Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 2d April, 1866

by Thomas Carlyle

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Genres: Classics

34 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1902

About the author

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian, critic, and sociological writer. was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, eldest child of James Carlyle, stonemason, and Margaret (Aitken) Carlyle. The father was stern, irascible, a puritan of the puritans, but withal a man of rigid probity and strength of character. The mother, too, was of the Scottish earth, and Thomas' education was begun at home by both the parents. From the age of five to nine he was at the village school; from nine to fourteen at Annan Grammar School. where he showed proficiency in mathematics and was well grounded in French and Latin. In November 1809 he walked to Edinburgh, and attended courses at the University till 1814, with the ultimate aim of becoming a minister. He left without a degree, became a mathematical tutor at Annan Academy in 1814, and three years later abandoned all thoughts of entering the Kirk, having reached a theological position incompatible with its teachings. He had begun to learn German in Edinburgh, and had done much independent reading outside the regular curriculum. Late in 1816 he moved to a school in Kirkcaldy, where he became the intimate associate of Edward Irving, an old boy of Annan School, and now also a schoolmaster. This contact was Carlyle's first experience of true intellectual companionship, and the two men became lifelong friends. He remained there two years, was attracted by Margaret Gordon, a lady of good family (whose friends vetoed an engagement), and in October 1818 gave up schoolmastering and went to Edinburgh, where he took mathematical pupils and made some show of reading law.

During this period in the Scottish capital he began to suffer agonies from a gastric complaint which continued to torment him all his life, and may well have played a large part in shaping the rugged, rude fabric of his philosophy. In literature he had at first little success, a series of articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia bringing in little money and no special credit. In 1820 and 1821 he visited Irving in Glasgow and made long stays at his father's new farm, Mainhill; and in June 1821, in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, he experienced a striking spiritual rebirth which is related in Sartor Resartus. Put briefly and prosaically, it consisted in a sudden clearing away of doubts as to the beneficent organization of the universe; a semi-mystical conviction that he was free to think and work, and that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the "Everlasting No."

For about a year, from the spring of 1823, Carlyle was tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, young men of substance, first in Edinburgh and later at Dunkeld. Now likewise appeared the first fruits of his deep studies in German, the Life of Schiller, which was published serially in the London Magazine in 1823-24 and issued as a separate volume in 1825. A second garner from the same field was his version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister which earned the praise of Blackwood's and was at once recognized as a very masterly rendering.

In 1821 Irving had gone to London, and in June 1821 Carlyle followed, in the train of his employers, the Bullers. But he soon resigned his tutorship, and, after a few weeks at Birmingham, trying a dyspepsia cure, he lived with Irving at Pentonville, London, and paid a short visit to Paris. March 1825 saw him back; in Scotland, on his brother's farm, Hoddam Hill, near the Solway. Here for a year he worked hard at German translations, perhaps more serenely than before or after and free from that noise which was always a curse to his sensitive ear and which later caused him to build a sound-proof room in his Chelsea home.

Before leaving for London Irving had introduced Carlyle to Jane Baillie Welsh daughter of the surgeon, John Welsh, and descended from John Knox. She was beautiful, precociously learned, talented, and a brilliant mistress of cynical satire. Among her numerous suitors, the rough, uncouth

Reviews

[AndrewR.Swan]

Given how late in time this came in Carlyle's career, it seems to me this is a good summary of his doctrine in ways both explicit and implicit.

His explicit insights about work and divinity are evident enough: his stoic affirmations that the reward for work is work well done and so forth. His charge to the young men to learn the real value in keeping silent and always following any word up with action. All this goes some way to summing up his modern, stoic, aristocratic ideal.

There is another way in which this address shows his character implicitly. That is the fact that this is an oration to a crowd of young men who (we suppose) admire him; while it may be compared to a work he wrote around the same time: Sooting Niagara, and After? - a very dangerous book. The character of the orator and writer are distinct, one from the other. The orator is clear, authoritative, controlled, firm. The writer is sporadic, angry, obscure and illusive. One almost feels there is a secret the writer must not disclose or cannot disclose to the reader in plain words. It may be explained somewhat by his closing words on authorship: "if, for instance, you are going to write a book,- you cannot manage it (at least I never could) without getting decidedly made ill by it."

The parallels drawn between Carlyle and Nietzche are not erroneous: they both worshiped the superman with more or less the same apparent motives, but something shows here, I think, of Carlyle's character which marks him out from the German philologist. His understanding of the Christian value of reverence for lower and even baser things which he gets from Goethe: "to learn to recognise in pain, in sorrow and contradiction, even in those things, odious to flesh and blood, what divine meanings are in them; to learn that there lies in these also, and more than in any of the preceding, a priceless blessing." Carlyle did not have that acute weakness of spirit which made Nietzche despise the common and lowly. Perhaps that can be said, more than any of the preceding tests, the true mark of a great man.