Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) is devoted to his theory of the ‘Great Man’ which was later to find expression in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845) and ultimately in the monumental History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great (1858–65). In Past and Present (1843) he compares the world around him, to its considerable disadvantage, with that of a twelfth-century monastic community, while in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), which was preceded by his notorious essay The Nigger Question, he berates what he saw as the social paralysis of mid-Victorian England, excoriating contemporary philanthropic panaceas with a virulence bordering on the insane. What was wanted, Carlyle cried, was not material assistance but spiritual regeneration:

These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final.

(Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I)

As Carlyle aged he became steadily more withdrawn, despite the increasing violence of his utterance. The more extravagant developments in his thinking disturbed even his greatest admirers and he became convinced, not without reason, that his apocalyptic warnings were being ignored. After the death, in 1866, of his wife Jane Welsh, who had endured and sustained him for forty years, he wrote very little for publication: a final pamphlet, Shooting Niagara: and After?, occasioned by the prospect of the Second Reform Bill of 1867, is the saddest of all literary reactions to that symbolic event. Froude records that in 1870 Carlyle lost the use of his right hand: this too has its own unhappy appropriateness. And yet, if Carlyle contended both in public and in private with the demons of anarchy and chaos, he remained a man who never lost the sympathy of his friends. Browning, for one, protested on his death that he was the most tender-hearted of men. Something of this quality is found in his biography of his friend John Sterling (1851), and finally in his Reminiscences, autobiographical fragments which he gathered together after the death of his wife. These memoirs, rambling and sometimes confused, nevertheless give a moving demonstration of Carlyle’s feelings towards people he had loved and admired in his early life – his father, his wife, his friend Edward Irving, and his first patron, Lord Jeffrey. Froude’s decision to publish them shortly after Carlyle’s death led to considerable controversy at the time but it has proved to our advantage, for they reveal a little-known aspect of Carlyle, the private communings of the public voice. For almost fifteen years that voice had been virtually silent when he died in 1881: born in the same year as Keats, he had lived on, albeit unknowingly, into the age of Hardy and Henry James.

The awe, mingled sometimes with suspicion, which Carlyle inspired in his contemporaries can to some extent be explained in terms of his very strangeness to them. His unshakeable moral conviction, born of his Calvinist upbringing, is markedly different from the humanistic and ultimately literary attitudes of writers like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold; less discriminating, it was more self-convinced, and Carlyle himself was uncompromising about the literary scene on his first visit to London. Writing to Jane Welsh he complains:

Coleridge is sunk inextricably in the depths of putrescent indolence. Southey and Wordsworth have retired far from the din of this monstrous city: so has Thomas Moore. Whom have we left? … Poor De Quincey … Vanity and opium have brought him to the state of ‘dog distract or monkey sick’ … Hazlitt is writing his way through France and Italy. The ginshops and pawnbrokers bewail his absence … ‘Good heavens!’ I often inwardly exclaim, ‘and is this the literary world?’ This rascal rout, this dirty rabble, destitute not only of high feeling and knowledge or intellect, but even of common honesty … They are only things for writing articles.

(Froude, Carlyle’s Early Life, Vol. I, Ch. 15)

To the end of his life Carlyle referred constantly back to the Scots peasant tradition which he insisted had made him what he was, and undoubtedly that tradition provided him with a distinctive kind of insight into the industrial and metropolitan world in which he chose to live.

If Carlyle’s background makes for distinctiveness from the Victorian literary world he is distinctive in another, and perhaps more telling way. As Professor Willey has pointed out, he was the Romantic who lived on, and to understand his thinking we have to set it not against that of Victorian social commentators like Arnold and Ruskin, but against that of the great Romantic figures of the earlier part of the century. His strictures on intellectual sophistication, on what he calls ‘dilletantism’, compare with those of Wordsworth on ‘this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads; his opposition to the over-valuation of the rational with not only Wordsworth, but also Blake. Like Wordsworth and Blake he mistrusted the claims of Newtonian science and the ‘enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, and to the end of his career he never ceased to inveigh against a time ‘so steeped in falsity’ that ‘a French Revolution had to end it’. In the opening chapter of Frederick the Great Carlyle defines his own chronological perspectives when, after attacking the eighteenth century as a ‘Century spendthrift; fraudulent-bankrupt; gone at length utterly insolvent,’ he continues:

‘And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?’ cries the reader. Yes, reader! truly. It is the grand out of which we ourselves have sprung; whereon now we have our immediate footing; – and, alas, in large sections of the practical world, it … still continues flourishing all round us! To forget it quite is not yet possible, nor would be profitable.

Carlyle never did ‘forget it quite’, and this perhaps accounts for the way in which his career became, in many ways, a continuous process of decline. His attacks on utilitarianism, for example, in Signs of the Times, and on laissez-faire economics in Chartism, are effective because he is attacking genuine manifestations of the rationalist ethic; the further he gets in time from the century which he detested the more difficult the enemy is for him to define.

The Romantic must needs find his own religion. If, like his fellow Romantics, Carlyle posits a distinction between the specious realities of the material world and the ultimate truths that lie behind them, he also discovered a personal philosophical structure through which those truths could be expressed. ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe’ he exclaims in Sartor Resartus; the transcendentalism of the great German idealist poets and philosophers whom he read as a young man – Schiller, Jean Paul Richter, Goethe, Fichte, Kant, Novalis – provided him with both a source of inspiration and a mode of expression.

Carlyle began the study of German in 1819 and by 1824 he had become sufficiently proficient to have published his translation of Wilhelm Meister. In his various translations, in his biography of Schiller and in the essays for the reviews which he wrote at this formative stage of his career Carlyle can justly claim to be considered as the first serious interpreter to British audiences of what until then had been very much a coterie interest.