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Carlyle Reader
As such this book will prove an indispensable tool to students and teachers of nineteenth-century literature and history, for it makes available a generous and carefully chosen sampling from the huge output of this great Victorian man of letters and man of ideas.
- GenresPhilosophy
544 pages, Hardcover
First published June 29, 1984
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June 23, 2020
I was inspired to read Carlyle by Lasch's The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Before that, I had only known of Carlyle as a conservative who wrote a famously critical history of the French Revolution. Lasch's reading of Carlyle does not peg him as a conservative, but as a radical in the prophetic tradition. After reading these selections, I tend to agree with that assessment. He glorifies the past, but he doesn't praise tradition for tradition's sake like Burke or Oakeshott. Rather, he searches the past to find some ultimate standard by which to judge the present, a standard that emanates from God through poets, prophets and heroes. This is the eternal law, one which we never fail to break, and in ages like the modern age, tend to completely disregard. Yet outbursts of cleansing fire like the French Revolution, while tragic, are a way of becoming reacquainted with this truth when we have lost our way. Carlyle was bold and uncompromising - he was definitely on the wrong side of history for several of his more controversial opinions, though they don't show up in this volume. His style can at times be hard to take - he can be incredibly lucid at one moment, and then pedantic and allusive the next. Overall, I found his meditations inspirational and refreshing, quite unlike anything else I've read.
As for this volume, I got it because it contained both the full text of Sartor Restartus as well as some of his most famous non-fiction writing - history, criticism and letters. The selections in this volume really showcase his ideas and unique style.
I have to say I struggled with Sartor Restartus, because it really doesn't have much of a plot. The best parts of the novel were the parts where it is basically just a philosophical essay, although I did laugh at his snipes at high-minded philosophers who seem to loose touch with reality as exemplified by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which criticisms become much more serious in his excellent chapter on Coleridge towards the end of this volume). Overall, I enjoyed reading his non-fiction the most.
For those considering this volume, I would point out it doesn't have any footnotes, which I could have really used especially for Sartor Restartus. One other minor point about this volume - the back cover advertises a bibliography of secondary sources, but I didn't find any such bibliography (there is instead a "Textual Note" which lists the primary sources used to produce this volume). Does not matter much to a dilettante like me, but it may matter to someone reading this review.
From Characteristics:
"The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong."
"Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be understood."
"An unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in repenting and anxiety; or, still worse, that inflates itself into dropsical boastfulness and vain-glory: either way, there is a self-seeking; an unprofitable looking behind us to measure the way we have made: whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward, and make more way."
"Ages of Heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy; Virtue, when it can be philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline."
"Of our Modern Metaphysics, accordingly, may not this already be said, that if they have produced no Affirmation, they have destroyed much negation? It is a disease expelling a disease: the fire of Doubt, as above hinted, consuming away the Doubtful; that so the Certain come to light, and again lie visible on the surface."
From The French Revolution:
"Honour to the strong man, in these ages, who has shaken himself loose of shams, and is something. For in the way of being worthy, the first condition surely is that one be. Let Cant cease, at all risks and at all costs: till Cant cease, nothing else can begin."
"Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive 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? An infinitely baser; the basest yet known. "
From On Heroes and Hero-Worship:
"... we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature' and 'moral nature'... We ought to know withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know them all."
"Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows-up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and sense of man.'"
(of Shakespeare's comedy) "And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy... Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise than genially."
"Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognise that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain."
As for this volume, I got it because it contained both the full text of Sartor Restartus as well as some of his most famous non-fiction writing - history, criticism and letters. The selections in this volume really showcase his ideas and unique style.
I have to say I struggled with Sartor Restartus, because it really doesn't have much of a plot. The best parts of the novel were the parts where it is basically just a philosophical essay, although I did laugh at his snipes at high-minded philosophers who seem to loose touch with reality as exemplified by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which criticisms become much more serious in his excellent chapter on Coleridge towards the end of this volume). Overall, I enjoyed reading his non-fiction the most.
For those considering this volume, I would point out it doesn't have any footnotes, which I could have really used especially for Sartor Restartus. One other minor point about this volume - the back cover advertises a bibliography of secondary sources, but I didn't find any such bibliography (there is instead a "Textual Note" which lists the primary sources used to produce this volume). Does not matter much to a dilettante like me, but it may matter to someone reading this review.
From Characteristics:
"The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong."
"Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be understood."
"An unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in repenting and anxiety; or, still worse, that inflates itself into dropsical boastfulness and vain-glory: either way, there is a self-seeking; an unprofitable looking behind us to measure the way we have made: whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward, and make more way."
"Ages of Heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy; Virtue, when it can be philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline."
"Of our Modern Metaphysics, accordingly, may not this already be said, that if they have produced no Affirmation, they have destroyed much negation? It is a disease expelling a disease: the fire of Doubt, as above hinted, consuming away the Doubtful; that so the Certain come to light, and again lie visible on the surface."
From The French Revolution:
"Honour to the strong man, in these ages, who has shaken himself loose of shams, and is something. For in the way of being worthy, the first condition surely is that one be. Let Cant cease, at all risks and at all costs: till Cant cease, nothing else can begin."
"Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we arrive 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? An infinitely baser; the basest yet known. "
From On Heroes and Hero-Worship:
"... we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature' and 'moral nature'... We ought to know withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know them all."
"Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows-up from the deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and sense of man.'"
(of Shakespeare's comedy) "And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy... Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise than genially."
"Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognise that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain."
Displaying 1 of 1 review