Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 8

was wont to
relieve his fits of sentiment:--
On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb
boiled in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which
I could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a
sunset have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without
relish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of

world's expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me:
nevertheless I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye
for the gilding.
In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of Sartor
and the Wahrheit of the Reminiscences are in accord. By Carlyle's own
account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on schools." Like
Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, where home
influences counted for more than the teaching of not very competent
masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of seven he
was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete in
English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School
of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began.
Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long
misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the
most savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate
singularity as the world at first hates originality, and have none of the
restraints which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey
the impulse of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any
stricken hart, the duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or
sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young
Carlyle was mocked for his moody ways, laughed at for his love of
solitude, and called "Tom the Tearful" because of his habit of crying.
To add much to his discomfort, he had made a rash promise to his
pious mother, who seems, in contrast to her husband's race, to have
adopted non-resistance principles--a promise to abstain from fighting,
provocative of many cuffs till it was well broken by a hinterschlag,
applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he refuge in the sympathy of
his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew Syntax enough, and of
the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, which
could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of
birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin
and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began to
study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright
prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend.
On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University,
despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a

boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not
done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the
son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity
of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world
which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked
through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom
Smail (who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes
open to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the
Reminiscences. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in
cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814.
Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to have
been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a
compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society
outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science,
mental or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We
infer, from hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle
lived much with his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is
clearly thinking of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Josè
must have been a loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn
reflection, probably to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill
nature--subject to the terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in
_Sartor,_ "It is my painful duty to say that out of England and Spain,
ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first
of a long series of libels on things and persons he did not like. The
Scotch capital was still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in
the light of the circle of Scott, which