CHAPTER V HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS—LITERARY WORK

Carlyle was so broken down with his efforts upon the French Revolution that a trip to Annandale became necessary. He stayed at Scotsbrig two months, 'wholly idle, reading novels, smoking pipes in the garden with his mother, hearing notices of his book from a distance, but not looking for them or caring about them.' Autumn brought Carlyle back to Cheyne Row, when he found his wife in better health, delighted to have him again at her side. She knew, as Froude points out, though Carlyle, so little vain was he, had failed as yet to understand it, that he had returned to a changed position, that he was no longer lonely and neglected, but had taken his natural place among the great writers of his day. He sent bright accounts of himself to Scotsbrig. 'I find John Sterling here, and many friends, all kinder each than the other to me. With talk and locomotion the days pass cheerfully till I rest and gird myself together again. They make a great talk about the book, which seems to have succeeded in a far higher degree than I looked for. Everybody is astonished at every other body's being pleased with this wonderful performance.'[18]

Carlyle did nothing all the winter except to write his essay on Sir Walter Scott. His next task was to prepare for a second course of lectures in the spring on 'Heroes.' The course ended with 'a blaze of fire-works—people weeping at the passionately earnest tone in which for once they heard themselves addressed.' The effort brought Carlyle £300 after all expenses had been paid. 'A great blessing,' he remarked, 'to a man that had been haunted by the squalid spectre of beggary.'

Carlyle had no intention of visiting Scotland that autumn, but having received a pressing invitation from old friends at Kirkcaldy, he took steamer to Leith in August. While at Kirkcaldy he crossed to Edinburgh and called on Jeffrey. 'He sat,' says Carlyle, 'waiting for me at Moray Place. We talked long in the style of literary and philosophic clitter-clatter. Finally it was settled that I should go out to dinner with him at Craigcrook, and not return to Fife till the morrow.' They dined and abstained from contradicting each other, Carlyle admitting that Jeffrey was becoming an amiable old fribble, 'very cheerful, very heartless, very forgettable and tolerable.'

On his return to London, equal to work again, Carlyle found all well. He was gratified to hear that the eighth edition of the French Revolution was almost sold, and that another would be called for, while there were numerous applications from review editors for articles if he would please to supply them. Mill about this time asked him to contribute a paper on Cromwell to the London and Westminster Review. Carlyle agreed, and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr Robertson to manage the Review. Robertson coolly wrote to say that he need not go on with the article, 'for he meant to do Cromwell himself.' Carlyle was wroth, and that incident determined him to 'throw himself seriously into the history of the Commonwealth, and to expose himself no more to cavalier treatment from "able editors."' But for that task he required books. Then it was that the idea of founding a London library occurred to him. Men of position took up the matter warmly, and Carlyle's object was accomplished. 'Let the tens of thousands,' says Mr Froude, 'who, it is to be hoped, "are made better and wiser" by the books collected there, remember that they owe the privilege entirely to Carlyle.'

One of Carlyle's new acquaintances was Monckton Milnes, who asked him to breakfast. Carlyle used to say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes would ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the 'good things' that Christ had said. He also became familiar with Mr Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and his accomplished wife, who in course of time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle household. It would not tend to edification to dwell upon the domestic misunderstandings at Cheyne Row; besides, are not they to be found detailed at great length in Froude's Life, the Reminiscences, and Letters and Memorials? Although Carlyle was taking life somewhat easy, he was making preparations for his third course of lectures, his subject being the 'Revolutions of Modern Europe.' They did not please the lecturer, but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he made a clear gain of £200.

