Chapter XI: Part III: 1822–1828 (1)

By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June 1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have contributed to the result.

One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his _Reminiscences_ he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh, because he was not sure but _she_ might be then in Edinburgh too; and it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr. Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in the _Reminiscences_. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh, had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street. He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The information agrees with the University records; for in the matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February. The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow, the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing” to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics, indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them, teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.

Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the visit of the previous June _that_ had gradually established itself, till it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books, etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller tutorship.

Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he says, “translating _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My _petards_ will not burst, or make only _noise_ when they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire. _Then_ shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear, in that connection with the _New Edinburgh Review_ of which mention has been already made, and in the translation of _Legendre_ which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the background. There is significance in the fact that his second contribution to the _New Edinburgh_, published in April 1822, when the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s _Faust_. The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his _Reminiscences_ where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when, having finished the reading of _Wilhelm Meister_, he walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him. Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.

The translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster deserves a passing notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with the title _Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an Introductory Essay on Proportion_,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten, that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about 1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to obtain an _affidavit_ from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the _Reminiscences_, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings, and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his _Budget of Paradoxes_, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements [Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”

The Translation of _Legendre_, with this Essay on Proportion, was Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution, Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it, he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir, you are dealing with the _ipsissima corpora_,” Chalmers used to say; and Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.

There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company; and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur, was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller, and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we are able to connect it with another advent.

It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the 29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core, fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his _Reminiscences_ how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in “black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings, round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the _Reminiscences_; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake, woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he was troubled no more.

The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of 2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class, and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time, and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears “John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the family who received a University education. He had been for some time a teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the _Reminiscences_ tell us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.

The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh routine of his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the Bullers in India Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and other intercourse with the Buller family and their guests, and his own German and other readings and literary efforts and schemings. It was in that winter, and not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the _Reminiscences_, that the cessation of correspondence with Irving became a matter of secret vexation to him. The good Irving, now in the full whirl of his activity with the Hatton Garden congregation and of the London notoriety to which that led, was too busy to write; and it was only by rumour, or by letters from others, that Carlyle heard of Irving’s extraordinary doings and extraordinary successes in the metropolis, of the crowds that were flocking to hear him in the little Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and his preachings were making in the London fashionable world. “People have their envies, their pitiful self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting that the real joy he felt at the vast and sudden effulgence of his friend into a fame commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense of the contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a “poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale fellow, now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames. There was, he adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be able to keep his head in the blaze of such enormous London popularity? Had he strength enough to guide and manage himself in that huge element with anything like the steadiness that had characterised the behaviour of the more massive and more simple-hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he seems to hint, was increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first publication came into his hands,—the famous _Orations and Arguments for Judgment to Come_, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical world was enabled to judge of the real substance of those pulpit-discourses which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as Irving himself was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own work. It seems to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having closed his contributions to Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and got the Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to his _Life of Schiller_.

If, however, the _Life of Schiller_ was begun in Edinburgh, it was not finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the spring and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that aptitude for change of residence which characterises retired Indians and people with plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of Kinnaird in Perthshire, situated on the river Tay, some miles to the north of Dunkeld. Carlyle and his tutorship of young Charles and Arthur Buller had, accordingly, been transferred thither. He must have been there early in June 1823; for a letter of his is extant, dated from Kinnaird House on the 17th of that month, in which he describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old cathedral, with Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in the neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your peaceful manse,—you at one side of the parlour fire, Mrs. M. at the other, and two or three little M.’s, fine chubby urchins, hopping about the carpet,—you will suddenly observe the door fly open, and a tall, meagre, careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance lightened by unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting a cordial welcome. This knight of the rueful visage will, in fact, mingle with the group for a season, and be merry as the merriest, though his looks are sinister. I warn you to make provision for such emergencies. In process of time I too must have my own peculiar hearth; wayward as my destiny has hitherto been, perplexed and solitary as my path of life still is, I never cease to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on my own footing.”[40] From the _Reminiscences_, where we learn that he was at this time persevering with his _Life of Schiller_, we have his later recollection of those summer and autumn months, and on into late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—

