PART III.—1822–1828
By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June 1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have contributed to the result.
One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his Reminiscences he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh, because he was not sure but she might be then in Edinburgh too; and it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr. Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in the Reminiscences. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh, had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street. He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The information agrees with the University records; for in the matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February. The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow, the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing” to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics, indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them, teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the visit of the previous June that had gradually established itself, till it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books, etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller tutorship.
Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he says, “translating Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My petards will not burst, or make only noise when they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution too.”[[38]] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire. Then shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[[39]] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear, in that connection with the New Edinburgh Review of which mention has been already made, and in the translation of Legendre which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the background. There is significance in the fact that his second contribution to the New Edinburgh, published in April 1822, when the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s Faust. The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his Reminiscences where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when, having finished the reading of Wilhelm Meister, he walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him. Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.
The translation of Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster deserves a passing notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with the title Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an Introductory Essay on Proportion,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten, that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about 1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to obtain an affidavit from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the Reminiscences, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings, and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his Budget of Paradoxes, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements [Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”
The Translation of Legendre, with this Essay on Proportion, was Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution, Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it, he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir, you are dealing with the ipsissima corpora,” Chalmers used to say; and Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.
There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company; and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur, was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller, and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we are able to connect it with another advent.
It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the 29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core, fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his Reminiscences how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in “black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings, round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the Reminiscences; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake, woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he was troubled no more.
The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of 2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class, and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time, and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears “John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the family who received a University education. He had been for some time a teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the Reminiscences tell us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.
The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh routine of his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the Bullers in India Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and other intercourse with the Buller family and their guests, and his own German and other readings and literary efforts and schemings. It was in that winter, and not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the Reminiscences, that the cessation of correspondence with Irving became a matter of secret vexation to him. The good Irving, now in the full whirl of his activity with the Hatton Garden congregation and of the London notoriety to which that led, was too busy to write; and it was only by rumour, or by letters from others, that Carlyle heard of Irving’s extraordinary doings and extraordinary successes in the metropolis, of the crowds that were flocking to hear him in the little Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and his preachings were making in the London fashionable world. “People have their envies, their pitiful self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting that the real joy he felt at the vast and sudden effulgence of his friend into a fame commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense of the contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a “poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale fellow, now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames. There was, he adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be able to keep his head in the blaze of such enormous London popularity? Had he strength enough to guide and manage himself in that huge element with anything like the steadiness that had characterised the behaviour of the more massive and more simple-hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he seems to hint, was increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first publication came into his hands,—the famous Orations and Arguments for Judgment to Come, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical world was enabled to judge of the real substance of those pulpit-discourses which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as Irving himself was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own work. It seems to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having closed his contributions to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and got the Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to his Life of Schiller.
If, however, the Life of Schiller was begun in Edinburgh, it was not finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the spring and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that aptitude for change of residence which characterises retired Indians and people with plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of Kinnaird in Perthshire, situated on the river Tay, some miles to the north of Dunkeld. Carlyle and his tutorship of young Charles and Arthur Buller had, accordingly, been transferred thither. He must have been there early in June 1823; for a letter of his is extant, dated from Kinnaird House on the 17th of that month, in which he describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old cathedral, with Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in the neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your peaceful manse,—you at one side of the parlour 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, careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance lightened by unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting 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 my own footing.”[[40]] From the Reminiscences, where we learn that he was at this time persevering with his Life of Schiller, we have his later recollection of those summer and autumn months, and on into late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—
“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally solitary, way. My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some three or four hundred yards from the new, and on a lower level, overshadowed with wood. Thither I always retired directly after tea, and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—good candles, good wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence and total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before or since. I remember still the grand sough of those woods, or, perhaps, in the stillest times, the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing else to converse with but this and my own thoughts, which never for a moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes pathetically sad. I was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I ought not to quit on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it; dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poor Schiller, nothing considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily persisted in, as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[[41]]
It was in October 1823 that the first part of Schiller’s Life and Writings appeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebrated London Magazine of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was the most important of the metropolitan magazines of that time, counting among its contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such writers as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Hamilton Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood, and De Quincey. The admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening of such a London connection at last, ought to have been some gratification to him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it was, to a far greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the Reminiscences. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had compliments from the editor of the magazine,—i.e., we must suppose, from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own editors, unless indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of assistant editor, was the medium of the communication. What is more important is that the Life of Schiller, if not all in the editor’s hands complete when the first part appeared, must have been reported as complete, or as approaching completeness, in Carlyle’s own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly, fixes October 1823, or thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from Schiller to the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a sequel, viz. the Translation of the Wilhelm Meister. It must have been in one of those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand sough of those woods” outside, when his Schiller manuscript lay finished beside him, and he had Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the Night-Moth” which he has commemorated in one of his metrical fragments—
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping
Their meek and silent course in heaven;
Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,
All mortal things to sleep are given.
But see! a wandering night-moth enters,
Allured by taper gleaming bright;
A while keeps hovering round, then ventures
On Goethe’s mystic page to light.
With awe she views the candle blazing
A universe of fire it seems
To moth-savante with rapture gazing,
Or fount whence life and motion streams.
What passions in her small heart whirling,
Hopes boundless, adoration, dread?
At length, her tiny pinions twirling,
She darts, and,—puff!—the moth is dead.”
Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the Reminiscences is that Irving had encouraged him in the Life of Schiller, and had “prepared the way” for it in the London Magazine. How is this to be reconciled with his repeated references to the total cessation of correspondence between himself and Irving from the date of Irving’s definite settlement in London to that week, “late in autumn 1823,” when Irving, having married Miss Martin of Kirkcaldy, was on his marriage-jaunt with her in Scotland, and generously determined to pass near Kinnaird, so as to pick up his old friend and have a day or two of his society? One might have thought that it was in this renewed meeting of the two friends in Irving’s honeymoon jaunt that there came from Irving the suggestion of the London Magazine as a place for the Schiller, or the intimation that he had already arranged for it and knew it would be welcome there. This supposition, however, will not cohere with the date of Irving’s marriage. It took place at Kirkcaldy on the 13th of October 1823, after the number of the London Magazine containing the first part of the Schiller had been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in Scotland lasted through the rest of that month and the whole of November. There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence between Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about the Schiller, some while before October 1823, though Carlyle’s memory had become hazy about that matter too. It is pleasant to be sure of the main fact,—which is that it was to the ever-friendly Irving that Carlyle owed this second great service of his introduction to the London Magazine, just as he had already owed him the Buller tutorship.
The winter of 1823–4 seems to have been passed wholly at Kinnaird. At least, there was no re-appearance of the Bullers in Edinburgh that winter, and no re-attendance that winter of Charles Buller or his brother Arthur in any of the classes of Edinburgh University. What we gather from the Reminiscences is that, towards the end of the winter, the Bullers had begun to weary of Kinnaird life, and indeed of life in Scotland, and were meditating a return to England, possibly for ultimate settlement in Cornwall, but certainly with a view to London as their intermediate head-quarters. He hints also that they had by this time been a good deal exercised by the moodiness and miserable bad health of the strange tutor they had with them, and whom they respected and admired so much. Might it not be the best arrangement that he should go for a month or two to his native Annandale to recruit his health, and then rejoin them in London, there again to take charge of his pupils?
Taking leave of Kinnaird with that understanding, Carlyle, it appears, rode, either directly thence or very soon afterwards from his father’s house at Mainhill, all the way to Edinburgh, to consult a doctor about his dyspepsia. Was it chronic, and incurable except by regimen? or could it be removed by medical treatment? “It is all tobacco, sir; give up tobacco,” was the physician’s answer; on which Carlyle’s comment is that, having instantly and absolutely followed the advice, and persevered for “long months” in total abstinence from tobacco, without the slightest sign of improvement, he came to the conclusion that he might as well have ridden sixty miles in the opposite direction, and poured his sorrows into the “long hairy ear of the first jackass” he met, as have made that ride to Edinburgh to consult the great authority. This story of the tobacco consultation was a favourite one with Carlyle in later days. I have heard it from him several times, with two additions to what appears in the Reminiscences. One was that, the doctor having asked him whether he could give up tobacco, “Give it up, sir?” he replied; “I can cut off my left hand with an axe, if that should be necessary!” The other was an account of his months of probation of the new no-tobacco regimen. The account took the form of a recollection of himself as staggering for months from tree-trunk to tree-trunk in a metaphorical wood, tobaccoless and dreary, without one symptom of benefit from his self-denial, till at last, sinking at the foot of one of the tree-trunks, and seeing a long clay and a tobacco-pouch providentially lying on the turf, he exclaimed “I will endure this diabolical farce and delusion no longer,” and had a good smoke then and there once more, in signal of reverting for ever to his old comfort. Tobacco and a very little good brandy, he used to say to the end of his life, were the only two drugs in the whole pharmacopœia that he had found of any real utility to the distressed human organism.[[42]]
It was during the two or three spring months of 1824, spent at Mainhill in Dumfriesshire, under the care of that “best of nurses and of hostesses,” his mother, that the Translation of Wilhelm Meister was finished. It was in the June of the same year that, having revised the proofs of the three volumes of that book for Messrs. Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, who had agreed to be the publishers, as they were also of his translation of Legendre’s Geometry, and having run up to Edinburgh himself with the last proofs and the preface, and received from Messrs. Oliver and Boyd £180 for the labour, and having taken a farewell at Haddington the purport of which may be guessed, he embarked in the Leith smack that was to carry him to London. He was then in his twenty-ninth year, and it was his first visit to the Great Babylon. The second part of his Life of Schiller had appeared in the number of the London Magazine for January 1824; but the rest had still to be published, and would probably appear in the magazine when he was himself in London and had formed personal acquaintance with the editorial powers. Copies of the Wilhelm Meister from the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous author of the Life of Schiller and of the Translation of Wilhelm Meister that he would first step into London literary society. For the rest, his prospects were utterly undefined. Whether he should remain in London permanently, or return to Scotland, depended on events not yet calculable. All that was certain was that the Buller tutorship would still be his anchorage for a time in London, as it had been for the last two years in Scotland, and that he had Irving’s house for his London home so long as he might choose. It was, in fact, to Irving’s house in Myddelton Terrace, Islington, where Irving and his wife were living as a newly-married couple, that Carlyle was to steer himself after the Leith smack had landed him in London river.
From this point there is a break of two years and four months in Carlyle’s life, during which he had nothing to do with Edinburgh. The incidents of that interval may be filled in briefly thus:—
Nine Months in London and Birmingham (June 1824–March 1825).—Residing with the Irvings at Islington, or in lodgings near them, Carlyle in those months made his first acquaintance with London, and with various persons in it of greater or less note. Introduced at once to the Stracheys, and to the then celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu of Bedford Square, it was through them, or otherwise directly or indirectly through Irving, that he saw something of Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, Bryan Waller Procter, Crabb Robinson, and others of literary name, besides such commercial London Scots of Irving’s congregation as Sir Peter Laurie, Mr. William Hamilton, and Mr. Dinwiddie, and the young English manufacturing chemist, Mr. Badams of Birmingham. After Mrs. Strachey and the queenly Mrs. Basil Montagu, his most valued new friends in this list, he tells us, were Procter, Allan Cunningham, and Badams. This last, indeed, under pretext of putting him on a regimen that would cure his dyspepsia, lured him away to Birmingham for three months; which three months of residence with Badams in Birmingham, and of rambles with Badams hither and thither in Warwickshire and sights of Joe Parkes and other Birmingham notabilities, have to be interpolated therefore in the general bulk of the London visit. There was also a trip to Dover, in the company of the Stracheys and the Irvings, with a run of some of the party, Carlyle one of them, to Paris, for ten days of Parisian sight-seeing. Altogether, the London visit had been so successful that, when the tutorial engagement with the Bullers came to an end in the course of it,—which it did from the impossibility of an adjustment of Carlyle’s views with Mrs. Buller’s ever-changing plans,—the notion among his friends was that he could not do better than remain in London and take his chances as a London man of letters. The concluding portions of his Schiller had appeared in the London Magazine during the first months of his visit; and before the end of 1825 the five portions into which the work had been cut up for magazine purposes had been gathered together, and published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey in the form of an octavo volume, with the title The Life of Friedrich Schiller, bringing the author £100. It was during his stay in London also that he received his first communication from Goethe, in the form of a brief letter of thanks for a copy of the Translation of Wilhelm Meister which had been sent to Weimar some months before. But, though things seemed thus to conspire in favour of the detention of Carlyle in London, he had made up his mind to the contrary; and in March 1825 he turned his back upon the great city, and was on his way once more to his native Dumfriesshire.
