Thomas Carlyle is the only English writer on whom German 
literature has exercised a direct and particularly significant influ- 
ence. Courtesy at the very least demands that a German should not 

let his writings pass without notice. 

The latest publication by Guizot (No. 2 of the N. Rh. Z.) has 
shown us that the intellectual powers of the bourgeoisie are in a 
process of decline. In the present two pamphlets by Carlyle we 
witness the decline of literary genius in historical struggles which 
have reached a point of crisis and against which it attempts to assert 
its unrecognised, direct, prophetic inspirations. 

To Thomas Carlyle belongs the credit of having taken the literary 
field against the bourgeoisie at a time when its views, tastes and ideas 
held the whole of official English literature totally in thrall, and ina 
manner which is at times even revolutionary. For example, in his 
history of the French Revolution, in his apology for Cromwell, in the 
pamphlet on Chartism and in Past and Present.” But in all these 
writings the critique of the present is closely bound up with a 
strangely unhistorical apotheosis of the Middle Ages, which is a 
frequent characteristic of other English revolutionaries too, for 
instance Cobbett and a section of the Chartists. Whilst he at least 
admires in the past the classical periods of a specific stage of society, 
the present drives him to despair and he shudders at the thought of 

the future. Where he recognises the revolution, or indeed apotheo- 
sises it, in his eyes it becomes concentrated in a single individual, a 
Cromwell or a Danton. He pays them the same hero-worship that he 
preached in his Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship? as the only 
refuge from a present pregnant with despair, as a new religion. 

Carlyle’s style is at one with his ideas. It is a direct violent reaction 
against the modern bourgeois English Pecksniffery, whose enervated 
affectedness, circumspect verbosity and vague, sentimentally moral 
tediousness has spread from the original inventors, the educated 
Cockneys, to the whole of English literature. In comparison, Carlyle 
treated the English language as though it were completely raw 
material which he had to cast utterly afresh. Obsolete expressions 
and words were sought out again and new ones invented, in the 
German manner and especially in the manner of Jean Paul. The new 
style was often in bad taste and hugely pretentious, but frequently 
brilliant and always original. In this respect too the Latter-Day 
Pamphlets represent a remarkable step backwards. 

It is, incidentally, characteristic that out of the whole of German 
literature the mind that had the greatest influence on Carlyle was not 
Hegel but the literary apothecary Jean Paul. 

In the cult of genius, which Carlyle shares with Strauss, the genius 
has got lost in the present pamphlets. The cult remains. 

The Present Time begins with the statement that the present is the 
child of the past and the parent of the future, but quite apart from 
that is a new era. 

The first manifestation of this new era is a reforming Pope. Gospel 
in hand, Pius IX set out to promulgate from the Vatican “the Law of 
Veracity” to Christendom. 

“More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory 
judicial notice [...] authentic order, registered in Heaven’s chancery and since legible 
in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,—to begone, and let us have no more 
to do with it and its delusions and impious deliriums;—and it has been sitting every 
day since [...] at its own peril [...], and will have to pay exact damages yet for every day 
it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was 
to give up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men; honestly to die; and 
get itself buried! Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook [...]; and yet 
on the whole it was essentially this too. Reforming Pope? [...] Turgot and Necker were 
nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man 
to take charge of it in hope, not in despair!” (P. 3.) 

With his manifestos of reform the Pope had aroused questions, 

“mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes..... Questions which all 
official men wished, and mostly hoped, to postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself 
had come; that was the terrible truth”. (P. 4.) 

The law of veracity was proclaimed. The Sicilians 

_ “were the first people that set about applying this new [...] rule sanctioned by the 
holy Father; [...] We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and these 
Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favour of Heaven and the Pope, be free of these”. — 

Hence the Sicilian Revolution. 

The French people, which considers itself as a kind of “Messiah 
people”, as “the chosen soldiers of liberty”, feared that the poor, 
despised Sicilians might take this trade* out of their hands—Feb- 
ruary Revolution. [Pp. 4-5.] 

