Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Thomas Carlyle (John Ruskin’ Mentor)


Thomas Carlyle (John Ruskin’ Mentor)


Posted on May 30, 2011by 
Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish satirical writer,essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.[1] He called economics “the dismal science“, wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.[1]
Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected to become a preacher by his parents, but while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life. This combination, of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity, made Carlyle’s work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order.
Early life and influences

Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle
Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway,.[1] His parents determinedly afforded him an education at Annan Academy, Annan, where he was bullied and tormented so much that he left after three years.[2] In early life, his family’s (and his nation’s) strong Calvinist beliefs powerfully influenced the young man.
After attending the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle became a mathematics teacher,[1]first in Annan and then in Kirkcaldy, where Carlyle became close friends with the mysticEdward Irving. (Confusingly, there is another Scottish Thomas Carlyle, born a few years later and also connected to Irving, through his work with the Catholic Apostolic Church.[3])
NOTE: The Catholic Apostolic Church is a Gnostic knockoff of the Catholic Church.
In 1819–1821, Carlyle returned to the University of Edinburgh, where he suffered an intense crisis of faith and conversion that would provide the material for Sartor Resartus(“The Tailor Retailored”), which first brought him to the public’s notice.
Carlyle developed a painful stomach ailment, possibly gastric ulcers (which pseudo-medicine of the time attributed to this “crisis of faith”[4]), that remained throughout his life and contributed to his reputation as a crotchety, argumentative, and somewhat disagreeable personality.
His prose style, famously cranky and occasionally savage, helped cement a reputation of irascibility.[5]
He began reading deeply in German literature.[1] Carlyle’s thinking was heavily influenced by German Idealism, in particular the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He established himself as an expert on German literature in a series of essays for Fraser’s Magazine, and by translating German writers, notably Goethe (the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre).[1] He also wrote Life of Schiller (1825).[1]
In 1826, Thomas Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, herself a writer, whom he had met in 1821,[1] during his period of German studies.
His home in residence for much of his early life, after 1828, was a farm in Craigenputtock, a house in Dumfrieshire, Scotland where he wrote many of his works.[1] He often wrote about his life at Craigenputtock, “It is certain that for living and thinking in I have never since found in the world a place so favourable…. How blessed, might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances if their wisdom and fidelity to heaven and to one another were adequately great!”.
At the Craigenputtock farm, Carlyle also wrote some of his most distinguished essays, and he began a lifelong friendship with the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.[1] In 1834, Carlyle moved to the Chelsea, London section of London, where he was then known as the “Sage of Chelsea” and became a member of a literary circle which included the essayists Leigh Hunt and John Stuart Mill.[1]
In London, Carlyle wrote The French Revolution: A History (3 volumes, 1837), as a historical study concerning oppression of the poor, which was immediately successful. That was the start of many other writings in London.

Writings

Early writings

By 1821, Carlyle had abandoned the clergy as a career and focused on making a life as a writer. His first attempt at fiction was “Cruthers and Jonson”, one of several abortive attempts at writing a novel. Following his work on a translation of Goethe‘s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,[1] he came to distrust the form of the realistic novel and so worked on developing a new form of fiction. In addition to his essays on German literature, he branched out into wider ranging commentary on modern culture in his influential essays Signs of the Times and Characteristics.

Sartor Resartus

His first major work, Sartor Resartus was begun in 1831 at his home (provided for him by his wife Jane Welsh, from her estate), Craigenputtock,[1] and was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure, while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where ‘truth’ is to be found. Sartor Resartus (“The Tailor Retailored”) was first published periodically in Fraser’s Magazine from 1833 to 1834.[1]The text presents itself as an unnamed editor’s attempt to introduce the British public to Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German philosopher of clothes, who is in fact a fictional creation of Carlyle’s. The Editor is struck with admiration, but for the most part is confounded by Teufelsdröckh’s outlandish philosophy, of which the Editor translates choice selections. To try to make sense of Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy, the Editor tries to piece together a biography, but with limited success. Underneath the German philosopher’s seemingly ridiculous statements, there are mordant attacks on Utilitarianism and the commercialization of British society. The fragmentary biography of Teufelsdröckh that the Editor recovers from a chaotic mass of documents reveals the philosopher’s spiritual journey. He develops a contempt for the corrupt condition of modern life. He contemplates the “Everlasting No” of refusal, comes to the “Centre of Indifference”, and eventually embraces the “Everlasting Yea”. This voyage from denial to disengagement to volition would later be described as part of the existentialistawakening.
Given the enigmatic nature of Sartor Resartus, it is not surprising[citation needed] that it was first received with little success. Its popularity developed over the next few years, and it was published in book form in Boston 1836, with a preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson, influencing the development of New England Transcendentalism. The first English edition followed in 1838.

