MacTutor
Thomas Carlyle
Times obituary
Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 9 on Saturday morn-ing at his house in Cheyne-row, Cheshire. He had been for some years in poor health, and more than once in 1879 and 1880. His recovery seemed doubtful. Of late, however, his friends saw little of him. He could not bear the strain of prolonged or exciting conversation, and growing weakness, approaching, as he himself said, almost constant pain, had compelled him to give up very much his old habit of taking long walks every day. But since his manhood, he had been frequently subject to sil- muta dyspepsia and kindred weaknesses had been his scourge since his childhood; he had rallied more than once from severe attacks of ill-health; and it was not supposed until quite recently that his condition was near. The announcement of his death will bring home to every educated English- must its significance. A chasm of hope between the present and the past of our literatures, a whole world of associations disappears. No recent man of letters has held in England a place comparable to that which for at least a quarter of a century has been his without dispute, and authors of all kinds and schools will feel that they have lost their venerable doyen. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal rule. The close has come of a well-ordered, full, stately, and complete life.
About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most ponetrating and sym pathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle's birthplace was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Huddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle's father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son's birth. James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he afterwards became tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle's youngest and only surviving brother. James Carlyle was a man of rectitude, worth, and intelligence, and in many ways remarkable. His son once said, "I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people," and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. Of the former specially he liked to talk, and he once made the remark that he thought his father, all things considered, the best man whom he had ever known. There were points of strong likeness between them. The father was a man of energy and strong will; and he had in no small measure the picturesque and vivid powers of speech of the son, and liked to use out-of-the-way, old-fashioned, sharp, and pungent words. His pithy sayings, occasionally prickly and sharp, ran through the country side. His favourite books were the Bible and an old Puritan divine. He was, said his son on one occasion to a friend, a far cleverer man than I am, or will ever be." An elder in the Kirk, and a man of established character for probity, he was one who, to use again his son's description of him, "like an old man, walked with God." All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle's father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk -- simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.
Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father's friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, "his first friend," as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Lads still go very young to Scotch Universities; 60 years ago they went still younger, and were wont to quit them with their degree, if they cared to take any, which they rarely did, at an age when an English youth has not quitted a public school. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. They were a group of men likely to impress much a susceptible lad of genius, and especially one who had a strong bias towards mathematical studies. But Carlyle was not so impressed. For Dr. Brown -- "Miss Brown," or "that little man who spouted poetry," as he derisively called him he had no liking, Against Playfair he had a grudge, because, after having worked bard at the class studies, on calling at Playfair's house for the certificate to which he was entitled, befound the document worded in a somewhat niggardly spirit. The only professor for whom he seems to have had much regard for was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that "the true University of these days is a collection of books," and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was duplicated in various circulating libraries — among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay — and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no reprimand. "Had you anywhere in Crim Tartary," he observes with reference to the University which Tenfelsdröckh studied, but probably with a covert glance at his own Alma mater, "walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years; certain persons, under the title of professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission fees -- you had not, indeed, in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary." Still, Carlyle profited much by the four years spent at college. He read hard, even to the point of injuring his health; he acquired a sound and, for his years, unusual knowledge of mathematics, and might have boasted with Gibbon, but without the qualification which Gibbon appended, that he had attained a stock of erudition that would have puzzled a doctor. Having passed through the arts curriculum of the University, Carlyle ought rightly, in the natural course of things, to have proceeded to the study of theology, for be had been destined by his father to be a minister.
There is some tradition that matters had gone so for that is had been arranged in what church Carlyle should appear as a "probationer." But he did not carry on his father's intentions. "Now that one bad gained man's estate," to quote his own account of this crisis in his life, "I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's church; and it was necessary I should now settle it. And so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition, doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there; and I wrestled with them in agony of spirit." The end of all this storm was the settled conviction that he could not enter the Church. Carlyle at once turned his hand to work by which he could earn his bread, and for a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where he had but lately been a pupil. He remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. At the of "the lang toun" was a private adventure school, called the Academy, where Edward Irving taught some of the well-known tongues and mathematics. The two young men of genius were already acquainted with each other; indeed, it was at Irving's instigation, and with view to be near him, that Carlyle went to Kirkcaldy. There, however, were riveted the bonds of a friendship destined to be tested by trials, some of them of a very personal character. These bonds were sometimes stretched, but never broken, not even when Carlyle saw with sorcerous grace his gifted friend pass into the regions of darkness and chaos when he never rested. Teaching Fifeshire boys was not Carlyle's vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy, he quit it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern discplinarian, to begin in Edinburgh the task of his life's work of books.
