Till Whitsunday I continue to reside here, and shall hope that some time before that period I may have opportunity to wait on you, and, as my commission bore, to hand you these memorials in person. Meanwhile I abide your further orders in this matter; and so, with all the regard which belongs to one to whom I, in common with other millions, owe so much, I have the honour to be, sir, most respectfully your servant,
Thomas Carlyle.
Besides the two medals specially intended for you, there have come four more, which I am requested generally to dispose of amongst “Wohlwollenden.” Perhaps Mr. Lockhart, whose merits in respect of German Literature, and just appreciation of this its Patriarch and Guide, are no secret, will do me the honour to accept of one, and direct me through your means how I am to have it conveyed?
As the wording of this letter shows, Carlyle was aware when he wrote it that Sir Walter was not then in Edinburgh. He had gone off, exactly ten days before, i.e. on the 3d of April, for a tour in England, and a plunge once more, partly on business and partly for mere pleasure, into the world of London. It would have been better if Carlyle had delayed till he came back; but, thinking the matter too important for that, he had gone, it would appear, to Scott’s house, then in Shandwick Place, ascertained his London address, and seen the letter dispatched. That it did reach Scott in London is certain; for the autograph is still extant, with the London post-mark of 17th April 1828 upon it, just as Scott must have had it in his hands that day in the house of his son-in-law Lockhart in Regent’s Park. He must have glanced at it carelessly, however,—so carelessly as hardly to have mastered its purport; for in his jottings in his Diary for that day, where he would naturally have taken note of so interesting an occurrence as a new message from Goethe, there is no mention of it whatever. The omission is explained perhaps by one phrase which does occur among those jottings. “In this phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like shadows” were the words with which, trying to record in his journal late that night the incidents of an unusually busy day,—beginning with a round of forenoon and afternoon calls, and ending with a dinner at Samuel Rogers’s and an appearance afterwards at an evening party at Lady Davy’s,—he almost gave up the attempt as hopeless, so difficult was it to recall coherently what one had done or seen during any twelve hours in such a vast and brain-dizzying place as London. Carlyle’s letter, delivered to him that morning, or possibly lying on his table for him at the moment of his writing those words, may have been one of the “objects” that had slipped his cognisance. And, if so that day, the chance was poor enough of its being remembered sufficiently on any subsequent day during the rest of Scott’s stay in the great metropolis. Day after day till the 26th of May, as the Journal shows, there was a continued succession of lionisings for him in the shape of calls on him from notabilities, dinners in his honour, applications to him to sit for his portrait or his bust, etc. etc. One of the dinners was with his Majesty King George IV. himself; another was at the Duchess of Kent’s, where he was presented to “the little Princess Victoria,” and looked at her with keen interest, wondering whether the little lady, then not nine years of age, had yet been made aware of her great destiny; several times he was with the Duke of Wellington; and of the other celebrities whom he saw, or among whom he moved, in the course of his stay,—statesmen, bishops, lawyers, men of letters, artists, etc.,—he could keep no complete reckoning. For a man in the fifty-seventh year of his age the whirl of such a series of London excitements might not, in ordinary cases, have been too much; but Sir Walter had been obviously in failing health already for the last year or two, and there had been symptoms even, recognisable by himself and his Edinburgh friends, of jaded mental energy. In his case the £250 which, as he tells us, his visit to London cost him, may not have been the only damage. Little wonder, at all events, that one of his letters from Edinburgh, even though it contained a message from Goethe, should have escaped his attention.
Meanwhile Carlyle was growing anxious about the fate of the letter. On the 18th of April, five days after he had sent it to Scott, he had written to Goethe, informing him that this had been done. “To Sir Walter Scott, who is at present in London,” the letter said, “I have already written, announcing so delightful a message, and even transcribing for him what you say of his Life of Napoleon: a friendly criticism which, from such a quarter, must gratify him highly”; and, after a sentence or two more on the subject of that criticism, these words were added: “Ere long I expect to see Sir Walter and present to him your medals in person.” The expectation was never to be fulfilled. Week after week had passed, and no reply to his first letter had been received, when the Whitsunday term arrived at which, as he had informed Scott, he was to leave Edinburgh. In these circumstances he addressed a brief note to Scott, referring to his former letter, and explaining that, as he could not now hope for the honour of presenting the Goethe medals in person, he had left them in charge of Mr. Jeffrey, who would doubtless deliver them to Sir Walter on the first convenient opportunity. This note, dated the 23d of May, was, in fact, written in Jeffrey’s own house in Moray Place, where Carlyle and his wife were residing for a few days by invitation before their departure for Craigenputtock. They had left Comely Bank a day or two before, had sent on their furniture to Craigenputtock in carts, and were to follow immediately themselves.
