Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet
both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail
Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on
"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are
united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in
exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one
enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching
silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech.
Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was
indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the
Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must
have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and
action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their
views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little
to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same
mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness,
abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power
of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both
in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and
manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more
admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity
of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little
evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought:
nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English
poets.
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