“As if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, 
uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, 
amazing, and on the whole humiliating years the European world ever saw.... Kings 
everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole 
world bellowing in their ear, ‘Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off 
with you, off!’—-and, what was peculiar and heard of in this year for the first time, the 
Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, ‘We are poor histrios, we sure 
enough;—do you need heroes? Don’t kill us; we couldn’t help it!"— Not one of them 
turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, 
or to risk his skin upon.... That, I repeat, is the alarming peculiarity at present. 
Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Playactors. 
[...] They fled precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite 
ignominy,—1in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the 
populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open ‘kinglessness’,” what 
we call anarchy,— how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable!—is everywhere 
the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, 
France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. [...] 
And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King exeept the Public 
Haranguer, haranguing on barrelhead, in leading article; or assembling with his like 
in the National Parliament. And for about four months all France, and to a great 
degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of delirium [...] was a weltering mob, 
presided over by M. de Lamartine at the H6tel-de-Ville [....] A sorrowful spectacle to 
men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing 
in him but melodious wind and soft sowder [....] Sad enough: the most eloquent latest 
impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively 
that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons [...] 
must give up their gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a repulsively 
flabby manner before long.” (Pp. 6-8.) 

Who was it that kindled this universal revolution, the fuel for 
which was of course at hand? 

“Students, young men of letters, advocates, newspaper writers, hot inexperienced 
enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes [...]. Never till now did young 
men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time 
since the word Senior (Seigneur, or Elder) was first devised to signify lord or 
superior; —as in all languages of men we find it.... Looking more closely [...] you will 
find that the old has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a 
foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young 
boys [...]. This mad state of matters will of course before long allay itself, as it has 
everywhere begun to do; the ordinary necessities of men’s daily existence cannot 
comport with it, and these, whatever else is cast aside, will go their way. Some 
remounting [...] of the old machine, under new colours and altered forms, will 
probably ensue soon in most countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back 
under conditions, under Constitutions, with national Parliaments, or the like 
fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life will try to begin again. But 
there is now no hope that such arrangements can be permanent [...]. In such baleful 
oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not 
steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying; now 
disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,—till 
once the new rock-basis does come to light, and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of 
need to mutiny, abate again!” (Pp. 8-10.) 

So much for history, which even in this form offers the old world 
little comfort. Now for the moral. 

“For universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, is the inevitable fact of the 
days in which we live.” (P. 10.) 

What is democracy? It must have a meaning, or it would not exist. 
It is all a matter, then, of finding the true meaning of democracy. If 
we succeed in this, we can deal with it; if not, we are lost. The 
February Revolution was “a universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; 
that may be the brief definition of it”. (P. 14.) Counterfeit and falsities, 
“shams”, “delusions”, “phantasms”,’ instead of real relationships 
and things, names that have lost all meaning, in a word, lying instead 
of truth has held sway in modern times. Individual and social divorce 
from these falsities and phantoms, that is the task of reform, and the 
necessity of putting an end to all sham and deceit is not to be 
gainsaid. 

“Yet strange to many a man it may seem; and to many a solid Englishman, 
wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it 
seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with 
mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to 
plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,—what you in your iconoclast humour 
call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there 
was any getting-on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries 

and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of 
shams?” (P. 15.) 

Now will democracy accomplish this necessary reform, this 
liberation from shams? 

“Democracy, when it is organised by means of universal suffrage will itself 
accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, from false to true, 
and make a new blessed world by and by?” (P. 17.) 

Carlyle denies this. Indeed, he sees in general in democracy and in 
universal suffrage only a contagion of all nations by the superstitious 
English belief in the infallibility of parliamentary government. The 
crew of the ship that had lost its course round Cape Horn and, 
instead of keeping watch on wind and weather and using the sextant, 
voted on the course to be set, declaring the decision of the majority 
to be infallible—that is the universal suffrage that lays claim to 
steering the state. As for every individual, so for society it is just a 
matter of discovering the true regulations of the Universe, the 
everlasting laws of nature relative to the task in hand at each 
moment, and acting accordingly. Whoever reveals these eternal laws 
to us, him shall we follow, “were it the Russian Autocrat or Chartist 
Parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury or Grand Lama”. But 
how do we discover these eternal, divine precepts? At all events 
universal suffrage, which gives each man a ballot paper and counts 
heads, is the worst method of doing so. The Universe is of a very 
exclusive nature and has ever disclosed its secrets but to a few elect, a 
small minority of wis¢ and noble-minded alone. That is why no 
nation was ever able to exist on the basis of democracy. The Greeks 
and Romans? We all know today that theirs were no democracies, 
that slavery was the basis of their states. It is quite superfluous to 
speak of the various French Republics. And the Model Republic of 
North America? It cannot yet even be said of the Americans that they 
form a nation or a state. The American population lives without a 
government; what is there constituted is anarchy plus a street- 
constable. What makes this condition possible is the great area of yet 
unbroken land and the respect brought over from England for the 
constable’s baton. As the population grows, that too comes to an end. 

