love-affairs with which his letters overflow appear, for the most part,
to have been sufficiently innocent; for an "Italian angel," Zelide (whom
he knew at Utrecht), Miss Bosville, and "La Belle Irlandaise" he
cherished at different times a chaste flame; while Miss Blair, a
neighbour and lady of fortune, very nearly caught him. But Boswell
decided that he would not have a "Scots lass." "You cannot say how fine
a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in
the kingdom." "Rouse me, my friend!" he cries; "Kate has not fire
enough; she does not know the value of her lover!" Nevertheless, he was
to have a "Scots lass" after all, for in the autumn of 1769 he married
Miss Margaret Montgomerie, "a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I
love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand"
("Letter to the People of Scotland").
After his marriage Boswell's life continued agitated and desultory: he
practised at the Scotch Bar, without much success, and was called to the
English; almost every year he visited London, where he cultivated
Johnson, enjoyed good company and fine, made the most of his social and
literary importance, and revelled in the genuine and flattering
friendship of Paoli, who seems to have made him free of his house: "I
felt more dignity when I had several servants at my devotion, a large
apartment, and the convenience and state of a coach."
It was absurd of him, no doubt, to say, "Am I not fortunate in having
something about me that interests most people at first sight in my
favour?" but it seems to have been near the truth. "I am really the
great man now. I have had David Hume in the forenoon, and Mr. Johnson in
the afternoon." These great men were interested somehow, and so, one
must suppose, was Miss Silverton:
"There is a Miss Silverton in the Fly with me, an amiable creature,
who has been in France. I can unite little fondnesses with perfect
conjugal love."
There was, too, "an agreeable young widow" who, also in a fly, "nursed
me, and supported my lame foot on her knee."
Boswell's life in Edinburgh was not happy; he hated the rough society of
Scotch lawyers, and quarrelled with his father, the Laird of Auchinleck,
who seems to have been a tiresome, disagreeable old man. The Laird died
in 1782, and seven years later Boswell lost his "valuable wife." His
story becomes melancholy: money troubles and family perplexities beset
him (he was left with five children); and it may be that what once made
him odd, aggravated by his breaking health, now made him gloomy. After
his wife's death he came to London for good. Already he had taken a
house in Queen Anne Street, and here he worked hard at "The Life,"
comforted a little by his assurance that it would be a masterpiece:
"I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography, which gives not
only a _History_ of Johnson's _visible_ progress through the world,
and of his publications, but a _view_ of his mind in his letters
and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and
will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared."
With this bold but just prophecy we may leave him; he died in 1795.
FOOTNOTE:
[7] "Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J. Temple." (Sidgwick and
Jackson.)
CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LOVE-LETTERS[8]
I
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum May and Oct. 1909_]
Are people still interested in the Carlyles? Some are, we suppose. The
older generation is interested in Carlyle, at any rate; though the
younger, we believe, is not. For men and women under thirty the
redoubtable sage has apparently no message; but for many of their
fathers and mothers his least word still has a certain importance.
Such reverent curiosity, though it may excuse some bad books and much
futile research, will, we fear, hardly justify the volume before us--Mr.
Archibald's we mean, which tells us little about Carlyle and that little
by no means new. One chapter only can be manufactured out of his
sufficiently indefinite relations with Miss Gordon; though ten more
pages are filled out with a discussion of that wholly unimportant
question "Who was Blumine?" The reasonable conjecture is, of course,
that Carlyle's method resembled that of other writers; his heroine, no
doubt, was the child of his own imagination, and when a model was needed
he drew indiscriminately from the ladies with whom he was acquainted.
Should any one chance to be interested in Margaret Gordon, her
ancestors, her kindred, or her husband, he may glean a certain amount of
information from this book. Born at Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island)
in 1798, she was left fatherless at the age of four, and brought up in
Scotland by her aunt. Between 1818 and 1820 she may have had a
love-affair or flirtation with Carlyle; and in 1824 she married Mr.
