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THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 A STUDY OF HIS LITERARY 
 APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 1814-1831 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM SAVAGE JOHNSON 
 
 NEW HAVEN : YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MCMXI 
 

 Copyright, 1911 
 
 BY 
 
 Yale University Press 
 
 Printed from tjrpe. 750 copies. September, 1911 
 
 ki Xi^ 
 
 'CI.A21)7897 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following essay is the result of a 
 course in Carlyle and Emerson, given first 
 at Yale University and later at the Univer- 
 Xl^ sity of Kansas, in which Sartor Resartus 
 
 was used as a text-book. In teaching this 
 work it became evident that it could be 
 appreciated properly only when studied, 
 first, in relation to the social and economic 
 conditions which produced it, and secondly, 
 as the culmination of a long period of 
 reflection and experimentation. One of the 
 primary aims of the present undertaking 
 is, therefore, to render clearer to general 
 readers the meaning and origin of Sartor. 
 
 In studying the Critical Essays, however, 
 it soon became clear that Carlyle had formu- 
 lated before 1831 all of the important doc- 
 trines which constitute the gospel that he 
 was to preach during the next thirty-five 
 years. The present study will help the 
 student of Carlyle to see where he found 
 and how he developed many of these ideas. 
 
 In arranging the materials for this sketch 
 I am aware that perfect proportion has not 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 been observed. The analysis of the magazine 
 literature of the period in Part IV., for 
 example, is perhaps unduly expanded. It 
 has seemed best in such cases, where the 
 facts are comparatively unfamiliar, to treat 
 the subject at greater length and to con- 
 dense the more familiar passages. 
 
 I wish to express my thanks to Professor 
 Selden L. Whitcomb of the University of 
 Kansas, and to Professor John C. Adams 
 of Yale University for valuable suggestions 
 and criticism. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Chapi 
 
 rER 
 
 Page 
 
 
 Introduction 
 
 1 
 
 I. 
 
 Philosophy and Religion 
 
 %% 
 
 II. 
 
 Theories of Poetry 
 
 45 
 
 III. 
 
 Spiritual History 
 
 54 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Times . 
 
 82 
 
 V. 
 
 Sartor Resartus . 
 
 109 
 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 122 
 
 
 Bibliographical Note 
 
 126 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Introduction 
 
 Much has been made of Margaret Car- 
 lyle's statement that her son was a man 
 "gej ill to Kve wi'." While by no means the 
 most important fact about Carlyle, this 
 interesting bit of biographical gossip is not 
 without significance. It is one indication 
 among many of his constant state of nervous 
 irritability and high tension. Dante and 
 Milton may be adduced in further proof that 
 the spirit of prophecy and domestic felicity 
 are seldom concomitants. All of these men 
 were intense, somewhat narrow, and puritani- 
 cal. Carlyle was not infrequently explosive, 
 — ^in his wrath, in his laughter, in his habits 
 of work. That this great mental and emo- 
 tional energy did not entirely dissipate itself 
 is due to another equally important quality, 
 a remarkable unity and concentration of 
 thought and purpose. Carlyle had only a 
 few things to say, but he said them with 
 tremendous force; he was blind on certain 
 sides, but where he saw, he saw with astound- 
 
2 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 ing clearness. In fact, that which gives to 
 each of his writings its highest value is 
 a certain quahty of vision, capable of dis- 
 cerning in person, event, or phenomenon of 
 nature that which constitutes its spiritual 
 center, in discovering, to use Carljle's own 
 phrase, "the reality that lies at the bottom 
 of appearance." Applied to the aspects of 
 physical nature this faculty leads to a con- 
 viction of the "Divine Idea of the World," 
 a belief that nature is only "a transitory 
 garment veiling the Eternal Splendour." 
 Applied to the study of human history it 
 results in an absorbing interest in spiritual 
 biography as contrasted with picturesque 
 gossip concerning the clothes, manners and 
 motions of the outward man, and in an 
 attempt to determine the spiritual origin 
 and meaning, the "dynamics," of historical 
 events or of present society. 
 
 This natural intensity of gaze was further 
 reinforced by the gradual formulation of a 
 definite philosophy, the product at once of 
 German Transcendentalism and his own tem- 
 perament. Both the strength and the limi- 
 tation of Carlyle's writing depend largely 
 on the constant application to the subject 
 
INTRODUCTION S 
 
 of his thought of a profound, but limited 
 and somewhat rigid philosophy of life. To 
 the reader of the present day the chief value 
 of his criticism lies not so much in its eval- 
 uation of the objects criticised, as in the 
 illustration, through their means, of this 
 philosophy. We go, for instance, to the 
 essay on Voltaire, less to learn something 
 definite about the subject of the sketch than 
 to discover how Voltairism is interpreted by 
 Carlyle. Nor is the interest merely curious 
 or personal. Here two great schools of 
 thought are brought into conflict. It is one 
 of the many little combats in a tremendous 
 world battle between gods and jotuns. 
 
 Out of this warfare against materialism 
 and skepticism Carlyle was to emerge in 
 later years scarred and battle-stained. But 
 the time of active conflict was naturally pre- 
 ceded by a period largely devoted to assimi- 
 lation and preparation. As all modern men 
 of wide reading must be, Carlyle was an 
 eclectic, and in his early writing we con- 
 stantly see him culling ideas wherever he can 
 find them and appropriating them as his 
 own. He was grateful to these masters of 
 his thought, and, whether men of profound 
 
4 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 genius like Goethe and Fichte, or smaller 
 men like Tieck and Novalis, he was ever 
 ready to give them their full due. In the 
 early books and essays, therefore, we are 
 able to see him in the very process of select- 
 ing and arranging the component ideas of 
 his philosophy. The present essay is an 
 endeavor to render clearer the stages of this 
 process. While not attempting an exhaust- 
 ive investigation of the influences at work 
 on Carlyle's mind, or the sources of his ideas 
 or of his style, it is hoped that this study 
 will show more clearly than has yet been 
 shown what were the materials of thought 
 accumulated before the publication of Sartor 
 Resartus and destined to furnish the solid 
 substructure of all his later work, and how 
 this material was taking an increasingly 
 distinct shape as he proceeded. 
 
 Carlyle first becomes articulate for us in 
 the year 1814, when at the age of eighteen 
 we find him carrying on an active corre- 
 spondence with a young friend, Robert 
 Mitchell of Linlithgow. The Carlyle of 
 these early letters discloses himself as an 
 earnest and high-minded young man, with 
 a strong sense of responsibility and a turn 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 for giving good advice. Though the letters 
 of these years furnish little evidence of 
 original literary genius, it is clear that he 
 has already made upon his friends the 
 impression of personal power. His intense 
 earnestness sometimes displays itself in a 
 vaulting ambition to "make some fellows 
 stand to the right and left," and at other 
 times in the serious conviction that "a man's 
 dignity in the great system of which he 
 forms a part is exactly proportional to his 
 moral and intellectual attainments." 
 
 It is well known that much of Carlyle's 
 early interest centered about the study of 
 mathematics. It is perhaps not so clearly 
 recognized that this interest was not that 
 of the prize mathematician of the college, 
 who delights in the exercise and display of 
 mental acuteness, but arose from the serious 
 desire to pursue truth under whatever guise 
 it presented itself. This is clear both from 
 the letters and from Wotton Reinfred. Car- 
 lyle desires "to see these truths" and "to 
 feel them." Wotton devotes himself to the 
 study of mathematics until he becomes sat- 
 isfied that it offers no satisfactory solution 
 of the mystery of life. It was inevitable, 
 
6 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 therefore, that Carlyle should turn from 
 mathematics to philosophy. The first re- 
 corded literary project is an "essay upon 
 natural religion," and about the same time 
 we find him reading Voltaire, "the most 
 impudent, blaspheming, libidinous black- 
 guard that ever lived," Dugald Stewart, 
 Hume, Gibbon, and the Stoic philosophers. 
 
 It was the reading of Mme. de Stael's Ger- 
 many in September, 1817, that led Carlyle 
 to the study of German literature. Six 
 months later we find him taking lessons in 
 German, and by 1821 he is deep in Schiller 
 and Kant, Schelling and Fichte. By July 
 of the latter year he has himself tasted of 
 "the magic cup of literature" and resolved 
 to "drink of it forever, though bitter in- 
 gredients enough be mixed with the liquor." 
 
 Of the early literary projects the most 
 interesting belong to the year 1822. One 
 of these is a "kind of essay on the Civil 
 Wars (of) the Commonwealth of England," 
 an interesting anticipation in its plan of the 
 most striking features of Carlyle's historical 
 method, according to which the biography of 
 great men is used to interpret the truly typi- 
 cal in national character, and the whole is 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 used to expound a personal philosophy.^ In 
 December he proposes to Miss Welsh a still 
 more interesting project, the writing of a 
 novel in collaboration. The hero was to be 
 a disappointed young man of genius in cir- 
 cumstances resembling Carlyle's own. "Sick 
 of struggling along the sordid bustle of 
 existence, where he could glean so little 
 enjoyment but found so much acute suffer- 
 ing," he was to wander discontentedly over 
 the hill country, musing and meditating and 
 occasionally delivering his opinions "upon 
 many points of science, literature and 
 morals." As his mental malady increased 
 he was to speak forth his sufferings "with a 
 tongue of fire — sharp, sarcastic, apparently 
 unfeeling, yet all the while betokening to the 
 quick-sighted a mind of lofty thoughts and 
 generous affections smarting under the tor- 
 ments of its own over-nobleness, and ready 
 to break in pieces by the force of its own 
 energies." This is the moment of entrance 
 for the heroine, that is, for Miss Welsh, 
 who rescues him from his state of despond- 
 
 a In 1898 Alexander Carlyle edited a series of Historical 
 Sketches, written by Carlyle about 1842 and 1843, a partial 
 fulfillment of the plan outlined in 1822. 
 
8 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 ency. "The earth again grows green 
 beneath his feet, his soul recovers all its 
 fiery energies, he is prepared to front death 
 and danger, to wrestle with devils and men, 
 that he may gain your favor. For a while 
 you laugh at him, but at length take pity 
 on the poor fellow, and grow as serious as 
 he is. Then, oh then! what a more than 
 elysian prospect ! But alas ! Fate, etc., 
 obstacles, etc., etc. You are both broken- 
 hearted, and die ; and the whole closes with 
 a mortcloth, and Mr. Trotter and a com- 
 pany of undertakers." 
 
 Although Carlyle soon abandoned this 
 project ("your novel-love has become a per- 
 fect drug"), it was destined to bud a few 
 years later, frost-nipped to be sure, in 
 Wotton Remfred, and to come to fruition at 
 last in the biographical portion of Sartor 
 Resartus. Of the other writings before 1826 
 all partake more or less of the nature of 
 hackwork. Besides the encyclopedia articles 
 written for Dr. Brewster, these are the Life 
 of Schiller, written in 1823 and 1824, the 
 translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 
 undertaken about the same time, and the 
 translations for the volume of German 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 Romance, apparently begun in November, 
 1825, and finished in June, 1826. On Octo- 
 ber 17, Carlyle and Miss Welsh were married 
 in the bride's home in Templand. His period 
 of hackwork and his unmarried life ended 
 together. 
 
 The seven years from 1819 to 1826 while 
 Carlyle had been struggling to find a place 
 for himself in the field of letters had been 
 in other ways perhaps the most crucial of 
 his life. Dyspepsia and doubt had joined 
 forces to bring him torment, and the first 
 three years of this period are those which he 
 has described as "the three most miserable 
 years of my life." The famous conversion 
 or "new birth" had taken place in June, 
 1821, but the victory was not completed 
 until 1826, when "the final chaining down, 
 trampling home 'for good,' home into their 
 caves for ever of all my spiritual dragons" 
 was at last accomplished. Even more dis- 
 tressing than his religious doubts was the 
 lack of certainty as to his own usefulness. 
 "The thought that one's best days are hurry- 
 ing darkly and uselessly away" seems to 
 have been the most grievous of all his 
 burdens. 
 
10 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 In the meanwhile he is not entirely 
 absorbed in the internal struggle. In 1819 
 for the first time we find him taking a lively 
 interest in social problems. The letters 
 from this time on contain little pictures of 
 the pathos and tragedy in the lives of the 
 poor and oppressed as they revealed them- 
 selves to this thoughtful young Scotchman 
 of a century ago, with his hungry heart, 
 his ready sympathy and no less ready con- 
 tempt, and his Faustian thirst for a deeper 
 knowledge of the meaning of life. We see 
 him at the time of the Radical rising in 
 Glasgow overtaking an old peasant and 
 eagerly discussing with him the rights of 
 the people and the poverty and misery of 
 the working classes ; or visiting the iron and 
 coal works at Birmingham and expressing 
 his pity for grimy and naked humanity 
 "plashing about among dripping caverns, 
 or scrambling amid heaps of broken mineral ; 
 and thirsting unquenchably for beer"; or 
 turning into the Morgue at Paris to see the 
 naked body of "an old gray-headed artisan 
 whom misery had driven to drown himself in 
 the river." The young observer notes the 
 "grim fixed look of despair," the "lean, 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 horny hands with their long ragged nails," 
 and "the patched and soiled apparel with 
 apron and sabots hanging at his head," and, 
 already keenly alive to the value of contrast, 
 throws the whole against the background of 
 noisy life streaming along the Pont Neiif, 
 A letter from London two months later pre- 
 sents a similarly striking picture of that 
 "enormous Babel," with its "coaches and 
 wains and sheep and oxen and wild people 
 rushing on with bellowings and shrieks and 
 thundering din, as if the earth in general 
 were gone distracted." There is in all this 
 perhaps too preponderant an interest in the 
 strikingly spectacular, too keen a desire to 
 throw the picture of the gray-headed artisan 
 into sharp contrast with the quacking, sharp- 
 ing, racketing multitude, too little of that 
 yearning human compassion which makes 
 possible a Bridge of Sighs or a Little Dorrit. 
 There is, however, a note of noble indignation 
 against wrong and oppression, premonitory 
 of Chartism and of Past and Present. 
 
 That Carlyle's sense of consecration to a 
 high purpose was growing in him during 
 this period is evident from the tone of many 
 letters. Carlyle has frequently been accused 
 
12 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 of egoism, and he cannot, I think, be wholly 
 cleared of this charge. In spite of his con- 
 viction of the necessity of renunciation he 
 never really learned the lesson of self- 
 effacement. Like Ruskin, he was filled with 
 wrath and disappointment at England for 
 paying so little heed to his most vehement 
 warnings. A touch of spiritual pride that 
 occasionally approaches Pharisaism now and 
 then offends us. Yet, on the whole, he was, 
 I believe, a man of true humility and true 
 sympathy; and to compare him, as a writer 
 has recently done, to the Japanese Thunder- 
 god who leers and lashes at humanity with 
 no real compassion for it in his heart, is 
 grossly unjust. Carlyle began with aggres- 
 sive egoism, but he soon realized that life 
 made nobler demands upon him than those 
 of personal ambition. In February, 1825, 
 he writes to Alexander Carlyle: "Literary 
 fame is a thing which I covet little; but I 
 desire to be working honestly in my day and 
 generation in this business, which has now 
 become my trade." "Do not imagine," he 
 writes to Miss Welsh in January, 1823, 
 "that I make no account of a glorious name : 
 I think it is the best of external rewards. 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 but never to be set in competition with those 
 that lie within." 
 
 Finally, the letters written toward the 
 close of this period reveal a tremendously 
 increased power of expression. The vision 
 is clearer, the penetration deeper, the lan- 
 guage more poetical. The man has seen 
 more widely, felt more deeply, lived more 
 earnestly. Though he has not yet gained 
 the power of expressing his whole mind in 
 any completed work of art, many letters 
 show that in single passages he has learned 
 how to bring all his faculties, pictorial and 
 reflective, to bear. Along with this goes a 
 deepening of the sense of mystery. Even 
 in the midst of hackwork he has begun to 
 voyage strange seas of thought alone, to see 
 in an ancient Scotch city the beauty of "a 
 city of fairy-land," in St. Paul's Cathedral 
 the solemnity of "Tadmor in the wilderness," 
 and to find that a hidden mystery lies behind 
 every simplest fact of life and of death, 
 "could man outlook that mark." 
 
 Carlyle began his married life at 21 Com- 
 ley Bank, Edinburgh, where he lived from 
 October, 1826, until May, 1828. From the 
 latter year until after the publication of 
 
14 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Sartor Resartus in 1834 his home was the 
 lonely farmhouse of Craigenputtock. The 
 period of apprenticeship, however, may be 
 said to have been completed by the end of 
 1881. The writings of these years include 
 nineteen of the Critical and Miscellaneous 
 Essays, the unfinished novel of Wot ton 
 Reinfred, and Sartor Resartus. The more 
 important essays are the two on Richter, 
 The State of German Literature, Burns, 
 Goethe, Voltaire, Novalis, Signs of the 
 Times, History, Schiller, and Characteris- 
 tics.^ None of these can properly be termed 
 hackwork. They are written with spirit and 
 originality and constitute an important part 
 of Carlyle's literary output. In Sartor he 
 found for himself a true medium of expres- 
 sion, and with the completion of this book 
 by the middle of 1831, and the publication 
 of Characteristics in the same year, the 
 period of literary apprenticeship has come 
 to a close. 
 
 The novel of Wotton Reinfred was begun 
 about the end of January, 1827.^ Its title 
 
 a See Bibliographical Note. 
 
 b On February 3 Carlyle says, "Last week, too, I fairly 
 began .... a book." 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 is first mentioned in March of the same year. 
 On June 4 we hear that "poor Wotton has 
 prospered but indifferently .... though 
 daily on the anvil," and the last passing 
 mention of it is on February 1, 18S8, at 
 which time it had apparently not yet been 
 abandoned. Mr. Norton quotes from an 
 unpublished manuscript of Carlyle's written 
 in 1869, to the effect that "the work proved 
 to be a dreary zerOy and went wholly to the 
 fire." The seven completed chapters were, 
 however, left among Carlyle's papers at his 
 death, and were published by D. Applet on & 
 Company in 1892. The story of the publi- 
 cation of Sartor has been told more than 
 once and need not be repeated here. Begun 
 about September, 1830, it was finished, 
 revised and expanded by July, 1831, when 
 Carlyle set off for London to find a publisher. 
 After its rejection it was laid aside without 
 change in the text until November, 1833, 
 when it began to appear in Fraser^s Maga- 
 zine. 
 
