Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "The Paradox of Thomas Carlyle: How to Read a Provocateur and Why We Should." The Weekly Standard, February 24, 1997.

Excerpt:

More than half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote an essay on T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society, calling upon his liberal and Marxist friends to be more appreciative of a mode of “religious politics” that was familiar in Victorian times but that was now regarded as reactionary. “When he [Eliot] says that he is a moralist in politics,” Trilling explained, “he means most importantly that politics is to be judged by what it does for the moral perfection, rather than for the physical easement, of man.” Trilling’s essay, “Elements That Are Wanted,” took its title from that Victorian eminence Matthew Arnold, who had said that the function of criticism is “to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent.”

 

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