The Times Great Scottish Lives: Obituaries of Scotland’s Finest. Magnus Linklater

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      Thomas Carlyle

      ‘A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted’

      7 February 1881

      Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 8 on Saturday morning at his house in Cheyne-row, Chelsea. He had been for some years in feeble health, and more than once his recovery seemed doubtful. Of late even his friends saw little of him, and growing weakness and pain had compelled him to give up his old habit of taking long walks every day. The announcement of his death opens a chasm between the present and the past of our literature, a whole world of associations disappears. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret.

      About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most penetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle’s birth-place was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Hoddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle’s father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son’s birth James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he became afterwards tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle’s youngest and only surviving brother. Of James Carlyle, his son once said, ‘I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people,’ and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle’s father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk – simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.

      Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father’s friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, ‘his first friend,’ as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. However, the only professor for whom Carlyle seems to have had much regard was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that ‘the true University of these days is a collection of books,’ and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was readable in various circulating libraries – among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay – and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no regret.

      Carlyle had been intended for the church, but could not bring himself to embrace the doctrines of his father’s kirk, and turned his hand instead to work by which he could earn his bread. For a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, and remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. Teaching Fifeshire boys however was not Carlyle’s vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy he quitted it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern disciplinarian to begin in Edinburgh the task his life as a writer of books.

      Carlyle tried his ’prentice hand in Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the elder and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author’s genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a picture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details. At the instance of Sir David Brewster he translated Legendre’s Geometry and Trigonometry, prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on Proportion. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on Faust, a subject to which he was so often to return.

      About this period of Carlyle’s life the once famous John Scott was editing The London Magazine and had gathered round him a group of clever writers; Hazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham amongst them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the Life of Schiller. No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle’s work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Undeterred by sneers and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled German Romance, containing translations from the chief writers of the romantic school.