For Carlyle, German literature was far more than a passing enthusiasm and the influence that it had upon him was to be a major factor throughout his literary career. The explication of this influence has had an almost fatal attraction for Carlyle scholars, both in this country and abroad, but it must never be underestimated. Its finer points are extremely complex, not to say confusing – Mill’s comment that Carlyle’s writings ‘seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics’ is very apt – but the central attraction for Carlyle of German Romanticism is clear enough: he responded above all to the emphasis which it places on the uniqueness of the individual experience set against the eternal and limitless perspectives of Time and Space. In the opening lecture of Heroes and Hero-Worship he defines the idea and attributes it to its source:

‘There is but one Temple in the Universe,’ says the devout Novalis, ‘and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form …’ This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so … We are the miracle of miracles, – the great inscrutable mystery of God.

At a period in Carlyle’s life when he was finding the religious literalism of his upbringing untenable he had thus discovered an authoritative mysticism that absolved him from the problems posed by explicitly Christian belief. On the title-page of Sartor Resartus he quotes a favourite couplet from Goethe:

Mein Vermächtnis, wie herrlich weit und breit

Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtnis, mein Acker ist die Zeit

(My inheritance, how lordly wide and fair,

Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir)

and while Sartor Resartus, that whimsical case-history of a tortured and triumphant soul, is the most obvious example of Carlyle’s debt to German Romanticism, the recurrence of this couplet at the conclusion of Chartism serves as a reminder of its effect on all aspects of Carlyle’s work. His reformulation of German thought was highly selective – he seems for instance to have been able to ignore the humanizing aspect of the mature Goethe’s concept of Bildung, and in particular its emphasis on the peaceful integration of the individual with society – and it was often sentimentalized and over-simplified, leading to excesses in his later years that can only be described as disastrous. At the outset of his career, however, Carlyle’s reading of German literature provided him with the opportunity to transform the morality of his Calvinist childhood, and gave him a unique insight into the limitations of that utilitarian self-assurance which, in intellectual circles at least, seemed at one time likely to dominate his age.

The transcendental element in Carlyle is clear in the opening pages of Signs of the Times, his first sustained essay on social issues:

The poorest Day that passes over us is the conflux of two Eternities; it is made up of currents that issue from the remotest Past and flow onwards into the remotest Future.

This emphasis on the infinite perspectives of the human situation gives point to the critique of Benthamite utilitarianism which is the main purpose of the essay: Carlyle is concerned not simply with a theoretical disquisition but with the affirmation of a faith which is not to be proscribed by a materialistic social philosophy. Written at a time when the effects of the industrial revolution were becoming clear, the essay gains also from Carlyle’s sense of the special nature of this point in time, and in particular from his acknowledgement of the possibilities inherent in technological change. There is nothing Luddite about Carlyle’s definition of the age as an ‘Age of Machinery’: having so categorized it he is quick to stress the positive side of the progress of technology:

What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on every one.

Whatever else may be said about Carlyle, in the early stages of his career, at least, he was not afraid to confront the realities of the world around him, and his positive response to change here is in courageous contrast to the alienation which was to become the standard response of so many of his artistic contemporaries. The advantages of ‘machinery’ however can only be achieved if man is master of the machine and not its servant, and Carlyle’s great complaint against the ‘Age of Machinery’ in Signs of the Times is that the machine has taken comprehensive control:

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also … Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, – for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

‘Not for internal perfection’ – the phrase reminds us of Matthew Arnold’s definition of the true source of culture in Culture and Anarchy almost forty years later, and there is much in both the spirit and the content of Signs of the Times that anticipates Arnold’s more famous essay. Signs of the Times, like Culture and Anarchy, was inspired by a period of agitation leading to a Reform Bill, and much of its quality comes from its re-creation of the tensions of that period. Social unrest and political instability are cited as symptomatic of what Carlyle recognizes as

… a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless grinding collision of the New with the Old …

and here again it is to Carlyle’s credit that he aligns himself positively, but not uncritically, with the modern:

Doubtless this age also is advancing. Its very unrest, its ceaseless activity, its discontent contain matter of promise. Knowledge, education are opening the eyes of the humblest; are increasing the number of thinking minds without limit. This is as it should be; for not in turning back, not in resisting, but only in resolutely struggling forward, does our life consist.

