FROUDE AND CARLYLE
When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made
unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was
incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged
himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than
Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon
is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection. Froude's Carlyle,
like Boswell's Johnson, is a great man painted as he was. When the
original head master of Uppingham described his school as Eton
without its faults, there were those who felt for the first time
that there was something to be said for the faults of Eton. Carlyle
without his paradoxes and prejudices, his impetuous temper and his
unbridled tongue would be only half himself. If he were known only
through his books, the world would have missed acquaintance with
letters of singular beauty, and with the most humourous talker of
his age. He was one of two men, Newman being the other, whose
influence Froude felt through life, and the influence of Newman was
chiefly upon his style. Of Newman indeed he saw very little after he
left Oxford, though his admiration and reverence for him never
abated. It was not until he came to live in London after the death
of his first wife that he grew really intimate with Carlyle. Up to
that time he was no more than an occasional visitor in Cheyne Row
with a profound belief in the philosophy of that incomparable poem
in prose, The French Revolution. Carlyle helped him with his own
history, the earlier volumes of which show clear traces of the
master, and encouraged him in his literary work.
Mrs. Carlyle was scarcely less remarkable than her husband. Although
she never wrote a line for publication, her private letters are
among the best in the language, and all who knew her agree that she
talked as well as she wrote. Froude thought her the most brilliant
and interesting woman he had ever met. The attraction was purely
intellectual. Mrs. Carlyle was no longer young, and Froude's
temperament was not inflammable. But she liked clever men, and
clever men liked her. She was an unhappy woman, without children,
without religion, without any regular occupation except keeping
house. Her husband she regarded as the greatest genius of his time,
and his affection for her was the deepest feeling of his heart. He
was at bottom a sincerely kind man, and his servants were devoted to
him. But he was troublesome in small matters; irritable, nervous,
and dyspeptic. His books harassed him like illnesses, and he groaned
under the infliction. If he were disturbed when he was working, he
lost all self-control, and his wife felt, she said, as if she were
keeping a private mad-house. It was not quite so private as it might
have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food
for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made
interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common
subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a
real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was
content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London
without troubling himself to solve mysteries which did not concern
him.
Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength
and early training to be the wife of a poor man. She was too anxious
a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles. Her
father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the
necessary servants. In Carlyle's home there were no servants at all.
His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the
family. Why should his wife be in a different position from his
mother's? There was no reason, in the nature of things. But custom
is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle's married life
were a hard struggle against grinding poverty. Carlyle was grandly
indifferent to material things. He wanted no luxuries, except
tobacco and a horse. He would not have altered his message to
mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies.
What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as
they thought proper. He never swerved from the path of integrity. He
did not know his way to the house of Rimmon. The mere practical
ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might
have realised a fortune in business. Carlyle just made enough money
to live in decent and wholesome comfort.
From the first Carlyle's conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled
him. But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than
intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was
no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship,
pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did
not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller.
Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a
rabbit. Herbert Spencer was "the most unending ass in Christendom."
"Scribbling Sands and Eliots" were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle's
shoe-strings. Editing Keats was "currying dead dog." Ruskin could only
point out the correggiosity of Correggio. Political economy was the
dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle's
eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving,
awe-compelling. They did not put his hearers at their ease, and
Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.
--
* McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant
--
In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he
received a visit from the great author himself. Carlyle did not take
to many people, but he took to Froude. Perhaps he was touched by the
younger man's devotion. Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary
disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he
relinquished it himself. At all events he expressed a wish to see
him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home. Nothing could
be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude
responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really
good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and
there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there
was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for
Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while
her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from
neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's
serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria
than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely
unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would
have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was
absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with
the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name
of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking
of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for
his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence
recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which
his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He
himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of
substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To
her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her
dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale,
drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs.
Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed
desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long
time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care
of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had
been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park
on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting
after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of
Edinburgh.
Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon
Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his
loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the
house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without
meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the
21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed
in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven
her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.
"For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him
without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his
mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his
wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing
had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times
been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his
misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him,
and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow-
creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after
his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of
papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of
her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to
read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased,
after Carlyle was dead.+
--
* This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's
Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under
his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version
has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now.
+ "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling,
about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the
very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and
contras there."--Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From
The Hill, Dumfries.
--
Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed
the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the
knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He
read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a
tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the
purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels
between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the
woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs.
Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it
would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events
his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and
that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his
offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it
was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he
had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most
considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be.
Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed
frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's
letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed
by himself.
Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it
rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards,
however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do
as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He
consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens,
a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents,
and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no
opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon
Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most
sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the
6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother
John as executors, contained the following passage:
"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh
Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though
of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and
indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write
farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript
my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude
(as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead.
To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and
elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do
his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There
is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to
this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the
text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really
rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John
Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the
manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to
this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour
and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality
along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine
can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay,
the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or
any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on
all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and
decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could
well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far
as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted
Froude.
Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the
letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to
publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in
tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt
of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more
letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without
much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they
were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to
undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned,
he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had
given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was
sure to be well received. His English in Ireland was approaching
completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light
on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in
many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and
would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the
best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son,
Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its
worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the
Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of
Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the
Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent
of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be
involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving
offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more
onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his
own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After
Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man
relied upon the younger as upon a son.
Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had
encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him.
He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did
venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with
evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from
Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of
Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a
Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing
on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole,
the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She
was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity
in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and
social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had
improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had
acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or
affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary
celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while
they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity
was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the
principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her
literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish
attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any)
were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for
weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine
benevolence as well as hospitality."*
--
* The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110.
--
But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's
wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the
Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to
dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the
relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other
hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal,
romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton,
and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was
nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer
acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation
carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's
jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not
one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has
himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the
light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual
affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally
looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been
his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage
which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous
championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the
importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the
opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of
forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had
undertaken to discharge.
Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be
remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still
thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good
influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the
sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last
thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was
altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's
original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster.
Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November,
1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen,
the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being
added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's
knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request
he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought
him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had
wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle
expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen
years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly
paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the
memorials entrusted to Froude.
In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole
executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle
suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of
mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs.
Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her
uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle
speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care
and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these
my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should
think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five
hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular
request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further
inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have
destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the
will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not
clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however,
acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his
intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first
volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs.
Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the
fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to
publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of
Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this
separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November,
1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen
years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the
letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and
believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that
he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no
more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in
the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to
relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind,
to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance
that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be
told.
On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and
Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan,
where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered
Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried
among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best
understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared,
including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs.
Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which
came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future
trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight
after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had
a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of
her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all
parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had
promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle
had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less.
Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family
related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her
aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had
promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which
was never in fact realised.
In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out
the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were
eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by
all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit
into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of
drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James
Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck
himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened.
The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There
were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the
first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss.
But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a
suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It
is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has
not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received
much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude
should have published the memoir is a question which may be
discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a
pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release
him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course
least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate
matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary
point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the
Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more
sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks
in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more
omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal
passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless
admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry
Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much
annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and
her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early
and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself.
But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most
intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to
her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of
the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the
sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude
was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude
knew Carlyle, and the public did not.
--
* Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230.
--
Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the
publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he
returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which
contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to
do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following
rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it
would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these
words:
"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish
this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without
fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can
order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine-
tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.
"T. C. (Saturday, July 28th, 1866)."
Mary Carlyle at once wrote to The Times, and accused Froude of
having violated her uncle's express directions. It would have been
better if Froude had himself quoted this passage, and explained the
subsequent events which made it obsolete. But he never suspected any
one, and believed at the time of publication in the entire
friendliness of the Carlyle family. His answer to the charge of
betraying a trust was simple and satisfactory. Carlyle had changed
his mind. This is clear from the fact that he gave Froude the memoir
in 1871, five years after it was written, to do as he pleased with;
and still clearer from the conversation in 1880, when Froude told
him that he meant to publish, and Carlyle said "Very well."