About this time Emerson was pressing him to go to Boston on a lecturing tour. But Carlyle thought better of it. More important work awaited him in London. 'All his life,' says Froude, 'he had been meditating on the problem of the working-man's existence in this country at the present epoch.... He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had heard his father talk of the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses. His letters are full of reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as the humour might be. He was himself a working-man's son. He had been bred in a peasant home, and all his sympathies were with his own class. He was not a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be no remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper misery. But the fact remained, portending frightful issues. The Reform Bill was to have mended matters but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were none the happier. The power of the State had been shifted from the aristocracy to the mill-owners, and merchants, and shopkeepers. That was all. The handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking, rather, into an unowned Arab, to whom "freedom" meant freedom to work if the employer had work to offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom to starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was the Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and he felt that he must put his thoughts upon it in a permanent form. He had no faith in political remedies, in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of man," etc.—absolutely none. That was the road on which the French had gone; and, if tried in England, it would end as it ended with them—in anarchy, and hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing now to flat denial, that they owed any duty to those under them beyond the payment of contract wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as formulated in Political Economy, was that every one should attend exclusively to his own interests, and that the best of all possible worlds would be the certain result. His own conviction was that the result would be the worst of all possible worlds, a world in which human life, such a life as human beings ought to live, would become impossible.'[19]

He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over: "Guess what immediate project I am on; that of writing an article on the working-classes for the "Quarterly." It is verily so. I offered to do the thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt a kind of call and monition of duty to do it, wrote to Lockhart accordingly, was altogether invitingly answered, had a long interview with the man yesterday, found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kindness, and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on the matter. Am to get books from him to-morrow, and so shall forthwith set about telling the Conservatives a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights, and mights of the working order of men."

When the annual exodus from London came, the Carlyles went north for a holiday. They returned much refreshed at the end of two months. His presence, moreover, was required in London, as Wilhelm Meister was now to be republished. He set about finishing his article for the "Quarterly," but as he progressed he felt some misgiving as to its ever appearing in that magazine. "I have finished," he wrote on November 8, 1839, "a long review article, thick pamphlet, or little volume, entitled "Chartism." Lockhart has it, for it was partly promised to him; at least the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all he will enjoy of it." Lockhart sent it back, 'seemingly not without reluctance,' saying he dared not. Mill was shown the pamphlet and was 'unexpectedly delighted with it.' He was willing to publish it, but Carlyle's wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good for a magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it, and before the close of the year Chartism was in the hands of the public.

The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies being sold immediately. 'Chartism,' Froude narrates, was loudly noticed: "considerable reviewing, but very daft reviewing." Men wondered; how could they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident power stripped bare the social disease, told them that their remedies were quack remedies, and their progress was progress to dissolution? The Liberal journals, finding their "formulas" disbelieved in, clamoured that Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet what he said was true, and could not be denied to be true. "They approve generally," he said, "but regret very much that I am a Tory. Stranger Tory, in my opinion, has not been fallen in with in these later generations." Again a few weeks later (February 11): "The people are beginning to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no! but one of the deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the Radicals now extant in the world—a thing productive of small comfort to several persons. They have said, and they will say, and let them say."

His final course of lectures now confronted him, and these he entitled Heroes and Hero Worship. He tells his mother (May 26, 1840): 'The lecturing business went off with sufficient éclat. The course was generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to be the bad best I have yet given. On the last day—Friday last—I went to speak of Cromwell with a head full of air; you know that wretched physical feeling; I had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would hardly wag at all when I got done. Yet the good people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds of testimonies of goodwill.... In a word, we got right handsomely through.' That was Carlyle's last appearance as a public lecturer. He was now the observed of all observers in London society; but he was weary of lionising and junketings. 'What,' he notes in his journal on June 15, 1840, 'are lords coming to call on one and fill one's head with whims? They ask you to go among champagne, bright glitter, semi-poisonous excitements which you do not like even for the moment, and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White said of whisky, "Keep it—Deevil a ever I'se better than when there's no a drop on't i' my weam." So say I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism—Keep it; give it to those that like it.'

Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits from Tennyson. Here is what he says of the poet: 'A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does emerge—a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.'

In a note to his brother John on September 11, 1840, he says: 'I have again some notions towards writing a book—let us see what comes of that. It is the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.' The book he had in view was Cromwell. Journalising on the day after Christmas he laments—'Oliver Cromwell will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about that subject some four months ago. I learn almost nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to begin.'

