From the year 1818, when Carlyle was two-and-twenty years of age, the
Church of Scotland had lost the chance of seeing him among her clergy.
In his _Reminiscences_ he speaks of his dropping off as but the natural,
and in a manner accidental, termination of the languid, half-willing,
half-reluctant, state of mind in which he had himself always been on
that subject of his clerical calling which his parents had so much at
heart. There can be little doubt, however, that stronger forces were at
work.
In Kirkcaldy he had been reading omnivorously, not only laying Irving’s
library under contribution, but getting over books from the Edinburgh
University library as well. Bailly’s _Histoire de l’Astronomie_ was one
of those received from Edinburgh; and among those from Irving’s library
he mentions “Gibbon, Hume, etc.,” besides a number of the French
classics in the small Didot edition. He dwells on his reading of
_Gibbon_, informing us that he read the book with “greedy velocity,”
getting through a volume a day, so as to finish the twelve volumes of
which Irving’s copy consisted in just as many days. He adds:—“It was, of
all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of
investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired
Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so
quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often
admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate
conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of
this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation
was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been
reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. After mentioning, rather
pathetically, as he does in his _Reminiscences_, his wonder at the
velocity of his reading in his early days as compared with the slow rate
at which he could now get through a book, he spoke of Gibbon himself in
some detail, and told me that it was from that first well-remembered
reading of Gibbon in twelve days, at the rate of a volume a day, that he
dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been
left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. This is literally what he
said, and it is of consequence in our present connection. The process of
extirpation can hardly have been complete at the moment of the call on
Dr. Ritchie,—else the call would not have been made; but there can be no
doubt that it was not mere continued languor that stopped Carlyle in his
clerical career. There were the beginnings in his mind of the crash of
that system of belief on which the Scottish Church rested, and some
adherence to which was imperative on any one who would be a clergyman of
that Church in any section of it then recognised or possible.
Although he kept that matter for the present to himself, not admitting
even Irving yet to his confidence, the fact that he had given up the
clerical career was known at once to all his friends.[17] It was a sore
disappointment, above all, to his parents; but they left him to his own
course, his father with admirable magnanimity, his mother “perhaps still
more lovingly, though not so silently.”
It was another disappointment to them, about the same time, to know that
he had resolved to quit the Kirkcaldy schoolmastership. His relations
with the Kirkcaldy people, or with some of them, had not been absolutely
satisfactory, any more than Irving’s; both had “got tired of
schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results,” and had
even come to the conclusion “Better die than be a schoolmaster for one’s
living”; and in the end of 1818 they had both thrown up their Kirkcaldy
engagements and were back in Edinburgh to look about for something else.
Irving, then twenty-six years of age and comparatively at ease in the
matter of pecuniary means, had preachings here and there about Edinburgh
to occupy him, and the possibility of a call to some parish-charge at
home, or heroic mission abroad, for his prospect. Carlyle, just
twenty-three years of age, was all at sea as to his future, but had
about £90 of savings on which to rest till he could see light.
The six months or so from December 1818 to the summer of 1819 form a
little period by itself in the Edinburgh lives of Irving and Carlyle.
They lodged in the Old Town, not far from each other. Carlyle’s rooms
were at No. 15 Carnegie Street, in the suburb called “The Pleasance”;
Irving’s, which were the more expensive, were in Bristo Street, close to
the University,—where, says Carlyle, he “used to give breakfasts to
intellectualities he fell in with, I often a guest with them.” Irving
also renewed his connection with the University by attending Hope’s
Class of Chemistry, which was always in those days the most crowded of
the classes by far, and the Natural History Class under Jameson. I find
no proof of any similar attendance on any University Class by Carlyle
through the session 1818–19; but we learn from Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of
Irving_ that he was for this session a member of a certain
_Philosophical Association_ which Irving had started “for the mutual
improvement of those who had already completed the ordinary academic
course.” It was one of those small and ephemeral societies of which
there have been so many in the history of the University, distinct from
the larger and more famous societies,—such as the _Speculative_, the
_Theological_, the _Dialectic_, and the _Diagnostic_,—which established
themselves permanently, and still exist. We hear a little of Irving’s
doings in the semi-academic brotherhood, especially of an essay which he
read to them; but of Carlyle’s doings, if there were any, we hear
nothing. The mere membership, however, was a kind of continued bond
between him and his _Alma Mater_ through that session; and we can
imagine also some renewed intercourse with Professor Leslie, and an
occasional dropping in, as an outsider, at one or other of the
class-rooms, to hear a stray lecture. Meanwhile, he found no occupation.
