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TITLE: THOMAS CARLYLE
AUTHOR: JOHN NICHOL
EBOOK: E05510 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

THOMAS CARLYLE

BY

JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON

1904

PREFATORY NOTE

The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt
to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on
slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied
by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary
legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every
critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as
every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of
these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every
student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his
own, and each has been similarly arraigned.

I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend,
betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that
often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr.
Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_
requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with
explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first
entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and
Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were
withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a
practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said
is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to
what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have
been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from
a devotee.

My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which
appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St.
James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his
religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene
Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable
hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also
to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to
reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881.
That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in
1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_.

I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively
short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts
less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events
previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the
incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so
far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the
itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it
might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short
record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his
greatest work.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I     INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

CHAPTER II    1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH

CHAPTER III   1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London)

CHAPTER IV    1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh)

CHAPTER V     1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother)

CHAPTER VI    1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle)

CHAPTER VII   1866-1881 DECADENCE

CHAPTER VIII  CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN

CHAPTER IX    CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER X     ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

APPENDIX      ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION

INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all
in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the
spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an
intellectual chain.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the
scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary,
which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some
points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid
temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking
Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local
genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people,
spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge
between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was
also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the
century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master
musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good
and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or
paralysing caution.

WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of
the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself
in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great
revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic
glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the
humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the
manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours,
the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von
Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from
the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening
to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams,
some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill
twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The
reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are
everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to
extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his
thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range.

Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain
atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant
image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the
relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite
his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle
was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of
the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with
the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could
never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent,
dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.
He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals,
self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost
mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one
exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with
reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself,
violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet,
in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent
inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord
Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other
was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than
Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely
different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge
Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the
other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society.
Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged
and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made
constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism;
Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts
are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely,
defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an
audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it.
In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there
is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere,"
in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous
incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering
belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the
citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient
name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and,
only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His
career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth,
from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown.
Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a
sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the
Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is
accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends
in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from
America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to
their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill,
passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached
at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a
sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often
by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as
senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the
builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the
pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists
whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism.
In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate
successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers
of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass
by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder
and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village
churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets
his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured.

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