At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote: 'Carlyle is reading voraciously, preparatory to writing a new book. For the rest, he growls away much in the old style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for one.' A month or two later, Carlyle writes: 'Think not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In the mutual misery we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a saying of yours. "When the wife has influenza, it is a slight cold—when the man has it, it is, &c., &c."' Writing to Sterling he exclaims, 'I shall verily fly to Craigenputtock again before long. Yet I know what solitude is, and imprisonment among black cattle and peat bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are. "Oh, the devil burn it"! said the Irish drummer flogging his countryman; "there's no pleasing of you, strike where one will."'

Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the bleak expanse of Craigenputtock, to accompany him to his father's house at Fryston, in Yorkshire, whence he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters to Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to Dumfriesshire to see his mother, who had been slightly ailing. He was back in London, however, in May, but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot summer, and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took a cottage at Newby, close to Annan. By the end of September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His latest hero still troubled him. 'Ought I,' he asks, 'to write now of Oliver Cromwell?... I cannot yet see clearly.'

Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish professorship, but the 'door had been shut in his face,' sometimes contemptuously. He was now famous, and the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever might be the opinions of the authorities and patrons, they for their part must consider lectures such as these a good exchange for what was provided for them. A 'History Chair' was about to be established. A party of them, represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a requisition to the Faculty of Advocates to appoint Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated, Carlyle replied: 'Accept my kind thanks, you and all your associates, for your zeal to serve me.... Ten years ago such an invitation might perhaps have been decisive of much for me, but it is too late now; too late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you with at present.'

A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who received news from Templand that her mother had been struck by apoplexy, and was dangerously ill. Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first train from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle's house there she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle lay ill in Liverpool, unable to stir. After a while she was able to go back to London, where Carlyle joined her in the month of May. It was on his return journey that he paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he had an opportunity, under his host's genial guidance, to explore the field of Naseby.

His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts they suggested, made Carlyle disinclined for society. He had a room arranged for him at the top of his house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books on Cromwell, 'the sight of Naseby having brought the subject back out of "the abysses."' Meanwhile he had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr Stephen Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote vivid descriptions.

On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'For many months there has been no writing here. Alas! what was there to write? About myself, nothing; or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even more formidable than the executing of it.' But another subject was to engross his attention for a little while. The distress of the poor became intense; less in London, however, than in other large towns. 'I declare,' he wrote to his mother early in January 1843, 'I declare I begin to feel as if I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I should perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them are not expecting—we shall see if this book were done.' On the 20th he wrote: 'I hope it will be a rather useful kind of book.' He could not go on with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. 'The look of the world,' he said, 'is really quite oppressive to me. Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the land all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the while! It is a thing no man with a speaking tongue in his head is entitled to be silent about.' The outcome of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was Past and Present, which appeared at the beginning of April. The reviewers set to work, 'wondering, admiring, blaming, chiefly the last.'

Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in order to visit Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which made the Oliver enterprise no longer impossible. He found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs Carlyle writing on November 28th, describes him as 'over head and ears in Cromwell,' and 'lost to humanity for the time being.' Six months later, he makes this admission in his journal—'My progress in "Cromwell" is frightful. I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than I can muster on most days, and I sit not so much working as painfully looking on work.' Four months later, when Cromwell was progressing slowly, Carlyle suffered a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling. 'Sterling,' says Froude, 'had been his spiritual pupil, his first, and also his noblest and best. Consumption had set its fatal mark upon him.' Carlyle drowned his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 the end of Cromwell was coming definitely in sight. In his journal under date August 26th, is to be found this entry: 'I have this moment ended Oliver; hang it! He is ended, thrums and all. I have nothing more to write on the subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any more) up to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic litter, hatefuller to me than most. I am to have a swept floor now again.' And thus the herculean labours of five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scotland, and he made his way northwards by the usual sea route to Annan and Scotsbrig. He did not remain long away, and upon his return Cromwell was just issuing from the press. It was received with great favour, the sale was rapid, and additional materials came from unexpected quarters. In February 1846 a new edition was needed in order to insert fresh letters of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said 'requiring one's most excellent talent, as of shoe-cobbling, really that kind of talent carried to a high pitch.' When completed, Carlyle presented a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he never took before or after with any of his writings,—a compliment which Peel gracefully acknowledged.

