[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.]
Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a niche in the Reminiscences as a "little man who meant well but did not see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the Diamond Necklace, which is a proem to the French Revolution, but inly growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally, disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His Sartor is indeed more contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's Confessions, or the Sorrows of Werther, or the first two cantos of Childe Harold: but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for me," and his brave wife approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his fortune sink or swim—in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in Chelsea near the Thames.
CHAPTER IV
CHEYNE ROW
[1834-1842]
The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. 24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he found a hearing among the mass of the people.
The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is preserved throughout:—
I. 1834-1842—When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with narrow means. It is the period of the French Revolution, The Lectures, and Hero-Worship, and of Chartism, the last work with a vestige of adherence to the Radical creed.
II. 1842-1853—When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the writing and publication of the Life and Letters of Cromwell, of Carlyle's political works, Past and Present and the Latter-Day Pamphlets, and of the Life of Sterling, works which mark his now consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom."
III. 1853-1866—When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period is filled with the History of Friedrick II., and marked by a yet more decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy.