Chapter XII: Part III: 1822–1828 (2)

From two persons in particular I have had intimate accounts of his habits and demeanour in the Comely Bank period. One was the late Rev. David Aitken, D.D., once minister of a Scottish country parish, but in the later part of his life resident in Edinburgh. He was a relative of the Carlyles, and had seen a great deal of them in their own house, and at the tables of various friends, in those old Edinburgh days. His report was that perhaps the most observable thing about Carlyle then was the combination of extraordinary frankness, a habit of speaking out most strikingly and picturesquely whatever was in his mind, with the most perfect command of temper in meeting objections, evading attempted slights or provocations to anger, or changing the subject when opposition was becoming noisy, or the opponent was evidently a fool. Again and again Dr. Aitken had observed this, and wondered at Carlyle’s tact and suavity, especially when he had propounded something startling to commonplace people, and the expression on the faces of some of his auditors was “Who are _you_ that dare thus advance notions discomposing to your seniors?” To the same effect is the information I had from another Edinburgh friend of Carlyle in those days, the late Dr. John Gordon. He was most methodic in his arrangement of his time, Dr. Gordon informed me, always reserving the solid hours of the day for his literary work in Comely Bank, but very accessible and sociable in the afternoons and evenings. To Dr. Gordon I definitely put the question, “Was he gloomy and morose, or noted for asperity and sarcastic bitterness in talk?” The answer was: “Not a bit of it, not a bit of it; the pleasantest and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent company.” It is evident that, whether from more smiling circumstances, or from that drill in self-control which had been imposed upon him by his experience at Hoddam Hill, he was a considerably different being now, in his social demeanour and aspects, from what he had been some years before, when Irving had thought it necessary to remonstrate with him on his fitful and forbidding manners with strangers. But, indeed, they mistake Carlyle utterly who do not know that to the end, with all his vehemence in indignation and invective, and with a stately dignity of manner which repelled irreverent familiarity, and with which the most impudent did not dare to trifle, there was a vast fund in him of what could be described as the homeliest and most genial good-fellowship and the richest old Scottish heartiness. It was not only his faculty of humour,—though those who have never heard Carlyle’s laugh, or known how frequently it would interrupt the gathered tempests of his verbal rage and dissipate them in sudden sunburst, can have no idea of his prodigious wealth in this faculty, or of the extent to which it contributed to the enjoyment and after-relish of every hour spent in his society. I have heard the echoes of Sloane Street ring with his great laugh many and many a night between ten and eleven o’clock, and more than once have had to stop by a lamp-post till the grotesque phrase or conception had shaken me to exhaustion in sympathy with him and the peal had ended. But better still was the proof of the depths of pleasant kindliness in his nature, his power of being actually happy himself and of making others happy, in some of those evening hours I have spent with him in the well-remembered dining-room in Chelsea. Then, both of us, or one of us, reclining on the hearth-rug, that the wreaths of pipe-smoke might innocently ascend the chimney, and Mrs. Carlyle seated near at some piece of work, and public questions laid aside or his vehemences over them having already subsided for that evening, how comfortable he would be, how simple, how husbandly in his looks round to his wife when she interjected one of her bright and witty remarks, how happy in the flow of casual fireside chat about all things and sundry, the quoting of quaint snatches of ballad or lyric, or the resuscitation of old Scottish memories! This mood of pleasant and easy sociability, which always remained with him as one into which he could sink when he liked out of his upper moods of wrath and lamentation, must have been even more conspicuous and common, more nearly habitual, in those Comely Bank days when he felt himself for the first time a full citizen and householder of the Modern Athens, and was not disinclined to friendly intimacy with the other Athenians. Then, as always, the basis of his nature was a profound constitutional sadness, a speculative melancholy, in the form of that dissatisfaction with all the ordinary appearances and courses of things, that private philosophy of protest and nonconformity, which made him really a recluse even when he seemed most accessible and frank. His talk with most of the Edinburgh people, even when apparently the friendliest, was therefore, as he told Mrs. Montagu, like talk from an upper window to people passing in the streets; and into the real house of his spirit few were admitted farther than the lobby. But he had at least disciplined himself into all the requisite observances of good-humoured courtesy, and learnt to practise in his own demeanour the maxim he had about this time thrown into verse:—

“The wind blows east, the wind blows west,
And there comes good luck and bad;
The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”

What he lacked most, as he told Mrs. Montagu, was a fit occupation. His four volumes of _Specimens of German Romance_, consisting of translations from Musæus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Jean Paul, and Goethe, with biographical and critical notices of these authors, had been already printed, and stored in Ballantyne’s warehouses, before he had settled in Comely Bank, and were published by Tait early in 1827. As they had been done originally on commission, they may have brought something more considerable in the way of payment than if they had been a voluntary labour. But, when these were out, what was he to do next? Fortunately, that question was soon answered.

It was in the spring of 1827 that, by means of a friendly letter of introduction sent from London by Mrs. Montagu’s son-in-law, Procter, _alias_ “Barry Cornwall,” Carlyle formed his memorable acquaintance with Jeffrey. The incidents of that acquaintance, from Carlyle’s first call on Jeffrey in George Street with Procter’s note, when Jeffrey received him so kindly, and said “We must give you a lift,” on to the ripening of the acquaintance by Jeffrey’s calls at Comely Bank, his pretty gallantries and wit-encounters with the fascinating young bride, and the frequent colloquies and amicable little disputations between Jeffrey and Carlyle in Jeffrey’s leisurely rides to his country-house at Craigcrook, or in that picturesque old mansion itself, have all been immortalised in the _Reminiscences_. Nowhere is there such a sketch of Jeffrey in our literature, such perfect portraiture and appreciation of that celebrated man; and the only question that remains is whether Carlyle has quite done justice there to Jeffrey’s kindness to himself. No doubt he wrote with a strict conscience, and knew better what he was about than readers can now know for him. Still one does carry away an impression that very seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him practically, as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. Goethe. Something of this feeling, indeed, does appear in many passages of Carlyle’s sketch, as when he says: “Jeffrey’s acquaintanceship seemed, and was for the time, an immense acquisition to me, and everybody regarded it as my highest good fortune.” And no wonder. From being a mere translator from the German, or writer of hack articles in obscure places, Carlyle became a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_. In June 1827, or within a month or two after his introduction to Jeffrey, appeared his first article in the Review, _Jean Paul Friedrich Richter_, in twenty pages; and in the very next number, in October 1827, appeared his more full and elaborate article, in forty-eight pages, entitled _State of German Literature_. They caused, as he tells us, “a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams,” and were widely criticised in the newspapers, with the effect of setting “many tongues wagging” about the strange fellow in Comely Bank to whom Jeffrey had given such unusual licence of innovation on the established doctrines of the Review, and who was trying to found a school of “German Mysticism.” At all events, people who liked that kind of matter and were interested in German Literature knew thenceforth where to apply; and, a so-called _Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany_ having been started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared his _Life and Writings of Werner_, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number, in April 1828, his _Goethe’s Helena_, in forty pages. These two articles in the _Foreign Review_, with the two already contributed to the _Edinburgh_, form the whole of Carlyle’s known writings during the Comely Bank period.