 In the meanwhile the published reviews 
 were attracting considerable attention. Their 
 author was beginning to be talked about and 
 even to gather a little band of disciples. He 
 
16 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 writes from Edinburgh in 1827 that the 
 people seem to think him "a genius perhaps, 
 but of what sort Heaven only knows." He 
 is regarded rather to his own satisfaction as 
 a mystic. A parcel from the Societe St.- 
 Simonienne in Paris after the publication of 
 Signs of the Times, a conversation with a 
 certain Mrs. Austin, whom he describes as 
 "the most enthusiastic of German Mystics," 
 and the visit of "a young man. Coke, from 
 Norwich," the bearer of a letter from a little 
 band of "Disciplekins," are small encourage- 
 ments. Three months later Mill introduces 
 him to a "fresh lot of youths" who seek his 
 acquaintance. 
 
 All this impresses more and more upon 
 him the readiness and necessity for adminis- 
 tering some sort of "medicinal assafcetida" 
 to the "pudding-stomach of England." 
 Much jangling concerning that "everlasting 
 'Catholic question' " and the Reform Bill 
 reaches his ears even at Craigenputtock, but 
 sounds somewhat vain there. To one whose 
 "Seed-field is Time" the proper relation 
 toward all this seems "that chiefly of Specta- 
 tor."^ Nevertheless, he is not indifFerent to 
 
 a Letter to Dr. Carlyle, June 6, 1831. 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 the actual state of English society in his own 
 day. His Journal for February, 1829, 
 records his desire above all things to know 
 England and "the essence of the social life" 
 there, and the jottings of this and the fol- 
 lowing year contain many reflections on 
 social questions.* He is, in fact, interested 
 in all that pertains to the life of his time, 
 but it is rather the inner than the outer man 
 with whom he is concerned. The "Mechan- 
 ism" of Whigs, and Lord Advocates, and 
 "unspeakably gabbling Parliamenteers and 
 Pulpiteers" offends him: "one spark of 
 Dynamism, of Inspiration, were it in the 
 poorest soul, is stronger than they all" 
 ( Craigenputtock, March 4, 1831). He is 
 resolved that he at least shall sit no longer 
 "mute as milestone, while Quacks of every 
 description are quacking as with lungs of 
 brass," even though "poor Teufelsdreck" 
 stands unsupported in such resistance. 
 After the failure to get Sartor printed, he 
 contemplates for a while the possibility of 
 lecturing to "this benighted multitude," 
 
 a The extracts of the journal of 1829-1830, which form 
 Chapter 4 of Froude's second volume, contain many passages 
 afterwards incorporated with changes in Sartor Resartus. 
 
18 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 whose "gross groping ignorance" is becom- 
 ing more and more evident to him. 
 
 Carlyle's spiritual condition at the begin- 
 ning of this period and his fitness to deliver 
 a message of affirmation are indicated in a 
 letter to Goethe (August 20, 1827) : 
 
 "As it is, your works have been a mirror 
 to me; unasked and unhoped for, your 
 wisdom has counselled me; and so peace and 
 health of soul have visited me from afar. 
 For I was once an Unbeliever, not in Reli- 
 gion only, but in all the Mercy and Beauty 
 of which it is the symbol; storm-tossed in 
 my own imaginations ; a man divided from 
 men ; exasperated, wretched, driven almost 
 to despair ; so that Faust's wild curse seemed 
 the only fit greeting for human life; and his 
 passionate Fluch vor alien der Geduld! was 
 spoken from my very inmost heart. But 
 now, thank Heaven, all this is altered; with- 
 out change of external circumstances, solely 
 by the new hght which rose upon me, I 
 attained to new thoughts, and a composure 
 which I should have once considered as 
 impossible. And now, under happier omens, 
 though the bodily health which I lost in 
 these struggles has never been and may 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 never be restored to me, I look forward with 
 cheerfulness to a life spent in Literature, 
 with such fortune and such strength as may 
 be granted me ; hoping little and fearing 
 little from the world; having learned that 
 what I once called Happiness is not only not 
 to be attained on Earth, but not even to be 
 desired." 
 
 The conviction that "the root of bitter- 
 ness in the bottom of our cup" cannot be 
 removed had slowly forced itself upon him 
 and had now become an integral part of his 
 philosophy. "Happy he who learns to drink 
 it without wincing!" he says in a letter to 
 Alexander Carlyle, written in January, 1827. 
 "Happier and wiser who can see that in this 
 very bitterness there is a medicine for his 
 Soul." The renunciation of happiness 
 demands either resignation or revolt and 
 bitterness of spirit. Carlyle chose the 
 former. "Humility is no mean feeling, but 
 the highest, and only one; the denial of Self 
 it is, and therein is the beginning of all that 
 is truly generous and noble" (January, 
 1831) . "He who has seen into the high mean- 
 ing of 'entsagen,' " he writes to Goethe, 
 "cherishes even here a still Faith in quite 
 
20 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 another Future than the vulgar devotee 
 believes, or the vulgar sceptic denies." 
 
 To believe in the goodness of hfe, yet to 
 disbelieve in the possibility of earthly happi- 
 ness, is in itself a high act of faith. With 
 Carlyle it was based upon the belief that 
 "Life is but a Shadow and a Show," and that 
 "the Substance and the Truth lies beyond 
 it." More and more the actual world about 
 him was coming to seem to him spectral and 
 unreal. "Man walks on the very brink of 
 unfathomable abysses always," he writes to 
 his brother John, and to his mother: "This 
 mad Existence .... I look upon rather as 
 a heavy Dream, wherefrom, when the night 
 is passed, we shall awaken to a fair Morn- 
 ing." The disregard of fame and worldly 
 ambition, and "the search and declaration" 
 of the invisible truth, the honest striving 
 "after the Idea," is from this time on to 
 become his steadfast purpose. Diligence, 
 "like the stars unhasting, unresting,"* the 
 pursuit of Truth, recognized as priceless, and 
 the avoidance of Dilettanteism, the endeavor 
 to make of oneself a man, and not only 
 "another money-gaining and money-spend- 
 
 a Goethe's "ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast." 
 
INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 ing machine," these are the counsels that he 
 is giving to others and striving himself to 
 follow.* "Not the quantity of Pleasure we 
 have had, but the quantity of Victory we 
 have gained, of Labor we have overcome: 
 that is the happiness of Life." 
 
 a See the letter to Mr. Henry Inglis, March 31, 1829. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 
 
 To make anything like a complete expo- 
 sition of Carljle's philosophy would lead us 
 far beyond the bounds of the present under- 
 taking. Besides, it has been done, or at 
 least been attempted with greater or less 
 success, not once but several times.* It is 
 our purpose here merely to sketch rapidly 
 the successive appearances of his more impor- 
 tant philosophical tenets. 
 
 Carlyle's first mention of Kant in the 
 letters is in 1820. He began reading the 
 transcendental philosophers soon after. In 
 1825, at the time of the appearance of the 
 Schiller, he was looking to them with hope, 
 though without any extravagant expecta- 
 tions, for that solution of the mystery of 
 life for which his whole soul ardently longed. 
 "The Philosophy of Kant is probably com- 
 bined with errors to its very core; but per- 
 haps also, this ponderous, unmanageable 
 
 a See, for instance, The Philosophy of Carlyle, by Edwin 
 D, Mead, Boston, 1881. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 23 
 
 dross may bear in it the everlasting gold of 
 truth." By this time he had already parted 
 with a belief in orthodox Christianity, he had 
 decided against the possibility of miraculous 
 interference with the laws of nature, but 
 his reverent and enthusiastic temperament 
 demanded some expression in religious belief. 
 The grounds for such faith he had been 
 unable to find in the English and Scotch 
 philosophers. He had toiled conscientiously 
 over Dugald Stewart, and had read eagerly 
 the works of Locke and Hume. But the 
 lack of clear penetration in the one, and the 
 materialism and skepticism of the other two 
 offended him. The Germans, on the other 
 hand, seemed to hold the key to the situation, 
 at any rate they seemed to approach the 
 problem from the right direction. That all 
 phenomena, when traced far enough, end in 
 mystery, is indisputable. That this myste- 
 rious life is spiritual rather than mechanical 
 in its origin and its essence, is at least 
 impossible to disprove. That not merely 
 occasional, but that all phenomena, are 
 accordingly to be looked upon as miraculous 
 in the sense that they are mysterious, inex- 
 plicable, and worthy of reverence, is a 
 
24 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 justifiable and even lofty doctrine. These 
 are the chief tenets which Carlyle found 
 expressed for him in German Transcenden- 
 talism, and which accordingly he appro- 
 priated as his own. 
 
 That none of these fundamental beliefs or 
 habits of mind is new, that they are all to be 
 found, for instance, in the book of Job, does 
 not make Carlyle's debt to the Germans the 
 less. What Transcendentalism did for him 
 was to persuade him that these beliefs are 
 still reasonable to a modern man, that they 
 are not inconsistent with the latest discov- 
 eries of science, and that they may be 
 deduced by the most strict and logical 
 methods known to the best equipped modem 
 mind. In other words, Kant translated the 
 language of the Bible and of Plato into the 
 modern tongue. 
 
 In the first essay on Richter this phil- 
 osophy, as modified by the individual mind 
 of the novelist, is just mentioned. Richter's 
 philosophy is deemed noteworthy in that it 
 is not mechanical or skeptical, that in spite 
 of disregard of dogma and apparent irrever- 
 ence it is at bottom profoundly reverent and 
 religious ; that it clings fast to faith in man's 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 25 
 
 immortality and native grandeur, and that 
 this faith is joined with that love of truth 
 which leads through doubt and denial before 
 it reaches affirmation. This is the only sort 
 of faith possible to the noble modern mind. 
 
 Carlyle's first attempt to present in any 
 adequate way the more important conclu- 
 sions of the transcendentalists occurs in the 
 essay on The State of German Literature. 
 The Germans have been accused of mysti- 
 cism. It is in answer to this charge that 
 Carlyle examines the philosophy which has 
 so profoundly influenced both their formal 
 thought and their imaginative literature. 
 The charge of mysticism arises, he believes, 
 either from the inability of the reader to 
 follow abstract discussion which cannot be 
 set forth through the use of ordinary sym- 
 bols, or from the inability of the writer, 
 "seized by some touch of divine Truth," to 
 convey his meaning through the rude sym- 
 bols at his command. Of mysticism in the 
 latter sense Kant with his strong, clear 
 quality of vision cannot justly be accused. 
 
 Carlyle does not pretend to have mastered 
 the philosophy which he here partially 
 expounds. He still professes to be only an 
 
26 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 inquirer on the outskirts of the matter, but 
 zealous to prove to Englishmen that there is 
 matter worthy of investigation. It can 
 hardly be said that he ever became much 
 more than this. He seized upon those doc- 
 trines which naturally appealed to his own 
 type of mind and gave them prominence. 
 
 Of these he selects in this place two of 
 primary importance. They are, first^: that 
 Primitive Truth, the assumption upon which 
 philosophy must build, is not to be found in 
 the experience of sense, but through the 
 faculty of intuition, "in the deepest and 
 purest nature of Man." God, Virtue, the 
 Soul, are not to be proved but to be assumed, 
 for no other truth is so primitive or so cer- 
 tain. "To open the inward eye to the sight 
 of this Primitively True," which, when 
 rightly discerned, will need no further proof, 
 is then the true task of philosophy. 
 
 The second doctrine asserts the existence 
 of a special faculty by which this Primitive 
 Truth may be discerned. The distinction 
 between the Understanding and the Reason 
 {V erst and and Vernunft) Carlyle calls "the 
 grand characteristic of Kant's philosophy." 
 Both Understanding and Reason are organs, 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 27 
 
 or modes of operation, by which the mind 
 discovers truth. Reason, however, deals 
 with Truth itself. Understanding only with 
 relations ; Understanding moves in the do- 
 main of logic and argument; Reason in the 
 higher realm of Poetry and Virtue. Man's 
 spiritual welfare depends in large measure 
 upon the subordination of the Understanding 
 to the Reason. Much of the merit of this 
 philosophy lies in its moral loftiness and its 
 religious depth. The German literature, 
 inspired by it consciously or unconsciously, 
 "breathes a spirit of devoutness and eleva- 
 tion," and its greatest thinkers, men like 
 Fichte, possess a rare moral grandeur. The 
 description of this "cold, colossal, adaman- 
 tine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a 
 Cato Major among degenerate men," is well 
 known. 
 
 The distinction between the Understand- 
 ing and the Reason affords Carlyle through- 
 out the essays a criterion for judging emi- 
 nent men. As in the realm of poetry, so in 
 that of philosophy Goethe and Voltaire are 
 contrasted types. With Voltaire Under- 
 standing is supreme. He sees no mystery 
 or majesty in heaven or earth; "his sub- 
 
28 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 limest Apocalypse of Nature lies in the 
 microscope and telescope ; the Earth is a 
 place for producing corn ; the Starry Heav- 
 ens are admirable as a nautical timekeeper."* 
 This constitutes the ground of his inferiority 
 to Goethe, who dwells in the realm of Reason. 
 The same superiority in less degree belongs 
 to other Germans, to Schiller, to Richter, 
 and to Novalis. 
 
 In the essay on the last named writer 
 Carlyle once more undertakes to expound to 
 some extent the transcendental philosophy. 
 We have again the distinction between the 
 absolute existence of spirit and the relative 
 existence of matter. "To a Transcenden- 
 talist matter has an existence, but only as a 
 Phenomenon; were we not there neither 
 would it be there; it is a mere Relation, or 
 rather the result of a Relation between our 
 living Souls and the great First Cause; and 
 depends for its apparent qualities on our 
 bodily and mental organs; having itself no 
 intrinsic qualities; being, in the common 
 sense of that word, Nothing." 
 
 Carlyle proceeds next to explain the Kan- 
 tian doctrine of subjectivity of Space and 
 
 a Voltaire. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 29 
 
 Time, and then repeats the distinction made 
 in the earher essay between the Understand- 
 ing and the Reason. In his discussion of 
 these ideas and of the application made of 
 them by Novahs we come upon many of the 
 phrases familiar to the readers of Sartor. 
 The material Creation is "an Appearance, a 
 typical shadow in which the Deity manifests 
 himself to Man" ; it is "a show" ; "Sound 
 and Smoke overclouding 'the Splendour of 
 Heaven' " ; it is "the veil and mysterious 
 Garment of the Unseen" ; the earth and its 
 glories are a "vapour and a Dream." 
 
 This idealism may be universally applied. 
 In accordance with its mode of thought the 
 physical universe is to be looked upon as a 
 garment of Deity; the Visible Church is 
 only the outward mechanism of the Invisible 
 Church; society is governed by a Social 
 Idea: 
 
 "Every Society, every Polity, has a spir- 
 itual principle; is the embodiment, tentative 
 and more or less complete, of an Idea; all 
 its tendencies of endeavor, specialties of 
 custom, its laws, politics and whole pro- 
 cedure (as the glance of some Montesquieu, 
 across innumerable superficial entangle- 
 
30 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 ments, can partly decipher), are prescribed 
 by an Idea, and flow naturally from it, as 
 movements from the living source of motion. 
 This Idea, be it of devotion to a man or 
 class of men, to a creed, to an institution, or 
 even, as in more ancient times, to a piece of 
 land, is ever a true Loyalty; has in it some- 
 thing of a religious, paramount, quite infi- 
 nite character; it is properly the Soul of 
 the State, its Life, mysterious as other forms 
 of Life, and like these working secretly, and 
 in a depth beyond that of consciousness."^ 
 
 In the novel of Wotton Reinfred the 
 mystic philosopher Dalbrook, whom Leslie 
 Stephen identifies with Coleridge, is the 
 champion of the transcendental philosophy. 
 Incapable of action and without unity in 
 himself, he is an ardent seeker of truth and 
 a worshipper of the invisible. A single pas- 
 sage on Truth, spoken by Dalbrook, may be 
 quoted for the sake of its characteristic 
 quality and its intrinsic beauty: 
 
 " 'It is expressed oftener than it is listened 
 to or comprehended,' said the other in reply ; 
 'for our ears are heavy, and the divine 
 harmony of the spheres is drowned in the 
 
 a Characteristics. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 31 
 
 gross, harsh dissonance of earthly things. 
 Expressed? In the expiring smile of mar- 
 tyrs ; in the actions of a Howard and a Cato ; 
 in the still existence of all good men. Echoes 
 of it come to us from the song of the poet ; 
 the sky with its azure and its rainbow and 
 its beautiful vicissitudes of morn and even 
 shows it forth; the earth also with her floods 
 and everlasting Alps, the ocean with its tem- 
 pests and its calms. It is an open secret, 
 but we have no clear vision for it: woe to us 
 if we have no vision at all !' " 
 
 It is a somewhat curious fact that Car- 
 lyle's first important discussion of an ethical 
 problem occurs in the little-read essay on 
 The Life and Writings of Werner. The 
 doctrines are not yet set forth boldly as Car- 
 lyle's own, but presented merely as the creed 
 of a mystical German dramatist. Many 
 pages of confused and cloudy character had 
 to be waded through before this creed could 
 be ascertained. When, however, we do reach 
 the conclusion we find that it agrees with 
 the decision which Carlyle himself was slowly 
 forming during these years. Under the 
 mythuses of Phosphoros and Baff^ometus, in 
 the latter of which we recognize the "Bapho- 
 
32 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 metic Fire-Baptism" of Sartor, Carlyle finds 
 figured his own doctrine of resignation. 
 
 "His [Werner's] fundamental principle of 
 morals we have seen in part already: it does 
 not exclusively or primarily belong to him- 
 self; being little more than that high tenet 
 of entire Self-forgetfulness, that 'merging 
 of the Me in the Idea'; a principle which 
 reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, 
 and is at this day common, in theory, among 
 all German philosophers, especially of the 
 Transcendental class. Werner has adopted 
 this principle with his whole heart and his 
 whole soul, as the indispensable condition of 
 all Virtue He will not have Happi- 
 ness, under any form, to be the real or chief 
 end of man: this is but love of enjoyment, 
 disguise it as we like ; and a more complex 
 and sometimes more respectable species of 
 hunger, he would say; to be admitted as an 
 indestructible element in human nature, but 
 nowise to be recognized as the highest ; on 
 the contrary, to be resisted and incessantly 
 warred with, till it become obedient to love 
 of God, which is only, in the truest sense, 
 love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies 
 deep in the inmost nature of man ; of author- 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 33 
 
 ity superior to all sensitive impulses ; form- 
 ing, in fact, the grand law of his being, as 
 subjection to it forms the first and last con- 
 dition of spiritual health. He thinks that 
 to propose a reward for virtue is to render 
 virtue impossible. He warmly seconds 
 Schleiermacher in declaring that even the 
 hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit 
 to be introduced into religion, and tending 
 only to pervert it, and impair its sacred- 
 ness." 
 
 It will be recognized that here we have all 
 the essential elements of Carlyle's ethics as 
 set forth in the second book of Sartor 
 Resartus. 
 
 The same ethical idea runs through the 
 great essay on Burns. But here it is no 
 longer hesitatingly uttered as the creed of 
 another, but set forth in words of burning 
 conviction. 
 
