LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE TO
HIS YOUNGEST SISTER
?
HIS YOUNGEST SISTER
?
Thomas Carlyle
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? 22 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
this kirkyard, where Carlyle has since laid
himself down with his kindred, is Carlyle's.
The reappearance (usually heightened or
elaborated) of bits of prospect or topography
first recorded in Carlyle's letters is an inter-
esting characteristic of his writing. His first
visit to Paris was of much service to him in
fixing the places and scenes of The French
Revolution; the trip into the country of
Cromwell's birth and the examination of
Naseby field come into sight again in the
book,-- witness especially the "Cease your
fooling," and the troopers' teeth that bit into
Carlyle's memory; and a number of rough
drafts for details of Frederick appear in let-
ters from the Continent. A brief note, dur-
ing a visit to Mr. Redwood in 1843, of the
Glamorganshire "green network of intricate
lanes, mouldering ruins, vigorous vegetation
good and bad," was afterward dilated (in
the Life of Sterling) into the spacious and
beautiful landscape beginning: "Llanblethian
hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and
orchard and other trees, on the western slope
of a green hill; looking far and wide over
green meadows and little or bigger hills, in
the pleasant plain of Glamorgan. "
Distinguished as are Carlyle's portraits of
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 23
places, it is probably his portraits of persons
that abide longest and most completely in
the memories of most readers. Robespierre,
Mirabeau and Mirabeau pere, Frederick and
Frederick William, -- it is one sign of Car-
lyle's power that he can make subordinate
characters salient and still bring out his hero,
-- Voltaire, Cromwell, and the Abbot Sam-
son, are a few of the pictures that line his
galleries. Wonderful as are these render-
ings of men he never saw, his sketches of men
he had known are almost literally "speaking
likenesses. " Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Mazzini, Louis Napo-
leon, are among the many who are painted to
a miracle in Carlyle's letters. Behold a great
American, in a letter to Emerson : --
"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast
the notablest of all your Notabilities, Daniel
Webster. He is a magnificent specimen;
you might say to all the world, This is your
Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in
Yankee-land! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate,
or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline
to back him at first sight against all the
extant world. The tanned complexion, that
amorphous craglike face; the dull black eyes
under their precipice of brows, like dull an-
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? 24 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WBITEE
thracite furnaces, needing only to be blown;
the mastiff - mouth, accurately closed : -- I
have not traced as much of silent Berserker-
rage, that I remember of, in any other man.
'I guess I should not like to be your nigger! '"
At the risk of numbering this paper with
the books of Chrysippus, we must look again
at the portrait of De Quincey, which is, per-
haps, the artist's chief triumph. Although
it is to be found in the Reminiscences, it yet
belongs here well enough, for that book is
not so much a book as a long, rambling let-
ter, partly of remorse, partly of pity, from
Carlyle to himself. "He was a pretty little
creature," says this terrible, sad old man, re-
membering after forty years, "full of wire-
drawn ingenuities; bankrupt enthusiasms,
bankrupt pride; with the finest silver-toned
low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding
courtesies and ingenuities of conversation:
'What would n't one give to have him in a
Box, and take him out to talk I' (That was
Her criticism of him; and it was right good. )
A bright, ready and melodious talker; but
in the end an inconclusive and long-winded.
One of the smallest man-figures I ever saw;
shaped like a pair of tongs; and hardly above
five feet in all: when he sat, you would have
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 25
taken him, by candle-light, for the beauti-
f ullest little Child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired,
sparkling face, -- had there not been a some-
thing too, which said, 'Eccovi, this Child has
been in Hell! '" One would be sure, without
other evidence than "Her criticism " in this
description, which is also a "character," -- to
use the old word, -- that She, too, had been
terrible. The broken order, the curious punc-
tuation, the capitals and italics, the leave of
absence granted to the verb, the quick inter-
jections, all taken together make the passage
a concentrated example of Carlyle's vox hu- mana style, -- of his writing when it is most
like speech, sublimated. In his use of persons, as of places, there
are pregnant comparisons to be made between
Carlyle's first study and the final portrait.
Sterling and old Sterling are cases in point;
Coleridge, maybe, the best instance of all.
The main lines and the personal atmosphere,
always visible, I think, in the sketch, are
reproduced by Carlyle in the finished work.
But in the heightening of lights, in the deep-
ening of shade, in composition, above all, he
makes many changes, which almost invariably
result in greater intensity of effect.
From such comparisons, if patiently con-
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? 26 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
ducted, might come luminous comment on
the question of Carlyle's style, -- a question
more vexed than the Bermoothes.
So far and so much for Carlyle's general
aspect as a letter-writer. I have tried to show
that, in addressing himself to a very few
friends, and especially to his own family, he
displays a different set of qualities. The dif-
ference between his vehemence toward the
world at large and his gentleness toward his
mother sometimes seems as marked as that
between the two visions of the prophet Jere-
miah: the one a seething caldron, the face
thereof from the north; the other, a rod of
an almond tree. The world, in truth, for this
peasant of genius, was, to the considerable
degree in which he remained a peasant, an
assemblage of persons and things to be ap-
proached with many reserves and a deal of
more or less violent disapproval. Annandale,
contrariwise, was an honest, strength-giving
corner of the world, which did for him
through life the office of the earth to An-
taeus. He went back to it so often that he
never lost his native accent, and, in certain
respects, the point of view to which he was
born. So long as Carlyle's mother lived,
there was rarely a year in which he did not
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 27
make a pilgrimage to Scotsbrig; and, after
she died, he went oftener to her grave than
most sons, dwelling at a distance from their
mothers, visit them in life. Scotsbrig also
came to him in the shape of letters, as well
as in the unsentimental (though, rightly be-
held, not unpathetic) guise of oatmeal, bacon,
clothes, and what not. The Carlyles held
that good meal could not be bought in Lon-
don; and when the barrel wasted, it was filled
again from home. One far-brought fowl we
all remember as the epic subject of a letter
from Mrs. Carlyle in Chelsea to her sister-
in-law in Scotland. Carlyle had his clothes
made in Annan, partly from thrift, partly
from distrust of London tailors.
