As Carlyle tells us incidentally that he was in Edinburgh in the summer of 1812, it is to be supposed that he spent less of that vacation than usual in his Dumfriesshire home. I find also that he matriculated rather late in our books for the session of 1812–13, his name not appearing in the first or main matriculation list, but only in a supplementary list, and then as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam, Dumfriesshire.” His father had by that time given up his trade of mason, and had left Ecclefechan to try a small farm in the neighbourhood. The number of students matriculated that year in the three faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine, was 1503; and Carlyle’s matriculation number was 1403. The classes in which he was enrolled for that session, his fourth and last in Arts, were Leslie’s 2d Mathematical Class (attended a second time, we may suppose, for such higher instruction as might be fit for very advanced students), and the Natural Philosophy Class, under Professor John Playfair. In this last session, accordingly, as a student only of Mathematics and Physics, with no distraction towards either Classics or Mental Philosophy, Carlyle may be said to have been in his element. He worked very hard in both classes, and distinguished himself in both. My own impression, from talks with him on the subject, is that he was, by acknowledgment of professors and fellow-students, easily supreme in both. Leslie’s second class that year numbered but forty-one students, and it was natural that his most distinguished student in two previous sessions should now be familiar with him and receive his especial notice. Certain it is that of all the Professors of Edinburgh University in Carlyle’s time Leslie was the only one of whom he spoke always with something of real gratitude and affection. The affection was mixed, indeed, with a kind of laughing remembrance of Leslie’s odd, corpulent figure, and odd rough ways; and he would describe with particular gusto the occasional effects of Leslie’s persistent habit of using hair-dyes, as when a streak of pink or green would be observable amid the dark-brown or black on those less accessible parts of his head where the chemicals had been too liberally or too rashly applied. But he had a real esteem for Leslie’s great abilities, and remembered him as a man to whose mathematical instructions, and to whose private kindness, he owed much.——A greater Hero with him in Pure Mathematics than even Leslie, I may mention parenthetically, was the now totally-forgotten John West, who had been assistant-teacher of Mathematics in the University of St. Andrews for some time from about 1780 onwards, and of whom Leslie, Ivory, and all the other ablest mathematicians sent forth from that University, had been pupils. Of this man, whom he knew of only by tradition, but whom he regarded as, after Robert Simson of Glasgow, the most original geometrical genius there had been in Scotland, I have heard him talk I know not how often. He would sketch West’s life, from the time of his hard and little-appreciated labours at St. Andrews to his death in the West Indies, whither he had emigrated in despair for some chaplaincy or the like; he would avow his belief that Leslie had derived some of his best ideas from that poor man; and he expressed pleasure at finding I knew something of West independently, and had a copy of West’s rare Elements of Mathematics, published in 1784. That book, obsolete now, was, I have no doubt, a manual with Carlyle while he was studying Mathematics in Edinburgh University, as I chance to know it had been with Dr. Chalmers at St. Andrews in his earlier mathematical days.——Of Leslie’s colleague, the celebrated Playfair, formerly in the Mathematical Chair, but since 1805 in that of Natural Philosophy, Carlyle had a less affectionate recollection personally than of Leslie. Sharing, I believe, the common opinion of Playfair’s great merits, and minutely acquainted with the facts of his life, as indeed he was with the biographies of all persons of any mark with whom he had come into contact, he rather resented a piece of injustice which he thought Playfair had done to himself. There were 131 students in the Natural Philosophy Class in 1812–13; and Carlyle, as he assured me, was single in that whole number for having performed and given in every one of all the prescribed exercises, mathematical or other. Another Dumfriesshire student, who came next to him, had failed in one, and that the most difficult. Naturally, at the end of the session, he expected that his certificate would correspond to his distinction in the class; and it was of some consequence to him that it should. But, when he called at Playfair’s house for the certificate, and it was delivered to him by a man-servant, he was a good deal disappointed. The usual form of the wording for a good student was to the effect that the Professor certified that so-and-so had attended the class in such and such a session and had “made good proficiency in his studies.” In Carlyle’s case there was a certain deviation from this form, but only to the effect that he had attended the class and that the Professor “had reason to know that he had made good proficiency in his studies.” I can remember Carlyle’s laugh as he told me of this delicate distinction; and I have always treasured the anecdote as a lesson for professors. They ought to be very careful not only in noting talent on the benches before them, but also in signifying what they have noted, if only because, as in Playfair’s case, they may be sometimes entertaining an angel unawares, and some angels have severe memories.
