plainly furnished room in a house on a quiet street in Chelsea, a part
of London, an old man "worn, and tired, and bent, with deep-lined
features, a firm under-jaw, tufted gray hair, and tufted gray and
white beard, and sunken and unutterably sad eyes, is returning from
the fireplace, where with trembling fingers he had been lighting his
long clay pipe, and now he resumes his place at a reading desk." Let
us enter this room with Theodore L. Cuyler, who in his _Recollections
of a Long Life_ tells us: "Thirty years afterwards, in June, 1872, I
felt an irrepressible desire to see the grand old man once more, and I
accordingly addressed him a note, requesting him the favor of a few
minutes' interview.... After we had waited some time, a feeble,
stooping figure, attired in a long blue flannel gown, moved slowly
into the room. His gray hair was unkempt, his blue eyes were still
keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of
his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and
husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a
most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched
degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness
itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue
was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave
showed that he was talking about as much for his own amusement as for
ours."
Between these two pictures,--the one showing us the boy trudging away
in the mist of the November morning, the other revealing an old man
whose home in Chelsea had become the Mecca of the lovers of English
literature,--what has occurred?
The young boy has finished his studies at the University; has
concluded not to enter the ministry; has studied law; served as tutor;
translated a masterpiece of German into English, and finally dedicated
his powers to becoming a notability in English literature: wrote
_Sartor Resartus_, the _History of the French Revolution_, a _Life of
Cromwell_, a _Life of Frederick the Great_, and has become
world-renowned as one of the great figures of the Nineteenth Century.
XXXV
CARLYLE AND HIS WIFE
In 1826 occurred what Saintsbury calls the most important event in the
life of Carlyle,--his marriage with Jane Welsh, a young woman who
traced her ancestry back to John Knox, the rugged Scotch reformer.
Jane was a keen, active, high-strung, sensitive soul. There has arisen
a formidable mass of literature discussing the relationship between
Thomas and Jane. Were they happy or were they miserable?
Jane Welsh was a Scotch lady whose family was socially superior to
that of Carlyle's. Her father had been a physician, while Carlyle's
was but a rude stone-mason,--and yet a great man. It is said she
married Thomas because she was ambitious and wanted to be the wife of
a famous man, and she had discovered in the unknown Thomas the marks
of genius. In after years she is reported to have said: "I married for
ambition. Carlyle had exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined
for him; _and I am miserable_."
Jeannie had what she had bargained for and yet she was unhappy,--why?
Carlyle was a big-hearted, hard-working, gruff, but kind-hearted
individual. I have not a doubt that he loved his Jeannie. But he took
no pains to show his love in those tender though trivial devotions
that mean so much to the sensitive wife.
During the first few years of their married life, they lived in a
lonely place and had but a scant income. We have a very interesting
picture of their life at Craigenputtock. Thomas could not eat bakers'
bread, so Jeannie baked. The one servant they had was not competent.
It may have been this same servant that was responsible for Thomas'
finding, altogether unexpectedly, of course, a dead mouse at the
bottom of his dish of oatmeal. As to the bread-baking Jean has given
us a very graphic account:
"Further we were very poor, and further and worst, being an only
child, and brought up to 'great prospects,' I was sublimely ignorant
of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar,
and very fair mathematician! It behooved me in these astonishing
circumstances to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore
their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons, and I was
expected 'to look to all that;' also it behooved me to learn to
_cook_! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way
place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my
difficulties dreadfully. The bread, above all, bought at Dumfries,
'soured on his stomach' (Oh heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a
Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's _Cottage
Economy_, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But knowing nothing
about the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to
pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought
to have been put into bed; and I remained the only person not asleep
in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then
two, and then three, and still I was sitting there in an immense
solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a
sense of forlornness and _degradation_. That I who had been so petted
at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, and
who had never been required to _do_ anything, but _cultivate my mind_,
should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching _a loaf
of bread_, which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts
maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud.