Carlyle's plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit to his mother and a run across to Ireland. Charles Gavan Duffy of the Nation newspaper saw him in London in consequence of what he had written in Chartism about misgovernment in Ireland. He had promised to go over and see what the 'Young Ireland' movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where he was to have been met by John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He missed his two friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum, and was there entertained at a large dinner-party. Next day he dined at Mitchel's. His stay was remarkably short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the early morning of September 10th 'he was sitting smoking a cigar before the door of his wife's uncle's house in Liverpool till the household should awake and let him in.'

In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying visit from Jeffrey. 'A much more interesting visitor than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who came down to us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I think, five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meeting. The good old man is grown white-headed, but is otherwise wonderfully little altered—grave, deliberate, very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of soft energy; full of interest still for all serious things, full of real kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth in a fair measure. He sate with us an hour and a half, went away with our blessings and affections. It is long since I have spoken to so good and really pious-hearted and beautiful old man.' In a week or two Chalmers was suddenly called away. 'I believe,' wrote Carlyle to his mother, 'there is not in all Scotland, or all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long be memorable to us, the little visit we had from him.'

Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament, and the fate of it doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to write a pamphlet in its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired how he answered. 'Well,' he said, 'I had to tell him it couldn't be; but I observed, too, that I could not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.' Froude asked what the Baron said to that. 'Why,' said Carlyle, 'he seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc.'

On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'Chapman's money [Chapman & Hall were his publishers] all paid, lodged now in the Dumfries Bank. New edition of "Sartor" to be wanted soon. My poor books of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating annual income; at all events, I am quite at my ease as to money, and that on such low terms. I often wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some £1500, I think, is what has accumulated in the bank. Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock) £150 a year. Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid the huge fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was £800: the year before, £100; the year before that, about £700; this year, again, it is like to be £100; the next perhaps nothing—very fluctuating indeed)—some £300 in all, and that amply suffices me. For my wife is the best of housewives; noble, too, in reference to the property, which is hers, which she has never once in the most distant way seemed to know to be hers. Be this noted and remembered; my thrifty little lady—every inch a lady—ah me! In short, I authentically feel indifferent to money; would not go this way or that to gain more money.'[20]

The Revolution of February 24th at Paris surprised Carlyle less than most of his contemporaries, as it confirmed what he had been saying for years. He did not believe, we are told, in immediate convulsion in England; but he did believe that, unless England took warning and mended her ways, her turn would come. The excitement in London was intense, and leading men expressed themselves freely, but Carlyle's general thoughts were uttered in a lengthy letter to Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, for whom he entertained a warm regard. On March 14 he met Macaulay at Lord Mahon's at breakfast; 'Niagara of eloquent commonplace talk,' he says, 'from Macaulay. "Very good-natured man"; man cased in official mail of proof; stood my impatient fire-explosions with much patience, merely hissing a little steam up, and continued his Niagara—supply and demand; power ruinous to powerful himself; impossibility of Government doing more than keep the peace; suicidal distraction of new French Republic, etc. Essentially irremediable, commonplace nature of the man; all that was in him now gone to the tongue; a squat, thickset, low-browed, short, grizzled little man of fifty.'

