THOMAS
CARLYLE

FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES

The following Volumes are now ready:—

THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton.
HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask.
JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes.
ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun.
THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton.
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond.
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas.
NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbé.
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart.
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne.
MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan.
DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood.

THOMAS
CARLYLE

BY
HECTOR: C
MACPHERSON

FAMOUS
SCOTS:
SERIES

PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON

& FERRIER · EDINBURGH
AND LONDON

Second Edition completing Seventh Thousand.

{5}

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Of the writing of books on Carlyle there is no end.
Why, then, it may pertinently be asked, add another
stone to the Carlylean cairn? The reply is obvious.
In a series dealing with famous Scotsmen, Carlyle has
a rightful claim to a niche in the temple of Fame.
While prominence has been given in the book to the
Scottish side of Carlyle’s life, the fact has not been
lost sight of that Carlyle owed much to Germany;
indeed, if we could imagine the spirit of a German
philosopher inhabiting the body of a Covenanter of
dyspeptic and sceptical tendencies, a good idea would
be had of Thomas Carlyle. Needless to say, I
have been largely indebted to the biography by Mr
Froude, and to Carlyle’s Reminiscences. After all has
been said, the fact remains that Froude’s portrait,
though truthful in the main, is somewhat deficient
in light and shade—qualities which the student
will find admirably supplied in Professor Masson’s
charming little book, “Carlyle Personally, and in
his Writings.” To the Professor I am under deep{6}
obligation for the interest he has shown in the
book. In the course of his perusal of the proofs,
Professor Masson made valuable corrections and suggestions,
which deserve more than a formal acknowledgment.
To Mr Haldane, M.P., my thanks are
also due for his suggestive criticism of the chapter on
German thought, upon which he is an acknowledged
authority.

I have also to express my deep obligations to Mr
John Morley, who, in the midst of pressing engagements,
kindly found time to read the proof sheets.
In a private note Mr Morley has been good enough
to express his general sympathy and concurrence with
my estimate of Carlyle.

Edinburgh, October 1897.{7}

CONTENTS

{9}

THOMAS CARLYLE

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

‘A great man,’ says Hegel, ‘condemns the world to
the task of explaining him.’ Emphatically does the
remark apply to Thomas Carlyle. When he began to
leave his impress in literature, he was treated as a confusing
and inexplicable element. Opinion oscillated
between the view of James Mill, that Carlyle was an
insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that he was
afflicted with a chronic craze for singularity. Jeffrey’s
verdict sums up pretty effectively the attitude of the
critics of the time to the new writer:—’I suppose
that you will treat me as something worse than an ass,
when I say that I am firmly persuaded the great source
of your extravagance, and all that makes your writings
intolerable to many and ridiculous to not a few, is not
so much any real peculiarity of opinion, as an unlucky
ambition to appear more original than you are.’ The
blunder made by Jeffrey in regard both to Carlyle and{10}
Wordsworth emphasises the truth which critics seem
reluctant to bear in mind, that, before the great man
can be explained, he must be appreciated. Emphatically
true of Carlyle it is that he creates the standard
by which he is judged. Carlyle resembles those
products of the natural world which biologists call
‘sports’—products which, springing up in a spontaneous
and apparently erratic way, for a time defy
classification. The time is appropriate for an attempt
to classify the great thinker, whose birth took place one
hundred years ago.

Towards the close of the last century a stone-mason,
named James Carlyle, started business on his own
account in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire.
He was an excellent tradesman, and frugal withal; and
in the year 1791 he married a distant kinswoman of
his own, Janet Carlyle, who died after giving birth
to a son. In the beginning of 1795 he married one
Margaret Aitken, a worthy, intelligent woman; and on
the 4th of December following a son was born, whom
they called Thomas, after his paternal grandfather.
This child was destined to be the most original writer
of his time.

Little Thomas was early taught to read by his
mother, and at the age of five he learnt to ‘count’
from his father. He was then sent to the village school;
and in his seventh year he was reported to be ‘complete’
in English. As the schoolmaster was weak in{11}
the classics, Tom was taught the rudiments of Latin by
the burgher minister, of which strict sect James Carlyle
was a zealous member. One summer morning, in 1806,
his father took him to Annan Academy. ‘It was a
bright morning,’ he wrote long years thereafter, ‘and
to me full of moment, of fluttering boundless Hopes,
saddened by parting with Mother, with Home, and
which afterwards were cruelly disappointed.’ At that
‘doleful and hateful Academy,’ to use his own words,
Thomas Carlyle spent three years, learning to read
French and Latin, and the Greek alphabet, as well as
acquiring a smattering of geometry and algebra.

It was in the Academy that he got his first glimpse
of Edward Irving—probably in April or May 1808—who
had called to pay his respects to his old teacher,
Mr Hope. Thomas’s impression of him was that of
a ‘flourishing slip of a youth, with coal-black hair,
swarthy clear complexion, very straight on his feet,
and except for the glaring squint alone, decidedly
handsome.’ Years passed before young Carlyle saw
Irving’s face again.

James Carlyle, although an austere man, and the
reverse of demonstrative, was bound up in his son,
sparing no expense upon the youth’s education. On
one occasion he exclaimed, with an unwonted outburst
of glee, ‘Tom, I do not grudge thy schooling, now
when thy Uncle Frank owns thee to be a better Arithmetician
than himself.’ Early recognising the natural{12}
talent and aptitude of his son, he determined to send him
to the nearest university, with a view to Thomas studying
for the ministry. One crisp winter’s morning, in 1809,
found Thomas Carlyle on his way to Edinburgh, trudging
the entire distance—one hundred miles or so.

He went through the usual university course,
attended the divinity classes, and delivered the customary
discourses in English and Latin. But Tom was
not destined to ‘wag his head in a pulpit,’ for he had
conscientious objections which parental control in no
way interfered with. Referring to this vital period of
his life, Carlyle wrote: ‘His [father’s] tolerance for
me, his trust in me, was great. When I declined
going forward into the Church (though his heart was
set upon it), he respected my scruples, my volition,
and patiently let me have my way.’ Carlyle never
looked back to his university life with satisfaction.
In his interesting recollections Mr Moncure Conway
represents Carlyle, describing his experiences as follows:—’Very
little help did I get from anybody in those
years, and, as I may say, no sympathy at all in all this
old town. And if there was any difference, it was found
least where I might most have hoped for it. There
was Professor ——. For years I attended his lectures,
in all weathers and all hours. Many and many a time,
when the class was called together, it was found to
consist of one individual—to wit, of him now speaking;
and still oftener, when others were present, the{13}
only person who had at all looked into the lesson
assigned was the same humble individual. I remember
no instance in which these facts elicited any note or
comment from that instructor. He once requested
me to translate a mathematical paper, and I worked
through it the whole of one Sunday, and it was laid
before him, and it was received without remark or
thanks. After such long years, I came to part with
him, and to get my certificate. Without a word, he
wrote on a bit of paper: “I certify that Mr Thomas
Carlyle has been in my class during his college course,
and has made good progress in his studies.” Then he
rang a bell, and ordered a servant to open the front
door for me. Not the slightest sign that I was a
person whom he could have distinguished in any
crowd. And so I parted from old ——.’

Professor Masson, who in loving, painstaking style
has ferreted all the facts about Carlyle’s university life,
sums up in these words: ‘Without assuming that he
meant the university described in Sartor Resartus to
stand literally for Edinburgh University, of his own
experience, we have seen enough to show that any
specific training of much value he considered himself
to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in Edinburgh
University, was the culture of his mathematical
faculty under Leslie, and that for the rest he acknowledged
merely a certain benefit from being in so many
class-rooms where matters intellectual were professedly{14}
in the atmosphere, and where he learned to take advantage
of books.’ As Carlyle put it in his Rectorial
Address of 1866, ‘What I have found the university
did for me is that it taught me to read in various
languages, in various sciences, so that I go into the
books which treated of these things, and gradually
penetrate into any department I wanted to make
myself master of, as I found it suit me.’

In 1814, Carlyle obtained the mathematical tutorship
at Annan. Out of his slender salary of £60 or
£70 he was able to save something, so that he was
practically independent. By and by James Carlyle gave
up his trade, and settled on a small farm at Mainhill,
about two miles from Ecclefechan. Thither Thomas
hied with unfeigned delight at holiday time, for he
led the life of a recluse at Annan, his books being his
sole companions.

Edward Irving, to whom Carlyle was introduced in
college days, was now settled as a dominie in Kirkcaldy.
His teaching was not favourably viewed by
some of the parents, who started a rival school, and
resolved to import a second master, with the result
that Carlyle was selected. Irving, with great magnanimity,
gave him a cordial welcome to the ‘Lang
Toon,’ and the two Annandale natives became fast
friends. The elder placed his well-selected library at
the disposal of the younger, and together they explored
the whole countryside. Short visits to Edinburgh had{15}
a special attraction for both, where they met with a
few kindred spirits. On one of those visits, Carlyle,
who had not cut off his connection with the university,
called at the Divinity Hall to put down his name
formally on the annual register. In his own words:
‘Old Dr Ritchie “not at home” when I called to enter
myself. “Good!” answered I; “let the omen be fulfilled.”‘
Carlyle’s studies in Kirkcaldy made him eager
to contribute to the fulfilment of the omen. Among the
authors which he read out of the Edinburgh University
library was Gibbon, who pushed Carlyle’s sceptical
questionings to a definite point. In a conversation
with Professor Masson, Carlyle stated that to his
reading of Gibbon he dated the extirpation from his
mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the
orthodox belief in miracles.

In the space of two years, Carlyle and Irving ‘got
tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions
and poor results.’ They bade Kirkcaldy farewell and
made for Edinburgh,—Irving to lodge in Bristo Street,
‘more expensive rooms than mine,’ naively remarks
Carlyle, where he gave breakfasts to ‘Intellectualities
he fell in with, I often a guest with them. They were
but stupid Intellectualities, etc.’ As for their prospects,
this is what Carlyle says: ‘Irving’s outlooks in Edinburgh
were not of the best, considerably checkered
with dubiety, opposition, or even flat disfavour in
some quarters; but at least they were far superior to{16}
mine, and indeed, I was beginning my four or five
most miserable, dark, sick, and heavy-laden years;
Irving, after some staggerings aback, his seven or eight
healthiest and brightest. He had, I should guess, as
one item several good hundreds of money to wait upon.
My peculium I don’t recollect, but it could not have
exceeded £100. I was without friends, experience, or
connection in the sphere of human business, was of shy
humour, proud enough and to spare, and had begun
my long curriculum of dyspepsia which has never ended
since!’[1] Carlyle’s intention was to study for the Bar,
if perchance he could eke out a livelihood by private
teaching. He obtained one or two pupils, wrote a stray
article or so for the ‘Encyclopædias’; but as he barely
managed to pay his way, he speedily gave up his law
studies. He was at this time—the winter of 1819—’advancing,’
as he phrases it, ‘towards huge instalments
of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this
my Edinburgh purgatory.’ It was about a couple of
years thereafter ere Carlyle went through what he has
described as his ‘spiritual new birth.’

When Carlyle was in diligent search for congenial
employment, a certain Captain Basil Hall crossed his
path, to whom Edward Irving had given lessons in
mathematics. The ‘small lion,’ as he calls the captain,
came to Carlyle, and wished the latter to go out
with him ‘to Dunglas,’ and there do ‘lunars’ in his{17}
name, he looking on and learning of Carlyle ‘what
would come of its own will.’ The said ‘lunars’
meanwhile were to go to the Admiralty, ‘testifying
there what a careful studious Captain he was, and help
to get him promotion, so the little wretch smilingly
told me.’ Carlyle adds: ‘I remember the figure of
him in my dim lodging as a gay, crackling, sniggering
spectre, one dusk, endeavouring to seduce me by
affability in lieu of liberal wages into this adventure.
Wages, I think, were to be smallish (“so poor are we”),
but then the great Playfair is coming on visit. “You
will see Professor Playfair.” I had not the least notion
of such an enterprise on these shining terms, and
Captain Basil with his great Playfair in posse vanished
for me into the shades of dusk for good.’[2] When
private teaching would not come Carlyle’s way, he
timorously aimed towards ‘literature.’ He had taken
to the study of German, and conscious of his own
powers in that direction, he applied in vain to more
than one London bookseller, proposing a complete
translation of Schiller. Irving not only did his utmost
to comfort Carlyle in his spiritual wrestlings, but he
tried to find him employment. The two friends continued
to make pleasant excursions, and in June 1821
Irving brought Carlyle to Haddington, an event which
was destined to colour all his subsequent life; for it
was then and there he first saw Jane Welsh, a sight, he
acknowledged, for ever memorable to him.{18}

‘In the ancient County Town of Haddington, July 14,
1801, there was born,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1869,
‘to a lately wedded pair, not natives of the place but
already reckoned among the best class of people there,
a little Daughter whom they named Jane Baillie Welsh,
and whose subsequent and final name (her own
common signature for many years) was Jane Welsh
Carlyle, and now so stands, now that she is mine in
death only, on her and her Father’s Tombstone in the
Abbey Kirk of that Town. July 14th, 1801; I was
then in my sixth year, far away in every sense, now
near and infinitely concerned, trying doubtfully after
some three years’ sad cunctation, if there is anything
that I can profitably put on record of her altogether
bright, beneficent and modest little Life, and Her, as my
final task in this world.’[3] The picture was never completed
by the master-hand; the ‘effort was too distressing’;
so all his notes and letters were handed over
to a literary executor.

At the time of Carlyle’s introduction to Miss Welsh,
she was living with her widowed mother. Her father,
Dr John Welsh, came of a good family, and was a
popular country physician. Her mother was Grace
Welsh of Capelgill, and was reckoned a beautiful, but
haughty woman. Their marriage took place in 1800,
and their only child, Jane, was born, as we have seen,
the year following. Her most intimate friend, Miss{19}
Geraldine Jewsbury, tells us that Miss Welsh had ‘a
graceful and beautifully-formed figure, upright and
supple, a delicate complexion of creamy white, with a
pale rose tint in the cheeks, lovely eyes full of fire and
softness, and with great depths of meaning.’ She had
a musical voice, was a good talker, extremely witty, and
so fascinating in every way that a relative of hers told
Miss Jewsbury that every man who spoke to her for
five minutes felt impelled to make her an offer of
marriage. Be that as it may, it is certain that Miss
Jane Welsh had troops of suitors in and around the
quiet country town. She always spoke of her mother
with deep affection and great admiration. Her father
she reverenced, and he was the only person during her
girlhood who had any real influence over her. This,
then, was the young lady of whom Thomas Carlyle
carried back to Edinburgh a sweet and lasting impression.
They corresponded at intervals, and Thomas
was permitted to send her books occasionally.

Edward Irving used to live in Dr Welsh’s house
when he taught in the local school, and he led Jeannie—a
winsome, wilful lass—to take an interest in the
classics. She entertained a girlish passion for the
handsome youth, and there can be little doubt that
they would have ultimately been married, were it not
that the eldest daughter of a Kirkcaldy parson, Miss
Martin, had ‘managed to charm Irving for the time
being,’ and an engagement followed.{20}

Before Carlyle had drifted into Edinburgh he had,
of course, heard of the fame of Francis Jeffrey. He
heard him once speaking in the General Assembly ‘on
some poor cause.’ Jeffrey’s pleading seemed to Carlyle
‘abundantly clear, full of liveliness, free flowing ingenuity.’
‘My admiration,’ he adds, ‘went frankly
with that of others, but I think it was hardly of very
deep character.’ When Carlyle was in the ‘slough of
despond,’ he bethought him of Jeffrey, this time as
editor of the Edinburgh Review. He resolved to
try the ‘great man’ with an actual contribution. The
subject was a condemnation of a new French book, in
which a mechanical theory of gravitation was elaborately
worked out by the author. He got ‘a certain
feeble but enquiring quasi-disciple’ of his own to act
as amanuensis, from whom he kept his ulterior purpose
quite secret. Looking back through the dim vista of
seven-and-forty years, this is what Carlyle says of that
anxious time: ‘Well do I remember those dreary evenings
in Bristo Street; oh, what ghastly passages and
dismal successive spasms of attempt at “literary enterprise”!…
My “Review of Pictet” all fairly written
out in George Dalgliesh’s good clerk hand, I penned
some brief polite Note to the great Editor, and walked
off with the small Parcel one night to his address in
George Street. I very well remember leaving it with
his valet there, and disappearing in the night with
various thoughts and doubts! My hopes had never{21}
risen high, or in fact risen at all; but for a fortnight
or so they did not quite die out, and then it was in
absolute zero; no answer, no return of MS., absolutely
no notice taken, which was a form of catastrophe more
complete than even I had anticipated! There rose in
my head a pungent little Note which might be written
to the great man, with neatly cutting considerations
offered him from the small unknown ditto; but I wisely
judged it was still more dignified to let the matter lie
as it was, and take what I had got for my own benefit
only. Nor did I ever mention it to almost anybody,
least of all to Jeffrey in subsequent changed times,
when at anyrate it was fallen extinct.’[4]

Carlyle’s star was, however, in the ascendant, for in
1822 he became tutor to the two sons of a wealthy
lady, Mrs Charles Buller, at a salary of £200 a year.
It was through Irving that this appointment came.
The young lads boarded with ‘a good old Dr Fleming’
in George Square, whither Carlyle went daily from his
lodgings at [5]3 Moray Street, Pilrig Street. The Bullers
finally returned to London, Carlyle staying at his
father’s little homestead of Mainhill to finish a translation
of ‘Wilhelm Meister.’ He followed the Bullers
to London, where he resigned the tutorship in the
hope of getting some literary work.

Irving introduced him to the proprietor of the
London Magazine, who offered Carlyle sixteen{22}
guineas a sheet for a series of ‘Portraits of Men of
Genius and Character.’ The first was to be a life of
Schiller, which appeared in that periodical in 1823-4.
Mr Boyd, the Edinburgh publisher, accepted the translation
of ‘Wilhelm Meister.’ ‘Two years before,’
wrote Carlyle in his Reminiscences, ‘I had at length,
after some repulsions, got into the heart of “Wilhelm
Meister,” and eagerly read it through; my sally out,
after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh,
(a windless, Scotch-misty Saturday night), is still vivid
to me. “Grand, surely, harmoniously built together,
far-seeing, wise, and true: when, for many years, or
almost in my life before, have I read such a book?”‘
A short letter from Goethe in Weimar, in acknowledgment
of a copy of his ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ was
peculiarly gratifying to Carlyle.