It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all
night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and
suddenly I asked myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers,
what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf
of bread, so that each be the thing that one's hand has found to do?'
... If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic
husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same
qualities would have come out more fitly in a _good_ loaf of bread.
"I cannot express what consolation this germ of an idea spread over my
uncongenial life during the years we lived at that savage place, where
my two immediate predecessors had gone _mad_, and the third had taken
to drink."
While enjoying the description which Mrs. Carlyle has painted in such
an entertaining manner, it is well to observe that she does not blame
her husband. She seems to be writing the account while she is silently
laughing at the absurd preparation her life had had for the duties of
the wife of a poor man. But Mr. T.P. O'Connor, who writes in 1895, is
outspoken:
"I do not want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle, but in spirit
it is somewhat hard to keep one's hand off him, as we reconstruct
those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock. There is a little
detail in one scene which adds a deeper horror. I have said that Mrs.
Carlyle had to scrub the floors, and as she scrubbed them Carlyle
would look on smoking--drawing in from tobacco pleasant
comfortableness and easy dreams--while his poor drudge panted and
sighed over the hard work, which she had never done before. Do you not
feel that you would like to break the pipe in his mouth, and shake him
off the chair, and pitch him on to the floor, to take a share of the
physical burden which his shoulders were so much more able to bear?"
Another anecdote is that at a dinner while Carlyle was monopolizing
the conversation, talking as only he could talk, he, the irritable,
turned upon his wife with "Jeanie, don't breathe so hard!" And still
again, we hear it said that Tennyson once remarked it was well the
Carlyles had married each other for if each had married another there
would have been _four_ instead of _two_ unhappy people. But I think
the truer remark was made when Tennyson said to his son, Hallam: "Mr.
and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoy life together, or else they would
not have chaffed one another so heartily."
The _Century_ of some years ago contained this witty skit from the pen
of Bessie Chandler:
And I sit here, thinking, thinking,
How your life was one long winking
At Thomas' faults and failings, and his undue share of bile!
Won't you own, dear, just between us,
That this living with a genius
Isn't, after all, so pleasant,--is it, Jeannie Welsh Carlyle?
However, with all that may be said to the contrary, I do not think we
dare say that the marriage of Thomas and Jeannie was an unhappy one.
After reading fifteen hundred pages of biography and hundreds of
letters passing to and fro, I am of the belief of Mr. Tennyson, that
on the whole their union was a happy one.
Shortly after Carlyle had been elected Rector of the University of
Edinburgh, Jean died suddenly. While out driving one afternoon by Hyde
Park, she jumped out to pick up her little dog, over whose foot a
carriage had passed. She was never again seen alive. In her carriage
she was found dead with her hands folded on her lap. When Carlyle
heard of it he was away at Scotsbrig. Later in describing his feelings
he wrote: "It had a kind of _stunning_ effect on me. Not for above two
days could I estimate the immeasurable depth of it, or the infinite
sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and a moment shattered my
poor world to universal ruin." And Froude tells us that in Carlyle's
old age--he lived to be eighty-five--he often broke forth in these
passionate words of Burns:
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE
From a photograph from life]
XXXVI
CARLYLE AS LECTURER
In 1834, the year of the death of Coleridge, we find Carlyle, like
many another Scotchman, leaving Scotland to enter the great Babylon,
London. The previous six years he had passed with his wife at
Craigenputtock. He was almost forty years of age. His wife had great
confidence in his ability, which up to this time the world had not
recognized. So she urged him to struggle for influence and power in
the great heart of the modern world. Number 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, is
the house they selected. There for the remaining forty-seven years of
his life he worked and loved and stormed. Their neighborhood was one
famous in association with the names of many _literati_. Near by
Smollett wrote _Count Fathom_; in the same locality More had
entertained the great scholar, Erasmus; there too had once lived
Bolingbroke, and earlier, the Count de Grammont; and last but not
least the author of Abou Ben Adhem, Leigh Hunt.
