CARLYLE, THOMAS. - Scottish writer, b. at Ecclefechan on 4 Dec. 1795 and d. in London on 4 Feb. 1881. After failed attempts to devote himself to an ecclesiastical career and, later, to that of a lawyer, he faced a hard life with elementary teaching and collaboration on various journals.
His first volumes, the translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1824) and The Life of Schiller (1825), demonstrate his tendency toward German culture, which also dominates in Sartor Resartus (1833-34, in volume in 1838: a kind of spiritual autobiography, built on the philosophy of clothes - a search for what is transitory and fictitious, and for what is substantial and eternal in the world) and in the History of Frederick II of Prussia (1858-65). In 1865 C. was named rector of the University of Edinburgh. His fame as a historian, begun with The French Revolution (1837), was reaffirmed with Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845). In 1841 he published the lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), which encapsulate his anti-democratic conception of history understood as the creation of superior spirits. In Past and Present (1843), to the sad present, created by the economic and social revolution, he counterposed the happy Middle Ages, configured above all in the orderly community of its monks. Everything he saw around him sharpened his irritation and inspired the fury of his writing, which included in its condemnation both the Oxford movement and Darwin's researches. As for Christ and Christianity, C. had the good taste not to include Jesus among his human heroes. Chesterton thus defined C.'s religion: «... he truly had a certain sympathy for the enormous and vague gods of that sad but virile religion of nature which seems to have filled the darkness of the north before the coming of the Roman Eagle or the Christian Cross. This was united in him, account being taken of certain skeptical omissions, with the terrible God of the Old Testament, of whom he had heard speak in the Sunday lands of his infancy; and so he proclaimed (against rationalists as against Catholics) a kind of pagan Puritanism: Protestantism, deprived of its Christian elements».