The great man, with his free force direct out of God’s own hand, is the lightning.

The ‘heroes’ of Heroes and Hero-Worship are in fact a demonstration of the enduring strength of Carlyle’s Calvinism: Luther and John Knox are his examples of the ‘Hero as Priest’, while Cromwell, to whom he was to return at length in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, precedes Napoleon as ‘Hero as King’. The most tactful, one might almost say persuasive, embodiment of the idea is the figure of Abbot Sampson in Past and Present; by the time of Latter-Day Pamphlets it has become so obsessive that specific reference, with the exception of a parenthetical apostrophe to Sir Robert Peel, seems to have been considered unnecessary. Ironically Carlyle was eventually caught in his own trap: in Frederick the Great he was to choose a hero so unsuitable for the role that he was to spend the seven worst years of his life trying to make him presentable.

Carlyle’s theory of the hero can obviously be traced to the influence upon him of German thought, and in particular that of Fichte, but his application of the theory to the problems posed by the limitations of democracy is a direct consequence of his relentless opposition to utilitarianism in any form. In an early passage in Chartism he derides the science of statistics:

… With what serene conclusiveness a member of some Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth with a figure of arithmetic!

The derision is echoed in his strictures on bureaucracy in Latter-Day Pamphlets, which anticipates the Circumlocution Office in Dickens’s Little Dorrit by some seven years. We are familiar enough in our own day with complaints of this kind, and indeed it is easy to see why they attract a sympathetic response. But the weakness of Carlyle’s case here is that ‘statistical enquiry’, painfully slow a process though it may be, and much as its results may disturb our preconceptions, is an essential means towards social enlightenment – indeed this has perhaps never been more effectively demonstrated than at the very time when Carlyle was deriding its pretensions – while an elected legislature, and a specialist Civil Service, are essential instruments of government. They are imperfect instruments indeed, but the only alternatives, as Carlyle so clearly, if not always wittingly, demonstrates, are anarchy or, ultimately, dictatorship. If Carlyle is to be attacked, however, on the grounds of his adulation of authority, it must be remembered that this aspect of his development is a direct consequence of his rejection of the powers of reason. If his case has a particular relevance for us today it is because it demonstrates so clearly the dangers to which utopian anti-rationalism is prone. Carlyle’s dismissal of democracy throughout Latter-Day Pamphlets, and indeed his singling out of universal suffrage for especial parody as the representative aspect of nineteenth-century constitutional aspirations, is in fact a turning away from the complexity of issues whose difficulties he himself had done so much to define.

The issue of Carlyle’s ‘fascism’ is one that has been rendered inescapable by the events of the twentieth century. Certainly guilt by association is easily demonstrated: Carlyle undoubtedly appealed to fascist ideologists in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and both in Italy and in Germany he was heralded as a prophet of their cause. More dramatically we know that Hitler himself took Frederick the Great with him into the Berlin bunker, but one might reasonably claim that it was the subject as much as the author of the work which attracted him. At a more serious level there is plenty in the work of Carlyle to have attracted this following: to his obsession with the hero and his offensive dismissal of philanthropic humanitarianism in, for example, the second of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, can be added his amateurish dabbling in racial theory, with his elevation of the ‘Teutonic’ races and his contempt for the Irish, the Negroes, and Jews. The case is a damning one and, in that his more intelligent contemporaries, like Mill and Arnold, give evidence of having sensed it, it can hardly be evaded by the rather easy apology that Carlyle had not seen fascism in action. What can be said, I think, is that the obsessive recurrence of these elements in Carlyle’s work, particularly in the later stages of his literary career, suggests not ideological belief but rather psychological disturbance and intellectual deterioration. Nothing is more remarkable in Carlyle than the way in which he simply stopped thinking: it is indicated by the way in which certain examples, and indeed phrases and sentences, recur throughout his work. When one first reads Carlyle the impression is of a wonderfully, in every sense of the word, stocked mind. The more of him one reads, the more one realizes that his arsenal of bizarre allusions is in fact deceptive, for the same references are used time and again to the point of cliché: Carlyle in fact is talking to himself in a language which he invented and which ultimately only he understands.

I have concentrated so far in this Introduction on Carlyle the social theorist rather than on Carlyle the historian, since it is in that role, I suspect, that his most immediate interest lies for us today. Carlyle himself, of course, would scarcely have acknowledged the distinction and, as I have suggested, the two aspects of his career, properly speaking, are inseparable. To his contemporaries, however, he was first and foremost the author of The French Revolution – ‘Mr Carlyle’s wonderful book’, as Dickens described it – and in so far as his work can be categorized his most substantial undertakings, The French Revolution, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches and Frederick the Great, are all the consequence of his belief, stated in his essay On History Again, that: ‘History is not only the fittest study but the only study, and includes all others whatsoever.’

Historiographically, Carlyle is a freak. The late Professor Cobban, in a judgement that bears repeating, has commented:

The examiners of a modern doctoral thesis, confronted with a history on Carlyle’s pattern, would greet the phenomenon with consternation; while Gibbon, if he could have read it, might have recanted his faith that the days of the Goths and Vandals could not come again.

(‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’, History, 48, 1963)

More specifically, at a time when the study of history, conforming with the general intellectual trends of the nineteenth century, was becoming increasingly scientific and aiming above all at academic objectivity, Carlyle, in accordance with his own transcendentalist priorities, believed in a philosophy of history that was inspirational rather than rational, subjective rather than objective, impressionistic rather than precise. For the scrupulously scientific historian he had a simple term of contempt – ‘Dryasdust’ – and he dismisses his activities in a memorable passage in Past and Present:

Alas, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and Philosophy of History; till, as we say, the human soul sinks wearied and bewildered; till the Past Time seems all one infinite incredible gray void, without sun, stars, hearth-fires, or candle-light; dim offensive dust-whirlwinds filling universal Nature; and over your Historical Library, it is as if all the Titans had written for themselves: DRY RUBBISH SHOT HERE!

(Book Two, Ch. 2)

The anomalous nature of Carlyle’s historiographical position can be explained by the fact that his own conception of history was such as to take it out of the region of history altogether. History, for Carlyle, was the pre-eminent study because it was nothing less, in transcendental terms, than the revelation in this world of the Divine Purpose, while the agents of the Divine Purpose are the individual lives of which history is composed. The two ideas are combined in a passage in Sartor Resartus:

Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine BOOK OF REVELATIONS, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named HISTORY; to which inspired Texts your numerous talented men, and your innumerable untalented men, are the better or worse exegetic Commentaries, and wagonload of too-stupid, heretical or orthodox, weekly Sermons. For my study, the inspired Texts themselves!

(Book Two, Ch. 8)

The concept, of course, is yet another consequence of Carlyle’s involvement with German philosophy, but it is interesting to see how it allows, for a lapsed Calvinist, belief both in predestination – ‘Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined and inevitable in the Time come’, as Carlyle writes in his essay On History – and in individual responsibility. The ‘Great Men’ of history are both an inspiration in themselves, and a reminder of the failings of others, a constant object-lesson for the mortal reader. As Longfellow was to put it in a verse beloved of Victorian schoolmasters:

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, in passing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

Carlyle’s belief in the especial significance of history meant quite clearly the abandonment of any pretence of comprehensive objectivity. What matters above all in history is the message which history has for the here and now: all else is irrelevant.