CORNER IN DRAWING-ROOM AT 5, CHEYNE ROW,with Carlyle’s Reading Chair, given him by John ForsterDrawn by R. Gray from a photograph by C. Baly(1881)(Reproduced from Reginald Blunt’s “The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home,” by kind permission of the author)
When a literary man is known to have been almost a monster of industry, when he has produced a colossal epic like “Frederick the Great” on the dullest of all earthly subjects—Germany in the eighteenth century—when he has piled up all the complicated material of the history of the French Revolution, lost it, and by a portent of heroism piled it all up again; when he has achieved such masterpieces of research as the discovery of sense in Cromwell’s speeches, and good qualities in Frederick of Prussia: when an author has done all this, it may seem a singular comment upon him to say that his main characteristic was a lack of patience. But this was in reality the chief weakness, in fact the only real weakness, of Carlyle as a moralist. It is very much easier to have what may be called moralpatience or mental patience than to have something which may best be described as spiritual patience. Carlyle was patient with facts, dates, documents, intolerably wearisome memoirs; but he was not patient with the soul of man. He was not patient with ideas, theories, tendencies, outside his own philosophy. He never understood, and therefore persistently undervalued, the real meaning of the idea of liberty, which is a faith in the growth and life of the human mind; vague indeed in its nature, but transcending in its magnitude even our faith in our own faiths. He was something of a Tory, something of a Sans-culotte, something of a Puritan, something of an Imperialist, something of a Socialist; but he was never, even for a single moment,a Liberal. He did not believe as the Liberal believes, first indeed in his own truth, which in his eyes is pure truth, but beyond that also in that mightier truth which is made up of a million lies.