"....distinguished at the time [aged 15, a student at Edinburgh University] by the same peculiarities that still mark his character - sarcasm, irony, extravagant sentiment, and a strong tendency to undervalue others, combined however with great kindness of heart and great simplicity of manner." Thomas Murray, a fellow student, written 1849
"You are so dreadfully in earnest." His friend, Francis Jeffrey
'And now my dear friend, a long, long adieu, one advice, and as a parting one, consider - value it. Cultivate the milder disposition of your heart, subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintances they are already beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners; deal gently with their inferiority, and be convinced they will respect you as much and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in your heart?' -Miss Gordon, his first love, writing to break of their relationship, in 1818:
'You mystics will not be contented with kindness and reasonable notions in anybody - but you must have gifts and tasks and duties - and relations with the universe, and strugglings to utter forth the truth - God help you and your vain-glorious jargon.' Francis Jeffrey, letter to TC, 10.1828, after visiting him at Craigenputtoch
"It pains me to discover, gradually, that his books are everything and their author nothing. Nor can I discover a single virtue in him, no sense of the beautiful, the good. He writes for humanity, and human beings mean nothing to him. He hates the aristocracy and worships an aristocrat. He talks of the freedom of nations, and wants to rule them all with a sword......Today he builds a temple to one idea right up to the clouds, only to tear it down tomorrow. It is always paradoxes that he offers, and because he alone defends them, and is never contradicted, he is always one-sided." Amalie Boelte - letter of 1846 - CL 22/xi
"What a growler he was!" Walt Whitman
"Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and has left us there." Arthur Clough to Emerson, 1848.
"My dearest Papa." John Ruskin, aged 53
"Part man of genius - part fanatic - and part tom-fool." Matthew Arnold, 1857
""English atheist, who made it a point of honour not to be one." Friedrich Nietzsche
"It (Carlyle's Reminiscences) contains however a true picture of the man himself, with his independence, ruggedness and egotism, and the absolute disregard and indifference about everybody but himself. He was not a philosopher at all to my mind, for I do not think that he ever clearly thought out a subject for himself. His power of expression outran his real intelligence, and constantly determined his opinion; while talking about shams, he was himself the greatest of shams!" Benjamin Jowett in a letter of 1881
Carlyle ‘never set out from premises and reasoned his way to conclusions, but habitually dealt in intuitions and dogmatic assertions.’ J S Mill - Autobiography
"He drove with us to Sloane Square, talking with energetic melancholy to the last." -Caroline Fox, Journal, 1847
"The other day he was, as often, pouring out the fulness [sic] of his indignation at the quackery and speciosity of the times. He wound up by saying, 'When I look at this, I determine to cast all tolerance to the winds.' Sterling quickly remarked, 'My dear fellow, I had no idea you had any to cast'." Caroline Fox - Journal, 18July, 1840
"One sometimes feels provoked - 'You have had your say, and I'll say my say, not yours over again, great as you are!'" Wm Allingham - Journal, 1872 - his thoughts, not spoken aloud!
"Carlyle called today - his humour runs into everything; hearty laugh, excellent company - has always something memorable to say in choice language." Emerson, 1872
"He was fierce and uncompromising. To those who saw but the outside of him he appeared scornful, imperious and arrogant. He was stern in his judgment of others.....insincerity ..he could never pardon.....He would not condescend to the conventional politenesses....He called things by their right names, and in a dialect edged with sarcasm.....His temper had been ungovernable from his childhood; he had the irritability of a dyspeptic man of genius....he who preached so wisely on 'doing the duty which lay nearest to us', forgot his own instructions....He was always sad: often gloomy in the extreme." Froude, long-standing friend, his first and greatest biographer, summing up the first volume of his biography
"A heaver of rocks and not a Shaper." George Meredith
Mrs Oliphant: 'Mr Carlyle alone, of all his peers, seems to have
trodden the straight way.'
Mrs Carlyle: 'My dear, if Mr Carlyle's digestion had been better there
is no telling what he might have done.' -Mrs Oliphant, 1881
"I'll never mew about it, like Carlyle." John Ruskin, of Old Age.
'I see the prophet pretty often myself and am almost equally repelled and attracted by him. Personally, indeed, I am simply attracted, for he is a really noble old cove, and by far the best specimen of the literary gent we can at present produce. He has grown milder too with age. But politically and philosophically he talks a good deal of what I call nonsense. He is indeed a genuine poet and a great humorist, which makes even his nonsense attractive in its way....He could not be made reasonable without ceasing to be Carlyle, so we must take what he can give and be grateful.' Sir Leslie Stephen, 1872.
‘That double-barrelled coxcomb, Carlyle.’ Lord Clarendon, Viceroy to Ireland, 1849, on Carlyle’s Irish trip.
Carlyle 'talked much and strongly about silence.' W B Hodgson, educationalist, 1844.
'If he spoke English and attended to the rules of good breeding, his charm for the mass of his admirers would disappear.' Anon. contemporary, quoted Johnson, E.
Of the Carlyles: 'A stern, laborious, plebeian family of Lowland Scots - with its remote Teutonic affiliations, its coarseness, its narrowness.' Havelock Ellis, quoted Johnson, E.
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