Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 2

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