PART I.—1809–1818
Early in November 1809 two boys walked together from Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh, to attend the classes in the University there. The distance, as the crow flies, is about sixty miles; and the boys took three days to it. The elder, who had been at College in the previous session, and therefore acted as the guide, generally stalked on a few paces ahead, whistling an Irish tune to himself. The younger, who was not quite fourteen years of age, and had never been out of Dumfriesshire before, followed rather wearily, irritated by the eternal Irish tune in front of him, but mainly given up to his own “bits of reflections in the silence of the moors and hills.” The elder of the two boys was a Thomas Smail, afterwards of some note as a Burgher minister in Galloway; the younger was Thomas Carlyle.
Of the arrival of the two boys in Edinburgh on the 9th of November 1809, after their third day’s walk of twenty miles, and of Carlyle’s first stroll, that afternoon, under Smail’s convoy, through some of the main streets, to see the sights, one may read in his own Reminiscences. What he remembered best of that first stroll was the look of the Old High Street, with St. Giles’s Kirk on one side and the old Luckenbooths running up the middle in its broadest part, but chiefly the amazing spectacle to which he was introduced when Smail pushed open a door behind St. Giles’s Kirk, and he found himself in the outer house of the Court of Session, amid the buzz of the lawyers and others walking up and down, with the red-robed judges hearing cases in their little throned enclosures.
Content with the description of that first stroll, he leaves us to imagine how, in the first days and weeks of his residence in the city, he gradually extended his acquaintance with it by further rambles, and by inspection of this and that interesting to a young stranger. The task is not difficult. The lodging which Smail and he had taken between them was, he says, “a clean-looking, most cheap lodging,” in the “poor locality” called Simon Square. The locality still survives under that name, though hardly as a square any longer, but only a poor street, at the back of Nicolson Street, on the left hand as one goes southwards from the University, and accessible most directly by an arched passage called Gibb’s Entry. From that obscure centre, by walks from it in the mornings, and returns to it during the day and in the evenings, we can see the little Dumfriesshire fellow gradually conquering for himself some notion of the whole of that Edinburgh into which he had come. It was the old Edinburgh, of less than 100,000 inhabitants, which we think of so fondly now as the Edinburgh of Scott before his novels had been heard of and when his fame depended chiefly on his poems, of Jeffrey in the early heyday of his lawyership and editorship of the Edinburgh Review, and of the other local celebrities, Whig and Tory, immortalised in tradition and in Cockburn’s Memorials.
It was chiefly of the externals of the city that the boy was making his notes; for the living celebrities, as he tells us, were hardly even names to him then. Scott and Jeffrey, he says, may have been in the peripatetic crowd of wigged and gowned lawyers he had seen in the hall of the Parliament House on the day of his arrival; but the only physiognomy he had marked there so as to know it again was that of John Clerk of Eldin. A reminiscence which I have heard from his own lips enables me, however, to connect his first days in Edinburgh with the memory of at least one Edinburgh worthy of a still elder generation. It was on the 18th of December 1809, or just six weeks after Carlyle’s arrival in Edinburgh, that the well-known Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, died; and I have heard Carlyle tell how the event impressed him, and how he went to see the funeral procession of the old scholar start from the High School yard at the foot of Infirmary Street. With a number of other boys, he said, he hung on by the railings outside, looking in upon the gathered assemblage of mourners. He seemed to remember the scene with peculiar vividness; for, after picturing himself as a boy hanging on by the High School railings, and watching the incidents within, he added, “Ay me! that moment then, and this now, and nothing but the rushing of Time’s wings between!”[[10]] He had a liking to the last for old Dr. Adam. I have heard him say that any Scotsman who was at a loss on the subject of shall and will would find the whole doctrine in a nutshell in two or three lucid sentences of Dr. Adam’s Latin Grammar; and I had an idea at the time that he had used this brief precept of Dr. Adam’s little book in his own early practice of English.
At the date of Dr. Adam’s death Carlyle had been for six weeks a student in the University, with pupils of Dr. Adam among his fellow-students on the same benches. One can see his matriculation signature, “Thomas Carlyle,” in his own hand,—a clear and good boyish hand, differing considerably from that which he afterwards wrote,—in the alphabetically arranged matriculation list of the Arts Students of the session 1809–10. It is the sixth signature under the letter C, the immediately preceding signature being that of a Dumfries youth named “Irvine Carlyle” (spelt so, and not “Irving Carlyle,”) of whom there is mention in the Reminiscences. It is clear that the two Carlyles were drawn to each other by community of name and county, if not by kin, and had gone up for matriculation together.
The College of those days was not the present complete quadrangle, but a chaotic jumble of inconvenient old class-rooms, with only parts of the present building risen among them, and finished and occupied. The classes which Carlyle attended in his first session were the 1st Humanity Class, under Professor Alexander Christison, and the 1st Greek Class, under Professor George Dunbar. From an examination of the records I find that among his class-fellows in both classes were the aforesaid Irving Carlyle, and Lord Inverurie, afterwards seventh Earl of Kintore, and that among his class-fellows in the 1st Greek Class was the late venerable Earl of Wemyss, then Lord Elcho. Neither from the records nor from the Reminiscences can anything be gathered of the history of the two classes through the session, or of the place taken in each by the young Dumfriesshire boy among the medley of his fellow-students, from 150 to 200 in number. The Latin class-room, we do learn from the Reminiscences, was a very dark room, so that Professor Christison, having two students of the name of Carlyle, never succeeded in distinguishing the one from the other; which was all the harder, Carlyle thought, because the other Carlyle, Mr. Irving Carlyle, was not only different physically, being “an older, considerably bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched complexion,” but was also the worst Latinist in the whole class. Carlyle himself had been so well grounded in Latin at Annan School that probably he could have held his own in the class even against Dr. Adam’s pupils from the Edinburgh High School. To the end of his life, at all events, he was a fair Latinist. To Greek he never in later life made any pretence; and whatever Greek he did learn from Dunbar,—which can have been but small in quantity,—must have faded through disuse. He retained, however, a high admiration for the Elementa Linguæ Græcæ of Dr. James Moor of Glasgow,—which was, I suppose, the Greek grammar then used in Dunbar’s class,—thinking it the very best grammar of any language for teaching purposes he had ever seen.
While we know so little of Carlyle’s Greek and Latin studies in his first University session, it is something to know that he was a pretty diligent reader of books that session from the College Library. Having examined a dusty old folio of the library receipts and outgoings, which chances to have been preserved, I am able to report that Carlyle had duly paid, before December 1809, his deposit or security of one guinea, entitling him to take books out, and that, in that month and the succeeding month of January 1810, he had out the following books, in parcels or in succession, in the following order:—Robertson’s History of Scotland, vol. ii.; Cook’s Voyages; Byron’s Narrative, i.e. “the Hon. John Byron’s Narrative of the Great Distresses suffered by Himself and his Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, 1740–6”; the first volume of Gibbon; two volumes of Shakespeare; a volume of the Arabian Nights; Congreve’s Works; another volume of the Arabian Nights; two volumes of Hume’s England; Gil Blas; a third volume of Shakespeare; and a volume of the Spectator. This is a sufficiently remarkable series of volumes for a boy of fourteen to have had out from the College library; and other books from other libraries may have been lying at the same time on the table in the small room in Simon Square which he shared with Tom Smail. What is most remarkable is the run upon books of voyages and travels, and on classic books of English literature, or books of mere literary amusement, rather than on academic books. Clearly there had been a great deal of previous and very miscellaneous reading at Ecclefechan and Annan, with the already formed result of a passion for reading, and very decided notions and tastes as to the kinds of books that might be worth looking after. But how, whether at Ecclefechan or in Annan, had the sedate boy been attracted to Congreve?
At the close of Carlyle’s first college session in April 1810 he returned to Ecclefechan. He was met on the road near the village, as he tells us so touchingly in his Reminiscences, by his father, who had walked out, “with a red plaid about him,” on the chance of seeing Tom coming; and the whole of the vacation was spent by him at home in his father’s house. It is not, therefore, till the beginning of the session of 1810–11 that we again hear of him in Edinburgh. He then duly matriculated for his second session, his signature again standing in the alphabetical Arts matriculation-list immediately after that of his namesake “Irving Carlyle” (now spelt so). His classes for this session were the 1st Mathematical Class, under Professor John Leslie, and the Logic Class, under Professor David Ritchie; and I have found no note of his having gone back that year, or any other, for a second course of Latin from Professor Christison. In the 1st Mathematical Class, consisting of seventy students, he had again Irving Carlyle on the benches with him; in the Logic Class, consisting of 194 students, the same Irving Carlyle was one of his fellow-students, and the late Earl of Wemyss was another. What he made of the Logic Class we have not the least intimation; and it is only by inference that we know that he must have distinguished himself in the Mathematical Class and given evidences there of his unusual mathematical ability. As before, however, he found variation, or diversion, from his work for the classes by diligent reading in his lodgings. Between Saturday the 1st December 1810 and Saturday 9th March 1811, I find, he took from the University library the following books in the following order:—Voyages and Travels, the 15th volume of some collection under that name; a volume of Fielding’s works; a volume of Smollett; Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind; a book called Scotland Described; two more volumes of Fielding’s works; Locke’s Essay in folio; another volume of Fielding; a volume of Anacharsis, i.e., of an English Translation of the Abbé Barthélémy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece during the middle of the Fourth Century before the Christian Era; and a volume of some translation of Don Quixote. His choice of books, it will be seen, is still very independent. Reid’s Inquiry and Locke’s Essay connect themselves with the work in the Logic Class; but the other volumes were evidently for mere amusement. Whether it was still in the lodging in Simon Square, and with Smail for his chum, that these books were read, is uncertain. His comradeship with Smail continued, indeed, he tells us, over two sessions; but the lodging may have been changed. It was still, doubtless, somewhere near the University.
For the session of 1811–12 the Matriculation Book is not alphabetically in Faculties, but general or mixed for the three Faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine. There were 1475 students for those three Faculties conjointly; and “Thomas Carlyle, Ecclefechan,” appears among them, his matriculation number being 966. That session, his third at the University, he attended the 2d Greek Class, under Dunbar, the 2d Mathematical Class, under Leslie, and the Moral Philosophy Class, under Dr. Thomas Brown. In the Greek Class, which consisted of 189 students, he had among his class-fellows the late venerable Sir Robert Christison, Sir Robert’s twin-brother, Alexander Christison, the late Earl of Wemyss again, his brother, the Honourable Walter Charteris, a Thomas Murray from Kirkcudbrightshire, afterwards a well-known citizen of Edinburgh, the inextinguishable Irving Carlyle, and an Andrew Combe, whom I identify with the subsequently well-known Dr. Andrew Combe, the brother of George Combe the phrenologist. In the Mathematical Class, which numbered forty-six, there were several Dumfriesshire students besides himself; and it was in this 2d Mathematical Class, if the tradition is correct, that Carlyle took the first prize,—another Dumfriesshire youth, who lived in the same lodging with him, taking the second. I have turned with most interest, in this session, to the “List of Students attending Dr. Thomas Brown’s Class,” preserved in the peculiarly neat, small handwriting of Dr. Brown himself. It was the second session of Brown’s full tenure of the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in succession to Dugald Stewart, and the fame of his lectures was at its highest. The class consisted of 151 students; and among them, besides Carlyle and his inseparable Irving Carlyle, and a Robert Mitchell and a Paulus Aemilius Irving, both from Dumfriesshire, there were Duncan McNeill, afterwards Lord Colonsay, his brother, John McNeill, Sir Andrew Agnew, David Welsh, afterwards Dr. David Welsh and Professor of Church History, and a James Bisset from Aberdeenshire, whom I identify with the late Rev. Dr. Bisset of Bourtie. Some of these were outsiders, already in the Divinity or Law Classes, who had returned to the Moral Philosophy Class for the benefit of Dr. Brown’s brilliant lectures,—notably young David Welsh, who had already attended the class for two sessions, but was full of enthusiasm for Brown, whose biographer and editor he was to be in time. Carlyle, I am sorry to say, was not one of the admirers of the brilliant Brown. Over and over again I have heard him speak of Brown, and always with mimicry and contempt, as “a finical man they called Brown, or sometimes Missy Brown, that used to spout poetry.” This can hardly have been out of disregard for metaphysics as such, for he had much respect for Dugald Stewart, the then retired professor. The dislike seems to have been partly personal, partly to the new kind of highly ingenious metaphysics which Brown was trying to substitute for the older and more orthodox Scottish Philosophy of Reid and Stewart. At all events, it is worthy of note that those brilliant lectures of Thomas Brown, which James Mill and John Stuart Mill admired so much in their published form, regarding them as an introduction to much that is best in modern British Philosophy, had no effect, in their actual delivery, on the hard-headed young Carlyle, but fell upon him as mere dazzle and moonshine.