One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William, and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, _there_ is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and speculations!” Since then he had formed some slight personal acquaintance with Sir William by meetings with him in the Advocates’ Library; but it was after the settlement in Comely Bank in 1826, when Sir William was thirty-eight years of age, and had been nominally for five years Professor of History in Edinburgh University, that the acquaintanceship reached the stage of familiarity. Carlyle has commemorated it in a few pages contributed to Professor Veitch’s _Memoirs of Sir William Hamilton_, published in 1869, thirteen years after Sir William’s death. “I recollect hearing much more of him,” Carlyle there writes, “in 1826 and onward than formerly: to what depths he had gone in study and philosophy; of his simple, independent, meditative habits, ruggedly athletic modes of exercise, fondness for his big dog, etc. etc.: everybody seemed to speak of him with favour, those of his immediate acquaintance uniformly with affectionate respect. I did not witness, much less share in, any of his swimming or other athletic prowesses. I have once or twice been on long walks with him in the Edinburgh environs, oftenest with some other companion, or perhaps even two, whom he had found vigorous and worthy: pleasant walks and abundantly enlivened with speech from Sir William.” He proceeds to describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “_The fact is_,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of words and distinctions, would repeat “_The fact is_,” and so go on again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the meetings.

Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of _Blackwood_ since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours, not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing. Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul of their little symposium.[43]

De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and 1828; but, his connection with _Blackwood_ having then begun, he was a good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of _Wilhelm Meister_ in the _London Magazine_ for August and September 1824, there was considerable shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk, no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the _Reminiscences_ in which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate. But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies, politically a Radical _sui generis_ though he was, and the _protégé_ though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of whom Wilson in _Blackwood_ was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the _Quarterly Review_, can hardly date from this period; but among those I have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons, Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs. Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that, after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death, called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea.

More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh, that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur Seat and the Corstorphines.

Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared, since that _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ in 1824 which Goethe had acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the _Life of Schiller_ in 1825, and the _Specimens of German Romance_ in 1827, this last completing the translation of the _Meister_ by the addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been. Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the _mental and moral core_ as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a _moral force of great importance_: there is in him much for the future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.” To the same purport were Goethe’s words on again speaking to Eckermann about Carlyle some time afterwards,—“What an earnest man he is! and how he has studied us Germans! he is almost more at home in our literature than we ourselves.”

Goethe’s surprise at Scott’s silence about Carlyle was an acute thrust, though made a little in the dark. Who does not regret to have it to say now that Carlyle never exchanged a word with Sir Walter? Yet this is the fact. That man of men in Edinburgh, of greater importance and interest to her than all her other celebrities put together, remained a stranger to the fellow-citizen that was worthiest to know him and that would fain have known him well. How did this happen?

Any time for the last fifteen or sixteen years Carlyle had, of course, been familiar with the stalwart figure of Scott, as he might be seen in the legal crowd in the Parliament House, or in his slow walk homewards thence, by the Mound and Princes Street, to his house in Castle Street. Further, it must have been in the Comely Bank days that Carlyle and his wife, when they chanced now and then to be in Princes Street together, would bestow those more particular glances of curiosity on Scott’s approaching figure of which I have heard Carlyle speak. The little dogs that were passing would jump up, they observed, to fawn on the kindly lame gentleman whom they knew by instinct to be a friend to all their species; and Scott, they observed, would stoop to pat the animals, or would look down on them benevolently from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. Observing this so admiringly more than once, why should they themselves have had to pass the great man on such occasions without interchange of personal greetings?

Recently, it is true, circumstances had been less propitious than formerly for access to Scott by persons desiring his acquaintance. When Carlyle and his wife took up house in Edinburgh, that fatal year for Scott was just closing in which there had come the sudden crash of his fortunes. This, followed by the death of Lady Scott, had converted him into a lonesome and bankrupt widower, incapable any longer of his customary hospitalities in Castle Street, and indeed bereft of that house, as of all else, for the behoof of his creditors, and toiling to redeem himself by his _Life of Napoleon_ and other colossal drudgery in lodgings in North St. David Street. But that crisis of his downfall had passed; and the year 1827 had seen him more like himself, and domiciled again, more in household fashion, first in Walker Street, and then in Shandwick Place. There had been the great Theatrical Fund Dinner in Edinburgh on the 23d of February 1827, when Sir Walter was in the chair, and when, in responding to the toast of his health, he divulged formally, amid plaudits such as had never been heard in that hall before, the already open secret that he was the sole author of the Waverley Novels. Later in the same year the voluminous _Life of Napoleon_ was published, with the first series of the _Chronicles of the Canongate_ besides, and the _Tales of a Grandfather_ had been begun. Any time, therefore, shortly before or shortly after that month of July 1827 when Goethe was so much gratified by the receipt of Scott’s letter, there was nothing but the most untoward fate to hinder such a meeting between Scott and Carlyle as would have been pleasant to both. Untoward fate did intervene, however, and with almost diabolic malignity. The story is as follows:—

