PART III.—1822–1828

By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of

other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in

his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the

continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June

1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one

can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have

contributed to the result.

One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very

important event in his life is rather hazy. In his _Reminiscences_ he

gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black

Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of

Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He

thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact

as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation

Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful

his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at

£200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product

of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one

fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs.

Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black

Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was

back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that

month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane

Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh,

because he was not sure but _she_ might be then in Edinburgh too; and it

was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that

Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of

Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The

good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must

have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January

1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull,

and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could

have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his

probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving,

moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English

Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister,

Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a

“domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a

very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh

from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat

troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him.

Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the

University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private

tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom

Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have

been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle

had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the

terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the

spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr.

Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with

Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had

that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the

High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in

the _Reminiscences_. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to

Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh,

had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had

tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was

in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to

board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street.

He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered

Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The

information agrees with the University records; for in the

matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest

matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I

find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session

in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s

tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the

University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly

been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February.

The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in

Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s

permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware

of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way

of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving

somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him

about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow,

the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing”

to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at

the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles

Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he

cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics,

indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow

training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both

the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them,

teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them

generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.

Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought

to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the

visit of the previous June _that_ had gradually established itself, till

it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books,

etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or

sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had

gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some

significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh

immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton

Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The

impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s

_Life of Irving_, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the

Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing

relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent

to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite

engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of

Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the

outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own

insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act

for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and

have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a

Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller

tutorship.

Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more

numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he

says, “translating _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster; my outlook

somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from

private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find

literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college

friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of

authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and,

if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the

moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of

human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My _petards_ will

not burst, or make only _noise_ when they do. I must mix them better,

plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution

too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on,

weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many

discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all

the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire.

_Then_ shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great

drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we

learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a

London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works.

That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle

speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the

time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it

would appear, in that connection with the _New Edinburgh Review_ of

which mention has been already made, and in the translation of

_Legendre_ which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in

the background. There is significance in the fact that his second

contribution to the _New Edinburgh_, published in April 1822, when the

Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s _Faust_. The

German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him

greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature.

Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual

worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the

same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his

own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller.

Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking

commemoration in the passage of his _Reminiscences_ where he tells of

that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our

present date, when, having finished the reading of _Wilhelm Meister_, he

walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation

over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he

had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him.

Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while

in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German

writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or

four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.

The translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster deserves a passing

notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press

of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with

the title _Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated

from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited

by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an

Introductory Essay on Proportion_,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and

continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship

of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten,

that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in

the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly

believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about

1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University

College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all

things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the

Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have

done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that

the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted

teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard

Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he

wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to

obtain an _affidavit_ from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said

Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and

that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some

consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the

_Reminiscences_, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a

fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he

says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings,

and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had

some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed

Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his _Budget of

Paradoxes_, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of

Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the

volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed

pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up

with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their

corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the

most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The

facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements

[Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”

The Translation of _Legendre_, with this Essay on Proportion, was

Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he

would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the

vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem

which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had

been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution,

Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the

theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it,

he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into

talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references

especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked

similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in

the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old

pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir,

you are dealing with the _ipsissima corpora_,” Chalmers used to say; and

Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.

There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether

disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two

boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up

house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company;

and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur,

was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and

becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller,

and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of

the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we

are able to connect it with another advent.

It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous

expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably

on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the

29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that

paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir

Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be

found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what

the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his

love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate

avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a

triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core,

fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his _Reminiscences_

how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two

before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the

streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in

“black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and

resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the

flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in

abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the

use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant

friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the

spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before

his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the

hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him

describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of

that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings,

round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail

than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the

_Reminiscences_; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the

first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village

inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from

which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at

the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but

George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he

was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if

to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his

ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin

partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with

toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had

become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the

whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more

insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed

the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake,

woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to

ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if

not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he

was troubled no more.

The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,”

matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest

students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of

2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under

Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity

Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is

that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his

brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class,

and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation

list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time,

and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears

“John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the

future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the

family who received a University education. He had been for some time a

teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to

choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts

classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the

sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the _Reminiscences_ tell

us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.

The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh routine of

his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the Bullers in India

Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and other intercourse

with the Buller family and their guests, and his own German and other

readings and literary efforts and schemings. It was in that winter, and

not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the _Reminiscences_, that the

cessation of correspondence with Irving became a matter of secret

vexation to him. The good Irving, now in the full whirl of his activity

with the Hatton Garden congregation and of the London notoriety to which

that led, was too busy to write; and it was only by rumour, or by

letters from others, that Carlyle heard of Irving’s extraordinary doings

and extraordinary successes in the metropolis, of the crowds that were

flocking to hear him in the little Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and

his preachings were making in the London fashionable world. “People have

their envies, their pitiful self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting

that the real joy he felt at the vast and sudden effulgence of his

friend into a fame commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense

of the contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a

“poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale fellow,

now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames. There was, he

adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be able to keep his

head in the blaze of such enormous London popularity? Had he strength

enough to guide and manage himself in that huge element with anything

like the steadiness that had characterised the behaviour of the more

massive and more simple-hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he

seems to hint, was increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first

publication came into his hands,—the famous _Orations and Arguments for

Judgment to Come_, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical

world was enabled to judge of the real substance of those

pulpit-discourses which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as

Irving himself was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own

work. It seems to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having

closed his contributions to Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and got the

Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to his _Life of

Schiller_.

If, however, the _Life of Schiller_ was begun in Edinburgh, it was not

finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the spring

and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that aptitude for

change of residence which characterises retired Indians and people with

plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of Kinnaird in Perthshire,

situated on the river Tay, some miles to the north of Dunkeld. Carlyle

and his tutorship of young Charles and Arthur Buller had, accordingly,

been transferred thither. He must have been there early in June 1823;

for a letter of his is extant, dated from Kinnaird House on the 17th of

that month, in which he describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old

cathedral, with Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in

the neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal

link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an

interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside

residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his

correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your peaceful

manse,—you at one side of the parlour fire, Mrs. M. at the other, and

two or three little M.’s, fine chubby urchins, hopping about the

carpet,—you will suddenly observe the door fly open, and a tall, meagre,

careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance lightened by

unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting a cordial welcome. This

knight of the rueful visage will, in fact, mingle with the group for a

season, and be merry as the merriest, though his looks are sinister. I

warn you to make provision for such emergencies. In process of time I

too must have my own peculiar hearth; wayward as my destiny has hitherto

been, perplexed and solitary as my path of life still is, I never cease

to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on my own footing.”[40] From the

_Reminiscences_, where we learn that he was at this time persevering

with his _Life of Schiller_, we have his later recollection of those

summer and autumn months, and on into late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—

“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally

solitary, way. My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some

three or four hundred yards from the new, and on a lower level,

overshadowed with wood. Thither I always retired directly after tea,

and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—good candles, good

wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence and

total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before

or since. I remember still the grand _sough_ of those woods, or,

perhaps, in the stillest times, the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing

else to converse with but this and my own thoughts, which never for a

moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes pathetically sad. I

was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I ought not

to _quit_ on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it;

dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poor _Schiller_, nothing

considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily

persisted in, as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate

huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[41]

It was in October 1823 that the first part of _Schiller’s Life and

Writings_ appeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebrated

_London Magazine_ of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was the most

important of the metropolitan magazines of that time, counting among its

contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such writers as Charles

Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Hamilton

Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood,

and De Quincey. The admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening

of such a London connection at last, ought to have been some

gratification to him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it

was, to a far greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the

_Reminiscences_. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own

judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had

compliments from the editor of the magazine,—_i.e._, we must suppose,

from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own editors, unless

indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of assistant editor, was the

medium of the communication. What is more important is that the _Life of

Schiller_, if not all in the editor’s hands complete when the first part

appeared, must have been reported as complete, or as approaching

completeness, in Carlyle’s own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly,

fixes October 1823, or thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from

_Schiller_ to the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a

sequel, viz. the _Translation of the Wilhelm Meister_. It must have been

in one of those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old

mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand _sough_ of those woods” outside,

when his _Schiller_ manuscript lay finished beside him, and he had

Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the Night-Moth”

which he has commemorated in one of his metrical fragments—

“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping

Their meek and silent course in heaven;

Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,

All mortal things to sleep are given.

