Thomas Carlyle
Out of the “Nay” into the “Everlasting Yea”
Un peuple qui n’est pas heureux, n’a pas de patrie.
A people that is not happy has no fatherland.
—Saint-Just, 1792
What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and pre-destined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe! …
—Thomas Carlyle
Amidst the clamors of protest, adjuration, warning and counsel, and the turmoils accompanying popular agitation for reform, there was also one voice that forcefully penetrated to the ears of the generation of the 1830s and the 1840s. It was the voice of a Scotsman who in June 1834 settled in London, and established himself at an address destined to become a celebrated landmark. Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, accompanied by their maid Bessie Barnett and a canary, took a lease on a house at 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea. He was then approaching thirty—a tall, robust, large-boned man, shaggy-browed, with deeply-piercing eyes—a man of loud, raucous speech and laughter, and a writer with an unbridled, turbulent literary style that despite its “wildness” somehow fastened itself on the mind and the imagination of readers. Here was to be found the storm of the times articulate, the formal bonds of traditional speech broken into apostrophes, adjurations, personalia, and not least, into insights and perceptions that cast a new light on the times’ needs. Jane Welsh was neither writer nor prophet, but she was highly intelligent and very beautiful—she was keen-minded and deep-feeling and brave. She had defied conventions, for as the daughter of a well-to-do physician who had left her extensive property, she had married a struggling writer, erstwhile teacher and candidate for the ministry, and ventured with him on a very hazardous future. He had been her tutor, and they had fallen in love.
Her hopes were not unfounded, nor her confidence in him. Already he was making a name for himself as the prime interpreter of German letters, here outdistancing even his predecessor Coleridge. Here he had produced brilliant periodical essays, an epoch-making life of Friedrich Schiller, and a magnificent translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. He had brought to the attention of his readers many of the German unknowns, notably such figures as Jean Paul Richter, Novalis, and other representatives of German Romanticism.
For the Victorians—and these included some of the greatest—he was to epitomize a great moral crisis and its transcendence. For the younger generation he was to stand forth as a “seer” who had emerged from the Hell (or as he called it, the Hebrew “Tophet”) of doubt and nullity, into a heaven of spiritual affirmations. He had sought new guides, and had found them.
In Goethe, he had found his Moses, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister his new Tables of the Law. Goethe, in turn, had recognized in Carlyle a “moral force,” and had entered into a prolonged correspondence with him, one of the very few Britishers to be so honored.
In the eyes of many of his admirers he stood forth as something of a “hero.” He had fought a hard battle with poverty and physical infirmities. He was the son of a stone-mason. He had had the courage to break with the formal Calvinism of his forebears, but the essence of his Presbyterian upbringing persisted within him in a surrogate, secular Calvinism—metaphysical and nonreligious, but retaining the old character of the Scottish “kirk.” A stern and inexorable Jehovah remained with him, though without angelic choirs. For his new creed he had amalgamated secular versions of predestination, original sin, and special grace, having also adapted to his purposes something of German idealistic philosophy and—above all—the works and thought of Goethe. He was the self-ordained prophet, or as he was to describe himself, a “missionary to the British heathen.”
Though more closely fettered than any other portion of Britain to a theocratic Presbyterian “kirk,” Scotland had not escaped the new waves of ideas emanating from the continent. It had its own tradition of scepticism in the great philosopher David Hume. Robert Burns testifies to the struggles between the conservative “auld lichts” and the more radical “new lichts.” Carlyle read prodigiously in literature as well as the physical sciences, especially mineralogy. He fell with eagerness on Newton’s Principia. It was then, as he later confessed to William Allingham, that “I … first clearly saw that Christianity was not true.”1 In 1819 he began to study German. A year later he was reading Goethe’s Faust in the original.
In Goethe he found his new “religion”—a religion for what he called “these hard, unbelieving utilitarian days,” a religion that wedded “clear Knowledge.”2 It was a bold thing to try to transform the image of Goethe that prevailed in the literate English mind up to that point. For the English at large, and the Scots as well, the outstanding representative of German letters was Friedrich Schiller. Coleridge went into raptures over Schiller’s Robbers, and succeeding generations found in the German poet and dramatist a high moral idealism that, in their minds, contrasted sharply with what they deemed the amoral paganism of Goethe.3
In Goethe, Carlyle saw a grander replica of himself in the journey from unbelief to belief:
“At one time, we found him in darkness, and now he is in light; he was once an Unbeliever, and now he is a Believer … How has this man, to whom the world once offered nothing but blackness, denial and despair, attained to that better vision which now shews it to him, not tolerable only but full of solemnity and loveliness? …” The long passage from The Sorrows of Werther to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the second part of Faust, was it not the prototype of his own tortured winding way from an “everlasting Nay” to an “everlasting Yea”? …
Carlyle was to depict his own agonies of desolation and his emergence therefrom in the unforgettable words of his veiled autobiography Sartor Resartus. From those moments in 1821 when the Great Doubt befell him, to the moment of Salvation, he passed through an ordeal of fire. And it is not without significance that the image of the phoenix was to occur in his works with such frequency. The desolation he had experienced—when his poor physical health, his bare worldly prospects, his tormented mind and outlook all combined to form one vast chaos—brought him to the verge of suicide, from which he recoiled only because there were some last swatches, or as he called it, an “after-glow,” of religious feelings left.
He lay in the uneasy torpor of a sick young man. He searched feverishly for a replacement of his “absentee God.” At that moment he might have envied the sure faith of his reticent father, the uncompromising belief of his mother. The feelings of internal dismemberment were accentuated by the turmoil in the outside world. The times were beckoning for significant speech and action. He was well aware of the sad economic plight of the Scottish farmer and worker. He had seen the inside of factories, and had been appalled. He had been amazed at the advances in technology—and affrighted at the sight of the workers. In 1824 he had visited Birmingham.
I was one day thro’ the iron and coal works of this neighborhood—a half-frightful scene! A space perhaps 30 square miles to the north of us, covered with furnaces, rolling mills, steam-engines and sooty men. A dense cloud of pestilential smoke hangs over it forever, blackening even the grain that grows upon it; and at night the whole region burns like a volcano spitting fire from a thousand tubes of brick. But oh the wretched hundred and fifty-thousand mortals that grin out their destiny there! In the coal-mines they were literally naked … black as ravens; plashing about among dripping caverns … In the iron-mills it was little better; blast-furnaces were roaring like the voice of many whirlwinds all around; the fiery metal was hissing thro’ its moulds, or sparkling and spurting under hammers of a monstrous size, which felt like so many earthquakes … It is in a spot like this that one sees the sources of British power. The skill of man combining these coals and that iron ore (till forty years ago—iron was smelted with charcoal only) has gathered three or four hundred thousand human beings round this spot, who send the products of their industry to all ends of the Earth.4
It was in the hours of his great despair that Germany and the German writers came to his rescue and opened a new world for him.
