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THOMAS CARTLYLE.
FroCm a Photograph by Elliott & Fry..0.0...
'.    '^ X',




irN
THOMAS CARLYLE
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY
*  * -
ILL USTRA TED
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1881




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by
HARPER &; R15THERS,
In the Office of the Librarilh'o] Congress, at Washington.
All rights reserved




PREFACE.


EARLY in the year 1863, when I first visited England, Emerson gave me a letter of introduction to
Thomas Carlyle, which at once secured for me a gracious reception and kindly entertainment from the
author and his wife at Chelsea. It was their custom
to receive their friends in the evening, and I was
invited to join their circle as often as it might be
convenient to me. As time went on, this evening
circle at Carlyle's became smaller, and many a time
I was the only guest present. I was also invited by
Carlyle to share his walks, after he had given up the
horseback exercise he used to take. These afternoon
walks were long, generally through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and even into Piccadilly. I was
careful never to interrupt his hours of literary labor,
and always to obey Mrs. Carlyle's kindly intimations
as to his habits and exigencies. My relations with
the memorable home at Chelsea were always, and to




vi


PREFACE.


the last, very pleasant, never marred by any incident
or word to be thought of now with regret.
This little book which I now send out to the world
was veritably written by Carlyle himself. However
inadequately transcribed and conveyed, these pages
do faithfully follow impressions made by his own
word and spirit upon my mind during an intercourse
of many years. Nothing has been imported into
them from other publications which have appeared
since his death. The letters of Carlyle, and that
charming one written by Emerson just after his first
visit to him which is added to them, have been intrusted to me by my friend Alexander Ireland-author of an excellent bibliographical work on the
writings of Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt - the
valued friend of both Carlyle and Emerson. The
suppressions indicated in those letters are of matters
properly private- as, indeed, are various withheld
notes of my own-.-and not things omitted with any
theoretical purpose.
I have written out my notes and my memories
with the man still vividly before me, and, as it were,
still speaking; and, I must venture to add, it is a
man I can by no means identify with any image that
can be built up out of his "Reminiscences."  I
do not wish to idealize Carlyle, but cannot admit




PREFACE.                Vii
that the outcries of a broken heart should be accepted as the man's true voice, or that measurements
of men and memories as seen through burning tears
should be recorded as characteristic of his heart or
judgment. This sketch of mine is written and published in loyalty to the memory of those two at
Chelsea whom, amid whatever differences of conviction, I honored and loved.




I




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THOMAS CARLYLE-FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT
AND FRY, LONDON........     Frontispiece
BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.       To face 16
CARLYLE'S MOTHER............ 29
FAC-SIMILE OF CARLYLE'S HANDWRITING. To face 46
CHOIR OF ABBEY CHURCH, HADDINGTON, MRS. CARLYLE'S GRAVE IN THE FOREGROUND..   Toface 54
RooM IN WHICH CARLYLE WAS BORN..     "    138
CRAIGENPUTTOCH.........      "    140
MRS. THOMAS CARLYLE........     "    142
EARLY PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE..   "    152




I




PART I.
THOMAS CARLYLE




I
I




THOMAS CARLYLE.
I.
THE real record of Carlyle's life will be a long
task, employing not only many human hands, but
even the hand of Time itself.
While writing his "History of Friedrich II.,"
Carlyle had prepared-as, indeed, the growth of the
work had demanded-a special study at the top of
his house in Chelsea, in which only that paper, book,
or picture was admitted which was in some way connected with the subject in hand. One side of the
room was covered from floor to ceiling with books;
two others were adorned with pictures of persons or
battles; and through these books and pictures was
distributed the man he was trying to put together
in comprehensible shape. But even more widely
was Carlyle himself distributed. In what part of
the earth have not his lines gone out and his labors
extended? On how many hearts and minds, on how
many lives, has he engraved passages which are




14


THOMAS CARLYLE.


transcripts of his own life, without which it can
never be fully told? To report this one life, precious contributions must be brought from the lives
of Goethe, Emerson, Jeffrey, Brewster, Sterling,
LeighHunt, Mill, Mazzini, Margaret Fuller, Harriet
Martineau, Faraday. But how go on with the long
cgtalogue? At its end, could that be reached, there
would remain the equally important memories of
lives less known, from which in the future may
come incidents casting fresh light upon this central
figure of two generations; and, were all told, time
alone can bring the perspective through which his
genius and character can be estimated. In one
sense, Carlyle was as a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid; in another, he was an "open secret,"
hid by the very simplicity of his unconscious disguises, the frank perversities whose meaning could
be known only by those close enough to hear the
heart-beat beneath them; and many who have fancied that they had him rightly labelled with some
moody utterance, or safely pigeon-holed in some outbreak of a soul acquainted with grief, will be found
to have measured the oak by its mistletoe.
Those who have listened to the wonderful conversation of Carlyle know well its impressiveness and
its charm: the sympathetic voice now softening to
the very gentlest, tenderest tone as it searched far
into some sad life, little known or regarded, or




THOMAS CARLYLE.


15


perhaps evil spoken of, and found there traits
to be admired, or signs of nobleness,-then rising
through all melodies in rehearsing the deeds of heroes; anon breaking out with illumined thunders
against some special baseness or falsehood, till one
trembled before the Sinai smoke and flame, and
seemed to hear the tables break once more in his
heart: all these, accompanied by the mounting, fading fires in his cheek, the light of the eye, now serene as heaven's blue, now flashing with wrath, or
presently suffused with laughter, made the outer
symbols of a genius so unique that to me it had
been unimaginable had I not known its presence
and power. His conversation was a spell; when I
had listened and gone into the darkness, the enchantment continued; sometimes I could not sleep till
the vivid thoughts and narratives were noted in
writing. It is mainly from these records of conversations that the following pages are written out, with
addition of some other materials obtained by personal inquiries made in Scotland and in London. I
realized many years ago that my notes contained
matter that might some day be useful, especially to
my American countrymen, in forming a just estimate and judgment of one whose expressions were
often unwelcome; and this conviction has made me
increasingly careful, as the years went on, to remark
any variations of his views, and his responses to crit



16


THOMAS CARLYLE.


icisms made so frequently upon statements of his
which had been resented. I do not in the least
modify, nor shall I set forth these things in such
order or relation as to illustrate any theory of my
own. He who spoke his mind through life must so
speak on, though he be dead.
II.
Thomas Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795, at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. The small
stone house still stands. It was a favorite saying
of his that great men are not born among fools.
"There was Robert Burns," he said one day; "I
used often to hear from old people in Scotland of
the good sense and wise conversation around that
little fireside where Burns listened as a child. Notably there was a man named Murdoch who remembered all that; and I have the like impression about
the early life of most of the notable men and women
I have heard or read of. When a great soul rises
up, it is generally in a place where there has been
much hidden worth and intelligence at work for a
long time. The vein runs on, as it were, beneath
the surface for a generation or so, then bursts into
the light in some man of genius, and oftenest that
seems to be the end of it." Carlyle was thinking of
other persons than himself, but there are few lives
that could better point his thought. Nothing could




---     -------!: -  --,
-- -- -z7     - i
WME                                 i
BIRTHPLACE OF TH031-AS CAULYLE.




I




THOMAS CARLYLE.


17


be more incongruous with the man and his life than
the attempt once made to get up a Carlyle "pedigree."
But the vigor of the lowly stock was proved by
the strong individuality it steadily developed, and
in none more notably than the father of Thomas.
The humble stone-mason certainly " builded better
than he knew," though he lived long enough to hear
his son's name pronounced with honor throughout
the kingdom. An aged Scotch minister who knew
him well told me that old James Carlyle was "a
character." " Earnest, energetic, of quick intellect,
and in earlier life somewhat passionate and pugnacious, he was not just the man to be popular among
his rustic neighbors of Annandale; but they respected his pronounced individuality, felt his strong will,
and his terse, epigrammatic sayings were remembered and repeated many years after his death
(1832). In the later years of his life he became a
more decidedly religious character, and the natural
asperities of his character and manner were much
softened."
Mr. James Routledge, in an Indian periodical,
Mookerjee's Magazine, October, 1872, says:
"I was interested enough in Mr. Carlyle the
younger to make a special tour, some years ago, to
learn something of Mr. Carlyle the elder; and from
what I gathered the reader may be pleased with a




18


THOMAS CARLYLE.


few scraps, as characteristic of the school of 'Sartor
Resartus.' Mr. Carlyle's landlord was one General
Sharpe, of whom little is now known, though he was
a great man in those days. On one occasion James
Carlyle and he had a quarrel, and James was heard
to say, in a voice of thunder, 'I tell thee what, Matthew Sharpe'-a mode of salutation that doubtless
astonished General Sharpe; but it was 'old James
Carlyle's way,' and was not to be altered for any
General in existence. There was much in the old
man's manner of speaking that never failed to attract attention. A gentleman resident in the locality told me that he remembered meeting him one
very stormy day, and saying, 'Here's a fearful day,
James;' which drew forth the response, ' Man, it's a'
that; it's roaring doon our glen like the cannon o'
Quebec.' My informant added, 'I never could forget that sentence.' James had also a wondrous power of fixing upon characteristic names for all manner of persons, and nailing his names to the individuals for life. Samuel Johnson was ' Surly Sam,' and
so on-a gift which has come among us in a more
livable form from the pen of his son. Mr. Carlyle
was a stern Presbyterian-a Burgher; held no terms
with prelacy or any other ungodly offshoot from the
Woman of Babylon, but clung to the 'auld Buke,'
without note or comment, as his only guide to heaven. He was one of the elders of his church when




THOMAS CARLYLE.


19


its pastor, having received a call from a church
where his stipend would be better than that of Ecclefechan, applied for leave to remove. The church
met, and lamentation was made for the irreparable
loss. After much nonsense had been spoken, Mr.
Carlyle's opinion was asked. 'Pay the hireling his
wages and let him go,' said the old man; and it was
done.  Mr. Carlyle had a thorough contempt for
any one who said, 'I can't.' 'Impossible' was not
in his vocabulary. Once, during harvest-time, he
was taken seriously ill. No going to the field, Mr.
Carlyle, for weeks to come: water-gruel, doctor's
bottles, visiting parson, special prayers —poor old
James Carlyle! Pshaw! James was found crawling
to the field early next morning, but still an idler
among workers. He looked at the corn, provokingly ripe for the sickle; and then, stamping his foot
fiercely to the ground, he said,' I'll gar mysel' work
at t' harvest.' And he did work at it like a man.
On one occasion a reverend gentleman had been favoring the congregation of Mr. Carlyle's church with
a terrible description of the last judgment. James
listened to him calmly; but when the sermon was
finished, he came out of his pew, and, placing himself before the reverend gentleman and all the congregation, he said, aloud, 'Ay, ye may thump and
stare till yer een start frae their sockets, but you'll
na gar me believe such stuff as that.'




20


THOMAS CARLYLE.


" If the reader will now go back with me to those
days, and view for a few minutes the little farm at
Mainhill, after the fair, honest, and well-earned hours
of evening rest have fully arrived, we shall, in all
probability, find Mr. Carlyle reading from the Bible
-not for fashion's sake, not to be seen and praised by
men, but for reproof, for correction, for instruction
in righteousness;Jand his children will be listening,
as children should. Refused his proper place in society for want of learning, we shall see this brave
old man doing the next best thing to moulding the
age-training his children to do that which he felt a
power within him capable of performing, but for
which the means-the mechanical means, the verb
and pronoun kind of thing-were denied. Such was
the father, and such the earliest school of Thomas
Carlyle."
Of the many anecdotes told of this elder Carlyle,
one seems to be characteristic not only of the man,
but of the outer environment amid which Thomas
passed his earlier life. On the occasion of a marriage of one of the sons, the younger members of the
household proposed that a coat of paint should be
given the house; but the old man resisted this scheme
for covering the plain walls with the varnish of falsehood. An attempt was made by the majority to set
aside his will, but, unfortunately, old Mr. Carlyle was
at home when the painters arrived, and planting him



THOMAS CARLYLE.


21


self in the doorway, demanded what they wanted.
They replied that they "cam' tae pent the house."
"Then," returned the old man, "ye can jist slent
the bog wi' yer ash-baket feet, for ye'll pit nane o'
yer glaur on ma door." The painters needed no
translation of this remark, and "slent the bog"-i. e.,
went their ways. Paint to the sturdy old stonemason meant simply so much slime; for it would
appear that the Latin clara and French glaire are
represented in Scotland by clarts and glaur-equivalents for mud, and more appropriately used for
mud of a viscous character.   I have sometimes
thought that if the father had been able to admit
those house-painters, the son's destiny might have
been different.  His dislike of rhyme and poetic
measures, after showing that he could excel in the
same, and all literary architecture, had in it an echo
of that paternal horror of "glaur."  He scented a
falsehood from afar. Some one spoke of " England's
prestige." "Do you remember what prestige means?"
asked he, sharply: " it is the Latin word for a lie."
As James Carlyle acquired more means he added
to the small house in Ecclefechan a further building,
which now stands behind the other in what is still
called " Carlyle's Close." Afterwards he took to
farming, and became the possessor of the neighboring farm and homestead of over two hundred acres,
called Scotsbrig. For some years previously he had




22


THOMAS CARLYLE.


become more of an architect than a stone-mason.
The stone- mason's craft often furnished Carlyle
with his metaphors, and he always had a special
horror of architectural shams. Once as we were
walking together he remarked the flimsiness of some
house-walls just going up. "Every brick in them
is a lie. A necessary part, I suppose, of the superlative ugliness of so many people crowding together.
The cities are all cabbaging out in this way. The
house I live in (at Chelsea) was built by honest men.
The brick and mortar have hardened together with
time, and made a wall which is one solid stone, and
it will stand there till Gabriel's trump blows it
down."
III.
In order to introduce here, as well as my notes
and memory enable me, some of Carlyle's own rambling reminiscences of those who were the presiding
destinies of his early life, it will be necessary to pass
to a comparatively recent period, and attend him to
an eminence in his life from which those young
years were beheld in natural perspective. And my
reader must pardon me for now and then turning
into a by-way on our road.
It was in the evening of the day when Carlyle was
inaugurated Lord Rector of Edinburgh University
that he himself told me most fully the story of his
early life, and of his struggles in that ancient city




THOMAS CARLYLE.


23


which had now decorated itself in his honor. That
day was the culmination of his personal history. No
pen has yet described the events of that day, and the
main fact of it, in their significance or picturesqueness. Nor can that be wondered at; the background
against which they stood out were the weary trials,
the long unwatched studies, the poverty and want,
amid which the little boy of fourteen began to climb
the rugged path which ended on this height. When
on that bright day (the 2d of April, 1866) Carlyle
entered the theatre in Edinburgh, the scene was one
for which no memory of the old university could
have prepared him. Beside him walked the venerable Sir David Brewster, fourteen years his senior,
who first recognized his ability, and first gave him
literary work to do. The one now Principal, the
other Lord Rector, they walked forward in their
gold-laced robes of office, while the professors, the
students, the ladies, stood up, cheering, waving their
hats, books, handkerchiefs, as if some wild ecstasy
were sweeping over the assembly. Who were these
around him? The old man sat and scanned for a
little the faces before him. His eye alights on Huxley, and not far away is the face of his friend Tyndall, all sunshine. Another and another face from
London, a score of aged faces that bring up memories from this and that quiet retreat of Scotland, and
the occasion begins to weave its potent influences




24


THOMAS CARLYLE.


around the man who had never faced audience since,
some twenty-six years before, he had celebrated " Heroes," and among them some less heroic than this
new Lord Rector. On that last occasion, in the Edwards Street Institute, London, Carlyle brought a
manuscript, and found it much in his way. On the
next evening he brought some notes, but these also
tripped him up, till he left them. The rest of the
lectures were given without a note, simply like his
conversation, and they required very little alteration
when they came to be printed. For this Edinburgh
occasion, also, Carlyle at first thought of writing
something; he made out some headings and a few
notes, and carried them in his pocket to the theatre,
but he did not look at them.
What that address really was no one can imagine
who has only read it. Throughout, it was phenomenal, like some spiritualized play of the elements.
Ere he began, Carlyle, much to the amusement of
the students, shook himself free of the gold-laced
gown; but it was not many minutes before he had
laid aside various other conventionalities: the grand
sincerity, the drolleries, the auroral flashes of mystical intimation, the lightnings of scorn for things low
and base-all of these severally taking on physiognomical expression in word, tone, movement of the
head, color of the face, really seemed to bring before
us a being whose physical form was purely a transparency of thought and feeling.




TIIHOMAS CARLYLE.


25


What a figure stood there before us! The form,
stately though slender and somewhat bent, conveyed
the impression of a powerful organization; the head,
well curved and long, moving but rarely from side
to side, then slowly; the limbs, never fidgety, buttressing, like quaint architecture, the lofty head and
front of the man: these characters at once made
their impression. But presently other and more
subtle characteristics came out on the face and form
before us, those which time and fate, thought a-ed
experience, had added to the man which nature had
given them. The rugged brow, softened by the
silvered hair, had its inscriptions left by the long
years of meditation and of spiritual sorrow; the
delicate mouth, whose satire was sympathetic, never
curling the lip nor sinking to sarcasm; the blond
face, with its floating colors of sensibility, and the
large luminous eye-these made the outer image of
Carlyle as lie stood and spake, when even the grayhaired were gathered at his feet, listening like children held by a tale of Wonderland.
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
2




26


TIHOMAS CARLYLE.


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.
When, after the address, Carlyle came out to the
door, a stately carriage was waiting to take him to
the house of Mr. Erskine, of Linlathen, but he begged to be allowed to walk. Ile had no notion, however, what that involved. No sooner did the delighted crowd, or friendly mob, discover that the
Lord Rector was setting out to walk through the
street than they extemporized a procession, and followed him, several hundred strong, with such clamorous glorification that he found it best to take a
cab. As he did so, lie turned and gave the rather
ragged part of the crowd a steady, compassionate
look, and said, softly, as if to himself," Poor fellows!
poor fellows!"
During the dinner that evening, at which Mr.
Erskine entertained Lord Neaves, Dr. John Brown,
and other Edinburgh celebrities, Carlyle was very
happy, and conversed in the finest humor; lie enlightened us, as I remember, about antiquarian words
and names; as that by meant town, and by-laws
town-laws; wick meant the corner of the mouth, such
names as Berwick being given to places on creeks
so shaped; ylead meant hawk, and Gladstone was
IIawkstone, and so on. When the ladies had retired,
Carlyle asked me to go with him to his room in order




THOMAS CARLYLE.


27


to consult a little about the revision of his address for
the press. This being arranged for, he lit his pipe
and fell into a long, deep silence. In the reverie
every furrow passed away from his face; all anxieties seemed far away. I saw his countenance as I
had never seen it before-without any trace of spiritual pain. The pathetic expression was overlaid by
a sort of quiet gladness-like the soft evening glow
under which the Profile on the New England mountain appears to smile; there fell on this great jutting
brow and grave face, whose very laughter was often
volcanic as its wrath, a sweet childlike look. He
was, indeed, thinking of his childhood.
" It seems very strange," he said, " as I look back
over it all now-so far away-and the faces that
grew aged, and then vanished. A greater debt I
owe to my father than he lived long enough to have
fully paid to him. He was a very thoughtful and
earnest kind of man, even to sternness. He was
fond of reading, too, particularly the reading of theology. Old John Owen, of the seventeenth century, *
was his favorite author. He could not tolerate anything fictitious in books, and sternly forbade us to
spend our time over the 'Arabian Nights'-' those
downright lies,' he called them. He was grimly religious. I remember him going into the kitchen,
where some servants were dancing, and reminding
them very emphatically that they were dancing on




28


THOMAS CARLYLE.


the verge of a place which no politeness ever prevented his mentioning on fit occasion. He himself
walked as a man in the full presence of heaven and
hell and the day of judgment. They were always
imminent. One evening, some people were playing
cards in the kitchen when the bake-house caught
fire; the events were to him as cause and effect, and
henceforth there was a flaming handwriting on our
walls against all cards. All of which was the hard
outside of a genuine veracity and earnestness of
nature such as I have not found so common among
men as to think of them in him without respect.
"My mother stands in my memory as beautiful
in all that makes the excellence of woman.' Pious
and gentle she was, with an unweariable devotedness
to her family; a loftiness of moral aim and religious
conviction which gave her presence and her humble
home a certain graciousness, and, even as I see it
now, dignity; and with it, too, a good deal of wit
and originality of mind. No man ever had better
opportunities than I for comprehending, were they
comprehensible, the great deeps of a mother's love
for her children. Nearly my first profound impressions in this world are connected with the death of
an infant sister-an event whose sorrowfulness was
made known to me in the inconsolable grief of my
mother. For a long time she seemed to dissolve in
tears-only tears. For several months not one night




THOMAS CARLYLE.


29


CARLYLE'S MO1HER.
passed but she dreamed of holding her babe in her
arms, and clasping it to her breast. At length one
morning she related a change in her dream: while
she held the child in her arms it had seemed to break
up into small fragments, and so crumbled away and
vanished. From that night her vision of the babe
and dream of clasping it never returned.
"The only fault I can remember in my mother
was her being too mild and peaceable for the planet
she lived in. When I was sent to school, she piously
enjoined on me that I should, under no conceivable
circumstances, fight with any boy, nor resist any evil
done to me; and her instructions were so solemn


7




:.
30             THOLS CARLYLE.    -      --
_k-     i     d^ A  ' - t / *s t.-1-M^ {i,a- -';
that for a long time I was accustomed to submit to
every kind of injustice, simply for her sake. It was
a sad mistake. When it was practically discovered
that I would not defend myself, every kind of indignity was put upon me, and my life was made utterly
miserable./ Fortunately the strain was too great.
One day a big boy was annoying me, when it occurred to my mind that existence under such conditions was not supportable; so I slipped off my
wooden clog, and therewith suddenly gave that boy
a blow on the seat of honor which sent him sprawling on face and stomach in a convenient mass of
mud and water. I shall never forget the burthen
that rolled off me at that moment. I never had a
more heart-felt satisfaction than in witnessing the
consternation of that contemporary./ It proved to
be a measure of peace, also; from that time I was
troubled by the boys no more."
Carlyle's mother died in 1853. Dr. John Carlyle told me that although the subjects upon which
Thomas wrote were to a large extent foreign to her,
she read all of his works published up to the time of
her death with the utmost care; and his "History
of the French Revolution," particularly, she read
and reread until she had comprehended it. With a
critical acumen known only to mothers, she excepted
"Wilhelm Meister" from her pious reprobation of
novel-reading (not failing, however, to express derrvril-rvruver, torv        exprrr




THOMAS CARLYLE.


31


cided opinions concerning the moral character of
Philina and others). At first she was somewhat disturbed by the novel religious views encountered in
these books, but she found her son steadfast and
earnest, and cared for no more. I have heard that
it was to her really inquiring mind that Carlyle
owed his first questioning of the conventional English opinion of the character of Cromwell.
There was something indescribably touching and
even thrilling in the tones of passionate longing with
which Carlyle spoke of his parents. It was a Lord
Rector talking about poor and comparatively ignorant workpeople long dead, but there was a love in
Carlyle passing the love of women: at that moment
hlie would have flung to the winds all the honors
which the world had heaped upon him for one more
day in the old honme at Scotsbrig with his fatherone hour of the old nestling at the heart of his mother. So long as either of them lived, he (as I knew
on good information) had been constant in his pleadings for permission to contribute something to make
their age happier; but they needed only his love,
and they chose well-a treasure not measurable.
"As I was compelled," continued Carlyle, "to
quietly abandon my mother's non-resistant lessons,
so I had to modify my father's rigid rulings against
books of fiction. I remember few happier days
than those in which I ran off into the fields to read




32


THOMAS CARLYLE.


-' Roderick Random,' and how inconsolable I was
that I could not get the second volume. To this day
I know of few writers equal to Smollett. Humphry
Clinker is precious to me now as he was in those
years. Nothing by Dante or any one else surpasses
in pathos the scene where Humphry goes into the
smithy made for him in the old house, and whilst
he is heating the iron, the poor woman who has lost
her husband, and is deranged, comes and talks to
him as to her husband. 'John, they told me you
were dead. How glad I am you have come!' And
Humphry's tears fall down and bubble on the hot
iron.
" Ah, well, it would be a long story. As with
every 'studious boy' of that time and region, the
destiny prepared for me was the nearly inevitable
kirk. And so I came here to Edinburgh, about fourteen, and went to hard work. And still harder work
it was when the University had been passed by, the
hardest being to find work. Nearly the only companion I had was poor Edward Irving, then one of
the most attractive of youths; we had been to the
same Annan school, but he was three years my senior.
Here, and for a long time after, destiny threw us a
good deal together."
(An old Scotch gentleman who knew the two in
those Edinburgh years told me that both were vehemently argumentative; also that though Carlyle was




THOMAS CARLYLE.


33


the better reasoner, Irving generally got the best of
the argument, since he was apt to knock Carlyle
down with his fist when himself driven into logical
distress. This was humorously said, and no doubt a
slight exaggeration of the facts.)
"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 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.
2*




31


THOMAS CARLYLE.


Not the slightest sign that I was a person whom he
could have distinguished in any crowd. And so I
parted from old --."
Carlyle's extraordinary attainments were clearly
enough recognized by his fellow-students, among
whom, no doubt, he might have found sympathetic
friends had he been willing to spare time from the
books he was devouring in such vast quantities.
When he had graduated, the professors began to
realize that their best student had gone. For two
years (1814-16) he was mathematical teacher in the
grammar-school at Annan, where he had been a pupil
between 1806 and 1809. Then Professor Leslie, the
coadjutor and afterwards the successor of Playfair,
procured for him, as he had previously done for Irving, a situation as teacher in the neighborhood.
"It had become increasingly clear to me that I
could not enter the ministry with any honesty of
mind; and nothing else then offering, to say nothing
of the utter mental confusion as to what thing was
desired, I went away to that lonely straggling town
on the Frith of Forth, Kirkcaldy, possessing then, as
still, few objects interesting to any one not engaged
in the fishing profession. Two years there of hermitage, loneliness, at the end of which something
must be done. Back to Edinburgh, and for a time
a small subsistence is obtained by teaching a few
pupils, while the law is now the object aimed at.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


35


Then came the dreariest years-eating of the heart,
misgivings as to whether there shall be presently
anything else to eat, disappointment of the nearest
and dearest as to the hoped-for entrance on the ministry, and steadily growing disappointment of self
with the undertaken law profession-above all, perhaps, wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual
questionings unanswered."
"I had gradually become a devout reader in German literature, and even now began to feel a capacity for work, but heard no voice calling for just
the kind of work I felt capable of doing. The first
break of gray light in this kind was brought by my
old friend David Brewster. He set me to work
on the "Edinburgh Encyclopedia;" there was not
much money in it, but a certain drill, and, still better, a sense of accomplishing something, though far
yet from what I was aiming at; as, indeed, it has
always been far enough from that."
I may recall here an occasion when Carlyle was
speaking, in his stormy way, of the tendency of the
age to spend itself in talk. Mrs. Carlyle (with her
wonted tact, anticipating any possible suggestion of
the same from some listener) said, archly, "And how
about Mr. Carlyle?" He paused some moments: the
storm was over, and I almost fancied that for once I
saw a tear gather in the old man's eyes as he said, in
low tone, " Mr. Carlyle looked long and anxiously to




36


THOMAS CARLYLE.


find something he could do with any kind of veracity: he found no door open save that he took, and
had to take, though it was by no means what he
would have selected." Once, too, when some vigorous person was praising a favorite poet, Carlyle spoke
of the said poet as a "phrasemonger." The other,
somewhat nettled, said, " But what are the best of
us but phrasemongers!" Siegfried was never more
conscious of the vulnerable point left by the leaf on
his back than Carlyle of the distance between his
doctrine of silence and his destiny of authorship.
He bowed and said, "True;" and the conversation
proceeded amiably enough.
Between the years 1820-24 Carlyle wrote for the
"Edinburgh Encyclopaedia" sixteen articles-namely, Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu,
Moontfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker,
Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord
Chatham, William Pitt. To the New Edinburgh
Review, in the same years, he contributed a paper, on Joanna Baillie's "Metrical Legends," and one on
Goethe's "Faust." In 1822 he made the translation
of Legendre, and wrote the valuable essay on "Proportion" prefixed to it, though it did not appear until 1824. M. Louis Blanc informed me that he once
met with a French treatise devoted to the discussion
of the mathematical theses of Carlyle, the writer of




THOMAS CARLYLE.


37


which seemed unaware of his author's fame in other
matters.
"And now" (towards the close of his twenty-seventh year this would be) " things brightened a little.
Edward Irving, then amid his worshippers in London, had made the acquaintance of a wealthy family,
the Bullers, who had a son with whom all teachers
had effected nothing. There were two boys, and he
named me as likely to succeed with them. It was in
this way that I came to take charge of Charles Buller
-afterwards my dear friend, Thackeray's friend also
-and I gradually managed to get him ready for
Cambridge. Charles and I came to love each other
dearly, and we all saw him with pride steadily rising
in Parliamentary distinction, when he died. Poor
Charles! he was one of the finest youths I ever
knew. The engagement ended without regret, but
while it lasted was the means of placing me in circumstances of pecuniary comfort beyond what I had
previously known, and of thus giving me the means
of doing more congenial work, such as the 'Life~
of Schiller,' and 'Wilhelm. Meister's Wanderjahre.' '
But one gaunt form had been brought to my side by
the strain through which I had passed, who was not
in a hurry to quit-ill-health. The reviewers were
not able to make much of Wilhelm. De Quincey -
and Jeffrey looked hard at us. I presently met De
Quincey, and he looked pale and uneasy, possibly




38


THOMAS CARLYLE.


thinking that he was about to encounter some resentment from the individual whom he had been
cutting up. But it had made the very smallest impression upon me, and I was quite prepared to listen
respectfully to anything he had to say. And, as I
remember, he made himself quite agreeable when his
nervousness was gone. He had a melodious voice
and an affable manner, and his powers of conversation were unusual. He had a soft, courteous way of
taking up what you had said, and furthering it apparently; and you presently discovered that he didn't
agree with you at all, and was quietly upsetting your
positions one after another."
The review of "Wilhelm Meister" by Jeffrey, just
mentioned, was one of the notable literary events of
the time.  Beginning his task with the foregone
conclusion that prevailed at Holland House concerning all importations from Germany, even before they
were visible, Jeffrey pronounced "Wilhelm Meister"
to be "eminently absurd, puerile, incongruous, and
affected," " almost from beginning to end one flagrant
offence against every principle of taste and every
rule of composition." Unfortunately, this was preceded by the statement that the judgment was made
" after the most deliberate consideration;" for in the
latter part of the review the writer is compelled to
regard the translator " as one who has proved by his
preface to be a person of talents, and by every part




THOMAS CARLYLE.


39


of the work to be no ordinary master of at least one
of the languages with which he has to deal;" and,
finally,this strange review (this time evidently "after
the most deliberate consideration") winds up with
its confession: " Many of the passages to which we
have now alluded are executed with great talent,
and, we are very sensible, are better worth extracting
than those we have cited. But it is too late now to
change our selections, and we can still less afford to
add to them. On the whole, we close the book with
some feeling of mollification towards its faults, and
a disposition to abate, if possible, some part of the
censure we were impelled to bestow on it at the beginning."
"And now" (to resume my notes of Carlyle's
story) "an event which had for a long time been
visible as a possibility drew on to consummation. In
the loneliest period of my later life here in Edinburgh there was within reach one home and one
family to which again Irving-always glad to do me
a good turn-had introduced me.*     At Haddington
lived the Welshes, and there I had formed a friendship with Jane, now Mrs. Carlyle.   She was charac* Irving has left an intimation that he himself was a lover of Jane
Welsh. Carlyle's marriage took place, after a long engagement, in
1826. She was a very brilliant writer, as her letters will show when
published. She wrote a little story called "Watch and Canary;"
and, it is said, had just set to work on a novel when she died.




40


THOMAS CARLYLE.


terized at that time by an earnest desire for knowledge, and I was for a long time aiding and directing
her studies. The family were very grateful, and
made it a kind of home for me. But when, further
on, our marriage was spoken of, the family-not unnaturally, perhaps, mindful of their hereditary dignity (they were descended from John Knox)-opposed
us rather firmly. But Jane Welsh, having taken her
resolution, showed further her ability to defend it
against all comers; and she maintained it to the
extent of our presently dwelling man and wife at
Comley Bank (Edinburgh), and then at the old solitary farm-house called Craigenputtoch, that is, Hill
of the Hawk. The sketch of it in Goethe's translation of my 'Schiller' was made by George Moir, a
lawyer here in Edinburgh, of whom I used to see
something. The last time I saw old Craigenputtoch
z it filled me with sadness-a kind of Valley of Jehoshaphat. Probably it was through both the struggles
of that time, the end of them being not yet, and the
happy events with which it was associated-now
buried and gone. It was there, and on our way
there, that the greetings and gifts of Goethe overtook us; and it was there that Emerson found us.
He came from Dumfries in an old rusty gig; came
one day and vanished the next. I had never heard
of him: he gave us his brief biography, and told us
of his bereavement in loss of his wife. We took a




THOMAS CARLYLE.


41


walk while dinner was prepared. We gave him a
welcome, we were glad to see him: our house was
homely, but she who presided there made it of neatness such as were at any moment suitable for a visit
from any majesty. I did not then adequately recognize Emerson's genius; but my wife and I both
thought him a beautiful transparent soul, and he was
always a very pleasant object to us in the distance.
Now and then a letter comes from him, and amid all
the smoke and mist of this world it is always as a
window flung open to the azure. During all this
last weary work of mine, his words have been nearly
the only ones about the thing done-' Friedrich' —to
which I have inwardly responded, 'Yes-yes-yes;
and much obliged to you for saying that same!'
The other day I was staying with some people who
talked about some books that seemed to me idle
enough; so I took up Emerson's 'English Traits,'
and soon found myself lost to everything else-wandering amid all manner of sparkling crystals and
wonderful luminous vistas; and it really appeared
marvellous how people can read what they sometimes
do with such books on their shelves. Emerson has
gone a very different direction from any in which I
can see my way to go; but words cannot tell how I
prize the old friendship formed there on Craigenputtoch hill, or how deeply I have felt in all he has
written the same aspiring' intelligence which shone




42


THOMAS CARLYLE.


about us when he came as a young man, and left
with us a memory always cherished.
" After Emerson left us, gradually all determining
interests drew us to London; and there the mnain
work, such as it is, has been done; and now they
have brought me down here, and got the talk out of
me! "
But here I must take a longer pause. Much did
Carlyle say here which I cannot even try to report.
He spake not to me, but as if unaware of any one's
\ presence; as if conversing with the risen shades of
a world I knew not. But, so often as I have read
" Sartor Resartus" since then, I have seen here and
there the man at whose feet I was then sitting;
most of all have I seen and heard the man of that
quiet chamber in Edinburgh in the weird experience
that closes " the everlasting No."  That passage is a
transcript from the life of Thomas Carlyle, and summing-up of the years which preceded and ended that
final venture (i. e., the Law), to enter upon some
conventional work of the world. I will ask my
reader to ponder the words to which I have referred,
and venture to quote here:
"'So had it lasted,' concludes the Wanderer-' so
had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony,
through long years. The heart within me, unvisited
by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sul



THOMAS CARLYLE.


43


phurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest
memory I shed no tear; or once only when I, murnmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Death-song, that
wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze finclet (Happy
whom he finds in Battle's splendor), and thought
that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken, that
Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it
of Man or of Devil; nay, I often felt as if it might
be solacing, could the Arch-devil himself, though
in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might
tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely
enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I know
not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens
above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if
the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws
of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.
"'Full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs,
was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas
de 'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close
atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace, whereby, doubtless, my spirits were
little cheered, when all at once there rose a Thought
in me, and I asked myself: " What art thou afraid




44


THOMAS CARLYLE.


of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever
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 whatsoever
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 forever. 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-eyed Defiance.
"'Thus had the EVERLASTING No (das ewige
Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses
of my Being, of my Me; and then it was 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 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 now made answer, "I am not thine, but
Free, and forever hate thee!"




THOMAS CARLYLE.


45


"' 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."'
This walk in Paris must not be supposed allegorical. Carlyle told me that it actually stood in his
life as it is written in his book. He had not heard
the story of how this Rue de l'Enfer came by its name
until I encountered it while writing my "Demonology."  In the time of Saint Louis it was a road sup- /
posed to be haunted by a fearful green monster, the
Diable Vauvert, a dragon-man, who twisted the necks
of all he met. It would appear to have been a phantasm got up by a murderous band of money-coiners,
who occupied the ancient Chateau Vauvert. The
Carthusian monks having offered to exorcise the <
devils if Saint Louis would give them the chateau,
that was done. The Diable Vauvert left his trail i
only in the name of the street, now called RocherauEnfer. Near-by is the convent Saint Michael. But
the only real dragon-slayer from the time of Saint
Louis until now who has passed that way was the
young Scotchman who there laid low the phantasm
of Fear with the poised spear of a free mind.
One of the sorrowful days of that period was that
on which he was compelled to open an abyss between himself and Edward Irving. On a long walk
they sat down together, and Carlyle unfolded to him,
as well as he could to a man who could so little com



46


THOMAS CARLYLE.


prehend them, the intellectual experiences which
forbade his entering on the ministry. They parted
to go their several ways. But Carlyle never lost his
love for his early friend; even when Irving was far
gone in insanity, he visited him and tried to soothe
him. "Friendliness still beamed in his eyes," he
wrote, "but now from amid unquiet fire; his face
was flaccid, wasted, unsound; hoary as with extreme
age: he was trembling over the brink of the grave.
Adieu, thou first friend-adieu, while this confused
twilight of existence lasts!"
IV.
When I left Mr. Erskine's house that night, it was
to go to the office of the Scotsman, in order to revise
the proof of the new Lord Rector's address. Carlyle placed in my hands the notes he had made beforehand for the occasion, saying, as he did so, that
he did not suppose they would assist me much. His
surmise proved unhappily true. The notes had been
written partly in his own hand, partly by an amanuensis. Those written by the amanuensis had been
but little followed in the address, and those added
by himself were nearly undecipherable. Already
that tremor which so long affected his hand when
he held a pen-it was much steadier when he used a
pencil-afflicted him. The best-written sentences in
the notes (now before me) are the lines of Goethe




1.
At lt
FAC-SIMILE OF CARLYLE'S HANDWRITING.
FC-SLE OF CRLYLE'S HANDRITING.
-                           ~.








THOMAS CARLYLE.


47


which he repeated at the close of the address, a facsimile of which I give.
For the rest, I find in these notes (which, on my
request, he said I was welcome to keep) some passages which     were not spoken, but were meant to
reach the public. I therefore quote them here, premising only that where I have supplied more than a
connecting word, such phrase is put in brackets, and
mainly supplied from      what he really did say.
EXTRACTS FROM      THE NOTES.
"Beautiful is young enthusiasm; keep it to the end, and be more
and more correct in fixing on the object of it. It is a terrible thing
to be wrong in that-the source of all our miseries and confusions
whatever."
" The 'Seven Liberal Arts' notion of education is now a little obsolete; but try whatever is set before you; gradually find what is fittest for you. This you will learn to read in all sciences and subjects."
" You will not learn it from any current set of History Books; but
God has not gone to sleep, and eternal Justice, not eternal Vulpinism
[is the law of the universe]."
"It was for religion that universities were first instituted; practically for that, under all changes of dialect, they continue: pious awe
of the Great Unknown makes a sacred canopy, under which all has
to grow. All is lost and futile in universities if that fail. Sciences
and technicalities are very good and useful, indeed, but in comparison
they are as adjuncts to the smith's shop."
"There is in this university a considerable stir about endowments.
That there should be need of such is not honorable to us at a time
when so many in Scotland and elsewhere have suddenly become pos



48


THOMAS CARLYLE.


sessed of millions which they do not know what to do with. Like
that Lancashire gentleman who left a quarter of a million to help pay
the national debt. Poor soul! All he had got in a life of toil and
struggle were certain virtues-diligence, frugality, endurance, patience-truly an invaluable item, but an invisible one. The money
which secured all was strictly zero! I am aware, all of us are aware,
a little money is needed; but there are limits to the need of moneycomparatively altogether narrow limits. To every mortal in this stupendous universe incalculably higher objects than money! The deepest depths of Vulgarism is that of setting up money as our Ark of the
/ Covenant. Devorgilla gave [a good deal of money gathered by John
Balliol in Scotland] to Balliol College in Oxford, and we don't want
it back; but as to the then ratio of man's soul to man's stomach,
man's celestial part to his terrestrial, and even bestial, compared to
the now ratio in such improved circumstances, is a reflection, if we
pursue it, that might humble us to the dust.
" [The English are the richest people, in the way of endowments, on
the face of the earth, in their universities; and it is a remarkable fact
that since the time of Bentley you cannot name anybody that has
gained a great name in scholarship among them, or constituted a
point of revolution in the pursuits of men in that way. The man
that does that is worthy of being remembered among men, though he
may be poor, not endowed with worldly wealth. One man that actually did constitute a revolution was the son of a poor weaver in Saxony, who edited his 'Tibullus' in Dresden in the room of a poor
comrade, and while he was editing it had to gather peascod shells in
the street and boil them for dinner. His name was hIeyne. I can
remember it was quite a revolution in my mind when I got hold of
that man's book on' Virgil.] Be zealous [for learning]: far beyond
money is it to use well what is prepared for us. You cannot wait on
better times; for you, it is here and now, or else never; the better
times will come if they can.
"We have ceased to believe, as Devorgilla did, that in colleges and
monasteries is the certain road to Wisdom; and, alas! secondly, that




THOMAS CARLYLE.


49


Wisdom is the way to heaven. Many of us think-do they not?
though nobody will say so-that cent. per cent. is the real course that
leads to advantages. In regard to the colleges and monasteries, I
agree with all the world in considerably dissenting from Devorgilla.
Wisdom is not quite so certainly to be obtained there; but in regard
to the second proposition, I do go with her, and invite every living
soul to go with her-that Wisdom is, was, and to the end of time and
through eternity will be, the supreme object for a man, and the only
path upward for his objects and for him. Yes, my friends, especially
you, my young friends, that is forever the divine thing for us; whatever heaven we can expect, there, or nowhere, is the road to it. [In
Wisdom, ' namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all the
objects that come round about you, and the habit of behaving with
justice and wisdom.'] I would have you reflect much upon this,
mostly in silence, in all stages of your life-journey, in all scenes and
situations; the more purely you can discern that, and the more steadfastly act upon it, the better it will be for you. On other terms, victory is possible for no man.
"Silent Wisdom! The mute ages, they say nothing for themselves;
but in this, the object and centre of all articulate knowledge, one has
to call them far more opulent. The old Baron who had no literature
whatever, could not sign his name, had to put his cross mark, sometimes dipped his iron hand and stamped that-many a 'brilliant'
writing and what not seems to me the reverse of improvement on
him! Noble virtues dwelt in him, spotless honor in interests not to
be measured in worldly good, an authentic commerce with heaven
not at all recognizable in his witty descendant. Prudent, patient,
valiant, steering towards his object with all the qualities needful, and
his object a good one, one begins to see in him what the real History
of England was-the making of the best men. And so it lasted for
six or seven generations. When you once put speech into that, it is
a glorious thing-glorious to the wise man himself, and to all the
world. But let me remind you, you may superadd speech, and unfortunately have little or nothing of all that to superadd it to. A
3




50


THOMAS CARLYLE.


man may actually have no wisdom, and be a very great talker. How
to regain all that? You will regain it in proportion as you are sincere. I often hear of an "excellent speech;" well, but it is the existence of the things spoken that will benefit me. So much depends
on a man's morality; on the heart fully as much depends as on the
head-the Heart is first of all! There are 75,000 sermons preached
every Sunday-dry-rot; but I will not suppose you gone into that
state. It is a long road I have travelled, and you are all upon it,
struggling forward into the undiscovered country, which to your fathers and grandfathers is but too well known; surely if they would
speak to you with candor and sincerity and insight, they might throw
some light on it.
" If all this is the supreme end of universities, it becomes more and
more dubious of attainment therein. The old Baron learned by apprenticeship; theoretic instruction will not do; it is a dreadful case
when the theoretic is got, and the real missed. This has led some
to think of mute education."
" What is fame? Shakespeare ends with, 'Good friend, for Jesus'
sake, forbear!'"
" Much confusion you may count on ahead, but there are beneficent
hearts too: their doors may seem closed; but such you will find, and
their human love of you and help of you will be balm for all your
wounds."
In transmitting a report of Carlyle's address as
Lord   Rector to the Pall Mall Gazette, I wrote a
note, which was printed in that journal, and which I
venture to insert here: " I have never heard a speech
of whose more remarkable qualities so few can be
conveyed    on paper.     You will read of 'applause'
and 'laughter,' but you will little realize the eloquent blood     flaming    up the   speaker's cheek, the




THOMAS CARLYLE.


51


kindling of his eye, or the inexpressible voice and
look when the drolleries were coming out. When
he spoke of clap-trap books exciting astonishment
'in the minds of foolish persons,' the evident halting
at the word 'fools,' and the smoothing of his hair, as
if he must be decorous, which preceded the 'foolish
persons,' were exceedingly comical. As for the flaming bursts, they took shape in grand tones, whose
impression was made deeper, not by raising, but by
lowering the voice. Your correspondent here declares that he should hold it worth his coming all
the way from London in the rain in the Sundaynight train were it only to have heard Carlyle say,
'There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all
California, or the getting of all the suffrages that are
on the planet just now.' In the first few minutes
of the address there was some hesitation, and much
of the shrinking that one might expect in a secluded
scholar; but these very soon cleared away, and during the larger part, and to the close of the oration,
it was evident that he was receiving a sympathetic
influence from his listeners, which he did not fail to
return tenfold. The applause became less frequent;
the silence became that of a woven spell; and the
recitation of the beautiful lines from Goethe at the
end was so masterly, so marvellous, that one felt in
it that Carlyle's real anathemas against rhetoric were
but the expression of his knowledge that there is a
rhetoric beyond all other arts."




52


THOMAS CARLYLE.


V.
On the evening of the Edinburgh Address, I wrote
to Mrs. Carlyle, giving particulars concerning Carlyle and the installation which I knew she would be
glad to hear. Alas! alas! It was but a few weeks
after that I placed in Carlyle's hand, when he returned from    her grave, the answer to my letter-one
of the last she ever wrote.     Here it is:
"15 CHEYNE Row, CHELSEA, 5 April, 1866.
"MY DEAR lMR. CONWAY,-The 'disposition to write me a little
note,' was a good inspiration, and I thank you for it; or rather, accepting it as an inspiration, I thank Providence for it-Providence,
'Immortal Gods,' 'Superior Powers,' 'Destinies,' whichever be the
name you like best.
" Indeed, by far the most agreeable part of this flare-up of success,
to my feeling, has been the enthusiasm of personal affection and sympathy on the part of his friends. I haven't been so fond of everybody, and so pleased with the world, since.I was a girl, as just in
these days when reading the letters of his friends, your own included.
I am not very well, having done what I do at every opportunitygone off my sleep; so I am preparing to spend a day and night at
Windsor for change of atmosphere, moral as well as material. I am
in a hurry, but couldn't refrain from saying, 'Thank you, and all
good be with you!'
" Sincerely yours,  JANE W. CARLYLE."
"Whatever 'triumph' there may have been," said
Carlyle, when I next met him, "in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed hers. Long, long years




THOMAS CARLYLE.


53


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
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."
Nothing could be more beautiful than the loving
reverence of Carlyle for the delicate, soft-voiced little lady whose epitaph he wrote in words that may
here be quoted:
"Here likewise now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas
Carlyle, Chelsea, London. She was born at Haddington, 14th July,
] 801, only child of the above John Welsh and of Grace Welsh, Caplegell, Dumfriesshire, his wife. In her bright existence she had more
sorrows than are common, but also a soft invincibility, a capacity of
discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart, which are rare. For forty
years she was the true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by
act and word unweariedly forwarded him as none else could in all of
worthy that he did or attempted. She died at London, 21st April,
1 866, suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if
gone out."
When Carlyle's mood was stormiest, her voice
could in an instant allay it; the lion was led as by a
little child. She sat a gentle invalid on the sofa, and
in the end, whatever had been the outburst of indignation, justice was sure to be done, and the mitigation sure to be remembered. I can hear her voice




54


THOMAS CARLYLE.


now-" But, Mr. Carlyle, you remember he did act
very nobly towards that poor man," etc., followed
> from the just now Rhadamanthus with, "Ah, yes;
he had, after all, a vein of good feeling in him;" and
then came the neatest summing-up of virtues concerning some personage whose fragments we had
despaired of ever picking up. Carlyle was always
modest when speaking of himself-which he rarely
did-and artistic in his portraits of others. The
shades might be laid on rather thickly at first, but
the lights were sure to be added at each possible
point,-except, indeed, in the case of a few typical
public figures, to hate whom was in the essence of
his religion. Mrs. Carlyle had a true poetic nature
and an almost infallible insight. In the conversation
which went on in the old drawing-room at Chelsea
there was no suggestion of things secret or reserved;
people with sensitive toes had no careful provision
made for them, and had best keep away; free, frank,
and simple speech and intercourse were the unwritten but ever-present law. Mrs. Carlyle's wit and
humor were overflowing, and she told anecdotes
about her husband under which he sat with a patient look of repudiation until the loud laugh broke
out and led the chorus. Now it was when she described his work on "Friedrich" as one of those
botanical growths which every now and then come
to a knot, which being slowly passed, it grows on




2 ti-,) 0


CHOIR~ OF ABBEY ClIURCIr, IIAIDINGTON, MIRS. CARLYLE'S GRAVE i-N rnE FOREGROUND).




~~I




THOMAS CARLYLE.


55


to another knot. "What Mr. Carlyle is when one
of those knots is reached, must be left to vivid imaginations."  Again it was a transitory cook who
served up daily some mess described by Carlyle as
"Stygian," with "Tartarean" for a variant. She
being dismissed, another applicant comes.
" Carlyle having, you are aware, deep intuitive insight into human character, goes down to speak to
the new woman, and returns to pronounce her a most
worthy and honest person. The woman next comes
to me, and a more accomplished Sairey Gamp my
eyes never looked on. The great coarse creature
comes close, eyes me from head to foot, and begins
by telling me, ' When people dies, I can lay 'em out
perfect.' 'Sairey' was not retained, though I had
no doubt whatever of her ability to lay any of us out
'perfect."'
One evening the talk fell on the Brownings. Carlyle had given us the most attractive picture of Robert Browning in his youth. " He had simple speech
and manners, and ideas of his own; and I recall a
very pleasing talk with him during a walk, somewhere about Croydon, to the top of a hill. Miss
Barrett sent me some of her first verses in manuscript, and I wrote back that I thought she could do
better than write verses. But then she wrote again,
saying: 'What else can I do? Here am I chained
to my sofa by disease.' I wrote then, taking back all




56


THOMAS CARLYLE.


I had said. Her father was a physician, late from
India; a harsh impracticable man, as I have heard,
his lightest word standing out like laws of the Medes
and Persians. One day she read some verses Browning had written about her."  "Oh no," interrupts
Mrs. Carlyle, "she wrote something about Browning." "Ah, well," continues Carlyle, "you shall give
the revised and corrected edition presently. As I
was saying, she wrote something about him, comparing him to some fruit ---"  "Oh, Mr. Carlyle!" exclaims Mrs. 0. "She compared him," continues Carlyle, "to a nectarine."  "That's too bad," says Mrs.
Carlyle; " she compared his poetry to a pomegranate
— it was suggested by the title of his poems, "Bells
and Pomegranates:
"'And from Browning some pomegranate which, cut deep down the
middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured with a veined humanity.'"
"I stand corrected," says Carlyle, "and the lines are
very sweet and true;" and he then proceeded to tell
the pleasant romance on which he set out with a subtle appreciation and sympathetic admiration which
made it sweeter than the tale of the Sleeping Beauty.
The advice which Carlyle gave to Miss Barrett,
and which so many will rejoice that she did not follow, but induced him to take back, was characteristic.
That Carlyle was himself a poet all his true readers
know; had his early life been happier, it is even




THOMAS CARLYLE.


57


probable that he might have broken upon the world
with songs such as his "Tragedy of the Night-moth"
and "Here hath been dawning another blue day"
show him to have been amply able to sing; but his
ideal was too literally a burden to rise with full freedom on its wings. He could rarely or never read
the rhymes of his contemporaries- Goethe always
excepted-without a sense of some frivolity in that
mode of expression. The motto of "Past and Present," from  Schiller-" Ernst ist das Leben"-was
deeply graven on Carlyle's heart. Thomas Cooper,
author of the "Purgatory of Suicides" (dedicated to Y
Carlyle), like so many others who had suffered for
their efforts for reform, was befriended by Carlyle.
"Twice," says Cooper, in his Autobiography, "he
put a five-pound note in my hand when I was in
difficulties, and told me, with a grave look of humor,
that if I could never pay him again he would not
hang me."   Carlyle gave Cooper more than moneya copy of "Past and Present," and therewith some
excellent advice. The letter is fine, and my reader
will be glad to read it.
"CHELSEA, Septemtber 1, 1845.
"DEAR SIR,-I have received your poem, and will thank you for
that kind gift, and for all the friendly sentiments you entertain towards me-which, as from an evidently sincere man, whatever we may
think of them otherwise, are surely valuable to a man. I have looked
into yonr poem, and find indisputable traces of genius in it-a dark
3*




58


THOMAS CARLYLE.


Titanic energy struggling there, for which we hope there will be a
clearer daylight by-and-by. If I might presume to advise, I think I
would recommend you to try your next work in Prose, and as a thing
turning altogether on Facts, not Fictions. Certainly the music that
is very traceable here might serve to irradiate into harmony far profitabler things than what are commonly called ' Poems,' for which, at
any rate, the taste in these days seems to be irrevocably in abeyance.
We have too horrible a practical chaos round us, out of which every
man is called by the birth of him to make a bit of Cosmos; that seems
to me the real Poem for a man - especially at present. I always
grudge to see any portion of a man's musical talent (which is the real
intellect, the real vitality or life of him) expended on making mere
words rhyme. These things I say to all my poetic friends, for I am
in earnest about them; but get almost nobody to believe me hitherto.
From you I shall get an excuse at any rate, the purpose of my so
speaking being a friendly one towards you.
"I will request you, further, to accept this book of mine, and to appropriate what you can of it. 'Life is a serious thing,' as Schiller
says, and as you yourself practically know. These are the words of a
serious man about it; they will not altogether be without meaning
for you."
Those who have read the " Purgatory of Suicides"
will be able to understand the extent to which Carlyle was influenced by his sympathies. A man who,
like Cooper, had been in jail for Chartist opinions
might be pretty sure, in those days, of getting a certificate for some "traces of genius" from           Carlyle.
My old friend William Lovett, a working-man and a
Radical, who had written a forcible letter to the English people from Warwick Jail, related to me the
tenderness and warmth with which he was received




THOMAS CARLYLE.


59


by Carlyle. Indeed, the author of " Chartism" wrote. his name so deep in the hearts of old Radicals that
they were never able to look far enough beyond his
sympathies to read his censures or his retractations.
When Carlyle came to live in London, it was with
something of the same feeling that animated the
Friar Bernard when he went to Rome, according to
the legend so finely used by Emerson in his lecture
on "The Conservative" (1841). The Friar had lamented in his cell on Mont Cenis the crimes of '"
mankind, and went to Rome to reform the general
corruption; but when he reached Rome, he was welcomed in the homes of the rich, found them loving
each other, bestowing alms on the poor, trying to
relieve the hard times. "Then the Friar Bernard
went home swiftly with other thoughts than he
brought, saying, 'This way of life is wrong; yet
these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are
lovers, they are lovers: what can I do? "' Carlyle
was disappointed in the two classes-that from
which he hoped much, that from which he looked
for little. As his favorite heroes had been poor
men, working-men or even peasants, who had risen
above all obstacles, so did he again and again cheer
and help and idealize men like Thomas Cooper and
Ebenezer Elliott and Samuel Bamford, seeing in
them morning-stars. But these faded away, or set,
without casting any great splendors over the world.




60


THOMAS CABLYLE.


On the other hand, he found aristocratic friends, like
Lansdowne and Ashburton, all alive to the evils of
the time, sympathizing with the Radicals, Chartists,
fighters against the Corn-laws. Carlyle's radicalism
gradually faded, and in the Continental revolutions
of 1848 went out altogether.
Four letters have recently been laid before the
Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester,
and printed in the Examiner there, of which some
extracts must be quoted here. They were written
by Carlyle to Samuel Bamford, an old Radical who
had been to prison, and had struggled by the side of
Henry Hunt-idealized in George Eliot's "Felix
Holt, the Radical." Bamford began a record of his
experiences in a little book called "Life of a Radical," and sent a copy of it to Carlyle.      It was acknowledged with enthusiasm (1843), and several copies ordered by the author at Chelsea. He wrote:
"I read your book with much interest; with a true desire to hear
more and more of the authentic news of Middleton and of the honest
toiling men there. Many persons have a similar desire. I would
recommend you to try whether there is not yet more to be said, perhaps, on some side of that subject; for it belongs to an important
class in these days. A man is at all times entitled, or even called
upon by occasion, to speak and write and in all fit ways utter what he
has himself gone through and known and got the mastery of; and
in truth, at bottom, there is nothing else that any man has a right to
write of. For the rest, one principle, I think, in whatever farther you
write, may be enough to guide you: that of standing rigorously by the




THOMAS CARLYLE.


61


fact, however naked it look. Fact is eternal; all fiction is very transitory in comparison. All men are interested in any man if he will
speak the facts of his life for them; his authentic experience, which
corresponds, as face with face, to that of all other sons of Adam."
The letter from which this was taken was dated at
Chelsea. The next letter, acknowledging a further
instalment of Bamford's " Life," is written five years
later, and dated at "The Grange, Hampshire," where
Carlyle was staying with his aristocratic friends. In
this he writes:
" There are only two precepts I will bid you, once more, always
keep in mind: the first is to be brief; not to dwell on an object one
instant after you have made it clear to the reader, and, on the whole,
to be select in your objects taken for description, dwelling on each in
proportion to its likelihood to interest, omitting many in which such
likelihood is doubtful, and only bringing out the more important into
prominence and detail. The second, which indeed is still more essential, but which I need not insist upon, since I see you scrupulously
observe it, is to be exact to the truth in all points; never to hope to
mend a fact by polishing any corner of it off into fiction, or adding
any ornament which it had not, but to give it us always as God gave
it-that, I suppose, will turn out to be best state it could be in! These
two principles, I think, are the whole law of the matter; and, in fact,
they are the epitome of what a sound, strong, and healthy mind will,
by Nature, be led to achieve in such an enterprise; wherefore, perhaps, my best ' precept' of all were, to recommend Samuel Bamford
to his own good genius (to his own honest good sense and healthy instincts) and bid him write or omit without misgivings whenever that
had clearly spoken! And, on the whole, persevere and prosper; that
is the wish we form for you.
"We are here among high people, to whom the ' Passages ' and
other writings of yours are known: last night I was commissioned by
Lord Lansdowne, to ask you to send him a copy of this new work."




62


THOMAS CARLYLE.


The year in which this last letter is dated (1848)
was, as I have said, that revolutionary year, in several
senses, which revolutionized Carlyle, and began his
reaction against radicalism. As Wordsworth was
turned to his extreme conservatism         by the French
Revolution-during part of which he was in Parisso Carlyle was repelled and disgusted by the events
of '48 on the Continent. There is just a slight indication of the change in the third letter to Bamford,
from which I give an extract as follows:
" On the whole, however, we must not yet let you off, or allow you
to persuade yourself that you have done with us. A vast deal more
of knowledge about Lancashire operatives, and their ways of living
and thinking, their miseries and advantages, their virtues and sins,
still lies in your experience; and you must endeavor, by all good
methods, to get it winnowed, the chaff of it well separated from the
wheat, and to let us have the latter, as your convenience will serve.
To workers themselves you might have much to say, in the way of
admonition, encouragement, instruction, reproof; and the Captains
of Workers, the rich people, are very willing also to listen to you, and
certain of them will believe heartily whatever true thing you tell
them: this is a combination of auditors which nobody but yourself
has such hold of at present; and you must encourage yourself to do
with all fidelity whatever you can in that peculiar and by no means
unimportant position you occupy. 'Brevity, sincerity'-and, in fact,
all sorts of manful virtue-will have once more, as they everywhere in
this world do, avail you."
It is very faint though-the tinge of reaction-as
yet; only a little more faith in the " Captains of
Workers," and a shade less in the workmen. The




THOMAS CARLYLE.


63


letter was written in January, 1849.     The next is in
April of the same year. In it he encloses twenty-five
pounds presented by Lord Ashburton to Bamford, in
whose Life that nobleman had been interested.         It
would seem that Bamford had written and wished to
publish some poems; that was a thing Carlyle never
failed to oppose. He says the publishers do not want
poetry; the public will not buy it; poetry is a bugbear:
"For my own part, too, I own I had much rather see a sensible
man, like you, put down your real thoughts and convictions in prose,
than occupy yourself with fancies and imaginations such as are usually dealt with in verse.  The time is in deadly earnest; our life
itself, in all times, is a most earnest practical matter, and only incidentally a sportful or singing or rhyming one: let S. Bamford continue to tell us in fresh truthful prose the things he has learned about
Lancashire and the world; that, I must say, would be my verdict
too!"
So hard did Carlyle struggle to believe in the
British working-men! Reading these letters, I can
only once more mourn that his early difficulties did
not make good their threat of sending him       over to
America.    Thor with his hammer-and the "triphammer with seolian attachment," as Emerson described it-had happier work awaiting him         in the
New World than any he found in the Old.
When Carlyle visited Berlin, he went to a museum
there.   "The keeper of it," he told me, "insisted on
showing me everything in the place; but what I went




64


THOMAS CARLYLE.


to see was Friedrich's clothes. It was as if one
should go into an inn to take a chop, and they insisted he must eat everything in their store. Finally, after some contention, I looked upon Friedrich's
military old clothes. And I saw that I really had
properly nothing to do with those clothes. Considerations of self-respect, chiefly, made me undertake
the 'Life of Friedrich,' but it has been all toil and
pain."  Carlyle's sigh as he spoke of "Friedrich's
military old clothes" was more pathetic than anything in "Sartor."   The hammer had done its tremendous stroke of work, but the strain of the aeolian
attachment was evermore in the minor key.
VI.
Carlyle and his young wife had visited London
before there was any thought of their going to reside
there. In February, 1832, they were staying at No. 4
Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Road.     Here one morning Carlyle received a volume addressed to the author of the essay on "Characteristics."   It was acknowledged in this note:
"The writer of the essay named 'Characteristics' has just received, apparently from Mr. Leigh Hunt, a volume entitled 'Christianism,' for which he hereby begs to express his thanks. The volume shall be read: to meet the author of it personally would doubtless be a new gratification.            T. CARLYLE."
The volume alluded to bore on its title-page:




THOMAS CARLYLE.


65


" ' Christianism; or, Belief and Unbelief Reconciled.'
Being Exercises and Meditations. 'M ercy and Truth
have met together; Righteousness and Peace have
kissed each other.' Not for sale; only seventy-five
copies printed. 1832." It was a book which completely captivated the heart of Carlyle. It was enlarged and published in 1853 under the title "The
Religion of the Heart," but I cannot forbear offering
here an extract from      its preface, styled "Introductory Letter," and signed Leigh Hunt:
"To begin the day with an avowed sense of duty and a mutual
cheerfulness of endeavor is at least an earnest of its being gone through
with the better. The dry sense of duty, or even of kindness, if rarely
accompanied with a tender expression of it, is but a formal and dumb
virtue, compared with a livelier sympathy: and it misses part of its
object, for it contributes so much the less to happiness. Affection
loves to hear the voice of affection. Love wishes to be told that it is
beloved. It is humble enough to seek in the reward of that acknowledgment the certainty of having done its duty. In the pages before
you there is as much as possible of this mutual strengthening of benevolence, and as little of dogmatism. They were written in a spirit
of sincerity, which would not allow a different proceeding.... Some
virtues which have been thought of little comparative moment, such
as those which tend to keep the body in health and the mind in good
temper, are impressed upon the aspirant as religious duties. What
virtues can be of greater consequence than those which regulate the
color of the whole ground of life, and effect the greatest purposes of
all virtue and all benevolence? Much is made, accordingly, not only
of the bodily duties, but of the very duty of cheerfulness, and of setting a cheerful example. In a word, the whole object is to encourage
everybody to be, and to make, happy; to look generously, neverthe



66


THOMAS CARLYLE.


less, on such pains, as well as pleasure, as are necessary for this purpose; to seek, as much as possible, and much more than is common,
their own pleasures through the medium of those of others; to cooperate with heaven, instead of thinking it has made us only to mourn
and be resigned; to unite in the great work of extending knowledge
and education; to cultivate a reasonable industry, and an equally reasonable enjoyment; not to think gloomily of this world, because we
hope for a better; not to cease to hope for a better, because we may
be able to commence our heaven in this."
Carlyle was already weary of the shrill negations,
albeit he had accepted many of them, and found in
such thoughts and aspirations as these the expression
of a congenial spirit. He had, indeed, read with admiration Leigh Hunt's previous and public works,
but now    he longed to know       him.   The brief note
quoted seems to have elicited a cordial response
from  Leigh Hunt.      Here is another note from       Carlyle to Leigh Hunt, dated soon after the last quoted:
"4 AMPTON STREET,
"GRAY'S INN ROAD, 20th February, 1832.
"DEAR SIR,-I stay at home (scribbling) till after two o'clock,
and shall be truly glad, any morning, to meet in person a man whom
I have long, in spirit, seen and esteemed.
" Both my wife and I, however, would reckon it a still greater favor
could you come at once in the evening, and take tea with us, that our
interview might be the longer and freer. Might we expect you, for
instance, on Wednesday night? Our hour is six o'clock; but we will
alter it in any way to suit you.
"We venture to make this proposal because our stay in town is
now likely to be short, and we should be sony to miss having free
speech of you.    Believe me, dear sir, very sincerely yours,
"THOMAS CARLYLE."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


Here, then, in a rather dingy part of London, began the lasting friendship between Carlyle and Leigh /
Hunt, illustrated in the letters contained in Part III.
of this work.
Readers of Leigh Hunt's " Autobiography" need
not be reminded of the loving reverence with which
that author regarded Carlyle. " I believe," he wrote,
"that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his faultfinding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering and loving and
sincere; and I believe, further, that if the fellowcreature were suffering only, and neither loving nor
sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life
which put him at the mercies of some good man for
some last help and consolation towards his grave,
even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount
of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached
him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle."
There is a tradition, I believe a true one, that the
two chief male characters in "The Onyx Ring," by
John Sterling, were meant to represent Carlyle and
Goethe (Collins and Walsingham). Those who have
read that charming romance will recognize in its
great-hearted hero an estimate of Carlyle confirmatory of Leigh Hunt, and even more important as
coming from the most intimate friend Carlyle ever
had.*
* "Not far," said Maria, "from the point we are approaching,




68


THOMAS CARLYLE.


