RECTORIAL ADDRESS--DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE
After a round of holiday visits, including one to Annandale, the
Carlyles settled down once more at Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865.
'The great outward event of Carlyle's own life,' observes Froude,
'Scotland's public recognition of him, was now lying close ahead. This
his wife was to live to witness as her final happiness in this world.'
Here is an eloquent passage from the same pen: 'I had been at
Edinburgh,' writes Froude, 'and had heard Gladstone make his great
oration on Homer there, on retiring from office as Rector. It was a
grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do; the
audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension,
bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of
moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like
enchantment, and the street, when we left the building, was ringing with
a prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there was not a man
whose views on all subjects, in heaven and earth, less resembled
Gladstone's than those of the man whom this same applauding multitude
elected to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were ignorant how
wide the contradiction was; but if they had been aware of it they need
not have acted differently. Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had
risen from among them--not by birth or favour, not on the ladder of any
established profession, but only by the internal force that was in
him--to the highest place as a modern man of letters. In _Frederick_ he
had given the finish to his reputation; he stood now at the summit of
his fame; and the Edinburgh students desired to mark their admiration in
some signal way. He had been mentioned before, but he had declined to be
nominated, for a party only were then in his favour. On this occasion,
the students were unanimous, or nearly so. His own consent was all that
was wanting.'[31] This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was chosen
Rector of Edinburgh University. But the Address troubled him. He
resolved, however, as his father used to say, to 'gar himself go through
with the thing,' or at least to try. Froude says he was very miserable,
but that Mrs Carlyle 'kept up his spirits, made fun of his fears,
bantered him, encouraged him, herself at heart as much alarmed as he
was, but conscious, too, of the ridiculous side of it.' She thought of
accompanying him, but her health would not permit of the effort. Both
Huxley and Tyndall were going down, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to
take care of her husband.
On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866, Carlyle and his wife parted.
'The last I saw of her,' he said, 'was as she stood with her back to the
parlour door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she me once, I her
a second time.' They parted for ever.
Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what happened there had best be
told by an eye-witness, Professor Masson. 'On the night following
Carlyle's arrival in town,' he says, 'after he had settled himself in Mr
Erskine of Linlathen's house, where he was to stay during his visit, he
and his brother John came to my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they
might have a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with me an hour
or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as could be, talking most
pleasantly, a little dubious, indeed, as to how he might get through his
Address, but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself, when
the old man stood up in the Music Hall before the assembled crowd, and
threw off his Rectorial robes, and proceeded to speak, slowly,
connectedly, and nobly raising his left hand at the end of each section
or paragraph to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated what he was
to say next, the crowd listening as they had never listened to a speaker
before, and reverent even in those parts of the hall where he was least
audible,--who that was present will ever forget that sight? That day,
and on the subsequent days of his stay, there were, of course, dinners
and other gatherings in Carlyle's honour. One such dinner, followed by a
larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then, too, he was in the best
of possible spirits, courteous in manner and in speech to all, and
throwing himself heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner-table,
I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one or two of his humorous
songs or recitatives, including his clever quiz called "Stuart Mill on
Mind and Matter," written to the tune of "Roy's wife of Aldivalloch." No
one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle; and he surprised me by doing
what I had never heard him do before,--actually joining with his own
voice in the chorus. "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart Mill on
Mind and Matter," he chaunted laughingly along with Lord Neaves every
time the chorus came round, beating time in the air emphatically with
his fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch as the
affair was more ceremonious and stately, at the dinner given to him in
the Douglas Hotel by the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend
Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while dignified and serene,
Carlyle was thoroughly sympathetic and convivial. Especially I remember
how he relished and applauded the songs of our academic laureate and
matchless chief in such things, Professor Douglas Maclagan, and how,
before we broke up, he expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on
having "contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening."'[32]
The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as Lord Rector is
that by Alexander Smith, the author of 'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,'
&c., &c., whose lamented death took place a few months after that event.
'Curious stories,' he wrote, 'are told of the eagerness on every side
manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen
came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen
came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London
by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast,
dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who
had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for
him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a
ticket _was_ reserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music
Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and
loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help
glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of
Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there, in the
early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and
down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who
remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired,
swift-gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy, too, ...
came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German
and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although
incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and
intact, and but little changed these fifty years--an act of hero-worship
for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed
to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble
friendship--of the David and Jonathan of so many years agone--was the
best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear.
David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of
Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I
had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the
freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with.
I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough,
found in this world, or now hope to find."
'In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was
filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the
Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced
towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The
Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right,
the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen had taken
their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he
sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet
lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire
as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not
touched his Annandale look, nor had it--as we soon learned--touched his
Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere,
truthful--the countenance of a man on whom "the burden of the
unintelligible world" had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair
was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-grey. His
eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at
times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something
aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been
polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality
had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about
Mr Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he
was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon--a man to set his
mark on the world--a man on whom the world could not set _its_ mark....
The proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D. on Mr
Erskine of Linlathen--an old friend of Mr Carlyle's--on Professors
Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That
done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr
Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe--which must have been a very
shirt of Nessus to him--advanced to the table, and began to speak in
low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the
melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play-fellows
must have been familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable
to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life
could not impair, even in the slightest degree, _that_. The opening
sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low,
plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on: "Your enthusiasm towards
me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard
to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well
known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came
the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching reminiscence and sigh
over old graves--Father's and Mother's, Edward Irving's, John
Sterling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time--and
with its flash of melancholy scorn. "There are now fifty-six years gone,
last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite
fourteen--fifty-six years ago--to attend classes here, and gain
knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what--with feelings of wonder and
awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what
we have come to.... There is something touching and tragic, and yet at
the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my
dear old native land, rising up, and saying: Well, you are not
altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through
a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." And thereafter,
without aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same
wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint
humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of
pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the
origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and Romans, Oliver
Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared with speech,
the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of
taking care of one's health. "There is no kind of achievement you could
make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are
nuggets and millions? The French financier said, 'Alas! why is there no
sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But
what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by
everybody? Appraise it as you please, it was a thing _per se_. Just as,
if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory,
you must go to the East; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh
listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be
quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual
warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock.'[33]
Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says: 'When Carlyle sat down
there was an audible sound, as of breath long held, by all present; then
a cry from the students, an exultation; they rose up, all arose, waving
their arms excitedly; some pressed forward, as if wishing to embrace
him, or to clasp his knees; others were weeping; what had been heard
that day was more than could be reported; it was the ineffable spirit
that went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the ages stored
up in it, and deep answered unto deep.'
Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall telegraphed to
Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A perfect triumph.' That evening she
dined at Forster's, where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They drank
Carlyle's health, and to her it was 'a good joy.' It was Carlyle's
intention to have returned at once to London, but he changed his mind,
and went for a few quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in
London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the rectorial address from
him, and was made perfectly happy about it.
Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs Carlyle, and for Saturday,
April 21st, she had arranged a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote
her daily letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in her
brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with her. When near Victoria
Gate, Hyde Park, she put the dog out to run. 'A passing carriage,' says
Froude, 'went over its foot.... She sprang out, caught the dog in her
arms, took it with her into the brougham, and was never more seen alive.
The coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch down to Stanhope
Gate, along the Serpentine and round again. Coming a second time near to
the Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, he turned
round, saw indistinctly that something was wrong, and asked a gentleman
near to look into the carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take
the lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards distant. She
was sitting with her hands folded in her lap _dead_.'[34]
At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 'green solitudes and fresh
spring breezes' of Annandale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine
o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, broke the news to
him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a
fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday,
and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so
before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It
had a kind of _stunning_ effect upon me. Not for above two days could I
estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had
peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to
universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically
needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose
from my sick heart the ejaculation, "My poor little woman!" but no full
gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it ever? A stony
"Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not
for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35]
On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On
the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his
brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday the
funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her
disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay,
with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and
the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw
him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there
may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed _hers_.
Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of
humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to
share his lot for weal or woe; and in that office what she has been to
him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him
and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the
knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.'
As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the
'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was
felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a
delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen,
conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John.