To explain them best, I can only think of the revelation, for I call it no other, that these men meant to me. It was like the rising of a light in the darkness, which lay around and threatened to swallow me up. I was then in the very midst of Wertherism—the blackness and darkness of Death. There was one thing in particular which struck me in Goethe. It is in his Wilhelm Meister. He had been describing an association to receive petitions and give responses. A number of applications for advice were daily made and answered. But many people wrote in particular for recipes for happiness. All that was laid on the shelf and not answered at all. “What!” I said, “is it not the recipe of happiness that I have been seeking all my life? And is it not precisely because I have failed in finding it that I am now miserable and discontented?”5
No! Happiness was not the answer to his own and the world’s distresses. In a world beset by mischiefs and falsehood, oppressions and tyrannies, misled by Wertherism, Byronism, Benthamism, Utilitarianism, eighteenth-century rationalism—all of these sceptical, cynical, “mud-gods” preaching selfishness, acquisitiveness, a dismal laissez-faire of political economists—what was required was new thinkers, poets, prophets, indeed altogether new “heroes,” new “saints,” and, one might add, new “bibles.”
For Carlyle, Goethe fulfilled such functions. The first part of Faust had already become a portion of the intellectual life of the Romantic world—appropriated, as we well know, by poets, musicians, and painters. Wilhelm Meister was practically unknown in England before Carlyle. Both Faust and the two novels concerned with Wilhelm Meister occupy a special place in Goethe’s life and development, for they might be said to have been well-nigh lifetime preoccupations. All together, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the Apprenticeship) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Travels) took fifty years to complete, from the 1770s to the 1820s; Goethe finished the second part of Faust a year before his death in 1832, which with the first part spanned almost sixty years. Thus both works represent a lifetime of experience, poetic and intellectual development, and innumerable mutations. Together they may also be said to epitomize the cultural history of Germany between 1770 and 1830.
The two Wilhelm Meisters became the fountainheads of the so-called Bildungsroman—studies in narrative form of the “self-development” of an individual personality in his search for a harmonious existence. They bore the stamp of their times no less than of their point of origin, the little duchy of Weimar, a patriarchal and pre-industrial community governed by an autocratic ruler—an enclave, one might say, in a world of storms and upheavals. Wilhelm Meister is the son of a bourgeois merchant who sets out to fashion his life into a work of art—to become a Lebenskünstler. To adapt the philosophy of such a novel to the new world of industry and commerce that England represented in the 1820s and the 1830s required on Carlyle’s part a particular sort of legerdemain, considering his own moral and spiritual predispositions and background. Such a task involved turning the “pagan” and life-loving Goethe into a moralizing Scottish Jeremiah. In translating Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, we have no doubt, Carlyle had to overcome numerous reservations and personal sentiments, particularly such as violated a certain prudishness on his part, not to mention certain moral ambiguities of the German original.
To fashion his own life not according to the vacuous tenets of the petty bourgois— to fight the “philistines” of his day that glorified and worshipped a “materialistic” existence of the business-counter—to develop his inner predilections and talents no matter where that led—that was the goal Wilhelm Meister set himself. With repugnance he turns away from the ideal of a business career in order to nourish his own great passion—the theatre. In the process he encounters life in its many and varied manifestations, meets a great many people, falls in love with and is loved by numerous women, some of them of “easy virtue.” Wilhelm becomes the protector of the strange Italian girl, Mignon, and befriends her mysterious companion the Harpist. He associates freely with actors and actresses and learns something of their exciting but precarious existence. Wilhelm’s friend Werner, the thoroughgoing Philistine, and a bourgeois merchant, adjures him to turn to a settled career. But he scoffs at the idea: “Was hilft es mir,” he asks,
gutes Eisen zu fabrizieren, wenn mein eigenes inneres voller Schlacken ist? und was ein Landgut in Ordnung bringe, wenn ich mit mir selber uneins bin?
Of what use is it for me to manufacture iron, when my inner self is full of slag? And of what use is it to bring order to an estate, when I am at odds with myself?6
He is horrified at being treated by his friend as if he were a piece of merchandise.
You cannot of course deny your character … You meet your friend after a long absence and all you see in him is some goods with which to speculate and make money.7
But unbeknownst to himself, there are watchful eyes upon Wilhelm. There is the Society of the Tower—Gesellschaft vom Turm—a kind of aristocratic Freemasonry, of which he eventually becomes aware and under whose guidance he finally becomes convinced that neither by character nor talent is he fitted for the theatrical profession. He is exhorted to turn from such dilettantism to an education which will serve to make him socially useful. He becomes Mignon’s guardian, and the educator of his illegitimate son Felix by the actress Marianne. His own training has in truth begun, and like Goethe himself he sets off for Italy.
It is in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre that Goethe draws up a complete program for the education of the soul, the mind, and the heart of both Wilhelm and Felix. Wilhelm has drawn away from the circle of lower-class actors, and now associates primarily, like Goethe, with aristocrats. It is they who set the stamp of true development upon him. And now they turn his eyes on the need for perfection of some particular skill or talent, founded upon true dedication to a handicraft. His son Felix is being educated according to a new system housed in the Pädagogische Provinz—the Pedagogic Province. Here he is instructed in the principles of a new morality based upon manual labor, which is regarded as conducive to the full unfolding of the personality. Wilhelm too is made aware of new religious concepts that govern the institution, concepts based upon the idea of “Reverence.” “No religion that is founded on fear is respected here,” he is told.
“Reverence” has a three-fold aspect—it is Reverence “for that which is above us”; Reverence “for that which is our equal”; and Reverence “for that which is below us, which is Christian … the consummation of that which Humanity must and can achieve.”
In a beautifully moving passage Goethe describes the nature of this third Reverence, one that takes cognizance of “lowliness and poverty, mockery and contempt, disgrace and wretchedness, suffering and death, and conceives of them as divine; yes,” one that even looks upon sin and crime with understanding and compassion, as “furthering that which is holy.”
The most Ancient of the Three Guardians addresses Wilhelm:
“I invite you to come back in a year to see how far your son has progressed. Then you will be initiated into the Sanctuary of Sorrow.”8
In the end, we obtain a summary statement of the ideal goal of this Bildung—the “cultivation of the self.”
Thought and Action, Action and Thought, this is the sum-total of human wisdom … Both move in life like the inhalation and the exhalation of breath, like question and answer. Whoever makes a law unto himself of that which the Genius of Human Understanding secretly whispers into the ear of each newborn—namely, that Action must be tested by Thought, and Thought by Action—he cannot err, and if he should, he will soon find the right way.”9
Yet, the Wanderjahre is not only a book of high didactic declarations. It is filled with evidence of a devotion to actual manual labor undertaken in the spirit already described, such labor including mining and mineralogy, as well as cotton-spinning. It is interesting to observe that Goethe selects as his locale of industry the still undeveloped manufacturing site of Switzerland. He is disposed to emphasize domestic rather than factory industry, and in particular, landed property.