As Carlyle tells us incidentally that he was in Edinburgh in the summer of 1812, it is to be supposed that he spent less of that vacation than usual in his Dumfriesshire home. I find also that he matriculated rather late in our books for the session of 1812–13, his name not appearing in the first or main matriculation list, but only in a supplementary list, and then as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam, Dumfriesshire.” His father had by that time given up his trade of mason, and had left Ecclefechan to try a small farm in the neighbourhood. The number of students matriculated that year in the three faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine, was 1503; and Carlyle’s matriculation number was 1403. The classes in which he was enrolled for that session, his fourth and last in Arts, were Leslie’s 2d Mathematical Class (attended a second time, we may suppose, for such higher instruction as might be fit for very advanced students), and the Natural Philosophy Class, under Professor John Playfair. In this last session, accordingly, as a student only of Mathematics and Physics, with no distraction towards either Classics or Mental Philosophy, Carlyle may be said to have been in his element. He worked very hard in both classes, and distinguished himself in both. My own impression, from talks with him on the subject, is that he was, by acknowledgment of professors and fellow-students, easily supreme in both. Leslie’s second class that year numbered but forty-one students, and it was natural that his most distinguished student in two previous sessions should now be familiar with him and receive his especial notice. Certain it is that of all the Professors of Edinburgh University in Carlyle’s time Leslie was the only one of whom he spoke always with something of real gratitude and affection. The affection was mixed, indeed, with a kind of laughing remembrance of Leslie’s odd, corpulent figure, and odd rough ways; and he would describe with particular gusto the occasional effects of Leslie’s persistent habit of using hair-dyes, as when a streak of pink or green would be observable amid the dark-brown or black on those less accessible parts of his head where the chemicals had been too liberally or too rashly applied. But he had a real esteem for Leslie’s great abilities, and remembered him as a man to whose mathematical instructions, and to whose private kindness, he owed much.——A greater Hero with him in Pure Mathematics than even Leslie, I may mention parenthetically, was the now totally-forgotten John West, who had been assistant-teacher of Mathematics in the University of St. Andrews for some time from about 1780 onwards, and of whom Leslie, Ivory, and all the other ablest mathematicians sent forth from that University, had been pupils. Of this man, whom he knew of only by tradition, but whom he regarded as, after Robert Simson of Glasgow, the most original geometrical genius there had been in Scotland, I have heard him talk I know not how often. He would sketch West’s life, from the time of his hard and little-appreciated labours at St. Andrews to his death in the West Indies, whither he had emigrated in despair for some chaplaincy or the like; he would avow his belief that Leslie had derived some of his best ideas from that poor man; and he expressed pleasure at finding I knew something of West independently, and had a copy of West’s rare Elements of Mathematics, published in 1784. That book, obsolete now, was, I have no doubt, a manual with Carlyle while he was studying Mathematics in Edinburgh University, as I chance to know it had been with Dr. Chalmers at St. Andrews in his earlier mathematical days.——Of Leslie’s colleague, the celebrated Playfair, formerly in the Mathematical Chair, but since 1805 in that of Natural Philosophy, Carlyle had a less affectionate recollection personally than of Leslie. Sharing, I believe, the common opinion of Playfair’s great merits, and minutely acquainted with the facts of his life, as indeed he was with the biographies of all persons of any mark with whom he had come into contact, he rather resented a piece of injustice which he thought Playfair had done to himself. There were 131 students in the Natural Philosophy Class in 1812–13; and Carlyle, as he assured me, was single in that whole number for having performed and given in every one of all the prescribed exercises, mathematical or other. Another Dumfriesshire student, who came next to him, had failed in one, and that the most difficult. Naturally, at the end of the session, he expected that his certificate would correspond to his distinction in the class; and it was of some consequence to him that it should. But, when he called at Playfair’s house for the certificate, and it was delivered to him by a man-servant, he was a good deal disappointed. The usual form of the wording for a good student was to the effect that the Professor certified that so-and-so had attended the class in such and such a session and had “made good proficiency in his studies.” In Carlyle’s case there was a certain deviation from this form, but only to the effect that he had attended the class and that the Professor “had reason to know that he had made good proficiency in his studies.” I can remember Carlyle’s laugh as he told me of this delicate distinction; and I have always treasured the anecdote as a lesson for professors. They ought to be very careful not only in noting talent on the benches before them, but also in signifying what they have noted, if only because, as in Playfair’s case, they may be sometimes entertaining an angel unawares, and some angels have severe memories.
