of nearly fifty years was begun. As winter approached, Carlyle's prospects were not very bright, and he once more turned his eyes towards London, where the remainder of his life was to be spent. Before following him thither, it may be well to turn from the outer to the inner side of Carlyle's life, and study the forces which went to the making of his unique personality.

CHAPTER III

CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would say incoherent, shape in Sartor Resartus,—a book which appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock.

In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental life—his early home training and German literature. In regard to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh—all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain. David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the Shorter Catechism.

Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his father with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood, his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity. Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature. Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and emotions his mind was saturated, and Sartor Resartus was the outcome. To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion—his triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and consolation.

What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot. His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism.

Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable. The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle clung when he