Existentialists

"In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner."

"Perhaps I owe more to Thomas Carlyle than to any other writer. The philosophy of the "Sage of Chelsea" always appealed to me from the time I first opened Heroes and Hero Worship. Sartor Resartus is, I think, the book I would save from my library if my house was on fire and I could only escape with one book."

"When Froude took Lord Wolseley to see Carlyle, the sage bade the laurelled commander lock the doors of the parliamentary palaver, and walk off with the key."

"When he [Joseph Chamberlain] was busy on temperance and the Gothenburg system, we had one of our talks with Carlyle. The sage told him that he rejoiced that this mighty reform was being attempted; then all at once he took fire at thought of compensation for the dispossessed publican, and burst into full blaze at its iniquity. Fiercely smiting the arms of his chair, with strong voice and flashing eye, he summoned an imaginary publican before him. "Compensation!" he cried, "you dare come to me for compensation! I'll tell you where to go for compensation! Go to your father the devil, let him compensate you"."

"I always felt the force of his [John Stuart Mill's] distrust of "thunderings" after an hour with Carlyle. You walked away from Chelsea stirred to the depths by a torrent of humour. But then it was splendid caricature: words and images infinitely picturesque and satiric, marvellous collocations and antitheses, impassioned railing against all the human and even superhuman elements in our blindly misguided universe. But of direction, of any sign-post or way out, not a trace was to be discovered, any more than a judicial page, or sense of any wisdom in the judicial, is to be found in his greatest pieces of history. After the grand humorist's despair was over, it was a healthy restorative in passing homeward along the Embankment to fling oneself into the arms of any statistician, politician, political economist, sanitary authority, poor-law reformer, prisoner-reformer, drainage enthusiast, or other practical friend of improvement, whom genial accident might throw in one's way."

"I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves, would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism, utilitarianism, the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see the same truths through media more suited to my mental constitution, that I recognized them in his writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate. Even at the time when out acquaintance commenced, I was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought, to appreciate him fully; a proof of which is, that on his showing me the manuscript of Sartor Resartus, his best and greatest work, which he had just then finished, I made little of it; though when it came out about two years afterwards in Fraser's Magazine I read it with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight. I did not seek and cultivate Carlyle less on account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy. He soon found out that I was not "another mystic," and when for the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my opinions which I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief difference between us was that I "was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic." I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I was destined to become one; but though both his and my opinions underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, we never approached much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first years of our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only saw many things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out."

"This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years."

"Carlyle was one who stood constantly in the presence of those ‘Eternal verities’ of which he speaks... The spirit of the prophet was in him... He was the greatest of the Britons of his time—and after the British fashion of not coming near perfection: Titanic, not Olympian: a heaver of rocks, not a shaper. But if he did no perfect work, he had lightning's power to strike out marvelous pictures and reach to the inmost of men with a phrase."

"The forms of government appear to him almost without meaning; such subjects as the extension of suffrage, the guarantee of any kind of political right, are evidently in his eyes pitiful things, materialism more or less disguised. What he requires is that men should grow morally better, that the number of just men should increase: one wise man more in the world would be to him a fact of more importance than ten political revolutions."

"Got Carlyle's Fred II from Cawthorn's and read it—that is as much as I can read it. I never saw a worse book. Nothing new of the smallest value. The philosophy nonsense and the style gibberish. I have the profoundest contempt for him... Read Cobbett—a much better writer than that charlatan Carlyle."

"At the Atheneum I read Carlyle's Trash—Latterday something or other—beneath criticism—yet his evidence before the Commissioners of the British Museum is even more absurd. Surely the world will not be duped for ever by such an empty-headed bombastic dunce."

"Then—with confessional tears—I tried, through something Haldane said when I told him you had been reading Carlyle's French Revolution, to read his Frederic the Great. I couldn't do more than the first volume. The manner drove me wild. The continuous exhibition of the Medicine-Man's paraphernalia made it like a mad mullah's dance."

"I found him as usual sitting at his table, but evidently in a condition of great suppressed irritability; with Mill's treatise On Liberty lying before him... [H]e rose angrily from the table with the book in his hand, and gave vent to such a torrent of anathema (glancing at Christianity itself, as if Christianity had been the inspiration of it), as filled me with pain and amazement. He addressed himself directly to me, almost as if I had written the book, or had sent it to him, or was in some way mixed up with it in his mind. I felt terribly hurt; but what could I say in protest against such a wide-rushing torrent of invective? ... I know the book well enough now, and the ghastly issues to which it inevitably points, with its accurate balancing of enlightened self-interests, and its deification of every man's own heart; and I will only say that, putting myself honestly in Carlyle's place, I do not wonder that his indignation was beyond endurance. It must have been to him, in the incisiveness of its attack and the taking popularity of its style, like a vision of the great red dragon standing triumphant before him, ready to devour the fruit of his soul's travail as soon as it was born. Since that day, I have never heard him express more utter abhorrence of anything than I have, more than once in late years, heard him express of the crowing, God denying, death-stricken spirit, now making such ‘great signs’ with our fashionable sciences and life-philosophies,—and all the world wondering after it!"

