Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 7

soul, full
of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all
manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to

render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I
have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his
words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault
was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in
description, and for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man
of rigid, even scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt.
The old Theorem of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a
true man, while his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue
he had which I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was
disagreeable and past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open
contempt for all "clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all
dreaded his wrath, but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did
not fear: God he always feared. His reverence was, I think,
considerably mixed with fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of
silence through which flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of
him. Let me write my books as he built his houses, and walk as
blamelessly through this shadow world.... Though genuine and
coherent, living and life-giving, he was nevertheless but half developed.
We had all to complain that we durst not freely love him. His heart
seemed as if walled in: he had not the free means to unbosom himself....
It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him. To me it
was especially so. Till late years I was ever more or less awed and
chilled by him.
James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of
both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their
integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of
winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a
broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a
better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist.
"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us
no more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged,
under the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he
remained stable and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his
own hands. James Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his
best year £100, till, after the first decade of the century, the family
migrated to Mainhill, a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he

so throve by work and thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about
£1000. Strong, rough, and eminently _straight,_ intolerant of
contradiction and ready with words like blows, his unsympathetic side
recalls rather the father of the Brontës on the wild Yorkshire moor than
William Burness by the ingle of Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was
in theological theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more
moan over the aberrations of her favourite son. Like most Scotch
mothers of her rank, she had set her heart on seeing him in a pulpit,
from which any other eminence seemed a fall; but she became, though
comparatively illiterate, having only late in life learnt to write a letter, a
student of his books. Over these they talked, smoking together in old
country fashion by the hearth; and she was to the last proud of the
genius which grew in large measure under the unfailing sunshine of her
anxious love.
Book II. of Sartor is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography,
mainly a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references
to his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of
Teufelsdröckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the
place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks
are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as
a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of
Wordsworth and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly
recalled; also the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an
orderly house, where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your
training is rather to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any
measure bold I had to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience
inflexibly held me down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome
one." The following oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early
love of nature and the humorous touches by which he