We have thus brought Carlyle to the summer of 1813, when he had completed his Arts course in the University of Edinburgh, and was in the eighteenth year of his age. Though qualified, according to the present standard, for the degree of M.A., he did not take it; but in that he was not in the least singular. In those days hardly any Edinburgh student ever thought of taking a degree in Arts; as far as Edinburgh University was concerned, the M.A. degree had fallen into almost complete disuse; and not till within very recent memory has it become customary again. After his course in Arts, therefore, Carlyle, with 95 per cent of those of his contemporaries who had passed the same course, was in the position merely of a virtual M.A., who had obtained the best education in Literature, Science, and Philosophy that the Edinburgh University could afford. His own estimate of the worth of that was not very high. Without assuming that he meant the university described in Sartor Resartus to stand literally for the Edinburgh University of his own experience, we have seen enough to show that any specific training of much value he considered himself to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in Edinburgh University was the culture of his mathematical faculty under Leslie, and that, for the rest, he acknowledged merely a certain benefit from having been in so many class-rooms, where matters intellectual were professedly in the atmosphere, and where he learnt to take advantage of books. “What I have found the University did for me,” he said definitely in his Rectorial Address of 1866, “is that it taught me to read, in various languages, in various sciences, so that I could go into the books which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suit me.” Similarly, in his Sartor Resartus, he made Teufelsdröckh declare that his chief benefit at the University had been from his private use of the University library. “From the chaos of that library I succeeded in fishing up more books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a literary life was hereby laid: I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences.” This may describe Carlyle’s own use of the University library all in all, but hardly his use of it during the four years of his Arts course. Only in Latin and French, and to some small extent in Greek, could he then have ranged beyond English in his readings; nor can his readings, in whatever language, have been then so vast and miscellaneous as Teufelsdröckh’s. We have seen, on the irrefragable evidence of preserved registers, what were the books, numbering between twenty and thirty volumes in all, which he actually took out from the University library in the first two winter-sessions of his course; and, though the series is very interesting, with some signs even of oddity, it contains hardly a book that the librarians would have had any difficulty in “fishing up.” I regret that, from the destruction or at least the disappearance of the library registers for a considerable lapse of years immediately after Carlyle’s second session, I am unable to exhibit his readings in his third and fourth sessions. The list for those two sessions, when he was passing from his sixteenth year to his eighteenth, and had been bitten by mathematics and physical science, would doubtless have been even more interesting, and probably more extensive and various, than that for the two sessions preceding. That he did continue to be a very diligent reader from the College library I positively know. He used to draw a ludicrous picture of the library accommodations of those days, when the books were in one of the surviving old buildings on one side of the present quadrangle. As I understood him, the students came at definite hours, and ranged themselves in queue in some passage, or at some entry, waiting for the opening of the door, and perhaps battering at it when the sub-librarian inside was dilatory. He was a sulky gentleman, of Celtic blood and stout build, who regarded the readers as his natural enemies; and, when he did open the door, he generally presented himself in rear to the impatient crowd, taking care to bend his body at the final moment so as to administer one last impediment of contempt for the entrants and send some of them sprawling. That was the kind of encouragement to reading, by Carlyle’s account, that he and other University students had in those days. To the end of his life he was all but savage in his resentment of difficulties thrown in the way of access to books by those who had charge of them; and the great Panizzi of the British Museum came in for a good deal of his wrath in private on this account.
“Entertaining an angel unawares” is the phrase I have used to indicate the relations of Carlyle’s teachers in the University to the then unknown young man that sat in their class-rooms. In fact, Carlyle, when he left the University in 1813, a virtual M.A., aged seventeen years and four months, was already potentially the very Carlyle we now revere, in consequence of his subsequent life, as one of the greatest and noblest spirits of his generation. Not yet at his full stature (which, when I knew him first in his yet unbent manhood, was over five feet eleven inches), and of thin, lean, rather gaunt frame (he told me himself he had never weighed more than about ten stone), he was a youth of as great faculty, as noble promise, as Scotland had produced since her Burns, born in 1759, and her Scott, born in 1771. This, or something very little short of this, seems to have been already recognised by those who knew him intimately. They were not many; for he was of peculiarly proud, shy, and reserved ways, if not even morose and unsocial. Poverty also kept him back. It was not for an Ecclefechan lad, chumming with one or two others in like circumstances in a poor lodging in Simon Square, or some other Old Town locality, and receiving his meagre supplies from home, to mix much with general Edinburgh society. The celebrities of that society, indeed, were no longer strangers to him by name or sight, as they had been on his first Edinburgh walk with Smail in 1809. He mentions particularly that Jeffrey’s face and figure had been quite familiar to him since 1811 by visits to the Parliament House; and the same visits, or walks in Princes Street, must have made him familiar with the face and figure of Scott, and the faces and figures of not a few others that were among the civic somebodies of their time. But it was by sight only, and by no more introduction than he had to Arthur Seat or Holyrood House, that he knew those important personages; and into the circles in which they moved he had never entered. Even the Professors of the University, if we except Leslie, seem to have been known to him only by their aspects in college or the vicinity. Further, his acquaintanceships among his fellow-students do not appear to have been numerous. He is not known to have been a member of any of the literary and debating societies which in those days, as in these, were so important an appendage to the apparatus of lectures, class-rooms, and library, and which draw young men together so congenially for the exchange of ideas, the exercise of oratory, and the formation of lasting friendships between kindred souls. His habits were those of solitary reading and musing, with intercourse only with a few companions, clannishly selected for the most part from among the Dumfriesshire or Galloway lads who could claim him as their district-compatriot, whose families he knew, and with one or other of whom he had made his pedestrian journeys homewards at the ends of the sessions. Smail has now vanished from his side; and we hear chiefly of James Johnstone, afterwards schoolmaster of Haddington, the Robert Mitchell already mentioned as one of his fellow-students in the Moral Philosophy class, a Thomas Mitchell, afterwards one of the classical masters in the Edinburgh Academy, and the Thomas Murray already mentioned as having been with him in the 2d Greek class. To these has to be added, on the faith of certain extant letters, a certain clever and whimsical fellow-student of the name of Hill, who used to delight in signing himself “Peter Pindar.” In the circle of these, and of others whose names are forgotten, young Carlyle, at the time of his leaving college, was already an object of admiration and respect passing all that is ordinary in such cases of juvenile camaraderie. Intellectually and morally, he had impressed them as absolutely unique among them all,—such a combination of strength of character, rugged independence of manner, prudence, great literary powers, high aspirations and ambition, habitual despondency, and a variety of other humours, ranging from the ferociously sarcastic to the wildly tender, that it was impossible to set limits to what he was likely to become in the world.
