Froude's Carlyle

THERE is no biography as interesting as an autobiography, and Mr. Froude’s life of Thomas Carlyle ¹ is essentially an autobiography, and a very frank and full one. In his will, Carlyle expressed the desire that no biography of him should be written. But he had preserved all the materials for one, and when he found that, whether he wished it or not, a life, perhaps several lives, would appear, he made over to his friend, Mr. Froude, his memoir of his wife, and the other biographical papers which have since been published with it as Reminiscences, and also a collection of her letters, covering the period of his life in London, with his own introductory explanation and notes, and with them his journal and other correspondence. The thought of misrepresentation, whether of praise or blame, was intolerable to him, and not long before his death he arranged with Mr. Froude that the Reminiscences should be printed as soon as he had gone, in the glow of feeling that his death would kindle, and that his memoir and letters should appear later. It is in pursuance of this plan that Mr. Froude has acted. The Reminiscences have been published, and now we have two volumes describing the first half of Carlyle’s life, — the Scottish part, while success was still uncertain ; soon to be followed by the letters, and to conclude with an account of his last years, when Mr. Froude was in constant intercourse with him. Thus these papers come to us with the highest authority, Carlyle’s own.

The manner in which the task was to be done was not left doubtful. Carlyle’s manly hatred of shams would not endure a half truth about himself, however flattering. He never hid his faults. He hated the “ delicate, decent . . . English biography, bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs forever over the poor English life - writer (as it does over poor English life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. . . . The biographer has this problem set before him: to delineate the likeness of the earthly pilgrimage of a man. He will compute well what profit is in it, and what disprofit; under which latter head this of offending any of his fellow creatures will surely not be forgotten. . . . But, having found a thing or things essential for his subject, and well computed the for and against, he will in very deed set down such thing or things, nothing doubting; having, we may say, the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever.” And, says Mr. Froude, “ as an illustration of his own wishes on the subject, I may mention that I consulted him about a passage in one of Mrs. Carlyle’s letters, describing an eminent living person. Her judgment was more just than flattering, and I doubted the prudence of printing it. Carlyle merely said, ‘ It will do him no harm to know what a sensible woman thought of him.’ ” Mr. Froude’s work was thus laid out for him on principles very different from those which usually guide the English, and still more the American, “ life-writer.” He had to justly delineate a life of few events, but intense individuality; a man of genius, whose freely displayed defects were an essential part of his character, before the grief which made his death seem a personal loss had been wholly tempered by time. And Mr. Froude must have known that the bitterness of many passages would be resented, and the blame for them laid upon the biographer rather than the hero; and that the criticism would be sharpened by the acerbity with which the church partisans in England have attacked his own previous historical works.

These considerations give an apologetic tone to Mr. Froude’s pages at times, and yet his is a wonderfully interesting story. Not even Johnson or Pepys has been more fully shown to us. Mr. Froude’s sympathies are keen, but they are not allowed to overpower his justice. And taking these volumes with the Reminiscences and the letters, we have one of the fullest soul pictures ever drawn. The absolute candidness with which Carlyle insists on revealing himself makes the drawing wonderfully complete and vivid. No one but Carlyle could so have shown Carlyle to us. No doubt it weakens his moral authority to see him so human, but that does not make the history less interesting. It is a painfully pathetic story, this of the first thirty-nine years of Carlyle’s life, with which these two volumes deal; full of the struggle, and not reaching the triumph. They leave Carlyle tormented by ill-health, solitary in his tastes, and “ caviare to the general,” when he makes his last despairing attempt to win the London world, in 1834. Failure seemed certain when success was nearly won. Burping with the fire of genius, he could not rest. “ Except when writing I never feel myself alive,” he said. He had never hesitated in his devotion to literature. He had sacrificed to it the years in which men generally do their best work. He had, indeed, introduced German literature to England, but the reputation that he had won by the exuberant splendor of those essays had been nearly destroyed by the Sartor Resartus, which no Englishman would read. And the great work of his life was still to be done. Those long years at Craigenputtock seemed wasted, — years passed in a bleak prison, in a mental solitude more gloomy than the desolate moors that surrounded him. And how sad those years were ! Sick, without books to satisfy his mental craving, raging against the bars, unable to admit even his wife to companionship, his egotism and arrogance seemed to separate him from mankind and forbid success. Had he died then his life would have been a sad failure.