When Emerson once suggested to Carlyle that he come over to America to
lecture, Carlyle took kindly to the idea. He kept it in mind as a
possibility for years, but he never carried it into effect. But he did
lecture in London. His literary work was not bringing him the money
he needed. His friends were struck with his ability. Why should he not
lecture? This, if well managed, would bring him immediate
remuneration. His friends set diligently to work, issued a prospectus,
tickets at a guinea a course, and invited persons of influence to
attend. Spedding wrote this letter to Monckton Milnes:
"I take the opportunity of writing to make you know, if you do not
know already, that Carlyle lectures on German literature next month;
the particulars you will find in the inclosed syllabus, which, if it
should convey as much knowledge to you as it does ignorance to me,
will be edifying. Of course, you will be here to attend the said
lectures, but I want you to come up a little before they begin, that
you may assist in procuring the attendance of others. The list of
subscribers is at present not large, and you are just the man to make
it grow. As it is Carlyle's first essay in this kind, it is important
that there should be a respectable number of hearers. Some name of
decided piety is, I believe, rather wanted. Learning, taste, and
nobility are represented by Hallam, Rogers, and Lord Lansdowne. H.
Taylor has provided a large proportion of family, wit, and beauty, and
I have assisted them to a little Apostlehood. We want your name to
represent the great body of Tories, Roman Catholics, High Churchmen,
metaphysicians, poets, and Savage Landor. Come!"
Carlyle was busy with his _French Revolution_ and so did not make as
careful preparation as he might have made. Yet he was so full of his
subject that if he could overcome the difficulties of public
speaking, he was bound to be interesting. As the day approached both
he and his wife grew nervous. For diversion he drew up a humorous
ending: "Good Christians, it has become entirely impossible for me to
talk to you about German or any literature or terrestrial thing; one
request only I have to make, that you would be kind enough to cover me
under a tub for the next six weeks and to go your ways with all my
blessing." This fortunately he did not need to use. Mrs. Carlyle
worried lest he would be late, but by dint of close attention she felt
she could have him "at the place of execution" at the appointed hour.
How to get him to stop at "four precisely" was another problem. One
humorous suggestion was that a lighted cigar might be laid on the
table before him when the clock struck the hour.
"May the First, 1837," says Professor MacMechan, "was a notable day.
In the afternoon, Carlyle lectured at Almack's, and in the evening
Macready produced young Mr. Browning's _Strafford_, for the first
time, at Covent Garden. Hallam, of the _Middle Ages_,--'a broad, old,
positive man, with laughing eyes,'--was chairman and brought the
lecturer face to face with his first audience, the two hundred holders
of guinea tickets. It was made up of the elements referred to in
Spedding's letter. Learning, taste, nobility, family, wit, and beauty
were all represented in that assembly; 'composed of mere quality and
notabilities,' says Carlyle. It is easy to figure the scene; the men
all clean-shaven, in the clumsy coats, high collars, and enormous
neck-cloths of the period, the ladies, and there were naturally more
ladies than men, following the vagaries of fashion in 'bishop' sleeves
and the 'pretty church-and-state bonnets,' that seemed to Hunt at
times, 'to think through all their ribbons.' We call that kind of
bonnet 'coal-scuttle' now, but Maclise's portrait of Lady Morgan
trying hers on before a glass justifies Hunt's epithet. The lecturer
was the lean, wiry type of Scot, within an inch of six feet. In face,
he was not the bearded, broken-down Carlyle of the Fry photograph, but
the younger Carlyle of the Emerson portrait. Clean-shaven, as was then
the fashion, the determination of the lower jaw lying bare, the thick
black hair brushed carelessly and coming down on the bony, jutting
forehead, violet-blue eyes, deep-set, and alert, the whole face shows
the Scot and the peasant in every line. It was a striking face, the
union of black hair, blue eyes, and, usually, ruddy color on the high
cheek bones, 'as if painted ... at the plow's tail,' Lady Eastlake
remarked, and she was an artist. Harriet Martineau remarks that he was
as 'yellow as a guinea,' but this would be due to some temporary
gastric disturbance. He was very nervous, as was most natural, and
stood with downcast eyes, his fingers picking at the desk before him.
