erce absorption of work,
blind even to the sorrow and discomfort of his wife, or taking rapid
tours to store his mind with the details of historical scenes, or in
the big houses of wealthy people, where he kept much to himself, stored
up irresistibly absurd caricatures of the other guests, and lamented
his own inaction. I have never been able to discover exactly why
Carlyle spent so much time in staying at great houses, deriding and
satirising everything he set eyes upon; it was, I believe, vaguely
gratifying to him to have raised himself unaided into the highest
social stratum; and the old man was after all a tremendous aristocrat
at heart. Or else he skulked with infinite melancholy in his mother's
house, being waited upon and humoured, and indulging his deep and true
family affection. But he was a solitary man for the most part, and
mixed with men, involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly fantastic
and whimsical talk; for his real gift was half-humorous,
half-melancholy improvisation rather than deliberate writing.

But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless and
plangent melancholy was concerned with. He had a very singular physical
frame, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which emphasized
and particularised every slight touch of bodily disorder. When he was
at work, he toiled like a demon day after day, entirely and vehemently
absorbed. When he was not at work he suffered from dreary reaction. He
fought out in early days a severe moral combat, and found his way to a
belief in God which was very different from his former Calvinism.
Carlyle can by no stretch of the word be called a Christian, but he was
one of the most thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived. The terror that
beset him in that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his own
insignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made on
fortuitous and indifferent lines. His dread was that of being worsted,
in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire to do a noble
work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly on the dust-heap of
the world. He learned a fiery sort of Determinism, and a faith in the
stubborn power of the will, not to achieve anything, but to achieve
something.

Yet after this tremendous conflict, described in Sartor Resartus, where
he found himself at bay with his back to the wall, he never had any
ultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought him no
serenity; and I sup