Struck with the anomaly that two such men should be living together in Edinburgh without knowing each other, Goethe himself had taken very special pains to put the matter right. On the 1st of January 1828, resuming his correspondence with Carlyle after a break of some months, he sent off from Weimar a letter to Carlyle about various matters then in discussion between them, but chiefly to announce that it was to be followed speedily by a box containing several parcels of presents. Most of the presents were to be for Carlyle himself or Mrs. Carlyle, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes selected for them; but one of the parcels was to consist of six bronze medals, respecting which Carlyle was requested to take some special trouble. “I send also six medals, three struck at Weimar and three at Geneva,” Goethe wrote; “two of which please present to Sir Walter Scott, with my best regards; and, as to the others, distribute them to well-wishers.” A fortnight afterwards, _i.e._ on the 15th of January, the box was duly dispatched from Weimar; but not till the 12th of April did it reach the Carlyles at 21 Comely Bank, though they had received the letter announcing it about two months before. On being opened, it was found to contain, besides the promised medals and other parcels, all neatly and separately packed, another letter from Goethe by way of continuation of the former post-letter. “If you see Sir Walter Scott,” were the first words of this second missive, “pray offer him my warmest thanks for his valued and pleasant letter, written frankly in the beautiful conviction that man must be precious to man. I have also received his _Life of Napoleon_; and during these winter evenings and nights I have read it through attentively from beginning to end.” Then follows an expression at some length of Goethe’s enjoyment of the great book and high appreciation of its merits. These are characterised glowingly and yet carefully; and altogether the criticism was calculated to please Scott extremely, and to be received by him as a most friendly acknowledgment of his attention in having sent a copy of his _Life of Napoleon_ to his great German contemporary. What interests us, however, is Goethe’s obvious purpose in having made Carlyle the medium of communication between himself and Scott. He wanted to bring the two men together; and with what delicacy of courteous invention he had manœuvred for his object! It was Carlyle that was to deliver to Scott the two medals intended as Goethe’s recognition of Scott’s supremacy in the Literature of Great Britain; and it was Carlyle to whom Goethe sent his first impressions of Scott’s latest large work, and that in a manner almost amounting to an injunction that they should be reported to Scott textually.

If Goethe’s purpose failed, it was not through any fault or negligence on Carlyle’s part. On the 13th of April 1828 he wrote the following letter to Sir Walter:

EDINBURGH: 21 COMELY BANK:
_13th April 1828_.

SIR,—In February last I had the honour to receive a letter from Von
Goethe, announcing the speedy departure from Weimar of a packet for
me, in which, among other valuables, should be found “two medals,” to
be delivered, _mit verbindlichsten Grüssen_, to Sir Walter Scott. By a
slow enough conveyance this _Kästchen_, with its medals in perfect
safety, has at length yesterday come to hand, and now lays on me the
enviable duty of addressing you.

Among its multifarious contents, the Weimar Box failed not to include
a long letter,—considerable portion of which, as it virtually belongs
to yourself, you will now allow me to transcribe. Perhaps it were
thriftier in me to reserve this for another occasion; but, considering
how seldom such a Writer obtains such a Critic, I cannot but reckon it
a pity that this friendly intercourse between them should be anywise
delayed.

[Carlyle here extracts from Goethe’s second letter, in the original
German, the whole of the portion relating to Scott’s _Napoleon_.]