At that date the capital of Scotland was still another Weimar. Men of letters had not yet deserted it for London. "Maga" was in its glory. Lockhart, John Wilson, Magion, were in their brilliant prime; Jeffrey was at the head of the Edinburgh, and the stalwart form of Scott, not yet beset by the load of misfortune and toll, might be seen occasionally in the streets. Carlyle tried his prentice-hand hand in Brewster's "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the older and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. These first essays on authorship have never been republished, and they do not, perhaps, deserve to be so. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author's genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a piéture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details; and they show that the author was consulting those stores of varied knowledge upon which his imagination was to work in after years. Here and there is a stroke of force and felicity. Occasionally the confidence of his later style is suspected, as, for example, when he refutes Montesquieu's theory of the influence of climate on race and history. We recognise the author of "The French Revolution" in the vivid description of the philosopher as a cheery and benign sage, talking with the peasant under the oak at La Brède. At the instances of Sir David Brewster be translated Legendre's "Geometry and Trigonometry," prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on proportion. Brewster's name was put to the translation. Carlyle received £30 for his work, which was not unimportant in those days. He was always proud of his essay on Proportion, and with good reason. De Morgan pronounced it "a thoughtful and ingenious essay, as good a substitute for the fifth book of Euclid as could be given in speech," and it is certainly clear, concise, and direct. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on "Faust," a subject to which he was so often to return.
For some time after leaving Kirkcaldy, and until a year or two before his marriage, he served as tutor to the brilliant, amiable Charles Baller, teaching him, if not then, at least afterwards, some other things besides mathematics, as those who remember Baller's views on pauperism, emigration, and colonization will admit. About this period of Carlyle's life, the once famous John Scott was to editing the London Magazine and gathered around him a group of enthusiastic writers; Lazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham were a few of them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the "Life of Schiller. No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle's work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of Meister's Lehrjahre," with misgivings, not strange or unjustified, as to how bis countrymen would receive a book so repugnant in many ways to the domicent taste. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge, and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Carlyle's style was sharply criticised. Magina, in after years, complained that Gosthe had been translated from the Fatherlandish dialect of High Dutch to the Allgemeine Mid Lothianish of Auld Reekie, and that Carlyle was seeking to acclimatize the roundabout, hubble-bubble, rumfustianish (hübble-bubblen, rüm-fästeanischen), roly-poly, gromerly of style, dear to the heart of a son of the Fatherland. Undeterred by listeners and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled "German Romance," containing translations from the chief writers of the Romantic school, such as Musmus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hofmann, and Richter, with short biographical notices. This work was, as he himself admitted, "mere journey-work," not of his own suggesting or desiring -- mere preparation for the work of his genius. Before putting out his full strength he seems to have felt the necessity of retiring to some secluded place where he might mature and arrange his seething and tumultuous thoughts. The occasion for doing so presented itself. In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle on the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock -- a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the bill, up which the little gooseberry garden runs, partly sheltered from the fierce wind by a few badly-grown ash trees, almost cut off from the world by a morass, and reached only by a rough cart-road -- to this peaceful and simple abode, some 15 miles from town or market, came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion—a companion worthy of him; a woman of much character and practical wisdom, given to silence when he talked, but a talker scarcely inferior to himself, as those who know her well could testify; a woman, as he himself termed her, of "bright invincibility of spirit." Here for these years he wrote and read much -- "a whole cartload of French, German, American and English journals and periodicals piled upon his little library table" -- meditating or holding much high converse with his wife as they wandered on foot or horseback over the black and silent moors and unending hills -- an expanse of bleak, sour uplands, watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mist and rolling vapours, yet not wholly wanting in rugged and tender beanties congenial to his spirit. In a well-known letter to Goethe, Carlyle describes his life at Craigenputtock. He says:
"Our residence is not in the town itself, but 15 poles to the northwest of it, among the Gaunt Hills and black moraines which stretch westward through Dalloway to the Irish Sea. In this wilderness of heath and hog, one estate stands forth as a green oasis, a tract of flat enclosed and planted ground, where long-hedged, partly corn ripens trees afford a shade, although surrounded by sea mews and rough-wooled sheep. Here, with no small effort, we have built and furnished a neat, substantial dwelling. Here, in the absence of professional or other offce, we live to cultivate literature according to our strength, and in our own special way. We wish a joyful growth to the roses and leaves of our garden; we hope for prosperity and peace, full thoughts to further our purpose. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they blossom soon in anticipation. Two ponies, which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air are the best medicine for weak nerves. This daily exercise, to which I am also devoted, is the only recreation, for this neck of ours is the loneliest in Britain -- six miles removed before any one likely to visit me"
Carlyle toiled hard in this temple of industrious peace. In these obscure youthful years, he wrote, read, and planned much, and made incursions into many domains of knowledge. Writing in December of 1828 to De Quincy of his ooupations, he says: -
"Such a quantity of German periodical and mystic speculation embossomed in plain Scotch post-moss being nowhere that I know of to be met with ... We have no society, but who has in the strict sense of that word. I have never had any worth speaking about since I came into the world ... My wife and I are busy learning Spanish: far advanced in "Don Quixote" already. I purpose writing mystical reviews for somewhat longer than a twelve-month period, have Greek to read and the whole universe to study (for one would understand less of it). "
In a bare, scantily furnished room of the farmhouse, now shown with pride to visitors, he pursued this plan and wrote essay after essay, and did much of his work. Here were composed his essays on Burns, Goethe and Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalls, Voltair and Diderot. "Sartor Resartus" was composed here; the manuscript to be laid aside until some other time. It was here, too, while, as Mr. Lewes remarked, Carlyle was rambling over the wild moors, "with thoughts at times as wild and dreary as those moors", that he conceived the
notion of sending to his master at Welmar a birthday present as a token of gratitude and silence on the part of himself and a few other English admirers of Goethe. The momento was a seal, designed by Mrs. Carlyle; it was followed by a letter written by Carlyle himself. The epistle runs:-
"We said to ourselves, as it is always the highest duty and pleasure to show reverence where reverence is due, and our chief, and perhaps our only benefactor, is he who by net and word instructs us in wisdom; so we, the undersigned, looking towards the poet Goethe as the spiritually taught towards their spiritual teacher are desirous to express that sentiment openly and in common; for which end we have determined to solicit his acceptance of a special English gift, proceeding from us all equally, on his approaching birthday; so that while the venerable man still dwells among us, some memorial of the gratitude we owe him, and we think the whole world owes him, may not be wanting. And thus our little tribute, perhaps the purest that men can offer to man, now stands in visible form, and begs to be received. May it be welcome and speak permanently of a most close relation, though wide seas flow between the parties.
In this happy mountain home Carlyle was not wholly cut off from the world. Fame came to him, though thus secluded, and thither from time to time journeyed strangers desires of seeing and holding converse with man whose written words in the Edinburgh and New and Foreign Quarterly had made them feel that a new teacher had come into the world. Sometimes an Edinburgh man of letters would travel by coach to Dumfries and walk or ride 16 long Scottish miles to Craigsaputtle, making, perhaps, unexpected demands on the resources of the hospitable household, and compelling Mrs. Carlyle to mount a pony and set out in search of provisions. Thither came, among many other strangers, Emerson, who had read and admired in New England what Carlyle had written, and who went away full of enthusiasm at his heart's bright, vivid story, full of lively anecdote and streaming humour, which fed everything it looked upon. Carlyle contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which was still under the management of Jeffrey. The relationship was not perfectly smooth or entirely satisfactory to either editor or writer. It was difficult to adjust the boundaries of the respective perspective provinces, Carlyle being apt to take offence at the ruthless hacking and hewing of his work in which Jeffrey indulged, and, the latter being cut to the quick by the eccentricities of style displayed by his contributor, and surprised that Carlyle was not grateful for efforts to impart trim grace and polish to his articles. Jeffrey once told Charles Sumner, who had made some remark about the deterioration in Carlyle's writing since the publication of the essay on Burns, that there had been, in fact, no change, and as much as suggested that the earlier writings owed their grace to his careful revision. In the recently published correspondence of Professor Manvey Napier we can see the feeling of Jeffrey and Carlyle toward each other. It was by no means unmixed friendliness. "I fear Carlyle will not do," writes Aristarchus of Craigorook to his sorely-bullied and much-suffering successor in 1832, "that is, if you do not take the liberties and pains with you that I did, by striking out freely, and writing in occasionally. The misfortune that he is very obstinate and, I am afraid, very conceited." "It is a great pity, for he is a man of genius and industry, and with the capacity of being an elegant and impressive writer." Carlyle was, alas! never fated to become the "elegans writer" whom Jeffrey saw in his critical mind's eye. Jeffrey lived to see his awkward contributor take rank as a classic, but that consumption of elegant authorship which he desired he was never to be hold of. With Professor Napier, on the other hand, Carlyle's dealings were much to his satisfaction, and he preferred to write for the Edinburgh.
Sartor Resartus, that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtooki in 1831. It had a difficulty in catching the light. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with gebius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. We declared that the anthor lacked tact," which was probably true. Another photo and a heavy piece of criticism pot without point. Even John John Stuart Mill, who, afterward, delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. The general impression seemed to be that much genius and German had made the author mad He himself was at times a little disheartened by repeated robbed books." "I have given up the notion," he says of Sartor, in 1832, "of hawking iny little manuscript book about any further: for a long time it bas lain quiet in a drawer waiting for a better day. The bookselling trade seems on the verge of dissolution; the force of puffing can go no further, yet hankruptcy clamours at every door: sad fate I have to serve the Devil, and get no wages even from him! The poor Bookselling Guild, I often predict to myself, will ere long de found unfit to be the strange part now plays in our European for the IT world; and will give place to new and higher arrangements, of which the coming shadows are already becoming visible." Not for seven years after its composition did "Sartor" appear as a volume. It had at last," says its successor, "to clip itself in pieves, and be contingent to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered."
Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 9 on Saturday morn-ing at his house in Cheyne-row, Cheshire. He had been for some years in poor health, and more than once in 1879 and 1880. His recovery seemed doubtful. Of late, however, his friends saw little of him. He could not bear the strain of prolonged or exciting conversation, and growing weakness, approaching, as he himself said, almost constant pain, had compelled him to give up very much his old habit of taking long walks every day. But since his manhood, he had been frequently subject to sil- muta dyspepsia and kindred weaknesses had been his scourge since his childhood; he had rallied more than once from severe attacks of ill-health; and it was not supposed until quite recently that his condition was near. The announcement of his death will bring home to every educated English- must its significance. A chasm of hope between the present and the past of our literatures, a whole world of associations disappears. No recent man of letters has held in England a place comparable to that which for at least a quarter of a century has been his without dispute, and authors of all kinds and schools will feel that they have lost their venerable doyen. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal rule. The close has come of a well-ordered, full, stately, and complete life.
About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most ponetrating and sym pathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle's birthplace was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Huddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle's father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son's birth. James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he afterwards became tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle's youngest and only surviving brother. James Carlyle was a man of rectitude, worth, and intelligence, and in many ways remarkable. His son once said, "I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people," and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. Of the former specially he liked to talk, and he once made the remark that he thought his father, all things considered, the best man whom he had ever known. There were points of strong likeness between them. The father was a man of energy and strong will; and he had in no small measure the picturesque and vivid powers of speech of the son, and liked to use out-of-the-way, old-fashioned, sharp, and pungent words. His pithy sayings, occasionally prickly and sharp, ran through the country side. His favourite books were the Bible and an old Puritan divine. He was, said his son on one occasion to a friend, a far cleverer man than I am, or will ever be." An elder in the Kirk, and a man of established character for probity, he was one who, to use again his son's description of him, "like an old man, walked with God." All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle's father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk -- simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.
Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father's friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, "his first friend," as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Lads still go very young to Scotch Universities; 60 years ago they went still younger, and were wont to quit them with their degree, if they cared to take any, which they rarely did, at an age when an English youth has not quitted a public school. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. They were a group of men likely to impress much a susceptible lad of genius, and especially one who had a strong bias towards mathematical studies. But Carlyle was not so impressed. For Dr. Brown -- "Miss Brown," or "that little man who spouted poetry," as he derisively called him he had no liking, Against Playfair he had a grudge, because, after having worked bard at the class studies, on calling at Playfair's house for the certificate to which he was entitled, befound the document worded in a somewhat niggardly spirit. The only professor for whom he seems to have had much regard for was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that "the true University of these days is a collection of books," and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was duplicated in various circulating libraries — among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay — and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no reprimand. "Had you anywhere in Crim Tartary," he observes with reference to the University which Tenfelsdröckh studied, but probably with a covert glance at his own Alma mater, "walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years; certain persons, under the title of professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission fees -- you had not, indeed, in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary." Still, Carlyle profited much by the four years spent at college. He read hard, even to the point of injuring his health; he acquired a sound and, for his years, unusual knowledge of mathematics, and might have boasted with Gibbon, but without the qualification which Gibbon appended, that he had attained a stock of erudition that would have puzzled a doctor. Having passed through the arts curriculum of the University, Carlyle ought rightly, in the natural course of things, to have proceeded to the study of theology, for be had been destined by his father to be a minister.
There is some tradition that matters had gone so for that is had been arranged in what church Carlyle should appear as a "probationer." But he did not carry on his father's intentions. "Now that one bad gained man's estate," to quote his own account of this crisis in his life, "I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's church; and it was necessary I should now settle it. And so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition, doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there; and I wrestled with them in agony of spirit." The end of all this storm was the settled conviction that he could not enter the Church. Carlyle at once turned his hand to work by which he could earn his bread, and for a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where he had but lately been a pupil. He remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. At the of "the lang toun" was a private adventure school, called the Academy, where Edward Irving taught some of the well-known tongues and mathematics. The two young men of genius were already acquainted with each other; indeed, it was at Irving's instigation, and with view to be near him, that Carlyle went to Kirkcaldy. There, however, were riveted the bonds of a friendship destined to be tested by trials, some of them of a very personal character. These bonds were sometimes stretched, but never broken, not even when Carlyle saw with sorcerous grace his gifted friend pass into the regions of darkness and chaos when he never rested. Teaching Fifeshire boys was not Carlyle's vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy, he quit it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern discplinarian, to begin in Edinburgh the task of his life's work of books.
At that date the capital of Scotland was still another Weimar. Men of letters had not yet deserted it for London. "Maga" was in its glory. Lockhart, John Wilson, Magion, were in their brilliant prime; Jeffrey was at the head of the Edinburgh, and the stalwart form of Scott, not yet beset by the load of misfortune and toll, might be seen occasionally in the streets. Carlyle tried his prentice-hand hand in Brewster's "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the older and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. These first essays on authorship have never been republished, and they do not, perhaps, deserve to be so. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author's genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a piéture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details; and they show that the author was consulting those stores of varied knowledge upon which his imagination was to work in after years. Here and there is a stroke of force and felicity. Occasionally the confidence of his later style is suspected, as, for example, when he refutes Montesquieu's theory of the influence of climate on race and history. We recognise the author of "The French Revolution" in the vivid description of the philosopher as a cheery and benign sage, talking with the peasant under the oak at La Brède. At the instances of Sir David Brewster be translated Legendre's "Geometry and Trigonometry," prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on proportion. Brewster's name was put to the translation. Carlyle received £30 for his work, which was not unimportant in those days. He was always proud of his essay on Proportion, and with good reason. De Morgan pronounced it "a thoughtful and ingenious essay, as good a substitute for the fifth book of Euclid as could be given in speech," and it is certainly clear, concise, and direct. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on "Faust," a subject to which he was so often to return.