Moreover, the will, a formal and legal document, expressly gave
Froude entire discretion in the matter. Froude replied at first with
temper and judgment. But when Mrs. Carlyle persisted in her
insinuations, and implied a doubt of his veracity, he gave way to a
very natural resentment, and made a rash offer. He had, he said,
brought out the memoir by Carlyle's own desire. He should do the
same with Mrs. Carlyle's letters, for the same reason. "The
remaining letters," he went on to say, "which I was directed to
return to Mrs. Carlyle so soon as I had done with them, I will
restore at once to any responsible person whom she will empower to
receive them from me. I have reason to complain of the position in
which I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They were sent
to me at intervals without inventory or even a memorial list. I was
told that the more I burnt of them the better, and they were for
several years in my possession before I was aware that they were not
my own. Happily I have destroyed none of them, and Mrs. Carlyle may
have them all when she pleases." Froude can hardly have reflected
upon the full significance of what he was saying. He had at this
time been long engaged upon the biography of Carlyle, and a
considerable part of it was finished. If he had then given back his
materials, his labour would have been wasted, and Carlyle's own
personal injunction would have been disobeyed. Carlyle's memory
would also have suffered parable injury. It is said, and it squares
with the facts, that Mary Carlyle and her friends, whose literary
judgment was not quite equal to Carlyle's own, desired to substitute
as his biographer some learned professor in Scotland.* If that were
their object, they are to be congratulated upon their failure. For
the offer was not carried out. As a bare promise without
consideration it was not of course valid in law, and since no one
had acted upon it, its withdrawal did no one any harm. There were
also legal difficulties which made its fulfilment impossible.
According to counsel's opinion, dated the 13th of May, 1881,
Carlyle's request that the papers should be restored was "an
attempted verbal testamentary disposition, which had no legal
authority." The documents belonged not to Froude personally, but to
himself and Fitz-james Stephen, as joint executors, and Stephen has
left it on record that he would not have consented to their return
until Froude's task was accomplished.
--
* David Masson, the editor of Milton, I have been told, but I do not know.
--
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's view was not shared by other and older
members of her uncle's family. During the summer of 1881 Froude
received from Carlyle's surviving brother, James, and his surviving
sister, Mrs. Austin, a letter dated the 8th of August, and written
from Ecclefechan, in which he was implored not to give up his task
of writing the Life, and assured of their perfect reliance upon him.
This assurance is the more significant because it was given after
the publication of the Reminiscences. It was renewed on James
Carlyle' s part through his son after the appearance of Mrs.
Carlyle's letters in 1883, and by Mrs. Austin through her daughter
upon receiving the final volumes of the biography in 1884. Miss
Austin wrote at her mother's request on the 25th of October, 1884,
"My uncle at all times placed implicit confidence in you, and that
confidence has not, I am sure, in any way been abused. He always
spoke of you as his best and truest friend." Time has amply
vindicated Carlyle's opinion, and his discretion in the choice of a
biographer.
As Mrs. Alexander Carlyle considered the publication of the memoir,
which is by far the most interesting part of the Reminiscences, to
be an impropriety, and a breach of faith, it might have been
supposed that she would repudiate the idea of deriving any profit
from the book. On the contrary, she attempted to secure the whole,
and refused to take a part, declaring that Froude had promised to
give her all. Froude's recollection was that, thinking Carlyle's
provision for his niece insufficient,* he had promised her the
American income, which he had been told would be large, though it
turned out to be very small indeed, in acknowledgment of her
services as a copyist. Ultimately he made her the generous offer of
fifteen hundred pounds, retaining only three for himself. She
accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift. In the
opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than
hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the
circumstances a moral obligation. But Mary Carlyle put forward
another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in
June, 1881. She then said that in 1875, six years before his death,
her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the
keys of the receptacles which contained them.
--
* The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however,
materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received
the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died
before her uncle Thomas.
--
Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous. For the bulk of
the papers had been in Froude's possession since the end of 1873, or
at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or
boxes which the keys would have opened. On the strength of her own
statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was
inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle's will leaving his
manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude
should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete
it. He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who
successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with
Carlyle's clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had
done with them. In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed
for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with
natural pride, "It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law-
suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative
question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing
Mr. Carlyle's life, and I am happy to say I succeeded." The public
will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living
except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that
could have produced such a book as his. Of the Reminiscences Froude
wrote to Skelton, "To me in no one of his writings does he appear in
a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all
mankind eventually think."
His own frame of mind at this period is vividly expressed in a
letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881. After some
references to Goethe's letters, and German copyright, he continues:
"So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters
that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I
undertook the business. I had intended, when I finished my English
history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend
the rest of my life on him. I might have been half through by this
time, and the world all in good humour with me. My ill star was
uppermost when I laid this aside. There are objections to every
course which I can follow. The arguments for and against were so
many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to
be done, and left it to me. He could see all sides of the question.
Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another,
whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of
people will blame me. Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would
blame me. What have I done that I should be in such a strait? But I
am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all."
The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of
Carlyle's life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835,
appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub. The public had got on a
false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme. Carlyle was in
truth one of the noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on
the surface. His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of
our being. For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn
too deep for words. He never sought, and he did not greatly value,
the praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in which he
profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short
of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak. Contemporaries
without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business,
attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high.
Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his
own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams. His
generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected
thanks. He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters,
whenever he had time to think. Courage and truth made him indifferent
to fashion and popularity. Popularity was not his aim. His aim was to
tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or
whether they would forbear. Froude had so much confidence in the
essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him
as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling
character and a lofty genius. Therefore his portrait lives, and will
live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have
been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.
Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle
himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the
vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English
biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for
"personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private
life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer
should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and
no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes
Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit.
For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had
done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him,"
he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems
incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam,
have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that
a similar view should have been taken of the relations between
Froude and Carlyle.
It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this
respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as
faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved
him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous
and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was
not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came,
and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has
made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a
splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most
miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There
could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life
and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated
by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in
Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero
wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those
disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many
small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence.
Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and
repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said,
half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating
a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very
important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with
Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as
a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment,
and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that
had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of
them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition,
Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him-
and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was
the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her
health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could
not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen,"
said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of
humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.
If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and
he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque
rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far
characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his
own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not
always being killed."+
--
* Life, i. 302.
+ Life, i. 209.
--
That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own
Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly
enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June,
1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's
Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very
faults that were attributed to himself, with the following
sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life,
and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of
his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to
know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person
who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been
universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently
denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must
have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.
If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that
his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the
result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood
before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who
can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling
the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first
forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had
not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against
poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by
any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it
seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid
exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle
was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he
had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's
Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826
Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to
explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any
public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his
father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man
left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters.
His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist
him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring
books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating
Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English
book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands
than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it
was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and
himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the
character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his
mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner
judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by
writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they
read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His
isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him.
Nobody could help him.
--
* I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection
with Fraser.
--
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not
hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would
admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in
a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort
with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco.
Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a
millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most
humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the
under side of things," to quote his own definition of the
undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read
all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a
talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in
London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers
of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the
generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly
struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.
Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own
conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than
injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people,
for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him,
is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those
passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a
lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one
to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his
diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men
who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would
be still noisier, still more inane.
Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude,
faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of
this book is that it introduced the British and American public to
some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the
language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any
language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her
husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she
surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in
terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes,
as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at
Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power
is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for
half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters
appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her
husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as
rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best,
the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he
was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light
it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two
remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her
relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the
trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied
without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the
letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the
immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.
Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead
wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought
that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and
apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the
bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down-
trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some
few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded
animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.
Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself,
and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have
been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household
details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others
published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their
permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.
--
* "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle,
"with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide."
--
I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.
A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes!
You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed:
His wife and himself had separate rooms.
Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the
controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out
and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife
is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an
unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude
we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all.
Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary
Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.
Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in
London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is
written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the
warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the
essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The
period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left
Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French
Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything
read that book. Southey read it six times. Dickens carried it about
with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities. Thackeray wrote
an enthusiastic review of it. Its wisdom and eloquence were a
treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was.
It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics
were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah. Such comparisons profit
little or nothing. The French Revolution is an original book by a
man who believed in God's judgment upon sin. The memoirs of Madame
Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle's own
heart and soul.
Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not
history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of
miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes. It remains one
of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers,
even the professors themselves. And yet, greater than the book
itself is Carlyle's behaviour when the first volume had been lost by
Mill. Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the
author. He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to
his wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must
endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us."
Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as
such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small
matters he could be very small.
The two personalities of Carlyle and his wife are so fascinating
that there may be some excuse for regarding even their quarrels,
which were chiefly on her side,* with interest. But Frederick the
Great will survive these broils, and so long as Carlyle's books are
read his biography will be read too, as his best extraneous
memorial, just, eloquent, appreciative, sincere. Carlyle was no
model of austere, colourless consistency. His reverent admiration of
Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt
of Gladstone, whom he did not know. Peel was a great parliamentary
statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple. Both belonged equally to
the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose
to supreme power through the representative system that he
especially abhorred. On no important point, while Peel was alive,
did they differ. "On the whole," said Gladstone, "Peel was the
greatest man I ever knew," and in finance he was always a Peelite.
