About this time Carlyle, who had been industriously studying German and French, published a translation of Legendre's "Elements of Geometry;" and in 1824 brought out a "Life of Schiller," a work that he never thought much of, but which was a very respectable performance. In fact, he never thought much of any of his works: they were always behind his ideal. He wrote slowly, and took great pains to be accurate; and in this respect he reminds us of George Eliot. Carlyle had no faith in rapid writing of any sort, any more than Daniel Webster had in extempore speaking. After he had become a master of composition, it took him thirteen years of steady work to write "Frederick the Great,"--about the same length of time it took Macaulay to write the history of fifteen years of England's life, whereas Gibbon wrote the whole of his voluminous and exhaustive "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in twenty years.
"Schiller" being finished, Carlyle was now launched upon his life-work as "a writer of books." He translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," for which he received £180. I do not see the transcendent excellence of this novel, except in its original and forcible criticism, and its undercurrent of philosophy; but it is nevertheless famous. These two works gave Carlyle some literary reputation among scholars, but not much fame.
Although Carlyle was thus fairly embarked on a literary career, the "trade" of literature he always regarded as a poor one, and never encouraged a young man to pursue it as a profession unless forced into it by his own irresistible impulses. Its nobility he ranked very high, but not its remunerativeness. He regarded it as a luxury for the rich and leisurely, but a very thorny and discouraging path for a poor man. How few have ever got a living by it, unless allied with other callings,--as a managing clerk, or professor, or lecturer, or editor! The finest productions of Emerson were originally delivered as lectures. Novelists and dramatists, I think, are the only class, who, without doing anything else, have earned a comfortable support by their writings. Historians have, with very few exceptions, been independent in their circumstances.
In the year 1826, at the age of thirty-one, Carlyle married Jane Welsh, the only child of a deceased physician of Haddington, who had some little property in expectancy from the profits of a farm in the moorlands of Scotland. She was beautiful, intellectual, and nervously intense. She had been a pupil of Edward Irving, who had introduced his friend Carlyle to her. On the whole, it was a fortunate marriage for Carlyle, although it would have been impossible for him to have or to give happiness in constant and intimate companionship with any woman. He was very fond of his wife, but in an undemonstrative sort of way,--except in his letters to her, which are genuine love-letters, tender and considerate. As in the case of most superior women, clouds at times gathered over her, which her husband did not or could not dissipate. But she was very proud of him, and faithful to him, and careful of his interest and fame. Nor is there evidence from her letters, or from the late biography which Froude has written, that she was, on the whole, unhappy. She was very frank, very sharp with her tongue, and sometimes did not spare her husband. She had a good deal to put up with from his irritable temper; but she also was irritable, nervous, and sickly, although in her loyalty she rarely complained, while she had many privations to endure,--for Carlyle until he was nearly fifty was a poor man. During the first two years of their residence in London they were obliged to live on £100 a year. He was never in even moderately easy circumstances until after his "Oliver Cromwell" was published.
After his marriage, Carlyle lived eighteen months near Edinburgh; but there was no opening for him in the exclusive society there. His merits were not then recognized as a man of genius in that cultivated capital, as it pre-eminently was at that time; but he made the acquaintance of Jeffrey, who acknowledged his merit, admired his wife, and continued to be as good a friend as that worldly but accomplished man could be to one so far beneath him in social rank.
The next seven years of Carlyle's life were spent at the Scotch moorland farm of Craigenputtock, belonging to his wife's mother, which must have contributed to his support. How any brilliant woman, fond of society as Mrs. Carlyle was, could have lived contentedly in that dreary solitude, fifteen miles from any visiting neighbor or town, is a mystery. She had been delicately reared, and the hard life wore upon her health. Yet it was here that the young couple established themselves, and here that some of the young author's best works were written,--as the "Miscellanies" and "Sartor Resartus." From here it was that he sent forth those magnificent articles on Heyne, Goethe, Novalis, Voltaire, Burns, and Johnson, which, published in the Edinburgh and other Reviews, attracted the attention of the reading world, and excited boundless admiration among students.
The earlier of these remarkable productions, like those on Burns and Jean Paul Richter, were free from those eccentricities of style which Carlyle persisted in retaining with amazing pertinacity as he advanced in life,--except, again, in his letters to his wife, which are models of clear writing.
The essay on "German Literature" appeared in the same year, 1827,--a longer and more valuable article, a blended defence and eulogium of a terra incognita, somewhat similar in spirit to that of Madame de Staël's revelations twenty years before, and in which the writer shows great admiration of German poetry and criticism. Perhaps no Englishman, with the possible exceptions of Julius Hare and Coleridge,--the latter then a broken-down old man,--had at that time so profound an acquaintance as Carlyle with German literature, which was his food and life during the seven years' retirement on his moorland farm. This essay also was comparatively free from the involved, grotesque, but vivid style of his later works; and it was religious in its tone. "It is mournful," writes he, "to see so many noble, tender, and aspiring minds deserted of that light which once guided all such; mourning in the darkness because there is no home for the soul; or, what is worse, pitching tents among the ashes, and kindling weak, earthly lamps which we are to take for stars. But this darkness is very transitory. These ashes are the soil of future herbage and richer harvests. Religion dwells in the soul of man, and is as eternal as the being of man."
In this extract we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle's earlier writings,--the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the immortal hopes which sustain the soul. He believed in the God of Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher than the earth. He had renounced historical Christianity, but he adhered to its essential spirit.
The next article which Carlyle published seems to have been on Werner, followed the same year, 1828, by one on Goethe's "Helena,"--a continuation of his "Faust." This transcendent work of German art, which should be studied rather than read, is commented on by the reviewer with boundless admiration. If there was one human being whom Carlyle worshipped it was the dictator of German literature, who reigned at Weimar as Voltaire had reigned at Ferney. If he was not the first to introduce the writings of Goethe into England, he was the great German's warmest admirer. If Goethe had faults, they were to Carlyle the faults of a god, and he exalted him as the greatest light of modern times,--a new force in the world, a new fire in the soul, who inaugurated a new era in literature which went to the heart of cultivated Europe, weary of the doubts and denials that Voltaire had made fashionable. It seemed to Carlyle that Goethe entered into the sorrows, the solemn questionings and affirmations of the soul, seeking emancipation from dogmas and denials alike, and, in the spirit of Plato, resting on the certitudes of a higher life,--calm, self-poised, many-sided, having subdued passion as he had outgrown cant; full of benignity, free from sarcasm; a man of mighty and deep experiences, with knowledge of himself, of the world, and the whole realm of literature; a great artist as well as a great genius, seated on the throne of letters, not to scatter thunderbolts, but to instruct the present and future generations.