The proofs are extant in documents of a date only a few months in advance of our present point. On the 1st of January 1814, the above-mentioned Hill, who seems to have been the freest and most jocose in his style of address to Carlyle, and had nicknamed him “The Dean” or “The Doctor,” by some implied comparison with Dean Swift, wrote to him as follows.—“You mention some two or three disappointments you have met with lately. For shame, sir, to be so peevish and splenetic! Your disappointments are trifles light as air when compared with the vexations and disappointments I have experienced.” Again, in a letter dated the 9th of May in the same year, he begins:—“Dear Doctor, I received yours last night; and a scurrilous, blackguardly, flattering, vexing, pernickety, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal, as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No; this won’t do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an off-hand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity, pursuing the even tenor of his way, so that one of Peter’s letters is as good as a thousand.”[[11]] More significant and serious is the following from one of the preserved letters to Carlyle by his friend Thomas Murray, the date “July 27,” and presumably of the year 1814:—“I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking, and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that among all my elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of letter-writing I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language, either for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these, our juvenile epistles, will be read and publicly applauded by a generation unborn, and the name of Carlyle at least will be inseparably connected with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century.”[[12]] Strangely enough, Carlyle’s answer to this letter has survived, and it is no less memorable:—“Oh Tom!” it says, “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 by 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. O Fortune! thou that givest unto each his portion on 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 favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame,—and, though starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have not been born a King.”[[13]]
Brave words these from the moody lad we saw, not five years ago, plodding up to Edinburgh from Ecclefechan, hardly fourteen years of age, with Tom Smail for pilot. From these words, and from the letters from Hill and Murray with which they connect themselves, we learn two things which I think we should have hardly known otherwise. One is the fact of Carlyle’s decisive passion for literature at this early period of his life, and of his reputation then among his intimates for great powers and acquirements of the purely literary kind. My own fancy, confirmed by one particular talk I had with him during a walk along the Thames Embankment and in the Temple Gardens, had rather been that the passion for literature came latish in his case, and that his original bent had been wholly the mathematical. He certainly did tell me that he had not cared much for poetry, or thought much about matters verbal, till the enthusiasm of an older companion, who used to recite Campbell’s lyrics and dwell with ecstasy on their beauties, came as a revelation to him and set him on fire with a similar passion. My mistake must have been in post-dating the reminiscence. He must have referred, I now see, not to so late a period as that of his college life in Edinburgh, but to the previous days of his mere boyhood in Ecclefechan and at Annan school. Indeed, we have already seen, in the list of his readings from the college library in his first two sessions, that he must have brought with him to the University some strongly formed literary tastes and likings of Ecclefechan and Annan origin. Connecting this piece of evidence with that of the just-quoted letters of himself and his friends in 1814, we are entitled, I think, now to assume the literary stratum to have been the deeper and more primitive in Carlyle’s constitution, and the mathematical vein to have been a superposition upon that. At all events, it is clear that in 1814, when he had concluded his Arts course in the University, it was for his literary powers that he was the wonder of his little circle, and it was on those powers that he set most store himself. For the letters reveal to us yet a second contradiction of what we might have supposed otherwise. No man was ever more contemptuous of fame, and especially of literary fame, than Carlyle was in conversation in his later life. The very phrase “desire for fame,” or any synonym for it, if used in his presence as the name of a worthy motive to exertion of any kind, would have provoked his most scathing scorn. He had no patience for “that last infirmity of noble mind,” and would have regarded even such a designation for the feeling as much too honourable. Yet, as we have seen, he had not escaped the malady himself. Call the ambition after fame by the homeliest name of sarcasm you please,—call it the measles of budding genius,—and the fact, on the evidence of Carlyle’s own confession, is that the attack in his case had been even more severe than it had been in the case of Burns, much more severe than we know it to have been in the case of Scott, and quite as severe as the records show it to have been in the case of young Chalmers. The condition of his mind, in his nineteenth year, with all his moodiness, all his self-despondency, was that of settled literary ambition, an appetency after literary distinction all but enormous. That this rested on honest consciousness of his own extraordinary powers, and was accompanied by a resolve, as deep as was ever in any young man’s heart, that the fame for which he craved should be won, if won at all, only by noble and manly methods, there is no room for doubt. There we see him standing, an unknown youth, teeth clenched and face determined, fronting the world, and anticipating his own future in it, with something of that feeling which, call it what we may, and smile at it as any one may in the retrospect, has probably, by God’s own ordinance, filled every great and honest heart at the outset of a great career:—
Lay the vain impostors low!
Blockheads fall in every foe;
Splendour comes with every blow;
Let me do or die.