Bannerman, a commonplace, good-humoured business-man from Aberdeen, who
became a Member of Parliament. Mr. Bannerman speculated, lost his
fortune, and was consoled with a colonial governorship and a knighthood.
Lady Bannerman was drawn into the Evangelical movement, devoted the last
years of her life to works of piety, and died (1878) in a little house
at Greenwich and the odour of sanctity. As to what manner of woman she
may have been we are left in ignorance; into her mode of thinking,
feeling, and seeing--into her character, that is--Mr. Archibald has
obtained no insight. The necessary changes in matters of history having
been made, his volume might do duty as the biographical memoir of
thousands of her contemporaries. But perhaps a couple of specimens of
the style and substance of Mr. Archibald's prose will best give the
measure of his understanding:
"Lady Bannerman dispensed the hospitality of Government House with
the dignity and grace which might be expected of one who for over
thirty years had moved in the best society of England. She had the
power of putting all at their ease, of identifying herself with
their individual interests, and of entering with animation into the
affairs of the hour. But while she was kind and gracious and frank,
and would freely enter into conversation with any one, there was
always a certain dignity which prevented any attempt at undue
familiarity."
Again:
"In St. John's she was exceedingly kind and charitable to the poor,
and she and Lady Hoyles were active workers in the Dorcas Society.
She worshipped at St. Thomas' (Episcopal) Church, and was
especially interested in her Sunday-school class. As we have seen,
her sympathies were more with the Presbyterian Church, but probably
because of her husband's official position, she always chose in the
Colonies to connect herself with the Church of England."
If this be a fair account of Lady Bannerman, we may be pardoned for
wondering why any one thought her biography worth writing. What it all
has to do with Carlyle is to us far from clear. The eyes of publishers,
however, are in these matters notoriously sharper than those of
reviewers.
II
Having disposed of Carlyle's first love, we can attend to his second--if
that is where Miss Welsh comes in order of seniority; for our text
mercifully obliges us to say nothing of Miss Aurora Kirkpatrick, another
claimant to the honour of having sat for Blumine, while on the glories
of Lady Ashburton, who, to be frank, interests us no more than the
simplest of these extremely simple "misses," the title of our essay
precludes us from expatiating. But can we? Does not the great man, who
was to give Jane the splendour of his name, seem rather to demand prompt
satisfaction for the insult paid him in our first paragraph? There we
said, or implied, that he was obsolescent; and it is, perhaps, worth
pausing to inquire how a man who seemed to his own age one of the great
teachers and spiritual masters of humanity--the peer of Pythagoras and
Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis and Rousseau--comes in this
generation to be held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal lower
than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so than Renan. And is it not worth
pausing again to reflect that, contemporaneously with these men, and
almost unknown to Western Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a
greater effect on the world than has been produced by any teacher since
the crucifixion?
It was primarily as a teacher, as a disseminator of ideas, that Carlyle
appeared venerable to his own age; in a less degree they admired him as
an historian and an artist. To-day, his ideas are as musty as those of
Godwin--a better exponent of deeper speculations: as an historian--in
spite of an undeniable gift for visualizing and describing scenes from
the past--he is hardly of more consequence than Creighton or Stanhope:
while, as an artist, he ranks with such faded rhetoricians as
Chateaubriand.
What is the meaning of this? Why simply that the Victorians made the
mistake about Carlyle that every age makes about its Carlyles. They took
a thoughtful journalist for a master; and this they did because the
journalist had the skill and conviction to persuade them, and himself,
that what is commonest and most vigorous in human nature is also most
sublime. Carlyle could, in perfect good faith, give tone to the vulgar
instincts and passions; he could make narrow-mindedness, brutality,
intolerance, obtuseness, and sentimentality seem noble; he knew, being
an unconscious hypocrite, how, without a glimmer of open cynicism, to
make the best of both worlds. For instance, Carlyle and his public
wished to believe in Eternal Justice regulating the affairs of men. They
believed in it as something emotionally congenial to them, not, you may
be sure, as a metaphysical truth discovered and confirmed by the
intellect. Intellectual processes were not in Carlyle's way: he was a
popular philosopher. From this belief in Eternal Justice he naturally
deduced the doctrine that Right is Might, which doctrine applied to
history bore fruit most grateful to hero-worshippers--a sect that
flourished uncommonly in those days. When, however, it was pointed out
by earthy and eristic rationalists that if in the past Right was Might
then it followed that Might was Right, Carlyle, who had ever the
shortest of ways with dissenters, drowned the argument in a flood of
invective. Of course if Right is Might it does follow that the good
cause has always been the successful one; and in that case it looks as
though the successful one must always have been the good. Might, in
fact, is Right. Carlyle knew better: and he who would be the prophet of
his age must know, as he did, to reject unwholesome conclusions without
invalidating the healthy premises from which they follow.