Nineteen Months of Dumfriesshire Farm-life (March 1825–October 1826):—For about two months Carlyle was at his father’s farmhouse of Mainhill, near Ecclefechan, resting from his return-tour through England, and preparing for the adventure which he had planned. This was an attempt at tenant-farming on his own account in that neighbourhood. A letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, of date May 20, 1825, is still from Mainhill; but on the 26th of that month he entered on the possession of the adjacent little farm of Hoddam Hill, which he had taken on lease from his father’s landlord, General Sharpe,—“a neat, compact little farm, rent £100,” with “a prettyishlooking cottage.” Here for a whole year he lived, nominally a tenant-farmer, as his father was, and close to his father, but in reality entrusting the practical farm-work to his brother Alick, while he himself, with his mother or one of his sisters for his housekeeper, delved a little for amusement, rode about for health, and pursued his studies and literary tasks,—chiefly his projected translation of Specimens of German Romance for the bookseller Tait of Edinburgh. There were letters to and from his London friends; there was once a sight in Annan of poor Irving, whose London troubles and aberrations were by this time matters of public notoriety; there were visits to and from neighbours; but, on the whole, the year was one of industrious loneliness. Though he tells us but little of it, what he does tell us enables us to see that it was a most important and memorable year in his recollection. Perhaps in all Carlyle’s life no other year is so important intrinsically. “I call that year idyllic,” he tells us, “in spite of its russet coat.” This is general; but he gives us vital particulars. It was the time, he distinctly says, of his complete spiritual triumph, his attainment once and for ever to that state of clear and high serenity, as to all the essentials of religion and moral belief, which enabled him to understand in his own case “what the old Christian people meant by conversion,” and which he described afterwards, in the Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour of the “Everlasting Yes” at last. The word happiness was no favourite one in Carlyle’s vocabulary, with reference to himself at least; but he does not refuse even this word in describing his new mental condition through the year at Hoddam Hill. What he felt, he says, was the attainment of “a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant.” Even his bodily health seemed to be improving; and the effect extended itself most manifestly to his temper and disposition towards others. “My thoughts were very peaceable,” he says, “full of pity and humanity as they had never been before.” In short, he was no longer the moody, defiant, mainly despondent and sarcastic Carlyle he had been, or had seemed to be to superficial observers, through the past Edinburgh days, but a calmer, wiser, and more self-possessed Carlyle, with depths of tenderness under all his strength and fearlessness,—the Carlyle that he was to be recognised as being by all who knew him through the next twenty years of his life, and that indeed he continued to be essentially to the very end. To what agency does he attribute this “immense victory,” as he calls it, which he had thus permanently gained over his own spirit in this thirtieth year of his age, passed at Hoddam Hill? “Pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature in those poor Annandale localities,”—these, including the sound on Sundays of the Hoddam kirk-bell coming to him touchingly from the plain below, “like the departing voice of eighteen centuries,” are mentioned as accounting for much, but not for all. “I then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the first of the moderns.” Not to be forgotten either, as that which tinged the year to perfection in its “idyllic” character, was the flitting across the scene of the presence that was dearest to him. His pledged bride, no longer at Haddington, but residing with her relatives in Nithsdale, made her first visit to his family in this year; they rode about together for ten days; and the future was arranged. After exactly one year at Hoddam Hill, a difference with General Sharpe, his father’s landlord and his own, led to the giving up of the Hoddam farm and of the Mainhill farm at the same time, and to the transference of the whole Carlyle family to Scotsbrig, a much better farm, out of General Sharpe’s territories, but still in the vicinity of Ecclefechan. This was in May 1826. At Scotsbrig, however, Carlyle remained little more than four months; for, “as turned out,” he married and went to Edinburgh in the following October.
Carlyle was now for the first time an Edinburgh householder. Comely Bank, where he had his domicile for the first eighteen months of his married life, is a single row of very neat houses, situated in a quiet road leading from the north-western suburb of Edinburgh to Craigleith Quarry, and uniting itself there with the great Dean Road, which has started from the west end of the city at a considerably higher level. The houses lie back a little from the footpath, within railings, each house with its iron gate and little strip of flower-garden in front, while each has a larger bit of walled garden behind. The entire row,—though within a walk of two minutes from the dense suburb from which it is detached, and of not more than fifteen minutes from the fashionable heart of the city, by the steep slopes of streets ascending from that suburb,—has even yet a certain look of being out in the open. There are fields before the windows, and there is a stretch of fields to the back; and fifty years ago there must have been less of incipient straggling of other buildings in the neighbourhood than there is now. Carlyle’s house was No. 21, the last but two at the outer or country end of the row. His natural daily walks thence, when they were not into town up the steep sloping streets spoken of, would be to Craigleith Quarry and the Corstorphine Hills, or past these on the great road towards Queensferry, or aside northwards to the beautiful strip of the shore of the Firth of Forth between Cramond and Granton.
No contemporary record yet accessible gives so distinct a general idea of Carlyle’s state of mind and mode of life during his eighteen months at Comely Bank as the following portion of a letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, dated on Christmas Day 1826, or just after he had settled there:—
“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 times I determine to be wise in spite of sickness, and feel that wisdom is better even than health; and I dismiss the 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. At all events, what right have we to murmur? It is the common lot: the 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 commit 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 to 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.... 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. My good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I believe, among the best women that the world contains. The philosophy of the heart is far better than that of the understanding. She loves me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught her much that I have long been vainly at the schools to learn. 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. [Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs. Montagu had never yet met, but are here considered as already fast friends, through Carlyle’s talks with each about the other.] 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 comfort to know beforehand what Turks are, have been, and for ever 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 can talk and enjoy myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in 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 bed-quilts) 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 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 those things that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or else, if the Fates would be so kind as to 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. Those men, those Hookers, Bacons, Brownes, were men; but, for our present ‘men of letters,’ our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, and sonnet 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.”
The mood here, though philosophic, pensive, and critical, is on the whole even cheerful, and accords undeniably with what we should expect from his own statement as to the remarkable change of spirit that had been effected in him during the late idyllic year at Hoddam Hill. It accords also with all that I have been able to learn independently of Carlyle in those now distant days of his early married life.
From two persons in particular I have had intimate accounts of his habits and demeanour in the Comely Bank period. One was the late Rev. David Aitken, D.D., once minister of a Scottish country parish, but in the later part of his life resident in Edinburgh. He was a relative of the Carlyles, and had seen a great deal of them in their own house, and at the tables of various friends, in those old Edinburgh days. His report was that perhaps the most observable thing about Carlyle then was the combination of extraordinary frankness, a habit of speaking out most strikingly and picturesquely whatever was in his mind, with the most perfect command of temper in meeting objections, evading attempted slights or provocations to anger, or changing the subject when opposition was becoming noisy, or the opponent was evidently a fool. Again and again Dr. Aitken had observed this, and wondered at Carlyle’s tact and suavity, especially when he had propounded something startling to commonplace people, and the expression on the faces of some of his auditors was “Who are you that dare thus advance notions discomposing to your seniors?” To the same effect is the information I had from another Edinburgh friend of Carlyle in those days, the late Dr. John Gordon. He was most methodic in his arrangement of his time, Dr. Gordon informed me, always reserving the solid hours of the day for his literary work in Comely Bank, but very accessible and sociable in the afternoons and evenings. To Dr. Gordon I definitely put the question, “Was he gloomy and morose, or noted for asperity and sarcastic bitterness in talk?” The answer was: “Not a bit of it, not a bit of it; the pleasantest and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent company.” It is evident that, whether from more smiling circumstances, or from that drill in self-control which had been imposed upon him by his experience at Hoddam Hill, he was a considerably different being now, in his social demeanour and aspects, from what he had been some years before, when Irving had thought it necessary to remonstrate with him on his fitful and forbidding manners with strangers. But, indeed, they mistake Carlyle utterly who do not know that to the end, with all his vehemence in indignation and invective, and with a stately dignity of manner which repelled irreverent familiarity, and with which the most impudent did not dare to trifle, there was a vast fund in him of what could be described as the homeliest and most genial good-fellowship and the richest old Scottish heartiness. It was not only his faculty of humour,—though those who have never heard Carlyle’s laugh, or known how frequently it would interrupt the gathered tempests of his verbal rage and dissipate them in sudden sunburst, can have no idea of his prodigious wealth in this faculty, or of the extent to which it contributed to the enjoyment and after-relish of every hour spent in his society. I have heard the echoes of Sloane Street ring with his great laugh many and many a night between ten and eleven o’clock, and more than once have had to stop by a lamp-post till the grotesque phrase or conception had shaken me to exhaustion in sympathy with him and the peal had ended. But better still was the proof of the depths of pleasant kindliness in his nature, his power of being actually happy himself and of making others happy, in some of those evening hours I have spent with him in the well-remembered dining-room in Chelsea. Then, both of us, or one of us, reclining on the hearth-rug, that the wreaths of pipe-smoke might innocently ascend the chimney, and Mrs. Carlyle seated near at some piece of work, and public questions laid aside or his vehemences over them having already subsided for that evening, how comfortable he would be, how simple, how husbandly in his looks round to his wife when she interjected one of her bright and witty remarks, how happy in the flow of casual fireside chat about all things and sundry, the quoting of quaint snatches of ballad or lyric, or the resuscitation of old Scottish memories! This mood of pleasant and easy sociability, which always remained with him as one into which he could sink when he liked out of his upper moods of wrath and lamentation, must have been even more conspicuous and common, more nearly habitual, in those Comely Bank days when he felt himself for the first time a full citizen and householder of the Modern Athens, and was not disinclined to friendly intimacy with the other Athenians. Then, as always, the basis of his nature was a profound constitutional sadness, a speculative melancholy, in the form of that dissatisfaction with all the ordinary appearances and courses of things, that private philosophy of protest and nonconformity, which made him really a recluse even when he seemed most accessible and frank. His talk with most of the Edinburgh people, even when apparently the friendliest, was therefore, as he told Mrs. Montagu, like talk from an upper window to people passing in the streets; and into the real house of his spirit few were admitted farther than the lobby. But he had at least disciplined himself into all the requisite observances of good-humoured courtesy, and learnt to practise in his own demeanour the maxim he had about this time thrown into verse:—
“The wind blows east, the wind blows west,
And there comes good luck and bad;
The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”
What he lacked most, as he told Mrs. Montagu, was a fit occupation. His four volumes of Specimens of German Romance, consisting of translations from Musæus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Jean Paul, and Goethe, with biographical and critical notices of these authors, had been already printed, and stored in Ballantyne’s warehouses, before he had settled in Comely Bank, and were published by Tait early in 1827. As they had been done originally on commission, they may have brought something more considerable in the way of payment than if they had been a voluntary labour. But, when these were out, what was he to do next? Fortunately, that question was soon answered.
It was in the spring of 1827 that, by means of a friendly letter of introduction sent from London by Mrs. Montagu’s son-in-law, Procter, alias “Barry Cornwall,” Carlyle formed his memorable acquaintance with Jeffrey. The incidents of that acquaintance, from Carlyle’s first call on Jeffrey in George Street with Procter’s note, when Jeffrey received him so kindly, and said “We must give you a lift,” on to the ripening of the acquaintance by Jeffrey’s calls at Comely Bank, his pretty gallantries and wit-encounters with the fascinating young bride, and the frequent colloquies and amicable little disputations between Jeffrey and Carlyle in Jeffrey’s leisurely rides to his country-house at Craigcrook, or in that picturesque old mansion itself, have all been immortalised in the Reminiscences. Nowhere is there such a sketch of Jeffrey in our literature, such perfect portraiture and appreciation of that celebrated man; and the only question that remains is whether Carlyle has quite done justice there to Jeffrey’s kindness to himself. No doubt he wrote with a strict conscience, and knew better what he was about than readers can now know for him. Still one does carry away an impression that very seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him practically, as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. Goethe. Something of this feeling, indeed, does appear in many passages of Carlyle’s sketch, as when he says: “Jeffrey’s acquaintanceship seemed, and was for the time, an immense acquisition to me, and everybody regarded it as my highest good fortune.” And no wonder. From being a mere translator from the German, or writer of hack articles in obscure places, Carlyle became a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. In June 1827, or within a month or two after his introduction to Jeffrey, appeared his first article in the Review, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, in twenty pages; and in the very next number, in October 1827, appeared his more full and elaborate article, in forty-eight pages, entitled State of German Literature. They caused, as he tells us, “a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams,” and were widely criticised in the newspapers, with the effect of setting “many tongues wagging” about the strange fellow in Comely Bank to whom Jeffrey had given such unusual licence of innovation on the established doctrines of the Review, and who was trying to found a school of “German Mysticism.” At all events, people who liked that kind of matter and were interested in German Literature knew thenceforth where to apply; and, a so-called Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany having been started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared his Life and Writings of Werner, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number, in April 1828, his Goethe’s Helena, in forty pages. These two articles in the Foreign Review, with the two already contributed to the Edinburgh, form the whole of Carlyle’s known writings during the Comely Bank period.
One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William, and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, there is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and speculations!” Since then he had formed some slight personal acquaintance with Sir William by meetings with him in the Advocates’ Library; but it was after the settlement in Comely Bank in 1826, when Sir William was thirty-eight years of age, and had been nominally for five years Professor of History in Edinburgh University, that the acquaintanceship reached the stage of familiarity. Carlyle has commemorated it in a few pages contributed to Professor Veitch’s Memoirs of Sir William Hamilton, published in 1869, thirteen years after Sir William’s death. “I recollect hearing much more of him,” Carlyle there writes, “in 1826 and onward than formerly: to what depths he had gone in study and philosophy; of his simple, independent, meditative habits, ruggedly athletic modes of exercise, fondness for his big dog, etc. etc.: everybody seemed to speak of him with favour, those of his immediate acquaintance uniformly with affectionate respect. I did not witness, much less share in, any of his swimming or other athletic prowesses. I have once or twice been on long walks with him in the Edinburgh environs, oftenest with some other companion, or perhaps even two, whom he had found vigorous and worthy: pleasant walks and abundantly enlivened with speech from Sir William.” He proceeds to describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “The fact is,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of words and distinctions, would repeat “The fact is,” and so go on again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the meetings.
Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of Blackwood since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours, not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing. Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul of their little symposium.[[43]]
De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and 1828; but, his connection with Blackwood having then begun, he was a good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of Wilhelm Meister in the London Magazine for August and September 1824, there was considerable shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk, no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the Reminiscences in which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate. But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies, politically a Radical sui generis though he was, and the protégé though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of whom Wilson in Blackwood was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the Quarterly Review, can hardly date from this period; but among those I have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons, Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs. Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the Reminiscences is that, after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death, called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea.
More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh, that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur Seat and the Corstorphines.
Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared, since that Translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824 which Goethe had acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the Life of Schiller in 1825, and the Specimens of German Romance in 1827, this last completing the translation of the Meister by the addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been. Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance: there is in him much for the future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.” To the same purport were Goethe’s words on again speaking to Eckermann about Carlyle some time afterwards,—“What an earnest man he is! and how he has studied us Germans! he is almost more at home in our literature than we ourselves.”
Goethe’s surprise at Scott’s silence about Carlyle was an acute thrust, though made a little in the dark. Who does not regret to have it to say now that Carlyle never exchanged a word with Sir Walter? Yet this is the fact. That man of men in Edinburgh, of greater importance and interest to her than all her other celebrities put together, remained a stranger to the fellow-citizen that was worthiest to know him and that would fain have known him well. How did this happen?
