Part 5

It seemed eminently fit that Carlyle's dust should rest here in his native soil, with that of his kindred, he was so thoroughly one of them, and that his place should be next his mother's, between whom and himself there existed such strong affection. I recall a little glimpse he gives of his mother in a letter to his brother John, while the latter was studying in Germany. His mother had visited him in Edinburgh. "I had her," he writes, "at the pier of Leith, and showed her where your ship vanished; and she looked over the blue waters eastward with wettish eyes, and asked the dumb waves 'when he would be back again.' Good mother."

To see more of Ecclefechan and its people, and to browse more at my leisure about the country, I brought my wife and youngster down from Lockerbie; and we spent several days there, putting up at the quiet and cleanly little Bush Inn. I tramped much about the neighborhood, noting the birds, the wild flowers, the people, the farm occupations, etc.; going one afternoon to Scotsbrig, where the Carlyles lived after they left Mainhill, and where both father and mother died; one day to Annan, another to Repentance Hill, another over the hill toward Kirtlebridge, tasting the land, and finding it good. It is an evidence of how permanent and unchanging things are here that the house where Carlyle was born, eighty-seven years ago, and which his father built, stands just as it did then, and looks good for several hundred years more. In going up to the little room where he first saw the light, one ascends the much-worn but original stone stairs, and treads upon the original stone floors. I suspect that even the window panes in the little window remain the same. The village is a very quiet and humble one, paved with small cobble-stone, over which one hears the clatter of the wooden clogs, the same as in Carlyle's early days. The pavement comes quite up to the low, modest, stone-floored houses, and one steps from the street directly into most of them. When an Englishman or a Scotchman of the humbler ranks builds a house in the country, he either turns its back upon the highway, or places it several rods distant from it, with sheds or stables between; or else he surrounds it with a high, massive fence, shutting out your view entirely. In the village he crowds it to the front; continues the street pavement into his hall, if he can; allows no fence or screen between it and the street, but makes the communication between the two as easy and open as possible. At least this is the case with most of the older houses. Hence village houses and cottages in Britain are far less private and secluded than ours, and country houses far less public. The only feature of Ecclefechan, besides the church, that distinguishes it from the humblest peasant village of a hundred years ago, is the large, fine stone structure used for the public school. It confers a sort of distinction upon the place, as if it were in some way connected with the memory of its famous son. I think I was informed that he had some hand in founding it. The building in which he first attended school is a low, humble dwelling, that now stands behind the church, and forms part of the boundary between the cemetery and the Annan road.

From our window I used to watch the laborers on their way to their work, the children going to school, or to the pump for water, and night and morning the women bringing in their cows from the pasture to be milked. In the long June gloaming the evening milking was not done till about nine o'clock. On two occasions, the first in a brisk rain, a bedraggled, forlorn, deeply-hooded, youngish woman, came slowly through the street, pausing here and there, and singing in wild, melancholy, and not unpleasing strains. Her voice had a strange piercing plaintiveness and wildness. Now and then some passer-by would toss a penny at her feet. The pretty Edinburgh lass, her hair redder than Scotch gold, that waited upon us at the inn, went out in the rain and put a penny in her hand. After a few pennies had been collected the music would stop, and the singer disappear,--to drink up her gains, I half suspect, but do not know. I noticed that she was never treated with rudeness or disrespect. The boys would pause and regard her occasionally, but made no remark, or gesture, or grimace. One afternoon a traveling show pitched its tent in the broader part of the street, and by diligent grinding of a hand-organ summoned all the children of the place to see the wonders. The admission was one penny, and I went in with the rest, and saw the little man, the big dog, the happy family, and the gaping, dirty-faced, but orderly crowd of boys and girls. The Ecclefechan boys, with some of whom I tried, not very successfully, to scrape an acquaintance, I found a sober, quiet, modest set, shy of strangers, and, like all country boys, incipient naturalists. If you want to know where the birds'-nests are, ask the boys. Hence, one Sunday afternoon, meeting a couple of them on the Annan road, I put the inquiry. They looked rather blank and unresponsive at first; but I made them understand I was in earnest, and wished to be shown some nests. To stimulate their ornithology I offered a penny for the first nest, twopence for the second, threepence for the third, etc.,--a reward that, as it turned out, lightened my burden of British copper considerably; for these boys appeared to know every nest in the neighborhood, and I suspect had just then been making Sunday calls upon their feathered friends. They turned about, with a bashful smile, but without a word, and marched me a few paces along the road, when they stepped to the hedge, and showed me a hedge-sparrow's nest with young. The mother bird was near, with food in her beak. This nest is a great favorite of the cuckoo, and is the one to which Shakespeare refers:--