Carlyle was not happy in London; dyspepsia and
‘the noises’ sorely troubled him. He was anxious to
be gone. To the surprise of Irving—who was now
settled in the metropolis—and everybody else, he resolutely
decided to return to Annandale, where his
father had leased for him a compact little farm at
Hoddam Hill, three miles from Mainhill, and visible
from the fields at the back of it. ‘Perhaps it was the
very day before my departure,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘at least
it is the last I recollect of him [Irving], we were walking
in the streets multifariously discoursing; a dim
grey day, but dry and airy;—at the corner of Cockspur{23}
Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair
(“Statistical Account of Scotland” etc.), whom I
had never seen before and never saw again. A lean
old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak, face very
wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction
as one might have expected it to be. He
spoke to Irving with benignant respect, whether to me
at all I don’t recollect.’

Carlyle shook the dust of London from off his feet,
and by easy stages made his way northwards. Arrived
at Ecclefechan, within two miles of his father’s house,
while the coach was changing horses, Carlyle noticed
through the window his little sister Jean earnestly looking
up for him. She, with Jenny, the youngest of the
family, was at school in the village, and had come
out daily to inspect the coach in hope of seeing him.
‘Her bonny little blush and radiancy of look when I
let down the window and suddenly disclosed myself,’
wrote Carlyle in 1867, ‘are still present to me.’ On
the 26th of May 1825, he established himself at
Hoddam Hill, and set about ‘German Romance.’ His
brother Alick managed the farm, and his mother, with
one of the girls, was generally there to look after his
comforts.

During the intervening years, Carlyle’s intimacy with
Miss Jane Welsh gradually increased, with occasional
differences. She had promised to marry him if he
could ‘achieve independence.’ Carlyle’s idea was that{24}
after their marriage they should settle upon the farm
of Craigenputtock, which had been in the possession
of the Welsh family for generations, and devote himself
to literary work. By and by Miss Welsh accepted his
offer of marriage, but not until she had acquainted him
of the Irving incident. The wedding took place on
the 17th of October 1825, and the young couple took
up housekeeping in a quiet cottage at Comely Bank,
Edinburgh. Of his life at this period, the best description
is given by Carlyle himself, in a letter to Mrs
Basil Montague, dated Christmas Day 1826:—

‘In spite of ill-health I reckon myself moderately
happy here, much happier than men usually are, or than
such a fool as I deserve to be. My good wife exceeds
all my hopes, and is, in truth, I believe, among the best
women that the world contains. The philosophy of
the heart is far better than that of the understanding.
She loves me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment
has taught her much that I have long been vainly
at the schools to learn…. On the whole, what I
chiefly want is occupation; which, when the times
grow better, or my own genius gets more alert and
thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to present
itself…. Some day—oh, that the day were here!—I
shall surely speak out those things that are lying in me,
and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or else, if
the Fates would be so kind as to shew me—that I had
nothing to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it{25}
after all; a hard result, yet not intolerable, were it once
clear and certain. Literature, it seems, is to be my
trade, but the present aspects of it among us seem to
me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting.’ [6]Here, as in
undertone, we discover what Professor Masson calls the
constitutional sadness of Carlyle—a sadness which,
along with indifferent health, led him to be impatient
at trifles, morbid, proud, and at times needlessly aggressive
in speech and demeanour. These traits, however,
in the early years of married life were not specially
visible; and on the whole the Comely Bank period
may be described as one of calm happiness. Carlyle’s
forecast was correct. Literature was to be his trade.

In the following spring came a letter to Carlyle from
Procter (Barry Cornwall), whom he had met in London,
offering to introduce him formally to Jeffrey, whom he
certified to be a ‘very fine fellow.’ One evening
Carlyle sallied forth from Comely Bank for Jeffrey’s
house in George Street, armed with Procter’s letter.
He was shown into the study. ‘Fire, pair of candles,’
he relates, ‘were cheerfully burning, in the light of
which sate my famous little gentleman; laid aside his
work, cheerfully invited me to sit, and began talking in
a perfectly human manner.’ The interview lasted for
about twenty minutes, during which time Jeffrey had
made kind enquiries what his visitor was doing and
what he had published; adding, ‘We must give you a{26}
lift,’ an offer, Carlyle says, which in ‘some complimentary
way’ he managed to Jeffrey’s satisfaction to decline.
Jeffrey returned Carlyle’s call, when he was captivated
by Mrs Carlyle. The intimacy rapidly increased, and
a short paper by Carlyle on Jean Paul appeared in the
very next issue of the Edinburgh Review. ‘It
made,’ says the author, ‘what they call a sensation
among the Edinburgh buckrams; which was greatly
heightened next Number by the more elaborate and
grave article on “German Literature” generally, which
set many tongues wagging, and some few brains considering,
what this strange monster could be that was
come to disturb their quiescence and the established
order of Nature! Some Newspapers or Newspaper took
to denouncing “the Mystic School,” which my bright
little Woman declared to consist of me alone, or of her
and me, and for a long while after merrily used to
designate us by that title.’

Mrs Carlyle proved an admirable hostess; Jeffrey
became a frequent visitor at Comely Bank, and they
discovered ‘mutual old cousinships’ by the maternal
side. Jeffrey’s friendship was an immense acquisition
to Carlyle, and everybody regarded it as his highest
good fortune. The literati of Edinburgh came to see
her, and ‘listen to her husband’s astonishing monologues.’
To Carlyle’s regret, Jeffrey would not talk in
their frequent rambles of his experiences in the world,
‘nor of things concrete and current,’ but was ‘theoretic{27}
generally’; and seemed bent on converting Carlyle
from his ‘German mysticism,’ back merely, as the
latter could perceive, into ‘dead Edinburgh Whiggism,
scepticism, and materialism’; ‘what I felt,’ says
Carlyle, ‘to be a forever impossible enterprise.’ They
had long discussions, ‘parryings, and thrustings,’ which
‘I have known continue night after night,’ relates
Carlyle, ’till two or three in the morning (when I was
his guest at Craigcrook, as once or twice happened in
coming years); there he went on in brisk logical
exercise with all the rest of the house asleep, and
parted usually in good humour, though after a game
which was hardly worth the candle. I found him
infinitely witty, ingenious, sharp of fence, but not in
any sense deep; and used without difficulty to hold
my own with him.’ Jeffrey did everything in his power
to further Carlyle’s prospects and projects. He tried
to obtain for him the professorship of Moral Philosophy
at St Andrews University, vacated by Dr Chalmers.
Testimonials were given by Irving, Brewster, Buller,
Wilson, Jeffrey, and Goethe. They failed, however, in
consequence of the opposition of the Principal, Dr
Nicol.

To Carlyle, doubtless, the most memorable incidents
of the Edinburgh period was his correspondence with
Goethe. The magnetic spell thrown over Carlyle by
Goethe will ever remain a mystery. Between the two
men there was no intellectual affinity. One would{28}
have expected Goethe the Pagan to have repelled
Carlyle the Puritan, unless we have recourse to the
philosophy of opposites, and conclude that the tumultuous
soul of Carlyle found congenial repose in the
Greek-like restfulness of Goethe. The great German
had been deeply impressed by the profound grasp
which Carlyle was displaying of German literature.
After reading a letter which he had received from
Walter Scott, Goethe remarked to Eckermann: ‘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.’{29}

CHAPTER II

CRAIGENPUTTOCK—LITERARY EFFORTS

Carlyle was feeling the force of Scott’s remark that
literature was a bad crutch—his prospects being far
from bright. The Carlyles had been a little over
eighteen months at Comely Bank, when their extensive
circle of friends were surprised to hear of their
intended withdrawal to Craigenputtock. Efforts were
made to dissuade Carlyle from pursuing what at the
time appeared a suicidal course. He was the intimate
associate of the brilliant Jeffrey; he was within the
charmed circle of Edinburgh Reviewers; he had laid
the foundation of a literary reputation. Outwardly all
seemed well with Carlyle; but ‘the step,’ himself says,
‘had been well meditated, saw itself to be founded on
irrefragable considerations of health, finance, &c., &c.,
unknown to bystanders, and could not be forborne or
altered.’ Next to his marriage with Miss Welsh,
Carlyle’s retirement to the howling wilds of Craigenputtock
at that juncture was the most momentous step
in his long life. He was conscious of his own powers,
and he clearly discerned how those powers could best{30}
be utilised and developed. Hence his determination
to bid adieu to Edinburgh. And in that
resolve he was fortified by the loyal support of his
wife.

Jeffrey promised to visit the Carlyles at Craigenputtock
as soon as they got settled. Meanwhile, they
stayed a week at his own house in Moray Place, after
their furniture was on the road, and they were waiting
till it should arrive and ‘render a new home possible
amid the moors and the mountains.’ ‘Of our history
at Craigenputtock,’ says Carlyle, ‘there might a
great deal be written which might amuse the curious;
for it was in fact a very singular scene and arena for
such a pair as my Darling and me, with such a Life
ahead…. It is a History I by no means intend
to write, with such or with any object. To me there
is a sacredness of interest in it consistent only with
silence. It was the field of endless nobleness and
beautiful talent and virtue in Her who is now gone;
also of good industry, and many loving and blessed
thoughts in myself, while living there by her side.
Poverty and mean Obstruction had given origin to it,
and continued to preside over it, but were transformed
by human valour of various sorts into a kind of victory
and royalty: something of high and great dwelt in it,
though nothing could be smaller and lower than very
many of the details.’[7]{31}

The Jeffreys were not slow in appearing at Craigenputtock.
Their ‘big Carriage,’ narrates the humorous
host, ‘climbed our rugged Hill-roads, landed the Three
Guests—young Charlotte (“Sharlie”), with Pa and Ma—and
the clever old Valet maid that waited on them;
… but I remember nothing so well as the consummate
art with which my Dear One played the
domestic field-marshal, and spread out our exiguous
resources, without fuss or bustle; to cover everything
with a coat of hospitality and even elegance and abundance.
I have been in houses ten times, nay, a hundred
times, as rich, where things went not so well. Though
never bred to this, but brought up in opulent plenty by
a mother that could bear no partnership in housekeeping,
she, finding it become necessary, loyally applied herself
to it, and soon surpassed in it all the women I have ever
seen.’[8] Of Mrs Carlyle’s frankness her husband gives
this amusing glimpse: ‘One day at dinner, I remember,
Jeffrey admired the fritters or bits of pancake he was
eating, and she let him know, not without some vestige
of shock to him, that she had made them. “What,
you! twirl up the frying-pan, and catch them in the
air?” Even so, my high friend, and you may turn
it over in your mind!’ When the Jeffreys were leaving,
‘I remarked,’ says Carlyle, that they ‘carried off
our little temporary paradise; … to which bit of
pathos Jeffrey answered by a friendly little sniff of{32}
quasi-mockery or laughter through the nose, and rolled
prosperously away.’

The Carlyles in course of time visited the Jeffreys
at Craigcrook, the last occasion being for about a fortnight.
Carlyle says it was ‘a shining sort of affair,
but did not in effect accomplish much for any of
us. Perhaps, for one thing, we stayed too long,
Jeffrey was beginning to be seriously incommoded in
health, had bad sleep, cared not how late he sat, and
we had now more than ever a series of sharp fencing
bouts, night after night, which could decide nothing
for either of us, except our radical incompatibility in
respect of World Theory, and the incurable divergence
of our opinions on the most important matters. “You
are so dreadfully in earnest!” said he to me once or
oftener. Besides, I own now I was deficient in reverence
to him, and had not then, nor, alas! have ever
acquired, in my solitary and mostly silent existence, the
art of gently saying strong things, or of insinuating my
dissent, instead of uttering it right out at the risk of
offence or otherwise.’ Then he adds: ‘These “stormy
sittings,” as Mrs Jeffrey laughingly called them, did not
improve our relation to one another. But these were
the last we had of that nature. In other respects
Edinburgh had been barren; effulgences of “Edinburgh
Society,” big dinners, parties, we in due measure
had; but nothing there was very interesting either to
Her or to me, and all of it passed away as an obliging{33}
pageant merely. Well do I remember our return to
Craigenputtock, after nightfall, amid the clammy yellow
leaves and desolate rains with the clink of Alick’s
stithy alone audible of human.’[9]

It was during his first two years’ residence at Craigenputtock
that Carlyle wrote his famous essay on Burns;
but his principal work was upon German literature,
especially upon Goethe. His magazine writings being
his only means of support, and as he devoted much
time to them, it is not surprising that financial matters
worried him. About this time Jeffrey, to whom doubtless
he confided his trouble, generously offered to
confer upon him an annuity of £100, which Carlyle
declined to accept. Jeffrey repeated the offer on two
subsequent occasions, with a like result. Carlyle in
his Reminiscences says that he could not doubt but
Jeffrey had intended an act of real generosity; and yet
Carlyle penned the ungracious remark, that ‘perhaps
there was something in the manner of it that savoured
of consciousness and of screwing one’s self up to the
point; less of god-like pity for a fine fellow and his
struggles, than of human determination to do a fine
action of one’s own, which might add to the promptitude
of my refusal.’ It is not surprising, therefore, to
find Carlyle suspecting that Jeffrey’s feelings were cooling
towards him. Jeffrey had powers of penetration as
well as the friend whom he was anxious to assist.{34}

By the month of February 1831, Carlyle’s finances
fell so low that he had only £5 in his possession, and
expected no more for months. Then he borrowed
£100 from Jeffrey, as his ‘pitiful bits of periodical
literature incomings,’ as he puts it, ‘having gone awry
(as they were liable to do), but was able, I still remember
with what satisfaction, to repay punctually within a few
weeks’; adding, ‘and this was all of pecuniary chivalry
we two ever had between us.’ The chivalry was all on
the one side—of Jeffrey. The outcome of his labours
at Craigenputtock, in addition to the fragmentary
articles already referred to, was the essays which form
the first three volumes of the ‘Miscellanies.’ They
appeared chiefly in the Edinburgh Review, the
Foreign Review, and Fraser’s Magazine. Jeffrey’s
resignation of the editorship of the ‘Review’ was a
great disappointment to Carlyle, because it stopped a
regular source of income.

German literature, of which Carlyle had begun a
history, not being a ‘marketable commodity,’ he cut
it up into articles. ‘My last considerable bit of
Writing at Craigenputtock,’ says Carlyle, ‘was “Sartor
Resartus”; done, I think, between January and August
1830; (my sister Margaret had died while it was going
on). I well remember where and how (at Templand
one morning) the germ of it rose above ground. “Nine
months,” I used to say, “it had cost me in writing.”
Had the perpetual fluctuation, the uncertainty and unintelligible{35}
whimsicality of Review Editors not proved
so intolerable, we might have lingered longer at Craigenputtock,
perfectly left alone, and able to do more work,
beyond doubt, than elsewhere. But a Book did seem
to promise some respite from that, and perhaps further
advantages. Teufelsdröckh was ready; and (first days
of August) I decided to make for London. Night before
going, how I still remember it! I was lying on
my back on the sofa in the drawing-room; she sitting
by the table (late at night, packing all done, I suppose);
her words had a guise of sport, but were profoundly
plaintive in meaning. “About to part, who knows for
how long; and what may have come in the interim!”
this was her thought, and she was evidently much out
of spirits. “Courage, Dearie, only for a month!” I
would say to her in some form or other. I went next
morning early.’[10]

Jeffrey, who was by that time Lord Advocate,
Carlyle found much preoccupied in London, but
willing to assist him with Murray, the bookseller.
Jeffrey, with his wife and daughter, lived in Jermyn
Street in lodgings, ‘in melancholy contrast to the
beautiful tenements and perfect equipments they had
left in the north.’ ‘If,’ says Carlyle, ‘I called in the
morning, in quest perhaps of Letters (though I don’t
recollect much troubling him in that way), I would find
the family still at breakfast, ten A.M. or later; and have{36}
seen poor Jeffrey emerge in flowered dressing-gown,
with a most boiled and suffering expression of face,
like one who had slept miserably, and now awoke
mainly to paltry misery and bother; poor Official man!
“I am made a mere Post-Office of!” I heard him once
grumble, after tearing open several Packets, not one of
which was internally for himself.’[11]

Mrs Carlyle joined her husband on the 1st of
October 1831, and they took lodgings at 4 Ampton
Street, Gray’s Inn Lane, with a family of the name of
Miles, belonging to Irving’s congregation. Jeffrey was
a frequent visitor there, and sometimes the Carlyles
called at Jermyn Street. Carlyle says that they were
at first rather surprised that Jeffrey did not introduce
him to some of his ‘grand literary figures,’ or try in
some way to be of help to one for whom he evidently
had a value. The explanation, Carlyle thinks, was
that he himself ‘expressed no trace of aspiration that
way’; that Jeffrey’s ‘grand literary or other figures’
were clearly by no means ‘so adorable to the rustic
hopelessly Germanised soul as an introducer of one
might have wished.’ Besides, Jeffrey was so ‘heartily
miserable,’ as to think Carlyle and his other fellow-creatures
happy in comparison, and to have no care
left to bestow upon them.

Here is a characteristic outburst in the ‘Reminiscences’:
‘The beggarly history of poor “Sartor”{37}
among the blockheadisms is not worth my recording or
remembering—least of all here! In short, finding that
whereas I had got £100 (if memory serve) for
“Schiller” six or seven years before, and for “Sartor,”
at least thrice as good, I could not only not get £200,
but even get no Murray, or the like, to publish it on
half-profits (Murray, a most stupendous object to me;
tumbling about, eyeless, with the evidently strong wish
to say “yes and no”; my first signal experience of
that sad human predicament); I said, “We will make
it No, then; wrap up our MS.; wait till this Reform
Bill uproar abate.”‘[12]

On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received
tidings of the death of his father. He departed on the
Sunday morning previous ‘almost without a struggle,’
wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke
for Carlyle. ‘Natural tears,’ he exclaimed shortly afterwards,
‘have come to my relief. I can look at my
dear Father, and that section of the Past which he has
made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light,
and give way to what thoughts rise in me without
feeling that they are weak and useless.’ Carlyle
determined that the time till the funeral was past
(Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All
others were excluded. He walked ‘far and much,’
chiefly in the Regent’s Park, and considered about
many things, his object being to see clearly what his{38}
calamity meant—what he lost, and what lesson that
loss was to teach him. Carlyle considered his father as
one of the most interesting men he had known. ‘Were
you to ask me,’ he said, ‘which had the greater natural
faculty,’ Robert Burns or my father, ‘I might, perhaps,
actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely
wider Education, my Father a far wholesomer.
Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the
other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient
thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen,
has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment
from Nature and the Arena from Fortune
were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this
often, and partly know it. As a man of Speculation—had
Culture ever unfolded him—he must have gone wild
and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct,
and Work keeps all right. What strange shapeable
creatures we are!’[13] Nothing that the elder Carlyle
undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and like a true
man. ‘I shall look,’ said his distinguished son, ‘on the
houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand
firm and sound to the heart all over his little district.
No one that comes after him will ever say, “Here was
the finger of a hollow eye-servant.” They are little texts
for me of the gospel of man’s free will. Nor will his
deeds and sayings in any case be found unworthy—not
false and barren, but genuine and fit. Nay, am{39}
not I also the humble James Carlyle’s work? I
owe him much more than existence; I owe him a
noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in
that rustic character). It was he exclusively that determined
on educating me; that from his small hard-earned
funds sent me to school and college, and made
me whatever I am or may become. Let me not
mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So
shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant
itself honourably forth into new generations.’[14] One
of the wise men about Ecclefechan told James Carlyle:
‘Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his
ignorant parents.’ His father once told Carlyle this,
and added: ‘Thou hast not done so; God be thanked
for it.’ When James Carlyle first entered his son’s
house at Craigenputtock, Mrs Carlyle was greatly
struck with him, ‘and still farther,’ says her husband,
‘opened my eyes to the treasure I possessed in a father.’

The last time Carlyle saw his father was a few days
before leaving for London. ‘He was very kind,’ wrote
Carlyle, ‘seemed prouder of me than ever. What he
had never done the like of before, he said, on hearing me
express something which he admired, “Man, it’s surely
a pity that thou should sit yonder with nothing but
the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such
a gift to speak.”‘ In closing his affectionate tribute,
Carlyle exclaims: ‘Thank Heaven, I know and have{40}
known what it is to be a son; to love a father, as spirit
can love spirit.’

The last days of March 1832 found the Carlyles
back at Craigenputtock. A new tenant occupied the
farm, and their days were lonelier than ever. Meanwhile
‘Sartor Resartus’ was appearing in Fraser’s
Magazine. The Editor reported that it ‘excited the
most unqualified disapprobation.’ Nothing daunted,
Carlyle pursued the ‘noiseless tenor of his way,’ throwing
off articles on various subjects. Finding that Mrs
Carlyle’s health suffered from the gloom and solitude
of Craigenputtock, they removed to Edinburgh in
January 1833. Jeffrey was absent in ‘official regions,’
and Carlyle notes that they found a ‘most dreary contemptible
kind of element’ in Edinburgh. But their
stay there was not without its uses, for in the Advocates’
Library Carlyle found books which had a great effect
upon his line of study. He collected materials for his
articles upon ‘Cagliostro’ and the ‘Diamond Necklace.’
At the end of four months, the Carlyles were
back again at Craigenputtock.

August was a bright month for Thomas Carlyle, for
it was then that Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at
his rural retreat. The Carlyles thought him ‘one of
the most lovable creatures’ they had ever seen, and
an unbroken friendship of nearly fifty years was begun.
As winter approached, Carlyle’s prospects were not
very bright, and he once more turned his eyes towards{41}
London, where the remainder of his life was to be
spent. Before following him thither, it may be well to
turn from the outer to the inner side of Carlyle’s life,
and study the forces which went to the making of his
unique personality.{42}

CHAPTER III

CARLYLE’S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

Through all the material struggles Carlyle’s mind at
Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a
theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew
inspiration in his future life work. Through his contributions
to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable
an original vein of thought and feeling which had its
origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle’s
studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would
say incoherent, shape in Sartor Resartus,—a book
which appropriately was written in the stern solitude
of Craigenputtock.

In order to acquire an adequate understanding of
Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the
two dominating influences of his mental life—his
early home training and German literature. In regard
to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much.
He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle
himself has left a graphic description of the religious
environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father
belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a{43}
certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first
Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath.
Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged
heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a
photograph: ‘Very venerable are those old Seceder
clergy to me now when I look back…. Most figures
of them in my time were hoary old men; men so like
evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and
gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among
Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world….
Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those
old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names,
employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew,
but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror.
Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen
solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for
ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like
a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty
cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved
coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh—all
this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five
years off, and hear the very voice of my mother
upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about
these persons of the drama and endeavouring to
describe and identify them.’ And what a glimpse we
have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting
religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David
Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family{44}
worship in order to take in his grain. David was putting
on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with
the words: ‘Such a raging wind risen will drive the
stooks into the sea if let alone.’ ‘Wind!’ answered
David, ‘wind canna get ae straw that has been appointed
mine. Sit down and let us worship God.’
Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his
father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last
the feeling of life’s mystery and solemnity remained
vivid with him, though fed from quite other sources
than the Bible and the Shorter Catechism.

Much has been said of Carlyle’s father, but it is
highly probable that to his mother he owed most
during his early years. The temperament of the
Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like
James Carlyle were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional.
Fighting like the Jews, with sword in one
hand and trowel in the other, they had no time for
cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to
go to the stake on behalf of religious liberty, they
exercised a repressive, not to say despotic, influence in
their own households. With them education meant
not the unfolding of the individual powers of the
children, but the ruthless crushing of them into a
theological mould. Religion in such an atmosphere
became loveless rather than lovely, and might have
had serious influences of a reactionary nature but for
the caressing tenderness of the mother. With a heart{45}
which overflowed the ordinary theological boundaries,
the mother in many sweet and hidden ways supplied
the emotional element, which had been crushed out of
the father by a narrow conception of life and duty.
Carlyle’s experience may be judged from his references
to his parents. He always speaks of his father with
profound respect and admiration; towards his mother
his heart goes forth with a devotion which became
stronger as the years rolled on. Carlyle’s love of his
mother was as beautiful as it was sacred. Long after
Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood, his
heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His
system of thought, indeed, might well be defined as
Calvinism minus Christianity. Had Carlyle not come
into contact with German thought, he would probably
have jogged along the path of literature in more or
less conventional fashion. In fact, nothing is more
remarkable than the comparatively commonplace nature
of Carlyle’s early contributions to literature. Germany
touched the deepest chords of his nature. With
German ideas and emotions his mind was saturated,
and Sartor Resartus was the outcome. To that book
students must go for a glance into Carlyle’s mind while
he was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence.
In June 1821, as Mr Froude tells us, took place what
may be called Carlyle’s conversion—his triumph over
his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To
understand this phase of Carlyle’s life, we must pause{46}
for a little to consider German literature, whence
Carlyle derived spiritual relief and consolation.

What, then, was the nature of the message of peace
which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe,
brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When
Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic conceptions
of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were
struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The
orthodox conception, into which he had been born,
and with which his father and mother had fronted the
Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern
thought. Carlyle’s belief in Christianity as a revelation
seems to have dropped from him without much of
a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot.
His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual
hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by
the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle
would have been invited to find salvation in the easy-going,
drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon,
or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity
known as Moderatism.

Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers
of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible
world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frowning
upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable.
The French Revolution had revolutionised men’s
thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to
man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical{47}
philosophy, which, spreading from England to France,
had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch.
Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely
mechanical theory of life which was offered as the substitute
for the theory of the Churches. There was
another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to
which Carlyle clung when he could no longer keep
hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism,
Carlyle found salvation.

What are the leading conceptions of the German
form of salvation? The answer to this will give the
key to Sartor Resartus, and to Carlyle’s whole mental
outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the
great objection to Christianity was the breach it made
between the natural and the supernatural. Between
them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and
temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students
who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law
and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which
had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of
the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural,
the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in
which everything, from the movements of solar masses
to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms
of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the
Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much
of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of
wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a{48}
vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary
embodiment of material particles in a highly complex
and unique form. Instead of being what it was to
the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the
materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradually
closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed
under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression
made upon him by the materialistic view of life.
As he says, ‘The materialistic theory, which reduces all
things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey,
so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as
at a ghost.’

Sartor Resartus is studded with vigorous protests
against the mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just
as distasteful to Carlyle, and equally mechanical in
spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as a huge
clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker,
whose duty consisted in seeing that the clock
kept good time and was in all respects thoroughly reliable.
The Germans attacked the problem from the
other side. They did not abolish the supernatural
with the materialists, or seek it in another world with
the theologians; they found the supernatural in the
natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
Hegel and Goethe had one reply:—Reduce matter to
its constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize
the principle of life; it evades you like a spirit; in this
principle everything lives and moves and has its being.{49}
German philosophy from Kant has been occupied in
attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great
process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe
attempted to represent this as the energising principle
of life and duty. The spiritual cannot be weighed in
the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the
dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things
is best seen by the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper,
from his mechanical and utilitarian standpoint, sees not
the Divine vision. This has been called Pantheism.
Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and
Materialism, and is the root thought of Sartor Resartus,
which may be taken as Carlyle’s Confession of Faith.
A few extracts will justify the foregoing analysis. The
transcendental view of Nature is expressed by Carlyle
thus:—’Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with
scientific nomenclature, experiments and what not, as
if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden
jars, and sold over counter; but the native sense of
man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims
it to be a living thing—ah, an unspeakable, God-like
thing, towards which the best attitude for us, after
never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and
humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then in
silence.’ Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in
its tone: ‘For Matter, were it never so despicable, is
Spirit; the manifestation of Spirit, were it never so honourable,
can it be more? The thing Visible, nay, the{50}
thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as
Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the
higher celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark
with excess of bright.’

The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take
their root in his speculative view of the Universe—a
view which demands careful analysis if the student
hopes to understand Carlyle’s strength and weakness.
It is not meant that Carlyle’s mind remained anchored
to the philosophic idealism of Sartor. In later days
he professed contempt for transcendental moonshine,
but his contempt was for the form and jargon of the
schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to
the end. After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage,
his views took more and more an anthropomorphic
mould, till in many of his writings he seems practically
a Theist. But at root Carlyle’s thought was more
Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the
German conception of the Ultimate Reality? The
German answer grew out of an attempt to get rid
of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the
father of all the Empiricists, in giving logical effect to
Berkeleyism, concluded that just as we know nothing
of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so of the
inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental
impressions. We can combine and recombine these
impressions as we choose, but from them we cannot
deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of{51}
mind. Hume would not sanction belief in causation
as a universal law. All that could be said was that
certain things happened in a certain manner so frequently
as to give rise to a law of expectation. But
this is not to solve, but to evade the problem? We
are still driven to ask, What is matter? What is
motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge
of the material world, and is that knowledge
reliable? These are wide questions that cannot be
adequately handled here. It was a favourite argument
of Comte and his followers, that man’s first conceptions
of Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they
were anthropomorphic. Theology was, therefore,
dethroned without ceremony. But science is as
anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee
that the great facts of Nature are as we think them.
We talk of Force, but our idea of Force is taken from
experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature.
It is well known, for example, that the secondary
qualities of objects, colour, &c., do not exist in
Nature. Our personality is so inextricably mixed with
the material universe that it is impossible to formulate
a philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a
product of Nature, and which sharply defines the
provinces of the two.

But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism
promises to perform. Idealism is simply
Materialism turned upside down. The only difference{52}
between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that
the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all
practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is
the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the temporary
product of a highly specialised form of matter.
In either case, man has no more freedom than the
bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may
discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically
as we please, the result is the same—absorption in the
universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves
man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only
difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the
prisoner’s neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism
adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no
appeal from Nature’s dread sentence, the less poetry
and embroidery there is about the doleful business the
better.

In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely,
of the peace which came over his soul when he discovered
that the universe was not mechanical but
Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What
consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not
appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic
optimism of Sartor and the heavily-charged pessimism
of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims
that God does nothing. Carlyle’s life abundantly
illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland,
Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy{53}
than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached
the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong
standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed.
A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his
spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissecting-table.
He waged a life-long warfare against science.
As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:—’Carlyle
never could tolerate the evolution theory.
He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin,
and everything pertaining to the development doctrines.
It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an
evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism
between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer
inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in
very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us
that through every crystal and through every grass
blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of
a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the
language of poetry what Spencer says in the language
of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained
and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution
is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction
between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the
German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the
Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists
in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists,
when, in addition to the dictates of conscience,
they can call as a witness and sanction to{54}
morality the testimony of all-embracing experience.
In his famous saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was
unconsciously formulating one aspect of evolutionary
ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as
that brute force and ethical sanctions are identical;
what he meant was that in the long run Righteousness
will prove the mightiest force in the universe. What is
this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of
the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly
evolved state of society, will mean the survival of the
best? In the highest social state the only Might
that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in
Right. Carlyle’s contemptuous attitude towards
science is deeply to be deplored. He waged bitter
warfare against the evolution theory, quite oblivious
of the fact that by means of it there was revealed
a deeper insight into the Power behind Nature, and
into the ethical constitution of the universe, than ever
entered into the minds of transcendental philosophers.’

It is taken for granted that Carlyle’s thoughts have
no organic unity. He is looked upon as a stimulating,
but confused, writer, as a thinker of original, but
incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind,
and pays no deference to the canons of the schools or
the market-place. But there is a method in Carlyle’s
apparent caprice. When analysed, his thoughts are
discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism embraces{55}
the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In
the sphere of morals, as of science, his writings are one
long tumultuous protest against the mechanical philosophy
and the utilitarian theory of morals. From
his essay on Voltaire we take the following:—’It is
contended by many that our mere love of personal
Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting in every
individual with such clearness as he may easily have,
will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others,
and wisely employ his own…. Without some belief
in the necessary eternal, or, which is the same thing,
in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue existing
in each individual, could the moral judgment of
a thousand or a thousand thousand individuals avail
us’? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces the
utilitarian system in these words: ‘What then? Is
the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some
passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the
direction others profit by? I know not; only this I
know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true
aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound
Digestion, man may front much. But what in these
dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience
to the diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but
on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there,
brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet
incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things
he has provided for his Elect’! The exponent of such{56}
a theory of ethics will have a natural distaste for the
rational or calculating side of conduct. He will depreciate
the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to
the inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid
temperament, methodical habits, and utilitarian aims,
but men of mystical and passionate natures, spasmodic
in action, and guided by ideas not easily justified at
the bar of utility.

Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has
profound contempt for the Diderots and Voltaires, with
their mechanical views of the Universe, so in practical
affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who endeavour
to further their aims by appealing to commonplace
motives by means of commonplace methods.
Specially opposed is he to the tendency of the age
to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great
elemental forces of human nature, but upon organisations,
committees, and all kinds of mechanism. In his
remarkable essay, ‘Signs of the Times,’ we have ample
verification of our exposition. After talking depreciatingly
of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing
philosophies, Carlyle comments upon the mechanical
nature of the reforming agencies of civilisation. The
intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind of
Socialism or Collectivism. He says: ‘Were we required
to characterise this age of ours by any single
epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical,
Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above{57}
all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery
in every outward and inward sense of that word…. Men
are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well
as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour,
and in natural force of any kind…. We
may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations
of our time: in its intellectual aspect, the studies it
most favours, and its manner of conducting them; in
its practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work;
in the whole sources, and throughout the whole current
of its spiritual, no less than its material, activity.’
With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life were discoverable,
not so much by the intellect as by the heart.
The man with the large heart, rather than the clear
head, saw furthest into the nature of things. The
history of German thought is strewn with the wreck of
systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition.
Schelling and Hegel showed the puerility to which great
men are driven when they started to construct science
out of their own intuitions, instead of patiently and
humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left
on record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip
of the scientific method, and was able to allow Carlyle’s
inspiration to play upon his mind without fear of harm;
but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from the
path of reason into the bogs of mysticism?

Carlyle’s impatience with reasoning and his determination
to follow the promptings of a priori conceptions{58}
gave his system of ethics a one-sided cast, and
made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his
day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come
to be known as Evolutionary Ethics. What is the
chief end of man considered as a moral agent? The
answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it
is comprehensive. Man’s duty consists in obeying the
laws of God revealed in Nature and in the Bible. But
apart from revelation, where is the basis of ethical
authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian
view, and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism,
Carlyle found refuge in the Fichtean and similar systems
of ethics. By substituting Blessedness for Happiness
as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured
to preserve the heroic attitude which was
associated with Supernaturalism. In his view, it was
more consistent with human dignity to trust for inspiration
to a light within than painfully to piece together
fragments of human experience and ponder the
inferences to be drawn therefrom.

In his ‘Data of Ethics,’ Herbert Spencer shows the
hollowness of Carlyle’s distinction between Blessedness
and Happiness. As Spencer puts it: ‘Obviously the
implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of Happiness,
and this implication at once suggests the question,
What mode of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness
at all, it is necessarily one of three states—painful,
indifferent, or pleasurable…. If the pleasurable{59}
states are in excess, then the blessed life can be
distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by
the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It
is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and
degree its end, and the assumption that blessedness is
not a form of happiness lapses…. In brief,
blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence
increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness
or other; and disappears utterly if we assume
that the actions called blessed are known to cause decrease
of happiness in others as well as in the actor.’

To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed
his critical method, by which he all but revolutionised
criticism as understood by his Edinburgh and London
contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with
the Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism
never lost its political bias. Apart from that, criticism
up till the time of Carlyle was mainly statical. The
critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon
the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences,
on the other defects, and when the two
columns were totalled the debtor and creditor side of
the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases
of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with
moral aberration, anything like a correct estimate was
impossible. The result was that in Scotland criticism
oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit and
the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh{60}
Reviewers could not afford to set the clergy at defiance,
they had to pay due respect to conventional
tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from
a different standpoint. He introduced into criticism
the dynamic principle which he found in the Germans,
particularly in Goethe. In contemplating a work of
Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of
seizing upon the creative spirit, what Hegel called the
Idea. The thought of Goethe and Hegel, though
differently expressed, resolves itself into the conception
of a life principle which shapes materials into
harmony with innate forms. In the sphere of life the
determining factors are the inner vitalities, which, however,
are susceptible to the environment. The critic
who would realise his ideal does not go about with
literary and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand
the spirit which animated the author as shewn in his
works and his life, and then studies the influence of his
environment. That this is a correct description of
Carlyle’s critical method is evidenced by his own remarks
in his essay on Burns. He says: ‘If an individual
is really of consequence enough to have his
life and character recorded for public remembrance,
we have always been of opinion that the public ought
to be made acquainted with all the springs and relations
of his character. How did the world and man’s
life from his particular position represent themselves
to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances{61}
modify him from without: how did he modify these
from within?’

This attention to the inner springs of character gives
the key to Carlyle’s critical work. How fruitful this
was is seen in his essay on Burns. He steered an
even course between the stern moralists, whose indignation
at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to
the genius of Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians,
who thought that by bidding defiance to the conventionalities
and moralities Burns proved his title to
the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly
with us in much spirituous devotion and rhymeless
doggerel at the return of each 25th of January. While
laying bare the springs of Burns’ genius, Carlyle, with
unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak
point in the poet’s moral nature. So faithfully did
Carlyle apply his critical method that he may
be considered to have said the final word about
Burns.

When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral
force he must have had in his mind the ethical tone
of Carlyle’s critical writing—a tone which had its roots
in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined,
not by isolated deviations from conventional or
even ethical standards, but by consideration of the
deep springs of character from which flow aspirations
and ideals. In his Heroes and Hero-Worship Carlyle
elaborates his critical theory thus: ‘On the whole, we{62}
make too much of faults; the details of the business
hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of
faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think,
might know better. Who is called there “the man
according to God’s own heart?” David, the Hebrew
King, had fallen into sins enough—blackest crimes—there
was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers
sneer and ask: Is this your man according
to God’s heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me
but a shallow one. What are faults? What are the
outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it,
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended
struggle of it, be forgotten?… The deadliest
sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness
of no sin: that is death…. David’s
life and history, as written for us in those Psalms
of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever
given of a man’s moral progress and warfare here
below.’

This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest
with a new and living interest large sections of
literary criticism. Burns, Johnson, Cromwell and
others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the
hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied
with the facile criticism of conventional reviewers, it
was a revelation to come into contact with a
writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind{63}
great inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical
outlook; it was like stepping out of a museum, or
a dissecting-room into the free, fresh, breezy air of
Nature.

Moreover, Carlyle’s interest in the soul is not of an
antiquarian nature; he studies his heroes as if they
were ancestors of the Carlyle family. He broods over
their letters as if they were the letters of his own flesh
and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings
of a pathos stricken kinsman rather than the
conscious reflections of a literary man. It is noteworthy
that Carlyle’s critical powers are limited by his
sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific
criticism, is largely influenced by the personal
equation. Face to face with writers like Scott and
Voltaire, he flounders in helpless incompetency. He
tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan
standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles,
no conscious devotion to heroic ends, no
introspective torturings, Carlyle sets himself to a process
of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle’s failure
in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the
ethical side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he
was false to his own principle of endeavouring to seize
the dominant idea. Because Scott and Voltaire were
not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt
with them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired
Goethe, but he certainly made no attempt to cultivate{64}
Goethe’s catholicity. Let us not fall into Carlyle’s
mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were
incompatible with his temperament. After all has
been said, English literature stands largely indebted
to Carlyle the critic.{65}

CHAPTER IV

LIFE IN LONDON

Mrs Carlyle entered heartily into her husband’s proposal
to remove to London. ‘Burn our ships!’ she
gaily said to him one day (i.e., dismantle our house);
‘carry all our furniture with us’; which they accordingly
did. ‘At sight of London,’ Carlyle wrote, ‘I
remember humming to myself a ballad-stanza of
“Johnnie o’ Braidislea,” which my dear old mother
used to sing,

Carlyle lodged at Ampton Street again; but presently
did ‘immense stretches of walking in search of
houses.’ He found his way to Chelsea and there
secured a small old-fashioned house at 5 (now numbered
24) Cheyne Row, at a rent of £35 a year.
Mrs Carlyle followed in a short time and approved of
his choice. They took possession on the 10th June
1834, and Carlyle recounts the ‘cheerful gipsy life’
they had there ‘among the litter and carpenters for
three incipient days.’ Leigh Hunt was in the next{66}
street ‘sending kind, unpractical messages,’ dropping
in to see them in the evenings.

When in London on a former occasion, Carlyle became
acquainted with John Stuart Mill, and the
intimacy was kept alive by correspondence to and
from Craigenputtock. It was through Mill’s letters
that Carlyle’s thoughts were turned towards the French
Revolution. When he returned to London, Mill was
very useful to him, lending him a fine collection of
books on that subject. Mill’s evenings in Cheyne Row
were ‘sensibly agreeable for most part,’ remarks Carlyle.
‘Talk rather wintry (“sawdustish,” as old
Sterling once called it), but always well-informed and
sincere.’ Carlyle was making rapid progress with the
first volume of his French Revolution. Stern necessity
gave a spurt to his pen, for in February 1835 he notes
that ‘some twenty-three months’ had passed since he
earned a single penny by the ‘craft of literature.’ The
volume was completed and he lent the only copy to
Mill. The MS. was unfortunately burnt by a servant-maid.
‘How well do I still remember,’ writes
Carlyle in his Reminiscences, ‘that night when he came
to tell us, pale as Hector’s ghost…. It was like half
sentence of death to us both, and we had to pretend to
take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was his horror at
it, and try to talk of other matters. He stayed three
mortal hours or so; his departure quite a relief to us.
Oh, the burst of sympathy my poor darling then gave{67}
me, flinging her arms round my neck, and openly
lamenting, condoling, and encouraging like a nobler
second self! Under heaven is nothing beautifuller.
We sat talking till late; ‘shall be written again,’ my
fixed word and resolution to her. Which proved to be
such a task as I never tried before or since. I wrote
out “Feast of Pikes” (Vol. II.), and then went at it.
Found it fairly impossible for about a fortnight; passed
three weeks (reading Marryat’s novels), tried, cautious-cautiously,
as on ice paper-thin, once more; and in
short had a job more like breaking my heart than any
other in my experience. Jeannie, alone of beings,
burnt like a steady lamp beside me. I forget how
much of money we still had. I think there was at first
something like £300, perhaps £280, to front London
with. Nor can I in the least remember where we had
gathered such a sum, except that it was our own, no
part of it borrowed or given us by anybody. “Fit to
last till French Revolution is ready!” and she had no
misgivings at all. Mill was penitently liberal; sent
me £200 (in a day or two), of which I kept £100
(actual cost of house while I had written burnt volume);
upon which he bought me “Biographie Universelle,”
which I got bound, and still have. Wish I could find
a way of getting the now much macerated, changed,
and fanaticised John Stuart Mill to take that £100
back; but I fear there is no way.’[15]{68}

Carlyle went diligently to work at the French Revolution.
Some conviction he had that the book was worth
something. Once or twice among the flood of equipages
at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon stroll,
he thought to himself, ‘Perhaps none of you could do
what I am at!’ But generally his feeling was, ‘I will
finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and
spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic Wildernesses,
far from human beggaries and basenesses!’ ‘This,’
he says, ‘had a kind of comfort to me; yet I always
knew too, in the background, that this would not practically
do. In short, my nervous system had got dreadfully
irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and
my desire was intense, beyond words, to have done
with it.’ Then he adds: ‘The last paragraph I well
remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room that
now is, which was then my writing-room; beside her
there in a grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon
after tea (perhaps); and thereupon, with her dear blessing
on me, going out to walk. I had said before going
out, “What they will do with this book, none knows,
my Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a two
hundred years, any book that came more truly from a
man’s very heart, and so let them trample it under foot
and hoof as they see best!” “Pooh, pooh! they cannot
trample that!” she would cheerily answer; for her
own approval (I think she had read always regularly
behind me) especially in Vol. III., was strong and{69}
decided.’ Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique
of critics could trample the French Revolution.

A month before the completion of the first book of
the French Revolution, Carlyle wrote in his journal:
‘My first friend Edward Irving is dead. I am friendless
here or as good as that.’ In a week or two thereafter
he met Southey, whom he describes as a ‘lean,
grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly
tall when he rises and still leaner then—the
shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small
carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high
crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement
pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen—a well-read,
honest, limited (straitlaced even), kindly-hearted, most
irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose
on either side, I imagine, to meet again.’[16] Later on
Carlyle admits to his brother John that his prospects
in London were not brightening; which fact left him
gloomy and morose.

During his enforced leisure after the destruction of
the first book of the French Revolution, Carlyle saw
more of his friends, among whom he numbered John
Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained
a clergyman. Sterling was of a ‘vehement but most
noble nature,’ and he was one of the few who had
studied Sartor Resartus seriously. He had been also
caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side.{70}
Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle
taught, Sterling recognised in him ‘a man not only
brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of
people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not
equivocate, that he would say always what he actually
thought, careless whether he pleased or offended.’ He
introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the
‘guiding genius’ of the Times, and who offered Carlyle
work there on the usual conditions. ‘Carlyle,’ says
Froude, ‘though with poverty at his door, and entire
penury visible in the near future, turned away from a
proposal which might have tempted men who had less
excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn
soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to
last was to truth, truth as it presented itself to his own
intellect and his own conscience.’

On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his
brother John: ‘I positively do not care that periodical
literature shuts her fist against me in these months.
Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil,
which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better
be brought to a crisis. There is perhaps a finger of
Providence in it…. My only new scheme, since last
letter, is a hypothesis—little more yet—about National
Education. The newspapers had an advertisement
about a Glasgow “Educational Association” which
wants a man that would found a Normal School, first
going over England and into Germany to get light on{71}
that matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar
off, enquiring who they were, what manner of man they
expected, testifying myself very friendly to their project,
and so forth—no answer as yet. It is likely they
will want, as Jane says, a “Chalmers and Welsh” kind
of character, in which case Va ben, felice notte. If otherwise,
and they (almost by miracle) had the heart, I am
the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox
in that circle, I shall not hear at all.’[17] Carlyle also
remarks, in the same letter, that John Stuart Mill is
very friendly: ‘He is the nearest approach to a real
man that I find here—nay, as far as negativeness goes,
he is that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory
much farther.’

Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. ‘I
did not expect much,’ he said in a letter, ‘but got
mostly what I expected. The old man has a fine
shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a
long Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of
sincerity in his speech. But for prolixity, thinness,
endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had
heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much,
but also essentially a small, genuine man.’

Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old
home. His mother-in-law had arrived on a visit at
Cheyne Row, and remained there with her daughter
during Carlyle’s absence in Scotland. He returned{72}
improved in health and spirits. Nothing came of the
National Education scheme. Carlyle was not a person
to push himself into notice, remarks Froude; and his
friends did not exert themselves for him, or they tried
and failed; ‘governments, in fact, do not look out for
servants among men who are speculating about the
nature of the Universe. Then, as always, the doors
leading into regular employment remained closed.’
Shortly after his return from the North, he was offered
the editorship of a newspaper at Lichfield. This was
unaccepted for the same reason that weighed with him
when he refused a post on the Times. In the following
summer money matters had become so pressing
that Carlyle wrote the article on Mirabeau, now printed
among the Miscellanies, for Mill’s review, which brought
him £50. Mrs Carlyle’s health began to suffer, and a
visit to Annandale became imperative. She returned
‘mended in spirits.’ Writing of her arrival in London,
she said: ‘I had my luggage put on the backs of two
porters, and walked on to Cheapside, when I presently
found a Chelsea omnibus. By-and-bye the omnibus
stopped, and amid cries of “No room, sir; can’t get
in,” Carlyle’s face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed
white hat, gazed in at the door like the
peri “who, at the gate of heaven, stood disconsolate.”
In hurrying along the Strand, his eye had lighted
on my trunk packed on the top of the omnibus, and
had recognised it. This seems to me one of the{73}
most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever
manifested.’

On the 22nd of January 1837 Carlyle wrote to his
mother: ‘The book [French Revolution] is actually
done; all written to the last line; and now, after
much higgling and maffling, the printers have got
fairly afloat, and we are to go on with the wind and
the sea.’ But no money could be expected from the
book for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Miss
Harriet Martineau (who had introduced herself into
Cheyne Row), and Miss Wilson, another accomplished
friend, thought that Carlyle should begin a course of
lectures in London, and thereby raise a little money.
Carlyle, it seems, gave ‘a grumbling consent.’ Nothing
daunted, the ladies found two hundred persons ready
each to subscribe a guinea to hear a course of lectures
from him. The end of it was that he delivered six
discourses on German literature, which were ‘excellent
in themselves, and delivered with strange impressiveness,’
and £135 went into his purse.

In the summer the French Revolution appeared.
The sale at first was slow, almost nothing, for it was
not ‘subscribed for’ among the booksellers. Alluding
to the criticisms which appeared, Carlyle said: ‘Some
condemn me, as is very natural, for affectation; others
are hearty, even passionate, in their estimation; on the
whole, it strikes me as not unlikely that the book may
take some hold of the English people, and do them{74}
and itself a little good.’ He was right. Other historians
have described the Revolution: Carlyle reproduces
the Revolution. He approaches history like a
dramatist. Give him, as in the French Revolution,
a weird, tragic, awe-inspiring theme, and he will
utilise his characters, scenes, and circumstances in
artistic subordination to the central idea. Carlyle
might be called a subjective dramatist—that is to say,
his own spirit, thoughts, and reflections get so mixed
up with the history that it is difficult to imagine the one
without the other. Every now and then the dramatist
interrupts the tragedy to interject his own reflections;
in the history the Carlylean philosophy plays the part
of a Greek chorus. As an example of Carlyle’s genius
for a dramatic situation, take his opening of the great
drama with the death scene of Louis XV. Who does
not feel, in reading that scene, as if the Furies were
not far off? who does not detect in the grotesque
jostling of the comedy and tragedy of life premonitions
of the coming storm?

‘But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching
at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable!
Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace
walls or lifeguards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram
of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is
here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it.
Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and
scenic show, at length becomest a reality; sumptuous{75}
Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void
Immensity: Time is done, and all the scaffolding
of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round
thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must
thou enter, naked, all unking’d, and await what is
appointed thee!… There are nods and sagacious
glances, go-betweens, silk dowagers mysteriously gliding,
with smiles for this constellation, sighs for that:
there is tremor, of hope or desperation, in several
hearts. There is the pale, grinning Shadow of Death,
ceremoniously ushered along by another grinning
Shadow, of Etiquette; at intervals the growl of Chapel
Organs, like prayer by machinery; proclaiming, as in
a kind of horrid diabolic horse-laughter, Vanity of
vanities, all is Vanity!‘

At every stage in the narrative, the reader is impressed
with the dramatic texture of Carlyle’s mind.
No dramatic writer surpasses him in the art of producing
effects by contrasts. In the midst of a vigorous
description of the storming of the Bastille, he rings
down the curtain for a moment in order to introduce
the following scene of idyllic beauty: ‘O evening sun
of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women
spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent
main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where
high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now
dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;—and{76}
also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel-de-Ville!’

Equally effective is Carlyle in rendering vivid the
doings of the individual actors in the drama. For
photographic minuteness and startling realism what
can equal the following:—’But see Camille Desmoulins,
from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline
in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol!
He springs to a table: the police satellites are eyeing
him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him
alive. This time he speaks without stammering:—Friends!
shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep
hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where
is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is
come, the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man;
when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed;
and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever.
Let such hour be well-come! Us, meseems, one cry
only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal
France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound
only: To arms!—”To arms!” yell responsive the
innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a
Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed,
all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or
fitter words does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers,
in this great moment—”Friends,” continues Camille,
“some rallying-sign! Cockades; green ones—the
colour of Hope!”—As with the flight of locusts,{77}
these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring
shops: all green things are snatched, and
made cockades of. Camille descends from his table;
“stifled with embraces, wetted with tears;” has a bit of
green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And
now to Curtius’ Image-shop there; to the Boulevards;
to the four winds, and rest not till France be on fire!’

As a historical work, the French Revolution is
unique. It is precisely the kind of book Isaiah
would have written had there been a like Revolution in
the Jewish kingdom; and just as we go to Isaiah, not
for sociological guidance, but for ethical inspiration, so
we turn to the French Revolution when the mind and
heart are in a state of torpor in order to get a series of
shocks from the Carlylean electric battery. From a
historian a student expects light as well as heat,
guidance as well as inspiration. It is not enough to
have the great French explosion vividly photographed
before his eyes; it is equally necessary to know the
causes which led to the catastrophe. Here, as a
historian, Carlyle is conspicuously weak. His habit of
looking for dramatic situations, his passion for making
commonplace incidents and commonplace men merely
the satellites of commanding personalities, in a word,
his theory that history should deal with the doings
of great men, prevents Carlyle from dwelling upon the
politico-economic side of national life. So absorbed is
he in painting the Revolution, that he forgets to explain{78}
the Revolution. We have abundance of vague declamations
against shams in high places, plenty of talk
about God’s judgments, in the style of the Hebrew
prophets, but of patient diagnosis, there is none. As
Mr Morley puts it in his luminous essay on Carlyle:
‘To the question whether mankind gained or lost by
the French Revolution, Carlyle nowhere gives a clear
answer; indeed, on this subject more than any other,
he clings closely to his favourite method of simple
presentation, streaked with dramatic irony…. He
draws its general moral lesson from the Revolution,
and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns
from King to Church that imposture must come to an
end. But for the precise amount and kind of dissolution
which the West owes to it, for the political meaning
of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic
significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the
subject, nor even evidence of consciousness that such
word is needed.’ Had Carlyle, in addition to his
genius as a historical dramatist, possessed the patient
diagnosing power of the writers and thinkers whom he
derided, his French Revolution would have taken its
place in historical literature as an epoch-making book.
As it stands, the reader who desires to have an intelligible
knowledge of the subject, is compelled to shake
himself free of the Carlylean mesmerism, and have
recourse to those writers whom Carlyle, under the
opprobrious names of ‘logic-choppers’ and ‘dry-as-dusts,’
held up to public ridicule.{79}

CHAPTER V

HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS—LITERARY WORK

Carlyle was so broken down with his efforts upon the
French Revolution that a trip to Annandale became
necessary. He stayed at Scotsbrig two months,
‘wholly idle, reading novels, smoking pipes in the
garden with his mother, hearing notices of his book
from a distance, but not looking for them or caring
about them.’ Autumn brought Carlyle back to Cheyne
Row, when he found his wife in better health, delighted
to have him again at her side. She knew, as
Froude points out, though Carlyle, so little vain was
he, had failed as yet to understand it, that he had
returned to a changed position, that he was no longer
lonely and neglected, but had taken his natural place
among the great writers of his day. He sent bright
accounts of himself to Scotsbrig. ‘I find John Sterling
here, and many friends, all kinder each than the
other to me. With talk and locomotion the days pass
cheerfully till I rest and gird myself together again.
They make a great talk about the book, which seems
to have succeeded in a far higher degree than I looked{80}
for. Everybody is astonished at every other body’s
being pleased with this wonderful performance.’[18]

Carlyle did nothing all the winter except to write
his essay on Sir Walter Scott. His next task was to
prepare for a second course of lectures in the spring
on ‘Heroes.’ The course ended with ‘a blaze of fire-works—people
weeping at the passionately earnest tone
in which for once they heard themselves addressed.’
The effort brought Carlyle £300 after all expenses
had been paid. ‘A great blessing,’ he remarked, ‘to
a man that had been haunted by the squalid spectre
of beggary.’

Carlyle had no intention of visiting Scotland that
autumn, but having received a pressing invitation from
old friends at Kirkcaldy, he took steamer to Leith in
August. While at Kirkcaldy he crossed to Edinburgh
and called on Jeffrey. ‘He sat,’ says Carlyle, ‘waiting
for me at Moray Place. We talked long in the style
of literary and philosophic clitter-clatter. Finally it
was settled that I should go out to dinner with him
at Craigcrook, and not return to Fife till the morrow.’
They dined and abstained from contradicting each
other, Carlyle admitting that Jeffrey was becoming an
amiable old fribble, ‘very cheerful, very heartless, very
forgettable and tolerable.’

On his return to London, equal to work again,
Carlyle found all well. He was gratified to hear that{81}
the eighth edition of the French Revolution was almost
sold, and that another would be called for, while there
were numerous applications from review editors for
articles if he would please to supply them. Mill about
this time asked him to contribute a paper on Cromwell
to the London and Westminster Review. Carlyle agreed,
and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were
broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr
Robertson to manage the Review. Robertson coolly
wrote to say that he need not go on with the article,
‘for he meant to do Cromwell himself.’ Carlyle was
wroth, and that incident determined him to ‘throw
himself seriously into the history of the Commonwealth,
and to expose himself no more to cavalier treatment from
“able editors.”‘ But for that task he required books.
Then it was that the idea of founding a London library
occurred to him. Men of position took up the matter
warmly, and Carlyle’s object was accomplished. ‘Let
the tens of thousands,’ says Mr Froude, ‘who, it is to
be hoped, “are made better and wiser” by the books
collected there, remember that they owe the privilege
entirely to Carlyle.’

One of Carlyle’s new acquaintances was Monckton
Milnes, who asked him to breakfast. Carlyle used to
say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes would
ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking
of the ‘good things’ that Christ had said. He also
became familiar with Mr Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton,{82}
and his accomplished wife, who in course of
time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle
household. It would not tend to edification to dwell
upon the domestic misunderstandings at Cheyne Row;
besides, are not they to be found detailed at great
length in Froude’s Life, the Reminiscences, and Letters
and Memorials? Although Carlyle was taking life
somewhat easy, he was making preparations for his third
course of lectures, his subject being the ‘Revolutions
of Modern Europe.’ They did not please the lecturer,
but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he
made a clear gain of £200.

About this time Emerson was pressing him to go
to Boston on a lecturing tour. But Carlyle thought
better of it. More important work awaited him in
London. ‘All his life,’ says Froude, ‘he had been
meditating on the problem of the working-man’s existence
in this country at the present epoch….
He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had
heard his father talk of the poor masons, dining silently
upon water and water-cresses. His letters are full of
reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as the
humour might be. He was himself a working-man’s
son. He had been bred in a peasant home, and all
his sympathies were with his own class. He was not
a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be
no remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper
misery. But the fact remained, portending frightful{83}
issues. The Reform Bill was to have mended matters
but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were
none the happier. The power of the State had been
shifted from the aristocracy to the mill-owners, and
merchants, and shopkeepers. That was all. The
handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking,
rather, into an unowned Arab, to whom “freedom”
meant freedom to work if the employer had work to
offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom to
starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was
the Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and
he felt that he must put his thoughts upon it in a permanent
form. He had no faith in political remedies,
in extended suffrages, recognition of “the rights of
man,” etc.—absolutely none. That was the road on
which the French had gone; and, if tried in England,
it would end as it ended with them—in anarchy, and
hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the
forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing
now to flat denial, that they owed any duty to
those under them beyond the payment of contract
wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as
formulated in Political Economy, was that every one
should attend exclusively to his own interests, and that
the best of all possible worlds would be the certain
result. His own conviction was that the result would
be the worst of all possible worlds, a world in which{84}
human life, such a life as human beings ought to live,
would become impossible.’[19]

He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over:
“Guess what immediate project I am on; that of
writing an article on the working-classes for the
“Quarterly.” It is verily so. I offered to do the
thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt
a kind of call and monition of duty to do it, wrote
to Lockhart accordingly, was altogether invitingly
answered, had a long interview with the man yesterday,
found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kindness,
and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on
the matter. Am to get books from him to-morrow,
and so shall forthwith set about telling the Conservatives
a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights,
and mights of the working order of men.”

When the annual exodus from London came, the
Carlyles went north for a holiday. They returned
much refreshed at the end of two months. His presence,
moreover, was required in London, as Wilhelm
Meister was now to be republished. He set about
finishing his article for the “Quarterly,” but as he progressed
he felt some misgiving as to its ever appearing
in that magazine. “I have finished,” he wrote on
November 8, 1839, “a long review article, thick
pamphlet, or little volume, entitled “Chartism.” Lockhart
has it, for it was partly promised to him; at least{85}
the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all
he will enjoy of it.” Lockhart sent it back, ‘seemingly
not without reluctance,’ saying he dared not. Mill was
shown the pamphlet and was ‘unexpectedly delighted
with it.’ He was willing to publish it, but Carlyle’s
wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good
for a magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it,
and before the close of the year Chartism was in the
hands of the public.

The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies
being sold immediately. ‘Chartism,’ Froude narrates,
was loudly noticed: “considerable reviewing, but
very daft reviewing.” Men wondered; how could
they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident
power stripped bare the social disease, told them that
their remedies were quack remedies, and their progress
was progress to dissolution? The Liberal journals,
finding their “formulas” disbelieved in, clamoured that
Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in
sheep’s clothing. Yet what he said was true, and
could not be denied to be true. “They approve
generally,” he said, “but regret very much that I am a
Tory. Stranger Tory, in my opinion, has not been
fallen in with in these later generations.” Again a few
weeks later (February 11): “The people are beginning
to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no! but one
of the deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the
Radicals now extant in the world—a thing productive{86}
of small comfort to several persons. They have said,
and they will say, and let them say.”

His final course of lectures now confronted him,
and these he entitled Heroes and Hero Worship. He
tells his mother (May 26, 1840): ‘The lecturing business
went off with sufficient éclat. The course was
generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to
be the bad best I have yet given. On the last day—Friday
last—I went to speak of Cromwell with a head
full of air; you know that wretched physical feeling; I
had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five,
etc. It is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would
hardly wag at all when I got done. Yet the good
people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds of
testimonies of goodwill…. In a word, we got right
handsomely through.’ That was Carlyle’s last appearance
as a public lecturer. He was now the observed
of all observers in London society; but he was weary
of lionising and junketings. ‘What,’ he notes in his
journal on June 15, 1840, ‘are lords coming to call on
one and fill one’s head with whims? They ask you to
go among champagne, bright glitter, semi-poisonous
excitements which you do not like even for the moment,
and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White
said of whisky, “Keep it—Deevil a ever I’se better
than when there’s no a drop on’t i’ my weam.” So say
I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism—Keep it;
give it to those that like it.’{87}

Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits
from Tennyson. Here is what he says of the poet:
‘A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured,
shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and
easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great
composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos
and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does
emerge—a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.’

In a note to his brother John on September 11,
1840, he says: ‘I have again some notions towards
writing a book—let us see what comes of that. It is
the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.’ The
book he had in view was Cromwell. Journalising on
the day after Christmas he laments—’Oliver Cromwell
will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about
that subject some four months ago. I learn almost
nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to
write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to
begin.’

At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote: ‘Carlyle
is reading voraciously, preparatory to writing a new
book. For the rest, he growls away much in the old
style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his
growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for
one.’ A month or two later, Carlyle writes: ‘Think
not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In the mutual misery
we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to
one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little{88}
better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at
dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a
saying of yours. “When the wife has influenza, it is a
slight cold—when the man has it, it is, &c., &c.”‘ Writing
to Sterling he exclaims, ‘I shall verily fly to Craigenputtock
again before long. Yet I know what solitude
is, and imprisonment among black cattle and peat
bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are.
“Oh, the devil burn it”! said the Irish drummer
flogging his countryman; “there’s no pleasing of you,
strike where one will.”‘

Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the
bleak expanse of Craigenputtock, to accompany him to
his father’s house at Fryston, in Yorkshire, whence
he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters to
Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to
Dumfriesshire to see his mother, who had been slightly
ailing. He was back in London, however, in May,
but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot
summer, and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took
a cottage at Newby, close to Annan. By the end of
September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His
latest hero still troubled him. ‘Ought I,’ he asks, ‘to
write now of Oliver Cromwell?… I cannot yet see
clearly.’

Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish
professorship, but the ‘door had been shut in his face,’
sometimes contemptuously. He was now famous, and{89}
the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his
lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever
might be the opinions of the authorities and patrons,
they for their part must consider lectures such as these
a good exchange for what was provided for them. A
‘History Chair’ was about to be established. A party
of them, represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a
requisition to the Faculty of Advocates to appoint
Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated,
Carlyle replied: ‘Accept my kind thanks, you and all
your associates, for your zeal to serve me…. Ten
years ago such an invitation might perhaps have been
decisive of much for me, but it is too late now; too
late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you
with at present.’

A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who
received news from Templand that her mother had
been struck by apoplexy, and was dangerously ill.
Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first train
from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle’s
house there she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle
lay ill in Liverpool, unable to stir. After a while she
was able to go back to London, where Carlyle joined
her in the month of May. It was on his return journey
that he paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he
had an opportunity, under his host’s genial guidance,
to explore the field of Naseby.

His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts{90}
they suggested, made Carlyle disinclined for society.
He had a room arranged for him at the top of his
house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books
on Cromwell, ‘the sight of Naseby having brought the
subject back out of “the abysses.”‘ Meanwhile he
had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr Stephen Spring
Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote
vivid descriptions.

On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal:
‘For many months there has been no writing here.
Alas! what was there to write? About myself, nothing;
or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word
to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings
of work are even more formidable than the
executing of it.’ But another subject was to engross
his attention for a little while. The distress of the
poor became intense; less in London, however, than
in other large towns. ‘I declare,’ he wrote to his mother
early in January 1843, ‘I declare I begin to feel as if
I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I should
perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them
are not expecting—we shall see if this book were
done.’ On the 20th he wrote: ‘I hope it will be
a rather useful kind of book.’ He could not go on
with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. ‘The
look of the world,’ he said, ‘is really quite oppressive
to me. Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living
on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the land{91}
all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the
while! It is a thing no man with a speaking tongue
in his head is entitled to be silent about.’ The outcome
of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was Past
and Present, which appeared at the beginning of April.
The reviewers set to work, ‘wondering, admiring,
blaming, chiefly the last.’

Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in
order to visit Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which
made the Oliver enterprise no longer impossible. He
found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs Carlyle
writing on November 28th, describes him as ‘over head
and ears in Cromwell,’ and ‘lost to humanity for the
time being.’ Six months later, he makes this admission
in his journal—’My progress in “Cromwell” is frightful.
I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions
that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than
I can muster on most days, and I sit not so much working
as painfully looking on work.’ Four months later,
when Cromwell was progressing slowly, Carlyle suffered
a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling.
‘Sterling,’ says Froude, ‘had been his spiritual pupil,
his first, and also his noblest and best. Consumption
had set its fatal mark upon him.’ Carlyle drowned
his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 the end of
Cromwell was coming definitely in sight. In his journal
under date August 26th, is to be found this entry: ‘I
have this moment ended Oliver; hang it! He is ended,{92}
thrums and all. I have nothing more to write on the
subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any
more) up to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic
litter, hatefuller to me than most. I am to have a swept
floor now again.’ And thus the herculean labours of
five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scotland,
and he made his way northwards by the usual
sea route to Annan and Scotsbrig. He did not remain
long away, and upon his return Cromwell was just
issuing from the press. It was received with great
favour, the sale was rapid, and additional materials
came from unexpected quarters. In February 1846 a
new edition was needed in order to insert fresh letters
of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said
‘requiring one’s most excellent talent, as of shoe-cobbling,
really that kind of talent carried to a high
pitch.’ When completed, Carlyle presented a copy of
it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he
never took before or after with any of his writings,—a
compliment which Peel gracefully acknowledged.

Carlyle’s plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit
to his mother and a run across to Ireland. Charles
Gavan Duffy of the Nation newspaper saw him in
London in consequence of what he had written in
Chartism about misgovernment in Ireland. He had
promised to go over and see what the ‘Young Ireland’
movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left
Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where{93}
he was to have been met by John Mitchel and Gavan
Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He missed his two
friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried
on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum,
and was there entertained at a large dinner-party.
Next day he dined at Mitchel’s. His stay was remarkably
short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the
early morning of September 10th ‘he was sitting smoking
a cigar before the door of his wife’s uncle’s house
in Liverpool till the household should awake and let
him in.’

In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying
visit from Jeffrey. ‘A much more interesting visitor
than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who came down to
us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I
think, five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meeting.
The good old man is grown white-headed, but is
otherwise wonderfully little altered—grave, deliberate,
very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of
soft energy; full of interest still for all serious things,
full of real kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth
in a fair measure. He sate with us an hour and a
half, went away with our blessings and affections. It is
long since I have spoken to so good and really pious-hearted
and beautiful old man.’ In a week or two
Chalmers was suddenly called away. ‘I believe,’ wrote
Carlyle to his mother, ‘there is not in all Scotland, or
all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long
be memorable to us, the little visit we had from him.’{94}

Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament,
and the fate of it doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron
Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to write a pamphlet in
its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum
which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired
how he answered. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I had to tell him
it couldn’t be; but I observed, too, that I could not
conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed
to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be
seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.’ Froude asked
what the Baron said to that. ‘Why,’ said Carlyle, ‘he
seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious
business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc.’

On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal:
‘Chapman’s money [Chapman & Hall were his publishers]
all paid, lodged now in the Dumfries Bank.
New edition of “Sartor” to be wanted soon. My poor
books of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating
annual income; at all events, I am quite at my ease
as to money, and that on such low terms. I often
wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some
£1500, I think, is what has accumulated in the bank.
Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock) £150 a year.
Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid
the huge fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was
£800: the year before, £100; the year before that,
about £700; this year, again, it is like to be £100;
the next perhaps nothing—very fluctuating indeed)—some{95}
£300 in all, and that amply suffices me. For
my wife is the best of housewives; noble, too, in reference
to the property, which is hers, which she has never
once in the most distant way seemed to know to be
hers. Be this noted and remembered; my thrifty little
lady—every inch a lady—ah me! In short, I authentically
feel indifferent to money; would not go this
way or that to gain more money.’[20]

The Revolution of February 24th at Paris surprised
Carlyle less than most of his contemporaries, as it confirmed
what he had been saying for years. He did
not believe, we are told, in immediate convulsion in
England; but he did believe that, unless England took
warning and mended her ways, her turn would come.
The excitement in London was intense, and leading
men expressed themselves freely, but Carlyle’s general
thoughts were uttered in a lengthy letter to Thomas
Erskine of Linlathen, for whom he entertained a warm
regard. On March 14 he met Macaulay at Lord
Mahon’s at breakfast; ‘Niagara of eloquent commonplace
talk,’ he says, ‘from Macaulay. “Very good-natured
man”; man cased in official mail of proof;
stood my impatient fire-explosions with much patience,
merely hissing a little steam up, and continued his
Niagara—supply and demand; power ruinous to powerful
himself; impossibility of Government doing more
than keep the peace; suicidal distraction of new French{96}
Republic, etc. Essentially irremediable, commonplace
nature of the man; all that was in him now gone to
the tongue; a squat, thickset, low-browed, short, grizzled
little man of fifty.’

One of the few men Carlyle was anxious to see
was Sir Robert Peel. He was introduced by the
Barings at a dinner at Bath House. Carlyle sat next
to Peel, whom he describes as ‘a finely-made man of
strong, not heavy, rather of elegant, stature; stands
straight, head slightly thrown back, and eyelids modestly
drooping; every way mild and gentle, yet with
less of that fixed smile than the portraits give him.
He is towards sixty, and, though not broken at all,
carries, especially in his complexion, when you are
near him, marks of that age; clear, strong blue eyes
which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low-toned,
something of cooing in it, rustic, affectionate,
honest, mildly persuasive. Spoke about French Revolutions
new and old; well read in all that; had seen
General Dumouriez; reserved seemingly by nature,
obtrudes nothing of diplomatic reserve. On the contrary,
a vein of mild fun in him, real sensibility to the
ludicrous, which feature I liked best of all…. I
consider him by far our first public man—which, indeed,
is saying little—and hope that England in these
frightful times may still get some good of him. N.B.—This
night with Peel was the night in which Berlin city
executed its last terrible battle, (19th of March to{97}
Sunday morning the 20th, five o’clock.) While we sate
there the streets of Berlin city were all blazing with grape-shot
and the war of enraged men. What is to become
of all that? I have a book to write about it. Alas!
We hear of a great Chartist petition to be presented
by 200,000 men. People here keep up their foolish
levity in speaking of these things; but considerate
persons find them to be very grave; and indeed all,
even the laughers, are in considerable secret alarm.’[21]

At such a time Carlyle knew that he, the author of
Chartism, ought to say something. Foolish people,
too, came pressing for his opinions. Not seeing his
way to a book upon ‘Democracy,’ he wrote a good
many newspaper articles, chiefly in the Examiner and
the Spectator, to deliver his soul. Even Fonblanque
and Rintoul (the editors), remarks Froude, friendly
though they were to him, could not allow him his full
swing. ‘There is no established journal,’ complained
Carlyle, ‘that can stand my articles, no single one they
would not blow the bottom out of.’

