Sublime

In his first important attempt at social commentary, “Signs of the Times” (1829), Carlyle noticed that society’s drift toward efficiency and uniformity had penetrated to the deepest layers of the human psyche: “For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in h

In his 1906 edition of Carlyle’s history, John Holland Rose cogently defined Carlyle’s achievement: “[He] asserted that no visible and finite object had ever spurred men on to truly great and far-reaching movements. Only the invisible and the infinite could do that” (1:xiv).

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, what Carlyle wanted was not a world in which everyone was financially equal, but one in which both the elite and the poor would merit their inequalities. ‘Europe requires a real aristocracy,’ he wrote, ‘only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.’ What Carlyle wanted – tho

The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kön-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes;—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say!

What the prophets were to morality, so too were the poets to beauty.