With regard to the medals,—which are, as I expected, the two
well-known likenesses of Goethe himself,—it could be no hard matter to
dispose of them safely here, or transmit them to you, if you required
it, without delay; but, being in this curious fashion appointed as it
were Ambassador between two Kings of Poetry, I would willingly
discharge my mission with the solemnity that beseems such a business;
and naturally it must flatter my vanity and love of the marvellous to
think that by means of a Foreigner whom I have never seen I might now
have access to my native Sovereign, whom I have so often seen in
public, and so often wished that I had claim to see and know in
private and near at hand.

Till Whitsunday I continue to reside here, and shall hope that some
time before that period I may have opportunity to wait on you, and, as
my commission bore, to hand you these memorials in person. Meanwhile I
abide your further orders in this matter; and so, with all the regard
which belongs to one to whom I, in common with other millions, owe so
much, I have the honour to be, sir, most respectfully your servant,

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Besides the _two_ medals specially intended for you, there have come
_four_ more, which I am requested generally to dispose of amongst
“_Wohlwollenden_.” Perhaps Mr. Lockhart, whose merits in respect of
German Literature, and just appreciation of this its Patriarch and
Guide, are no secret, will do me the honour to accept of one, and
direct me through your means how I am to have it conveyed?

As the wording of this letter shows, Carlyle was aware when he wrote it that Sir Walter was not then in Edinburgh. He had gone off, exactly ten days before, _i.e._ on the 3d of April, for a tour in England, and a plunge once more, partly on business and partly for mere pleasure, into the world of London. It would have been better if Carlyle had delayed till he came back; but, thinking the matter too important for that, he had gone, it would appear, to Scott’s house, then in Shandwick Place, ascertained his London address, and seen the letter dispatched. That it did reach Scott in London is certain; for the autograph is still extant, with the London post-mark of 17th April 1828 upon it, just as Scott must have had it in his hands that day in the house of his son-in-law Lockhart in Regent’s Park. He must have glanced at it carelessly, however,—so carelessly as hardly to have mastered its purport; for in his jottings in his Diary for that day, where he would naturally have taken note of so interesting an occurrence as a new message from Goethe, there is no mention of it whatever. The omission is explained perhaps by one phrase which does occur among those jottings. “In this phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like shadows” were the words with which, trying to record in his journal late that night the incidents of an unusually busy day,—beginning with a round of forenoon and afternoon calls, and ending with a dinner at Samuel Rogers’s and an appearance afterwards at an evening party at Lady Davy’s,—he almost gave up the attempt as hopeless, so difficult was it to recall coherently what one had done or seen during any twelve hours in such a vast and brain-dizzying place as London. Carlyle’s letter, delivered to him that morning, or possibly lying on his table for him at the moment of his writing those words, may have been one of the “objects” that had slipped his cognisance. And, if so that day, the chance was poor enough of its being remembered sufficiently on any subsequent day during the rest of Scott’s stay in the great metropolis. Day after day till the 26th of May, as the Journal shows, there was a continued succession of lionisings for him in the shape of calls on him from notabilities, dinners in his honour, applications to him to sit for his portrait or his bust, etc. etc. One of the dinners was with his Majesty King George IV. himself; another was at the Duchess of Kent’s, where he was presented to “the little Princess Victoria,” and looked at her with keen interest, wondering whether the little lady, then not nine years of age, had yet been made aware of her great destiny; several times he was with the Duke of Wellington; and of the other celebrities whom he saw, or among whom he moved, in the course of his stay,—statesmen, bishops, lawyers, men of letters, artists, etc.,—he could keep no complete reckoning. For a man in the fifty-seventh year of his age the whirl of such a series of London excitements might not, in ordinary cases, have been too much; but Sir Walter had been obviously in failing health already for the last year or two, and there had been symptoms even, recognisable by himself and his Edinburgh friends, of jaded mental energy. In his case the £250 which, as he tells us, his visit to London cost him, may not have been the only damage. Little wonder, at all events, that one of his letters from Edinburgh, even though it contained a message from Goethe, should have escaped his attention.