 "We become men, not after we have been 
 dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of 
 false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, 
 in any way, what impassable barriers hem us 
 in through this life; how mad it is to hope 
 for contentment to our infinite soul from 
 the gifts \)f this extremely finite world ; that 
 
34 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 a man must be sufficient for himself; and 
 that for suffering and enduring there is no 
 remedy but striving and doing. Manhood 
 begins when we have in any way made truce 
 with Necessity; begins even when we have 
 surrendered to Necessity, as the most part 
 only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully 
 only when we have reconciled ourselves to 
 Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed 
 over it, and felt that in Necessity we are 
 free." 
 
 Carlyle finds Burns' inferiority to men 
 like Locke and Milton and Cervantes in his 
 inability to attain to their condition of self- 
 forgetfulness. These men were not "self- 
 seekers and self-worshippers," they had 
 another object than personal enjoyment; 
 they counted it "blessedness to spend and be 
 spent" in the service of that "Invisible Good- 
 ness, which alone is man's reasonable ser- 
 vice." 
 
 Still more clearly anticipatory of the 
 familiar passages in Sartor is the discussion 
 of the "Happiness-question" in the essay 
 on Schiller. Carlyle's argument is that, 
 although we recognize the fact that the gross 
 are happier than the refined, we would still 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 35 
 
 be unwilling to change places with them. 
 His position in regard to the whole matter 
 is nowhere stated more clearly than in this 
 essay. 
 
 "If Happiness mean Welfare, there is no 
 doubt but all men should and must pursue 
 their Welfare, that is to say, pursue what is 
 worthy of their pursuit. But if, on the 
 other hand. Happiness mean, as for most 
 men it does, 'agreeable sensations,' Enjoy- 
 ment refined or not, then must we observe 
 that there is a doubt; or rather that there 
 is a certainty the other way. Strictly con- 
 sidered, this truth, that man has in him 
 something higher than a Love of Pleasure, 
 take Pleasure in what sense you will, has 
 been the text of all true Teachers and 
 Preachers since the beginning of the world; 
 and in one or another dialect, we may hope, 
 will continue to be preached and taught till 
 the world end." 
 
 Wotton Reinfred opens characteristically 
 with a discussion of the question of happi- 
 ness, Wotton contending that happiness "if 
 it be the aim was never meant to be the end 
 of our being." The subject is resumed in a 
 later chapter. Various ideas familiar to the 
 
36 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 reader of Carlyle are brought forward, that 
 happiness is dependent upon stupidity and 
 "an excellent nervous system" ; that unhap- 
 piness would be less if we ceased to demand 
 that to which we have no proper claim ; that 
 "our highest, our only real blessedness lies 
 in this very warfare with evil" ; that not 
 happiness, but the disinterested pursuit of 
 virtue is man's highest wish. This leads 
 naturally to the question of self-interest as 
 a motive for conduct and its rejection 
 together with all other motives "in that 
 sense of the word motive." The germ of the 
 theory of unconsciousness later elaborated in 
 the essay called Characteristics is to be found 
 in a sentence in the same paragraph: "The 
 virtue we are conscious of is no right virtue." 
 That the best answer to all such problems 
 is to be found in the right performance of 
 duty and that "the end of man is an action, 
 not a thought," is a conclusion reached early 
 in the book. "It is a poor philosophy which 
 can be taught in words : we talk and talk ; 
 and talking without acting, though Socrates 
 were the speaker, does not help our case but 
 aggravate it. Thou must act, thou must 
 work, thou must do! Collect thyself, com- 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 37 
 
 pose thyself, find what is wanting that so 
 tortures thee; do but attempt with all thy 
 strength to attain it and thou art saved." 
 
 Throughout the period of the early essays 
 we may say, I think, with confidence, that 
 this principle of Self- Annihilation, or Resig- 
 nation, involving the renunciation of happi- 
 ness on the one hand and devotion to some 
 higher ideal on the other, constitutes Car- 
 lyle's most important ethical teaching. In 
 addition to this he lays chief emphasis upon 
 reverence and sincerity as leading virtues. 
 
 Reverence for that which is higher and 
 nobler than ourselves is the beginning of 
 wisdom. Carlyle's chief debt to Goethe was 
 the lesson that reverence was still possible 
 for all men. The chief fault in Voltaire's 
 constitution was the lack of the feeling of 
 reverence. All manifestations of the spirit, 
 all evidences of the invisible Goodness, should 
 inspire in us this feeling. Especially is this 
 true of the highest manifestation of all, the 
 life of a spiritually gifted man. Such men 
 are "Illuminated Characters" in the Book 
 of Life, "Hieroglyphs of a true Sacred 
 Writing," "mystic windows through which 
 we glance deeper into the hidden ways of 
 
38 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Nature."* The doctrine of Hero-Worship is 
 not prominent in the early essays, does not 
 become so until the criticism of Croker's 
 Edition of Boswell's Johnson in 1832, but it 
 finds occasional expression. Burns' visit to 
 Edinburgh is an illustration of it. Vol- 
 taire's final visit to Paris is highly signifi- 
 cant of the reverence paid to wisdom or the 
 show of it. "Only to spiritual worth can 
 the spirit do reverence ; only in a soul deeper 
 and better than ours can we see any heavenly 
 mystery, and in humbling ourselves feel our- 
 selves exalted We rejoice to see and 
 
 know that such a principle exists perennially 
 in man's inmost bosom ; that there is no heart 
 so sunk and stupefied, none so withered and 
 pampered, but the felt presence of .a nobler 
 heart will inspire it and lead it captive." 
 
 Sincerity, as Carlyle later elaborated the 
 idea, came to mean not only honesty of pur- 
 pose, but vision and sympathy; a power to 
 see through appearance into reality, a dwell- 
 ing in the Truth of things, a living in the 
 Divine Idea. The inculcation of this virtue, 
 frequently reiterated in Carlyle's later work, 
 
 a These familiar phrases first occur in the article on Peter 
 Nimmo in Eraser's Magazine, February, 1831. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 39 
 
 is less prominent in the early period. In the 
 essay on Burns, however, he finds it, "the 
 root of most other virtues, literary as well 
 as moral." Burns' chief excellence is "his 
 Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth." 
 "Let a man but speak forth with genuine 
 earnestness the thought, the emotion, the 
 actual condition of his own heart ; and other 
 men, so strangely are we all knit together by 
 the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed 
 to him." 
 
 Carlyle's religion, as visible to us in the 
 early essays, is neither dogmatic and eccle- 
 siastical, nor vaguely benevolent and human- 
 itarian. It is not allied with theology on 
 the one hand or with socialism on the other. 
 It has been called pantheistic, but pantheism 
 is a vague term and may mean anything or 
 nothing. Religion for Carlyle consisted in 
 a clear perception of, and a deep reverence 
 for, what he calls the Divine Idea of the 
 World. The perception everywhere of a 
 divine power and presence, manifest in the 
 moving of the stars and in the smallest blade 
 of grass, through which as through a 
 window man may look into the infinite, the 
 recognition of the miraculous in what men 
 
40 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 are pleased to call the common, and of the 
 supernatural in the natural, these are its 
 essential modes. The truly religious tem- 
 perament is described in Tieck's comment on 
 Novalis, for whom "it had become the most 
 natural disposition to regard the commonest 
 and nearest as a wonder, and the strange, 
 the supernatural as something common; 
 man's every-day life itself lay round him like 
 a wondrous fable, and those regions which 
 the most dream of or doubt of as of a thing 
 distant, incomprehensible, were for him a 
 beloved home." Such perception and recog- 
 nition of the divine about us is possible only 
 to profound spirits, gifted with the powers 
 of love, reverence and insight. It will be 
 seen in the following section that these are 
 the very faculties which Carlyle has de- 
 manded also of the true poet. It may be 
 inferred, therefore, that the true poet and 
 the truly religious man are one and the 
 same, except perhaps in faculty of expres- 
 sion. This is indeed Carlyle's belief. Poetry 
 "is but another form of Wisdom, of Reli- 
 gion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion."* 
 
 Religion, then, is not to be identified with 
 
 a Burns. 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 41 
 
 its forms. These are, as he quotes approv- 
 ingly from Richter, but "the Ethnic Fore- 
 court of the Invisible Temple" which con- 
 stitutes the true church. In the essay on 
 Werner the idea is further elaborated: 
 
 "It is a common theory among the Ger- 
 mans that every Creed, every Form of wor- 
 ship, is a form merely; the mortal and ever- 
 changing hodi/, in which the immortal and 
 unchanging spirit of Religion is, with more 
 or less completeness, expressed to the mate- 
 rial eye, and made manifest and influential 
 among the doings of men." The figure of 
 the Phoenix as "shadowing forth the history 
 of his own Faith," used by Carlyle in Sartor 
 as the emblem of the history of all religion, 
 is borrowed from Werner. 
 
 In the figure of the Phoenix two ideas are 
 implicit: first, the distinction in religion 
 between the spirit or reality and the forms 
 or phenomena; and second, the evolutionary 
 idea, the unchanging spirit of religion being 
 thought of as passing through continuous 
 metamorphosis of perishable forms. To this 
 idea Carlyle applies the Kantian distinction 
 between the Understanding and the Reason, 
 the forms of religion being in the province 
 
42 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 of the former and its spirit in that of the 
 latter. Men, therefore, who allow their 
 Understanding to master their Reason can- 
 not by any possibility be religious men, since 
 they are sure to place the forms or the prac- 
 tical benefits of religion above its mysterious 
 spirit. This is the trouble with the Ben- 
 thams and the Paleys as well as the Vol- 
 taires. Voltaire, indeed, spent his whole 
 strength in battling, if not quite ineffect- 
 ually, at any rate with an entire misunder- 
 standing of the situation. "That the Chris- 
 tian Religion could have any deeper founda- 
 tion than Books, could possibly be written 
 in the purest nature of man, in mysterious, 
 ineffaceable characters, to which Books, and 
 all Revelations, and authentic traditions, 
 were but a subsidiary matter, were but as 
 the light by which that divine writing was 
 to be read; — nothing of this seems to have, 
 even in the faintest manner, occurred to 
 him." 
 
 It follows from what has already been 
 said that the Christian Religion is to be 
 thought of as simply one form, though 
 immeasurably the highest, of the universal 
 spirit of religion. To compare it, however, 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 4S 
 
 as superior, inferior or equal to, any other 
 form is to hit beside the mark, since it differs 
 from such forms in its entire nature, "as a 
 perfect Ideal Poem does from a correct com- 
 putation in Arithmetic." To exactly define 
 its nature is also impossible. Something of 
 its divine character may, however, be sug- 
 gested in such phrases as Humility, or the 
 "Sanctuary of Sorrow," or may be symbol- 
 ized by some such parable as that of the 
 Three Reverences in Wilhelm Meister, to 
 which Carlyle makes reference in the essay 
 on Goethe, in Sartor, and in the Edinburgh 
 Address of 1866. 
 
 "But now we have to speak of the Third 
 Religion, grounded on Reverence for what 
 is Under us: this we name the Christian; as 
 in the Christian Religion such a temper is 
 the most distinctly manifested: it is a last 
 step to which mankind was fitted and des- 
 tined to attain. But what a task was it, not 
 only to be patient with the Earth, and let 
 it lie beneath us, we appealing to a higher 
 birthplace; but also to recognize humility 
 and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace 
 and wretchedness, suffering and death, to 
 recognize these things as divine; nay, even 
 
44 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, 
 but to honor and love them as furtherances, 
 of what is holy."* 
 
 The essence of the Christian Religion 
 resides then in its spirit of humility, rever- 
 ence and self-denial. "Enlightened self- 
 interest," which is advanced by the French 
 Philosophes and the English Utilitarians as 
 a sufficient guide for conduct will prove a 
 "dim homlantern" hardly able to keep man- 
 kind from stumbling into quagmires. As 
 self-denial is the primary virtue, so we may 
 say, with apologies to Matthew Arnold, that 
 self-denial, "touched with emotion," is, in 
 Carlyle's opinion, the heart of the Christian 
 Religion. 
 
 a Quoted from Meister's Travels in the esSay on Goethe. 
 
II 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY 
 
 "Divine philosophy" wrought into noble 
 poetical expression and breathing a lofty 
 and devout character seemed ever to Carlyle 
 as "musical as is Apollo's lute," but mere 
 versification, the thin piping of feeble 
 poetasters, aroused in him only contempt. 
 Until after the completion of Sartor he 
 looked upon himself primarily as a literary 
 critic, and though interest in purely literary 
 matters seemed increasingly less vital to him 
 in his later work, the distinction formulated 
 in the early essays between true poetry and 
 manufactured verse continued to be for him 
 a valid one. Even in the early years, how- 
 ever, he seems occasionally to have wavered 
 in his faith, or to have forgotten his own 
 distinction. In his journal for January, 
 1830, he speaks of poetry as "the jingle of 
 maudlin persons" and adds: "My greatly 
 most delightful reading is when some Goethe 
 musically teaches me." 
 
46 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 The italics show where Carlyle's chief 
 emphasis lies. In the essay on Goethe, the 
 function of poetry is declared to be the 
 revelation of the "inward and essential 
 Truth in Art" and in Early German Liter- 
 ature the poet is defined as "he who, not 
 indeed by mechanical but by poetical 
 methods, can instruct us, can more and 
 more evolve for us the mystery of our own 
 life." Undoubtedly Carlyle here overem- 
 phasizes the teaching function, which is 
 hardly the primary essential in poetry. 
 Not to expound, but to illuminate, not to 
 explain the nature of beauty and truth, but 
 to convey us into the region of beauty and 
 truth, to make us sharers in these things, 
 this is what the best poetry does for us. 
 
 A more vital discussion of the subject 
 occurs in the State of German Literature. 
 Here the purpose of poetry is separated not 
 only from that of amusement and sensation, 
 but from utility also. It is to be loved for 
 itself "not because it is useful for spiritual 
 pleasure, or even for moral culture, but 
 because it is Art, and the highest in man, 
 and the soul of all Beauty." "It dwells and 
 is born in the inmost Spirit of Man," it is 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY 47 
 
 one with love of Virtue and true belief in 
 God, "another phase of the same highest 
 principle in the mysterious infinitude of the 
 human Soul." This is perhaps Carlyle's 
 most satisfactory discussion of the subject. 
 William Morris was wont to say that the 
 customary talk about inspiration as the 
 origin of poetry was nonsense, and that 
 poetical creation is a matter of craftsman- 
 ship alone. Carlyle's view differs radically 
 and fundamentally from this. For him, as 
 for Wordsworth, it is "the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge," coming, one knows 
 not how, from the mysterious depths of 
 man's nature and without regard to theory 
 or discernible law. 
 
 More objectively considered, poetry is to 
 be looked upon as the interpretation of that 
 Divine Idea or spiritual reality of which the 
 visible Universe is but the "symbol and sen- 
 sible manifestation." In this invisible the 
 poet lives and has his being. "Life with its 
 prizes and its failures, its tumult and its 
 jarring din, were a poor matter in itself; to 
 him it is baseless, transient and hollow, an 
 infant's dream ; but beautiful also, and 
 solemn and of mysterious significance. Why 
 
48 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 should he not love it and reverence it? Is 
 not all visible nature, all sensible existence 
 the symbol and vesture of the Invisible and 
 Infinite?"* 
 
 In the greatest poets of the nineteenth 
 century the actual aspects of life, with its 
 meanness, barrenness and skepticism, are 
 sharply delineated, yet at the same time its 
 "secret significance is laid open," its beauty 
 and its spiritual meaning. The poet teaches 
 us, therefore, at the same time to know the 
 world and to love it. "All is hollowness, and 
 insufficiency, and sin and woe are there ; but 
 with them, nay by them do beauty and mercy 
 and a solemn grandeur shine forth, and man 
 with his stinted and painful existence is no 
 longer little or poor, but lovely and vener- 
 able ; for a glory of Infinitude is round him ; 
 and it is by his very poverty that he is rich, 
 and by his littleness that he is great. "^ 
 
 For such revelation of truth and beauty 
 three things are necessary, the clear eye, 
 the loving heart, the steadfast faith. Lit- 
 erary men so gifted are to be looked upon 
 as a perpetual priesthood, setting forth the 
 
 a Wotton Reinfred. 
 b Ibid. 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY 49 
 
 Divine Idea to each new age in the forms 
 which that age demands and will under- 
 stand. In our time one literature alone has 
 given us poetry in this high sense, the Ger- 
 man. 
 
 The various poets are criticised from 
 this point of view. Goethe is a great poet 
 because he has "incorporated the everlasting 
 Reason of Man in forms visible to his Sense." 
 Similarly Burns is a true poet, because in 
 his heart resides "some effluence of wisdom, 
 some tone of the 'Eternal Melodies,' " and 
 because he has discerned that "the Ideal 
 world is not remote from the Actual, but 
 under it and within it," finding beauty even 
 in the Scottish peasant's life, "the meanest 
 and rudest of all lives." 
 
 Less gifted writers, for example, certain 
 of the German playwrights, are distin- 
 guished as prosaists and not poets. Their 
 art is "a knack, a recipe, or secret of the 
 craft"; it is manufacture and not creation. 
 For poetry there is no secret except this 
 general one, "that the poet be a man of 
 purer, higher, and richer nature than other 
 men." 
 
 We have seen that Voltaire stands for 
 
50 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Carlyle as a type in marked contrast with 
 Goethe. He fails of being a poet, not 
 because he is without intellectual vision, but 
 because he is without love and reverence, and 
 without faith. The Divine Idea has no 
 meaning for him. He lives in appearances 
 and not in reality. He is not capable of 
 true humor, but only of ridicule, grounded 
 not on "fond sportful sympathy," but on 
 contempt or indifference. His verse is the 
 result of contrivance and not of inspiration; 
 it is distinguished by a modish elegance, not 
 by universal, everlasting beauty. 
 
 Historically considered, poetry is to be 
 looked upon as an expression of the highest 
 spiritual attainment of the epoch in which 
 it is written, "the test how far Music, or 
 Freedom, existed therein"; and the success 
 of the literary historian will depend upon 
 his ability to discern and record this highest 
 aim or enthusiasm in its successive direc- 
 tions and developments. Judged by this 
 standard the present age cannot be ranked 
 high. The poetry of our time fails to dis- 
 close "to our sense the deep infinite harmo- 
 nies of Nature and Man's soul"; it "has no 
 eye for the Invisible"; it worships strength 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY 51 
 
 rather than beauty.^ And yet, in spite of 
 this fact and largely owing to the chaotic 
 condition of religious thought and belief, 
 literature has taken a commanding place in 
 the modern world. The "true Autocrat and 
 Pope" of to-day is the Man of Letters, "the 
 real or seeming wisest of the past age" ;^ 
 "the true Church of England, at this mo- 
 ment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers."*^ 
 Still more hopefully may we look to Ger- 
 many, where signs of a new spiritual era are 
 to be met with, and skepticism, frivolity and 
 sensuality are beginning to disappear before 
 the return of the "ancient creative inspira- 
 tion." 
 
