CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION

INDEX

THOMAS CARLYLE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all

in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the

spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an

intellectual chain.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the

scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary,

which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some

points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid

temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking

Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local

genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people,

spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge

between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was

also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the

century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master

musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good

and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or

paralysing caution.

WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of

the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself

in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great

revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic

glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the

humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the

manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours,

the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von

Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from

the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening

to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams,

some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill

twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The

reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are

everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to

extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his

thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range.

Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain

atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant

image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the

relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite

his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle

was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of

the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with

the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could

never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent,

dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.

He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals,

self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost

mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one

exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with

reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself,

violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet,

in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent

inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord

Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other

was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than

Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely

different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge

Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the

other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society.

Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged

and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made

constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism;

Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts

are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely,

defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an

audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it.

In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there

is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere,"

in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous

incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering

belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the

citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient

name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and,

only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His

career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth,

from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown.

Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a

sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the

Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is

accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends

in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from

America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to

their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill,

passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached

at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a

sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often

by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as

senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the

builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the

pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists

whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism.

In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate

successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers

of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass

by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder

and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village

churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets

his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured.

Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in

his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the

feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace,"

where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the ticking

of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the

steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from

"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last

bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian

characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander."

Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was

a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns,

Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven

years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the

"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two

whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms.

"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies,

governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been

sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig,

Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was

seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory

and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires,

two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions,

revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in

the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian

without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another

across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes

alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated

and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most

restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading

nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a

pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to

new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic

movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the

Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even

contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no

shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and

Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period,

advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams

of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised,

Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made

ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest

of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life

in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet

the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of

becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called

into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated

goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who

throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,

With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age,

are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the

darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of

prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a

great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable,

accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He

swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes

analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him

by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed

to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by

syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of

Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist

or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist,

practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is

consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of

the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was

among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the

link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an

expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves

physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a

physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms

of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or

rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with

unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in

his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern

Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously

of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit

the battle-fields of Friedrich II.--

Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring....

The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still

infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through

immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate,

you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless

you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are

lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are

buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what

Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and

sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that?

The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or

stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in

Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY

without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides

as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who

protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to

Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the

philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision,

has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only

tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his

beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were

liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is

practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms

"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark

of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi"

survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bête_ of a word

'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador,

"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind

eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres

Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found

perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck.

This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided

sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men

who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to

the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not

inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute

to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents

may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the

_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :--

"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous

fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated,

formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful

and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy

of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen

Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress,

there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero

that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that

produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble

the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a

fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the

Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the

earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern

thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally

accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are

denied the faculty of producing nations."

_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary

of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied

assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that

Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted

Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism

extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three

volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of

revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an

assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly,

every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and

one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr.

Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful

and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results,

but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on

the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops

of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without

attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think

to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word

"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's

divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart

and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to

Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about

the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and

Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William

I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame

from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to

masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose

memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze,

Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch

dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican

Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events,

were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and

dominated.

So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men

are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance

in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In

an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education,

when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised

to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest

civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead

the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be

accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a

mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the

matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain

that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become

civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more,"

preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second

"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier

date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities.

A people is but the attempt of many

To rise to the completer life of one;

And those who live as models to the mass

Are singly of more value than they all.

Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his

_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older

than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our

times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau

and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of

Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of

the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour

of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation

of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be

beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude,

we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the

circumstances amid which he was "evolved."

CHAPTER II

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 £100, 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 £1000. Strong, rough, and

eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words

like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the

Brontës 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

Teufelsdröckh, 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: "Josè 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 protégé 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 £90

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 £150 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 Teufelsdröckh 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 Kämpfer 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 £50. 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 Musæus, Fouqué,

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 £200 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 £200 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, _fâcheux_ 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.

CHAPTER III

CRAIGENPUTTOCK

[1826-1834]

"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing,

Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at

ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and

he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister

Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON

NURSE.

"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a

furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830.

During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis

of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of

which he was greatly himself to blame.

No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life,

already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion.

Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to

share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to

an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her

judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane

Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from

Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to

an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed

in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and

afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity

and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father

his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family

estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To

her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane,

of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the

tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of

precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of

Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the

gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and

shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of

"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all

point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life,

it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a

mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The

little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to

venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long

friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of

dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my

feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude,

"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and

heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George

Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive,

very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in

Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause

of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the

world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard

a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she

went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed.

Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving,

and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him

in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn

her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to

contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view

of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she

retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me."

But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some

struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide,

philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle.

Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of

constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations,

confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with

interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the

dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that

Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane

Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the

honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and

attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her

esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by

Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be

left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but

the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under

two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of

remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle

began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and

Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half

conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English

authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him

Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care

nothing for the £500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but

later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his

master Goethe, he exclaims:--

Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like

a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful

twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O

God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up

their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the

noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course

was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and

proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he

been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he

not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of

seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he

shall not return to us.

This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it

all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon

was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of

a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is

dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or

disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or

they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear

on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look

before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As

early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife;

she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination

akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating

my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping,

honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were

recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh

there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she

confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment

you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had

written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you.

But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I

will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never,

though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet

shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have

no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment

of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to

entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in

this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger,

the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural

repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing

herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without

having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with

you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic,"

retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of

perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and

support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in

the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not

your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won

and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings

to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility

of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own

words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I

will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this

very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her

widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might

have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear

rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of

nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother

consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her

daughter's husband!"

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd,

Was ever woman in this humour won?

Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at

Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another

counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit

argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which

for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs.

Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular,

Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant

house, saying in effect to his fiancée that as for intrusive visitors he

had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point,

however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had

to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards

difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had £200 to start with,

and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a year.

On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am

resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has

decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father.

Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and

his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries

to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects

to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove

in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled

at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family

migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil

months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in

some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social

gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their

brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the

northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster,

John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey,

a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself.

Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch

cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still

struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_.

The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the

course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks

the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical

essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the

front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_

was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign

Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were

ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send.

To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and

Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the

second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on

_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England.

In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially

acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for

himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the

author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a

correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude

on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe

assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in

a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of

Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host

of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most

lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The

testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that"

the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts

to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure,

about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a

Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of

Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt

to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after

publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could

not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He

had no _invention._"

[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear.

The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the

rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of

"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to

Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di

non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact,

and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of

cymbals!]

"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and

all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie."

The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from

his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter

Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in

Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new

Annual Register, designed to be a literary _résumé_ of the year, make up

the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic

life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox

honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom

saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and

read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the

author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought

alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did

not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but

there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles,

Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not

succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful

whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater

quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell

vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a

natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the

Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of

the Hawks.

Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British

dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy

straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid

bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in

front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or

apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle

allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery;

an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its

magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother,

and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit,

and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was

Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual

forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations.

"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and

spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals,

nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of

Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in

his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as

a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran

warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude,

against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food

of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of

action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous,

the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his

deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his

wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was

great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out

the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany,

as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_

and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all

obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing

to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even

duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it

be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as

completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a

housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had

chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as

himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of

delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr.

Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of

fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words

like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to

which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live

on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent

to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to

gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged

to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour

floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to

admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that

thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle

has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am

miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never

marry a man of genius."

Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all

his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o'

Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later

to Goethe:--

Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of

Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here

to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results.

But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of

life, and to secure the independence through which I could

be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our

own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases

ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the

monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry,

about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola

and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I

was born, and there both father and mother still live to

love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have

written since I came here is an Essay on Burns.

This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in

the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal

and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den,"

elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he

confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have

really had enough."

Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam.

Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for

the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he

called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the

den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently

disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like

solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a

Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending--

God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest

With little ones all in good time be blest;

I love thee much

For well thou managest that life of thine,

While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine,

Would I were such!

_The Desert._

The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and

others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London,

and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with

the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this

period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend

who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law

for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From

these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow

Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:--

Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all

work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but

grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is

in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really

love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary

men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer,

Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger,

etc.

The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation

of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:--

You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called.

Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right

have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live

a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled

with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated,

than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be

filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can

even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens!

What is to be done with my _empty Head_?

Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys

(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of

kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a

double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly

regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen

though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he

wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so

entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth,

whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And

again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek

shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a

strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed,

with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle,

who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to

no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to

his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London,

he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the

editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary

conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last

production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those

following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were

brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit

was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends,

in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and

destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his

benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to

in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by

Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray.

He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of

which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained

one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our

happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially

that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine

unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of

1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the

birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is

pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end

loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I

am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling

may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote,

and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his

life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose

fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects,

the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from

original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes

Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs,

Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality

is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German

professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of

the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as

his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly

conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the

unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved

if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born

male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his

friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least,"

pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse."

This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully returned), was

induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never

wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their

resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made

his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always

preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages

the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not

print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not

buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of

five-and-thirty years:--

Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and

August 1830, _Teufelsdröckh_ was ready, and I decided

to make for London; night before going, how I remember it....