We have thus brought Carlyle to the summer of 1813, when he had completed his Arts course in the University of Edinburgh, and was in the eighteenth year of his age. Though qualified, according to the present standard, for the degree of M.A., he did not take it; but in that he was not in the least singular. In those days hardly any Edinburgh student ever thought of taking a degree in Arts; as far as Edinburgh University was concerned, the M.A. degree had fallen into almost complete disuse; and not till within very recent memory has it become customary again. After his course in Arts, therefore, Carlyle, with 95 per cent of those of his contemporaries who had passed the same course, was in the position merely of a virtual M.A., who had obtained the best education in Literature, Science, and Philosophy that the Edinburgh University could afford. His own estimate of the worth of that was not very high. Without assuming that he meant the university described in Sartor Resartus to stand literally for the Edinburgh University of his own experience, we have seen enough to show that any specific training of much value he considered himself to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in Edinburgh University was the culture of his mathematical faculty under Leslie, and that, for the rest, he acknowledged merely a certain benefit from having been in so many class-rooms, where matters intellectual were professedly in the atmosphere, and where he learnt to take advantage of books. “What I have found the University did for me,” he said definitely in his Rectorial Address of 1866, “is that it taught me to read, in various languages, in various sciences, so that I could go into the books which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suit me.” Similarly, in his Sartor Resartus, he made Teufelsdröckh declare that his chief benefit at the University had been from his private use of the University library. “From the chaos of that library I succeeded in fishing up more books perhaps than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a literary life was hereby laid: I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences.” This may describe Carlyle’s own use of the University library all in all, but hardly his use of it during the four years of his Arts course. Only in Latin and French, and to some small extent in Greek, could he then have ranged beyond English in his readings; nor can his readings, in whatever language, have been then so vast and miscellaneous as Teufelsdröckh’s. We have seen, on the irrefragable evidence of preserved registers, what were the books, numbering between twenty and thirty volumes in all, which he actually took out from the University library in the first two winter-sessions of his course; and, though the series is very interesting, with some signs even of oddity, it contains hardly a book that the librarians would have had any difficulty in “fishing up.” I regret that, from the destruction or at least the disappearance of the library registers for a considerable lapse of years immediately after Carlyle’s second session, I am unable to exhibit his readings in his third and fourth sessions. The list for those two sessions, when he was passing from his sixteenth year to his eighteenth, and had been bitten by mathematics and physical science, would doubtless have been even more interesting, and probably more extensive and various, than that for the two sessions preceding. That he did continue to be a very diligent reader from the College library I positively know. He used to draw a ludicrous picture of the library accommodations of those days, when the books were in one of the surviving old buildings on one side of the present quadrangle. As I understood him, the students came at definite hours, and ranged themselves in queue in some passage, or at some entry, waiting for the opening of the door, and perhaps battering at it when the sub-librarian inside was dilatory. He was a sulky gentleman, of Celtic blood and stout build, who regarded the readers as his natural enemies; and, when he did open the door, he generally presented himself in rear to the impatient crowd, taking care to bend his body at the final moment so as to administer one last impediment of contempt for the entrants and send some of them sprawling. That was the kind of encouragement to reading, by Carlyle’s account, that he and other University students had in those days. To the end of his life he was all but savage in his resentment of difficulties thrown in the way of access to books by those who had charge of them; and the great Panizzi of the British Museum came in for a good deal of his wrath in private on this account.
