Carlyle, Dr James Browne, and the 'Mystical Blackguard' Werner

Abstract

WRITING to his mother in 1828, a thirty-two-year-old Thomas Carlyle complained of a recent newspaper review of his article on the German author Zacharias Werner, by a respected Edinburgh linguist and editor: one Brown[e], an Advocate and Loggerhead, speaks of me in a wondrous style. … I think in about twenty years, if there is anything in me, such men as Brown[e] and Company may see it; not sooner, nor do I wish it.1 He says that I am as it were the most beautiful penny-candle you could see in a winter night, but that unhappily a ‘murky cloud of German Transcendentalism’ is descending over me; whereby what can tallow and wick avail tho’ never so goodly? The light must go out in its socket; and nothing remain but the waily-dreg of the Mercury to illuminate the Earth.2 1 Postscript to a letter by Jean Carlyle and Jane W. Carlyle to Margaret A. Carlyle, 19 Feb. (printed in Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders et al., 28 vols to date (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1970–), IV, 327–8. I retain the editor's square brackets with the amendment of ‘Brown[e]’. An editorial footnote identifies the newspaper as ‘probably an issue of the Caledonian [Mercury] which Carlyle sent to his mother’ (327 n.). 2 Letter to John A. Carlyle, 12 March (Collected Letters, IV, 339–44, at 340). The editor explains ‘waily-dreg’ as ‘the last-made candle, thin and ill-shaped’ made to ‘utiliz[e] the remaining tallow’ (340 n.).