asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are
thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise
must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to
the last,—_Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_. Among the many fine and
humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of
the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most
companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott
limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him,
recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such
lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as
was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of
himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his
literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere
in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What
need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been
read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the
English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board
Schools know the story of _Rab and his Friends_. How laughingly it
opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper
through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of
the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first
introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab,
the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his
pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his
victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the
consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years
afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the
wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab
remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie
is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy
country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the
carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the
author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who
could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has
taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of
while he was alive as “The author of _Rab and His Friends_.” It is by
that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as
also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the
quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of
us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation,
containing _Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_, and also let us say the
_Letter to Dr. Cairns_, and _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, and _Jeems the
Doorkeeper_, and the paper called _Mystifications_, and that called _Pet
Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_, and that then readers now unborn,
thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius
can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will
think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh.
LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH
A GENERAL REVIEW[51]
I
The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to
have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and
James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary
activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in
which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when
Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and
was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that
Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What
was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new
literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came
from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas,
and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual
residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in
the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which
connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?
From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh
of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s
own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James
VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh
still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other
things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as
into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences.
Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns,
survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a
champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and,
though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the
Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally,
and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost
intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When
John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and
wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with
his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and
pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist
and scholar, _poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps_, as his foreign
admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but
in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of
Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still,
while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in
Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life
after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in
Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of _him_ too. It was in Edinburgh that
he published his _Baptistes_, his _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_, and
others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh
lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last
proof-sheets of his _Rerum Scoticarum Historia_, or Latin History of
Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of
literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert
Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting
that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at
hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew
Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed
notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the
Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real
interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun
with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of
the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship
and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely
marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It
was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all.
Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary
power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the
historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between
the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland
rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up
in the British Islands, so it must be admitted that it was in the last
eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that
the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly
and brilliantly from hand to hand.
From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty
doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that
King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his
own literary ambition in his _Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of
Poesie_ and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt
that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly
and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science
and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield
forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some
mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal
silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled.
Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then
through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of
Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the
Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James
II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period,
the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time
when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan
splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries,
and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes,
Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what
had Scotland to show in comparison? In the first section of the period
Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well
worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after
these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than
mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of
an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the
pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the
vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer
quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of
an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’s _Letters_ or Stair’s
_Institutes_; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking
any continuation of the old race of the _Scoti extra Scotiam agentes_,
only such small mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or
a Cleland, among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a
Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!
What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a
resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to
England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of
Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for
stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to be
found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of the
century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of Scotland,
in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with the successive
phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-Episcopacy in
Church government, and its theological and political concomitants. It
was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it was with such
persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in Scotland, to strangle all
the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the historical compensation.
There are other interests in a nation, other duties, than those of art
and literature; and he would be but a wretched Scotsman who, while
hovering over the history of his country in the seventeenth century and
noting her deficiencies then in literary respects in comparison with
England, should forget that this very century was the time of the most
powerful action ever exerted by Scotland in the general history of the
British Islands, and that, when the great British Revolution of that
century was over, its accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably
successful and useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was
traceable to Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own
peculiar politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been
argued or done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such
men as Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose,
Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we are
now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been stated.
From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through the Scottish
century and a quarter under view, very few roses or other flowers, and
not much even of happy thistle-bloom!
A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of
Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was
represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian recruits
as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Gay, and
Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish literary
stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn,
Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there stepped
forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be for so many years
the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only supplying the lieges
with such songs and poems as they had not had the like of for many a
day, but actually shaking them again into some sense of the importance
of popular books and of a taste for lightsome reading. Yes, it was Allan
Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-cap that one sees in the
white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was he that was the real
reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in Scotland after their
long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:—
“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.
Hae reared up great poetic stocks
Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect
On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:
Our country then a tale could tell:
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
In verse or prose:
Our kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”
He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and
antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all
but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an eager
interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the “chiels of
London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—had recently
done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the great literary
traditions of England. How strong was his interest in those “chiels of
London,” how much he admired them, appears not only from their influence
upon him in his own special art of a resuscitated Scottish poetry in an
eclectic modification of the old vernacular, but also in the dedication
of so much of his later life to the commercial enterprise of an
Edinburgh circulating library for the supply of his fellow-citizens with
all recent or current English books, and in his less successful
enterprise for the introduction of the English drama by the
establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre. In short, before Allan
Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own example and exertions, what
from the stimulus upon his countrymen independently of the new sense,
more and more consciously felt since the Union, of an acquired
partnership with England in all that great inheritance in the English
speech which had till then belonged especially to England, and in the
common responsibilities of such partnership thenceforward, Scotland was
visibly holding up her head again. Before that date there had appeared,
in Ramsay’s wake, some of the other forerunners of that famous race of
eighteenth-century Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for
any continuance of the imputation of the literary inferiority of
Scotland to England, were to command the respect of Europe by the vigour
of their co-operation and rivalry with their English coevals.
Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose noble poetic
fragment of _Hardyknute_ was made public by Ramsay, and whose influence
on the subsequent course of specially Scottish literature by that
fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged things of the same kind,
remains yet to be adequately estimated, one notes that among those
juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the career of literature after him
and under his observation, but who had died before him, were Robert
Blair, James Thomson, and William Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch,
once an Edinburgh _protégé_ of Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner
since 1723, and Anglicised into Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s
Scottish literary survivors, and does not count for much. But, when
Ramsay died, there were already in existence, at ages varying from full
maturity to mere infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable
now, on one ground or another, in the British Literary History of the
eighteenth century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle,
and Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and Mallet
had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are associated
locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of Scotland; but by
far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay himself, had their homes
in Edinburgh, or were essentially of Edinburgh celebrity by all their
belongings. Kames, David Hume, Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh
Blair, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith,
Dr. Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor
Robison, James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor
Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton: these,
with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern lights of
the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in which Dr.
Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and he and
Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon, were seen in the
London streets. Greater and smaller together, were they not a sufficient
northern constellation? Do not we of modern Edinburgh still remember
them now with a peculiar pride, and visit, out of curiosity, the houses
in the Old Town squares or closes where some of them had their
dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of their physiognomies and
habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate,
the Parliament House, and the site of our University? Was it not the
fact that in their days there were two recognised and distinct centres
or foci of literary production in Great Britain: the great London on the
banks of the Thames being one; but the other 400 miles farther north, in
the smaller city of heights and hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur
Seat on the banks of the Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring
radiance yet, vanishes from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age
of the Literary History of Edinburgh.
A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It was in
July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of
the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that same year
that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to Edinburgh. On
one particular day in the course of that visit, as all know, Burns
encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a lame fair-haired
youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the midst of other
company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix themselves for a
moment or two with some special interest. This was young Walter Scott.
In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that another Edinburgh boy, two
years younger than Scott, standing somewhere in the High Street, and
staring at a man whose unusual appearance had struck him, was told by a
bystander that he might well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This
was young Francis Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming
lives of those two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the
wondrous man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six
years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the
“Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year
appeared the first number of the _Edinburgh Review_, projected in
Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third
number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the year
of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty years to
all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history of
Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of Scott’s
creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other, all
Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his
associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to the
juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind, however,
criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze of the
completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that the
present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the
Edinburgh of those thirty following years.
II.
It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the
architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter
Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere
on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The Edinburgh of the
thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever be, the Edinburgh
of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else that were contained in
the Edinburgh of those thirty years are thought of now as having had
their being and shelter under the presidency of that one overarching
personality. When these are counted up, however, the array should be
sufficiently impressive, even were the covering arch removed. The later
lives of Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the
Alison of the _Essays on Taste_; the lyric genius of the Baroness
Nairne, and her long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse
of James Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early
promise of the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier
strains of Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in
aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs.
Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief
career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most active
career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the Scottish
Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the contributions of
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David Laing, to Scottish
history and Scottish literary antiquities; the starting of _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ in 1817, and the outflashing in that periodical of Wilson as
its “Christopher North,” with his coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of
fame that attended the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the
more quiet popularity of such particular contributions to its pages as
those of David Macbeth Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary
erudition and the philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first
years of the Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first
tentative residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in
connection with _Blackwood_ and other periodicals, of the strange
English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial
of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure
Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what was to
be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious literary
assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various kinds
already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible in the
history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s continuous
ascendency through which there ran the equally continuous shaft of
Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh moved on,
indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into another
tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary
activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, _who_ so fit to succeed
him in the presidency, _who_ called to it with such acclamation, as the
long-known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In
many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued literary
activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson, was really
but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the great Sir
Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had vanished
there were various intellectual developments, various manifestations of
literary power and tendency, as well as of social energy, which Sir
Walter could not have foreseen, which were even alien to his genius, and
which owed little or nothing to his example. There were fifteen years
more of the thunders and lightnings of the great Chalmers; of real
importance after a different fashion was the cool rationality of George
Combe, with his physiological and other teachings; the little English De
Quincey, hidden away in no one knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in
succession, and appearing in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only
furtively and timorously when he appeared at all, was sending forth more
and more of his wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a
recluse, but somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp,
Sir William Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations
which were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since
Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to multiply
other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive Hugh Miller
from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism superinduced upon
native Scandinavian strength, and powdered with the dust of the Old Red
Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence of
Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the _Scotticism of Scott_,—that
special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and
shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in
preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish
Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a
restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those
Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. One sees
a good deal of this in Christopher North himself, and also in Hugh
Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the long-protracted
devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of Scottish
antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive and under
Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of labour of
such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the character of many
of those writings which marked the advance of Robert Chambers, after the
days of his youthful attachment to Scott personally, to his more mature
and more independent celebrity. It appears, moreover, in the nature of
much of that publishing enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the
commencement of which by the starting of _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_
in the very year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the
annals of Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the
contemporary publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to
keep still to individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted
guises, in the literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill
Burton and William Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a
convenient stopping-point at which to round off our recollections of the
whole of that age of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes
both the era of the living Scott and the described prolongation of that
era, then, unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the
death of Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable
representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the
afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich
as was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his
serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his
imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—
“Let me feel the breezes blowing
Fresh along the mountain side!
