CHAPTER II CRAIGENPUTTOCK—LITERARY EFFORTS

Carlyle was feeling the force of Scott's remark that literature was a bad crutch—his prospects being far from bright. The Carlyles had been a little over eighteen months at Comely Bank, when their extensive circle of friends were surprised to hear of their intended withdrawal to Craigenputtock. Efforts were made to dissuade Carlyle from pursuing what at the time appeared a suicidal course. He was the intimate associate of the brilliant Jeffrey; he was within the charmed circle of Edinburgh Reviewers; he had laid the foundation of a literary reputation. Outwardly all seemed well with Carlyle; but 'the step,' himself says, 'had been well meditated, saw itself to be founded on irrefragable considerations of health, finance, &c., &c., unknown to bystanders, and could not be forborne or altered.' Next to his marriage with Miss Welsh, Carlyle's retirement to the howling wilds of Craigenputtock at that juncture was the most momentous step in his long life. He was conscious of his own powers, and he clearly discerned how those powers could best be utilised and developed. Hence his determination to bid adieu to Edinburgh. And in that resolve he was fortified by the loyal support of his wife.

Jeffrey promised to visit the Carlyles at Craigenputtock as soon as they got settled. Meanwhile, they stayed a week at his own house in Moray Place, after their furniture was on the road, and they were waiting till it should arrive and 'render a new home possible amid the moors and the mountains.' 'Of our history at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'there might a great deal be written which might amuse the curious; for it was in fact a very singular scene and arena for such a pair as my Darling and me, with such a Life ahead.... It is a History I by no means intend to write, with such or with any object. To me there is a sacredness of interest in it consistent only with silence. It was the field of endless nobleness and beautiful talent and virtue in Her who is now gone; also of good industry, and many loving and blessed thoughts in myself, while living there by her side. Poverty and mean Obstruction had given origin to it, and continued to preside over it, but were transformed by human valour of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty: something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower than very many of the details.'[7]

The Jeffreys were not slow in appearing at Craigenputtock. Their 'big Carriage,' narrates the humorous host, 'climbed our rugged Hill-roads, landed the Three Guests—young Charlotte ("Sharlie"), with Pa and Ma—and the clever old Valet maid that waited on them; ... but I remember nothing so well as the consummate art with which my Dear One played the domestic field-marshal, and spread out our exiguous resources, without fuss or bustle; to cover everything with a coat of hospitality and even elegance and abundance. I have been in houses ten times, nay, a hundred times, as rich, where things went not so well. Though never bred to this, but brought up in opulent plenty by a mother that could bear no partnership in housekeeping, she, finding it become necessary, loyally applied herself to it, and soon surpassed in it all the women I have ever seen.'[8] Of Mrs Carlyle's frankness her husband gives this amusing glimpse: 'One day at dinner, I remember, Jeffrey admired the fritters or bits of pancake he was eating, and she let him know, not without some vestige of shock to him, that she had made them. "What, you! twirl up the frying-pan, and catch them in the air?" Even so, my high friend, and you may turn it over in your mind!' When the Jeffreys were leaving, 'I remarked,' says Carlyle, that they 'carried off our little temporary paradise; ... to which bit of pathos Jeffrey answered by a friendly little sniff of quasi-mockery or laughter through the nose, and rolled prosperously away.'

The Carlyles in course of time visited the Jeffreys at Craigcrook, the last occasion being for about a fortnight. Carlyle says it was 'a shining sort of affair, but did not in effect accomplish much for any of us. Perhaps, for one thing, we stayed too long, Jeffrey was beginning to be seriously incommoded in health, had bad sleep, cared not how late he sat, and we had now more than ever a series of sharp fencing bouts, night after night, which could decide nothing for either of us, except our radical incompatibility in respect of World Theory, and the incurable divergence of our opinions on the most important matters. "You are so dreadfully in earnest!" said he to me once or oftener. Besides, I own now I was deficient in reverence to him, and had not then, nor, alas! have ever acquired, in my solitary and mostly silent existence, the art of gently saying strong things, or of insinuating my dissent, instead of uttering it right out at the risk of offence or otherwise.' Then he adds: 'These "stormy sittings," as Mrs Jeffrey laughingly called them, did not improve our relation to one another. But these were the last we had of that nature. In other respects Edinburgh had been barren; effulgences of "Edinburgh Society," big dinners, parties, we in due measure had; but nothing there was very interesting either to Her or to me, and all of it passed away as an obliging pageant merely. Well do I remember our return to Craigenputtock, after nightfall, amid the clammy yellow leaves and desolate rains with the clink of Alick's stithy alone audible of human.'[9]