However much he depended on the people
and the kindly fruits of his native soil, how-
ever much the exclusiveness of the Carlyles
may have been only that common to all
Scotch peasant families, it is still hard to
credit, though on the excellent authority of
Mrs. Oliphant, that their mutual love was
not "by ordinar," even among Scotch peas-
ants. Especially is it difficult of credence
that the attachment of Carlyle and his mother
was not as rare as it was beautiful. In 1832,
after the death of his father, he writes to his
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? 28 CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
brother Alick, at Scotsbrig: "0 let us all be
gentle, obedient, loving to our Mother, now
that she is left wholly to our charge ! ' Hon-
our thy Father and thy Mother': doubly
honour thy Mother when she alone remains. "
For twenty years this double honor was more
than trebly paid. The son writes once to his
mother: "Since I wrote last I have been in
Scotsbrig more than in London. " And so
it often is to the end, -- and after. Dream-
ing and waking, he looks far up across Eng-
land and the Solway. In the spring the plow
and the sower pass between his eyes and the
page of Cromwell or The French Revolution;
in the autumn he has a vision of the yel-
low fields, of "Jamie's" peat-stack, and the
"cauldron" singing under his mother's win-
dow. The mother's trembling thought of her
children answers their love for her. "She
told me the other day " (writes one of Car-
lyle's sisters), " the first gaet she gaed every
morning was to London, then to Italy, then
to Craigenputtock, and then to Mary's, and
finally began to think them at hame were,
maybe, no safer than the rest. When I asked
her what she wished me to say to you, she
said she had a thousand things to say if she
had you here; 'and thou may tell them, I'm
very little fra' them. '"
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 29
As from his first clear earnings Carlyle sent
his father a pair of spectacles, and his mother
"a little sovereign to keep the fiend out of
her hussif," so throughout he never forgot
her in the least or the greatest particular.
From year to year he sent her money and to-
bacco, -- which they often smoked together
in the farmhouse, -- books and comforts and
letters. The letters, of course, were far the
best of all to her. Often as they came, they
could not come often enough. In 1824 Mar-
garet Carlyle wrote to her son: "Pray do
not let me want food; as your father says, I
look as if I would eat your letters. Write
everything and soon. " Everything and soon
it always was; and in these many letters Car-
lyle strove to bring near to the untraveled
ones at home all that he was seeing and
doing. One means of doing this was to de-
scribe interesting places in terms of Annan-
dale. Thus, in telling his sister Jean about
Naseby, he wrote : --
"Next day they drove me over some fif-
teen miles off to see the field of Naseby fight
-- Oliver Cromwell's chief battle, or one of
his chief. It was a grand scene for me --
Naseby, a venerable hamlet, larger than Mid-
dlebie, all built of mud, but trim with high
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? 80 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
peaked roofs, and two feet thick of smooth
thatch on them, and plenty of trees scattered
round and among. It is built as on the brow
of the Hagheads at Ecclefechan; Cromwell
lay with his back to that, and King Charles
was drawn up as at Wull Welsh's -- only the
Sinclair burn must be mostly dried, and the
hollow much wider and deeper. "
Carlyle knew that his mother would be
eager to hear of Luther and Lutherland. In
September of the last year but one of her
life, he writes to her from Weimar that
"Eisenach is about as big as Dumfries;"
that a hill near by is "somewhat as Lock-
erbie hill is in height and position. " The
donjon tower of the Wartburg (which he
translates for her, Watch Castle) stands like
the old Tower of Repentance on Hoddam
Hill, where his mother had visited him during
his "russet-coated idyll" there, many years
before. "They open a door, you enter a
little apartment, less than your best room at
Scotsbrig, I almost think less than your
smallest, a very poor low room with an old
leaded lattice window > to me the most ven-
erable of all rooms I ever entered. " That
afternoon they drive to Gotha in a " kind of
clatch. " Carlyle helps out his English for
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 31
his mother with bits of their common Doric,
and falls unconsciously into Scotch locutions,
such as "you would be going," or "you
would be doing," when he means "you are
likely to go" or " likely to do. " In larger
matters it is the same. Carlyle may have
been chanting the Miserere to some corre-
spondent, but if he writes to his mother on
the same day, the note changes to Sursum
corda, even though it must visibly struggle
up from the depths. Nor do the Immensities
and the Eternities appear in his letters to her.
In these the Lord her God is also his God.
The belief in personal immortality came to
Carlyle, so far as I can discover, but dimly
and infrequently. This chill lack of faith,
so common in our day, sharpened the dread
of his mother's death. So early as 1844 he
writes in his Journal: "My dear old mother
has, I doubt, been often poorly this winter.
