.
Probably his few mistakes arose from his unfortunate tendency to find “shams.” Some have supposed this to be the essence and value of his message; it was in truth its worst pitfall and disaster. A man is almost always wrong when he sets about to prove the unreality and uselessness of anything: he is almost invariably right when he sets about to prove the reality and value of anything. I have a quite different and much more genuine right to say that bull’s-eyes are nice than I have to say liquorice is nasty: I have found out the meaning of the first and not of the second. And if a man goes on a tearing hunt after shams, as Carlyle did, it is probable that he will find little or nothing real. He is tearing off the branches to find the tree.
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.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Arch House, Ecclefechan
see page [2]
Carlyle’s mother
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In a house which his father, a mason, had built with his own hands, Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4th, 1795. His mother, Margaret Aitken, “a woman of the fairest descent, that of the pious, the just and wise,” was the second wife of James Carlyle, and Thomas was the eldest of their nine children.