Meanwhile Carlyle was growing anxious about the fate of the letter. On the 18th of April, five days after he had sent it to Scott, he had written to Goethe, informing him that this had been done. “To Sir Walter Scott, who is at present in London,” the letter said, “I have already written, announcing so delightful a message, and even transcribing for him what you say of his _Life of Napoleon_: a friendly criticism which, from such a quarter, must gratify him highly”; and, after a sentence or two more on the subject of that criticism, these words were added: “Ere long I expect to see Sir Walter and present to him your medals in person.” The expectation was never to be fulfilled. Week after week had passed, and no reply to his first letter had been received, when the Whitsunday term arrived at which, as he had informed Scott, he was to leave Edinburgh. In these circumstances he addressed a brief note to Scott, referring to his former letter, and explaining that, as he could not now hope for the honour of presenting the Goethe medals in person, he had left them in charge of Mr. Jeffrey, who would doubtless deliver them to Sir Walter on the first convenient opportunity. This note, dated the 23d of May, was, in fact, written in Jeffrey’s own house in Moray Place, where Carlyle and his wife were residing for a few days by invitation before their departure for Craigenputtock. They had left Comely Bank a day or two before, had sent on their furniture to Craigenputtock in carts, and were to follow immediately themselves.

The note must have reached Sir Walter on the 27th of May, the very last day of his stay in London. Leaving London that day, as his journal shows, he began the homeward journey through the middle and northern English counties which was to bring him to Abbotsford on the 2d of June, and thence to Edinburgh on the 4th of June. The Carlyles were then gone; and any acknowledgment that Carlyle could now receive of either of his two missives could only be by letter from Sir Walter in Edinburgh to Craigenputtock. Something of the sort seems to have been expected by Carlyle; for it was not till the 25th of September that he wrote that first of his letters to Goethe from Craigenputtock in which he told Goethe of the ending of the business of the medals. “Sir Walter Scott,” he then wrote, “has received your Medals several months ago,—not through me directly, for he had not returned to Edinburgh when I left it, but through Mr. Jeffrey, our grand ‘British Critic’; to whom, as I learn, Sir Walter expressed himself properly sensible of such an honour from one of his masters in Art.” This leaves no doubt that the medals actually came into Sir Walter’s hands as soon as he had returned to Edinburgh; and the only question that remains is how it could have happened that the two letters from Carlyle heralding the medals, and connected with them so vitally, received no acknowledgment, and so that Goethe’s design of bringing Carlyle into contact with Sir Walter Scott was miserably frustrated.

To this day the affair remains somewhat of a mystery. That Scott, the largest-hearted of men, the kindliest, the most courteous, the most attentive to every punctilio of business or of social etiquette, should have deliberately, of his own accord, left such letters unanswered, it is next to impossible to suppose; and it is hardly less difficult to suppose that, if any one had tried to prejudice him against Carlyle in connection with them, he would have allowed the interference to prevent him from doing what was independently proper. All things considered, one must revert, I think, to the opinion already suggested by the fact that there is no mention in Scott’s journal during his weeks in London either of the Carlyle letters or of the message they conveyed from Goethe. In the bustle and hurry of his London engagements, and then of his leave-taking for his return journey to Scotland, he had never, we are to conclude, read the letters, or at all events the first and principal one, with sufficient attention to apprehend the contents, and so, having set them aside on their first receipt, had forgotten all about them. To be sure, the medals were ultimately delivered to him by Jeffrey; but one can imagine that they were delivered in a casual manner, and without such explanation of the relative circumstances as might have brought the missing letters to his recollection and caused him to look for them. What is certain is that they lay among his papers, to be found there after his death, and are still preserved. That Lockhart had read them is proved by a reference in his _Life of Scott_. So slight is the reference, however, and so vaguely worded, that it told virtually nothing. Not till the publication in 1887 of the _Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle_, edited by Mr. C. E. Norton, was any real light thrown on the subject; and not till the appearance in 1890 of _The Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript_, edited and published by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, and containing a copy of Carlyle’s first letter to Scott, were the facts fully revealed.[44]