 In criticising Carlyle's theory of poetry 
 it must be remembered that it is an integral 
 part of a well-considered philosophy. This 
 philosophy lays chief emphasis on inspira- 
 tion, intuition, and the primary energies of 
 man's nature. Just as in religion Carlyle 
 minimized almost to the vanishing point the 
 importance of evidences of the faith and 
 authority of the church, so in poetry he 
 looked upon matters of technique as of prac- 
 
 a Signs of the Times. 
 b Historic Survey. 
 c Signs of the Times. 
 
52 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 tically negligible value. To the man of 
 truly poetic inspiration he beheved that 
 these things would come as a matter of 
 course. The failure to realize how impor- 
 tant a part verbal music plays in poetry is 
 partly due also to a very defective ear, a 
 fact which becomes eAddent in reading Car- 
 lyle's early attempts at verse, notably the 
 blank verse translations in the Schiller. 
 
 A further limitation was the result of his 
 Scotch peasant inheritance. He was bom a 
 CaMnist and remained through life a Puri- 
 tan. The sensuous made little appeal to 
 him. His range of interests was narrow, 
 being practically confined to those acti^'ities 
 wliich have a clearly demonstrable relation 
 to religion and conduct. In critical and 
 troubled times he advised the earnest man 
 to "perambulate his picture gallery" in 
 silence, he execrated "view hunting" and the 
 chatter that resulted from it, and he had 
 little patience with poetry which ended in 
 mere pastime. Carlyle's culture was not 
 perfectly rounded, it was too preponderat- 
 ingly Hebraic and not sufficiently Hellenic, 
 and his estimate of poetry suffers from this 
 limitation. 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY 53 
 
 On the other hand, as appHed at any rate 
 to the best poetr}^, his criticism has a depth 
 of penetration corresponding to its narrow- 
 ness. Such poetry is invested with lofty 
 dignity, it is given a definite place in a pro- 
 found philosoph}^ of life, and it is shown in 
 its proper relations to art and religion as 
 a manifestation of the human spirit. Car- 
 lyle had himself many of the essential quali- 
 ties of a true poet, he knew the tones of the 
 great "road-melody or marching-music of 
 mankind," and here as elsewhere he speaks 
 to us not without authority. 
 
Ill 
 
 SPIRITUAL HISTORY 
 
 More important than any discussions in 
 the abstract concerning Poetry, Philosophy, 
 or Religion, is Carlyle's interest in spiritual 
 biography. This may be called his para- 
 mount and omnipresent interest. The great 
 aim of all study is looked upon as the acqui- 
 sition of wisdom in the ordering of life. 
 The great source of such wisdom is the 
 biography of spiritually gifted men. To 
 this end all poetry, philosophy and history 
 are contributory. These are but different 
 modes of manifestation of the human spirit. 
 History is defined as the essence of innu- 
 merable biographies ; art derives its chief 
 value from its revelation of the personality 
 of the artist ; poetry should be made the 
 means of interpreting the poet. Biog- 
 raphy of the sort which Carlyle chose to 
 write contains three elements which, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, he seems to have 
 regarded as indispensable: the ideal, based 
 upon and growing out of the actual, and 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 55 
 
 affording opportunity for instruction and 
 edification. A biography may be said to 
 possess ideality when it deals with lofty 
 character, and when it shows the aim and 
 tendency of a life as well as its accomplish- 
 ment, and its meaning as well as its external 
 activity. It possesses actuality when it is 
 based upon ascertained facts ; and it may be 
 made instructive by pointing out its typical 
 character in relation to the life which we 
 ourselves must live and the difficulties which 
 we must encounter. Such biography pos- 
 sesses the highest sort of dignity and should 
 result from a reverent and dispassionate 
 inquiry. Sympathetic endeavor to under- 
 stand should precede judgment. Readers in 
 studying the life of a great man should 
 strive "to work their way into his manner of 
 thought, till they see the world with his eyes, 
 feel as he felt and judge as he judged, 
 neither believing nor denying, till they can 
 in some measure so feel and so judge." 
 
 Consequently the most important facts of 
 history or biography are not the external 
 but the internal. These facts are not the 
 most obvious and often make the least stir. 
 Biographers are prone to forget that "man 
 
56 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 has a soul as certainly as he has a body" 
 and "that properly it is the course of his 
 unseen, spiritual life which informs and 
 rules his external visible life, rather than 
 receives rule from it; in which spiritual life, 
 indeed, and not in any outward action or 
 condition arising from it, the true secret of 
 his history lies, and is to be sought after, 
 and indefinitely approached." To portray 
 the facts of history or biography so as to 
 make manifest their true spiritual signifi- 
 cance is a task then of boundless importance 
 and of boundless difficulty, a fit task to 
 engage the powers of philosopher and poet. 
 The choice of appropriate subjects for bio- 
 graphical treatment is also of importance. 
 Two types of men seem especially significant, 
 the man who represents some important 
 period, national character, or historic move- 
 ment, and the man, especially characteristic 
 of the modern age, who has gone through 
 some sort of moral struggle, with or without 
 victory. Of the first sort are Voltaire, 
 Goethe, Novalis, Johnson ; of the latter, 
 Goethe, Schiller and Burns are the most 
 important whom Carlyle studies. This is for 
 the modern man the most instructive and 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 57 
 
 precious species of biography. It furnishes 
 the spectacle of a hfe nobler than the ordi- 
 nary fighting the battle offered to all noble 
 souls, and is thus the means of furnishing us 
 with inspiration and faith in ourselves. All 
 of the biographical studies should be brought 
 to the test which Carlyle himself applied, of 
 ideality, actuality, and edification. Thus, 
 Werner is "a gifted spirit struggling ear- 
 nestly amid the new, complex, tumultuous 
 influences of his time and country." Rich- 
 ter, a still more instructive example, is a 
 character heroic and devout, formed in our 
 own age through "manifold and victorious 
 struggling with the world" and constituting 
 a Gospel of Freedom, "preached abroad to 
 all men; whereby, among mean unbelieving 
 souls, we may know that nobleness has not 
 yet become impossible ; and, languishing 
 amid boundless triviality and despicability, 
 still understand that man's nature is inde- 
 feasibly divine, and so hold fast what is the 
 most important of all faiths, the faith in 
 ourselves." The essays on Heyne and the 
 German playwrights are not of importance 
 in either of the ways mentioned, and Carlyle 
 considered them as pieces of comparatively 
 
58 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 little worth. The formulation of a bio- 
 graphical method was of course a gradual 
 process and a comparison in this respect of 
 his earlier and his later work is highly 
 instructive. 
 
 The Life of Schiller is a clear, simple, 
 engaging narrative, free from mannerism, 
 stating the biographical facts with scrupu- 
 lous fidelity and criticising the works with 
 sympathy and insight. It has been praised 
 by all its critics, and is indeed one of the 
 most irreproachable things that Carlyle ever 
 did. His own entire dissatisfaction with it 
 and later desire to suppress it have occa- 
 sioned surprise, and it has been suggested 
 that this dissatisfaction arose, after the per- 
 fection of the characteristic Carlylese dic- 
 tion, which made the early work seem im- 
 mature and ineffective. But Carlyle was 
 never satisfied with it, and his own criticism, 
 "My mind will not catch hold of it," 
 expresses the essential truth. If we compare 
 the Life of Schiller with the first essay on 
 Goethe written in 1828, we shall see that in 
 the earlier work Carlyle has not yet pene- 
 trated to the heart of his subject, or thor- 
 oughly assimilated the facts at his disposal. 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 59 
 
 Many of them are unrelated to any central 
 purpose. The book shows skill rather than 
 power, clear rather than piercing vision. 
 
 Yet the ideal of what biography should 
 aim at is already becoming plain. The 
 author proposes "to follow the steps of his 
 [Schiller's] intellectual and inoral culture; 
 to gather from his life and works some pic- 
 ture of himself." As the occurrences of his- 
 tory are to be measured "by their influence 
 upon the general history of man, their ten- 
 dency to obstruct or to forward him in his 
 advancement towards liberty, knowledge, 
 true religion and dignity of mind," so facts 
 of biography are to be judged as they con- 
 tribute to spiritual culture. In Schille^ Car- 
 lyle first foVmd a mind in several important 
 ways representative of the vital experiences 
 common to his own day. Here was a pure 
 and lofty soul struggling in the midst 'of a 
 complex and intricate civilization to find 
 an adequate standing-ground for himself, 
 whereon he could attain to his true spiritual 
 stature and unity with himself. "The Ideal 
 Man that lay within him, the image of him- 
 self as he should be, was formed upon a strict 
 and curious standard ; and to reach this con- 
 
60 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 stantly approached and constantly receding 
 emblem of perfection was the unwearied 
 effort of his life." He was encompassed with 
 many obstructions, and harassed by poverty 
 and disease, but he learned to conquer pain 
 and to attain to a lofty serenity. This 
 spiritual progress is clearly portrayed in his 
 works, which pass from the explosive violence 
 of The Rohhers through various intermediate 
 stages to the wisdom of Tell and the lofty 
 beauty of W aliens tein. 
 
 Schiller illustrates also the struggle with 
 the modern malady of religious doubt. He 
 bears the marks of many a gloomy conflict ; 
 he reveals the earnest mind that has learned 
 to look upon life as a solemn mystery ; his 
 works bear "the impress of a philosophic and 
 poetic mind struggling with all its vast 
 energies to make its poetry and its philos- 
 ophy agree." This high seriousness reveals 
 itself also in his love of truth, his hatred of 
 cant, his recognition of genius as "the 
 inspired gift of God, a solemn mandate to its 
 owner to go forth and labor in his sphere," 
 and of literature as the essence of "whatever 
 speaks to the immortal part of man." 
 
 But in spite of Schiller's loftiness and 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 61 
 
 beauty of character Carlyle has already dis- 
 covered that he is unsatisfying. Though he 
 struggles stoutly against doubt, puts it 
 aside or lives manfully in spite of it, he 
 never succeeds in resolving it. "Many of his 
 later poems indicate an incessant and in- 
 creasing longing for some solution of the 
 mystery of life; at times it is a gloomy 
 resignation to the want and the despair of 
 any." For such solution Carlyle discovered 
 then that he must look elsewhere. Two 
 sources of help and inspiration are already 
 beginning to interest him. These are the 
 poetry of Goethe and the transcendental 
 philosophy of Kant and his followers. 
 
 The second part of the present work con- 
 tains a striking contrast between Goethe and 
 Schiller. The one is like Shakespeare, the 
 other like Milton; one is Catholic, the other 
 sectarian ; one is tolerant, peaceful, collected, 
 the other is earnest, devoted, intense, "at 
 war with the one half of things, in love with 
 the other half." Where Schiller had but 
 battled bravely, Goethe had in large measure 
 attained. 
 
 The later essay on Schiller, written in 
 1829, is not a mere abstract of the earlier 
 
62 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 life, but a second presentment of the subject 
 in accordance with maturer standards. 
 Here, Schiller's life is treated as a piece of 
 spiritual history. The "high purpose after 
 spiritual perfection," which is the true end 
 of man's life, is found in him as love of 
 poetry. He pursues it through life without 
 wavering and unmixed with worldly ambi- 
 tion. He does not, indeed, ever attain to 
 such deep wisdom as that of Goethe or 
 Shakespeare. He never learns to discern the 
 miraculous in the common, or to find poetry 
 in the midst of prose. He does not possess 
 that sort of humor which "is properly the 
 exponent of low things ; that which first 
 renders them poetical to the mind," but 
 dwells rather upon old "conventionally- 
 noble themes." Less broad in his interests 
 than Goethe, his life is nevertheless highly 
 instructive from the very intensity and sim- 
 plicity of its purpose. 
 
 Carlyle's first attempts to give English- 
 men some knowledge of the man whom he 
 considered the greatest genius of modern 
 Europe were contained in the translation of 
 Wilhelm Meister in 1824 and the volume of 
 German Romance in 1826. Of the former 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 63 
 
 book we know that Carlyle's admiration at 
 this time was by no means unqualified. Of 
 the latter he says in the preface that it was 
 "not of my suggesting or desiring, but of 
 my executing as honest journey work in 
 defect of better." We learn from the letters 
 that it was done with pleasure and satisfac- 
 tion, with less agonizing perhaps than any 
 other of his books. 
 
 The preface to the first edition of Wil- 
 helm Meister is honest and straightforward. 
 As a translator Carlyle lays claim only to 
 fidelity; as an ultimate object he seeks to 
 further the study of German literature 
 among his countrymen. As a criticism of 
 Goethe it need not detain us, since we find 
 it so soon superseded by the comment in the 
 German Romance. 
 
 It is plain from the latter that Goethe 
 has now come to represent for Carlyle the 
 typical modern man of genius, and his career 
 and works to furnish the best image of that 
 ideal spiritual life which it is the highest 
 mission of all art to body forth. And as 
 attainment is seen in its fullness of meaning 
 only as the crown of effort and the conquest 
 of imperfection, so the wisdom of Meister's 
 
64 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Travels becomes more impressive when we 
 understand it as the matured product of the 
 same hand whose youth expressed itself in 
 the waywardness of Gotz von Berlichingen 
 and The Sorrows of Werther. 
 
 That Goethe manifests the calmness, 
 beauty and strength that come from victory 
 after severe conflict, that his rest is not the 
 result of surrender but of conquest, that his 
 is a mind in perfect unity with itself, these 
 facts constitute the first reason for the pre- 
 eminent interest which Goethe should arouse 
 in us. His life gives to the modern struggler 
 and doubter the inspiration and faith that 
 he too may battle successfully. 
 
 Moreover, the life and works of Goethe 
 have an immense advantage over others in 
 that they belong to the modern world. We 
 find reflected in him the science and the 
 skepticism of the age, yet joined with 
 poetry and imagination. Every age requires 
 that its spiritual life shall be reinterpreted 
 in terms of its own, in order to be continually 
 efi^ective. By doing this Goethe has proved 
 that faith and affirmation belong not less 
 to the modern than to the ancient and 
 medieval world. 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 65 
 
 That Goethe's final message is a positive 
 one constitutes its greatest importance. 
 "He is not a questioner and a despiser, but 
 a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, 
 but a builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise 
 man." In this respect he contrasts sharply 
 with Voltaire. Here we have already the 
 antithesis which Carlyle was to develop more 
 and more fully as he proceeded. Goethe and 
 Voltaire are henceforth to constitute for him 
 two great representative types of the modern 
 intellect. 
 
 It is evident from the above analysis that 
 Carlyle's object in making his countrymen 
 acquainted with Goethe is not merely that 
 of a literary critic. The message is one of 
 light to those who are sitting in darkness, 
 of hope and salvation to men in despair. 
 The story of Goethe's life is to bring inspira- 
 tion, his poetry is to bring peace. As in the 
 case of Schiller, but with far greater satis- 
 faction, we are to estimate the life and the 
 writings together as the progressive reve- 
 lation of a single spirit; hterature is to be 
 interpreted in terms of life. 
 
 Similarly the minor German novelists are 
 presented to us, not, like Goethe, as com- 
 
66 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 pletely rounded men, but as possessing this 
 or that spiritual gift of value. Among 
 these Richter is especially significant. He 
 too has learned to look upon human life 
 with an understanding of its vanities and 
 yet with love; to rejoice in man's immor- 
 tality ; to interpret nature in terms of spirit ; 
 "from the solemn phases of the starry 
 heavens to the simple floweret of the meadow, 
 his eye and his heart are open for her charms 
 and her mystic meanings." The description 
 of Hoff^mann is equally interesting as sug- 
 gesting certain traits utilized later in the 
 creation of the shaggy oracle of Weiss- 
 nicht-wo. Taken all together these frag- 
 ments of the German novelists are offered 
 as a contribution, not lofty, but of genuine 
 value, to the study of man and nature.* 
 
 The first essay which illustrates Carlyle's 
 mature biographical method is the 1828 
 essay on Goethe. From this point of view 
 it is the most important of the Critical and 
 Miscellaneous Essays. Here Carlyle at- 
 
 a In a note to the discussion of Goethe, Carlyle first intro- 
 duces the term Philistine into English literature. His off- 
 hand explanation of it as descriptive of one who "judged of 
 poetry as he judged of Brunswick mum, by its utility," con- 
 nects it with the mechanical philosophy of Utilitarianism, 
 which he was to oppose so vehemently in later years. 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 67 
 
 tempts to do in the case of a living man, the 
 man whose life has furnished the most satis- 
 factory material for such an undertaking, 
 exactly what he tries to accomplish in the 
 case of Sartor with typical and autobio- 
 graphical material. Goethe's hfe represents 
 the victorious struggle against the manifold 
 spiritual perplexities of modern life. Such 
 a struggle "must take place, more or less 
 consciously, in every character that, espe- 
 cially in these times, attains to spiritual 
 manhood; and in characters possessing any 
 thoughtfulness and sensibility, will seldom 
 take place without a too painful conscious- 
 ness, without bitter conflicts, in which the 
 character itself is too often maimed and im- 
 poverished, and which end too often not in 
 victory, but in defeat, or fatal compromise 
 with the enemy." 
 
 With these considerations in mind Car- 
 lyle's problem is plain. It is so to arrange 
 the facts of Goethe's life at his disposal and 
 so to present the substance of his works that 
 this spiritual struggle and victory with the 
 various stages in which progress is made will 
 become clear to the reader. Accordingly we 
 find the essay free on the one hand from 
 
68 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 entertaining biographical gossip and on the 
 other from technical literary criticism. It 
 is a bit of spiritual history for which both 
 life and works are used as documents. Its 
 more important passages from the days of 
 Gotz von Berlichingen and Werther to those 
 of Dichtung und Wahrheit and Meister's 
 Wander jahre are accordingly delineated 
 from this point of view. 
 
 Carlyle begins the essay on Burns with a 
 criticism of the earlier biographers. The 
 usual fault has been to present us "with a 
 detached catalogue of his several supposed 
 attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a 
 delineation of the resulting character as a 
 living unity." The true biography should 
 aim on the other hand to acquaint us "with 
 all the inward springs and relations" of 
 the character whose life is studied. So far 
 as it is possible, therefore, in a short sketch 
 Carlyle attempts to penetrate into the cen- 
 tral meaning of Burns' life, and to discover 
 the causes of his success and his failure. 
 