Sad it had always been. His youth was full of gloom. For his mother he had a devoted love, but his family were humble peasants, in no way companions for him. Edward Irving was his only friend, and they were seldom together. His early attachment to Miss Gordon, had it not been so soon broken, might have been invaluable in giving him a healthier view of life; for his nature was not then insusceptible to feminine influence, and indeed needed it profoundly. An attachment then, before his character had finally hardened, to some charming woman, who would have wiled away his bitterness, smoothed his rugged manners, and quickened or at least directed his aspirations, might have brightened his whole life. But Miss Gordon was so much his superior in rank that their intercourse was soon broken off, and his life in Edinburgh was darker than ever. He was very poor and very proud. “ Heaven knows that ever since I have been able to form a wish the wish of being known has been the foremost,” he early wrote to a friend. Uncertain how to reach his aim; dissatisfied with every attempt, with the ministry, with teaching, with the law; unassured of literary power ; doubtful and despondent, he yet aspired to something better than the sordidness around him. He had “ a sense that revolt against such a load of unveracities, impostures, and quietly inane formalities would one day become indispensable ; ” and so for years he struggled on, alone and wretched, until that singular incident occurred in Leith Walk, when he was twenty-five years old, which he describes in Sartor Resartus as follows. In a doubtful, palpitating mood, all at once there rose in him the thought, “ What art thou afraid of ? . . . Death ? . . . Tophet ? . . . Let it come, then, and I will meet it and defy it. And as I so thought there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul, and I shook base fear away from me forever. I was strong ; of unknown strength ; a spirit; almost a god. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed ; not fear or whining sorrow was it, but indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance. Thus had the everlasting NO (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my ME ; and then it was that my whole ME stood up in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. ... It is from this hour I incline to date my spiritual new birth; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a man.” Whether this attitude of “ fire-eyed,” defiant self-assertion was as noble as Carlyle believed it to be we may doubt, but that he meant this account to be taken quite literally is certain, — a real change of soul, and self-caused. With all his enthusiasm. he did not think for a moment of attributing it to a higher influence. But we can hardly doubt that it was his introduction to the charming Miss Welch, a few weeks before, and the long evening talks with that “ bright and earnest” girl, enthusiastic for literature and full of animation, that inspired the change.

Froude’s picture of her is very pleasant. When a child she wanted " to learn Latin, like a boy,” but her mother objected. “ The question was settled at last in a characteristic fashion by herself. She found some lad in Haddington who introduced her to the mysteries of nouns of the first declension. Having mastered her lesson, one night, when she was thought to be in bed, she had hidden herself under the drawing - room table. When an opportunity offered the small voice was heard from below the cover :

“ Penna, a pen.

“ Pennæ, of a pen, etc., etc.

“ She crept out, amidst the general amusement, ran to her father, and said, ‘ I want to learn Latin; please let me be a boy.’ And learn it she did, though not exactly boy fashion ; for her tutor, after a time, was Edward Irving, and his teaching of Virgil made her change her religion to a girlish paganism. One of her old note-books tells how, when she was tempted to do wrong, she used simply to say to herself, ‘A Roman would not have done it,’ and that sufficed under ordinary temptations; and when she had withstood a severer trial she felt that she deserved a civic crown. Her account of the death of her dolly is charming : —

“' It had been intimated to me by one whose wishes were law that a young lady in Virgil should, for consistency’s sake, drop her doll. So the doll, being judged, must be made an end of, and I, doing what I would with my own, like the Duke of Newcastle, quickly decided how. She should end as Dido ended, that doll! — as the doll of a young lady in Virgil should end! With her dresses, which were many and sumptuous, her four-posted bed, a fagot or two of cedar allumettes, a few sticks of cinnamon, a few cloves, and a nutmeg, I, non ignara futuri, constructed her funeral pyre, sub auras of course ; and the new Dido, having placed herself in the bed with help, spoke through my lips the last sad words of Dido the first, which I had then all by heart as pat as A B C. . . . The doll, having thus spoken, pallida morte futura, kindled the pile, and stabbed herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword. Then, however, in the moment of seeing my poor doll blaze up, — for, being stuffed with bran, she took fire and was all over in no time, — in that supreme moment my affection for her blazed up also, and I shrieked, and would have saved her and could not, and went on shrieking, till everybody within hearing flew to me and bore me off in a plunge of tears.’ ”