“What great human soul, what great thought, what great noble thing that one 
could worship, or loyally admire, has America yet produced?” (P. 25.) 

It has doubled its population every twenty years— voila tout. 

On this side of the Atlantic and on that, democracy is thus for ever 
impossible. The Universe itself is a monarchy and hierarchy. No 
nation in which the divine everlasting duty of directing and 

controlling the ignorant is not entrusted to the Noblest, with his select 
series of Nobler Ones, has the Kingdom of God, or corresponds to the 
eternal laws of nature. 

Now we are also apprised of the secret, the origin and the necessity 
of modern democracy. It consists simply in the fact that the 
sham-noble* has been raised up and consecrated by tradition or 
newly invented delusions. 

And who is to discover the true precious stone with all its setting of 
smaller human jewels and pearls? Certainly not universal suffrage, 
for only the noble can discern the noble. And so Carlyle affirms that 
England still possesses many such nobles and “kings”, and on p. 38 
he summons them to him. 

We see the “noble” Carlyle proceed from a thoroughly pantheistic 
mode of thinking. The whole process of history is determined not by 
the development of the living masses themselves, naturally dep- 
endent on specific but in turn historically created changing condi- 
tions, it is determined by an eternal law of nature, unalterable 
for all time, from which it departs today and to which it returns 
tomorrow, and on the correct apprehension of which everything 
depends. This correct apprehension of the eternal law of nature 
is the eternal truth, everything else is false. With this mode 
of thinking, the real class conflicts, for all their variety at various 
periods, are completely resolved into the one great and eternal 
conflict, between those who have fathomed the eternal law of 
nature and act in keeping with it, the wise and the noble, and 
those who misunderstand it, distort it and work against it, the 
fools and the rogues. The historically produced distinction be- 
tween classes thus becomes a natural distinction which itself 
must be acknowledged and revered as a part of the eternal law 
of nature, by bowing to nature’s noble and wise: the cult of genius. 
The whole conception of the process of historical development 
is reduced to the shallow triviality of the lore of the Illuminati 
and the Freemasons of the previous century, to the simple morality 
we find in the Magic Flute**’ and to an infinitely depraved and 
trivialised form of Saint-Simonism. And there of course we have the 
old question of who then should in fact rule, which is discussed at 
great length and with self-important shallowness and is finally 
answered to the effect that the noble, wise and knowledgeable should 
rule, which leads quite naturally to the conclusion that there would 
have to be a large amount, a very large amount of governing, and 

there could never be too much governing, for after all governing is 
the constant revelation and assertion of the law of nature vis-a-vis the 
masses. But how are the noble and the wise to be discovered? They 
are not revealed by any celestial miracle; they have to be looked for. 
And here the historical class distinctions which have been made into 
purely natural distinctions once more rear their heads. The noble 
man is noble because he is wise and knowledgeable. He will therefore 
have to be sought among the classes which have the monopoly of 
education—among the privileged classes, and it will be the same 
classes who will have to seek him out in their midst and to judge his 
claims to the rank of a noble and wise man. In so doing the privileged 
classes automatically become, if not precisely the noble and wise class, 
at least the “articulate” class; the oppressed classes are of course the 
“silent, inarticulate” and class rule is thereby sanctioned anew. All 
this highly indignant bluster turns out to be a thinly disguised 
acceptance of existing class rule whose sole grumble and complaint is 
that the bourgeoisie does not assign a position at the top of society to 
its unrecognised geniuses, and for highly practical reasons does not 
accede to the starry-eyed drivellings of these gentlemen. Carlyle 
incidentally provides us with striking examples of the way in whicn 
here too pompous cant becomes its opposite and the noble, 
knowledgeable and wise man is transformed in practice into a base, 
ignorant and foolish man. 