For some time after leaving Kirkcaldy, and until a year or two before his marriage, he served as tutor to the brilliant, amiable Charles Baller, teaching him, if not then, at least afterwards, some other things besides mathematics, as those who remember Baller's views on pauperism, emigration, and colonization will admit. About this period of Carlyle's life, the once famous John Scott was to editing the London Magazine and gathered around him a group of enthusiastic writers; Lazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham were a few of them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the "Life of Schiller. No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle's work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of Meister's Lehrjahre," with misgivings, not strange or unjustified, as to how bis countrymen would receive a book so repugnant in many ways to the domicent taste. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge, and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Carlyle's style was sharply criticised. Magina, in after years, complained that Gosthe had been translated from the Fatherlandish dialect of High Dutch to the Allgemeine Mid Lothianish of Auld Reekie, and that Carlyle was seeking to acclimatize the roundabout, hubble-bubble, rumfustianish (hübble-bubblen, rüm-fästeanischen), roly-poly, gromerly of style, dear to the heart of a son of the Fatherland. Undeterred by listeners and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled "German Romance," containing translations from the chief writers of the Romantic school, such as Musmus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hofmann, and Richter, with short biographical notices. This work was, as he himself admitted, "mere journey-work," not of his own suggesting or desiring -- mere preparation for the work of his genius. Before putting out his full strength he seems to have felt the necessity of retiring to some secluded place where he might mature and arrange his seething and tumultuous thoughts. The occasion for doing so presented itself. In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle on the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock -- a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the bill, up which the little gooseberry garden runs, partly sheltered from the fierce wind by a few badly-grown ash trees, almost cut off from the world by a morass, and reached only by a rough cart-road -- to this peaceful and simple abode, some 15 miles from town or market, came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion—a companion worthy of him; a woman of much character and practical wisdom, given to silence when he talked, but a talker scarcely inferior to himself, as those who know her well could testify; a woman, as he himself termed her, of "bright invincibility of spirit." Here for these years he wrote and read much -- "a whole cartload of French, German, American and English journals and periodicals piled upon his little library table" -- meditating or holding much high converse with his wife as they wandered on foot or horseback over the black and silent moors and unending hills -- an expanse of bleak, sour uplands, watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mist and rolling vapours, yet not wholly wanting in rugged and tender beanties congenial to his spirit. In a well-known letter to Goethe, Carlyle describes his life at Craigenputtock. He says:
"Our residence is not in the town itself, but 15 poles to the northwest of it, among the Gaunt Hills and black moraines which stretch westward through Dalloway to the Irish Sea. In this wilderness of heath and hog, one estate stands forth as a green oasis, a tract of flat enclosed and planted ground, where long-hedged, partly corn ripens trees afford a shade, although surrounded by sea mews and rough-wooled sheep. Here, with no small effort, we have built and furnished a neat, substantial dwelling. Here, in the absence of professional or other offce, we live to cultivate literature according to our strength, and in our own special way. We wish a joyful growth to the roses and leaves of our garden; we hope for prosperity and peace, full thoughts to further our purpose. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they blossom soon in anticipation. Two ponies, which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air are the best medicine for weak nerves. This daily exercise, to which I am also devoted, is the only recreation, for this neck of ours is the loneliest in Britain -- six miles removed before any one likely to visit me"
Carlyle toiled hard in this temple of industrious peace. In these obscure youthful years, he wrote, read, and planned much, and made incursions into many domains of knowledge. Writing in December of 1828 to De Quincy of his ooupations, he says: -
"Such a quantity of German periodical and mystic speculation embossomed in plain Scotch post-moss being nowhere that I know of to be met with ... We have no society, but who has in the strict sense of that word. I have never had any worth speaking about since I came into the world ... My wife and I are busy learning Spanish: far advanced in "Don Quixote" already. I purpose writing mystical reviews for somewhat longer than a twelve-month period, have Greek to read and the whole universe to study (for one would understand less of it). "
In a bare, scantily furnished room of the farmhouse, now shown with pride to visitors, he pursued this plan and wrote essay after essay, and did much of his work. Here were composed his essays on Burns, Goethe and Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalls, Voltair and Diderot. "Sartor Resartus" was composed here; the manuscript to be laid aside until some other time. It was here, too, while, as Mr. Lewes remarked, Carlyle was rambling over the wild moors, "with thoughts at times as wild and dreary as those moors", that he conceived the
notion of sending to his master at Welmar a birthday present as a token of gratitude and silence on the part of himself and a few other English admirers of Goethe. The momento was a seal, designed by Mrs. Carlyle; it was followed by a letter written by Carlyle himself. The epistle runs:-
"We said to ourselves, as it is always the highest duty and pleasure to show reverence where reverence is due, and our chief, and perhaps our only benefactor, is he who by net and word instructs us in wisdom; so we, the undersigned, looking towards the poet Goethe as the spiritually taught towards their spiritual teacher are desirous to express that sentiment openly and in common; for which end we have determined to solicit his acceptance of a special English gift, proceeding from us all equally, on his approaching birthday; so that while the venerable man still dwells among us, some memorial of the gratitude we owe him, and we think the whole world owes him, may not be wanting. And thus our little tribute, perhaps the purest that men can offer to man, now stands in visible form, and begs to be received. May it be welcome and speak permanently of a most close relation, though wide seas flow between the parties.
In this happy mountain home Carlyle was not wholly cut off from the world. Fame came to him, though thus secluded, and thither from time to time journeyed strangers desires of seeing and holding converse with man whose written words in the Edinburgh and New and Foreign Quarterly had made them feel that a new teacher had come into the world. Sometimes an Edinburgh man of letters would travel by coach to Dumfries and walk or ride 16 long Scottish miles to Craigsaputtle, making, perhaps, unexpected demands on the resources of the hospitable household, and compelling Mrs. Carlyle to mount a pony and set out in search of provisions. Thither came, among many other strangers, Emerson, who had read and admired in New England what Carlyle had written, and who went away full of enthusiasm at his heart's bright, vivid story, full of lively anecdote and streaming humour, which fed everything it looked upon. Carlyle contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which was still under the management of Jeffrey. The relationship was not perfectly smooth or entirely satisfactory to either editor or writer. It was difficult to adjust the boundaries of the respective perspective provinces, Carlyle being apt to take offence at the ruthless hacking and hewing of his work in which Jeffrey indulged, and, the latter being cut to the quick by the eccentricities of style displayed by his contributor, and surprised that Carlyle was not grateful for efforts to impart trim grace and polish to his articles. Jeffrey once told Charles Sumner, who had made some remark about the deterioration in Carlyle's writing since the publication of the essay on Burns, that there had been, in fact, no change, and as much as suggested that the earlier writings owed their grace to his careful revision. In the recently published correspondence of Professor Manvey Napier we can see the feeling of Jeffrey and Carlyle toward each other. It was by no means unmixed friendliness. "I fear Carlyle will not do," writes Aristarchus of Craigorook to his sorely-bullied and much-suffering successor in 1832, "that is, if you do not take the liberties and pains with you that I did, by striking out freely, and writing in occasionally. The misfortune that he is very obstinate and, I am afraid, very conceited." "It is a great pity, for he is a man of genius and industry, and with the capacity of being an elegant and impressive writer." Carlyle was, alas! never fated to become the "elegans writer" whom Jeffrey saw in his critical mind's eye. Jeffrey lived to see his awkward contributor take rank as a classic, but that consumption of elegant authorship which he desired he was never to be hold of. With Professor Napier, on the other hand, Carlyle's dealings were much to his satisfaction, and he preferred to write for the Edinburgh.
Sartor Resartus, that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtooki in 1831. It had a difficulty in catching the light. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with gebius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. We declared that the anthor lacked tact," which was probably true. Another photo and a heavy piece of criticism pot without point. Even John John Stuart Mill, who, afterward, delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. The general impression seemed to be that much genius and German had made the author mad He himself was at times a little disheartened by repeated robbed books." "I have given up the notion," he says of Sartor, in 1832, "of hawking iny little manuscript book about any further: for a long time it bas lain quiet in a drawer waiting for a better day. The bookselling trade seems on the verge of dissolution; the force of puffing can go no further, yet hankruptcy clamours at every door: sad fate I have to serve the Devil, and get no wages even from him! The poor Bookselling Guild, I often predict to myself, will ere long de found unfit to be the strange part now plays in our European for the IT world; and will give place to new and higher arrangements, of which the coming shadows are already becoming visible." Not for seven years after its composition did "Sartor" appear as a volume. It had at last," says its successor, "to clip itself in pieves, and be contingent to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered."
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