But see! a wandering night-moth enters,

Allured by taper gleaming bright;

A while keeps hovering round, then ventures

On Goethe’s mystic page to light.

With awe she views the candle blazing

A universe of fire it seems

To moth-_savante_ with rapture gazing,

Or fount whence life and motion streams.

What passions in her small heart whirling,

Hopes boundless, adoration, dread?

At length, her tiny pinions twirling,

She darts, and,—puff!—the moth is dead.”

Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that Irving

had encouraged him in the _Life of Schiller_, and had “prepared the way”

for it in the _London Magazine_. How is this to be reconciled with his

repeated references to the total cessation of correspondence between

himself and Irving from the date of Irving’s definite settlement in

London to that week, “late in autumn 1823,” when Irving, having married

Miss Martin of Kirkcaldy, was on his marriage-jaunt with her in

Scotland, and generously determined to pass near Kinnaird, so as to pick

up his old friend and have a day or two of his society? One might have

thought that it was in this renewed meeting of the two friends in

Irving’s honeymoon jaunt that there came from Irving the suggestion of

the _London Magazine_ as a place for the _Schiller_, or the intimation

that he had already arranged for it and knew it would be welcome there.

This supposition, however, will not cohere with the date of Irving’s

marriage. It took place at Kirkcaldy on the 13th of October 1823, after

the number of the _London Magazine_ containing the first part of the

_Schiller_ had been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in

Scotland lasted through the rest of that month and the whole of

November. There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence

between Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about the _Schiller_, some

while before October 1823, though Carlyle’s memory had become hazy about

that matter too. It is pleasant to be sure of the main fact,—which is

that it was to the ever-friendly Irving that Carlyle owed this second

great service of his introduction to the _London Magazine_, just as he

had already owed him the Buller tutorship.

The winter of 1823–4 seems to have been passed wholly at Kinnaird. At

least, there was no re-appearance of the Bullers in Edinburgh that

winter, and no re-attendance that winter of Charles Buller or his

brother Arthur in any of the classes of Edinburgh University. What we

gather from the _Reminiscences_ is that, towards the end of the winter,

the Bullers had begun to weary of Kinnaird life, and indeed of life in

Scotland, and were meditating a return to England, possibly for ultimate

settlement in Cornwall, but certainly with a view to London as their

intermediate head-quarters. He hints also that they had by this time

been a good deal exercised by the moodiness and miserable bad health of

the strange tutor they had with them, and whom they respected and

admired so much. Might it not be the best arrangement that he should go

for a month or two to his native Annandale to recruit his health, and

then rejoin them in London, there again to take charge of his pupils?

Taking leave of Kinnaird with that understanding, Carlyle, it appears,

rode, either directly thence or very soon afterwards from his father’s

house at Mainhill, all the way to Edinburgh, to consult a doctor about

his dyspepsia. Was it chronic, and incurable except by regimen? or could

it be removed by medical treatment? “_It is all tobacco, sir; give up

tobacco_,” was the physician’s answer; on which Carlyle’s comment is

that, having instantly and absolutely followed the advice, and

persevered for “long months” in total abstinence from tobacco, without

the slightest sign of improvement, he came to the conclusion that he

might as well have ridden sixty miles in the opposite direction, and

poured his sorrows into the “long hairy ear of the first jackass” he

met, as have made that ride to Edinburgh to consult the great authority.

This story of the tobacco consultation was a favourite one with Carlyle

in later days. I have heard it from him several times, with two

additions to what appears in the _Reminiscences_. One was that, the

doctor having asked him whether he _could_ give up tobacco, “Give it up,

sir?” he replied; “I can cut off my left hand with an axe, if _that_

should be necessary!” The other was an account of his months of

probation of the new no-tobacco regimen. The account took the form of a

recollection of himself as staggering for months from tree-trunk to

tree-trunk in a metaphorical wood, tobaccoless and dreary, without one

symptom of benefit from his self-denial, till at last, sinking at the

foot of one of the tree-trunks, and seeing a long clay and a

tobacco-pouch providentially lying on the turf, he exclaimed “I will

endure this diabolical farce and delusion no longer,” and had a good

smoke then and there once more, in signal of reverting for ever to his

old comfort. Tobacco and a very little good brandy, he used to say to

the end of his life, were the only two drugs in the whole pharmacopœia

that he had found of any real utility to the distressed human

organism.[42]

It was during the two or three spring months of 1824, spent at Mainhill

in Dumfriesshire, under the care of that “best of nurses and of

hostesses,” his mother, that the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ was

finished. It was in the June of the same year that, having revised the

proofs of the three volumes of that book for Messrs. Oliver and Boyd of

Edinburgh, who had agreed to be the publishers, as they were also of his

translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_, and having run up to Edinburgh

himself with the last proofs and the preface, and received from Messrs.

Oliver and Boyd £180 for the labour, and having taken a farewell at

Haddington the purport of which may be guessed, he embarked in the Leith

smack that was to carry him to London. He was then in his twenty-ninth

year, and it was his first visit to the Great Babylon. The second part

of his _Life of Schiller_ had appeared in the number of the _London

Magazine_ for January 1824; but the rest had still to be published, and

would probably appear in the magazine when he was himself in London and

had formed personal acquaintance with the editorial powers. Copies of

the _Wilhelm Meister_ from the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would

follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous author

of the _Life of Schiller_ and of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_

that he would first step into London literary society. For the rest, his

prospects were utterly undefined. Whether he should remain in London

permanently, or return to Scotland, depended on events not yet

calculable. All that was certain was that the Buller tutorship would

still be his anchorage for a time in London, as it had been for the last

two years in Scotland, and that he had Irving’s house for his London

home so long as he might choose. It was, in fact, to Irving’s house in

Myddelton Terrace, Islington, where Irving and his wife were living as a

newly-married couple, that Carlyle was to steer himself after the Leith

smack had landed him in London river.

* * * * *

From this point there is a break of two years and four months in

Carlyle’s life, during which he had nothing to do with Edinburgh. The

incidents of that interval may be filled in briefly thus:—

NINE MONTHS IN LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM (_June 1824–March 1825_).—Residing

with the Irvings at Islington, or in lodgings near them, Carlyle in

those months made his first acquaintance with London, and with various

persons in it of greater or less note. Introduced at once to the

Stracheys, and to the then celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu of

Bedford Square, it was through them, or otherwise directly or indirectly

through Irving, that he saw something of Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Allan

Cunningham, Bryan Waller Procter, Crabb Robinson, and others of literary

name, besides such commercial London Scots of Irving’s congregation as

Sir Peter Laurie, Mr. William Hamilton, and Mr. Dinwiddie, and the young

English manufacturing chemist, Mr. Badams of Birmingham. After Mrs.