The removal of Carlyle from Edinburgh to Craigenputtock, while connecting itself rather remarkably with the abortive issue of Goethe’s attempt to introduce him to Sir Walter Scott, is of such importance otherwise in his biography that a word or two as to the causes and circumstances may not be superfluous.

Carlyle’s later memories of the eighteen months, or more strictly nineteen, spent in Comely Bank, are summed up by him in the _Reminiscences_ in one doleful sentence. “Comely Bank,” he says, “except for one darling soul, whose heavenly nobleness, then as ever afterwards, shone on me, and should have made the place bright (ah me, ah me! I only now know how noble she was!), was a gloomy intricate abode to me, and in retrospect has little or nothing of pleasant but her.” So far as this is not a picture tinged, like all the rest of his life, by the final darkness in which it was painted, and to be corrected by the facts as they are otherwise ascertained, the reference may be to the causes which made him suddenly give up his Comely Bank house and remove himself again from Edinburgh. These, there can be no doubt, were economical perplexities. Thrift, frugality, abhorrence from debt or extravagance, was always one of Carlyle’s characteristics; and he had found the expenses of married life in Edinburgh beyond his means. On this point some light can be thrown by information from himself, and an annexed calculation.

He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening, with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however, that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition, remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his _Wilhelm Meister_, together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear £100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the whole of his remuneration for the _German Romance_ fell in then, may have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his four articles in the _Edinburgh_ and the _Foreign Review_. Compute the expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he was in danger of running aground.

He had been anxious, in fact, to obtain some post of fixed and certain income that would relieve him from precarious dependence on the press. Two such chances had offered themselves. The new “University of London” (now “University College, London”) had been founded in 1826; and in the course of 1827 the authorities of the new institution had been looking about for professors, in view of the opening of the classes for teaching in October 1828. Carlyle had thought that the Professorship of English Literature would suit him and that he would suit it, and had hoped that Jeffrey’s influence with Brougham might secure him the post. Then, while that matter was still pending, there was the still more desirable chance of the succession to Dr. Chalmers in the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews. It was known in January 1828 that Dr. Chalmers was to be removed to Edinburgh; candidates were already in the field for the succession, the gift of which was with the Professors of St. Andrews; and Carlyle is found in that month making very energetic exertions as one of them. A letter of his to Procter in London is extant, dated the 17th of that month, explaining the circumstances, informing Procter that Jeffrey is his mainstay in the business, and that he may “also reckon on the warm support of Wilson, Leslie, Brewster, and other men of mark,” and requesting a testimonial from Procter and one from Mr. Basil Montagu.[45]

Both projects having failed, and the certainty having come that he must depend still on his earnings by literature, his resolution was taken. Away in his native Dumfriesshire, but in a much more wild and solitary part of it than his previous residences of Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and Scotsbrig, was his wife’s little property of Craigenputtock, worth from £200 to £250 a year. It was not in his wife’s possession as yet,—her mother, Mrs. Welsh, having a life-interest in it; but, besides the farmhouse upon it, occupied by the farmer who rented it, there was another and superior house, the humble mansion-house of the property, with sufficient appurtenances of garden, stabling, etc. Why not remove thither? One could live there at half the cost of living in Edinburgh, and yet have excellent milk, poultry, eggs, etc., of one’s own, a horse to ride on, and healthy moors to scamper over! Jeffrey and others thought Carlyle mad in making such a proposal; but late in May 1828, as we have seen, it was carried into effect.