The French Revolution

In 1834, Carlyle moved to London from Craigenputtock and began to move among celebrated company.[1] Within the United Kingdom, Carlyle’s success was assured by the publication of his three-volume work The French Revolution: A History in 1837.[1] After the completed manuscript of the first volume was accidentally burned by the philosopher John Stuart Mill‘s maid, Carlyle wrote the second and third volumes before rewriting the first from scratch.[2][4]
The resulting work was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto unknown in historical writing. In a politically charged Europe, filled with fears and hopes of revolution, Carlyle’s account of the motivations and urges that inspired the events in France seemed powerfully relevant. Carlyle’s style of writing emphasised this, continually stressing the immediacy of the action – often using the present tense.
For Carlyle, chaotic events demanded what he called ‘heroes’ to take control over the competing forces erupting within society. While not denying the importance of economic and practical explanations for events, he saw these forces as ‘spiritual’ – the hopes and aspirations of people that took the form of ideas, and were often ossified into ideologies (“FORMULAS” or “ISMS”, as he called them).
In Carlyle’s view, only dynamic individuals could master events and direct these spiritual energies effectively: as soon as ideological ‘formulas’ replaced heroic human action, society became dehumanised.
On a side note, Victorian writer CHARLES DICKENS used Carlyle’s work as a primary source for the events of the French Revolution in his novel A Tale of Two Cities.

Heroes and Hero Worship

These ideas were influential on the development of Socialism, but—like the opinions of many deep thinkers of the time—are also considered to have influenced the rise of Fascism.[6] Carlyle moved towards his later thinking during the 1840s, leading to a break with many old friends and allies, such as Mill and, to a lesser extent, Emerson. His belief in the importance of heroic leadership found form in his book “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History”, in which he compared a wide range of different types of heroes, including Odin, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, William Shakespeare, Dante,Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns, John Knox, Martin Luther and the PROPHET MUHAMMAD.

Thomas Carlyle, circa 1860s
Photo by Elliott & Fry
The book was based on a course of lectures he had given. The French Revolution had brought Carlyle fame, but little money. His friends worked to set him on his feet by organizing courses of public lectures for him, drumming up an audience and selling guinea tickets. Between 1837 and 1840, Carlyle delivered four such courses. The final course was on “Heroes.” From the notes he had prepared for this course, he wrote out his book, reproducing the curious effects of the spoken discourses.[7]
The Hero as Man of Letters (Quotes):
  • “In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”
  • “A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.”
  • “All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”
  • “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
  • “The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.”
  • “Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.” (Often shortened to “can’t stand prosperity” as an unknown quote.)
  • “Not what I have, but what I do, is my kingdom.”
Carlyle was one of the very few philosophers who witnessed the industrial revolution but still kept a transcendental non-materialistic view of the world. The book included people ranging from the field of Religion through to literature and politics. He included people as coordinates and accorded MUHAMMAD a special place in the book under the chapter title “Hero as a Prophet”. In his work, Carlyle declared his admiration with a passionate championship of MUHAMMAD AS A HEGELIAN AGENT OF REFORM, insisting on his sincerity and commenting ‘how one man single-handedly, could weld warring tribes and wandering Bedouins into a most powerful and civilized nation in less than two decades.’ For Carlyle, the hero was somewhat similar to Aristotle‘s “Magnanimous” man — a person who flourished in the fullest sense. However, for Carlyle, unlike Aristotle, the world was filled with contradictions with which the hero had to deal. All heroes will be flawed. Their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of these difficulties, not in their moral perfection. To sneer at such a person for their failings is the philosophy of those who seek comfort in the conventional. Carlyle called this ‘valetism’, from the expression ‘no man is a hero to his valet.[8]
All these books were influential in their day, especially on writers such as CHARLES DICKENS and JOHN RUSKIN. However, after the Revolutions of 1848 and political agitations in the United Kingdom, Carlyle published a collection of essays entitled “Latter-Day Pamphlets” (1850) in which he attacked democracy as an absurd social ideal, while equally condemning hereditary aristocratic leadership. The latter was deadening, the former nonsensical: as though truth could be discovered by totting up votes. GOVERNMENT SHOULD COME FROM THOSE MOST ABLE. BUT HOW WE WERE TO REGOGNISE THE ABLEST, AND TO FOLLOW THEIR LEAD, WAS SOMETHING CARLYLE COULD NOT CLEARLY SAY. (Darwin and his student Ruskin did soon thereafter – coincidence?)
In later writings, Carlyle sought to examine instances of heroic leadership in history. The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) presented a positive image of CROMWELL (murdering bastard): someone who attempted to weld order from the conflicting forces of reform in his own day. Carlyle sought to make Cromwell’s words live in their own terms by quoting him directly, and then commenting on the significance of these words in the troubled context of the time. Again this was intended to make the ‘past’ ‘present’ to his readers. (this guy influenced Ruskin, Ruskin in turn influenced Rhodes.