"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it's had it head bit off by it young."

The bird is not a sparrow at all, but is a warbler, closely related to the nightingale. Then they conducted me along a pretty by-road, and parted away the branches, and showed me a sparrow's nest with eggs in it. A group of wild pansies, the first I had seen, made bright the bank near it. Next, after conferring a moment soberly together, they took me to a robin's nest,--a warm, mossy structure in the side of the bank. Then we wheeled up another road, and they disclosed the nest of the yellow yite, or yellow-hammer, a bird of the sparrow kind, also upon the ground. It seemed to have a little platform of coarse, dry stalks, like a door-stone, in front of it. In the mean time they had showed me several nests of the hedge-sparrow, and one of the shilfa, or chaffinch, that had been "harried," as the boys said, or robbed. These were gratuitous and merely by the way. Then they pointed out to me the nest of a tomtit in a disused pump that stood near the cemetery; after which they proposed to conduct me to a chaffinch's nest and a blackbird's nest; but I said I had already seen several of these and my curiosity was satisfied. Did they know any others? Yes, several of them; beyond the village, on the Middlebie road, they knew a wren's nest with eighteen eggs in it. Well, I would see that, and that would be enough; the coppers were changing pockets too fast. So through the village we went, and along the Middlebie road for nearly a mile. The boys were as grave and silent as if they were attending a funeral; not a remark, not a smile. We walked rapidly. The afternoon was warm, for Scotland, and the tips of their ears glowed through their locks, as they wiped their brows. I began to feel as if I had had about enough walking myself. "Boys, how much farther is it?" I said. "A wee bit farther, sir;" and presently, by their increasing pace, I knew we were nearing it. It proved to be the nest of the willow wren, or willow warbler, an exquisite structure, with a dome or canopy above it, the cavity lined with feathers and crowded with eggs. But it did not contain eighteen. The boys said they had been told that the bird would lay as many as eighteen eggs; but it is the common wren that lays this number,--even more. What struck me most was the gravity and silent earnestness of the boys. As we walked back they showed me more nests that had been harried. The elder boy's name was Thomas. He had heard of Thomas Carlyle; but when I asked him what he thought of him, he only looked awkwardly upon the ground.