“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally
solitary, way. My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some
three or four hundred yards from the new, and on a lower level,
overshadowed with wood. Thither I always retired directly after tea,
and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—good candles, good
wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence and
total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before
or since. I remember still the grand _sough_ of those woods, or,
perhaps, in the stillest times, the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing
else to converse with but this and my own thoughts, which never for a
moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes pathetically sad. I
was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I ought not
to _quit_ on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it;
dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poor _Schiller_, nothing
considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily
persisted in, as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate
huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[41]

It was in October 1823 that the first part of _Schiller’s Life and Writings_ appeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebrated _London Magazine_ of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was the most important of the metropolitan magazines of that time, counting among its contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such writers as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Hamilton Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood, and De Quincey. The admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening of such a London connection at last, ought to have been some gratification to him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it was, to a far greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the _Reminiscences_. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had compliments from the editor of the magazine,—_i.e._, we must suppose, from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own editors, unless indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of assistant editor, was the medium of the communication. What is more important is that the _Life of Schiller_, if not all in the editor’s hands complete when the first part appeared, must have been reported as complete, or as approaching completeness, in Carlyle’s own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly, fixes October 1823, or thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from _Schiller_ to the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a sequel, viz. the _Translation of the Wilhelm Meister_. It must have been in one of those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand _sough_ of those woods” outside, when his _Schiller_ manuscript lay finished beside him, and he had Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the Night-Moth” which he has commemorated in one of his metrical fragments—

“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping
Their meek and silent course in heaven;
Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,
All mortal things to sleep are given.

But see! a wandering night-moth enters,
Allured by taper gleaming bright;
A while keeps hovering round, then ventures
On Goethe’s mystic page to light.

With awe she views the candle blazing
A universe of fire it seems
To moth-_savante_ with rapture gazing,
Or fount whence life and motion streams.

What passions in her small heart whirling,
Hopes boundless, adoration, dread?
At length, her tiny pinions twirling,
She darts, and,—puff!—the moth is dead.”

Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that Irving had encouraged him in the _Life of Schiller_, and had “prepared the way” for it in the _London Magazine_. How is this to be reconciled with his repeated references to the total cessation of correspondence between himself and Irving from the date of Irving’s definite settlement in London to that week, “late in autumn 1823,” when Irving, having married Miss Martin of Kirkcaldy, was on his marriage-jaunt with her in Scotland, and generously determined to pass near Kinnaird, so as to pick up his old friend and have a day or two of his society? One might have thought that it was in this renewed meeting of the two friends in Irving’s honeymoon jaunt that there came from Irving the suggestion of the _London Magazine_ as a place for the _Schiller_, or the intimation that he had already arranged for it and knew it would be welcome there. This supposition, however, will not cohere with the date of Irving’s marriage. It took place at Kirkcaldy on the 13th of October 1823, after the number of the _London Magazine_ containing the first part of the _Schiller_ had been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in Scotland lasted through the rest of that month and the whole of November. There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence between Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about the _Schiller_, some while before October 1823, though Carlyle’s memory had become hazy about that matter too. It is pleasant to be sure of the main fact,—which is that it was to the ever-friendly Irving that Carlyle owed this second great service of his introduction to the _London Magazine_, just as he had already owed him the Buller tutorship.