The Everlasting Yea and No

The Everlasting Yea is Carlyle’s name for the spirit of faith in God in an express attitude of clear, resolute, steady, and uncompromising antagonism to the Everlasting No, and the principle that there is no such thing as faith in God except in such antagonism against the spirit opposed to God.[9]

Carlyle in 1848.
The Everlasting No is Carlyle’s name for the spirit of unbelief in God, especially as it manifested itself in his own, or rather Teufelsdröckh‘s, warfare against it; the spirit, which, as embodied in the MEPHISTOPHELES of GOETHE, is for ever denying,—der stets verneint—the reality of the divine in the thoughts, the character, and the life of humanity, and has a malicious pleasure in scoffing at everything high and noble as hollow and void.
In Sartor Resartus, the narrator moves from the “Everlasting No” to the “Everlasting Yea,” but only through “The Center of Indifference,” which is a position not merely ofagnosticism, but also of DETACHMENT. Only after reducing desires and certainty and aiming at a Buddha-like “indifference” can the narrator move toward an affirmation. In some ways, this is similar to the contemporary philosopher Søren Kierkegaard‘s “leap of faith” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
In regards to the abovementioned “antagonism,” one might note that William Blake famously wrote that “without contraries is no progression,” and Carlyle’s progress from the everlasting nay to the everlasting yea was not to be found in the “Centre of Indifference” (as he called it) but in Natural Supernaturalism, a TRANSCENDENTAL philosophy of the divine within the everyday.

Worship of Silence and Sorrow

Based on Goethe’s having described Christianity as the “Worship of Sorrow”, and “our highest religion, for the Son of Man”, Carlyle adds, interpreting this, “there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but is a crown of thorns”.
The “Worship of Silence” is Carlyle’s name for the sacred respect for restraint in speech till “thought has silently matured itself, …to hold one’s tongue till some meaning lie behind to set it wagging,” a doctrine which many misunderstand, almost wilfully, it would seem; silence being to him the very womb out of which all great things are born.

Frederick the Great


Carlyle (left) depicted with Frederick Maurice in Ford Madox Brown‘s painting Work (1865)
His last major work was the epic life of Frederick the Great (1858–1865). In this Carlyle tried to show how a heroic leader CAN FORGE A STATE, and help CREATE A NEW MORAL CULTURE FOR A NATION. For Carlyle, Frederick epitomized the transition from the liberal Enlightenment ideals of the eighteenth century to a new modern culture of SPIRITUAL DYNAMISM: embodied by Germany, its thought and its polity. The book is most famous for its vivid, arguably very biased, portrayal of Frederick’s battles, in which Carlyle communicated his vision of almost overwhelming chaos mastered by leadership of genius.
Carlyle called the work his “Thirteen Years War” with Frederick. In 1852, he made his first trip to Germany to gather material, visiting the scenes of Frederick’s battles and noting their topography. He made another trip to Germany to study battlefields in 1858. The work comprised six volumes; the first two volumes appeared in 1858, the third in 1862, the fourth in 1864 and the last two in 1865. Emerson considered it “Infinitely the wittiest book that was ever written.” Lowell pointed out some faults, but wrote: “The figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out through any hole that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle’s are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed.” The work was studied as a textbook in the military academies of Germany.[10][11]
The effort involved in the writing of the book took its toll on Carlyle, who became increasingly depressed, and subject to various probably psychosomatic ailments. Its mixed reception also contributed to Carlyle’s decreased literary output.