It was during his first two years' residence at Craigenputtock that Carlyle wrote his famous essay on Burns; but his principal work was upon German literature, especially upon Goethe. His magazine writings being his only means of support, and as he devoted much time to them, it is not surprising that financial matters worried him. About this time Jeffrey, to whom doubtless he confided his trouble, generously offered to confer upon him an annuity of £100, which Carlyle declined to accept. Jeffrey repeated the offer on two subsequent occasions, with a like result. Carlyle in his Reminiscences says that he could not doubt but Jeffrey had intended an act of real generosity; and yet Carlyle penned the ungracious remark, that 'perhaps there was something in the manner of it that savoured of consciousness and of screwing one's self up to the point; less of god-like pity for a fine fellow and his struggles, than of human determination to do a fine action of one's own, which might add to the promptitude of my refusal.' It is not surprising, therefore, to find Carlyle suspecting that Jeffrey's feelings were cooling towards him. Jeffrey had powers of penetration as well as the friend whom he was anxious to assist.

By the month of February 1831, Carlyle's finances fell so low that he had only £5 in his possession, and expected no more for months. Then he borrowed £100 from Jeffrey, as his 'pitiful bits of periodical literature incomings,' as he puts it, 'having gone awry (as they were liable to do), but was able, I still remember with what satisfaction, to repay punctually within a few weeks'; adding, 'and this was all of pecuniary chivalry we two ever had between us.' The chivalry was all on the one side—of Jeffrey. The outcome of his labours at Craigenputtock, in addition to the fragmentary articles already referred to, was the essays which form the first three volumes of the 'Miscellanies.' They appeared chiefly in the Edinburgh Review, the Foreign Review, and Fraser's Magazine. Jeffrey's resignation of the editorship of the 'Review' was a great disappointment to Carlyle, because it stopped a regular source of income.

German literature, of which Carlyle had begun a history, not being a 'marketable commodity,' he cut it up into articles. 'My last considerable bit of Writing at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'was "Sartor Resartus"; done, I think, between January and August 1830; (my sister Margaret had died while it was going on). I well remember where and how (at Templand one morning) the germ of it rose above ground. "Nine months," I used to say, "it had cost me in writing." Had the perpetual fluctuation, the uncertainty and unintelligible whimsicality of Review Editors not proved so intolerable, we might have lingered longer at Craigenputtock, perfectly left alone, and able to do more work, beyond doubt, than elsewhere. But a Book did seem to promise some respite from that, and perhaps further advantages. Teufelsdröckh was ready; and (first days of August) I decided to make for London. Night before going, how I still remember it! I was lying on my back on the sofa in the drawing-room; she sitting by the table (late at night, packing all done, I suppose); her words had a guise of sport, but were profoundly plaintive in meaning. "About to part, who knows for how long; and what may have come in the interim!" this was her thought, and she was evidently much out of spirits. "Courage, Dearie, only for a month!" I would say to her in some form or other. I went next morning early.'[10]

Jeffrey, who was by that time Lord Advocate, Carlyle found much preoccupied in London, but willing to assist him with Murray, the bookseller. Jeffrey, with his wife and daughter, lived in Jermyn Street in lodgings, 'in melancholy contrast to the beautiful tenements and perfect equipments they had left in the north.' 'If,' says Carlyle, 'I called in the morning, in quest perhaps of Letters (though I don't recollect much troubling him in that way), I would find the family still at breakfast, ten A.M. or later; and have seen poor Jeffrey emerge in flowered dressing-gown, with a most boiled and suffering expression of face, like one who had slept miserably, and now awoke mainly to paltry misery and bother; poor Official man! "I am made a mere Post-Office of!" I heard him once grumble, after tearing open several Packets, not one of which was internally for himself.'[11]

Mrs Carlyle joined her husband on the 1st of October 1831, and they took lodgings at 4 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Lane, with a family of the name of Miles, belonging to Irving's congregation. Jeffrey was a frequent visitor there, and sometimes the Carlyles called at Jermyn Street. Carlyle says that they were at first rather surprised that Jeffrey did not introduce him to some of his 'grand literary figures,' or try in some way to be of help to one for whom he evidently had a value. The explanation, Carlyle thinks, was that he himself 'expressed no trace of aspiration that way'; that Jeffrey's 'grand literary or other figures' were clearly by no means 'so adorable to the rustic hopelessly Germanised soul as an introducer of one might have wished.' Besides, Jeffrey was so 'heartily miserable,' as to think Carlyle and his other fellow-creatures happy in comparison, and to have no care left to bestow upon them.

