Life’s a variorum.
Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[[36]] was not Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript, carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of it.
This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia, which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M. Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820, with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park, William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends, to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages on Goethe’s Faust.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh, she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl, looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the Sartor Resartus.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of practical determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit, each determination coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things shall be my view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel.
The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr. Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on his way to Leith.