Let me see the purple heather,
Let me hear the thundering tide,
Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan
Spouting when the storm is high!
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.”
In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh to the
point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will have
been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in what
would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are among us
some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty again, a season of
the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream. _Ichabod_, they tell us, may be now
written on the front of the Register House; and Edinburgh is living on
her past glories! As this complaint was raised again and again in
previous times to which its application is now a matter of surprise, may
we not hope that its recurrence in the present is only a passing wave of
that feeling, common to all times, and not unbecoming or unuseful, which
underestimates, or even neglects, what is near and round about, in
comparison with what is old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh
is now despicable intellectually in comparison with her former self,
like the larger question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and
pressed along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually
poor in comparison with her former self, is really a question of
statistics. As a certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient
basis for a fair inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one
remembers, however, that among those who would have to be included in
the inventory, inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of
Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been suggested as
a separating point between the defunct past and the still current, are
not only such of the older and already-named ornaments of Edinburgh as
David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert Chambers, and Hill Burton,
but also such individualities of later conspicuous mark as Alexander
Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr. John Brown, then, perhaps, there might
be some confidence that, if one were to proceed to the more delicate
business of comprising in the list all that suit among the living,
together with those of whom there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the
town to come,” the total would exhibit an average not quite shameful.
Perhaps, however, as has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to
count.
Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh naturally find
the cause to some extent in the increasing centralisation of the
commerce of British Literature universally in London. They point to such
facts as that the _Edinburgh Review_ has long ceased to be an Edinburgh
periodical, that some Edinburgh publishing firms have transferred their
head-quarters to London, and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are
understood to be meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place,
is there not here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its
population of four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that
the fair comparison in this matter should not be between London and
Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it were
found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were even
one-twentieth of that of London, the scores between the two places would
then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly equal. I cannot
pretend to have used all the available means for the computation; but,
in view of some facts before me, I should be surprised if it turned out
that Edinburgh did not come up to her proportional mark. Edinburgh
possesses, at all events, a most flourishing printing industry. The
printing of Edinburgh is celebrated all the world over; a very large
proportion of the books published in London are printed in Edinburgh.
That is something; but what of _publishing_ business? From the Edinburgh
Directory of this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city
there are 62 who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing
houses in Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be
about 1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find
that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—_i.e._ that
London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the
publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers, however,
do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the proportionally fewer
London houses have been doing a much larger amount of business, and may
not the publishing machinery of Edinburgh have been lying comparatively
idle? Well, I do not know; but the recent publishing lists of our
Edinburgh houses show no signs of declining activity. The completed
Ninth Edition of the great _Encyclopædia Britannica_, for example, has
been wholly an Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another
Edinburgh Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls
most obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of
her journalism and her apparatus of periodical literature. _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ and _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_ exist still; but other
literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are extinct, and one can
recollect the time when there were more newspapers in Edinburgh than
there are now. Those, however, were the days of twice-a-week newspapers
or once-a-week newspapers; and in the present daily journalism of
Edinburgh one has to observe not only the unprecedented amount of energy
and writing ability at work for all the ordinary requirements of
newspapers, but also (a very noteworthy feature of Edinburgh journalism
in particular) the increasing extent to which, by frequent non-political
articles and continual accounts of current books, it is annexing to
itself the functions hitherto performed by magazines, reviews, and other
literary miscellanies. But, suppose that, all these appearances
notwithstanding, it should be made out that the publishing machinery of
Edinburgh _is_ scantier and slacker than it was, there is another
consideration yet in reserve. The real measure of the present or the
future literary capabilities of Edinburgh, or of Scotland generally, is
not the extent of the publishing machinery which either Edinburgh, or
Scotland generally, still retains within herself, but the amount and
worth of the actual or potential authorship, the literary brain and
ability of all kinds, that may be still resident within the bounds of
Edinburgh or of Scotland, wheresoever the products are published. Those
who are so fond of upbraiding the present Edinburgh more especially with
the former literary distinction of Edinburgh in the latter half of the
eighteenth century,—the days of Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and
others,—seem to be ignorant of a most important fact. The publishing
machinery of Edinburgh in those days was very poor; and the chief books
of those Edinburgh celebrities were published in London. That there came
a change in this respect was owing mainly, or wholly, to one man. His
name was Archibald Constable. Of this man, the Napoleon of the British
publishing trade of his time, and of such particular facts in his
publishing career as his bold association of himself with the _Edinburgh
Review_ from its very outset, and his life-long connection with Scott,
all have some knowledge from tradition. But hear Lord Cockburn’s
succinct account of him in general. “Constable,” says Lord Cockburn,
“began as a lad in Hill’s shop, and had hardly set up for himself when
he reached the summit of his business. He rushed out, and took
possession of the open field, as if he had been aware from the first of
the existence of the latent spirits which a skilful conjurer might call
from the depths of the population to the service of literature.
Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he stood out as the
general patron and payer of all promising publications, and confounded
not merely his rivals in trade, but his very authors, by his unheard-of
prices. Ten, even twenty, guineas a sheet for a review, £2000 or £3000
for a single poem, and £1000 each for two philosophical dissertations,
drew authors from dens where they would otherwise have starved, and made
Edinburgh a literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its
own citizens.” These words of Lord Cockburn’s are too high-flown, in so
far as they might beget wrong conceptions of what was or is possible.
But, recollecting what Constable did,—recollecting that it was mainly
his example and success that called into being those other Edinburgh
publishing firms, contemporary with his own or subsequent, which have
maintained till now the place won by him for Edinburgh in the commerce
of British literature,—recollecting also how largely he led the way in
that enormous change in the whole system of the British book trade, now
almost consummated, which has liberated publishers from the good old
necessity of waiting for the authors that might come to them, one by
one, with already-prepared manuscripts under their arm, the fruit of
their careful private labours on self-chosen subjects, and has
constituted publishers themselves, to a great extent, the real
generators and regulators of literature, projecting serials, manuals,
sets of schoolbooks, and whatever else they see to be in demand, and
employing literary labour preferably in the service of these enterprises
of their own,—recollecting all this, may we not speculate on what might
be the consequences in the present Edinburgh of the appearance of
another Archibald Constable? The appurtenances are all ready. One has
heard complaints lately of the dearth in Edinburgh of those materials in
the shape of collections of books which would be requisite for the
future sufficiency of the city as a manufactory of such kinds of
literature as admit of being manufactured. That is a sheer
hallucination. Next to London, and perhaps to Oxford, Edinburgh has the
largest provision of books of any city in the British Empire. There are
at this moment 800,000 volumes,—say close on a million,—on the shelves
of the various public or corporate libraries. Much remains to be done
towards making all this wealth of books in Edinburgh as available as it
might be; and there ought to be no rest among us till that particular
advance is made towards an ideal state of things which shall consist in
the conversion of the present noble library of the Faculty of Advocates
into the nucleus of a great National Library for all Scotland. But, even
as things are, why be indolent, why not utilise our implements? Doubt
not that in the present Edinburgh and in the present Scotland, as in
other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions, there are, as Napier of
Merchiston phrased it, “good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner
of honest science,” who, if they were to bestir themselves, and
especially if there were another Archibald Constable in the midst of
them, would find plenty of excellent employment without needing, unless
they chose, to change the territory of their abode!
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
-----
Footnote 1:
From _The Scotsman_ of 18th, 19th, and 21st August 1886.
Footnote 2:
Written, and in part delivered, as an Introductory Lecture to the
Class of English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in the
Session 1867–8.
Footnote 3:
A scrap from unpublished MSS.
Footnote 4:
From _The Scotsman_ of 29th December 1890.
Footnote 5:
Written in 1883, in the form of a Lecture.
Footnote 6:
Written in 1883, as a lecture for the Class of English Literature in
the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.
Footnote 7:
Reprinted, with some modifications, from the _Westminster Review_ for
Oct.–Dec. 1856; where it appeared, with the title “Edinburgh Fifty
Years Ago,” in the form of an article on Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of
Edinburgh,” then just published.
Footnote 8:
Opening Address to Session 1890–1 of The Philosophical Institution of
Edinburgh.
Footnote 9:
From _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for November and December 1881 and January
1882.
Footnote 10:
Another incident which he told me of his first boyish saunterings
about Edinburgh is more trivial in itself, but of some interest as
showing his observant habits and sense of humour at that early
age:—For some purpose or other, he was going down Leith Walk, the long
street of houses, stone-yards, and gaps of vacant space, which leads
from Edinburgh to its sea-port of Leith. In front of him, and also
walking towards Leith, was a solid, quiet-looking countryman. They had
not gone far from Edinburgh when there advanced to them from the
opposite direction a sailor, so drunk that he needed the whole breadth
of the footpath to himself. Taking some umbrage at the countryman, the
sailor came to a stop, and addressed him suddenly, “Go to H——,”
looking him full in the face. “’Od, man, I’m gaun to Leith,” said the
countryman, as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and walked
on, Carlyle following him and evading the sailor.
Footnote 11:
Quoted by Mr. Froude in his article, “The Early Life of Thomas
Carlyle,” in the _Nineteenth Century_ for July 1881.
Footnote 12:
Quoted by Mr. Froude, _ut supra_.