Meanwhile the near future was not very inspiring. Hardly by any wish of his own, but in deference to the fond hopes of his father and mother, and to those social necessities which made the clerical career the only natural and possible one in those days for an educated Scottish youth from the humbler ranks, Carlyle had proceeded to qualify himself for the ministry. Not, however, for the ministry in that Nonconforming communion, called “the Burgher Seceders,” to which his parents belonged, but, apparently with no objection on their part, in the Established or National Scottish Church.[[14]] Now, the regular qualification for the ministry of the Scottish Church in those days, after a student had passed his Arts course in the University, consisted in further attendance for four winter-sessions in the Divinity Hall of one of the Universities, for instruction in Theology, Hebrew, and Church History, and for the delivery of so many trial-discourses, one in Latin and the rest in English, at appointed intervals. But, to accommodate students whose means made it difficult for them to reside in town during four consecutive winters, there was a device of “partial sessions,” by which a certain small amount of personal appearance in the Divinity Hall, if protracted over six sessions, and duly signalised by delivery of the required discourses, was accepted as sufficient. By the former plan, Carlyle, entering the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh in the session 1813–14, immediately after his last session in Arts, would have been a qualified probationer or preacher in the Scottish Church, and eligible for a fixed parochial charge, in 1817, i.e. in his twenty-second year. The other plan, however, permitting him to find some occupation out of Edinburgh, if it could be had, and so to spare his parents further expense in his education, was altogether the more convenient. His connection with Edinburgh was not yet over; but it was to be continued only in the form of such occasional visits through six years as might enable him to pass as “licentiate” or “probationer” in 1819, i.e. in his twenty-fourth year. That, however he may have reconciled it to his ambition or to his conscience, was his immediate worldly outlook.
Divinity students did not need to register in the general Matriculation Book of the University, as the Arts, Medicine, and Law students did; and so we have not that means of tracing Carlyle’s connection with the University during his Divinity course. Another Thomas Carlyle, indeed, is found in the matriculation lists and in the Arts classes, just after our Carlyle had left those classes; but he is a Thomas Carlyle from Galloway, and is probably the person to whom Carlyle refers angrily as his troublesome double-goer, about whom and himself mistakes were constantly occurring, from this early period in the lives of both, on even to the time when this Thomas Carlyle was an “Angel” in the Irvingite Church and an author of books, and took the precaution of distinguishing himself always on his title-pages as “Thomas Carlyle, Advocate.” It is in the special Divinity Hall Registers that we should look now for our Carlyle. Unfortunately, these Registers are defective. I have not found a list of the Divinity Hall students for 1813–14, though I believe it must have been in that session that Carlyle entered himself in the books of Dr. William Ritchie, the chief Divinity Professor, as going on nominally in the Divinity course, if not attending lectures. The only sessions in which I do find his name registered are those of 1814–15 and 1817–18, both times as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam,” and both times as one of 183 students then attending the Divinity Hall. Whether this means that his attendance in those two sessions amounted to something more real than in those in which his name is not found, I cannot determine, though I should like to be able to do so. It would be a pleasure to me to know to what real extent Carlyle attended the lectures of Dr. Ritchie in Divinity and of Dr. Hugh Meiklejohn in Church History; and it would be a greater pleasure to me to know whether he ever sat in the Hebrew class-room and was called up by Dr. Alexander Brunton to read a bit from the Hebrew Bible. For I had the fortune to be a disciple of this “Rabbi Brunton” myself in the same Hebrew class a great many years afterwards, when he was a very old gentleman, a wonder of antique clerical neatness in his dress, and with a great bald head, and large, pink, bland face, which it did one good to look at. That was all the good you got, however; for, though he professed to teach Hebrew in two sessions, with the elements of Chaldee and Syriac, and, I think, Arabic in addition, the amount of linguistic instruction he gave, or was capable of giving, was as if you had boiled ten chapters of the Hebrew Bible in the same kettle with three or four leaves of Hebrew and Chaldee grammar, and drunk the concoction in a series of doses. Carlyle on Rabbi Brunton’s benches would have been a picture for my fancy worth a thousand; and I wish now I had asked him whether he did attend the Hebrew class. Once I spoke to him of Brunton’s predecessor in the Hebrew chair, Dr. Alexander Murray, a real linguist, and one of the finest minds of his time in Scotland, as any one may see who will read his letters published in that most delightful of recent books of literary anecdote, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents, edited by the late Thomas Constable. This fine scholar and thinker had died in 1813, after having held the Hebrew chair only one year; and Brunton, who had been a rival candidate with him, had stepped into his place. That had been in the last year of Carlyle’s Arts course, and he retained no more than a vague recollection of Murray’s figure as seen about the College.
What makes it all the likelier that Carlyle did begin his Divinity course in 1813–14, and did give some attendance in the Divinity Hall that session, is that he informs us in his Reminiscences that he was in Edinburgh in May 1814, and was among the audience in the General Assembly of the Kirk for that year, when he heard Jeffrey plead, and Drs. Hill and Inglis, and also Dr. Chalmers, speak. The annual meeting of the General Assembly in May was then, as it is now, a great affair; and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a young student of Divinity, fresh from his first session at the Hall, to be in the gallery of the Assembly, to see the physiognomies of the leaders, Moderate or Evangelical, and to hear the debates. If he had resided in Edinburgh through the preceding session, the probability is that he had teaching engagements which helped to pay his expenses. We do not, however, hear definitely of any such teaching employment in Edinburgh in 1813–14, but only that, later in 1814, he applied for the vacant mathematical mastership in his own school of Annan, won the post by competition in Dumfries, and settled in Annan to perform the duties.
The Annan mathematical mastership lasted about two years, or from the autumn of 1814 to the autumn of 1816, bringing Carlyle from his nineteenth year to his twenty-first. His receipts were between £60 and £70 a year; and he boarded in the house of Mr. Glen, the Burgher minister of Annan, where he read prodigiously at nights in all sorts of books, latterly sitting up till three in the morning over Newton’s Principia. But, though the Glens were pleasant, kind people, and he was not far from his father’s house, and had two or three good friends in the neighbourhood,—one of them the Rev. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, a man of many accomplishments, and the real founder of Savings Banks,—he found himself, on the whole, “lonesome, uncomfortable, and out of place.” His character among the Annan people was that of “morose dissociableness,” and he detested his school-work.