Her devotion to her tutor ripened, as she grew older, into a passionate attachment, which he returned, although engaged to another young girl; and the unfortunate affair dragged along for some years before Irving’s marriage to his betrothed put an end to it. It was before Irving’s marriage that he introduced Carlyle to her; “ a red, dusky evening, the sky hanging huge and high, but dim as with dust or drought,” Carlyle says. She attracted him powerfully at once, and in return appreciated the ability and friendship of this “ Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,” without returning his affection. After half a dozen years of devotion he won her consent, though never her passionate love, — a thing, indeed, which he would hardly have known what to do with. She had many reasons for her hesitation. Superior to him in family and position, and accustomed to a luxurious home, she would give up a great deal in becoming the wife of a selfish, rough-mannered student, who at thirty-one had done nothing to show his ability but mere hack work, translation from the German and the like. But she loved her power, nevtheless, over this masterful genius, who talked like a demi-god. " In serious moments she would tell him that their meeting had made an epoch in her history, and had influenced her character and life. When her humor changed she would ridicule his Annandale accent, turned his passionate expressions to scorn; and when she had toned him down again, she would smile once more, and enchant him back into illusions. She played with him, frightened him away, drew him back, quarreled with him, received him again into favor, as the fancy took her,” till at last, after being particularly provoking once, she gave way, being moved thereto by a busybody who told Carlyle of her tendresse for Irving, which he had not had sympathy enough with her to discover himself.

To tell the truth, sympathy with her he never had, though he wished hers to be ready when he felt the want of it for himself. His correspondence with her about marriage in 1825 was sadly characteristic. His dyspepsia troubled him, and he thought that if they could marry and take a poor farm of hers he should be in good health, and find time for literature besides. Her sound sense rejected the plan at first: the hardships would be great; neither of them was fit for such a life, and it could be avoided by his coming to live with her mother. He, however, was determined to be master in his own house, and thought she ought to sacrifice herself to him in such a matter. " For these many months,” he wrote her, “ the voice of every persuasion in my conscience has been thundering to me as with the trump of the archangel : Man ! thou art going to destruction. . . . Thy nights and days are spent in torment ; thy heart is wasting into entire bitterness. Up, hapless mortal ! Up, and rebuild thy destiny if thou canst ! ” and so on. Only it did not occur to him that it would he well for him to think a little of her destiny, too, — the brilliant woman whom lie won and neglected, and sorrowed over too late. She did not hold back very long. In 1826 things looked a little brighter for a time, and they were married ; but their married life was not happy. “ For the forty years which these two extraordinary persons lived together their essential conduct to the world and to each other was sternly upright. They had to encounter poverty in its most threatening aspect, — poverty which they might at any moment have escaped if Carlyle would have sacrificed his intellectual integrity, would have carried his talents to the market, and written down to the level of the multitude. If he ever flagged it was his wife who spurred him on ; nor would she ever allow him to do less than his very best. She never flattered any one, least of all her husband ; and when she saw cause for it the sarcasms flashed out from her as the sparks fly from lacerated steel. Carlyle, on his side, did not find in his marriage the miraculous transformation of nature which he had promised himself. He remained lonely and dyspeptic, possessed by thoughts and convictions which struggled in him for utterance, and which could be fused and cast into form only (as I have heard him say) when his whole mind was like a furnace at white heat. The work which he has done is before the world, and the world has long acknowledged what it owes to him. It would not have been done as well, perhaps it would never have been done at all, if he had not had a woman at his side who would bear without resenting it the outbreaks of his dyspeptic humor, and would shield him from the petty troubles of a poor man’s life — from vexations which would have irritated him to madness — by her own incessant toil.