Later work

Later writings were generally short essays, often indicating the hardening of Carlyle’s political positions. His notoriously racist essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” suggested that SLAVERY SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABOLISHED, OR ELSE REPLACED WITH SERFDOM. It had kept order, he argued, and forced work from people who would otherwise have been lazy and feckless. This – and Carlyle’s support for the repressive measures of Governor Edward Eyre in Jamaica – further alienated him from his old liberal allies. Eyre had been accused of brutal lynchings while suppressing a rebellion. 

Private life

Carlyle had a number of would-be romances before he married Jane Welsh, important as a literary figure in her own right. The most notable were with Margaret Gordon, a pupil of his friend Edward Irving. Even after he met Jane, he became enamoured of Kitty Kirkpatrick, the daughter of a British officer and an Indian princess. William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, suggests that feelings were mutual, but social circumstances made the marriage impossible, as Carlyle was then poor. Both Margaret and Kitty have been suggested as the original of “Blumine”, Teufelsdröch’s beloved, in Sartor Resartus.[12][13]

Marriage

Carlyle married Jane Welsh in 1826, making the marriage one of the most famous, well documented, and unhappy of literary unions. Over 9000 letters between Carlyle and his wife have been published showing the couple had an affection for one another marred by frequent and angry quarrels.[5]
It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.

He had been introduced to Welsh by his friend and her tutor Edward Irving, with whom she came to have a mutual romantic (although not sexually intimate) attraction.
Carlyle became increasingly alienated from his wife. Although she had been an invalid for some time, her death (1866) came unexpectedly and plunged him into despair, during which he wrote his highly self-critical “Reminiscences of Jane Welsh Carlyle”, published posthumously.

Later life

After Jane Carlyle’s death in the year 1866, Thomas Carlyle partly retired from active society. He was appointed rector of the University of Edinburgh. The Early Kings of Norway: Also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox appeared in 1875. His last years were spent at 24 Cheyne Row (then numbered 5), Chelsea, London SW3 (which is now a National Trust property[15] commemorating his life and works) but he always wished to return to Craigenputtock.

Death

Carlyle grave.jpg
Upon Carlyle’s death on 5 February 1881 in London, it was made possible for his remains to be interred in Westminster Abbey, but his wish to be buried beside his parents in Ecclefechan was respected.

Biography

Carlyle would have preferred that no biography of him were written, but when he heard that his wishes would not be respected and that several people were only waiting for him to die before they published, he relented and began to supply his friend James Anthony Froude with many of his and his wife’s papers. Carlyle’s essay about his wife, Reminiscences of Jane Welsh Carlyle, was published after his death by Froude, who also published the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle annotated by Carlyle himself. Froude’s Life of Carlyle was published over 1882-84. The frankness of this book was unheard of by the usually respectful standards of 19th-century biographies of the period. Froude’s work was attacked by Carlyle’s family, especially his nephew, Alexander Carlyle and his niece, Margaret Aitken Carlyle. However, the biography in question was consistent with Carlyle’s own conviction that the flaws of heroes should be openly discussed, without diminishing their achievements. Froude, who had been designated by Carlyle himself as his biographer-to-be, was acutely aware of this belief. Froude’s defence of his decision, My Relations With Carlyle was published posthumously in 1903, including a reprint of Carlyle’s 1873 will, in which Carlyle equivocated: “Express biography of me I had really rather that there should be none.” Nevertheless, Carlyle in the will simultaneously and completely deferred to Froude’s judgement on the matter, whose “decision is to be taken as mine.”