One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect
was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character;
her heart was as truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife
in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary
expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and
need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as
vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be
confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an
edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the
conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She
never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine
stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in
the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as her
husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be
appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous
applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in
literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for
good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she
sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his
work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and
better part?'[36]
On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and when domestic
differences arose he abstained from paying those little attentions which
a delicate and sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband who
was so lavish of terms of endearment in the letters he wrote to her when
away from her side. 'Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,'
observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly composed of a silent
sitting by the fireside of an evening in the old "houseplace," with a
tranquillising pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long
rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative silence; and now
and then, at meeting or parting, some pious and earnest words from the
good soul to her son.'[37] And it never occurred to Carlyle to act
differently with his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition
to all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diagnosis of Carlyle's
character. 'If,' he wrote, 'matters went well with himself, it never
occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on
the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be
uncomfortable along with him.'
There was a strong element of selfishness in that phase of Carlyle's
nature; and throughout his letters and journal he appears wholly wrapt
up in himself and in his literary projects, without even a passing
allusion to the courageous woman who had shared his lot. Now and again
we alight upon a passage where special mention is made of her efforts,
but these have all a direct or indirect bearing upon _his_ work, _his_
plans, _his_ comforts.[38]
Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been to him until she was
suddenly snatched from his side. And this was his testimony: 'I say
deliberately, her part in the stern battle, and except myself none
knows how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.' In one of those
terrible moments of self-upbraiding the grief-stricken husband exclaims:
'Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living,
wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle
dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and
beautiful, _when it is too late_!'
In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have a pathetic picture of
Carlyle in his lonely old age. A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a
visit to this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle.
In conversation the grave-digger said: 'Mr Carlyle comes here from
London now and then to see this grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind
of old man, looking very old the last time he was here.' 'He is
eighty-six now,' said I. 'Ay,' he repeated, 'eighty-six, and comes here
to this grave all the way from London.' And I told him that Carlyle was
a great man, the greatest man of the age in books, and that his name was
known all over the world; but he thought there were other great men
lying near at hand, though I told him their fame did not reach beyond
the graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. 'Mr Carlyle
himself,' said the gravedigger softly, 'is to be brought here to be
buried with his wife. Ay, he comes here lonesome and alone,' continued
the gravedigger, 'when he visits the wife's grave. His niece keeps him
company to the gate, but he leaves her there, and she stays there for
him. The last time he was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed
down under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that ruined wall
of the old cathedral, and round there and in here by the gateway, and he
tottered up here to this spot.' Softly spake the gravedigger, and
paused. Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he
proceeded:--"And he stood here awhile in the grass, and then he kneeled
down and stayed on his knees at the grave; then he bent over and I saw
him kiss the ground--ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept
kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and tottered out of the
cathedral, and wandered through the graveyard to the gate, where his
niece was waiting for him." This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle, and
engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in the chancel of Haddington
Church:--
'HERE LIKEWISE NOW RESTS JANE WELSH CARLYLE, SPOUSE OF THOMAS
CARLYLE, CHELSEA, LONDON. SHE WAS BORN AT HADDINGTON, 14TH JULY
1801, ONLY DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE JOHN WELSH, AND OF GRACE
WELSH, CAPELGILL, DUMFRIESSHIRE, HIS WIFE. IN HER BRIGHT
EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON; BUT ALSO A SOFT
INVINCIBILITY, A CLEARNESS OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY
OF HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR FORTY YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND
EVER-LOVING HELPMATE OF HER HUSBAND, AND, BY ACT AND WORD,
UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE ELSE COULD, IN ALL OF WORTHY
THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866,
SUDDENLY SNATCHED AWAY FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS LIFE AS
IF GONE OUT.'
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 295.
[32] Masson's 'Carlyle Personally and in his Writings,' pp. 27-9.
[33] Alexander Smith's 'Sketches and Criticisms,' pp. 101-8.
[34] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 312.
[35] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 314.
[36] Larkin's 'Carlyle and the Open Secret of his Life,' pp. 334-5.
[37] 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle,' pp. 191-2.
[38] After reading the above estimate in the proof sheets, Professor
Masson writes to me as follows:--
'May I hint that, in the passage about his character and
domestic relations, you seem hardly to do justice to the depths
of real kindness and tenderness in him, and the actual
_couthiness_ of his manner and fireside conversation in his
most genial hours? He was delightful and loveable at such
hours, with a fund of the raciest Scottish humour.'
This is a side of Carlyle's nature which would naturally be hidden from
the general reader, and from Mr Froude. It is easy to imagine how
Carlyle's genial humour, frozen at its source in the company of the
solemnly pessimistic Froude, should be thawed by the presence of 'a
brither Scot.'