"For there's seven foresters in yon forest;
And them I want to see, see,
And them I want to see (and shoot down)!"
Carlyle lodged at Ampton Street again; but presently did 'immense stretches of walking in search of houses.' He found his way to Chelsea and there secured a small old-fashioned house at 5 (now numbered 24) Cheyne Row, at a rent of £35 a year. Mrs Carlyle followed in a short time and approved of his choice. They took possession on the 10th June 1834, and Carlyle recounts the 'cheerful gipsy life' they had there 'among the litter and carpenters for three incipient days.' Leigh Hunt was in the next street 'sending kind, unpractical messages,' dropping in to see them in the evenings.
When in London on a former occasion, Carlyle became acquainted with John Stuart Mill, and the intimacy was kept alive by correspondence to and from Craigenputtock. It was through Mill's letters that Carlyle's thoughts were turned towards the French Revolution. When he returned to London, Mill was very useful to him, lending him a fine collection of books on that subject. Mill's evenings in Cheyne Row were 'sensibly agreeable for most part,' remarks Carlyle. 'Talk rather wintry ("sawdustish," as old Sterling once called it), but always well-informed and sincere.' Carlyle was making rapid progress with the first volume of his French Revolution. Stern necessity gave a spurt to his pen, for in February 1835 he notes that 'some twenty-three months' had passed since he earned a single penny by the 'craft of literature.' The volume was completed and he lent the only copy to Mill. The MS. was unfortunately burnt by a servant-maid. 'How well do I still remember,' writes Carlyle in his Reminiscences, 'that night when he came to tell us, pale as Hector's ghost.... It was like half sentence of death to us both, and we had to pretend to take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was his horror at it, and try to talk of other matters. He stayed three mortal hours or so; his departure quite a relief to us. Oh, the burst of sympathy my poor darling then gave me, flinging her arms round my neck, and openly lamenting, condoling, and encouraging like a nobler second self! Under heaven is nothing beautifuller. We sat talking till late; 'shall be written again,' my fixed word and resolution to her. Which proved to be such a task as I never tried before or since. I wrote out "Feast of Pikes" (Vol. II.), and then went at it. Found it fairly impossible for about a fortnight; passed three weeks (reading Marryat's novels), tried, cautious-cautiously, as on ice paper-thin, once more; and in short had a job more like breaking my heart than any other in my experience. Jeannie, alone of beings, burnt like a steady lamp beside me. I forget how much of money we still had. I think there was at first something like £300, perhaps £280, to front London with. Nor can I in the least remember where we had gathered such a sum, except that it was our own, no part of it borrowed or given us by anybody. "Fit to last till French Revolution is ready!" and she had no misgivings at all. Mill was penitently liberal; sent me £200 (in a day or two), of which I kept £100 (actual cost of house while I had written burnt volume); upon which he bought me "Biographie Universelle," which I got bound, and still have. Wish I could find a way of getting the now much macerated, changed, and fanaticised John Stuart Mill to take that £100 back; but I fear there is no way.'[15]
Carlyle went diligently to work at the French Revolution. Some conviction he had that the book was worth something. Once or twice among the flood of equipages at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon stroll, he thought to himself, 'Perhaps none of you could do what I am at!' But generally his feeling was, 'I will finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic Wildernesses, far from human beggaries and basenesses!' 'This,' he says, 'had a kind of comfort to me; yet I always knew too, in the background, that this would not practically do. In short, my nervous system had got dreadfully irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and my desire was intense, beyond words, to have done with it.' Then he adds: 'The last paragraph I well remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room that now is, which was then my writing-room; beside her there in a grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon after tea (perhaps); and thereupon, with her dear blessing on me, going out to walk. I had said before going out, "What they will do with this book, none knows, my Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a two hundred years, any book that came more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as they see best!" "Pooh, pooh! they cannot trample that!" she would cheerily answer; for her own approval (I think she had read always regularly behind me) especially in Vol. III., was strong and decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique of critics could trample the French Revolution.