On July 12 occurs this entry in his journal: ‘Chartist
concern, and Irish Repeal concern, and French
Republic concern have all gone a bad way since the
March entry—April 20 (immortal day already dead),
day of Chartist monster petition; 200,000 special
constables swore themselves in, etc., and Chartism
came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders all{98}
lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc.,
and so ends Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel,
poor fellow! is now in Bermuda as a felon; letter from
him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord Clarendon—was
really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help?
French Republic cannonaded by General Cavaignac; a
sad outlook there.’[22]

Carlyle’s Cromwell had created a set of enthusiastic
admirers who were bent on having a statue of the
great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked to give his
sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he
said: ‘The people having subscribed £25,000 for a
memorial to an ugly bullock of a Hudson, who did not
even pretend to have any merit except that of being
suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little
other than at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow,
I think they ought to leave Cromwell alone of their
memorials, and try to honour him in some more profitable
way—by learning to be honest men like him, for
example. But we shall see what comes of all this
Cromwell work—a thing not without value either.’[23]

‘Ireland,’ says Froude, ‘of all the topics on which
Carlyle had meditated writing, remained painfully fascinating.
He had looked at the beggarly scene, he
had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of the
wretched race who were suffering for other’s sins as{99}
well as for their own. Since that brief visit of his, the
famine had been followed by the famine-fever, and the
flight of millions from a land which was smitten with a
curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had
dined at Dundrum were working as felons in the docks
at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy, after a near escape from
the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row; and
the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by
crowbars, and shivering families, turned out of their
miserable homes, dying in the ditches by the roadside,
had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was furious
at the economical commonplaces with which England
was consoling itself. He regarded Ireland as “the breaking-point
of the huge suppuration which all British and
all European society then was.”‘[24] Carlyle paid a second
visit to Ireland. He was anxious to write a book on
the subject. He noted down what he had seen, and
‘then dismissed the unhappy subject from his mind,’
giving his manuscript to a friend, which was published
after his death.

The 7th of August found Carlyle among his ‘ain
folk’ at Scotsbrig, and this was his soliloquy: ‘Thank
Heaven for the sight of real human industry, with
human fruits from it, once more. The sight of fenced
fields, weeded crops, and human creatures with whole
clothes on their back—it was as if one had got into
spring water out of dunghill puddles.’ Mrs Carlyle{100}
had also gone to Scotland, and ‘wandered like a
returned spirit about the home of her childhood.’ Of
her numerous lively letters, room must be found for
a characteristic epistle to her brother-in-law, John
Carlyle. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was just
out, and her uncle’s family at Auchtertool Manse, in
Fife, where she was staying, were busy reading and
discussing it. ‘We had been talking about you,’
she says, ‘and had sunk silent. Suddenly my uncle
turned his head to me and said, shaking it gravely,
“He has made an awesome plooster o’ that place.”
“Who? What place, uncle?” “Whew! the place
ye’ll maybe gang to, if ye dinna tak’ care.” I really
believe he considers all those circles of your invention.
Walter [a cousin, just ordained] performed the marriage
service over a couple of colliers the day after I came.
I happened to be in his study when they came in, and
asked leave to remain. The man was a good-looking
man enough, dreadfully agitated, partly with the business
he was come on, partly with drink. He had
evidently taken a glass too much to keep his heart up.
The girl had one very large inflamed eye and one
little one, which looked perfectly composed, while the
large eye stared wildly, and had a tear in it. Walter
married them very well indeed; and his affecting words,
together with the bridegroom’s pale, excited face, and
the bride’s ugliness, and the poverty, penury, and want
imprinted on the whole business, and above all fellow-feeling{101}
with the poor wretches then rushing on their
fate—all that so overcame me that I fell crying as
desperately as if I had been getting married to the
collier myself, and, when the ceremony was over, extended
my hand to the unfortunates, and actually (in
such an enthusiasm of pity did I find myself) I presented
the new husband with a snuff-box which I
happened to have in my hand, being just about presenting
it to Walter when the creatures came in. This
unexpected Himmelsendung finished turning the man’s
head; he wrung my hand over and over, leaving his
mark for some hours after, and ended his grateful
speeches with, “Oh, Miss! Oh, Liddy! may ye
hae mair comfort and pleasure in your life than ever
you have had yet!” which might easily be.’

Carlyle was full of wrath at what he considered
the cant about the condition of the wage-earners
in Manchester and elsewhere, and his indignation
found vent in the Latter-day Pamphlets. Froude
once asked him if he had ever thought of going
into Parliament, for the former knew that the opportunity
must have been offered him. ‘Well,’ he said,
‘I did think of it at the time of the “Latter-day
Pamphlets.” I felt that nothing could prevent me from
getting up in the House and saying all that.’ ‘He
was powerful,’ adds Froude, ‘but he was not powerful
enough to have discharged with his single voice the
vast volume of conventional electricity with which the{102}
collective wisdom of the nation was, and remains
charged. It is better that his thoughts should have
been committed to enduring print, where they remain
to be reviewed hereafter by the light of fact.’[25]

The printing of the Pamphlets commenced at the
beginning of 1850, and went on month after month,
each separately published, no magazine daring to
become responsible for them. When the Pamphlets
appeared, they were received with ‘astonished indignation.’
‘Carlyle taken to whisky,’ was the popular
impression—or perhaps he had gone mad. ‘Punch,’
says Froude, ‘the most friendly to him of all the
London periodicals, protested affectionately. The
delinquent was brought up for trial before him, I think
for injuring his reputation. He was admonished, but
stood impenitent, and even “called the worthy magistrate
a windbag and a sham.” I suppose it was
Thackeray who wrote this; or some other kind
friend, who feared, like Emerson, “that the world
would turn its back on him.” He was under no illusion
himself as to the effect which he was producing.’[26]

Amid the general storm, Carlyle was ‘agreeably
surprised’ to receive an invitation to dine with Peel
at Whitehall Gardens, where he met a select company.
‘After all the servants but the butler were gone,’
narrates Carlyle, ‘we began to hear a little of Peel’s{103}
quiet talk across the table, unimportant, distinguished
by its sense of the ludicrous shining through a strong
official rationality and even seriousness of temper.
Distracted address of a letter from somebody to Queen
Victoria; “The most noble George Victoria, Queen of
England, Knight and Baronet,” or something like that.
A man had once written to Peel himself, while
secretary, “that he was weary of life, that if any
gentleman wanted for his park-woods a hermit, he,
etc.”, all of which was very pretty and human as Peel
gave it us.’[27] Carlyle was driven home by the Bishop
of Oxford, ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, whom he had
probably met before at the Ashburton’s. The Bishop
once told Froude that he considered Carlyle a most
eminently religious man. ‘Ah, Sam,’ said Carlyle to
Froude one day, ‘he is a very clever fellow; I do not
hate him near as much as I fear I ought to do.’
Carlyle and Peel met once more, at Bath House,
and there, too, he was first introduced to the Duke of
Wellington. Writing at the time, Carlyle said: ‘I
had never seen till now how beautiful, and what an
expression of graceful simplicity, veracity, and nobleness
there is about the old hero when you see him close
at hand…. Except for Dr Chalmers, I have not for
many years seen so beautiful an old man.’

Carlyle intended, some time or other, writing a
‘Life of Sterling,’ but meanwhile he accepted an invitation{104}
to visit South Wales. Thence he made his way
to Scotsbrig. On the 27th September 1850, he ‘parted
sorrowfully with his mother.’ When he reached London,
the autumn quarterlies were reviewing the Pamphlets,
and the ‘shrieking tone was considerably modified.’
‘A review of them,’ says Froude, ‘by Masson in the
North British distinctly pleased Carlyle. A review in
the Dublin he found “excellently serious,” and conjectured
that it came from some Anglican pervert or
convert. It was written, I believe, by Dr Ward.’

After a few more wanderings, Carlyle set about the
Life of Sterling, and on April 5, 1851, he informs his
mother: ‘I told the Doctor about “John Sterling’s
Life,” a small, insignificant book or pamphlet I have
been writing. The booksellers got it away from me the
other morning, to see how much there is of it, in the
first place. I know not altogether myself whether it is
worth printing or not, but rather think it will be the end
of it whether or not. It has cost little trouble, and need
not do much ill, if it do no great amount of good.’
Another visit had to be paid to Scotsbrig, where he
read the “Life of Chalmers.” ‘An excellent Christian
man,’ he said. ‘About as great a contrast to himself
in all ways as could be found in these epochs under
the same sky.’

When he got back to Cheyne Row, he took to reading
the “Seven Years’ War,” with a view to another
book. He determined to go to Germany, and on August{105}
30, 1852, Carlyle embarked ‘on board the greasy little
wretch of a Leith steamer, laden to the water’s edge
with pig-iron and herrings.’ The journey over, he set
to work on ‘Frederick,’ but was driven almost to
despair by the cock-crowing in his neighbourhood.
Writing to Mrs Carlyle, he says: ‘I foresee in general
these cocks will require to be abolished, entirely
silenced, whether we build the new room or not. I
would cheerfully shoot them, and pay the price if
discovered, but I have no gun, should be unsafe
for hitting, and indeed seldom see the wretched
animals.’

He took refuge at the Ashburton’s house, the
Grange, but on the 20th of December, news came
that his mother was seriously ill, and could not last
long. He hurried off to Scotsbrig, and reached there
in time to see her once more alive. In his journal,
this passage is to be found under date January
8, 1854: ‘The stroke has fallen. My dear old
mother is gone from me, and in the winter of the
year, confusedly under darkness of weather and of
mind, the stern final epoch—epoch of old age—is
beginning to unfold itself for me…. It is
matter of perennial thankfulness to me, and beyond
my desert in that matter very far, that I found my dear
old mother still alive; able to recognise me with a
faint joy; her former self still strangely visible there in
all its lineaments, though worn to the uttermost thread.{106}
The brave old mother and the good, whom to lose had
been my fear ever since intelligence awoke in me in
this world, arrived now at the final bourn…. She
was about 84 years of age, and could not with advantage
to any side remain with us longer. Surely it was
a good Power that gave us such a mother; and good
though stern that took her away from amid such grief
and labour by a death beautiful to one’s thoughts.
“All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my
change come.” This they heard her muttering, and
many other less frequent pious texts and passages.
Amen, Amen! Sunday, December 25, 1853—a day
henceforth for ever memorable to me…. To live for
the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the
simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone:
that would be a right learning from her death, and a
right honouring of her memory. But alas all is yet
frozen within me; even as it is without me at present,
and I have made little or no way. God be helpful to
me! I myself am very weak, confused, fatigued,
entangled in poor worldlinesses too. Newspaper paragraphs,
even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not
indifferent to me. Weak soul! and I am fifty-eight
years old, and the tasks I have on hand, Frederick,
&c., are most ungainly, incongruous with my mood—and
the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which
for her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother
Jack! Will he do his Dante now? For him also I am{107}
sad; and surely he has deserved gratitude in these last
years from us all.’[28]

When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict
seclusion, making repeated efforts at work on what he
called ‘the unexecutable book,’ Frederick. In the
spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death of
Professor Wilson. Between them there had never
been any cordial relation, says Froude. ‘They had
met in Edinburgh in the old days; on Carlyle’s part
there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not
unconscious of Carlyle’s extraordinary powers. But he
had been shy of Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it,
and now this April the news came that Wilson was
gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. ‘I knew
his figure well,’ wrote Carlyle in his journal on April
29; ‘remember well first seeing him in Princes Street
on a bright April afternoon—probably 1814—exactly
forty years ago…. A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous
blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste
towards some distant object, strode rapidly along,
clearing the press to the left of us, close by the
railings, near where Blackwood’s shop now is. Westward
he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell
whispered me, “That is Wilson of the Isle of Palms,”
which poem I had not read, being then quite mathematical,
scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now
see them to have been. The broad-shouldered stately{108}
bulk of the man struck me; his flashing eye, copious,
dishevelled head of hair, and rapid, unconcerned progress,
like that of a plough through stubble. I really
liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no
more of him. It must have been fourteen years later
before I once saw his figure again, and began to have
some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal
kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better
and more familiarly acquainted; but though I liked
much in him, and he somewhat in me, it would not do.
He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have
a feeling I should—could—not become wholly his,
in which he was right, and that on other terms he
could not have me; so we let it so remain, and for many
years—indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh—I had
no acquaintance with him; occasionally got symptoms
of his ill-humour with me—ink-spurts in Blackwood,
read or heard of, which I, in a surly, silent manner,
strove to consider flattering rather…. So far as I
can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely
Bank, with a testimonial, poor fellow!), and I once
in his, De Quincey, &c., a little while one afternoon.’[29]

On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his
journal: ‘”The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.”‘ What a fearful word! I
cannot find how to take up that miserable “Frederick,”{109}
or what on earth to do with it.’ He worked hard at it,
nevertheless, for eighteen months, and by the end of
May 1858, the first instalment was all in type. Froude
remarks that a fine critic once said to him that Carlyle’s
Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; certainly as distinct a personality
as exists in English fiction. Carlyle made a
second journey to Germany. Shortly after his return,
the already finished volumes of Frederick appeared, and
they met with an immediate welcome. The success
was great; 2000 copies were sold at the first issue, and
a second 2000 were disposed of almost as rapidly, and
a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle’s health being unsatisfactory,
Carlyle took a house for the summer at
Humbie, near Aberdour in Fife. They returned to
Cheyne Row in October, neither of them benefited by
their holiday in the north.

While many of Carlyle’s intimate friends were passing
away, he formed Ruskin’s acquaintance, which
turned out mutually satisfactory. On the 23rd April
1861, Carlyle writes to his brother John: ‘Friday last I
was persuaded—in fact had unwarily compelled myself,
as it were—to a lecture of Ruskin’s at the Institution,
Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological,
pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed
house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The
lecture was thought to “break down,” and indeed it
quite did “as a lecture“; but only did from embarras{110}
des richesses—a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder
as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which
were manifold, curious, genial; and, in fact, I do not
recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing
I liked so well as this chaotic one.’[30]

Frederick was progressing, though slowly, as he
found the ore in the German material at his disposal
“nowhere smelted out of it.” The third volume was
finished and published in the summer of 1862; the
fourth volume was getting into type; and the fifth and
last was finished in January 1865. ‘It nearly killed
me,’ Carlyle writes in his journal, ‘it, and my poor
Jane’s dreadful illness, now happily over. No sympathy
could be found on earth for those horrid
struggles of twelve years, nor happily was any needed.
On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865)
I walked out, with the multiplex feeling—joy not
very prominent in it, but a kind of solemn thankfulness
traceable, that I had written the last sentence
of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many
forebodings in bad hours, had actually got done with
it for ever.’

In England it was at once admitted, says Froude,
that a splendid addition had been made to the national
literature. ‘The book contained, if nothing else, a
gallery of historical figures executed with a skill which
placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters….{111}
No critic, after the completion of Frederick,
challenged Carlyle’s right to a place beside the greatest
of English authors, past or present.’ The work was
translated instantly into German, calling forth the
warmest appreciation.{112}

CHAPTER VI

RECTORIAL ADDRESS—DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE

After a round of holiday visits, including one to
Annandale, the Carlyles settled down once more at
Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865. ‘The great
outward event of Carlyle’s own life,’ observes Froude,
‘Scotland’s public recognition of him, was now lying
close ahead. This his wife was to live to witness as
her final happiness in this world.’ Here is an eloquent
passage from the same pen: ‘I had been at Edinburgh,’
writes Froude, ‘and had heard Gladstone make
his great oration on Homer there, on retiring from
office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never
recognised before what oratory could do; the audience
being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension,
bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said
which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards;
but the voice was like enchantment, and the
street, when we left the building, was ringing with a
prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there
was not a man whose views on all subjects, in heaven
and earth, less resembled Gladstone’s than those of{113}
the man whom this same applauding multitude elected
to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were
ignorant how wide the contradiction was; but if they
had been aware of it they need not have acted differently.
Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had
risen from among them—not by birth or favour, not on
the ladder of any established profession, but only by
the internal force that was in him—to the highest
place as a modern man of letters. In Frederick he
had given the finish to his reputation; he stood now
at the summit of his fame; and the Edinburgh students
desired to mark their admiration in some signal way.
He had been mentioned before, but he had declined
to be nominated, for a party only were then in his
favour. On this occasion, the students were unanimous,
or nearly so. His own consent was all that was wanting.’[31]
This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was
chosen Rector of Edinburgh University. But the
Address troubled him. He resolved, however, as his
father used to say, to ‘gar himself go through with the
thing,’ or at least to try. Froude says he was very
miserable, but that Mrs Carlyle ‘kept up his spirits,
made fun of his fears, bantered him, encouraged him,
herself at heart as much alarmed as he was, but conscious,
too, of the ridiculous side of it.’ She thought
of accompanying him, but her health would not permit
of the effort. Both Huxley and Tyndall were going{114}
down, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to take care
of her husband.

On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866,
Carlyle and his wife parted. ‘The last I saw of her,’
he said, ‘was as she stood with her back to the parlour
door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she
me once, I her a second time.’ They parted for ever.

Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what
happened there had best be told by an eye-witness,
Professor Masson. ‘On the night following Carlyle’s
arrival in town,’ he says, ‘after he had settled himself
in Mr Erskine of Linlathen’s house, where he was to
stay during his visit, he and his brother John came to
my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they might have
a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with
me an hour or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as
could be, talking most pleasantly, a little dubious,
indeed, as to how he might get through his Address,
but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself,
when the old man stood up in the Music Hall before
the assembled crowd, and threw off his Rectorial robes,
and proceeded to speak, slowly, connectedly, and nobly
raising his left hand at the end of each section or paragraph
to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated
what he was to say next, the crowd listening as they
had never listened to a speaker before, and reverent
even in those parts of the hall where he was least
audible,—who that was present will ever forget that{115}
sight? That day, and on the subsequent days of his
stay, there were, of course, dinners and other gatherings
in Carlyle’s honour. One such dinner, followed
by a larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then,
too, he was in the best of possible spirits, courteous in
manner and in speech to all, and throwing himself
heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner-table,
I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one
or two of his humorous songs or recitatives, including
his clever quiz called “Stuart Mill on Mind and
Matter,” written to the tune of “Roy’s wife of Aldivalloch.”
No one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle;
and he surprised me by doing what I had never heard
him do before,—actually joining with his own voice in
the chorus. “Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart
Mill on Mind and Matter,” he chaunted laughingly
along with Lord Neaves every time the chorus came
round, beating time in the air emphatically with his
fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch
as the affair was more ceremonious and stately,
at the dinner given to him in the Douglas Hotel by
the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend
Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while
dignified and serene, Carlyle was thoroughly sympathetic
and convivial. Especially I remember how
he relished and applauded the songs of our academic
laureate and matchless chief in such things, Professor
Douglas Maclagan, and how, before we broke up, he{116}
expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on having
“contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening.”‘[32]

The most graphic account of Carlyle’s installation as
Lord Rector is that by Alexander Smith, the author of
‘A Life Drama,’ ‘Summer in Skye,’ &c., &c., whose
lamented death took place a few months after that event.
‘Curious stories,’ he wrote, ‘are told of the eagerness
on every side manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country
clergymen from beyond Aberdeen came to Edinburgh
for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen
came down from London by train the night before, and
returned to London by train the night after. Nay, it
was even said that an enthusiast, dwelling in the remote
west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who had charge
of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved
for him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh.
Let us hope a ticket was reserved. On the
day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were
besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived;
and loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd,
one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street,
towards the “lang toun of Kirkcaldy,” dimly seen beyond
the Forth; for on the sands there, in the early
years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed
to pace up and down solitarily, and “as if the sands
were his own,” people say, who remember, when they
were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift-gestured,{117}
squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy,
too, … came young Carlyle from Edinburgh
College, wildly in love with German and mathematics;
and the schoolroom in which these men taught,
although incorporated in Provost Swan’s manufactory,
is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed
these fifty years—an act of hero-worship for which the
present and other generations may be thankful. It
seemed to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking
of that noble friendship—of the David and Jonathan
of so many years agone—was the best preparation for
the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear.
David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell
on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity; and
David sang his funeral song: “But for him I had
never known what the communion of man with man
means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human
soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on
the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough,
found in this world, or now hope to find.”

‘In a very few minutes after the doors were opened,
the large hall was filled in every part; and when up
the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector,
the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen
advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous
and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair,
of course; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord
Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen{118}
had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the
Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour
had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet
lost the country bronze which he brought up with
him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years
ago. His long residence in London had not touched
his Annandale look, nor had it—as we soon learned—touched
his Annandale accent. His countenance was
striking, homely, sincere, truthful—the countenance of
a man on whom “the burden of the unintelligible
world” had weighed more heavily than on most. His
hair was yet almost dark; his moustache and short
beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy,
sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at
times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect
there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of
unhewn granite, which had never been polished to
any approved pattern, whose natural and original
vitality had never been tampered with. In a word,
there seemed no passivity about Mr Carlyle; he
was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass;
he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon—a
man to set his mark on the world—a man on
whom the world could not set its mark…. The
proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of
LL.D. on Mr Erskine of Linlathen—an old friend of
Mr Carlyle’s—on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and
Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That{119}
done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically
waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial
robe—which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to
him—advanced to the table, and began to speak in
low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance
with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale
accent with which his play-fellows must have been
familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable
to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh
and London life could not impair, even in the
slightest degree, that. The opening sentences were lost
in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive,
quavering voice was heard going on: “Your enthusiasm
towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved
it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling
honourable to all men, and one well known to myself
when in a position analogous to your own.” And then
came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching
reminiscence and sigh over old graves—Father’s and
Mother’s, Edward Irving’s, John Sterling’s, Charles
Buller’s, and all the noble known in past time—and
with its flash of melancholy scorn. “There are now fifty-six
years gone, last November, since I first entered your
city, a boy of not quite fourteen—fifty-six years ago—to
attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I
knew not what—with feelings of wonder and awe-struck
expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this
is what we have come to…. There is something{120}
touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful,
to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old
native land, rising up, and saying: Well, you are not
altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You
have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and
have had many judges.” And thereafter, without aid
of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same
wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a
touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in
upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine,
the old man talked to his vast audience about the
origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and
Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence
of silence as compared with speech, the value of
courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance
of taking care of one’s health. “There is no kind of
achievement you could make in the world that is equal
to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions?
The French financier said, ‘Alas! why is there no
sleep to be sold?’ Sleep was not in the market at
any quotation.” But what need of quoting a speech
which by this time has been read by everybody?
Appraise it as you please, it was a thing per se. Just
as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the
Murex; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East;
so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened
to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It
may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there{121}
is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of
article is kept in stock.’[33]

Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says:
‘When Carlyle sat down there was an audible sound,
as of breath long held, by all present; then a cry from
the students, an exultation; they rose up, all arose,
waving their arms excitedly; some pressed forward, as
if wishing to embrace him, or to clasp his knees; others
were weeping; what had been heard that day was more
than could be reported; it was the ineffable spirit that
went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the
ages stored up in it, and deep answered unto deep.’

Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall
telegraphed to Mrs Carlyle this brief message, ‘A
perfect triumph.’ That evening she dined at Forster’s,
where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They
drank Carlyle’s health, and to her it was ‘a good joy.’
It was Carlyle’s intention to have returned at once to
London, but he changed his mind, and went for a few
quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in
London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the
rectorial address from him, and was made perfectly
happy about it.

Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs
Carlyle, and for Saturday, April 21st, she had arranged
a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote her daily
letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in{122}
her brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with
her. When near Victoria Gate, Hyde Park, she put
the dog out to run. ‘A passing carriage,’ says
Froude, ‘went over its foot…. She sprang out,
caught the dog in her arms, took it with her into the
brougham, and was never more seen alive. The
coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch
down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and
round again. Coming a second time near to the
Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions,
he turned round, saw indistinctly that something was
wrong, and asked a gentleman near to look into the
carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take the
lady to St. George’s Hospital, which was not 200 yards
distant. She was sitting with her hands folded in her
lap dead.’[34]

At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the
‘green solitudes and fresh spring breezes’ of Annandale,
‘quietly but far from happily.’ About nine
o’clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken,
broke the news to him. ‘I was sitting in sister Jean’s
at Dumfries,’ Carlyle wrote a fortnight after, ‘thinking
of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday, and
perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig
two weeks or so before, when the fatal telegrams, two
of them in succession, came. It had a kind of stunning
effect upon me. Not for above two days could I{123}
estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite
sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and in a
moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin.
They took me out next day to wander, as was medically
needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and
ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation,
“My poor little woman!” but no full gust of
tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it
ever? A stony “Woe’s me, woe’s me!” sometimes
with infinite tenderness and pity, not for myself, is my
habitual mood hitherto.’[35]

On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John
set off for London. On the Wednesday he was on his
way to Haddington with the remains, his brother and
John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday
the funeral took place. ‘In the nave of the old
Abbey Kirk,’ wrote her disconsolate husband, ‘long a
ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the
skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little
Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine
on me more.’ When Mr Conway saw him on his
return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, ‘Whatever
triumph there may have been in that now so darkly
overcast day, was indeed hers. Long, long years ago,
she took her place by the side of a poor man of
humblest condition, against all other provisions for
her, undertook to share his lot for weal or woe; and{124}
in that office what she has been to him and done for
him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him
and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now
only in the knowledge of one man, and will presently
be finally hid in his grave.’ As he touchingly expressed
it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the ‘light of his
life’ had assuredly ‘gone out.’ Universal sympathy
was felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very
much affected by ‘a delicate, graceful, and even affectionate’
message from the Queen, conveyed by Lady
Augusta Stanley through his brother John.

One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks
of her: ‘Her intellect was as clear and incisive as his,
yet altogether womanly in character; her heart was as
truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a
wife in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She
had a gift of literary expression as unique as his;
as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and need;
as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and
folly; as vivid powers of description and illustration;
and also, it must be confessed, when the spirit of
mockery was strong upon her, as keen an edge to her
flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of
the conventional proprieties. But she was no literary
hermaphrodite. She never intellectually strode forth
before the world upon masculine stilts; nor, in private
life, did she frowardly push to the front, in the vanity
of showing she was as clever and considerable as her{125}
husband. She longed, with a true woman’s longing
heart, to be appreciated by him, and by those she
loved; and, for her, all extraneous applause might
whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king
in literature, so might she have been a queen. Her
influence with him for good cannot be questioned by
any one having eyes to discern. And if she sacrificed
her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to
make his work possible for him, who shall say she did
not choose the nobler and better part?’[36]

On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and
when domestic differences arose he abstained from
paying those little attentions which a delicate and
sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband
who was so lavish of terms of endearment in
the letters he wrote to her when away from her side.
‘Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,’
observes Mrs Ireland, ‘the intercourse was mainly
composed of a silent sitting by the fireside of an
evening in the old “houseplace,” with a tranquillising
pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long
rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative
silence; and now and then, at meeting or parting, some
pious and earnest words from the good soul to her son.’[37]
And it never occurred to Carlyle to act differently with
his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition{126}
to all that, we have Froude’s brief but accurate diagnosis
of Carlyle’s character. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘matters
went well with himself, it never occurred to him that
they could be going ill with any one else; and, on
the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required
everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.’

There was a strong element of selfishness in that
phase of Carlyle’s nature; and throughout his letters
and journal he appears wholly wrapt up in himself and
in his literary projects, without even a passing allusion
to the courageous woman who had shared his lot.
Now and again we alight upon a passage where special
mention is made of her efforts, but these have all a
direct or indirect bearing upon his work, his plans, his
comforts.[38]

Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been
to him until she was suddenly snatched from his side.
And this was his testimony: ‘I say deliberately, her{127}
part in the stern battle, and except myself none knows
how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.’ In
one of those terrible moments of self-upbraiding the
grief-stricken husband exclaims: ‘Blind and deaf that
we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait
not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds
and idle dissonances of the moment, and all be at last
so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late!’

In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have
a pathetic picture of Carlyle in his lonely old age.
A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a visit to
this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle.

In conversation the grave-digger said: ‘Mr Carlyle
comes here from London now and then to see this
grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind of old man,
looking very old the last time he was here.’ ‘He is
eighty-six now,’ said I. ‘Ay,’ he repeated, ‘eighty-six,
and comes here to this grave all the way from London.’
And I told him that Carlyle was a great man, the
greatest man of the age in books, and that his name
was known all over the world; but he thought there
were other great men lying near at hand, though
I told him their fame did not reach beyond the
graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle.
‘Mr Carlyle himself,’ said the gravedigger softly, ‘is
to be brought here to be buried with his wife. Ay, he
comes here lonesome and alone,’ continued the gravedigger,
‘when he visits the wife’s grave. His niece{128}
keeps him company to the gate, but he leaves her
there, and she stays there for him. The last time he
was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed down
under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that
ruined wall of the old cathedral, and round there and
in here by the gateway, and he tottered up here to
this spot.’ Softly spake the gravedigger, and paused.
Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he
proceeded:—”And he stood here awhile in the grass,
and then he kneeled down and stayed on his knees at
the grave; then he bent over and I saw him kiss the
ground—ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept
kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and
tottered out of the cathedral, and wandered through
the graveyard to the gate, where his niece was waiting
for him.” This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle,
and engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in
the chancel of Haddington Church:—

{129}

CHAPTER VII

LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE

In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of
Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter
into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales
the old man’s blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his
wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower,
was anxious that they should live together, but it was
otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and
Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was
prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and
on his return to London he wrote, ‘My home is very
gaunt and lonesome; but such is my allotment henceforth
in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant
circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.’

Carlyle’s first public appearance after his sore bereavement
was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest
against Governor Eyre’s recall. ‘Poor Eyre!’ he
wrote to a correspondent, ‘I am heartily sorry for him,
and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal
fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from
£6000 a year into almost zero, and has a large family{130}
and needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward
for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary
mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.’

Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with
the Ashburtons at Mentone, and on the 22nd of
December he started thither with Professor Tyndall.
He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals
made some progress with his Reminiscences. He returned
to London in March, and on the 4th of April
1867 he writes in his journal: ‘Idle! Idle! My employments
mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling
on the days that culminated on the 21st of last year.’
About this time his thoughts were directed to the
estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became absolute
owner at his wife’s death. All her relations on the
father’s side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it
ought not to lapse to his own family, he determined to
leave it to the University of Edinburgh, ‘the rents of
it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious
students there, under the title of “the John Welsh
Bursaries.” Her name he could not give, because she
had taken his own. Therefore he gave her father’s.’

On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: ‘Finished
off on Thursday last, at three p.m. 20th of June, my
poor bequest of Craigenputtock to Edinburgh University
for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and
Froude as witnesses; the good Professor Masson, who
had taken endless pains, alike friendly and wise, being{131}
at the very last objected to in the character of “witness,”
as “a party interested,” said the Edinburgh
lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance; so I
think did Masson secretly. He read us the deed with
sonorous emphasis, bringing every word and note of it
home to us. Then I signed; then they two—Masson
witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply
moved, as I well might be, but held my peace and
shed no tears. Tears I think I have done with;
never, except for moments together, have I wept for
that catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of
weeping would have been in other times a blessed
relief…. This is my poor “Sweetheart Abbey,”
“Cor Dulce,” or New Abbey, a sacred casket and
tomb for the sweetest “heart” which, in this bad, bitter
world, was all my own. Darling, darling! and in a
little while we shall both be at rest, and the Great God
will have done with us what was His will.’[39]

When the Tories were preparing to ‘dish the
Whigs’ over the Reform Bill, Carlyle felt impelled to
write a pamphlet, which he called Shooting Niagara,
and After. It was his final utterance on British
politics. Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of
his works engrossed his attention for some time. He
went annually to Scotland, and devoted a great deal of
time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and
annotating of his wife’s letters.{132}

Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through
Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with
Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster
Deanery: ‘The Queen,’ Carlyle said, ‘was really very
gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose
greatly in my esteem by everything that happened; did
not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very
mournful to me; the one point of real interest, a
sombre thought: “Alas! how would it have cheered
her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been
there!”‘

When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end,
he—in June 1871—brought to Mr Froude’s house a
large parcel of papers. ‘He put it in my hands,’ says
Froude. ‘He told me to take it simply and absolutely
as my own, without reference to any other person or
persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was
gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that
it was an account of his wife’s history, that it was
incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion
whether it ought to be published or not, that he could
do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He
wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I
must publish it, the whole, or part—or else destroy it
all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to
do.’[40]

Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own{133}
and his wife’s private papers, journals, correspondence,
reminiscences, and other documents. ‘Take them,’ he
said to Froude, ‘and do what you can with them. All
I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any
affection for me, the more you burn the better.’ Mr
Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he
did not, for a year before his death he desired him,
when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his
niece. ‘The new task which had been laid upon me,’
writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, ‘complicated
the problem of the “Letters and Memorials.” My
first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite
instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of
Mrs Carlyle’s letters with his own correspondence in
an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and
touching the dangerous places only so far as was
unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the
greatest part of “the first forty years” of his life. The
evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it
was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into
the straighter and better course.’ The outcome of it
all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here.

In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred
upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the
great Frederick had himself founded. He could not
refuse it, but he remarked, ‘Were it ever so well meant,
it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither
ill na gude.’ Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, then{134}
Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath
along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined
both.

Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with
a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and
with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he
valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter
of three or four lines to the Times, which he explains to
his brother in this fashion: ‘After much urgency and
with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877]
got issued through the Times a small indispensable deliverance
on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy,
it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest
in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new
war for the Turk against all mankind; and this letter
hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest
speculations on that side.’

Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the
Bible, ‘the significance of which’ he found ‘deep and
wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.’ The
Bible and Shakespeare remained ‘the best books’ to
him that were ever written.

The death of his brother John was a severe shock
to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each
other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the
University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a
handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage
poor students. ‘These two brothers,’ Froude remarks,{135}
‘born in a peasant’s home in Annandale, owing little
themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed
discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland’s
chief University what Scotland’s peers and merchants,
with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour,
had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.’

In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm;
in January he was visibly sinking; and on the 5th of
February 1881, he passed away in his eighty-fifth year.
In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried
him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own
people.

At his death Carlyle’s fame was at its zenith. A
revulsion of feeling was caused by the publication of
Froude’s Life of Carlyle and the Reminiscences. In
regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was created
by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by
Froude. Was Froude justified in presenting to the
public Carlyle in all grim realism? The answer to
this depends upon one’s notions of literary ethics. The
view of the average biographer is that he must suppress
faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is
that the majority of biographies are simply expanded
funeral sermons; instead of a life-like portrait we have
a glorified mummy. Boswell’s Johnson stands at the
head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the conventional
method, his book would long since have passed
into obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froude{136}
has not overdone the sombre elements in Carlyle’s life.
Readers of Professor Masson’s little book, which shows
Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good
reason to suspect that Froude has given too much
emphasis to the Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle’s
life. In the main, however, Froude’s conception of
biography was more correct than that of his critics.
In dealing with the reputation of a great man it is not
enough to consider the feelings of contemporaries;
regard should be had to the rights of posterity. In
his usual forcible manner Johnson goes to the heart
of this question when he says in the Rambler:—’If
the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and
makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is
danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his
tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to
conceal, if not to invent. There are many who think
it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their
friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their
detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters
adorned with uniform panegyric and not to be known
from one another, but by extrinsic and casual circumstances.
If we have regard to the memory of the dead,
there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to
virtue, and to truth.’ When Johnson’s own biography
came to be written, Boswell, in spite of the expostulation
of friends, resolved to be guided closely by the
literary ethics of his great hero. In reply to Hannah{137}
More who begged that he would mitigate some of the
asperities of Johnson, Boswell said, ‘he would not
cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody.’

Some critics have insinuated that Froude took a
curious kind of pleasure in smirching the idol. The
insinuation is as unworthy as it is false. Froude had
resolved to paint Carlyle as he was, warts and all, and
all that can be said is that in his anxiety to avoid the
charge of idealism he has given the warts undue
prominence.{138}

CHAPTER VIII

CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER

In his essay on Carlyle, Mr John Morley utters a protest
against the habit of labelling great men with names.
After making every allowance for the waywardness of
the men of intuitive and poetic insight, it remains true
that between the speculative and the practical sides of
a great thinker’s mind there is a potent, though subtle,
connection. For those who take the trouble of searching,
there is discoverable such a connection between
the speculative ideas of Carlyle and his practical outlook
upon civilisation. Given a thinker who lays stress
upon the emotional side of progress, and we have a
thinker who will take for heroes men of mystical
tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a thinker
who will value progress not by the increase of worldly
comfort, but by the increase in the number of magnetic,
epoch-making personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle
remark that the history of the world is at bottom the
history of its great men.