It was a characteristic of Carlyle that, though he*
really loved but few, he never recalled his heart once
given.    There were many who felt that (as I once
heard Mill say) " Carlyle had turned against all his
lives the man we have before spoken of-the hermit Collins. I have
seen him often; and, strange as he is, I like him very much. There
is such thorough honesty about him, as well as so much queer uncouth kindness, that he interests me extremely. He is the most
marked and original figure I have ever heard of in England. Whatever is usual or commonplace among us seems to have influenced
him only by contraries, and called out nothing but opposition."
"All that," answered Walsingham, "is very foolish, or at least
very imperfectly wise. In every age there is good enough, if a man
will put himself into harmony with it, to enable him to produce more
good out of it.... We are not thrown down out of the sky like
meteoric stones, but are formed by the same laws and gradual processes as all about us, and so are adapted to it all, and it to us. But,
no doubt, Collins will fight his way through his present angry element
to peace and activity. What employment has he now?"
"He minds his beehives. To the few people he ever sees, he talks
quaintly and vigorously-I sometimes think, wildly; but all he says
has a strong stamp upon it, and never could pass from hand to hand
without notice. After having heard him, some of his phrases keep
ringing in one's ears, as if he had sent a goblin trumpeter to haunt
one with the sound, for days and nights after. But I have always
felt that he has more in his mind than ever comes out in the expression; and, odd as his talk is, I should hardly call it affected or conceited."
"Ah! no doubt there must be much genuine nature there. But
although these vehement lava-lumps and burning coals of his may be
no mere showy firework, and do shoot out from a hot central furnace,
I would rather it were so much cool, clear water, pouring from an inward lake of freshness."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


69


friends," but this was only true of their radicalism,
which he once shared. On the other hand, Charles
Kingsley, who had shared his reaction in political
affairs, kept away from him a good deal in later years
because he felt himself to be one of the large number implicitly arraigned in the " Life of Sterling " as
the disappointed young ladies who had taken the
veil. But Carlyle always spoke affectionately of
Kingsley. " I have a very vivid remembrance," he
once said, "of Charles coming with his mother to
see me.   A lovely woman she was, with large, clear
eyes, a somewhat pathetic expression of countenance,
sincerely interested in all religious questions. The
delicate boy she brought with her had much the
same expression, and sat listening with intense and
silent interest to all that was said. He was always
of an eager, loving, poetic nature."
With Alfred Tennyson his frequent intercourse
was interrupted when the poet went to reside in the
Isle of Wight. Until then they used to sit with a
" I can fancy him saying-the All is right. Thlere must be a FireGod as well as a Water-God. If there were no fire-forces seething
and blasting, for aught you know the fountains and flood-forces would
stagnate into slime...."
"All very true. But I stoop to drink of the stream; and I hasten
away from the eruption."
"In this case," replied Maria, laughing, "the eruption saves you
the trouble. It seeks no one, and loves its solitude" ("The Onyx
Ring;" published in Blackwood's Magazine, 1838).




70


THOMAS CARLYLE.


little circle of friends under the one tree that made
the academy of the Chelsea home, smoke long pipes,
and interchange long arguments. But they remained
warm friends; and when Tennyson visited London,
they generally met, and were very apt to relapse into
the old current of conversation that had begun under
the tree. I may mention here the delicacy of Carlyle
towards Tennyson when they were both offered titles
at the same time by Disraeli. Carlyle having written his reply declining the offer, withheld it carefully until the answer of Tennyson had been made
known, fearing that the latter might in some degree
be supposed to have been influenced by the course
he himself had resolved to adopt.
Some of Carlyle's earlier friends had been drawn
to him by the dazzling attractions of " Sartor Resartus."  A contemporary writer reports of the audiences which attended the lectures on " Heroes " that
"they chiefly consisted of persons of rank and
wealth," and he added, " There is something in his
manner which must seem very uncouth to London
audiences of the most respectable class, accustomed
as they are to the polished deportment which is usually exhibited in Willis's or the Hanover rooms."
7 Not a few of these Turveydrop folk fell back when
/ they found whither that pillar of fire was leading
them.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


71


VII.
Dr. John Carlyle told me, with reference to the
quaint framework of his brother's unique book (" Sartor Resartus"), that he had no doubt it was suggested
by the accounts he (Dr. C.) used to give him of his
experiences in Germany while pursuing his medical
studies there. There was a Schelling Club, which
Schelling himself used to visit now and then, devoted to beer, smoke, and philosophy. The free, and
often wild, speculative talks of these cloud-veiled
(with tobacco-smoke) intelligences of the transcendental Olympus amused his brother Thomas much in
the description and rehearsal, and the doctor said he
recalled many of the comments and much of the
laughter in "Sartor Resartus."  Apart from this
framework, there never was a book which came
more directly from the heart and life of a man; and
being for that very reason a chapter of the world's
experience, it was a word which came to its own only
to find a slow reception. It was a long time before
it could find a publisher-this great book into which
five years of labor had gone-but at last (1833) Mr.
Fraser consented to publish it in his magazine, much
to the consternation of his readers.
"When it began to appear," said Carlyle, "poor
Fraser, who had courageously undertaken it, found
himself in great trouble. The public had no liking




72


THOMAS CARLYLE.


whatever for that kind of thing. Letters lay piled
mountain high on his table, the burden of them being, 'Either stop sending your magazine to me, or
stop printing that crazy stuff about clothes.' I advised him to hold on a little longer, and asked if
there were no voices in a contrary sense. 'Just two
-a Mr. Emerson, of New England, and a Catholic
priest at Cork.' These said, ' Send me Fraser so
long as "Sartor" continues in it."' Some years
afterwards Carlyle visited Cork, and found out his
Roman Catholic reader, and he used to relate, with
some drollery, how he was kept waiting for some
time because the servant was unwilling to disturb
him during some hours of penance and prayer with
which he was engaged in the garden. "The interview did not amount to much."
"Sartor Resartus " first appeared in book form in
New England (1835), edited by Emerson, to whom
also is to be credited the collection of Carlyle's miscellaneous papers. Carlyle loved to dwell upon the
recognition he had received from New England in
the years when he was comparatively unknown in his
own country. "There was really something maternal in the way America treated me. The first book
I ever saw of mine, the first I could look upon as
wholly my own, was sent me from that country, and
I think it was the most pathetic event of my life
when I saw it laid on my table. The 'French Rev



THOMAS CARLYLE.


73


olution,' too, which had alarmed everybody here,
and brought me no penny, was taken up in America
with enthusiasm, and as much as one hundred and
fifty pounds sent to me for it."     " Sartor Resartus"
and the " Miscellanies " were both published in England in book form in 1838, after their appearance in
America.
Mr. Carlyle was much urged about that time to
visit the United States, and had intended to do so;
he was, I believe, only prevented       from   fulfilling
his intention by the pressure of his labors on the
"French    Revolution"-more particularly by the
necessity of reproducing the first volume of it, which
had been burned by a servant-girl.
There is a letter of which my reader will be glad
to read a portion in this memoir, and in connection
with what has been said concerning the home and
circumstances amid which "Sartor Resartus" was
written.   It is Carlyle's letter to Goethe, published
in the latter's translation of the " Life of Schiller"
(Frankfort, 1830):
" You inquire with such warm interest respecting our present abode
and occupations, that I feel bound to say a few words about both,
while there is still room left. Dumfries is a pleasant town, containing about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and may be considered the
centre of the trade and judicial system of a district which possesses
some importance in the sphere of Scottish industry. Our residence
is not in the town itself, but fifteen miles to the northwest, among the
granite hills and the black morasses which stretch westward through
4




74                  THOMAS CARLYLE.
Galloway almost to the Irish Sea. In this wilderness of heath and
rock our estate stands forth a green oasis, a tract of ploughed, partly
enclosed and planted ground, where corn ripens, and trees afford a
shade, although surrounded by sea-mews and rough-wooled sheep.
Here, with no small effort, have we built and furnished a neat, substantial dwelling; here, in the absence of professorial or other office,
we live to cultivate literature according to our strength, and in our
own peculiar way. We wish a joyful growth to the rose and flowers
of our garden; we hope for health and peaceful thoughts to further
our aims. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they
blossom already in anticipation. Two ponies, which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air, are the best medicines for weak nerves.
This daily exercise-to which I am much devoted-is my only recreation: for this nook of ours is the loveliest in Britain-six miles removed from any one likely to visit me. Here Rousseau would have
been as happy as on his island of St. PielTe. My town friends, indeed, ascribe my sojourn here to a similar disposition, and forbode me
no good result. But I came hither solely with the design to simplify
my way of life, and to secure the independence through which I could
be enabled to remain true to myself. This bit of earth is our own;
here we can live, write, and think as best pleases ourselves, even
though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the monarch of literature.
Nor is the solitude of such great importance; for a stage-coach takes
us speedily to Edinburgh, which we look upon as our British Weimar.
And have I not, too, at this moment piled up upon the table of my
little library a whole cart-load of French, German, American, and
English journals and periodicals-whatever may be their worth? Of
antiquarian studies, too, there is no lack. From some of our heights
I can descry, about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola and his Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I
was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me. And
so one must let Time work.
"But whither am I wandering? Let me confess to you I am uncertain about my future literary activity, and would gladly learn your




THOMAS CARLYLE.


75


opinion concerning it; at least pray write to me again, and speedily,
that I may feel myself united to you. The only piece of any importance that I have written since I came here is an 'Essay on Burns.'
Perhaps you never heard of him, and yet he is a man of the most
decided genius; but born in the lowest rank of peasant life, and
through the entanglements of his peculiar position was at length
mournfully wrecked, so that what he effected was comparatively unimportant. He died, in the middle of his career, in the year 1796.
We English, especially the Scotch, loved Burns more than any poet
that had lived for centuries. I have often been struck by the fact
that he was born a few months before Schiller, in the year 1759, and
that neither of them ever heard the other's name. They shone like
stars in opposite hemispheres, or, if you will, the thick mist of earth
intercepted their reciprocal light."
Goethe, commenting upon this letter, says that
Burns was not unknown to him.           He speaks in the
highest terms of the exactness with which Carlyle
had entered into the life and individuality of Schiller, and of all the German authors whom he had introduced to his countrymen. He prefaces his translation of the " Life of Schiller " with two pictures of
the residence of Carlyle. In the year after the above
letter was written, Mr. Carlyle wrote another letter
to Goethe in reply to one from the latter, which I
have not seen published in England, but is interesting as indicating the feeling in that country towards
German literature up to the time at which he began
his work. This letter was written on December 22,
1829, and in it Carlyle says, " You will be pleased
to hear that the knowledge and appreciation of foreign, and especially of German, literature spreads




76


THOMAS CARLYLE.


with increasing rapidity wherever the English tongue
rules; so that now at the Antipodes, in New Holland
itself, the wise men of your country utter their wisdom. I have lately heard that even in Oxford and
Cambridge, our two English universities, hitherto
looked upon as the stopping-place of our peculiar
insular conservatism, a movement in such things has
begun. Your Niebuhr has found a clever translator
at Cambridge, and at Oxford two or three Germans
have already enough employment in teaching their
language. The new light may be too strong for certain eyes, yet no one can doubt the happy consequences that shall ultimately follow therefrom. Let
nations, as individuats, only know each other, and
mutual jealousy will change to mutual helpfulness;
and instead of natural enemies, as neighboring countries too often are, we shall all be natural friends."
VIII.
What Carlyle's parents hoped he would becomea preacher-that he was, in a far wider way than
they could have anticipated.  His casual, or even
half-cynical, remarks, bearing on religious matters,
were searching sermons. In Christmas week, he
said to his friend William Allingham that he had
observed an unusual number of drunken men in the
street, and " then," he quietly added, " I remembered
that it was the birthday of the Redeemer."  Car



THOMAS CARLYLE.


77


lyle's very oaths were more devout than many benedictions. I have heard none of the "sham damns
which disgust " (as Emerson said in his lecture on
" Superlatives "), but great sentences pronounced on
wrong with the solemnity of a foreman speaking for
an invisible jury. Being in Scotland at the house of
an old acquaintance, whom he knew to be a sceptic,
Carlyle was shocked, when dinner came, by the complaisance with which his entertainer-evidently because of the neighbors present-entered upon a sanctimonious "grace-before-meat" of the long Scotch
pattern; and cut it short by exclaiming, " Oh,
this is damnable!"
I believe that a careful criticism of Carlyle's style
of writing, which has puzzled so many, would show
it to be largely a scholastic exaltation and expansion
of the Duinfriesshire dialect. And when any comprehensive statement of his religious position is made
(if it ever is, which is doubtful), it will be found that
the "reverences" which germinated at his mother's
knee survived in him the decay of their objects and
symbols. Nay, even the old phrases were quaintly
transfigured in the speech of this heretical Covenanter. He sometimes used the metaphors of Gehenna in consigning dogmas about the same to the
place where he thought they belonged. It was, I
believe, the great pain of his life that he could reach
no solid shore beyond the endless quicksands of ne



78


THOMAS CARLYLE.


gation upon which he had entered. He could not,
with many of his friends, find any spiritual hope or
significance in the theory of "Evolution," and his
dislike of Comte's formulas repelled him from the
"Church of Humanity:" albeit the Evolutionists
find texts enough in his own doctrine of Force, and
the "Religion of Humanity" may be equally said to
have been heralded in the "Essay on Characteristics." However, in the matter of belief, here was
a powerful warrior, courageous, perfectly equipped,
without post to defend or battle to fight.
"To what religion do I belong?" wrote Schiller.
"To none thou mightst name. And wherefore to
i none? Because of my religion." It was the fervor
of Carlyle's religion which led him to turn away
from the Scotch Church with a breaking heart: it
was that which ignored each hallowed dome which
for him shut out the vault of pure reason, beneath
which he knelt with never-ceasing wonder and aspiration. He acknowledged that the English Church
was " the apotheosis of decency," but they who looked upon its articles as the thirty-nine pillars of the
universe were apt to find those pillars toppling upon
them before this Samson. The sects, for him, remained to the end, each some small umbrella which
its devotees imagined to be the vault of heaven.
Many years ago he was persuaded by some friends
in the south of England, whom he was visiting, to




THOMAS CARLYLE.


79


go to a Nonconformist chapel on Sunday. It was, I
believe, for the first time in many years that he had
entered either church or chapel, and was destined to
be the last. " The preacher's prayer," he said, "filled
me with consternation. ' 0 Lord, thou hast plenty
of treacle up there; send a stream of it down to us '
That was about the amount of it. He did not seem
in the least to know that what such as he needed
was rather a stream of brimstone. But this was only
the vulgar form of what I have sometimes found beneath the more refined phraseology of' distinguished
divines,' who, for the most part, know least of what
they pretend to know most. What do such know
of religion? of the absolute veracity, the passionate
love of truth and rectitude, unspeakable horror of
the reverse, which are Religion?  How many of
them are laboring to save the people from their real
Satan-alcohol, which is turning millions of them
into demons? The clergy are trying to make up for
the vacancy left by the decay of all real Belief with
theatrical displays, candles, and costumes. Everything goes to the theatre. 'Enter Christ!' That
will soon be the stage-direction. But it is all another
way of saying 'Exit Christ'-which states the fact
more nearly. Charles I. established the English
Church in order to keep his head on his shoulders.
A good many support it now for the like reason, and
with as little success. Undoubtedly there are some




80


THOMAS CARLYLE.


good men in it. There is Frederic Maurice, one of
the most pious-minded men in England. He once
wrote a novel called 'Eustace Conway:' he would
like it suppressed: it is a key to him. A young man
gets into mental doubts; a priest comes and sprinkles
moonshine over him, and then all is clear! Alas,
poor Sterling! That is what happened to him for a
little time. He got bravely through it; but when he
did, it became painfully evident to us that he was
too fine and thin to live among us here."
Carlyle is still thought by many people to have
been severe and unsympathetic, and that this was
owing to the despairing view of the world which
he so often took. But I remember that, when our
child died many years ago (we lonely in a foreign
land), Carlyle came and sat with us; and his tenderness, his healing words, his inspiration of courage,
made the one rainbow on that black cloud. True
to his experience that in work alone could sorrow
escape from its beleaguering cares, he, with kindly
art, suggested to me a congenial literary task. Ah,
when one was in grief and pain, what a providential
heart he had! What sincerity with his wisdom,
what bountifulness with his light and heat, and superiority to those selfish pettinesses, small personal
aims, which too often mingle their smoke with the
fine flame of genius!
It was in speaking of our grief, and that of others,




THOMAS CARLYLE.


81


that he said: " I still find more in Goethe about all
high things than in any other. His gleams come
now from a line, or even a word, or next a scrap of
poetry. He did not believe in a gray-haired Sovereign seated in the heavens, but in the Supreme;
Laws. A loyal soul! Concerning things unknown|
he has spoken the best word-Entsagung. In thinking about immortality, we jump to selfish conclusions, and support them as if they were piety: even
if we sanctify our conclusion by associating with it
our departed friends and clinging affections, it is
something you want. But nothing can be known.
Goethe says-Entsagung. Submission! Renunciation! That is near to it. I studied the word long
before I knew what he meant by it; but I know
there is such a thing as rising to that state of mind,
and that it is the best. Shall it be as I wish? It
shall be as it is. So, and not otherwise. To any
and every conceivable result the loyal man can and
will adapt himself; face that possibility until he
becomes its equal; and when any clear idea is reached, bend to that till it becomes ideal. Entsagung
shall then mean, 'tis best even so 1"
A characteristic of Carlyle was his sympathetic
interest in all animal life. Often when walking in
the park he would pause to observe the sparrows
which, hardly getting out of the way, would pertly
turn their heads and look at him as landlords might
4*




82


THOMAS CARLYLE.


observe a suspicious character trespassing upon their
estate. This seemed to amuse him much. He had
always a severe anathema for vivisection, and all
cruelty to animals. "Never can I forget the horror
with which I once saw a living mouse put into the
cage of a rattlesnake in the Zoological Gardens, to be
luncheon for that reptile. The serpent fixed upon
it his hard glittering eyes, and the poor little creature stood paralyzed, trembling with terror. It seemed to me a cruelty utterly unjustifiable, and one to
be unceasingly protested against." The compassion
of Burns for the field-mouse, whose home and hopes
his plough had overthrown, was in Carlyle's tone of
voice in this and much else that he said concerning his humble contemporaries of the animal world.
No reader of "Sartor Resartus" can lose the image
of the little boy at Ecclefechan, therein called En-,-  tepfuhl, dreaming over the migration and return of
the swallows. " Why mention our Swallows, which,
out of far Africa, as I learned, threading their way
over seas and mountains, corporate cities and belligerent nations, yearly found themselves, with the
month of May, snug lodged in our Cottage Lobby?
The hospitable Father (for cleanliness' sake) had
fixed a little bracket plumab vunder their nest: there
they built, caught flies, and twittered, and bred; and
all, I chiefly, loved them. Bright, nimble creatures,
who taught you the mason-craft; nay, stranger still,




THOMAS CARLYLE.


83


gave you a masonic incorporation, almost social police? For if, by ill chance, and when time pressed,
your House fell, have I not seen five neighborly
Helpers appear next day, and swashing to and fro,
with animated, loud, long-drawn chirpings, and activity almost super-hirundine, complete it again before nightfall?" This picture rose again before me
one day when Carlyle was speaking of an experience of the philosopher Kant, when he was walking
in a wood, near the wall of a ruin. He heard a
clamor among the swallows, high up on the wall, so
loud that it made him pause. The birds were in
shrill debate about something. Presently there was
a pause, then a long, low, plaintive note from one of
them; and immediately thereafter a nestling, not
yet able to fly, fell to the ground. Kant concluded
that the debate was that of a council which decreed
that there was not nest-room or food enough for all
the little ones; one must be sacrificed; and the one
low, plaintive note was that of the mother submitting to the fatal conclusion. Kant picked up the
fallen swallow, which was not yet dead, and looked
into its eye. How deep it was! As he gazed in it
he seemed to be looking into an infinite depth, a
mystical vista. "This struggle for existence," said
Carlyle, "of which our scientific men say so much, is
infinitely sad. We see it all around us. Our human
reptiles are outcomes of it. Somebody told me of a




84


THOMAS CARLYLE.


subtle fellow, a small lad, who heard a poor rustic,
warned to take care of his money in the crowd, say
he had only a pound and meant to keep it in his
mouth. Soon after the street-boy crosses the poor
man's path, and sets up a cry, 'You give me my
money!' A crowd having gathered, the boy explains
that he had been sent by his poor mother with a
sovereign to buy something, had fallen, and as the
money rolled away the man had picked it up and
put it in his mouth. The crowd cried 'Shame!' and
he from the country had to disgorge and get home as
he could. The story is credible of a boy struggling
for existence in this vast abyss of greed and want.
Survival of the fittest! Much that they write about
it appears to me anything but desirable. I was reading lately some speculations which seemed to be fine
white flour, but I presently found it was pulverized
glass I had got into my mouth-no nourishment in
it at all, but the reverse. What they call Evolution
is no new doctrine. I can remember when Erasmus
Darwin's 'Zoonomia' was still supplying subjects
for discussion, and there was a debate among the
students whether man were descended from an oyster or a cabbage. I believe the oyster carried the
day. That the weak and incompetent pass away,
while the strong and adequate prevail and continue,
appears true enough in animal and in human history; but there are mysteries in life, and in the uni



THOMAS CARLYLE.


85


verse, not explained by that discovery. They should
be approached with reverence. An irreverent mind
is really a senseless mind. I have always said that
I would rather have written those pages in Goethe's
'Wilhelm Meister' about the 'Three Reverences'
than all the novels which lhave appeared in my day."
IX.
Notwithstanding his affection for Professor Tyndall, Carlyle, in scientific matters, clung to the great
masters of the past, such as Faraday, for many years
his personal friend, and Franklin. He often spoke
of Franklin as America's greatest man, and told
good anecdotes of him; among others, one I had not
heard, of his going to see a church-steeple at Streatham, near London, which had been struck by lightning.  Franklin predicted that, if rebuilt in the
same way, the steeple would be again struck-and
that was just what happened.
The hostility which his father manifested towards
all works of fiction (as "downright lies ") turned, in
Carlyle, to the very severe standard of veracity by
which he judged all such works. He had an admiration for Charles Dickens, especially after hearing
that author read some of his own works. He could,
he said, hardly recall any theatrical representation
he had witnessed in which the whole company had
exhibited more variety of effect than came from the




86


THOMAS CARLYLE.


play of Dickens's voice and features. Thackeray
was one of his friends during life. One evening he
pointed out to me, when we were walking, an inn
to which Thackeray once retired to escape calls and
company when he had on hand a piece of work requiring special care and solitude. " I learned where
he was by his sending around to our house for a
Bible. Better work might come of the writers of
books if they knew more of this working in secret
with their Bible beside them. Some novelists of
our time appear to think that study and veracity
may be dispensed with in their art. I undertook to
read a famous novel recently, in which a personage,
a carpenter, is described as putting in the door-panel
after the rest of the door was completed. The famous novelist knew nothing at all about the making
of a door. I got no farther with that book."
On one occasion, a number of persons being present, a scholarly person (a nobleman) asked Carlyle
his opinion concerning works of imagination, of
high ability, but containing incidents not quite decorous - such books as "Tom Jones" and "IRoderick Random." The main question was whether
works of such character might safely be permitted
to women. " Quite as safely as to men," said Carlyle. "If the book is really valuable in other respects, I should advise them to read such and keep
quiet about it." It is hardly to be wondered, when




THOMAS CARLYLE.


87


the woman who lived by his side is remembered, that
Carlyle made a clause in his conservatism (though a
curiously cautious one) in favor of the women who
were seeking medical education in Edinburgh University. While filling the office of Lord Rector, his
opinion on that subject was asked by a friend there.
The answer returned and privately used with good
effect there, in the contest, was as follows:
"5 CHEYNE Row, CHELSEA, February 9, 1871.
"DEAR SIR, -It is with reluctance that I write anything to you
on this subject of Female Emancipation which is now rising to such
a height, and I do it only on the strict condition that whatever I say
shall be private, and nothing of it get into newspapers. The truth
is, the topic, for five-and-twenty years past, especially for the last
three or four, has been a mere sorrow to me, one of the most afflicting
proofs of the miserable anarchy that prevails in human society, and
I have avoided thinking of it, except when fairly compelled. What
little has become clear to me on it, I shall now endeavor to tell you.
"In the first place, then, I have never doubted but the true and
noble function of a woman in this world was, is, and forever will be,
that of being a Wife and Helpmate to a worthy man, and discharging
well the duties that devolve on her in consequence as mother of children and Mistress of a Household-duties high, noble, silently important as any that can fall to a human creature; duties which, if
well discharged, constitute woman, in a soft, beautiful, and almost
sacred way, the Queen of the World, and which, by her natural faculties, graces, strengths, and weaknesses are every way indicated as
specially hers. The true destiny of a woman, therefore, is to wed a
man she can love and esteem, and to lead noiselessly under his protection, with all the wisdom; grace, and heroism that is in her, the
life prescribed in consequence.
"It seems, furthermore, indubitable that if a woman miss this




88


THOMAS CARLYLE.


destiny, or have renounced it, she has every right, before God and
man, to take up whatever honest employment she can find open to
her in the world. Probably there are several or many employments
now exclusively in the hands of men for which women might be more
or less fit-printing, tailoring, weaving, clerking, etc. That medicine
is intrinsically not unfit for them is proved from the fact that in much
more sound and earnest ages than ours, before the medical profession
rose into being, they were virtually the physicians and surgeons as
well as sick-nurses-all that the world had. Their form of intellect,
their sympathy, their wonderful acuteness of observation, etc., seem to
indicate in them peculiar qualities for dealing with disease; and evidently in certain departments (that of female disease) they have quite
peculiar opportunities of being useful. My answer to your question,
then, may be that two things are not doubtful to me in this matter.
"1. That Wohen-any woman who deliberately so determineshave a right to study medicine; and that it might be profitable and
serviceable to have facilities, or at least possibilities, offered them for
so doing. But"2. That, for obvious reasons, Female Students of Medicine ought
to have, if possible, Female Teachers, or else an extremely select
kind of men, and, in particular, that to have young women present
among young men in anatomical classes, clinical lectures, or generally studying medicine in concert, is an incongruity of the first magnitude, and shocking to think of to every pure and modest mind.
" This is all I have to say; and I send it to you, under the condition above mentioned, as a friend for the use of friends.
"Yours sincerely,
"T. CARLYLE."
The servant who burned the "French Revolution"
was in the employ of Mrs. Taylor, afterwards Mrs.
Mill.   "One day," said Carlyle, in relating this tragedy, "Mill rushed in, and sat there, white as a sheet,
and for a time was a picture of speechless terror.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


89


At last it came out, amid his gasps, that Mrs. Taylor,
to whom he had lent the manuscript in whose preparation he had been much interested, had laid it on
her study-table, when her servant-girl had found it
convenient for lighting the fire; each day the volume must have been decreasing, until one day, the
lady coming in, found scattered about the grate the
last burnt vestiges of the most difficult piece of
work I had yet accomplished. The downright agony of Mill at this catastrophe was such that for a
tine it required all our energies to bring him any
degree of consolation; for me but one task remained in that matter: the volume was rewritten as well
as I could.do it, but it was never the same book."
" I used to see a good deal of Mill once, but we
have silently-and I suppose inevitably-parted
company. He was a beautiful person, affectionate,
lucid; he had always the habit of studying out the
thing that interested him, and could tell how he
came by his thoughts and views. But for many
years now I have not been able to travel with him
on his ways, though not in the least doubtful of his
own entire honesty therein. His work on ' Liberty'
appears to me the most exhaustive statement of precisely that I feel to be untrue on the subject treated.
But, alas! the same discrepancy has become now a
familiar experience. The Irishman is nOW about the
'freest' man in existence; he is at liberty to sit him




90


THOMAS CARLYLE.


down on his dunghill and curse all creation; 'he
clothes himself with curses as with a garment;' yet
what good does he or anybody else get by it all?"
In a letter written in 1832 (see Part III.) Carlyle
speaks of Mill as " one of the best, clearest-headed,
and clearest-hearted young men now living in London."
John Stuart Mill always seemed to me to grow
suddenly aged when Carlyle was spoken of. The
nearest to painful emotion in him which I ever saw
was when he made that remark, "Carlyle turned
against all his friends." I did not and do not think
the remark correct. When Carlyle came out with
his reactionary opinions, as they were deemed, his
friends became afraid of him, and nearly all stopped
going to see him at the very time when they should
have insisted on coming to a right understanding.
Carlyle was not reserved in speaking of the change
which had come over his convictions. "I used to
go up stairs and down spouting the oratory of all
radicals, especially the negro emancipationists. Nor
have I the slightest doubt that such people have
sometimes put an end to the most frightful cruelties.
Whlat worth they put into such work they reaped.
But it steadily grew into my mind that of all the insanities that ever gained foothold in human minds,
the wildest was that of telling masses of ignorant
people that it is their business to attend to the reg



THOMAS CARLYLE.


91


ulation of human society. I remember when Emerson first came to see me that he had a great deal to
say about Plato that was very attractive, and I began
to look up Plato; but, amid the endless dialectical
hair-splitting, was generally compelled to shut up the
book, and say,' How does all this concern me at all '
But later on I have read Plato with much pleasure,
finding him an elevated soul, spreading a pure atmosphere around one as he reads. And I find him
there pouring his scorn on the Athenian democracy
-the charming government, full of variety and disorder, dispensing equality alike to equals and unequals'-and hating that set quite as cordially as
the writer of the 'Latter-Day Pamphlets' hates the
like of it now; expressed in a sunny, genial way,
indeed, instead of the thunder and lightning with
which the pamphlet man was forced to utter it.
Let Cleon, the shoemaker, make good shoes, and no
man will honor him more than I. Let Cleon go
about pretending to be legislator, conductor of the
world, and the best thing one can do for Cleon is to
remand him to his work, and, were it possible, under
penalties. And I demand nothing more for Cleon
or Cuffee than I should be prepared to assert concerning the momentarily successful of such who have
managed to get titles and high places. In that kind,
for example, his Imperial Majesty Napoleon Thirdan intensified Pig, as, indeed, must some day appear."




92


THOMAS CARLYLE.


X.
It became clear to my own mind, after a few
months' acquaintance with Carlyle, that hlie had in
his mind a very palpable Utopia, one neither unlovely nor unjust, whose principles, if genuinely applied,
would make ordinary Conservatives glad enough to
accept those of Mill in preference. It was part of
his view, for instance, that private proprietorship in
land should be abolished; and I well remember him
building a long discourse on English "fee," Scotch
"feu  as derived from foi, fides, a trust, and destined to be that again when Cosmos replaced Chaos.
The paper- nobility would stand small chance in
his Commonwealth. It was they mainly who usurp
the posts of highest work, for which they are incompetent, and keep the true kings, the Voltaires,
Burnses, Johnsons, in the exile of mere " talk."  But
I also felt that it was by a rare felicity that Margaret Fuller spoke of him as "the Siegfried of England-great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable."
His vulnerable point was a painful longing to make
present facts square with his theory and ideal. He
could not bear to think the realization of his hope so
distant as the world said. He had lived through the
generation of bread riots, Chartism, Irish rebellions,
trade-union strikes and rattenings, and longed for a
fruitful land, with bread for all, work for all, each




THOMAS CARLYLE.


93


laborer provided for, disciplined, regulated-a great
army of honest and competent toilers, making the
earth blossom as a rose, and at the same time dwelling peacefully in patriarchally governed homes. If
this could only be realized somewhere! Then there
reached him the tidings that in the Southern States
of America there was such a fair country. I found
him fully possessed with this idea in 1863. In his
longing that his dream should be no dream, but a
reality, he had listened to the most insubstantial representations. An enthusiastic Southern lady had
repeatedly visited him, and found easy credence to
her story that such was the inherent vitality of
slaverv, and the divine force attending it, that even
then, when the South was blockaded, and harassed
by war on every side, prosperity was springing up,
and factories appearing. Southern theorists, indeed,
there were as sincerely visionary as himself, and they
came to him personally with a wonderful scheme, by
which the South and the West Indies were to be constituted into one great nation, in which the physical
beauty of the country would only be surpassed by
the songs of the happy negroes working in their own
natural clime, untainted by any of the mad, wild
strife between labor and capital, the greed of pelf, or
the ambitions of corrupt politics. As a Southern
myself, I had another story to tell. A dream as fair
had been driven from my own heart and mind when




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TIIOMAS CARLYLE.


I was able to look beyond the peaceful homes of one
or two small districts in my beloved Virginia to the
actual condition of the average South, and I laid before him the facts which had expelled that dream.
One or two of the simplest facts which I narrated,
on a day when we walked in Hyde Park, so filled
him with wrath at the injustice perpetrated that his
denunciations attracted the attention of loungers in
the Park. I saw before me the same man that afterwards so deeply sympathized with the wronged African Langahelele, when Bishop Colenso came over
from Natal to plead for him against English oppressors-the man whose voice has helped to arrest the
schemes to obtain English aid for the European
slave-trader, "the unspeakable Turk."
Carlyle was always most patient when he was vigorously grappled with about his facts, perhaps from
a half-consciousness that there lay his weakness, and
from a natural honesty of mind. Soon after David
A.Wasson had written to him that stern and dignified paper which appeared in the Atlantic Mionthly,
he asked me about Wasson, and remarked that he
seemed to be " an honest, sturdy, and valiant kind of
man." Subsequently I had the pleasure of introducing to him the friendly but severe critic in question,
and he was very genial in conversation with his
American critic.
Carlyle awakened from his dream of a beautiful




THOMAS CARLYLE.


