“The solution of this important problem now inserted in the text was suggested to me by Mr. Thomas Carlyle, an ingenious young mathematician, formerly my pupil. But I here subjoin likewise the original construction given by Pappus; which, though rather more complex, has yet some peculiar advantages.”
Leslie then proceeds to give the solution of Pappus, in about two pages, and to add about three pages of further remarks on the application of the problem to the construction of quadratics. The mention of Carlyle by Leslie in this volume of 1817 is, I believe, the first mention of Carlyle by name in print; and it was no small compliment to prefer, for text purposes, young Carlyle’s solution of an important problem to the old one that had come down from the famous Greek geometrician. Evidently Carlyle’s mathematical reputation was still kept up about the Edinburgh University, and Leslie was anxious to do his favourite pupil a good turn.[[16]]
More personal were the connections with Edinburgh which Carlyle still kept up by visits from Kirkcaldy, either by himself or with Irving. As it was not much to cross the Firth on a Saturday or occasional holiday, such visits were pretty frequent. Carlyle notes them, and the meetings and little convivialities which he and Irving had in the course of them with nondescript and clerical Edinburgh acquaintances, chiefly Irving’s, here and there in Edinburgh houses and lodgings. Nothing of consequence came of these convivialities, passed mostly, he says, in “gossip and more or less ingenious giggle,” and serving only to make Irving and him feel that, though living in Kirkcaldy, they had the brighter Edinburgh element close at hand. One Edinburgh visit of Carlyle’s from Kirkcaldy deserves particular record:—“On one of these visits,” he says, “my last feeble tatter of connection with Divinity Hall affairs or clerical outlooks was allowed to snap itself and fall definitely to the ground. Old Dr. Ritchie ‘not at home’ when I called to enter myself. ‘Good!’ answered I; ‘let the omen be fulfilled.’” In other words, he never went back to Dr. Ritchie, and ceased to be a Divinity student. Such is the account in the Reminiscences, confirmed by a private note in Carlyle’s hand, published in Mr. Froude’s article:—“The theological course, which could be prosecuted or kept open by appearing annually, putting down your name, but with some trifling fee, in the register, and then going your way, was,” he says, “after perhaps two years of this languid form, allowed to close itself for good. I remember yet being on the street in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, probably in 1817, and come over from Kirkcaldy with some intent, the languidest possible, still to put down my name and fee. The official person, when I rang, was not at home, and my instant feeling was, ‘Very good, then, very good; let this be finis in the matter.’ And it really was.” This is precise enough, but perhaps with a slight mistake in the dating. The name, “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam,” as we have seen, does stand in the register of the Edinburgh Divinity Hall students for the session 1817–18, its only previous appearance in the preserved lists being in 1814–15, though it is likely he had begun his Divinity course in 1813–14. It must, therefore, have been after 1817 that he made the above-mentioned call on Dr. Ritchie in Argyll Square. The probability is that it was late in 1818, in anticipation of the coming session of 1818–19.
PART II.—1818–1822
From the year 1818, when Carlyle was two-and-twenty years of age, the Church of Scotland had lost the chance of seeing him among her clergy. In his Reminiscences he speaks of his dropping off as but the natural, and in a manner accidental, termination of the languid, half-willing, half-reluctant, state of mind in which he had himself always been on that subject of his clerical calling which his parents had so much at heart. There can be little doubt, however, that stronger forces were at work.
In Kirkcaldy he had been reading omnivorously, not only laying Irving’s library under contribution, but getting over books from the Edinburgh University library as well. Bailly’s Histoire de l’Astronomie was one of those received from Edinburgh; and among those from Irving’s library he mentions “Gibbon, Hume, etc.,” besides a number of the French classics in the small Didot edition. He dwells on his reading of Gibbon, informing us that he read the book with “greedy velocity,” getting through a volume a day, so as to finish the twelve volumes of which Irving’s copy consisted in just as many days. He adds:—“It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. After mentioning, rather pathetically, as he does in his Reminiscences, his wonder at the velocity of his reading in his early days as compared with the slow rate at which he could now get through a book, he spoke of Gibbon himself in some detail, and told me that it was from that first well-remembered reading of Gibbon in twelve days, at the rate of a volume a day, that he dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. This is literally what he said, and it is of consequence in our present connection. The process of extirpation can hardly have been complete at the moment of the call on Dr. Ritchie,—else the call would not have been made; but there can be no doubt that it was not mere continued languor that stopped Carlyle in his clerical career. There were the beginnings in his mind of the crash of that system of belief on which the Scottish Church rested, and some adherence to which was imperative on any one who would be a clergyman of that Church in any section of it then recognised or possible.
