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A Visit to the Grave
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE.
BY
SALADIN.
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON STREET, E.C.
�ERECTED TO THE
MEMORY OF JANNET CARLYLE,
SPOUSE OF JAMES CARLYLE, MAS
ON, IN ECCLEFECHAN, WHO DIED
THE IIth SEPtr, 1792, IN THE 25th
YEAR OF HER AGE.
ALSO JANNET CARLYLE, DAUGHTER TO
JAMES CARLYLE AND MARGARET AIKEN,
DIED
SHE AT ECCLEFECHAN JANR 27™, l8oi,
AGED 17 MONTHS, ALSO MARGRET
THEIR DAUGHTER, SHE DIED JUNE 2 2nd, 1830,
AGED 27 YEARS. AND THE ABOVE
JAMES CARLYLE, BORN AT BROWN KNOWE
IN AUGT 1758, DIED AT SCOTSBRIG ON THE
2 3d JANry 1832, AND NOW ALSO RESTS HERE
AND HERE NOW RESTS THE ABOVE
MARGARET AITKEN, HIS SECOND
WIFE, BORN AT WHITESTANE, KIRKMAHOE, IN SEPTM 1771; DIED AT SCOTSBRIG,
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1853.
SHE BROUGHT
HIM NINE CHILDREN WHEREOF FOUR
SONS AND THREE DAUGHTERS SURVIVED
GRATEFULLY REVERENT OF SUCH
A FATHER AND SUCH A MOTHER.
�6 SIX©
LA0'
[Reprinted from The Secular Review.]
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Barefooted lads and lasses, when I was some seventeen
years of age, came skelping over the red heather and
yellow broom of the moors from Carlyle’s Craigenputtock
to my school at Glenesslin, Dunscore. I well knew
Mr. Cumming, the seven-feet-high child of Anak, who
was then Carlyle’s tenant farmer, and who showed me
some of Carlyle’s “ business ” letters to himself, and
which, for the incipient soul which was then in my body
of length without breadth, I could not decipher. “ I
should flog the smallest boy in my school for perpetrating
a handwriting like that!” exclaimed I, with the full flavour
of pedagogic strut. As far as I am aware, Carlyle never
visited the Dunscore district without calling upon my
venerable and highly-gifted friend, Thomas Aird; and
dear old Aird of “The Devil’s Dream” made up his
mind that I, his raw and vehement young protege, should
take tea with Carlyle in the little upper room at Mountain
Hall, near Dumfries, where the grand and quiet old poet
had often told me tales of his earlier years to cheer me
through the toil and blighted hope of mine. What tales
he could tell, too, of his early associates in literature; of
John Wilson, with his radiant genius and majestic man
hood ; of De Quincey, with his dreamings over the
borderland of the world; of the lovable “Delta” of
“ Casa Wappy,” and of Blackwood and of Lord Jeffrey ;
and of that marvellous shepherd of Ettrick, who fashioned
the glamourie of “ Kilmeny ” out of the dim mists of
his native hills.
�2
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
Carlyle took tea exactly like any other uncouth mortal.
I was young and blate and timid. By the grace of a
Titan I, a big schoolboy, with his legs too long for his
breeches, was stuck between a Titan and a Deity, and I
shrank into nothingness under the fierce light that beat
upon me. I was told that the butter was from the Barnkin
(which was ever Aird’s guarantee of that article’s excel
lence), and I was recommended to try it with the soda
scone. Thus appealed to, I felt that it devolved upon
me to immortalise myself. Now was the chance for me
to come out of my shell and show Carlyle that Aird was
correct in his predilection for me, and that I was no
common country hobbledehoy. I would astonish Carlyle
—and I daresay I did. I began a sentence, which I
intended to be a long, eloquent, and elegant one. I
would demonstrate that I could orally marshal more than
monosyllables. I would prove that I was a scholar, and
could weild the sesquipedalian thunders. But, O shade
of Tully, in my blateness and trepidation a word of
tremendous length got inextricably and inappropriately
jammed into the sentence, and all the wits I had left got
jammed i.i along with it. I lost my meaning altogether.
I abandoned the old sentence, and began a new one, less
ambitious and perfectly commonplace and trite; but,
before I had got half way through with it, I had forgotten
what I had intended to say. I stuttered and blushed, let
my knife fall upon the floor with a bang, the perspiration
broke upon my brow, and I subsided into silence and
despair. I dared not look up to observe the facial effect
my discomfiture had produced; but I doubt not that, if
Carlyle deigned to think of me at all, he set me down as
a complete idiot, or the nearest to it that could wrell be
conceived.
Much has come and gone since then. Now I am
bolder and my sentences are less ambitious. A raw youth,
I broke down in the orgies of my hero-worship before
the furrowed cheeks and the rugged brow of one of the
most exceptional men that ever ate bread prepared from
the cereals of our planet. In the morning of August 29th,
1884, I repeated wierdly : “Brief, brawling day, with its
noisy phantoms, its poor paper crowns, tinsel gilt, is gone,
and divine, everlasting night, with her star-diadems, with
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
3
her silences, and her veracities, is come,”* and I deter
mined, since I was only some fifteen miles from Ecclefechan, that I should go and see my old master’s restingplace, and cull a few blades of grass from the clay of
death which now fills up the wrinkles indented with the
graving tool of a weary life. I reached Ecclefechan.
There is a key to the plain iron gate of the sepulchre;
but, as regards the cottage where the key is kept, there
was no one within and the door was locked. A substan
tial and ungainly wall of whin-stone and lime rose, some
nine or ten feet high, between me and the Ecclefechan
city of the dead. But, standing within a few feet of
where Carlyle lay, was I to be turned aside by a wall of
stone—aye, or a wall of fire ? It wras Carlyle who had
first prompted me to be heroic enough to become a Free
thinker and repudiate the moral suicide of attempting to
force upon the credence that which is repulsive to the
reason. I buttoned my coat, glanced critically at my
boot-soles, and, repeating between my set teeth, “ What
is incredible to thee thou shalt not, at thy soul’s peril,
attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or die
here. Go to perdition if thou might; but not with a
lie in thy mouth ; by the Eternal Maker, no ;”t rushed
at the jagged, hard, and ungainly wall, scrambled up it
like a cat, and leapt from its top like a deer.
A plain, spear-headed iron railing, set on a coping of
stone, the spear-points reaching as high as your chin,
encloses three headstones standing in line, to the left old
James Carlyle, the stone-mason ; to the right Thomas
Carlyle, the baby; in the centre Thomas Carlyle, the
God-knows-what, lying waiting for God-knows-what.
“Yes, thy future fate, indeed? Thy future fate, while
thou makest it the chief question, seems to me extremely
questionable.’’^ “ Or, alas, perhaps at bottom is there
no Great Day, no sure look-out of any life to come, but
only this poor life; and what of taxes, felicities, Nell
Gwynes, and entertainments we can manage to muster
here ?Ӥ Outside the rail, in a drizzling shower, I
copied the inscriptions upon the three several grave
stones, for the benefit of him who may not care to visit
* “ Past and Present.”
+ “ Life of Sterling.”
I “ Past and Present.”
§ Ibidem.
�4
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OK THOMAS CARLYLE.
Ecclefechan at all, and also for the benefit of him who
may visit Ecclefechan, but who may not see his way to
leaping over a ten-feet wall at the risk of breaking his
neck.*
The Thomas Carlyle on tombstone No. 3 was the son of
James Carlyle, brother of Thomas the Great. This brother
James still vegetates in Ecclefechan, but was invisible.
He was described to me as “wee and eccentric,” and was,
till lately, farmer in the Scotsbrig, of tombstone celebrity.
I called at his house ; but, although he did not pretend
to be absent, he was more difficult of access than even
his brother’s grave, and I had to return to London with
out even a glimpse at Carlyle the undistinguished. I,
however, saw his son, nephew of him whom Gilfillan
dubbed “ the cursing Polyphemus of Chelsea.” He is a
rough, broad-set, bucolic-looking person, with a wrinkled,
bull-dog sort of face, but full of ingenuousness and
sonsy integrity. In a quiet and stolid, but unostenta
tiously polite, manner he took me upstairs and pointed
out to me several mementoes of his illustrious uncle.
Among these was a framed oil painting of a person of
about forty-five years of age, not a ladies’ man by any
means, but the possessor of a grim, hard face of heather
and granite, under which the volcanic fires of genius
might slumber, and which I had no difficulty in predicat
ing to be the face of Thomas Carlyle. It is noteworthy
that, from this oil painting, no impression whatever has
yet been taken, as the nephew laconically assured
me. In the room there is also a framed oil painting,
purporting to be the counterfeit presentment of Jane
Welsh Carlyle. But the thing has a face as long as your
arm, and has, altogether, such features and expression as
I cannot charge God Almighty with having bestowed
upon any being I have yet seen. If the father of
Teufelsdrockh had really a wife like that, the key is
furnished to the secret of his bearishness, dyspepsia, and
misanthropy.
I next went to the house in which Thomas the
Uncanny was born. It has a wide cart-arch running
right through it to some unspeakable stables or lumber
* F®r an exact transcript see cover.