They report her well at present: but, alas!
there is nothing in all the earth so stern to
me as that constantly advancing inevitability,
which indeed has terrified me all my days. "
Yet, in Carlyle's letters after her death, a
dovelike peace seems to brood over his deep
sorrow. With Roman piety he records the
death-trance, sixteen hours long, in which his
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? 32 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
mother, her face "as that of a statue," lay
waiting for the end. It was another
"Dulcis et alta quies, placidaeque simillima morti;"
and all Carlyle's words about that holy part-
ing are grave and sweet.
Whatever of loveliness there may have been
in the life together of Carlyle and his wife,
-- and there was much, in spite of all that
has been said to the contrary, -- in death
they were far divided. She lies with her
gentle forbears in the abbey kirk at Hadding-
ton; he, in Ecclefechan kirkyard with his
peasant forbears. When Carlyle was dying,
the Lord remembered for him the kindness
of his youth, -- his mother might have be-
lieved, -- and "his mind seemed to turn alto-
gether to the old Ecclefechan days. " Said
his niece, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, writing
just after his death: "He often took Alick
for his father (uncle Sandy), and he would
put his arms round my neck and say to me,
'My dear mother. '"
Great writer as Carlyle is, many critics feel
that he can never become classical. The
word " classic," as Sainte-Beuve has pointed
out, is a stretchable term; but very possibly
the Soudanese lexicographer, descended from
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 33
a native of New Zealand, will label many of
Carlyle's phrases "post-classical," and place
him with Browning and Ruskin, who felt his
influence, in the Silver Age of English. Cer-
tainly, the Soudanese Quintilian will do well
to tell his pupils the story of Erasmus's ape,
and warn them against the danger of imitat-
ing Carlyle. Classical or post-classical, Car-
lyle's name is as closely linked with the
French Revolution and the Life of Oliver
Cromwell, as is the name of Thucydides with
the Peloponnesian War, that of Tacitus with
the Emperors of the Julian line, or that of
Gibbon with the Decline and Fall of their
Empire. Yet even if Carlyle's historical titles
were torn from his grant of immortality, he
would survive as one of the most remarkable
of English letter-writers.
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?
LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE TO
HIS YOUNGEST SISTER
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? LETTERS
Mrs. Hanning (Janet Carlyle) was born, as
were all her brothers and sisters before her,
in the village of Ecclefechan. The following
notes of her life are supplied by her son-in-law,
the Rev. George M. Franklin: --
"She was reckoned the neatest seamstress
of the family, and received the rare compli-
ment of praise from her eldest brother (Thomas
Carlyle) for having done excellent work on
some shirts. Robert Hanning, an old friend
of the Carlyles, going to the same school with
Janet, and' looking on the same book,' wooed
and won her. They were married at Scots-
brig, on March 15, 1836. They went to
Manchester, England, to live, as Mr. Hanning
was employed by a Mr. Craig, and subse-
quently was a partner in the business. This
business having proved unprofitable, they re-
turned to Scotland, and Mr. Hanning entered
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? 88
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
into business with his brother Peter as part-
ner. This proved also a failure. Soon after-
ward the family went back to Dumfries. Mr.
Hanning sailed for America, arriving at New
York; and after working there for a time
left that city for Hamilton, Ontario, his fu-
ture home. Mrs. Hanning and her two chil-
dren remained in Dumfries, although she had
wished much to go with her husband and
share his fortunes. Thomas persuaded her,
'against her judgment,' as she has said, to
wait until her husband was settled. Mr.
Hanning was a man of strong convictions and
the highest moral principle. The reunion of
his family was effected in 1851, when the
wife and two daughters left Glasgow in a
sailing-vessel, the passage to Quebec occu-
pying about seven weeks. Then taking a
steamer from Quebec, they reached Hamilton
in good time. This was before the building
of the Great Western Railway. Mrs. Han-
ning soon made a home for her devoted hus-
band, earning the commendation ' brave little
sister. ' Mr. Hanning entered the service of
the Great Western Railway of Canada in
1853, and remained with that company until
his death, which occurred March 12, 1878. "
An indispensable guide to the correspond-
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? THE CARLYLE FAMILY
89
ence will be found in the following list, given
by Professor Norton, of the children of James
Carlyle, with the dates of their births,--
Thomas, born December 4, 1795 (died at
Chelsea, February 5, 1881); Alexander, born
August 4, 1797; Janet, born September 2,
1799; John Aitkin, born July 7,1801; Mar-
garet, born September 20,1803; James, born
November 12,1805; Mary, born February 2,
1808; Jean, born September 2, 1810; Janet
(Mrs. Hanning), born July 18, 1813.
Among the persons mentioned by Mr.
Franklin as visiting Mrs. Hanning, the most
distinguished was Emerson, who went to Ham-
ilton in the summer of 1865. "Mr. Emerson
placed her in a chair near the window, so
that he might the more readily examine her
features, and, looking into her eyes, ex-
claimed, 'And so this is Carlyle's little
sister! '"
Mention of "the youngest stay of the
house, little Jenny," is rare and slight in the
published letters and memorials of Carlyle.
Froude, in an ingeniously careless passage,
confuses her with an older sister, Jean. He
speaks of " the youngest child of all, Jane,
called the Craw, or Crow, from her black
hair. " Carlyle, on pages 92 and 93 of the
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? 40
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
second volume of the Reminiscences, -- in
Mr. Norton's edition, -- mentions both Jean
and Jenny: "There was a younger and
youngest sister (Jenny), who is now in Can-
ada; of far inferior ' speculative intellect' to
Jean, but who has proved to have (we used
to think) superior housekeeping faculties to
hers. "
"My prayers and affection are with you
all, from little Jenny upwards to the head
of the house," writes Carlyle to his mother
on October 19, 1826, after a form common
enough, with its variations, in his early let-
ters. Occasionally she has done something
to be noted. On October 20, 1827: "Does
Jenny bring home her medals yet? " On
November 15: "Does Jenny still keep her
medals? Tell her that I still love her, and
hope to find her a good lassie and to do her
good. " In the spring of 1828 Carlyle writes
from Scotsbrig to his "Dear Little Craw"
in Edinburgh: "Mag and Jenny are here;
Jenny at the Sewing-school with Jessie Combe,
and making great progress. " Mrs. Carlyle
adds, in a postscript to an 1835 letter to Mrs.
Aitken: "Carlyle has the impudence to say
he forgot to send his compliments to Jenny;
as if it were possible for any one acquainted
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? JENNY CARLYLE
41
with that morsel of perfections to forget her!
Tell her I will write a letter with my own
hand, and hope to see her ' an ornament to
society in every direction. '" In a preface --
written many years after -- to a letter to Jean
Carlyle, bearing date November, 1825, and
signed Jane Baillie Welsh, Carlyle explains:
"This Jean Carlyle is my second youngest
sister, then a little child of twelve. The
youngest sister, youngest of us all, was Jenny
[Janet], now Mrs. Robert Hanning, in Ham-
ilton, Canada West. These little beings, in
their bits of grey speckled [black and white]
straw bonnets, I recollect as a pair of neat,
brisk items, tripping about among us that
summer at the Hill. " Letter and preface are
given by Froude, as is also a letter from Car-
lyle to his wife, dated Scotsbrig, May 3,1842,
and ending thus: "Yesterday I got my hair
cropped, partly by my own endeavours in the
front, chiefly by sister Jenny's in the rear.
I fear you will think it rather an original
cut. "
In 1827: << Tell her that I still love her,
and hope to find her a good lassie and to do
her good;" in 1873, in Carlyle's last letter
to Mrs. Hanning written with his own hand:
"I please myself with the thought that you
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? 42
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
will accept this little New Year's Gift from
me as a sign of my unalterable affection, whh,
tho' it is obliged to be silent (unable to write
as of old), cannot fade away until I myself
do! Of that be always sure, my dear little
Sister; and that if in anything I can be of
help to you or yours, I right willingly will. "
All the letters that follow are strung on a
slender thread of biography. Even readers
who know their Carlyle thoroughly may like
to see, from year to year and from page to
page, the contrast between his life in the
world and his life with the peasant kindred
who were so far from everything that men
call the world. And although nothing in
these letters will add to our knowledge of
Carlyle, they cannot -- taken together -- fail
to touch us freshly with the sense of what he
was to his people, and what they were to
him.
Carlyle's life until 1832, the year of the
first letter, may be most briefly summarized.
The son of James Carlyle, a stone-mason, he
was born at Ecclefechan, "in a room incon-
ceivably small," on the 4th of December,
1795. He went to school at Annan, and, in
1809, to the University of Edinburgh. Five
years later he returned to the Annan school
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? TO JANET CARLYLE
43
as a teacher of mathematics, and in 1816
went to Kirkcaldy to teach the same subject.
After an experience of literary hack work in
Edinburgh, which began when he was twenty-
three years old, he became tutor in the Buller
family. A long, strange, and ill-boding court-
ship ended, on the 17th of October, 1826, in
his marriage with Jane Baillie Welsh. She
had a small inherited estate at Craigenput-
tock, high up on the moors, and sixteen miles
from Dumfries; and there, two years after
their marriage, they went to live for six years.
In 1831 and 1832 they were merely trying
their wings in London.
"Mrs. Welsh" was Mrs. Carlyle's mother.
"Maister Cairlill" was a frequent name for
Carlyle's brother James. The family had
been living at Scotsbrig since 1826. Carlyle
was thirty-six years old, and his sister nine-
teen, when the following letter was written.
i. cablyle to janet carlyle, scotsbeio.
Ampton St. , London,
23rd January, 1832.
My dear Jenny, -- Will you put up with
the smallest of letters rather than with none
at all? I have hardly a moment, and no
paper but this thick, coarse sort.
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? 44
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
Understand always, My dear Sister, that I
love you well, and am very glad to see and
hear that you conduct yourself as you ought.
To you also, my little lassie, it is of infinite
importance how you behave: were you to get
a Kingdom, or twenty Kingdoms, it were but
a pitiful trifle compared with this, whether
you walked as God command you, and did
your duty to God and to all men. You have
a whole Life before you, to make much of or
to make little of: see you choose the better
part, my dear little sister, and make yourself
and all of us pleased with you. I will add
no more, but commend you from the heart
(as we should all do one another) to God's
keeping. May He ever bless you! I am too
late, and must not wait another minute. We
have this instant had a long letter from Mrs.
Welsh, full of kindness to our Mother and
all of you. The Cheese, &c, &c, is faithfully
commemorated as a "noble" one; Mary is
also made kind mention of. You did all very
right on that occasion. Mrs. Welsh says she
must come down to Scotsbrig and see you all.
What will you think of that? Her Father,
in the meantime, is very ill, and gives her in-
cessant labour and anxiety.
See to encourage Jean to write, and do
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? DEATH OF HIS FATHER
45
you put your hand a little to the work.
What does Maister Cairlill think of the last
letter he wrote us? Was it not a letter
among many? He is a graceless man. I
send you a portrait of one of our Chief Radi-
cals here: it is said to be very like.
? 22 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
this kirkyard, where Carlyle has since laid
himself down with his kindred, is Carlyle's.