“Entertaining an angel unawares” is the phrase I have used to indicate the relations of Carlyle’s teachers in the University to the then unknown young man that sat in their class-rooms. In fact, Carlyle, when he left the University in 1813, a virtual M.A., aged seventeen years and four months, was already potentially the very Carlyle we now revere, in consequence of his subsequent life, as one of the greatest and noblest spirits of his generation. Not yet at his full stature (which, when I knew him first in his yet unbent manhood, was over five feet eleven inches), and of thin, lean, rather gaunt frame (he told me himself he had never weighed more than about ten stone), he was a youth of as great faculty, as noble promise, as Scotland had produced since her Burns, born in 1759, and her Scott, born in 1771. This, or something very little short of this, seems to have been already recognised by those who knew him intimately. They were not many; for he was of peculiarly proud, shy, and reserved ways, if not even morose and unsocial. Poverty also kept him back. It was not for an Ecclefechan lad, chumming with one or two others in like circumstances in a poor lodging in Simon Square, or some other Old Town locality, and receiving his meagre supplies from home, to mix much with general Edinburgh society. The celebrities of that society, indeed, were no longer strangers to him by name or sight, as they had been on his first Edinburgh walk with Smail in 1809. He mentions particularly that Jeffrey’s face and figure had been quite familiar to him since 1811 by visits to the Parliament House; and the same visits, or walks in Princes Street, must have made him familiar with the face and figure of Scott, and the faces and figures of not a few others that were among the civic somebodies of their time. But it was by sight only, and by no more introduction than he had to Arthur Seat or Holyrood House, that he knew those important personages; and into the circles in which they moved he had never entered. Even the Professors of the University, if we except Leslie, seem to have been known to him only by their aspects in college or the vicinity. Further, his acquaintanceships among his fellow-students do not appear to have been numerous. He is not known to have been a member of any of the literary and debating societies which in those days, as in these, were so important an appendage to the apparatus of lectures, class-rooms, and library, and which draw young men together so congenially for the exchange of ideas, the exercise of oratory, and the formation of lasting friendships between kindred souls. His habits were those of solitary reading and musing, with intercourse only with a few companions, clannishly selected for the most part from among the Dumfriesshire or Galloway lads who could claim him as their district-compatriot, whose families he knew, and with one or other of whom he had made his pedestrian journeys homewards at the ends of the sessions. Smail has now vanished from his side; and we hear chiefly of James Johnstone, afterwards schoolmaster of Haddington, the Robert Mitchell already mentioned as one of his fellow-students in the Moral Philosophy class, a Thomas Mitchell, afterwards one of the classical masters in the Edinburgh Academy, and the Thomas Murray already mentioned as having been with him in the 2d Greek class. To these has to be added, on the faith of certain extant letters, a certain clever and whimsical fellow-student of the name of Hill, who used to delight in signing himself “Peter Pindar.” In the circle of these, and of others whose names are forgotten, young Carlyle, at the time of his leaving college, was already an object of admiration and respect passing all that is ordinary in such cases of juvenile camaraderie. Intellectually and morally, he had impressed them as absolutely unique among them all,—such a combination of strength of character, rugged independence of manner, prudence, great literary powers, high aspirations and ambition, habitual despondency, and a variety of other humours, ranging from the ferociously sarcastic to the wildly tender, that it was impossible to set limits to what he was likely to become in the world.
The proofs are extant in documents of a date only a few months in advance of our present point. On the 1st of January 1814, the above-mentioned Hill, who seems to have been the freest and most jocose in his style of address to Carlyle, and had nicknamed him “The Dean” or “The Doctor,” by some implied comparison with Dean Swift, wrote to him as follows.—“You mention some two or three disappointments you have met with lately. For shame, sir, to be so peevish and splenetic! Your disappointments are trifles light as air when compared with the vexations and disappointments I have experienced.” Again, in a letter dated the 9th of May in the same year, he begins:—“Dear Doctor, I received yours last night; and a scurrilous, blackguardly, flattering, vexing, pernickety, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal, as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No; this won’t do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an off-hand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity, pursuing the even tenor of his way, so that one of Peter’s letters is as good as a thousand.”[[11]] More significant and serious is the following from one of the preserved letters to Carlyle by his friend Thomas Murray, the date “July 27,” and presumably of the year 1814:—“I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking, and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that among all my elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of letter-writing I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language, either for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these, our juvenile epistles, will be read and publicly applauded by a generation unborn, and the name of Carlyle at least will be inseparably connected with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century.”[[12]] Strangely enough, Carlyle’s answer to this letter has survived, and it is no less memorable:—“Oh Tom!” it says, “what a foolish flattering creature thou art! To talk of future eminence in connection with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century to such a one as me! Alas! my good lad, when I and all my fancies and reveries and speculations shall have been swept over by the besom of oblivion, the Literary History of no century will feel itself the worse. Yet think not, because I talk thus, I am careless about literary fame. No, Heaven knows that, ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been the foremost. O Fortune! thou that givest unto each his portion on this dirty planet, bestow, if it shall please thee, coronets and crowns, and principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth; grant me that, with a heart of independence, unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame,—and, though starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have not been born a King.”[[13]]
