Carlyle’s Past and Present

Abstract

It is difficult for us of our time and generation to appreciate Carlyle. So many things come between us and him. In the first place that appalling style, with its repetitiveness, its overemphasis, its perpetual note of adjuration, its shrillness and exaggeration, with no soft tones at all, the trumpets always braying and rather discordantly: it makes him almost impossible to read. Then there is the insensitiveness, the dislike of art for itself, of music and painting, the philistinism of the Scotch peasant. No less serious, there is his German monomania, the confusion about what he thought of the relation between Might and Right, his intellectual muddle. There is no doubt that the Victorians overrated him; and that the older textbooks on the literature of the age were wrong in placing him at the head of it. Newman, for whose intellect Carlyle expressed great contempt, should have had a larger place ; in some ways his mind foreshadowed the more subtle and critical intellectual issues of our time.