Any time for the last fifteen or sixteen years Carlyle had, of course, been familiar with the stalwart figure of Scott, as he might be seen in the legal crowd in the Parliament House, or in his slow walk homewards thence, by the Mound and Princes Street, to his house in Castle Street. Further, it must have been in the Comely Bank days that Carlyle and his wife, when they chanced now and then to be in Princes Street together, would bestow those more particular glances of curiosity on Scott’s approaching figure of which I have heard Carlyle speak. The little dogs that were passing would jump up, they observed, to fawn on the kindly lame gentleman whom they knew by instinct to be a friend to all their species; and Scott, they observed, would stoop to pat the animals, or would look down on them benevolently from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. Observing this so admiringly more than once, why should they themselves have had to pass the great man on such occasions without interchange of personal greetings?
Recently, it is true, circumstances had been less propitious than formerly for access to Scott by persons desiring his acquaintance. When Carlyle and his wife took up house in Edinburgh, that fatal year for Scott was just closing in which there had come the sudden crash of his fortunes. This, followed by the death of Lady Scott, had converted him into a lonesome and bankrupt widower, incapable any longer of his customary hospitalities in Castle Street, and indeed bereft of that house, as of all else, for the behoof of his creditors, and toiling to redeem himself by his Life of Napoleon and other colossal drudgery in lodgings in North St. David Street. But that crisis of his downfall had passed; and the year 1827 had seen him more like himself, and domiciled again, more in household fashion, first in Walker Street, and then in Shandwick Place. There had been the great Theatrical Fund Dinner in Edinburgh on the 23d of February 1827, when Sir Walter was in the chair, and when, in responding to the toast of his health, he divulged formally, amid plaudits such as had never been heard in that hall before, the already open secret that he was the sole author of the Waverley Novels. Later in the same year the voluminous Life of Napoleon was published, with the first series of the Chronicles of the Canongate besides, and the Tales of a Grandfather had been begun. Any time, therefore, shortly before or shortly after that month of July 1827 when Goethe was so much gratified by the receipt of Scott’s letter, there was nothing but the most untoward fate to hinder such a meeting between Scott and Carlyle as would have been pleasant to both. Untoward fate did intervene, however, and with almost diabolic malignity. The story is as follows:—
Struck with the anomaly that two such men should be living together in Edinburgh without knowing each other, Goethe himself had taken very special pains to put the matter right. On the 1st of January 1828, resuming his correspondence with Carlyle after a break of some months, he sent off from Weimar a letter to Carlyle about various matters then in discussion between them, but chiefly to announce that it was to be followed speedily by a box containing several parcels of presents. Most of the presents were to be for Carlyle himself or Mrs. Carlyle, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes selected for them; but one of the parcels was to consist of six bronze medals, respecting which Carlyle was requested to take some special trouble. “I send also six medals, three struck at Weimar and three at Geneva,” Goethe wrote; “two of which please present to Sir Walter Scott, with my best regards; and, as to the others, distribute them to well-wishers.” A fortnight afterwards, i.e. on the 15th of January, the box was duly dispatched from Weimar; but not till the 12th of April did it reach the Carlyles at 21 Comely Bank, though they had received the letter announcing it about two months before. On being opened, it was found to contain, besides the promised medals and other parcels, all neatly and separately packed, another letter from Goethe by way of continuation of the former post-letter. “If you see Sir Walter Scott,” were the first words of this second missive, “pray offer him my warmest thanks for his valued and pleasant letter, written frankly in the beautiful conviction that man must be precious to man. I have also received his Life of Napoleon; and during these winter evenings and nights I have read it through attentively from beginning to end.” Then follows an expression at some length of Goethe’s enjoyment of the great book and high appreciation of its merits. These are characterised glowingly and yet carefully; and altogether the criticism was calculated to please Scott extremely, and to be received by him as a most friendly acknowledgment of his attention in having sent a copy of his Life of Napoleon to his great German contemporary. What interests us, however, is Goethe’s obvious purpose in having made Carlyle the medium of communication between himself and Scott. He wanted to bring the two men together; and with what delicacy of courteous invention he had manœuvred for his object! It was Carlyle that was to deliver to Scott the two medals intended as Goethe’s recognition of Scott’s supremacy in the Literature of Great Britain; and it was Carlyle to whom Goethe sent his first impressions of Scott’s latest large work, and that in a manner almost amounting to an injunction that they should be reported to Scott textually.
If Goethe’s purpose failed, it was not through any fault or negligence on Carlyle’s part. On the 13th of April 1828 he wrote the following letter to Sir Walter:
Edinburgh: 21 Comely Bank:
13th April 1828.
Sir,—In February last I had the honour to receive a letter from Von Goethe, announcing the speedy departure from Weimar of a packet for me, in which, among other valuables, should be found “two medals,” to be delivered, mit verbindlichsten Grüssen, to Sir Walter Scott. By a slow enough conveyance this Kästchen, with its medals in perfect safety, has at length yesterday come to hand, and now lays on me the enviable duty of addressing you.
Among its multifarious contents, the Weimar Box failed not to include a long letter,—considerable portion of which, as it virtually belongs to yourself, you will now allow me to transcribe. Perhaps it were thriftier in me to reserve this for another occasion; but, considering how seldom such a Writer obtains such a Critic, I cannot but reckon it a pity that this friendly intercourse between them should be anywise delayed.
[Carlyle here extracts from Goethe’s second letter, in the original German, the whole of the portion relating to Scott’s Napoleon.]
With regard to the medals,—which are, as I expected, the two well-known likenesses of Goethe himself,—it could be no hard matter to dispose of them safely here, or transmit them to you, if you required it, without delay; but, being in this curious fashion appointed as it were Ambassador between two Kings of Poetry, I would willingly discharge my mission with the solemnity that beseems such a business; and naturally it must flatter my vanity and love of the marvellous to think that by means of a Foreigner whom I have never seen I might now have access to my native Sovereign, whom I have so often seen in public, and so often wished that I had claim to see and know in private and near at hand.
Till Whitsunday I continue to reside here, and shall hope that some time before that period I may have opportunity to wait on you, and, as my commission bore, to hand you these memorials in person. Meanwhile I abide your further orders in this matter; and so, with all the regard which belongs to one to whom I, in common with other millions, owe so much, I have the honour to be, sir, most respectfully your servant,
Thomas Carlyle.
Besides the two medals specially intended for you, there have come four more, which I am requested generally to dispose of amongst “Wohlwollenden.” Perhaps Mr. Lockhart, whose merits in respect of German Literature, and just appreciation of this its Patriarch and Guide, are no secret, will do me the honour to accept of one, and direct me through your means how I am to have it conveyed?
As the wording of this letter shows, Carlyle was aware when he wrote it that Sir Walter was not then in Edinburgh. He had gone off, exactly ten days before, i.e. on the 3d of April, for a tour in England, and a plunge once more, partly on business and partly for mere pleasure, into the world of London. It would have been better if Carlyle had delayed till he came back; but, thinking the matter too important for that, he had gone, it would appear, to Scott’s house, then in Shandwick Place, ascertained his London address, and seen the letter dispatched. That it did reach Scott in London is certain; for the autograph is still extant, with the London post-mark of 17th April 1828 upon it, just as Scott must have had it in his hands that day in the house of his son-in-law Lockhart in Regent’s Park. He must have glanced at it carelessly, however,—so carelessly as hardly to have mastered its purport; for in his jottings in his Diary for that day, where he would naturally have taken note of so interesting an occurrence as a new message from Goethe, there is no mention of it whatever. The omission is explained perhaps by one phrase which does occur among those jottings. “In this phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like shadows” were the words with which, trying to record in his journal late that night the incidents of an unusually busy day,—beginning with a round of forenoon and afternoon calls, and ending with a dinner at Samuel Rogers’s and an appearance afterwards at an evening party at Lady Davy’s,—he almost gave up the attempt as hopeless, so difficult was it to recall coherently what one had done or seen during any twelve hours in such a vast and brain-dizzying place as London. Carlyle’s letter, delivered to him that morning, or possibly lying on his table for him at the moment of his writing those words, may have been one of the “objects” that had slipped his cognisance. And, if so that day, the chance was poor enough of its being remembered sufficiently on any subsequent day during the rest of Scott’s stay in the great metropolis. Day after day till the 26th of May, as the Journal shows, there was a continued succession of lionisings for him in the shape of calls on him from notabilities, dinners in his honour, applications to him to sit for his portrait or his bust, etc. etc. One of the dinners was with his Majesty King George IV. himself; another was at the Duchess of Kent’s, where he was presented to “the little Princess Victoria,” and looked at her with keen interest, wondering whether the little lady, then not nine years of age, had yet been made aware of her great destiny; several times he was with the Duke of Wellington; and of the other celebrities whom he saw, or among whom he moved, in the course of his stay,—statesmen, bishops, lawyers, men of letters, artists, etc.,—he could keep no complete reckoning. For a man in the fifty-seventh year of his age the whirl of such a series of London excitements might not, in ordinary cases, have been too much; but Sir Walter had been obviously in failing health already for the last year or two, and there had been symptoms even, recognisable by himself and his Edinburgh friends, of jaded mental energy. In his case the £250 which, as he tells us, his visit to London cost him, may not have been the only damage. Little wonder, at all events, that one of his letters from Edinburgh, even though it contained a message from Goethe, should have escaped his attention.
Meanwhile Carlyle was growing anxious about the fate of the letter. On the 18th of April, five days after he had sent it to Scott, he had written to Goethe, informing him that this had been done. “To Sir Walter Scott, who is at present in London,” the letter said, “I have already written, announcing so delightful a message, and even transcribing for him what you say of his Life of Napoleon: a friendly criticism which, from such a quarter, must gratify him highly”; and, after a sentence or two more on the subject of that criticism, these words were added: “Ere long I expect to see Sir Walter and present to him your medals in person.” The expectation was never to be fulfilled. Week after week had passed, and no reply to his first letter had been received, when the Whitsunday term arrived at which, as he had informed Scott, he was to leave Edinburgh. In these circumstances he addressed a brief note to Scott, referring to his former letter, and explaining that, as he could not now hope for the honour of presenting the Goethe medals in person, he had left them in charge of Mr. Jeffrey, who would doubtless deliver them to Sir Walter on the first convenient opportunity. This note, dated the 23d of May, was, in fact, written in Jeffrey’s own house in Moray Place, where Carlyle and his wife were residing for a few days by invitation before their departure for Craigenputtock. They had left Comely Bank a day or two before, had sent on their furniture to Craigenputtock in carts, and were to follow immediately themselves.
The note must have reached Sir Walter on the 27th of May, the very last day of his stay in London. Leaving London that day, as his journal shows, he began the homeward journey through the middle and northern English counties which was to bring him to Abbotsford on the 2d of June, and thence to Edinburgh on the 4th of June. The Carlyles were then gone; and any acknowledgment that Carlyle could now receive of either of his two missives could only be by letter from Sir Walter in Edinburgh to Craigenputtock. Something of the sort seems to have been expected by Carlyle; for it was not till the 25th of September that he wrote that first of his letters to Goethe from Craigenputtock in which he told Goethe of the ending of the business of the medals. “Sir Walter Scott,” he then wrote, “has received your Medals several months ago,—not through me directly, for he had not returned to Edinburgh when I left it, but through Mr. Jeffrey, our grand ‘British Critic’; to whom, as I learn, Sir Walter expressed himself properly sensible of such an honour from one of his masters in Art.” This leaves no doubt that the medals actually came into Sir Walter’s hands as soon as he had returned to Edinburgh; and the only question that remains is how it could have happened that the two letters from Carlyle heralding the medals, and connected with them so vitally, received no acknowledgment, and so that Goethe’s design of bringing Carlyle into contact with Sir Walter Scott was miserably frustrated.
To this day the affair remains somewhat of a mystery. That Scott, the largest-hearted of men, the kindliest, the most courteous, the most attentive to every punctilio of business or of social etiquette, should have deliberately, of his own accord, left such letters unanswered, it is next to impossible to suppose; and it is hardly less difficult to suppose that, if any one had tried to prejudice him against Carlyle in connection with them, he would have allowed the interference to prevent him from doing what was independently proper. All things considered, one must revert, I think, to the opinion already suggested by the fact that there is no mention in Scott’s journal during his weeks in London either of the Carlyle letters or of the message they conveyed from Goethe. In the bustle and hurry of his London engagements, and then of his leave-taking for his return journey to Scotland, he had never, we are to conclude, read the letters, or at all events the first and principal one, with sufficient attention to apprehend the contents, and so, having set them aside on their first receipt, had forgotten all about them. To be sure, the medals were ultimately delivered to him by Jeffrey; but one can imagine that they were delivered in a casual manner, and without such explanation of the relative circumstances as might have brought the missing letters to his recollection and caused him to look for them. What is certain is that they lay among his papers, to be found there after his death, and are still preserved. That Lockhart had read them is proved by a reference in his Life of Scott. So slight is the reference, however, and so vaguely worded, that it told virtually nothing. Not till the publication in 1887 of the Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, edited by Mr. C. E. Norton, was any real light thrown on the subject; and not till the appearance in 1890 of The Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript, edited and published by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, and containing a copy of Carlyle’s first letter to Scott, were the facts fully revealed.[[44]]
The removal of Carlyle from Edinburgh to Craigenputtock, while connecting itself rather remarkably with the abortive issue of Goethe’s attempt to introduce him to Sir Walter Scott, is of such importance otherwise in his biography that a word or two as to the causes and circumstances may not be superfluous.
Carlyle’s later memories of the eighteen months, or more strictly nineteen, spent in Comely Bank, are summed up by him in the Reminiscences in one doleful sentence. “Comely Bank,” he says, “except for one darling soul, whose heavenly nobleness, then as ever afterwards, shone on me, and should have made the place bright (ah me, ah me! I only now know how noble she was!), was a gloomy intricate abode to me, and in retrospect has little or nothing of pleasant but her.” So far as this is not a picture tinged, like all the rest of his life, by the final darkness in which it was painted, and to be corrected by the facts as they are otherwise ascertained, the reference may be to the causes which made him suddenly give up his Comely Bank house and remove himself again from Edinburgh. These, there can be no doubt, were economical perplexities. Thrift, frugality, abhorrence from debt or extravagance, was always one of Carlyle’s characteristics; and he had found the expenses of married life in Edinburgh beyond his means. On this point some light can be thrown by information from himself, and an annexed calculation.