Strachey and the queenly Mrs. Basil Montagu, his most valued new friends

in this list, he tells us, were Procter, Allan Cunningham, and Badams.

This last, indeed, under pretext of putting him on a regimen that would

cure his dyspepsia, lured him away to Birmingham for three months; which

three months of residence with Badams in Birmingham, and of rambles with

Badams hither and thither in Warwickshire and sights of Joe Parkes and

other Birmingham notabilities, have to be interpolated therefore in the

general bulk of the London visit. There was also a trip to Dover, in the

company of the Stracheys and the Irvings, with a run of some of the

party, Carlyle one of them, to Paris, for ten days of Parisian

sight-seeing. Altogether, the London visit had been so successful that,

when the tutorial engagement with the Bullers came to an end in the

course of it,—which it did from the impossibility of an adjustment of

Carlyle’s views with Mrs. Buller’s ever-changing plans,—the notion among

his friends was that he could not do better than remain in London and

take his chances as a London man of letters. The concluding portions of

his _Schiller_ had appeared in the _London Magazine_ during the first

months of his visit; and before the end of 1825 the five portions into

which the work had been cut up for magazine purposes had been gathered

together, and published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey in the form of an

octavo volume, with the title _The Life of Friedrich Schiller_, bringing

the author £100. It was during his stay in London also that he received

his first communication from Goethe, in the form of a brief letter of

thanks for a copy of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ which had been

sent to Weimar some months before. But, though things seemed thus to

conspire in favour of the detention of Carlyle in London, he had made up

his mind to the contrary; and in March 1825 he turned his back upon the

great city, and was on his way once more to his native Dumfriesshire.

NINETEEN MONTHS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE FARM-LIFE (_March 1825–October

1826_):—For about two months Carlyle was at his father’s farmhouse of

Mainhill, near Ecclefechan, resting from his return-tour through

England, and preparing for the adventure which he had planned. This was

an attempt at tenant-farming on his own account in that neighbourhood. A

letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, of date May 20, 1825, is still from

Mainhill; but on the 26th of that month he entered on the possession of

the adjacent little farm of Hoddam Hill, which he had taken on lease

from his father’s landlord, General Sharpe,—“a neat, compact little

farm, rent £100,” with “a prettyishlooking cottage.” Here for a whole

year he lived, nominally a tenant-farmer, as his father was, and close

to his father, but in reality entrusting the practical farm-work to his

brother Alick, while he himself, with his mother or one of his sisters

for his housekeeper, delved a little for amusement, rode about for

health, and pursued his studies and literary tasks,—chiefly his

projected translation of _Specimens of German Romance_ for the

bookseller Tait of Edinburgh. There were letters to and from his London

friends; there was once a sight in Annan of poor Irving, whose London

troubles and aberrations were by this time matters of public notoriety;

there were visits to and from neighbours; but, on the whole, the year

was one of industrious loneliness. Though he tells us but little of it,

what he does tell us enables us to see that it was a most important and

memorable year in his recollection. Perhaps in all Carlyle’s life no

other year is so important intrinsically. “I call that year idyllic,” he

tells us, “in spite of its russet coat.” This is general; but he gives

us vital particulars. It was the time, he distinctly says, of his

complete spiritual triumph, his attainment once and for ever to that

state of clear and high serenity, as to all the essentials of religion

and moral belief, which enabled him to understand in his own case “what

the old Christian people meant by _conversion_,” and which he described

afterwards, in the Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour

of the “Everlasting Yes” at last. The word _happiness_ was no favourite

one in Carlyle’s vocabulary, with reference to himself at least; but he

does not refuse even this word in describing his new mental condition

through the year at Hoddam Hill. What he felt, he says, was the

attainment of “a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and

supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant.”

Even his bodily health seemed to be improving; and the effect extended

itself most manifestly to his temper and disposition towards others. “My

thoughts were very peaceable,” he says, “full of pity and humanity as

they had never been before.” In short, he was no longer the moody,

defiant, mainly despondent and sarcastic Carlyle he had been, or had

seemed to be to superficial observers, through the past Edinburgh days,

but a calmer, wiser, and more self-possessed Carlyle, with depths of

tenderness under all his strength and fearlessness,—the Carlyle that he

was to be recognised as being by all who knew him through the next

twenty years of his life, and that indeed he continued to be essentially

to the very end. To what agency does he attribute this “immense

victory,” as he calls it, which he had thus permanently gained over his

own spirit in this thirtieth year of his age, passed at Hoddam Hill?

“Pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature

in those poor Annandale localities,”—these, including the sound on

Sundays of the Hoddam kirk-bell coming to him touchingly from the plain

below, “like the departing voice of eighteen centuries,” are mentioned

as accounting for much, but not for all. “I then felt, and still feel,

endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I

perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the first of

the moderns.” Not to be forgotten either, as that which tinged the year

to perfection in its “idyllic” character, was the flitting across the

scene of the presence that was dearest to him. His pledged bride, no

longer at Haddington, but residing with her relatives in Nithsdale, made

her first visit to his family in this year; they rode about together for

ten days; and the future was arranged. After exactly one year at Hoddam

Hill, a difference with General Sharpe, his father’s landlord and his

own, led to the giving up of the Hoddam farm and of the Mainhill farm at

the same time, and to the transference of the whole Carlyle family to

Scotsbrig, a much better farm, out of General Sharpe’s territories, but

still in the vicinity of Ecclefechan. This was in May 1826. At

Scotsbrig, however, Carlyle remained little more than four months; for,

“as turned out,” he married and went to Edinburgh in the following

October.

* * * * *

Carlyle was now for the first time an Edinburgh householder. Comely

Bank, where he had his domicile for the first eighteen months of his

married life, is a single row of very neat houses, situated in a quiet

road leading from the north-western suburb of Edinburgh to Craigleith

Quarry, and uniting itself there with the great Dean Road, which has

started from the west end of the city at a considerably higher level.

The houses lie back a little from the footpath, within railings, each

house with its iron gate and little strip of flower-garden in front,

while each has a larger bit of walled garden behind. The entire

row,—though within a walk of two minutes from the dense suburb from

which it is detached, and of not more than fifteen minutes from the

fashionable heart of the city, by the steep slopes of streets ascending

from that suburb,—has even yet a certain look of being out in the open.

There are fields before the windows, and there is a stretch of fields to

the back; and fifty years ago there must have been less of incipient

straggling of other buildings in the neighbourhood than there is now.

Carlyle’s house was No. 21, the last but two at the outer or country end

of the row. His natural daily walks thence, when they were not into town

up the steep sloping streets spoken of, would be to Craigleith Quarry

and the Corstorphine Hills, or past these on the great road towards

Queensferry, or aside northwards to the beautiful strip of the shore of

the Firth of Forth between Cramond and Granton.

