“Schiller” being finished, Carlyle was now launched upon his life-work as “a writer of books.”  He translated Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,” for which he received L180.  I do not see the transcendent excellence of this novel, except in its original and forcible criticism, and its undercurrent of philosophy; but it is nevertheless famous.  These two works gave Carlyle some literary reputation among scholars, but not much fame.

Although Carlyle was thus fairly embarked on a literary career, the “trade” of literature he always regarded as a poor one, and never encouraged a young man to pursue it as a profession unless forced into it by his own irresistible impulses.  Its nobility he ranked very high, but not its remunerativeness.  He regarded it as a luxury for the rich and leisurely, but a very thorny and discouraging path for a poor man.  How few have ever got a living by it, unless allied with other callings,—­as a managing clerk, or professor, or lecturer, or editor!  The finest productions of Emerson were originally delivered as lectures.  Novelists and dramatists, I think, are the only class, who, without doing anything else, have earned a comfortable support by their writings.  Historians have, with very few exceptions, been independent in their circumstances.

In the year 1826, at the age of thirty-one, Carlyle married Jane Welsh, the only child of a deceased physician of Haddington, who had some little property in expectancy from the profits of a farm in the moorlands of Scotland.  She was beautiful, intellectual, and nervously intense.  She had been a pupil of Edward Irving, who had introduced his friend Carlyle to her.  On the whole, it was a fortunate marriage for Carlyle, although it would have been impossible for him to have or to give happiness in constant and intimate companionship with any woman.  He was very fond of his wife, but in an undemonstrative sort of way,—­except in his letters to her, which are genuine love-letters, tender and considerate.  As in the case of most superior women, clouds at times gathered over her, which her husband did not or could not dissipate.  But she was very proud of him, and faithful to him, and careful of his interest and fame.  Nor is there evidence from her letters, or from the late biography which Froude has written, that she was, on the whole, unhappy.  She was very frank, very sharp with her tongue, and sometimes did not spare her husband.  She had a good deal to put up with from his irritable temper; but she also was irritable, nervous, and sickly, although in her loyalty she rarely complained, while she had many privations to endure,—­for Carlyle until he was nearly fifty was a poor man.  During the first two years of their residence in London they were obliged to live on L100 a year.  He was never in even moderately easy circumstances until after his “Oliver Cromwell” was published.

After his marriage, Carlyle lived eighteen months near Edinburgh; but there was no opening for him in the exclusive society there.  His merits were not then recognized as a man of genius in that cultivated capital, as it pre-eminently was at that time; but he made the acquaintance of Jeffrey, who acknowledged his merit, admired his wife, and continued to be as good a friend as that worldly but accomplished man could be to one so far beneath him in social rank.