He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening, with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however, that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition, remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his Wilhelm Meister, together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear £100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the whole of his remuneration for the German Romance fell in then, may have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his four articles in the Edinburgh and the Foreign Review. Compute the expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he was in danger of running aground.
He had been anxious, in fact, to obtain some post of fixed and certain income that would relieve him from precarious dependence on the press. Two such chances had offered themselves. The new “University of London” (now “University College, London”) had been founded in 1826; and in the course of 1827 the authorities of the new institution had been looking about for professors, in view of the opening of the classes for teaching in October 1828. Carlyle had thought that the Professorship of English Literature would suit him and that he would suit it, and had hoped that Jeffrey’s influence with Brougham might secure him the post. Then, while that matter was still pending, there was the still more desirable chance of the succession to Dr. Chalmers in the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews. It was known in January 1828 that Dr. Chalmers was to be removed to Edinburgh; candidates were already in the field for the succession, the gift of which was with the Professors of St. Andrews; and Carlyle is found in that month making very energetic exertions as one of them. A letter of his to Procter in London is extant, dated the 17th of that month, explaining the circumstances, informing Procter that Jeffrey is his mainstay in the business, and that he may “also reckon on the warm support of Wilson, Leslie, Brewster, and other men of mark,” and requesting a testimonial from Procter and one from Mr. Basil Montagu.[[45]]
Both projects having failed, and the certainty having come that he must depend still on his earnings by literature, his resolution was taken. Away in his native Dumfriesshire, but in a much more wild and solitary part of it than his previous residences of Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and Scotsbrig, was his wife’s little property of Craigenputtock, worth from £200 to £250 a year. It was not in his wife’s possession as yet,—her mother, Mrs. Welsh, having a life-interest in it; but, besides the farmhouse upon it, occupied by the farmer who rented it, there was another and superior house, the humble mansion-house of the property, with sufficient appurtenances of garden, stabling, etc. Why not remove thither? One could live there at half the cost of living in Edinburgh, and yet have excellent milk, poultry, eggs, etc., of one’s own, a horse to ride on, and healthy moors to scamper over! Jeffrey and others thought Carlyle mad in making such a proposal; but late in May 1828, as we have seen, it was carried into effect.
Here, then, in Carlyle’s thirty-third year, his Edinburgh life properly ends, and there begins that extraordinary Craigenputtock period of six years, the literary products of which were five more articles for the Edinburgh Review, six more for the Foreign Review, three articles for the Foreign Quarterly Review, one for the Westminster Review, about a score of contributions of various lengths to Fraser’s Magazine, several little papers elsewhere, and, above all, the Sartor Resartus. There were, indeed, two considerable breaks in the six years of Craigenputtock hermitship. One was that second visit to London, from August 1831 to April 1832, in which he heard of his father’s death, and in which, while endeavouring to get his Sartor Resartus published in book-form, he added Leigh Hunt, young John Stuart Mill, and others, to the number of his London acquaintances. The other was in the winter of 1832–33, when he and his wife were again in Edinburgh for some months, renewing old ties. That winter in Edinburgh, however,—just after the death of Scott, and some months after the death of Goethe,—furnishes nothing essentially new in the way of incident. Then, in the summer of 1834, when Carlyle was in his thirty-ninth year, and his Sartor Resartus was appearing at last by instalments in Fraser’s Magazine, there was the great final migration to London, beginning the forty-six years of Carlyle’s life that were to be associated for ever with No. 5 (now No. 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea. During those forty-six years there were, of course, frequent trips to Scotland, with chance returns for a few days to Edinburgh. Most memorable of all was the visit to Edinburgh in April 1866, for his installation in the Rectorship of Edinburgh University. Of that visit, perhaps the crowning glory of his old age, and reconnecting him so conspicuously with Edinburgh at the last, but saddened for him so fatally by the death of his wife in his absence, I have not a few intimate recollections; as also of those later, almost furtive, visits now and again in his declining autumns, to his eightieth year and beyond, when his real purpose was pilgrimage to his wife’s grave in Haddington Church, and he would saunter, or almost shuffle, through the Edinburgh streets as a bowed-down alien, disconsolate at heart, and evading recognition. Any such recollections may be reserved. All that is properly the Edinburgh Life of Carlyle has been described here.
CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE[[46]]
To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more. For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93 Princes Street.
It was mainly in this Princes Street portion of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther redivivus, delighting in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in 1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank. Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more and more of an invalid and a recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered pantaloon,” or rather that old gentleman in the antique blue surtout and light-brown wig, who is remembered as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe by most of those now living in Edinburgh that can remember him at all. He was not so very old a gentleman, either; for, when he died in March 1851, he had not quite completed his seventieth year.
The best sketch of Kirkpatrick Sharpe in his prime is that given in Lockhart’s Life of Scott, in the form of an extract from Scott’s Diary, under the date of Sunday, the 20th November 1825. It chanced that William Clerk and Kirkpatrick Sharpe had dined with Scott that day in his house in Castle Street; and the Diary, after describing Clerk, thus describes the other:—
“Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was bred for a clergyman, but never took orders. He has infinite wit, and a great turn for antiquarian lore, as the publications of Kirkton, etc., bear witness. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll imaginable,—a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign masters who painted temptations of St. Anthony and other grotesque subjects. As a poet he has not a very strong touch. Strange that his finger-ends can describe so well what he cannot bring out clearly and firmly in words. If he were to make drawing a resource, it might raise him a large income. But, though a lover of antiquities, and therefore of expensive trifles, C. K. S. is too aristocratic to use his art to assist his revenue. He is a very complete genealogist, and has made detections in Douglas and other books on pedigree, which our nobles would do well to suppress if they had an opportunity. Strange that a man should be curious after scandal of centuries old! Not but Charles loves it fresh and fresh also; for, being very much a fashionable man, he is always master of the reigning report, and he tells the anecdote with such gusto that there is no helping sympathising with him,—a peculiarity of voice adding not a little to the general effect. My idea is that C. K. S., with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace Walpole; perhaps in his person also in a general way.”
This description, which C. K. S. must have himself read on its first appearance in Lockhart,[[47]] had to serve as a sufficient account of him for the general public so long as he lived, except in so far as it might be filled up by impressions from his own writings. After his death there were obituary sketches of him, of course, in the Edinburgh newspapers; and he figured posthumously, under the thin disguise of “Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq.,” as one of the typical Edinburgh bibliomaniacs so cleverly described by Hill Burton in his Book-Hunter, published in 1862. Not till 1869, however, was there any adequate commemoration of him. In that year there was published by Messrs. Blackwood a sumptuous large quarto entitled Etchings by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with Photographs from Original Drawings, Poetical and Prose Fragments, and a Prefatory Memoir. The volume sufficed in every respect for those who still felt an interest in Kirkpatrick Sharpe and his memory, save that it contained hardly any representation of his extensive epistolary correspondence. The defect has been amply supplied in the two large new volumes now before us. The Memoir which they contain is substantially a reproduction of that in the now scarce volume of 1869; but they consist chiefly of a selection of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s preserved letters, and of letters to him, through the long period of fifty-two years extending from 1798 to 1850. The careful editor, Mr. Allardyce, has erred rather by excess than by defect in his selection. A good many of the letters of Sharpe’s correspondents which he has thought worth giving might well have been spared. With that exception, however, the editing is admirable; and in the main, the collection is as variously amusing, and here and there as startlingly and laughably odd, as anything of the kind that has been published in Great Britain for many a day.
By far the largest proportion of the letters belong to what has been hitherto the least known period of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s life: to wit, the period preceding his definite settlement of himself in Edinburgh in 1813. From these, together with Mr. Bedford’s prefixed Memoir, we obtain the following facts:—
Born in 1781, at Hoddam Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the third son of Charles Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam, and with a pedigree, both on the father’s side and on the mother’s, of specially marked connections with some of the oldest houses of the Scottish aristocracy, and some of the most memorable events of Scottish history, the boy had grown up to his sixteenth year, one of a large family of well-educated brothers and sisters, imbibing the family tastes, and strongly influenced also by the traditions and legends of the antique family-dwelling itself, and of the adjacent scenery of that old West Border region. Drawing, howsoever learnt, must have been one of his earliest accomplishments; and one of the most interesting memories of his boyhood was that, in consequence of his father’s friendly relations with the poet Burns, he himself had seen and spoken with the poet familiarly more than once. It was in the winter after the poet’s death that Kirkpatrick Sharpe added to his home education by attending a class or two in the University of Edinburgh. The intention for the time, however, being that he should become an English clergyman, he was sent, in 1798, at the age of seventeen, to Christ Church, Oxford. Mainly here we see him for the next eight years, taking his B.A. degree in 1802 and his M.A. in 1806, and meanwhile forming intimacies with a select number of his young College and University coevals. Chief among these were Earl Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Viscount Newtown, afterwards Earl of Lanesborough, Lord Lewisham, afterwards Earl of Dartmouth, the Rev. J. J. Conybeare, afterwards Oxford Professor of Poetry, Mr. R. A. Inglis, afterwards the well-known Sir Robert Inglis, and Elijah B. Impey, son of the famous Indian Chief-Justice Impey. In the society of these, and of other young Oxonians, he seems to have made a strong mark, and to have been greatly liked,—a dandyish young fellow, but with eccentric ways and bookish tastes, a very shrill voice and abundant sarcasm in the use of it, no end of knowledge of art subjects, and an inimitable power of portrait-sketching and caricaturing. Incidents of the same college period at Oxford were some contributions by Sharpe to the Anti-Jacobin, and the beginning of his acquaintance with Scott, first by correspondence, and then personally. Through the next seven years, when he was passing out of his twenties into his thirties, we see him, though he still kept up his connection with Oxford and was occasionally in residence there, yet moving about a good deal,—sometimes at Hoddam, sometimes in Edinburgh, sometimes in London, but with frequent visits to the country-houses of his aristocratic friends. His habits of letter-writing were now at their briskest; and among his correspondents through those seven years, besides the Oxonian friends already mentioned, none of whom forgot him wherever he was, one notes the Margravine of Anspach, and her son, the Hon. Keppel Craven, the Marchioness of Stafford, the Countess of Dalkeith, the Count de Gramont, the Marchioness of Queensberry, Lady Charlotte Campbell (afterwards Lady Charlotte Bury), Miss Campbell of Monzie, and the Duchess of Buccleuch. What ended this desultory life of wandering and fashionable acquaintance-making in England was the death of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s father in 1813. The lairdship of Hoddam having then descended to the eldest son, General Matthew Sharpe,[[48]] the old Hoddam household was broken up, and Kirkpatrick Sharpe, at the age of thirty-two, began, on an allowance from his brother, that long residence in Edinburgh which has been sketched sufficiently already.
If we were to regard Kirkpatrick Sharpe as a kind of Scottish Horace Walpole, it would not be because his correspondence furnishes, to anything like the same extent as Walpole’s, a continuous comment of gossip on what was most central in the history of his time. Even the Edinburgh portion of it will disappoint, if what is looked for in it is a record of the most important occurrences in Edinburgh through the time traversed. Some of the most notable persons in the society of Edinburgh, and even in its literary society, between 1813 and 1851, are either barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The truth is that Kirkpatrick Sharpe moved through the world in a track, or in a series of tracks, determined by a few affinities of his own constitution, which led him sometimes into social companionship, but at other times left him stranded, and at leisure to find amusement in counting over the stray beads of past memories. Hence, though his correspondence does contain a good deal of historical gossip at intervals, its chief interest will be missed by those who read it only for that kind of recompense, and do not also find pleasure in it as a revelation of Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself.
Kirkpatrick Sharpe was, as we have hinted, a born Sir Mungo Malagrowther. From his first youth, whether in consequence or not of some constitutional peculiarity, such as might be supposed to be indicated by his thin and shrill voice,—by the bye, Sir Walter, when he introduces the original Sir Mungo in his Nigel, expressly notes that the voice of that original was “high-pitched and querulous,”—the lad of elegant accomplishments from Hoddam Castle was marked by a disposition to snarl at things, express shrill and sarcastic views of things, ventilate the absurdest little momentary animosities. In the very first of his letters, which is of date November 1798, and announces to his mother his entry into Christ Church College, his description of the young men of the college he has yet seen is that they “are all ugly, conceited, and putting themselves in postures like Mr. Don, and have the worst legs I ever beheld, crooked thirty different ways, east, west, north, south, that it is a very shame to be seen”; and in a later letter the Rev. Dr. Cyril Jackson, the head of the college, is described as “an inspired swine.” These irreverences and causticities, characteristic from the first of the conversation and the letters of a young fellow of indubitable natural talent otherwise, and of gentlemanly tastes and belongings, must, in fact, have been one cause of that zest for his society when it could be had, and for continued epistolary intercourse at other times, which was felt by so many of his college comrades of the most aristocratic set, and communicated by them to the seniors of their families. In English country-houses, and among great ladies, what more privileged person than the weak-voiced young Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with his witty cynicisms and budget of queer stories? And so to the end, with only the difference made by change of residence back to Scotland, increasing age, and increasing carelessness in dress,—always a privileged person, just because he was recognised as so amusing a Malagrowther. Here, from the abundance in the volumes before us, are a few of his characteristic Malagrowtherisms, arranged in the chronological order of their subjects:—
Character of the Countess of Mar, his own ancestress.—“Her good qualities were not proportioned, as is generally the case, to her rank. She basked all her life in the beams of royalty, with a pension from the Crown, and yet cultivated the Kirk, and hounded out her whelps to bark and bite in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant.”
Milton.—“I think Milton’s Paradise Lost a heap of blasphemy and obscenity, with, certainly, numberless poetical beauties. Milton was a Whig, and in my mind an Atheist. I am persuaded his poem was composed to apologise for the Devil, who certainly was the first Whig on record.”
Mrs. Siddons.—“I met Mrs. Siddons at dinner one day, just before the death of her spouse,—’twas at Walter Scott’s,—and you cannot imagine how it annoyed me to behold Belvidera guzzle boiled beef and mustard, swill streams of porter, cram up her nose with handfuls of snuff, and laugh till she made the whole room shake again.”