One of the few men Carlyle was anxious to see was Sir Robert Peel. He was introduced by the Barings at a dinner at Bath House. Carlyle sat next to Peel, whom he describes as 'a finely-made man of strong, not heavy, rather of elegant, stature; stands straight, head slightly thrown back, and eyelids modestly drooping; every way mild and gentle, yet with less of that fixed smile than the portraits give him. He is towards sixty, and, though not broken at all, carries, especially in his complexion, when you are near him, marks of that age; clear, strong blue eyes which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low-toned, something of cooing in it, rustic, affectionate, honest, mildly persuasive. Spoke about French Revolutions new and old; well read in all that; had seen General Dumouriez; reserved seemingly by nature, obtrudes nothing of diplomatic reserve. On the contrary, a vein of mild fun in him, real sensibility to the ludicrous, which feature I liked best of all.... I consider him by far our first public man—which, indeed, is saying little—and hope that England in these frightful times may still get some good of him. N.B.—This night with Peel was the night in which Berlin city executed its last terrible battle, (19th of March to Sunday morning the 20th, five o'clock.) While we sate there the streets of Berlin city were all blazing with grape-shot and the war of enraged men. What is to become of all that? I have a book to write about it. Alas! We hear of a great Chartist petition to be presented by 200,000 men. People here keep up their foolish levity in speaking of these things; but considerate persons find them to be very grave; and indeed all, even the laughers, are in considerable secret alarm.'[21]

At such a time Carlyle knew that he, the author of Chartism, ought to say something. Foolish people, too, came pressing for his opinions. Not seeing his way to a book upon 'Democracy,' he wrote a good many newspaper articles, chiefly in the Examiner and the Spectator, to deliver his soul. Even Fonblanque and Rintoul (the editors), remarks Froude, friendly though they were to him, could not allow him his full swing. 'There is no established journal,' complained Carlyle, 'that can stand my articles, no single one they would not blow the bottom out of.'

On July 12 occurs this entry in his journal: 'Chartist concern, and Irish Repeal concern, and French Republic concern have all gone a bad way since the March entry—April 20 (immortal day already dead), day of Chartist monster petition; 200,000 special constables swore themselves in, etc., and Chartism came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders all lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc., and so ends Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel, poor fellow! is now in Bermuda as a felon; letter from him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord Clarendon—was really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help? French Republic cannonaded by General Cavaignac; a sad outlook there.'[22]

Carlyle's Cromwell had created a set of enthusiastic admirers who were bent on having a statue of the great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked to give his sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he said: 'The people having subscribed £25,000 for a memorial to an ugly bullock of a Hudson, who did not even pretend to have any merit except that of being suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little other than at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow, I think they ought to leave Cromwell alone of their memorials, and try to honour him in some more profitable way—by learning to be honest men like him, for example. But we shall see what comes of all this Cromwell work—a thing not without value either.'[23]

'Ireland,' says Froude, 'of all the topics on which Carlyle had meditated writing, remained painfully fascinating. He had looked at the beggarly scene, he had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of the wretched race who were suffering for other's sins as well as for their own. Since that brief visit of his, the famine had been followed by the famine-fever, and the flight of millions from a land which was smitten with a curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had dined at Dundrum were working as felons in the docks at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy, after a near escape from the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row; and the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by crowbars, and shivering families, turned out of their miserable homes, dying in the ditches by the roadside, had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was furious at the economical commonplaces with which England was consoling itself. He regarded Ireland as "the breaking-point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society then was."'[24] Carlyle paid a second visit to Ireland. He was anxious to write a book on the subject. He noted down what he had seen, and 'then dismissed the unhappy subject from his mind,' giving his manuscript to a friend, which was published after his death.