The victory was won, but, as of old in Aulis, not without a victim. Miss Welch had looked forward to being Carlyle’s intellectual companion ; to sharing his thoughts and helping him with his writings. She was not overrating her natural powers when she felt being equal to such a position and deserving it. The reality was not like the dream. Poor as they were, she had to work as a menial servant. She who had never known a wish ungratified for any object which money could buy ; she who had seen the rich of the land at her feet, and might have chosen among them at pleasure ; with a weak frame, withal, which had never recovered the shock of her father’s death, — she after all was obliged to slave like the wife of her husband’s friend Wightman, the hedger, and cook and wash and scour and mend shoes and clothes for many a weary year. Bravely she went through it all ; and she would have gone through it cheerfully if she had been rewarded with ordinary gratitude. But if tilings were done rightly Carlyle did not inquire who did them. Partly he was occupied, partly he was naturally undemonstrative, and partly she, in generosity, concealed from him the worst which she had to bear. The hardest part of all was that he did not see that there was occasion for any special acknowledgment. Poor men’s wives had to work. She was a poor man’s wife, and it was fit and natural that she should work. He had seen his mother and sisters doing the drudgery of his father’s household without expecting to be admired for doing it. Mrs. Carlyle’s life was entirely lonely save so far as she had other friends. He consulted her judgment about his writings, for he knew the value of it, but in his conceptions and elaborations he chose to be always by himself. When he was at work he could bear no one in the room ; and, at least through middle life, he rode and walked alone, not choosing to have his thoughts interrupted. The slightest noise or movement at night shattered his nervous system; therefore he required a bedroom to himself: thus from the first she saw little of him, and as time went on less and less ; she too was human and irritable. Carlyle proved, as his mother had known him, “ ill to live with.” Generous and kind as he was at heart, and as he always showed himself when he had leisure to reflect, the devil, as he had said, continued to speak out of him in distempered sentences, and the bitter arrow was occasionally shot back. No wonder that, late in life, she said, " I married for ambition. Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, — and I am miserable.”

The next nine years, up to the final removal to London, were years of severe struggle, during which at times it was hard to keep the wolf from the door, and Carlyle’s generosity to his brothers was unbounded. He was a pure and true man, of noble ideals, which he would not diminish by one jot. His mind gained in strength in the solitude of those barren moors, and his wonderful essays on German authors and on Voltaire and Diderot were well received ; for the English critics appreciated that these men were truly seen and truly painted for them for the first time. Carlyle had made them live again. But he was too far from books, too remote from the correcting influence of other minds, and he let his enthusiasm run riot in the Sartor Resartus to an extent that disgusted the public, and shut against him the pages of the magazines whose generous treatment had been his sole means of support. And so the scene had grown very dark when he resolved to make a final struggle in London with his historical projects; a grandly successful one, as the event proved. It was well that he went. The great works upon which his fame rests, the French Revolution and Frederick the Great, could hardly have been written on his Scottish farm. In London for a time he worked much better. But that unwavering fight in Scotland against frightful odds was a grand sight. Year after year he went on, unfaltering, sick, in utter solitude, the books and essays which the publishers dared not touch lying tied up in his desk. He was not altogether right. His work might have been better, as well as more popular, could he have profited by the advice of his publishers ; but to him it seemed degradation. He had faults enough, — he insists on our seeing them. He could not endure “ the common woes of humanity. Nature had in fact given him a constitution of unusual strength. He saw his ailments through the lens of his imagination, so magnified by the metaphors in which he described them as to seem to him something supernatural ; and if he was a torment to himself, he distracted every one with whom he came in contact.” Every annoyance was exaggerated. When he was teaching he talked vehemently of breaking the backs of the “ brats.” When he went to town he wanted to cut the throat of the watchman, whose cries disturbed his sleep, because he was so “ loud, hideous, and ear and soul piercing, resembling the voices of ten thousand gibcats all molten into one terrific peal.” His criticisms upon the distinguished men of his time were bitterly caustic, with scarcely any praise ; for his hero worship did not extend to his own time. Barry Cornwall, Campbell, Coleridge, De Quincey, Rogers, Moore, Bentham, even gentle Elia, have their little personal weaknesses magnified into damning vices. His dearest friend was etched with the same biting acidity. It is safe to say that we should not have the portrait that he gave us of Frederick the Great had Carlyle ever met him. He drew his own picture with the same savage keenness. Sometimes it was with deliberate abuse : “ On the whole, art thou not among the vainest of living men, at bottom among the very vainest? Oh, the sorry mad ambitions that lurk in thee ! ” Often unconsciously, as in that passage in the Reminiscences referring to his mental change in 1825 : This year I emerged “ free in spirit into the eternal blue of ether, where, blessed be Heaven, I have for the spiritual part ever since lived, looking down . . . [with] no feeling of my own except honest silent pity for the serious or religious part of them, and occasional indignation for the poor world’s sake at the frivolous, secular, and impious part, with their universal suffrages, their nigger emancipations, sluggard and scoundrel protection societies, and unexampled prosperities for the time being. What my pious joy and gratitude then was let the pious soul figure.” Well had it been for Carlyle if the soaring of his soul had borne him to some nobler height than that of scornful pity and wrath for the noblest movements of his time.