This is a far remove from Manchester or Birmingham, though it is likely that such primitivism would have appealed strongly to Carlyle. In the end, Wilhelm Meister dedicates himself to medicine and is thus enabled to save his own son’s life…
One more element deserves attention: Goethe subtitled the Wanderjahre as die Entsagenden—“the Renouncers.” For one of the most important aspects of “education,” so far as Wilhelm Meister himself and the other characters in the book are concerned, is the need for self-limitation—the development and nourishing of one’s particular aptitude or talent, as against self-dispersion and dilettantism; the supreme importance of that order of self-discipline that recognizes inner and outer organization as prerequisites of a creative life. Goethe’s own ideal was the Kulturstaat, a state that concentrated on culture, inner and outward, but remained indifferent to the political or social structure in which the individual was to find his personal fulfilment.
Carlyle was particularly attracted by the element of Entsagen—renunciation—and proceeded to redefine it in quasi-theological terms. Goethe’s goal of an aesthetic perfection is turned into a moral imperative of an almost ascetic renunciation of Happiness. With this notion, Carlyle also conjoined, as particularly attractive, the notion of “Sorrow”—endowing the “Worship of Sorrow” with a special Carlylean, Calvinistic dourness.
Goethe did not achieve canonization easily at Carlyle’s hands. While he was translating Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, he fumed, fussed and stormed; he was frequently outraged, admiration and repulsion constantly warred within him. There it was—a book with “touches of the very highest, most ethereal genius in it, but diluted with floods of inspidity, which even I would not have written for the world. I sit down to it every night at six, with the ferocity of a hyena.” And he had his own moral tussles with the “players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the ‘moral world’.”10
Wilhelm Meister was to have a powerful influence on many writers during the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. Carlyle himself ventured on a Bildungsroman—Wotton Reinfred—in 1827. After completing seven chapters, he wisely abandoned the work, which did not appear in print until after his death. While the imprint of Werther and Wilhelm Meister is only too obvious, the characters are lifeless. But direct and indirect influences of Wilhelm Meister were to play upon the English novel from the time of Bulwer-Lytton to Meredith and beyond. In that movement, Carlyle’s role as initiator cannot be minimized…11
* * *
But England was no Weimar. The country was in a state of ferment, and Carlyle anticipated the worst when in 1831 the Lords again blocked the passage of the Reform Bill, and political and social disturbances broke out in Coventry, Worcester, and Bristol; there was the threat of a march from Manchester; and not least, the ravages of cholera. All these events seemed to bode the end of the world; or, at the least, another revolution like that in France. Almost in despair, Carlyle cried out,
… there is nowhere any tie remaining among men. Everywhere, in court and cathedral, brazen falsehood now stands convicted of a lie, and famishing Ignorance cries, Away with her, away with her! God deliver us!12
There was the example of the 1830 Revolution in France. Would Reform Bills be of any help? Carlyle had little faith that reform of the parliamentary structure would solve any of the crucial problems.
The whole frame of society is rotten, he wrote in his Note Books, and must go for fuelwood, and where is the new frame to come from? I know not, and no man knows.13
In 1829, he had launched in the pages of the Edinburgh Review a formidable attack on the spirit of the age, entitled “Signs of the Times.” Self-interest, he exclaimed, was the sole rule of this world; we are living for the sake of the “purse” rather than for “conscience.” The dominant religion today consists in “Expediency, and Utility … and Profit.” Would England take note of many warning signs from abroad? There was the Carbonari movement in Italy, and ominous tumults in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. All of society is being racked by a grinding collision of “the new and the Old.” The revolution inaugurated by France in 1789 is far from accomplished. “The final issue,” he wrote, “was not unfolded in that country; nay, it is not yet anywhere unfolded.” That revolution which has as its object political freedom is not enough. There is a higher freedom “than mere freedom from oppression by his fellow-mortals.”
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.14
Strangely enough, the strident voice emanating from far-off Scottish Craigenputtock found echoes and responses in France. “Signs of the Times” was reprinted in the Paris Revue Britannique, and came to the attention of the Saint-Simonians, whose critique of the essay, while laudatory, sharply censured the writer’s failure to note the saving powers of association and unity. In July 1830, one of the Saint-Simonians’ leading missionaries, Gustave d’Eichthal, sent Carlyle a packet of Saint-Simonian literature, a critique of his essay, and Saint-Simon’s important Le Nouveau Christianisme. This was a warming recognition for one who seemed unheard in his own land, and Carlyle, though not converted to the new “religion,” found in it sufficient support for his own ideas, as well as some highly impressive and stimulating new ones. Here was a call to social as well as moral response. Carlyle noted that “la classe la plus pauvre”of the Saint-Simonians was rising from its “present deepest abasement.” He noted the disparity existing between rich and poor, when “a man with £200,000 a years eats the whole fruit of 6,666 men’s labour the year” and “private individuals” earn wages equal to the “wages of seven or eight hundred thousand other individuals.”
What do these highly beneficed individuals do to society for their wages? Kill partridges! Can this last? No, by the soul that is in man it cannot, and will not and shall not!15
As he did in other cases, he translated the Saint-Simonian cyclical theory of history—the alternation of periods of dismemberment and organic reconstruction— into his own terms as periods of “Denial, Irreligion and Destruction” and periods of “Affirmation, of Religion.”16 The present was of course a time of dismemberment.
He is reported to have prepared a translation of Le Nouveau Christianisme, with an Introduction, which remained unpublished and seems to have disappeared. But even meetings with two prominent Saint-Simonians in London—the Eichthal brothers— did not serve to keep his interest in the Saint-Simonian doctrines at full heat, and by 1832 it had almost petered out.
For he was already deep in the transcendentalism of his “Clothes” philosophy, soon to take shape as Sartor Resartus. Though he was not to forego the ideas of Progress, Change, History as Process, the mystic was to triumph over the rationalist, and he suffused even these ideas with his own brand of supernaturalism. But he was heartened that in so irreligious (as he thought then) nation as France there was an emergent “religion,” the Saint-Simonian, that preached a gospel that “Man is still Man.”17
There was scarcely another voice in England—in 1831—that spoke with such fervor to the conscience of the middle and upper classes, addressing himself to what he believed were their better qualities. He became, so to speak, the conscience of the bourgeois that fought the bourgeois morality of acquisitiveness and selfishness; and also the Tory conscience as it warred against the threatening bourgeois dominance. Both elements dreaded the prospect of violence on the part of the “lower” classes; both sought for some moral alleviation of their troubled souls. Here was an eloquent voice that fought clear of advocating “materialism” and “atheism,” yet affirmed the notion of Progress, the necessity of Change, while at the same time assuaging theological and clerical misgivings by proposing the invisible workings of a Providence. Yet he was also anticipating indirectly some elements of a later socialism, almost pre-envisioning the dialectic of Karl Marx.