The reappearance (usually heightened or
elaborated) of bits of prospect or topography
first recorded in Carlyle's letters is an inter-
esting characteristic of his writing. His first
visit to Paris was of much service to him in
fixing the places and scenes of The French
Revolution; the trip into the country of
Cromwell's birth and the examination of
Naseby field come into sight again in the
book,-- witness especially the "Cease your
fooling," and the troopers' teeth that bit into
Carlyle's memory; and a number of rough
drafts for details of Frederick appear in let-
ters from the Continent. A brief note, dur-
ing a visit to Mr. Redwood in 1843, of the
Glamorganshire "green network of intricate
lanes, mouldering ruins, vigorous vegetation
good and bad," was afterward dilated (in
the Life of Sterling) into the spacious and
beautiful landscape beginning: "Llanblethian
hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and
orchard and other trees, on the western slope
of a green hill; looking far and wide over
green meadows and little or bigger hills, in
the pleasant plain of Glamorgan. "
Distinguished as are Carlyle's portraits of
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 23
places, it is probably his portraits of persons
that abide longest and most completely in
the memories of most readers. Robespierre,
Mirabeau and Mirabeau pere, Frederick and
Frederick William, -- it is one sign of Car-
lyle's power that he can make subordinate
characters salient and still bring out his hero,
-- Voltaire, Cromwell, and the Abbot Sam-
son, are a few of the pictures that line his
galleries. Wonderful as are these render-
ings of men he never saw, his sketches of men
he had known are almost literally "speaking
likenesses. " Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Mazzini, Louis Napo-
leon, are among the many who are painted to
a miracle in Carlyle's letters. Behold a great
American, in a letter to Emerson : --
"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast
the notablest of all your Notabilities, Daniel
Webster. He is a magnificent specimen;
you might say to all the world, This is your
Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in
Yankee-land! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate,
or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline
to back him at first sight against all the
extant world. The tanned complexion, that
amorphous craglike face; the dull black eyes
under their precipice of brows, like dull an-
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? 24 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WBITEE
thracite furnaces, needing only to be blown;
the mastiff - mouth, accurately closed : -- I
have not traced as much of silent Berserker-
rage, that I remember of, in any other man.
'I guess I should not like to be your nigger! '"
At the risk of numbering this paper with
the books of Chrysippus, we must look again
at the portrait of De Quincey, which is, per-
haps, the artist's chief triumph. Although
it is to be found in the Reminiscences, it yet
belongs here well enough, for that book is
not so much a book as a long, rambling let-
ter, partly of remorse, partly of pity, from
Carlyle to himself. "He was a pretty little
creature," says this terrible, sad old man, re-
membering after forty years, "full of wire-
drawn ingenuities; bankrupt enthusiasms,
bankrupt pride; with the finest silver-toned
low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding
courtesies and ingenuities of conversation:
'What would n't one give to have him in a
Box, and take him out to talk I' (That was
Her criticism of him; and it was right good. )
A bright, ready and melodious talker; but
in the end an inconclusive and long-winded.
One of the smallest man-figures I ever saw;
shaped like a pair of tongs; and hardly above
five feet in all: when he sat, you would have
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 25
taken him, by candle-light, for the beauti-
f ullest little Child; blue-eyed, blonde-haired,
sparkling face, -- had there not been a some-
thing too, which said, 'Eccovi, this Child has
been in Hell! '" One would be sure, without
other evidence than "Her criticism " in this
description, which is also a "character," -- to
use the old word, -- that She, too, had been
terrible. The broken order, the curious punc-
tuation, the capitals and italics, the leave of
absence granted to the verb, the quick inter-
jections, all taken together make the passage
a concentrated example of Carlyle's vox hu- mana style, -- of his writing when it is most
like speech, sublimated. In his use of persons, as of places, there
are pregnant comparisons to be made between
Carlyle's first study and the final portrait.
Sterling and old Sterling are cases in point;
Coleridge, maybe, the best instance of all.
The main lines and the personal atmosphere,
always visible, I think, in the sketch, are
reproduced by Carlyle in the finished work.
But in the heightening of lights, in the deep-
ening of shade, in composition, above all, he
makes many changes, which almost invariably
result in greater intensity of effect.
From such comparisons, if patiently con-
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? 26 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
ducted, might come luminous comment on
the question of Carlyle's style, -- a question
more vexed than the Bermoothes.
So far and so much for Carlyle's general
aspect as a letter-writer. I have tried to show
that, in addressing himself to a very few
friends, and especially to his own family, he
displays a different set of qualities. The dif-
ference between his vehemence toward the
world at large and his gentleness toward his
mother sometimes seems as marked as that
between the two visions of the prophet Jere-
miah: the one a seething caldron, the face
thereof from the north; the other, a rod of
an almond tree. The world, in truth, for this
peasant of genius, was, to the considerable
degree in which he remained a peasant, an
assemblage of persons and things to be ap-
proached with many reserves and a deal of
more or less violent disapproval. Annandale,
contrariwise, was an honest, strength-giving
corner of the world, which did for him
through life the office of the earth to An-
taeus. He went back to it so often that he
never lost his native accent, and, in certain
respects, the point of view to which he was
born. So long as Carlyle's mother lived,
there was rarely a year in which he did not
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 27
make a pilgrimage to Scotsbrig; and, after
she died, he went oftener to her grave than
most sons, dwelling at a distance from their
mothers, visit them in life. Scotsbrig also
came to him in the shape of letters, as well
as in the unsentimental (though, rightly be-
held, not unpathetic) guise of oatmeal, bacon,
clothes, and what not. The Carlyles held
that good meal could not be bought in Lon-
don; and when the barrel wasted, it was filled
again from home. One far-brought fowl we
all remember as the epic subject of a letter
from Mrs. Carlyle in Chelsea to her sister-
in-law in Scotland. Carlyle had his clothes
made in Annan, partly from thrift, partly
from distrust of London tailors.