Since for him everything depends on strong government, he turns 
upon the cry for liberation and emancipation with extreme 
indignation: 

“Let us all be free of one another [...]. Free without bond or connexion except that 
of cash payment; fair day’s wages for the fair day’s work; determined by voluntary 
contract, and law of supply and demand: this is thought to be the true solution of 
all difficulties and injustices that have occurred between man and man. To rectify the 
relation that exists between two men, is there no method, then, but that of ending it?” 
(P. 29.) 

This complete dissolution of all bonds, all relationships between 
men naturally reaches its climax in anarchy, the law of lawlessness, the 
condition in which the bond of bonds, the government, is completely 
cut to pieces. And this is what people in England and on the 
Continent alike are striving towards, yes, even in “staid Germany”. 

Carlyle blusters on like this for several pages, lumping together 
Red Republic, fraternité, Louis Blanc, etc., in a most disconcerting 
way with free trade,* the abolition of the duty on corn, etc. (Cf. pp. 
29-42.) The destruction of the remnants of feudalism which are still 
preserved by tradition, the reduction of the state to what is 

unavoidably necessary and absolutely cheapest, the complete realisa- 
tion of free competition by the bourgeoisie, are thus mixed up 
together and identified by Carlyle with the elimination of these same 
bourgeois relations, with the abolition of the conflict between capital 
and wage labour, with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the 
proletariat. Brilliant return to the “Night of the Absolute” in which 
all cats are grey! Deep knowledge of the “knowledgeable man” who 
does not know the first thing about what is happening around him! 
Strange perspicacity which believes that with the abolition of 
feudalism or free competition, all relations between men are 
abolished! Unfathomable fathoming of the “eternal law of nature’”’, 
seriously believing that no more children will be born from the 
moment that the parents cease to go to the Mairie? first to “bind” 
themselves in matrimony! 

After this edifying example of a wisdom amounting to unmiti- 
gated ignorance, Carlyle goes on to demonstrate to us how 
high-principled nobility of character at once turns into undisguised 
baseness as soon as it descends from its heaven of sententious 
verbiage to the world of real relations. 

“In all European countries, especially in England, one class of Captains and 
commanders of men, recognisable as the beginning of a new, real and not imaginary 
Aristocracy, has already in some measure developed itself: the Captains of 
Industry; — happily the class who above all [...] are wanted in this time. [...] And surely, 
on the other hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad class of 
brother-men whom we have described as ‘Hodge’s emancipated horses’, reduced to 
roving famine, this too has in all countries developed itself and, in fatal geometrical 
progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity which alarms everyone. On 

this ground [...] it may be truly said, the Organisation of Labour [...] is the universal 
vital Problem of the world.” (Pp. 42, 43.) 

Carlyle having thus vented all his virtuous fury time and time 
again in the first forty pages against selfishness, free competition, 
the abolition of the feudal bonds between man and man, supply and 
demand, laissez-faire,” cotton-spinning, cash payment, etc., etc., we 
now suddenly find that the main exponents of all these shams, the 
industrial bourgeoisie, are not merely counted among the celebrated 
heroes and geniuses but even comprise the most indispensable part 
of these heroes, that the trump card in all his attacks on bourgeois 
relations and ideas is the apotheosis of bourgeois individuals. It 
appears yet odder that Carlyle, having discovered the commanders 
and the commanded of labour, in other words, a certain organisation 
of labour, nevertheless declares this organisation to be a great 
problem requiring solution. But one should not be deceived. It is not 

a question of the organisation of those workers who have been 
regimented, but of the organisation of those who are unregimented 
and captainless, and this Carlyle has reserved for himself. At the end 
of his pamphlet we suddenly see him in the role of the British Prime 
Minister in partibus,7 summoning together the three million Irish 
and other beggars, the able-bodied lackalls, nomadic or stationary, 
and the general assembly of British paupers, outside the workhouse” 
and inside the workhouse,” and “haranguing” them in a speech in 
which he first repeats to the lackalls everything that he has previously 
confided to the reader and then addresses the select company as 

follows: . 