"It is really, as Coleridge I think said of something else, like reading a story by flashes of lightning!"

"About that age [16], or perhaps a year later, a friend sent me Sartor Resartus, and one of the most abiding remembrances of those days is the attic in which I used to read by the light only of my collier's lamp whilst going through Carlyle's most impressive book. I felt I was in the presence of some great power, the meaning of which I could only dimly guess at. I mark the reading of Sartor, however, as a real turning point, and went through the book three times in succession until the spirit of it somewhat entered into me. Since then I have learned much of the human failings and weaknesses of Carlyle, but I still remain a worshipper at his shrine. He was, indeed, to me in those days a hero, more particularly when Past and Present and the French Revolution followed in the wake of Sartor."

"For Cromwell, the primary authority is Mr. Carlyle's "Life and Letters," an invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet."

"Carlyle was the greatest of English historical portrait-painters... But the writer who saw individuals with such incomparable clearness was weak in perspective and blind to the very existence of the masses. His later years reveal something like contempt for the poor and the ignorant. "Shooting Niagara" gave almost brutal expression to his opinion of the working-classes in 1867. He told Wolseley, half in earnest, that he hoped he would lock the door of Parliament and turn the members out. He sided with the South in the slavery struggle, and with Governor Eyre against quashee nigger. His whole philosophy was that the common herd must be drilled, led and punished by their superiors. Alike in politics and history he drifted ever further away from the generous intuitions of his early manhood."

"If the "Frederick" thus fails both as a biography and a history of the reign and adds little to knowledge, it is none the less full of purple patches. It has been called the largest and most varied show-box in historical literature. Mrs. Carlyle, an exacting critic, pronounced it the best of her husband's works. It exhibits an undiminished power of mise-en-scène, freshness of humour, and mastery of character-painting. Emerson pronounced it the wittiest book ever written. Carlyle never composed anything more brilliant than the story of Voltaire's visit to Potsdam, and the portraits of the rulers of Europe are in his best style."

"It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance. There is in him much for the future."

"I have recently been reading Thomas Carlyle's book on Frederick the Great. This biography is extraordinarily instructive and uplifting. Carlyle is an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and the picture he draws of his life is that of an heroic epic."

"He was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teaching are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky. Time only can show how this will be."

"They (the Nazis) would put it to our young people that our best writers were Nazis at heart, and so try to warp their minds. It is interesting, in this connextion, to read what Nazi critics have been saying lately about Shakespeare and Carlyle. They have not got a bad case over Carlyle - he had something of the Nazi about him: he despised individualism and liberty and worshipped the dictator-hero. However, Carlyle also said "Thought is stronger than artillery-parks", and this side of him the Nazis don't mention."

"This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle landowning aristocracy which "have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief", a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, "captains of industry", are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn-out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interests, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own "brute individuality", a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of "soul", that is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness, in furious discontent and rebellion against the old social order, and hence a threatening, irresistibly advancing democracy — everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility. — That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle's particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says. He, alone of the "respectable" class, has kept his eyes open at least towards the facts, he has at least correctly apprehended the immediate present, and that is indeed a very great deal for an "educated" Englishman."

"Thomas Carlyle has become known in Germany through his efforts to make German literature accessible to the English. For several years he has been mainly occupied with the social conditions of England — the only educated man of his country to do so! — and as early as 1838 he wrote a brief work entitled Chartism. At that time the Whigs were in office and proclaimed with much trumpeting that the "spectre" of Chartism, which had arisen round 1835, was now destroyed. Chartism was the natural successor to the old radicalism which had been appeased for a few years by the Reform Bill and reappeared in 1835–36 with new strength and with its ranks more solid than ever before. The Whigs thought they had suppressed this Chartism, and Thomas Carlyle took this as his cue to expound the real causes of Chartism and the impossibility of eradicating it before these causes were eradicated."

"Search as you will, Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view."

"He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due. One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of these times—the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style."

"As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing."

"Not less am I grateful for the Carlyle eulogium [on Emerson]. I have shed some quite delicious tears over it. This is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love another."

"Because he frowned at the cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to a fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered, will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run finds its right level."

"His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress. Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less pleasing people in Manchester."

"The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect to call them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from which had come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical philosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (I had almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence, it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to second sight.' Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a grand power of guessing. He saw the crowd of the new States General, Danton with his "rude flattened face," Robespierre peering mistily through his spectacles. He saw the English charge at Dunbar. He guessed that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had something sturdy inside him. He guessed that Lafayette, however brave and victorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness of Cromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically felt the feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greater considered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and the central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child."

"He came and spoke a word, and the chatter of rationalism stopped, and the sums would no longer work out and be ended. He was a breath of Nature turning in her sleep under the load of civilisation, a stir in the very stillness of God to tell us He was still there."

"It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."