Madame de Stäel.—“Her face was that of a blackamoor attempted to be washed white. She wore a wig like a bunch of withered heather, and over that a turban which looked as if it had been put on in the dark; a short neck, and shoulders rising so much behind that they almost amounted to a hump. With all this ugliness all the airs of a beauty,—for ever tormenting her shawl into new draperies, and distorting her fingers as you see them in the ridiculous French portraits by Mignard and his followers.”
Queen Caroline.—“Her eyes projected, like those of the royal family. She made her head large by wearing an immense wig; she also painted her eyebrows, which gave her face a strange, fierce look. Her skin,—and she showed a great deal,—was very red. She wore very high-heeled shoes, so that she bent forward when she stood or walked: her feet and ankles were dreadful.”
Shelley.—“We have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here [at Oxford], before whom our former luminaries must hide their diminished heads,—a Mr. Shelley, of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hour’s sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson.”
The Rev. Dr. M’Crie.—“The villainous biographer of John Knox.” “That villain, Dr. M’Crie.”
The Rev. H. Philpotts (afterwards Bishop of Exeter).—“A hideous fellow of the name of Fillpot.”
Sir Walter Scott:—(1) First Sight of Scott at Oxford in 1803.—“The Border Minstrel paid me a visit some time since on his way to town, and I very courteously invited him to breakfast. He is dreadfully lame, and much too poetical. He spouts without mercy, and pays compliments so high-flown that my self-conceit, though a tolerable good shot, could not even wing one of them.” (2) Opinion of the Waverley Novels in 1839, seven years after Scott’s death.—“As to Sir Walter’s harmless romances,—not harmless, however, as to bad English,—they contain nothing: pictures of manners that never were, are, or will be, besides ten thousand blunders as to chronology, costume, etc. etc., which must mislead the million who admire such captivating comfits.”
Rachel and Jenny Lind.—“I have seen and heard Misses Rachel and J. Lind. The Jewess has a good voice,—far inferior, however, to that of Mrs. Siddons,—but an ungraceful and often vulgar action. As to Miss Jenny, she sings very prettily; but her highest note is a downright squall, and the buzz like a bee she can make (I have heard boys in Annandale do something like it) is a trick,—not music.”
These are specimens of what may be called the Malagrowtherism of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s disposition,—his readiness to snarl and snap at everything; but they leave unrepresented the two special forms of his Malagrowtherism which strike one most constantly and startlingly in his correspondence. Like Swift, one of his constitutional resemblances to whom was an extreme personal fastidiousness,—an extreme sensitiveness to anything about himself that was offensive to eye, ear, or nostril,—he tended, in a most inordinate degree, in his writings and letters, as if by revenge against this constitutional nicety, to descriptions and imaginations of the physically nasty; and, like Swift also, and probably from some similar radical cause, he tended, in a most inordinate degree, to sexual allusions, and to all scandals and speculations of the sexual order. Illustrations will not be expected here, but will be found in sufficient number in the volumes which Mr. Allardyce has edited. Mr. Allardyce has been a bold editor; for there are in the volumes passages of both the specified kinds that verge on the bounds of what many people nowadays might regard as the unpublishable. Some of these passages, it is curious to observe, occur in letters to Sharpe’s lady-correspondents; one or two of whom, it is also curious to remark, do not seem at all discomposed, but even,—those were the days of the Regency!—reciprocate with due elegance. The worst of the matter is that poor Sir Walter himself, honest man! does not escape uninvolved. In one or two frank moments, knowing his friend’s tastes, he had sent him communications which he thought would suit them; and lo! these now in printed black and white! Hurrah for old Peveril all the same! What can ever smirch him?
It would be wrong to leave our readers with the impression that Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe was nothing more than a Sir Mungo Malagrowther of the first half of the present century. At the back of his Malagrowtherism, as appears from plenty of testimony in these volumes, there was much gentlemanly courtesy, a good deal of kindliness and willingness to oblige, a highly cultivated critical judgment in minute matters of art and literature, a sensitiveness to whatever of the fine and poetical in Scottish tradition he could discern amid the gross and scandalous, and, most especially, a real sense of humour. In this last particular his fondness for little scraps of whimsical or nonsensical verse may be taken as a sure sign. There must have been some heart of intrinsic fun in the man who could go about in the streets, or sit alone in his room, repeating to himself, as we know he did, such scraps as these:—
“Yours till death, till death doth come,
And shut me up in the cold tum.”
“What is impossible can’t be,
And never, never comes to pass.”
“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,
Fatharalinkum feedle;
Mony better, few waur,
Fatharalinkum feedle.”
Above all, we must remember how many attached friends Kirkpatrick Sharpe had drawn around him in the course of his life, and how all that survived of the earliest of these kept up their liking for him, and an affectionate intercourse with him, to the last. In September 1831, when the dying Scott was departing on his final journey to the Mediterranean in quest of health, almost the last friend he wrote to was his “Dear Charles”: and the letter contained these words—“I should like to have shaken hands with you, as there are few I regret so much to part with. But it will not be. I will keep my eyes dry if possible, and therefore content myself with bidding you a long, perhaps an eternal, farewell.” That, surely, is a testimony by itself. All in all, then, need we wonder at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk umbrella?
JOHN HILL BURTON[[49]]
Dr. Hill Burton used to be a little annoyed by the praises bestowed on him for his Book-Hunter. He had written books far more laborious and important, he thought; and why should the public, why should his own friends even, be always paying him such special compliments on account of a mere piece of literary bye-play?
The feeling was natural on Dr. Burton’s part; and it is certainly not to this casual production of his, published originally in 1862, that one would now point as the most solid exhibition of his powers. Yet the public were not wrong in their extraordinary fondness for The Book-Hunter. Not only was it a book of deliciously amusing matter, such as one prays for on a dull evening or a rainy day; but it was pervaded, in an unusual degree, by the flavour of the author’s own peculiar character. If not the most valuable of Dr. Burton’s writings, it is the most thoroughly Burtonian. Hence a real propriety in the form of the present republication. If any one of Dr. Burton’s books was to be converted, by the care of his publishers, into a memorial of himself, and set forth, therefore, in all the beauties of quarto size, thick ribbed paper, wide margins, and gilt binding, and with the accompaniments of a portrait, illustrative vignettes, and a prefixed biography, which could it be but The Book-Hunter? Messrs. Blackwood have done well in perceiving this, and in making reaccessible such a famous book about books, unfortunately so long out of print, in a new edition devised so expressly, in the first place, for book-lovers of very æsthetic tastes and correspondingly superior purses.
No need at this time of day to revert to the book itself for description of the richly humorous variety of its contents, or for specification of the parts that are most fascinating and memorable. No need either to point out the errors into which the author sometimes fell in his hurry, and some of which remain in the present text,—as, for example, the extraordinary blunder of making Gilbert Rule “the founder and first Principal of the University of Edinburgh.” We prefer attending to what is really the most important, as well as the most charming, feature of distinction between this new edition of The Book-Hunter and the older and smaller editions. Biographic sketches of Dr. Burton, some of them in the shape of obituary notices, have already made the public acquainted with the main facts of his life; but there has been no such full, intimate, or interesting account of him as that furnished in the “Memoir of the Author” which opens the present volume, and bears the signature of his widow, “Katharine Burton.” Consisting of no fewer than 104 pages, and sketching the whole life with sufficient continuity, and with a pleasant abundance of personal detail, it is exactly the kind of biographical introduction that one would desire to see prefixed to the most characteristic work, or to the collected works, of any deceased author. We should have been grateful for so much information about Dr. Burton and his habits in whatever form it had been communicated; but the form itself deserves praise. Although there has been evidence of Mrs. Burton’s literary ability and skill in former writings of hers, in none of them has she been more successful than in this. The style is easy; and the narrative is managed throughout with an admirable combination of fidelity to fact, dutiful affection for the subject, and artistic perception of what is historically significant, or racy, or picturesque. One is struck, also, by the frank candour of the writer, her abstinence from exaggeration, her resolution that Dr. Burton should be seen in her pages exactly as he was. In two or three passages this honesty of the writer, so rare in biographies by relatives, comes upon the reader with the effect of a surprise.
In the first portion of the Memoir we are with young Burton in Aberdeen, where he was born in 1809, and where he mainly resided till 1830. We see him in his boyhood and early youth, growing up hardily among the quaint and old-fashioned domesticities of his maternal relatives, the Patons of Grandholm, or moving about between the two almost contiguous towns, the main Aberdeen and the smaller Old Aberdeen, that share the mouths of the Dee and the Don. By-the-bye, why does Mrs. Burton lavish all her affection on Old Aberdeen, calling it “a sweet, still, little place,” and dilating on the charms of its college and cathedral and antique streets, while she has nothing more to say for New Aberdeen than that it is “a highly prosperous commercial city, as utterly devoid of beauty or interest as any city under the sun”? About Old Aberdeen all will agree with her; but who that really knows the Granite City will agree with her about the New? Is it nothing to be able to walk along the whole length of her noble Union Street, whether on fair summer mornings, when the sun is shining, or again in the frosty winter nights, when the eye is held by the undulating perspective of the lamps, and the very houses glitter keenly in the starlight, and the aurora borealis is seen dancing at its best in the northward sky over the chasm from Union Bridge? Is it nothing to saunter down by the bustling quays and ship-yards, and thence to the extreme of the harbour, where the great out-jutting pier of stonework commands the miles of breakers and of sandy beach to the left, and spikes the wrath of the German Ocean?
To young Burton, at all events, these and other sights and experiences of his native city were by no means nothing. Familiar, like all other Aberdonians, with the quiet little old town of the Don, he was a nursling more peculiarly of the new town of the Dee,—historically the older town, after all. It was at the Grammar School of New Aberdeen that he received his first instruction in Latin; and, when he passed to the University, it was not to King’s College in Old Aberdeen, but to the amorphous hulk of a building, off the Broadgate, in the New Town, then famous as Marischal College and University, where Dugald Dalgetty had been educated long before him. For a while, indeed, it seemed as if Burton was to be a denizen of New Aberdeen all his days. Hardly had he left the University when he was apprenticed to an Aberdeen writer, and began the drudgery of officework, with a view to being an Aberdeen writer himself. Two passions, however, had already been developed in him, which made the prospect of such a life unendurably irksome. One was a passion for rambling about the country. To the last Dr. Burton was an indefatigable pedestrian, thinking nothing of a walk of fifty or even sixty miles in a day, over any tract of country and in any kind of weather; and the habit, Mrs. Burton tells us, and proves by letters, had been formed in his boyhood. Nothing more common with him then than to set off, in the holiday season, with a pound in his pocket, accomplish some incredible distance on that sum in the Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, or Morayshire Highlands, and reappear, draggled and footworn, when the sum was spent. His other passion was for literature. Letter-writing he disliked, and avoided as much as he could; but for every other purpose he had always a pen in his hand. Heaps of early manuscript of his, Mrs. Burton informs us, are yet extant, conspicuously weak in the spelling, but showing an extraordinary versatility of taste in the matter. He wrote verse as well as prose, drama as well as narrative, but had a special propensity to terrific prose-stories of the blood and murder sort. There were newspapers in Aberdeen, and even a magazine, at that date; and, where editors were so good-natured and not over-burdened, it was not difficult for a clever young scribbler to get a percentage of his writings into print. The Memoir does not give us particulars; but Aberdonian legend still preserves the memory of those old days when young Burton, young Joseph Robertson, young Spalding, and others, began their literary lives together, and had no higher ambition as yet than astonishing the Devanha and being read in the Gallowgate.
Released, by happy chance, from his detested Aberdeen writership, Burton came to Edinburgh in November 1830, at the age of one-and-twenty, and was able, by passing some forms of examination, which seem to have been easier and more rapid than the corresponding forms now, to qualify himself at once for the Scottish Bar. He was called in 1831; and from that date he was a citizen of Edinburgh, never leaving it save for one of his country rambles, or for an occasional visit to London or the Continent. From that date, too, his membership of the Bar leading to little or no practice, but only to more and more distinct recognition of him as one of the Whig politicians of the Parliament House, literature was his avowed profession.
The fifty years of Burton’s Edinburgh life are sketched for us in Mrs. Burton’s Memoir with chronological and topographical precision. The substance is as follows:—
The thirteen years of his continued bachelorship, from 1831 to 1844, when he was domiciled with his mother and sister, first in Warriston Crescent, and then in Howard Place, with a little summer cottage at Brunstane, were a period of extraordinary and most varied literary industry, chiefly anonymous. He wrote for newspapers and reviews; he wrote schoolbooks and other compilations; he wrote no one knows what or how much. “Dr. Burton’s whole resources at this time,” we are informed, “were derived from his pen.”
It was the same during the five years of his first married life, from 1844 to 1849, when he and his wife resided in Scotland Street, and then in Royal Crescent, his mother and sister having taken up house by themselves,—not at Brunstane, which was given up about this time,—but at Liberton Bank. It was during those five years, however, that, while still engaged in a great amount of miscellaneous hackwork, he emerged into independent authorship in his Life and Correspondence of David Hume, his Lives of Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, his Benthamiana, and his Political and Social Economy,—the last written for the Messrs. Chambers. This was the time, too, of his fullest relish for general companionship, his most frequent appearances at Edinburgh dinner tables, and perhaps his highest reputation for humorous sociability and powers of table talk.
The sad death of his wife in 1849, leaving him a widower in his fortieth year, with three young daughters, produced a change in that respect from which he never quite recovered. He was all but shattered by the blow, and went about for a time broken-hearted, shunning all ordinary society, and finding relief only in aimless walks by night and day, and in strenuous and solitary work. Through the whole of his widowerhood, in fact, he remained very much of a recluse, living laboriously with his children and his books, first in Castle Street and then in Ann Street, and having intercourse only with a few intimates: such as Joseph Robertson, John Ritchie, Alexander Russel and other Scotsman friends, and Professor Cosmo Innes. With the last of these, especially, he was in the habit of taking long Saturday and Sunday walks; which ended generally in his dining with the Innes family, the one guest at their table in Inverleith Row, of a Saturday or Sunday evening. This, we believe, was the time of the beginning of his important connection with Blackwood’s Magazine, as it was certainly of the publication of his Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland, his Treatise of the Law of Bankruptcy in Scotland, and his History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Rebellion. His appointment in 1854 to the Secretaryship of the Scottish Prisons Board, with a salary of £700 a year, made his circumstances easier, and at the same time provided him with that regular occupation in official business for so many hours every day which he thought desirable for any man of letters. The appointment caused him to remove to a largish, semi-rural house in Lauriston Place, backing on the Meadows, the site of which is now occupied by the Simpson Memorial Hospital.