At the beginning his speech was broken, and his throat was dry, drink
as he would; but his desperate determination not to break down carried
him through. The society people were 'very humane' to him, and the
lecturer had a message for them; his matter was new, his manner was
interesting; he knew his subject. The rugged Scottish accent came like
a welcome draught of caller air from the moorlands of Galloway, to
the dwellers in London drawing-rooms, and 'they were not a little
astonished when the wild Annandale voice grew high and earnest.'"
From this first venture which was so successful--he cleared one
hundred and thirty-five guineas after all the expenses had been
paid--Carlyle was induced to give other series in the next few years.
One of the most popular books by Carlyle is _Heroes and Hero Worship_;
this first was given in a course of lectures. When "The Hero as Man of
Letters" was given, Caroline Fox, an ardent admirer of the Scot, was
in attendance. She has left a vivid description of the man: "Carlyle
soon appeared, and looked as if he felt a well-dressed London audience
scarcely the arena for him to figure in as a popular lecturer. He is a
tall, robust-looking man; rugged simplicity and indomitable strength
are in his face, and such a glow of genius in it--not always
smoldering there, but flashing from his beautiful gray eyes, from the
remoteness of their deep setting under that massive brow. His manner
is very quiet, but he speaks as one tremendously convinced of what he
utters, and who had much, very much, in him that was quite
unutterable, quite unfit to be uttered to the uninitiated ear; and
when the Englishman's sense of beauty or truth exhibited itself in
vociferous cheers, he would impatiently, almost contemptuously, wave
his hand, as if that were not the kind of homage which truth demanded.
He began in a rather low and nervous voice, with a broad Scotch
accent, but it soon grew firm, and shrank not abashed from its great
task."
XXXVII
CARLYLE ON WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING
On our first day's journey, wrote Mr. Duffy in the _Contemporary
Review_, the casual mention of Edmund Burke induced me to ask Carlyle
who was the best talker he had met among notable people in London.
He said that when he met Wordsworth first he had been assured that he
talked better than any man in England. It was his habit to talk
whatever was in his mind at the time, with total indifference to the
impression it produced on his hearers. On this occasion he kept
discoursing how far you could get carried out of London on this side
and on that for sixpence. One was disappointed,--perhaps,--but, after
all, this was the only healthy way of talking, to say what is actually
in your mind, and let sane creatures who listen to make what they can
of it. Whether they understood or not, Wordsworth maintained a stern
composure, and went his way, content that the world went quite another
road. When he knew him better, he found that no man gave you so
faithful and vivid a picture of any person or thing which he had seen
with his own eyes.
I inquired if Wordsworth came up to this description he had heard of
him as the best talker in England.
"Well," he replied, "it was true you could get more meaning out of
what Wordsworth had to say than from anybody else. Leigh Hunt would
emit more pretty, pleasant, ingenious flashes in an hour than
Wordsworth in a day. But in the end you would find, if well
considered, that you had been drinking perfumed water in one case, and
in the other you got the sense of a deep, earnest man, who had thought
silently and painfully on many things. There was one exception to your
satisfaction with the man. When he spoke of poetry he harangued about
meters, cadences, rhythms, and so forth, and one could not be at the
pains of listening to him. But on all other subjects he had more sense
in him of a sound and instructive sort than any other literary man in
England."
I suggested that Wordsworth might naturally like to speak of the
instrumental part of his art, and consider what he had to say very
instructive, as by modifying the instrument, he had wrought a
revolution in English poetry. He taught it to speak in unsophisticated
language and of the humbler and more familiar interests of life.