Although he kept that matter for the present to himself, not admitting even Irving yet to his confidence, the fact that he had given up the clerical career was known at once to all his friends.[[17]] It was a sore disappointment, above all, to his parents; but they left him to his own course, his father with admirable magnanimity, his mother “perhaps still more lovingly, though not so silently.”
It was another disappointment to them, about the same time, to know that he had resolved to quit the Kirkcaldy schoolmastership. His relations with the Kirkcaldy people, or with some of them, had not been absolutely satisfactory, any more than Irving’s; both had “got tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results,” and had even come to the conclusion “Better die than be a schoolmaster for one’s living”; and in the end of 1818 they had both thrown up their Kirkcaldy engagements and were back in Edinburgh to look about for something else. Irving, then twenty-six years of age and comparatively at ease in the matter of pecuniary means, had preachings here and there about Edinburgh to occupy him, and the possibility of a call to some parish-charge at home, or heroic mission abroad, for his prospect. Carlyle, just twenty-three years of age, was all at sea as to his future, but had about £90 of savings on which to rest till he could see light.
The six months or so from December 1818 to the summer of 1819 form a little period by itself in the Edinburgh lives of Irving and Carlyle. They lodged in the Old Town, not far from each other. Carlyle’s rooms were at No. 15 Carnegie Street, in the suburb called “The Pleasance”; Irving’s, which were the more expensive, were in Bristo Street, close to the University,—where, says Carlyle, he “used to give breakfasts to intellectualities he fell in with, I often a guest with them.” Irving also renewed his connection with the University by attending Hope’s Class of Chemistry, which was always in those days the most crowded of the classes by far, and the Natural History Class under Jameson. I find no proof of any similar attendance on any University Class by Carlyle through the session 1818–19; but we learn from Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving that he was for this session a member of a certain Philosophical Association which Irving had started “for the mutual improvement of those who had already completed the ordinary academic course.” It was one of those small and ephemeral societies of which there have been so many in the history of the University, distinct from the larger and more famous societies,—such as the Speculative, the Theological, the Dialectic, and the Diagnostic,—which established themselves permanently, and still exist. We hear a little of Irving’s doings in the semi-academic brotherhood, especially of an essay which he read to them; but of Carlyle’s doings, if there were any, we hear nothing. The mere membership, however, was a kind of continued bond between him and his Alma Mater through that session; and we can imagine also some renewed intercourse with Professor Leslie, and an occasional dropping in, as an outsider, at one or other of the class-rooms, to hear a stray lecture. Meanwhile, he found no occupation. Irving, besides his preachings, had an hour or two a day of private mathematical teaching, at the rate of two guineas a month per hour; but nothing of the sort came to Carlyle. Once, indeed, recommended by Nichol, the mathematical schoolmaster of whom we have already heard, he did call on a gentleman who wanted mathematical coaching for some friend; but the result was that the gentleman,—whom he describes in the letter as “a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers,”—thought two guineas a month “perfectly extravagant,” and would not engage him. In these circumstances, and as his weekly bills for his lodgings and board amounted to between 15s. and 17s.,—which he thought unreasonable for his paltry accommodations, with badly-cooked food, and perpetual disturbance from the noises of a school overhead,—he resolved to leave Edinburgh, for a time at least, and return to his father’s farmhouse at Mainhill.
On the 29th of March 1819 he intimated this intention in a letter to his mother thus:—“A French author, d’Alembert (one of the few persons who deserve the honourable epithet of honest man), whom I was lately reading, remarks that one who has devoted his life to learning ought to carry for his motto ‘Liberty, Truth, Poverty,’ for he who fears the latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using every honest effort to attain to a comfortable situation in life; it says only that the best is dearly bought by base conduct, and the worst is not worth mourning over. We shall speak of all these matters more fully in summer; for I am meditating just now to come down to stay a while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German, and others. You will give me yonder little room, and you will waken me every morning about five or six o’clock. Then such study! I shall delve in the garden too, and, in a word, become not only the wisest, but the strongest, man in those regions. This is all claver, but it pleases one.”[[18]]