In change [he wrote in “Characteristics”] … is nothing terrible … On the contrary, it lies in the very essence of our log and life in this world … Change, indeed, is painful yet ever needful … Nay, if we look well into it, what is all Derangement, and necessity of great Change, in itself such an evil, but the product of increased resources, which the old methods can no longer administer; of new wealth which the old coffers will no longer contain: What is it, for example, that in our own day bursts asunder the bonds of ancient Political Systems, and perplexes all Europe with the fear of Change, but even this: the increase of social resources, which the old social methods will no longer sufficiently administer?
At the same time he lightened disturbed hearts with his affirmation of a “clear ascertainment that we are in Progress,” noting how Paganism gave way to Christianity, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to Representative Government. He comforted himself and others by claiming that Scepticism and Materialism had disappeared, and a “Faith in Religion is again possible and inevitable for the scientific method …”
But he was not unaware—and made others aware—of the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor, exposing what was later to be called the “contradictions” within society—the anomaly of Progress and Poverty:
How was it, he asked, that though
Labour’s thousand arms, of sinew and metal, all concurring everywhere, from the tops of the mountains to the depths of mine and caverns of the sea, ply unweariedly for the service of man: yet man remains unserved; he has subdued this Planet, his happiness and inheritance; yet reaps no profit from the victory. Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of civilization, nine tenths of mankind have to struggle in the lowest battle of savage or even animal man, the battle against Famine. Countries are rich, prosperous in all manner of increase, beyond example; but the Men of those countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance outward and inward: of Belief, of Knowledge, of Money, of Food … So that Society, were it not by nature immortal, and its death ever a new-birth, might appear, as it does in the eyes of some, to be sick to dissolution, and even now writhing in its last agony.18
He had larger works in mind with which to medicine the world and help restore an “absentee God.” The first of these, necessarily, was a sort of confessional—his own spiritual pilgrimage, the soul’s migration out of the chaos of Doubt into the delectable valleys of Affirmation—a metaphysical Lehr- and Wanderjahre. It was Sartor Resartus….
* * *
He had Goethe in mind (and himself too) when he wrote in Sartor Resartus:
What too are all Poets and moral Teachers, but a species of Metaphorical Tailors? Touching which high Guild the greatest Guild-brother has triumphantly asked us: “Nay, if thou will have it, who but the Poet first made Gods for men; brought them down to us; and raised us up to them?”19
A tailor to repatch the world! especially his own dear England! The idea was high and worthy, but its realization meant, first of all, repatching himself. The idea of writing a veiled autobiography of his spirit took root in 1830, when Carlyle’s material resources were low indeed, his reputation as a writer, despite his translations, the important Life of Schiller, and numerous periodical contributions, yet in the balance. He was still deep in the valleys of self-doubt. But this, his new work, was to be the theoretical manifesto of a new Credo, as seven years later, under more favorable circumstances, his second major achievement, The French Revolution, was to be the practical exposition and exemplification of his ideas as reflected on the stage of world history.
Both labors were to be accompanied by staggering fatalities and accidents, though differing in kind. Sartor Resartus had begun as a fantasy on the subject of Clothes and soon widened into a full-sized philosophical or metaphysical tract. High in hopes, Carlyle sent it forth from Craigenputtock, still in partial form, to the publisher Fraser in London, in November 1830. Its title then was Thoughts on Clothes. It was rejected. Undeterred, Carlyle continued working on it, completing it in July 1831. Then, on a borrowed fifty pounds, he set off for London. Eluded by success, he returned to Scotland, and in May of 1833 broke the book up into “strips,” which he sent once more to Fraser for serial publication in Fraser’s Magazine. Rechristened Sartor Resartus, it ran there from November 1833 to August 1834.
In Britain, the work met with almost unanimous disapproval or indifference. But in America it received warm recognition, and here it was published in book form in 1836. Ralph Waldo Emerson, principal instigator of the publication, also wrote a preface for it, left unsigned. It was not until 1838, Carlyle’s French Revolution having now taken England by storm, that Fraser ventured to issue Sartor Resartus in book form and it came into its own.
There were good reasons for the failure of Sartor Resartus on its first appearance. Its style struck out recklessly, full of rhetorical heresies. Taking advantage of the disguise he assumed in the book as the putative editor of the German Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröck’s treatise on clothes, Carlyle gave vent to his inner anarchism, as if declaring war on traditional classical English prose. In his own rebel style he fused dithyramb with the disconnected explosiveness of the German Romantics, the style of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter and others; the humor, sentimentality, and designed incoherences of Laurence Sterne; and the brilliant coruscating clothes symbolism of Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub. Frequent apostrophes, fusillades—many of them in German—strikingly new metaphors, and above all the high tension of the at times ecstatic locutions, strike the reader with the insistence of kettle-drums…. At such moments, it might almost have seemed that we were seeing not our Carlyle, but a type of German university professor—some Professor extraordinarius in some German university town redolent of Teutonic Gemütlichkeit—in the company of philosophical pundits, scholars, students, and in an atmosphere of Rauchtabak in one of the town’s favorite inns—a Carlyle matching his own biting, sardonic, Scottish wit and raucous laugh against those of his German confrères, far, far away from the sepulchral quietism of Oxford or Cambridge, or the Bentham-ridden new London University, or the parochialism of Edinburgh!
Carlyle’s German professor is named Diogenes Teufelsdröck—that is, “Diogenes Devils’-dung.” He is Professor of Allerlei-Wissenschaft (All Sorts of Knowledge), at Weissnichtwo (I Know Not Where);—he resides in the Wahngasse (Vanity Street), and is a nightly visitor at the good tavern of The Green Goose. He is the author of a redoubtable book, Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken—“Clothes, Their Origin and Influence.” Through some good fortune the book had fallen into the hands of the “Editor,” who, with the generous assistance of Hofrath Heuschrecke (Court Councillor Grasshopper), a source of some additional biographical material, is enabled to round out the volume.
From his perch in that attic apartment in Vanity Street, Teufelsdröck looks down on the world of Weissnichtwo—his microcosm. Apparently something of a political radical, he is also unconventional so far as philosophical and moral ideas are concerned. As he sits there, he reflects: These human beings passing down below, what are they? Who are they? In their various vestments, ranging from the opulent apparel of the visiting Baron, down to the drab garb of the poor widow—each of them, the Professor states, is an Apparition. This confidence he communicates to the only two persons admitted to his retreat, the Editor and the Court Councillor. Each “apparition,” he insists, is a “living link in that tissue of History, which interweaves all Being.” Each is a portion of Eternity…
Strange Professor Teufelsdröck! He never lectures at the University, for though there is a chair there, it has not been endowed. Stranger still are his origins, for no one knows where he came from. As a child, he was deposited at the home of a very respectable couple and brought up by them.