That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have
been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that
the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum. Carlyle seldom
studied a political question thoroughly, and of public men with whom
he was acquainted only through the newspapers he was no judge.
Personal contact produced estimates which, though they might be
harsh, hasty, and unfair, were always interesting, and sometimes
marvellously accurate. Of Peel, for instance, though he saw him very
seldom, he has left a finished portrait, not omitting the great
Minister's humour, for any trace of which the Peel papers may be
searched in vain.
--
* "Both he and she were noble and generous, but his was the soft heart
and hers the stern one."---Carlyle's Life in London, vol. ii. p. 171.
--
The same can be said of Thirlwall, barring the groundless
insinuation that he was dishonest in accepting a bishopric. A very
different sort of bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, Carlyle liked for his
cleverness, though here too he could not help suggesting that on the
foundation, or rather baselessness, of the Christian religion, "Sam"
agreed with him. The great historian of the age he did not
appreciate at all. But, then, he never met Macaulay. "Some little
ape called Keble," is not a happy formula for the author of the
Christian Year, and this is one of the phrases which I think Froude
might well have omitted, as meaning no more than a casual
execration. Yet how minute are these defects, when set beside the
intrinsic grandeur of the central figure in the book. Carlyle mixed
with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of
Annandale to the best intellectual society of London. He was always,
or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor
over-awed," standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting
aside all props and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice
of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself
with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with
an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On pretence and
affectation he had no mercy. Learning, intellect, character,
humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem. As Froude
says, and it is the final word, Carlyle's "extraordinary talents
were devoted, with an equally extraordinary purity of purpose, to
his Maker's service, so far as he could see and understand that
Maker's will." He led "a life of single-minded effort to do right
and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed."
That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with
which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a
traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was
incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and
intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more
astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket. For
criticism of his own judgment he was prepared. He knew well that
acute differences of opinion might arise. The dishonesty and
malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the
range of his ideas. He lived in a society where such things were not
done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them. He had
fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle's own injunctions,
and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all
others he most revered. He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what
seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his
accusers. Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some even
of his own friends looked coldly on him. He was a sensitive man, and
he felt it deeply. He shrank from going out unless he knew exactly
whom he was to meet. But his pride came to his rescue, and he
preferred suffering injustice in silence to discussing in public, as
though it admitted of doubt, the question whether he was an honest
man. He did, however, invite the opinion of his co-executor, an
English judge, a close friend of Carlyle, and a man whose personal
integrity was above all suspicion. Although the calumnies which gave
Froude so much distress have long sunk into an oblivion of contempt,
and require no formal refutation, the conclusive verdict of Sir
James Fitzjames Stephen may be fitly quoted here:
"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant
companion of both of you [Carlyle and Froude], and never in my life
did I see any one man so much devoted to any other as you were to
him during the whole of that period of time. The most affectionate
son could not have acted better to the most venerated father. You
cared for him, soothed him, protected him, as a guide might protect
a weak old man down a steep and painful path. The admiration you
have habitually expressed for him was unqualified. You never said to
me one ill-natured word about him down to this day. It is to me
wholly incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth,
learnt to a great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you
to embody in your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and
weaknesses which mixed with his great qualities."*
--
* My Relations with Carlyle, p. 62.
--
Calling witnesses to the character of such a man as Froude is itself
almost an insult. But there is one judgment so valuable and so
emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it. The fifteenth Earl of
Derby held such a high position in the political world that his
literary attainments have been comparatively neglected. He was in
truth an omnivorous reader and a cool, sagacious critic, who was not
led astray by enthusiasm, and never said more than he felt. Writing
to Froude on the 20th of October, 1884, Lord Derby described the
Life of Carlyle as the most interesting biography in the English
language, and added, "I think you have finally silenced the foolish
talk about indiscretion, and treachery to a friend's memory. It is
clear that you have done only, and exactly, what Carlyle wished
done: and to me it is also apparent that he and you were right: that
his character could not have been understood without a full
disclosure of what was least attractive in it: and that those
defects--the product mainly of morbid physical conditions--do not
really take away from his greatness, while they explain much that
was dark, at least to me, in his writings." Lord Derby's opinions
were not lightly formed, and he was as much guided by pure reason as
mortal man can be.
