"Builds in the weather on the outward wall,
Even in the force and road of casualty."
I noticed that a pair had built their nest on an iron bracket under the
eaves of a building opposite our inn, which proved to be in the "road of
casualty;" for one day the painters began scraping the building,
preparatory to giving it a new coat of paint, and the "procreant cradle"
was knocked down. The swallows did not desert the place, however, but
were at work again next morning before the painters were. The Scotch, by
the way, make a free use of paint. They even paint their tombstones.
Most of them, I observed, were brown stones painted white. Carlyle's
father once sternly drove the painters from his door when they had been
summoned by the younger members of his family to give the house a coat
"o' pent." "Ye can jist pent the bog wi' yer ashbaket feet, for ye'll
pit nane o' yer glaur on ma door." But the painters have had their
revenge at last, and their "glaur" now covers the old man's tombstone.
One day I visited a little overgrown cemetery about a mile below the
village, toward Kirtlebridge, and saw many of the graves of the old
stock of Carlyles, among them some of Carlyle's uncles. This name occurs
very often in those old cemeteries; they were evidently a prolific and
hardy race. The name Thomas is a favorite one among them, insomuch that
I saw the graves and headstones of eight Thomas Carlyles in the two
graveyards. The oldest Carlyle tomb I saw was that of one John Carlyle,
who died in 1692. The inscription upon his stone is as follows:--
"Heir Lyes John Carlyle of Penerssaughs, who departed this life ye 17 of
May 1692, and of age 72, and His Spouse Jannet Davidson, who departed
this life Febr. ye 7, 1708, and of age 73. Erected by John, his son."
The old sexton, whom I frequently saw in the churchyard, lives in the
Carlyle house. He knew the family well, and had some amusing and
characteristic anecdotes to relate of Carlyle's father, the redoubtable
James, mainly illustrative of his bluntness and plainness of speech. The
sexton pointed out, with evident pride, the few noted graves the
churchyard held; that of the elder Peel being among them. He spoke of
many of the oldest graves as "extinct;" nobody owned or claimed them;
the name had disappeared, and the ground was used a second time. The
ordinary graves in these old burying places appear to become "extinct"
in about two hundred years. It was very rare to find a date older than
that. He said the "Cairls" were a peculiar set; there was nobody like
them. You would know them, man and woman, as soon as they opened their
mouths to speak; they spoke as if against a stone wall. (Their words hit
hard.) This is somewhat like Carlyle's own view of his style. "My
style," he says in his note-book, when he was thirty-eight years of age,
"is like no other man's. The first sentence bewrays me." Indeed,
Carlyle's style, which has been so criticised, was as much a part of
himself, and as little an affectation, as his shock of coarse yeoman
hair and bristly beard and bleared eyes were a part of himself; he
inherited them. What Taine calls his barbarisms was his strong mason
sire cropping out. He was his father's son to the last drop of his
blood, a master builder working with might and main. No more did the
former love to put a rock face upon his wall than did the latter to put
the same rock face upon his sentences; and he could do it, too, as no
other writer, ancient or modern, could.
I occasionally saw strangers at the station, which is a mile from the
village, inquiring their way to the churchyard; but I was told there had
been a notable falling off of the pilgrims and visitors of late. During
the first few months after his burial, they nearly denuded the grave of
its turf; but after the publication of the Reminiscences, the number of
silly geese that came there to crop the grass was much fewer. No real
lover of Carlyle was ever disturbed by those Reminiscences; but to the
throng that run after a man because he is famous, and that chip his
headstone or carry away the turf above him when he is dead, they were
happily a great bugaboo.
A most agreeable walk I took one day down to Annan. Irving's name still
exists there, but I believe all his near kindred have disappeared.
Across the street from the little house where he was born this sign may
be seen: "Edward Irving, Flesher." While in Glasgow, I visited Irving's
grave, in the crypt of the cathedral, a most dismal place, and was
touched to see the bronze tablet that marked its site in the pavement
bright and shining, while those about it, of Sir this or Lady that, were
dull and tarnished. Did some devoted hand keep it scoured, or was the
polishing done by the many feet that paused thoughtfully above this
name? Irving would long since have been forgotten by the world had it
not been for his connection with Carlyle, and it was probably the lustre
of the latter's memory that I saw reflected in the metal that bore
Irving's name. The two men must have been of kindred genius in many
ways, to have been so drawn to each other, but Irving had far less hold
upon reality; his written word has no projectile force. It makes a vast
difference whether you burn gunpowder on a shovel or in a gun-barrel.