Our Professor’s spiritual and moral pilgrimage through life has not been an easy one. Only in the course of mortal anguish and struggle had he reached the point where he was enabled to penetrate beyond the external vestures of Man and Nature, and discover the true Vesture—the Mystery of Man… “To the eye of vulgar Logic,” he writes
… what is man: An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eyes of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition…
Not Logic, nor merely rational thought, but only “Pure Reason”—which is Intuition—could bring one to see the true nature of existence, the true nature of Man and the World.
But to achieve the true vision requires much labor and anguish. Teufelsdröck wanders widely, like another Wilhelm Meister; he suffers the torments of unfulfilled love; he is frustrated by the differences existing between classes and is overcome by a sense of futility, nullity, chaos and despair. Thus he has reached the Everlasting No!—the conviction that there is no fixed moral order in this universe; that necessity, evil, human limitations, suffering and death are the only true realities. All else is illusion. The world is a neutral, if indeed not hostile, machine. Human life is ringed by Necessity. There is no Freedom. Man lives in the “hot fever of anarchy and misery,” shut off from all hope.
Well might he exclaim, in his wild way, ‘Is there no God, then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing it go?’
A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude [Teufelsdröck continues], I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.
The universe seemed “one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine,” to grind him “limb from limb…” a “vast gloomy Golgotha, the Mill of Death!”20
Utterly shattered, Teufelsdröck wanders through the “dirty little street of Saint-Thomas d’Enfer”—just as Carlyle had in Leith Walk, Edinburgh—when suddenly he is struck by a startling question:
What art thou afraid of? … Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consume thee? Let it come, then; I will meet and defy it!”
Such was the beginning of Teufelsdröck’s “Spiritual New-birth.”
Follows a period of torpor, the “Center of Indifference.” He has discovered the “Me” but not yet found his new view of the universe. The Ego must transcend itself, pass through the purgatory of self-annihilation—the Selbst-tötung—before its eyes can be unsealed, and its hands “ungyved.” He begins to be aware of his fellow human beings and their plight. The “sacred gates” of the “Sanctuary of Sorrow” are about to open for him. He discovers the meaning of Goethe’s Entsagen (Renunciation), that is, the renunciation of Happiness.
What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? … There is in man a higher than Love of Happiness… Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved… Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name… Work while it is called Today, for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.21
He has now discovered that the world is Symbol, and Man, too—both Symbols of God; all of these, “embodiment and revelation of the Infinite.” Thus he has overcome the great Negations, the “mud-gods” of “our Logical, Mensurative faculty,” and now affirms that it is our Imagination which is “King over us.” Thought is master of the world, the great magician, who through the mouth of poets and prophets “makes and unmakes the whole world.” And Thought is “father of the Act.” Thus an idea in the mind of James Watt transmuted into the steam engine is “rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society,” to wit, Feudalism, and preparing us for Industrialism and “the Government of the Wisest.”
Then came the staggering news from France, the “three glorious days” of the July 1830 Revolution. At the tavern of the Goose, where everything was bustle and buzzing with the news, Professor Teufelsdröck sat and spoke not a word for a whole week, “except once these three: Es geht an (It is beginning)…” He (like his Editor) had not been untouched by Saint-Simonian ideas, and when their publications reached the tavern, to be subjected to “one vast cackle of laughter, lamentation, and astonishment, our Sage sat mute; and at the end of the third evening said merely: Here also are men who have discovered not without amazement, that Man is still Man,” and was heard to quote the celebrated Saint-Simonian dictum that the “golden age, which a blind tradition has thitherto placed in the Past, is before us.”
Then the Professor disappears. He had apparently been in correspondence with the Saint-Simonians! Was he in Paris? Or was he, as the Editor is inclined to conjecture, actually in London?
But he had left his Clothes Testament to the world. Here was his acid critique of contemporary society:
Call ye that a Society … where there is no longer any Social idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common over-crowded Lodging-house? Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries “Mine!” and calls it Peace, because in the cut-purse and cutthroat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has become an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has no tongue but for plate-licking: and your high Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez-faire, Leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than darkness; eat you your wages and sleep!22
Such, then, the alienation of modern man and woman. How then to restore or recreate those “organic filaments” that bind all things together in this world? How to attain the “higher Freedom”? Neither Saint-Simon nor the ballot can be instruments in their achievement. What is needed is to cast off the veil that shrouds the eye from the perception of the Miracles that are around us and in us—the miracles of Creation, of Nature, of Past and Present—the miracle that is Man, and the miracle that lies in the fact that one “can stretch forth” one’s hand at all! What wonders await us once we transcend the chains of “blind Custom, and become Transcendental”! The whole world is a book of Revelations!
But who is there to open that Book? Carlyle replies: the Hero—the Great Man! Heroes are
the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelation, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named HISTORY.23
Such is the intoxicated book that Carlyle was offering to this generation of the 1830s as a new bible. Here was a dilution of German idealistic transcendental philosophy that saw all Creation as Spirit—Geist—and asked of it to cast off its worldly integuments—materialism—and perceive its kinship with the Godhead. Aside from these mystical adjurations there was also the eloquent call to become aware of the miseries—actual miseries, both moral and physical—besetting this new world of industry and machines. And not least, the call to translate thought into action.
But what Action? Carlyle leaves us in total doubt. The new temples of regeneration he envisions would house a joint participation in the heroic suffering of Man, but the fitting medicine for its assuagement is left unnamed. To the well-meaning and deeply troubled he advanced a gospel of the heroic—of “self-annihilation,” of “renunciation.” To a society deep in the morass of “materialism” he offered an ethic of labor, abjuration of the worth of happiness, the need for obedience and reverence toward that which is “higher.” To all, the prospect of a regenerating Hero, God-sent, who in the person of Poet, Prophet, Legislator, or “King” would help reweave the tattered “organic filaments”—the human tie. But all in all, Carlyle’s was an invocation to search one’s soul, and there was nothing the Victorian needed more urgently.
Carlyle was now prepared to translate a metaphysic into a philosophy of History and enter upon the second stage of his development with the query: What can History teach us of the ways of God and Man?
* * *
Now in London, the Carlyles loved their new home in Cheyne Row. Old friendships were revived, new friendships formed. Carlyle’s name was becoming known more and more widely, and men and women were being drawn to Cheyne Row not merely by Carlyle’s intellect, but also by the beauty and brain of his wife: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Leigh Hunt, veteran of many literary and journalistic battles; young John Sterling; Robert Browning and Tennyson; Ralph Waldo Emerson; French Saint-Simonians, and foreign liberals fleeing the repressions of the July Monarchy; somewhat later, Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy’s apostle of national liberation. After the publication of Carlyle’s French Revolution the stream of visitors and admirers widened, and on one occasion Frédéric Chopin agreed to touch the none-too-workable pianoforte for Jane’s delectation. Carlyle remained as ever deaf to music as he had been, and was, deaf to poetry.
