There was, at all events, no very obvious change in Carlyle’s mood and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His own report in the Reminiscences is still of the dreariness of his life, his gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated though this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be a mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness. From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving, whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of sunrising upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar effect: such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which Irving had written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when you shall be plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and therefore more clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note respecting Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have caught some glimpse of your inner man, though he had few opportunities; for he never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[[37]]
Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there must have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on Irving’s own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that Irving was not to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow Demosthenes and his very difficult congregation. After two years and a half of the Glasgow assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come that invitation to the pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton Garden, London, which Irving received as exultingly, as he afterwards said, as if it had been a call to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his way to London to offer himself on probation to the little colony of London Scots that thought he might suit them for their minister; and Carlyle was the last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of their parting was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith Street, then the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was “a dim night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving helps us to the more precise dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had their talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a bundle of cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium of his journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the cigars no one ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next morning, forgot to take them with him, and left them lying in a stall in the coffee-room.
That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to be remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the Thames on fire; Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical teaching, his private German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and the chances of continued contributorship to the New Edinburgh Review. Thus the year 1821 ended, and the year 1822 began.
PART III.—1822–1828
By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June 1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have contributed to the result.
One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his Reminiscences he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh, because he was not sure but she might be then in Edinburgh too; and it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr. Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in the Reminiscences. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh, had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street. He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The information agrees with the University records; for in the matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February. The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow, the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing” to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics, indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them, teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the visit of the previous June that had gradually established itself, till it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books, etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller tutorship.
Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he says, “translating Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My petards will not burst, or make only noise when they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution too.”[[38]] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire. Then shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[[39]] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear, in that connection with the New Edinburgh Review of which mention has been already made, and in the translation of Legendre which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the background. There is significance in the fact that his second contribution to the New Edinburgh, published in April 1822, when the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s Faust. The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his Reminiscences where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when, having finished the reading of Wilhelm Meister, he walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him. Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.
The translation of Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster deserves a passing notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with the title Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an Introductory Essay on Proportion,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten, that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about 1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to obtain an affidavit from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the Reminiscences, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings, and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his Budget of Paradoxes, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements [Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”
The Translation of Legendre, with this Essay on Proportion, was Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution, Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it, he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir, you are dealing with the ipsissima corpora,” Chalmers used to say; and Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.