The winter of 1823–4 seems to have been passed wholly at Kinnaird. At least, there was no re-appearance of the Bullers in Edinburgh that winter, and no re-attendance that winter of Charles Buller or his brother Arthur in any of the classes of Edinburgh University. What we gather from the _Reminiscences_ is that, towards the end of the winter, the Bullers had begun to weary of Kinnaird life, and indeed of life in Scotland, and were meditating a return to England, possibly for ultimate settlement in Cornwall, but certainly with a view to London as their intermediate head-quarters. He hints also that they had by this time been a good deal exercised by the moodiness and miserable bad health of the strange tutor they had with them, and whom they respected and admired so much. Might it not be the best arrangement that he should go for a month or two to his native Annandale to recruit his health, and then rejoin them in London, there again to take charge of his pupils?

Taking leave of Kinnaird with that understanding, Carlyle, it appears, rode, either directly thence or very soon afterwards from his father’s house at Mainhill, all the way to Edinburgh, to consult a doctor about his dyspepsia. Was it chronic, and incurable except by regimen? or could it be removed by medical treatment? “_It is all tobacco, sir; give up tobacco_,” was the physician’s answer; on which Carlyle’s comment is that, having instantly and absolutely followed the advice, and persevered for “long months” in total abstinence from tobacco, without the slightest sign of improvement, he came to the conclusion that he might as well have ridden sixty miles in the opposite direction, and poured his sorrows into the “long hairy ear of the first jackass” he met, as have made that ride to Edinburgh to consult the great authority. This story of the tobacco consultation was a favourite one with Carlyle in later days. I have heard it from him several times, with two additions to what appears in the _Reminiscences_. One was that, the doctor having asked him whether he _could_ give up tobacco, “Give it up, sir?” he replied; “I can cut off my left hand with an axe, if _that_ should be necessary!” The other was an account of his months of probation of the new no-tobacco regimen. The account took the form of a recollection of himself as staggering for months from tree-trunk to tree-trunk in a metaphorical wood, tobaccoless and dreary, without one symptom of benefit from his self-denial, till at last, sinking at the foot of one of the tree-trunks, and seeing a long clay and a tobacco-pouch providentially lying on the turf, he exclaimed “I will endure this diabolical farce and delusion no longer,” and had a good smoke then and there once more, in signal of reverting for ever to his old comfort. Tobacco and a very little good brandy, he used to say to the end of his life, were the only two drugs in the whole pharmacopœia that he had found of any real utility to the distressed human organism.[42]

It was during the two or three spring months of 1824, spent at Mainhill in Dumfriesshire, under the care of that “best of nurses and of hostesses,” his mother, that the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ was finished. It was in the June of the same year that, having revised the proofs of the three volumes of that book for Messrs. Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, who had agreed to be the publishers, as they were also of his translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_, and having run up to Edinburgh himself with the last proofs and the preface, and received from Messrs. Oliver and Boyd £180 for the labour, and having taken a farewell at Haddington the purport of which may be guessed, he embarked in the Leith smack that was to carry him to London. He was then in his twenty-ninth year, and it was his first visit to the Great Babylon. The second part of his _Life of Schiller_ had appeared in the number of the _London Magazine_ for January 1824; but the rest had still to be published, and would probably appear in the magazine when he was himself in London and had formed personal acquaintance with the editorial powers. Copies of the _Wilhelm Meister_ from the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous author of the _Life of Schiller_ and of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ that he would first step into London literary society. For the rest, his prospects were utterly undefined. Whether he should remain in London permanently, or return to Scotland, depended on events not yet calculable. All that was certain was that the Buller tutorship would still be his anchorage for a time in London, as it had been for the last two years in Scotland, and that he had Irving’s house for his London home so long as he might choose. It was, in fact, to Irving’s house in Myddelton Terrace, Islington, where Irving and his wife were living as a newly-married couple, that Carlyle was to steer himself after the Leith smack had landed him in London river.

