Session 1819–20: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor Alexander Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
Session 1820–21: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
Session 1821–22: No attendance.
Session 1822–23: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819 contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact, though a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of time over which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to his Edinburgh life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He was not, indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides absences now and then on brief visits, e.g. to Irving in Glasgow or elsewhere in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations, longer or shorter, in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at Mainhill in Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in country quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the proper date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an Edinburgh man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but afterwards and more continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of course, the great Moray Place of the aristocratic West End, but a much obscurer namesake, now re-christened “Spey Street,” at right angles to Pilrig Street, just off Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings that he read and mused; it was in the streets of Edinburgh, or on the heights on her skirts, that he had his daily walks; the few friends and acquaintances he had any converse with were in Edinburgh; and it was with Edinburgh and her affairs that as yet he considered his own future fortunes as all but certain to be bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be quoted:—
April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong.”[22]
March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[23]
October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-brown shade.”[24]
March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[25]
Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and “backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy. On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human intellect in that class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost Margaret Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat and compel to listen.
Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[29] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[30] In a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day, and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh; and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however, were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library; and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,” and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of his successive experiments in established professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words “Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while, turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having returned no answer.[33] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title “Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers and Jonson.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with “Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man, whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo, Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in 1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In 1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it, and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical “Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the solitary bard in quest of a subject:—
In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and appearance:—
Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a problem:—
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript, carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of it.
This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia, which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M. Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820, with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park, William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends, to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages on Goethe’s Faust.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh, she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl, looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the Sartor Resartus.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of practical determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit, each determination coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things shall be my view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel.
The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr. Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on his way to Leith.
There was, at all events, no very obvious change in Carlyle’s mood and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His own report in the Reminiscences is still of the dreariness of his life, his gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated though this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be a mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness. From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving, whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of sunrising upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar effect: such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which Irving had written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when you shall be plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and therefore more clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note respecting Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have caught some glimpse of your inner man, though he had few opportunities; for he never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[37]
Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there must have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on Irving’s own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that Irving was not to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow Demosthenes and his very difficult congregation. After two years and a half of the Glasgow assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come that invitation to the pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton Garden, London, which Irving received as exultingly, as he afterwards said, as if it had been a call to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his way to London to offer himself on probation to the little colony of London Scots that thought he might suit them for their minister; and Carlyle was the last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of their parting was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith Street, then the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was “a dim night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving helps us to the more precise dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had their talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a bundle of cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium of his journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the cigars no one ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next morning, forgot to take them with him, and left them lying in a stall in the coffee-room.
That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to be remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the Thames on fire; Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical teaching, his private German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and the chances of continued contributorship to the New Edinburgh Review. Thus the year 1821 ended, and the year 1822 began.
By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June 1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have contributed to the result.
One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his Reminiscences he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh, because he was not sure but she might be then in Edinburgh too; and it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr. Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in the Reminiscences. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh, had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street. He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The information agrees with the University records; for in the matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February. The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow, the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing” to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics, indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them, teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the visit of the previous June that had gradually established itself, till it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books, etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller tutorship.
Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he says, “translating Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My petards will not burst, or make only noise when they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire. Then shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear, in that connection with the New Edinburgh Review of which mention has been already made, and in the translation of Legendre which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the background. There is significance in the fact that his second contribution to the New Edinburgh, published in April 1822, when the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s Faust. The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his Reminiscences where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when, having finished the reading of Wilhelm Meister, he walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him. Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.
The translation of Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster deserves a passing notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with the title Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an Introductory Essay on Proportion,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten, that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about 1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to obtain an affidavit from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the Reminiscences, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings, and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his Budget of Paradoxes, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements [Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”
The Translation of Legendre, with this Essay on Proportion, was Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution, Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it, he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir, you are dealing with the ipsissima corpora,” Chalmers used to say; and Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.
There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company; and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur, was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller, and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we are able to connect it with another advent.
It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the 29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core, fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his Reminiscences how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in “black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings, round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the Reminiscences; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake, woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he was troubled no more.
The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of 2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class, and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time, and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears “John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the family who received a University education. He had been for some time a teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the Reminiscences tell us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.