95


patriarchal society in the Southern States slowly,
but he did awake. One day he received from the
Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, as a reply to his
"Ilias in Nuce" (1863), a photograph taken of the
lacerated back of a negro, with the words "Look
upon this, and may God forgive your cruel jest!"
He asked me about Dr. Furness, and I was able to
give him an account which relieved him from the
suspicion that the picture was " got up" for partisan
purposes. A good many things made him, as I
thought, uneasy about his position in those days.
But the staggering blow, dealt with all the force of
love, came from Emerson. It was early in October,
1864, that I found him reading and rereading a letter
from Emerson. Long years before he had written to
an American, "I hear but one voice, and that comes
from Concord:" the voice had now come to him
again, freighted with tenderness, but also with terrible truth. He bade me read the letter. It spoke of
old friendship, conveyed kindest sympathies to Mrs.
Carlyle-then an invalid-mentioned pleasantly a
friend whom Carlyle had introduced, and spoke of
the satisfaction with which he had read the fourth
volume of "Friedrich," especially the paramount
fact he drew from it that many years had not yet
broken any fibre of his force; "a pure joy to me
who abhor the inroads which time makes in me and
my friends. To live too long is the capital. misfort



96


THOMAS CARLYLE.


une." Then Emerson's sentences turned to firefire in which love was quick as enthusiasm was burning. He said he had lately lamented that he (Carlyle)
had not visited America. It would have made it
impossible that his name should ever be cited against
the side of humanity, and would have shown him the
necessities and aspirations struggling up in the free
states, though but unsteadily articulated there. " The
battle of Humanity is at this hour in America." He
longed to enlist him with his thunderbolt on the
right side. England should hold America stanch to
her best tendency. Cannot the thoughtful minds
of England see the finger-pointings of the gods
which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and
guide the wills of men? Generals have carried to
the field the same delusions as those which had misled so many Englishmen, until corrected by experience. Every one has been wrong in his guess
except good women who never despair of the ideal
right. As for Carlyle himself, there must be some
mistake; perhaps hle was experimenting on idlers,
etc. But he could not by any means be disguised
from those eyes that saw deep; they knew him better than he knew himself, perhaps, certainly better
than others knew him; and so Carlyle felt when he
read in this letter, at the close, " Keep the old kindness, which I prize above words."
"No danger but that will be kept," said Carlyle.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


97


"For the rest, this letter, the first I have received
from Emerson this long time, fills me with astonishment. That the cleanest mind now living-for I
don't know Emerson's equal on earth for perception
-should write so is quasi-miraculous. I have tried
to look into the middle of things in America, and I
have seen a people cutting throats indefinitely to
put the negro into a position for which all experience
shows him unfit. Two Southerners have just been
here. One of them, I should say, has some negro
blood in him, and he said, quietly, the Southerners will all die rather than submit to reunion with
the North. The other, a Mr. John R. Thompson,
brought me an autograph letter from Stonewall
Jackson."
I knew Mr. Thompson, once editor of the Southern
Literary Messenger, very well, and said that there
could be no doubt whatever of his honor and sincerity. No one could be more sensible than I was that
there were in the South many excellent people, earnest and even religious believers in the system of
slavery. It had been the heaviest tragedy of my
personal life when I came to feel and know that so
much heart and sincerity as that amid which I grew
up in Virginia were pitted against all the necessary
and irresistible currents and forces of the universe.
My Virginian relatives and friends, or most of them,
failed to get that point of view from outside which
5




98


THOMAS CARLYLE.


residence in free states had opened to me with personally sorrowful results, and they could not see that
the movement for emancipation in the United States
was fed from world-wide sources. They thought
me a traitor to them, I feared, though I would die
to do them any service. They regarded the abolitionists as wicked, self-seeking men, and they were
certainly therein proceeding against the fact and the
truth. Was Emerson a wicked, self-seeking man? I
had known Emerson-refined, retiring, loving solitude, hating mobs-I have known him for this cause
face a wild mob; and it was along with Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, and others who had thrown away
all self-interest and all popularity, to plead for justice to the race most powerless to repay them.
Carlyle said, after a long pause, and in the gentlest
voice: "All the worth they or you have put into
this thing will return to you. You must be patient
with me when I say how it all appears to me. I
cannot help admiring the Northern people for their
determination to maintain their Union. There is
Abraham Lincoln " (taking up a photograph I had
brought); "plainly a brave, sincere kind of man,
who seemed to me crying to the country, 'Come on!'
without in the least knowing where he was leading
them, or even with quiet doubts whether he might
not be leading them to a struggle against the laws
of this universe.  The Americans will probably




THOMAS CARLYLE.
never believe it, but no man feels more profoundly
interested and concerned for all he believes really
for their good than the man who now speaks to you."
On another occasion he said: "Notwithstanding all
the irritation which the Americans feel towards
England, America owes a great deal to England; a
vast deal of English courage, wealth, literature, have
gone to give America her start in the world; and I
have always believed it would be paid back, with
compound interest, in the steady working out to
demonstration of the utter and eternal impossibility
of what Europe is pursuing under the name of Democracy. The Americans are powerful, but they
cannot make two men equal when the universe has
determined that they are and shall be unequal.
They may pursue that road, and believe they are on
the way to Je-rusalem, but they shall find it Ge-henna that is finally arrived at. Nor can I doubt that
an increasing number of men in America perceive
this just as clearly as I do, whatever they may think
of negro slavery. Many an intelligent American
has told me in this room what evils their country
has suffered from a vast mass of crass ignorant suffrage; and I have even come to envy America her
advantage over England, inasmuch as her democratic
smash-up bids fair to precede ours, with little chance
of preventing it. I believe it even probable that the
rule of men competent to rule-as against both.slIam




100


THOMAS CARLYLE.


nobility and the ignorant populace-will be first established in the United States."
He was talking in this way once when an eminent
American clergyman was present, and the latter began to defend with energy the right of every man
to an equal vote. " Well," said Carlyle, " I do not
believe that state can last in which Jesus and Judas
have equal weight in public affairs."
One evening I was trying to harmonize the positive and negative poles, i. e., to make him admit the
mer ' of certain passages in Walt Whitman. " Ah,"
hlie said, " I cannot like him. It all seems to be, ' I'm
a big man because I live in such a big country.' But
I have heard of great men living in very small corners of the earth. America will, perhaps, become
a great as well as a big country; but it will have
to learn from the experience and age of the world.
The authorities of the world have always been the
aged-the Senior, Senator, Sire; I am told the Indian Sachem means the same. 'YounDg America'
must consider that."
Carlyle was born among peasants, and knew too
much of them, their ignorance and superstition, to
believe that their suffrage could be trusted in government; at the same time, he had observed too much
the nobility and gentry to believe that theirs was
more trustworthy. The intellectual world was just
entefirg on its phase of transcendentalism, which
*  * 0
* *e......




THOMAS CARLYLE.


101


emphasized the idea of individual "missions:" men
were, greatest and smallest, " God-sent," their tasks
organic. Rulers were, like poets, born-could not
be made. The prophetic vision which Carlyle had
caught, amid intervals of pulpit- dulness, in Ecclefechan kirk, when Christ should be on the throne and
Satan chained in the pit, survived in his mature concgption of the future. Against a democracy which
would give Jesus and Judas equal votes, he set an
order which would place the best man on the throne,
and bind down the worst. To do that, he often said,
was the only meaning of progress. " Harriet Martineau, after she had come from America, used to
talk about 'progress' to tediousness. It's doubtful
whether there is any such thing in the sense ordinarily meant. Before one rejoices in the expansion
and progress of a thing, it might be well to inquire
whether it is a good thing, or the reverse, which is
so flourishing."
It is notable that the heroes marked out for homage by Carlyle were chiefly from the humble rank
from which he had himself sprung-Luther, Burns,
Johnson, Heyne, Richter, Schiller, and others. Such
was this great anti-democrat's tribute to the common
people, and even the poorest. It could only have
been owing to the unhappy causes already intimated
that he did not add to the list of those lowly-born heroes the man who, of all his contemporaries, perhaps
had the best right to be there-Abraham Lincoln.




102


THOMAS CARLYLE.


XI.
When the poet Longfellow called at Chelsea with
an introduction from Emerson, Carlyle told him that
Emerson's coming to him at Craigenputtoch was
" like the visit of an angel." Emerson's letter now
came, after a generation had passed, as the voice of
Carlyle's good angel. Never again, after that letter
(of October, 1864), did I hear Carlyle speak with his
former confidence concerning the issue in America.
As time went on, I could perceive an increase of
attentiveness in his manner towards Americans, and
he seemed to be touched by the evidence that their
faith in him and love for him were in nowise shaken
by anything he had said or written-not even by
his "Ilias in Nuce."  Among the Americans who
visited him in the latter years of his life were George
Ripley, Samuel Longfellow, David Wasson, Wentworth Higginson, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes, and Professor Charles Norton. Concerning each of these and
others I have heard him speak in a tone which indicated a quiet revolution going on in his mind. It
was a rare thing at these interviews to hear any discussion of the questions raised in Emerson's letter,
though Carlyle generally "bore his testimony"
against democracy. But his esteem for America and
Americans steadily grew, and his eyes seemed again
turning with hope to the West, as in his youth when
he thought of going to dwell there.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


103


Never can I forget the conversation between Carlyle and Bayard Taylor, when the latter visited London on his way to take his place as minister at Berlin. Several years before, Bayard had called upon
Carlyle, and audaciously announced that he meant to
write the Life of Goethe. The old man could not
allow any such liberties to be taken with his literary
hero without a challenge, and set a sort of trap for
this ambitious American. " But," said he, "are there
not already Lives of Goethe? There is Blank's Life
of Goethe: what fault have you to find with that?"
The tone was that Blank had exhausted the subject.
Bayard immediately began showing the inadequacy
and errors of Blank's book, and withal his own minute and critical knowledge of Goethe, when Carlyle
broke out with a laugh, saying of the Life he had
mentioned, "I couldn't read it through." From that
moment he was cordial, and recognized the man before him. And now when Bayard was once again
here, and the opportunity to achieve the great work
he had undertaken seemed to be within reach, he
called upon Carlyle again. We found Carlyle in the
early afternoon alone, and reading. He presently
remembered the previous call which the young author had made upon him, and congratulated him that
hle belonged to a country which preferred to be represented abroad by scholars and thinkers rather than
by professional diplomatists. He at once inquired




104


THOMAS CARLYLE.


how he was getting on with his Life of Goethe, remarking that such a work was needed. Bayard told
him of a number of new documents of importance
which the Germans had intrusted to him. The two
at once entered upon an interesting consultation concerning the knotty points in Goethe's history. He
referred to Bayard's translation of " Faust;" with a
good-natured smile, he said, " Yours is the twentieth
version of that book which their authors have been
kind enough to place on my shelves. You have
grappled, I see, with the second part. My belief
increasingly has been that when Goethe had got
through with his 'Faust' he found himself in possession of a vast quantity of classical and medieval
lore, demonology and what not; it was what he
somewhere called his Walpurgis Sack, which he
might some day empty; and it all got emptied, in
his artistic way, in Part II. Such is my present
impression." At length Carlyle's brougham was announced, and he must take his customary drive; but
he was evidently sorry to give up this interview.
He entered upon an impressive monologue about
Goethe, which ended with a repetition of the first
verses of the Freemason's Song. His voice trembled
a little when he came to the lines"Stars silent rest o'er us;
Graves under us silent."
" No voice from either of those directions!" he said,




THOMAS CARLYLE.


105


with a sigh. Then Bayard took up the strain, and
in warm, earnest tones repeated the remaining verses
in his perfect German. Carlyle was profoundly
moved. He grasped Taylor's hand, and said, " Shall
I see you again?" The other answered that he must
immediately leave England, but hoped to return before long. Carlyle passed down to his carriage, but
just as he was about driving off made the driver
halt, and signalled to us to come near. He said to
Bayard, "I hope you will do your best at Berlin to
save us from further war in Europe;" and then,
after a moment's silence, "Let us shake hands once
more; we are not likely to meet again. I wish you
all success and happiness."
No man was more free from personal pride than
Carlyle, or more ready to confess his error when it
was proven such. In early days he had retracted
his sarcasms upon Sir Robert Peel, when he found
that statesman possessed of the courage to turn
against his own party in order to redress a great
wrong suffered by the people. He had said sharp
things of Palmerston too, but when that Premier
died I remember his words —" Good-bye, old friend;
I shall perhaps live, at any rate England will live,
long enough to see many uglier men occupying your
place!" He confessed that he had been mistaken
about Frederick the Great. The freethinking monarch, and friend of Voltaire, had loomed up before
5*




106


THOMAS CARLYLE.


him as a hero; but as that biography, which has
given to the world such a grand chapter of history,
proceeded, Frederick was found to be no worshipful
man; and he said to Yarnhagen von Ense that he
had no satisfaction in writing the book-" only labor and sorrow. What the devil had I to do with
your Friedrich?" It is my belief that it was mainly
through his absorption in that heavy task that.Carlyle was so easily misled about the struggle in
America. But this mistake he also discovered and
confessed. An American lady, Mrs. Charles Lowell,
whose noble son was one of those Harvard youths
that fell in the war, sent Carlyle the Harvard Memorial volume. The old man perused this volume
with close attention, and became aware that there
had been in the Northern soldiers a spirit and purpose which he had failed to recognize. When, at
length, Mrs. Lowell personally came to see him, he
said, as he took her hand, and even with tears, "I
doubt I have been mistaken.".Those who have regarded Carlyle as A mere worshipper of force have formed a superficial judgment.
What Carlyle really worshipped was work; his motto
to the last was Laborare est orare; and his idea of
work was a spiritual force turning some bit of chaos
into order. In the hard hand of toil he saw a sceptre
nobler than that of many a monarch organizing disorder. He who could denounce Napoleon III. when




THOMAS CARLYLE.


107


the most powerful emperor in Europe, defended
Mazzini while he was the most helpless exile in Europe. He who defended Governor Eyre in the belief
that he had saved Jamaica from wholesale massacre
was equally resolute in his sympathy with the Zulus
when he saw them assailed by English troops. He
never took the side of mere success. He had no
sympathy with imperialism. One of his latest public acts was to protest against the proposition to
raise, in Westminster Abbey, a memorial to Prince
Louis Napoleon, slain by the Zulus. While he has
been popularly credited with admiration for military
leaders, England has not begun a war, from the Crimean to the Afghan, in which he was not opposed to
his own country.
No man was a stronger hater of tyranny. He rejoiced in the American Revolution, and also in the
story of the Dutch as related by Motley-a historian of whose works he spoke very warmly indeed.
"Those Dutclh are a strong people. They raised
their land out of a marsh, and went on for a long
period of time breeding cows and making cheese,
and might have gone on with their cows and cheese
till doomsday. But Spain comes over and says, 'We
want you to believe in St. Ignatius.' ' Very sorry,'
replied the Dutch, 'but we can't.' ' God! but you
mnust,' says Spain; and they went about with guns
and swords to make the Dutch believe in St. Igna



108


THOMAS CARLYLE.


tius-never made them believe in him, but did succeed in breaking their own vertebral column forever, and raising the Dutch into a great nation."
Louis Napoleon was simply a "swindler who found
a people ready to be swindled." I thought he looked
with favor upon the new French Republic, but feared
that the people of that country were of a kind to
forget the terrible experience they had with the man
of Sedan. "They are liable to fits of depression in
which they seem driven to madness. Just now they
are in their other mood of exaltation, and the fine
qualities they possess shine out. But it is a dangerous experiment to suddenly break the chains of an
ignorant population."
Speaking of the "mere worship of force," which
had been attributed to him, he said: "Most of that
which people call force is but the phantasm of it,
not reverend in the slightest degree to any sane
mind. Here is some small unnoted thing silently
working, or for the most part invisibly, in which
lies the real force. Plenty of noise and show of
power around us. Men in the pulpits, platforms,
street corners, crying (as I hear it), 'Ho! all ye that
wish to be convinced of the thing that is not true,
come hither;' but the quietly true thing prevails at
last. I admire Phocion there among those highly
oratorical Athenians.  Demosthenes says to him,
'The Athenians will get mad, and kill you some




THOMAS CARLYLE.


109


day.' ' Yes,' says Phocion-' me when they are mad,
you when they are in their senses.' They sent Phocion to look after Philip, who was coming against
them. Phocion returned and told them they could
do nothing against Philip, and had better make peace
with him. All the tongues began to wag and abuse
him. Phocion quietly broke his staff, and cast the
pieces to them. Let me be out of it altogether!
Demosthenes and the orators had it their own way,
and the Athenians were defeated. They then had
to go to Phocion to get them out of the trouble as
well as he could. I think of all this when they tell
me Mr. So-and-so has made a tremendous speech. If
I had my way with that eloquent man, I should say
to him, 'Have you yourself done, or tried to do, any
of these fine things you talk about?' 'Done?' he
would most likely have to say; 'quite the reverse.
The more I say them, the less need have I to do
them.' Then I would just snip a little piece of that
eloquent tongue off. And the next time he made an
eloquent speech, I would put to him the same question, and when the like reply came, I would snip another small piece of his tongue off. And in the end
very little, most likely nothing at all, of that eloquent
tongue would be left. If he could not then act, at
least my fine orator could be silent. The strongest
force in Europe just now-Bismarck-is the silentest. He completes the slow work of seven hundred




110


THOMAS CARLYLE.


years, but neither with tongue nor pen. Not the least
service he is doing Europe, could the people give
right heed to it, might be regarded his demonstration that most of the ruling men esteemed as powerful are only wind-bags. The utmost strain of their
power seems to be to keep themselves one day more
in their pleasurable places; that exhausts them.
Mere egoism, and that of the paltry kind. It might
be an adequate provision for such should a fit number of flunkeys be employed, as in the case of a high
personage Voltaire tells about, to go every morning
and bow to them, and say, How very great and noble your Excellency is! Iow much reason your
Excellency has to be satisfied with Himself!"
I should remark that this was said long before
Prince Bismarck was suspected of conniving with
Catholic reactionists. (He used to remember that the
German Chancellor's name etymologically meant the
" Bishop's limit.") Since then I never heard Carlyle
mention him. Carlyle might scold the Socialists, but
his hatred was reserved for Jesuitism-which, however, did not mean, on his lips, simply a papal Order,
but always that false Spirit arraigned in his "Latterday Pamphlets." On an occasion when some one was
denouncing Jesuitism, I remember his scrutinizing
the speaker rather severely, and asking him " whereabouts he could lay his hand upon anything free
from Jesuitism in what is called religion nowadays?"




THOMAS CARTLYLE.


Ill


XII.
Carlyle has suffered much from having his humorons exaggerations taken, as one might say, underfoot
of the letter. If the parties of progress have been
misled by this kind of interpretation, still more have
those been mistaken who have inferred from his
anti-democratic utterances a disposition to court the
aristocracy. When, in the latter years of his life,
some of high rank, who had forgotten, or had never
read, what he used to write about " paper-nobility,"
began to make much of Carlyle, his tone occasionally showed that he remembered another story of his
favorite Phocion, how when the Athenian Assembly applauded, he turned to his friends and asked
"what bad thing he had let slip." When the Emperor of Germany sent him the Order for Civil Merit
(founded by Frederick the Great), he did not refuse
it, though he did not care for, and, I believe, never
acknowledged it; but, as the world knows, he would
not accept the patronage at home, which might imply an admission that honest thought is to be paid in
royal decorations. He had not worked for such wage,
and would not receive it. When, about the time in
which the German honor to the biographer of Frederick came, Queen Victoria sought an interview with
him, he met her at the residence of the Dean of
Westminster, and her Majesty became aware that




112


THOMAS CARLYLE.


she was in the presence of a man beyond all fictions
of etiquette when he said, "Your Majesty sees that I
am an old man, and, if you will allow me to be seated, I may perhaps be better able to converse." The
Queen bowed assent, but she had never before conversed with one of her subjects on such terms of
equality. This interview took place March 4, 1869.
There were present the Duchess-Dowager of Athole
(in waiting on the Queen); the Princess Louise, "decidedly a very pretty young lady, and clever too;"
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell; Mr. and Mrs. Grote;
and Robert Browning; besides the Dean and Lady
Augusta Stanley. Carlyle entertained the Queen
with a graphic account of the antiquarian and modern associations of the region where he was born,
concerning which she inquired, and of Carlisle (" Caer
Lewel, about the same age as Solomon"); also with
much pleasant talk of Berlin and Potsdam. Ie told
Majesty about his grandfather's ride in old times to
Glasgow, when a man worth ten thousand pounds
was considered a Croesus, when the people sang
psalms and the streets were silent at 9.30 P.M."hard, sound, presbyterian root of what has now
shot up into a hemlock-tree," to which Majesty responded with a soft, low-voiced politeness which
pleased Carlyle well. He went to the interview by
the underground railway, and by the same conveyance" was home before seven, and out of the adventure with no more than a headache."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


113


When the decoration of the Grand Cross of Bath
was offered and declined, the throne, the ministry,
and the people heard once more from the vicinity
of Ayr the brave song:
"A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his mightGuid faith he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
Their dignities, and a' that,
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth,
Are higher ranks than a' that."
Carlyle was sensible of a certain magnanimity in
Disraeli's proffer of this honor, for he had written
some severe things about the Prime-minister. The
two men had never been introduced to each other.
Disraeli perhaps thought that Carlyle remembered
an early satire he had written upon him, which was
not the case, Carlyle being always utterly free from
personal resentments of that kind. Their point of
nearest contact was when they were sitting together
upon the late Lord Derby's commission of the National Portrait Gallery. On that occasion the portrait of Lord Brougham (he still living) was offered,
and though all present felt that the acceptance of it
would be a bad precedent-since politicians might
utilize the gallery to advance their fame-yet all
hesitated to oppose the offer save one. Carlyle rose




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


up and said that, "since the rest hesitated, he begged
leave to move that the Brougham picture be for the
present rejected." The motion was adopted; and
Disraeli left his seat, went round to where Carlyle
was, and stood before him for a few moments, uttering no word, but fairly beaming upon the only man
who had the courage to do that which all felt to be
right.
Disraeli's letter to Carlyle was not merely munificent-offering not only the order, but also what sum
of money might be desired to support it-but it
was expressed with the finest taste and feeling. The
order was fixed on because it had been kept more
pure than others; and "since you, like myself, are
childless," wrote the Premier, the common baronetcy
seemed less appropriate. Carlyle wrote an equally
courteous and noble reply in declining. Carlyle introduced Emerson to the English public as the singular American "who did not want to be President," and he must now himself be recorded as the
eccentric Briton who did not want to be decorated.
One honor Carlyle did value-the naming of a green
space in Chelsea "Carlyle Square."
Oin Saturday,.December 4,1875, when Carlyle completed his eightieth year, a number of his friends
and others variously representing literature united in
an address to him as follows:




THOMAS CARLYLE.


115


TO THOMAS CARLYLE.
"Dec. 4, 1875.
" SIR,-We beg leave, on this interesting and memorable anniversary, to tender you the expression of our most respectful good wishes.
"Not a few of the voices which would have been dearest to you to
hear to-day are silent in death. There may perhaps be some compensation in the assurance of the reverent sympathy and affectionate
gratitude of many thousands of living men and women throughout
the British Islands and elsewhere, who have derived delight and inspiration from the noble series of your writings, and who have noted
also how powerfully the world has been influenced by your great personal example. A whole generation has elapsed since you described
for us the hero as a man of letters. We congratulate you and ourselves on the spacious fulness of years which has enabled you to sustain this rare dignity among mankind in all its possible splendor and
completeness. It is a matter for general rejoicing that a teacher whose
genius and achievements have lent radiance to his time still dwells
amidst us; and our hope is that you may yet long continue in fair
health, to feel how much you are loved and honored, and to rest in the
retrospect of a brave and illustrious life.
"We request you to do us the honor to accept the accompanying
copy of a medal designed by Mr. J. E. Boehm, which has been struck
in commemoration of the day."
The medal bears on one of its faces a medallion of
Mr. Carlyle, by Mr. Boehm, and on the obverse the
words-"In Commemoration. Dec. 4, 1875." Silver and bronze copies were struck for the use of the
subscribers, with a few for presentation to public institutions. The copy Mr. Carlyle was requested to
accept was in gold.




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


The inhabitants of Chelsea had for many years
become familiar with Carlyle's unique figure, as he
took his daily and nightly walks; and when one of
his friends, under a mistake, publicly stated that he
(Carlyle) had been treated with disrespect by the
youngerplebs around him, the author as publicly declared the reverse to be true. The only case of this
kind which I ever heard of was one in which some
fine ladies were the offenders. He stumbled and
nearly fell over some obstruction in the street. The
ladies, who happened to be passing, laughed. Carlyle, removing his hat, bowed low to them, and went
on his way.
XIII.
Carlyle never thoroughly enjoyed Art. Had that
side of him not been repressed in early life, his last
years had been happier. He had, indeed, on his
walls some valuable pictures, but they were portraits, or pictures which had got there for some
other reason than that they were works of art. I
have never doubted that he quietly included the fine
arts in the ban he placed upon rhymed poetry, and
that his early bias against all such things was precisely reported in Sterling's portrait of him in " The
Onyx Ring."  "You," says Collins to Walsingham,
" you for whose pipings and madrigals the world has
smooth and favorable ears, had you the heart of a
man, instead of the fancy of a conjurer, might find




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117


or make the sad hour for speaking severe truths.
You might inspirit and shame men into the work of
painfully building up new and graver and serener
hopes, instead of lulling them into a drunken dream
with wanton airs and music." Walsingham replies,
" One builds cyclopean walls; another fashions marble carvings. Each must work as he can. But remember that the cyclopean walls, though they stood
indeed, and stand, became useless monuments of a
dead past; and the fox and the robber kennel among
the stones. The marble carvings, which humanized
their own early age, are still the delight of all humane generations." The voice of Carlyle is certainly in the rejoinder of Collins. "Ay, but those
marble carvings, for those who wrought and revered
them, were holy realities. Our modern poems and
other tinsel-work are for us mere toys, as musical
snuff-boxes or gauze flowers." He admired Shakespeare as a hero, but could hardly forgive him for not
having written a history of England; and his tone
about the devotion of Goethe and Schiller to the
stage was sometimes apologetic. I do not remember
to have heard him speak at all of the great painters and sculptors. HIe was impatiently, and always,
searching for realities, albeit so many of them, when
found, were dry and dusty. I have heard that when
he first came to London he had a prejudice even
against portraits. Count d'Orsay was only able




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(1839) to make his clever sketch half-surreptitiously.
Much difficulty the artists had in persuading him to
sit for a picture. The first to coax him in that direction was his early neighbor, Maclise-a good work
of art, but evidently by an artist who knew hardly
more than the rest of the world at that time (1833)
the man he was delineating on canvas. Samuel
Laurence, who interpreted so many good heads in
America, drew a good one of Carlyle, published in
the American edition of his " Miscellanies."  One of
the most notable pictures of him is that least known,
by Madox Brown. This excellent artist designed a
picture of "Work," in which he desired to introduce
the Rev. Frederic D. Maurice as a working-man's
friend, and Carlyle as the Prophet of Work. He
had no difficulty with Maurice, but Carlyle refused
to sit, and could barely be persuaded to accompany
the artist to South Kensington, and stand against a
rail while a photographer took the full-length which
Madox Brown needed. Carlyle made a grimace,
however, and said, " Can I go now?"  The picture
represents builders busy on the street; some fashionably dressed ladies are picking their way past the
bricks and mortar; Maurice looks on meditatively,
and with some sadness in his face, at this continuance of the curse, "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat thy bread;" while Carlyle rejoices in it,
and, leaning on his cane, laughs heartily-this laugh




THOMAS CARLYLE.


119


being the outcome of the grimace which he left on
the photograph. Few of his portraits are satisfactory, partly, no doubt, because of the somewhat miserable look which spread over his face whenever he
was induced to sit for his portrait. However, he
gradually gained a respect for the artist's work, and
expressed a childlike surprise and pleasure at seeing
his face emerge from the chaos of pigments. Perhaps the best picture of him as a young man was that
taken by Count d'Orsay, soon after the publication
of "Sartor Resartus."  A fairly satisfactory picture
of him is that by Robert Tait, owned by Lady Ashburton, "An Interior at Chelsea."  The portrait by
G. F. Watts is too gloomy; that made by Whistler
is a powerful work, but makes the author, as he sits
in a rude chair, hat in hand, too much like a beggar
at a church door. At request of his friend, Lady
Ashburton, Carlyle sat for the sculptor, Thomas
Woolner. It was a very difficult work; Carlyle was
now an image of still agony, and now all fluent
spirit. The sculptor said it was like trying to model
a flame. He has achieved the best success in that
direction of art. Woolner's bust is powerful, but
the better part of Carlyle cannot be suggested in
marble; granite would be a better medium. Happily, about two years before Carlyle's death, his
friend Mrs. Helen Allingham  was able to make
sketches of him from  time to time, in his own




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home, without interfering with his ways. In her
beautiful art the last years of Carlyle are preserved;
he is seen reading, smoking, conversing, meditating,
and even asleep. It is to be hoped that the literary
art of her husband, the poet-so long intimate with
Carlyle-may somne day give the world from his
memory companion-pictures to these.
Carlyle had much admiration for his neighbor
John Leech, and thoroughly enjoyed his cartoons in
Punch. When that master of caricature died prematurely of a nervous disorder, from which it was
thought he might have recovered but for the organgrinders, Carlyle, who suffered from the same fraternity, mingled with his sorrow for Leech some severe
sermons against that kind of liberty which "permitted Italian foreigners to invade London, and kill
John Leech, and no doubt hundreds of other nervous
people, who die and make no sign."  John Leech
was doing his work thoroughly well, and that is the
only liberty worth anything. Carlyle did not attend
the theatre. I have sometimes suspected that there
was in him some survival of the religious horror of
theatres which prevailed at Annandale. He went to
hear Charles Dickens read his works, and enjoyed
that extremely. " I had no conception, before hearing Dickens read, of what capacities lie in the human
face and voice. No theatre-stage could have had
more players than seemed to flit about his face, and




THOMAS OARLYLE.


121


all tones were present. There was no need of any
orchestra."  Such enjoyments were very rare, however, as, indeed, they were poor beside the scenery
of history, the heroic figures of great men, and the
world drama, on which the eye of Carlyle never
closed. The dramatic and other arts came within
his reach too late in life. He had passed the age
when he could enjoy them for beauty or turn them
to use; and when the further age came, and the feebleness which the arts might have beguiled, he had
no pleasure in them.
XIV.
Carlyle's was not only an essentially religious mind,
but even passionately so. His profound reverence,
his ever-burning flame of devout thought, made him
impatient of all such substitutes for these as dogmas
and ceremonies-the lamps gone out long ago. There
was a sort of divine anger that filled him whenever
forced to contemplate selfishness and egotism in the
guise of humility and faith.
When Emerson was on one of his earlier visits to
England, large numbers of fine gentlemen whom he
met desired him to introduce them to Carlyle. Some
of these were crack-brained egoists, others actuated,
as he saw, by curiosity, and he saved such from the
catastrophes they invited by saying, mildly, "Why
should you wish to have aquafortis thrown over
6




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


you?" In one case Emerson's name introduced to
him a vegetarian, with whom Carlyle went to walk.
Unfortunately, his companion expatiated too much
upon his then favorite topic, upon which Carlyle
broke out with, "There's Piccadilly; there it has
been for a hundred years, and there it will be when
you and your damned potato-gospel are dead and
forgotten." He was more patient in listening to
Miss Bacon, also introduced by Emerson, when she
tried to persuade him that Shakespeare's plays were
written by Lord Bacon. Carlyle never thought very
much of the philosopher who had been unable to
recognize such a contemporary as Kepler; and his
only reply to Miss Bacon was, " Lord Bacon could as
easily have created this planet as he could have written ' Hamlet. " I have heard that when she had gone
he added to a letter written to his friend in Concord
the brief postscript, "Your woman's mad. T. C."
He was apt to meet a new-comer as he met Bayard
Taylor, with a challenge, but knew how to yield
gracefully when he found an able man. One evening a German philologist came, who said he had
come over to investigate "the roots of the Welsh
language." Carlyle said " if a cartload of those roots
were brought to his door, he wouldn't give sixpence
for them." But the German persisted with his talk
about roots, and in ten minutes Carlyle was absorbed
in the matter and bringing out his vast lore of old




THOMAS CARLYLE.


123


Scotch and Gaelic words, until at length the philologist went off enriched with a " cartload " of important facts. An English Unitarian who sought to enlist him in a scheme for a New Universal Church
fared badly. Carlyle never liked Unitarianism, regarding it as a competitive variety of that Coleridgean "moonshine" devised by and for those who
had not the courage of their principles. " If so far,
why not farther?" He preferred Quakerism, the
one religion before which Voltaire bowed his head.
It was often the case that Carlyle's attack was a
feint; if he met with a sturdy defence, implying
character, he knew how to surrender graciously. A
man once came in saying he had been studying Carlyle's books, and was convinced by them that every
man had some work to do in the world; he had
come to ask help in trying to find out what his own
work was. " Ye're a great fool," exclaimed Carlyle,
" to come to me to learn what you have got to find
out with your heart's blood!" A modest and forcible reply, however, cleared the way for a good conversation. With men who were making sacrifices
for a cause Carlyle was not only patient, but sympathetic, even when he was opposed to their cause.
On the day of Mazzini's death Carlyle talked with a
good deal of feeling about him. "I remember well
when he sat for the first time on the seat there,
thirty-six years ago. A more beautiful person I




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


never beheld, with his soft flashing eyes and face
full of intelligence. He had great talent-certainly
the only acquaintance of mine of anything like equal
intellect who ever became entangled in what seemed
to me hopeless visions. He was rather silent, spoke
chiefly in French, though he spoke good English
even then, notwithstanding a strong accent. It was
plain he might have taken a high rank in literature.
He wrote well, as it was-sometimes for the love of
it, at others when he wanted a little money; but
he never wrote what he might had he devoted
himself to that kind of work. Hie had fine tastes,
particularly in music. But hle gave himself up as a
martyr and sacrifice to his aims for Italy. He lived
almost in squalor. His health was poor from the
first; but he took no care of it. He used to smoke
a great deal, and drink coffee with bread crumbled
in it; but hardly gave any attention to his food.
His mother used to send him money; but he gave
it away. When she died, she left him as much as
two hundred pounds a year-all she had; but it
went to Italian beggars. His mother was the only
member of his family who stuck to him. His father
soon turned his back on his son. His only sister
married a strict Roman Catholic, and she herself became too strict to have anything to do with him.
He did see her once or twice; but the interviews
were too painful to be repeated. He desired, I am




THOMAS CARLYLE.