Influence


Carlyle painted by JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS. Froude wrote of this painting “under Millais’s hands the old Carlyle stood again upon the canvas as I had not seen him for thirty years. The inner secret of the features had been evidently caught. There was a likeness which no sculptor, no photographer, had yet equalled or approached. Afterwards, I knew not how, it seemed to fade away.”
Thomas Carlyle is notable both for his continuation of older traditions of the Torysatirists of the 18th century in England and for forging a new tradition of Victorian era criticism of progress known as sage writing. Sartor Resartus can be seen both as an extension of the chaotic, sceptical satires of Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne and as an enunciation of a new point of view on values. Finding the world hollow, Carlyle’s misanthropist professor-narrator discovers a need for revolution of the spirit. In one sense, this resolution is in keeping with the Romantic era’s belief in revolution, individualism, and passion, but in another sense it is a nihilistic and private solution to the problems of modern life that makes no gesture of outreach to a wider community.
Later British critics and sage writers, such as MATHEW ARNOLD, would similarly denounce the mob and the naïve claims of progress, and others, such as JOHN RUSKIN, would reject the era’s incessant move toward industrial production. However, few would follow Carlyle into a narrow and solitary resolution, and even those who would come to praise heroes would not be as remorseless for the weak.
Carlyle is also important for helping to introduce German Romantic literature to Britain. Although SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE had also been a proponent of  SCHILLER, Carlyle’s efforts on behalf of Schiller and Goethe would bear fruit.
Carlyle also made a favourable impression on some SLAVEHOLDERS in the U.S. South. His conservatism and criticisms of capitalism were enthusiastically repeated by those anxious to defend slavery as an alternative to capitalism, such as GEORGE FITZHUGH.
The reputation of Carlyle’s early work remained high during the 19th century, but declined in the 20th century. His reputation in Germany was always high, because of his promotion of German thought and his biography of Frederick the Great. FREIDRICH NEITZSCHE, whose ideas are comparable to Carlyle’s in some respects, was dismissive of his moralism, calling him an “insipid muddlehead” in Beyond Good and Evil and regarded him as a thinker who failed to free himself from the very petty-mindedness he professed to condemn. Carlyle’s distaste for democracy and his belief in charismatic leadership was unsurprisingly appealing to ADOLF HITLER, who was reading CARLYLE’S biography of Frederick during his last days in 1945.
This association with fascism [Petra - > aka fabianism aka totalitarianism] did Carlyle’s reputation no good in the post-war years, but “Sartor Resartus” has recently been recognised once more as a unique masterpiece, anticipating many major philosophical and cultural developments, from Existentialism to Postmodernism. It has also been argued that his critique of ideological formulas in “The French Revolution” provides a good account of the ways in which revolutionary cultures turn into repressive dogmatisms.
Essentially a Romantic, Carlyle attempted to reconcile Romantic affirmations of feeling and freedom with respect for historical and political fact. Many believe that he was always more attracted to the idea of heroic struggle itself, than to any specific goal for which the struggle was being made. However, Carlyle’s belief in the continued use to humanity of the Hero, or Great Man, is stated succinctly at the end of his admirably positive aforementioned essay on MOHAMMED, in 1841’s ‘On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History’, in which he concludes that: “the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.”

[Petra - > Carlyle admired slavery stating it should never be abolished so it's no surprise that Mohammed was his hero - having Hitler as a fan fits right in with this Fabianist.]