Footnote 13:
Printed in an appendix to Mr. Moncure D. Conway’s Memoir of Carlyle
(1881), with other fragments of letters which had been copied from the
originals by Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and which Mr.
Ireland put at Mr. Conway’s disposal. The date of this fragment is
“August 1814”; and, as it is evidently a reply to Murray’s letter of
“July 27,” I have ventured to dissent from Mr. Froude’s conjectural
addition of “1816?” to the dating of that letter.
Footnote 14:
The first secession from the National Presbyterian Church of Scotland,
as established at the Revolution, was in 1733, when differences on
account of matters of administration, rather than any difference of
theological doctrine, led to the foundation by Ebenezer Erskine of the
dissenting communion called _The Associate Presbytery_ or _Secession
Church_. In 1747 this communion split itself, on the question of the
obligation of the members to take a certain civil oath, called The
Burgher’s Oath, into two portions, calling themselves respectively the
_Associate_ or _Burgher Synod_ and the _General Associate_ or
_Anti-Burgher Synod_. The former in 1799 sent off a detachment from
itself called the _Original Burgher Synod_ or _Old Light Burghers_,
the main body remaining as the _Associate Burgher Synod_; and it was
to the second that Carlyle’s parents belonged, their pastor in
Ecclefechan being that Rev. Mr. Johnston to whose memory Carlyle has
paid such a tribute of respect, and whose grave is now to be seen in
Ecclefechan churchyard, near Carlyle’s own.
Footnote 15:
This is not the first passage at arms on record between a Carlyle and
an Irving. As far back as the sixteenth century, when Irvings and
Carlyles were even more numerous in the West Border than they are at
present, and are heard of, with Maxwells, Bells, Johnstons, and other
clans, as keeping those parts in continual turmoil with their feuds,
raids, and depredations, it would happen sometimes that a Carlyle
jostled with an Irving. Thus, in the Register of the Privy Council of
Scotland, under date Aug. 28, 1578, we have the statement from an
Alexander Carlyle that there had been a controversy “betwix him and
Johnne Irvin, callit the Windie Duke.” What the controversy was does
not appear; but both parties had been apprehended by Lord Maxwell,
then Warden of the West Marches, and lodged in the “pledge-chalmer,”
or prison, of Dumfries; and Carlyle’s complaint is that, while the
said John Irving had been released on bail, no such favour has been
shown to _him_, but he has been kept in irons for twenty-two weeks.
This Alexander Carlyle seems to be the same person as a “Red Alexander
Carlyle of Eglisfechan” heard of afterwards in the same Record, under
date Feb. 22, 1581–2, as concerned in “some attemptatis and slauchter”
committed in the West March, and of which the Privy Council were
taking cognisance. On this occasion he is not in controversy with an
Irving, but has “Edward Irving of Boneschaw,” and his son “Christie
Irving of the Coif,” among his fellow-culprits. Notices of the
Dumfriesshire Carlyles and Irvings, separately or in company, are
frequent in the Register through the reign of James VI.
Footnote 16:
I have been informed, however, that Leslie must have misconceived
Carlyle when he took the solution as absolutely Carlyle’s own. It is
to be found, I am told, in an old Scottish book of geometry.
Footnote 17:
A letter of Carlyle’s among those contributed by Mr. Alexander Ireland
to Mr. Conway’s _Memoir_ proves that the momentous reading of Gibbon
was before Feb. 20, 1818; and in a subsequent letter in the same
collection, of date “July 1818,” he informs his correspondent, “I have
quitted all thoughts of the Church, for many reasons, which it would
be tedious, perhaps [word not legible], to enumerate.” This piece of
information is bedded, however, in some curious remarks on the
difficulties of those “chosen souls” who take up opinions different
from those of the age they live in, or of the persons with whom they
associate. See the letter in Mr. Conway’s volume, pp. 168–170.
Footnote 18:
Quoted in Mr. Froude’s article, “The Early Life of Carlyle,” in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for July 1881.
Footnote 19:
Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ (1862), i. 90, 91.
Footnote 20:
My impression now is that it was this autumn of 1819 in his father’s
house that Carlyle had in his mind when he talked to me once of the
remembered pleasures of certain early mornings in the Dumfriesshire
hill-country. The chief was when, after a saunter out of doors among
the sights and sounds of newly awakened nature, he would return to the
fragrant tea that was ready for him at home. No cups of tea he had
ever tasted in his life seemed so fragrant and so delicious as those
his mother had ready for him after his walks in those old
Dumfriesshire mornings.
