No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be quoted:—
April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong.”[[22]]
March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[[23]]
October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-brown shade.”[[24]]
March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[[25]]
Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[[26]]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach.”[[27]] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and “backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy. On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human intellect in that class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost Margaret Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat and compel to listen.