Works

Definitions

Carlyle had quite a few unusual definitions at hand, which were collected by the Nuttall Encyclopedia. Some include:
Centre of Immensities
an expression of Carlyle’s to signify that wherever any one is, he is in touch with the whole universe of being, and is, if he knew it, as near the heart of it there as anywhere else he can be.
Eleutheromania
A mania or frantic zeal for freedom.
Gigman
Carlyle’s name for a man who prides himself on, and pays all respect to, respectability. It is derived from a definition once given in a court of justice by a witness who, having described a person as respectable, was asked by the judge in the case what he meant by the word; “one that keeps a gig,” was the answer. Carlyle also refers to “gigmanity” at large.
Hallowed Fire
an expression of Carlyle’s in definition of Christianity “at its rise and spread” as sacred, and kindling what was sacred and divine in man’s soul, and burning up all that was not.
Mights And Rights
the Carlyle doctrine that Rights are nothing till they have realised and established themselves as Mights; they arerights first only then.
Pig-Philosophy
the name given by Carlyle in his Latter-Day Pamphlets, in the one on Jesuitism, to the widespread philosophy of the time, which regarded the human being as a mere creature of appetite instead of a creature of God endowed with a soul, as having no nobler idea of well-being than the gratification of desire—that his only Heaven, and the reverse of it his Hell.
Plugston of Undershot
Carlyle’s name for a “captain of industry” or member of the manufacturing class.
Present Time
defined by Carlyle as “the youngest born of Eternity, child and heir of all the past times, with their good and evil, and parent of all the future with new questions and significance,” on the right or wrong understanding of which depend the issues of life or death to us all, the sphinx riddle given to all of us to rede as we would live and not die.
Prinzenraub
(the stealing of the princes), name given to an attempt, to satisfy a private grudge of his, on the part of Kunz von Kaufingen to carry off, on the night of 7 July 1455, two Saxon princes from the castle of Altenburg, in which he was defeated by apprehension at the hands of a collier named Schmidt, through whom he was handed over to justice and beheaded. See Carlyle’s account of this in his “Miscellanies.”
Printed Paper
Carlyle’s satirical name for the literature of France prior to the Revolution.
Progress of the Species Magazines
Carlyle’s name for the literature of the day which does nothing to help the progress in question, but keeps idly boasting of the fact, taking all the credit to itself, like French Poet Jean de La Fontaine‘s fly on the axle of the careening chariot soliloquising, “What a dust I raise!”
Sauerteig
(i. e. leaven), an imaginary authority alive to the “celestial infernal” fermentation that goes on in the world, who has an eye specially to the evil elements at work, and to whose opinion Carlyle frequently appeals in his condemnatory verdict on sublunary things.
The Conflux of Eternities
Carlyle’s expressive phrase for time, as in every moment of it a centre in which all the forces to and from eternity meet and unite, so that by no past and no future can we be brought nearer to Eternity than where we at any moment of Time are; the Present Time, the youngest born of Eternity, being the child and heir of all the Past times with their good and evil, and the parent of all the Future. By the import of which (see Matt. xvi. 27), it is accordingly the first and most sacred duty of every successive age, and especially the leaders of it, to know and lay to heart as the only link by which Eternity lays hold of it, and it of Eternity.