No contemporary record yet accessible gives so distinct a general idea

of Carlyle’s state of mind and mode of life during his eighteen months

at Comely Bank as the following portion of a letter of his to Mrs. Basil

Montagu, dated on Christmas Day 1826, or just after he had settled

there:—

“Of my late history I need not speak, for you already know it: I am

wedded; to the best of wives, and with all the elements of enjoyment

richly ministered to me, and health—rather worse than even it was wont

to be. Sad contradiction! But I were no apt scholar if I had not

learned long ago, with my friend Tieck, that ‘in the fairest sunshine

a shadow chases us, that in the softest music there is a tone which

chides.’ I sometimes hope that I shall be well: at other times I

determine to be _wise_ in spite of sickness, and feel that wisdom is

better even than health; and I dismiss the lying cozener Hope

entirely, and fancy I perceive that even the rocky land of Sorrow is

not without a heavenly radiance overspreading it, lovelier than aught

that this Earth, with all its joys, can give. At all events, what

right have we to murmur? It is the common lot: the Persian King could

not find three happy men in the wide world to write the names of on

his queen’s tomb, or the Philosopher would have recalled her from

death. Every son of Adam has his task to toil at, and his stripes to

bear for doing it wrong. There is one deadly error we commit at our

entrance on life, and sooner or later we must lay it aside, for till

then there is neither peace nor rest for us in this world: we all

start, I have observed, with the tacit persuasion that, whatever

become of others, we (the illustrious all-important we) are entitled

of _right_ to be _entirely fortunate_, to accumulate all knowledge,

beauty, health, and earthly felicity in _our_ sacred person, and to

pass _our_ most sovereign days in rosy bowers, with distress never

seen by us, except as an interesting shade in the distance of our

landscape.... But I must descend from life in general to life in

Edinburgh. In spite of ill-health, I reckon myself moderately happy

here, much happier than men usually are, or than such a fool as I

deserves to be. My good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I

believe, among the best women that the world contains. The philosophy

of the heart is far better than that of the understanding. She loves

me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught her much

that I have long been vainly at the schools to learn. Good Jane! She

is sitting by me knitting you a purse: you must not cease to love her,

for she deserves it, and few love you better. [Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs.

Montagu had never yet met, but are here considered as already fast

friends, through Carlyle’s talks with each about the other.] Of

society, in this Modern Athens, we have no want, but rather a

superabundance; which, however, we are fast and successfully reducing

down to the fit measure. True it is, one meets with many a Turk in

grain among these people; but it is some comfort to know beforehand

what Turks are, have been, and for ever will be, and to understand

that from a Turk no Christian word or deed can rationally be expected.

Let the people speak in the Turkish dialect, in Heaven’s name! It is

their own, and they have no other. A better class of persons, too, are

to be found here and there,—a sober, discreet, logic-loving,

moderately well-informed class: with these I can talk and enjoy

myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in the street;

into the house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the unwise

wonderment they exhibit when I do but show them the lobby warns me to

lose no time in again slamming-to the door. But what of society? Round

our own hearth is society enough, with a blessing. I read books, or,

like the Roman poet and so many British ones, ‘disport on paper’; and

many a still evening, when I stand in our little flower-garden (it is

fully larger than two bed-quilts) and smoke my pipe in peace, and look

at the reflection of the distant city lamps, and hear the faint murmur

of its tumult, I feel no little pleasure in the thought of ‘my own

four walls’ and what they hold. On the whole, what I chiefly want is

occupation; which, when ‘the times grow better’ or my own ‘genius’

gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to

present itself. Idle I am not altogether, yet not occupied as I should

be; for to dig in the mines of Plutus, and sell the gift of God (and

such is every man’s small fraction of intellectual talent) for a piece

of money, is a measure I am not inclined to; and for _invention_, for

Art of any sort, I feel myself too helpless and undetermined. Some

day,—oh that the day were here!—I shall surely speak out those things

that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or

else, if the Fates would be so kind as to show me—that I had nothing

to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all; a hard

result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain.

Literature, it seems, is to be my trade; but the present aspects of it

among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting. I love it

not: in fact, I have almost quitted modern reading: lower down than

the Restoration I rarely venture in English. Those men, those Hookers,

Bacons, Brownes, were _men_; but, for our present ‘men of letters,’

our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, and

sonnet manufacturers, I shall only say, May the Lord pity us and them!

But enough of this! For what am I that I should censure? Less than the

least in Israel.”

The mood here, though philosophic, pensive, and critical, is on the

whole even cheerful, and accords undeniably with what we should expect

from his own statement as to the remarkable change of spirit that had

been effected in him during the late idyllic year at Hoddam Hill. It

accords also with all that I have been able to learn independently of

Carlyle in those now distant days of his early married life.

From two persons in particular I have had intimate accounts of his

habits and demeanour in the Comely Bank period. One was the late Rev.

David Aitken, D.D., once minister of a Scottish country parish, but in

the later part of his life resident in Edinburgh. He was a relative of

the Carlyles, and had seen a great deal of them in their own house, and

at the tables of various friends, in those old Edinburgh days. His

report was that perhaps the most observable thing about Carlyle then was

the combination of extraordinary frankness, a habit of speaking out most

strikingly and picturesquely whatever was in his mind, with the most

perfect command of temper in meeting objections, evading attempted

slights or provocations to anger, or changing the subject when

opposition was becoming noisy, or the opponent was evidently a fool.

Again and again Dr. Aitken had observed this, and wondered at Carlyle’s

tact and suavity, especially when he had propounded something startling

to commonplace people, and the expression on the faces of some of his

auditors was “Who are _you_ that dare thus advance notions discomposing

to your seniors?” To the same effect is the information I had from

another Edinburgh friend of Carlyle in those days, the late Dr. John

Gordon. He was most methodic in his arrangement of his time, Dr. Gordon

informed me, always reserving the solid hours of the day for his

literary work in Comely Bank, but very accessible and sociable in the

afternoons and evenings. To Dr. Gordon I definitely put the question,

“Was he gloomy and morose, or noted for asperity and sarcastic

bitterness in talk?” The answer was: “Not a bit of it, not a bit of it;