I had less trouble to get the opinion of an old road-mender whom I fell in with one day. I was walking toward Repentance Hill, when he overtook me with his "machine" (all road vehicles in Scotland are called machines), and insisted upon my getting up beside him. He had a little white pony, "twenty-one years old, sir," and a heavy, rattling two-wheeler, quite as old I should say. We discoursed about roads. Had we good roads in America? No? Had we no "metal" there, no stone? Plenty of it, I told him,--too much; but we had not learned the art of road-making yet. Then he would have to come "out" and show us; indeed, he had been seriously thinking about it; he had an uncle in America, but had lost all track of him. He had seen Carlyle many a time, "but the people here took no interest in that man," he said; "he never done nothing for this place." Referring to Carlyle's ancestors, he said, "The Cairls were what we Scotch call bullies,--a set of bullies, sir. If you crossed their path, they would murder you;" and then came out some highly-colored tradition of the "Ecclefechan dog fight," which Carlyle refers to in his Reminiscences. On this occasion, the old road-mender said, the "Cairls" had clubbed together, and bullied and murdered half the people of the place! "No, sir, we take no interest in that man here," and he gave the pony a sharp punch with his stub of a whip. But he himself took a friendly interest in the schoolgirls whom we overtook along the road, and kept picking them up till the cart was full, and giving the "lassies" a lift on their way home. Beyond Annan bridge we parted company, and a short walk brought me to Repentance Hill, a grassy eminence that commands a wide prospect toward the Solway. The tower which stands on the top is one of those interesting relics of which this land is full, and all memory and tradition of the use and occasion of which are lost. It is a rude stone structure, about thirty feet square and forty high, pierced by a single door, with the word "Repentance" cut in Old English letters in the lintel over it. The walls are loopholed here and there for musketry or archery. An old disused graveyard surrounds it, and the walls of a little chapel stand in the rear of it. The conies have their holes under it; some lord, whose castle lies in the valley below, has his flagstaff upon it; and Time's initials are scrawled on every stone. A piece of mortar probably three or four hundred years old, that had fallen from its place, I picked up, and found nearly as hard as the stone, and quite as gray and lichen-covered. Returning, I stood some time on Annan bridge, looking over the parapet into the clear, swirling water, now and then seeing a trout leap. Whenever the pedestrian comes to one of these arched bridges, he must pause and admire, it is so unlike what he is acquainted with at home. It is a real viaduct; it conducts not merely the traveler over, it conducts the road over as well. Then an arched bridge is ideally perfect; there is no room for criticism,--not one superfluous touch or stroke; every stone tells, and tells entirely. Of a piece of architecture, we can say this or that, but of one of these old bridges this only: it satisfies every sense of the mind. It has the beauty of poetry, and the precision of mathematics. The older bridges, like this over the Annan, are slightly hipped, so that the road rises gradually from either side to the key of the arch; this adds to their beauty, and makes them look more like things of life. The modern bridges are all level on the top, which increases their utility. Two laborers, gossiping on the bridge, said I could fish by simply going and asking leave of some functionary about the castle.

Shakespeare says of the martlet, that it

"Builds in the weather on the outward wall, Even in the force and road of casualty."

I noticed that a pair had built their nest on an iron bracket under the eaves of a building opposite our inn, which proved to be in the "road of casualty;" for one day the painters began scraping the building, preparatory to giving it a new coat of paint, and the "procreant cradle" was knocked down. The swallows did not desert the place, however, but were at work again next morning before the painters were. The Scotch, by the way, make a free use of paint. They even paint their tombstones. Most of them, I observed, were brown stones painted white. Carlyle's father once sternly drove the painters from his door when they had been summoned by the younger members of his family to give the house a coat "o' pent." "Ye can jist pent the bog wi' yer ashbaket feet, for ye'll pit nane o' yer glaur on ma door." But the painters have had their revenge at last, and their "glaur" now covers the old man's tombstone.

One day I visited a little overgrown cemetery about a mile below the village, toward Kirtlebridge, and saw many of the graves of the old stock of Carlyles, among them some of Carlyle's uncles. This name occurs very often in those old cemeteries; they were evidently a prolific and hardy race. The name Thomas is a favorite one among them, insomuch that I saw the graves and headstones of eight Thomas Carlyles in the two graveyards. The oldest Carlyle tomb I saw was that of one John Carlyle, who died in 1692. The inscription upon his stone is as follows:--

"Heir Lyes John Carlyle of Penerssaughs, who departed this life ye 17 of May 1692, and of age 72, and His Spouse Jannet Davidson, who departed this life Febr. ye 7, 1708, and of age 73. Erected by John, his son."

The old sexton, whom I frequently saw in the churchyard, lives in the Carlyle house. He knew the family well, and had some amusing and characteristic anecdotes to relate of Carlyle's father, the redoubtable James, mainly illustrative of his bluntness and plainness of speech. The sexton pointed out, with evident pride, the few noted graves the churchyard held; that of the elder Peel being among them. He spoke of many of the oldest graves as "extinct;" nobody owned or claimed them; the name had disappeared, and the ground was used a second time. The ordinary graves in these old burying places appear to become "extinct" in about two hundred years. It was very rare to find a date older than that. He said the "Cairls" were a peculiar set; there was nobody like them. You would know them, man and woman, as soon as they opened their mouths to speak; they spoke as if against a stone wall. (Their words hit hard.) This is somewhat like Carlyle's own view of his style. "My style," he says in his note-book, when he was thirty-eight years of age, "is like no other man's. The first sentence bewrays me." Indeed, Carlyle's style, which has been so criticised, was as much a part of himself, and as little an affectation, as his shock of coarse yeoman hair and bristly beard and bleared eyes were a part of himself; he inherited them. What Taine calls his barbarisms was his strong mason sire cropping out. He was his father's son to the last drop of his blood, a master builder working with might and main. No more did the former love to put a rock face upon his wall than did the latter to put the same rock face upon his sentences; and he could do it, too, as no other writer, ancient or modern, could.