Footnote 21:
But for the phrase “Hume’s Lectures once done with, I flung the thing
away for ever,” quoted by Mr. Froude as from “a note somewhere,” I
should, on the evidence of handwriting, etc., have decided
unhesitatingly for the second and more extensive of the two
hypotheses.—The attendance on the Chemistry Class, which would become
a fact if that hypothesis were correct, would be of some independent
interest. With Carlyle’s turn for science at that time, it was not
unlikely. I may add that, from talks with him, I have an impression
that, some time or other, he must have attended Professor Jameson’s
class of Natural History. He had certainly heard Jameson lecture
pretty frequently; for he described Jameson’s lecturing humorously and
to the life, the favourite topic of his recollection being Jameson’s
discourse on the order _Glires_ in the Linnæan Zoology. Though I have
looked over the Matriculation Lists and also the preserved class-lists
pretty carefully from 1809 to 1824, it is just possible that Carlyle’s
name in one of Jameson’s class-lists within that range of time may
have escaped me. The only other Professor, not already mentioned in
the text, that I remember to have heard him talk of was Dr. Andrew
Brown, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; but _him_ he knew, I
think, only by occasional dropping in at his lectures.
Footnote 22:
Carlyle to a correspondent, in one of Mr. Ireland’s copies of letters:
_Conway_, p. 178.
Footnote 23:
Ditto, _ibid._ p. 180.
Footnote 24:
Ditto, _ibid._ pp. 201, 202.
Footnote 25:
Carlyle to his brother John, quoted in Mr. Froude’s Article.
Footnote 26:
_Reminiscences_, ii. 16, 11.
Footnote 27:
Quoted at p. 57 of Mr. William Howie Wylie’s excellent volume entitled
_Carlyle: The Man and His Books_.
Footnote 28:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of Letters, in _Conway_, p. 171.
Footnote 29:
_Ibid._ p. 180.
Footnote 30:
Quoted in Mr. Froude’s Article.
Footnote 31:
Quoted _ibid._
Footnote 32:
The best account I ever had of Carlyle’s father was from an
intelligent elderly gentleman who, having retired from business,
amused himself one session, somewhere about or after 1857, by
attending my class of English Literature in University College,
London. He was from Dumfriesshire originally, and had known all the
Carlyle family. He spoke more of Carlyle’s father than of Carlyle
himself; and his first words to me about him were these:—“He was a
most extraordinary man, Carlyle’s father: he said a thing, and it
ran through the country.”——Carlyle often talked to me of his father,
and always in the tone of the memoir in his _Reminiscences_, though
I did not then know that he had any such memoir in writing. “He was
a far cleverer man, my father, than I am or ever shall be,” was one
of his phrases. He dwelt on what he thought a peculiar use by his
father of the Scottish word _gar_, meaning “to compel,” as when he
was reluctant to do a thing that must be done, and ended by saying
he must “just _gar_ himsel’ do it.” The expression was not new to
me, for it is to be heard farther north than Annandale; but it
seemed characteristic.—Of the strong and picturesque rhetoric of
Carlyle’s father I remember two examples, told me, I think, by Mrs.
Carlyle. Once, when he was going somewhere in a cart with his
daughters on a rainy day, he was annoyed by the drip-dripping into
his neck from the whalebone point of one of the umbrellas. “I would
rather sit a’ nicht in my sark,” he said, “under a waterspout on the
tap of ——” [some mountain in the neighbourhood, the name of which I
forget]. Once, when his son, of whom he had become proud, was at
home in a vacation, and a pious old neighbour-woman who had come in
was exciting herself in a theological controversy with the Divinity
student on some point or other, he broke out, “Thou auld
crack-brained enthusiastic, dost thou think to argue wi’ our Tom?”
Footnote 33:
The substance of the paper must have been retained in Carlyle’s
memory, for he described to me once with extraordinary vividness
his first sight of the Vale of Yarrow as he struck it in one
of his walks to Annandale. It was a beautiful day, and he had
come upon a height looking down upon the stony stream and its
classic valley. As he stood and gazed, with something in his mind
of Wordsworth’s salutation, “And this is Yarrow!”, up from the
valley there came a peculiar, repeated, rhythmical sound, as of
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_, for which he could not
account. All was solitary and quiet otherwise, but still the
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_ rose to his ear. At last, some
way off, he saw a man with a cart standing in the bed of the stream,
and lifting stone after stone from it, which he threw into the cart.
He could then watch the gesture of each cast of a stone in among the
rest, and note the interval before the _clink_ reached him.—The
Yarrow songs were familiar to Carlyle; and among the many scraps of
old verse which he was fond of quoting or humming to himself in his
later years I observed this in particular:—
“But Minstrel Burn cannot assuage
His grief while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age,
Which fleeting time procureth;
For mony a place stands in hard case
Where joy was wont beforrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,
And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow.”
Footnote 34:
See the article _Some Fifty Years Ago_ in Fraser’s
Magazine for June 1879, by Mr. Allingham, then Editor of the Magazine.
Footnote 35:
Dr. Hill Burton’s Reminiscences of Professor Wilson, published in
_Wilson’s Life_ by Mrs. Gordon, ii. 25.