However much he depended on the people
and the kindly fruits of his native soil, how-
ever much the exclusiveness of the Carlyles
may have been only that common to all
Scotch peasant families, it is still hard to
credit, though on the excellent authority of
Mrs. Oliphant, that their mutual love was
not "by ordinar," even among Scotch peas-
ants. Especially is it difficult of credence
that the attachment of Carlyle and his mother
was not as rare as it was beautiful. In 1832,
after the death of his father, he writes to his
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? 28 CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
brother Alick, at Scotsbrig: "0 let us all be
gentle, obedient, loving to our Mother, now
that she is left wholly to our charge ! ' Hon-
our thy Father and thy Mother': doubly
honour thy Mother when she alone remains. "
For twenty years this double honor was more
than trebly paid. The son writes once to his
mother: "Since I wrote last I have been in
Scotsbrig more than in London. " And so
it often is to the end, -- and after. Dream-
ing and waking, he looks far up across Eng-
land and the Solway. In the spring the plow
and the sower pass between his eyes and the
page of Cromwell or The French Revolution;
in the autumn he has a vision of the yel-
low fields, of "Jamie's" peat-stack, and the
"cauldron" singing under his mother's win-
dow. The mother's trembling thought of her
children answers their love for her. "She
told me the other day " (writes one of Car-
lyle's sisters), " the first gaet she gaed every
morning was to London, then to Italy, then
to Craigenputtock, and then to Mary's, and
finally began to think them at hame were,
maybe, no safer than the rest. When I asked
her what she wished me to say to you, she
said she had a thousand things to say if she
had you here; 'and thou may tell them, I'm
very little fra' them. '"
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? CABLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 29
As from his first clear earnings Carlyle sent
his father a pair of spectacles, and his mother
"a little sovereign to keep the fiend out of
her hussif," so throughout he never forgot
her in the least or the greatest particular.
From year to year he sent her money and to-
bacco, -- which they often smoked together
in the farmhouse, -- books and comforts and
letters. The letters, of course, were far the
best of all to her. Often as they came, they
could not come often enough. In 1824 Mar-
garet Carlyle wrote to her son: "Pray do
not let me want food; as your father says, I
look as if I would eat your letters. Write
everything and soon. " Everything and soon
it always was; and in these many letters Car-
lyle strove to bring near to the untraveled
ones at home all that he was seeing and
doing. One means of doing this was to de-
scribe interesting places in terms of Annan-
dale. Thus, in telling his sister Jean about
Naseby, he wrote : --
"Next day they drove me over some fif-
teen miles off to see the field of Naseby fight
-- Oliver Cromwell's chief battle, or one of
his chief. It was a grand scene for me --
Naseby, a venerable hamlet, larger than Mid-
dlebie, all built of mud, but trim with high
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? 80 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
peaked roofs, and two feet thick of smooth
thatch on them, and plenty of trees scattered
round and among. It is built as on the brow
of the Hagheads at Ecclefechan; Cromwell
lay with his back to that, and King Charles
was drawn up as at Wull Welsh's -- only the
Sinclair burn must be mostly dried, and the
hollow much wider and deeper. "
Carlyle knew that his mother would be
eager to hear of Luther and Lutherland. In
September of the last year but one of her
life, he writes to her from Weimar that
"Eisenach is about as big as Dumfries;"
that a hill near by is "somewhat as Lock-
erbie hill is in height and position. " The
donjon tower of the Wartburg (which he
translates for her, Watch Castle) stands like
the old Tower of Repentance on Hoddam
Hill, where his mother had visited him during
his "russet-coated idyll" there, many years
before. "They open a door, you enter a
little apartment, less than your best room at
Scotsbrig, I almost think less than your
smallest, a very poor low room with an old
leaded lattice window > to me the most ven-
erable of all rooms I ever entered. " That
afternoon they drive to Gotha in a " kind of
clatch. " Carlyle helps out his English for
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 31
his mother with bits of their common Doric,
and falls unconsciously into Scotch locutions,
such as "you would be going," or "you
would be doing," when he means "you are
likely to go" or " likely to do. " In larger
matters it is the same. Carlyle may have
been chanting the Miserere to some corre-
spondent, but if he writes to his mother on
the same day, the note changes to Sursum
corda, even though it must visibly struggle
up from the depths. Nor do the Immensities
and the Eternities appear in his letters to her.
In these the Lord her God is also his God.
The belief in personal immortality came to
Carlyle, so far as I can discover, but dimly
and infrequently. This chill lack of faith,
so common in our day, sharpened the dread
of his mother's death. So early as 1844 he
writes in his Journal: "My dear old mother
has, I doubt, been often poorly this winter.
They report her well at present: but, alas!
there is nothing in all the earth so stern to
me as that constantly advancing inevitability,
which indeed has terrified me all my days. "
Yet, in Carlyle's letters after her death, a
dovelike peace seems to brood over his deep
sorrow. With Roman piety he records the
death-trance, sixteen hours long, in which his
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? 32 CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER
mother, her face "as that of a statue," lay
waiting for the end. It was another
"Dulcis et alta quies, placidaeque simillima morti;"
and all Carlyle's words about that holy part-
ing are grave and sweet.
