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Thomas Carlyle

‘A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted’

7 February 1881

Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 8 on Saturday morning at his house in Cheyne-row, Chelsea. He had been for some years in feeble health, and more than once his recovery seemed doubtful. Of late even his friends saw little of him, and growing weakness and pain had compelled him to give up his old habit of taking long walks every day. The announcement of his death opens a chasm between the present and the past of our literature, a whole world of associations disappears. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret.

About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most penetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle’s birth-place was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Hoddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle’s father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son’s birth James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he became afterwards tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle’s youngest and only surviving brother. Of James Carlyle, his son once said, ‘I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people,’ and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle’s father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk – simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.

Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father’s friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, ‘his first friend,’ as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. However, the only professor for whom Carlyle seems to have had much regard was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that ‘the true University of these days is a collection of books,’ and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was readable in various circulating libraries – among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay – and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no regret.

Carlyle had been intended for the church, but could not bring himself to embrace the doctrines of his father’s kirk, and turned his hand instead to work by which he could earn his bread. For a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, and remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. Teaching Fifeshire boys however was not Carlyle’s vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy he quitted it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern disciplinarian to begin in Edinburgh the task his life as a writer of books.

Carlyle tried his ’prentice hand in Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the elder and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author’s genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a picture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details. At the instance of Sir David Brewster he translated Legendre’s Geometry and Trigonometry, prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on Proportion. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on Faust, a subject to which he was so often to return.

About this period of Carlyle’s life the once famous John Scott was editing The London Magazine and had gathered round him a group of clever writers; Hazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham amongst them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the Life of Schiller. No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle’s work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Undeterred by sneers and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled German Romance, containing translations from the chief writers of the romantic school.

In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle found the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock – a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the hill, some 15 miles from town or market – came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion – a companion worthy of him, a talker scarcely inferior to himself, a woman, as he himself termed her, of ‘bright invincibility of spirit.’

Carlyle toiled hard in this temple of industrious peace. In these obscure youthful years, he wrote, read, and planned much, and made incursions into many domains of knowledge. In a bare, scantily furnished room of the farmhouse, now shown with pride to visitors, he pursued this plan and wrote essay after essay and did much of his best work. Here were composed his essays on Burns, Goethe and Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalis, Voltaire and Diderot. Sartor Resartus was composed here; the manuscript to be laid aside until some other time. Carlyle contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which was still under the management of Jeffrey. The relationship was not perfectly smooth or entirely satisfactory to either editor or writer. It was difficult to adjust the boundaries of the respective provinces, Carlyle being apt to take offence at the ruthless hacking and hewing of his work in which Jeffrey indulged, and the latter being cut to the quick by the eccentricities of style displayed by his contributor, and surprised that Carlyle was not grateful for efforts to impart trim grace and polish to his articles. With Professor Napier, on the other hand, Carlyle’s dealings were much to his satisfaction. Sartor Resartus, that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtock in 1831. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with genius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. Even John Stuart Mill who afterwards delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. Not for seven years after its composition did Sartor appear as a volume. It ‘had at last,’ says its author, ‘to clip itself in pieces, and be content to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered.’

Strengthening and helpful and rich in fruit were these years in his Nithsdale hermitage. But the time came for him to leave Craigenputtock. A historian, a critic, a biographer must needs have libraries within his reach. Some ties which bound Carlyle to Dumfriesshire had been severed. His father had passed away full of years, and it became fit, and even necessary, that Carlyle should leave his mountain seclusion and betake himself to London. He settled in Cheyne-row, in a small three-storied house, which he never afterwards quitted.

Carlyle was a man of mature years when he removed to London. The first years after his coming to the city were the most fruitful of his literary life. Essays, histories, lectures, biographies poured from his brain with surprising rapidity. No book-hack could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked, late and early, in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day’s duties. At 10 o’clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until 3 o’clock; nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends. One of his favourite relaxations was riding, in an omnibus. In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow.

His best books were by no means instantaneously successful. Even The French Revolution, with all its brilliancy and captivating élan, had to wait for a publisher. He found his first warmest admirers on the other side of the Atlantic. Before fame in its common form had come to him, men whose private opinions were to be future public opinion had conceived the highest notion of his powers and the future before him; and the little parlour in Cheyne-row had become the gathering place, the favourite haunt of many literary men. At different times between 1837 and 1840, Mr. Carlyle delivered at Willis’s Rooms and Portmansquare courses of lectures on some of his favourite subjects – German Literature, The History of Literature, The Revolutions of Modern Europe, and Heroes and Hero-Worship. Each of these lectures was a considerable event in literature. People of all shades and schools were amazed. Crabbe Robinson, who attended the whole of one course, says of a certain lecture, ‘It gave great satisfaction, for it had uncommon thoughts, and was delivered with unusual animation.’ ‘As for Carlyle’s Lectures,’ writes Bunsen, ‘they are very striking, rugged thoughts, not ready made up for any political or religious system; thrown at people’s heads, by which most of his audience are sadly startled.’