Footnote 36:
_Peter Nimmo: A Rhapsody_ is duly registered among
Carlyle’s anonymous contributions to Fraser’s Magazine in Mr. Richard
Herne Shepherd’s _Bibliography of Carlyle_ (1881). Should
any one entertain doubts, even after such excellent authority, a
glance at the prose preface to the thing, signed O. Y. (“Oliver
Yorke”), in _Fraser_ for February 1831, will remove them.
After specifying Edinburgh University as Peter’s local habitat, and
estimating the enormously diffused celebrity he has attained by his
long persistence there, the preface proceeds: “The world itself is
interested in these matters: singular men are at all times worthy of
being described and sung; nay, strictly considered, there is nothing
else worthy.... The Napoleon, the Nimmo, are mystic windows through
which we glance deeper into the hidden ways of Nature, and discern
under a clearer figure the working of that inscrutable Spirit of the
Time, and Spirit of Time itself, who is by some thought to be the
Devil.” There may remain some little question as to the date of the
_Rhapsody_. That it was written by Carlyle in Annandale
seems proved by the phrase “in heaths and splashy weather” in the
prologue. The date _may_ have been any time before 1831; but
before 1821 seems the most likely.
Footnote 37:
Quoted by Mr. Froude in his _Nineteenth Century_ article.
Footnote 38:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of early Carlyle Letters, in Mr. Conway’s
_Memoir_, p. 185.
Footnote 39:
_Ibid._
Footnote 40:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of Carlyle’s Letters, in _Conway_,
pp. 192, 193.
Footnote 41:
_Reminiscences_, i. 208, 209.
Footnote 42:
Carlyle’s habit of smoking had begun in his boyhood, probably at
Ecclefechan before he came to Edinburgh University. His father, he
told me, was a moderate smoker, confining himself to about an ounce
of tobacco a week, and so thoughtfully as always to have a pipe ready
for a friend out of that allowance. Carlyle’s allowance, in his
mature life, though he was very regular in his times and seasons,
must have been at least six times as much. Once, when the canister
of “free-smoking York River” on his mantelpiece was nearly empty,
he told me not to mind that, as he had “about _half-a-stone_
more of the same upstairs.”——Another tobacco anecdote of Carlyle,
which I had from the late G. H. Lewes, may be worth a place here.
One afternoon, when his own stock of “free-smoking York River” had
come to an end, and when he had set out to walk with a friend (Lewes
himself, if I recollect rightly), he stopped at a small tobacco-shop
in Chelsea, facing the Thames, and went in to procure some temporary
supply. The friend went in with him, and heard his dialogue with the
shopkeeper. York River, having been asked for, was duly produced;
but, as it was not of the right sort, Carlyle, while making a small
purchase, informed the shopkeeper most particularly what the right
sort was, what was its name, and at what wholesale place in the city
it might be ordered. “O, we find that this suits our customers very
well,” said the man. “That may be, Sir,” said Carlyle; “but you will
find it best in the long run always to deal in the veracities.” The
man’s impression must have been that _the veracities_ were some
peculiar curly species of tobacco, hitherto unknown to him.
Footnote 43:
There does not seem to have been much direct intercourse between
Wilson and Carlyle after the meeting mentioned, though there were
cordial exchanges of regards between them, and some incidental
compliments to Carlyle in _Blackwood_.
Footnote 44:
As the dates in this sentence will suggest, the last few paragraphs,
narrating the story of Goethe’s frustrated attempt to bring Scott
and Carlyle together, did not appear in the paper as originally
published in _Macmillan_, but are an insertion into the
present reprint made possible by the information furnished by the
two recent publications named. I did, indeed, give an outline sketch
of some such affair as it had hung in my memory from talk either
with Carlyle himself or with his brother Dr. John Carlyle. But the
sketch was hazy, and I now find that it was inaccurate in some
points.—Scott and Carlyle, I may here add, _were_ once together
in the same room in Edinburgh in a semi-private way. The fact has
been communicated to me by Mr. David Douglas, the editor of Scott’s
Journal, who had it from Dr. David Aitken, already mentioned in this
paper as an intimate friend of Carlyle’s in the Comely Bank days.
The scene of the meeting was the shop of Mr. Tait, the publisher,
then in an upper floor in Hanover Street. Carlyle and Mr. Aitken,
who had been walking in Princes Street, turned aside for a call at
Mr. Tait’s. While they were there and talking with Mr. Tait, Scott
came in,—well known to both by sight. “Mr. Tait, have you got a copy
of Horace at hand? I want to make a quotation,” were Scott’s words
on entering. The book having been brought,—a handsome quarto, Dr.
Aitken remembered,—Scott sat down with it in his lap, and began to
turn over the leaves, Carlyle and Mr. Aitken standing a little way
off meanwhile, and Carlyle continuing his talk with Mr. Tait. Soon,
as if attracted by the voice or by something said, Scott began to
look up, the volume still resting in his lap. Several times he raised
his eyes in the same fashion from the book to the two strangers, or
to the one who was talking. The expression, as Dr. Aitken interpreted
it in recollection, was as if he were saying to himself: “He is a
kenspeckle-looking chiel that; I wonder who he is.”—The date of this
encounter I do not know. If it was _after_ the affair of the
Goethe medals and the unanswered letters (and that is not impossible
if we suppose some occasion for a brief visit from Craigenputtock
to Edinburgh in 1829 or 1830), one can imagine with what studious
_aloofness_ from his great senior Carlyle would comport himself
in the accidental interview.
