ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH
[1795-1826]
In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against
giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the
sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length Friedrich, prefaced
by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited
influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in
suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the
deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his
hero-worship. Carlyle, says the Athenaeum critic before quoted, divides
contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the
Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the
rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any
of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth.
[Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his
imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.]
The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat
differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a
legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a
certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The
churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the
family, all with coats of arms—two griffins with adders' stings. More
definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that
dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel
Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of
Anson's Voyages and of the Arabian Nights: "a fiery man, his stroke
as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an
honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm,
in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with
much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother
having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the
sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and
throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons—"a curious
sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter
speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James,
born 1757, married—first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue
of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret
Aitken, by whom he had four sons—THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander,
1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James,
1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her
cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who
tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life.
Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in
the first of the papers published under the name of Reminiscences.
It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all
offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in
1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief
space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, i.e.
the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:—
In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting
men I have known, … of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of
any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget
that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul,
full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all
manner of potent words…. Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to
render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have
heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words
were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that
he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and
for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even
scrupulous veracity…. He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem
of the Universe was sufficient for him … he stood a true man, while
his son stands here on the verge of the new…. A virtue he had which
I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and
past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all
"clatter."… He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath,
but passion never mastered him…. Man's face he did not fear: God he
always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with
fear—rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which
flickered a trembling hope…. Let me learn of him. Let me write my books
as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow
world…. Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was
nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not
freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free
means to unbosom himself…. It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear
repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was
ever more or less awed and chilled by him.
James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of
both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their
integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of
winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a
broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a
better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist.
"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no
more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under
the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable
and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James
Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year L100, till,
after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill,
a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and
thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about L1000. Strong, rough, and
eminently straight, intolerant of contradiction and ready with words
like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the
Brontes on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of
Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as
her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her
favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her
heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a
fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late
in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they
talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she
was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the
unfailing sunshine of her anxious love.
Book II. of Sartor is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly
a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to
his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of
Teufelsdroeckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the
place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks
are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as
a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth
and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also
the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house,
where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather
to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had
to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me
down. It was not a joyful life, yet … a wholesome one." The following
oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the
humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:—
On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled
in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I
could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset
have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish,
my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's
expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless
I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the
gilding.
In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of
Sartor and the Wahrheit of the Reminiscences are in accord. By
Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on
schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish,
where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very
competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of
seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete
in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School
of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began.
Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long
misery. Ordinary boys—those of the Scotch borderland being of the most
savage type—are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as
the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints
which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse
of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the
duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all
hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for
his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the
Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort,
he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to
her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles—a promise
to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well
broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he
refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew
Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty
called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by
appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge
of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began
to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright
prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend.
On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University,
despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a
boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not
done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the
son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity
of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world
which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked
through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail
(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open
to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the
Reminiscences. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in
cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814.
Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to
have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a
compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society
outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental
or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from
hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with
his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking
of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Jose must have been a
loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably
to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature—subject to the
terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in Sartor, "It is my
painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of
all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of
libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was
still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of
the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of
Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the Quarterly and Edinburgh
Reviews, and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were
conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required
from Professors, some of them—conspicuously Brown (the more original if
less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie—rising
to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt
themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and
restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than
History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those
of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of
irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in
any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty—Aeschylus and Sophocles
mainly in translations—and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace.
For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his
days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He
distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt,
the Principia of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil
of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he
took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he
said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when
alone.
[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered
the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he
had done before."]
The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice
and necessity integer vitae, he divided his time between the seclusion
of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps
the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course
without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year,
accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving,
who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the
ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a
year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses
of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another
was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The
posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of
the novel Wotton Reinfred, reconciles us to the loss of those which have
not been recovered.
In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and
corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters,
reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in
that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the
tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly
commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon;
or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more
valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or
to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with
impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king."
Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of
aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves
with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere
inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas
Murray he writes:—
Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known
has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and
principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and
noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding
to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary
fame.
That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is
ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of
Leyden :—
Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye,
For that was a day
When we stood in our array
Like the lion's might at bay.
"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes
almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I
desire you read it (sic) and tell me what you think of him," etc.
Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the
lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied
in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his
opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the
modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes.
Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which
he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The
whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows
with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of
Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.—
How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this
world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its
fat ones and its lean … pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea,
they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast
wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the
purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the
ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!"
On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial
intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of
the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan
predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of
severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The
Reminiscences of Irving's generous reception of his protege present one
of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same
chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the
east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere
enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical
criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped
the author's observation.