* * * * *

From this point there is a break of two years and four months in Carlyle’s life, during which he had nothing to do with Edinburgh. The incidents of that interval may be filled in briefly thus:—

NINE MONTHS IN LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM (_June 1824–March 1825_).—Residing with the Irvings at Islington, or in lodgings near them, Carlyle in those months made his first acquaintance with London, and with various persons in it of greater or less note. Introduced at once to the Stracheys, and to the then celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu of Bedford Square, it was through them, or otherwise directly or indirectly through Irving, that he saw something of Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, Bryan Waller Procter, Crabb Robinson, and others of literary name, besides such commercial London Scots of Irving’s congregation as Sir Peter Laurie, Mr. William Hamilton, and Mr. Dinwiddie, and the young English manufacturing chemist, Mr. Badams of Birmingham. After Mrs. Strachey and the queenly Mrs. Basil Montagu, his most valued new friends in this list, he tells us, were Procter, Allan Cunningham, and Badams. This last, indeed, under pretext of putting him on a regimen that would cure his dyspepsia, lured him away to Birmingham for three months; which three months of residence with Badams in Birmingham, and of rambles with Badams hither and thither in Warwickshire and sights of Joe Parkes and other Birmingham notabilities, have to be interpolated therefore in the general bulk of the London visit. There was also a trip to Dover, in the company of the Stracheys and the Irvings, with a run of some of the party, Carlyle one of them, to Paris, for ten days of Parisian sight-seeing. Altogether, the London visit had been so successful that, when the tutorial engagement with the Bullers came to an end in the course of it,—which it did from the impossibility of an adjustment of Carlyle’s views with Mrs. Buller’s ever-changing plans,—the notion among his friends was that he could not do better than remain in London and take his chances as a London man of letters. The concluding portions of his _Schiller_ had appeared in the _London Magazine_ during the first months of his visit; and before the end of 1825 the five portions into which the work had been cut up for magazine purposes had been gathered together, and published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey in the form of an octavo volume, with the title _The Life of Friedrich Schiller_, bringing the author £100. It was during his stay in London also that he received his first communication from Goethe, in the form of a brief letter of thanks for a copy of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ which had been sent to Weimar some months before. But, though things seemed thus to conspire in favour of the detention of Carlyle in London, he had made up his mind to the contrary; and in March 1825 he turned his back upon the great city, and was on his way once more to his native Dumfriesshire.