 The chief trouble with Burns Carlyle finds 
 to reside in the lack of clear unity of aim. 
 The poet has great gifts of insight, of sin- 
 cerity, of love, but he fails to consecrate 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 69 
 
 them to a single high purpose. His hfe is, 
 therefore, one of fragments. Instead of 
 making a clear choice, he strives to reconcile 
 the irreconcilable, "to mingle in friendly 
 union the common spirit of the world with 
 the spirit of poetry." This is only another 
 way of saying that Burns has not performed 
 what we have seen elsewhere to be the first 
 great step toward right life, the act of self- 
 renunciation. "He would be happy, not 
 actively and in himself, but passively and 
 from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, 
 not earned by his own labour, but showered 
 on him by the beneficence of Destiny." The 
 poet especially must be capable of the heroic 
 life. He has no right to expect kindness 
 from his age, "but is rather bound to do it 
 great kindness." Burns' failure, therefore, 
 was an internal and not an external one, "it 
 is his inward, not his outward misfortunes 
 that bring him to the dust." 
 
 The interest which attaches to the char- 
 acter of Voltaire is not that of struggle and 
 development, but of representative quality. 
 "He rises before us as the paragon and 
 epitome of a whole spiritual period," a 
 period of intellect divorced from sympathy, 
 
70 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 of wit without wisdom, of persiflage. He is, 
 therefore, no complete man like Goethe, but 
 the great exponent of an age of division. 
 He is the great Persifleur, lacking in ear- 
 nestness, sympathy, reverence, and therefore 
 without the deepest insight ; does not possess 
 what Ruskin called "heartsight," but only 
 eyesight ; Truth of the deepest sort is, there- 
 fore, hidden from him. His faculty is chiefly 
 one of ridicule and denial, rather than of 
 affirmation and construction. On the other 
 hand, unlike Burns, he is not divided in his 
 aim; he possesses unity with himself, so that 
 he ends in a great blaze of success. Carlyle 
 leaves us, however, with the feeling that 
 Burns, whose life was a struggle ending in 
 failure, was a nobler man than Voltaire, 
 whose life was an almost unimpeded triumph. 
 The lack of struggle is, as a matter of 
 fact, in itself the proof of lack of the poetic 
 nature. It is the curse laid upon every poet 
 that he must endure spiritual torment, for he 
 is called upon to "struggle from the little- 
 ness and obstruction of an Actual world, into 
 the freedom and infinitude of an Ideal," and 
 the history of this struggle is the history of 
 his life. Men like Voltaire do not truly hear 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 71 
 
 this call at all, men like Burns and Bjron 
 hear it, but have not strength to follow it 
 wholly. It is only the greatest, men like 
 Goethe and Schiller, who hear it clearly and 
 follow it resolutely. Our age is an age of 
 Halfness, of "halting between two opinions," 
 uncertain whether to compound with God or 
 the devil. The lives of such men as Schiller 
 and Goethe are, therefore, of peculiar impor- 
 tance to us. 
 
 These four men, Voltaire, the skeptic; 
 Burns, the noble failure ; Schiller, the lofty 
 radiant spirit; Goethe, the profound, 
 broadly human sage, are four great repre- 
 sentative types of the human spirit, and 
 together may indicate to us the ideal human 
 life as it exists under modem conditions. 
 It only remained to select the most essential 
 elements in them, to interpret these in the 
 light of an intense personal struggle, and 
 to present their abstract as the typical 
 manly life of our perplexing age. This was 
 to be the work of Sartor Resartus. 
 
 But the biographical second book of Sar- 
 tor had its forerunners in two different sorts 
 of writing in the early period. The first was 
 analytic, a series of studies which attempted 
 
72 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 to probe the motive impulses and display 
 their operation in the lives of such men as 
 most significantly interpreted the contem- 
 porary life. These form the biographical 
 studies which we have been examining. The 
 other was synthetic, an attempt to set forth 
 the eternal truth concerning the life of man 
 in conflict with the world in forms of the 
 higher creative imagination. The first 
 appearance of Carlyle's interest in the writ- 
 ing of fiction is in the letter of 18^^, out- 
 lining the plan of a novel to be written in 
 collaboration. The only actual attempt of 
 this sort before Sartor, with the exception 
 of an unimportant sketch contributed to 
 Fraser^s Magazine,^ is the unfinished novel 
 of Wotton Reinfred. One of the critical 
 essays, however, first deserves attention. 
 
 The first published passage in which Car- 
 lyle clearly sets forth as typical the essential 
 elements involved in the struggle presented 
 in Sartor Resartus occurs in the essay on 
 Goethe^s Helena. In the earlier part of this 
 essay the drama of Faust is sketched. We 
 have on the one hand Mephistopheles repre- 
 senting the spirit of Denial, "perfect Under- 
 
 a Cruthers and Johnson, Eraser's Magazine, January, 1831. 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 73 
 
 standing with perfect Selfishness," the Ever- 
 lasting No of Sartor. On the other hand 
 we have Faust representing the spirit of 
 Inquiry and Endeavor, a man of infinite 
 aspiration, persuaded that he is destined to 
 achieve that lofty happiness for which he is 
 ready to sacrifice all lower forms of pleasure, 
 quitting the ways of vulgar men but unable 
 to find the true light, moved always by 
 pride, love of power and love of self. In 
 Faust there is no such triumphant issue as 
 in Sartor, but the opposing elements in the 
 struggle are essentially the same. 
 
 Wotton Reinfred follows in general the 
 lines indicated by Carlyle in the letter to 
 Miss Welsh of December, 1822. Wotton is 
 Carlyle in exceedingly thin disguise, his 
 parents are Carlyle's parents, and Jane 
 Montagu, while to some extent similar in 
 circumstances to Margaret Gordon, is more 
 emphatically Jane Welsh. Wotton, hke 
 Carlyle, cannot remember ever having been 
 unable to read. Like Carlyle, he is a "timid 
 still boy," tormented by his school fellows, 
 and passing for a bookworm and a coward 
 until he flashes forth in a rage of fearless 
 uncontrolled anger. His early life is sad- 
 
74 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 dened by the loss of a sister. He enters the 
 university with boundless hopes, most of 
 them doomed to disappointment. Mathe- , 
 matics takes the first strong hold upon him, 
 but he soon discovers that his "spiritual 
 nature is not fed" by this study. He turns 
 to philosophy, reads the French skeptics and 
 the philosophy of Epicurus, but remains dis- 
 satisfied. He meditates various professions 
 and even attempts that of law. Disgusted 
 with its technicalities and doubtful of its 
 value, he abandons this pursuit and hurries 
 into the country, where he undergoes a 
 period of spiritual torment and struggle, 
 wandering "in endless labyrinths of doubt, 
 or in the void darkness of denial." Then 
 come the new hope inspired by his love for 
 Jane Montagu,^ and the disillusionment that 
 follows her enforced separation from him. 
 His first desperation consequent upon this 
 incident gives way at last to an "iron 
 quietude" and the thought occurs to him 
 which Carlyle imputes later to Teufelsdrockh 
 and to Dante: "Destiny itself cannot doom 
 us not to die." 
 
 a The relation of Jane Montagu to the Blumine of Sartor 
 Resartus is fully treated by Professor McMechan in the intro- 
 duction to his edition of that book. 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 15 
 
 At the opening of the story we find 
 Wotton in this not altogether comfortable 
 condition, a skeptic longing for belief, a 
 passionate lover of good but uncertain as 
 to what good is, desiring to act but with all 
 his powers of action paralyzed by unbelief. 
 His friends, aware of his capabilities and 
 solicitous for his welfare, plan to take him 
 pn a journey with the hope of diverting his 
 mind from its broodings by action. W'otton 
 readily agrees, and the story from this time 
 on to the end of the seventh chapter, where 
 the narrative was dropped, is, for the most 
 part, an account of the hero's wanderings, 
 meditations and conversations. In the sixth 
 chapter Jane Montagu appears again, and 
 a very promising villain is introduced in the 
 shape of Captain Walter, a former rival 
 contestant for the hand of Jane Montagu. 
 
 The story is almost entirely innocent of 
 plot and suffers far more from division of 
 purpose than does Sartor Resartus. Carlyle 
 evidently expects to make the usual conces- 
 sions to the demand for romance, intrigue, 
 and complication of plot, but lacks both the 
 interest and the power of invention neces- 
 sary to accomplish this purpose. There is 
 
76 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 not a trace of humor and little contrast in 
 character drawing. All the characters are 
 in deadly earnest, most of them represent 
 some phase or other of Carljle's own char- 
 acter, and a majority are afflicted with a 
 morbid tendency to introspection and a con- 
 suming desire to find an answer to the 
 "happiness-question." Their conversation is 
 wanting in flexibility and is always painfully 
 serious and anxious. Much of it takes place 
 in a mysterious House of the Wolds, a 
 strange hotbed of dissatisfied philosophers, 
 who contend for the opposing merits of 
 Kant and Epicurus over their eggs and 
 coffee. We are treated to much lofty dis- 
 course, but the shadow and sunshine of the 
 common human life, which we are accustomed 
 to look for in the modern novel dealing with 
 contemporary material, is wholly lacking. 
 The book does not contain a single feature 
 necessary to success in this field. 
 
 As a book of personal philosophy and as 
 an anticipation of the author's later work, 
 it is far more interesting. Most of the chief 
 tenets of Carlyle's philosophy appear in 
 some form. We hear nothing of Hero- 
 Worship, but the gospels of work, of the 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 77 
 
 renunciation of happiness, of the necessity 
 of belief and of the hatred of cant, are aU 
 prominent. The style is that of the early 
 essays, but many sentences were extracted, 
 with or without change, for use in the later 
 writings.^ The conversation is largely 
 given over to philosophical discussion and 
 often turns into sermonizing and monologue, 
 as Carlyle's and Coleridge's own conversa- 
 tion was only too likely to do. No novel is 
 to be nourished on such fare, nor did Carlyle 
 willingly turn back from such congenial 
 writing to the necessity of forwarding his 
 plot and humanizing his characters. More- 
 over, as the outline given will show, he fol- 
 lowed the facts of his own Hfe too slavishly. 
 Wotton Reinfred, if for no other reason, is 
 interesting as evidence of Carlyle's entire 
 unfitness for the writing of fiction. 
 
 A word must be said in conclusion concern- 
 ing the relation of Carlyle's studies in spirit- 
 ual biography and their culmination in the 
 
 a Compare, for instance, the following sentence with the 
 similar passages in History and the chapter on Natural Super- 
 naturalism in Sartor: '* 'The Book of Nature,* said Wotton, 
 'is written in such strange intertwisted characters, that you 
 may spell from among them a few words in any alphabet, 
 but to read the whole is for omniscience alone.' " 
 
78 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 semi-autobiographical second book of Sartor 
 to other romantic autobiographical fiction 
 of similar character. Goethe of course fur- 
 nished the most important model. Carlyle 
 attempted, first in Wotton Reinfred and 
 afterwards in Sartor, to compress into a 
 single volume the essence of the various 
 phases of the spiritual struggle presented in 
 Goethe's Werther (1774), Meister's Lehr- 
 jahre (1795) and Meister's Wander jahre 
 (1821). Teufelsdrockh passes through 
 Werther's melancholy and sentimentalism 
 to emerge at last victorious, having learned 
 the lesson of abnegation which Meister had 
 taught him. 
 
 Carlyle's earlier biographical studies had 
 already suggested to him the four main 
 romantic elements which characterize the 
 autobiographical portion of Sartor. These 
 are, it seems to me, four in number: melan- 
 choly unrest or discontentment ; struggle ; 
 the quest after an ideal; symbolic or repre- 
 sentative character. A romantic work, 
 according to a recent definition, "is a record 
 of exploration in the realm of the material, 
 the mental or the spiritual, in search of an 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 79 
 
 ideal."^ In this sense Sartor is essentially 
 romantic. 
 
 The melancholy unrest or discontentment 
 which characterizes Teufelsdrockh, and in a 
 more exaggerated way Wotton Reinfred, was 
 typical of Carlyle's age and has been called 
 the mal du siecle. Goethe had found it in 
 Rousseau's Nowvelle Heloise and Confessions 
 and gives copious expression to it in Werther. 
 It was increased by the political and social 
 unrest which followed the French Revolution 
 and was beginning to find expression in the 
 rising French romantic school. Alfred de 
 Musset's autobiographical romance,' La Con- 
 fession d'u/n Enfant du Siecle (1837), is a 
 product of conditions in France comparable 
 with those at work in England and influenc- 
 ing Carlyle. Both Schiller and the youthful 
 Goethe clearly exhibit this trait of unrest. 
 The quest after an ideal, often baffling or 
 unattainable, is another not uncommon fea- 
 ture of nineteenth century romantic litera- 
 ture. The typical example is The Blue 
 Flower of Novalis, an author who exercised 
 an early and lasting influence on Carlyle. 
 
 a F. H. Stoddard, The Evolution of the English Novel, 
 page 132. 
 
80 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 Professor Beers has pointed out repetitions 
 of this idea in Lowell, Whittier, Emerson 
 and others. In Sartor its influence is espe- 
 cially apparent in the chapter called Sor- 
 rows of Teufelsdrockh. Carlyle looked upon 
 Goethe's life as such an ideal quest, issuing 
 in triumphant success. The element of 
 struggle, which, as we have seen, Carlyle 
 considered unavoidable in the noble modern 
 life, and which he found amply illustrated in 
 the lives of the great Germans, and the 
 symbolic and representative character which 
 he wished to give to both Wotton Reinfred 
 and Sartor, constitute the other clearly 
 marked romantic traits of these books. It 
 is especially in the last characteristic that 
 Sartor differs not only from the methods of 
 the eighteenth century writers of fiction, but 
 from such nineteenth century autobiograph- 
 ical fiction as Bulwer's The Caxtons (1849) 
 and My Novel (1853), Dickens' David Cop- 
 per field (1849-51), and Borrow's Lavengro 
 (1851) and Romany Rye (1857). Carlyle 
 makes little use of such picturesque material 
 as interested these writers, and prefers the 
 a priori method. He writes his story to 
 
SPIRITUAL HISTORY 81 
 
 illustrate a preconceived idea of general 
 application. 
 
 It is also this desire to delineate the typical 
 and ideal modern life as a means for edifica- 
 tion, that separates Carlyle's biographical 
 method from that more commonly in vogue 
 since the production of Boswell's Johnson, 
 the aim of which was to present a vivid and 
 intimate picture of the individual man. Car- 
 lyle fully appreciated the merits of this 
 great work and of its much maligned author, 
 but he had no intention of becoming a Bos- 
 well. It is true that in Cromwell he faith- 
 fully subordinated his own very definite 
 opinion of his hero to the evidence of the 
 actual letters and speeches, and that in gen- 
 eral his power of vivid portraiture is unex- 
 celled. IBut he believed it the primary duty 
 of a biographer to interpret as well as to 
 present a life. The ultimate purpose of the 
 second book of Sartor Resartus and that of 
 the 1828 essay on Goethe are identical, and 
 Carlyle's interest in each form of writing 
 helps us in no small degree to understand the 
 principle of selection which governed the 
 composition of the other. 
 
IV 
 
 THE TIMES 
 
 The more intensely interested a man 
 becomes in the needs of his own times, the 
 less intent is he Hkely to become upon the 
 calm enunciation of universal truth and the 
 more on the vital utterance of that partic- 
 ular side or aspect of truth which seems to 
 be needed at the moment. He becomes less 
 of a philosopher and more of a prophet. 
 Carlyle passed through this change. Toward 
 the latter part of his life he found himself 
 little moved by transcendental distinctions, 
 was even ready to call it all "moonshine," 
 but he became more and more vehement in 
 his objurgations against sham and his rec- 
 ommendations of sincerity and hero-worship. 
 
 In one sense, however, all his writings, 
 from the very beginning, may be said to 
 have had a practical application in mind. 
 The letters, the prefaces and the essays 
 themselves show us that the German litera- 
 ture which Carlyle was devoting himself to 
 making known in England, was looked upon 
 
THE TIMES 83 
 
 as medicative and restorative, a needed anti- 
 dote to the materialism and skepticism of 
 English literature and philosophy. Locke 
 had paved the way "for banishing religion 
 from the world." Voltaire had furthered 
 the same cause in France. Germany alone 
 still retained a faith in the Invisible. Goethe, 
 Schiller, Richter, Novalis, still held fast to 
 this faith. Knowledge of these writers is the 
 first step to removing the incubus of unbelief 
 from the rest of Europe. "To judge from 
 the signs of the times," Carlyle had said in 
 the preface to German Romance, "this gen- 
 eral diffusion of German among us seems a 
 consummation not far distant. As an indi- 
 vidual I cannot but anticipate from it some 
 little evil and much good." 
 
 By 1827 he had begun to analyze his age, 
 and to look upon it as a critical period in 
 the world's history. His view of it, how- 
 ever, was so far an optimistic one. In the 
 essay on German Literature he speaks of his 
 time as an era of promise and threatening, 
 in which "many elements of good and evil 
 are everywhere in conflict." The rapid 
 material advance characteristic of the cen- 
 tury seems on the whole beneficial. "The 
 
84 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 commerce in material things has paved roads 
 for commerce in things spiritual, and a true 
 thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly 
 to us from remotest countries, provided only 
 our minds be open to receive it." An elo- 
 quent and still more optimistic passage 
 closes the essay. In spite of religious uncer- 
 tainty we may be assured that Religion and 
 Poetry are not dead; that they are "eternal 
 as the being of man," Even amid the triv- 
 ialities of every-day life we are striving as 
 best we may to catch "tidings from loftier 
 worlds." "Meanwhile the first condition of 
 success is, that, in striving honestly our- 
 selves, we honestly acknowledge the striving 
 of our neighbor; that with a will unwearied 
 in seeking Truth, we have a Sense open for 
 it, wheresoever and howsoever it may arise." 
 A similar plea for "tolerant and sober 
 investigation" of foreign thought, especially 
 of the so-called German mysticism, closes 
 the essay on Novalis. Whatever its aber- 
 rations, Carlyle feels that mysticism will 
 prove superior to the "Coffin-and-Gas-Phil- 
 osophy" which it opposes. He agrees with 
 Jean Paul that "our present time is indeed 
 a criticising and critical time," but trusts in 
 
THE TIMES 85 
 
 spite, of this that it will find some issue out 
 of all its perplexities. 
 