Thomas Carlyle: Biography

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian, critic, and sociological writer, was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, eldest child of James Carlyle, stonemason, and Margaret (Aitken) Carlyle. The father was stern, irascible, a puritan of the puritans, but withal a man of rigid probity and strength of character. The mother, too, was of the Scottish earth, and Thomas’ education was begun at home by both the parents. From the age of five to nine he was at the village school; from nine to fourteen at Annan Grammar School. where he showed proficiency in mathematics and was well grounded in French and Latin. In November 1809 he walked to EDINBURGH, and attended courses at the University till 1814, with the ultimate aim of becoming a minister. He left without a degree, became a mathematical tutor at Annan Academy in 1814, and three years later abandoned all thoughts of entering the Kirk, having reached a theological position incompatible with its teachings. He had begun to learn German in Edinburgh, and had done much independent reading outside the regular curriculum. Late in 1816 he moved to a school in Kirkcaldy, where he became the intimate associate of EDWARD IRVING, an old boy of Annan School, and now also a schoolmaster. This contact was Carlyle’s first experience of true intellectual companionship, and the two men became lifelong friends. He remained there two years, was attracted by Margaret Gordon, a lady of good family (whose friends vetoed an engagement), and in October 1818 gave up schoolmastering and went to Edinburgh, where he took mathematical pupils and made some show of reading law.
During this period in the Scottish capital he began to suffer agonies from a gastric complaint which continued to torment him all his life, and may well have played a large part in shaping the rugged, rude fabric of his philosophy. In literature he had at first little success, a series of articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia bringing in little money and no special credit. In 1820 and 1821 he VISITED IRVING IN GLASGOW and made long stays at his father’s new farm, Mainhill; and in June 1821, in Leith Walk, EDINBURGH, he experienced a striking SPIRITUAL REBIRTH which is related in SARTOR RESARTUS. Put briefly and prosaically, it consisted in a sudden clearing away of doubts as to the beneficent organization of the universe; a semi-mystical conviction that he was free to think and work, and that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the “EVERLASTING NO.”
For about a year, from the spring of 1823, Carlyle was tutor to CHARLES AND ARTHUR BULLER, young men of substance, first in Edinburgh and later at Dunkeld. Now likewise appeared the first fruits of his deep studies in German, the Life of Schiller, which was published serially in the London Magazine in 1823-24 and issued as a separate volume in 1825. A second garner from the same field was his version of GOETHE’S WILHELM MEISTER which earned the praise of Blackwood’s and was at once recognized as a very masterly rendering.
In 1821 Irving had gone to London, and in June 1821 Carlyle followed, in the train of his employers, the Bullers. But he soon resigned his tutorship, and, after a few weeks at Birmingham, trying a dyspepsia cure, he lived with Irving at Pentonville, London, and paid a short visit to Paris. March 1825 saw him back; in Scotland, on his brother’s farm, Hoddam Hill, near the Solway. Here for a year he worked hard at German translations, perhaps more serenely than before or after and free from that noise which was always a curse to his sensitive ear and which later caused him to build a sound-proof room in his Chelsea home.
Before leaving for London Irving had introduced Carlyle to JANE BAILLIE WELSH daughter of the surgeon, JOHN WELSH, and descended from JOHN KNOX. She was beautiful, precociously learned, talented, and a brilliant mistress of cynical satire. Among her numerous suitors, the rough, uncouth Carlyle at first made an ill impression; but a literary correspondence was begun, and on October 17, 1826, after a courtship that was in some sort a battle of strong wills, the two were married and went to live at Comely Bank, EDINBURGH starting with a capital of £200. FRANCIS JEFFREY, editor of the Edinburgh Review, was a cousin of the Welshes. He accepted Carlyle as a contributor, and during 1827 printed two important articles — on “Richter” and “The State of German Literature.”
The Foreign Review published two penetrating essays on GOETHE; and in 1827 a cordial correspondence was begun with the great German writer, who backed Carlyle (unsuccessfully) for the vacant Chair of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Another application for a university chair, this time at the new University of London, failed equally. An attempt at a novel was destroyed.
In May 1828 the Carlyles moved to Craigenputtock, an isolated farm belonging to the Welsh family, which was their permanent home until 1834. Carlyle lived the life of a recluse and scholar, and his clever wife, immersed in household duties and immured in solitude, led a dull and empty existence. Jeffrey, who paid visits in 1828 and 1830, said: “Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek shelter in the lower world,” but Carlyle was lacking in consideration for his partner, and would not. Jeffrey even thought of Carlyle as his successor in the editorship of the Edinburgh, when he gave it up in 1829, but the matter could not be arranged. A memorable visit, in August 1833, was that of the young RALPH WALDO EMERSON, who was kindly received and became a fast friend.
At Craigenputtock was written the first of Carlyle’s great COMMENTARIES ON LIFE IN GENERAL, Sartor Resartus, which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834. The idea of a philosophy of clothes was not new; there are debts to SWIFT, JEAN PAUL RICHTER, and others; but what were new were the amazing, humorous energy, the moral force, the resourceful (if eccentric) command over English. It was damned by the press, and was not issued in book-form until 1838; but it is now numbered among his most significant works. Other notable writings of this time were essays on VOLTAIRE, NOVALIS, and RICHTER (a new paper) in the Foreign Review.
After visits to Edinburgh and London, and an unsuccessful application for a professorship of ASTRONOMY at Edinburgh in January 1834, Carlyle decided to set up house in London, settling at 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea. His struggle to live was made more severe by his refusal to engage in journalism: even an offer of work on The Times was rejected; and instead a grandiose history of the French Revolution was begun. In the spring of 1835 occurred one of the great heroisms of literature. The manuscript of the first volume of the new work had been lent to the philosopher, J. S. MILL, who in his turn had lent it to a MRS. TAYLOR. An illiterate housekeeper took it for waste paper, and it was burnt. Mill was inconsolable; Carlyle behaved with the utmost stoicism and nobility, and was only with difficulty induced to accept £ 100 as a slight pecuniary compensation.