I occasionally saw strangers at the station, which is a mile from the village, inquiring their way to the churchyard; but I was told there had been a notable falling off of the pilgrims and visitors of late. During the first few months after his burial, they nearly denuded the grave of its turf; but after the publication of the Reminiscences, the number of silly geese that came there to crop the grass was much fewer. No real lover of Carlyle was ever disturbed by those Reminiscences; but to the throng that run after a man because he is famous, and that chip his headstone or carry away the turf above him when he is dead, they were happily a great bugaboo.

A most agreeable walk I took one day down to Annan. Irving's name still exists there, but I believe all his near kindred have disappeared. Across the street from the little house where he was born this sign may be seen: "Edward Irving, Flesher." While in Glasgow, I visited Irving's grave, in the crypt of the cathedral, a most dismal place, and was touched to see the bronze tablet that marked its site in the pavement bright and shining, while those about it, of Sir this or Lady that, were dull and tarnished. Did some devoted hand keep it scoured, or was the polishing done by the many feet that paused thoughtfully above this name? Irving would long since have been forgotten by the world had it not been for his connection with Carlyle, and it was probably the lustre of the latter's memory that I saw reflected in the metal that bore Irving's name. The two men must have been of kindred genius in many ways, to have been so drawn to each other, but Irving had far less hold upon reality; his written word has no projectile force. It makes a vast difference whether you burn gunpowder on a shovel or in a gun-barrel. Irving may be said to have made a brilliant flash, and then to have disappeared in the smoke.

Some men are like nails, easily drawn; others are like rivets, not drawable at all. Carlyle is a rivet, well headed in. He is not going to give way, and be forgotten soon. People who differed from him in opinion have stigmatized him as an actor, a mountebank, a rhetorician; but he was committed to his purpose and to the part he played with the force of gravity. Behold how he toiled! He says, "One monster there is in the world,--the idle man." He did not merely preach the gospel of work; he was it,--an indomitable worker from first to last. How he delved! How he searched for a sure foundation, like a master builder, fighting his way through rubbish and quicksands till he reached the rock! Each of his review articles cost him a month or more of serious work. "Sartor Resartus" cost him nine months, the "French Revolution" three years, "Cromwell" four years, "Frederick" thirteen years. No surer does the Auldgarth bridge, that his father helped build, carry the traveler over the turbulent water beneath it, than these books convey the reader over chasms and confusions, where before there was no way, or only an inadequate one. Carlyle never wrote a book except to clear some gulf or quagmire, to span and conquer some chaos. No architect or engineer ever had purpose more tangible and definite. To further the reader on his way, not to beguile or amuse him, was always his purpose. He had that contempt for all dallying and toying and lightness and frivolousness that hard, serious workers always have. He was impatient of poetry and art; they savored too much of play and levity. His own work was not done lightly and easily, but with labor throes and pains, as of planting his piers in a weltering flood and chaos. The spirit of struggling and wrestling which he had inherited was always uppermost. It seems as if the travail and yearning of his mother had passed upon him as a birthmark. The universe was madly rushing about him, seeking to engulf him. Things assumed threatening and spectral shapes. There was little joy or serenity for him. Every task he proposed to himself was a struggle with chaos and darkness, real or imaginary. He speaks of "Frederick" as a nightmare; the "Cromwell business" as toiling amid mountains of dust. I know of no other man in literature with whom the sense of labor is so tangible and terrible. That vast, grim, struggling, silent, inarticulate array of ancestral force that lay in him, when the burden of written speech was laid upon it, half rebelled, and would not cease to struggle and be inarticulate. There was a plethora of power: a channel, as through rocks, had to be made for it, and there was an incipient cataclysm whenever a book was to be written. What brings joy and buoyancy to other men, namely, a genial task, brought despair and convulsions to him. It is not the effort of composition,--he was a rapid and copious writer and speaker,--but the pressure of purpose, the friction of power and velocity, the sense of overcoming the demons and mud-gods and frozen torpidity he so often refers to. Hence no writing extant is so little like writing, and gives so vividly the sense of something done. He may praise silence and glorify work. The unspeakable is ever present with him; it is the core of every sentence: the inarticulate is round about him; a solitude like that of space encompasseth him. His books are not easy reading; they are a kind of wrestling to most persons. His style is like a road made of rocks: when it is good, there is nothing like it; and when it is bad, there is nothing like it!

