Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto occupied in society.”[[28]] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[[29]] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[[30]] In a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[[31]] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[[32]]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day, and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh; and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however, were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library; and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,” and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of his successive experiments in established professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words “Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while, turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having returned no answer.[[33]] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title “Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended for the press.[[34]] The other is of more interest to us here, from its picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers and Jonson.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.”[[35]]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with “Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man, whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo, Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in 1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In 1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it, and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical “Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the solitary bard in quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?