A. L. Rowse on Thomas Carlyle

“If you want one great name in English literature that sums up all that England does not stand for, a bitter spirit, sour, an extravagant, a worshipper of force and of the führerprinzip, it can be said in one name: Carlyle.”

“In the first place that appalling style, with its repetitiveness, its overemphasis, its perpetual note of adjuration, its shrillness and exaggeration, with no soft tones at all, the trumpets always braying and that rather discordantly: it makes him almost impossible to read... Yet for all his defects Carlyle was unmistakably a man of genius. He was that very unattractive kind of genius, a prophet. All prophets are misfits; and that throws a flood of light on the source and conditioning of their "message".”

“Carlyle appealed to the conscience and political interest of the rulers; Marx and Engels did their best to organise the workers to push themselves. (They must have been wonderfully disillusioned after a lifetime of entertaining such hopes of them.) Carlyle, with more immediate point, tells the ruling class that since they are in possession of the land, they owe it good governance; and if they did not do their duty, worse consequences would follow. He always had the vision of the French Revolution at the back of his mind.”

“Liberty he attached less importance to than economic security: in that a true man of the people. "Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine." It is here that Carlyle links up with the socialist trend of thought in his age.”