Carlyle is one of the many great men who have suffered severely at the
hands of their biographers, and from the pen clan in general. When the
world knew him alone or chiefly through the lurid splendors of "The
French Revolution,"--that book which, as he himself would have expressed
it, was a truth, though a truth written in hell-fire,--or through the
uncanny labyrinths of "Sartor Resartus," or the subtle analysis of the
"Hero-Worship," or the more pleasing pages of his "Burns," or "Milton,"
or the "Characteristics," it would stand aloof in wonder, in admiration,
almost in awe. But when with his own hand--for he was primarily the
cause of all--he stripped away the privacy which he had guarded so
jealously through life, and through the "Reminiscences" and his wife's
letters, which he prepared for publication, took, as we may say, the
roof off from the house, that all the world might look in, then indeed
he fell from his lofty pedestal and became like one of us. Hero-worship
was no longer possible, but loud abuse and recrimination, or apology and
a cry for charitable construction, became the order of the day. We may
say that he had only himself to thank for it; but who can help
regretting that the man in his old age should so have destroyed the fair
fabric of his own fame? We are not so rich in heroes that we can afford
to lose even the least of the kingly band; and we have felt that we have
sustained an irreparable loss ever since the luckless day when we took
up the first of the intensely interesting but most painful books
relating to this great life.
Let us look a little at this hero's domestic life. What was its
foundation, what its outcome? That there was something wrong at the
foundation seems to be clear. And it was not so much the fact that
neither party married the first choice of the heart,--though it is true
that Jane Welsh loved with all the ardor of her nature Edward Irving
first, and that Carlyle undoubtedly would have married his first love,
the fair and amiable Margaret Gordon, the original of Blumine in "Sartor
Resartus," had not poverty prevented,--but rather was it their
unsuitability to each other. She was a lady, delicately reared, and with
a taste for society and the refinements of life; with a love for
admiration, too, and a wish to shine in her little sphere. He was a
peasant, coarsely bred, and scorning the amenities of life to which he
was unaccustomed,--scorning, too, the chivalric feeling with which
better bred men look upon women and treat their wives. He told her this,
bluntly and brutally, before marriage. They two were to be one, and he
that one. He had the peasant idea of being master, and to the end of his
days held fast to it. They were never, to his mind, equals, but he was
the chief and she the subject. This was what put her down
intellectually. In her youth she had literary tastes and ambitions, and
doubtless much ability; but after marriage we hear no more of that. Even
in the seven years at Craigenputtoch, when one would think that out of
sheer weariness and want of occupation she would have written or
studied, we hear nothing of any such attempts. Her married life seems to
have quenched all this utterly.
Then all the domestic drudgery, which to her seemed such a burden, and
appears to have afflicted her to the end of life, seemed to him to be
the natural and proper thing for a woman. He had all his life been
accustomed to see his mother and sisters at their tasks, naturally and
uncomplainingly, and he could never understand why all women should not
feel in the same way. Then he was fond of solitude, and looked upon a
visitor as an emissary of the devil; and he failed to see that a gay,
pleasure-loving, volatile, sparkling girl could not share his feelings.
So he shut her up remorselessly,--never dreaming that he was cruel. That
she was fond of admiration was nothing to him, though he was fond of it
himself in his own grim way; _he_ was the central figure of this
household, and if she was deprived of a natural enjoyment it seemed a
trifle to him. In short, their whole philosophy of life was different,
their characters unsuited to each other, and their tempers of the order
described as "difficult." It is not necessary to blame one or the other
entirely for what followed. He saw everything in one light, she in
another; what but disappointment and unrest could ensue?