Irving, besides his preachings, had an hour or two a day of private
mathematical teaching, at the rate of two guineas a month per hour; but
nothing of the sort came to Carlyle. Once, indeed, recommended by
Nichol, the mathematical schoolmaster of whom we have already heard, he
did call on a gentleman who wanted mathematical coaching for some
friend; but the result was that the gentleman,—whom he describes in the
letter as “a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers,”—thought two
guineas a month “perfectly extravagant,” and would not engage him. In
these circumstances, and as his weekly bills for his lodgings and board
amounted to between 15s. and 17s.,—which he thought unreasonable for his
paltry accommodations, with badly-cooked food, and perpetual disturbance
from the noises of a school overhead,—he resolved to leave Edinburgh,
for a time at least, and return to his father’s farmhouse at Mainhill.
On the 29th of March 1819 he intimated this intention in a letter to his
mother thus:—“A French author, d’Alembert (one of the few persons who
deserve the honourable epithet of honest man), whom I was lately
reading, remarks that one who has devoted his life to learning ought to
carry for his motto ‘_Liberty, Truth, Poverty_,’ for he who fears the
latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using
every honest effort to attain to a comfortable situation in life; it
says only that the best is dearly bought by base conduct, and the worst
is not worth mourning over. We shall speak of all these matters more
fully in summer; for I am meditating just now to come down to stay a
while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German, and
others. You will give me yonder little room, and you will waken me every
morning about five or six o’clock. Then _such_ study! I shall delve in
the garden too, and, in a word, become not only the wisest, but the
strongest, man in those regions. This is all _claver_, but it pleases
one.”[18]
It seems to have been about June 1819 that the migration from
Edinburgh to Mainhill was carried into effect. It is thus mentioned in
one of Irving’s letters from Bristo Street to the Martins of
Kirkcaldy:—“Carlyle goes away to-morrow, and Brown the next day. So
here I am once more on my own resources, except Dickson, who is better
fitted to swell the enjoyment of a joyous than to cheer the solitude
of a lonely hour. For this Carlyle is better fitted than any one I
know. It is very odd indeed that he should be sent for want of
employment to the country. Of course, like every man of talent, he has
gathered around this Patmos many a splendid purpose to be fulfilled,
and much improvement to be wrought out. ‘I have the ends of my
thoughts to bring together, which no one can do in this thoughtless
scene. I have my views of life to reform, and the whole plan of my
conduct to new-model; and, into all, I have my health to recover. And
then once more I shall venture my bark upon the waters of this wide
realm; and, if she cannot weather it, I shall steer west, and try the
waters of another world.’ So he reasons and resolves; but surely a
worthier destiny awaits him than voluntary exile.”[19]
Within a few weeks after the writing of this letter, viz. on a late
Sunday in July 1819, there occurred the incident which was to lead to
Irving’s own removal from Edinburgh, and affect the whole future course
of his life. This was his appearance in the pulpit of St. George’s
church, by the friendly arrangement of Dr. Andrew Thomson, the minister
of that church, in order that Dr. Chalmers, then on a visit to
Edinburgh, and looking out for an assistant to himself in his great
Glasgow church and parish of St. John’s, might have a private
opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his fitness.
Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with Carlyle’s
studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in
Dumfriesshire,[20] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr.
Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the
Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was
settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in
Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new duties,
picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the valley of
the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend, Frank Dickson, in
his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly described in the
_Reminiscences_.
Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming acquaintance with Dr.
Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly knew what to make of him,—some
thinking him more like a “cavalry officer” or “brigand chief” than a
young minister of the Gospel,—Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His
uncertainties and speculations as to his future, with the dream of
emigration to America, had turned themselves into a vague notion that,
if he gave himself to the study of law, he might possibly be able to
muster somehow the two or three hundreds of pounds that would be
necessary to make him a member of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for
walking up and down the floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown,
like the grandees he had seen there in his memorable first visit to the
place, with Tom Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in
Edinburgh was essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings
now seem to be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo
Street,—possibly in the rooms which Irving had left.
No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with our
University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law studies
after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his own, quoted by
Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears that he attended
“Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude adds that his intention
of becoming an advocate, and his consequent perseverance in attendance
on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh University, continued for some
time. Our records, however, are not quite clear in the matter. In our
Matriculation Book for the session 1819–20, where every law student, as
well as every arts student and every medical student, was bound to enter
his name, paying a matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas
Carlyles, both from Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and
elegant hand, I should take to be that of _our_ Carlyle at that date,
enters himself as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5
Lit.,” signifying that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in
four preceding sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle
is 825. The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself,
in a somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,”
with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one previous
session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the construction of the
appearances of those two Carlyles in the independent class-lists that
have been preserved, in the handwritings of the Professors, for that
session of their common matriculation and for subsequent sessions.
Without troubling the reader with the puzzling details, I may say that
the records present an alternative of two suppositions: viz. either (1)
Both the Thomas Carlyles who matriculated for 1819–20 became law
students that session; in which case the “Thomas Carlyle,
Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too boyish-looking handwriting, and
the gross misdescription of him as “2 Lit.,” was _our_ Carlyle; or (2)
Only one of the two became a law student; in which case he was the
“Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or _our_ Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the
name of his county, and correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the
first supposition it has to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance
in a law class was in the Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for
the session 1819–20, while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class
for “the Institutes” that session, but reappeared in other classes in
later sessions. On the second supposition (which also involves a mistake
in the registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the
“Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so began
a new career of attendance in the University, which extended to 1823
thus:—
_Session 1819–20_: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor Alexander
Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
_Session 1820–21_: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s
Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his
vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
_Session 1821–22_: No attendance.
_Session 1822–23_: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new
Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819
contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact, though
a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of time over
which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to his Edinburgh
life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He was not,
indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides absences
now and then on brief visits, _e.g._ to Irving in Glasgow or elsewhere
in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations, longer or shorter,
in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at Mainhill in
Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in country
quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the proper
date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an Edinburgh
man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but afterwards and more
continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of course, the great Moray
Place of the aristocratic West End, but a much obscurer namesake, now
re-christened “Spey Street,” at right angles to Pilrig Street, just off
Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings that he read and mused; it was in
the streets of Edinburgh, or on the heights on her skirts, that he had
his daily walks; the few friends and acquaintances he had any converse
with were in Edinburgh; and it was with Edinburgh and her affairs that
as yet he considered his own future fortunes as all but certain to be
bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of
any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural
faculties, unmistakably of the order called _genius_, and that unusual
wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814
by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by
Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still
manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of
them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange
moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness
and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others
had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into
settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is
misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the
meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some
of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate
and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment
on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his
immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen.
If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal
blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came
into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it
was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to
have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost
the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly
endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal
peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain.
From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of
him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the
prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings,
addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies,
all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour
and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous
confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but
had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh
life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems
then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be
quoted:—
_April, 1819._—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several
accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly
inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past
eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are
fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The
probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is
certainly not very strong.”[22]
_March, 1820._—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble,
weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely
unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this
planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of
absurdity and chicane.”[23]
_October, 1820._—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the
next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last.
Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are
worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this
terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no
share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and
howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under
dark-brown shade.”[24]
_March 9, 1821._—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene
for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from
a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of
things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she
will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously
ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is
settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am
considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so
had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing
the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the
atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you
ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills
swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and
precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung;
with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged
foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black,
venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like
a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was
going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver
creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[25]
_Reminiscence in 1867._—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce
resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways,
and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as
too likely!) that I could do _nothing_. This kind of humour, what I
sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my
life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing
towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this
my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal
fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the
worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved
city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of
spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his
seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto
had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he
could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he
had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual
poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it
was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable
employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to
get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger
than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then
finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this
has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of
Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the
Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of
those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh,
Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his
abnormal unhappiness was to be found in _himself_. Was it, then, his
ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his
twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to
Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his
days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the
case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have
accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged
on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought
along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as
he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy
and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet
become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called
a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the
Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their
persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as
if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere
pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not
suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses,
arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a
soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the
most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of himself
away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father and
mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that his clear
intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the theology from
which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The main evidence is that,
though he had some central core of faith still to seek as a
substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a new way the
old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, _Num detur Religio
Naturalis?_, and had not yet attained to that light, describable as a
fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or Supernaturalism, in
the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,—yet he was not
involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and “backward
hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so cantingly, in
feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in his case of
any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a theosophic
refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy. On the
contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of moral or
really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have settled
once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the limits of
the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human intellect in that
class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may suggest
itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent and
imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those
love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a
masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we may
well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a while
by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost Margaret
Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their
due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and
all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those
Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a
noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions
measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions,
and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given
up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the
Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others
could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle
could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which
he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on
speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very
best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary,
to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant
glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this
innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the
throat and compel to listen.
Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation
with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for
conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a
correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive
atmosphere, not of vulgar _mauvaise honte_, though such it is generally
esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature,
and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto
occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The
fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this
best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one
observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever
come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have
adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the
world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and
uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in
ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are
wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[29] These feelings were
known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor
social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call
it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his
own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him
than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that
we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own
demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even
within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present
move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to
him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a
winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding,
and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most
favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very
few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is
worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical,
unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and
who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their
vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter.
Therefore, my dear friend, _some other way is to be sought for_.”[30] In
a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is,
my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts
of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those
more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which
they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the
ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and
wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your
treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring
them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so
much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of
it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than
theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to
mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of
ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of
mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables
us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh
struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and
aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning
rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging
contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which
characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the
forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s most
immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of the kind at
his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day, and also of
one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away from Edinburgh.
Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the higher mathematics. My
recollection is that he used to connect the break-down of his health
with his continued wrestlings with Newton’s _Principia_ even after he
had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh; and he would speak of the grassy
slopes of the Castle Hill, then not railed off from Princes Street, as a
place where he liked to lie in fine weather, poring over that or other
books. His readings, however, were now, as before, very miscellaneous.
The Advocates’ Library, to which he had access, I suppose, through some
lawyer of his acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books
such as he had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to _it_, alone of
Scottish institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this
Library; and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may
judge from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When
I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which
solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable
little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s
repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take
them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just after
settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was the
study of the German language. French, so far as the power of reading it
was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his boyhood; Italian, to
some less extent, had come easily enough; but German tasked his
perseverance and required time. He was especially diligent in it through
the years 1819 and 1820, with such a measure of success that in August
in the latter year he could write to one friend, “I could tell you much
about the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight study of German
literature has revealed to me,” and in October of the same year to
another, “I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest:
they are the greatest men at present with me.” His German readings were
continued, and his admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature
himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very
vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned
his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of
his successive experiments in established professions had ever since
been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately
urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him
that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his
manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances
in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his
advice in the words “_Some other way is to be sought for._” What Irving
meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those
letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary
attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as
possible, and aim at a connection with the _Edinburgh Review_ and
_Blackwood_.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while,
turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly
impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing
letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to
astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the
specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been
exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters,
and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces
suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells
us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some
magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,”
giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow
country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one
of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never
knew, the editor having returned no answer.[33] Although, after this
rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there
can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not
in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very
possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in
prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were
open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but
two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published
anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title
“_Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story_,” but
certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own
information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended
for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its
picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It
is entitled “_Peter Nimmo_,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for
February 1831, the next number after that containing _Cruthers and
Jonson_.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known
about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called
PETER NIMMO, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, SIR PETER
NIMMO. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown
age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of
the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown
great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms
and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a
University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for
the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have
been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his
appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and
pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of
disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at
least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not
get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and
the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the
thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the
heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill
Burton wrote of _his_ first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31,
when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important
figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any
quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to
create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and
the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was
“merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having
once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the
occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to
keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various
houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students
got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him
with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at
dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at
country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to
Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he
had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had
left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a
Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the
most sensible men he had ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though
thus familiar with “Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his
real standing by his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly,
he had at one time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced
him in the University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s
knowledge of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking
out one or two classes. In the _Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler_, a
small satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session
1823–24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the
matter consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous
notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man, whose
abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze forth,
and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in
Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the
Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical classes,
having entered himself in the matriculation book, in conspicuously large
characters, as “PETRUS BUCHANAN NIMMO, ESQUIRE, &C., DUMBARTONSHIRE,”
with the addition that he was in the 17th year of his theological
studies. Six years previously, viz. in 1813–14, he is registered as in
the 8th year of his literary course. In 1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s
fellow-students in the 2d Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in
1810–11 he was with Carlyle in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in
the Logic Class. Peter seems to have been lax in his dates; but there
can be no doubt that he was a known figure about Edinburgh University
before Carlyle entered it, and that the whole of Carlyle’s University
career, as of the careers of all the students of Edinburgh University
for another generation, was spent in an atmosphere of PETER NIMMO. What
Peter had been originally it is difficult to make out. The probability
is that he had come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid
youth from Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he
had gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could
not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture
about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for the
theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the essential
portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical “Rhapsody,”
consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and an epilogue.
In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “_Numeris fertur lege
solutis_,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the solitary bard in
quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?
Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;
Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.
Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,
And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?
Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?
If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.
For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, PETER NIMMO:
Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!
In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and
appearance:—
Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,
Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,
To and from that everlasting College-gate,
With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?
Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is
really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the
college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second
part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A
summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country
neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the
vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:
Here was he (words of import strange),—_He_ here!
Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:
But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.
Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has come, and
on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the sight of the
little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the donkey
canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His transition
from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the third part sings
of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the fourth part he is
the poor mendicant Peter who has become the Wandering Jew of the
University, and whose mode of living is a problem:—
Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,
This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;
He spins not, neither does he toil;
Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but
sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part of
the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we must
hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
At midnight hour did Peter come;
Right well I knew his tap and tread;
With smiles I placed two pints of rum
Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.
Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy of
his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great prospects of
various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s head reduced to
a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is sent off in a
wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather indistinctly in three
stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
_Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:
Life’s a variorum._
Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not Carlyle’s
element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and
was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would
not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked
forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for
the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh.
Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books
before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were
materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s
letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the
_Edinburgh Review_, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of
Gravitation, of which we hear in the _Reminiscences_. The manuscript,
carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very
legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great
Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was
not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors
are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of
it.
This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle
might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good
while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster,
afterwards Sir David. The _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_, which Brewster had
begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which
had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns,
had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther
than the letter _M_. Among the contributors had been, or were, these:
Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel,
Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and
other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as
Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas
Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev.
Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor
Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr.
Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary
_début_, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted
conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted
to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in
just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles
continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_,
_Montaigne_, _Montesquieu_, _Montfaucon_, _Dr. Moore_, _Sir John Moore_,
were his first six, all under the letter _M_, and all supplied in 1820,
with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he
was to contribute ten more, running through the letter _N_, and ending
in the sixteenth volume, under the letter _P_, with _Mungo Park_,
_William Pitt the Elder_, and _William Pitt the Younger_. It was no bad
practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought
him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for
casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself,
and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he
contributed to the _New Edinburgh Review_, a quarterly which was started
in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the
previous _Edinburgh Monthly Review_, and which came to an end, as might
have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823.