NINETEEN MONTHS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE FARM-LIFE (_March 1825–October 1826_):—For about two months Carlyle was at his father’s farmhouse of Mainhill, near Ecclefechan, resting from his return-tour through England, and preparing for the adventure which he had planned. This was an attempt at tenant-farming on his own account in that neighbourhood. A letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, of date May 20, 1825, is still from Mainhill; but on the 26th of that month he entered on the possession of the adjacent little farm of Hoddam Hill, which he had taken on lease from his father’s landlord, General Sharpe,—“a neat, compact little farm, rent £100,” with “a prettyishlooking cottage.” Here for a whole year he lived, nominally a tenant-farmer, as his father was, and close to his father, but in reality entrusting the practical farm-work to his brother Alick, while he himself, with his mother or one of his sisters for his housekeeper, delved a little for amusement, rode about for health, and pursued his studies and literary tasks,—chiefly his projected translation of _Specimens of German Romance_ for the bookseller Tait of Edinburgh. There were letters to and from his London friends; there was once a sight in Annan of poor Irving, whose London troubles and aberrations were by this time matters of public notoriety; there were visits to and from neighbours; but, on the whole, the year was one of industrious loneliness. Though he tells us but little of it, what he does tell us enables us to see that it was a most important and memorable year in his recollection. Perhaps in all Carlyle’s life no other year is so important intrinsically. “I call that year idyllic,” he tells us, “in spite of its russet coat.” This is general; but he gives us vital particulars. It was the time, he distinctly says, of his complete spiritual triumph, his attainment once and for ever to that state of clear and high serenity, as to all the essentials of religion and moral belief, which enabled him to understand in his own case “what the old Christian people meant by _conversion_,” and which he described afterwards, in the Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour of the “Everlasting Yes” at last. The word _happiness_ was no favourite one in Carlyle’s vocabulary, with reference to himself at least; but he does not refuse even this word in describing his new mental condition through the year at Hoddam Hill. What he felt, he says, was the attainment of “a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant.” Even his bodily health seemed to be improving; and the effect extended itself most manifestly to his temper and disposition towards others. “My thoughts were very peaceable,” he says, “full of pity and humanity as they had never been before.” In short, he was no longer the moody, defiant, mainly despondent and sarcastic Carlyle he had been, or had seemed to be to superficial observers, through the past Edinburgh days, but a calmer, wiser, and more self-possessed Carlyle, with depths of tenderness under all his strength and fearlessness,—the Carlyle that he was to be recognised as being by all who knew him through the next twenty years of his life, and that indeed he continued to be essentially to the very end. To what agency does he attribute this “immense victory,” as he calls it, which he had thus permanently gained over his own spirit in this thirtieth year of his age, passed at Hoddam Hill? “Pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature in those poor Annandale localities,”—these, including the sound on Sundays of the Hoddam kirk-bell coming to him touchingly from the plain below, “like the departing voice of eighteen centuries,” are mentioned as accounting for much, but not for all. “I then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the first of the moderns.” Not to be forgotten either, as that which tinged the year to perfection in its “idyllic” character, was the flitting across the scene of the presence that was dearest to him. His pledged bride, no longer at Haddington, but residing with her relatives in Nithsdale, made her first visit to his family in this year; they rode about together for ten days; and the future was arranged. After exactly one year at Hoddam Hill, a difference with General Sharpe, his father’s landlord and his own, led to the giving up of the Hoddam farm and of the Mainhill farm at the same time, and to the transference of the whole Carlyle family to Scotsbrig, a much better farm, out of General Sharpe’s territories, but still in the vicinity of Ecclefechan. This was in May 1826. At Scotsbrig, however, Carlyle remained little more than four months; for, “as turned out,” he married and went to Edinburgh in the following October.

* * * * *

Carlyle was now for the first time an Edinburgh householder. Comely Bank, where he had his domicile for the first eighteen months of his married life, is a single row of very neat houses, situated in a quiet road leading from the north-western suburb of Edinburgh to Craigleith Quarry, and uniting itself there with the great Dean Road, which has started from the west end of the city at a considerably higher level. The houses lie back a little from the footpath, within railings, each house with its iron gate and little strip of flower-garden in front, while each has a larger bit of walled garden behind. The entire row,—though within a walk of two minutes from the dense suburb from which it is detached, and of not more than fifteen minutes from the fashionable heart of the city, by the steep slopes of streets ascending from that suburb,—has even yet a certain look of being out in the open. There are fields before the windows, and there is a stretch of fields to the back; and fifty years ago there must have been less of incipient straggling of other buildings in the neighbourhood than there is now. Carlyle’s house was No. 21, the last but two at the outer or country end of the row. His natural daily walks thence, when they were not into town up the steep sloping streets spoken of, would be to Craigleith Quarry and the Corstorphine Hills, or past these on the great road towards Queensferry, or aside northwards to the beautiful strip of the shore of the Firth of Forth between Cramond and Granton.

No contemporary record yet accessible gives so distinct a general idea of Carlyle’s state of mind and mode of life during his eighteen months at Comely Bank as the following portion of a letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, dated on Christmas Day 1826, or just after he had settled there:—