During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered
his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady,
"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils—Margaret
Gordon—"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not
relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in
asserting this lady to have been the original of Sartor's "Blumine";
and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova
Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests
her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of
the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius
will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful
distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal
gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect
you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even
tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my
address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always
intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better
to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with L90
saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private
pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of
literature—gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of
laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social
advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of
genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle,
even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this
stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his
fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a
torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed
like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness,
due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men,
machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first
to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical
teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but
journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he
had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been
due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self-
reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any
plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any
"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical
reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of
neutral gray.
[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's Decline and Fall as "of all books the
most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind.
His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were
often admirably potent and illustrative to me."]
Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow,
which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in
the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of
letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the
Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There
is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness
to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.—I was
entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart,
misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat,
fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries … three
weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise,
… wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered,
etc.
What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards
stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack?
Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood.
"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than
it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his
mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a
matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have
seemed as if possessed."
Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully
about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject,
yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean
compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon
gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his
throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes.
I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and
converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But
it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere
denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as
wages for all that bogpool of disgust.
The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in
Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great
war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and
the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences
of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on
Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A
few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political
progress:—
A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce
Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all
around me … gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and
looking disgustingly busy and important…. One bleared Sunday morning
I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a
kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way,
not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little
crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very
loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of
sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and
dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning … I
met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in
hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen"
volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he,
cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on
which side"—which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed
my feeling … mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young.
This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had
migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound
counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical
opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but
the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his
contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the Edinburgh
Encyclopedia under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant
remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no
original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from
one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his
early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend,
"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together … my views of life to
reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark
on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall
steer west and try the waters of another world."
[Footnote: The subjects of these were—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker,
Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire,
Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on
the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are
characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general
fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im
pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are
curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early
judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with
a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in
almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly
mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau
confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without
scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in
overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that
state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc.
Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc.,
are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research,
fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as
in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend
itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to
show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be
united with a coarse and ignoble heart."]
The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,—"nos manet
oceanus,"—as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some
critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough,
Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and
the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom
of wild lands—when more than dreams—have been failures.
[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his
New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green
forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.]
Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the
Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been
successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine.
It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across
the Atlantic, the author of the Latter-Day Pamphlets would have found
the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or
London.
The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on
Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His
few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed
merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr.
Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but
slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other
than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth
transcribing:—
He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and
kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination…. He had a
burst of genuine fun too…. His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw,
and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No
preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of
little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect,
professing to be educated, and yet … ignorant in all that lies beyond
the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with—a man
capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding … as the first
stage of his life well indicated, … yet capable of impetuous activity
and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will
never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of
Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic
ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"—a sympathetic image but of no
great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose
originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly
commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of
Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of
offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is
notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth."
There follows in some of the early pages of the Reminiscences an
account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle
for the first stage, i.e. fifteen miles of the road, of his for the
most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among
many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached
margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as
Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the
picture of Drumclog moss,—"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and
dangerously difficult for Claverse (sic) and horse soldiery if the
suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"—for the graphic
glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the
twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from
me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the
Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or
should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like
an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did
so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet
little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached
Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I
ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern
languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the
Encyclopedia articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was
offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer
which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal
world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate
men of middle life. You may be taught to forget … the splendours and
envies … of men of literature."
This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and
arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso
Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was
yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly
after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at
liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:—
I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power
to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a
considerable change in my stile (sic) of life, a
proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to
a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise
was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness.
They offered me L150 per annum, and withal invited me to
come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went
accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was
ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale
would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard,
a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a
two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue,
and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating
pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous
people….York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust
(see Ivanhoe) is justly named. York is the Boetia of
Britain…. Upon the whole, however, I derived great
amusement from my journey, … I conversed with all kinds of
men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with
them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any),
which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no
prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown
from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien,
a pilgrim … and life is to me like a pathless, a waste,
and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if
you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a
fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life,
and then to float alone undirected on its restless,
monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you
must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without
a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold
fast by the Manilla ship, and do not let go the painter.
Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's
despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to
spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter
of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its
drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest
descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat.
According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates
are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being
introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by
her old tutor, Edward Irving—an event which marks the beginning of a new
era in his career—took place towards the close of May or in the first
week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in Sartor as
the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of
revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk—Rue St. Thomas de
l'Enfer in the Romance—on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in
the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it
is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St.
Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse.
It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was
but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood
of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of
eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdroeckh had
darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself.
If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath,"
careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire
and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality
perhaps.
What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver?
Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold…. Thus has
the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into
the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo.