 The spirit of this closing paragraph of 
 Novalis finds ampler expression in the next 
 essay on Signs of the Times. From some 
 points of view this is the most important of 
 the early essays. It is Carlyle's first broad 
 and full discussion of the needs of his age, 
 its disease and the remedy to be applied. 
 It contains the germinal thought of all his 
 later work, and looks forward not only to 
 Sartor, but to Past and Present and the 
 Latter day Pamphlets. It attracted atten- 
 tion, if not widely, at any rate in quarters 
 where it was likely to bring forth fruit. 
 The St. Simonians, as we have seen, began 
 to look upon Carlyle as a spiritual leader, 
 and "disciplekins" in London to express their 
 belief in him; while Lowell dates the rise of 
 Transcendentalism in New England from 
 the appearance of Signs of the Times and 
 History. In his discussion of mechanism 
 Carlyle sounded a note which has been echoed 
 by all the great didactic essayists of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 The essay possesses a high degree of unity 
 and is simply expressed. The age is a criti- 
 
86 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 cal one, and is everywhere recognized as 
 such. As distinguished from other ages, it 
 may be designated as the Mechanical Age 
 or Age of Machinery. This mechanical 
 character may be discerned not only in the 
 great increase of machinery in industry but 
 in the elaborate organization in all branches 
 of thought and life, social, scientific, reli- 
 gious, philosophical and literary. The 
 dominion of Mechanism, if made absolute, 
 cannot but end in disaster. The renovation 
 of society can come only through a return 
 to faith in Dynamics^ by which is meant "the 
 primary, unmodified forces and energies of 
 man, the mysterious springs of Love, and 
 Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, 
 Religion." 
 
 In speaking of the relation of Signs of 
 the Times to the period in which it was writ- 
 ten, it may be premised that the essay was 
 to some extent an outcome of Carlyle's 
 anxious and apprehensive temperament as 
 well as of external conditions. Professor 
 Masson, in his Life of Chatterton, makes the 
 remark that every age is likely to look upon 
 itself as an especially critical one. Whether 
 or not this be true, it is certain that men of 
 
THE TIMES 87 
 
 Carlyle's disposition are wont to find a crisis 
 impending under whatever conditions they 
 may be placed. The author of the Signs of 
 the Times is the same Carlyle who almost 
 forty years later wrote: "There probably 
 never was since the Heptarchy ended, or 
 almost since it began, so hugely critical an 
 epoch in the history of England as this we 
 have now entered upon."^ On the other 
 hand, in several important ways this essay 
 is an expression of the thought current in 
 1829. It appeared during a period of 
 anxious and excited thought and discussion, 
 at the very height of the Reform movement 
 which began soon after the close of the 
 French Revolution in 1815. 1829 was the 
 year of the Catholic Emancipation Act ; in 
 the previous year the Test Act, admitting 
 dissenters to public offices, had become law ; 
 three years later the great Reform Bill, 
 already v/armly debated in parliament, was 
 passed. England, indeed, owing to the rapid 
 advance accomplished through the French 
 Revolution, had been outstripped in political 
 progress by the continental nations. It was 
 inevitable that a radical revision and mod- 
 
 a Shooting Niagara; and After? 1867. 
 
88 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 ernization of her institutions should take 
 place, and Englishmen by 1829 had begun 
 to realize that these changes were revolu- 
 tionary in character. This gave rise to an 
 anxiously critical spirit and to alternating 
 optimism and pessimism. Throughout the 
 whole period the demands of the working 
 people were becoming more and more insist- 
 ent. The Luddite riots of 1811-1819, the 
 Peterloo massacre of 1819, the Corn law 
 agitation of 1825-1846 and the Chartist 
 Movement of 1832, are symptoms of the 
 general progress. Not only Signs of the 
 Times but Characteristics, Sartor Resartus, 
 Chartism and Past and Present are to be 
 read in the light of these events. 
 
 In October, 1825, the Quarterly Review 
 had spoken of the condition of England as 
 "a singular if not a critical state of things," 
 in which "engines of great power, for good 
 or ill, are set in action," but had found sat- 
 isfaction in an "almost universal peace 
 abroad, and a more than common content- 
 ment at home." In June, 1826, the same 
 periodical indulges in a eulogy of England, 
 rejoicing in her prosperity and prospect of 
 future greatness. In accordance with the 
 
THE TIMES 89 
 
 tendency of the period to apply a nickname 
 it speaks of the time as "the age of indus- 
 try," "the age of comfort to the poor," and 
 "the age of the people." 
 
 By April, 1829, however, the Quarterly 
 has changed its tune. An article on the 
 State and Prospects of the Country makes 
 careful examination of England's condition. 
 Causes of discontent are found in the heavy 
 burdens of public debt and the poor rates, 
 in the redundancy of the population, and in 
 the raising of undue pretensions owing to 
 past prosperity. "Symptoms now and then 
 appear," it says, "which look as if all were 
 wearing out, and the present order of things 
 were verging to one of those great changes 
 to which all sublunary affairs are subject." 
 
 Blackwood^ s for July, 1829, finds no small 
 cause for amusement in this sudden right- 
 about of the Quarterly. It undertakes, how- 
 ever, to examine the causes of the "bitter 
 misery" of the population on its own account 
 and among others adds overtrading, bad 
 harvests, the corn laws and the increase of 
 machinery, to those discovered by the Quar- 
 terly. In the September following Black^ 
 wood's points out the coexistence of immod- 
 
90 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 erate luxury among the aristocracy with 
 unexampled misery among the laboring 
 classes, the latter largely due to the read- 
 justment made necessary by the great 
 increase of machinery. In October, 1830, an 
 article on The Present Crisis repeats the 
 judgment of the Quarterly. "In no period 
 of modem times has the settled order of 
 things appeared to be so extensively under 
 the influence of desire for change." The 
 author of this article likewise finds the use 
 of machinery raising a "very vital question." 
 In December, 1830, Blachwood's attempts 
 once more to analyze the "Spirit of the 
 Age," an undertaking which "absorbs, at 
 present, the attention of the world." 
 According to this writer the spirit of the 
 age is one of social and political discontent 
 manifesting itself among the people and 
 demanding certain reforms, chief among 
 which are republican form of government, 
 reduction of taxes, of pensions and sinecures, 
 and of church property, repeal of the corn 
 laws, and parliamentary reform. 
 
 A similar feeling of anxiety or distrust 
 had been expressed by The Athenceum in 
 January, 1828. In spite of the unexampled 
 
THE TIMES 91 
 
 progress "in everything connected with the 
 senses" it doubts "whether we have advanced 
 at all proportionably in those higher and 
 interior qualities which are of infinitely more 
 importance towards the perfection of each 
 individual nature, but display themselves far 
 less definitely by outward and calculable 
 manifestations." The Athenceum proposes 
 to watch "the signs of the times" as they 
 appear in contemporary writers. All this is 
 somewhat in Carlyle's own vein. In a later 
 number of the magazine the same writer 
 deprecates the tendency of a large class of 
 literary men "to seek the moral amelioration 
 of mankind by the pursuit or diffusion 
 of the merely physical or mathematical 
 sciences." 
 
 It was natural that the use of machinery 
 should occupy a large share of men's 
 thoughts. It is difficult for us to realize how 
 rapidly the industrial age had arisen. For 
 centuries men had been content to till their 
 fields and weave their cloth in the ways that 
 their fathers had taught them. Suddenly 
 toward the close of the eighteenth century a 
 marvelous series of mechanical inventions 
 began to appear and to revolutionize every 
 
92 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 industry. The inauguration of the factory 
 system resulted in the most conspicuous fea- 
 tures of modern society, the growth of great 
 manufacturing towns, the appearance of the 
 capitalist class, the consequent dependence 
 of the workman upon the capitalist, the 
 increased employment of men and women in 
 manufacturing, and the vast expansion of 
 commerce. This great industrial revolution 
 began in England and advanced most 
 rapidly there. During the twenty-five years 
 which preceded the publication of The 
 French Revolution the number of power 
 looms in England increased from twenty- 
 four hundred to one hundred thousand. 
 The magazines, as we have seen, made the 
 use of machinery a frequent topic of dis- 
 cussion. Sometimes they found it a cause 
 of anxiety, sometimes of rejoicing. Prac- 
 tically all of these discussions were economic 
 in character; most of them considered the 
 causes of alarm to reside in the misery which 
 machinery might bring to the working 
 classes, and through their discontent upon 
 the upper classes. 
 
 The feeling of depression due to the sense 
 of various impending crises was deepened by 
 
THE TIMES 93 
 
 the dark outlook in the field of literary 
 enterprise. The great poets were all dead 
 or had ended their poetical careers. Byron, 
 Keats and Shelley had passed away. Crabbe 
 and Scott had ceased to write poetry. 
 Wordsworth's inspiration was gone, Southey 
 was writing prose, Coleridge was "involved 
 in an eternal maze of metaphysics"; thus 
 Fraser's Magazine laments the decay of 
 poetry. Various reasons were assigned for 
 this, the social and political disturbances, 
 the interest in economics and physical 
 science; it seemed doubtful to some whether 
 the muse would ever lift her head again. 
 "When the Pelion of political economy is 
 piled upon the Ossa of scientific research, 
 surmounted with a pagoda of four-volumed 
 fashionable novels, it's time for the invaded 
 deities to betake them to earth, and become 
 (or appear) 'of the earth earthy,' or perish 
 utterly."^ 
 
 Finally, the great scientific advance in the 
 eighteenth century had resulted in a more 
 liberal and enlightened religious spirit. At 
 the same time the apparently solid founda- 
 tions of religious belief had in many cases 
 
 a Fraser's Magazine, December, 1834. 
 
94 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 been shaken, and thousands of thoughtful 
 men had become troubled and doubtful. 
 The natural tendency to materialism conse- 
 quent on the introduction of mechanism 
 united with the rationaHstic and skeptical 
 thought largely imported from France. 
 The English deists of the early eighteenth 
 century had been followed by the skepticism 
 of Voltaire, the atheism of Diderot and the 
 Encyclopaedists, and the sentimental deism 
 of Rousseau. On the other hand, a devoutly 
 religious spirit, though dependent less upon 
 authority than upon reason and intuition, 
 made its appearance in Germany in Kant, 
 Novalis, Richter, and other transcendent- 
 alist philosophers and men of letters. 
 
 In these various ways, then, Carlyle's 
 essay is an expression of the current feeling; 
 in its sense that the time was a critical and 
 dangerous one, in its anxious desire to diag- 
 nose its diseases and to suggest remedies, in 
 its emphasis upon the industrial nature of 
 the age and the importance of machinery, 
 and in its feeling that the spiritual life of 
 the people was being crushed by the mate- 
 rial, the scientific, and the mechanical. The 
 essay, however, differs widely in spirit from 
 
THE TIMES 95 
 
 all other contemporary discussions of the 
 subject. It differs in its greater breadth of 
 treatment and in its emphasis upon the 
 moral rather than the economic aspect of 
 the subject. 
 
 After indicating in general the spirit of 
 the age Carlyle proceeds to point out its 
 various manifestations. The prevalence of 
 educational machinery is one ; the religious 
 machines, such as the Bible Society, sup- 
 ported by "puffing, intrigue and chicane,"* 
 are another; the rapid formation of scien- 
 tific institutions^ is another. The science of 
 Mind has yielded in interest to physical 
 science. It is supported weakly by the 
 Scottish School, but has become for the most 
 part materialistic in character. Cabanis in 
 France has come to the conclusion that "as 
 the liver secretes bile, so does the brain 
 secrete thought," and that Poetry and Reli- 
 gion are "a product of the smaller intes- 
 tines." In politics the trust in the efficiency 
 of parliamentary reforms and other political 
 
 a The Quarterly for June, 1827, in an attack on the trans- 
 lations of the Bible Society refers to the "glowing terms" of 
 praise of its panegyrists. 
 
 b For evidence as to the "growing taste for the cultivation 
 of Physical Science" in England as attested by the formation 
 of scientific institutions see the Quarterly for June, 1826. 
 
96 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 contrivances is evidence of a mechanical 
 turn of thought. Even poetry has gone 
 over to an idol-worship of some "brute- 
 image of Strength." 
 
 Such are the manifestations of the 
 mechanical spirit of the age. More impor- 
 tant still is an explanation of its origin. 
 Carlyle finds this a moral one. For him the 
 ultimate causes of all phenomena are spirit- 
 ual, mysterious, profound. Circumstances 
 are the product of man and not man of cir- 
 cumstances. The prevalence of machinery 
 therefore is not the cause of the current 
 conditions, but a symptom of that cause. 
 The cause itself is the placing of men's 
 faith in the outward and mechanical, and 
 the devotion of men's best powers to the 
 development of this province, instead of 
 "applying themselves chiefly to regulate, 
 increase and purify the inward primary 
 powers of man," an enterprise of vastly 
 greater importance. If this is so, then man 
 needs only to be rightly directed to acquire 
 true spiritual freedom; "we are but fettered 
 by chains of our own forging." In the mean- 
 while we may begin the needed reform, not 
 by attempting to mend a world or a nation, 
 
THE TIMES 97 
 
 but by setting diligently about the perfection 
 of our individual selves. 
 
 One of the ways in which Carlyle and his 
 great contemporaries, Ruskin, Arnold and 
 Emerson, differ from any other group of 
 English-writing essayists before or since, is 
 their intense concern in national movements 
 and social conditions, coupled with a scorn 
 of mere expediency and a strong desire to 
 see and interpret the broad moral issues. 
 An excellent illustration of this general ten- 
 dency together with certain differences in 
 their methods of attack and points of view 
 is furnished by their various handling of this 
 question of mechanism and the use of 
 machinery. Each of these men in his own 
 way recognizes the danger of the one-sided 
 development of a mechanical age, and each 
 characteristically protests against it, Ruskin 
 because of his interest in the lower classes 
 and in art and the artistic ordering of life; 
 Arnold because of his faith in the efficacy of 
 a wide culture, an internal perfection to 
 which the externality of machinery is 
 opposed; Emerson because of his absorbing 
 interest in individual development and his 
 fear that machinery will reduce men to 
 
98 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 machines f Carljle because of his conviction 
 of the paramount importance of the moral 
 and rehgious life and his fear that machinery 
 will turn men from trust in inner inspiration 
 to trust in the external and mechanical. 
 Arnold and Carlyle especially have essen- 
 tially the same thought, and the famous 
 passage in Culture and Anarchy (1867) is 
 little more than a restatement of Carlyle's 
 essay of 1829. When Arnold tells us that 
 "faith in machinery is our besetting danger," 
 that "our whole civilization is mechanical 
 and external," and that "human perfection 
 is in an internal condition," we have Carlyle 
 reechoed. The possibility of widening the 
 definition of machinery by applying the 
 term to such things as the national wealth, 
 the railways and the coal industries, and to 
 religious and social organizations, was also 
 first indicated in the earlier essay. How 
 clearly is Arnold's very phraseology antici- 
 pated in such a sentence as this from Signs 
 of the Times: "Not for internal perfection, 
 but for external combinations and arrange- 
 ments, for institutions, constitutions, — for 
 
 a See Emerson's Works, Centenary Ed., vol. 5, pages 103 
 and 163, and vol. 6, page 164. 
 
THE TIMES 99 
 
 Mechanism of one sort or other, do they 
 hope and struggle." 
 
 The essay called Characteristics hardly 
 falls within the period which we have called 
 that of Carlyle's apprenticeship, but it must 
 be included for the sake of completeness in 
 our discussion. Carlyle spoke of it in a 
 letter of December 4, 1831, as "a sort of 
 second Signs of the Times,^' and this is an 
 apt enough description of it. Like the 
 earlier essay it is a searching investigation 
 of contemporary conditions ; like that it dis- 
 covers a single principle, that of Self- 
 Consciousness, corresponding to the Mechan- 
 ism of Signs of the Times, which it applies 
 to every walk of life ; in a similar way it finds 
 this principle a symptom rather than a cause 
 of existing spiritual conditions, and it joins 
 a pessimism concerning the present with 
 hope and confidence concerning the future 
 and the spiritual capabilities of man. 
 
 Carlyle's much disputed principle of 
 unconsciousness is an important one and 
 will be seen to lie at the root of his whole 
 philosophy. Stated briefly it is this, that 
 "always the characteristic of right perform- 
 ance is a certain spontaneity, an uncon- 
 
 s 1 ' a 
 » » J 
 
100 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 sciousness, 'the healthy know not of their 
 health, but only the sick.'" Thus, "the 
 Orator persuades and carries all with him, 
 he knows not how," while the Rhetorician is 
 intensely conscious of every trick by means 
 of which he should have done so ; true virtue 
 is a "spontaneous, habitual, all-pervading 
 spirit of Chivalrous Valour," when it becomes 
 conscious of itself it dwindles into a "punc- 
 tilious Politeness, 'avoiding meats'; 'paying 
 tithes of mint and anise, neglecting the 
 weightier matters of the law.' " Similarly 
 the true Poet differs from the little one in 
 his greater spontaneity of performance. 
 
 Applying this principle to contemporary 
 conditions we discover the age to be an 
 intensely self-conscious one. Instead of 
 poetic creation we find men occupied with 
 Theories of Poetry; instead of heroic con- 
 duct with Discourses on the Evidences; 
 instead of loyalty and patriotism with 
 Reform Bills and Codifications. The same 
 tendency is to be observed in the character 
 of our speculative thinking. The very 
 existence of Metaphysics is itself a symp- 
 tom of disease. "In the perfect state, all 
 Thought were but the picture and inspiring 
 
THE TIMES 101 
 
 symbol of Action; Philosophy, except as 
 Poetry and Religion, would have no being." 
 Metaphysics is, in essence, a skeptical 
 inquiry. The present is in this sense a 
 highly metaphysical age. It probes into and 
 casts doubt upon all things ; "Faith has well 
 nigh vanished from the world."* 
 
 The criticisms that have been made on 
 this theory as here enunciated have failed, 
 I think, to probe to the bottom of Carlyle's 
 thought. It has been objected, for instance, 
 that men like Dante, Shakespeare and Cer- 
 vantes were well aware of the greatness of 
 what they had produced. It is true that 
 Carlyle makes something of this point, but 
 it does not constitute the center of his doc- 
 trine. We must remember once more that 
 Carlyle is a transcendentalist and that 
 Transcendentalism lays most stress upon the 
 value of inspiration, intuition and the mys- 
 terious and primary energies as contrasted 
 with logic, argument and ratiocination. 
 
 a Carlyle's theory of the unconsciousness or spontaneity of 
 the production of any great creative work is reinforced by 
 that of Emerson. Their comments on Hamlet, for instance, 
 are very similar. Carlyle says: "The Shakespeare takes no 
 airs for writing Hamlet and The Tempest, understands not 
 that it is anything surprising." Emerson says: "Shakes- 
 peare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest." 
 
102 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 What Carlyle is trying to impress upon us 
 is, not that Shakespeare and Dante were 
 totally unconscious of their genius, but that 
 they were unconscious of its processes as 
 explicable, namable or describable. The 
 processes which produce a great poem or 
 a great heroism are unconscious simply 
 because they are profound, mysterious, 
 spiritual, not technical, logical or mechan- 
 ical. 
 