The French Revolution, the first work to which Mr. Carlyle put his name, appeared in 1837. It would have been published sooner but for the famous disaster which befell the manuscript of the first volume. The author had lent it to Mr. John Stuart Mill; the latter handed it to Mrs. Taylor, his future wife. What became of it was never exactly known. Mrs. Taylor left the manuscript for some days on her writing table: when wanted it could nowhere be found; and the most probable explanation of its disappearance was the suggestion that a servant had used the manuscript to light the fire. Carlyle at once set to work to reproduce from his notes the lost volume; he swiftly finished his task, but he always thought that the first draft was the best.

There followed Carlyle’s political period, when he produced pamphlet after pamphlet, abhorring the Chartists and their movement. Carlyle pronounced them one and all vain and unprofitable. His criticisms were often grotesque caricatures. They abounded in contradictions, and it was always pretty clear that Mr. Carlyle found it much easier to rail at large than to suggest any working substitutes for the systems which he despised. De Quincey was unanswerable when he said to Carlyle, ‘You’ve shown or you’ve made another hole in the tin kettle of society; how do you propose to tinker it?’

In 1845 he published Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations. The work was well received. It passed rapidly through several editions. In a petition addressed in 1839 to the House of Commons on the subject of the Copyright Bill, Mr. Carlyle had said of his literary labours that they had ‘found hitherto, in money or money’s worth, small recompense or none,’ and he was by no means sure of ever getting any. Between 1858 and 1865 appeared the ten volumes of Mr. Carlyle’s laborious History of Frederick the Great. On this work Mr. Carlyle spent more time and trouble than on any of his other books. It is a marvel of industry. Every accessible memoir and book bearing on the subject was read and collated. And yet the ten volumes are painful to read. Peculiarities of diction, embarrassing in others of Mr. Carlyle’s books, have grown to be wearisome and vexatious; little tricks and contortions of manner are repeated without mercy; miserable petty details are pushed into the foreground; whole pages are written in a species of crabbed shorthand; the speech of ordinary mortals is abandoned; and sometimes we can detect in the writer a sense of weariness and a desire to tumble out in any fashion the multitude of somewhat dreary facts which he had collected.

Since his Frederick was published Mr. Carlyle had undertaken no large work. But he had not been altogether silent. During the American War was published his half-contemptuous, we had almost said, truculent, account of the issues in his Ilias in Nuce, enunciating his old predilection for the peculiar institution. In 1865 he was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Those who remember the old man’s appearance, as he talked to the lads before him with amiable gravity of manner, his courageous, hopeful words, did not expect that in a few hours exceeding sorrow would befall him. During his absence from London his wife died. Her death was quite unlooked for; while she was driving in the Park she suddenly expired. When the coachman stopped he found his mistress lifeless. Carlyle might well say that ‘the light of his life had quite gone out;’ and the letters which he wrote to his friends are full of exceeding sorrow, and were at times the voice of one for whom existence has nothing left.

Mr. Carlyle has shunned many literary honours which were always within his reach. He did not accept the Grand Cross of the Bath, and on the death of Manzoni, in 1875, he was presented with the Prussian Order ‘for Merit’ – an honour given by the Knights of the Order and confirmed by the Sovereign, and limited to 30 German and as many foreign Knights.

Those who remember him best do so through his talks. One who heard them often describes them thus: ‘His talk is still an amazement and splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse only harangues. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound … He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical Poem with regular cadences and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full ... He puts out his chin till it looks like the beak of a bird of prey, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove’s bird.’

This is not the fit time to try to measure Mr. Carlyle’s services or the worth of his works. Wherever, in truth, men have turned their minds for the last quarter of a century to the deep relations of things his spirit has been present to rebuke frivolity, to awaken courage and hope. No other writer of this generation ever cast so potent a spell on the youth of England. To many he was always a teacher. He brought ardour and vehemence congenial to their young hearts, and into them he shot fiery arrows which could never be withdrawn. What Hazlitt said of Coleridge was true of him − he cast a great stone into the pool of contemporary thought, and the circles have grown wider and wider.