In August 1855 he married his second wife,—the daughter of his friend Cosmo Innes, and writer of the present Memoir. As is natural, she devotes a considerable proportion of the Memoir to recollections of the subsequent six-and-twenty years of her husband’s life. Till March 1861 they remained in Lauriston Place,—where three more children were born to Dr. Burton, a son and two daughters; but in that month they entered on the tenancy of Craighouse, a quaint old-sixteenth century fortalice, near the Braid Hills, and two miles out of Edinburgh, on which they had set their hearts, partly for the charm of its own ruinous picturesqueness, partly for its historical associations with the reigns of Queen Mary and James VI., and partly on account of the singular beauty of the views in its vicinity. Here, having reduced the ruin into habitable and pleasant order, they lived till 1878, on the verge of the Edinburgh world, and sufficiently close to it for the daily business purposes of such an inveterate pedestrian as Burton, but still so much out of it that the recluse evening habits into which he had settled could be interrupted only when he chose, whether by the reception of a friend or two now and then under his own roof, or by the still rarer accident of a visit to some friend’s house in town.
Incidents of those seventeen years at Craighouse, besides the birth of his seventh child and youngest son, were his honorary graduation as LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh, his election to the membership of the Athenæum Club in London, his appointment to the dignity of the Historiographership-Royal for Scotland, and his honorary graduation as D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. These honours were successive acknowledgments of that growth of his literary reputation which had attended the appearance of such results of his continued industry for Blackwood as his Book-Hunter and his Scot Abroad, but, above all, the publication of his completed History of Scotland in eight volumes. Hardly had this last, his largest, work been finished when he projected his History of the Reign of Queen Anne.
That work, however, prosecuted slowly and intermittently, and requiring visits to London and to the Continent for its preparation, was not concluded in Craighouse, but in another country house, called Morton House, at the foot of the Pentland Hills, to which he was reluctantly obliged to remove in 1878, when a new speculation affecting the future property of Craighouse and its neighbourhood dispossessed him from that much-loved home. The last three years of his life, marked by the publication of his History of the Reign of Queen Anne, in three volumes, and then, as if in final farewell to authorship of any kind, by the sale of his library, were spent in this Morton House; and here he died in 1881. As he had by that time retired from his official duties in connection with the Prisons Board, and had few business occasions for being in Edinburgh, he was even more of a recluse at Morton than he had been before. Many of the younger Edinburgh generation, however, that knew nothing of him personally in his prime, must have a vivid recollection of casual glimpses of him in those still recent years, when his stooping, eccentric figure, very untidily dressed, and with the most battered and back-hanging of hats, would be seen pushing rapidly along Princes Street, or some other thoroughfare, with a look that seemed to convey the decided intimation: “Don’t stop me; I care for none of you.” But, if you did have a meeting with Burton in circumstances that made colloquy possible, he was the most kindly of men in his rough and unsophisticated way, with a quantity of the queerest and most entertaining old lore, and no end of good Scottish stories.
For the filling-out of this mere chronological scheme with the particulars that make it lively and interesting, the reader must go to Mrs. Burton’s own pages. She has judiciously interwoven her own narrative with a selection from the simple and chatty letters which, with all his dislike of letter-writing, he did punctually send to his family whenever he chanced to be absent from them. Of her account of his domestic habits, and of the singular honesty which tempers, as we have said, her affectionate estimate of his character all-in-all, the following sentences, strung together from different parts of the Memoir, will be a sufficient specimen here:—
“His defect in conversation was that he was a bad listener. His own part was well sustained. His enormous store of varied information poured forth naturally and easily, and was interspersed with a wonderful stock of lively anecdotes and jokes. But he always lacked that greatest power of the conversationalist, the subtle ready sympathy which draws forth the best powers of others. He was invaluable at a dull dinner-table, furnishing the whole frais de la conversation himself.... His mode of life at that time [during his residence at Lauriston Place and at Craighouse] was to repair to the office of the Prison Board, in George Street, about eleven. He remained there till four, and made it a matter of conscience neither to do any extra-official writing nor to receive visits during those hours.... Returning from his office to dinner at five, he would, after dinner, retire to the library for twenty minutes or half-an-hour’s perusal of a novel as mental rest. His taste in novels has been already described. Although he would read only those called exciting, they did not, apparently, excite him, for he read them as slowly as if he was learning them by heart. He would return to the drawing-room to drink a large cup of extremely strong tea, then retire again to the library to commence his day of literary work about eight in the evening. He would read or write without cessation, and without the least appearance of fatigue or excitement, till one or two in the morning.... Constitutionally irritable, energetic, and utterly persistent, Dr. Burton did not know what dulness or depression of spirits was. With grief he was indeed acquainted, and while such a feeling lasted it engrossed him; but his spirits were naturally elastic, and both by nature and on principle he discouraged in himself and others any dwelling on the sad or pathetic aspects of life. He has said that the nearest approach he had ever felt to low spirits was when he had finished some great work and had not yet begun another.... John Hill Burton can never have been handsome, and he so determinedly neglected his person as to increase its natural defects. His greatest mental defect was an almost entire want of imagination. From this cause the characters of those nearest and dearest to him remained to his life’s end a sealed book.... Dr. Burton was excessively kind-hearted within the limits placed by this great want. To any sorrow or suffering which he could understand he craved with characteristic impatience to carry immediate relief; and the greatest enjoyment of his life, especially of its later years, was to give pleasure to children, poor people, or the lower animals. Many humble folks will remember the bunches of flowers he thrust silently into their hands, and the refreshment he never failed to press on their acceptance in his own peculiar manner. He was liberal of money to a fault. He never refused any application even from a street beggar.... No printer’s devil or other chance messenger failed to receive his sixpence or shilling, besides a comfortable meal.... Many of the ‘motley crew’ along with whom Dr. Burton received his education fell into difficulties in the course of their lives. Application from one of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired. In his earlier life he would also spare no trouble in endeavouring to help these unfortunates to help themselves. As he grew older he was less zealous, probably from being less sanguine of success, in this service.”
The illustrations that accompany the Memoir deserve a word. The portrait of Dr. Burton, etched by Mr. W. B. Hole, A.R.S.A., after a photograph, and representing him walking away, with a book in his hand, from an old book-stall near Candlemaker Row, is done to the life, slightly tidied perhaps in the look of the costume, but catching his gait and the keen expression of his eyes and face with wonderful fidelity. Very faithful and pleasing, also, are the vignettes of Craighouse Avenue and Craighouse itself, the view of a nook in the library of Craighouse, and the vignette of Dalmeny Churchyard, where Dr. Burton lies buried, all drawn by his daughter Miss Rose Burton, and engraved by her sister Miss E. P. Burton.
DR. JOHN BROWN OF EDINBURGH[[50]]
Since the last session of our University, Edinburgh has lost two of her citizens of literary mark. Dr. John Brown died, in his house in Rutland Street, on the 11th of May, in the seventy-second year of his age; and his friend, Dr. William Hanna, died in London on the 24th of the same month, aged seventy-three. They were both buried in Edinburgh. As I had the honour of knowing them both well, I cannot let the present occasion pass without asking you to join with me in remembering them affectionately. I could say much to you of Dr. Hanna, the son-in-law and biographer of Dr. Chalmers. I could dwell on the merits of his Life of that great man and of his other well-known works, and on his fine liberality of intellect and the keen and warm geniality of his Scoto-Irish heart. In this place, however, it is naturally of Dr. John Brown that I feel myself entitled to speak at some length. He was, in a sense, during the latter part of his life, peculiarly our Edinburgh man of letters, the man most fondly thought of in that character by many people at a distance. They had begun, long before his death, to call him “The Scottish Charles Lamb”; and the name is applied to him still by English critics.
Born at Biggar in Lanarkshire, in 1810, the son of the Secession minister of that town, and of a family already in the third generation of its remarkable distinction in the Scottish religious world as “The Browns of Haddington,” our friend came to Edinburgh in 1822, when he was twelve years old. His father had then removed from Biggar, to assume that pastorate of the Rose Street Secession Church in this city in which, and subsequently in his ministry in the Broughton Place Church, and in his Theological Professorship in connection with the Associate Synod, he attained his celebrity. When I first knew Edinburgh there was no more venerable-looking man in it than this Dr. John Brown of Broughton Place Church. People would turn in the streets to observe his dignified figure as he passed; and strangers who went to hear him preach were struck no less by the beauty of his appearance in the pulpit, the graceful fall of the silver locks round his fine head and sensitive face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his doctrine. At that time, the phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if used in any part of Scotland away from the metropolis, would have been taken as designating this venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and not his son.
The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known within Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the High School and the University, and having chosen the medical profession, and been apprenticed for some time to the famous surgeon, Syme, he had taken his degree of M.D. in 1833, and had then,—with no other previous medical experience out of Edinburgh than a short probation among the sailors at Chatham,—settled down permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice. From that date, therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own first recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor and the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I have said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” par excellence, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger with its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age, with some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him at that time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his father, with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant manner, the husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and greatly liked and sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which he and she appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid temperament and conversation, and partly because of a reputation for literary ability that had been recently gathering round him on account of occasional semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers and periodicals, chiefly art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of “The Browns of Haddington” had, in this fourth generation of them, turned itself out of the strictly theological direction, to work in new ways. While Dr. Samuel Brown, a younger cousin of our Dr. John, had been astonishing Edinburgh by his brilliant speculations in Chemistry, Dr. John himself, in the midst of what medical practice came in his way, had been toying with Literature. Toying only it had been at first, and continued to be for a while; but, by degrees,—and especially after 1847, when the editorship of the North British Review, which had been founded in 1844, passed into the hands of his friend Dr. Hanna,—his contributions to periodical literature became more various and frequent. At length, in 1858, when he was forty-eight years of age, and had contributed pretty largely to the periodical named and to others, he came forth openly as an author, by publishing a volume of what he called his Horæ Subsecivæ, consisting mainly of medical biographies and other medico-literary papers collected from the said periodicals, but including also his immortal little Scottish idyll called “Rab and His Friends.” His father had died in that year, so that thenceforward, if people chose, the designation “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” could descend to the son without ambiguity.
And it did so descend. For eleven years before that appearance of the first collection of his Horæ Subsecivæ, with “Rab and His Friends” included in it, I had been resident in London, and I remained there for seven years more. During all those eighteen years, therefore, my direct opportunities of cultivating his acquaintance had ceased; and, while I could take note through the press of the growth of his literary reputation, it was only by hearsay at a distance, or by a letter or two that passed between us, or by a glimpse of him now and then when I came north on a visit, that I was kept aware of his Edinburgh doings and circumstances. Not till the end of 1865, when I resumed residence in Edinburgh, were we brought again into close neighbourhood and intercourse. Then, certainly, I found him, at the age of five-and-fifty, as completely and popularly our “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” in the new sense as ever his father had been in the old one. His pen had been still busy in newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging away more and more from the medical; another volume of his Horæ Subsecivæ, or collected articles, had been published; and some of his papers, selected from that volume or its predecessor, or taken more directly from the manuscript, had been brought out separately, in various forms, under the discerning care of his friend and publisher, Mr. David Douglas, and had been in circulation almost with the rapidity of one of the serial parts of a novel by Dickens. Of both his Minchmoor and his Jeems the Doorkeeper more than 10,000 copies had been sold; his Pet Marjorie had passed the sale of 15,000 copies; and Rab and His Friends was already in its 50th thousand.
With all this applause beating in upon him from the reading public, in Scotland, in England, and in America, there he still was in his old Edinburgh surroundings: a widower now for some years, domesticated with his two children, and more solitary in his habits than he had been; but to be seen walking along Princes Street of a forenoon, or sometimes at some hospitable dinner-table of an evening, always the same simple, wise, benevolent, lovable, and much-loved Dr. John. And so for sixteen years more, and to the very end. The sixties crept upon him after the fifties, and the white touch of the first seventies followed, and the vivid darkish-haired Dr. John of my first memory had changed into the bald-headed and spectacled veteran you may see in the later photographs,—the spectacles before his fine eyes if he were looking to the front, but raised over the placid forehead if he were looking downwards at a print or a book. But these changes had come softly, and with a mellowing rather than withering effect; and, as late as last winter, what veteran was there in our community whose face and presence in any company was more desired or gave greater pleasure? If a stranger of literary tastes visited Edinburgh, about whom did he inquire more curiously, or whom was he more anxious to see, if possible, than Dr. John Brown? We knew, most of us, that his calm face concealed sorrows; we remembered his long widowerhood; we were aware too of the occasional glooms and depressions that withdrew him from common society; but, when he did appear among us, whether in any public gathering or in more private fashion, how uniformly cheerful he was, how bright and sunny! It has been stated, in one obituary notice of him, that his medical practice declined as his literary reputation increased. I doubt the truth of the statement, and imagine that the reverse might be nearer the truth. To the end he loved his profession; to the end he practised it; to the end there were not a few families, in and about Edinburgh, who would have no other medical attendant, if they could help it, than their dear and trusted Dr. John. My impression rather is that he was wrapt up in his profession more and more in his later days, using his pen only for a new trifle now and then as the whim struck him, and content in the main with the continued circulation of his former writings or their reissue in new shapes. It was on the 12th of April in the present year, or only a month before his death, that he put the last prefatory touch to the first volume of that new edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ in three volumes in which his complete literary remains are now accessible.
