CARLYLE'S PERSONALITY


 

Description

        The psychiatrist speculating about the defenceless dead must proceed circumspectly, and establish the evidence before offering any theories about it. This is a descriptive section, giving an account of Carlyle's personality with no attempt to explain it in terms of any personality theory.
    Carlyle had personality traits widely different from the average, and hence abnormal in a statistical sense. This does not imply that he was sick or ill. Carlyle's adult personality was formed by the age of fifteen, and altered little until late in life. This simplifies its description, although the massive inconsistencies between what he preached and what he practised make for difficulties.
 
 

Sources

        There are three main sources of information about his personality. Firstly, his own writings, especially in his letters and journal; secondly, his wife's letters to her husband and others; and thirdly the reminiscences, journals and correspondence of friends and acquaintances. All three have problems.
Carlyle himself is obviously a biased source, but revelatory in what he says, as opposed to what he does. His journal is gloomy and depressive at all times, and his niece claimed that, at least in his latter years, he brought out his journal and started to write only when he was in a gloomy frame of mind.
    Jane is hardly less biased. In all her correspondence she is anxious to write an entertaining letter and always successful; but she is liable to embroider her stories, or at times to exaggerate her husband's faults. And yet their massive correspondence is invaluable.
    His friends are a more reliable source, but most of them recorded their encounters with him when he had become famous; there is less information of this kind about the first half of his life. There are many of these accounts, and they can be compared for bias. One of the most important sources is Froude, not because he was Carlyle's first and best biographer, but because he saw Carlyle frequently for many years and was his confidant.
 
 

Appearance

         The best-known photographs and portraits are deceptive. They show him in later life, bearded; but Carlyle did not grow a beard until he made a light hearted agreement with Lord Ashburton that if one grew a beard the other must follow. This was during the Crimean War when beards suddenly became fashionable. The troops had grown them in the Crimean winter, and returned home sporting them. In October 1854, Ashburton returned from abroad bearded, and held Carlyle to his promise, aided by Jane, who removed his razors.
    He had then been clean shaven for over fifty eight years and was still a handsome man. He was tall - 5ft 11" - at a time when average heights were much shorter than today. He was always lean in face and body. He had violet-tinged eyes, whose brightness many remarked on. His thick brown hair became grey and untidy in later life. He was upright until very late in life, when he developed a pronounced stoop.
    At times his face was so thin he seemed gaunt. He had an elongated head on a thin neck. His chin and lower lip protruded; he kept his mouth clenched tight when not speaking.
    He dressed in a plain and unfashionable way, remaining loyal throughout his London years to his Ecclefechan village tailor and to shirts made by family members .
 
 

Speech, Conversation and Social Behaviour

        He had a pronounced Lowland Scots accent, probably little different from that to be heard today in rural Dumfriesshire. He retained it throughout his life in London, and it was often remarked upon, but tolerated as one of his eccentricities. He continued to use many dialect words in dealings with his wife and family and in correspondence with them. As a student at Edinburgh his 'provincial intonation was then very remarkable - his speech was copious and bizarre' (T Murray). When he was seventy-four Queen Victoria noted his 'broad Scotch accent'.
    He was famous as a conversationalist, but descriptions make it evident that, in public at leas, the gave monologues. Froude says: 'I had been accustomed to hear him impatient of contradiction, extravagantly exaggerative, overbearing opposition with bursts of scornful humour. In private I found him impatient of nothing but of being bored; gentle, quiet, tolerant; badly-humoured, but never ill-tempered; ironical, but wihout the savageness, and when speaking of persons always scrupulously just.' Emerson, a disciple and admirer, said: 'He is as dangerous as a madman. Nobody knows what he will say next, or whom he will strike. Prudent people keep out of his way.'
    He was loquacious in company, dominating the company, a trait that became worse as he grew older. His harangues were sometimes amusing, but latterly often inappropriate for his audience and caused offence. For tiresome American visitors he had prepared outrageous monologues - they wanted to be shocked, and he obliged. Often he would unleash a stream of invective, then burst out laughing at himself. Unfortunately there are few faithful transcriptions of his conversations but his later ranting style can be surmised from the tone of the Latter Day Pamphlets.
    Thackeray attended his lectures : 'rough, broken, wavering and sometimes almost weak and abortive; but full throughout of earnest purpose, abundant knowledge, and a half-suppressed struggling fire of zeal and conviction.' Many remarked on his sense of humour. One visitor was reduced to helpless laughter by Carlyle conducting an imaginary conversation between 'a missionary and a negro.' There are reports of servants where he dined having to run from the room, choking with laughter. There are few examples of his humour, except in parts of Sartor Resartus, and one suspects that it must have had a savage, Swiftian quality, not to every taste. Even as a teenaged student he was nicknamed 'Jonathan' after the satirist.

          John Morley, a politician and cabinet minister, reminiscing in 1917, wrote:
'You walked away from Chelsea stirred to the depths by a torrent of humour. But then it was splendid caricature: words and images infinitely picturesque and satiric, marvellous collocations and antitheses, impassioned railing against all the human and even superhuman elements in our misguided universe.. But of direction, of any sign-post or way out- not a trace was to be discovered...'
    At home he and his wife had a private language, with nicknames for friends and acquaintances, and many quotations and sayings from events in the past. Like many husbands he had pet names for his wife; they included: wifekin, screamikin, Janekin, goody, lassie, poor bairn, my poor little protectress, and necessary evil. This 'coterie speech' spread among their circle as the years went by.
    But often he had little to say at home, especially when researching and writing. This tendency culminated in years of gloomy domestic isolation when he was writing his last major work, Frederick.
 
 

Some Descriptions of Carlyle in Company

        There are many accounts of his conversation and behaviour in company at various times of his life. Here is a representative selection, with some of the responses he evoked.
    Carlyle himself said in later life that he had been 'far too sarcastic for a young man'.`
    Froude writes of Carlyle in company: 'pouring out a torrent of sulphurous denunciation which drowned out any contradiction.' and of 'the fiercest denunciations ending in a burst of laughter at his exaggerations.'
    In 1846, Margaret Fuller, an American from Emerson's set, visited London, and mentions: '...light witty sketches...and some homely stories .......Nor was he ashamed to laugh himself when amused.' And on a second visit in the same year: 'The worst of hearing Carlyle is that you cannot interrupt him. I understand the habit and power of haranguing have increased v much upon him, so that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you. To interrupt him is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears you down...'
    Emily Tennyson, newly married to the poet, met Carlyle over the dinner table in 1850, and wrote : 'Your father [Tennyson] made me rather nervous, I dare say, listening to what I said to him[Carlyle] at dinner, and no doubt was rather nervous himself when he heard me say, "Mr Carlyle, you know that is not sane."......He was ever after invariably most kind to me!'
    In 1853 Bishop Wilberforce wrote in his diary: 'Rode with Carlyle .....C full of unconnected and inconsistent utterances. Full of condemnation of the present day, of its honesty, etc.......(his talk) a heap of discordant ideas......Poor man, a strange enigma.'
    Queen Victoria receive him when he was 74 years of age, and wrote in her diary: '...a strange-looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.'
    Sir Leslie Stephen, who would later write the Carlyle entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, of which he was the founder editor, also met Carlyle in his last years. Writing to J R Lowell in 1871, he said: '....I can't help loving the old fellow; and amongst the other reasons for this is that of all us literary professionals in London he is in his life the manliest and simplest. It is a pleasure to see anybody who has the courage to live so little spoilt by the flattery which might have choked him and made him a windbag.'
    In a letter written the following year, Sir Leslie gives a more qualified opinion: 'I see the prophet pretty often myself and am almost equally repelled and attracted by him. Personally, indeed, I am simply attracted, for he is a really noble old cove, and by far the best specimen of the literary gent we can at present produce. He has grown milder too with age. But politically and philosophically he talks a good deal of what I call nonsense. He is indeed a genuine poet and a great humorist, which makes even his nonsense attractive in its way....He could not be made reasonable without ceasing to be Carlyle, so we must take what he can give and be grateful.'
    His wife was one of the few who dared not to take him too seriously: 'Mr Carlyle! One cannot indeed swear what he will not say! His great aim and philosophy of life being "the smallest happiness of the fewest number!"'
For other accounts see 'Carlyle by his Contemporaries' and the analysis of the prophetic style in 'Carlylese' which must have applied to his monologues as much as to his books.
    His 'Inaugural Address' is worth reading. Despite its length it was delivered without notes and claimed to be spontaneous, although doubtless it was well planned, and probably polished for later publication. Nonetheless the style is freer than in his other published work and may give a useful idea of his speech, and of his lecturing style.
 
 

Inconsistency

        He was inconsistent in his views, and vague about some of their detail, despite his dogmatic style. Amalie Boelte who lived in the household for a time, wrote in 1846:
    'It pains me to discover, gradually, that his books are everything and their author nothing. Nor can I discover a single virtue in him , no sense of the beautiful, the good. He writes for humanity and human beings mean nothing to him. He hates the aristocracy and worships an aristocrat. He talks of the freedom of nations, and wants to rule them with a sword. Today he builds a temple to one idea right up to the clouds, only to tear it down tomorrow. It is always paradoxes that he offers, and because he alone defends them, and is never contradicted, he is always one-sided.'
    This is illustrated especially by his views on religion, which his contemporaries found very difficult to pin down. From an early age he rejected Christianity, at least in private, while his writing and speech remained steeped in the language and events of the bible. He concealed his rejection of Christianity from his mother, was evasive about his real views in Sartor, and was mealy-mouthed about them in his public utterances.
    He ill-treated his wife during the long years of their marriage, yet was dependent upon her and showed great affection for her, especially when they were separated, even for a short time.
    His constantly gloomy outlook was coupled with a good sense of humour, and his lifelong hypochondriasis was coupled with robust physical health, and with walking and riding long distances regularly up to an advanced age.
    He was mean and over-careful about money and housekeeping, hated waste, even when his financial position was comfortable, but always gave generously to his family, to beggars, to children, and to the many requests for help he had when he became famous, to the extent of being sometimes duped by strangers asking for help. Despite his humble origins his wife could say of him in 1865:
'...he never pays the slightest regard to a servant's humours; remains sublimely unconscious of them, so long as he gets his bidding done.'
 
 

Mood

        He was famously gloomy about himself and about the state of the world. His gloomy views were often at odds with his behaviour, and his mood could change rapidly with events. There is no evidence at all that he ever suffered from a depressive illness; that is, from symptoms that incapacitated him, making him unable to work or concentrate. But he was a gloomy person, and could be said almost to enjoy his unhappiness at times. In his last years he was more unhappy and often talked about suicide, but never threatened it, and none thought that he had any intention of self-slaughter.
 
 

Irritability

        Carlyle's first recorded recollection is of his temper:
'My earliest of all is a mad passion of rage at my elder Brother John (on a visit to us likely from his grandfather's); in which my Father figures though dimly, as a kind of cheerful comforter or soother. I had broken my little stool, by madly throwing it at my brother; and felt for perhaps the first time, the united pangs of Loss and Remorse. I was perhaps hardly more than two years old.' (Reminiscences)
    'His temper had been ungovernable from his childhood; he had the irritability of a dyspeptic man of genius.....he who preached so wisely 'on doing the duty which lay nearest to us', forgot his own instructions.(Froude)
    It is possible that on least one occasion he was violent towards his wife, and he was certainly verbally cruel. One example will suffice. When Jane was injured in an accident in 1850, and in great pain, she wrote to her friend Helen Welsh:
'O God forbid that I should die a lingering death, trying the patience of those about me; beside a Husband who could not avoid letting me see how little patience his own ailments have left him for anybody else's - should such a thing come upon me in reality, I should go away from here, I think, and ask one of you to tend me and care for me in some little place of my own - even my low spirits about the thing which in the first days I could not conceal from him - nor in fact did I think there was any obligation on me to keep up appearances with him - brought down upon me such a tempest of scornful and wrathful words, such charges of 'impatience', 'cowardliness', 'impiety', contemptibility' that I shut myself up altogether and nothing should ever wring from me another expression of suffering to him.....'
    She goes on to say that as a child she was brave and bore pain well, and that she must have done so to gain her father's approbation, 'to be praised by him and kissed and "loved very much indeed". Oh! that was the right handle to take me up by - not "shoring [scolding] me out of creation" for my faults and weaknesses, not trying to make me heroic by abusing as "contemptible and impious"'....'
 
 

Arrogance

        In his forties he wrote to his brother Jack:
'The longer I live among the people, the deeper grows my feeling (not a vain one: a sad one) of natural superiority over them; of being able (were the tools in my hand) to do a hundred things better than the hundred I see paid for doing them.'
    This arrogance had been present from an early age. He did not suffer fools gladly, and frequently after a social evening his comment is 'nichts zu bedeuten', a contemptuous, dismissive 'nothing of importance/significance,' of the evening and of the people he had met.
 
 

Intellectual Abilities

        His intellectual abilities are not in doubt, and singled him out at an early age. He had an astonishing memory for his vast reading. Although he took notes and annotated his source books, he wrote mostly from memory, advising would-be writers to do the same, as memory would retain what was important. His ability with words has already been described both in terms of his conversation and style. He was an accomplished linguist with a knowledge of Greek and Latin, together with French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. He was also a distinguished mathematician from his youth, with publications and translations in the subject. He had some interest in art, especially in portraiture, but little musical ability or interest, although he enjoyed Scots songs
 
 

Pet Hates

        He had pet hates, which included most manifestations of the nineteenth century as it progressed. To name only a few: Gladstone; Jews; bad housebuilding.
    He disliked Jews - claiming that they had no sense of humour. Standing in front of Rothschild's house at Hyde Park Corner, Allingham reports in his diary, Carlyle imagined himself King John demanding money from a rich Jew -'palaces or pincers'. " 'You won't?' Carlyle gives a twist of his wrist. 'Now will you?', and then another twist, till the millions were yielded." This unpleasant piece of sadistic fantasy, torturing rich Jews, exceeds the conventional anti-semitism of the period. In his Reminiscences he writes: 'There is a kind of citizen which Britain used to have; very different from the millionaire Hebrews, Rothschild money-changers, Demosthenic Disraelis, and inspired young Goeschens, and their "unexampled prosperity". Weep Britain, if these latter are among the honourable you now have.'
 
 

Obsessional Traits

        He showed a constellation of traits that psychiatrists label as obsessional.
    Froude describes Carlyle as extremely conscientious. In his historical works he would not write a single sentence without checking every fact to its source and the basis for every opinion. If he read a book which impressed him he took endless pains to learn all he could about the author. His niece, Mary, once reminded a printer that her uncle was 'painfully particular about his punctuation and capital letters'.
    He was mean, and careful about household expenditure, by necessity in youth. But even when very well off in later life, he hated waste to the extent that he would pick up crusts in the street and put them on steps or railings. He laid great emphasis on cleanliness, and in the early years of their marriage at Craigenputtoch would run his fingers over surfaces in the house, inspecting for dust. He was always fussy about clean plates, and both he and Jane were very tidy. He was demanding about his diet, living on very plain fare, but insisting that special bread, fresh milk and fresh eggs were available at all times, no easy matter in London.
 
 

Noise

        Throughout his adult life Carlyle showed an abnormal sensitivity to noise, and made constant and increasing demands for quiet on his wife and neighbours, culminating in the construction of a soundproof room, (which was a failure) at the top of the Chelsea house.
    The complaint seems unusual for a man who spent his childhood and adolescence among a large family in restricted accommodation at home, in the hurly burly of his boarding school at Annan, and sharing a single room with several others while at University in Edinburgh. Curiously, too, for a man raised on farms, his anger was particularly directed toward cocks crowing, dogs barking, and other animal sounds.
    Jane was obliged to make multiple changes of furniture and rooms, and to write endless letters to the neighbours. Before the soundproof room was constructed, padded screens had been installed in the windows. Much planning, time and money were expended on the room. An inner shell was built within the attic, but distant noises penetrated the skylight, and the venture was not a success, although Carlyle used the room for the thirteen years he wrestled with Frederick.
 
 

Dependency

        Despite his autocratic attitude to marriage, which he set out in letters to Jane during their courtship, he was in many matters excessively dependent on her, forcing her to take responsibility for tasks that should have been his. When there were difficulties about his income tax and he was summoned to the income tax inspectors, Jane went, to the astonishment of the officials, who clearly considered a wife's visit an unheard of event.

SUMMARY

        Carlyle was a man of high intelligence, with an exceptional memory and phenomenal verbal skills. He was of an intensely gloomy and irritable disposition, arrogant and autocratic in his dealings with others, yet at times very dependent on his wife. Hypochondriacal throughout his life, he was oversensitive to noise, and somewhat obsessional in his habits. He was loyal to his family, and, above all, devoted to his parents , especially his mother. Throughout his life he showed great inconsistencies in his conduct, his behaviour being often at odds with his expressed convictions. It is this inconsistency that cries out for explanation, to be provided in subsequent sections.
 

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