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
5
houses behind. In a little room upstairs, on December
4th, 1795, a baby came howling and wailing, as we have
all done, out of Mystery into Mystery ; and this baby,
instead of an ordinary clod-hopper, turned out to be
Thomas Carlyle. Scotland, although she has specially
the knack of turning cuckoos—or, rather, eagles—out
of sparrows’ nests, had done nothing so tremendous in
this line since the immortal twenty-fifth of January, 1759>
when she parturited in an “auld clay biggin” near
Alloway Kirk the infant that developed into that porten
tous jumble of dirt and deity known as Robert Burns.
In the little room there is a chair, brought from Chelsea,
and which is interesting as being reputed to have often
sustained the somatic foundations of the author of
“ Sartor Resartus.” There is also, in a corner, a bracket,
on which are arranged copies of the whole of the
author’s works—his own present to the room. 1. he
house, although a poor and plain, is a strong and sub
stantial one, and was built with the undistinguished
hands of a father whose son built up with distinguished
hands, not a little whin-stone house in a little obscure
village, but a fabric whose august and rugged masonry
forms a fane in which millions worship, and in which
succeeding millions will continue to worship when the
present celebrants are wiped off the slate with the sponge
of Death. The natal room is shown off by a smart and
pretty young dressmaker, who exposes for sale some
Carlyle nicnacks, one of which I brought away with me
in the shape of a wooden pin-tray, with a photograph of
Ecclefechan in the bottom thereof.
But, as to Ecclefechan itself, it is not worth going the
length of your leg to see. Its principal feature is the
red and rustic U. P. church, which overlooks Ecclefechan’s sole attraction—its graveyard. I saw at least
four public-houses, two or three of which had the cheek
to dub themselves inns. All seemed dead as the grave
yard, except these “ inns,” and one old man wheeling a
barrow, and one frail old woman carrying a back-load of
sticks. Where did the money come from to purchase
the “liquid Madness sold at tenpence a quartern, all
the products of which are, and must be, like its origin,
mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only”?* And yet,
�6
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
let the “ inns ” flourish ; their “ black, unluminous, un
heeded Inferno and Prisonhouse of souls in pain ”f of
fiery whisky must surely be better than the waters of
the Ecclefechan burn as it “wimples through the
clachan.” Even for Carlyle’s sake, I did not taste the
liquid of this burn that runs down the main—in fact,
the only—street of the village, and quite close to the
door of the tenement in which Ecclefechan’s only man
was born. The day was showery ; watery clouds scudded
athwart the autumn sky, and the tide of the unclassical
burn had the appearance of dirty milk. This appear
ance was considerably enhanced t’ne wrong way by the
presence in the bed of the stream—which is now, how
ever, partly covered over—of old boots, old sardine tins,
scraps of old newspapers, the heads of herrings, the
parings of potatoes, yellow cabbage leaves, and the
mortal remains of unburied cats. I should think Eccle
fechan should be a tolerably ready place to die in, never
to speak of the privilege of being buried beside a man
who has left an indelible mark upon his century. Off
trudges the dirty burn to join Mein Water, which, in its
turn, falls into the River Annan, and the miasma of
dead cabbages and the malodour of the corpses of cats
are lost in the tossing tides and saline winds of the
Solway. Ecclefechan has a woollen factory (I took it for
a gaol, or a madhouse), which, when business is brisk,
employs forty hands ; but it now employs only four
teen. Alas for the local Plugstone of Undershot!
Ichabod is over every door. The glory has departed.
There is no vitality in the woollen factory, in the dotard
with the wheelbarrow, or in the beldame with the bundle
of sticks. The village’s only heirloom is decay; its only
source of life—a grave 1 I looked beyond the wheel
barrow, the public-house, and the bundle of sticks, into
the depths of the silent and mysterious sky, and
murmured : “ The Past is a dim, indubitable fact; the
b uture, too, is one, only dimmer—nay, properly, it is the
same fact in new dress and development. For the
Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole
Future : as the Life-Tree, Igdrasil, wide-waving,
* “Chartism.”
+ Ibidem.
