Divinity students did not need to register in the general Matriculation Book of the University, as the Arts, Medicine, and Law students did; and so we have not that means of tracing Carlyle’s connection with the University during his Divinity course. Another Thomas Carlyle, indeed, is found in the matriculation lists and in the Arts classes, just after our Carlyle had left those classes; but he is a Thomas Carlyle from Galloway, and is probably the person to whom Carlyle refers angrily as his troublesome double-goer, about whom and himself mistakes were constantly occurring, from this early period in the lives of both, on even to the time when this Thomas Carlyle was an “Angel” in the Irvingite Church and an author of books, and took the precaution of distinguishing himself always on his title-pages as “Thomas Carlyle, Advocate.” It is in the special Divinity Hall Registers that we should look now for our Carlyle. Unfortunately, these Registers are defective. I have not found a list of the Divinity Hall students for 1813–14, though I believe it must have been in that session that Carlyle entered himself in the books of Dr. William Ritchie, the chief Divinity Professor, as going on nominally in the Divinity course, if not attending lectures. The only sessions in which I do find his name registered are those of 1814–15 and 1817–18, both times as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam,” and both times as one of 183 students then attending the Divinity Hall. Whether this means that his attendance in those two sessions amounted to something more real than in those in which his name is not found, I cannot determine, though I should like to be able to do so. It would be a pleasure to me to know to what real extent Carlyle attended the lectures of Dr. Ritchie in Divinity and of Dr. Hugh Meiklejohn in Church History; and it would be a greater pleasure to me to know whether he ever sat in the Hebrew class-room and was called up by Dr. Alexander Brunton to read a bit from the Hebrew Bible. For I had the fortune to be a disciple of this “Rabbi Brunton” myself in the same Hebrew class a great many years afterwards, when he was a very old gentleman, a wonder of antique clerical neatness in his dress, and with a great bald head, and large, pink, bland face, which it did one good to look at. That was all the good you got, however; for, though he professed to teach Hebrew in two sessions, with the elements of Chaldee and Syriac, and, I think, Arabic in addition, the amount of linguistic instruction he gave, or was capable of giving, was as if you had boiled ten chapters of the Hebrew Bible in the same kettle with three or four leaves of Hebrew and Chaldee grammar, and drunk the concoction in a series of doses. Carlyle on Rabbi Brunton’s benches would have been a picture for my fancy worth a thousand; and I wish now I had asked him whether he did attend the Hebrew class. Once I spoke to him of Brunton’s predecessor in the Hebrew chair, Dr. Alexander Murray, a real linguist, and one of the finest minds of his time in Scotland, as any one may see who will read his letters published in that most delightful of recent books of literary anecdote, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents, edited by the late Thomas Constable. This fine scholar and thinker had died in 1813, after having held the Hebrew chair only one year; and Brunton, who had been a rival candidate with him, had stepped into his place. That had been in the last year of Carlyle’s Arts course, and he retained no more than a vague recollection of Murray’s figure as seen about the College.
What makes it all the likelier that Carlyle did begin his Divinity course in 1813–14, and did give some attendance in the Divinity Hall that session, is that he informs us in his Reminiscences that he was in Edinburgh in May 1814, and was among the audience in the General Assembly of the Kirk for that year, when he heard Jeffrey plead, and Drs. Hill and Inglis, and also Dr. Chalmers, speak. The annual meeting of the General Assembly in May was then, as it is now, a great affair; and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a young student of Divinity, fresh from his first session at the Hall, to be in the gallery of the Assembly, to see the physiognomies of the leaders, Moderate or Evangelical, and to hear the debates. If he had resided in Edinburgh through the preceding session, the probability is that he had teaching engagements which helped to pay his expenses. We do not, however, hear definitely of any such teaching employment in Edinburgh in 1813–14, but only that, later in 1814, he applied for the vacant mathematical mastership in his own school of Annan, won the post by competition in Dumfries, and settled in Annan to perform the duties.
The Annan mathematical mastership lasted about two years, or from the autumn of 1814 to the autumn of 1816, bringing Carlyle from his nineteenth year to his twenty-first. His receipts were between £60 and £70 a year; and he boarded in the house of Mr. Glen, the Burgher minister of Annan, where he read prodigiously at nights in all sorts of books, latterly sitting up till three in the morning over Newton’s Principia. But, though the Glens were pleasant, kind people, and he was not far from his father’s house, and had two or three good friends in the neighbourhood,—one of them the Rev. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, a man of many accomplishments, and the real founder of Savings Banks,—he found himself, on the whole, “lonesome, uncomfortable, and out of place.” His character among the Annan people was that of “morose dissociableness,” and he detested his school-work.