The FRENCH REVOLUTION WAS RE-WRITTEN, and its publication in January 1837 brought the praise of Thackeray, Southey, Hallam, and others of weight, and consolidated Carlyle’s reputation as one of the foremost men of letters of the day. Even so, it sold slowly, and he had to resort to public lecturing (arranged by Harriet Martineau) to raise funds; and it was only in 1842, when Mrs. Welsh died and left them an annuity, that the Carlyles were able to rid themselves of financial worry.
Of outward event Carlyle’s life contains little. From his establishment in London his history was one of enormous work and the gradual building up of a literary fame that became world-wide. In the ‘forties and onward he became more and more sought after by men of letters, statesmen and the aristocracy, and his friends included such names as MONCKTON MILNES, TYNDALL, PEEL, FROUDE, GROTE, BROWNING, and RUSKIN. One friendship, with the clergyman, JOHN STERLING, was close and warm, and left its record in the Life published in 1851. Another, with LADY HARRIET ASHBURTON, caused grave dissension in the Carlyle home, being strongly disapproved by Mrs. Carlyle, though there was no suggestion of anything more than high mutual regard.
In literature Carlyle moved more and more away from democratic ideas. Chartism, On Heroes Past and Present, and Cromwell all developed his thesis that the PEOPLE NEED A STRONG AND RUTHLESS RULER AND SHOULD OBEY HIM. Latter-day Pamphlets, which includes “HUDSON’S STATUE,” poured out all his contempt on the philanthropic and humanitarian tendencies of the day. His last monumental exaltation of strength was a six-volume history of FRIEDRICH II of Prussia: Called Fredrick the Great. Following his custom, he paid two visits to Germany to survey the scene (in 1852 and 1858), and turned over great masses of material. The first two volumes appeared in the autumn of 1858, were at once translated into German, and were hailed as a masterpiece. The remaining volumes appeared in 1862, 1864, and 1865. In this last year Carlyle was MADE LORD RECTOR of the University of EDINBURGH. While he was still in the north, after delivering his inaugural address, he learned of the sudden death of his wife, from heart disease, and was thereby plunged into the deepest distress.
Thenceforward a gradual decadence supervened. In the autumn of 1866 Carlyle joined the committee for the defense of Governor Eyre, of Jamaica, who had been recalled for alleged cruelty in the suppression of a rebellion. The next year he wrote the tract, Shooting Niagara, against the Reform Act (which had introduced improvements into the British franchise system). HE SIDED WITH THE PRUSSIANS IN THE WAR OF 1870-71; in 1874 he was awarded the high Prussian order “Pour le Merite,” and the same year refused Disraeli’s offer of a Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath and a pension. He died on February 4, 1881, and was buried at Ecclefechan (PRO-SLAVERY AND COMMUNIST).
Carlyle’s personal character and his philosophy are alike full of contradictions and hardly susceptible to summary exposition. The most high-minded devotee of the ideal, he could yet be in the last degree churlish and uncharitable to the work and personalities of others — even to such a man as CHARLES LAMB. An apostle of courage and endurance, he was yet the most vociferous and ungracious of grumblers. His love for his wife was deep and abiding, yet her life with him was often a torment. While he abhorred philanthropy and liberal legislation along utilitarian lines, and came more and more to admire despotism, he could be scathing about the “game-preserving aristocracy” and in his personal life was quick to relieve distress.
No coherent body of philosophy can be extracted from his teachings: it is rather as a PROPHET AND A SEER that he has his place. He was blind to the greatest phenomenon of his age — the rise of science as an interpreter of the universe — and spoke insultingly of DARWIN. Formal economics also incurred his censure. His theological attitude is hardest of all to define. At an early age he found himself unable to subscribe to any of the orthodox creeds, but he was even more condemnatory of atheism than of the Kirk, and never ceased to believe passionately in a personal God (THIS NEEDS TO BE CHECKED OUT). His central tenet was the worship of strength; and, after beginning as a radical, he came to despise the democratic system and increasingly to extol the value and necessity of strong and stern government, in which the people themselves should have no share.
In literature he was the pioneer who explored and made known the work of modern Germany. His literary judgments were penetrating, and (when he had a congenial subject) just; and on men like VOLTAIRE, BURNS, and JOHNSON he gave verdicts that approached finality. As a historian he is in the highest rank. Bating certain unimportant errors of detail, he illumined the past with astonishing insight and made his personages actual and his scenes dramatic. His style is an extraordinary farrago, leaping not flowing, coining strange words and performing extravagant evolutions; yet cumulatively it impresses as a great style, suffused with humor, irony, and passion; impossible to imitate, utterly personal, burning, and convincing.
“Carlyle’s genius,” wrote Hector Macpherson, “was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that ‘no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.’”
(From British Authors of the Nineteenth Century, 115-118)
(Car lyle said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was “fighting against God.” . . . But in spite of its superficial spirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such a doctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is on the side of the big battalions — or at least, of the victorious ones. Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corrupt soldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success: and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophy of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right is only “rightly articulated” might, men would never articulate or move in any way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is no right, it cannot rationally be done at all.
This element, like the Anti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with after developments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as (in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also carries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts of the Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeed present at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa but Golgotha.)
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