* * * * *

Here, then, in Carlyle’s thirty-third year, his Edinburgh life properly ends, and there begins that extraordinary Craigenputtock period of six years, the literary products of which were five more articles for the _Edinburgh Review_, six more for the _Foreign Review_, three articles for the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, one for the _Westminster Review_, about a score of contributions of various lengths to _Fraser’s Magazine_, several little papers elsewhere, and, above all, the _Sartor Resartus_. There were, indeed, two considerable breaks in the six years of Craigenputtock hermitship. One was that second visit to London, from August 1831 to April 1832, in which he heard of his father’s death, and in which, while endeavouring to get his _Sartor Resartus_ published in book-form, he added Leigh Hunt, young John Stuart Mill, and others, to the number of his London acquaintances. The other was in the winter of 1832–33, when he and his wife were again in Edinburgh for some months, renewing old ties. That winter in Edinburgh, however,—just after the death of Scott, and some months after the death of Goethe,—furnishes nothing essentially new in the way of incident. Then, in the summer of 1834, when Carlyle was in his thirty-ninth year, and his _Sartor Resartus_ was appearing at last by instalments in _Fraser’s Magazine_, there was the great final migration to London, beginning the forty-six years of Carlyle’s life that were to be associated for ever with No. 5 (now No. 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea. During those forty-six years there were, of course, frequent trips to Scotland, with chance returns for a few days to Edinburgh. Most memorable of all was the visit to Edinburgh in April 1866, for his installation in the Rectorship of Edinburgh University. Of that visit, perhaps the crowning glory of his old age, and reconnecting him so conspicuously with Edinburgh at the last, but saddened for him so fatally by the death of his wife in his absence, I have not a few intimate recollections; as also of those later, almost furtive, visits now and again in his declining autumns, to his eightieth year and beyond, when his real purpose was pilgrimage to his wife’s grave in Haddington Church, and he would saunter, or almost shuffle, through the Edinburgh streets as a bowed-down alien, disconsolate at heart, and evading recognition. Any such recollections may be reserved. All that is properly the Edinburgh Life of Carlyle has been described here.

CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE[46]

To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more. For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93 Princes Street.

It was mainly in this Princes Street portion of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther _redivivus_, delighting in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in 1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank. Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more and more of an invalid and a recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered pantaloon,” or rather that old gentleman in the antique blue surtout and light-brown wig, who is remembered as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe by most of those now living in Edinburgh that can remember him at all. He was not so very old a gentleman, either; for, when he died in March 1851, he had not quite completed his seventieth year.

The best sketch of Kirkpatrick Sharpe in his prime is that given in Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, in the form of an extract from Scott’s Diary, under the date of Sunday, the 20th November 1825. It chanced that William Clerk and Kirkpatrick Sharpe had dined with Scott that day in his house in Castle Street; and the Diary, after describing Clerk, thus describes the other:—

“Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was
bred for a clergyman, but never took orders. He has infinite wit, and
a great turn for antiquarian lore, as the publications of _Kirkton_,
etc., bear witness. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll
imaginable,—a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign
masters who painted temptations of St. Anthony and other grotesque
subjects. As a poet he has not a very strong touch. Strange that his
finger-ends can describe so well what he cannot bring out clearly and
firmly in words. If he were to make drawing a resource, it might raise
him a large income. But, though a lover of antiquities, and therefore
of expensive trifles, C. K. S. is too aristocratic to use his art to
assist his revenue. He is a very complete genealogist, and has made
detections in _Douglas_ and other books on pedigree, which our nobles
would do well to suppress if they had an opportunity. Strange that a
man should be curious after scandal of centuries old! Not but Charles
loves it fresh and fresh also; for, being very much a fashionable man,
he is always master of the reigning report, and he tells the anecdote
with such gusto that there is no helping sympathising with him,—a
peculiarity of voice adding not a little to the general effect. My
idea is that C. K. S., with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high
aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace Walpole; perhaps in his person
also in a general way.”