The 7th of August found Carlyle among his 'ain folk' at Scotsbrig, and this was his soliloquy: 'Thank Heaven for the sight of real human industry, with human fruits from it, once more. The sight of fenced fields, weeded crops, and human creatures with whole clothes on their back—it was as if one had got into spring water out of dunghill puddles.' Mrs Carlyle had also gone to Scotland, and 'wandered like a returned spirit about the home of her childhood.' Of her numerous lively letters, room must be found for a characteristic epistle to her brother-in-law, John Carlyle. His translation of Dante's Inferno was just out, and her uncle's family at Auchtertool Manse, in Fife, where she was staying, were busy reading and discussing it. 'We had been talking about you,' she says, 'and had sunk silent. Suddenly my uncle turned his head to me and said, shaking it gravely, "He has made an awesome plooster o' that place." "Who? What place, uncle?" "Whew! the place ye'll maybe gang to, if ye dinna tak' care." I really believe he considers all those circles of your invention. Walter [a cousin, just ordained] performed the marriage service over a couple of colliers the day after I came. I happened to be in his study when they came in, and asked leave to remain. The man was a good-looking man enough, dreadfully agitated, partly with the business he was come on, partly with drink. He had evidently taken a glass too much to keep his heart up. The girl had one very large inflamed eye and one little one, which looked perfectly composed, while the large eye stared wildly, and had a tear in it. Walter married them very well indeed; and his affecting words, together with the bridegroom's pale, excited face, and the bride's ugliness, and the poverty, penury, and want imprinted on the whole business, and above all fellow-feeling with the poor wretches then rushing on their fate—all that so overcame me that I fell crying as desperately as if I had been getting married to the collier myself, and, when the ceremony was over, extended my hand to the unfortunates, and actually (in such an enthusiasm of pity did I find myself) I presented the new husband with a snuff-box which I happened to have in my hand, being just about presenting it to Walter when the creatures came in. This unexpected Himmelsendung finished turning the man's head; he wrung my hand over and over, leaving his mark for some hours after, and ended his grateful speeches with, "Oh, Miss! Oh, Liddy! may ye hae mair comfort and pleasure in your life than ever you have had yet!" which might easily be.'

Carlyle was full of wrath at what he considered the cant about the condition of the wage-earners in Manchester and elsewhere, and his indignation found vent in the Latter-day Pamphlets. Froude once asked him if he had ever thought of going into Parliament, for the former knew that the opportunity must have been offered him. 'Well,' he said, 'I did think of it at the time of the "Latter-day Pamphlets." I felt that nothing could prevent me from getting up in the House and saying all that.' 'He was powerful,' adds Froude, 'but he was not powerful enough to have discharged with his single voice the vast volume of conventional electricity with which the collective wisdom of the nation was, and remains charged. It is better that his thoughts should have been committed to enduring print, where they remain to be reviewed hereafter by the light of fact.'[25]

The printing of the Pamphlets commenced at the beginning of 1850, and went on month after month, each separately published, no magazine daring to become responsible for them. When the Pamphlets appeared, they were received with 'astonished indignation.' 'Carlyle taken to whisky,' was the popular impression—or perhaps he had gone mad. 'Punch,' says Froude, 'the most friendly to him of all the London periodicals, protested affectionately. The delinquent was brought up for trial before him, I think for injuring his reputation. He was admonished, but stood impenitent, and even "called the worthy magistrate a windbag and a sham." I suppose it was Thackeray who wrote this; or some other kind friend, who feared, like Emerson, "that the world would turn its back on him." He was under no illusion himself as to the effect which he was producing.'[26]

Amid the general storm, Carlyle was 'agreeably surprised' to receive an invitation to dine with Peel at Whitehall Gardens, where he met a select company. 'After all the servants but the butler were gone,' narrates Carlyle, 'we began to hear a little of Peel's quiet talk across the table, unimportant, distinguished by its sense of the ludicrous shining through a strong official rationality and even seriousness of temper. Distracted address of a letter from somebody to Queen Victoria; "The most noble George Victoria, Queen of England, Knight and Baronet," or something like that. A man had once written to Peel himself, while secretary, "that he was weary of life, that if any gentleman wanted for his park-woods a hermit, he, etc.", all of which was very pretty and human as Peel gave it us.'[27] Carlyle was driven home by the Bishop of Oxford, 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, whom he had probably met before at the Ashburton's. The Bishop once told Froude that he considered Carlyle a most eminently religious man. 'Ah, Sam,' said Carlyle to Froude one day, 'he is a very clever fellow; I do not hate him near as much as I fear I ought to do.' Carlyle and Peel met once more, at Bath House, and there, too, he was first introduced to the Duke of Wellington. Writing at the time, Carlyle said: 'I had never seen till now how beautiful, and what an expression of graceful simplicity, veracity, and nobleness there is about the old hero when you see him close at hand.... Except for Dr Chalmers, I have not for many years seen so beautiful an old man.'

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.