Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1883 — The Key to Carlyle’s Genius. [ARTICLE]

The Key to Carlyle’s Genius.

In the lately-published Emerson and Carlyle correspondence there is a passage from Emerson’s note-book upon Carlyle that may well serve to start us upon our course in this essay. “He has,” says Emerson, “manly superiority rather than intellectuality;” “there is more character than intellect in every sentence?’ This fact, with the consequent steep inclination of all Carlyle’s faculties toward personality or personal prowess, affords the master-key to him, to his life, his works, his opinions, and is a brief summary of much that I have written upon him. He was a man of vehement and overweening conceit in man, A sort of anthropological greed and hunger possessed him, an insatiable craving for strong, picturesque characters, and for contact and conflict with them. This was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a passion) all his days. He fed his soul on heroes and heroic qualities, and all his literary exploits were a search for these things. Where he found them not, where he did not come upon some trace of them in books, in society, in politics, he saw only barrenness and futility. He was an idealist who was inhospitable to ideas; he must have a man, the flavor and stimulus of ample concrete personalities.—John Burroughs, in the Century.