From this scepticism, deeper than that of Queen Mab, fiercer than that
of Candide, Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a
servant of God, even when doubting His existence.
After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me,
I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my
allegiance….Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me
for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland
were the price of apostacy.
With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and
asserts himself:
Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen
Und das heisst ein Kaempfer seyn.
He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength,
and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve.
He would not make his judgment blind;
He faced the spectres of the mind,—
but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master,
Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He
threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of
one making a leap.
Death? Well, Death … let it come then, and I will
meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream
of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from
that time the temper of my misery was changed; not …
whining sorrow … but grim defiance.
Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:—
I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce,
upon myself and all things earthly….The year is closing. This time
eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago….
Oh! little did my mother think,
That day she cradled me,
The lands that I should travel in,
The death I was to dee.
My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in
a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain.
How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself,
sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And
hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas…but it will be time enough to
use them when I have lost the game I am but losing, … and while
my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not
breaking their hearts would still remain….I want health, health,
health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are
greater than I am able to bear.
Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of
Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no
surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have
proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack
service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a
translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun,
according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822,
and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original Essay on
Proportion, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum
of L50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that
Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his
practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an
author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has
been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of
swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap."
But in his earliest substantial volume, the Life of Schiller, there is
nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to
appear in the London Magazine in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in
1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an
encouraging article in the Times, it was, in 1830, translated into
German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an
important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name
conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly
perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak
slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said
he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic."
But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other
victims, he turned and rent himself. Pari passu, he was toiling at his
translation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. This was published in
Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in Blackwood, it was generally
recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author;
and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks
in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent
attack of De Quincey—a writer as unreliable as brilliant—in the London
Magazine does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has
none now. The Wanderjahre, constituting the third volume of the English
edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance—a series
of admirably selected and executed translations from Musaeus, Fouque,
Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and
critical notices of each—published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is
also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms
which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established
Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these
works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to
render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another
source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle
his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University
course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family
circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any
brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from
which all are entitled to draw."
For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends.
Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and
at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the
Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a
greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost
in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland
breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs.
Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he
found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the
elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired
to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to
Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's
charge. The proposal, with an offer of L200 a year, was accepted, and the
brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor
remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship
were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the
Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite
another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another
sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest
boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and
the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil,
whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the
good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the
entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old
master's life.
[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen.
He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (aet. forty-two).]
But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied
by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed,
ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder
Bullers—the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the
father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian
service—came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and
recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and
treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did
not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his
hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims.
Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld,
when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons;
but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to
their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants.
During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in
another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award:
"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind
that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It
is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of
Mrs. Buller."
In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by
a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter,
sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of
his first impressions of the capital:—
We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the
Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle,
the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten
thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that
monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever
witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel
annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world.
On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's
roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young
cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess,
he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and
friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to
justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter
of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and
"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the
eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also,
in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt,
Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in
some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being
addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of
well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain
on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he
writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in
the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature."
And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to
his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him
two alternatives—to go with the family to France or to remain in the
country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and
they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a
sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done
with them … I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for L200 a
year."
[Footnote: Vide Carlyle's Life of Sterling (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii.
p. 79.]
There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a
friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method
and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others,
as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling
squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to
Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days
they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of
Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De
Quincey's review of Meister, and in recounting the event credits
himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some
points; if so let him be admonitory."
But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell,"
however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr.
Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to
Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then
lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the
Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met
Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what
was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city
of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder.
Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between
Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street,
he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of
Meister, characteristically and generously cordial.
In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by
coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established
himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from
Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander
farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on
horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life,
there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the
pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the
opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold.
Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :—
With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam
Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now
like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of
the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly
important of my life…. I found that I had conquered all my
scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with
the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch,
and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of
ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory…. Once
more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and
still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He,
in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road
before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself
seemed improving…. Nowhere can I recollect of myself such
pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact
and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound
of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from
Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was
strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen
hundred years.
Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid
storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his
tyrannous love of liberty:—
It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of
consciousness—of inward dignity—I have gained since I came
within the walls of this poor cottage—my own four walls.
They simply admit that I am Herr im Hause, and act on
this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes
and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they
will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that
I am an unintelligible mortal, facheux to deal with,
but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls.
The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most
characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual
composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his
career, beginning—
Wild through the wind the huntsman calls,
As fast on willing nag I haste
Home to my own four walls.
The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance—
King George has palaces of pride,
And armed grooms must ward those halls;
With one stout bolt I safe abide
Within my own four walls.
Not all his men may sever this;
It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls;
My whinstone house my castle is—
I have my own four walls.
When fools or knaves do make a rout,
With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals,
I turn my back and shut them out;
These are my own four walls.