The two visits which he paid to Edinburgh in the course of the two years were bright interruptions in his dull routine. The first was about the Christmas of 1814, only a few months after he had gone to Annan. His purpose was to read the first of his trial-discourses in the Divinity Hall,—that being, as we have supposed, his second session in Divinity, and one of the two sessions in which, as we have seen, his name occurs in the Divinity Hall lists. The discourse was an English sermon on the text (Psalm cxix. 67): “Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept Thy Word.” It was, he says, “a very weak, flowery, and sentimental piece,”—which we may believe if we like. The second visit was in the Christmas-time of 1815, for the delivery of his second discourse, a Latin exegesis on the question, “Num detur Religio Naturalis?” (“Is a Natural Religion possible?”) This too, he supposes, was “weak enough,” though the writing of the Latin had given him some satisfaction, and there had been some momentary pleasure in “the bits of compliments and flimsy approbation from comrades and professors” which greeted this performance, as indeed had been the case with the previous year’s sermon. But this visit of the Christmas of 1815 was memorable to him for something more than the delivery of his exegesis. That trouble off his mind, he was taking a holiday week, and looking up old Edinburgh acquaintances; and it was one night, when he was in Rose Street, sitting rather silently in the rooms of a certain Waugh, a distant cousin of his own, and his predecessor in the Annan mastership, that the door opened, and there stepped in Edward Irving, accompanied by an Edinburgh mathematical teacher named Nichol. Carlyle had once seen Irving casually long before in the Annan schoolroom, when Irving called there as a former boy of the school, home from the University with prizes and honours; he had heard much of Irving since,—especially of his continued University triumphs and his brilliant success in schoolmastering, first in the new academy he had set up in Haddington, and more recently in a similar academy at Kirkcaldy; but this was their first real meeting. It was, as Carlyle tells us, by no means promising. Irving, in a somewhat grandiose way, asked Carlyle this and that about what was going on in Annan. Carlyle, irritated a little by his air of superiority, answered more and more succinctly, till at last to such questions as “Has Mrs. —— got a baby? Is it a son or daughter?” his answers were merely that he did not know. “You seem to know nothing,” said Irving, after one or two rebuffs of the kind. “To which,” says Carlyle, “I, with prompt emphasis, somewhat provoked, replied, ‘Sir, by what right do you try my knowledge in this way? Are you the grand inquisitor, or have you authority to question people and cross-question at discretion? I have had no interest to inform myself about the births in Annan, and care not if the process of birth and generation there should cease and determine altogether.’” There might be worse subjects for a painter than this first meeting between Irving and Carlyle. The very room in Rose Street, I suppose, still exists, and there would be little difficulty in imagining the group. On one side, staggering from the blow he has just received, we see the Herculean Irving, three-and-twenty years of age, with coal-black hair, and handsome and jovial visage, despite his glaring squint; seated on the other side we see the thinner and more bilious figure of the stripling Carlyle, just after he has delivered the blow; and Waugh and Nichol stand between, looking on and laughing.[[15]]
The next meeting of Carlyle and Irving was in Annan about six months afterwards. In the interval the Kirkcaldy people, many of whom were dissatisfied with Irving’s conduct in the new academy there, and especially with the severity of his discipline among the young ones, had resolved on resuscitating their regular or Burgh School; and, on the recommendation of Professors Leslie and Christison, Carlyle had been offered the mastership of that school. If Carlyle accepted and went to Kirkcaldy, it would thus be as Irving’s rival. The meeting, therefore, might have been awkward but for Irving’s magnanimity. He invited Carlyle cordially to be his guest in the preliminary visit he meditated to Kirkcaldy for the purpose of inquiry; said that his books were at Carlyle’s service, that two Annandale men must not be strangers in Fifeshire, etc. Accordingly, when Carlyle did accept the appointment, and transfer himself from Annan to Kirkcaldy in the autumn of 1816, the two became inseparable. They were the David and Jonathan of Kirkcaldy town; and one of the pleasantest parts of Carlyle’s Reminiscences is his description of those Kirkcaldy days, from 1816 to the end of 1818, when he and Irving were constantly together, walking on the Kirkcaldy sands, or making Saturday excursions to Fifeshire places round about, or boating expeditions on the Firth, or longer rambles in holiday time to the Lochlomond country and the West, or to their native Dumfriesshire by Moffat and the Yarrow. Irving was by this time a licensed preacher in the Scottish Church; and Carlyle attended him in his occasional preachings in Kirkcaldy or the neighbourhood, or accompanied him to hear other preachers,—once, for example, to Dunfermline to hear Dr. Chalmers. This was the time too of some memorable incidents of more private mark in the lives of the two young men. It was the time of Irving’s intimacy with the Martins of Kirkcaldy Manse, and of his engagement to a daughter of that family, though his heart was with the Jane Welsh who had been his pupil at Haddington; and it was also the time of Carlyle’s frustrated first love,—the object of which was a Margaret Gordon, an orphan girl, then residing in Kirkcaldy with her widowed Aberdeenshire aunt. Though it is with the Edinburgh connections of Carlyle during his two years at Kirkcaldy that we are concerned here, I cannot refrain from this episode of his acquaintance with Margaret Gordon.