Had she clung to her original determination not to marry him, would it
have been better? Doubtless, yet it is certain that she learned to love
him, even too much for her peace of mind; and it is foolish to picture
her, as some have done, as a loveless wife. Probably at marriage she was
not what is usually styled "in love" with him, but that she did love him
through life is not to be doubted. And that, spite of all his neglect
and harshness and selfishness, he truly loved her and was essentially
loyal to her is as little to be doubted. Whence then came the
unhappiness,--an unhappiness which, we think, has in some places been
greatly exaggerated? As we said before, from their different points of
view. Take, for instance, the hardships of Craigenputtoch. They seemed
nothing to him, brought up as he had been, but much to her, who from her
youth had been the petted darling of a handsome home. This terrible
place, which has been described as worse than a desert island, was a
large and recently renovated old manor-house standing in fields of its
own, only fifteen miles from where her mother lived, and twelve miles
from Dumfries. Everything had been made comfortable for them by her
mother, and in the farm-cottage near were his brother and sister, Jane
and Alexander Carlyle, who had three men and two women; and Mrs.
Carlyle herself always one servant. Much has been written of her
hardships here,--and they were very real hardships to her; but from his
point of view they did not seem so bad. She did some work, but one
cannot help thinking that with so many about her, if she habitually did
such drudgery as is represented, it was her own fault. There will come
domestic crises in all households, when the hands of the mistress must
take hold to save from chaos; but on the whole it would seem that she
was not so very great a martyr in this.
The lack of society was the real evil; and this Carlyle did not feel,
absorbed as he was in his mighty work, his brain burning with the great
thoughts to which he must give utterance. How could he appreciate the
vacuity of her life,--who had always had young and cheerful company
about her, and a mother to pity and cheer her smallest sorrow? It was
very pitiful that he could not see, but not so very strange. Many
another man would have been equally obtuse.
His sisters would not have minded it; he did not mind it, and it was not
given him to see that she minded it as much as she really did. For it is
certain that those seven years left marks upon her which she never
outgrew. They almost seem to have changed her very nature. Yet Carlyle
with his peasant nature did not see it, but wrote cheerfully upon a
time, "Jane is far heartier, now that she has got to work." A mistake,
says Froude: "Mrs. Carlyle had not strength for household work, and
doing it, she permanently broke down her health."
And again Carlyle writes, with a little more appreciation of the
situation:--
"Her life beside me, constantly writing here, is but a dull one;
however, she seems to desire no other. . . . I tell her many times
there is much for her to do, if she were trained for it,--her whole
sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dollhood, and
imbecility, into the freedom of valor and womanhood."
Of the solitude which had nearly killed his wife, he after a time
wearied himself; and then he effected a change. One laughs to think of
the second moving, and wonders if it was as bad as the first, which he
thus described:--
"In this mansion we have had a battle like that of Saint George and
the dragon. Neither are we yet conquerors. Smoke, and wet, and
chaos! May the good Lord keep all Christian men from moving."
If it seemed as bad as this to him, what did it seem to her, delicately
reared and hating the disagreeables of life? Still she did not complain,
but wrote to his mother about this time: "I could wish him a little less
yellow, and a little more peaceable; otherwise he is perfect." And she
soon learned, compelled to it possibly by dire necessity, to take upon
herself all of the practical and prosaic part of the management of their
affairs.
It is painful, although it is also comical, to read of her domestic
battles and defeats. She put infinite wit and talent into her
descriptions of them in her letters to her friends, and the whole world
has read them with smiles and tears; but they were not light troubles to
her, as they would have been to many commonplace women. Probably upon a
majority of wives, even if they have not men of genius for husbands,
fall nearly as great a part of the domestic duties and cares as upon
Mrs. Carlyle; yet few consider this a great hardship, and the sympathies
of the world are not invoked in their behalf. It was not this so much in
Mrs. Carlyle's case as it was the moodiness and fault-finding and
general irascibility of the husband which aggravated everything, and
made little things seem great.
That her spirits were entirely gone and her whole vivacious nature
changed at the end of the Craigenputtoch period is proved by sentences
from her letters, To his mother she writes:--
"It is my husband's worst fault with me that I will not or cannot
speak. Often when he has talked to me for an hour without answer,
he will beg for some sign of life on my part, and all that I can
give him is a little kiss."