But he was always at work. Already in September 1834, barely three months after settling in London, he commenced the first chapter of his great historic work on the French Revolution. Friends came to his aid with the needed but not easily procurable materials—especially John Stuart Mill, who was the most helpful. Jane Carlyle, to the outward eye a perfect Victorian mate, bore with her husband’s difficult temperament—his explosions, her own isolation while he worked, and unfortunately other marital dissatisfactions that Victorians were not prone to mention or think about. Her dedication to her husband’s great work was complete, but its progress was accompanied by a notable disaster.
The incident is well known but bears repetition, revealing Carlyle at his spiritual best. He completed the first part of the French Revolution in January 1835. Some time later John Stuart Mill, who was then already emotionally involved with Harriet Taylor, had taken it to read in her company, as well as for review. The rest of the story is told by Carlyle himself in a letter written March 23, 1835 to Dr. John Carlyle (his younger brother), then living in Rome:
… Well, one night about three weeks ago, we sat at tea, and Mill’s short rap was heard at the door; Jane rose to welcome him; but he stood there unresponsive, pale, the very picture of despair; said half-despairingly gasping, that she must go down to speak to “Mrs. Taylor.” … After some considerable additional gasping, I learned from Mill this fact: that my poor Manuscript, all except four tattered leaves, was annihilated! He had left it out (too carelessly); it had been taken for waste-paper; and so five months as tough labour as I could remember of, were as good as finished, gone like a whiff of smoke.—There never in my life had come upon me any other Accident of much moment; but this I could but feel a sore one. The thing was lost, and perhaps worse; for I had not only forgotten all the structure of it, but the spirit it was with was past; only the general impression seemed to remain, and the recollection that I was on the whole well satisfied with that, and could hardly hope to equal it…
…And so, I began at the beginning…24
“And so, I began at the beginning.”
The mind is staggered at these words—an immensity of labor undertaken anew. And brought to completion! On January 12, 1837 it was finished, and six months later published. It met with instant acclaim. Mill and Thackeray reviewed it enthusiastically. Robert Southey, it is reported, “read it six times over.”25 Thousands of others read it at least once. For Carlyle’s generation and its successors the book represented an epochal revelation.
For, it must be remembered, not a few of the readers of Carlyle’s book had lived during the days of the French Revolution (take Wordsworth, for example), its aftermath, Napoleon, Waterloo, the Restoration, and even just a few years before, the Paris Revolution of July. The staggering historical changes were not a matter of fantasy— they were there, right before them, inescapable realities. History was being made at an unprecedented pace of change, and change was of course the mark of the nineteenth century. The century was to feel as if Eternities and Infinities were unfolding before its gaze. Those hieroglyphics of Nature that Carlyle spoke of as symbols were in very fact now being deciphered by the Champollions and the Grotefends. The no longer symbolic fossils embedded in the earth’s crust or in the ocean’s depths pointed to an incalculable past history. And would Man’s own antiquity not soon be set back millions of years, his own emergence be made a portion of the rocks, the oceans and the mountains? There had been no century like this before. Nothing fixed, everything in motion. Nothing frozen, everything a Process! What was the nature of these processes? What, if any, were the Laws of History? What the motive forces that directed the course and the life of nations?
Friedrich Schiller had shown that History was philosophy “teaching by experience.” “World history is the world-court of law.”
And what could offer greater challenge to the philosophical and moral imagination of the historian than the outstanding single event of modern times, the French Revolution? It was a daring thing that Carlyle had undertaken, and successor historians have not been slow in finding flaw with Carlyle’s work. But Carlyle was working with still inadequate source material, mostly with memoirs and letters; he had no access to the historical archives of France, which were not opened until 1860. For all its shortcomings, Carlyle’s French Revolution still amazes with the sweep of its style, its pace, vividness, and occasional grandeur. For his contemporaries the book proved a revelation. It gave them a dramatic spectacle of a revolution, a sense that they were themselves living in a revolutionary age whose end was still indeterminate. As Carlyle himself indicated in speaking of the Revolution as “the event of these modern ages,” this was an “unfinished” revolution: Find the right key to the understanding of the Revolution in France and you may have the key to the understanding of History itself. And might that not lead to a discovery of means of obviating or avoiding our own revolution? As he was to write in his pamphlet on “Chartism,”
Since the year 1789, there is now half a century complete; and a French Revolution not yet complete! Whosoever will look at that enormous Phenomenon may find many meanings in it, but this meaning as the ground of all: That it was a revolt of the oppressed lower classes against the oppressing or neglecting upper classes; not a French revolt only; no, a European one; full of stern monition to all countries of Europe. These Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill … and jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution; God grant that, we, with our better methods, may be able to transact it by argument alone.
It may be hard for our generation, so much more sophisticated in matters of history, fully to understand the profound influence of this and other works of Carlyle on his contemporaries. Let us remember that there had been nothing like his French Revolution—addressing itself, as we have seen, not only to a historical event, but to all the most serious concerns of the Victorian age. Carlyle was actually writing a “drama,” evoking the past as if it were present. He gave them the feeling of participating in the march of history, and he unrolled that vast panorama with his own special rhetoric, irony, satire, personal objurgation and laudation, apostrophes, questions, all marked by an intoxicated sense of the prophetic. At such moments he was himself the prophet as he envisioned the finger of God and His “celestial sanctions” operating in the rise and fall of men, parties, movements.
Thus he celebrates May 4, 1789 as the “baptism-day of Democracy … The extremeunction of Feudalism! A superannuated System of Society … is now to die; and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born.” “The age of Miracles has come back!”
Yet Carlyle is no friend of Democracy, and he steers his way skilfully between the exaltation of Feudalism of an Edmund Burke, and an exaltation of the Revolution of a Thomas Paine. But he is writing a “drama,” so to speak; and a “drama” centers on personalities. And here there are Actors, whether great heroes or great sinners, or endowed with portions of both the heroic and the sinful. Here also is an Actor of magnitude, the “mob.” A “mob” may mean Anarchy! But Anarchy itself is a necessary in the progression of Mankind—a flame needed to burn away the prevailing and baleful imposture of the age.
This mob or canaille is twenty-five million screaming out their grievances against their oppressors. It consists of “units,” and “every unit of these masses is a miraculous Man.” “The plebeian heart too has red life.” “A new Unknown of Democracy was coming into being.”
Down in those dark dens, in those dark heads and hungry hearts, who knows what strange figure the new Political Evangel may have shaped itself; what miraculous ‘Communion of Drudges’ may be getting formed?26
They too, like the great individual Actors, are working out God’s purposes, perhaps unknowingly. For the Revolution is fit punishment for the sins of France, “the parent of misery,” the “long despotism tempered by epigrams.”