The two visits which he paid to Edinburgh in the course of the two years were bright interruptions in his dull routine. The first was about the Christmas of 1814, only a few months after he had gone to Annan. His purpose was to read the first of his trial-discourses in the Divinity Hall,—that being, as we have supposed, his second session in Divinity, and one of the two sessions in which, as we have seen, his name occurs in the Divinity Hall lists. The discourse was an English sermon on the text (Psalm cxix. 67): “Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept Thy Word.” It was, he says, “a very weak, flowery, and sentimental piece,”—which we may believe if we like. The second visit was in the Christmas-time of 1815, for the delivery of his second discourse, a Latin exegesis on the question, “Num detur Religio Naturalis?” (“Is a Natural Religion possible?”) This too, he supposes, was “weak enough,” though the writing of the Latin had given him some satisfaction, and there had been some momentary pleasure in “the bits of compliments and flimsy approbation from comrades and professors” which greeted this performance, as indeed had been the case with the previous year’s sermon. But this visit of the Christmas of 1815 was memorable to him for something more than the delivery of his exegesis. That trouble off his mind, he was taking a holiday week, and looking up old Edinburgh acquaintances; and it was one night, when he was in Rose Street, sitting rather silently in the rooms of a certain Waugh, a distant cousin of his own, and his predecessor in the Annan mastership, that the door opened, and there stepped in Edward Irving, accompanied by an Edinburgh mathematical teacher named Nichol. Carlyle had once seen Irving casually long before in the Annan schoolroom, when Irving called there as a former boy of the school, home from the University with prizes and honours; he had heard much of Irving since,—especially of his continued University triumphs and his brilliant success in schoolmastering, first in the new academy he had set up in Haddington, and more recently in a similar academy at Kirkcaldy; but this was their first real meeting. It was, as Carlyle tells us, by no means promising. Irving, in a somewhat grandiose way, asked Carlyle this and that about what was going on in Annan. Carlyle, irritated a little by his air of superiority, answered more and more succinctly, till at last to such questions as “Has Mrs. —— got a baby? Is it a son or daughter?” his answers were merely that he did not know. “You seem to know nothing,” said Irving, after one or two rebuffs of the kind. “To which,” says Carlyle, “I, with prompt emphasis, somewhat provoked, replied, ‘Sir, by what right do you try my knowledge in this way? Are you the grand inquisitor, or have you authority to question people and cross-question at discretion? I have had no interest to inform myself about the births in Annan, and care not if the process of birth and generation there should cease and determine altogether.’” There might be worse subjects for a painter than this first meeting between Irving and Carlyle. The very room in Rose Street, I suppose, still exists, and there would be little difficulty in imagining the group. On one side, staggering from the blow he has just received, we see the Herculean Irving, three-and-twenty years of age, with coal-black hair, and handsome and jovial visage, despite his glaring squint; seated on the other side we see the thinner and more bilious figure of the stripling Carlyle, just after he has delivered the blow; and Waugh and Nichol stand between, looking on and laughing.[[15]]
The next meeting of Carlyle and Irving was in Annan about six months afterwards. In the interval the Kirkcaldy people, many of whom were dissatisfied with Irving’s conduct in the new academy there, and especially with the severity of his discipline among the young ones, had resolved on resuscitating their regular or Burgh School; and, on the recommendation of Professors Leslie and Christison, Carlyle had been offered the mastership of that school. If Carlyle accepted and went to Kirkcaldy, it would thus be as Irving’s rival. The meeting, therefore, might have been awkward but for Irving’s magnanimity. He invited Carlyle cordially to be his guest in the preliminary visit he meditated to Kirkcaldy for the purpose of inquiry; said that his books were at Carlyle’s service, that two Annandale men must not be strangers in Fifeshire, etc. Accordingly, when Carlyle did accept the appointment, and transfer himself from Annan to Kirkcaldy in the autumn of 1816, the two became inseparable. They were the David and Jonathan of Kirkcaldy town; and one of the pleasantest parts of Carlyle’s Reminiscences is his description of those Kirkcaldy days, from 1816 to the end of 1818, when he and Irving were constantly together, walking on the Kirkcaldy sands, or making Saturday excursions to Fifeshire places round about, or boating expeditions on the Firth, or longer rambles in holiday time to the Lochlomond country and the West, or to their native Dumfriesshire by Moffat and the Yarrow. Irving was by this time a licensed preacher in the Scottish Church; and Carlyle attended him in his occasional preachings in Kirkcaldy or the neighbourhood, or accompanied him to hear other preachers,—once, for example, to Dunfermline to hear Dr. Chalmers. This was the time too of some memorable incidents of more private mark in the lives of the two young men. It was the time of Irving’s intimacy with the Martins of Kirkcaldy Manse, and of his engagement to a daughter of that family, though his heart was with the Jane Welsh who had been his pupil at Haddington; and it was also the time of Carlyle’s frustrated first love,—the object of which was a Margaret Gordon, an orphan girl, then residing in Kirkcaldy with her widowed Aberdeenshire aunt. Though it is with the Edinburgh connections of Carlyle during his two years at Kirkcaldy that we are concerned here, I cannot refrain from this episode of his acquaintance with Margaret Gordon.
This girl, interesting long ago to all inquirers into Carlyle’s biography as the nameless original of the “Blumine” of his Sartor Resartus, has become even more interesting since the revelation of her name and the description of her by Carlyle himself in his Reminiscences. Even this description, however, falls far short of the impression made by that fragment of her own farewell letter to Carlyle which Mr. Froude published in his Nineteenth Century article on Carlyle’s Early Life. Nothing finer than that letter has come to light, or ever can come to light, in all Carlyle’s correspondence:—
“And now, my dear friend, a long, long adieu! One advice; and, as a parting one, consider, value it. Cultivate the milder dispositions of your heart. Subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintance they are already beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved! Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners. Deal gently with their inferiority, and be convinced they will respect you as much, and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in your heart?... Again adieu! Pardon the freedom I have used; and, when you think of me, be it as of a kind sister, to whom your happiness will always yield delight, and your griefs sorrow.... I give you not my address, because I dare not promise to see you.”
