A History of English Literature

compensation for its inaccuracies.
THOMAS CARLYLE. The intense spiritual striving which was so foreign to
Macaulay's practical nature first appears among the Victorians in the
Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, a social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and
prose-poet, one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating of
all English writers. The descendant of a warlike Scottish Border clan and
the son of a stone-mason who is described as 'an awful fighter,' Carlyle
was born in 1795 in the village of Ecclefechan, just across the line from
England, and not far from Burns' county of Ayr. His fierce, intolerant,
melancholy, and inwardly sensitive spirit, together with his poverty,
rendered him miserable throughout his school days, though he secured,
through his father's sympathy, a sound elementary education. He tramped on
foot the ninety miles from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh University, and
remained there for four years; but among the subjects of study he cared
only for mathematics, and he left at the age of seventeen without receiving
a degree. From this time for many years his life was a painful struggle, a
struggle to earn his living, to make a place in the world, and to find
himself in the midst of his spiritual doubts and the physical distress
caused by lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in various
places he taught school and received private pupils, for very meager wages,
latterly in Edinburgh, where he also did literary hack-work. He had planned
at first to be a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered
this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the
most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study
of German and his absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant,
Schelling, and Fichte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, and
the subtile influence of Richter. A direct result was his later very
fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work in turning the attention of
Englishmen to German thought and literature. In 1821 he passed through a
sudden spiritual crisis, when as he was traversing Leith Walk in Edinburgh
his then despairing view of the Universe as a soulless but hostile
mechanism all at once gave way to a mood of courageous self-assertion. He
afterward looked on this experience as a spiritual new birth, and describes
it under assumed names at the end of the great chapter in 'Sartor Resartus'
on 'The Everlasting No.'
In 1825 his first important work, a 'Life of Schiller,' was published, and
in 1826 he was married to Miss Jane Welsh. She was a brilliant but quiet
woman, of social station higher than his; for some years he had been acting
as counselor in her reading and intellectual development. No marriage in
English Literature has been more discussed, a result, primarily, of the
publication by Carlyle's friend and literary executor, the historian J. A.
Froude, of Carlyle's autobiographical Reminiscences and Letters. After Mrs.
Carlyle's death Carlyle blamed himself bitterly for inconsiderateness
toward her, and it is certain that his erratic and irritable temper, partly
exasperated by long disappointment and by constant physical misery, that
his peasant-bred lack of delicacy, and his absorption in his work, made a
perpetual and vexatious strain on Mrs. Carlyle's forbearance throughout the
forty years of their life together. The evidence, however, does not show
that the marriage was on the whole really unfortunate or indeed that it was
not mainly a happy one.
For six years beginning in 1828 the Carlyles lived on (though they did not
themselves carry on) the lonely farm of Craigenputtock, the property of
Mrs. Carlyle. This was for both of them a period of external hardship, and
they were chiefly dependent on the scanty income from Carlyle's laborious
work on periodical essays (among which was the fine-spirited one on Burns).
Here Carlyle also wrote the first of his chief works, 'Sartor Resartus,'