Whatever of loveliness there may have been
in the life together of Carlyle and his wife,
-- and there was much, in spite of all that
has been said to the contrary, -- in death
they were far divided. She lies with her
gentle forbears in the abbey kirk at Hadding-
ton; he, in Ecclefechan kirkyard with his
peasant forbears. When Carlyle was dying,
the Lord remembered for him the kindness
of his youth, -- his mother might have be-
lieved, -- and "his mind seemed to turn alto-
gether to the old Ecclefechan days. " Said
his niece, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, writing
just after his death: "He often took Alick
for his father (uncle Sandy), and he would
put his arms round my neck and say to me,
'My dear mother. '"
Great writer as Carlyle is, many critics feel
that he can never become classical. The
word " classic," as Sainte-Beuve has pointed
out, is a stretchable term; but very possibly
the Soudanese lexicographer, descended from
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? CARLYLE AS A LETTER-WRITER 33
a native of New Zealand, will label many of
Carlyle's phrases "post-classical," and place
him with Browning and Ruskin, who felt his
influence, in the Silver Age of English. Cer-
tainly, the Soudanese Quintilian will do well
to tell his pupils the story of Erasmus's ape,
and warn them against the danger of imitat-
ing Carlyle. Classical or post-classical, Car-
lyle's name is as closely linked with the
French Revolution and the Life of Oliver
Cromwell, as is the name of Thucydides with
the Peloponnesian War, that of Tacitus with
the Emperors of the Julian line, or that of
Gibbon with the Decline and Fall of their
Empire. Yet even if Carlyle's historical titles
were torn from his grant of immortality, he
would survive as one of the most remarkable
of English letter-writers.
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?
LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE TO
HIS YOUNGEST SISTER
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? LETTERS
Mrs. Hanning (Janet Carlyle) was born, as
were all her brothers and sisters before her,
in the village of Ecclefechan. The following
notes of her life are supplied by her son-in-law,
the Rev. George M. Franklin: --
"She was reckoned the neatest seamstress
of the family, and received the rare compli-
ment of praise from her eldest brother (Thomas
Carlyle) for having done excellent work on
some shirts. Robert Hanning, an old friend
of the Carlyles, going to the same school with
Janet, and' looking on the same book,' wooed
and won her. They were married at Scots-
brig, on March 15, 1836. They went to
Manchester, England, to live, as Mr. Hanning
was employed by a Mr. Craig, and subse-
quently was a partner in the business. This
business having proved unprofitable, they re-
turned to Scotland, and Mr. Hanning entered
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? 88
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
into business with his brother Peter as part-
ner. This proved also a failure. Soon after-
ward the family went back to Dumfries. Mr.
Hanning sailed for America, arriving at New
York; and after working there for a time
left that city for Hamilton, Ontario, his fu-
ture home. Mrs. Hanning and her two chil-
dren remained in Dumfries, although she had
wished much to go with her husband and
share his fortunes. Thomas persuaded her,
'against her judgment,' as she has said, to
wait until her husband was settled. Mr.
Hanning was a man of strong convictions and
the highest moral principle. The reunion of
his family was effected in 1851, when the
wife and two daughters left Glasgow in a
sailing-vessel, the passage to Quebec occu-
pying about seven weeks. Then taking a
steamer from Quebec, they reached Hamilton
in good time. This was before the building
of the Great Western Railway. Mrs. Han-
ning soon made a home for her devoted hus-
band, earning the commendation ' brave little
sister. ' Mr. Hanning entered the service of
the Great Western Railway of Canada in
1853, and remained with that company until
his death, which occurred March 12, 1878. "
An indispensable guide to the correspond-
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? THE CARLYLE FAMILY
89
ence will be found in the following list, given
by Professor Norton, of the children of James
Carlyle, with the dates of their births,--
Thomas, born December 4, 1795 (died at
Chelsea, February 5, 1881); Alexander, born
August 4, 1797; Janet, born September 2,
1799; John Aitkin, born July 7,1801; Mar-
garet, born September 20,1803; James, born
November 12,1805; Mary, born February 2,
1808; Jean, born September 2, 1810; Janet
(Mrs. Hanning), born July 18, 1813.
Among the persons mentioned by Mr.
Franklin as visiting Mrs. Hanning, the most
distinguished was Emerson, who went to Ham-
ilton in the summer of 1865. "Mr. Emerson
placed her in a chair near the window, so
that he might the more readily examine her
features, and, looking into her eyes, ex-
claimed, 'And so this is Carlyle's little
sister! '"
Mention of "the youngest stay of the
house, little Jenny," is rare and slight in the
published letters and memorials of Carlyle.
Froude, in an ingeniously careless passage,
confuses her with an older sister, Jean. He
speaks of " the youngest child of all, Jane,
called the Craw, or Crow, from her black
hair. " Carlyle, on pages 92 and 93 of the
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? 40
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
second volume of the Reminiscences, -- in
Mr. Norton's edition, -- mentions both Jean
and Jenny: "There was a younger and
youngest sister (Jenny), who is now in Can-
ada; of far inferior ' speculative intellect' to
Jean, but who has proved to have (we used
to think) superior housekeeping faculties to
hers. "
"My prayers and affection are with you
all, from little Jenny upwards to the head
of the house," writes Carlyle to his mother
on October 19, 1826, after a form common
enough, with its variations, in his early let-
ters. Occasionally she has done something
to be noted. On October 20, 1827: "Does
Jenny bring home her medals yet? " On
November 15: "Does Jenny still keep her
medals? Tell her that I still love her, and
hope to find her a good lassie and to do her
good. " In the spring of 1828 Carlyle writes
from Scotsbrig to his "Dear Little Craw"
in Edinburgh: "Mag and Jenny are here;
Jenny at the Sewing-school with Jessie Combe,
and making great progress. " Mrs. Carlyle
adds, in a postscript to an 1835 letter to Mrs.