And she was a woman who loved to talk, and he the best and most
brilliant talker of his day. Surely, this is pitiful. But after they
went up to London this aspect of things was improved for her, and had it
not been that thereafter she suffered from constant ill-health she would
doubtless have been quite comfortable. But her health was bad, and in
the ignorance of the day the dosing was bad; and when we read of the
medicine which she took as she took her daily bread, we only wonder that
she lived to tell the tale. It speaks a great deal for her Scotch
constitution that she survived her remedies.
Carlyle was soon in the zenith of his fame, and the great men of the day
sat at his feet, figuratively speaking, and would literally have done so
had not his growl been so fierce that it kept them at bay. Of those who
did "beard the lion in his den, the Douglas in his hall," many were
immolated in his diary; and we see them, now that it has been published,
like so many flies with pins stuck through them, fastened to the paper.
Poor Charles Lamb stands there, bloodless, fleshless; but we think
scarcely the less of gentle Elia as we look upon him, but far less of
the cruel perpetrator of the atrocity. Leigh Hunt, too, has a pin quite
through his warm heart; and Stuart Mill, and many others. One wonders
sometimes if Froude himself escaped, or if he were there too, like a
giant bluebottle, desiccated as the rest; and was that the reason why he
did not suppress all the damaging letters and recollections, but
maliciously gave them to the world?
Mrs. Carlyle's pen could be dipped in acid also, as has been proved in
her comments upon the men and women of her time. These, to be sure, are
very brief and fragmentary, and it has been a source of much wonder
that, knowing intimately as she did many of the notable persons of her
time, she has not left behind in any single letter a valuable portrait
or even sketch of any of these great people. What priceless words of
Darwin she might have gathered up, which all the world would have
eagerly read; what characteristic anecdotes she could have told of
Tennyson,--what an insight she might have given into the man behind the
poet; what noble things she must have known of Stuart Mill; what
inimitable _facetiae_ concerning the Hunts; what spirited stories she
could have told of Jeffrey; what a light she could have cast over dark
places in the life of Edward Irving! Why did she not do this, we wonder.
Did the dread of assassination hover over her? For Charles Buller,
Carlyle's friend, had just made his plea for the man who killed his wife
for keeping a diary: "What else could a poor fellow do with a wife who
kept a diary, but murder her?"
We cannot but regret that the sketches were not written. They would have
been immortal; for her power in this line has been unequalled by any one
who has written in these later days. As it is, she has, unconsciously to
herself, left a picture of the greatest of all the men she knew--Carlyle
himself--which can never be blotted out. The portrait is full-length,
full of Rembrandt-like light and shadow, and remorselessly faithful.
Painted not for the public eye, but sketched in a thousand little parts,
in matter-of-fact every-day letters to humble friends, with no remotest
thought that other eyes would ever see them,--it is this by which
Carlyle as a man will be known to all coming time. Not a hero, not a
monster, as some have claimed, but a faulty man, with the defects of his
qualities, described by a woman faulty like himself. A constitutional
growler, with a warm heart withal, and infinite capacities for
tenderness; selfish it may be, but inexorably just; cold to all the
outside world, but warm-hearted and generous and magnificently loyal to
his family, throughout all his distinguished career. No trace of
snobbery or false shame in him. Not liking the reformers of his own day,
but almost deifying the reformers of the past, and himself making it his
mission, from earliest youth to hoary age, to reform the world in his
own particular Carlylean way; fiercely assailing much that passed for
religion, but being always deeply and truly religious at heart. What a
vast contradictory Titan he seems in it all! If a lovely wind-flower,
fresh and fragrant as the breath of morning, was crushed in the arms of
this god of thunder, what shall we say? Shall we reject the god of
thunder, who gave us the "Heroes," and the "Cromwell," and the
"Frederick," and wish that he might have been a gentle poet singing to a
lute; or shall we thank God for him, even as he was, though we give a
tear to the wind-flower?
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