This girl, interesting long ago to all inquirers into Carlyle’s biography as the nameless original of the “Blumine” of his Sartor Resartus, has become even more interesting since the revelation of her name and the description of her by Carlyle himself in his Reminiscences. Even this description, however, falls far short of the impression made by that fragment of her own farewell letter to Carlyle which Mr. Froude published in his Nineteenth Century article on Carlyle’s Early Life. Nothing finer than that letter has come to light, or ever can come to light, in all Carlyle’s correspondence:—
“And now, my dear friend, a long, long adieu! One advice; and, as a parting one, consider, value it. Cultivate the milder dispositions of your heart. Subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintance they are already beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved! Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners. Deal gently with their inferiority, and be convinced they will respect you as much, and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in your heart?... Again adieu! Pardon the freedom I have used; and, when you think of me, be it as of a kind sister, to whom your happiness will always yield delight, and your griefs sorrow.... I give you not my address, because I dare not promise to see you.”
Valuable as an additional attestation of the enormous impression made by Carlyle upon all who came near him even at this early date, and of the prodigious expectations entertained of his future career, these words reveal also such a character in the writer herself as almost to compel speculation as to what might have happened if she had become his wife. That there was real affection on both sides is evident. The obstacle was partly in circumstances. In the opinion of her aunt and guardian, and of others, Margaret Gordon, who, though the daughter of a poor colonial, and left with little or nothing, was one of the aristocratic family of the Aberdeenshire Gordons, could hardly marry a Kirkcaldy schoolmaster. But perhaps some dread on her own part, arising from those perceptions of the harder side of his character which she communicated to himself so tenderly and frankly, may have aided in the separation. Her subsequent history could be told in some detail by persons still living. She became the wife of Alexander Bannerman of Aberdeen, a man of note in the commerce of that city, and of a family of old standing and landed estates in the shire. There were traditions of him in his youth as “Sandy Bannerman,” one of the wild Maule of Panmure and Duke of Gordon set, who filled the north with their pranks; but my own recollection of him in his more mature days is of the staid and highly respectable Alexander Bannerman, latterly Sir Alexander Bannerman, who was long the Whig M.P. for Aberdeen, and in that capacity was very attentive to the interests of the city, and very kind to old pensioners and the like who had any grievances or claims on the Government. The Whigs promoted him at last to a colonial governorship; and I think he died in that post. I might have seen Carlyle’s “Blumine” myself when she was Lady Bannerman, if only when she drove through the streets of Aberdeen to grace one of her husband’s elections; but I have no recollection that I ever did.
To my surprise, Carlyle did not seem indisposed to talk of the “Blumine” episode in his life at Kirkcaldy. He used to make inquiries about the Aberdeenshire Bannermans; and he once sketched the whole story to me, in a shadowy way and without naming names (though I then knew them for myself), but dwelling on various particulars, and especially on those casual meetings with his first love in her married state which he has described in his Reminiscences. Though he talked prettily and tenderly on the subject, the impression left was that the whole thing had become “objective” to him, a mere dream of the past. But fifty years had then elapsed since those Kirkcaldy days when Margaret Gordon and he were first together.
Among Carlyle’s Edinburgh connections in the Kirkcaldy days, one comes to us in a book form. It was in 1817 that Professor Leslie, not yet Sir John Leslie, brought out the third edition of his Elements of Geometry and Plane Trigonometry, being an improvement and enlargement of the two previous editions of 1809 and 1811. The geometrical portion of the volume consists of six books, intended to supersede the traditional six books of Euclid, and containing many propositions not to be found there. The seventeenth proposition of the sixth book is the problem “To divide a straight line, whether internally or externally, so that the rectangle under its segments shall be equivalent to a given rectangle.” The solution, with diagrams, occupies a page; and there is an additional page of “scholium,” pointing out in what circumstances the problem is impossible, and calling attention to the value of the proposition in the construction of quadratic equations. So much for the text of the proposition at pp. 176–177; but, when we turn to the “Notes and Illustrations” appended to the volume, we find, at p. 340, this note by Leslie:—