125


told, to see her again when he was dying; but she
declined. Poor Mazzini! I could not have any
sympathy with many of his views and hopes. He
used to come here and talk about the 'solidarity of
peoples;' and when he found that I was less and less
interested in such things, he had yet another attraction than myself which brought him to us. But lie
found that she also by no means entered into his
opinions, and his visits became fewer. But we always esteemed him. He was a very religious soul.
When I first knew him he reverenced Dante chiefly,
if not exclusively. When his letters were opened at
the post-office here, Mazzini became, for the first
time, known to the English people. There was great
indignation at an English government taking the
side of the Austrian against Italian patriots; and
Mazzini was much sought for, invited to dinners,
and all that. But he did not want the dinners. He
went to but few places. He formed an intimacy
with the Ashursts which did him great good-gave
him a kind of home-circle for the rest of his life in
England. At last it has come to an end. I went to
see him just before he left London for the last time,
passed an hour, and came away feeling that I should
never see him again. And so it is. The papers and
people have gone blubbering away over him-the
very papers and people that denounced him during
life, seeing nothing of the excellence that was in




126


THOMAS CARLYLE.


him. They now praise him without any perception
of his defects.   Poor Mazzini!     After all, he succeeded. He died receiving the homage of the people, and seeing Italy united, with Rome for its capital. Well, one may be glad he has succeeded. We
wait to see whether Italy will make anything great
out of what she has got. We wait."
Severe as Carlyle was upon mere idlers and lionhunters, where there was any opportunity of assisting or usefully advising any one in difficulties or
seriously desirous of doing good work, no woman's
heart could be more tender.      A  young Scotchman,
James Dodds, went off to England with three shillings in his pocket; at Newcastle he became one of
a strolling company of low-comedians; after that,
tried to gain a living as schoolmaster, and failed;
next, failed as an editor; and ultimately got a place
as clerk with a solicitor near Melrose, and studied
law. But Dodds had a good deal of talent, and was
ambitious of literary fame. A cousin of his wrote
for him to ask advice of Carlyle, who gave it:
" It is doubtful to me," he wrote, "whether the highest conceivable success in that course might not be for your cousin an evil in place
of a blessing. I speak advisedly in this matter. There is no madder
section of human business now weltering under the sun than that
of periodical literature in England at this day. The meagrest breadand-water wages at any honest, steady occupation, I should say, are
preferable to a young man, especially for an ambitious, excitable
young man. I mistake much if your cousin were not wise to stick




THOMAS CARLYLE.


127


steadfastly by his law, and what benefit it will yield him, studying, of
course, in all ways to perfect and cultivate himself, but leaving all literary glory, etc., etc., to lie in the distance-an obscure possibility of
the future, which he might attain, perhaps, but also would do very well
without attaining. In another year, it seems, his official salary may be
expected to increase to something tolerable; he has his mother and
loved ones within reach; he has, or by diligence can borrow, some
books worth reading; his own free heart is within him to shape into
humble wisdom or mar into violent madness; God's great sky is over
him, God's peaceable green earth around him; I really know not that
he ought to be in haste to quit such arrangements."
James Dodds followed this advice, and became an
eminent lawyer.       But Carlyle followed up his first
advice with friendly letters. In 1841 he writes:
"By-the-way, do you read German? It would be worth your while
to learn it, and not impossible-not even difficult-even where you
are, if you be resolved. These young obscure years ought to be incessantly employed in gaining knowledge of things worth knowing-especially of heroic human souls worth knowing; and you may believe
me, the obscurer such years are, it is apt to be the better. Books are
needed, but not yet many books; a few well read. An open, true,
patient, and valiant soul is needed; that is the one thing needful."
Later on, when Mr. Dodds wished to settle in London, Carlyle was prepared to aid him:
"In this immeasurable treadmill of a place I have no time to answer letters," he says, but "if at any time a definite service can be
done by answering, doubt not I shall make time for it."  "Of law in
London," he writes again, "I know nothing practical. I see some few
lawyers in society at times, a tough, withered, wiry sort of men; but
they hide their law economies, even when I question them, very much




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THOMAS CABLYLE.


under lock and key. I understand that the labor is enormous in their
profession, and the reward likewise; the successful lawyer amasses
hundreds of thousands, and actually converts himself into a 'spiritual
speldrin '-no blessed bargain."
Mr. Dodds, who, besides becoming a successful
barrister, wrote " The Fifty Years' Struggle of the
Scottish Covenanters," and other works, was for
many years a valued visitor at the memorable evenings in Chelsea.
Carlyle was absolutely trusted by literary people.
For this reason, if he consented to be an arbiter, his
arbitration was never appealed from. No one ever
suspected, or could suspect, that any personal affection or prejudice could ever make the balances
waver in his hand. The letter in Part III. dated
September 26,1848, for the first time herein published, written to a gentleman whom I knew, will
show the wisdom and care exhibited by Carlyle in
differences of such character.
XV.
I have often recalled the words of Carlyle, in the
room at Edinburgh, concerning Craigenpnttoch when
he last visited it: it seemed to him a Valley of Jehoshaphat. The Valley full of graves, where Jews
and Mussulmans desire to be buried because, as they
suppose, that is to be the scene of the final judgment!
Edgar Quinet brings his Wanderer, Ahasuerus, to the




THOMAS CARLYLE.


129


Valley of Jehoshaphat, seeking the repose which has
been forbidden him until the day of judgment. In
answer to his final appeal for some herb that will
cure the wound in his heart, the Valley says to
Ahasuerus, "My simples cure all pains but those of
a heart in which the thorn remains." Carlyle, too,
was a Wanderer, and wherever he went was a small
tract of that sombre Valley. He had wandered out
of the fore-world of thought and feeling, and come
into an age to which he did not belong. The thorn
in his heart, which the solitudes of Scotland could
not remove, was his utter inability to bring his intellect into any harmony with the faith and ideas of the
people in that region which always held his affections. After he had come to London, where he was
scandalized by the frivolous and tippling habits of so
many even of the literary men, he saw the old folks
and friends of Scotland in rosy tints. Again and
again he went back there, but, as Mrs. Carlyle told me,
the majority of them were so narrow and dogmatic
that Carlyle hardly drew a peaceful breath till he
got back to Chelsea. But in London he was quite
as much what M. Taine named him-a Mastodon.
His kingdom was extinct; and as he measured bane
and blessing by that past standard, his pessimism was
inevitable. In the society of London Carlyle never
had any pedantry about trifles of conventionality.
He told me that his stomach had never ceased to
6*




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


protest against the late dinner-hour, but he made his
stomach submit. He even thought his American
friends made too much complaint of the precedence
accorded titled persons in society. It was, he said,
traditional and not quite reasonable; but it was continued mainly because of the convenience of having
already settled, without any one being responsible
for it, a matter that might become complicated and
troublesome. It was in far other matters than these
that Carlyle failed to find his habitat. The spiritual
pugnacity of the burgher in him was represented by
an instinctive dislike of commonplace. He hated
what he called Schwarmerei-the heaping of assent
upon assent-to an almost morbid extent. It is even
possible that if his early antislavery and other radicalism had not become so general, some of his paradoxical writings might never have appeared. Masses
of men following either a Bright or a Beaconsfield
were to him equally repulsive. One evening when
I was taking tea with him, a third who was present
expressed his joy that there was one man in England
who sat down to his own cup of tea and his own
pipe, as it were under his own vine and fig-tree, and
expressed his independent views of men and events
without even remembering whether they were the
common opinion or not. Instantly the Scotch
burgher rose again in Carlyle, and he expatiated on
the " God-fearing men " he had known in his youth.




THOR" CARLYLE.


131


He was apt on such occasion to take up parables sufficiently commonplace, but dressed by him in novel
costumes. " Some one was telling me in Scotland of
a shepherd of the moors driving some sheep into
Dumfries. All at once the bellwether took a fancy
to go another road altogether, and the rest began to
follow. The shepherd ran ahead and held his staff
for a bar to them, a yard from the ground; but one
after the other they jumped over it. The poor fellow was spattered from head to foot with mud, and
got out of it as best he could. But the sheep went
on and on the same wrong way; and every one
jumped at the point where the shepherd's staff had
once been. When one comes to think of it, there
was in that whole proceeding the light of one sheep's
head!"
When she who had been the mediator between
Carlyle and the world he was in, but not of, was gone,
it seemed to me that his mental health first gave
way. Mrs. Carlyle was more than his other self. Instinctively all who came near them accepted her as
the head in matters relating to the visible him. The
tailor measuring him for a coat says, " Will you have
a velvet collar, ma'am?" Now suddenly this "light
of his life as if gone out," he seemed to grope. His
eye saw but one thing clearly-a grave. He seemed
to be concentrating all of his powers of vision into
that lens, as if to pierce it and catch some glimpse of




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


that Beyond which hitherto had baffled him. Once
he spoke to me of the " strange experiences" he had
undergone within the few months following his
wife's death. For a year, or nearly two, it was as if
the world had become to him a realm of shadows.
The fineness of both his memory and his judgment
seemed blunted, and many of the persons he had
known, and used to describe with interest and discrimination, were, if mentioned, brushed away like
flies-mere annoyance to a heart trying to find silence and repose in the grave where it lay with his
lost treasure. After a few years he rallied from this
condition somewhat, but he was never quite the same
man again, unless in exceptional hours. "Emerson
complains of his memory," he once said, " but I fancy
his memory is good enough; probably it is with him
as with me, much that he hears possesses no interest
for him, and comes in one ear to go out of the other."
He increasingly disliked to be in large companies,
and if any argument was begun with him was apt to
end it abruptly with a corncessum sit. He was restless too.
The last time that Carlyle appeared in any public
assembly was on March 5, 1879, when he went with
Allingham to hear his friend, the charming storyteller W. R. S. Ralston, recite and interpret his fairylore in St. James's Hall. It was for the benefit of
the innocent sufferers by the failure of the City of




THOMAS CARLYLE.


133


Glasgow Bank, with whom Carlyle sympathized.
During the recital of one of the fables, a figure introduced of a Vampire seemed to him to mean alldevouring Time-Tempus edax rerum —and Mr.
Ralston tells me that he heard Carlyle whisper that
to some one beside him. Carlyle did not stay long,
for already the spirit of unrest was upon him. But
this story (" The Witch and the Sun's Sister," which
is contained in Ralston's " Russian Folk-tales ") made
an impression on him. In the tale, Prince Ivan leaves
his home, being warned that his about-to-be-born sister will be a vampire, and will devour all her family.
He finds two aged sewing-women, and begs to live
with them; but they refuse, having no time to attend to him, since they must die as soon as they
have used up a trunkful of needles. He journeys on
and makes the same request of the.giant Vertodub
(Tree-extractor), who is also too busy, since he will
have to die when he has uprooted the surrounding
forests. The same happens with a further giant,
Vertogon (Mountain-leveller), who is to die when he
has levelled all the neighboring mountains. Ivan
presses forward till he reaches the house of the sister
of the Sun. He leaves her to see his old home again.
She gives him a brush which produces forests, a
comb which produces mountains; so on his way
back Ivan gives the giants plenty of work to do, so
extending their lives. He also has some talisman




134:


THOMAS CARLYLE.


which makes the old sewing-women young again.
Arrived home, he is pursued by his vampire sister;
but the giants impede her with forests and mountains, and at last he is secure in the chamber of the
Sun's sister. " None of them," said Carlyle, " could
help Ivan; they had to stick to their needles and
forest-clearings; Ivan must go on his way with the
like steadfastness and accomplish what is before him.
When he has reached the light, he can give them all
more life and work, and make their old hearts young
again at it; and, doing that, he gets beyond reach of
the Devourer."
But Carlyle himself was never an Ivan. He was
rather the giant laboring at forest and mountain to
whom no Prince from the chamber of the Sun returned. He stood faithfully to what seemed to him
his task; from it he never swerved at the call of any
passing wanderer, prince or peasant, till his hand was
palsied and his eye grew dim. Then he sighed for
Death, which was over-long in coming.






PART II.
BY THE GRAVE OF CARLYLE




I




BY THE GRAVE OF CARLYLE.
ECCLEFECHAN, February 10, 1881.
ON Saturday last a child came to me and said,
"He is dead." I did not ask, Who? For nearly
two weeks all eyes in Europe and America which
know the value of a great man in this world had
been centred on that home in Chelsea where Carlyle
lay dying. He had long been sighing for death, for,
he said, "Life is a burden when the strength has
gone out of it." For a 16ng time he had been unable to receive his friends in the evening: those true
Noctes Amnbrosianme were forever past. Brief interviews with intimate friends in the early afternoon,
followed by a drive with one or another of them,
continued for about a year more. But these drives
were not cheerful. The old man's voice was sometimes scarcely audible. " The daughters of song are
low." I found it painful to have to bend so close to
catch the words, which when caught showed the intellect still abiding in its strength. It was long ere
it must also be said, "Those that look out of the




138


THOMAS CARLYLE.


windows be darkened." But slowly that time came
too. The old man sank into a state of painless prostration. The effort to attend to what was said to
him was a disturbance, and all was silent around
him. He was conscious nearly unto the last, and
thoughtfully intimated to his nephew and niece, who
had so long watched beside him, that he was in no
pain. His last word was a gentle "Good-bye."  At
half-past eight, February 5, the end came without
struggle. The golden lamp was not shattered; it
went out. And how dark seemed London that day!
On Monday morning I started northward through
a snow-storm, and in the evening was driving through
the narrow streets of Annan. Along these same
streets he and Irving used to walk in their schooldays. Next morning I called on his sister, Mrs.
Austin, who much resembles him. She spoke sweetly of her great brother in his early youth-how loving he was as a son, how affectionate to them all,
even in those days when his mind was harassed with
doubts and misgivings about the path on which he
should enter. Sleep might fail him, and appetite,
but love for those who needed his love never failed
him. She is one of two sisters surviving. The one
remaining brother, James, resides in a pleasant home
in the neighborhood, and is about seventy-five years
of age. The other surviving sister is Mrs. Aitken,
of Dumfries.




K-~ IJ


ROOM IN WHICH CARLYLE WAS BORN.




7
t
i
I




THOMAS CARLYLE.


139


The house in which Carlyle was born will probably be preserved as a monument-perhaps with a
library in it for the neighborhood. There could be
none better. In this small house his parents, at his
birth, were only able to occupy two rooms. That in
which the great man was born is humble enough, lit
by one little window-the bed built into the wall.
The rooms are now occupied by the sexton who dug
his grave.
Between that small room where Carlyle first saw
the light, and that smaller grave which hides him
from the light, it is hardly a hundred steps: yet
what a life-pilgrimage lies between those terms!
what stretches of noble years, of immense labors, of
invincible days rising from weary nights, mark the
fourscore years and five that led from the stonemason's threshold to a hero's tomb!
What could his parents give him? An ever-present sense of an invisible world, of which this life is
the threshold-a world of transcendent joys marking
the crown which the universe prepares for virtue,
with an underside of unspeakable pains which mark
the eternal brand fixed on evil-doing. Of this world
they could teach him little, only that it was a place
of brief probation by suffering and self-denial. For
the rest they can only send him to a poor little school
hard by. It, and Ecclefechan influences generally,
are travestied in the experiences of Herr Teufels



140


THOMAS CARLYLE.


dr6ckh in his native "Entepfuhl."  "Of the insignificant portion of my education which depended on
schools," he says, "there need almost no notice be
taken. I learned what others learn, and kept stored
by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no manner
of use in it."
But, meanwhile, there is another university than
that at Edinburgh, and little Thomas is already studying in it more deeply than pedagogue or parent suspects. That university is the universe itself, and
little by little he finds that Ecclefechan is a centre
of it. The little burn runs before the door; as he
wades in it the brook whispers of its course as it
passes on to the river, on to the sea, out into the
universe.  The swallows come from    afar —from
Africa and other regions-to nestle in the eaves of
the house. The stage-coach, as it comes and departs,
becomes mystical to the lad when he learns that it
connects the village with distant cities, and is weaving human habitations together like a shuttle. The
village road leads to the end of the world.
On the day before the funeral I went out to
Craigenputtoch, the name of the solitude in whose
one house Carlyle and his wife began life together.
The nearest railway-station is about ten miles distant from the place, and, as I was warned, affords no
means of conveyance, so I started in a carriage to
drive over the fifteen miles of country road. It is




CRAIGEI'NPUTTOCLI.




I
iI
i,
v
I




THOMAS CARLYLE.


141


a pilgrimage not without way-side shrines. Dumfries, to begin with, is the town of Robert Burns,
who died July 21, 1796, when Carlyle was in his
eighth month. Here, in the church-yard, is the
beautiful monument of Burns: the Muse touches
him on the shoulder as he holds the plough. On
the outward road we pause at Iron Gray Church to
see the tomb which Sir Walter Scott erected over
Helen Walker, whom he had made the friend and
exemplar of many children under the name of Jeannie Deans, the girl who would not swerve from verbal truth to save her sister's life, but did journey to
London on foot to save her. The epitaph bids the
wayfarer "Respect the grave of poverty when combined with love of truth and dear affection." Not
much farther on is the solitary monument of the old
decipherer of mossy epitaphs, "Old Mortality." Now
and then a stately old mansion is passed, and some
cultured vales, but at length the road enters upon a
wild, bleak country. The snow covers the desolate
moors; the road is stony  but it is all picturesque
as I remember how along every mile of it Emerson
drove in a gig to clasp heart and hand of his young
intellectual brother forty-eight years before. "I
found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where
the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart." And
now, too, I found it, the home of a kindly shepherd
and his family. Arthur Johnstone-Douglas, of Glen




142


THOMAS CARLYLE.


Stuart, is with me, and we are given by the humble
people welcome and refreshment. We sit in the
room where " Sartor Resartus " was written. Here
gathered around the young thinker the faces of the
great with whom he spiritually conversed, "never
less alone than when alone." Here were written
many of those essays which, as Emerson said when
collecting them, had deprived their readers of sleep.
The house itself is much the same in appearance
as it was when Goethe had a sketch of it made for
his translation of Carlyle's " Life of Schiller." A
large kitchen was added at a later period, and several
out-houses. There are about a thousand acres of the
estate, though much of it is uncultivated. While
Carlyle resided there he was only able to cultivate
some two hundred acres, most of the produce of
which went in the shape of rental to the widow
Welsh, Mrs. Carlyle's mother. Only at her death
did it come into the possession of Carlyle's wife.
Up to the present time it had belonged to the
author, and has been under the care of his brother
James, and his son of the same name. It would
now revert to the Welsh family, were any representative of it living; as it is, Craigenputtoch will become the possession of Edinburgh University. The
house is neat and comfortable. The room which was
used for a library is commodious, though the outlooks are sombre enough. However, there are fine




MRS. THOMAS CARLYLE.


(O f








THOMAS CARLYLE.


143


old ash-trees around, and near-by there was in those
days a noble grove to make up for the treeless barrenness of the surrounding landscape.
But no place could be joyless where Jane Welsh
Carlyle was. I have just seen a portrait of her,
taken when she was young. No one who saw her
only in the days of her invalidism can imagine how
bright and beautiful she then was. The face is full
of mirth and graciousness, refined and spirituelle.
One can imagine that graceful form moving daintily
amid the wood and heather, and the merry laugh
that made the solitude gay.
The solitude was not unvisited by a certain class
of guests. " Poor Irish folk come wandering over
these moors," he said to Emerson.  "My dame
makes it a rule to give every son of Adam bread to
eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But
here are thousands of acres which might give them
all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to
the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and
so found a way to force rich people to attend to
them." When Carlyle died, the Irish were again
burning stacks, and the rich attending to them.
For the rest, there was "not a person to speak to
within sixteen miles, except the minister of Dunscore." Yet Carlyle's heart was still clinging to his
kindred in the far-away people among whom he was
born. In 1832 he heard that the cholera was devas



144


THOMAS CARLYLE.


tating Dnmfries. He wrote the following letter to
his mother's brother, addressed to " Mr. John Aitken,
mason, Friars' Vennel, Dumfries:"
"'CRAIGENPUTTOCH, October 16, 1832.
"MY DEAR UNCLE,-Judge if I am anxious to hear fiom you.
Except the silence of the newspapers, I have no evidence that you are
still spared. The disease, I see, has been in your street; in Shaw's;
in Jamie Aitken's; it has killed your friend Thomson: who knows
what further was its appointed work? You I strive to figure in the
meanwhile as looking at it, in the universal terror, with some calmness, as knowing and practically believing that your days and the
days of those dear to you were now, as before and always, in the
hand of God only, from whom it is vain to fly, towards whom lies the
only refuge of man. Death's thousand doors have ever stood open;
this, indeed, is a wide one, yet it leads no farther than they all lead.
"Our boy was in the town a fortnight ago (for I believe, by experience, the infectious influence to be trifling, and quite inscrutable to
man, therefore go and send whithersoever I have business, in spite of
cholera); but I had forgot that he would not naturally see Shaw or
some of you, and gave him no letter, so got no tidings. He will call
on you to-morrow, and in any case bring a verbal message. If you
are too hurried to write in time for him, send a letter next day 'to the
care of Mrs. Welsh, Templand, Thornhill;' tell me only that you are
all spared alive.
"We are for Annandale after Thornhill, and may possibly enough
return by Dumfries. I do not participate in the panic. We were
close beside cholera for many weeks in London.  'Every ball has its
billet.'
"I hear the disease is fast abating. It is likely enough to come
and go among us, to take up its dwelling with us among our other
maladies. The sooner we grow to compose ourselves beside it, the
wiser for us. Man who has reconciled himself to die need not go distracted at the manner of his death.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


145


"God make us all ready, and be his time ours  No more tonight.
"Ever your affectionate  T. CARLYLE."
Hither Emerson's divining-rod brought him in
1833. " Straight uprose that lone wayfaring man,"
to commune with one lonelier than himself, while as
yet but few had heard the names of either. On leaving Craigenputtoch, we passed a craggy brow, high
on the left, overlooking Dunscore, which was easily
identified as the point where Carlyle and Emerson
sat together. " There we sat down," wrote Emerson,
"and talked of the immortality of the soul." There
Carlyle said, "Christ died on the tree: that built
Dunscore kirk yonder; that brought you and me
together. Time has only a relative existence."
The last words Carlyle ever said to me were,
" Give my love to Emerson. I still think of his visit
to us in Craigenputtoch as the most beautiful thing
in my experience there."
That high point, where the two young thinkers sat
and conversed, appeared to me as a latter-day Pisgah:
only one of them was to enter the Land of Promise
they beheld from afar. One returned to his Valley
of Jehoshaphat to dwell with the shades of heroes
whose world is forever past; the other passed on to
greet the heralds of a world unborn. Despair and
Hope have found their fullest utterances in the OldWorld scholar and the New-World prophet who met
7




146


THOMAS CARLYLE.


and parted on that lonely height of Scotland fortyeight years ago.
Dunscore village is seven miles from Craigenputtoch. The shepherd told us that the minister there
was very aged, and had been there a long time;
probably would have known Carlyle. So we drove
over to Dunscore, and visited the Manse, as the parsonage is termed in Scotland. The aged minister
said he had come there after Mr. Carlyle had gone to
London; he had never seen him. "But he was one
of my heritors " (i. e., pecuniary helpers), " and my acquaintance with him was limited to correspondence
concerning the educational needs of this district, in
which I am bound to say he liberally assisted."
The funeral of Carlyle, it may be assumed in accordance with his expressed wishes, was singularly
private. Neither the day nor the place of it was
known to the public. It was generally supposed
that he would be buried beside his wife amid the
mouldering walls of Haddington Cathedral. How
strong were the ties that bound his heart to that spot
is shown in the tribute on her grave. But with so
much else which Carlyle had derived from his early
Hebrew training, he had a desire, like that of the
patriarchs, to be " gathered to his people." But for
his love of his people, lowly as they were, probably
the grave of Carlyle would have been in America.
"I have," he said to Edward Irving, when they




THOMAS CARLYLE.


147


were young men together-" I have the ends of my
thoughts to bring together, which no one can do in
this thoughtless scene. I have my views of life to
reform, and the whole plan of my conduct to remodel; and withal I have my health to recover.
And then once more I shall venture my bark upon
the waters of this wide realm, and, if she cannot
weather it, I shall steer west and try the waters of
another world." This alternative must have recurred to him when America alone was listening to his
voice; when his spiritual biography, in " Sartor Resartus," unpublished in England, was already speaking to American youth, as Emerson said, with an emphasis that deprived them of sleep. But Carlyle
loved his widowed mother and his people, and could
not leave them. And his last wish was to rest among
them. As Israel died in an Egyptian palace, and
would have been laid by Pharaoh in the proudest
pyramid, but charged his sons, "Ye shall bury me
with my people," so could not Carlyle rest in Westminster Abbey, which was offered, nor in Haddington Cathedral, where his wife's wealthier kindred
lay. Ecclefechan, long raised from obscurity by being his birthplace, is now consecrated by holding his
dust.
Had Carlyle's aversion to all pomp and ostentation not caused such strict privacy to be observed,
the funeral would have been one of vast dimensions.




148


THOMAS CARLYLE.


The Scotch gentry would have stood beside the
grave of one of whom they were proud; but as it
was, a red-coated fox-hunt was going on in the
neighborhood. A new minister, too, was installed
that day in the neighboring kirk of Cummertrees.
As I drove to the funeral I met the more well-to-do
folk of Ecclefechan driving thither. Those left in
the village seemed to be mainly peasants and their
children. These were made aware of the hour when
the burial was to take place by the tolling of the
bell in the School Board building. Hundreds of
children gathered near the gate of the church-yard
or climbed on the walls. About a hundred young
workmen made their way inside, and stood awaiting the arrival of the body after the night journey
from London. Soon after noon the hearse drove
up; with it five coaches, containing the relatives.
The coffin was of plain oak. On it was engraved,
"Thomas Carlyle: born December 4, 1795; died
February 5, 1881." White flowers were upon it,
among them a large wreath. Along with the male
relations stood a very few personal friends of Carlyle, foremost among them Anthony Froude, Professor Tyndall, and Mr. Lecky. With exception of
these, and a few journalists, they who gathered
around Carlyle's grave were of the peasantry.
What did these lowly ones think as they saw their
great villager laid to rest  It was amid profound




THOMAS CABLYLE.


149


stillness: there was no ceremony; no word broke
that silence amid which the prophet of Silence was
laid to rest. But those young workmen may have
heard still, small voices. One of these might have
come from the family tomb, which bears this inscription:
" Erected to the memory of Jannet Carlyle, spouse
to James Carlyle, mason in Ecclefechan, who died
the 11th September, 1792, in the twenty-fifth year
of her age. Also Jannet Carlyle, daughter to James
Carlyle and Margaret Aitken: she died at Ecclefechan, January 27, 1801, aged seventeen months.
Also Margaret their daughter: she died June 22,
1830, aged twenty-seven. And the above James
Carlyle, born at Brownknowe in August, 1758, died
at Scotsbrig on the 23d January, 1832, and now also
rests here. And here also now rests the above Margaret Aitken, his second wife: born at Whitestanes,
Kirkmahoe, in September, 1771; died at Scotsbrig
on Christmas - day, 1853. She brought him nine
children, whereof four sons and three daughters survived, gratefully reverent of such a father and such
a mother,"
The last sentence was added by Thomas Carlyle.
It is almost the only touch of feeling discoverable in
the crowded church-yard. Some of the old slabs
are carved with skull and cross-bones, but their inscriptions are merely names and dates. Some of the




150


THOMAS CARLYLE.


old folk of this region are still in the cross-bone
stratum of belief. "What a pity yon man Tom
Caerl was an infidel!" one was heard saying to another along the road. The two shook their heads
over their greatest countryman. What notions they
had of fidelity who regarded that life as product of
infidelity were an antiquarian speculation.  The
younger peasantry of Ecclefechan, reading that tribute on the tomb, seeing the great man laid beside his
lowly parents, bringing there whatever lustre surrounded his name, will probably reflect that a man
may depart from the creed and the ways of his people, might become famous enough to refuse decorations proffered by royalty, yet preserve the simplicity
and the affections of his early life. They may have
been impressed, in that silence, by the fact that here
was one of themselves-nay, as the tolling School
Board bell might remind them, with less advantages
than theirs-who climbed upward, and gained the
love and honor of the world.
It is said that the name of this village means the
Ecclesia of St. Fechan, and that the ancient church
stood near the spot where Hoddam kirk now stands.
Beside this church stood the school to which Carlyle
was sent as a child. There taught the poor " downbent, broken-hearted, under-foot martyr," the teacher
who " did little for me except discover that he could
do little." At any rate, the poor man pronounced




THOMAS CARLYLE.


151


Thomas a genius, fit for a learned profession. In
looking after the site of the old school-house, I found
at Hoddam an old man who had been a pupil there
with Thomas. He was aged and shivering as he
moved slowly amid the snow. He said, "Tom always sent me something every year-until this last
winter; then it stopped."
Then it stopped! And how much has stopped
besides this poor brother's little winter solace
What charities to hearts and minds in their sore
need, what brave words of cheer for those moving
about in worlds not realized   Graduation from
"Carlyle Close," now a shamble, to the highest intellectual distinction of the nineteenth century implies the realization of several worlds dim to others.
Out of a depth like this his voice will always go
forth, and to it the deeps will always answer. The
influence of Carlyle will never "stop:" wherever
shams are falling, his sturdy blows will still be
heard; generations of the free will recognize that
they are offspring of the fire in his heart, burning
all fetters; and when the morning stars sing together of dawning days, when heroes of humanity
replace nobles without nobility and bauble-crowned
kings, his voice, so long a burden of pain, will be
heard again rising into song.




I




THOMAS CARLYLE.


7N,-0 (.,,
tt ///,




I




PART III.
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
(WITH ONE FROM EMERSON)




i,     I.               I




EXPLANATORY NOTE.


THE following extracts, from   early letters of
Thomas Carlyle, require a few words of explanation:
In the year 1838 a friend kindly lent me for perusal a bundle of letters, numbering between forty
and fifty, written by Thomas Carlyle, addressed to
two intimate and evidently much-beloved college
friends. The earliest date of these letters was 1814,
when the writer of them was nineteen years of age,
and the latest 1824, the year in which he first visited
London. These two friends were Thomas Mitchell,
afterwards one of the classical masters in the Edinburgh Academy, who died before 1838, and Thomas
Murray, afterwards Dr. Thomas Murray, author of
" The Literary History of Galloway," a lecturer, in
later years, on political economy, and subsequently
partner in a printing firm in Edinburgh. He also
is dead.
At the time when these letters were lent to me I
had just been reading with absorbing interest and
*.




156


THOMAS CARLYLE.


admiration that marvellous book-the book of the
century-" The French Revolution; a History," by
Thomas Carlyle, which produced a deeper and more
vivid impression on my mind than any work I had
ever met with before. His early articles in the
Edinburgh and other reviews were familiar to me,
and in 1837 I had received from Mr. Emerson a
copy of the first edition, published at Boston, United
States, of "Sartor Resartus," reprinted from Fraser's Magazine (prior to any reprint in this country).
To me, therefore, the privilege of reading this batch
of letters was a treat of no common kind. With
eager delight I commenced their perusal at a late
hour, and never ceased until I had finished them in
the early hours of morning. In these letters Carlyle poured out to his two college-mates his inmost
thoughts and feelings with unstinted frankness. He
confided to them his aspirations, his failures, his
glooms and despondencies, his struggles, hopes, and
disappointments, while bravely battling with hard
fortune and uncongenial work, and as yet unable to
find his true vocation. There are passages in these
letters which I venture to say are not surpassed by
anything he has siace written; and many of them
afford a deeply intresting insight into his mind and
character. So mrch was I struck with this that I
ventured to make copious extracts, sitting up through
thQ best part of a couple of nights for this purpose.
~ *
* *




THOMAS CARLYLE.


157


When I restored the precious packet to the kind
friend who had lent it, I was asked whether I had
made any transcripts. While confessing my transgression, if transgression it could be called, I was
allowed to retain what I had copied on the distinct
understanding that during Carlyle's lifetime not a
line should be allowed to get into print. This
pledge I have strictly kept. A few years ago the
matter was mentioned to the venerable writer of
the letters by a common friend. His deliverance
on the matter was-a hearty laugh, accompanied
with an expression of surprise, not unmingled with
satisfaction, that there was any one, at that early
time, who felt so much interest in him and his doings as to have taken the trouble to preserve these
records of his youthful thoughts and feelings and
struggles.
In conclusion, let me say that I thought it due to
Mr. Froude to submit these extracts to him, and to
place them at his disposal for use in the forthcoming
"Life and Letters" from his pen, in case the original letters themselves should not come into his possession-at the same time asking to be allowed to
make them public, in the event of his not being able
to use the whole of them, from the abundance of
material likely to be in his hands. I need not say
that I should regret the withholding of a single sentence of these extracts, they are so characteristic




158


THOMAS CARLYLE.


throughout. Mr. Froude has been so kind as to say
that there can be no objection to their publication,
as it is most desirable that the fullest light should
be thrown on every period of Carlyle's life.
ALEXANDER IRELAND.
INGLEWOOD, Bowdon, Cheshire, April 14th, 1881.