We cannot, on the whole, blame his friend Jeffrey, as Froude seems inclined to do, and as Carlyle himself certainly did, for not procuring a professorship for such a man, if he had the power. Carlyle was, in truth, utterly unfit for it. He was right when he called himself a Bedouin. He had learnt neither how to command nor how to obey, still less how to work harmoniously side by side with others. He never could long lay aside his obscure philosophy, but must ever be showing

His rough manners, his dislike of teaching, his irregular habits of labor, all made him unfit for such a post, at least until the mighty force of his genius had set him above its ordinary demands. But what a man he was ! He never failed to impress his magnificent personality on every one who knew him. His power of speech was unsurpassed. “ Carlyle first, and all the rest nowhere,” was the description of him by one of the best judges in London, when speaking of the great talkers of the day. “ His vast reading, his minute observation, his miraculously retentive memory, gave him something valuable to say on every subject which could be raised. What he took into his mind was dissolved and recrystallized into original combinations of his own. His writing, too, was as fluent as his speech. His early letters — even the most exquisitely finished sentences of them—are in an even and beautiful hand, without erasure or alteration of a phrase. Words flowed from him with a completeness of form which no effort could improve. When he was excited it was like the eruption of a volcano, — thunder and lightning, hot stones, and smoke and ashes. He had a natural tendency to exaggeration, and although at such times his extraordinary metaphors and flashes of titanesque humor made him always worth listening to, he was at his best when talking of history, or poetry, or biography, or of some contemporary person or incident which had either touched his sympathy or amused his delicate sense of absurdity. His laugh was from his whole nature, voice, eyes, and even his whole body. And there was never any malice in it. His own definition of humor, ' a genial sympathy with the under side,’ was the definition also of his own feeling about all things and all persons when it was himself that was speaking, and not what he called the devil that was occasionally in possession. In the long years that I was intimate with him I never heard him tell a malicious story or say a malicious word of any human being. His language was sometimes like the rolling of a great cathedral organ, sometimes like the softest flute notes, sad or playful, as the mood or the subject might be ; and you listened, — threw in, perhaps, an occasional word to show that you went along with him; but you were simply charmed, and listened on without caring to interrupt. Interruption, indeed, would answer little purpose, for Carlyle did not bear contradiction any better than Johnson. Contradiction would make him angry and unreasonable. He gave you a full picture of what was in his own mind, and you took it away with you and reflected on it.”

He threw himself into his work with an enthusiasm that amounted to actual passion. “ It is an agitating, fiery, consuming business when your heart is in it. I can easily conceive a man writing the soul out of him,” he said, “ writing till it evaporated like the snuff of a farthing candle, when the matter interests him properly.” In his concentration he became narrow. He made high art the target of his wit, and had even less tolerance for science. But he had a wonderful power of historical analysis and dramatic description, and his pictorial imagination, by which, in a word or two, he could call up a life-like image of his hero king or some nameless fellow traveler on a journey, kept its power remarkably late in life. It is a great misfortune that the French Revolution and Frederick the Great should have been his only important historical works.