Froude's own judgment is given in a letter to Lady Derby, which
contains also much interesting speculation on South African
politics. Lord Derby, it will be remembered, was at that time
Secretary of State for the Colonies.
"October 14th, 1884.--Carlyle in London comes out this week. I loved
and honoured him above all living men, and with this feeling I have
done my best to produce a faithful likeness of him. This is a
consolation to me, if the only one I am likely to have. We shall
see. I am very anxious about South Africa. I have written twice at
length to Lord Derby. Unfortunately my view is the exact opposite to
that which is generally taken. Lord D. is evidently being driven
into active measures against his will. My fear is that there will be
some half-action insufficient to crush the Dutch, and sufficient to
exasperate them. He relies on the promised support of the Colonial
Ministry. They may promise, but I will believe only when I see it
that a Cape Ministry and Legislature will oppose the Boers in
earnest. They will encourage us to entangle ourselves, as they did
with the Diamond Fields, and then leave us to get out of the mess as
we can. South Africa cannot be self-governed in connection with this
country, except with the good-will of the Dutch population. Enough
may have been done, however, to quiet Parliament (which knows
nothing about the matter) in the approaching Session--and that, I
suppose, is the chief consideration. Carnarvon writes to me
preliminary, I suppose, to some attack when Government meets. I have
told him exactly what I have told Lord D. I hope I may turn out
mistaken, but the course of things so far has generally confirmed my
opinion whenever I have seen my way to forming one. I shall be glad
to hear what you think about the book. From you I shall get the
friendliest judgment that the circumstances admit of, and if you are
dissatisfied I shall know what to look for from others. The last two
hundred pages are the most interesting. The drift of the whole is
that Carlyle was by far the most remarkable man of his time--that
five hundred years hence he will be the only one of us all whose
name will be so much as remembered, while perhaps he may be one who
will have reshaped in a permanent form the religious belief of
mankind. Therefore he ought to be known exactly as he was. The
argument will not be felt by those who disbelieve in his greatness,
and the idolaters--those who pretend to worship without believing-
will be savagest of all. Idols must be draped in fine clothes, and
are reduced to nothing by mere human garments."
Perhaps the fullest, and certainly the least reserved, account of
Froude's own feelings about the book is contained in a letter to
Mrs. Charles Kingsley:
"I tell Longmans to-day to send you the book. If you can find time,
I shall like to hear the independent impression it makes upon you.
Only remember this: that it was Carlyle's own determination (or at
least desire) to do justice to his wife, and to do public penance
himself--a desire which I think so noble as to obliterate in my own
mind the occasion there was for it. I have long known the worst, and
Charles knew it generally. We all knew it, and yet the more
intimately I knew Carlyle, the more I loved and admired him; and
some people, Lord Derby, for instance, after reading the Life, can
tell me that their opinion of him is rather raised than diminished.
There is something demonic both in him and her which will never be
adequately understood; but the hearts of both of them were sound and
true to the last fibre. You may guess what difficulty mine has been,
and how weary the responsibility. You may guess, too, how dreary it
is to me to hear myself praised for frankness, when I find the world
all fastening on C.'s faults, while the splendid qualities are
ignored or forgotten. Let them look into their own miserable souls,
and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private
histories ransacked and laid bare. I deliberately say (and I have
said it in the book), that C.'s was the finest nature I have ever
known. It is a Rembrandt picture, but what a picture! Ruskin, too,
understands him, and feels too, as he should, for me, if that
mattered, which it doesn't in the least."
A few years after publication the Reminiscences ran out of print,
and Froude was anxious to bring out a corrected edition. Mrs.
