Carlyle intended, some time or other, writing a 'Life of Sterling,' but meanwhile he accepted an invitation to visit South Wales. Thence he made his way to Scotsbrig. On the 27th September 1850, he 'parted sorrowfully with his mother.' When he reached London, the autumn quarterlies were reviewing the Pamphlets, and the 'shrieking tone was considerably modified.' 'A review of them,' says Froude, 'by Masson in the North British distinctly pleased Carlyle. A review in the Dublin he found "excellently serious," and conjectured that it came from some Anglican pervert or convert. It was written, I believe, by Dr Ward.'
After a few more wanderings, Carlyle set about the Life of Sterling, and on April 5, 1851, he informs his mother: 'I told the Doctor about "John Sterling's Life," a small, insignificant book or pamphlet I have been writing. The booksellers got it away from me the other morning, to see how much there is of it, in the first place. I know not altogether myself whether it is worth printing or not, but rather think it will be the end of it whether or not. It has cost little trouble, and need not do much ill, if it do no great amount of good.' Another visit had to be paid to Scotsbrig, where he read the "Life of Chalmers." 'An excellent Christian man,' he said. 'About as great a contrast to himself in all ways as could be found in these epochs under the same sky.'
When he got back to Cheyne Row, he took to reading the "Seven Years' War," with a view to another book. He determined to go to Germany, and on August 30, 1852, Carlyle embarked 'on board the greasy little wretch of a Leith steamer, laden to the water's edge with pig-iron and herrings.' The journey over, he set to work on 'Frederick,' but was driven almost to despair by the cock-crowing in his neighbourhood. Writing to Mrs Carlyle, he says: 'I foresee in general these cocks will require to be abolished, entirely silenced, whether we build the new room or not. I would cheerfully shoot them, and pay the price if discovered, but I have no gun, should be unsafe for hitting, and indeed seldom see the wretched animals.'
He took refuge at the Ashburton's house, the Grange, but on the 20th of December, news came that his mother was seriously ill, and could not last long. He hurried off to Scotsbrig, and reached there in time to see her once more alive. In his journal, this passage is to be found under date January 8, 1854: 'The stroke has fallen. My dear old mother is gone from me, and in the winter of the year, confusedly under darkness of weather and of mind, the stern final epoch—epoch of old age—is beginning to unfold itself for me.... It is matter of perennial thankfulness to me, and beyond my desert in that matter very far, that I found my dear old mother still alive; able to recognise me with a faint joy; her former self still strangely visible there in all its lineaments, though worn to the uttermost thread. The brave old mother and the good, whom to lose had been my fear ever since intelligence awoke in me in this world, arrived now at the final bourn.... She was about 84 years of age, and could not with advantage to any side remain with us longer. Surely it was a good Power that gave us such a mother; and good though stern that took her away from amid such grief and labour by a death beautiful to one's thoughts. "All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come." This they heard her muttering, and many other less frequent pious texts and passages. Amen, Amen! Sunday, December 25, 1853—a day henceforth for ever memorable to me.... To live for the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone: that would be a right learning from her death, and a right honouring of her memory. But alas all is yet frozen within me; even as it is without me at present, and I have made little or no way. God be helpful to me! I myself am very weak, confused, fatigued, entangled in poor worldlinesses too. Newspaper paragraphs, even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not indifferent to me. Weak soul! and I am fifty-eight years old, and the tasks I have on hand, Frederick, &c., are most ungainly, incongruous with my mood—and the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which for her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother Jack! Will he do his Dante now? For him also I am sad; and surely he has deserved gratitude in these last years from us all.'[28]
When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict seclusion, making repeated efforts at work on what he called 'the unexecutable book,' Frederick. In the spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death of Professor Wilson. Between them there had never been any cordial relation, says Froude. 'They had met in Edinburgh in the old days; on Carlyle's part there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he had been shy of Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, and now this April the news came that Wilson was gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. 'I knew his figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 29; 'remember well first seeing him in Princes Street on a bright April afternoon—probably 1814—exactly forty years ago.... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste towards some distant object, strode rapidly along, clearing the press to the left of us, close by the railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. Westward he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell whispered me, "That is Wilson of the Isle of Palms," which poem I had not read, being then quite mathematical, scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now see them to have been. The broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man struck me; his flashing eye, copious, dishevelled head of hair, and rapid, unconcerned progress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no more of him. It must have been fourteen years later before I once saw his figure again, and began to have some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better and more familiarly acquainted; but though I liked much in him, and he somewhat in me, it would not do. He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have a feeling I should—could—not become wholly his, in which he was right, and that on other terms he could not have me; so we let it so remain, and for many years—indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh—I had no acquaintance with him; occasionally got symptoms of his ill-humour with me—ink-spurts in Blackwood, read or heard of, which I, in a surly, silent manner, strove to consider flattering rather.... So far as I can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely Bank, with a testimonial, poor fellow!), and I once in his, De Quincey, &c., a little while one afternoon.'[29]
On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his journal: '"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."' What a fearful word! I cannot find how to take up that miserable "Frederick," or what on earth to do with it.' He worked hard at it, nevertheless, for eighteen months, and by the end of May 1858, the first instalment was all in type. Froude remarks that a fine critic once said to him that Carlyle's Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as Sterne's Tristram Shandy; certainly as distinct a personality as exists in English fiction. Carlyle made a second journey to Germany. Shortly after his return, the already finished volumes of Frederick appeared, and they met with an immediate welcome. The success was great; 2000 copies were sold at the first issue, and a second 2000 were disposed of almost as rapidly, and a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle's health being unsatisfactory, Carlyle took a house for the summer at Humbie, near Aberdour in Fife. They returned to Cheyne Row in October, neither of them benefited by their holiday in the north.
While many of Carlyle's intimate friends were passing away, he formed Ruskin's acquaintance, which turned out mutually satisfactory. On the 23rd April 1861, Carlyle writes to his brother John: 'Friday last I was persuaded—in fact had unwarily compelled myself, as it were—to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The lecture was thought to "break down," and indeed it quite did "as a lecture"; but only did from embarras des richesses—a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and, in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one.'[30]
Frederick was progressing, though slowly, as he found the ore in the German material at his disposal "nowhere smelted out of it." The third volume was finished and published in the summer of 1862; the fourth volume was getting into type; and the fifth and last was finished in January 1865. 'It nearly killed me,' Carlyle writes in his journal, 'it, and my poor Jane's dreadful illness, now happily over. No sympathy could be found on earth for those horrid struggles of twelve years, nor happily was any needed. On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865) I walked out, with the multiplex feeling—joy not very prominent in it, but a kind of solemn thankfulness traceable, that I had written the last sentence of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many forebodings in bad hours, had actually got done with it for ever.'
In England it was at once admitted, says Froude, that a splendid addition had been made to the national literature. 'The book contained, if nothing else, a gallery of historical figures executed with a skill which placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters.... No critic, after the completion of Frederick, challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past or present.' The work was translated instantly into German, calling forth the warmest appreciation.