Brave words these from the moody lad we saw, not five years ago, plodding up to Edinburgh from Ecclefechan, hardly fourteen years of age, with Tom Smail for pilot. From these words, and from the letters from Hill and Murray with which they connect themselves, we learn two things which I think we should have hardly known otherwise. One is the fact of Carlyle’s decisive passion for literature at this early period of his life, and of his reputation then among his intimates for great powers and acquirements of the purely literary kind. My own fancy, confirmed by one particular talk I had with him during a walk along the Thames Embankment and in the Temple Gardens, had rather been that the passion for literature came latish in his case, and that his original bent had been wholly the mathematical. He certainly did tell me that he had not cared much for poetry, or thought much about matters verbal, till the enthusiasm of an older companion, who used to recite Campbell’s lyrics and dwell with ecstasy on their beauties, came as a revelation to him and set him on fire with a similar passion. My mistake must have been in post-dating the reminiscence. He must have referred, I now see, not to so late a period as that of his college life in Edinburgh, but to the previous days of his mere boyhood in Ecclefechan and at Annan school. Indeed, we have already seen, in the list of his readings from the college library in his first two sessions, that he must have brought with him to the University some strongly formed literary tastes and likings of Ecclefechan and Annan origin. Connecting this piece of evidence with that of the just-quoted letters of himself and his friends in 1814, we are entitled, I think, now to assume the literary stratum to have been the deeper and more primitive in Carlyle’s constitution, and the mathematical vein to have been a superposition upon that. At all events, it is clear that in 1814, when he had concluded his Arts course in the University, it was for his literary powers that he was the wonder of his little circle, and it was on those powers that he set most store himself. For the letters reveal to us yet a second contradiction of what we might have supposed otherwise. No man was ever more contemptuous of fame, and especially of literary fame, than Carlyle was in conversation in his later life. The very phrase “desire for fame,” or any synonym for it, if used in his presence as the name of a worthy motive to exertion of any kind, would have provoked his most scathing scorn. He had no patience for “that last infirmity of noble mind,” and would have regarded even such a designation for the feeling as much too honourable. Yet, as we have seen, he had not escaped the malady himself. Call the ambition after fame by the homeliest name of sarcasm you please,—call it the measles of budding genius,—and the fact, on the evidence of Carlyle’s own confession, is that the attack in his case had been even more severe than it had been in the case of Burns, much more severe than we know it to have been in the case of Scott, and quite as severe as the records show it to have been in the case of young Chalmers. The condition of his mind, in his nineteenth year, with all his moodiness, all his self-despondency, was that of settled literary ambition, an appetency after literary distinction all but enormous. That this rested on honest consciousness of his own extraordinary powers, and was accompanied by a resolve, as deep as was ever in any young man’s heart, that the fame for which he craved should be won, if won at all, only by noble and manly methods, there is no room for doubt. There we see him standing, an unknown youth, teeth clenched and face determined, fronting the world, and anticipating his own future in it, with something of that feeling which, call it what we may, and smile at it as any one may in the retrospect, has probably, by God’s own ordinance, filled every great and honest heart at the outset of a great career:—
Lay the vain impostors low!
Blockheads fall in every foe;
Splendour comes with every blow;
Let me do or die.
Meanwhile the near future was not very inspiring. Hardly by any wish of his own, but in deference to the fond hopes of his father and mother, and to those social necessities which made the clerical career the only natural and possible one in those days for an educated Scottish youth from the humbler ranks, Carlyle had proceeded to qualify himself for the ministry. Not, however, for the ministry in that Nonconforming communion, called “the Burgher Seceders,” to which his parents belonged, but, apparently with no objection on their part, in the Established or National Scottish Church.[[14]] Now, the regular qualification for the ministry of the Scottish Church in those days, after a student had passed his Arts course in the University, consisted in further attendance for four winter-sessions in the Divinity Hall of one of the Universities, for instruction in Theology, Hebrew, and Church History, and for the delivery of so many trial-discourses, one in Latin and the rest in English, at appointed intervals. But, to accommodate students whose means made it difficult for them to reside in town during four consecutive winters, there was a device of “partial sessions,” by which a certain small amount of personal appearance in the Divinity Hall, if protracted over six sessions, and duly signalised by delivery of the required discourses, was accepted as sufficient. By the former plan, Carlyle, entering the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh in the session 1813–14, immediately after his last session in Arts, would have been a qualified probationer or preacher in the Scottish Church, and eligible for a fixed parochial charge, in 1817, i.e. in his twenty-second year. The other plan, however, permitting him to find some occupation out of Edinburgh, if it could be had, and so to spare his parents further expense in his education, was altogether the more convenient. His connection with Edinburgh was not yet over; but it was to be continued only in the form of such occasional visits through six years as might enable him to pass as “licentiate” or “probationer” in 1819, i.e. in his twenty-fourth year. That, however he may have reconciled it to his ambition or to his conscience, was his immediate worldly outlook.