Valuable as an additional attestation of the enormous impression made by Carlyle upon all who came near him even at this early date, and of the prodigious expectations entertained of his future career, these words reveal also such a character in the writer herself as almost to compel speculation as to what might have happened if she had become his wife. That there was real affection on both sides is evident. The obstacle was partly in circumstances. In the opinion of her aunt and guardian, and of others, Margaret Gordon, who, though the daughter of a poor colonial, and left with little or nothing, was one of the aristocratic family of the Aberdeenshire Gordons, could hardly marry a Kirkcaldy schoolmaster. But perhaps some dread on her own part, arising from those perceptions of the harder side of his character which she communicated to himself so tenderly and frankly, may have aided in the separation. Her subsequent history could be told in some detail by persons still living. She became the wife of Alexander Bannerman of Aberdeen, a man of note in the commerce of that city, and of a family of old standing and landed estates in the shire. There were traditions of him in his youth as “Sandy Bannerman,” one of the wild Maule of Panmure and Duke of Gordon set, who filled the north with their pranks; but my own recollection of him in his more mature days is of the staid and highly respectable Alexander Bannerman, latterly Sir Alexander Bannerman, who was long the Whig M.P. for Aberdeen, and in that capacity was very attentive to the interests of the city, and very kind to old pensioners and the like who had any grievances or claims on the Government. The Whigs promoted him at last to a colonial governorship; and I think he died in that post. I might have seen Carlyle’s “Blumine” myself when she was Lady Bannerman, if only when she drove through the streets of Aberdeen to grace one of her husband’s elections; but I have no recollection that I ever did.
To my surprise, Carlyle did not seem indisposed to talk of the “Blumine” episode in his life at Kirkcaldy. He used to make inquiries about the Aberdeenshire Bannermans; and he once sketched the whole story to me, in a shadowy way and without naming names (though I then knew them for myself), but dwelling on various particulars, and especially on those casual meetings with his first love in her married state which he has described in his Reminiscences. Though he talked prettily and tenderly on the subject, the impression left was that the whole thing had become “objective” to him, a mere dream of the past. But fifty years had then elapsed since those Kirkcaldy days when Margaret Gordon and he were first together.
Among Carlyle’s Edinburgh connections in the Kirkcaldy days, one comes to us in a book form. It was in 1817 that Professor Leslie, not yet Sir John Leslie, brought out the third edition of his Elements of Geometry and Plane Trigonometry, being an improvement and enlargement of the two previous editions of 1809 and 1811. The geometrical portion of the volume consists of six books, intended to supersede the traditional six books of Euclid, and containing many propositions not to be found there. The seventeenth proposition of the sixth book is the problem “To divide a straight line, whether internally or externally, so that the rectangle under its segments shall be equivalent to a given rectangle.” The solution, with diagrams, occupies a page; and there is an additional page of “scholium,” pointing out in what circumstances the problem is impossible, and calling attention to the value of the proposition in the construction of quadratic equations. So much for the text of the proposition at pp. 176–177; but, when we turn to the “Notes and Illustrations” appended to the volume, we find, at p. 340, this note by Leslie:—
“The solution of this important problem now inserted in the text was suggested to me by Mr. Thomas Carlyle, an ingenious young mathematician, formerly my pupil. But I here subjoin likewise the original construction given by Pappus; which, though rather more complex, has yet some peculiar advantages.”
Leslie then proceeds to give the solution of Pappus, in about two pages, and to add about three pages of further remarks on the application of the problem to the construction of quadratics. The mention of Carlyle by Leslie in this volume of 1817 is, I believe, the first mention of Carlyle by name in print; and it was no small compliment to prefer, for text purposes, young Carlyle’s solution of an important problem to the old one that had come down from the famous Greek geometrician. Evidently Carlyle’s mathematical reputation was still kept up about the Edinburgh University, and Leslie was anxious to do his favourite pupil a good turn.[[16]]
More personal were the connections with Edinburgh which Carlyle still kept up by visits from Kirkcaldy, either by himself or with Irving. As it was not much to cross the Firth on a Saturday or occasional holiday, such visits were pretty frequent. Carlyle notes them, and the meetings and little convivialities which he and Irving had in the course of them with nondescript and clerical Edinburgh acquaintances, chiefly Irving’s, here and there in Edinburgh houses and lodgings. Nothing of consequence came of these convivialities, passed mostly, he says, in “gossip and more or less ingenious giggle,” and serving only to make Irving and him feel that, though living in Kirkcaldy, they had the brighter Edinburgh element close at hand. One Edinburgh visit of Carlyle’s from Kirkcaldy deserves particular record:—“On one of these visits,” he says, “my last feeble tatter of connection with Divinity Hall affairs or clerical outlooks was allowed to snap itself and fall definitely to the ground. Old Dr. Ritchie ‘not at home’ when I called to enter myself. ‘Good!’ answered I; ‘let the omen be fulfilled.’” In other words, he never went back to Dr. Ritchie, and ceased to be a Divinity student. Such is the account in the Reminiscences, confirmed by a private note in Carlyle’s hand, published in Mr. Froude’s article:—“The theological course, which could be prosecuted or kept open by appearing annually, putting down your name, but with some trifling fee, in the register, and then going your way, was,” he says, “after perhaps two years of this languid form, allowed to close itself for good. I remember yet being on the street in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, probably in 1817, and come over from Kirkcaldy with some intent, the languidest possible, still to put down my name and fee. The official person, when I rang, was not at home, and my instant feeling was, ‘Very good, then, very good; let this be finis in the matter.’ And it really was.” This is precise enough, but perhaps with a slight mistake in the dating. The name, “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam,” as we have seen, does stand in the register of the Edinburgh Divinity Hall students for the session 1817–18, its only previous appearance in the preserved lists being in 1814–15, though it is likely he had begun his Divinity course in 1813–14. It must, therefore, have been after 1817 that he made the above-mentioned call on Dr. Ritchie in Argyll Square. The probability is that it was late in 1818, in anticipation of the coming session of 1818–19.