the pleasantest and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent

company.” It is evident that, whether from more smiling circumstances,

or from that drill in self-control which had been imposed upon him by

his experience at Hoddam Hill, he was a considerably different being

now, in his social demeanour and aspects, from what he had been some

years before, when Irving had thought it necessary to remonstrate with

him on his fitful and forbidding manners with strangers. But, indeed,

they mistake Carlyle utterly who do not know that to the end, with all

his vehemence in indignation and invective, and with a stately dignity

of manner which repelled irreverent familiarity, and with which the most

impudent did not dare to trifle, there was a vast fund in him of what

could be described as the homeliest and most genial good-fellowship and

the richest old Scottish heartiness. It was not only his faculty of

humour,—though those who have never heard Carlyle’s laugh, or known how

frequently it would interrupt the gathered tempests of his verbal rage

and dissipate them in sudden sunburst, can have no idea of his

prodigious wealth in this faculty, or of the extent to which it

contributed to the enjoyment and after-relish of every hour spent in his

society. I have heard the echoes of Sloane Street ring with his great

laugh many and many a night between ten and eleven o’clock, and more

than once have had to stop by a lamp-post till the grotesque phrase or

conception had shaken me to exhaustion in sympathy with him and the peal

had ended. But better still was the proof of the depths of pleasant

kindliness in his nature, his power of being actually happy himself and

of making others happy, in some of those evening hours I have spent with

him in the well-remembered dining-room in Chelsea. Then, both of us, or

one of us, reclining on the hearth-rug, that the wreaths of pipe-smoke

might innocently ascend the chimney, and Mrs. Carlyle seated near at

some piece of work, and public questions laid aside or his vehemences

over them having already subsided for that evening, how comfortable he

would be, how simple, how husbandly in his looks round to his wife when

she interjected one of her bright and witty remarks, how happy in the

flow of casual fireside chat about all things and sundry, the quoting of

quaint snatches of ballad or lyric, or the resuscitation of old Scottish

memories! This mood of pleasant and easy sociability, which always

remained with him as one into which he could sink when he liked out of

his upper moods of wrath and lamentation, must have been even more

conspicuous and common, more nearly habitual, in those Comely Bank days

when he felt himself for the first time a full citizen and householder

of the Modern Athens, and was not disinclined to friendly intimacy with

the other Athenians. Then, as always, the basis of his nature was a

profound constitutional sadness, a speculative melancholy, in the form

of that dissatisfaction with all the ordinary appearances and courses of

things, that private philosophy of protest and nonconformity, which made

him really a recluse even when he seemed most accessible and frank. His

talk with most of the Edinburgh people, even when apparently the

friendliest, was therefore, as he told Mrs. Montagu, like talk from an

upper window to people passing in the streets; and into the real house

of his spirit few were admitted farther than the lobby. But he had at

least disciplined himself into all the requisite observances of

good-humoured courtesy, and learnt to practise in his own demeanour the

maxim he had about this time thrown into verse:—

“The wind blows east, the wind blows west,

And there comes good luck and bad;

The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest;

’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad;

’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”

What he lacked most, as he told Mrs. Montagu, was a fit occupation. His

four volumes of _Specimens of German Romance_, consisting of

translations from Musæus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Jean Paul,

and Goethe, with biographical and critical notices of these authors, had

been already printed, and stored in Ballantyne’s warehouses, before he

had settled in Comely Bank, and were published by Tait early in 1827. As

they had been done originally on commission, they may have brought

something more considerable in the way of payment than if they had been

a voluntary labour. But, when these were out, what was he to do next?

Fortunately, that question was soon answered.

It was in the spring of 1827 that, by means of a friendly letter of

introduction sent from London by Mrs. Montagu’s son-in-law, Procter,

_alias_ “Barry Cornwall,” Carlyle formed his memorable acquaintance with

Jeffrey. The incidents of that acquaintance, from Carlyle’s first call

on Jeffrey in George Street with Procter’s note, when Jeffrey received

him so kindly, and said “We must give you a lift,” on to the ripening of

the acquaintance by Jeffrey’s calls at Comely Bank, his pretty

gallantries and wit-encounters with the fascinating young bride, and the

frequent colloquies and amicable little disputations between Jeffrey and

Carlyle in Jeffrey’s leisurely rides to his country-house at Craigcrook,

or in that picturesque old mansion itself, have all been immortalised in

the _Reminiscences_. Nowhere is there such a sketch of Jeffrey in our

literature, such perfect portraiture and appreciation of that celebrated

man; and the only question that remains is whether Carlyle has quite

done justice there to Jeffrey’s kindness to himself. No doubt he wrote

with a strict conscience, and knew better what he was about than readers

can now know for him. Still one does carry away an impression that very

seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three

years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him

practically, as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some

subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from

himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt

up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. Goethe. Something of this

feeling, indeed, does appear in many passages of Carlyle’s sketch, as

when he says: “Jeffrey’s acquaintanceship seemed, and was for the time,

an immense acquisition to me, and everybody regarded it as my highest

good fortune.” And no wonder. From being a mere translator from the

German, or writer of hack articles in obscure places, Carlyle became a

contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_. In June 1827, or within a month

or two after his introduction to Jeffrey, appeared his first article in

the Review, _Jean Paul Friedrich Richter_, in twenty pages; and in the

very next number, in October 1827, appeared his more full and elaborate

article, in forty-eight pages, entitled _State of German Literature_.

They caused, as he tells us, “a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams,”

and were widely criticised in the newspapers, with the effect of setting

“many tongues wagging” about the strange fellow in Comely Bank to whom

Jeffrey had given such unusual licence of innovation on the established

doctrines of the Review, and who was trying to found a school of “German

Mysticism.” At all events, people who liked that kind of matter and were

interested in German Literature knew thenceforth where to apply; and, a

so-called _Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany_ having been

started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the

first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared his _Life

and Writings of Werner_, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number,

in April 1828, his _Goethe’s Helena_, in forty pages. These two articles

in the _Foreign Review_, with the two already contributed to the

_Edinburgh_, form the whole of Carlyle’s known writings during the

Comely Bank period.

One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen

months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William,

and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to

philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later

days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the

house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir

William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, _there_

is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and

speculations!” Since then he had formed some slight personal

acquaintance with Sir William by meetings with him in the Advocates’

Library; but it was after the settlement in Comely Bank in 1826, when

Sir William was thirty-eight years of age, and had been nominally for

five years Professor of History in Edinburgh University, that the

acquaintanceship reached the stage of familiarity. Carlyle has

commemorated it in a few pages contributed to Professor Veitch’s

_Memoirs of Sir William Hamilton_, published in 1869, thirteen years

after Sir William’s death. “I recollect hearing much more of him,”

Carlyle there writes, “in 1826 and onward than formerly: to what depths

he had gone in study and philosophy; of his simple, independent,

meditative habits, ruggedly athletic modes of exercise, fondness for his

big dog, etc. etc.: everybody seemed to speak of him with favour, those

of his immediate acquaintance uniformly with affectionate respect. I did

not witness, much less share in, any of his swimming or other athletic

prowesses. I have once or twice been on long walks with him in the

Edinburgh environs, oftenest with some other companion, or perhaps even

two, whom he had found vigorous and worthy: pleasant walks and

abundantly enlivened with speech from Sir William.” He proceeds to

describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some

difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “_The fact

is_,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of

words and distinctions, would repeat “_The fact is_,” and so go on

again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to

bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate

on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a

great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in

Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by

exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other

the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological

measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence

of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a

winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence

in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them

than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and

rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of

correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and

visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the

meetings.

Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with

John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of

_Blackwood_ since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the

youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and

the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no

less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy

professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he

strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George

Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You

could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the

outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in

your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh

had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was

now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s

thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook

hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as

one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once

described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory

of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours,

not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby

and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very

late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard

afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw

open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing.

Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he

was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now

and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion

or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other

instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with

far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul

of their little symposium.[43]

De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and

1828; but, his connection with _Blackwood_ having then begun, he was a

good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of

finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend

Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his

severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of _Wilhelm Meister_ in the

_London Magazine_ for August and September 1824, there was considerable

shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having

happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk,

no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank

than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the _Reminiscences_ in

which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey

as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications

of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as

one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and

there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his

regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate.

But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies,

politically a Radical _sui generis_ though he was, and the _protégé_

though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory

set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of

whom Wilson in _Blackwood_ was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s

more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance

with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the

_Quarterly Review_, can hardly date from this period; but among those I

have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of

this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young

Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards

Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons,

Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely

Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs.

Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that

subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle

and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a

great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many

others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then

a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not

yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow

and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral

Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional

visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to

the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh

University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that,

after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company

in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble

old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death,

called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea.