9f




LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
TO THOMAS MITCHELL AND THOMAS MURRAY.
1.
"August, 1814.
"But-O Tom! what a foolish, flattering creature
thou art! To talk of future eminence in connection
with the literary history of the nineteenth century
to such a one as me! Alas! my good lad, when I
and all my fancies and reveries and speculations
shall have been swept over with the besom of oblivion, the literary history of no century will feel itself
the worse. Yet think not, because I talk thus, I am
careless about literary fame. No, Heaven knows
that ever since I have been able to form a wish, the
wish of being known has been the foremost. 0
Fortune! thou that givest unto each his portion in
this dirty planet, bestow (if it shall please thee), coronets and crowns, and principalities and purses, and
pudding and power upon the great and noble and fat
ones of the earth; grant me that, with a heart of independence, unyielding to thy favors and unbending
to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame-and,




160


THOMAS CARLYLE.


though starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have
not been born a king!! I But, alas! my dear Murray, what am I, or what are you, or what is any other
poor unfriended stripling in the ranks of learning?
" ' Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb,' etc., etc.
*      *      *      *      *      *
"The more I know her and her species, the more
heartily I despise them. It is strange, but it is true,
that by a continued and unvarying exercise of affectation, those creatures in the end entirely lose any
kind of real feeling which they might originally
have possessed. Ignorant, formal, conceited, their
whole life is that of an automaton, without sense,
and almost without soul! Once, for instance, I recollect that to fill up one of those awful hiatus in
conversation that occur at times in spite of all one's
efforts to the contrary, and to entertain Miss M,
q        I took up a 'Tristram Shandy,' and read her one of
the very best jokes within the boards of the book.
Ah-h-h-h! sighed Miss M-, and put on a look
of right tender melancholy! Now, did the smallest
glimmering of reason appear here? But I have
already wasted too much time on her and those like
her. Heaven be their comforter!
"I regret that Jeffrey should bestow so much of
his time upon politics, and I rejoice in the prospect
(for this is one of the advantages of Peace) that in
a short time he will not have this in his power. He




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must be an extraordinary man. No subject, however
hackneyed, but he has the wit of extracting some
new thought out of it. The introduction to the
criticism on Byron is, in my opinion, admirable-so
acute, so philosophical; none but a man of keen
penetration and deep research could have written
such a thing. Even the ' Present State of Europe'
becomes interesting in his hands."
2.
"April, 1815.
"But the book I am most pleased with is ' Cicero
de Finibus '-not that there is much new discussion
in it, but his manner is so easy and elegant; and,
besides, there is such a charm connected with attending to the feelings and principles of a man over
whom ' the tide of years has rolled.' We are entertained even with a common sentiment; and when we
meet witlh a truth which we ourselves had previously
discovered, we are delighted with the idea that our
minds are similar to that of the venerable Roman."
3.
" ANAN, June 21,1815.
"The most disagreeable circumstance in a tutor's
life is his want of society. There is no person in
the family of equal rank with him except the governess; and as the aims and ends of her and him are




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often various, and their dispositions heterogeneous,
the tutor is, for the most part, left to commune with
himself. Such a situation, in this view, is not desirable; but the power of habit is unlimited, and, at
any rate, this state has its advantages: the increase
of opportunities it affords for study are obvious;
and though we cannot enjoy the spirit-stirring crack
of our jocund cronies, yet if we can spend the same
time with Shakespeare or Addison, or Stewart, we
are gainers by the privation. I grant we cannot
always live with your sages and your demigods; but
no conversation at all is preferable to the gossiping
and tittle-tattle that many a poor wight is forced to
brook,-e. g., your humble servant,-living ' Pelican
in the Wilderness to avoid the cant and slang of
the coxcombs, the bloods, the bucks, the boobies,
with which all earth is filled."
4.
"ANNAN, August 22, 1815.
"* * * His (Lord Kaimes's) works are generally all
an awkward compound of ingenuity and absurdity,
and in this volume [" Essays on the Principles of
Morality "] the latter quality, it appears to me, considerably preponderates. It is metaphysical-upon
Belief, Identity, Necessity, etc. I devoutly wish that
no friend of mine may ever come to study it, unless
he wish to learn




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163


" 'To weave fine cobwebs, fit for skull
That's empty, when the moon is full;'
and in that case he cannot study under a more proper master. * * * [I am] becoming daily more lukewarm about the preaching business."
5.
"ANNAN, December 5, 1815.
<"  * * I had a sight of 'Waverley' soon after I
received your letter, and I cannot help saying that,
in my opinion, it is by far the best novel that has
been written these thirty years-at least, that I know
of. Eben. Cruickshanks, mine host of The Seven
Golden Candlesticks, and Mr. Gifted Gilfillan, are
described in the spirit of Smollett or Cervantes. Who
does not shed a tear for the ardent Vich Ian Vohr,
and the unshaken Evan Dhu, when, perishing amid
the shouts of an English mob, they refuse to swerve
from their principles  And who will refuse to pity
the marble Callum Beg, when, hushed in the strife of
death, he finishes his earthly career on Clifton Moor,
far from the blue mountains of the North, without
one friend to close his eyes? 'Tis an admirable
performance. Is Scott still the reputed author?"
[In this letter Carlyle mentions reading Euler's
"Algebra," Addison's "Freeholder," Cuvier's "Theory of the Earth," Molire's " Comedies," the monthly reviews, critical journals, etc.]




164


THOMAS CARLYLE.


6.
" February 20, 1818.
"After an arduous struggle with sundry historians
of great and small renown, I sit down to answer the
much-valued epistle of my friend. Doubtless you
are disposed to grumble that I have been so long in
doing so; but I have an argument in store for you.
To state the proposition logically: This letter, I conceive, must either amuse you or not. If it amuse
you, then certainly you cannot be so unreasonable as
to cavil at a little harmless delay; and if it do not,
you will rejoice that your punishment has not been
sooner inflicted. Having thus briefly fixed you between the horns of my dilemma, from which, I flatter
myself, no skill will suffice to extricate you, I proceed with a peaceful and fearless mind.
"* * * I continue to teach (that I may subsist
thereby), with about as much satisfaction as I should
beat hemp, if such were my vocation. Excepting
one or two individuals, I have little society that I
value very highly; but books are a ready and effectnal resource. May blessings be upon the head of
Cadmus, or the Phoenician, or whoever it was that
invented books! I may not detain you with the
praises of an art that carries the voice of man to the
extremities of the earth, and to the latest generations; but it is lawful for the solitary wight to ex



THOMAS CARLYLE.


165


press the love he feels for those companions so steadfast and unpresuming, that go or come without reluctance, and that, when his fellow-animals are proud
or stupid or peevish, are ever ready to cheer the languor of his soul, and gild the barrenness of life with
the treasures of bygone times. Now and then I
cross the Firth; but these expeditions are not attended with much enjoyment. The time has been when
I would have stood a-tiptoe at the name of Edinburgh; but all that is altered now. The men with
whom I meet are mostly preachers and students in
divinity. These persons desire not to understand
Newton's Philosophy, but to obtain a well-plenished
manse. Their ideas, which are uttered with much
vain jangling, and generally couched in a recurring
series of quips and most slender puns, are nearly confined to the Church, or rather Kirk-session politics
of the place; the secret habits, freaks, or adventures
of the clergy or professors; the vacant parishes and
their presentees, with patrons, tutors, and all other
appurtenances of the tithe-pigtail. Such talk is very
edifying certainly; but I take little delight in it.
My theological propensities may be included within
small compass; and with regard to witlings, gibers,
or such small gear, the less one knows of them it is
not the worse.
"My perusal of Smollet's 'Continuation' was a
much harder and more unprofitable task. Next I




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


read Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' a work of immense research and splendid execution. Embracing
almost all the civilized world, and extending from
the time of Trajan to the taking of Constantinople
by Mahomet II, in 1453, it connects the events of
ancient with those of modern history. Alternately
delighted and offended by the gorgeous coloring
with which his fancy invests the rude and scanty
materials of his narrative, sometimes fatigued by the
learning of his notes, occasionally amused by their
liveliness, frequently disgusted by their obscenity,
and admiring or deploring the bitterness of his skilful irony, I toiled through his many tomes with exemplary patience. His style is exuberant, sonorous, and
epigrammatic to a degree that is often displeasing.
He yields to Hume in elegance and distinctness, to
Robertson in talent for general disquisition; but he
excels them both in a species of brief shrewd remark
for which he seems to have taken Tacitus as a model,
more than any other that I know of. The whole
historical triumvirate is abundantly destitute of virtuous feeling, or indeed of any feeling at all. I wonder what benefit is derived from reading all this stuff.
What business of mine is it though Timur Bey erected a pyramid of 80,000 human skulls in the valley of Bagdad, and made an iron cage for Bajazet?
or what have I to do with the cold-blooded savage
policy of [illegible] and the desolating progress either




THOMAS CARLYLE.


167


of Gengis or Napoleon? It is in vain to tell us that
our knowledge of human nature is increased by the
operation. Useful knowledge of that sort is acquired
not by reading, but by experience; and with regard
to political advantages, the less one knows of them
the greater will be his delight in the principles of
Lord Castlereagh and Sidmouth with their [illegible]
suspension, holy league, and salvation of Europe.
Yet, if not profit, there is some pleasure. In history, at all events, I believe we must not apply the
cui bono too rigorously. It may be enough to sanction any pursuit that it gratifies an innocent, and
still more an honorable, propensity of the human
mind. When I look back upon this paragraph, I cannot but admit that reviewing is a very beneficial art.
If a dull man take it into his head to write either
for the press or the post-office without materials or a
dead lift, it never fails to extricate him."
7.
"May 20, 1818.
"I believe it to be a truth (and though no creature
believed it, it would continue to be a truth) that a
man's dignity, in the great system of which he forms
a part, is exactly proportioned to his moral and intellectual acquirements; and I find, moreover, that
when I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent
and ferocity which solitude at all times tends to pro



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duce, 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. I believe all this, but my practice clashes
with my creed.
"* * * Sometimes, indeed, on a fine evening, and
when I have quenched my thirst with large potations
of Souchong, I say to myself, Away with despondency! Hast thou not a soul, and a kind of understanding in it? And what more has any analyst of
them all  But next morning, alas! when I consider
my understanding, how coarse yet feeble it is, and
how much of it must be devoted to supply the vulgar wants of life, or to master the paltry but neverending vexations with which all creatures are beleaguered, I ask how it is possible not to despond."
8.
"July, 1818.
"Be assured, I have not forgotten the many joyful days which long ago we spent together. Sweet
days of ignorance and airy hope! They had their
troubles too; but to bear them there was a lightheartedness and buoyancy of soul which the sterner
qualities of manhood, and the hardier buffetings that
require them, have forever forbidden to return. I
forbear to say much of the pursuits which have en



THOMAS CARLYLE.


169


gaged me. They would little interest you, I fear.
With most young men, I have had dreams of intellectual greatness, and of making me a name upon
the earth. They were little else but dreams. To
gain renown is what I do not hope, and hardly care
for in the present state of my feelings. The imnprovement of one's mind, indeed, is the noblest object which can occupy any reasonable creature, but
the attainment of it requires a concurrence of circumstances over which one has little control. I now
perceive more clearly than ever that any man's opinions depend not on himself so much as on the age
he lives in, or even the persons with whom he associates. If his mind at all surpass their habits, his
aspirings are briefly quenched in the narcotic atmosphere that surrounds him. He forfeits sympathy,
and provokes hatred, if he excel but a little the dull
standard of his neighbors. Difficulties multiply as
he proceeds, and none but chosen souls can rise to
any height above the level of the swinish herd.
Upon this principle, I could tell you why Socrates
sacrificed at his death to ~~Esculapius; why Kepler
wrote his 'Cosmographic Harmony;' and why Sir
Thomas More believed the Pope to be infallible.
Nevertheless, one should do what he can. I need
not trouble yon with the particulars of my situation.
My prospects are not extremely brilliant at present.
I have quitted all thoughts of the Church, for many
8




170


THOMAS CARLYLE.


reasons, which it would be tedious, perhaps [illegible], to enumerate. I feel no love (I should wish to
see the human creature that feels any love) for the
paltry trade I follow; and there is before me a checkered and fluctuating scene, when I see nothing clearly, but that a little time will finish it. Yet wherefore should we murmur? A share of evil, greater or
less (the difference of shares is not worth mentioning), is the unalterable doom of mortals, and the
mind may be taught to abide in peace. Complaint
is generally despicable, always worse than unavailing. It is an instructive thing, I think, to observe
Lord Byron, surrounded with the voluptuousness of
an Italian seraglio, chanting a mournful strain over
the wretchedness of human life-and then to contemplate the poor but lofty-minded Epictetus, the
slave of a cruel master too; and to hear him lifting
up his voice to far-distant generations in the unforgotten words of his 'Encheiridion.' But a truce to
moralizing; suffice it, with our Stoic, to suffer and
abstain."
9.
"November, 1818.
"From the conversation which we had in the Inn
of Basenthwaite, etc., I judge you are as unfit as
myself for the study of theology, as they arrogantly
name it. Whatever becomes of us, never let us
cease to behave like honest men. * * *




THOMAS CARLYLE.


171


"I have thought much and long of the irksome
drudgery, the solitude, the gloom of mny condition.
I reasoned thus: These things may be endured, if
not with a peaceful heart, at least with a serene
countenance; but it is worth while to inquire
whether the profit will repay the pain of enduring
them-a scanty and precarious livelihood constitutes
the profit; you know me and can form some judgment of the pain. But there is loss as well as pain.
I speak not of the loss of health; but the destruction of benevolent feeling, that searing of the heart
which misery, especially of a petty kind, sooner or
later will never fail to effect-is a more frightful
thing. Thle desire which, in common with all men,
I feel for conversation and social intercourse is, I
find, 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.
If I continue a schoolmaster, I fear there is little
reason to doubt that these feelings will increase, and
at last drive me entirely from the kindly sympathies
of life, to brood in silence over the bitterness into
which my friendly propensities must be changed.
Where then would be my comfort? * * * I have
thought of writing for booksellers. RisumT teneas;
for at times I am serious in this matter. In fine




172


THOMAS CARLYLE.


weather, it does strike me that there are in this head
some ideas, a few disjecta menmbra, which might find
admittance into some one of the many publications
of the day. To live by authorship was never my intention. It is said not to be common at present, and
happily so; for if we may credit biographies, the
least miserable day of an author's life is generally
the last.
"' —  sad cure, for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?'
* * * You see, my boy, that my prospects are not
the brightest in nature.  Yet what shall we say?
Contentment, that little-practised virtue, has been
inculcated by saint, by savage, and by sage-and by
each person from a different principle. Do not fear
that I shall read you a homily on that hackneyed
theme. Simply I wish to tell you that in days of
darkness-for there are days when my support (pride,
or whatever it is) has enough to do-I;fnd it useful
to remember that Cleanthes whose [illegible] may
last yet other two thousand years, never murmured
when he labored by night, as a street-porter, that he
might hear the lectures of Zeno by day; and that
Epictetus, the ill-used slave of a cruel tyrant's as
wretched minion, wrote that 'Encheiridion' which




TIIOMA CARLYLE.


173


may fortify the souls of the latest inhabitant of the
earth. Besides, though neither of these men had
adorned their species, it is morally certain that our
earthly joys or griefs can last but for a few brief
years; and though the latter were eternal, complaint
and despondency could neither mitigate their intensity nor shorten their duration. Therefore, my duty
and that of every young man on that point is clear
as light itself."
10.
"January 7, 1819.
"  * * I wish from my soul some less laborious
mode of friendly intercourse could be devised than
letter-writing. Much may be done in the flight of
ages; I despair of steam indeed, notwithstanding its
felicitous application to many useful purposes, but
who can limit the undiscovered agent with which
knowledge is yet to enrich philanthropy  Charming prospect for the dull, above all, the solitary dull,
of future times; small comfort for us, however, who,
in no great fraction of one age, shall need to care
nothing about the matter."
11.
" EDINBURGH, February, 1819.
"* * * I shall be much gratified to get intelligence of your fortunes. I might send you some
details about my own, but they have nowise altered




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


since I wrote last, and have therefore a most indefinite and wavering aspect. Your road through life
seems to be separating from mine-perhaps never
more to meet. During the five years that have
elapsed since we lived together, each must have acquired principles and predilections in which the
other cannot be expected to participate. Yet I
trust, for the sake of both, that neither of us will
cease to remember with a meek and kindly feeling
that pleasant period which we spent together. Betide
us what will, whenever we meet again may each see
in the friend of his youth a man unsullied by anything that is paltry or degrading.
"Although well aware of the propensity which
exists in men to speak more about themselves than
others care for hearing, yet as you have hitherto
been the participator of all my schemes, I venture
to solicit your forbearance and advice at a time when
I need them as much, perhaps, as I have ever done.
"* * *X The source of that considerable quantity
of comfort which 1 enjoy in these circumstances Is
twofold. First, there is the hope of better days,
which I am not yet old or worn out enough to have
quite laid aside.
" This cheerful feeling is combined with a portion
of the universal quality which we ourselves name
firmness, others obstinacy; the quality which I suppose to be the fulcrum of all Stoical philosophy, and




THOMAS CARLYLE.


175


which, when the charmer Hope has utterly forsaken
us, may afford a grim support in the extreme of
wretchedness. But there are other emotions which
at times arise. When in my solitary walks round
the Meadows or Carlton Hill, my mind escapes from
the smoke and tarnish of those unfortunate persons
with whom it is too much my fortune to associate;
emotions which, if less fleeting, might constitute the
principle of action, at once rational and powerful.
It is difficult to speak upon these subjects without
being ridiculous, if not hypocritical. Besides, the
principles to which I allude, being little else than a
more intense perception of certain truths universally
acknowledged, to translate them into language would
disgrace them to the rank of truisms. Therefore
unwillingly I leave you to conjecture. It is probablle, however, that your good-natured imagination
might lead you to overrate my resources if I neglected to inform you that, upon the whole, my mind
is far from philosophical composure. The vicissitudes of our opinions do not happen with the celerity
or distinctness of an astronomical phenomenon; but
it is evident that my mind at the present is undergoing sundry alterations. When I review my past
conduct, it seems to have been guided by narrow or
defective views, and (worst of all) by lurking, deeply
lurking affectation. I could have defended these
views by the most paramount logic; but what logic




176


THOMAS CARLYLE.


can withstand experience? This is not the first, and
if I live long it will not be the last, of my revolutions.
Thus, velut unda supervenit undam, error succeeds to
error; and thus while I seek a rule of life, life itself
is fast flying away. At the last, perhaps, my creed
may be found too nearly to resemble the memorable
Tristrapaedia of Walter Shandy, of which the minute
and indubitable directions for Tristram's baby-clothes
were finished when Tristram was in breeches. But
I forget the aphorism with which I began my letter.
Here, at least, let me conclude this long-winded account of my own affairs, and request from you as
particular a one of your own. We cannot help one
another, my friend; but mutual advice and encouragement may easily be given and thankfully received. Will you go to Liverpool, or Bristol, or
anywhither, and institute a classico-mathematical
academy?   Or what say you to that asylum, or
rather hiding-place, of poverty and discontent, America? To be fabricating Lock No. 8 among the passes
of the Alleghany!"
[In the letter from which the above extract is
taken, Carlyle mentions that he is attempting to
learn German.]
12.
"EDINBURGH, 15 CARNEGIE STREET, April, 1819.
"The despicable wretchedness of teaching can be
known only to those who have tried it and to Him




THOMAS CARLYLE.


177


who made the heart and knows it all. One meets
with few spectacles more afflicting than that of a
young man with a free spirit, with impetuous though
honorable feelings, condemned to waste the flower
of his life in such a calling; to fade in it' by slow
and sure corrosion of discontent; and, at last, obscurely and unprofitably to leave, with an indignant
joy, the miseries of a world which his talents might
have illustrated and his virtues adorned. Such things
have been and will be. But surely in that better
life which good men dream of, the spirit of a Kepler
or a Milton will find a more propitious destiny.
" *    * I long to hear that you have comfortably
adjusted your establishment in the Island of Man. In
the event of your going thither, you have only to exert your abilities with the zeal and prudence of which
you are capable; and I am convinced your hope
of respectability and contentment will not be disappointed. Probably you are disposed to agree with
the Pariah of Saint-Pierre, in thinking that " there
is no real happiness without a good wife;" and it
may be you are right. Let me advise you, however
(you need not frown; I am not going to jest, but to
give most serious and weighty counsel), to examine
and re-examine the circumstances before taking any
step in consequence of this persuasion. A calendar
month destroys the illusions of the imagination; and
if judgment be not interested, the rest of one's life
8*




178


THOMAS CARLYLE.


is the very gall of bitterness. A narrow income, too!
It would break your heart-at least, I hope it would
-to see the helplessness of an amiable woman (granting that your choice was fortunate) exposed to the
hard [illegible] from which you had undertaken, but
were unable, to defend her. Of a truth, such a thing
should give us pause. But I doubt not your good
sense will render this advice superfluous. Your
good-nature will pardon it, considering the motive
which has called it forth. * * * As to my own
projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I can
give no satisfactory reply 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. Friends are necessary, and
I have few friends, and most of those few have their
own concerns to mind. Health also is requisite, but
my late precious trade and indolent habits (it must
be owned) have left me little of that to boast of."
13.
" May, 1819.
"It [first volume of Rousseau's " Confessions"] is
perhaps the most remarkable tome I ever read. Except for its occasional obscenity, I might wish to see




THOMAS CARLYLE.


179


the remainder of the book, to try, if possible, to connect the character of Jean Jacques with my previous
ideas of human nature. To say he is mad were to
cut the knot without loosing it. At any rate, what
could have induced any mortal, mad or wvise, to recollect and delineate such a tissue of vulgar debauchery, false-heartedness, and misery is quite beyond my
comprehension. If we regret our exclusion from
that Gallic constellation, which has set and found no
successor to its brilliancy, the ' Memoirs' of Marmontel or Rousseau's ' Confessions' should teach a virtuous Briton to be content with the dull sobriety of
his native country."
14.
"December, 1819.
"Yet, in general, I set a stubborn front to the
storm, live in hope of better days. In wet weather,
indeed, when the digestive apparatus refuses to perform its functions, my world is sometimes black
enough. Melancholy remembrances,
" Shades of departed joys around me rise,
With many a face that smiles on me no more,
With many a voice that thrills of transport gave,
Now silent as the grass that tufts their grave;'
and dark anticipations of the coming time-such
are the fruits of solitude and want of settled occupation. But this, also, is vanity."


I




180


THOMAS CARLYLE.


15.
"llarch, 1820.
"The thought that one's best days are hurrying
darkly and uselessly away is yet more [illegible]. It
is vain to deny it, my friend. 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 renounced; it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane; and the ten years which a barrister commonly
spends in painful idleness before arriving at employment is more than my physical and moral frame
could endure. Teaching school is but another word
for sure and not very slow destruction; and as to compiling the wretched lives of Montesquieu, Montaigne,
Montagu, etc., for Dr. Brewster, the remuneration
will hardly sustain life. But I touch a string which
generally yields a tedious sound to any but the operator. I know you are not indifferent to the matter,
but I would not tire you with it. 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




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181


man who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honor and uprightness
whlich 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; and, if lie quit not his integrity, end a
wretched, though happily a short, career in misery
and failure.
" I was glad to learn that you had finished the perusal of Homer. Certainly the blind bard is little
obliged by your opinion of him. I believe, however,
Candor is, and that is better. If from the admiration felt by Casaubon, Scaliger, and Co., and still more
by the crowds that blindly follow them, we could
subtract that portion which originates in the as hollow admiration of others for the same object; and
if, further, all affectation could be banished, I fear a
very inconsiderable item would remain. In fact,
Maeonides has had his day-at least the better part
of it; the noon was five-and-twenty centuries ago;
the twilight (for he set in 1453) may last for five-andtwenty other centuries; but it, too, must terminate.
Nothing that we know of can last forever. The
very mountains are silently wasting away; and long
before eternity is done Mont Blanc might cease to
be the pinnacle of Europe, and Chimborazo lie under
the Pacific. Philosophy and literature have a far
shorter date. Error in the first succeeds to error, as




182


THOMAS CARLYLE.


wave to wave. Plato obscured the fame of Pythagoras; Cudworth and Kant, of Plato; the Stagyrite
and his idle spawn have been swept away by Lord
Bacon, himself to be swept away in his turn. Even
in the narrow dominions of truth the continuance
of renown is not more durable; each succeeding observer from a higher vantage-ground compresses the
labors of his forerunner; and as the 'Principia' of
Newton is already swallowed up in the' M6canique
Celeste' of Laplace, so likewise will it fare with the
present Lord of the Ascendant. Poetry, they tell
us, escapes the general doom; but, even without the
aid of revolutions or deluges, it cannot always escape.
The ideas about which it is conversant must differ
in every different age and country. The poetry of
a Choctaw, I imagine, would turn chiefly on the pains
of hunger, and the pleasure of catching bears or
scalping Chickasaws. In like manner, though some
of the affections which Homer delineates are coexistent with the race, yet in the progress of refinement
(or change) his mode of delineating them will appear
trivial or disgusting, and the very twilight of his
fame will have an end. Thus all things are dying,
my friend-only ourselves die faster! Man! if I
had but ~200 a year, a beautiful little house in some
laughing valley, three or four pure-spirited mortals
who would love me and be loved again, together with
a handsome library and-a great genius, I would in



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vestigate the hallucinations that connect themselves
with such ideas. At present I must revisit this
nether sphere."
16.
"MAINHILL, NEAR ECCLEFECHAN, August 4, 1820.
" ** * How could it have got into your head that
you stood low in my estimation? The words that
conveyed such an impression must indeed have been
ill-chosen whenever they were used. Graglia's Dictionary and the rest came safely as well as timeously to hand; and though the articles had been
entirely destroyed, do you think I would have quarrelled with you about so trifling an affair? It has
been my chance to meet with some whose sympathy
has brightened, at times, the gloomy labyrinth of
life; but not to meet so many that I could sacrifice
them upon grounds like this. I pray you put away
such thoughts utterly. Our paths may lead us far
asunder, but the place will be distant, the period remote, when I forget the calmness and happiness of
bygone days, or the amiable qualities that contributed
to make them calm and happy. I hope we shall
meet together often, after all, when the sun is shining
more brightly over us both; and I feel a sort of confidence that neither of us will allow his spirit to be
sullied or debased, though disastrous twilight should
still overcast both the present and the future.
"* * * My health has been indifferent for the




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last three years-seldom very bad; I think it is improving. My spirits, of course, have been various;
my prospects are a shadowy void. Yet why should
a living man complain? The struggle is brief; there
are short yet most sweet pauses in it; something of
pride, too, at times, will gild its humble endurance;
and there is all eternity to rest in.
" I could tell you much about the new Heaven and
new Earth which a slight study of German literature
has revealed to me; but room fails me, and timewhile ' twilight gray' and certain phenomena within
give warning that I should mount the sheltie and
take my evening ride."
17.
"March, 1821.
" * * X But toleration, man! Toleration is all I
ask, and all I am ready to give. Do you take your
Lipsius, your Crombie, your Schweighaiuser, and let
me be doing with Lake Poets, Mystics, or any trash
I can fall in with. Why should we not cast an eye
of cheering, give a voice of welcome to each other as
our paths become mutually visible, though they are
no longer one? * * * The most enviable thing, I
often think, in all the world must be the soundest
of the Seven Sleepers; for he reposes deeply in his
corner, and to him the tragi-comedy of life is as
painless as it is paltry.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


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" * * * I have tried 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. IMypetards 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.
<"* * I would not wish any one to launch, as I
was forced to do, upon the roaring deep, so long as
he can stay ashore. For me, the surges and the
storm are round my skiff; yet I must on-on lest
biscuit fail me, ere I reach the trade-wind and sail
with others."
18.
"April, 1821.
" X* * 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; then shall-which you see
is just use and wont."




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19.
"October, 1821.
" * * * My own experience of these things is trifling and unfavorable; yet I do not reckon the problem of succeeding in a school, and learning to remedy
and endure all its grievances, one of extreme difficulty. First, as in every undertaking, it is necessary,
of course, that you wish to succeed; that you determine firmly to let nothing break your equanimity,
that you 'lay aside every weight '-your philosophical projects, your shyness of manner (if you are
cursed with that quality), your jealous sense of independence-everything, in short, that circumstances
may point out as detrimental to your interest with
the people; and then, being thus balanced and set
in motion, your sole after-duty is to 'run with patience;' you will reach the goal undoubtedly. Public favor in some sense is requisite for all men, but a
teacher ought constantly to bear in mind that it is
life and breath to h]im. Hence, in comparison with
it nothing should be dear to him; lie must be meek
and kindly, and soft of speech to every one, how
absurd or offensive soever. To the same object he
must also frequently sacrifice the real progress of
his pupils, if it cannot be gained without affecting
their peace of mind. The advantages of great learning are so vague and distant, the miseries of constant




THOMAS CARLYLE.


187


whining are so immediate and manifest, that not
one parent in a thousand can take the former in exchange for the latter, with patience-not to speak of
thankfulness. For the same reason, he must (if the
fashion of the place require it) go about and visit his
employers; he must cook them and court them by
every innocent mode which the ever-varying posture
of circumstances will suggest to a mind on the outlook for them. This seems poor philosophy, but it
is true. The most diligent fidelity in discharging
your duties will not serve you-by itself. Never
forget this-it is mathematically certain. If men
were angels, or even purely intellectual beings, having judgment, but no vanity or other passion, it
might be different; but as it is, the case becomes
much more complicated. Few, very few, had not
rather be cheated than despised; and even in the
common walks of life, probity is often left to rot,
without so much as being praised. It has the alget
without the laudatur, which is a most sorry business, doubtless. I have written down all this, my
dear -, not because I thought you wanted it; on
the contrary, I imagine your talents and manners
and temper promise you a distinguished success;
but because I thought the fruit of my painful experience might be worth something to you, and that
something, however small, I was anxious to offer you.
Take it, and call it the widow's mite, if you like. It
is from your friend,            T. CARLYLE."




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20.
"April, 1822.
" * * It is a great truth which Gibbon sets forth
somewhere, that letters are like alms, in one respectsymbols of friendship, as alms are of charity, though
it is well known that the thing signified may exist
in great activity without the symbol, in both cases.
At all events, I hope you need no persuasion that I
feel always great pleasure in writing to you; not
only as to a man whose talents and principle I respect, but also as to one with whom some of the
most picturesque years of my life are inseparably
connected in memory; whose name recalls to me a
thousand images of the past, a thousand passages and
half-forgotten moods of mind, which were not without a degree of pleasure while present, and which
distance is every day rendering dearer, and covering
with a softer and purer color. How many sheets
have I scrawled to you, how many consultations and
inerrymakings and loungings have wte had together!
How many sage purposes and speculations have we
formed by each other's counsel-how contentedly,
though neither of us knew the right hand from the
left! I declare I shall always think of those days
with a certain melancholy pleasure, and keep anticipating the nights when we (old gray-heads, covered
with honor as with years) shall yet sit by each other's




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189


hearthl, and recount these achievements, and forget,
in recollecting them, all the weakness and the weariness and cares and coldnesses of age. ' Chateaux en
Espagne,' you say. No matter, they look very hospitable, and one loves to gaze upon them.
* * * One thing I am sure of, and congratulate
you upon: it is the advantage you possess over me
in having a fixed object in life; a kind of chart of
the course you are to follow, and the opportunity not
only of enjoying all the pleasures which this affords
in the meantime, but likewise of increasing your experience, and thus at once, by the power of habit
and of new skill in discharging your duties, increasing and accumulating more and more your means
of happiness and usefulness. There is an immense
blessing in your lot. I advise you (for two good reasons) to beware of letting it go. None but a wandering, restless pilgrim, who has travelled long and
advanced little, anxious to proceed on his destined
journey, but perpetually missing or changing his
path, can tell you how fine a thing it is to have a
beaten turnpike for your accommodation. Better to
keep it, almost however miry and rugged, than to
spring the hedge, and so lose yourself among footpaths."




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21.
"December, 1822.
"I need not advise you to keep a strict watch over
your health; you have already suffered too severely
to need any such caution. The whole earth has no
blessing within its circuit worthy to be named along
with health. The loss of it I reckon the very dearest item in the lot of man. I often think I could
snap my fingers in the face of everything, if it were
not for this. Pandora's box was but a toy compared
with biliousness, or any other fundamental bodily
disorder. Watch! watch! and think mens sana in
corpore sano is the whole concern.
" They [the probationers of the Scottish Kirk] are
getting into kirks gradually, or lingering on the
muddy shore of 'Private Teaching,' to see if any
Charon will waft them across the Styx of Patronage
into the Elysium of teinds and glebe. Success attend them all, poor fellows! They are cruising in
one small sound, as it were, of the great ocean of
life; their trade is harmless, their vessels leaky; it
will be hard if they altogether fail. * * * I sit here
and read all the morning, or write; regularly burning everything I write. It is a hard matter that
one's thoughts should be so poor and scanty, and at
the same time the power of uttering them so difficult
to acquire.




