Victorian Worthies | Page 9

knowledge of it among his countrymen. After Coleridge
he was the first of our literary men to appreciate the poets and mystics
of Germany, and he did more even than Coleridge to make Englishmen
familiar with them. He acquired at this time a knowledge of French and
Italian literature too; but the philosophy of Kant and the writings of
Goethe and Schiller roused him to greater enthusiasm. From Kant he
learnt that the guiding principle of conduct was not happiness, but the
'categorical imperative' of duty; from Goethe he drew such hopefulness

as gleams occasionally through his despondent utterances on the
progress of the human race. He translated Goethe's novel, Wilhelm
Meister, in 1823, and followed it up with the Life of Schiller. There was
no considerable sale for either of these books till his lectures in London
and his established fame roused a demand for all he had written. In
these days he was practising for the profession of a man of letters, and
was largely influenced by personal ambition and the desire to earn an
income which would make him independent; he was not yet fired with
a mission, or kindled to white heat.
His long courtship was rewarded in October 1826. When the marriage
took place the bride was twenty-five years old and the bridegroom
thirty. Men of letters have not the reputation of making ideal husbands,
and the qualities to which this is due were possessed by Carlyle in
exaggerated measure. It was a perilous enterprise for any one to live
with him, most of all for such a woman, delicately bred, nervous, and
highly strung. She was aware of this, and was prepared for a large
measure of self-denial; but she could not have foreseen how severe she
would find the trial. The morbid sensitiveness of Carlyle to his own
pains and troubles, so often imaginary, joined with his inconsiderate
blindness to his wife's real sufferings, led to many heart-burnings. If
she contributed to them, in some degree, by her wilfulness, jealous
temper, and sharpness of tongue, ill-health and solitude may well
excuse her.
His own confessions, made after her death, are coloured by sorrow and
deep affection: no doubt he paints his own conduct in hues darker than
the truth demands. Shallow critics have sneered at the picture of the
philosopher whose life was so much at variance with his creed, and too
much has, perhaps, been written about the subject. If reference must be
made to such a well-worn tale, it is best to let Carlyle's own account
stand as he wished it to stand. His moral worth has been vindicated in a
hundred ways, not least by his humility and honesty about himself, and
can bear the test of time.
For the first two years of married life Carlyle's scheme of living on a
farm was kept at bay by his wife, and their home was at Edinburgh.

Carlyle refers to this as the happiest period of his life, though he did not
refrain from loud laments upon occasions. The good genius of the
household was Jeffrey, the famous editor of the Edinburgh Review,
who was distantly related to Mrs. Carlyle. He made friends with the
newly-married pair, opened a path for them into the society of the
capital, and enabled Carlyle to spread the knowledge of German
authors in the Review and to make his bow before a wider public. The
prospects of the little household seemed brighter, but, by generously
making over all her money to her mother, his wife had crippled its
resources; and Carlyle was of so difficult a humour that neither Jeffrey
nor any one else could guide his steps for long. Living was precarious;
society made demands even on a modest household, and in 1828 he at
length had his way and persuaded his wife to remove to Craigenputtock.
It was in the loneliness of the moors that Carlyle was to come to his full
stature and to develop his astonishing genius.
Craigenputtock was a farm belonging to his wife's family, lying
seventy feet above the sea, sixteen miles from Dumfries, among
desolate moors and bogs, and fully six miles from the nearest village.
'The house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands with the scanty fields
attached as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed
either by grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather
with peat bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the
home where the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic
labours, in solitude, in growing ill-health, the husband in omnivorous
reading, in digesting the knowledge that he gathered, in transmuting it
and marking it with the peculiar stamp of his genius. There was no true
companionship over the work. As the moorland