Carlyle said, "No, not so; all he had got to say in that way was like
a few driblets from the great ocean of German speculation on kindred
subjects by Goethe and others. Coleridge, who had been in Germany,
brought it over with him, and they translated Teutonic thought into a
poor, disjointed, whitey-brown sort of English, and that was nearly
all. But Wordsworth, after all, was the man of most practical mind of
any of the persons connected with literature whom he had encountered;
though his pastoral pipings were far from being of the importance his
admirers imagined. He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical
man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual
work of some sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him
as he looked out of his stern blue eyes, superior to men and
circumstances."
I said I had expected to hear of a man of softer mood, more
sympathetic and less taciturn.
Carlyle said, "No, not at all; he was a man quite other than that; a
man of an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a
mold designed for prodigious work."
"I begged him," continued Mr. Duffy, in writing of conversations with
Carlyle, "to tell me something of the author of a serial I had come
across lately, called _Bells and Pomegranates_, printed in painfully
small type, on inferior paper, but in which I took great delight.
There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little
tragedy, _The Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, which, though not over-disposed
to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears. The
heroine's excuse for the sin which left a blot in a 'scutcheon
stainless for a thousand years, was, in the circumstances of the case,
as touching a line as I could recall in English poetry:
I had no mother, and we were so young."
He said Robert Browning had a powerful intellect, and among the men
engaged in literature in England just now was one of the few from whom
it was possible to expect something. He was somewhat uncertain about
his career, and he himself (Carlyle) had perhaps contributed to the
trouble by assuring him that poetry was no longer a field where any
true or worthy success could be won or deserved. If a man had anything
to say entitled to the attention of rational creatures, all mortals
would come to recognize after a little that there was a more effectual
way of saying it than in metrical numbers. Poetry used to be regarded
as the natural, and even the essential language of feeling, but it was
not at all so; there was not a sentiment in the gamut of human passion
which could not be adequately expressed in prose.
Browning's earliest works had been loudly applauded by undiscerning
people, but he was now heartily ashamed of them, and hoped in the end
to do something altogether different from _Sordello_ and _Paracelsus_.
He had strong ambition and great confidence in himself, and was
considering his future course just now. When he first met young
Browning, he was a youth living with his parents, people of
respectable position among the Dissenters, but not wealthy neither,
and the little room in which he kept his books was in that sort of
trim that showed that he was the apple of their eyes. He was about six
and thirty at present, and a little time before had married Miss
Barrett. She had long been confined to a sofa by a spinal disease, and
seemed destined to end there very speedily, but the ending was to be
quite otherwise, as it proved. Browning made his way to her in a
strange manner, and they fell mutually in love. She rose up from her
sick-bed with recovered strength and agility, and was now, it was
understood, tolerably well. They married and were living together in
Italy, like the hero and heroine of a mediaeval romance.
XXXVIII
THE AUTHOR OF "JANE EYRE"
Charlotte Bronte was born in Yorkshire in 1816. A generation ago
everybody was reading and talking about _Jane Eyre_, her most popular
novel. The life of the author was not a happy one. She was compelled
to teach for a living, and her position as governess was at times
humiliating to her proud spirit. Her two sisters, whom she tenderly
loved, died young; her brother was no credit to the family, and the
life surrounding the parsonage--she was the daughter of a
clergyman--was not particularly cheery, yet her many trials but
enriched a rare and beautiful character.
While living at the parsonage she would occasionally receive a box of
books from her publisher. The following letter is self-explanatory:
"Do not ask me to mention what books I should like to read. Half the
pleasure of receiving a parcel from Cornhill consists in having its
contents chosen for us. We like to discover, too, by the leaves cut
here and there that the ground has been traveled before us. I took up
Leigh Hunt's book, _The Town_, with the impression that it would be
interesting only to Londoners, and I was surprised, ere I had read
many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy
style, varied knowledge, just views, and kindly spirit. There is
something peculiarly anti-melancholic in Leigh Hunt's writings, and
yet they are never boisterous--they resemble sunshine, being at once
bright and tranquil.