A month before the completion of the first book of the French Revolution, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'My first friend Edward Irving is dead. I am friendless here or as good as that.' In a week or two thereafter he met Southey, whom he describes as a 'lean, grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then—the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen—a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even), kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'[16] Later on Carlyle admits to his brother John that his prospects in London were not brightening; which fact left him gloomy and morose.
During his enforced leisure after the destruction of the first book of the French Revolution, Carlyle saw more of his friends, among whom he numbered John Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most noble nature,' and he was one of the few who had studied Sartor Resartus seriously. He had been also caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side. Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle taught, Sterling recognised in him 'a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not equivocate, that he would say always what he actually thought, careless whether he pleased or offended.' He introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the 'guiding genius' of the Times, and who offered Carlyle work there on the usual conditions. 'Carlyle,' says Froude, 'though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to truth, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own conscience.'
On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 'I positively do not care that periodical literature shuts her fist against me in these months. Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil, which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better be brought to a crisis. There is perhaps a finger of Providence in it.... My only new scheme, since last letter, is a hypothesis—little more yet—about National Education. The newspapers had an advertisement about a Glasgow "Educational Association" which wants a man that would found a Normal School, first going over England and into Germany to get light on that matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar off, enquiring who they were, what manner of man they expected, testifying myself very friendly to their project, and so forth—no answer as yet. It is likely they will want, as Jane says, a "Chalmers and Welsh" kind of character, in which case Va ben, felice notte. If otherwise, and they (almost by miracle) had the heart, I am the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox in that circle, I shall not hear at all.'[17] Carlyle also remarks, in the same letter, that John Stuart Mill is very friendly: 'He is the nearest approach to a real man that I find here—nay, as far as negativeness goes, he is that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory much farther.'
Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. 'I did not expect much,' he said in a letter, 'but got mostly what I expected. The old man has a fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of sincerity in his speech. But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, but also essentially a small, genuine man.'
Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old home. His mother-in-law had arrived on a visit at Cheyne Row, and remained there with her daughter during Carlyle's absence in Scotland. He returned improved in health and spirits. Nothing came of the National Education scheme. Carlyle was not a person to push himself into notice, remarks Froude; and his friends did not exert themselves for him, or they tried and failed; 'governments, in fact, do not look out for servants among men who are speculating about the nature of the Universe. Then, as always, the doors leading into regular employment remained closed.' Shortly after his return from the North, he was offered the editorship of a newspaper at Lichfield. This was unaccepted for the same reason that weighed with him when he refused a post on the Times. In the following summer money matters had become so pressing that Carlyle wrote the article on Mirabeau, now printed among the Miscellanies, for Mill's review, which brought him £50. Mrs Carlyle's health began to suffer, and a visit to Annandale became imperative. She returned 'mended in spirits.' Writing of her arrival in London, she said: 'I had my luggage put on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, when I presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By-and-bye the omnibus stopped, and amid cries of "No room, sir; can't get in," Carlyle's face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the door like the peri "who, at the gate of heaven, stood disconsolate." In hurrying along the Strand, his eye had lighted on my trunk packed on the top of the omnibus, and had recognised it. This seems to me one of the most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever manifested.'
On the 22nd of January 1837 Carlyle wrote to his mother: 'The book [French Revolution] is actually done; all written to the last line; and now, after much higgling and maffling, the printers have got fairly afloat, and we are to go on with the wind and the sea.' But no money could be expected from the book for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Miss Harriet Martineau (who had introduced herself into Cheyne Row), and Miss Wilson, another accomplished friend, thought that Carlyle should begin a course of lectures in London, and thereby raise a little money. Carlyle, it seems, gave 'a grumbling consent.' Nothing daunted, the ladies found two hundred persons ready each to subscribe a guinea to hear a course of lectures from him. The end of it was that he delivered six discourses on German literature, which were 'excellent in themselves, and delivered with strange impressiveness,' and £135 went into his purse.