Signs of the Times, as well as being the first of Carlyle’s social essays, is in many ways the most effective of them, showing an open-mindedness that its author was rarely to achieve again. Stylistically too it is a success; the clear and confident prose of its concluding paragraphs is a measure of the quality of its arguments and gives no hint of the mystifying rhetoric which has come to be regarded as the characteristic Carlylean mode of expression. By the time of Chartism, written ten years later, the hints of hysteria are clear to see; in Latter-Day Pamphlets, written at the end of a further decade, hysteria is the predominant tone.

In Chartism, at least, the honesty of Carlyle’s confrontation with social realities still survives. It was part of Carlyle’s creed that the cataclysmic events of history were both predestined and an inevitable consequence of human self-deception, hence his life-long obsession with the French Revolution as the archetypal historical exemplum. In Chartism he argues that

… These Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe Bill, and infinite other discrepancy, and acrid argument and jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution: God grant that we, with our better methods, may be able to transact it by argument alone.

The sense of historical perspective is reinforced throughout the essay by the kind of humanitarian feeling that was to inspire Past and Present, and that is an essential part of the Carlylean paradox. In Chartism Carlyle’s observations on the operation of the New Poor Law, for example, and on the state of affairs in Ireland, give substance to his famous ‘Condition of England’ question in the opening chapter:

Is the condition of the English working people wrong; so wrong that rational working men cannot, will not, and even should not rest quiet under it?

The force of that ‘rational’ is considerable: put in this way the question clearly assumes an affirmative answer and here, and in his comments, for example, on the way in which, as a consequence of laissez-faire economics, ‘Cash payment’ has come to be ‘the universal sole nexus of man to man’, Carlyle shows an insight that is valuably reinforced by this emotional involvement.

I have referred, however, to the ‘Carlylean paradox’, and in Chartism Carlyle’s emotional involvement is in fact of a very ambiguous kind. At its best it suggests a genuinely humanitarian commitment, but when it is combined with speculations on the proper basis of human relationships which owe much to the less fortunate aspects of Carlyle’s debt to German philosophy its dangers become apparent. When Carlyle writes, for example, that, in the past ‘it was something other than money that the high expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low’ he invites tentative agreement: when he writes of social disturbances that they are

… Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain … inarticulate prayers: ‘Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!’

and continues:

Surely of all ‘rights of man,’ this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly [my italics] held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest …

it is clear that he is already on the road to the brutalistic authoritarianism of The Nigger Question and Latter-Day Pamphlets. Chartism is a particularly interesting essay in that it demonstrates so clearly the best and worst of Carlyle, both in its content and in its style: after the powerful opening chapters analyzing the condition of England on the eve of the ‘hungry forties’ it deteriorates into speculative and often fanciful rant. Even the two solutions of Education and Emigration which Carlyle suggests in his final chapter are indicative of his social schizophrenia. The first is a valid response to a genuine social need, the second an extension of a spurious racial interpretation of history outlined in an earlier chapter.

In Chartism we have for the first time in Carlyle a sustained attack on the ideal of democracy:

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business; and gives in the long-run a net result of zero … Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling of itself … it abrogates the old arrangement of things; and leaves, as we say, zero and vacuity for the institution of a new arrangement … The relation of the taught to their teacher, of the loyal subject to his guiding king, is, under one shape or another, the vital element of human Society; indispensable to it, perennial in it; without which, as a body reft of its soul, it falls down into death, and with horrid noisome dissolution passes away and disappears.

Carlyle’s theory of the pre-eminence of the Hero, a legacy of transcendentalism that he could well have done without, recurs in one form or another in all of his work from this date. It is defined in its most explicit form at the beginning of Heroes and Hero-Worship:

I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress towards final ruin; – all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it.