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 theReminiscences, that the cessation of correspondence with Irving became amatter 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 famousOrations 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 hiscontributions to Brewster’sEncyclopædia, and got the Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to hisLife of Schiller.
If, however, theLife of Schillerwas 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 makeprovision 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 theReminiscences, where we learn that he was at this time persevering with hisLife 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 grandsoughof 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 toquiton that account, and at times almost resolving to do it; dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poorSchiller, 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 ofSchiller’s Life and Writingsappeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebratedLondon Magazineof 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, HamiltonReynolds, 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 theReminiscences. 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 theLife 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 fromSchillerto the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a sequel, viz. theTranslation 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 grandsoughof those woods” outside, when hisSchillermanuscript 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 keepingTheir 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 venturesOn Goethe’s mystic page to light.With awe she views the candle blazingA universe of fire it seemsTo moth-savantewith 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.”
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keepingTheir 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 venturesOn Goethe’s mystic page to light.With awe she views the candle blazingA universe of fire it seemsTo moth-savantewith 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.”
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keepingTheir meek and silent course in heaven;Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,All mortal things to sleep are given.
“’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 venturesOn Goethe’s mystic page to light.
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 blazingA universe of fire it seemsTo moth-savantewith rapture gazing,Or fount whence life and motion streams.
With awe she views the candle blazing
A universe of fire it seems
To moth-savantewith 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.”
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 theReminiscencesis that Irving had encouraged him in theLife of Schiller, and had “prepared the way” for it in theLondon 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 theLondon Magazineas a place for theSchiller, 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 theLondon Magazinecontaining the first part of theSchillerhad been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in Scotland lastedthrough the rest of that month and the whole of November. There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence between Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about theSchiller, 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 theLondon 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 theReminiscencesis 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 theReminiscences. One was that, the doctor having asked him whether hecouldgive up tobacco, “Give it up, sir?” he replied; “I can cut off my left hand with an axe, ifthatshould 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 wholepharmacopœia 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 theTranslation of Wilhelm Meisterwas 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 ofLegendre’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 smackthat 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 hisLife of Schillerhad appeared in the number of theLondon Magazinefor 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 theWilhelm Meisterfrom the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous author of theLife of Schillerand of theTranslation of Wilhelm Meisterthat 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 viewswith 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 hisSchillerhad appeared in theLondon Magazineduring 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 titleThe 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 theTranslation of Wilhelm Meisterwhich 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 prettyishlookingcottage.” 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 ofSpecimens of German Romancefor 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 byconversion,” and which he described afterwards, in the Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour of the “Everlasting Yes” at last. The wordhappinesswas 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 thepresence 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 suburbfrom 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 bewisein 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 ofrightto beentirely fortunate, to accumulate all knowledge, beauty, health, and earthly felicity inoursacred person, and to passourmost 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 Ishould 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 forinvention, 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, weremen; 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, withthe 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 areyouthat 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 irreverentfamiliarity, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 ofSpecimens 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 theReminiscences. 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 theEdinburgh 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, entitledState 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-calledForeign Review and Continental Miscellanyhaving been started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared hisLife and Writings of Werner, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number, in April 1828, hisGoethe’s Helena,in forty pages. These two articles in theForeign Review, with the two already contributed to theEdinburgh, 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,thereis 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’sMemoirs 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 hisswimming 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 ofBlackwoodsince 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 convivialityon 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 withBlackwoodhaving 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 ofWilhelm Meisterin theLondon Magazinefor 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 theReminiscencesin 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 Radicalsui generisthough he was, and theprotégéthough 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 inBlackwoodwas 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 theQuarterly 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 theReminiscencesis 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 thatTranslation of Wilhelm Meisterin 1824 which Goethe had acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, theLife of Schillerin 1825, and theSpecimens of German Romancein 1827, this last completing the translation of theMeisterby 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 themental and moral coreas that which is really influential. Carlyle is amoral 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 crowdin 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 hisLife of Napoleonand 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 greatTheatrical 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 voluminousLife of Napoleonwas published, with the first series of theChronicles of the Canongatebesides, and theTales of a Grandfatherhad 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 pleasepresent 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 hisLife 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 hisLife of Napoleonto 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 supremacyin 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: