’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”
What he lacked most, as he told Mrs. Montagu, was a fit occupation. His four volumes of Specimens of German Romance, consisting of translations from Musæus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Jean Paul, and Goethe, with biographical and critical notices of these authors, had been already printed, and stored in Ballantyne’s warehouses, before he had settled in Comely Bank, and were published by Tait early in 1827. As they had been done originally on commission, they may have brought something more considerable in the way of payment than if they had been a voluntary labour. But, when these were out, what was he to do next? Fortunately, that question was soon answered.
It was in the spring of 1827 that, by means of a friendly letter of introduction sent from London by Mrs. Montagu’s son-in-law, Procter, alias “Barry Cornwall,” Carlyle formed his memorable acquaintance with Jeffrey. The incidents of that acquaintance, from Carlyle’s first call on Jeffrey in George Street with Procter’s note, when Jeffrey received him so kindly, and said “We must give you a lift,” on to the ripening of the acquaintance by Jeffrey’s calls at Comely Bank, his pretty gallantries and wit-encounters with the fascinating young bride, and the frequent colloquies and amicable little disputations between Jeffrey and Carlyle in Jeffrey’s leisurely rides to his country-house at Craigcrook, or in that picturesque old mansion itself, have all been immortalised in the Reminiscences. Nowhere is there such a sketch of Jeffrey in our literature, such perfect portraiture and appreciation of that celebrated man; and the only question that remains is whether Carlyle has quite done justice there to Jeffrey’s kindness to himself. No doubt he wrote with a strict conscience, and knew better what he was about than readers can now know for him. Still one does carry away an impression that very seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him practically, as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. Goethe. Something of this feeling, indeed, does appear in many passages of Carlyle’s sketch, as when he says: “Jeffrey’s acquaintanceship seemed, and was for the time, an immense acquisition to me, and everybody regarded it as my highest good fortune.” And no wonder. From being a mere translator from the German, or writer of hack articles in obscure places, Carlyle became a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. In June 1827, or within a month or two after his introduction to Jeffrey, appeared his first article in the Review, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, in twenty pages; and in the very next number, in October 1827, appeared his more full and elaborate article, in forty-eight pages, entitled State of German Literature. They caused, as he tells us, “a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams,” and were widely criticised in the newspapers, with the effect of setting “many tongues wagging” about the strange fellow in Comely Bank to whom Jeffrey had given such unusual licence of innovation on the established doctrines of the Review, and who was trying to found a school of “German Mysticism.” At all events, people who liked that kind of matter and were interested in German Literature knew thenceforth where to apply; and, a so-called Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany having been started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared his Life and Writings of Werner, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number, in April 1828, his Goethe’s Helena, in forty pages. These two articles in the Foreign Review, with the two already contributed to the Edinburgh, form the whole of Carlyle’s known writings during the Comely Bank period.
One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William, and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, there is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and speculations!” Since then he had formed some slight personal acquaintance with Sir William by meetings with him in the Advocates’ Library; but it was after the settlement in Comely Bank in 1826, when Sir William was thirty-eight years of age, and had been nominally for five years Professor of History in Edinburgh University, that the acquaintanceship reached the stage of familiarity. Carlyle has commemorated it in a few pages contributed to Professor Veitch’s Memoirs of Sir William Hamilton, published in 1869, thirteen years after Sir William’s death. “I recollect hearing much more of him,” Carlyle there writes, “in 1826 and onward than formerly: to what depths he had gone in study and philosophy; of his simple, independent, meditative habits, ruggedly athletic modes of exercise, fondness for his big dog, etc. etc.: everybody seemed to speak of him with favour, those of his immediate acquaintance uniformly with affectionate respect. I did not witness, much less share in, any of his swimming or other athletic prowesses. I have once or twice been on long walks with him in the Edinburgh environs, oftenest with some other companion, or perhaps even two, whom he had found vigorous and worthy: pleasant walks and abundantly enlivened with speech from Sir William.” He proceeds to describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “The fact is,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of words and distinctions, would repeat “The fact is,” and so go on again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the meetings.
Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of Blackwood since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours, not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing. Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul of their little symposium.[[43]]
De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and 1828; but, his connection with Blackwood having then begun, he was a good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of Wilhelm Meister in the London Magazine for August and September 1824, there was considerable shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk, no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the Reminiscences in which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate. But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies, politically a Radical sui generis though he was, and the protégé though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of whom Wilson in Blackwood was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the Quarterly Review, can hardly date from this period; but among those I have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons, Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs. Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the Reminiscences is that, after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death, called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea.
More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh, that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur Seat and the Corstorphines.
Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared, since that Translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824 which Goethe had acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the Life of Schiller in 1825, and the Specimens of German Romance in 1827, this last completing the translation of the Meister by the addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been. Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance: there is in him much for the future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.” To the same purport were Goethe’s words on again speaking to Eckermann about Carlyle some time afterwards,—“What an earnest man he is! and how he has studied us Germans! he is almost more at home in our literature than we ourselves.”
Goethe’s surprise at Scott’s silence about Carlyle was an acute thrust, though made a little in the dark. Who does not regret to have it to say now that Carlyle never exchanged a word with Sir Walter? Yet this is the fact. That man of men in Edinburgh, of greater importance and interest to her than all her other celebrities put together, remained a stranger to the fellow-citizen that was worthiest to know him and that would fain have known him well. How did this happen?