The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the

blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least

of all here! In short, finding that I had got £100 (if

memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before,

and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not

only not get £200, but even get no Murray or the like to

publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous

object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently

strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal

experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will

make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for

some two years from one terrified owl to another; published

at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then

mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what

was sent by Emerson from America.

This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's

recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had

carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better

bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the

matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled

into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already

contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published

with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a

nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to

justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in

general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense,"

pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of

_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the

crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used

to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth

reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he

would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of

_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley,

after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and

then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss.

It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some

slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the

_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends,

from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a

thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently

and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to

Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts

about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had

it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all."

[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap

edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few

weeks.]

In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in

a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A

criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the

most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics,

literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has

been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over

all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the

occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure

splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him."

Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are,

more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions

of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by

philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of

the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh

products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from

Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions,

physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter

slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the

electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning

were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen

were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a

photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message

of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck.

To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was

almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It

was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in

theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of

_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a

place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous,

almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally

obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of

the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory

of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable

of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf

of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth,

_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the

old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body

cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was

abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which

he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the

consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the

_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_,

and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this

period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his

summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where

he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time.

They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of

tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as

"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but

was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to

remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like

Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he

afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was

enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in

_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's

favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had

married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a

master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter

reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by

to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation

at £300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled,

as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been

still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year,

when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a

residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when,

referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely

a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of

Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."

The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking

bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he

to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his

own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to

complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link

between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period

is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to

Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle

thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not,

probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself

he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the

impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and

might continue to retard his advancement.

[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.]

Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though

an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous

compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a

niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not

see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the

_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly

growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any

promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his

own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally,

disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather

than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede.

He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more

contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's

_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of

_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay

and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in

the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through

glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At

last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife

approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his

fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the

initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to

London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in

Chelsea near the Thames.

CHAPTER IV

CHEYNE ROW

[1834-1842]

The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills,

and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds,

as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea,

dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the

excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle

Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a

stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No.

24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house

where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men,

lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters,

but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips

almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France,

and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to

admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English

society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he

found a hearing among the mass of the people.

The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases

of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is

preserved throughout:--

I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of

Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with

narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_,

and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of

adherence to the Radical creed.

II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the

North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the

writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of

Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day

Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now

consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of

adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom."

III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector

at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period

is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more

decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy.

IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun.

The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised

audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to £300 at most, could not

propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their

circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one.

Chelsea,

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite

Beyond it,

was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable

distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a

host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in

old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have

memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and

Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of

Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our

own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott,

Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle

came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door

neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome,

despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his

"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright

"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle

criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca

of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends,

drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss

Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To

quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full

light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar

skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age.

Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close

of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and

paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might

have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol

misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have

benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict

either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional

insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength

that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later

times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being

overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of

the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew

weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men

of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in

this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material

to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his

criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation

should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in

the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and

sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo,

his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to

the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us

was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb,"

who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best

adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom

he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain

towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken

a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly

ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable,

affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt

to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable

in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the-

wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again

of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine

to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be

relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though

even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful

in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's

"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their

last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when

he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the

benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around

you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is

pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another

old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of

their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent

kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am

at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic

flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one

visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of

1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any

more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his

youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume

of the _Reminiscences_.

[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle

deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply

justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of

his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of

the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now

"beginning to be somebody."]

The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production

of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London

life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves

little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written

for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French

in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and

oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This,

doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other

being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who

never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's

peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an

artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never

wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme

well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much

discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work

enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had,

on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle,

never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt

like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still

ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped,

adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German

and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from

Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard,"

exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am

forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own

doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in

London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the

usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the

employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to

literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature"

means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always

conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects,

essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he

did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule

of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an

acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are

enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation

to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited

him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the

benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the

record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and

perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the

chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author

to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the

implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well

as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his

life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but

he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who

did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the

offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main

authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and

wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of

his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings

and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more

neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of

literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence,

but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of

people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally

gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident,

justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles

Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening

for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled

in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about,

super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he

made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession

became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not

wonder to find him writing in 1833--

It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the

craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have

committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit

literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to

have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal

Universe;

or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world

like Teufelsdröckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet

all the time, with incomparable naiveté, he was asserting:--

The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my

feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary

world here is a thing which I have no other course left me

but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health

and peace for one year, I could write a better book than

there has been in this country for generations.