More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh

afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to

this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging

on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh,

that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely

Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur

Seat and the Corstorphines.

Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared,

since that _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ in 1824 which Goethe had

acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the

_Life of Schiller_ in 1825, and the _Specimens of German Romance_ in

1827, this last completing the translation of the _Meister_ by the

addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These

had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at

Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been.

Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little

presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of

which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been

more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had

become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on

Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just

received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th

of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which

he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used

these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and

expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does

not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that

he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in

his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the

_mental and moral core_ as that which is really influential. Carlyle is

a _moral force of great importance_: there is in him much for the

future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.” To the

same purport were Goethe’s words on again speaking to Eckermann about

Carlyle some time afterwards,—“What an earnest man he is! and how he has

studied us Germans! he is almost more at home in our literature than we

ourselves.”

Goethe’s surprise at Scott’s silence about Carlyle was an acute thrust,

though made a little in the dark. Who does not regret to have it to say

now that Carlyle never exchanged a word with Sir Walter? Yet this is the

fact. That man of men in Edinburgh, of greater importance and interest

to her than all her other celebrities put together, remained a stranger

to the fellow-citizen that was worthiest to know him and that would fain

have known him well. How did this happen?

Any time for the last fifteen or sixteen years Carlyle had, of course,

been familiar with the stalwart figure of Scott, as he might be seen in

the legal crowd in the Parliament House, or in his slow walk homewards

thence, by the Mound and Princes Street, to his house in Castle Street.

Further, it must have been in the Comely Bank days that Carlyle and his

wife, when they chanced now and then to be in Princes Street together,

would bestow those more particular glances of curiosity on Scott’s

approaching figure of which I have heard Carlyle speak. The little dogs

that were passing would jump up, they observed, to fawn on the kindly

lame gentleman whom they knew by instinct to be a friend to all their

species; and Scott, they observed, would stoop to pat the animals, or

would look down on them benevolently from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.

Observing this so admiringly more than once, why should they themselves

have had to pass the great man on such occasions without interchange of

personal greetings?

Recently, it is true, circumstances had been less propitious than

formerly for access to Scott by persons desiring his acquaintance. When

Carlyle and his wife took up house in Edinburgh, that fatal year for

Scott was just closing in which there had come the sudden crash of his

fortunes. This, followed by the death of Lady Scott, had converted him

into a lonesome and bankrupt widower, incapable any longer of his

customary hospitalities in Castle Street, and indeed bereft of that

house, as of all else, for the behoof of his creditors, and toiling to

redeem himself by his _Life of Napoleon_ and other colossal drudgery in

lodgings in North St. David Street. But that crisis of his downfall had

passed; and the year 1827 had seen him more like himself, and domiciled

again, more in household fashion, first in Walker Street, and then in

Shandwick Place. There had been the great Theatrical Fund Dinner in

Edinburgh on the 23d of February 1827, when Sir Walter was in the chair,

and when, in responding to the toast of his health, he divulged

formally, amid plaudits such as had never been heard in that hall

before, the already open secret that he was the sole author of the

Waverley Novels. Later in the same year the voluminous _Life of

Napoleon_ was published, with the first series of the _Chronicles of the

Canongate_ besides, and the _Tales of a Grandfather_ had been begun. Any

time, therefore, shortly before or shortly after that month of July 1827

when Goethe was so much gratified by the receipt of Scott’s letter,

there was nothing but the most untoward fate to hinder such a meeting

between Scott and Carlyle as would have been pleasant to both. Untoward

fate did intervene, however, and with almost diabolic malignity. The

story is as follows:—

Struck with the anomaly that two such men should be living together in

Edinburgh without knowing each other, Goethe himself had taken very

special pains to put the matter right. On the 1st of January 1828,

resuming his correspondence with Carlyle after a break of some months,

he sent off from Weimar a letter to Carlyle about various matters then

in discussion between them, but chiefly to announce that it was to be

followed speedily by a box containing several parcels of presents. Most

of the presents were to be for Carlyle himself or Mrs. Carlyle, in the

form of volumes or sets of volumes selected for them; but one of the

parcels was to consist of six bronze medals, respecting which Carlyle

was requested to take some special trouble. “I send also six medals,

three struck at Weimar and three at Geneva,” Goethe wrote; “two of which

please present to Sir Walter Scott, with my best regards; and, as to the

others, distribute them to well-wishers.” A fortnight afterwards, _i.e._

on the 15th of January, the box was duly dispatched from Weimar; but not

till the 12th of April did it reach the Carlyles at 21 Comely Bank,

though they had received the letter announcing it about two months

before. On being opened, it was found to contain, besides the promised

medals and other parcels, all neatly and separately packed, another

letter from Goethe by way of continuation of the former post-letter. “If

you see Sir Walter Scott,” were the first words of this second missive,

“pray offer him my warmest thanks for his valued and pleasant letter,

written frankly in the beautiful conviction that man must be precious to

man. I have also received his _Life of Napoleon_; and during these

winter evenings and nights I have read it through attentively from

beginning to end.” Then follows an expression at some length of Goethe’s

enjoyment of the great book and high appreciation of its merits. These

are characterised glowingly and yet carefully; and altogether the

criticism was calculated to please Scott extremely, and to be received

by him as a most friendly acknowledgment of his attention in having sent

a copy of his _Life of Napoleon_ to his great German contemporary. What

interests us, however, is Goethe’s obvious purpose in having made

Carlyle the medium of communication between himself and Scott. He wanted

to bring the two men together; and with what delicacy of courteous

invention he had manœuvred for his object! It was Carlyle that was to

deliver to Scott the two medals intended as Goethe’s recognition of

Scott’s supremacy in the Literature of Great Britain; and it was Carlyle

to whom Goethe sent his first impressions of Scott’s latest large work,

and that in a manner almost amounting to an injunction that they should

be reported to Scott textually.

If Goethe’s purpose failed, it was not through any fault or negligence

on Carlyle’s part. On the 13th of April 1828 he wrote the following

letter to Sir Walter:

EDINBURGH: 21 COMELY BANK:

_13th April 1828_.

SIR,—In February last I had the honour to receive a letter from Von

Goethe, announcing the speedy departure from Weimar of a packet for

me, in which, among other valuables, should be found “two medals,” to

be delivered, _mit verbindlichsten Grüssen_, to Sir Walter Scott. By a

slow enough conveyance this _Kästchen_, with its medals in perfect

safety, has at length yesterday come to hand, and now lays on me the

enviable duty of addressing you.

Among its multifarious contents, the Weimar Box failed not to include

a long letter,—considerable portion of which, as it virtually belongs

to yourself, you will now allow me to transcribe. Perhaps it were

thriftier in me to reserve this for another occasion; but, considering

how seldom such a Writer obtains such a Critic, I cannot but reckon it

a pity that this friendly intercourse between them should be anywise

delayed.

[Carlyle here extracts from Goethe’s second letter, in the original

German, the whole of the portion relating to Scott’s _Napoleon_.]

With regard to the medals,—which are, as I expected, the two

well-known likenesses of Goethe himself,—it could be no hard matter to

dispose of them safely here, or transmit them to you, if you required

it, without delay; but, being in this curious fashion appointed as it

were Ambassador between two Kings of Poetry, I would willingly

discharge my mission with the solemnity that beseems such a business;

and naturally it must flatter my vanity and love of the marvellous to

think that by means of a Foreigner whom I have never seen I might now

have access to my native Sovereign, whom I have so often seen in

public, and so often wished that I had claim to see and know in

private and near at hand.