Irving may be said to have made a brilliant flash, and then to have
disappeared in the smoke.
Some men are like nails, easily drawn; others are like rivets, not
drawable at all. Carlyle is a rivet, well _headed_ in. He is not going
to give way, and be forgotten soon. People who differed from him in
opinion have stigmatized him as an actor, a mountebank, a rhetorician;
but he was committed to his purpose and to the part he played with the
force of gravity. Behold how he toiled! He says, "One monster there is
in the world,--the idle man." He did not merely preach the gospel of
work; he was it,--an indomitable worker from first to last. How he
delved! How he searched for a sure foundation, like a master builder,
fighting his way through rubbish and quicksands till he reached the
rock! Each of his review articles cost him a month or more of serious
work. "Sartor Resartus" cost him nine months, the "French Revolution"
three years, "Cromwell" four years, "Frederick" thirteen years. No surer
does the Auldgarth bridge, that his father helped build, carry the
traveler over the turbulent water beneath it, than these books convey
the reader over chasms and confusions, where before there was no way, or
only an inadequate one. Carlyle never wrote a book except to clear some
gulf or quagmire, to span and conquer some chaos. No architect or
engineer ever had purpose more tangible and definite. To further the
reader on his way, not to beguile or amuse him, was always his purpose.
He had that contempt for all dallying and toying and lightness and
frivolousness that hard, serious workers always have. He was impatient
of poetry and art; they savored too much of play and levity. His own
work was not done lightly and easily, but with labor throes and pains,
as of planting his piers in a weltering flood and chaos. The spirit of
struggling and wrestling which he had inherited was always uppermost. It
seems as if the travail and yearning of his mother had passed upon him
as a birthmark. The universe was madly rushing about him, seeking to
engulf him. Things assumed threatening and spectral shapes. There was
little joy or serenity for him. Every task he proposed to himself was a
struggle with chaos and darkness, real or imaginary. He speaks of
"Frederick" as a nightmare; the "Cromwell business" as toiling amid
mountains of dust. I know of no other man in literature with whom the
sense of labor is so tangible and terrible. That vast, grim, struggling,
silent, inarticulate array of ancestral force that lay in him, when the
burden of written speech was laid upon it, half rebelled, and would not
cease to struggle and be inarticulate. There was a plethora of power: a
channel, as through rocks, had to be made for it, and there was an
incipient cataclysm whenever a book was to be written. What brings joy
and buoyancy to other men, namely, a genial task, brought despair and
convulsions to him. It is not the effort of composition,--he was a rapid
and copious writer and speaker,--but the pressure of purpose, the
friction of power and velocity, the sense of overcoming the demons and
mud-gods and frozen torpidity he so often refers to. Hence no writing
extant is so little like writing, and gives so vividly the sense of
something _done_. He may praise silence and glorify work. The
unspeakable is ever present with him; it is the core of every sentence:
the inarticulate is round about him; a solitude like that of space
encompasseth him. His books are not easy reading; they are a kind of
wrestling to most persons. His style is like a road made of rocks: when
it is good, there is nothing like it; and when it is bad, there is
nothing like it!
In "Past and Present" Carlyle has unconsciously painted his own life and
character in truer colors than has any one else: "Not a May-game is this
man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and
powers; no idle promenade through fragrant orange groves and green,
flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is
a stern pilgrimage through burning, sandy solitudes, through regions of
thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men with inexpressible soft
pity, as they _cannot_ love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the
uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he
rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the
Terrors and the Splendors, the Archdemons and Archangels. All heaven,
all pandemonium, are his escort." Part of the world will doubtless
persist in thinking that pandemonium furnished his chief counsel and
guide; but there are enough who think otherwise, and their numbers are
bound to increase in the future.