The title Horæ Subsecivæ, borrowed by Dr. John from the title-pages of some old volumes of the minor English literature of the seventeenth century, indicates, and was intended to indicate, the nature of his writings. They are all “Leisure Hours,” little things done at times snatched from business. There are between forty and fifty of them in all, none of them long, and most of them very short. It is vain in his case to repeat the regret, so common in similar cases, that the author did not throw his whole strength into some one or two suitable subjects, and produce one or two important works. By constitution, I believe, no less than by circumstances, Dr. John Brown was unfitted for large and continuous works, and was at home only in short occasional papers. One compensation is the spontaneity of his writings, the sense of immediate throb and impulse in each. Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a moment of himself, and we can read his own character in the collected series.
A considerable proportion of his papers, represented most directly by his Plain Lectures on Health addressed to Working People, his little essay entitled Art and Science, and his other little essays called Excursus Ethicus and Education through the Senses, but also by his Locke and Sydenham and others of his sketches of eminent physicians, are in a didactic vein. Moreover, they are all mainly didactic on one string. When these papers are read, it is found that they all propound and illustrate one idea, which had taken such strong hold of the author that it may be called one of his characteristics. It is the idea of the distinction or contrast between the speculative, theoretical, or scientific habit of mind, and the practical or active habit. In medical practice and medical education, more particularly, Dr. John Brown thought there had come to be too much attention to mere science, too much faith in mere increase of knowledge and in exquisiteness of research and apparatus, and too little regard for that solid breadth of mind, that soundness of practical observation and power of decision in emergencies, that instinctive or acquired sagacity, which had been conspicuous among the best of the older physicians. As usual, he has put this idea into the form of humorous apologue:—
A DIALOGUE.
Scene.—Clinical wards of Royal Infirmary. The Physician and his Clerk loquuntur.
John Murdoch, in the clinical ward with thoracic aneurism of the aorta, had at his bedside a liniment of aconite, etc. Under the stress of a paroxysm of pain, he drank it off, and was soon dead.
Physician.—Well, Sir, what about Murdoch? Did you see him alive?
Clerk.—Yes, Sir.
Physician.—Did you feel his pulse?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you examine his eyes?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you observe any frothing at the mouth and nose?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you count his respirations?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Then, Sir, what the d——l did you do?
Clerk.—I ran for the stomach-pump.
Dr. John was never tired of inculcating this distinction; it is the backbone of almost all those papers of his that have been just mentioned, and it reappears in others. In his special little essay called Art and Science he formulates it thus:—
IN MEDICINE
Science
Looks to essence and cause.
Is diagnostic.
Has a system.
Is post-mortem.
Looks to structure more than function.
Studies the phenomena of poisoning.
Submits to be ignorant of nothing.
Speaks.
Art
Looks to symptoms and occasions.
Is therapeutic and prognostic.
Has a method.
Is ante-mortem.
Looks to function more than structure.
Runs for the stomach-pump.
Submits to be ignorant of much.
Acts.
Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here represented, we should, doubtless, all agree with our friend. We should all, for ourselves, in serious illness, infinitely prefer the attendance of any tolerable physician of the therapeutic and prognostic type to that of the ablest of the merely diagnostic type, especially if we thought that the genius of the latter inclined him to a post-mortem examination. Hence we may be disposed to think that Dr. John did good service in protesting against the run upon science, ever new science, in the medicine of his day, and trying to hark back the profession to the good old virtues of vigorous rule of thumb. What I detect, however, underneath all his expositions of this possibly salutary idea, and prompting to his reiterations of it, is something deeper. It is a dislike in his own nature to the abstract or theoretical in all matters whatsoever. Dr. John Brown’s mind, I should say, was essentially anti-speculative. His writings abound, of course, with tributes of respect to science and philosophy, and expressions of astonishment and gratitude for their achievements; but it may be observed that the thinkers and philosophers to whom he refers most fondly are chiefly those older magnates, including Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Bishop Butler among the English, whose struggle was over long ago, whose results are an accepted inheritance, and who are now standards of orthodoxy. All later drifts of speculative thought, and especially the latest drifts of his own day, seem to have made him uncomfortable. He actually warns against them as products of what he calls “the lust of innovation.” This is a matter of so much consequence in the study of Dr. John Brown’s character that it ought not to be passed over lightly.
There can be no doubt that his dislike of the purely speculative spirit, and especially of recent speculation of certain kinds, was rooted in some degree in the fine devoutness of his nature, his unswerving fidelity to his inherited religion. The system of beliefs which had been consecrated for him so dearly and powerfully by the lives and example of his immediate progenitors was still substantially that with which he went through the world himself, though it had been softened in the course of transmission, stripped of its more angular and sectarian features, and converted into a contemplative Religio Medici, not unlike that of his old English namesake, the philosopher and physician of Norwich. Like that philosopher, for whom he had all the regard of a felt affinity, he delighted in an O altitudo!, craved the refuge of an O altitudo! in all the difficulties of mere reason, and held that in that craving itself there is the sure gleam for the human spirit of the one golden key that unlocks those difficulties. A difference, however, between him and old Browne of Norwich is that he had much less of clear and definite thought, of logical grasp of prior propositions and reasonings, with which to prepare for an altitudo, justify it, and prop it up. Take as a specimen a passage relating to that very distinction between Art and Science which he valued so much:—
“It may be thought that I have shown myself, in this parallel and contrast, too much of a partisan of Art as against Science, and the same may be not unfairly said of much of the rest of this volume. It was in a measure on purpose,—the general tendency being counteractive of the purely scientific and positive, or merely informative, current of our day. We need to remind ourselves constantly that this kind of knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that buildeth up. It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God, and we may as truly say that all Art,—in the widest sense, as practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows all that goes to the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense, the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius Cæsar and Plato, what we know them to have been; and they are His by the same right as the sea is His, and the strength of the hills, for He made them and His hands formed them, as well as the dry land. This making the circle for ever meet, this bringing Omega eternally round to Alpha, is, I think, more and more revealing itself as a great central, personal, regulative truth, and is being carried down more than ever into the recesses of physical research, where Nature is fast telling her long-kept secrets: all her tribes speaking, each in their own tongue, the wonderful works of God,—the sea saying ‘It is not in me,’ everything giving up any title to anything like substance, beyond being the result of one Supreme Will. The more chemistry, and electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most remorseless experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that motive power and force, as manifested to us, is derived, is in its essence immaterial, is direct from Him in whom we live and move, and to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power.”
This is fine, it is eloquent, it is likeable; but one cannot call it lucid. Indeed, if interpreted literally, it is incoherent, for the end contradicts the beginning. “Abstain from excess of theory or speculation,” it substantially says, “for theory and speculation, when prosecuted to the very utmost, lead to a profound religiousness.” This is the only verbal construction of the passage; but it is the very opposite of what was meant.
It is much the same with Dr. John Brown in smaller matters. If he wants a definition or a distinction on any subject, he generally protests first against the desire for definitions and distinctions, maintaining the superiority of healthy practical sense and feeling over mere theory; then he produces, in his own words, some “middle axiom,” or passable first-hand notion on the subject, as sufficient for the purpose if anything theoretical is wanted; and then he proceeds to back this up by interesting quotations from favourite and accredited authors. In short, Dr. John Brown lived in an element of the “middle propositions,” the accredited axioms, on all subjects, and was impatient of reasoning, novelty of theory, or search for ultimate principles. It is but the same thing in another form,—though it deserves separate statement,—to say that he disliked controversy. He shrank from controversy in all matters, social as well as intellectual; was irritated when it came near him; and kept rather on the conservative side in any new “cause” or “movement” that was exciting his neighbourhood. Perhaps the most marked exception in his writings to this disposition to rest in existing social arrangements, and also to his prevailing dislike of speculation, was his assertion of his unhesitating assent to that extreme development of Adam Smith’s doctrines which would abolish the system of state-licensing for particular professions, or at all events for the profession of Medicine. He advocates this principle more than once in his papers, and he signifies his adherence to it in almost the last words he wrote. “I am more convinced than ever,” he says in the prefatory note to the collected edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ, “of the futility and worse of the Licensing System, and think, with Adam Smith, that a mediciner should be as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a mole-catcher. The public has its own shrewd way of knowing who should build its house or catch its moles, and it may quite safely be left to take the same line in choosing its doctor.” This is bold enough, and speculative enough; but the fact is that this acceptance of the principle of absolute laissez-faire, or non-interference of the state, or any other authority, in Medicine, or in any analogous art or craft, was facilitated for him by his hereditary Voluntaryism in Church matters, and indeed came to him ready-made in that form. What is surprising, and what corroborates our view of the essentially non-theoretical character of his intellect, is the unsystematic manner in which he was content to hold his principle, his failure to carry it out consistently, his apparent inability to perceive the full sweep of its logical consequences. Thus, to the words just quoted he appends these,—“Lawyers, of course, are different, as they have to do with the state, with the law of the land.” Was there ever a more innocent non sequitur? If any one may set up as a curer of diseases and make a living in that craft by charging fees from those who choose to employ him, why may not any one set up as a lawyer, and why may not I select and employ any one I please to plead my cause in court, instead of being bound to employ one of a limited number of wigged and gowned gentlemen?
If, then, it was not in theory or speculation that Dr. John Brown excelled,—and that there was no deficiency of hereditary speculative faculty in his family, but much the reverse, is proved not only by the theological distinction of his predecessors in the family, and by the brilliant career of his cousin, Dr. Samuel Brown, but also by the reputation among us at this moment of his still nearer relative, the eminent Philosophical Chemist of Edinburgh University,—in what was it that he did excel? It was in what I may call an unusual appreciativeness of all that did recommend itself to him as good and admirable. In few men has there been such a fulfilment of the memorable apostolic injunction: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,—if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,—think on these things.” The context of that passage shows that what was enjoined on the Philippians was a habit of meditative and ruminative appreciation of all that was noteworthy, of every variety, within accredited and prescribed limits. Dr. John Brown was a model in this respect. Within the limits of his preference for the concrete and practical over the abstract and theoretical, he was a man of peculiarly keen relish for anything excellent, and of peculiar assiduity in imparting his likings to others.
His habit of appreciativeness is seen, on the small scale, even in such a matter as his appropriation and use of pithy phrases and anecdotes picked up miscellaneously. “‘Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your colours with?’ said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter. ‘With brains, sir,’ was the gruff reply.” Having met this story in some Life of the painter Opie, Dr. John Brown had fastened on it, or it had adhered to him; and not only did he hang one whole paper on it, entitled With Brains, Sir, but he made it do duty again and again in other papers. At times when Dr. Chalmers happened to be talked to about some person not already known to him, and was told that the person was a man of ability, “Yes, but has he wecht, Sir, has he wecht?” was his common question in reply; and, as Dr. John Brown had also perceived that it is not mere cleverness that is effective in the world, and that weight is the main thing, he was never tired of bringing in Dr. Chalmers’s phrase to enforce that meaning. When Dr. John wanted to praise anything of the literary kind as being of the most robust intellectual quality, not food for babes but very “strong meat” indeed, he would say “This is lions’ marrow.” As he was not a man to conceal his obligations, even for a phrase, we learn from him incidentally that he had taken the metaphor originally from this passage in one of the pieces of the English poet Prior:—
“That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lions’ marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread.”
Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms, picked up from books or conversation, which he liked to use as flavouring particles for his own text. He dealt largely also in extracts and quotations of greater length. Any bit that struck him as fine in a new book of verses, any scrap of old Scottish ballad not generally known, any interesting little poem by a friend of his own that he had seen in manuscript, or any similar thing communicated to him as not having seen the light before, was apt to be pounced upon, stamped with his imprimatur, and turned into service in his own papers, as motto, relevant illustration, or pleasant addition. His fondness for quotation from his favourite prose authors has already been mentioned. In fact, some of his papers are little more than patches of quotations connected by admiring comments. In such cases it is as if he said to his readers, “How nice this is, how capital! don’t you agree with me?” Sometimes you may not quite agree with him, or you may wish that he had thrown fewer quotations at you, and had said more on the subject out of his own head; but you always recognise his appreciativeness.
On the larger scale of the papers themselves the same appreciativeness is discernible. Take first the papers which are most in the nature of criticisms. Such are those entitled Henry Vaughan, Arthur H. Hallam, Thackeray’s Death, Notes on Art, John Leech, Halle’s Recital, and Sir Henry Raeburn. Whether in the literary papers of this group, or in the art papers, you can see how readily and strongly Dr. John Brown could admire, and what a propagandist he was of his admirations. If Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the quaint and thoughtful English poet of the seventeenth century, is now a better known figure in English literary history than he was a generation ago, it is owing, I believe, in some measure, to Dr. John Brown’s resuscitation of him. So, when Tennyson’s In Memoriam appeared in 1850, and all the world was moved by that extraordinary poem, who but Dr. John Brown could not rest till he had ascertained all that was possible about young Arthur Hallam, by obtaining a copy of his “Remains in Verse and Prose,” privately printed in 1834, with a memoir by the author’s father, Hallam the historian, and till he had been permitted to give to the public, in liberal extracts from the memoir, and by quotation from the pieces themselves, such an authentic account of Tennyson’s dead friend as all were desiring? The paper called Thackeray’s Death, though the only paper on Thackeray now to be found among Dr. John Brown’s collected writings, is by no means, I believe, the only paper he wrote on Thackeray. If there was a Thackeray-worshipper within the British Islands, it was Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. Thackeray was his greatest man by far, after Scott, or hardly after Scott, among our British novelists,—his idol, almost his demigod; he had signified this, if I mistake not, in an article on Thackeray while Thackeray’s fame was still only in the making; and the particular paper now left us is but a re-expression of this high regard for Thackeray as an author, blended with reminiscences of his own meetings with Thackeray in Edinburgh, and testimonies of his warm affection for the man. Another of his chief admirations was Ruskin. I can remember how, when the first volume of the Modern Painters appeared, the rumour of it ran at once through Edinburgh, causing a most unusual stir of interest in the new book, and in the extraordinary “Oxford Graduate” who was its author; and I am pretty sure now that it was Dr. John Brown that had first imported the book among us, and had enlightened Dr. Chalmers and others as to its merits. There is no article on Ruskin among the collected papers; but there are frequent references to him, and his influence can be discerned in all the Art-criticisms. These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are expounded or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as it were, before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen, some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—exclaiming “How good this is, how true, how powerful, how pathetic!” while he attends to the direct human interest of the subject, interprets the story of the picture in his own way, and throws in kindly anecdotes about the painter. It is the same, mutatis mutandis, for music, in his notices of pieces by Beethoven and others, as heard at Halle’s concerts. His most elaborate paper of Art-criticism is that entitled John Leech. It is throughout a glowing eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man, on his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed incorporating reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been supplied him by a friend of both as material for a projected Memoir of Leech on a larger scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here and there in some of the others, the query may suggest itself whether the laudation is not excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good Dr. John was not carried away by the amiable fault of supposing that what happens to be present before one of a decidedly likeable kind at any moment, especially if it be recommended by private friendship, must be the very nonsuch of its kind in the whole world. Another query forced on one is whether there did not sometimes lurk under Dr. John’s superlative admiration of a chief favourite in any walk an antipathy to some other in the same walk. It is told of Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of Junius, that, when he was an old man, he gave this counsel to a promising young member of the House of Commons whom he had heard deliver a speech distinguished by the generosity of its praises of some of his fellow-members,—“Young man, take my advice; never praise anybody unless it be in odium tertii,” i.e. “unless it be to the discredit of some third party.” No man ever acted less in the spirit of this detestable, this truly diabolic, advice than Dr. John Brown; and one’s question rather is whether he did not actually reverse it by never attacking or finding fault with any one unless it were in laudem tertii, to the increased credit of some third party. Whether he was so actuated, consciously or unconsciously, in his declaration of irreconcilable dislike to Maclise, and his exceptionally severe treatment of that artist, I will not venture to say; but I can find no other sufficient explanation of his habitual depreciation of Dickens. His antipathy to Dickens, his resentment of any attempted comparison between Dickens and Thackeray, was proverbial among his friends, and amounted almost to a monomania.