“Vagrant Lackalls and Good-for-nothings, foolish most of you, criminal many of 
you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. [...] Here 
are some three millions of you [...]: so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of 
~ open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit that falls is loading so much more 
the chain that drags the others over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted 
millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1,200 a-day [...] falling, falling one after 
the other; and the chain is getting ever heavier [...] and who at last will stand? What to 
do with you?... The others that still stand have their own difficulties, I can tell 
you! —But you, by imperfect energy and redundant appetite, by doing too little work 
and drinking too much beer, you [...] have proved that you cannot do it! [...] Know 
that, whoever may be ‘sons of freedom’, you for your part are not and cannot be such. 
Not ‘free’ you, ... you palpably are fallen captive ... you are of the nature of slaves, or if 
’ you prefer the word, of nomadic [...] and vagabond servants that can find no master... 
Not as glorious unfortunate sons of freedom, but as recognised captives, as 
unfortunate fallen brothers requiring that I should command them, and if need were, 
control and compel them, can there henceforth be a relation between us.... Before 
Heaven and Earth, and God the Maker of us all, I declare it is a scandal to see sucha 
life kept in you, by the sweat and heart’s blood of your brothers; and that, if we cannot 
mend it, death were preferable!... Enlist in my Irish, my Scotch and English 
‘Regiments of the New Era’... ye poor wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, 
as all of us have had to do.... Industrial Colonels, Workmasters, Taskmasters, 
Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and inflexible as he: such [...] you do 
need; and such, you being once put under law as soldiers are, will be discoverable for 
you.... To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; strike into it with manlike, 
soldierlike obedience and heartiness, according to the methods I here dictate,— wages 
follow for you without difficulty.... Refuse, shirk the heavy labour, disobey the 
rules,—I will admonish and endeavour to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in 
vain, I will at last shoot you.” (Pp. 46-55.) 

The “ New Era’’, in which genius rules, is thus distinguished from 

. the old era principally by the fact that the whip imagines it possesses 
genius. The genius Carlyle is distinguished from just any prison. 

Cerberus or poor-law beadle by his virtuous indignation and the 
moral consciousness of flaying the paupers? only in order to raise 
them to his level. We here observe the high-principled genius in his 
world-redeeming anger fantastically justifying and exaggerating the 
infamies of the bourgeoisie. If the English bourgeoisie equated 
paupers? with criminals in order to create a deterrent to pauperism 
and brought into being the Poor Law of 1834,?° Carlyle accuses the 
paupers? of high treason because pauperism generates pauperism. 
Just as previously the ruling class that had arisen in the course of 
history, the industrial bourgeoisie, was privy to genius simply by 
virtue of ruling, so now any oppressed class, the more deeply it is 
oppressed, the more is it excluded from genius and the more is it 
exposed to the raging fury of our unrecognised reformer. So it is 
here with the paupers.* But his morally noble wrath reaches its 
highest peak with regard to those who are absolutely vile and 
ignoble, the “scoundrels”, i.e. criminals. He treats of these in the 
pamphlet on Model Prisons. 

This pamphlet is distinguished from the first only by a fury much 
greater, yet all the cheaper for being directed against those officially 
expelled from established society, against people behind bars; a fury 
which sheds even that little shame which the ordinary bourgeois still 
for decency’s sake display. Just as in the first pamphlet Carlyle erects 
a complete hierarchy of Nobles and seeks out the Noblest of the 
_ Noble, so here he arranges an equally complete hierarchy of 
scoundrels and villains and exerts himself in hunting down the worst 
of the bad, the supreme scoundrel in England, for the exquisite pleasure 
of hanging him. Assuming he were to catch him and hang him; then 
another will be our Worst and must be hanged in turn, and then 
another again, until the turn of the Noble and then the More Noble 
is reached and finally no one is left but Carlyle, the Noblest, who as 
persecutor of scoundrels is at once the murderer of the Noble and 
has murdered what is noble even in the scoundrels; the Noblest of 
the Noble, who is suddenly transformed into the Vilest of Scoundrels 
and as such must hang himself. With that, all questions concerning 
government, state, the organisation of labour, and the hierarchy of 
the Noble would be resolved and the eternal law of nature realised at 
last. |