Each age has its Carlyles, but it never much respects the Carlyles of
other ages. We have our Ferrero and our H. G. Wells, to say nothing of
such small fry as Faguets, Marinetti, _e tutti quanti_. They are people
who have something for their own age and nothing for any other, and
their own age is pretty sure to prefer them to any great man it may
produce but fail to smother: they are adored and duly forgotten. They
must come forward as the critics and guides of society; whether they
declare their messages in prose or verse, in novels, histories,
speeches, essays, or philosophical treatises is of no consequence. It
must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or
philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth
but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin
and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were
not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it
might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and
warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It
chose him because he was what Mill was not--a Carlyle. Yet, though
Utilitarianism is discredited, Mill remains; the candour and subtlety of
his intellect impress us still, and his Autobiography will seem to
future generations one of the most moving documents of the nineteenth
century.
As for Carlyle, "nobody marks him"; we only wonder that he will still be
talking. The old controversy between those who wish to believe the truth
and those who insist that what they wish to believe is true raves on;
but neither side dreams of briefing the Chelsea sage. His vatic
eloquence carries no conviction. Men and women of the younger
generation, whatever their views, find no support in him, because he
appeals to axioms and postulates which to them seem unreal. It is not
that his arguments are old-fashioned, but that they are based on nothing
and apply to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call in Tolstoy or
Bergson or Berkley or Leon Bloy or Peguy or Plato himself to break
the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not
trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite
aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant
morality--moralizing rather--his provincialism, and the grossness of his
method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure
thought nor pure feeling--nothing but a point of view which is now
perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one
positive gift that the younger generation is perhaps not very well
qualified to appreciate, he was an extraordinarily capable man of
letters. His footnotes, for instance, might serve as models; he had a
prodigious talent for picking out just those bits of by-information that
will amuse and interest a reader and send him back to the text with
renewed attention. His editing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters--letters which
come not within our terms of reference and from which, therefore, we
cannot decently quote--is remarkable: only, even here, his intolerable
virtue and vanity, his callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced
self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality parade themselves on almost
every page. For all his "Oh heavenses," "courageous little souls," and
"ay de mis," he never once guessed the nature of his offence, never
realized the beastliness of that moral and religious humbug which to
himself seems always to have justified him in playing tyrant and vampire
to a woman of genius.
III
The volumes before us, as we have hinted, were expected, not without
excitement, by those people for whose benefit we are about to review
them. It must be confessed that they have not wholly escaped the fate
that is apt to befall the progeny of parturient mountains. Not that they
are precisely what Horace would have expected them to be: they are
anything but small; yet, about the contents there is something
mousey--the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are disappointing. The
letters they contain--a bare third of which are by Jane Welsh--were all
written between the middle of 1821 and the end of 1826--that is to say,
before either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves. At his best, Carlyle
was not a letter-writer; he was a clever man who wrote letters. These
have sometimes the personal quality of a good essay, never the charm of
familiar correspondence. In these early days his mind is as undeveloped
as his style; he is crude, awkward, over-emphatic; apter at catching the
faults than the excellences of the eighteenth-century prose writers.
That one should write to please rather than to improve one's
correspondent was an idea which seems hardly to have occurred to him:
"When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I
am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite
great quantities of nonsense, which even my own judgment
condemns--when too late for being mended."
That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions
to his future wife:
"I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in
some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by
any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing
more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books
continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own
conceptions. We amass ideas, it is true; but at the same time we
proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power
equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in
some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree
the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of
culture," etc.
Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms
such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages.
Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted
that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and
others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one
passage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst
when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the
majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when
unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss
Welsh just what he thought of it:
"[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the
_maniere d'etre_ of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately
titillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the
hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places
where they sleep and dress; they live in _cafes_ and promenades and
theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in
every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and
fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."
Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be
small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of
letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme.
de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger
second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary
Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald,
Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a
place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but
twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of
her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse
of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural.
Yet, under all her pert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious
quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please
two people--her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore,
to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming.
Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises,
and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never
makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small
things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in
all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a
correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make
life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides
occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end
disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a
whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from
standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals--the head and the
heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G---- is, in its way, a
little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter
specimen of her style:
"Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amusement within
doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without.
'Coelebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and
even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I
strongly suspect) on Coeleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon
of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat
counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl
beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of
undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in
a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing
but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle--just
for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair;
and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people
retain their faculties in rainy weather!"
We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between
the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for
letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's
correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs.
Carlyle will no doubt discover what it is that they both possess and
Carlyle lacks. We would say, if permitted once again to trot out the
weary and well-fired hack, that you may think of Carlyle writing his
"Frederick" in a tail-coat, or whatever costume you prefer, and feel
sure, if your mind be not too literal, that his letters were written in
the same full dress. Far pleasanter to imagine Jane Welsh, coming home
from a rout, slipping a gay dressing-gown over a satin petticoat, and
gossiping till the fire burnt low. What is more, before she had the
privilege of "doing for" a great man with a Scotch sense of economy and
a peasant's notion of wifely duties, she may often have so gossiped. The
fact is, Carlyle, in his most playful moments, kept one eye on "the
eternities," and Jane, in her most solemn, never lost sight of the comic
spirit.
The volumes before us are well printed on good paper, and without are
embellished by a device--two hearts, stamped in gold, linked with a
golden ring, and supported by a plump little cupid; the same device is
repeated on the title-page in mauve. Trifles may be significant; whether
this symbol was suggested by the editor, or whether the editor was
influenced by it, are questions deserving thought. Turning to matters
less subtle, we wish that Mr. Alexander Carlyle had not found it
necessary to rake up the ashes which reticence had allowed to grow cold.
Also, we wish that he had adopted some other policy towards Jane Welsh;
the pin, even between deft fingers, is an ignoble and unattractive
weapon. In his notes he contrives a small and unpleasant sensation (vol.
i, p. 319) which would be more effective were it supported by anything
better than a piece of gossip, for which no authority is given, and the
doubtful interpretation of one passage in a letter. We are grateful to
him, however, for translating all the Latin, French, German, Italian,
and Scotch words, and for several touches of unconscious humour, of
which the following is a pleasant example:
"Pen (from Penfillan, home of Miss Welsh's paternal grandfather)
was her pet name used to distinguish her from the Welshes of her
maternal grandfather's household, especially from her mother's
younger sister, whose name was also Jeannie Welsh. Conscious of
procrastinating too long in writing, Miss Welsh here sportively
enlarges Pen not into Penfillan, but into Penelope, the name of
Ulysses' faithful wife, who put off so long the hateful task of
choosing a husband from the wasteful and riotous horde of suitors
assembled in her house during Ulysses' protracted absence. See
Homer's 'Odyssey.'"
FOOTNOTE:
[8] "The Love-Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh." Edited by
Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. Illustrated. (John Lane.)
"Carlyle's First Love, Margaret Gordon, Lady Bannerman." By Raymond
Clare Archibald. (John Lane.)
THE LYSISTRATA[9]
[Greek: Ahi Charites temenos ti labein hoper ouchi peseitai zetousai
psuchen euron Aristophanous.]
PLATO.
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]