 Consciousness is, as a matter of fact, only 
 another name for Mechanism. Men become 
 intensely self-conscious when they are think- 
 ing exclusively of the outward and mechani- 
 cal; for it is only the mechanical processes 
 which we can explain or talk about with 
 much profit. That this identification is clear 
 in Carlyle's own mind appears in various 
 passages. "Boundless as is the domain of 
 man," he says in the fourth paragraph of 
 the essay, "it is but a small fractional pro- 
 portion of it that he rules with Conscious- 
 ness and by Forethought: what he can con- 
 trive, nay what he can altogether know and 
 comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, 
 small; the great is ever, in one sense or 
 other, the vital; it is essentially the myste- 
 
THE TIMES 103 
 
 rious, and only the surface of it can be 
 understood." Again: "In our inward, as 
 in our outward world, what is mechanical lies 
 open to us : not what is dynamical and has 
 vitality. Of our Thinking, we might say, 
 it is but the mere surface that we shape 
 into articulate Thoughts; — underneath the 
 region of argument and conscious discourse 
 lies the region of meditation; here, in its 
 quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital 
 force is in us ; here, if aught is to be created, 
 and not merely manufactured and communi- 
 cated, must the work go on. Manufacture 
 is intelligible and trivial; Creation is great, 
 and cannot be understood." 
 
 Carlyle's criticism must not, therefore, be 
 understood as meaning that we are thinking 
 too much, but that we are thinking too 
 superficially; not that we should substitute 
 blind instinct for reason, but that we should 
 recognize and cultivate the vital depths of 
 our nature out of which poetry and religion 
 and all that is deepest and highest in us 
 unconsciously^ spring. To those who have 
 followed the present discussion this doctrine 
 will occasion no surprise. It is in perfect 
 accord with all that he has hitherto spoken. 
 
104 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 It is another form of his theory of poetry. 
 It rests upon that transcendental behef in 
 the supremacy of the Reason over the Under- 
 standing which, he had stated two years 
 before, constituted, in his behef, the most 
 important feature of the Kantian meta- 
 physics. "The healthy Understanding," he 
 says in the present essay, "we should say, is 
 not the logical, argumentative, but the 
 Intuitive." It is connected also with the 
 constant insistence which we find in Sartor 
 and have already noticed, upon the recog- 
 nition of mystery, as well as with that well- 
 known doctrine of Silence which Carlyle has 
 been ridiculed for vociferating "in thirty 
 volumes." Whoever, therefore, rejects Car- 
 lyle's theory of Consciousness must be ready 
 to quarrel with the whole body of thought 
 into the tissue of which this theory is woven. 
 We have said that the essay on Character- 
 istics ends with the strong optimism which in 
 the end prevails in all the early essays. It 
 is evident that man's spiritual progress is a 
 matter not only of faith but of observation. 
 No truth or goodness can ever die; though 
 the forms perish the immortal soul survives. 
 Present conditions need not therefore alarm 
 
THE TIMES 105 
 
 us. The principle of life now confined to 
 
 the conscious and mechanical will once more 
 
 find its true domain to be the unconscious 
 
 and dynamical. Evidence is not wanting to 
 
 indicate that this change is even now taking 
 
 place. Men are beginning to recognize 
 
 again that God is present in human affairs 
 
 and that the age of miracles is not a thing 
 
 of the past. The mystery of the Infinite is 
 
 still a mystery. The battle of life may still 
 
 be fought with submission, courage, and 
 
 heroic joy. "Behind us, behind each one of 
 
 us, lie Six Thousand Years of human effort, 
 
 human conquest: before us is the boundless 
 
 Time, with its yet uncreated and uncon- 
 
 quered Continents and Eldorados, which we, 
 
 even we, have to conquer, to create; and 
 
 from the bosom of Eternity there shine for 
 
 us celestial guiding stars. 
 
 ' My inheritance how wide and fair ! 
 , Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.' " 
 
 From the above discussion it will be clear 
 that the character of Carlyle's criticism of 
 his times, like his theory of poetry and his 
 practice in history and biography, was 
 determined by that spiritual philosophy 
 which enters into or dominates every one of 
 
106 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 his important utterances from the Life of 
 Schiller to the Historic of Frederick the 
 Great. It was essentially a moral incitement 
 and to a large extent individualistic. Men 
 are to begin bj reforming themselves, not by 
 entering into any large schemes of social 
 reconstruction. This continued to be his 
 position to the end of his hfe. His skep- 
 ticism as to the value of any schemes of 
 reform, which later expressed itself in the 
 reactionary sentiments of Model Prisons and 
 the frequent contemptuous allusions to the 
 "dismal science" of economics, already 
 appears in the private jottings of his jour- 
 nal and with less personal feeling in his pub- 
 lished essays. 
 
 Carlyle believed in probing deeply, in 
 striking at the roots of evil and in strength- 
 ening the sources of good. These sources he 
 believed to be human and spiritual. The so- 
 called economic theory of history had not 
 been clearly set forth in his day. But Signs 
 of the Times and Characteristics are in a 
 sense a partial refutation of this theory. In 
 these essays institutions of whatever sort are 
 looked upon as mechanical, accordingly as 
 external, and in comparison with internal 
 
THE TIMES 107 
 
 and dynamic forces as of inferior impor- 
 tance. Both in this individualism and in his 
 moral emphasis, Carlyle, though differing in 
 detail, agrees in essentials with the other 
 great didactic essayists whom we have 
 already mentioned in connection with the 
 Signs of the Times. Emerson carries individ- 
 ualism to the extent of a sort of philosophi- 
 cal anarchism. Arnold, though he strongly 
 believed in the importance of the principle of 
 equaHty, devoted himself to the encourage- 
 ment of the harmonious expansion of the 
 inward powers of the individual man. Rus- 
 kin saw the value of cooperation and con- 
 cerned himself to a considerable extent with 
 economic questions, but he, too, interpreted 
 life from the moral, rather than from the 
 economic standpoint. 
 
 Carlyle's attitude toward social problems, 
 though in large measure still valid, seems 
 incomplete to serious students of the pre- 
 sent day. Perhaps it is an indication of the 
 partial triumph of the materialistic con- 
 ception of Hfe which he deprecated that we 
 look upon the adjustment of institutions as 
 of as much importance to the soul of the 
 state as care of the body is necessary to spir- 
 
108 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 itual health. "Mending a world" may be a 
 task beyond our powers, but social reorgan- 
 ization on a large scale is no longer beUeved 
 to be impossible. The clamor of socialism 
 is becoming more and more insistent, and is 
 more and more enlisting the sympathetic 
 attention of thoughtful men. At least we 
 have become convinced that some mechanism 
 must be provided for making moral impetus 
 effective. We must look to men of science 
 and of practical knowledge and training, 
 men willing to deal in patient and painstak- 
 ing fashion with matters of mechanical detail, 
 to carry out the reform made apparent to 
 us through the awakening of the individual 
 and the social conscience by our Tolstois and 
 our Carlyles. So far as permanent literary 
 value is concerned, however, Carlyle showed 
 in these essays an unerring instinct in deal- 
 ing powerfully with fundamental moral 
 issues, rather than with mechanical details 
 of ephemeral interest. 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 
 
 Anything like a systematic discussion of 
 Sartor Resartus does not form a part of the 
 present plan. It would be at best a gratui- 
 tous performance, since the book has been 
 analyzed already many times, and is thor- 
 oughly familiar to all students and lovers of 
 Carlyle. It will be evident to such a one 
 that Sartor has gathered up the reflections 
 and convictions presented in a fragmentary 
 way in the earlier works and repeated them 
 in more compact and striking form. There 
 is little that is new, and sometimes the new 
 statement of truth is less clear or effective 
 than the original. The total impression, 
 however, is far more powerful than that of 
 any earlier writing. There is still no fully 
 rounded or systematized philosophy. But 
 the author, by freeing himself from the 
 tyranny of facts, with which he felt himself 
 obliged largely to deal in the critical essays, 
 has been enabled to give greater space to 
 the enunciation of truth. The comments 
 
110 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 on poetry, philosophy and religion and the 
 criticisms of society and the age appear 
 again, not as incidental reflections, but as 
 part of the central theme. These comments 
 are for the most part confined to the first 
 and third books. The first book moves on 
 a distinctly lower plane than the other two; 
 in the third the author rises to his greatest 
 height of poetic power, a height not far 
 below the supremely great. All this is 
 rendered vital and bound together by the 
 spiritual autobiography which forms book 
 two, in which the passage through doubt 
 and unbelief to the attainment of a tran- 
 scendental philosophy is portrayed. Any 
 adequate discussion of the ethics and meta- 
 physics of Sartor would take us far beyond 
 the limits of a short essay. We propose, 
 therefore, to point out only a single charac- 
 teristic of Carlyle's thought common to both 
 Sartor and the earlier essays, and to discuss 
 in some detail the mode of its manifestation 
 in the former. 
 
 We have seen everywhere in Carlyle's 
 work that his thought naturally falls into 
 some sort of opposition. Thus he is fond of 
 opposing matter and spirit, appearance and 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 111 
 
 reality, the Understanding and the Reason, 
 Time and Eternity, doubt and faith, logic 
 and intuition. Mechanics and Dynamics, the 
 conscious and the unconscious, knowledge 
 and mystery. In each of these cases, while 
 allowing a certain inferior value to the 
 former, his chief purpose is to convince with 
 all the power of his eloquence that by far 
 the superior worth belongs to the latter. 
 In Sartor this opposition occurs again in all 
 its forms, but it becomes most clearly mani- 
 fest and most inclusive in the antithesis of 
 two modes of thought characteristic of 
 Teufelsdrockh's mind under different condi- 
 tions, designated as Transcendentalism and 
 Descendentalism, or as it is more frequently 
 called, Sansculottism. 
 
 To make this distinction clear we must 
 say a word about the sources of Sartor. 
 It '■will be remembered that Carlyle derived 
 his notion of a clothes-philosophy from a 
 passage in Swift's Tale of a Tub, In section 
 two of that work Swift tells us of a certain 
 sect of philosophers who "held the universe 
 to be a large suit of clothes, which invests 
 everything ; that the earth is invested by the 
 air, the air is invested by the stars, and the 
 
112 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 stars are invested by the primum mobile." 
 This is generally conceded as having fur- 
 nished Carlyle with the starting-point of 
 Sartor. But Carlyle had in common with 
 Swift something more than a clever idea that 
 the world might be looked upon as a huge 
 suit of clothes. While at college his fond- 
 ness for Swift's writings and his possession 
 of a certain Swiftian power of satire were 
 noticed by his friends and he was nicknamed 
 "Jonathan" and "The Dean." This satirical 
 power which ruthlessly tears away obscuring 
 veils, exposes shams, and brings to light the 
 practical and material actualities of things, 
 may be looked upon as the Swiftian side of 
 Sartor. It is called Descendentalism or 
 Sansculottism. 
 
 On the other hand Carlyle's thought 
 derives from the German transcendental 
 philosophy and Goethe. Professor Adamson 
 says that "the guiding principle of all Car- 
 lyle's ethical work is the principle of Fichte's 
 speculation that the world of experience is 
 but the appearance or vesture of the divine 
 idea of life; and that he alone has true life 
 who is willing to resign his own personality 
 in the service of humanity." Of his enor- 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 113 
 
 mous indebtedness to Goethe we have already 
 had sufficient evidence. Novahs and Richter 
 contributed detached ideas and furnished 
 further illustration of the German philos- 
 ophy appearing in literary form. All these 
 Germans strengthened in Carlyle the mode 
 of thought which we have called transcen- 
 dental. 
 
 The clear indication of opposition in the 
 words Transcendentalism and Descendental- 
 ism is further strengthened by the name and 
 description of the hero. The full name, 
 Diogenes Teufelsdrockh,^ God-born Devil's 
 Dung, indicates the combination in one per- 
 son of the half malicious Swiftian satire with 
 the ethereal idealism of a Fichte or a Goethe. 
 Carlyle calls attention to this twofold nature 
 of his hero in numerous places. In the chap- 
 ter on Reminiscences the editor remembers 
 seeing in his eyes "gleams of an ethereal or 
 else a diabolic fire" ; in the chapter on Char- 
 
 a The "secret design in the composition of this most 
 uneuphonious proper name" is first noticed in a note to an 
 excellent review of Sartor by N. L. Frothingham in the 
 Christian Examiner for September, 1836, shortly after the 
 publication of the book in America. The writer finds his 
 conjecture confirmed by the character of the professor, "who 
 is a great radical and seems to be made up of violently 
 opposite elements." 
 
114 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 act eristics we are told that his voice screws 
 itself aloft "as into the song of spirits, or 
 else the shrill mockery of fiends," that at 
 times we distinguish "gleams of an ethereal 
 love," "soft wailings of infinite pity," and at 
 others "some half invisible wrinkle of a bitter 
 sardonic humor" so that "you look on him 
 almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate 
 Mephistopheles." His eyes again are de- 
 scribed as sparkling with lights, which "may 
 indeed be reflexes of the heavenly stars, but 
 perhaps also gleams from the region of 
 Nether Fire." 
 
 The nature of the opposing elements in 
 Sartor now becomes clear. The one is to be 
 expressed through the half diabolic medium 
 of satire, the other through seraphic ecstasy 
 or rapt contemplation. The one employs 
 the faculty of the Understanding, the acute 
 understanding and penetrating common 
 sense of a Swift, the other that of the 
 Reason, the divine vision of a Fichte. The 
 one deals with the actual world about us, 
 and beholds man in his social relations, a 
 man among men, but stripped of all such 
 "adventitious wrappages" as disguise his 
 actual manhood; the other deals with the 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 115 
 
 world of spiritual reality, with the isolated 
 soul brought face to face with the divine 
 universe, spirit meeting with spirit. The 
 one is largely destructive, negative, an 
 exposure of the false, the other is wholly 
 constructive, affirmative, a revelation of the 
 true. The one is partial and needs some 
 higher vision to complete it, the other sup- 
 plies that deficiency and gives it worth. 
 Both are methods of seeing the truth, and 
 both are necessary to complete and perfect 
 vision. Descendentalism, as we have said, is 
 the faculty which enables us to see beneath 
 outward wrappings of clothing or the like 
 the common human animal, to discern that 
 "within the most starched cravat there passes 
 a windpipe and a weasand," that underneath 
 the choicest cloak there is only "a forked 
 straddling animal with bandy legs" or "a 
 forked radish with a head fantastically 
 carved," and which finds no great difference 
 between the star of a lord and the clown's 
 broad button of Birmingham spelter. Dwell- 
 ing much upon man's common humanity and 
 helplessness it leads to a sort of radicalism 
 in which the brotherhood of man is recog- 
 nized, though approached through the 
 
116 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 medium of satire. The term "Sansculot- 
 tism," that is, the condition of being without 
 breeches, a term used to designate the radical 
 republican party during the period of the 
 French Revolution, is an implication of this. 
 The idea had been expressed long before 
 Swift's time and in a more wonderful way 
 than he expressed it. Lear, stripped of his 
 power, finds his royal robes a mockery, and 
 as he enters the hut and finds the naked 
 Edgar, the truth of man's common humanity 
 and helplessness overpowers him. He pro- 
 ceeds to strip off his lendings, his borrowing 
 from the sheep and the silkworm, and to 
 become in appearance what he is in fact, a 
 poor, bare, forked animal. With this idea, 
 then, are naturally connected the social rela- 
 tions of man. Lear thinks of the "poor, 
 naked wretches" exposed to the "pelting of 
 the pitiless storm," and his act is symbolic 
 of his sympathy and feeling of brotherhood 
 with them. All this Carlyle has in mind in 
 his development of the idea of Sansculottism. 
 Further illustration of the duality of 
 Sartor need be only briefly indicated. It is 
 Teufelsdrockh, the Sansculottist, who rises 
 in the tavern with his tumbler of gukguk to 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 117 
 
 propose a toast to the poor "in Gottes and 
 Teufels Namen" ; it is he whose sharp sar- 
 casm suggests that the scarecrow, as clothed 
 person par excellence, should be allowed 
 special privilege, such as trial by jury; and 
 whose whimsical imagination has the strange 
 habit of suddenly divesting the occupants of 
 a drawing-room of their clothing and behold- 
 ing them straddling there in nakedness. 
 
 It is Diogenes, the Transcendentalist, on 
 the other hand, who alone with the stars sits 
 in the watch tower of the Wahngasse, look- 
 ing down upon the living flood, hurrying 
 from Eternity onward to Eternity. "The 
 world with its loud trafRckings retires," and 
 he is alone with the universe, one mysterious 
 presence communing with another. In the 
 deeper speculations of this mood man is seen 
 to be a spirit, and the universe to be but the 
 Phantasy of his dream. We are surrounded 
 by Phantasmagoria; we live as in a dream 
 grotto and the very warp and woof of the 
 canvas whereon our dreams are painted, 
 namely, space and time, are themselves only 
 modes of thought and vanish when we try 
 to grasp them. To the eye of vulgar logic, 
 indeed, man is but "an omniverous Biped 
 
118 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 that wears Breeches," but to the eye of Pure 
 Reason he is a spirit, a divine Apparition, a 
 revelation of the spirit in the form of flesh, 
 dwelling in a sky-woven universe. 
 
 Thus the author arrives again at the 
 recurring thought. Everything yields to 
 him a double meaning. In the Imperial 
 Sceptre and the ox-goad alike he sees decay, 
 contemptibility (this is Descendentalism) ; 
 yet as the revelation of spirit he finds in both 
 Poetry and reverend worth. "For matter, 
 were it never so despicable, is spirit, the 
 manifestation of spirit ; were it never so 
 honorable, can it be more?" 
 
 In this way the two ideas draw together 
 for final treatment in the last chapter of the 
 first book, in which the unity of all nature 
 is emphasized. Not only is all physical 
 nature correlated, "the smithy-fire kindled 
 at the sun," but physical and spiritual are 
 shown also to be one, that is, philosophical 
 monism is taught. All objects are windows 
 looking into infinitude. "Matter exists only 
 spiritually, and to represent some idea and 
 body it forth." "What thou seest is not 
 there on its own account; strictly taken is 
 not there at all." Finally, at the close of 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 119 
 
 the chapter we are prepared for the new 
 way of taking up the whole matter again in 
 the form of human experience by the news 
 of the arrival of Heuschrecke's "six consid- 
 erable paper-bags" and an anticipation of 
 the editor's task in straightening out the 
 material. 
 
