There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company; and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur, was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller, and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we are able to connect it with another advent.
It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the 29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core, fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his Reminiscences how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in “black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings, round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the Reminiscences; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake, woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he was troubled no more.
The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of 2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class, and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time, and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears “John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the family who received a University education. He had been for some time a teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the Reminiscences tell us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.
The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh routine of his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the Bullers in India Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and other intercourse with the Buller family and their guests, and his own German and other readings and literary efforts and schemings. It was in that winter, and not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the Reminiscences, that the cessation of correspondence with Irving became a matter of secret vexation to him. The good Irving, now in the full whirl of his activity with the Hatton Garden congregation and of the London notoriety to which that led, was too busy to write; and it was only by rumour, or by letters from others, that Carlyle heard of Irving’s extraordinary doings and extraordinary successes in the metropolis, of the crowds that were flocking to hear him in the little Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and his preachings were making in the London fashionable world. “People have their envies, their pitiful self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting that the real joy he felt at the vast and sudden effulgence of his friend into a fame commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense of the contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a “poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale fellow, now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames. There was, he adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be able to keep his head in the blaze of such enormous London popularity? Had he strength enough to guide and manage himself in that huge element with anything like the steadiness that had characterised the behaviour of the more massive and more simple-hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he seems to hint, was increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first publication came into his hands,—the famous Orations and Arguments for Judgment to Come, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical world was enabled to judge of the real substance of those pulpit-discourses which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as Irving himself was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own work. It seems to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having closed his contributions to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and got the Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to his Life of Schiller.
If, however, the Life of Schiller was begun in Edinburgh, it was not finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the spring and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that aptitude for change of residence which characterises retired Indians and people with plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of Kinnaird in Perthshire, situated on the river Tay, some miles to the north of Dunkeld. Carlyle and his tutorship of young Charles and Arthur Buller had, accordingly, been transferred thither. He must have been there early in June 1823; for a letter of his is extant, dated from Kinnaird House on the 17th of that month, in which he describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old cathedral, with Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in the neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your peaceful manse,—you at one side of the parlour fire, Mrs. M. at the other, and two or three little M.’s, fine chubby urchins, hopping about the carpet,—you will suddenly observe the door fly open, and a tall, meagre, careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance lightened by unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting a cordial welcome. This knight of the rueful visage will, in fact, mingle with the group for a season, and be merry as the merriest, though his looks are sinister. I warn you to make provision for such emergencies. In process of time I too must have my own peculiar hearth; wayward as my destiny has hitherto been, perplexed and solitary as my path of life still is, I never cease to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on my own footing.”[[40]] From the Reminiscences, where we learn that he was at this time persevering with his Life of Schiller, we have his later recollection of those summer and autumn months, and on into late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—
“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally solitary, way. My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some three or four hundred yards from the new, and on a lower level, overshadowed with wood. Thither I always retired directly after tea, and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—good candles, good wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence and total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before or since. I remember still the grand sough of those woods, or, perhaps, in the stillest times, the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing else to converse with but this and my own thoughts, which never for a moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes pathetically sad. I was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I ought not to quit on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it; dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poor Schiller, nothing considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily persisted in, as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[[41]]
It was in October 1823 that the first part of Schiller’s Life and Writings appeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebrated London Magazine of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was the most important of the metropolitan magazines of that time, counting among its contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such writers as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Hamilton Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood, and De Quincey. The admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening of such a London connection at last, ought to have been some gratification to him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it was, to a far greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the Reminiscences. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had compliments from the editor of the magazine,—i.e., we must suppose, from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own editors, unless indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of assistant editor, was the medium of the communication. What is more important is that the Life of Schiller, if not all in the editor’s hands complete when the first part appeared, must have been reported as complete, or as approaching completeness, in Carlyle’s own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly, fixes October 1823, or thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from Schiller to the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a sequel, viz. the Translation of the Wilhelm Meister. It must have been in one of those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand sough of those woods” outside, when his Schiller manuscript lay finished beside him, and he had Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the Night-Moth” which he has commemorated in one of his metrical fragments—
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping
Their meek and silent course in heaven;
Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,