It is funny that, although now Carlyle is seen as a foundational reactionary author, at the time Frederick Engels wrote an adoring review of another one of Carlyle's publications, called Past and Present:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo...arlyle.htm
Of course, Engels disagreed with Carlyle's solution to the problems seen in England at the time, but all the same thought the book was: "Of all the fat books and thin pamphlets which have appeared in England in the past year for the entertainment or edification of “educated society,” the above work is the only one which is worth reading."
Ralp Waldo Emerson wrote the introduction to
Past and Present and that boiok too is highly recommended. Emerson said of it:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo...arlyle.htm
Of course, Engels disagreed with Carlyle's solution to the problems seen in England at the time, but all the same thought the book was: "Of all the fat books and thin pamphlets which have appeared in England in the past year for the entertainment or edification of “educated society,” the above work is the only one which is worth reading."
Ralp Waldo Emerson wrote the introduction to
Past and Present and that boiok too is highly recommended. Emerson said of it:
Quote:Quote:
Here is Carlyle's new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master's mind, -- and with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until such daily and nightly meditation has grown into a great connexion, if not a system of thoughts, and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance. "No new truth," say the critics on all sides. Is it so? truth is very old; but the merit of seers is not to invent, but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other.