Aitken: "Carlyle has the impudence to say
he forgot to send his compliments to Jenny;
as if it were possible for any one acquainted
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? JENNY CARLYLE
41
with that morsel of perfections to forget her!
Tell her I will write a letter with my own
hand, and hope to see her ' an ornament to
society in every direction. '" In a preface --
written many years after -- to a letter to Jean
Carlyle, bearing date November, 1825, and
signed Jane Baillie Welsh, Carlyle explains:
"This Jean Carlyle is my second youngest
sister, then a little child of twelve. The
youngest sister, youngest of us all, was Jenny
[Janet], now Mrs. Robert Hanning, in Ham-
ilton, Canada West. These little beings, in
their bits of grey speckled [black and white]
straw bonnets, I recollect as a pair of neat,
brisk items, tripping about among us that
summer at the Hill. " Letter and preface are
given by Froude, as is also a letter from Car-
lyle to his wife, dated Scotsbrig, May 3,1842,
and ending thus: "Yesterday I got my hair
cropped, partly by my own endeavours in the
front, chiefly by sister Jenny's in the rear.
I fear you will think it rather an original
cut. "
In 1827: << Tell her that I still love her,
and hope to find her a good lassie and to do
her good;" in 1873, in Carlyle's last letter
to Mrs. Hanning written with his own hand:
"I please myself with the thought that you
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? 42
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
will accept this little New Year's Gift from
me as a sign of my unalterable affection, whh,
tho' it is obliged to be silent (unable to write
as of old), cannot fade away until I myself
do! Of that be always sure, my dear little
Sister; and that if in anything I can be of
help to you or yours, I right willingly will. "
All the letters that follow are strung on a
slender thread of biography. Even readers
who know their Carlyle thoroughly may like
to see, from year to year and from page to
page, the contrast between his life in the
world and his life with the peasant kindred
who were so far from everything that men
call the world. And although nothing in
these letters will add to our knowledge of
Carlyle, they cannot -- taken together -- fail
to touch us freshly with the sense of what he
was to his people, and what they were to
him.
Carlyle's life until 1832, the year of the
first letter, may be most briefly summarized.
The son of James Carlyle, a stone-mason, he
was born at Ecclefechan, "in a room incon-
ceivably small," on the 4th of December,
1795. He went to school at Annan, and, in
1809, to the University of Edinburgh. Five
years later he returned to the Annan school
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? ? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:17 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/hvd. 32044090311788 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? TO JANET CARLYLE
43
as a teacher of mathematics, and in 1816
went to Kirkcaldy to teach the same subject.
After an experience of literary hack work in
Edinburgh, which began when he was twenty-
three years old, he became tutor in the Buller
family. A long, strange, and ill-boding court-
ship ended, on the 17th of October, 1826, in
his marriage with Jane Baillie Welsh. She
had a small inherited estate at Craigenput-
tock, high up on the moors, and sixteen miles
from Dumfries; and there, two years after
their marriage, they went to live for six years.
In 1831 and 1832 they were merely trying
their wings in London.
"Mrs. Welsh" was Mrs. Carlyle's mother.
"Maister Cairlill" was a frequent name for
Carlyle's brother James. The family had
been living at Scotsbrig since 1826. Carlyle
was thirty-six years old, and his sister nine-
teen, when the following letter was written.
i. cablyle to janet carlyle, scotsbeio.
Ampton St. , London,
23rd January, 1832.
My dear Jenny, -- Will you put up with
the smallest of letters rather than with none
at all? I have hardly a moment, and no
paper but this thick, coarse sort.
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? 44
LETTERS OF CARLYLE
Understand always, My dear Sister, that I
love you well, and am very glad to see and
hear that you conduct yourself as you ought.
To you also, my little lassie, it is of infinite
importance how you behave: were you to get
a Kingdom, or twenty Kingdoms, it were but
a pitiful trifle compared with this, whether
you walked as God command you, and did
your duty to God and to all men. You have
a whole Life before you, to make much of or
to make little of: see you choose the better
part, my dear little sister, and make yourself
and all of us pleased with you. I will add
no more, but commend you from the heart
(as we should all do one another) to God's
keeping. May He ever bless you! I am too
late, and must not wait another minute. We
have this instant had a long letter from Mrs.
Welsh, full of kindness to our Mother and
all of you. The Cheese, &c, &c, is faithfully
commemorated as a "noble" one; Mary is
also made kind mention of. You did all very
right on that occasion. Mrs. Welsh says she
must come down to Scotsbrig and see you all.
What will you think of that? Her Father,
in the meantime, is very ill, and gives her in-
cessant labour and anxiety.
See to encourage Jean to write, and do
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-11-14 09:17 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/hvd. 32044090311788 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? DEATH OF HIS FATHER
45
you put your hand a little to the work.
What does Maister Cairlill think of the last
letter he wrote us? Was it not a letter
among many? He is a graceless man. I
send you a portrait of one of our Chief Radi-
cals here: it is said to be very like.