The old Adam of radicalism in Carlyle overcomes him at times, as he appears to be participating in the breathtaking events. Thus when the Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly on the eve of the taking of the Bastille, the author explodes: “Forward, ye maddened sons of France; be it towards this destiny or that! Around you is but starvation, falsehood, corruption, and the clam of death. Where ye are is no abiding … They who would make grass be eaten do now eat grass.” “Fear not Sanscullotism … it too came from God: for has it not been?”
And now for the grand Actors: Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre:
Jean Paul Marat of Neufchâtel! O Marat! Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech … as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face, what sees it in all this?
And Danton, with his “black brows, and rude flattened face…” and Mirabeau, “the world compeller,”
with the thick black locks … through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy—and burning fire of genius …
and Robespierre:
… that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future time …27
Few novelists could have excelled Carlyle in his descriptions of the royal family’s flight to Varennes, and their capture and return to Paris. No less vivid is the recital of the arming of the counterrevolutionary coalition and the preparations of Brunswick to march against France. But Carlyle’s own feelings break out rapturously when he comes to write about the heroic men marching from Marseilles to defend the Republic “from foreign despots”:
But to our minds, the notablest of all these moving phenomena is that of Barbaroux’s “Six hundred Marseillese who know how to die.” … These Marseillese remain inarticulate, undistinguishable in feature; a blackbrowed Mass, full of grim fire, who wend there, in the hot, sultry weather: very singular to contemplate … Fate and Feudal Europe, having decided, come girdling in from without; they, having also decided, do march within … The Thought, which works voiceless in this blackbrowed mass, an inspired Tyrtaean Colonel, Rouget de Lisle … has translated into the grim melody and rhythm; into his Hymn or March of the Marseillese. The sound of which will make the blood tingle in men’s veins; and whole Armies and Assemblages will sing it, with eyes weeping and burning, with hearts defiant of Death, Despot and Devil …28
On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI is executed. France becomes a divided land. From without, the Great Coalition of Austria, England and Prussia threatens the destruction of the new state. From within, civil war: the “respectable washed Middle Classes” against the hunger-screams of twenty-five millions near the point of starvation. And then the so-called “Reign of Terror.” Behold, within this seeming Chaos, the French armies perform miracles against their foreign enemies.
Well, what about that “Reign of Terror”? What is the truth and what is the legend?
History, Carlyle writes, … confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name the Reign of Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds and Units; who shrieked and published, and made the world ring with their wail …
This Terror, Carlyle admits, was a frightful thing. How many perished in it? Enemies of the Revolution claim two thousand? Even four thousand? How compare that number with the thousands sacrificed on fields of battle, such, for example, as in the Seven Years War?
Let all take this as a warning:
If the gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent as Epicurus’ gods, with the living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger weltering uncared-for at their feet, and smooth Parasites preaching, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, then the dark Chaos, it would seem will rise;—has risen, and, O Heavens! has it not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us go and do otherwise …29
And so, the confused wreck of a “Republic of the Poverties” ends in the Reign of Terror, and is given its coup de grâce by the Napoleonic grapeshot … And now, what follows? What of today? What are the new rulers who have succeed the former despots?
Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive at Aristocracy of the Moneybag. It is the course through which all European Societies are at this hour travelling. Apparently a still baser sort of Aristocracy? And infintely baser; the basest yet known.30
Carlyle had tried to do partial justice to the “masses.” In that respect he contrasts significantly with Edmund Burke’s depiction of them as a “band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with …. blood,” or Hippolyte Taine’s description of them, forty years after Carlyle, as “smugglers,” dealers in contraband salt, poachers, vagabonds, beggars, old offenders … society’s dregs come to the surface.31 But Carlyle did not understand the importance of the French Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution, or the heroic role of the bourgeoisie within it. Once again the mystic and the realist are at war within him; he is apocalyptic as he traces the finger of the Lord in its workings in the revolutionary phenomenon; realistic in his appraisal of the role of poverty and despotic oppression as causes of the Revolution, and in his warnings to his own contemporaries. But he blunts the sharp barbs of his exhortations by denouncing Democracy, Constitutions, Ballot-boxes and franchise reforms as illusions, thus appeasing the fears of both Whig and Tory, neither of whom minded his attacks on greed and materialism (these being always not their own, but someone else’s).
Others of his contemporaries, more radical than Carlyle himself, saw more clearly the implications of an “unfinished” revolution: Bronterre O’Brien, the Chartist, who saw such revolutions as “begin in the upper regions … till they reach … the classes who live by buying and selling,” as doomed to failure; and as for the bourgeois, having attained his goal against the aristocracy, he “flings off his old auxiliaries (the lower classes), and to keep them down, unites with their former oppressors.”32
* * *
Carlyle was famous. He undertook popular lectures on Literature as well as on Heroes, and more and more spoke with the accents of a Hebrew prophet. Yet he would not be a true Victorian if he did not harbor within himself serious contradictions. On the one hand he was obsessed with the “Condition of England Question,” a critic of his age aghast at the brutality, injustices, wretchedness and oppressions he saw around him. With unexampled fervor, even fury, he delivers the infamy of his times. Up to 1848, one could say, the element which predominated in his thought, writing and speeches, and which brought him closest to many of his gifted and sensitive contemporaries, was his sharp, incisive appraisal of the nature of the changed world in which both he and they were living. In the “Hungry Forties” he unweariedly kept before his readers and audiences the glaring contrast between an England “full of wealth, of multifarious produce” and an England “dying of inanition”; the horrifying situation of the needy and the unemployed, the shame and terror of the “Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons,” those “Bastilles”—the one million and a half paupers. He lashes out at the “Unworking Aristocracy,” that is, the landed gentry, for having surrendered their true responsibilities of “guidance and government” of England; he is equally severe on the powerful new bourgeoisie, “the Working Aristocracy, Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders of Working Men,” servitors of the “Gospel of Mammon,” imploring, exhorting, and frothing at them to “reform their own selves from top to bottom … England will not be habitable long, unreformed.”33
Behold! Supply-and-Demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man,—how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man’s Life itself.34
In Past and Present another element comes to the fore, which we may call Carlyle’s “Tory Romanticism.” It proved attractive to many diverse spirits. Here was a glorification of the Middle Ages and Medievalism that combined a moral, spiritual, religious and economic critique (already in a smaller compass adumbrated in the pamphlet on Chartism). Here Carlyle established a vivid contrast between human relations as they subsisted in the Middle Ages and as they manifested themselves at present. That which distinguished the social polity of those times and bound together kings, lords, and subjects was a degree of unity, morality, humaneness that has since almost disappeared. Of course there was also less poverty, less misery and wretchedness. Because,
… in one word, Cash-Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high. With the supreme triumph of Cash, a changed time entered; there must a changed Aristocracy enter.35
Past and Present delineated this contrast brilliantly. Carlyle was drawing upon a medieval chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond and the latter’s picture of twelfth-century St. Edmundsbury as illustrating the moral and spiritual qualities of the Middle Ages and its remarkable leader-figure, the Lord Abbot Samson. An idealized picture, it presented a vision of dedicated sanctity, especially the sanctity of Work. Laborare est orare. Relationships among the various estates, fixed as they were, were founded on responsibility and duty. A serf, though tied to the soil in perpetuity, was always assured of subsistence….
How wretched by contrast is our own age—Chaos of Selfhood and Greed, domain of Midas and Mannon! …
Strange and varied was the company that drew sustenance from Past and Present. Such a romantic Medievalism—so different from that of Shelley and Byron—was likely to appeal strongly even to Tories, who could overlook Carlyle’s attacks on them and find solace and even joy in his glorification of medieval paternalism, medieval feudalism, and his exaltation of the more humane relationships between lord and serf. This was the very gospel embraced by the so-called Young Tory movement, and its prophet Benjamin Disraeli … If Tory Romanticism dreamt of some kind of a neo-medieval political and religious Restoration—not unlike their German Romantic counterparts (Novalis, for example)—others were to draw more radical conclusions from Carlyle’s protestations and, focusing on the magnificent artistic contributions of the Middle Ages, spark far-reaching questioning, as in John Ruskin and William Morris, as to the relations of Art and Society. Carlyle’s identification of the “cash-nexus” as the terrifying element of kinship in modern society was to find epoch making expansion in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Friedrich Engels wrote appreciatively of Carlyle, who without doubt had considerable impact on his own celebrated work, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Yet even before 1848, certain ominous notes become audible in Carlyle’s writings that to a keen ear were anticipatory of a later full-fledged retreat from his “radicalism” of the 1830s and 1840s. “Democracy … means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you,” he wrote in Past and Present. It is in that remarkable and very militant essay, “Chartism,” that he advances the notorious tenet that Might is Right:
Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical. Whose land was this of Britain? God’s who made it, His and no other’s it was and is. Who of God’s creatures had the right to live in it? The wolves and the bisons? Yes, they; till one with better right showed himself. The Celt, “aboriginal savage of Europe,” as a snarling antiquary names him, arrived, pretending to have a better right; and did accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that piece of God’s land; namely a better might to turn it to use … The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession, and tilled. Forever, was it to be? Alas, Forever is not a category that can establish itself in this world of Time … No property is eternal but God’s, the Maker’s; whom Heaven permits to take possession, his is the right … nothing more can be said … By the same great law do Roman Empires establish themselves, Christian Religions promulgate themselves, and all extant Powers bear rule. The strong thing is the just thing: this thou wilt find throughout in our world;—as indeed was God and Truth the Maker of our world, or was Satan and Falsehood?
If this is the case, one cannot help wondering why Carlyle—having already insisted that “labor” was the laboring man’s “property” as sure as forests and fields and lands were that of the Aristocracy—censures the latter for appropriating that of the laboring man. And with one stroke of the pen, guided by what he calls “the miraculous breath of Life” in him, Carlyle destroys the very physical character of “property,” transmogrifying it into Spirit! Addressing himself to his “unhappy brother, most poor insolvent brother,” who like Carlyle himself is often possessed of an empty purse, he instructs him that he has a property worth far more: “the miraculous breath of Life,” and rights “stretching into Immensity, far into Eternity!” “… Fifteen pence a day; three-and-sixpence a day; eight hundred pounds and odd a day, dost thou call that my property?”36
By 1850 he was already writing that
Slave or free is settled in Heaven for a man … Slaves are in a tremendous majority everywhere and the voting of them—not to be got rid of just yet—is a nuisance in proportion … The free man is he who is loyal to the Laws of the Universe; who in his heart sees and knows, across all contradictions, that injustice cannot befall him here. The first symptom of such a man is not that he resists and rebels, but that he obeys.37
It would be a useless task, and a sad one, to trace in detail the course of the moral and social petrification of Carlyle’s thought, from his early “radicalism” to his delivery of a gospel of despotism. Recent scholarship has tried forcefully to rehabilitate Carlyle, insisting that he was a continuing “permanent” revolutionary to the end of his days;38 but it founders on the brute facts of his later writings and actions.
For all that, one need not minimize Carlyle’s prodigious services in exposing eloquently the miseries, the shams, the injustices of the times, with their perpetrators and victims. The mystic in him appeals to such vaporous, undefined ethereal forces as “the great deep law of Nature,” “the great fact of existence,” “the law of the whole,” “God-like reality,” never defining or clarifying with the precision he was able to bring to his descriptions of the actual conditions existing in his England. His deep social passion, his critical self, however, was transmitted to others, like Dickens and George Eliot.
But he is incapable of developing any positive “revolutionary” theory that does not center on some “Hero” like Cromwell or Frederick the Great.
His prejudices ran deep; his hatred of Jews was intense. He called Disraeli “a superlative Hebrew Conjuror.” Even more intense was his revulsion from Negroes. In 1849 he contributed an article to Fraser’s Magazine entitled “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” on the subject of Jamaican Blacks. And he addresses himself to them as follows:
… Decidedly you will have to be servant to those are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you; servant to the Whites, if they are (as to what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you. That, you may depend on it, my obscure Black friends, is and was always the Law of the World, for you and for all men.
And he applied the Master–Servant relationship to his own household, especially as it concerned the role of woman:
“The man should bear rule in the house, and not the woman.” This is an eternal axiom, the law of nature, which no mortal departs from, unpunished … I must not, and I cannot, live in a house of which I am not the head.39
This was, of course, standard Victorian doctrine, though there was many a wife who bridled against it, even revolted, or for want of proper outlet submitted but frequently took to illness, neurosis, and hysteria. And so far as “sex” was concerned— let us call it “Love”—he held that it was “utterly damnable” that love
be represented as spreading itself over our whole existence, and constituting one of the grand interests of it; whereas love—the thing people call love—is confined to a very few years of a man’s life; in fact, a quite insignificant fraction of it, and even then is one thing to be attended to among many infinitely more important things.40
It is best, then, to remember Carlyle for what he did achieve, rather than for his failures; acting in the first half of the nineteenth century as a spur to the conscience of the Victorians, and as one who extended Englishmen’s knowledge and understanding of German literature, and of Goethe in particular, immeasurably. It is best to remember him in the words of Harriet Martineau:
If I am warranted in believing that the society I am bidding farewell to is a vast improvement upon that which I was born into, I am confident that the blessed change is attributable to Carlyle more than to any single influence besides.41
Or those of G. H. Lewes, the author of the first comprehensive English life of Goethe:
I sat at your feet when my mind was first awakened; and I have honored and loved you since both as teacher and friend.42