Till Whitsunday I continue to reside here, and shall hope that some

time before that period I may have opportunity to wait on you, and, as

my commission bore, to hand you these memorials in person. Meanwhile I

abide your further orders in this matter; and so, with all the regard

which belongs to one to whom I, in common with other millions, owe so

much, I have the honour to be, sir, most respectfully your servant,

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Besides the _two_ medals specially intended for you, there have come

_four_ more, which I am requested generally to dispose of amongst

“_Wohlwollenden_.” Perhaps Mr. Lockhart, whose merits in respect of

German Literature, and just appreciation of this its Patriarch and

Guide, are no secret, will do me the honour to accept of one, and

direct me through your means how I am to have it conveyed?

As the wording of this letter shows, Carlyle was aware when he wrote it

that Sir Walter was not then in Edinburgh. He had gone off, exactly ten

days before, _i.e._ on the 3d of April, for a tour in England, and a

plunge once more, partly on business and partly for mere pleasure, into

the world of London. It would have been better if Carlyle had delayed

till he came back; but, thinking the matter too important for that, he

had gone, it would appear, to Scott’s house, then in Shandwick Place,

ascertained his London address, and seen the letter dispatched. That it

did reach Scott in London is certain; for the autograph is still extant,

with the London post-mark of 17th April 1828 upon it, just as Scott must

have had it in his hands that day in the house of his son-in-law

Lockhart in Regent’s Park. He must have glanced at it carelessly,

however,—so carelessly as hardly to have mastered its purport; for in

his jottings in his Diary for that day, where he would naturally have

taken note of so interesting an occurrence as a new message from Goethe,

there is no mention of it whatever. The omission is explained perhaps by

one phrase which does occur among those jottings. “In this

phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like

shadows” were the words with which, trying to record in his journal late

that night the incidents of an unusually busy day,—beginning with a

round of forenoon and afternoon calls, and ending with a dinner at

Samuel Rogers’s and an appearance afterwards at an evening party at Lady

Davy’s,—he almost gave up the attempt as hopeless, so difficult was it

to recall coherently what one had done or seen during any twelve hours

in such a vast and brain-dizzying place as London. Carlyle’s letter,

delivered to him that morning, or possibly lying on his table for him at

the moment of his writing those words, may have been one of the

“objects” that had slipped his cognisance. And, if so that day, the

chance was poor enough of its being remembered sufficiently on any

subsequent day during the rest of Scott’s stay in the great metropolis.

Day after day till the 26th of May, as the Journal shows, there was a

continued succession of lionisings for him in the shape of calls on him

from notabilities, dinners in his honour, applications to him to sit for

his portrait or his bust, etc. etc. One of the dinners was with his

Majesty King George IV. himself; another was at the Duchess of Kent’s,

where he was presented to “the little Princess Victoria,” and looked at

her with keen interest, wondering whether the little lady, then not nine

years of age, had yet been made aware of her great destiny; several

times he was with the Duke of Wellington; and of the other celebrities

whom he saw, or among whom he moved, in the course of his

stay,—statesmen, bishops, lawyers, men of letters, artists, etc.,—he

could keep no complete reckoning. For a man in the fifty-seventh year of

his age the whirl of such a series of London excitements might not, in

ordinary cases, have been too much; but Sir Walter had been obviously in

failing health already for the last year or two, and there had been

symptoms even, recognisable by himself and his Edinburgh friends, of

jaded mental energy. In his case the £250 which, as he tells us, his

visit to London cost him, may not have been the only damage. Little

wonder, at all events, that one of his letters from Edinburgh, even

though it contained a message from Goethe, should have escaped his

attention.

Meanwhile Carlyle was growing anxious about the fate of the letter. On

the 18th of April, five days after he had sent it to Scott, he had

written to Goethe, informing him that this had been done. “To Sir Walter

Scott, who is at present in London,” the letter said, “I have already

written, announcing so delightful a message, and even transcribing for

him what you say of his _Life of Napoleon_: a friendly criticism which,

from such a quarter, must gratify him highly”; and, after a sentence or

two more on the subject of that criticism, these words were added: “Ere

long I expect to see Sir Walter and present to him your medals in

person.” The expectation was never to be fulfilled. Week after week had

passed, and no reply to his first letter had been received, when the

Whitsunday term arrived at which, as he had informed Scott, he was to

leave Edinburgh. In these circumstances he addressed a brief note to

Scott, referring to his former letter, and explaining that, as he could

not now hope for the honour of presenting the Goethe medals in person,

he had left them in charge of Mr. Jeffrey, who would doubtless deliver

them to Sir Walter on the first convenient opportunity. This note, dated

the 23d of May, was, in fact, written in Jeffrey’s own house in Moray

Place, where Carlyle and his wife were residing for a few days by

invitation before their departure for Craigenputtock. They had left

Comely Bank a day or two before, had sent on their furniture to

Craigenputtock in carts, and were to follow immediately themselves.

The note must have reached Sir Walter on the 27th of May, the very last

day of his stay in London. Leaving London that day, as his journal

shows, he began the homeward journey through the middle and northern

English counties which was to bring him to Abbotsford on the 2d of June,

and thence to Edinburgh on the 4th of June. The Carlyles were then gone;

and any acknowledgment that Carlyle could now receive of either of his

two missives could only be by letter from Sir Walter in Edinburgh to

Craigenputtock. Something of the sort seems to have been expected by

Carlyle; for it was not till the 25th of September that he wrote that

first of his letters to Goethe from Craigenputtock in which he told

Goethe of the ending of the business of the medals. “Sir Walter Scott,”

he then wrote, “has received your Medals several months ago,—not through

me directly, for he had not returned to Edinburgh when I left it, but

through Mr. Jeffrey, our grand ‘British Critic’; to whom, as I learn,

Sir Walter expressed himself properly sensible of such an honour from

one of his masters in Art.” This leaves no doubt that the medals

actually came into Sir Walter’s hands as soon as he had returned to

Edinburgh; and the only question that remains is how it could have

happened that the two letters from Carlyle heralding the medals, and

connected with them so vitally, received no acknowledgment, and so that

Goethe’s design of bringing Carlyle into contact with Sir Walter Scott

was miserably frustrated.

To this day the affair remains somewhat of a mystery. That Scott, the

largest-hearted of men, the kindliest, the most courteous, the most

attentive to every punctilio of business or of social etiquette, should

have deliberately, of his own accord, left such letters unanswered, it

is next to impossible to suppose; and it is hardly less difficult to

suppose that, if any one had tried to prejudice him against Carlyle in

connection with them, he would have allowed the interference to prevent

him from doing what was independently proper. All things considered, one

must revert, I think, to the opinion already suggested by the fact that

there is no mention in Scott’s journal during his weeks in London either

of the Carlyle letters or of the message they conveyed from Goethe. In

the bustle and hurry of his London engagements, and then of his

leave-taking for his return journey to Scotland, he had never, we are to

conclude, read the letters, or at all events the first and principal

one, with sufficient attention to apprehend the contents, and so, having

set them aside on their first receipt, had forgotten all about them. To

be sure, the medals were ultimately delivered to him by Jeffrey; but one

can imagine that they were delivered in a casual manner, and without

such explanation of the relative circumstances as might have brought the

missing letters to his recollection and caused him to look for them.