“Of my late history I need not speak, for you already know it: I am
wedded; to the best of wives, and with all the elements of enjoyment
richly ministered to me, and health—rather worse than even it was wont
to be. Sad contradiction! But I were no apt scholar if I had not
learned long ago, with my friend Tieck, that ‘in the fairest sunshine
a shadow chases us, that in the softest music there is a tone which
chides.’ I sometimes hope that I shall be well: at other times I
determine to be _wise_ in spite of sickness, and feel that wisdom is
better even than health; and I dismiss the lying cozener Hope
entirely, and fancy I perceive that even the rocky land of Sorrow is
not without a heavenly radiance overspreading it, lovelier than aught
that this Earth, with all its joys, can give. At all events, what
right have we to murmur? It is the common lot: the Persian King could
not find three happy men in the wide world to write the names of on
his queen’s tomb, or the Philosopher would have recalled her from
death. Every son of Adam has his task to toil at, and his stripes to
bear for doing it wrong. There is one deadly error we commit at our
entrance on life, and sooner or later we must lay it aside, for till
then there is neither peace nor rest for us in this world: we all
start, I have observed, with the tacit persuasion that, whatever
become of others, we (the illustrious all-important we) are entitled
of _right_ to be _entirely fortunate_, to accumulate all knowledge,
beauty, health, and earthly felicity in _our_ sacred person, and to
pass _our_ most sovereign days in rosy bowers, with distress never
seen by us, except as an interesting shade in the distance of our
landscape.... But I must descend from life in general to life in
Edinburgh. In spite of ill-health, I reckon myself moderately happy
here, much happier than men usually are, or than such a fool as I
deserves to be. My good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I
believe, among the best women that the world contains. The philosophy
of the heart is far better than that of the understanding. She loves
me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught her much
that I have long been vainly at the schools to learn. Good Jane! She
is sitting by me knitting you a purse: you must not cease to love her,
for she deserves it, and few love you better. [Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs.
Montagu had never yet met, but are here considered as already fast
friends, through Carlyle’s talks with each about the other.] Of
society, in this Modern Athens, we have no want, but rather a
superabundance; which, however, we are fast and successfully reducing
down to the fit measure. True it is, one meets with many a Turk in
grain among these people; but it is some comfort to know beforehand
what Turks are, have been, and for ever will be, and to understand
that from a Turk no Christian word or deed can rationally be expected.
Let the people speak in the Turkish dialect, in Heaven’s name! It is
their own, and they have no other. A better class of persons, too, are
to be found here and there,—a sober, discreet, logic-loving,
moderately well-informed class: with these I can talk and enjoy
myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in the street;
into the house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the unwise
wonderment they exhibit when I do but show them the lobby warns me to
lose no time in again slamming-to the door. But what of society? Round
our own hearth is society enough, with a blessing. I read books, or,
like the Roman poet and so many British ones, ‘disport on paper’; and
many a still evening, when I stand in our little flower-garden (it is
fully larger than two bed-quilts) and smoke my pipe in peace, and look
at the reflection of the distant city lamps, and hear the faint murmur
of its tumult, I feel no little pleasure in the thought of ‘my own
four walls’ and what they hold. On the whole, what I chiefly want is
occupation; which, when ‘the times grow better’ or my own ‘genius’
gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to
present itself. Idle I am not altogether, yet not occupied as I should
be; for to dig in the mines of Plutus, and sell the gift of God (and
such is every man’s small fraction of intellectual talent) for a piece
of money, is a measure I am not inclined to; and for _invention_, for
Art of any sort, I feel myself too helpless and undetermined. Some
day,—oh that the day were here!—I shall surely speak out those things
that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or
else, if the Fates would be so kind as to show me—that I had nothing
to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all; a hard
result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain.
Literature, it seems, is to be my trade; but the present aspects of it
among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting. I love it
not: in fact, I have almost quitted modern reading: lower down than
the Restoration I rarely venture in English. Those men, those Hookers,
Bacons, Brownes, were _men_; but, for our present ‘men of letters,’
our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, and
sonnet manufacturers, I shall only say, May the Lord pity us and them!
But enough of this! For what am I that I should censure? Less than the
least in Israel.”

The mood here, though philosophic, pensive, and critical, is on the whole even cheerful, and accords undeniably with what we should expect from his own statement as to the remarkable change of spirit that had been effected in him during the late idyllic year at Hoddam Hill. It accords also with all that I have been able to learn independently of Carlyle in those now distant days of his early married life.