Here is a characteristic outburst in the 'Reminiscences': 'The beggarly history of poor "Sartor" among the blockheadisms is not worth my recording or remembering—least of all here! In short, finding that whereas I had got £100 (if memory serve) for "Schiller" six or seven years before, and for "Sartor," at least thrice as good, I could not only not get £200, but even get no Murray, or the like, to publish it on half-profits (Murray, a most stupendous object to me; tumbling about, eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "yes and no"; my first signal experience of that sad human predicament); I said, "We will make it No, then; wrap up our MS.; wait till this Reform Bill uproar abate."'[12]

On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received tidings of the death of his father. He departed on the Sunday morning previous 'almost without a struggle,' wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke for Carlyle. 'Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly afterwards, 'have come to my relief. I can look at my dear Father, and that section of the Past which he has made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light, and give way to what thoughts rise in me without feeling that they are weak and useless.' Carlyle determined that the time till the funeral was past (Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All others were excluded. He walked 'far and much,' chiefly in the Regent's Park, and considered about many things, his object being to see clearly what his calamity meant—what he lost, and what lesson that loss was to teach him. Carlyle considered his father as one of the most interesting men he had known. 'Were you to ask me,' he said, 'which had the greater natural faculty,' Robert Burns or my father, 'I might, perhaps, actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider Education, my Father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from Nature and the Arena from Fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of Speculation—had Culture ever unfolded him—he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct, and Work keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures we are!'[13] Nothing that the elder Carlyle undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and like a true man. 'I shall look,' said his distinguished son, 'on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him will ever say, "Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant." They are little texts for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his deeds and sayings in any case be found unworthy—not false and barren, but genuine and fit. Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence; I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he exclusively that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honourably forth into new generations.'[14] One of the wise men about Ecclefechan told James Carlyle: 'Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' His father once told Carlyle this, and added: 'Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it.' When James Carlyle first entered his son's house at Craigenputtock, Mrs Carlyle was greatly struck with him, 'and still farther,' says her husband, 'opened my eyes to the treasure I possessed in a father.'

The last time Carlyle saw his father was a few days before leaving for London. 'He was very kind,' wrote Carlyle, 'seemed prouder of me than ever. What he had never done the like of before, he said, on hearing me express something which he admired, "Man, it's surely a pity that thou should sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."' In closing his affectionate tribute, Carlyle exclaims: 'Thank Heaven, I know and have known what it is to be a son; to love a father, as spirit can love spirit.'

The last days of March 1832 found the Carlyles back at Craigenputtock. A new tenant occupied the farm, and their days were lonelier than ever. Meanwhile 'Sartor Resartus' was appearing in Fraser's Magazine. The Editor reported that it 'excited the most unqualified disapprobation.' Nothing daunted, Carlyle pursued the 'noiseless tenor of his way,' throwing off articles on various subjects. Finding that Mrs Carlyle's health suffered from the gloom and solitude of Craigenputtock, they removed to Edinburgh in January 1833. Jeffrey was absent in 'official regions,' and Carlyle notes that they found a 'most dreary contemptible kind of element' in Edinburgh. But their stay there was not without its uses, for in the Advocates' Library Carlyle found books which had a great effect upon his line of study. He collected materials for his articles upon 'Cagliostro' and the 'Diamond Necklace.' At the end of four months, the Carlyles were back again at Craigenputtock.

August was a bright month for Thomas Carlyle, for it was then that Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at his rural retreat. The Carlyles thought him 'one of the most lovable creatures' they had ever seen, and an unbroken friendship of nearly fifty years was begun. As winter approached, Carlyle's prospects were not very bright, and he once more turned his eyes towards London, where the remainder of his life was to be spent. Before following him thither, it may be well to turn from the outer to the inner side of Carlyle's life, and study the forces which went to the making of his unique personality.