Carlyle’s fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told
banefully upon his work in sociology. Trusting to his{139}
inner light, to what we might call Mystical Quakerism,
Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of progress.
Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of
the patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose
emotions find outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like
the prophets of old, Carlyle tends towards Pessimism.
His golden age is in the past. When Past and Present
appeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the
style and spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social
reformer. As an attempt to solve the social problem,
Past and Present is not a success. Carlyle could do
no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of
the feudal period, when the people were led by the
aristocracy. It showed considerable audacity on
Carlyle’s part to come to the interpretation of history
with no theory of progress, no message to the world
beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations
will be turned into hell which forget God. Of what
value is such writing as this, taken from the introduction
to his Cromwell?:—’Here of our own land and
lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once
more, who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring
laid to heart that an Almighty Justice does verily rule
this world, that it is good to fight on God’s side, and
bad to fight on the Devil’s side! The essence of all
heroism and veracities that have been or will be.’ This
is simply a reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas;
indeed, except for the details, Carlyle might as readily{140}
have written a life of Moses as of Cromwell. In
the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to
Bunyan, a kind of pilgrim’s progress; only in the
Carlylean creed it is all battle and no victory, all
Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain.
Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action,
where individual reason is depreciated, progress is
associated with the rise of abnormal individualities,
men of strong wills like Cromwell and Frederick.
With Rousseau, Carlyle appears to look upon civilisation
as a disease. In one of his essays, Characteristics,
he goes near the Roussean idea when he declaims
against self-consciousness, and deliberately gives a
preference to instinct. The uses of great men are
to lead humanity away from introspection back to
energetic, rude, instinctive action. When humanity
will not listen to the voice of the prophets, it must be
treated to whip and scorpion. It never dawned upon
Carlyle that the highest life, individual and collective,
has roots in physical laws, that politico-economic forces
must be reckoned with before social harmony can be
reached.

Just as Carlyle’s Idealism drove him into opposition
to the utilitarian theory of morals, so it drove him into
opposition to the utilitarian theory of society. Out of
his idealistic way of looking upon life there flowed a
curious result. As early as Sartor Resartus we find
Carlyle anticipating the evolutionary conception of{141}
society. Spencer has familiarised us with the idea
that society is an organism. The idea which he
received from the Germans that Nature is not a mere
mechanical collection of atoms, but the materialised
expression of a spiritual unity—that idea Carlyle
extended to society. As he puts it in Sartor Resartus:
‘Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living
indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image
that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature
were not…. Noteworthy also, and serviceable for
the progress of this same individual, wilt thou find his
subdivisions into Generations. Generations are as the
Days of toilsome Mankind; Death and Birth are the
vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to
sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement.
What the Father has made, the Son can make and
enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him.
Thus all things wax and roll onwards…. Find mankind
where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement,
in progress faster or slower; the Phœnix soars
aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with
her music; or as now, she sinks, and with spheral
swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she may soar
the higher and sing the clearer.’

Philosophies of civilisation have a tendency to beget
Fatalism. Bent upon watching the resistless play of
general laws, philosophers, in their admiration of the
products, are apt to ignore the frightful suffering and{142}
waste involved in the process. Society being an
organism, a thing of development, the duty of thinkers
is to demonstrate the nature of sociological laws, and
allow them free scope for operation. To this is due
much of the apparent hardness of Eighteenth Century
political speculation, which, beginning with the French
Physiocratic School, culminated in the works of Adam
Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and the two Mills. With
those thinkers, the one palpable lesson of the past
was the duty of abstaining from interference with the
general process of social development. Give man
liberty, said the Utilitarian Radicals, and he will
work out his own salvation: from the play of individual
self-interest, social harmony will result.

Carlyle is frequently thought of as a Conservative
force in politics. In some respects he was more
Radical than the Benthams and the Mills. His
deeper ideal conception of society intensified his dissatisfaction
with society as it existed. In fact, to
Carlyle’s attack upon those institutions, beliefs and
ceremonies which had no better basis than mere
unreasoning authority, most of the Radicalism of the
early ‘forties’ was due. Conceive what effect language
like this must have had upon thoughtful, high-souled
young men: ‘Call ye that a Society, where
there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so
much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of
a common overcrowded Lodging-house? Where each,{143}
isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his
neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries “Mine!”
and calls it Peace because, in the cut-purse and cut-throat
Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger
sort, can be employed? Where Friendship,
Communion, has become an incredible tradition; and
your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern
Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest
has no tongue but for plate-licking; and your high
Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all hands
hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez faire; leave
us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than
darkness; eat your wages and sleep. Thus, too, must
an observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spectacle:
the Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered
Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork; the Rich,
still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth.
The Highest in rank, at length, without
honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with a little mouth-honour,
as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in
the bill. Once sacred Symbols fluttering as empty
Pageants, whereof men grudge even the expense; a
World becoming dismantled: in one word, the
CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy;
the STATE shrunken into a Police-Office,
straitened to get its pay!’

It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle’s
Idealistic Radicalism parted company with Utilitarian{144}
Radicalism. Failing to see that society was
in a transition period, a period so well described by
Herbert Spencer as the movement from Militarism to
Industrialism, in which there was a severe conflict of
ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought for the
remedy in a return to a form of society which had
been outgrown. There was surely something pathetically
absurd in the spectacle of a great teacher endeavouring
to cure social and political diseases by
preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time
when the intellect of the day was parting company
with theocratic conceptions. Equally absurd was it
to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism
of ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering
from the effects of previous despotism. Equally irrelevant
was the attempt in Past and Present to get reformers
to model modern institutions on those of the
Middle Ages. Carlyle’s remedy for the evils of liberty
was a return to the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle,
in fact, forgot his conception of society as a developing
organism; he endeavoured to arrest progress at the
autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws
of progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic
ideas. Still, the value of Carlyle’s political writings
should not be overlooked. The Utilitarian Radicals
laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual
superstition. They worshipped human nature as a
fetish. Lacking clear views of social evolution, they{145}
overlooked the relativity of political terms. Ignorant
of the conception of human nature to which Spencer
has accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as
a constant quantity which only needed liberty for its
proper development. In their eagerness to discard
theology, they discarded the truth of man’s depravity
which finds expression in the creed of the Churches.
We have changed all that. We now realise the fact
that political institutions are good or bad, not as they
stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a
rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or conflict
with existing phases of human nature.

If in the sphere of industrialism Carlyle as a guide
is untrustworthy, great is his merit as an inspirer. His
influence was needed to counteract the cold prosaic
narrowness of the Utilitarian teaching. He called
attention to an aspect of the economic question which
the Utilitarian Radicals ignored, namely, the inadequacy
of self-interest as a social bond. To Carlyle is
largely due the higher ethical conceptions and quickened
sympathies which now exist in the spheres of
social and industrial relationships. Unhappily his implicit
faith in intuitionalism led him to deride political
economy and everything pertaining to man’s material
life. Much there was in the writings of the economists
to call for severe criticism, and if Carlyle had treated
the subject with discrimination he would have been a
power for good; but he chose to pour the vials of his{146}
contempt upon political economy as a science, and
upon modern industrial arrangements, with the result
that many of the most intelligent students of sociology
have been repelled from his writings. In this respect
he contrasts very unfavourably with Mill, who, notwithstanding
the temptations to intellectual arrogance from
his one-sided training, with quite a chivalrous regard
for truth, was ever ready to accept light and leading
from thinkers who differed from him in temperament
and methods. There may be conflicting opinions
as to which of the two men was intellectually
the greater, but there can be no doubt that Mill
dwelt in an atmosphere of intellectual serenity and
nobility far removed from the foggy turbulence in
which Carlyle lived, moved, and had his being.
Between the saintly apostle of Progress and the
barbaric representative of Reaction there was a great
gulf fixed.

As was natural, the Latter-day Pamphlets were
treated as a series of political ravings. For that
estimate Carlyle himself was largely responsible. He
deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers
by the violence of his invective and the lack of discrimination
in his abuse. Much of what Carlyle said
is to be found in Mill’s Representative Government,
said, too, in a quiet, rational style, which commands
attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle,
was a believer in mob rule. He did not think that{147}
the highest wisdom was to be had by the counting of
heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not deem
it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies.
They suggested remedies on the lines of these tendencies.
They did not try to put back the hands on the clock of
time; they sought to remove perturbing influences.
Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by
political methods what should not be done by these
methods. Carlyle’s idea that Government should do
this, that, and the other thing has wrought mischief, inasmuch
as it has led to an undue belief in the virtues
of Government interference. His writings are largely
responsible for the evils he predicted.

It is curious to notice how, with all his belief in
individualism, Carlyle, in political matters, was unconsciously
driven in the direction of socialism. Get
your great man, worship him, and render him obedience—such
was the Carlylean recipe for modern diseases.
Suppose the great man found, how is he to proceed?
In these democratic days, he can only proceed by
ruling despotically with the popular consent; in other
words, there will follow a regime of paternalism and
fraternalism, the practical outcome of which would be
Socialism. Carlyle himself never suspected how childish
was his conception of national life. He wrote of his
Great Man theory as if it was a discovery, whereas the
most advanced races had long since passed through it,
and those which were not advanced were precisely{148}
those which had not been able to shake themselves
free of paternal despotism. On this point the criticism
of the late Professor Minto goes to the heart of the
matter: ‘Carlyle’s doctrines are the first suggestions of
an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity.
As a rule, with no exception, that is worth naming, they
take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too
impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for
the wisdom and experience of others to submit to be
corrected: opposition rather confirmed him in his own
opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already
been made before, and judged impracticable upon
grounds which he could not, or would not, understand.
His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were
in full operation under the despotism of Henry VII.
and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which
means in practice an accidentally good and able man
in a series of indifferent or bad despots, had been more
frequently tried than any other political system; Asia
at this moment contains no government that is not
despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge
are also chiefly determined by the strength of his unreasoning
impulses.’

In his interesting Recollections Mr Espinasse states
that during the time that Carlyle was writing on the
labour question, not a single blue-book was visible on
his table! To Carlyle’s influence must be traced
much of the sentimental treatment of social and industrial{149}
questions which has followed the unpopularity
of political economy. It is only fair to Carlyle to note,
that at times he had qualms as to the superiority of his
paternal theory of government over Laissez Faire. In
one place he admits that even Frederick could not
have superintended the great emigration movement to
such good effect as was done by the spontaneous efforts
of nature. In the social sphere Carlyle was false to his
doctrine of spontaneity. In his early essays he was
perpetually condemning mechanical interference with
society, and contending that free play should be given to
the dynamic agencies. Untrue to himself and his creed,
Carlyle in his later books was constantly denouncing
Government for neglecting to apply mechanical
remedies for social diseases. In his view, the duty of
a ruler was not to work in harmony with social impulses,
but to cut and carve institutions in harmony
with the ideas of great men. Puritanism under Cromwell
failed because it was forgotten that society is an
organism, not a piece of clay, to be moulded according
to the notions of heroic potters. Strictly speaking,
Frederick and Cromwell should be classed with the
Latter Day Pamphlets. In the Pamphlets Carlyle declaims
against democratic methods, and in Frederick
and Cromwell we are presented with incarnations of
autocratic methods.

Of all the critics of Carlyle, no one has surpassed
Mr Morley in indicating the mischievous effects which{150}
flow from the elevation of mere will power and
emotional force into guides in social and political
questions. As Mr Morley says: ‘The dictates of a
kind heart are of superior force to the maxims of
political economy; swift and peremptory resolution is
a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will
works easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude
of the moving impulse. All this is no caricature of a
system which sets sentiment, sometimes hard sentiment,
above reason and method. In other words, the
writer who in these days has done more than anybody
else to fire men’s hearts with a feeling for right, and an
eager desire for social activity, has, with deliberate
contempt, thrust away from him the only instruments
by which we can make sure what right is,
and that our social action is effective. A born poet,
only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a
more delicate spiritual self-possession to have added
another name to the illustrious band of English
singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of
his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social
questions in an imaginative and highly emotional
manner.’

Had Carlyle confined himself to description of
social, industrial, and political diseases, he would have
had an unsullied reputation in the sphere of spiritual
dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he
endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his{151}
remedies were too vague to be of use; where they
were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be useless.
His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism
never imposed on any sensible man on this side of
cloud-land.{152}

CHAPTER IX

CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE

It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and
the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of
events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The
influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As
the present writer has elsewhere said:—Carlyle has
been called a prophet. The word in these days
has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned
the name in consequence of the oracular and
denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then,
again, the word prophet has come to be associated
with the thought of a foreteller of future events.
A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one
who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps
alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense
of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the
Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of temperament
and all degrees of culture? Because in it,
especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of
Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are
brought face to face with the great mysteries, God,{153}
Nature, Man, Death, etc.—mysteries, however, which
only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on
special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by
the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life
the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities,
Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even
good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live
lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it:

The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate
utterance to keep alive in the minds of his countrymen
a deep, abiding sense of life’s mystery, sacredness, and
solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle did
for the moderns. In the whole range of modern
literature, it is impossible to match Carlyle’s magnificent
passages in Sartor Resartus, in which, under
a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal
emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form
the warp and woof of human life.

Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to
those mechanical scientists who imagine that Nature
can be measured by tape-lines, and duly labelled in
museums:—

‘System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is
his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of{154}
quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof
limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. The course of Nature’s phases,
on this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially
known to us; but who knows what deeper courses
these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of
causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the
Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and
accident, of its little native Creek may have become
familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean
Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and
Monsoons, and Moon’s eclipses; by all which the
condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may,
from time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset
and reversed? Such a minnow is Man; his Creek
this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All;
his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious
Course of Providence through Æons of Æons. We
speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume
it is,—whose Author and Writer is God.’

Agree or disagree with Carlyle’s views of the Ultimate
Reality as we may, there can be nothing but harmony
with the spirit which breathes in the following:—

‘Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art
not thou the “Living Garment of God”? O Heavens,
is it in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through
thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves
in me?{155}

‘Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of
that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously
over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked
in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother’s voice
to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in
unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial
music to my too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel.
The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a
charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my
Father’s!’

The mystery and fleetingness of life with its awful
counterpart death, are the commonplaces of every hour,
but who but Carlyle has rendered them with such
inspirational power?

‘Generation after generation takes to itself the form
of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night,
on Heaven’s mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire
is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of
Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine
heights of Science; one madly dashed to pieces on the
rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—and then
the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls
away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished
Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering
train of Heaven’s Artillery, does this mysterious
Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding
grandeur, through the unknown Deep.
Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we{156}
emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the
astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane.
Earth’s mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up,
in our passage; can the Earth, which is but dead and
a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?
On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is
stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces
of the earliest Van. But whence?—O Heaven,
whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only
that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and
to God.

A fervid perception of the evanescence and sorrows
of life is the root of Carlyle’s pathos, which is unsurpassed
in literature. It leads him to some beautiful
contrasts between childhood and manhood, positively
idyllic in their charm.

‘Happy season of Childhood!’ exclaims Teufelsdröckh:
‘Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful
mother; that visitest the poor man’s hut with auroral
radiance; and for thy Nurseling hast provided a soft
swathing of Love and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes
and slumbers, danced-round (umgäukelt) by sweetest
Dreams! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us in, its
roof still screens us; with a Father we have as yet
a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that{157}
makes us Free. The young spirit has awakened out
of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time;
as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful
sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages; ah! the
secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay
and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric,
from the granite mountain to the man or
day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless
Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling
Universe is forever denied us, the balm of
Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough
journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt
sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic
battles; thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern
patience: “Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all
Eternity to rest in?” Celestial Nepenthe! though a
Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the
world, he finds thee not; and thou hast once fallen
gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart
of every mother’s child. For, as yet, sleep and waking
are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around,
and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of
Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it
grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a
prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest
can find the kernel.’

Carlyle’s pathos touches its most sombre mood when
he is dwelling upon the common incidents of daily{158}
life as painted on the background of Eternity. In his
‘Cromwell,’ he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation
while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of
the letters of Cromwell:—’Mrs St John came down to
breakfast every morning in that summer visit of the
year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and they
spake polite devout things to one another, and they
are vanished, they and their things and speeches,—all
silent like the echoes of the old nightingales that sang
that season, like the blossoms of the old roses. O
Death! O Time!’

Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle’s
attitude towards science. There was this excuse for
his contemptuous attitude—science in its early days
fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were
these men in analysing Nature, that they missed the
sense of mystery and beauty which is the essence of
all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the Dryasdusts,
Nature was converted into a museum in which
everything was duly labelled. During the mania for
analysis, it was forgotten that there is a great difference
between the description and the explanation of phenomena.
In Sartor Resartus Carlyle rescues science
from the grip of the pedant and restores it to the
poet. ‘Wonder, is the basis of Worship; the reign of
wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only at
certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short
season, a reign in partibus infidelium.’ That progress{159}
of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its
stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds
small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise
venerates these two latter processes.

‘Shall your Science,’ exclaims he, ‘proceed in the
small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground
workshop of Logic alone; and man’s mind become an
Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper,
and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification,
and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are
the Meal? And what is that Science, which the
scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the
Doctor’s in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it
alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart,—but
one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts,
for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it)
is too noble an organ? I mean that Thought without
Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at best, dies
like Cookery with the day that called it forth; does not
live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading
harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to
all Time.’

‘The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually
wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable
Royal Societies, and carried the whole
Mécanique Céleste and Hegel’s Philosophy, and the
epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with{160}
their results, in his single head,—is but a pair of
Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those
who have Eyes look through him, then he may be
useful.’

In the sphere of ethics, Carlyle’s influence has been
inspirational in the highest sense. To a generation
which had to choose between the ethics of a conventional
theology and the ethics of a cold, prosaic utilitarianism,
Carlyle’s treatment of the whole subject of duty
came as a revelation. If in the sphere of social relationships
he did not contribute to the settlement of the
theoretic side of complex problems, he did what was
equally important—he roused earnest minds to a
sense of the urgency and magnitude of the problem,
awakened the feeling of individual responsibility, and
quickened the sense of social duty which had grown
weak during the reign of laissez faire. If Carlyle had
no final message for mankind, if he brought no gospel
of glad tidings, he nevertheless did a work which was
as important as it was pressing. In the form of a
modern John the Baptist, the Chelsea Prophet with
not a little of the wilderness atmosphere about him,
preached in grimly defiant mood to a pleasure-loving
generation the great doctrines which lie at the
root of all religions—the doctrines of Repentance,
Righteousness, and Retribution.

FOOTNOTES