 It is not necessary to trace in detail the 
 progress of the spiritual warfare described 
 in book two, but it is important to point 
 out that the opposing elements are precisely 
 the same as those of book one. The Ever- 
 lasting No is not, I believe, to be understood, 
 as one critic has defined it, as the "sum 
 of facts adverse to the moral order of 
 the universe," but rather as the spirit of 
 Denial, which, as we have seen, represents 
 for the modern man a necessary stage in 
 the soul's progress towards spiritual free- 
 dom. Divorced, indeed, from any capacity 
 for the higher vision, it does represent the 
 spirit of Time or the devil. In the essay on 
 Goethe^s Helena^ Carlyle had thus described 
 the character of Mephistopheles : "Such a 
 combination of perfect Understanding with 
 perfect Selfishness, of logical Life with 
 moral Death; so universal a denier, both in 
 
120 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 heart and head, — is undoubtedly a child of 
 Darkness, an emissary of primeval Nothing; 
 and coming forward, as he does, like a person 
 of breeding, and without any flavor of brim- 
 stone, may stand here, in his merely spiritual 
 deformity, at once potent, dangerous and 
 contemptible, as the best and only genuine 
 Devil of these latter times." Doubt and 
 denial, however, cannot be conceived of as 
 evil except when they are final processes. 
 When preliminary steps toward affirmation 
 and reconstruction they are means of good. 
 It is because the hero of Sartor joins to the 
 spirit of denial the will to believe, because 
 he is capable of both Descendentalism and 
 Transcendentalism, that the ultimate out- 
 come of his struggle is victory. 
 
 It is often complained that Carlyle's doc- 
 trine of renunciation and duty, which is the 
 final message of Sartor, and his ideal of a 
 Blessedness which agrees to renounce all 
 claim upon the world's gifts of happiness, 
 fame or what not, while consecrating life and 
 labor to the world's betterment, is narrow 
 and incomplete. Doubtless it is so. To no 
 man is it given to see and to appropriate in 
 the form of experience the whole truth. 
 
SARTOR RESARTUS 121 
 
 Surely it is enough for one book that for 
 thousands of readers it has helped to sharpen 
 insight, strengthen veracity and encourage 
 devotion of purpose to noble ends. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The years between 1814 and 1831 have 
 been designated as those of Carlyle's appren- 
 ticeship, because during this period he was 
 consciously dependent upon the thought and 
 learning of other men and had not yet given 
 his ideas a distinctly coherent and individual 
 form. The foregoing discussion, however, 
 will make it plain that his later work was 
 simply a clearer enunciation and wider 
 application of ideas already gathered and 
 reflected upon in the early years. There is, 
 for instance, not one of his philosophical and 
 religious teachings which does not find place 
 here. The transcendental doctrine of the 
 reality of spirit and the phenomenal char- 
 acter of matter, which dominates all his 
 thought and is no less important to the 
 appreciation of The French Revolution than 
 to the understanding of Sartor, is more 
 clearly stated in the Critical Essays than 
 anywhere in his later work. The ethical 
 ideas of renunciation, of reverence and hero- 
 worship, of sincerity and hatred of cant, as 
 well as the gospel of work, are all touched 
 
CONCLUSION 123 
 
 upon or fully expounded. Carlyle's central 
 religious idea, the belief in an immanent 
 divine presence rendering all phenomena 
 miraculous and worthy of reverence, is also 
 fully set forth. His attitude toward the 
 Christian religion as one among many forms, 
 though incomparably the highest, constitut- 
 ing a continuous revelation of God through 
 all ages and to all men, remains through life 
 practically unchanged. 
 
 Carlyle dealt with the theory of poetry to 
 a far greater proportionate extent in his 
 early essays than at any later time. His 
 emphasis upon the instructional value of 
 poetry, his identification of its ultimate pur- 
 pose with that of philosophy and religion, 
 and his belief in the sacred character of the 
 true poet or man of letters, are repeated in 
 Heroes and Hero-Worship and elsewhere 
 throughout his later writings. 
 
 The early biographical studies are of 
 great value, not only because of their 
 intrinsic merit, but because they make clear 
 to us the theory of biographical writing 
 which he faithfully practised from this time 
 on. That the true biography should set 
 forth the ideal based upon and growing out 
 
124 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 of the actual, that the external facts of 
 history should be treated merely as the 
 manifestation of an unseen, spiritual life, 
 and that these facts should be used so far as 
 possible to furnish warning or help and 
 inspiration for the life of our own perplexing 
 age, are the most important convictions 
 illustrated and expounded in the early books 
 and essays. 
 
 A further application of Carlyle's central 
 philosophy becomes manifest in an analysis 
 of his specific criticisms of his own age. 
 The appeal for a more widespread cultiva- 
 tion of the dynamical and unconscious part 
 of our nature was made to England in a 
 critical and troubled period of her history, 
 and is to be understood as the reaction of a 
 spiritual philosopher against the growing 
 materialism of a mechanical age. 
 
 Sartor Resartus is to be regarded as the 
 culmination of all his earlier work. Under 
 the opposing categories of Transcendental- 
 ism and Descendentalism he marshaled all 
 the philosophical ideas which he had pre- 
 viously advocated and combatted. In the 
 second book of that work he outlined 
 the ideal spiritual biography, and in the 
 
CONCLUSION 125 
 
 third he included, in such chapters as 
 Helotage, Natural Supernaturalism and 
 Church Clothes, his most profound criti- 
 cisms of society and religion. 
 
 In working with the materials of the 
 present study, the author has become more 
 than ever impressed with Carlyle's sense of 
 the sacredness of his calling. He worked 
 ever in the consciousness that the eye of his 
 great Taskmaster was upon him. 
 
 Here eyes do regard you, 
 In Eternity's stillness; 
 Here is all fulness, 
 Ye brave, to reward you; 
 Work, and despair not. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 The chief materials for the present study 
 are the works of Carlyle written between 
 1823 and 1831, and the early letters. Those 
 made use of, with their dates of publication, 
 are: 
 
 Works 
 
 1824. Translation of Wilhelm Meister. 
 
 1825. The Life of Schiller. 
 
 1826. German Romance. 
 
 1827. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. 
 
 1827. The State of German Literature. 
 
 1828. Life and Writings of Werner. 
 1828. Goethe's Helena. 
 
 1828. Goethe. 
 
 1828. Burns. 
 
 1828. Life of Heyne. 
 
 1829. German Playwrights. 
 1829. Voltaire. 
 
 1829. Novalis. 
 
 1829. Signs of the Times. 
 
 1830. On History. 
 
 1830. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. 
 
 1831. Luther's Psalm. 
 1831. Schiller. 
 
 1831. The Niebelungen Lied. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 127 
 
 1831. German Literature of the XIV. and XV. 
 Centuries. 
 
 1831. Historic Survey of German Poetry. 
 
 1831. Characteristics. 
 
 1833-4. Sartor Resartus. 
 
 1892. Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (con- 
 tains Wotton Reinfred). 
 
 Letters 
 
 Early Letters, 1814-1826, ed. Norton, New 
 York, 1886. 
 
 Letters, 1826-1836, ed. Norton, New York, 
 
 1889. 
 
 Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, 
 
 ed. Norton, New York, 1887. 
 
 Biography, Criticism, Etc. 
 
 Two recent books of especial interest in the 
 study of the early Carlyle may be mentioned. 
 
 Craig, R. S. The Making of Carlyle; an 
 experiment in biographical explication. Lon- 
 don, 1908. 
 
 RowE, F. W. Carlyle as a Critic of Litera- 
 ture. New York, 1910. 
 
 The standard lives by Froude, NicoU, Gar- 
 nett, etc., have, of course, been consulted. A 
 study of the periodical writing in Great Britain 
 
128 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 between 1825 and 18S0 is also necessary for an 
 adequate appreciation of the distinctive quality 
 of Carlyle's contribution to the thought of his 
 time. For the historical background given in 
 Chapter IV the following has been used as chief 
 authority : 
 
 Robinson, J. H. and Beard, C. A. The 
 Development of Modern Europe. New York^ 
 1907. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adamson, Professor 113 
 
 Appearance, the world an 39, 113 
 
 Arnold, Matthew 44, 97-98, 107 
 
 Art 46, 54 
 
 A thenwum 90, 91 
 
 Austin, Mrs 16 
 
 BaflFometus 31 
 
 Baphometic Fire-Baptism 31 
 
 Beers, Professor 80 
 
 Bentham 43 
 
 Bible 34 
 
 Bible-Society 95 
 
 Biography, see Spiritual Biography. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine 89, 90 
 
 Blessedness 130 
 
 Blue Flower, The, of Novalis 79 
 
 Blumine 74n 
 
 Borrow 80 
 
 Boswell 38, 81 
 
 Brewster, Dr., his Encyclopedia 8 
 
 Bulwer 80 
 
 Burns, 34, 38, 39, 49, 56, 68-71; Carlyle's essay 
 
 on, 14, 33, 39, 68. 
 Byron 71, 93 
 
 Cabanis 95 
 
 Cant 60, 77, 133 
 
 Carlyle, Alexander 13, 19 
 
 Carlyle, Jane Welsh 7,9,13,73 
 
 Carlyle, John 30 
 
 Carlyle, Margaret 1, 30 
 
130 INDEX 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, his intensity, 1; an eclectic, 3; 
 earnestness, 5; interest in mathematics, 5; 
 turns to Philosophy, 6; to German literature, 
 6; early literary projects, 6-8; writings 1823- 
 1826, 8-9; marriage, 9; period of doubt, 9; 
 interest in social problems, 10; egoism, 11; 
 growing power of expression, 13; life at 
 Edinburgh, 13 ; at Craigenputtock, 14 ; writ- 
 ings 1826-1831, 14; gets disciples, 15; a 
 mystic, 16; spiritual condition in 1827, 18; 
 philosophy, 22-44; a Calvinist, 52; absorbing 
 interest in religion and conduct, 52; culture, 
 52; attitude toward social problems, 107-108; 
 compared with Swift, 112. 
 
 Catholic question 16, 87 
 
 Cervantes 34, 101 
 
 Characteristics 14, 36, 88, 99-105, 106, 113 
 
 Chartism 11* 88 
 
 Chartist Movement 88 
 
 Christian Examiner 113n 
 
 Christianity 23, 32, 42-44, 123 
 
 Church 29, 51 
 
 Church Clothes 125 
 
 Civil Wars, Carlyle's essay on 6 
 
 Clothes-philosophy Ill 
 
 Coleridge .30, 77, 93 
 
 Consciousness 36, 99-105, 111, 124 
 
 Corn Law 88 
 
 Crabbe 93 
 
 Craigenputtock 14, 16 
 
 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 14, 66, 122 
 
 Croker, his edition of Boswell's Johnson 38 
 
 Cromwell 81 
 
 Cruthers and Johnson 72n 
 
INDEX 131 
 
 Dalbrook 30 
 
 Dante 1, 74, 101-102 
 
 Deists .* 94 
 
 Denial 73, 74, 119 
 
 Descendentalism 111-120, 124 
 
 Dichtung und Wahrheit 68 
 
 Dickens, his David Copperfield 80 
 
 Diderot 94 
 
 Dilettanteism 20 
 
 Diogenes, see Teufelsdrockh. 
 
 Divine Idea 2, 38, 39, 47, 49, 50 
 
 Duty 120 
 
 Dynamics 2, 17, 86, 103, 111, 124 
 
 Early German Literature 46 
 
 Edinburgh A ddress 43 
 
 Emerson 80, 97, 98n, lOln, 107 
 
 Encyclopedists 94 
 
 Epicurus 74, 76 
 
 Everlasting No 73, 119 
 
 Faust 18, 72, 73 
 
 Fichte 4, 6, 27, 112, 113, 114 
 
 Forms 41 
 
 Eraser's Magazine 15, 72, 93 
 
 Frederick the Great , 106 
 
 French Revolution, 79, 87, 116; Carlyle's History 
 
 of, 92, 122. 
 Frothingham, N. L 113n 
 
 German literature 6, 27, 28, 49, 51, 63, 82, 83, 94 
 
 German novelists 65,66 
 
 German philosophy, see Transcendentalism. 
 
 German playwrights 49, 57 
 
 German Romance 8, 62-66,83 
 
132 INDEX 
 
 Germany, Mme. de Stael's 6 
 
 Goethe, 4, 8, 18, 19, 27, 28, 37, 45, 49, 50, 56, 61, 
 62-68, 70, 71, 78-80, 83, 112, 113; Carlyle's 
 essay on, 14, 43, 46, 58, 66-68, 81 ; his Helena, 
 Carlyle's essay on, 72, 119. 
 
 Gotz von Berlichingen 64, 68 
 
 Gordon, Margaret 73 
 
 Happiness 19-20, 32-37, 69, 77, 120 
 
 Helotage 125 
 
 Heroes and Hero-worship 123 
 
 Hero-worship 38, 76, 82, 122 
 
 Heuschrecke 119 
 
 Heyne , 57 
 
 History, 54; essay on, 14, 85. 
 
 Hoffman 66 
 
 Hume 6, 23 
 
 Humility 19, 43, 44 
 
 Ideal 49, 54-55, 57, 59, 70, 123 
 
 Immanence of God 123 
 
 Immortality 33, 60 
 
 Inglis, Henry, letter to 21 
 
 Intuition 26, 51, 101,1104 
 
 Job, book of 24 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 56; life of, 38, 81. 
 
 Journal, Carlyle's 17, 45 
 
 Kant 6, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 41, 61, 76, 94, 104 
 
 Keats 93 
 
 Latterday Pamphlets 85 
 
 Lear, King 116 
 
 Literary criticism 45 
 
 Literary historian 50 
 
INDEX 133 
 
 Literary men 48, 51 
 
 Literature 51, 60 
 
 Locke 33, 34, 83 
 
 Lowell, J. R 80, 85 
 
 Luddite Riots 88 
 
 McMechan, editor of Sartor Resartus , 74n 
 
 Masson, Life of Chatterton 86 
 
 MateriaUsm 3, 23, 83, 94, 134 
 
 Mathematics .5, 74 
 
 Mechanism . . . 85-86, 91-93, 94-99, 103-103, 108, 111, 134 
 Men of Letters, see Literary Men. 
 
 Mephistopheles 73, 114, 119 
 
 Metaphysics 100-101 
 
 Mill, J. S 16 
 
 Milton 1, 34, 61 
 
 Mitchell, Robert, of Linlithgow 4 
 
 Model Prisons 106 
 
 Montagu, Jane 73-75 
 
 Morris, William 47 
 
 Musset, Alfred de 79 
 
 Mysticism 16, 35, 84 
 
 Natural Supernaturalism 40, 77n, 135 
 
 Necessity 34 
 
 New England Transcendentalism 85 
 
 Newspapers 51 
 
 Novalis, 4, 40, 56, 79, 83, 94, 113; essay on, 14, 
 38-39, 84-85. 
 
 Open secret 31 
 
 Paley 43 
 
 Pantheism 39 
 
 Past and Present 11, 85, 88 
 
 Peterloo massacre 88 
 
134 INDEX 
 
 Philistine 66n 
 
 Philosophes 44 
 
 Philosophy 6, 22-44, 74 
 
 Phoenix 41 
 
 Phosphoros 31 
 
 Plato 24 
 
 Poet 40, 48, 69, 100, 123 
 
 Poetry, 40, 45-53, 54, 84, 93, 96, 104, 123 
 
 Primitive Truth 26 
 
 Quarterly Review 88-90, 95n 
 
 Reason 26-29, 41-42, 49, 104, 111, 114 
 
 Reform Bill 16, 87 
 
 Religion 39-44, 84 
 
 Reminiscences 113 
 
 Renunciation 19, 77, 120, 122 
 
 Resignation 19, 37, 112 
 
 Revelation 42 
 
 Reverence 37-38, 44, 65, 70, 122 
 
 Reverences, The Three 43 
 
 Richter, 24, 28, 41, 57, 66, 83, 84, 94, 113; essays 
 on, 14, 24. 
 
 Robbers, The 60 
 
 Rousseau 79, 94 
 
 Ruskin 12, 70, 97, 107 
 
 St. Simonians 16, 85 
 
 Sanctuary of Sorrow 43 
 
 Sansculottism 112, 116 
 
 Sartor Resartus, 4, 8, 14, 15, 17, 29, 32, 33, 34, 
 
 41, 43, 45, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74n, 75, 77n, 78, 80, 
 
 81, 86, 88, 104, 109-121, 122, 124. 
 
 Schelling 6 
 
 SchiUer, 6, 28, 56, 59-62, 65, 71, 79, 83; life of, 
 
 8, 22, 52, 58-61, 106; essay on, 14, 34, 61-62. 
 
INDEX 135 
 
 Schleiermacher 33 
 
 Scientific advance 93 
 
 Scott 93 
 
 Self-annihilation 37 
 
 Self-denial 19, 32, 34, 44, 69 
 
 Shakespeare 61, 63, 101, 103 
 
 Shelley 93 
 
 Shooting Niagara; and After? 87n 
 
 Signs of the Times 14, 16, 85-99, 106, 107 
 
 Silence 104 
 
 Sincerity 37-39, 83, 132 
 
 Social Idea 39 
 
 Socrates 36 
 
 Southey 93 
 
 Space and Time 38 
 
 Spiritual biography 3, 54-81, 110, 133, 134 
 
 Stael, Mme. de 6 
 
 State of German Literature, The 14, 35, 46, 83 
 
 Stephen, Leslie 30 
 
 Stewart, Dugald 6, 33 
 
 Stoic philosophy 6, 33 
 
 Stoddard, F. H., Evolution of the English Novel, 79n 
 Swift 111-114, 116 
 
 Tale of a Tub Ill 
 
 Teaching function of poetry 45-46 
 
 Tell, Wilhehn 60 
 
 Test Act 87 
 
 Teufelsdrockh 17, 74, 78-79, 111, 113, 117 
 
 Tieck 4, 40 
 
 Times, the 83-108 
 
 Tolstoi 108 
 
 Transcendentalism 3, 33-38, 30, 33, 41-43, 61, 83, 85, 
 
 101, 104, 110, 111-130, 133, 134. 
 Truth, 30, 38, 46, 60, 70, 84 
 
136 INDEX 
 
 Unconsciousness, see Consciousness. 
 
 Understanding ...26, 27, 29, 41-43, 72, 104, 111, 114, 119 
 
 Utilitarianism 44, 66n 
 
 Vernunft 36 
 
 Verstand 2Q 
 
 Voltaire, 3, 6, 2T, 37, 38, 43, 49, 56, 65, 69-71, 83, 94 ; 
 essay on, 14. 
 
 Wallenstein 60 
 
 Walter, Captain 75 
 
 Weissnicht-wo 66 
 
 Welsh, Jane, see Carlyle, Jane Welsh. 
 
 Werner, 31-33, 57 ; essay on, 31, 41 
 
 Werther 64, 68, 78 
 
 Whittier 80 
 
 Wilhelm Meister 8, 43, 63-63, 68, 78 
 
 Wordsworth 47 
 
 Work 36, 76, 133 
 
 Wotton Beinfred 5, 8, 14, 30, 35, 73, 73-80 
 
I ISIvf 
 
One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
 
 NOV 9 <9^^