In "Past and Present" Carlyle has unconsciously painted his own life and character in truer colors than has any one else: "Not a May-game is this man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers; no idle promenade through fragrant orange groves and green, flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning, sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendors, the Archdemons and Archangels. All heaven, all pandemonium, are his escort." Part of the world will doubtless persist in thinking that pandemonium furnished his chief counsel and guide; but there are enough who think otherwise, and their numbers are bound to increase in the future.

A HUNT FOR THE NIGHTINGALE

While I lingered away the latter half of May in Scotland, and the first half of June in northern England, and finally in London, intent on seeing the land leisurely and as the mood suited, the thought never occurred to me that I was in danger of missing one of the chief pleasures I had promised myself in crossing the Atlantic, namely, the hearing of the song of the nightingale. Hence, when on the 17th of June I found myself down among the copses near Hazlemere, on the borders of Surrey and Sussex, and was told by the old farmer, to whose house I had been recommended by friends in London, that I was too late, that the season of the nightingale was over, I was a good deal disturbed.

"I think she be done singing now, sir; I ain't heered her in some time, sir," said my farmer, as we sat down to get acquainted over a mug of the hardest cider I ever attempted to drink.

"Too late!" I said in deep chagrin, "and I might have been here weeks ago."

"Yeas, sir, she be done now; May is the time to hear her. The cuckoo is done too, sir; and you don't hear the nightingale after the cuckoo is gone, sir."

(The country people in this part of England sir one at the end of every sentence, and talk with an indescribable drawl.)

But I had heard a cuckoo that very afternoon, and I took heart from the fact. I afterward learned that the country people everywhere associate these two birds in this way; you will not hear the one after the other has ceased. But I heard the cuckoo almost daily till the middle of July. Matthew Arnold reflects the popular opinion when in one of his poems ("Thyrsis") he makes the cuckoo say in early June,--

"The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!"

The explanation is to be found in Shakespeare, who says,--

"The cuckoo is in June Heard, not regarded,"

as the bird really does not go till August. I got out my Gilbert White, as I should have done at an earlier day, and was still more disturbed to find that he limited the singing of the nightingale to June 15. But seasons differ, I thought, and it can't be possible that any class of feathered songsters all stop on a given day. There is a tradition that when George I. died the nightingales all ceased singing for the year out of grief at the sad event; but his majesty did not die till June 21. This would give me a margin of several days. Then, when I looked further in White, and found that he says the chaffinch ceases to sing the beginning of June, I took more courage, for I had that day heard the chaffinch also. But it was evident I had no time to lose; I was just on the dividing line, and any day might witness the cessation of the last songster. For it seems that the nightingale ceases singing the moment her brood is hatched. After that event, you hear only a harsh chiding or anxious note. Hence the poets, who attribute her melancholy strains to sorrow for the loss of her young, are entirely at fault. Virgil, portraying the grief of Orpheus after the loss of Eurydice, says:--

"So Philomela, 'mid the poplar shade, Bemoans her captive brood; the cruel hind Saw them unplumed, and took them; but all night Grieves she, and, sitting on a bough, runs o'er Her wretched tale, and fills the woods with woe."