The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based on what he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain to be surprised by what he finds.  There are histories in the canon of his works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are composed on a plan that no other historian and no other social reformer would own.  A reader will find in them no argument, next to no reasoning, and little practical judgment.  Carlyle was not a great “thinker” in the strictest sense of that term.  He was under the control, not of his reason, but of his emotions; deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming into the light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work.  Against cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire.  Nor had he the faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth.  In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another.  His picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets:  “dark simmering pit of Tophet,” “bottomless universal hypocrisies,” and all the rest.  In it all he left no practical scheme.  His works are fundamentally not about politics or history or literature, but about himself.  They are the exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two deeply held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of fact.

This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those people who ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme for the abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the result of the next general election.  Carlyle has little help for these and no message save the disconcerting one of their own futility.  His message is at once larger and simpler, for though his form was prose, his soul was a poet’s soul, and what he has to say is a poet’s word.  In a way, it is partly Wordsworth’s own.  The chief end of life, his message is, is the performance of duty, chiefly the duty of work.  “Do thy little stroke of work; this is Nature’s voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to each man.”  All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to labour is to pray.  And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he says in Past and Present, for governing, and “our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break.”  Carlyle asked of every man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a strenuous warfare against cant.  The historical facts with which he had to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the French Revolution, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear.  “Quack-ridden,” he says, “in that one word lies all misery whatsoever.”