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
7
many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-King
doms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its
boughs reaches away beyond the stars, and in all times
and places is one and the same Life-tree.”*
By the way, speaking of Scotsbrig, I had a chat with
a hale and hearty old peasant, who had long been plough
man at that farm. He knew all the ins and outs of the
Carlyles well, and had frequently, when a youth, “put
the graith on the pony for baith Tammas and his brither
John, the doctor. The doctor was a raal gentleman. I
never pat on a saddle for him but he geid me half-acroon ; but Tammas was a meeserable screw. I never
got as muckle as a bawbee frae him.” So much for
this aged yokel’s estimate of him of the Eternities and
Immensities 1
It will be observed that, on his monolith, James Carlyle
is described mas-on. The ancient ploughman of Scots
brig assured me that the gravestone was the handiwork
of the mason who sleeps below. I am sorry for this, as
there is something on the obverse side of the stone which
offends me. At the top there is an angel with wonder
fully chubby cheeks, and the rest of the space is carved
and scrolled over with two heraldic beasts and two
heraldic shields, showing that the modern stonemason
prided himself upon being connected with some strutting
sept of ancient cut-throats. The two heraldic beasts
have each an open mouth, from which proceeds what has
evidently been intended to represent a tongue with
terrible forks ; but which, as they stand, would more
readily suggest that each beast had swallowed a hen, all
but one foot and leg, which still protruded from the open
jaws, with all the toes spread. There are, furthermore,
in sundry places on the stone, as many loose feathers
carved here and there as would make a decent-sized
pillow; but whether they had belonged to the angel, or
the hen, or both, I could not determine. With its
feathers and feet and detached nooks and corners and
humbugs, the whole thing looks like a Kindergarten
puzzle: “Given the pieces, put together the hen.” So
much for a peasant’s heraldry.
Proem to “ Past and Present.’'
�s
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
Howbeit, in the village stonemason all this might be
overlooked and forgiven ; but the very two heraldic brutes
that figure on the back of the tombstone of the father
appear on the face of that of the son—he of the mongrel
English and German kettle-drum with stick and calf’sskin thunder. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the
streets of Askelon. One more cynical than I might
pronounce the soi-disant scarifier of shams himself a
sham, and sneer that, if Carlyle’s burial in Westminster
would have savoured of vain-glory, his interment in Eccle
fechan is redolent of burlesque.
But if there be here, over thy tomb, Thomas Carlyle,
room for cynicism, still that cynicism is not for me. I
leave to burn, as the only funeral tapers over thy grave,
the few heads of red clover I found blooming there
among the sweet and ungrimed green grass over which
trod the feet of thy childhood. I am fain to forget thy
poor little make-believes of heraldry. Thou, and not
the red-handed cattle-reiver of the bygone centuries, art
the founder of the house of Carlyle. Thine are the
gules, d’argent, and d’or that should make every dead
man of thy lineage, proud of thee, stand up in his grave,
and utter a sepulchral hurrah. So much for thy lineage
of the Past; and, as for thy lineage of the Future, did
no “ two-legged animals without feathers ”* proceed from
thy loins ? Yet, thou hast ten thousand sons, no dwarfs
and drowes either, but men with blood of fire and thews
of steel—Atlases carrying the world on their shoulders.
Over thy bed, with its clay sheets so cool, with its cover
let of green grass and white daisies, I lean, O my father,
and ask thee for thy blessing. I am thy youngest and
most unworthy son; but I have the honour to be con
sanguine with thee in Scottish peasant blood, in sour
peat bogs, in porridge and penury. Your boyish arm,
like mine, bore a shield that was battered shapeless in
the battle for bread; and your right hand, like mine,
bore a blade whose gladiatorial flashes of flame had ren
dered more terrible, but had not illumed, the invulner
able panoply of Ontology and Mystery.
�HUMILITATE.
HERE RESTS THOMAS CARLYLE, WHO WAS BORN
AT ECCLEFECHAN, 4™ DECEMBER, 4795, AND DIED AT
24 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, LONDON, ON SATURDAY
5th FEBRUARY, l88l.
HERE ALSO RESTS JOHN AITKEN CARLYLE, M.D. LL.D.
WHO WAS BORN AT ECCLEFECHAN 7™ JULY l8oi
AND DIED AT THE HILL, DUMFRIES ON MONDAY
15 SEPTEMBER 1879
IN
MEMORY
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE
SON OF JAMES CARLYLE AND ISABELLA CALVERT
IN SCOTSBRIG WHO DIED 27 DEC. 1841
AGED 3 YEARS AND ONE MONTH.
ALSO THE ABOVE ISABELLA CALVERT, WHO
DIED AT SCOTSBRIG Ist JUNE 1859,
AGED 46 YEARS.
�Price 2s., post free,
LAYS OF ROMANCE & CHIVALRY.
By W. STEWART ROSS (“Saladin”).
“ Some of these effusions are ot a very remarkable character, and indicate
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London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Now Ready, bound strongly in cloth, gilt lettered, price is, 8d.
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AN EXAMINATION & POPULAR EXPOSITION
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London: W. Stewart & Co., 4r, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
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Title
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A visit to the grave of Thomas Carlyle
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes references to Carlyle's works. Reprinted from The Secular Review. Stamp inside front cover: Bishopsgate Institute Reference Library, 09 MAR 1998. Medallion of Carlyle on front cover. Publisher's advertisements on back cover. Date of publication from British Library. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[1884]
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N601
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Thomas Carlyle
Free thought
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A visit to the grave of Thomas Carlyle), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
Language
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English
Free Thought
NSS
Thomas Carlyle