In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an
article of 21 pages by Carlyle on _Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends_,
to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages
on _Goethe’s Faust_.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no
improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was
all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and
impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches
to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving,
whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and
strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now
and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when
the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the
open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving
wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving
did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in
June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced
him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child,
Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not
impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement
interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most
remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form,
features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale,
black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant
black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or
culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now
stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the
wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as
she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse,
the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at
Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh,
she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The
address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on
the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate;
and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington
nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I
had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her
recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as
possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a
fleein’, dancin’, licht-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——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister
Carlyle himsel’; and _he_ cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a
great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was
certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful
and spirited girl in Haddington not only the gigantic, handsome,
black-haired Irving, whom she had known since her childhood, but also
the friend he had brought with him,—less tall than Irving, of leaner and
less handsome frame, but with head of the most powerful shape, thick
dark-brown hair several shades lighter than her own, and an intenser
genius than Irving’s visible in his deep eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad
face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about this time that Irving used to
rattle up his friend from his desponding depths by the prophecy of the
coming time when they would shake hands across a brook as respectively
first in British Divinity and in British Literature, and when people,
after saying “Both these fellows are from Annandale,” would add “Where
_is_ Annandale?” The girl, looking at the two, may have already been
thinking of Irving’s jocular prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to
Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude to a
memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the _Sartor
Resartus_.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has deserted
the popular faith, passes through three stages before he attains to
complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in the state of
mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves on to a middle
point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally he reaches “The
Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question is that in which,
having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting No,” the prey of the
most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly helpless and abject,
there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry day, as he was toiling
along the wretched little street in Paris called _Rue Saint Thomas de
l’Enfer_, a kind of miraculous rousing and illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What
_art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip
and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is
the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death;
and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may,
will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not
suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast,
trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it
come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there
rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear
away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit,
almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim
fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (_das Ewige Nein_)
pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me;
and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created
majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the
most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and
Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The
Everlasting No had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and
the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer:
‘_I_ am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ It is from this
hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic
Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares
that, while most of _Sartor Resartus_ is mere symbolical myth, this
account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh
in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened
literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the
incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith
Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the
incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in
June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and
first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever
was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his
recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an
exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of
Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense
that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative,
by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place,
we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his _Reminiscences_
that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of
finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings,
fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,”
and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of
Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present
date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th
May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake
to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe,
whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from
the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the
“Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to
any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology,
in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete;
and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to
the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question
had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between
Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual
Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal
duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which
Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic
one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle
between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No
constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested
in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however
passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a
host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be
brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any
certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How
was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world;
or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible
power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man
amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental
groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general
assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken
account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is
that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on
an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of
the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the
mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of _practical
determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit_, each determination
coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from
that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom
and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a
corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the
principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things _shall_ be my
view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is
by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel.
The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent
in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of
which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by
any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a
beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the
temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it
substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and
whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to
be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the
Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr.
Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when
he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh
and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot
must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s
starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on
his way to Leith.
There was, at all events, no very _obvious_ change in Carlyle’s mood
and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His own report
in the _Reminiscences_ is still of the dreariness of his life, his
gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated though
this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be a
mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such
abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily
suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of
his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he
thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows
of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity
of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness.
From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving,
whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to
Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of
sunrising upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar
effect: such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which
Irving had written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when
you shall be plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and
therefore more clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note
respecting Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him
Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have caught some
glimpse of your inner man, though he had few opportunities; for he
never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[37]
Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there must
have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on Irving’s
own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that Irving was not
to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow Demosthenes and his very
difficult congregation. After two years and a half of the Glasgow
assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come that invitation to the
pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton Garden, London, which Irving
received as exultingly, as he afterwards said, as if it had been a call
to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his
way to London to offer himself on probation to the little colony of
London Scots that thought he might suit them for their minister; and
Carlyle was the last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of
their parting was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith
Street, then the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was
“a dim night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells
us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ helps us to the more precise
dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had their
talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a bundle of
cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium of his
journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the cigars no one
ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next morning, forgot to
take them with him, and left them lying in a stall in the coffee-room.
That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to be
remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the Thames on fire;
Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical teaching, his private
German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_,
and the chances of continued contributorship to the _New Edinburgh
Review_. Thus the year 1821 ended, and the year 1822 began.