What is certain is that they lay among his papers, to be found there

after his death, and are still preserved. That Lockhart had read them is

proved by a reference in his _Life of Scott_. So slight is the

reference, however, and so vaguely worded, that it told virtually

nothing. Not till the publication in 1887 of the _Correspondence between

Goethe and Carlyle_, edited by Mr. C. E. Norton, was any real light

thrown on the subject; and not till the appearance in 1890 of _The

Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript_, edited and

published by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, and containing a copy of

Carlyle’s first letter to Scott, were the facts fully revealed.[44]

The removal of Carlyle from Edinburgh to Craigenputtock, while

connecting itself rather remarkably with the abortive issue of Goethe’s

attempt to introduce him to Sir Walter Scott, is of such importance

otherwise in his biography that a word or two as to the causes and

circumstances may not be superfluous.

Carlyle’s later memories of the eighteen months, or more strictly

nineteen, spent in Comely Bank, are summed up by him in the

_Reminiscences_ in one doleful sentence. “Comely Bank,” he says, “except

for one darling soul, whose heavenly nobleness, then as ever afterwards,

shone on me, and should have made the place bright (ah me, ah me! I only

now know how noble she was!), was a gloomy intricate abode to me, and in

retrospect has little or nothing of pleasant but her.” So far as this is

not a picture tinged, like all the rest of his life, by the final

darkness in which it was painted, and to be corrected by the facts as

they are otherwise ascertained, the reference may be to the causes which

made him suddenly give up his Comely Bank house and remove himself again

from Edinburgh. These, there can be no doubt, were economical

perplexities. Thrift, frugality, abhorrence from debt or extravagance,

was always one of Carlyle’s characteristics; and he had found the

expenses of married life in Edinburgh beyond his means. On this point

some light can be thrown by information from himself, and an annexed

calculation.

He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening,

with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain

nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of

the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be

attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the

moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far

north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however,

that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the

Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit

himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there

resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station

on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of

two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition,

remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and

settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his _Wilhelm Meister_,

together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of

duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in

London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at

Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of

furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he

cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear

£100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the

whole of his remuneration for the _German Romance_ fell in then, may

have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his

four articles in the _Edinburgh_ and the _Foreign Review_. Compute the

expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not

less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning

of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he

was in danger of running aground.

He had been anxious, in fact, to obtain some post of fixed and certain

income that would relieve him from precarious dependence on the press.

Two such chances had offered themselves. The new “University of London”

(now “University College, London”) had been founded in 1826; and in the

course of 1827 the authorities of the new institution had been looking

about for professors, in view of the opening of the classes for teaching

in October 1828. Carlyle had thought that the Professorship of English

Literature would suit him and that he would suit it, and had hoped that

Jeffrey’s influence with Brougham might secure him the post. Then, while

that matter was still pending, there was the still more desirable chance

of the succession to Dr. Chalmers in the Moral Philosophy Professorship

at St. Andrews. It was known in January 1828 that Dr. Chalmers was to be

removed to Edinburgh; candidates were already in the field for the

succession, the gift of which was with the Professors of St. Andrews;

and Carlyle is found in that month making very energetic exertions as

one of them. A letter of his to Procter in London is extant, dated the

17th of that month, explaining the circumstances, informing Procter that

Jeffrey is his mainstay in the business, and that he may “also reckon on

the warm support of Wilson, Leslie, Brewster, and other men of mark,”

and requesting a testimonial from Procter and one from Mr. Basil

Montagu.[45]

Both projects having failed, and the certainty having come that he must

depend still on his earnings by literature, his resolution was taken.

Away in his native Dumfriesshire, but in a much more wild and solitary

part of it than his previous residences of Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and

Scotsbrig, was his wife’s little property of Craigenputtock, worth from

£200 to £250 a year. It was not in his wife’s possession as yet,—her

mother, Mrs. Welsh, having a life-interest in it; but, besides the

farmhouse upon it, occupied by the farmer who rented it, there was

another and superior house, the humble mansion-house of the property,

with sufficient appurtenances of garden, stabling, etc. Why not remove

thither? One could live there at half the cost of living in Edinburgh,

and yet have excellent milk, poultry, eggs, etc., of one’s own, a horse

to ride on, and healthy moors to scamper over! Jeffrey and others

thought Carlyle mad in making such a proposal; but late in May 1828, as

we have seen, it was carried into effect.

* * * * *

Here, then, in Carlyle’s thirty-third year, his Edinburgh life properly

ends, and there begins that extraordinary Craigenputtock period of six

years, the literary products of which were five more articles for the

_Edinburgh Review_, six more for the _Foreign Review_, three articles

for the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, one for the _Westminster Review_,

about a score of contributions of various lengths to _Fraser’s

Magazine_, several little papers elsewhere, and, above all, the _Sartor

Resartus_. There were, indeed, two considerable breaks in the six years

of Craigenputtock hermitship. One was that second visit to London, from

August 1831 to April 1832, in which he heard of his father’s death, and

in which, while endeavouring to get his _Sartor Resartus_ published in

book-form, he added Leigh Hunt, young John Stuart Mill, and others, to

the number of his London acquaintances. The other was in the winter of

1832–33, when he and his wife were again in Edinburgh for some months,

renewing old ties. That winter in Edinburgh, however,—just after the

death of Scott, and some months after the death of Goethe,—furnishes

nothing essentially new in the way of incident. Then, in the summer of

1834, when Carlyle was in his thirty-ninth year, and his _Sartor

Resartus_ was appearing at last by instalments in _Fraser’s Magazine_,

there was the great final migration to London, beginning the forty-six

years of Carlyle’s life that were to be associated for ever with No. 5

(now No. 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea. During those forty-six years there

were, of course, frequent trips to Scotland, with chance returns for a

few days to Edinburgh. Most memorable of all was the visit to Edinburgh

in April 1866, for his installation in the Rectorship of Edinburgh

University. Of that visit, perhaps the crowning glory of his old age,

and reconnecting him so conspicuously with Edinburgh at the last, but

saddened for him so fatally by the death of his wife in his absence, I

have not a few intimate recollections; as also of those later, almost

furtive, visits now and again in his declining autumns, to his eightieth

year and beyond, when his real purpose was pilgrimage to his wife’s

grave in Haddington Church, and he would saunter, or almost shuffle,

through the Edinburgh streets as a bowed-down alien, disconsolate at

heart, and evading recognition. Any such recollections may be reserved.

All that is properly the Edinburgh Life of Carlyle has been described

here.

CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE[46]

To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in

the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a

faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging

cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible

between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his

thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a

green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it

already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed

some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more.

For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the

notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present

house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a

wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but

remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that

prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93

Princes Street.

It was mainly in this Princes Street portion of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s

Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to

the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed

reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some

Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and

semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector

of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait

and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and

hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was

notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther _redivivus_, delighting

in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical

sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction

of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be

told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in

1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always

prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in

fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank.

Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known

of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially

Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his

acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such

as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to

call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes

Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere

in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in

No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more and more of an invalid and a

recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered

pantaloon,” or rather that old gentleman in the antique blue surtout and

light-brown wig, who is remembered as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe by most

of those now living in Edinburgh that can remember him at all. He was

not so very old a gentleman, either; for, when he died in March 1851, he

had not quite completed his seventieth year.