While, as will have been seen, Dr. John was by no means insensible to impressions from anything excellent coming from besouth the Tweed, it was naturally in his own Scotland, and among the things and persons immediately round about him there, that his faculty of appreciation revelled most constantly. With the majority of his literary fellow-countrymen that have attained popularity in Scotland during the last fifty years, he derived many of his literary instincts from the immense influence of “Scotticism” which had been infused into the preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of themes, following reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He reminds one somewhat of Aytoun in this respect, though with a marked Presbyterian difference. Most of his papers are on Scottish subjects; and in some of them, such as his Queen Mary’s Child-Garden, his Minchmoor, the paper called The Enterkin, that entitled A Jacobite Family, and that entitled Biggar and the House of Fleming, we have descriptions of Scottish scenes and places very much in the spirit of Sir Walter, though by no means slavishly so, with notes of their historical associations, and recovery of local legends, romances, and humours. In a more original vein, though also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be described as memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than the three or four already referred to as combining memoir with criticism. By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own Father, in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. John Cairns, and published under the too vague title of Letter to John Cairns, D.D. It is a really beautiful piece of writing, not only full of filial affection, and painting for us his father’s life and character with vivid fidelity, but also interesting for its reminiscences of the author’s own early years, and its sketches of several eminent ministers of the Scottish Secession communion whom he had known as friends of his father. The paper entitled Dr. Chalmers, though not particularly good, attests the strength of the impression made by that great man on Dr. John Brown, as on every one else that knew Dr. Chalmers. Better, and indeed fine, though slight, are Edward Forbes, Dr. George Wilson, The Duke of Athole, Struan, and Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune. On the whole, however, the most characteristic papers of the Memoir class are those of Medical Biography, including Locke and Sydenham, Dr. Andrew Combe, Dr. Henry Marshall and Military Hygiene, Our Gideon Grays, Dr. Andrew Brown and Sydenham, Dr. Adams of Banchory, Dr. John Scott and His Son, Mr. Syme, and Sir Robert Christison. Sydenham was Dr. John Brown’s ideal of a physician, and his account of that English physician and of his place in the history of medicine is of much value. The medical profession is indebted to him also for his warm-hearted vindication of those whom he calls, after Scott, “Our Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for the justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class as the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical reformers as Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially interesting to us here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and Christison, so recently the ornaments of the Medical School of Edinburgh University. He threw his whole heart into his sketch of Syme, his admiration of whom, dating from the days when he had been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in surgery, had been increased by life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell a little on this sketch, the rather because it reminds me of perhaps the only occasion on which I was for some hours in the society of Syme and Dr. John Brown together.
In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our University, and in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded, on account of some little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and put himself under the care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment. Syme, proud of such a patient, and resolved that he should have his best skill, would hear of no other arrangement than that Carlyle should be his guest for the necessary time. For a fortnight or more, accordingly, Carlyle resided with Syme in his beautiful house of Millbank in the southern suburb of our city. Pains were taken to prevent the fact from becoming known, that Carlyle might not be troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was convalescent, there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet him. Besides Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s family, there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at him as a being of another genus than his own, but whom he had found as lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was no “tossing and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-room at all events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and that. After dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the talk was continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle having most of it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his old friend David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had just privately printed of the rare Gude and Godly Ballates by the brothers Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle, taking up the volume from the table, would dip into it here and there, and read some passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One piece of fourteen stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with excellent chaunt and pronunciation of the old Scotch. Here are three of the stanzas:—
“Thocht thow be Paip or Cardinall,
Sa heich in thy Pontificall,
Resist thow God that creat all,
Than downe thou sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow be Archebischop or Deane,
Chantour, Chanslar, or Chaplane,
Resist thow God, thy gloir is gane,
And downe thow sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow flow in Philosophie,
Or graduate in Theologie,
Yit, and thow fyle the veritie,
Than downe thow sall cum, downe.”
Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to the low trellised verandah on the south side of the house, opening on the beautiful garden of flowers and evergreens in which Syme took such delight. It was a fine, still evening; and, as the talk went on in the open air, with the garden stretching in front of us and the views of the hills beyond, only with the accompaniment now of wreaths of tobacco-smoke, Syme, who disliked tobacco, was smilingly tolerant even of that accompaniment, in honour of the chief smoker.
For more than twelve years after that evening, which I remember now like a dream, Carlyle was still in the land of the living, advancing from his seventy-third year to his eighty-sixth; but hardly a year of the twelve had elapsed when the great surgeon who had entertained him, and who was so much his junior, was struck by the paralysis which carried him off. It is from Dr. John Brown that we have this touching record of Syme’s last days:—
“I was the first to see him when struck down by hemiplegia. It was in Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying his evenings in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its matchless orchids and heaths and azaleas, its bananas and grapes and peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion saw the Scottish host mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with Cairketton Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry scaur holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before said, in his room in Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having been set up by his faithful Blackbell. His face was distorted. He said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his, and our, and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly fortitude, but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime, full of rich power, abler than ever to do good to men, his soul surviving his brain, and looking on at its steady ruin during many sad months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily moved, even to tears; but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the core, remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing good to men, of seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the front of the world,—how he accepted all this only those nearest him can know. I have never seen anything more pathetic than when, near his death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind, and made known in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he wished to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The big, clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever getting prizes at the Horticultural), brought it,—the Stanhopea Tigrina,—in without a word. It was the very one,—radiant in beauty, white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole, and, like it, ‘right proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”
To have been such a chronicler of the excellent as Dr. John Brown was required more than endowment, however extraordinary, in any mere passive quality of appreciativeness. It required the poetic eye, the imaginative faculty in its active form, the power of infusing himself into his subject, the discernment and subtlety of a real artist. Visible to some extent in his criticisms of books and pictures, and also in his memoirs and character-sketches, and in a still higher degree in those papers of local Scottish description, legend, and reminiscence to which I have already referred,—Queen Mary’s Child Garden, Minchmoor, The Enterkin, A Jacobite Family, and Biggar and the House of Fleming,—this rising of sympathetic appreciation into poetic art and phantasy appears most conspicuously of all in those papers or parts of papers in which the matter is whimsical or out of the common track. Perhaps it is his affection for out-of-the-way subjects, evident even in the titles of some of his papers, that has led to the comparison of Dr. John Brown with Charles Lamb. Like that English humourist, he did go into odd corners for his themes,—still, however, keeping within Scottish ground, and finding his oddities, whether of humour or of pathos, in native Scottish life and tradition. Or rather, by his very appreciativeness, he was a kind of magnet to which stray and hitherto unpublished curiosities, whether humorous or pathetic, floating in Scottish society, attached themselves naturally, as if seeking an editor. In addition to the illustrations of this furnished by the already-mentioned papers of Scottish legend, or by parts of them, one may mention now his paper entitled The Black Dwarf’s Bones, that entitled Mystifications, his Marjorie Fleming or Pet Marjorie, his Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the quaint little trifle entitled Oh! I’m wat, wat. In the first three of these Dr. John Brown is seen distinctly as the editor of previously unpublished curiosities. There were relics of information respecting that strange being, David Ritchie, the deformed misanthropist of Peeblesshire, who had been the original of one of Scott’s shorter novels. These came to Dr. John Brown, and he strung them together, extracts and quotations, on a thread of connecting narrative. Again, having had the privilege of knowing intimately that venerable Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune who is the subject of one of his memorial sketches, and who used to reside in Edinburgh every winter till within a few years of her death in 1877 at the age of ninety-five, who but Dr. John Brown first persuaded the venerable lady to give to the world her recollections of her marvellous dramatic feats in her earlier days, when she used to mystify Scott, and Jeffrey, and Lord Gillies, and John Clerk of Eldin, and Count Flahault, and whole companies of their contemporaries in Edinburgh drawing-rooms, by her disguised appearances in the dress and character of an eccentric old Scottish gentlewoman; and who but Dr. John immortalised the tradition by telling her story over again, and re-imagining for us the whole of that Edinburgh society of 1820–21 in which Miss Stirling Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten years before that, or in December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a little girl of a family with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and who lived near him. She was but in her ninth year; but for several years she had been the pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours and abilities, her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint genius in her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in verse. Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor little “Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her. One sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing, tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely tender Pet Marjorie or Marjorie Fleming,—the gem in its kind among all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in our language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr. John Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even in that view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were more such editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered the long-dead little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper, though consisting largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly his own as any of the rest. But, should there be a disposition still with some to distinguish between editing and invention, and to regard Mystifications and Marjorie Fleming as merely well-edited curiosities of a fascinating kind, no such distinction will trouble one who passes to Jeems the Doorkeeper. A real person, as the writer tells us, sat for that sketch too, and we have a portrait of the actual Jeems who officiated as his father’s beadle in Broughton Place Church; but with what originality and friskiness of humour is the portrait drawn, and how fantastically the paper breaks in the end into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the same quaint originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the little fragment called “Oh, I’m wat, wat,” and in one or two other trifles, with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.
There is no better test of imaginative or poetic faculty in a man than susceptibility to anything verging on the preternaturally solemn or ghastly. Of the strength of this susceptibility in Dr. John Brown’s nature there are evidences, here and there, in not a few of his writings. Take for example the following reminiscence, in his paper entitled Thackeray’s Death, of a walk with Thackeray in one of the suburbs of Edinburgh:—
“We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December when he was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of Edinburgh,—one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening,—such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance, in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what we all were feeling, in the word ‘Calvary!’ The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things.”
Even a more remarkable example is that furnished by the paper entitled “In Clear Dream and Solemn Vision.” The paper purports to be the record of a singular dream, dreamt by a man whom Dr. John Brown counted among his friends, and of whose great abilities, powers of jest and whimsical humour, and powers of a still higher kind, there are yet recollections in the lawyer-world of Edinburgh,—the late A. S. Logan, Sheriff of Forfarshire. I prefer here to tell the dream in my own words, as it has remained in my memory since I first heard it described many years ago. This I do because, while the version of it I have so retained came to me originally from Dr. John Brown himself, it seems to me better than the version subsequently given by him in his own paper, attenuated as it is there by explanations and comments, and by the insertion of a weak metrical expansion of it by Logan himself.
The Dream may be entitled The Death of Judas, and was as follows:—The dreamer seemed to be in a lonely, dreary landscape somewhere, the nearer vicinity of which consisted of a low piece of marshy ground, with dull, stagnant pools, overgrown with reeds. The air was heavy and thick: not a sound of life, or sight of anything indicating human presence or habitation, save that on the other side of the marshy ground from the dreamer, and near the margin of the pools and reeds, was what seemed to be a deserted wooden hut, the door half-broken, and the side-timbers and rafters also ragged, so that through the rifts there was a dim perception of the dark interior. But lo! as the dreamer gazed, it appeared as if there were a motion of something or other within the hut, signs of some living thing in it moving uneasily and haggardly to and fro. Hardly has one taken notice of this when one is aware of a new sight outside the hut,—a beautiful dove, or dove-like bird, of spotless white, that has somehow stationed itself close to the door, and is brooding there, intent and motionless, in a guardian-like attitude. For a while the ugly, ragged hut, with the mysterious signs of motion inside of it, and this white dove-like creature outside at its door, are the only things in the marshy tract of ground that hold the eye. But, suddenly, what is this third thing? Round from the gable of the hut it emerges slowly towards the marshy front, another bird-like figure, but dark and horrible-looking, with long and lean legs and neck, like a crane. Past the hut it stalks and still forward, slowly and with loathsome gait, its long neck undulating as it moves, till it has reached the pools and their beds of reeds. There, standing for a moment, it dips down its head among the reeds into the ooze of one of the pools; and, when it raises its head again, there is seen wriggling in its mouth something like a small, black, slimy snake, or worm. With this in its mouth, it stalks slowly back, making straight for the white dove that is still brooding at the door of the hut. When it has reached the door, there seems to be a struggle of life and death between the two creatures,—the obscene, hideous, crane-like bird, and the pure, white innocent,—till, at last, by force, the dove is compelled to open its throat, into which its enemy drops the worm or snake. Immediately the dove drops dead; and at that same instant the mysterious motion within the hut increases and becomes more violent,—no mere motion now, but a fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters, and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all at once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It was Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the Betrayer.
Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage, or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was “done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings. This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to the last,—Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs. Among the many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board Schools know the story of Rab and his Friends. How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of Rab and His Friends.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation, containing Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs, and also let us say the Letter to Dr. Cairns, and Queen Mary’s Child-Garden, and Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the paper called Mystifications, and that called Pet Marjorie or Marjorie Fleming, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh.