Spiritual Selfhood and the Modern Idea: Thomas Carlyle and T.S. Eliot

By David Donovan

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) were icons of their age, literary giants who dominated the British cultural landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet both were cosmopolitan outsiders who lived in London as expatriates but remained products of their biographical historiesCarlyle as the working class Scotsman and Eliot the transplanted New England patrician. Carlyle quickly earned himself a reputation as the Chelsea Sage of the Victorian Era, the cultural prophet whose creative and critical works, informal salon gatherings, and oracular personality generated an unprecedented following among both the intellectuals and masses. His opinion and company were sought out by almost every major luminary of his century, including John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And his social and political insights, like his aesthetic and philosophical views, touched on wide-ranging subjects from Romatic poetry and German history to parliamentary reform and slavery abolition. Similarly, T. S. Eliots reputation as a writer and social observer enjoyed mythic status as he became the preeminent twentieth-century critic of the English-speaking world. In his verse masterpiece The Waste Land, spiritual drama Murder in the Cathedral, Christian social initiatives with Moot, and editorial leadership at The Criterion, Eliot conversed with the principal figures and movements of his time, from Charles Maurras and the struggles against communism to G. K. Chesterton and disputes over Anglican reform.
Ultimately, however, both men may be seen as moderns whose sensitivities inclined them to encounter the monumental historical changes of their day with a unique historical perspective and an informed cultural conservatism. Democratization, industrialization, urbanization, and population growth were signs of changing times, signs demanding a new vision and mode of expression to integrate and process rapidly transforming realities. And Carlyle and Eliot address these by establishing a spiritual response to modernitys loss of faith in transcendent authority. Their conceptions of self, society, and God are communicated, in other words, through a literary form that engages the conditions of modernity through the language, categories, and symbols of the Western humanistic and Christian traditions. And because their cultural and theoretical judgments fall on that historical continuum between the pre-modern and postmodern, their lives and works are particularly relevant as case studies that can tell us much about the historical progression of European intellectual and cultural history into the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 6, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469106380

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Copyright © 2004 by David Donovan.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  

INTRODUCTION  

CHAPTER ONE  

THE BOUNDS OF SELF

CHAPTER TWO  

THE SOCIAL WORLD

CHAPTER THREE  

THE DIVINE HORIZON

CONCLUSION  

SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY  

ENDNOTES  

TO SHEILA

MY FRIEND, MY LOVE, MY LIFE

For the twelfth century, the divine vision could only be attained by a process in which the intellect took part; it was through and beyond discursive thought that man could arrive at beatitude.

—T. S. Eliot, Toward a Definition of Metaphysical Poetry

If Time and Space have no absolute existence, no existence out of our minds [if, in short, they are ideal], it removes a stumbling block from the very threshold of our Theology.

—Thomas Carlyle, Essay on Novalis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

I want to thank those institutions that, through their generous and indispensable fellowship support, made this scholarly undertaking possible. I would like to especially recognize Delbarton School, Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, the Acton Institute, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Roothbert Fund for the resources provided me. The writing of a book requires the time, guidance, and energies of some, and the love, patience, and understanding of others. I thank my dissertation readers—Dr. Jonathan Rose, Dr. Robert Ready, and Dr. James Pain—for the former, and my family and friends for the latter. I also wish to express gratitude to my parents, James and Arlene Donovan, for their lifelong encouragement of my personal and academic goals. Finally, I am most grateful to my beautiful wife, Sheila, who has earned more than any degree could confer. Thank you, too, for bringing into the world what is God’s achievement and our greatest grace—Meghan, William, Trey and Ryan.

INTRODUCTION

 

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) are exceptional subjects for comparative study. Such a study may seem curious, at first, given the very real differences in the personal and professional biographies of these two figures, Carlyle being a nineteenth-century Scottish historian and Eliot a twentieth-century American poet. And although Eliot did teach the works of Carlyle in his courses at the London Workingmen’s College, Eliot would later condemn the Chelsea Sage for corrupting the style of English prose.¹ Yet their ostensible differences go beyond mere literary taste and seem to extend into how these writers both interpreted and inhabited the world.

Carlyle, on the one hand, is in the popular imagination the consummate Victorian moralist who viewed the modern world with deep suspicion and, at times, outright hostility. Enjoying a combative yet flourishing rhetorical style, Carlyle issued diatribes against what he coined the cash-nexus of free markets and the industrialization of social existence, comments earning him a reputation as a defender of a more organic cultural order who, like John Ruskin and William Morris after him, championed the social and aesthetic verities of medieval Europe. Carlyle’s political affinities too approached a medievalism in embracing strong monarchies and civic hierarchies. Carlyle has been accordingly vilified as the prophet of fascism² whose authoritarianism is only fully disclosed in his more mature historical and social commentaries, namely On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in which he champions the despotisms of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte, and in Latter-Day Pamphlets, where he excoriates proponents of criminal law reform, democratic government, activist parliaments, and slavery abolition. As a persuasive writer and charismatic personality whose spiritual sensibilities bordered on the mystical, Carlyle seems to have selfconsciously exploited England’s bourgeoning literary culture to fashion for himself an oracular public image that provided an outlet to his decidedly ideological and dogmatic prejudices. He is interpreted, in short, as a political reactionary, cultural romantic, or religious esoteric.

This persona of the public and tyrannical Thomas Carlyle is seemingly difficult to reconcile with that of the private and effete

T.S. Eliot. For Eliot is the understated modernist poet whose Christian and neoclassical leanings inclined him toward an insular and chaste aestheticism. Eliot was, first and foremost, an artist. His social commentaries were tempered as reflective observations and the political attacks in his imaginative literature were skillfully couched persuasions. He assumed as his personal idiom, in other words, an austerity that was more subtle than the grand expressiveness of the Scotsman’s Carlylese. Eliot seems to depart from Carlyle in less obvious ways as well. Carlyle was the son of a stonemason in rural Scotland, Eliot a member of patrician Brahmins of old New England transplanted to the American midwest; Carlyle admired the political absolutism of an Oliver Cromwell, Eliot the distributist communitarianism of a Chesterton; Carlyle had difficulty laughing at himself, Eliot enjoyed whoopie cushions and Groucho Marx; Carlyle had an aversion to noise and slept in a soundproof room, Eliot frequented crowded music halls. Carlyle hated religious orthodoxy, Eliot found in it his salvation.

Parallels do exist, nevertheless, between both writers that are striking and significant. Both Carlyle and Eliot were practiced in disciplines outside literature, Carlyle in mathematics and Eliot in philosophy. Both married, remained childless, and endured trying and infamous conjugal relationships, Carlyle with Jane Welsh and Eliot with Vivien Haigh-Wood. Both suffered chronic poor health, Carlyle battling insomnia and digestive difficulties and Eliot tachycardia and a congenital hernia for which he wore a truss. The choice of where to live and work was also critical for both writers. They each took up residence in London as English-speaking expatriates living among that city’s intellectual elite. Carlyle at Cheyne Row hosted a weekly gathering of Victorian elites which included Dickens and Mill; Eliot in Russell Square conversed regularly with Edwardian figures like Clive Bell and Virginia Woolf.

Although Carlyle died in the decade of Eliot’s birth, both men are products of Anglo-modernism and Puritan religious faith. Carlyle’s imagination took shape as a negotiation between the skeptical tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment and the orthodox Presbyterianism of his rural Ecclefechan; the contours of Eliot’s thinking emerged out of a struggle with the positivist skepticisms of analytic philosophy early in the century and the ideas of sin and salvation derived from the Calvinist theological temper of his native New England. The lives of both men extend as bridges between pivotal cultural periods—Carlyle spanning the late-Romantic and Victorian, Eliot the late-Edwardian and modern. Both are seen as prophets of their respective centuries, and each was a literary inspiration to those that followed, Carlyle to Victorian stylists of the nineteenth century and Eliot to the New Critics of the twentieth century. Early in their careers, both championed a continental literary form that they believed would enliven English prose and poetry, Carlyle looking to German romantics like Richter and Heine and Eliot to French symbolists like LaForgue. Both men chose foreign canonical writers as their lifelong moral-intellectual guides. For Carlyle, it was Goethe who loomed large and whose depiction of spiritual aspiration in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship evoked so much of Carlyle’s own journey between doubt and belief. Eliot discovered his model in Dante, for the movement in The Divine Comedy from despair to salvation paralleled his own understanding of the aspirations of soul.

Carlyle, in his most esoteric digressions, spoke in an idiom of natural supernaturalism. Employing a theodicy of natural form, with allusive phrases like autumnal decay and Time-Symbol, he echoed American transcendentalists like Emerson with whom he maintained a long and close friendship. Eliot urged upon his contemporaries a similar exotic cosmopolitanism, borrowing from the East a poetic symbology with words from the Upanishads (Shantih shantih shantih—the Peace which passeth understanding) to close his most famous modernist poem. Both drew liberally from independent literary traditions, Carlyle from romanticism and Eliot from classicism. The careers of both writers were inaugurated with the publication of masterpieces of cultural-spiritual biography, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Eliot’s The Waste Land. Both would publish in the diverse genres of literary criticism and social commentary. And perhaps most importantly, each may be seen as a cultural conservative struggling against the materialist and secularizing tendencies of his time. For they witnessed in their lives and addressed specifically in their works such momentous phenomena as urbanization, secularization, and democratization. In response to these entropic conditions, they drew upon unities represented philosophically in the idealist tradition, Carlyle looking to Immanuel Kant and Eliot to F.H. Bradley. ³ They thus eschewed the nascent cultural materialism of industrial Europe and embraced, instead, what Eliot called the permanent things.

To be sure, the ostensibly reactionary leanings of both men have received considerable scholarly attention, notably by William Chace who identifies the political temperaments of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot with a tradition of anti-semitic authoritarianism, and by Herbert Grierson who links the racist posturing of Thomas Carlyle to the ideological systems of Adolf Hitler.⁴ It is true that Carlyle’s works were translated into German and sold three hundred thousand copies between 1926 and 1932, that Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History was made compulsory reading in Nazi schools, and that Joseph Goebbels read History of Friedrich II of Prussia to Adolf Hitler during the final days of the Third Reich.⁵ Yet despite their purported political views having lost them widespread favor among many contemporary scholars, Carlyle and Eliot remain central figures in an important modern drama. For their age is our age. The intellectual disjunctions and social dislocations that characterize the climate of contemporary thought and action find their source in a deeper crisis of Victorian and Edwardian values. It is in this modern milieu that competing claims for the humanities and the sciences, the individual and the community, faith and reason, ruralism and urbanism, tradition and reform, and stability and change are enacted and ultimately reconstituted. A joint analysis of the lives and ideas of Thomas Carlyle and T.S. Eliot seems, therefore, not only appropriate and necessary but promising and overdue. For it would disclose fundamental correlations between these two prominent writers, illuminating their literary projects, cultural contexts, and historical settings. In this way, the shared concerns of both Carlyle and Eliot for the changing social, political, and economic realities of their day becomes instrumental to understanding parallels in their historical significance as writers. And such similarities indicate, more importantly, that modernism existed earlier in the Western tradition than is commonly suspected.

Pressing questions about the life and thought of these two men persist, however, despite their many conspicuous affinities. For instance, are there significant similarities in the intellectual and aesthetic assumptions of Eliot and Carlyle? May both be meaningfully called conservative? Are the terms modern, modernity, modernization, modernism, or modernist either coherent or useful in understanding the post-Enlightenment context of these men? What accounts for the unusual resemblances in their creative and personal life choices? How has each writer negotiated the balance between private and public demands, their literary art and their social sympathies? These considerations require elaboration, especially in light of their continuing relevance to scholarly debate in fields as diverse as British cultural studies, Edwardian and Victorian history, romantic and classical literary criticism, and modern social and political theory.

This dissertation will argue that both Thomas Carlyle and T.S. Eliot acknowledge, in complementary ways, the nature of three fundamental human relationships: the personal (the relation of the human to himself), the social (the relation of the human to the human), and the religious (the relation of the human to the divine). The first of these relationships responds to the personal dimension, the who? and what? of the human self. (Who is the human person specifically? What is his nature generally?). For both writers, the human person is constrained by original sin yet capable of an enlightened grace. His experiences, moreover, are always mediated by the faculties of human thought and feeling, so that an integrated personhood lends a necessary balance to the competing demands of body, mind, and spirit. There is for Carlyle and Eliot here, however, a hierarchy of human sensibilities, leading from the physical through the intellectual to the spiritual. Material needs, in other words, are always anterior and subordinate to the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of selfhood. Just as intellect, therefore, closes the epistemological divide separating subject and object relations in the world, it is spirit that dissolves the existential boundaries dividing God and man. One can detect the forms of Idealist philosophy and Christian theology operating in the works of Carlyle and Eliot as they give shape to their philosophical anthropologies.

The second relationship treated in the works of Carlyle and Eliot addresses the social existence, the where? and when? of the human self. (In what place geographically does the human find himself? In what time historically does he exist?). Both Carlyle and Eliot bring to their social perspectives an informed conservatism and a deep historical sensibility that acknowledges in civic culture an organic design. Whether it is Carlyle extolling the virtues of St. Edmundsbury and Western monasticism in Past and Present or Eliot championing the vitality of the canon in Tradition and the Individual Talent, the presence of the past is a dominant subtext structuring the formal and thematic designs of their literature. For Carlyle and Eliot, consequently, every human context is a product of the past, giving voice to history and conserving for the future a cultural patrimony. The subjects of time and place rightly assume, therefore, a unique significance in their corpus, from the period-specific essays of Carlyle’s Signs of the Times and The Present Time to the place-specific locales of Burnt Norton, East Coker, the Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding in Eliot’s Four Quartets. Carlyle’s most recent biographer, Fred Kaplan, notes in fact Carlyle’s … deep respect for the genius of place, for the literary and spiritual associations that a particular place contained.⁶ And Eliot himself observed in a 1919 letter: I think two things are wanted—civilization which is impersonal, traditional (by ‘tradition’ I don’t mean stopping in the same place) and which forms people unconsciously … and culture—which is a personal interest and curiosity in particular things.⁷ History for both Carlyle and Eliot unfolds, then, as a humane narrative linking the conscious life of the individual with the unconscious climate of his age; the union of culture and civilization manifests itself, in turn, as an intimate exchange between person and place across time.

The third and final human relationship involves the religious experience, the why? and how of existence. (Why does the human person exist? How was he created?) These concerns properly express the religious preoccupations of Carlyle and Eliot and their understanding of the existential and metaphysical relationships linking the created to the creator. The Christian vernaculars of Carlyle and Eliot depict this relationship as a movement of fall and redemption, sin and beatification, though Eliot’s understanding is more explicitly sacramental and institutional than is Carlyle’s. Importantly, however, the human state for both writers is defined by this quality of lack, by this unfulfilled need to which the divine presence responds in love. The full significance of this condition of spiritual want is intimated best by Thomas Aquinas in his explication of grace as a supernatural form that condescends to the natural order. Grace, for Aquinas, has three related connotations: a state of good favor (e.g., to be in the good grace of another), a gift freely given (e.g., to be granted the grace of God), and a quality of gratitude (e.g., to say grace at a meal). It is good favor that motivates the gift for which the receiver is thankful, so that the third grace presupposes the second which derives from the first.⁸ For Carlyle and Eliot, as products of Protestant upbringing, the human drama is similarly signified by a divine presence for which one prepares, receives, and gives thanks. The individual relationship to the source of his being, in this respect, is fundamentally mystical because of the profound and immediate nature of the experience. It is this religious dimension of the human relationship which, in the end, conditions both the personal and the social dimensions, so that for both Carlyle and Eliot the divine informs and renews human action in the world.

Through their treatment of these three fundamental human relationships, Carlyle and Eliot attempt a spiritual response to the problem of modernity—a problem they identify with the loss of transcendent understanding. Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, for instance, depicts the protagonist Herr Teufelsdrockh as a rebellious, alienated hero whose artistic and prophetic voice provides humanity redemption from the sickness of nineteenth-century culture. Through such imaginative writings, Carlyle affirms a spiritual rather than materialist metaphysics, an intuitive rather than empirical epistemology, and a noumenal rather than phenomenal aesthetic. Similarly, Eliot’s poetic vision in compositions like Four Quartets also discloses a mystical sensibility which infers from human circumstance a divine significance. For Eliot, fact references divinity through the symbolic. This is best demonstrated by Eliot’s deliberate appropriation of religious imagery and attention to the temporal and eternal dimensions of experience in the Four Quartets when he writes: We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.⁹

The interior landscapes of the soul, as a consequence, represent the principal settings of dramatic action in Eliot’s verse. However, the phenomenological understandings implied in the literatures of both Carlyle and Eliot express their distinctively modernist sensibilities in two respects: first, their works each affirm the inward orientation of truth as a product of private inspiration and transcendent illumination; and secondly, they both manipulate the rhetorical language and idiosyncratic style of their fictions to convey the authority of subjective experience. In this way, by marrying private perception with literary invention, Carlyle and Eliot offer a modern synthesis to conceptual categories commonly dividing nature and culture, subject and object, particular and universal, human and divine. If the sources of Carlyle’s thought are located in German Romanticism and those of Eliot in French Classicism, it is equally important to acknowledge the ways in which each writer employs mystical categories of journey, vision, redemption, and renewal to frame the narrative architectures of their fiction. This paper endeavors to answer, therefore, the following question: Are Thomas Carlyle and T. S. Eliot undertaking a common literary project in addressing the concerns of modernity? I will argue that a Carlylean and Eliotesque spirituality, depicted in both their literary and critical writings, represents a conscious and explicit response to both the complexities of the modern context and to the reality of the personal, social, and religious relationships of the human person within that context.

Scholarship:

No single study has treated inclusively the subject of Thomas Carlyle and T. S. Eliot within the context of English modernism. This is because early and contemporary scholarship alike have placed these writers in distinct intellectual and literary traditions—Carlyle with Romantic Victorians and Eliot with Neoclassical Modernists. However, important studies do exist which trace themes within the Anglo-literary tradition from romanticism to modernism. But these often explore only summarily the relationship between Carlyle and Eliot as writers, on the one hand, and the cultural and historical contexts of modernity, on the other.

The definitive biography of Thomas Carlyle is Fred Kaplan’s Thomas Carlyle: A Biography, depicting the Scotsman as a circumspect and anxious Victorian. Eloise Behnken views Carlyle as a Calvinist devoid of a formal theology, much like A. Abbott Ikeler, who discovers in the writer’s life and work an amalgam of Puritan spirit and transcendental conviction. Chris Vanden Bossche interprets Carlyle’s personal and literary efforts as a more desperate search for cultural authority, situating him within a setting of Victorian transition, as does B.H. Lehman, who examines this Carlylean search