Yet he could never have been a historian of the first rank, for he had no grasp of impersonal causes. His mind was too impatient of correction from another to grow symmetrically. Hardly any one can safely disregard contemporary criticism. Carlyle certainly did not do it with impunity. His appetite for extravagance grew on him. His instincts became more perverted. The exaltation of strength in his earlier work became an apotheosis of violence later in life, when the slave-driver became a hero and the murderer a saint. That he did not do more of such work is no matter of regret.

It would have been difficult, however, to correct a nature whose faults were such an integral part of it as Carlyle’s were. To have moderated his over-vehemence and arrant individualism would have made him a pleasanter and broader man, but it would have weakened his power. Had he been a wider student, with a clearer grasp of abstractions and the power of absorbing more from others, he would have been a greater historian ; but it would probably have lessened his influence upon his own generation, for it was his unconquerable individuality and his concentration of imagination that made him such a power. To have given him a true sympathy with humanity, a profound power of thought, would have been reconstruction, not correction. We should have had a greater man, but we should not have had Carlyle.

He could not fall in with the current of his time, as Emerson and Victor Hugo did : his philosophy was reactionary, and his influence short-lived. He united with German mysticism and romanticism an English worship of force and a caustic Scotch humor that were quite foreign to it, and the compound of foreign philosophy and native practice was not a stable one, Mr. Emerson had the mysticism without the pugnacity, and he elevated our souls. Victor Hugo had the vehemence for action without the passive philosophy, and he swept the French people on in a floodtide of passion. Carlyle united both, and did not reach either mind or heart so perfectly. While Emerson was teaching individualism and avoiding self-assertion, Carlyle preached hero worship with unbounded egotism, and urged action while he flouted reform. An idealist, he grew to scorn ideas, He threw himself into the past to create a world that no present could ever give.

These three men, Emerson, Hugo, and Carlyle, belonged to the same general awakening, and need to be studied together : the first representing the ideal, the second the real, and the third the reactionary elements. They were all three men of strong imagination, though of very different kinds. They were almost poets. Neither Carlyle nor Victor Hugo had the lofty and refined spiritual iusight of Emerson, but they had far more pictorial imagination. Both of them, and especially the Frenchman, could conjure up before our eyes the scenes of their fancy with a life-like reality and vividness that no other author of our time, except Hawthorne, has approached. But both, in their weaker moments, load their pages with an intolerable mass of detail, from which Emerson’s are free.

The intellectual methods of the three men had much similarity. They each broke away from the old creeds without losing their reverence for the Divine. Neither of them was a vigorous reasoner or a sound critic. They swayed us by their eloquence, not their logic. But their individualism led them into an extravagance and an egotistic brusqueness of style that at times became harshly abrupt.

The dreams of Carlyle and Emerson and Victor Hugo were an epoch in the intellectual growth of the century, but the world moves on by more substantial means than dreams. It has left them behind, and we do not believe that it will ever return to them. We turn back often to the sound thought, the careful reasoning, of the past, but not to its conjectures, however splendid. For permanent progress is made by accurate reasoning, in which each successive step is firmly fixed, and not by soaring intuition, however lofty its flight.

In Carlyle, as in Emerson and in Victor Hugo, there was the same unconquerable rebellion against the narrow and tyrannous spirit of the time, and a return to humanity, a devotion to it, an adoring love of it, as the motive of life. But the manly enthusiasm for reality of the followers of the Scotchman has faded before a new gospel of clothes ; and in America transcendentalism melts away before the positive spirit of the new culture. In France, in a general way, Victor Hugo has triumphed, for he threw himself into the democratic current of the time, and now the stage is free from the classic fetters that he struggled with in youth ; and the democracy that he gave his maturer life to has gained at last not only the sceptre, but the power to use it, as well. The new literary elements, however, that he contributed, the romance, the melodrama, the horrible violence, have not been lasting either in plays or novels. All his wondrous powers of enthusiasm and imagination have not founded a school, or reconciled gay Paris to the terrible con ceptions of Le Roi s’Amuse.

These men were the prophets of a new era, which they felt rather than saw; and the world hailed them with delight. But it soon craved something solider than prophecy ; something which neither Carlyle, nor Emerson, nor Victor Hugo could give, — science.