"Carlyle, to the modern reader, is a paradox, an extraordinary compound of the archaic, or, worse, the deeply unfashionable, and elements we think of as distinctly modern. Swift and Rabelais before him suggest parallels, as does Whitman after. Carlyle's classmates nicknamed him "the Dean" in recognition of a Swiftian quality. Relations to earlier historiography are harder to see, though Carlyle greatly admired Schiller and came towards the end of a long period of erosion of the idea of the dignity of history. Carlyle has much time for the sublime, none for dignity. It is not surprising that the classical republican historians make no figure in his work, despite the French revolutionaries' devotion to them. The chief borrowing is, rather surprisingly, from Florence: Carlyle a number of times employs the carroccio...as an image of a symbolic rallying point. For the rest, no humanist he, or philosophe, but an Old Testament-nurtured Puritan, at home with the mundane and the transcendental. Humorous, hectoring and at times almost frenzied, he found one guide to his monumental task in Homer's epic realism, and for the rest he went his own way. At his best – and he has more than one kind of best – his history and his prose have enormous imaginative energy, whose degenerations into bombast are the price the reader pays."

"One book especially, given to me by a sergeant of ours, had a strong influence on me. This was Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. I read that over and over and then bought a cheap copy of Sartor Resartus. I remember one evening, after reading the famous meditation on the sleeping city, I threw the book across the room. I felt I should never be able to write like that."

"As you introduced Schiller to your countrymen, so you have placed before the Germans our great Prussian King in his full figure; like a living statue. What you said long years ago of the "Hero as Man of Letters"—that he is under the noble obligation to be true,—has been fulfilled in yourself; but, more fortunate than those of whom you then spoke, you may rejoice in what you have accomplished, and continue your work in full vigour, which may God long preserve to you. Accept with my cordial congratulations the assurance of my sincere respect."

"The influence of Carlyle and Maurice was nothing less than socialistic. Those who at one-and-twenty pored over the Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and Chartism, became distinctly Socialists—not such gentry as bawl the Gospel of Destruction and break club windows, but Socialists of the highest type, to whom nothing of humanity is common or unclean."

"There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward Irving, then just dead: ‘Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,—and it took her twelve years!’"

"I never much liked Carlyle. He seemed to me to be “carrying coals to Newcastle,” as our proverb says; preaching earnestness to a nation which had plenty of it by nature, but was less abundantly supplied with several other useful things."

"That regular Carlylean strain which we all know by heart and which the clear-headed among us have so utter a contempt for."

"These are damned times—everything is against one—the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle."

"After fifty years we are still dependent on him for Cromwell, and in Past and Present he gave what was the most remarkable piece of historical thinking in the language. But the mystery of investigation had not been revealed to him when he began his most famous book [The French Revolution] ... [T]he vivid gleam, the mixture of the sublime with the grotesque, make other opponents forget the impatient verdicts and the poverty of settled fact in the volumes that delivered our fathers from thraldom to Burke. They remain one of those disappointing storm-clouds that give out more thunder than lightning."

"[T]here is no English historian who has a right to be judged by a higher or severer test, for no one has spoken more deeply and truly on the character and dignity of history... He showed an intelligence of things which no other English historian has understood. He dwelt upon the invisible impersonal forces that act in history, and appreciated, often with rare sagacity, the true significance and sequence of events. But he was unable to follow the course he had pointed out, and failed even to maintain himself on the high ground he had reached. He could not distinguish in history what was unknown to him in religion: thus he fell to the exclusive contemplation of certain typical individuals, whose greatness appeared to supply what he wanted, an object of worship, and personified invisible elements in visible men. And now the belongings of his hero possess so great an importance that they distract his attention from him; he invests with an absurd dignity not only his relations, but their goods and chattels, and allows merely material things to eclipse the human interest of his subject. It is a history made up of eccentricities. This is the way that Mr. Dickens writes novels; for whom the spectacles of an elderly gentleman, a pair of mulberry coloured hose, or a wandering American pig, have greater attractions than any psychological problem."

"A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men."

"Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done."

"Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?"

"Lord Bacon could as easily have created this planet as he could have written Hamlet."

"If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be un-inhabited, what a waste of space."

"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other."

"I shall now no more behold my dear father with these "bodily eyes. With him a whole threescore and ten years of the past has doubly died for me. It is as if a new leaf in the great hook of time were turned over. Strange time — endless time or of which I see neither end nor beginning. All rushes on. Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told; yet under Time does there not lie Eternity? Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written. We shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way), the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me. "The essence of whatever was, is, or shall be, even now is." God is great. God is good. His will be done, for it will be right. As it is, I can think peaceably of the departed love. All that was earthly, harsh, sinful, in our relation has fallen away; all that was holy in it remains. I can see my dear father's life in some measure as the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise and be built; the waters of time have now swelled up round his (as they will round mine); I can see it all transfigured, though I touch it no longer. I might almost say his spirit seems to have entered into me (so clearly do I discern and love him); I seem to myself only the continuation and second volume of my father. These days that I have spent thinking of him and of his end are the peaceablest, the only Sabbath that I have had in London. One other of the universal destinies of man has overtaken me. Thank Heaven, I know, and have known, what it is to be a son; to love a father, as spirit can love spirit. God give me to live to my father's honor and to His. And now, beloved father, farewell for the last time in this world of shadows I In the world of realities may the Great Father again bring us together in perfect holiness and perfect love! Amen!"