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191


c"* * * Have you seen the Liberal?    It is a
most happy performance. Byron has a 'Vision of
Judgment' there; and a 'Letter to the Editor of my
Grandmother's Review,' of the wickedest and cleverest turn you could imagine. * * * This is a wild,
fighting, loving, praying, blaspheming, weeping,
laughing sort of world!"
22.
"KENNAIRD HOUSE,.June 17, 1823.
"Your letters have a charm to me, independently
of their intrinsic merit. They are letters of my first
and oldest correspondent; they carry back the mind
to old days-days perhaps in themselves not greatly
better than those now passing over us, but invested
by the kind treachery of imagination with hues which
nothing present can equal. If I have any fault to
find with you it is in the very excess of what renders
any correspondence agreeable-the excess of your
complaisance, the too liberal [word wanting] which
you offer at the shrine of other people's vanity. I
might object to this with the more asperity did I not
consider that flattery is in truth the sovereign emollient, the true oil of life, by which the joints of the
great social machine, often stiff and rusty enough, are
kept from grating, and made to play sweetly to and
fro; hence, that if you pour it on a thought too lavishly, it is an error on the safe side-an error which




192


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proceeds from the native warmness of your heart,
and ought not to be quarrelled with too sharply; not,
at least, by one who profits, though unduly, by the
commission of it. So I will submit to be treated as
a kind of slender genius, since my friend will have
it so. Our intercourse will fare but little worse on
that account. We have now, as you say, known each
other long, and never, I trust, seen aught to make us
ashamed of that relation. I calculate that succeeding years will but more firmly establish our connection, strengthening with the force of habit, and the
memory of new kind offices, what has a right to subsist without those aids. Some time hence, when you
are seated in your peaceful manse-you at one side
of the parlor fire, Mrs. M. at the other, and two or
three little M.'s, fine chubby urchins, hopping about
the carpet-you will suddenly observe the door fly
open, and a tall, meagre, care-worn figure stalk forward, his grim countenance lightened by unusual
smiles, in the certainty of meeting with a cordial
welcome. This knight of the rueful visage will, in
fact, mingle with the group for a season, and be
merry as the merriest, though his looks are sinister.
I warn you to make provision for such emergencies.
In process of time, I, too, must have my own peculiar
hearth; wayward as my destiny has hitherto been,
perplexed and solitary as my path of life still is, I
never cease to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on




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193


my own footing. Like the men of Glasgow, I shall
have 'a house within myself ' (what tremendous abdomina we householders have!) with every suitable
appurtenance, before all is done; and when friends
are met, there is little chance that will be forgotten.
We shall talk over old times, compare old hopes with
new fortune, and secure comfort by Sir John Sinclair's celebrated recipe, by being comfortable. There
are certainly brave times: would they could only be
persuaded to come on a little faster.
" Dunkeld is about the prettiest village I ever beheld. I shall not soon forget the bright sunset, when
skirting the base of the " Birnam Wood" (there is no
wood now) and asking for Dunsinane's high hill,
which lies far to the eastward, and thinking of the
immortal link-boy who has consecrated those two
spots, which he never saw, with a glory that [will
last] forever. I first came in sight of the ancient
capital of Caledonia, standing in the lap of the
mountains, with its quick broad river running byits old gray cathedral, and its peak-roofed white
houses peering through many groves of stately trees,
all gilded from the glowing west-the whole so clear
and pure and gorgeous as if it had been a city of
fairy-land; not a vulgar clachan, where men sell
stots, and women buy eggs by the dozen. I walked
round and round it till late, the evening I left you.
* - The virtue of punctuality [is not considered]
9




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


in treatises of Ethics, but it is of essential importance in the conduct of life; like common kitchensalt, scarce heeded by cooks and purveyors, though
without it their wares would soon run to rottenness
and ruin."
23.
"August, 1824.
"" * * I quitted the muddy beach of my native
Scotland, 'stern nurse for a dyspeptic child,' with no
other feelings towards it than I had long entertained. Hard, rugged land! I often think of its earnest
features amid the rich scenes of the south. Distance
is producing something of its usual effect: much
that was unpleasant or repulsive is forgotten or softened down; and I think of the green landscape of
Perthshire or the bleak simplicity of Annandale,
which the sight of them was often far from giving.
London astonishes, disgusts, and charms me. There
are two or three persons there whom I should regret
to know no more about.
* * * X      - -   is not a Scotchman. * ** Hardship, I suspect, has withered out the sensibilities of
his nature, and turned him, finally, into a whisking,
antithetical little editor. There is no significance in
his aspect. His blue frock, and switch, and fashionable wig, and clear, cold eyes, and clipt accents, and
slender persifXage might befit a dandy. ** * Allan
Cunningham I love: he retains the honest tones of




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195


his native Nithsdale true as ever. He has a heart;
a mind simple as a child's, but with touches of genius singularly wild and original. -     is a kind
little fellow, sings Italian airs, keeps daggers and
other play-gear lying on his dressing-table, and is of
the mob of gentlemen who write with ease.
-- sprawls about as if his body consisted of four
ill-conditioned flails. Coleridge is a steam-engine
of a hundred horses' power, with the boiler burst.
Iis talk is resplendent with imagery and the shows
of thought; you listen as to an oracle, and find yourself no jot the wiser. He is without beginning or
middle or end. * * * A round, fat, oily, yet impatient
little man, his mind seems totally beyond his own
control; he speaks incessantly, not thinking or [illegible] remembering, but combining all these processes into one, as a lazy housewife might mingle
her soup and fish and beef and custard into one unspeakable mass, and present it true-heartedly to her
astonished guest."
24.
"SCOTSBRIG, June 20, 1826.
"* * * Be in no haste for a church; and feel
very happy that you can do very comfortably without one, till the time come-whenever that may be.
I begin to see that one is fifty times better for being
heartily drilled in the school of experience, though
beaten daily for years with forty stripes save one.




196


THOMAS CARLYLE.


I used to reckon myself very wretched, and now I
find that no jot of my castigation could have been
spared."
25.
" 21 COMLEY BANK ROW,
EDINBURGH, December 12, 1827.
"MY DEAR SIR,-My mother is arrived here on a
short visit to us, and feels extremely anxious, among
other purposes, to see her old friend, your aunt, Mrs.
Hope, whom she parted with in Ecelefechan, many
years ago, with very little expectation of ever meeting her again. I think you once told me the old
lady lived somewhere in the outskirts of this city;
if so, it will not be impossible to bring about this interview, in which I myself feel somewhat interested,
having still a vivid recollection of that disastrous gig
expedition which I executed under your auspices on
the Moffatt Road. Will you be so good as to send
us a note of Mrs. Hope's address, and let us try if we
can find her? The sooner the better, for my mother's time is limited.
" I dare say you come often to Edinburgh: how is
it that you never find your way to Comley Bank?
Come hither, and I will show you my little cottage,
and introduce you to my little wife, who will receive
you with all graciousness as her husband's friend.
Come down the very first time you visit Edinburgh.
There is a spare bed here, and many a reminiscence
of auld lang-syne.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


197


"I am grown quite a stranger in Glasgow of late
years, now that Grahame and Irving and all have
left it: yet the memory of that hospitable, jolly, wellliving city still dwells with me fresh as ever, and
hopes that a time is coming when I may behold it
again. Meanwhile my true prayer is, in the words
of your civic emblazonry, Let Glasgow flourish! and
you and all the honest hearts that have your being
in it.
"My mother brings no tidings from Grahame, except that lie is still at Burnswark, irrigating meadows,
salting bog hay, and striving by agricultural philosophy to make 'the desert blossom as the rose.' I
heard that h hhad hopes of returning to your city
and resuming traffic. I pray that it may be so, for
it is a thousand pities so good and gifted a man were
not working in his proper sphere, where alone he
can be happy and wholesomely active.
"I have heard several times from the Caledonian
orator of late. He does not seem in the least millenniary in his letters: but the same old friendly man
we have long known him to be. And yet his printed works are enough to strike one blank with amazement: for if the millennium is to come upon us in
twenty years and odd months, ought we not to be
turning a new leaf? ought not you to shut up your
ledger and I my note-book, and both of us to sit on
the lookout, like Preventive-service men, spying and




198


THOMAS CARLYLE.


scenting, with eye and nostril, whether there be
aught of it in the wind? Alas! alas! the madness
of man findeth no termination, but only new shapes,
the old spirit being still the same. To the last there
is and will be a bee in his bonnet, which only in
every new generation buzzes with a new note.
"I am scribbling here with considerable diligence,
and not without satisfaction, though still in very poor
health. In the course of years I hope to grow better; but now, such is the extent of my philosophy,
I think I can partly do, whether I get better or not.
My brother John, the doctor, is away in Germany,
dissecting subjects, I suppose, at this very date, in
Munich, the capital of Bavaria. He writes to us full
of wonder at the marvels of that strange land. Mrs.
C. and I have some thoughts of going thither and
winter ourselves. But why should I darken counsel
by words without wisdom? Send us that address of
Mrs. Hope as soon as possible; come over to Comley
Bank the first day or night you are in town; and
believe me ever, my dear sir,
"Affectionately yours,
" THOMAS CARLYLE."
26.
" CRAIGENPUTTOCH, May 31, 1828.
"* * * 0 Murray! how we poor sons of Adam
are shovelled to and fro! Do you remember when
we walked together, you escorting me, to the fifth




THOMAS CARLYLE.


199


mile-stone on the Dumfries road? Two young pilgrims; yet even then the future looking stern and
fateful in our eyes! How many a weary foot hlave
we had to travel since that hour! and here we are
still travelling, and must travel till the sun set and
we get to our inn! Well, let us travel cheerily; for,
after all, it is a brave journey: the great universe is
around us; time and space are ours; and in that
city whither we are bound it is said 'there are many
mansions."'
27.
TO -      FERGUSON.
"ANNAN, October 22, 1820.
" MY DEAR FERGUSON,-I delayed writing to you
chiefly for the old reason-want of anything to say;
and I have begun to write not because that want is
at all sufficiently supplied, but because I would not
vex your mind by unfounded suspicions that absence
and oblivion are interchangeable terms in my vocabulary, or that the light of two months' experience
has shown me any flaws in your character to the
prejudice of our wavering though agreeable (sic) correspondence. I prize the frankness of your procedure in writing a second time; there is so much of
the counting-house in formal regularity, one likes to
see a friend's letter sometimes want the 'I duly received your valuable favor, dated, and so forth.' It
is not my inclination to put your generosity often to




200


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such trials; but I promise you the present exercise
of it shall not be thrown away.
" The first letter, written late, appears also to have
lingered long on the road. It reached me while in
the heat of managing a small concern, which not
long after called me into Yorkshire; and I wilfully
delayed sending an answer, till, the affair being finally adjusted, I might have it in my power to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a considerable change in my stile (sic) of life. The matter I allude to was a proposal to become 'a travelling
tutor,' as they call it, to a young person in the North
Riding, for whom that exercise was recommended,
on account of bodily and mental weakness. They
offered me ~150 per annum, and withal invited me
to come and examine things on the spot, before engaging. I went, accordingly, and happy was it I
went. From description, I was ready to accept the
place; from inspection, all Earndale would not have
hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, a semivegetable; the elder brother, head of the family, a
two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue; and all the connections seemed to have the
power of eating pudding, but no higher power. So
I left the barbarous people-kindly, however, because
they used me kindly, and crossed the Sark, with a
higher respect for our own bleak fatherland than
ever I had felt before. York is but a heap of bricks;




THOMAS CARLYLE.


201


Jonathan Dryasdust (see 'Ivanhoe') is justly named.
It was edifying to hear the principal of their Unitarian College lament the prevalence of mysticism
in religion; and as to their newspaper editor, though
made of lead, he is lighter than McCullogh's little
finger. York is the Boeotia of Britain; its inhabitants enjoy all sensual pleasures in perfection; they
have not even the idea of any other. Upon the
wlole, however, I derived great amusement from my
journey. I viewed a most rich and picturesque country. I conversed with all kinds of men, from graziers up to knights of the shire; argued with them
all, and broke specimens from the souls (if any),
which I retain within the museum of my cranium
for your inspection at a future day.
" It is scarce a week since I returned from this expedition; and now my plans must all be altered. If
I come to Edinburgh, which seems likely, few manuscripts will accompany or follow me; 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 there, for I have
no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a
being thrown from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors;
I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me
like a pathless, a waste, and howling wilderness-surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under 'dark9*




202


THOMAS CARLYLE.


brown shade.' Yet hope will sometimes visit me,
and, at the worst, complaint is weak, and idle if it
were not. After all, one has a desperate struggleand for what? For the bubble reputation, that we
may fly alive through the mouths of men, and be
thought happy, or learned, or great, by creatures as
feeble and fleeting as ourselves. Sure it is a sorry
recompense for so much [illegible] bustle and vexation. Do not leave your situation, if you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a fearful
thing to be swept on by the roaring surge of life, and
then to float alone-undirected on its restless, monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may; or,
if you must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the
waves without a guide. You and I are but pinnaces
or cockboats yet; hold fast by the Manilla ship; do
not let go the painter, however rough and grating.
I am sorry you are tired of anatomy, and such things.
I am tired too, but that does not mend the matter.
Yet trust the best; nec deus intersit is indeed true,
naturally as well as poetically. Yet in spite of this,
all things will and shall be well, if we believe aright.
I designed to tell you a long tale about my most neglected studies, but I have no room. I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest. They
are the greatest men at present with me,
"I am yours affectionately,
"T. CARLYLE."




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203


28.
TO LEIGH HUNT.
"CRAIGENPUTTOCH, DUMFRIES, November 20, 1832.
"MY DEAR SIR,-I sent you a little note, by
some conveyance I had, several months ago; whether it ever came to hand is unknown here. We
learned soon afterwards, from a notice in the New
Monthly Magazine, that you were again suffering in
health.
" If that note reached you, let this be the second;
if it did not, let this be the first little messenger arriving from the mountains to inquire for you, to
bring assurance that you are lovingly remembered
here, that nothing befalling you can be indifferent
to us.
"Being somewhat uncertain about the number of
your house, I send this under cover to a friend who
will punctually see that it reaches its address. If he
deliver it in person, as is not impossible, you will
find him worth welcoming. He is John Mill, eldest
son of India Mill; and, I may say, one of the best,
clearest-headed, and clearest-hearted young men now
living in London.
"We sometimes fancy we observe you in Tait's
and other periodicals. Have the charity sometime
soon to send us a token of your being and well



204


THOMAS CARLYLE.


being. We often speak of you here, and are very
obstinate in remembering.
" I still wish much you would write Hazlitt's Life.
Somewhat of history lay in that too luckless man;
and you, of all I can think of, have the organ for
discerning it and delineating it.
" As for myself, I am doing little. The literary
element is one of the most confused to live in, at all
times; the bibliopolic condition of this time renders
it perfect chaos. One must write ' articles '-write
and curse (as Ancient Pistol ate his leek); what can
one do?
"My wife is not with me to-day, otherwise she
would surely beg to be remembered. You will offer
my best wishes to Mrs. Hunt, to Miss, and the little
gray-eyed philosopher who listened to us.
" I asked you to come hither and see us, whenever
you wanted to rusticate a month. Is that forever
impossible?
"I remain, always, my dear sir, yours truly and
kindly,                         T. CARLYLE."
29.
" CRAIGENPUTTOCH, April 18, 1834.
" MY DEAR SIR,-Your letters are rare, too rare,
in their outward quality of sequence through the
post; but happily still rarer in their inward quality;
the hope and kind trustful sympathy of new eighteen dwelling unworn under hair which, you tell me,




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205


is getting tinged with gray. It is actually true we
are coming to London! So far has Destiny and a
little resolution brought it. The kind Mrs. Austin,
after search enough, has now (we imagine) found us
a house which I hope and believe is not very far
from yours; It shall be farther than my widest calculation if I fail to meet your challenge, and walk
and talk with you to all lengths. I know not well
how Chelsea lies from the Parish Church of Kensington, but it is within sight of the latter we are to
be; and some 'trysting-tree' (do you know so much
Scotch?) is already getting into leaf, as yet unconscious of its future honor between these two suburbs
of Babylon. Some days, too, we will walk the whole
day long, in wide excursion; you lecturing me on
the phenomena of the region, which to you are native. My best amusement is walking; I like, as well
as Hadrian himself, to mete out my world with steps
of my own, and to take possession of it. But if to
this you add Speech! Is not Speech defined to be
cheerfuller than light, and the eldest daughter of
Heaven? I mean articulate discourse of reason, that
comes from the internal heavenly part of us; not the
confused gabble, which (in so many millions) comes
from no deeper than the palate of the mouth, which
it is the saddest of all things to listen to-a thing
that fills one alternately with sorrow and indignation,
and at last almost with a kind of horror and terror.




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As if the world were a huge Bedlam, and the sacred
speech of men had become an inarticulate jargon of
hungry, cawing rooks!
" We laid down your description of your house as
the model our kind friend was to aim at. How far
we have prospered will be seen. In rent we are
nearly on a par. We also anticipate quiet, and some
visitations of the heavenly air; but, for the rest, ours
will be no 'high-wainscoted' dwelling, like Homer's
and yours-no, some new-fangled brickwork which
will tremble at every step, in which no four-footed
thing can stand, but only three-footed, such as ' Holland Street, Kensington,' in this year of grace, can
be expected to yield. However, there is a patch of
garden, or, indeed, two patches. I shall have some
little crib for my books and writing-table, and so do
the best that may be. Innumerable vague forebodings hang over me as I write; meanwhile there is
one grand assurance-the feeling that it was a duty,
almost a necessity. My dame, too, is of resolution
for the enterprise, and whatsoever may follow it; so,
forward in God's name!
"I have seen nothing of you for a long time, except what of the' Delicacies of Pig-driving' my Examiner once gave me. A most tickling thing, not a
word of which can I remember; only the whole fact
of it, pictured in such subquizzical, sweet-acid geniality of mockery, stands here, and, among smaller and




THOMAS CARLYLE.


207


greater things, will stand. If the two volumes are of
that quality, they will be worth a welcome. I cannot
expect them now till the beginning of May; or perhaps I may even still find them with Fraser at Whitsuntide. Here among the moors they were best of all.
"The starting of your Journal was a glad event
for me; it seems one of the hopefullest projects in
these days: and surely it must be a strange public,
one would think, in which -   -    prospers and
Leigh Hunt fails. You must bear up steadily at
first; it is there, in this as in all things, that the
grand difficulties lie.
"Thornton need be under no uneasiness about
Henry Inglis, from whom we heard not long ago,
with some remark, too, of a very friendly character,
about the traveller in question, and not the faintest
hint about pounds or shillings.
"I am writing nothing; reading, above all things,
my old Homer and Prolegomena enough; the old
song itself with a most singular delight. Fancy me
as reading till you see me; then must another scene
open. Your newspapers will interest me; as for the
unhappy 'Sartor,' none can detest him more than my
present self. There are some ten pages rightly fused
and harmonious; the rest is only welded, or even agglomerated, and may be thrown to the swine. All
salutations from us both!
" Valete et no8 amate!      T. CARLYLE."




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30.*
" CHELSEA, June 17, 1850.
"DEAR HUNT,-I have just finished your Autobiography,' which has been most pleasantly occupying all my leisure these three days; and you must
permit me to write you a word upon it, out of the
fulness of the heart, while the impulse is still fresh,
to thank you. This good book, in every sense one of
the best I have read this long while, has awakened
many old thoughts which never were extinct, or even
properly asleep, but which (like so much else) have
had to fall silent amid the tempests of an evil timeHeaven mend it! A word from me once more, I
know, will not be unwelcome while the world is talking of you.
" Well, I call this an excellent good book, by far
the best of the autobiographic kind I remember to
have read in the English language; and, indeed, except it be Boswell's of Johnson, I do not know where
we have such a picture drawn of human life as in
these three volumes.
" A pious, ingenious, altogether human and worthy
book, imaging, with graceful honesty and free felic* This letter, though most of it appeared in an edition of Leigh
Hunt's "Autobiography," is here for the first time printed verbatim,
and therefore included among others which appear here for the first
time.




THOMAS CARLYLE.


209


ity, many interesting objects and persons on your
life-path, and imaging throughout, what is best of
all, a gifted, gentle, patient, and valiant human soul,
as it buffets its way through the billows of the time,
and will not drown, though often in danger; cannot
be drowned, but conquers, and leaves a track of radiance behind it: that, I think, comes out more clearly
to me than in any other of your books; and that, I
can venture to assure you, is the best of all results
to realize in a book or written record. In fact, this
book has been like an exercise of devotion to me; I
have not assisted at any sermon, liturgy or litany, this
long while, that has had so religious an effect on me.
Thanks in the name of all men! And believe, along
with me, that this book will be welcome to other
generations as well as ours. And long may you live
to write more books for us; and may the evening
sun be softer on you (and on me) than the noon
sometimes was!
"Adieu, dear Hunt (you must let me use this
familiarity, for I am now an old fellow too, as well
as you). I have often thought of coming up to see
you once more; and perhaps I shall, one of these
days (though horribly sick and lonely, and beset with
spectral lions, go whitherward one may); but, whether
I do or not, believe forever in my regard. And so
God bless you! prays heartily    T. CARLYLE."




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31.
"CHELSEA, June 21.
"DEAR HUTT,-Many kind thanks! I saw the
book, and sent thanks for it by Vincent; but I did
not know, till this minute, what other pleasant things
lay in the letter itself, which the dusk and the hurry
would not suffer me to read at the moment. By all
means, yes, yes! My wife is overjoyed at the prospect of seeing you again in the good old style. Courage, and do not disappoint us. We are here, quite
disengaged, and shall be right glad to see you.
"I hope Vincent explained what a miscellaneous
uproar had accidentally got about me to-night, and
how for want of light, as well as of time, I missed
the kernel of the letter altogether. Tuesday, remember! We dine about five, and tea comes naturally about seven-sooner if you will come sooner.
" One of my people to-night, an accomplished kind
of American, has begged a card of introduction to
you. He is a son of a certain noted Judge Story;
is himself, I believe, a kind of sculptor and artist, as
well as lawyer. Pray receive him if he call; you
will find him a friendly and entertainable and entertaining man.
"And so, till Tuesday evening,
"Yours with all regard,
"T. CARLYLE."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


211


32.
TO WILLIAM BRIDGES.
" CHELSEA, November 19, 1846.
"MY DEAR SIR,-I have read your letter, ' History
in a Nutshell,' with much pleasure. It is surely an
eloquent, pious, melodious conception of that immeasurable matter; and, if you chose to elaborate
it further, might lead you into all manner of interesting analogies and contrasts. I like well, in particular, that co-ordinating of sacred events with events
called 'Profane.' We ought to know always that
if any one of them be sacred, they are all sacred.
That is the right use to make of the, at present, very
burdensome 'Hebrew element' in our affairs. In
this way we shall conquer it, not let it conquer uswhich latter is a very bad result, worse even than
running from it; as the world in these centuries, as
a bad-best, is very much inclined to do. I should be
glad to know more minutely what you are about of
late; and to see you here some evening when you
feel inclined to walk so far.
"Yours very truly,
T. CARLYLE."




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


33.
TO A LITERARY FRIEND.
"THE GRANGE, ALRESFORD, HANTS, September 2G, 1848.
" DEAR -,-I know not what little tiff this is
that has arisen between     and you, but I wish
much it would handsomely blow over, and leave all
of you in the simple state of as you were. Reflecting on the enclosed little note that reached me this
morning, I decide that one of the usefullest things I
could, in the first place, attempt in regard to it would
be to try if hereby the matter could not be quashed,
and people who are certainly good friends, and who
are probably of real service to one another, be prevented from flying asunder on slight cause.
"This controversy I know well enough to be perpetual and universal between Editor and Contributor: no law can settle it; the best wisdom can do
no better than suppress it from time to time. On
--  's side I will counsel patience, everywhere needful in human affairs; on your side, I would say that
though an editor can never wholly abandon his right
to superintend, which will mean an occasional right
to alter, or at least to remonstrate and propose alterations, yet it is in general wise, when, as in this case,
you have got a really conscientious, accurate, and
painstaking contributor, to be sparing in the exercise
of the right, and to put up with various unessential




THOMAS CARLYLE.


213


things rather than forcibly break in to amend them.
You have perhaps but a faint idea how much it distresses and disheartens such a man as I describe;
nay, lames him in the practice of his art, and tends
to put his conscience especially into painful abeyance. 'What is the use of me?' his literary conscience says; ' better for us all that I went to sleep.'
When a man has a literary conscience-which I believe is a very rare case-this result is a most sad
one to bring about; hurtful not to himself only, as
you may well perceive. In fact, I think a serious
sincere man cannot very well write if he have the
perpetual fear of correction before his eyes; and if
I were the master of such a one, I should certainly
endeavor to leave him (within very wide limits) his
own director, and to let him feel that he was so, and
responsible accordingly.
"Forgive me if I interfere unduly with your affairs. If the case be that you perceive, after the
trial, that    is no longer worth his wages to
the -, then all is said, and I have not a word to
object. But if it be not so, and this is but a transitory embarrassment of detail, then it will be a service
to both parties if I can get it ended within the safe
limits. Of the fact, how it may stand, I know nothing at all, and you alone can know.
" All help that I can give  - in other courses of
enterprise I have, of course, to promise him; but I




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will advise him first of all that a reconciliation with
you, if any ground he feels feasible were offered,
would seem to me by far the desirablest course.
With kind regards to —, to whom, indeed, as much
as to you, these remarks address themselves, in great
haste, yours, always truly,       T. CARLYLE.
"We have been here with country friends near a
month, and are not to be in Chelsea, I imagine, for
some ten days.                         T. C."
34.
TO ALEXANDER IRELAND.
"CHELSEA, October 15, 1847.
"MY DEAR SIR,-By a letter I had very lately
from Emerson-which had lain, lost and never
missed, for above a month in the treacherous postoffice of Buxton, where it was called for and denied-I learn that Emerson intended to sail for this
country 'about the first of October,' and infer therefore that probably even now he is near Liverpool or
some other of our ports. Treadmill, or other as emphatic admonition, to that scandalous postmaster of
Buxton! He has put me in extreme risk of doing
one of the most unfriendly and every way unpardonable-looking things a man could do.
"Not knowing in the least to what port Emerson
is tending, where he is expected, or what his first
engagements are, I find no way of making my word




THOMAS CARLYLE.


215


audible to him in time, except that of intrusting it,
with solemn charges, to you, as here. Pray do me
the favor to contrive in some sure way that Emerson
may get hold of that note the instant he lands in
England. I shall be permanently grieved otherwise;
shall have failed in a clear duty (were it nothing
more) which will never probably in my life offer
itself again. Do not neglect, I beg very much of
you; and, on the whole, if you can get Emerson put
safe into the express train, and shot up hither, as the
first road he goes! That is the result we aim at.
But the note itself, at all events, I pray you get that
delivered duly, and so do me a very great favor for
which I depend on you.
" It is yet only two days since I got home, through
Keswick and the Lake country; nor has my head yet
fairly settled from the whirl of so many objects, and
such rapid whirls of locomotion, outward and inward, as the late weeks have exposed me to. Today, therefore, I restrict myself to the indispensable,
and will add nothing more.
" Kind regards to Ballantyne and Espinasse. Hope
your School Society prospers. Glad shall I be to
learn that your scheme, or any rational or even semirational scheme, for that most urgently needful object, promises to take effect among those dusty populations! Of your Program, as probably I mentioned, there remains with me no copy now.
" Yours very truly,    T. CAELYLE."




216


THOMAS CARLYLE.


35.
" CHELSEA, March 18, 1863.
"DEAR IRELAND,-I am glad to hear from you
again, and much obliged for those two portraits of
Emerson. The painted one I cannot endure, but
the actual shadow of the sun (who aims at nothing
but the truth) is beautiful, and really interesting to
me. Wonderfully little oldened; has got a black
wig, I see; nothing else changed!
" Two or three weeks ago there was forwarded to
me a clipping from a Manchester newspaper (the Examiner, I think)-some letter from somebody about
a wonderful self-condemnatory MS. by Frederick
the Great, gathered at Berlin by some Duke of Rovigo, for the endless gratitude of the curious. I had
not heard of the monstrous platitude at all till then,
but guessed then what it would be-an old acquaintance of mine, truly a thrice-brutal stupidity, which
has had red-hot pokers indignantly run through it
about ten times, but always revives and steps forth
afresh with new tap of the parish drum-there being
no 'parish' in the universe richer in prurient darkness and flunkey malevolence than ours is! I set
Neuberg upon it, in the Athenceum, but know not
what he made of it. No editor, in my time, has
crowned himself with such a pair of ears as he of the
Williams and Norgate periodical. It is a clear fact,




THOMAS CARLYLE.


217


though not clear in England, that here is the most
brutal of moon-calves lately heard of in any country; that to have one moment's belief, or doubt, on
such a subject is to make affidavit that your knowledge of Frederick and his affairs is zero and less.
Would to Heaven I were 'done with them!' I never
in my life was held in such hurry-to last six months
yet.               Yours ever,        T. CARLYLE."
36.*
TO A YOUNG LADY FRIEND.
" 5 GREAT CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, 21st, 1866.
" DEAR YOUNG LADY,-Your appeal to me is very
touching, and I am heartily sorry for you, if I could
but help at all. In very great want of time, among
other higher requisites, I write a few words, which, I
hope, may at least do no harm, if they can do little
good. Herein, as in many other cases, the 'patient
must minister unto himself;' no best of doctors can
do much.    The grand remedy against such spiritual
maladies and torments is to rise upon them vigorously from without, in the way of practical work
* This letter is not in Mr. Ireland's collection. It was written to a
lady of my acquaintance when she was quite a young girl. She had
passed into a somewhat morbid state of mind and feeling about herself, and wrote to the man who appeared to her almost a prophet.
The letter reveals that tenderness of Carlyle towards the young which
was really the unsatisfied part of his nature, as I believe was recognized by him towards the last.-M. D. C.
10




218


THOMAS CARLYLE.


and performance. Our thoughts, good or bad, are
not in our command, but every one of us has at all
hours duties to do, and these he can do negligently,
like a slave; or faithfully, like a true servant. 'Do
the duty that is nearest thee'-that first, and that
well; all the rest will disclose themselves with increasing clearness, and make their successive demand.
Were your duties never so small, I advise you, set
yourself with double and treble energy and punctuality to do them, hour after hour, day after day, in
spite of the devil's teeth! That is our one answer to
all inward devils, as they used to be called. 'This
I can do, 0 Devil, and I do it, thou seest, in the name
of God.' It is astonishing and beautiful what swift
exorcism lies in this course of proceeding, and how
at the first real glimpse of it all foul spirits and
sickly torments prepare to vanish.
" I hope you will not often have experience of this,
poor child. And don't object that your duties are
so insignificant; they are to be reckoned of infinite
significance and alone important to you. Were it
but the more perfect regulation of your apartments,
the sorting-away of your clothes and trinkets, the
arranging of your papers-'Whatsoever thy hand
findeth to do, do it with all thy might,' and all thy
worth and constancy. Much more, if your duties
are of evidently higher, wider scope; if you havebrothers, sisters, a father, a mother, weigh earnestly




THOMAS CARLYLE.


219


what claim does lie upon you, on behalf of each, and
consider it as the one thing needful, to pay them
more and more honestly and nobly what you owe.
What matter how miserable one is, if one can do
that? That is the sure and steady disconnection
and extinction of whatsoever miseries one has in
this world. Other spiritual medicine I never do discover; neither, I believe, does other exist, or need to
exist.
"For the rest, dear child, you are evidently too
severe upon yourself; these bad thoughts don't make
you a 'wicked girl,' not until you yield to them; the
excess of your remorse and self-abhorrence is itself
proof of some height of nobleness in you. We have
all of us to be taught by stripes, by sufferings-won't
learn otherwise. Courage, courage! As to fasting,
penance, etc., that is all become a ghastly matter;
have nothing to do with that; work, work, and be
careful about nothing else. Choose with your utmost skill among your companions and coevals some
real associates; be not too much alone with your
thoughts, which are by nature bottomless. Finally,
be careful of your health; bodily ill-health, unknown
to your inexperience, may have much to do with the
miseries. Farewell.             T. CABLYLE."




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


37.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON TO ALEXANDER IRELAND.
"LIVtRPOOL, August 30, 1833.
"MY DEAR SIR,-A shower of rain, which hinders
my visiting, gives me an opportunity of fulfilling my
promise to send you an account of my visit to Mr.
Carlyle and to Mr. Wordsworth. I was fortunate
enough to find both of them at home. Mr. C. lives
among some desolate hills in the parish of Dunscore,
fifteen or sixteen miles from Dumfries. He had
heard of my purpose from his friend who gave me
my letter, and insisted on dismissing my gig, which
went back to Dumfries to return for me the next
day in time to secure my seat in the evening coach
for the South. So I spent near twenty-four hours
with him. IHe lives with his wife, a most agreeable
and accomplished woman, in perfect solitude. There
is not a person to speak to within seven miles. He
is the most simple, frank, amiable person. I became
acquainted with him at once; we walked over several miles of hills and talked upon all the great questions which interest us most. The comfort of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks sincerely, that
he feels himself to be so rich that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has
not; and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved
the great problems, but rather to be an observer of




THOMAS CARLYLE.


221


their solution as it goes forward in the world. I
asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edinburgh Review
upon German literature (say five years ago), and
some passages in the piece called 'Characteristics,'
pointed. He replied that he was not competent to
state it even to himself; he wanted rather to see.
My own feeling was that I had met with men of far
less power who had yet greater insight into religious
truth. He is, as you might guess from his papers,
the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and
loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in
his own place and arrive at his own ends. But his
respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is rather the reverse of the popular scale.
Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon-even Baconare no heroes of his. Stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates, the glory of the Greek world; but
Burns and Samuel Johnson. Mirabeau, he said, interested him; and I suppose whoever else has given
himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and
has not calculated too much. But I cannot think of
sketching even his opinions, or repeating his conversation here. I will cheerfully do it when you visit
me in America. He talks finely, seems to love the
broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I
am afraid lie finds his entire solitude tedious; but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure




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THOMAS CARLYLE.


in his wife, and I hope they will not leave the moors,
'tis so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city
society.
"The third day afterwards I called upon Mr.
Wordsworth at Rydal Mount. He received me
with much kindness, and remembered up all his
American acquaintance. He had very much to say
about the evils of superficial education, both in this
country and in mine. He thinks the intellectual
tuition of society is going on out of all proportion
faster than its moral training, which last is essential
to all education. He doesn't wish to hear of schools
of tuition; it is the education of circumstances which
he values, and much more to this point. He says
that he is not in haste to publish more poetry, for
many reasons; but that what he has written will at
some time be given to the world. He led me out
into a walk in his grounds, where, he said, many
thousands of his lines were composed, and repeated
to me those beautiful sonnets which he has just finished, upon the occasion of his recent visit to Fingal's Cave at Staffa. I hope he will print them
speedily. The third is a gem. Hle was so benevolently anxious to impress upon me my social duties
as an American citizen that he accompanied me near
a mile from his house, talking vehemently, and ever




THOMAS CARLYLE.            223
and anon stopping short to imprint his words. I
noted down some of his words when I got home, and
you may see them in Boston, Massaclusetts, when
you will. I enjoyed both my visits highly, and shall
always esteem your Britain very highly in love for
its wise and good men's sake. I remember with
much pleasure my visit to Edinburgh, and my short
acquaintance with yourself. It will give me great
pleasure to hear from you-to know your thoughts.
Every man that was ever born has some that are peculiar. Present my respects to your father and family. Your friend and servant,
" R. WALDO EMERSON."




0 ---" --




PART IV.
LETTERS ADDRESSED TO
MRS. BASIL MONTAGU AND B. W. PROCTER
BY
MR. THOMAS CARLYLE


10*




I
I




LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE
ADDBESBBP TO
MRS. BASIL MONTAGU AND B. W. PROCTER.
TO MRS. MONTAGU, 25 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON.
"MANNHILL, ECCLEFECHAN, 20th May, 1825.
" MY DEAR MADAM,-I were inexcusable had this
long silence been wilful: the kind and delightful
letter which you sent me merited at least a prompt
and thankful answer. Your generous anxieties for
my welfare should not have been met by months of
total silence. My apology is a trite but yet a faithful
one. Your letter reached me, after various retardations, in a scene of petty business and petty engagement; and I had no choice but either to write inanities in reply to elegant and friendly sense, or to wait
with patience for a calmer day.
" That calmer day has not yet come. Ever since I
left you I have been so shifted and shovelled to and
fro among men and things of the most discordant
character that my thoughts have altogether lost




228


THOMAS CARLYLE.


their regular arrangement. The small citadel of my
intellectual identity has almost yielded to so many
inroads; at least the garrison, weary of never-ending
battle and imperfect conquest, have now locked the
gates, and scarcely ever sally out at all. I live without thinking or theorizing, as the passing hour directs;
and any true expression of myself il writing, or even
speech, is a problem of unusual difficulty. You see
my situation: 1 have been disturbed and dissipated
till I have become exhausted and stupid. Yesterday
I was buying chairs and curtains, and even crockery,
and there is still no rest till three weeks after Whitsunday! Add to all this that three days ago, in
cutting sticks for certain rows of peas which I am
cultivating here, I tore my thumb, so that it winces
every line I write! But can the Ethiopian change
his skin, or the dolt his dulness, by confession and
complaint? I had much rather you should think
me stupid than ungrateful; so I write to-day without
further explanation or apology, which would but aggravate the evil either way. When I think of all
your conduct towards me, I confess I am forced to
pronounce it magnanimous. From    the first, you
had faith enough in human nature to believe that
under the vinegar surface of an atrabiliar character
there might lurk some touch of principle and affection; notwithstanding my repulsive aspect, you followed me with unwearied kindness, while near you;




THOMAS CARLYLE.


229


and now that I am far off, and you suspect me of
stealing from you the spirit of your most valued
friend, you still think tenderly of me; you send me
cheering words into my solitude. Amid these rude
moors a little dove-like messenger arrives to tell me
that I am not forgotten, that I still live in the memories and wishes of some noble souls. Believe me, I
am not unthankful for this; I am poor in heart, but
not entirely a bankrupt. There are moments when
the thought of these things makes me ten years
younger, when I feel with what fervid gratitude I
should have welcomed sympathy, or the very, show
of sympathy, from such a quarter, had it thlen been
offered me; and vow that yet, changed as matters
are, you shall not escape me, that I will yet understand you and love you, and be understood and loved
by you. I did you injustice; I never saw you till
about to lose you. Base Judean that I was! Can
you forgive without forgetting me? I hope yet to
be near you long and often, and to taste in your
society the purest pleasure, that of fellow-feeling
with a generous and cultivated mind. How rare it
is in life, and what were life without it! Forgivei
me if you can. If my affection and gratitude have
any value in your eyes, you are like to be no loser
by my error. I felt it before I left you; I feel it still
more deeply now.
" I must also entreat you to free me from the charge




230


THOMAS CARLYLE.


of alienating Mr. Irving from the friend whom he
should value most. I have no such influence as you
ascribe to me; and if I had, I hope I should be sorry
so to use it. Edward Irving must be blind indeed
if he does not see that you love him with the affection of a mother; and he were no longer my Edward
if this itself did not bind him to you. Depend on
it, my dear madam, for this time you are wrong.
Our friend does not love you or esteem you less: it
is only his multifarious purposes and ever-shifting
avocations that change the outward aspect of his conduct. He was my earliest, almost my only friend,
and yet for two years after he began to reign among
you, I could not wring a single letter from him!
You must tolerate such things in him, and still be
kind to him, and not forsake him; in his present circumstances, however it may fare with him, your
counsel might be doubly precious. For Mrs.also I must say a friendly word. She does not hate
you; she respects you, and desires your friendship.
Will you believe that I had actually engaged to be
her mediator with you, and to bring about an intimacy which I saw might be so profitable to her!
On a narrower inspection, I renounced the project in
despair; yet I feel convinced you would like her,
were she fully known to you. That you disagreed
at first cannot be strange to me; her primary imppreA
sion of you was in some 9Cuefix ke ij vw.  and A'd




THOMAS CARLYLE.


231


had not the toleration for her inexperience which
you had for mine. I confess I have still some hope
from the flight of years; where one sees a want and
the means of supplying it, one would gladly bring
about a combination. Had you been Mrs.      's
sister, she had never been a mystic devotee, and
never trod the thorny paths through which her vehement, sincere, and misdirected spirit is struggling
after what, in all its forms, is the highest aim of
mortals-Moral Trutli. But the [letter torn] judgment of character must be fallible in your eyes!
[torn] will go for nothing.
"But ill-success in this attempt does not deter me
from a new one. You know Miss Welsh of Haddington, if not in name, at least in character and from her
friends. I was with her at her mother's when you
wrote to me. Jane knew the writer by the portraiture of two not unfriendly friends, admired and liked
the letter, and begged of me to let her keep it.
" She had refused an invitation to Pentonville: one
of her chief regrets in declining it was the veto put
on her commencing an acquaintance with you.
"She asked would you not write to her. I engaged
to try, and now will you? Can you?
" This young lady is a person whom you will love
and tend as a daughter when you meet; an ardent,
generous, gifted being, banished to the pettinesses of
a country town; loving, adoring the excellent in all




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its phases, but without models, advisers, or sympathy.
Six years ago she lost her father, the only person
who had ever understood her: since that hour she
has never mentioned his name; she never alludes to
him yet without an agony of tears.
" It was Mr. Irving's wish, and mine, and, most of
all, her own, to have you for her friend; that she
should live beside you till she understood you; that
she might have at least one model to study, one
woman with a mind as warm and rich to show her
by living example how the most complex destiny
might be wisely managed. Separated by space, could
you draw near to one another by the imperfect
medium of letters? Jane thinks it would abate the
'awe' which she must necessarily feel on first meeting with you personally. She wishes it; I also if it
were attainable: is it not?
"I should now depict my doings and my circumstances, my farming and my gardening, literature
and dietetics. All this demands another sheet, which
I trust you will very soon afford me opportunity of
sending. I am getting healthier and happier, living
by the strictest letter of the Badamian Code, and
hoping steadfastly to conquer the baleful monster
which has crushed me to the dust so long. Do write
as soon as possible; and do not pay the postage.
"I am unjust to you no more, but ever most sincerely yours,              THOMAS CARLYLE."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


233


" You will make my best respects to Mr. Montagu,
and to Mrs. and Mr. Procter. The latter, I hope, will
by-and-by bethink him of his promise, and let me
have a sheet of literary news.
" Is my dear Badams with you? Did you get the
book I sent for him? Excuse this miserable letter. I
am sick and in confusion. Next time I will do better."
TO MRS. MONTAGU, 25 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON.
"21 COILEY BANK, 25th December, 1826.
"My DEAR MADAM,-At length my most nervous
bookseller has determined, even in these 'worst of
times,' as he calls them, on sending forth his literary
cargo; an heroic resolution, which he has not adopted
till after the most painful consultation, and after calculating as if by astrological science the propitious
day and minute indicated by the horoscope of the
work. I know not whether it is right to laugh at
this poor profit-and-loss philosopher in his pitiable
quandary; for his one true God being Mammon, he
does worship him with an edifying devoutness; but,
at all events, I may rejoice that this favorable conjunction of the stars has at length actually occurred,
which after four months' imprisonment in Ballantyne's warehouses now takes this feeble concern
finally off my hands, and enables me, among many
other important duties, to discharge not the least
important one-that of paying my debt to you.




234


THOMAS CARLYLE.


" I have really owed you long, but you are a patient
creditor, and know too, I am persuaded, that though
letters are the symbol of attention and regard, the
thing signified may often exist in full strength without the sign. Indeed, indeed, my dear madam, I am
not mad enough to forget you: the more I see of the
world and myself the less tendency have I that way,
the more do I feel that in this my wilderness journey
I have found but one Mrs. Montagu, and that, except
in virtue of peculiar good-fortune, I had no right to
calculate on even finding one. A hundred times do
I regret that you are not here, or I there: but I say
to myself, we shall surely meet again on this side the
wall of Night; and you will find me wiser, and I shall
know you better, and love and reverence you more.
Meantime, as conscience whispers, what are protestations? Nothing, or worse than nothing: therefore
let us leave them.
" Of my late history I need not speak, for you already know it: I am wedded; to the best of wives,
and with all the elements of enjoyment richly ministered to me, and health-rather worse than even
it was wont to be. Sad contradiction! But I were
no apt scholar if I had not learned long ago, with
my friend Tieck, that 'in the fairest sunshine a
shadow chases us; that in the softest music there is
a tone which chides.'
"I sometimes hope that I shall be well: at other




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235


times I determine to be wise in spite of sickness,
and feel that wisdom is better even than health; and
I dismiss thlt lying cozener Hope entirely, and fancy I perceive that even the rocky land of Sorrow is
not without a heavenly radiance overspreading it,
lovelier than aught that this Earth, with all its joys,
can give us. At all events, what right have we to
murmur? It is the common lot: thle Persian King
could not find three happy men in the wide world
to write the names of on his queen's tomb, or the
Philosopher would have recalled her from death.
Every son of Adam has his task to toil at, and his
stripes to bear for doing it wrong. There is one
deadly error we cormmit at our entrance on life, and
sooner or later we must lay it aside, for till then
there is neither peace nor rest for us in this world:
we all start, I have observed, with the tacit persuasion that whatever become of others, we (the
illustrious all-important we) are entitled of right to
be entirely fortunate, to accumulate all knowledge,
beauty, health, and earthly felicity in our sacred
person, and so pass our most sovereign days in rosy
bowers, with Distress never seen by us, except as an
interesting shade in the distance of our landscape.
Alas! what comes of it? Providence will not treat
us thus-nay, with reverence be it spoken, cannot
treat us thus; and so we fight and fret against His
laws, and cease not from our mad, harassing delu



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sion till Experience have beaten it out of us with
many chastisements.
" Most, indeed, never fully unlearn it all their days,
but continue to the last to believe that in their lot
in life they are unjustly treated, and cease not from
foolish hopesand still stand in new amazement that
they should be disappointed-so very strangely, so
unfairly! This class is certainly the most pitiable
of all, for an Action of Damages against Providence
is surely no promising lawsuit.
"But I must descend from Life in general to Life
in Edinburgh. -- In spite of ill-health, I reckon myself moderately happy here, much happier than men
usually are, or than such a fool as I deserves to be.
Mfy good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is in truth,
I believe, among the best women that the world
contains. The philosophy of the heart is far better
than that of the understanding. She loves me with
her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught
her much that I have long been vainly at the
Schools to learn. Good Jane! She is sitting by
me knitting you a purse: you must not cease to
love her, for she deserves it, and few love you better. Of society, in this modern Athens, we have no
want, but rather a superabundance, which, however,
we are fast and successfully reducing down to the
fit measure. True it is, one meets with many a
Turk in grain among these people; but it is some




THOMAS CARLYLE.


237


comfort to know beforehand that Turks are, have
been, and forever will be; and to understand that
from a Turk no Christian word or deed can rationally be expected. Let the people speak in the Turkish dialect, in Heaven's name! It is their own, and
they have no other. A better class of persons, too,
are to be found here and there; a sober, discreet,
logic-loving, moderately well-informed class: with
these I talk and enjoy myself; but only talk as from
an upper window to people on the street; into the
house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the
unwise wonderment they exhibit when I do but
show them the lobby warns me to lose no time in
again slamming to the door. But what of society?
Round our own hearth is society enough, with a
blessing. I read books, or like the Roman poet and
so many British ones, 'disport on paper;' and many
a still evening when I stand in our little flower-garden (it is fully larger than two bedquilts), and smoke
my pipe in peace, and look at the reflection of the
distant city lamps, and hear the faint murmur of its
tumult, I feel no little pleasure in the thought of
'my own four walls,' and what they hold.
" On the whole, what I chiefly want is occupation;
which when 'the times grow better,' or my own 'genius' gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail,
I suppose, to present itself. Idle I am not altogether, yet not occupied as I should be; for to dig in


/




238


THOMAS CARLYLE.


the mines of Plutus, and sell the gift of God (and
such is every man's small fraction of intellectual talent) for a piece of money is a measure I am not inclined to; and for invention, for Art of any sort, I
feel myself too helpless and undetermined. Some
day-oh that the day were here!-I shall surely
speak out these things that are lying in me, and
giving me no sleep till they are spoken! Or else
if the Fates would be so kind as show me-that I
had nothing to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret
of it, after all; a hard result, yet not intolerable, were
it once clear and certain. Literature, it seems, is to
be my trade; but the present aspects of it among us
seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting. I
love it not: in fact, I have almost quitted modern
reading: lower down than the Restoration I rarely
venture in English. These men, these Hookers, Bacons, Brownes, were men; but for our present 'men
of letters,' our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, sonnet, and song manufacturers, I shall only say, May the Lord pity us and them!
But enough of this! For what am I that I should
censure? Less than the least in Israel.
"It is time that I devote a word or two to others,
having spent the whole sheet on myself. You say
nothing of your health: am I to consider you as
recovered? I dare scarcely believe it: yet perhaps
you are recovering. Alas! sorrow has long been




THOMAS CARLYLE.


239


familiar to you; and ill-health is but one of the
many forms under which it too frequently pursues
such beings from the cradle to the grave. But the
heart, too, according to the old similitude, is sometimes like a spicy flower, which yields not its sweetest perfume till it be crushed. Of Charles's history
at Cambridge I am sorry to hear, though it does not
surprise me much, or in any wise diminish my faith
in his character and capabilities. It shows only that,
venerating Science, and this alone, he has formed
too lofty an estimate of its Expositors and Institutions: he looked for Sages, such as are not to be
found on this clay planet; he meets with Drivellers,
and his heart is too proud to yield their gowns and
maces what it denies their minds. He is far too
proud, poor fellow; and that is a failing which he
must and will lay aside. But what is to be done with
him for the present? At Cambridge, in his present
mood, he must not continue; in Edinburgh I durst
not predict his fate: he might find the right road, or
deviate farther from it than ever. Again and again I
say, if I can be of any service, command me. And in
the meanwhile fear not for your stormful, headstrong,
high-minded boy. There is metal in him which no
fire can utterly consume, and one way or other (with
more or less suffering to himself, but with certainty,
as I believe), it will be fused and purified, and the
wayward youth will be a wise and generous man.




240


THOMAS CARLYLE.


"I have finished my sheet, and more I must deny
myself at present. Will you get these tomes conveyed to Badams, my own good Badams, whom I
swear I had rather see than any ten men in England? I have begged of him to write, but I know
he will not: my good wishes are always with him.
From you I expect better things, being minded to
become a better correspondent myself. Will you
make my kindest compliments to Mr. Montagu,
and all your household, and believe me ever, my
dear madam,
"Your affectionate friend,
" T. CARLYLE."
TO B. 'W. PROCTER, ESQ., 25 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON.
" EDINBURGH, 21 COMLEY BANK, 17th January, 1828.
"MY DEAR SIR,-I have long felt that I owed
you a letter of the kindest thanks: yet now I am
not intending to repay you, but rather to increase
my debt by a new request of favors. The case is
this: I am, since yesterday, a candidate for the Moral Philosophy Professorship in the University of St.
Andrews, soon to be vacated by the transferrence of
Dr. Chalmers to Edinburgh; and thus my task for
the present is to dun all such of my friends as have
a literary reputation for Testimonials in my behalf.
Considerable support in this way I can promise myself, and, except in this way, I have no hope of any;




THOMAS CARLYLE.


241


being altogether unconnected, as you know, either
with Church or State, and, at all events, unfit for the
dark ways of political intrigue, which too often, I
am sorry to own, lead safeliest and soonest to such
a goal as I am now aiming at. However, the St.
Andrews Professors, the electors to this office, boast
much that they have amended their ways; and, under terror of the late Royal Commission, who knows
but the Melville interest may have ceased to be omnipotent there. In this case I have some hope, in
any other case little; but in all cases happily no
great degree of fear. Meanwhile the business is to
try, and try with my whole might, since I have entered on the enterprise. Your friend Mr. Jeffrey is
my Palinurus, and forwards me with great heartiness: I may also reckon on the warm support of
Wilson, Leslie, Brewster, and other men of mark in
this city; and now I am writing to London for
yours and Mr. Montagu's. If you and he, or you
yourself, can with freedom speak any word in my
favor, I cannot doubt that you will do it readily.
"Perhaps you will tell me that you have no special judgment in matters philosophic, and think
within yourself that any skill I may have possessed
in this province must have been kept with extreme
secrecy, during our acquaintance, in the recesses of
my own consciousness. It were now too late to
prove the error of these opinions, especially the lat11




242


THOMAS CARLYLE.


ter; but I may observe, in refutation, that it is not
skill in Philosophy alone, but general talent, and all
sorts of literary gifts that come into play here; in
which case, who is better entitled to speak than
'Barry Cornwall,' if so be his conscience will let
him? The Editor of Bacon will be another name of
weight in a professional election: may I count on
your laying this matter before him, and Mrs. Montagu's friendly intervention in inciting him to act?
I would have written to him in particular; but why,
thought I, two letters on one subject, and to one
house? The rather that I am busy to a degree;
for though the business may not be settled for many
months, it is judged important by my friends that I
should produce my documents without delay. Shall
I hope, then, to ornament my little list with two
other names? To see you, an English Poet, beside
a Scottish one and a German, for Goethe also is
written to? I believe I shall. For the rest, I need
give you no directions as to theform of your Testimonial; this being altogether arbitrary, equally effectual were it a Letter to me, or a Letter to the
Principal and Professors of St. Andrews, or a general
Testamur directed to all men at large. Edward Irving, moreover, knows the whole matter, and can explain it all if you have any difficulty, which, however,
you will not have. And now enough of this poor
business! only do not think me a sorner on your




THOMAS CARLYLE.


243


friendliness, and I will say no more about the matter.
Speak for me also to Mr. Montagu, and explain to
him why I have not spoken for myself. Do I not
hereby give you a full power of attorney; and for
which you are to be paid-in wind-money, on the
other side of the Border!
"What do I not owe you, already for one of the
kindest and most pleasant friends I ever had!
Francis Jeffrey is a man meant by Nature to be an
intellectual Ariel, with a light etherealness of spirit
which the weight of whole Courts of Session resting
on it for quarter-centuries has not been able utterly
to suppress. There is a glance in the eyes of the
man which almost prompts you to take him in your
arms. Alas that Mammon should be able to hire
such servants, even though they continue to despise
him!
"And where are you, my Friend? What is become of your seven-stringed shell that once gave
such notes of melody? Do you not reckon it a sin
and a shame to bury that fine sense, that truly
Artist-spirit, under a load of week-day business?
Ought not your light to shine before men, in this
season of dim eclipse, when the opaque genius of
Utility is shedding disastrous twilight over half the
nations? I swear that I will never forgive you, if
you keep silence long. My only ground of patience
is that you are lentefestinans; fusing richer ores in




244


THOMAS CARLYLE.


the hidden furnace, that they may be cast in fairer
moulds of purer metal, and become shapes that will
endure forever. Positively this is no idle talk, but
the true wish and feeling of my heart, growing
clearer to me and clearer the longer I know you.
Remember my warning: it is your better genius
that speaks through me.
" Do you ever see Mr. Fraser? and why lingers his
Review? The other day I met a little man, whose
eyes sparkled with fire in speaking of it, and he
wished to enlist me into his own corps on the other
side: I answered that, like Dugald Dalgetty, I had
taken bounty under the opposite flag, and so as a
true soldado could not leave my colors; under which,
however, I reckoned myself bound to fight not him,
or Gillies, or Cochrane, but the Devil (of Stupidity),
and the Devil only. Seeing matters take this turn,
the little man's eye grew soft, and he left me.
" What is this periodical of Leigh Hunt's? and have
you seen that wondrous Life of Byron 2 Was it not
a thousand pities Hunt had borrowed money of the
man he was to disinhuine and behead in the course
of duty afterwards? But for love or money I cannot see Hunt's book, or anything but extracts of it,
and so must hold my tongue. Poor Hunt! He has
a strain of music in him too, but poverty and vanity
have smote too rudely over the strings. To-day, too,
I saw De Quincey: alas, poor Yorick! But enough




THOMAS CARLYLE.


245


of gossip also, in which I delight more than I can
own in writing. My wife sends her kind regards to
you, and I believe would prize two stanzas of yonr
making at no ordinary rate. Is Mrs. Procter well
and safe? Alas! it was, for all the world, such a
night when I sat with you in Russell Street till the
ghost-hour, and forgot that Time had shoes of felt.
These times and places are all-away. Will Mrs.
Montagn accept my thanks at this late date for her
so kind and graceful letter? Jane would have written, but was making silk pelisses and cloth pelisses,
and had sempstresses, white and black, and only three
days ago obtained entire dominion over Frost, and
marched the needle-women out.
"Adieu. I am ever you irs,
" T. CARLYLE."
TO MRS. MONTAGU, 25 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON.
" CRAIGENPUTTOCH, DuMFRIES, 13th November, 1829.
M1Y DEAR MADAM,-After a long silence, or mere
listening with indirect replies, I again address you,
and on the humblest possible subject: a matter of
business, relating entirely to myself. Why I trouble
you in such a case, your helpfulness in past times
and constant readiness to do me service will sufficiently explain. At the end of your last letter there
occurs a little incidental notice of some opening for
a medical man in Warwick, coupled with an advice




246


TIIOMAS CARLYLE.


from Badains that it might be worth my brother's
attention. Now it so chances that to my brother, at
this season, this announcement is of all others the
most interesting. The worthy Doctor has crammed
himself with all manner of Scottish, English, and
Continental Science in this department; and, ever
since his return, has been straining his eyes to discover some spot where he might turn it to some
account for himself and others; manifesting in the
meanwhile not a little impatience that no such spot
was to be found, but that Fate should inthrall free
Physic, and condemn so bright a candle to burn altogether under a bushel. On our return from Edinburgh I transmitted him your tidings, on which lie
wrote instantly to Badams for further information;
wrote also to me that he thought the outlook highly
promising; and, in fine, this night, has ridden up
hither, some five-and-thirty miles (from Scotsbrig) to
take counsel with me on the subject, and lament that
'Badams has given him no answer. My petition,
therefore, is that you would have the goodness to
help the honest adventurer in this affair, and procure for him, by such ways as lie open to you, what
light can be had in regard to the actual, practical aspect it presents. My own opinion is that a very
little encouragement would bring the man to Warwick, for he is fond of England, and utterly wearied
of idleness, as passiveness at his age may with little




THOMAS CARLYLE.


247


injustice be named. My devout prayer, too, has long
been that he were settled somewhere, with any rational prospect; for lie has a real solidity, both of
talent and character, as I judge, and wants nothing
but Action to make him a very sufficient fellow.
Do, pray, therefore, help the embryo Hippocrates a
little, if you can! He will wait here some eight
days, in expectation of your writing, and perhaps also
persuading Badams to write: nay, at any time I can
forward the news to him into Annandale within a
week of their arrival. Write what you know without apprehension of consequences: honest Jack risks
little by any such adventure, having little save a
clear head and a stout honest heart, which are not so
easily lost and won. For my own share, I, too, am
getting fond of Warwick: it is in the heart of Old
England, whither I should then have a pretext for
coming; nay, it is within a day's journey of London,
where, among other wondrous things, there is 'a 25
Bedford Square.'
"You are not to account this a Letter, but only a
sort of commercial Message, a Man-of-Business Commission. 'Do you know, Mr. -,' said John Wilson once, in my hearing, to a noted writer to the
Signet, proud enough of his Signet honors,' there is
nothing in nature that I detest so much as a Man of
Business.' He of the Signet had imagined himself
high in the other's good graces, and now of a sud



218


THOMA CARLYLE.


den saw himself quite stranded, and left alone on the
beach.
"I am thinking to take the Correspondence with
you out of my wife's bands, so languidly does she
manage it; and of old times it was altogether mine.
I know not that I have yet found, or shall ever find,
any correspondent to replace you.
"You will kindly remember me to Mr. Procter
and his lady, in whose welfare I- must always feel a
friend's interest. This is not altogether ' words,' and
yet what more can I make it?
"Assure Mr. Montagu that his book was the most
delightful I have read for many days. Your hand
also was often visible in it. Why does he not publish more such? I have got old Ascham, and read a
little of him, when I have done work, every evening.
Do you ever see Edward Irving? He stretched himself out here on the moors, under the free sky, for
one day beside me, and was the same honest soul as
of old. Badarns will not write to me, I know, but
some day I will see him and make him speak.
"Believe me ever, my dear madam,
"Your affectionate friend,
" TomAs CARLYLE."




THOMAS CARLYLE.


249


TO MRS. MONTAGU, 25 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON.
"CRAIGENPUTTOCH, 27th October, 1830.
"MY DEAR FRIEND,-While I wait in the confident though somewhat unaccountably deferred anticipation of a kind answer from you to a kind message, come tidings to my wife that such message is
still only looked for 'through the portal of Hope;'
in plain prose, that my last letter has lost its way, did
not reach, and now never will reach, you! This is
the more singular, as the like never happened in my
past experience, and now, as indeed misfortune usually does, comes doubly. Much about the time when
I wrote your letter, I despatched another to Weimar:
and here on the same Wednesday night arrive, side
by side, two announcements, from you and from
Goethe, that both letters have miscarried! Goethe's
I have satisfactorily traced to the post-office, and
hope there may have been some oblivion on the part
of my venerable correspondent; neither is this,
though less likely, in your case, a quite impossible
supposition. At all events, true it is that, some two
months ago I did actually write you a most densely
filled letter, one which if it did me any justice must
have been filled, moreover, with the friendliest sentiments. I can still recollect of it that I entreated
earnestly you would never forget me, would fromn
time to time send me notice of your good or evil
11*




250


THOMAS CARLYLE,


fortune, though I myself (for lack of historical inci.
dent in these solitudes) were silent, assuring you, of
what is still true, that Iwas nowise of the forgetting
species, but blessed or burdened with one of your
perennial memories, and a hard and stony heart,
whereon truly only diamonds would write; but the
Love-charm and Think-of-me once written stood ineffaceable, defying all time and weather. Such statement, whereof I could make an affidavit were it
needful, will be a light for you to explain several
things; above all, will absolve from the crime of indifference and negligence, which crime towards you,
at least, it will be forever impossible for me to fall
into. Believe this, for it is morally and even physiologically true.
"We hear with real sorrow of the domestic mischances that come upon you; from which, in this
world, no wisdom will secure us.
"Happily the consciousness you mention is a bulwark which keeps our inward citadel, or proper Self,
unharmed, unimpregnable, whatever havoc there
may be in the outworks. Let us study to maintain
this, and let those others go their way, which, indeed,
is natural for them. When I think of the miserable
A. and of many like him, I could feel as if our old
fathers who believed in witchcraft and Possession
were, nearer the truth than we.
"It is strange how vice, like a poisonous ingredient




THOMAS CARLYLE.


251


thrown into some fermenting mixture, will, in small
beginnings, seize on the young heart, and proceed
there, tainting, enlarging, till the whole soul, and
all the universe it holds, is. blackened, blasted, rent
asunder with it, and the man that walked in the
midst of us is clutched, as it were, by some unseen
devil, and hurled into abysses of Despair and Mladness, which lie closer than we think on the path of
every one. Let us hope (for this is the Place of
Hope) that for himself reformation is still possible;
that, at least and worst, to the friends that cannot
save him, his future misdoings will be harmless.
" Poor Hazlitt! He, too, is one of the victims to
the Moloch Spirit of this Time-a Time when Selfishness and Baseness, dizened out with rouge and
a little theatrical frippery, has fearlessly seated herself on high places, and preaches forth her Creed of
Profit and Loss as the last Gospel for men; when
the thing that calls itself God's Church is a den of
Unclean Beasts, from which the honest-hearted turns
away with loathing; when, between the Utilitarians
and the Millenarians, and the dense dust and vapor
they have raised up, the Temple of the Universe has
become to the most invisible; and the devout spirit
that will not blind itself cannot worship, and knows
not what or how to worship, and so wanders in aimless pilgrimages, and lives without God in the world!
In Hazlitt, as in Byron and Burns and so many others




252


THOMAS CARLYLE.


in their degree, there lay some tone of the 'eternal
melodies,' which he could not fashion into terrestrial music, but which uttered itself only in harsh
jarrings and inarticulate cries of pain. Poor Hazlitt! There is one star less in the heavens, though
a twinkling, dimmed one; while the street-lamps
and horn lanterns are all burning, with their whaleoil or coal gas, as before! These the street passenger and drayman and bearer of burden will prize and
bless; but in the lonely journeys and far voyages (of
Thought) the traveller will miss the other.
" I should give you some glimpse into our way of
life here, but know not how in such compass to do
it. Astrange contrast it must be to yours. If London is the noisiest, busiest spot on the earth, this is
about the stillest and most solitary. The road hither
ends at our house: to see a lime-cart or market-cart
struggling along the broken moor, till it reach gravel
'and wheel-ruts, and scent the Dominion of Commerce
from afar, is an incident which, especially in winter,
we almost mark in our journals. In this meek, pale
sunshine of October, in this grave-like silence, there
is something ghostly; were it not that our meadows
are of peat-bog and not of asphodel, and our hearts
too full of earthly passions and cares, you might
fancy it the abode of spirits, not of men and fleecy
or hairy cattle. I have a rough broken path along
the neighboring hill-side, two miles in length, where




THOMAS CARLYLE.


253


I take a walk (sometimes as I would take physic)
and see over Ayrshire and Galloway, far and wide,
nothing but granite mountains and idle moors; save
that here and there the cottage trees and smoke, with
its patch of cornfield painfully won from the desert,
indicate that man's two hands are there, who, like the
cony, has built himself a nest in the rocks. On the
whole, an original scene for studying in. Private as
heart could wish; and possessing in this one thought,
that it positively is a scene, and dates since the day
when Eternity became Time, and was created by
God-the source, could one but draw from it, of
innumerable, inexhaustible others. Here, truly, is
the place for thinking, if you have any faculty that
way. Since I came hither I have seen into various
things. In my wife, too, I have the clearest, most
Scotch-logical, yet the eagerest Disciple and Convert.
For the rest, I read and write and smoke assiduously,
as I was wont: one day I hope to give you one of
the most surprising books you have met with lately.
Am I happy? My theory was and is that the man
who cannot be happy (as happy as is needful) wheresoever God's sky overspans him, and men forbear to
beat him with bludgeons, deserves to be, and will
always be, what one calls miserable. Nevertheless,
we are coming to London, so soon as the yet clearly
audible prohibition of Destiny is withdrawn. Will
it be this winter? Full glad were I too think so;




254


TIOMAS CARLYLE.


but there are sad shaligs of the head. We had the
Jeffreys lately; the Jeffrey a more interesting and
better man, a sadder and a wiser, than I had ever
seen him. That he missed you was no oversight on
his part, but ignorance that it would not be an intrusion.
" He looked to Mr. Procter, and Mr. Procter spake
not. The like will not occur a second time. Such
a visit here, of which we rejoice in one or two perhaps yearly, is a true 'Illumination with the finest
Transparencies:' next night, indeed, comes our own
still candle, and the past splendor is gone like a
dream, but not the memory of it, nor the hope of
its return. With Goethe I am more contented the
longer I know him; hard as adamant towards outer
fortune, yet with the spirit of a prophet within, and
the softest all-embracing heart.
" He is to me the most venerable man now extant,
surely the only literary man whom, amid all my
respect, my admiration, I can view without a considerable admixture of contempt. He tells me yesterday to write soon, 'for days and weeks are growing
more and more precious to him.'
"God keep that day long distant! I must add
this other passage for the piece of news it brings.
Take it in the original too.
"'Ein talentvoller junger Mann und gliicklicher
Uebersetzer beschaftigt sich mit BURNS: ich bin dar



THOMAS CARLYLE.


255


auf sehr verlangend.' 'At.anted young man and
successful Translator is busy with BURNS: I am
very curious for the issue.' You must thank Mr.
Montagu for his book on laughter, which I have
read with pleasure: the other book (of Extracts) my
mother has borrowed, and eagerly begs to keep for
a second and a third perusal: it is among the best
books she ever saw, worthy whole cartloads of their
new ware. For poetry (not mere rhyme and rant
or else elegance), a Scotch reviewer is probably the
blindest of created things; but in a Scotch peasant
there is sometimes life, and a soul of God's making.
MIy own impression is that Nature is still active, and
that we are all alive did we but know it!-God bless
you. I am ever yours,            T. CARLYLE.
"My brother speaks with warmest gratitude of
your and Mr. Montagu's kindness. Such friends in
such a course as his are indeed invaluable. I too
am doubly your debtor for the maternal charge you
take of my poor Doctor, whose posture in that wild
chaos often fills me with misgivings.  Will Mr.
Procter, with his bright kind Lady, who is still
strangely present with me, be pleased to know that
I think of them"


THE END.




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THOMAS CARLYLE'S WORKS
PUBLISHED BY
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Edited by JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.       12mo, Cloth, Illustrated by
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FREDERICK THE GREAT.
History of Friedrich II., called Frederick the Great. Portraits, Maps,
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Probably the history of Frederick will forever remain one of the finest pieces
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Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth,
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A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the singular and complex
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History of the French Revolution. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2 50.
No work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in
this country for many years.-Westminster Review, London.
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Past and Present, Chartism, and Sartor Resartus.    12mo, Cloth,
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The volume contains, under a quaint and singular form, a great deal of deep
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The Early Kings of Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of
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ENGLISH M1EN OF LETTERS.
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
The following volumes are now ready:
JOHNSON.......................................... LESLIE. STE'PHEN'.
GIBBON.............................................. J. C. Monisox.
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HU-ME............................................ Professor HUXLEY.
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BUNYAN............................................. J. A. FROUDE.
COWPER........................................... GOLDWIN SMITH.
POPE...............................................LESLIE STEPHaEN.
BYRON.............................................. Jome NIOIJO0L.
LOCKE.............................................T-HOMAS FoWLER i.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DATE DUE




JUN 2 3 1986




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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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