Alexander Carlyle, however, wished for another editor. The copyright
was Froude's, and no one could reprint the book in Great Britain
without his consent. At that time there was no international
copyright between the United Kingdom and the United States. A
distinguished American professor, Mr. Eliot Norton, was invited by
Mary Carlyle to re-edit the book beyond the Atlantic, and he
undertook the task. Froude always thought that Professor Norton
should have communicated with him, and the public will probably be
of the same opinion. In the end, however, Froude voluntarily
assigned the copyright to Mrs. Carlyle, who then had possession of
the papers, and Mr. Norton's edition appeared in England, published
by Macmillan, six years after Carlyle's death. It proved to be very
like the first, though some errors of the press were corrected and
also some slips of the pen. The disputed memoir was not omitted, nor
was anything of the slightest interest added by Mr. Norton to the
book. In his Preface he attacked Froude for fulfilling Carlyle's own
wishes, of which he seems to have known little or nothing, and, by
way of further justification for his interference, he added the
following paragraph:
"The first edition of the Reminiscences was so carelessly printed as
to do grave wrong to the sense. The punctuation, the use of capitals
and italics, in the manuscript, characteristic of Carlyle's method
of expression in print, were entirely disregarded. In the first five
pages of the printed text there were more than a hundred and thirty
corrections to be made of words, punctuation, capitals, quotation
marks, and such like; and these pages are not exceptional."
This looks like a formidable indictment, and in the literal sense of
the words it may be true. I have compared the first five pages of
the two editions, and there are a good many changes in the use of
capitals and italics. But except one obvious misprint of a single
letter, "even" for "ever," there is nothing which does "grave wrong"
to the sense, or affects it in any way. "And these pages," as Mr.
Norton says, with another meaning, "are not exceptional." The later
reminiscences were not easy to decipher. Carlyle's handwriting was
seriously affected by age, he wrote upon both sides of very thin
paper, and I have seen several letters of his which bear out
Froude's assertion that, after his hand began to shake, "it became
harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever
examined." In preparing the book Froude had to use a magnifying
glass, and in many cases the true reading was a matter of opinion.
In one case, however, it was not. Sir Henry Taylor, the most serene
and dignified of men, found himself charged in Carlyle's sketch of
Southey with the unpleasant attribute of "morbid vivacity," and not
only with morbid vivacity simpliciter, or per se, but "in all senses
of that deep-reaching word." Mr. Norton restored the true reading,
which was "marked veracity," though, on the other hand, he replaced
the statement, omitted by Froude, that Taylor, who had died between
the two editions, was "not a well-read or wide-minded man." It must
be admitted that in this instance Froude allowed a proof which made
nonsense to pass, and that Mr. Norton did a public service by
correcting the phrase. Froude's occasional carelessness in revision
is a common failing enough. What made it remarkable in him was the
combination of liability to these lapses with intensely laborious
and methodical habits.
Although Froude's legal connection with Carlyle's family ceased with
the assignment to Carlyle's niece of the copyright in the
Reminiscences, the names of the two men are as inseparably
associated as Boswell's and Johnson's, Lockhart's and Scott's,
Macaulay's and Trevelyan's, Morley's and Gladstone's. Some readers,
such as Tennyson and Lecky, thought that Froude had revealed too
much. Others, such as John Skelton and Edward FitzGerald, believed
that he had raised Carlyle to a higher eminence than he had occupied
before. Froude himself felt entire confidence both in the greatness
of Carlyle's qualities and in the permanence of his fame. That was
why he thought that the revelation of small defects would do more
good than harm. A faultless character, even if he himself could have
reconciled it with his conscience to draw one, would not have been
accepted as genuine, would not have been treated as credible. The
true character, in its strength and its weakness, would command
belief, and admiration too. If Froude were alive, he would say that
the time had not yet come for a final judgment, and might not come
for a hundred years. Still, I think it will be conceded that the
twenty years which have elapsed since he accomplished his task are
a period of growth rather than decadence in the number and zeal of
Carlyle's admirers. This is no doubt in large measure due to
Carlyle's own books. He has been called the father of modern
socialism, and credited with the destruction of political economy. I
am too much out of sympathy with these views to judge them fairly.
But I suppose it cannot be denied that Carlyle fascinates thousands
who do not accept him as an infallible, or even as a fallible,
guide, or that they, as well as his disciples, devour the pages of
Froude.
Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded
might with right. He declared that, on the contrary, he had never
said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on
justice. Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never
glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is
necessarily to glorify him. This prevalent misconception of
Carlyle's gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a
critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude. No one can
read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle's real
foe was materialism. The French Revolution was to him the central
fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of
Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness.
Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as
possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian.
Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of
England was to him more important than any constitutional change,
any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact
explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a
Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for
the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost
insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme
merit of Froude.*
--
* John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor
of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle
for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface:
"Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude
as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart .... I must
here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend,
betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence
that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But
Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott,
requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the
most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first
entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and
Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were
withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached
a practical injunction to communicate the whole."
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