Footnote 45:
From the _Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle_,
edited by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, we learn that Carlyle had, on the
same day on which he wrote this letter to Procter, written to Goethe
soliciting a testimonial from _him_ for the same occasion. The
testimonial was sent from Weimar, but not till the 14th of March; and
it came too late to be of use. A copy of the original German, with
an English translation, is printed in Mr. Norton’s volume. It is a
document of five pages, and perhaps the most unbusiness-like thing
ever sent in the shape of a testimonial on behalf of a candidate for
a Scottish Professorship. It begins thus:—“True conviction springs
from the heart; the Soul, the real seat of the Conscience, judges
concerning what may be permitted and what may not be permitted far
more surely than the Understanding, which will see into and determine
many things without hitting the right mark. A well-disposed and
self-observant man, wishing to respect himself and to live at peace
with himself, and yet conscious of many an imperfection perplexing
his inner life, and grieved by many a fault compromising him in the
eyes of others, whereby he finds himself disturbed and opposed from
within and from without, will seek by all methods to free himself
from such impediments.” Then follow two paragraphs of continued
remarks on the intellectual or literary life in general; after which
the testimonial becomes more specific, thus:—“It may now without
arrogance be asserted that German Literature has effected much
for humanity in this respect,—that a moral-psychological tendency
pervades it, introducing not ascetic timidity, but free culture
in accordance with nature, and a cheerful obedience to law; and
therefore I have observed with pleasure Mr. Carlyle’s admirably
profound study of this Literature, and I have noticed with sympathy
how he has not only been able to discover the beautiful and human,
the good and great, in us, but has also contributed what was his
own, and has endowed us with the treasures of his genius. It must be
granted that he has a clear judgment as to our Æsthetic and Ethic
writers, and, at the same time, his own way of looking at them, which
proves that he rests on an original foundation and has the power to
develop in himself the essentials of what is good and beautiful. In
this sense, I may well regard him as a man who would fill a Chair
of Moral Philosophy with single-heartedness, with purity, effect,
and influence, enlightening the youth entrusted to him as to their
real duties, in accordance with his disciplined thought, his natural
gifts, and his acquired knowledge, aiming at leading and urging their
minds to moral activity, and thereby steadily guiding them towards
a religious completeness.”—When one imagines the probable effects
on the minds of the St. Andrews Principal and Professors of 1828 of
such a testimonial from the German sage, known to them so dimly, and
perhaps in ways that made them suspicious of him, one’s impression
is that, if they had been thinking of appointing Carlyle, the
presentation of this testimonial would have been likely to stop them.
Never having been presented, it can have done no harm.
Footnote 46:
Review, in _The Scots Observer_ (now _The National Observer_), 15th
December 1888, of “_Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe,
Esq._ Edited by Alexander Allardyce. With a Memoir by the Rev. W. K.
R. Bedford. In two volumes. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.”
Footnote 47:
Lockhart, in his quotation from the Diary as here given, omitted a
line or two. The complete text may be now read in Mr. Douglas’s
edition of the entire Diary in 1890.
Footnote 48:
This is the “General Sharpe” from whom Carlyle’s father had a lease of
his farm of Mainhill from 1815 onwards, and from whom Carlyle himself
rented the house and grounds of Hoddam Hill for his one year’s
experiment of farming-life in 1825–26. See the _Reminiscences_ for the
story of Carlyle’s quarrel, and then his father’s also, with their
landlord, caused mainly by his “arbitrary high-handed temper, used to
a rather prostrate style of obedience, and not finding it here.” Both
father and son gave up their leases in 1826, the father protesting “We
can live without Sharpe and the whole Sharpe creation,” and saying he
would “rather go to Jerusalem seeking farms, and die without finding
one,” than remain under such a landlord.
Footnote 49:
From _The Scotsman_ of 18th November 1882; where it appeared as a
review of “_The Book-Hunter_, etc. By John Hill Burton, D.C.L., LL.D.,
Author of _A History of Scotland_, _The Scot Abroad_, _The Reign of
Queen Anne_, etc. A New Edition: with a Memoir of the Author. William
Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.”
Footnote 50:
From _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for February 1883. The main portion of the
paper was delivered as a lecture in the University of Edinburgh on
Tuesday, October 24, 1882; and there are reasons for retaining the
familiarity of the lecture form in the reprint.
Footnote 51:
From _The Scotsman_ of 8th and 9th November 1889. This paper is
purposely placed last in the volume, as containing necessarily a
recapitulation of portions of the matter of some of the preceding.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.