The note must have reached Sir Walter on the 27th of May, the very last day of his stay in London. Leaving London that day, as his journal shows, he began the homeward journey through the middle and northern English counties which was to bring him to Abbotsford on the 2d of June, and thence to Edinburgh on the 4th of June. The Carlyles were then gone; and any acknowledgment that Carlyle could now receive of either of his two missives could only be by letter from Sir Walter in Edinburgh to Craigenputtock. Something of the sort seems to have been expected by Carlyle; for it was not till the 25th of September that he wrote that first of his letters to Goethe from Craigenputtock in which he told Goethe of the ending of the business of the medals. “Sir Walter Scott,” he then wrote, “has received your Medals several months ago,—not through me directly, for he had not returned to Edinburgh when I left it, but through Mr. Jeffrey, our grand ‘British Critic’; to whom, as I learn, Sir Walter expressed himself properly sensible of such an honour from one of his masters in Art.” This leaves no doubt that the medals actually came into Sir Walter’s hands as soon as he had returned to Edinburgh; and the only question that remains is how it could have happened that the two letters from Carlyle heralding the medals, and connected with them so vitally, received no acknowledgment, and so that Goethe’s design of bringing Carlyle into contact with Sir Walter Scott was miserably frustrated.
To this day the affair remains somewhat of a mystery. That Scott, the largest-hearted of men, the kindliest, the most courteous, the most attentive to every punctilio of business or of social etiquette, should have deliberately, of his own accord, left such letters unanswered, it is next to impossible to suppose; and it is hardly less difficult to suppose that, if any one had tried to prejudice him against Carlyle in connection with them, he would have allowed the interference to prevent him from doing what was independently proper. All things considered, one must revert, I think, to the opinion already suggested by the fact that there is no mention in Scott’s journal during his weeks in London either of the Carlyle letters or of the message they conveyed from Goethe. In the bustle and hurry of his London engagements, and then of his leave-taking for his return journey to Scotland, he had never, we are to conclude, read the letters, or at all events the first and principal one, with sufficient attention to apprehend the contents, and so, having set them aside on their first receipt, had forgotten all about them. To be sure, the medals were ultimately delivered to him by Jeffrey; but one can imagine that they were delivered in a casual manner, and without such explanation of the relative circumstances as might have brought the missing letters to his recollection and caused him to look for them. What is certain is that they lay among his papers, to be found there after his death, and are still preserved. That Lockhart had read them is proved by a reference in his Life of Scott. So slight is the reference, however, and so vaguely worded, that it told virtually nothing. Not till the publication in 1887 of the Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, edited by Mr. C. E. Norton, was any real light thrown on the subject; and not till the appearance in 1890 of The Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript, edited and published by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, and containing a copy of Carlyle’s first letter to Scott, were the facts fully revealed.[[44]]
The removal of Carlyle from Edinburgh to Craigenputtock, while connecting itself rather remarkably with the abortive issue of Goethe’s attempt to introduce him to Sir Walter Scott, is of such importance otherwise in his biography that a word or two as to the causes and circumstances may not be superfluous.
Carlyle’s later memories of the eighteen months, or more strictly nineteen, spent in Comely Bank, are summed up by him in the Reminiscences in one doleful sentence. “Comely Bank,” he says, “except for one darling soul, whose heavenly nobleness, then as ever afterwards, shone on me, and should have made the place bright (ah me, ah me! I only now know how noble she was!), was a gloomy intricate abode to me, and in retrospect has little or nothing of pleasant but her.” So far as this is not a picture tinged, like all the rest of his life, by the final darkness in which it was painted, and to be corrected by the facts as they are otherwise ascertained, the reference may be to the causes which made him suddenly give up his Comely Bank house and remove himself again from Edinburgh. These, there can be no doubt, were economical perplexities. Thrift, frugality, abhorrence from debt or extravagance, was always one of Carlyle’s characteristics; and he had found the expenses of married life in Edinburgh beyond his means. On this point some light can be thrown by information from himself, and an annexed calculation.
He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening, with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however, that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition, remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his Wilhelm Meister, together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear £100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the whole of his remuneration for the German Romance fell in then, may have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his four articles in the Edinburgh and the Foreign Review. Compute the expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he was in danger of running aground.