Jane Welsh Carlyle

UNCONSCIOUS autobiography is interesting, but it is seldom fair and adequate. In this last instance, The Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle,¹ one reads plainly the petty and mean details of a thirty years’ housekeeping; but it is only inferentially that one gains an impression of the charm that, before Mrs. Carlyle’s marriage, surrounded her with lovers, and, after it, made her the prized friend of men of intellect, and the refuge of all mad and miserable people, and won for her, when she grew old, the enthusiastic affection of her associates of all ages and all degrees of talent or stupidity. She has fared ill in having her familiar letters given to the world just as they were written, in the raw, with all their feminine confidences, which an editor with a touch of the old-fashioned chivalrous feeling for women would have suppressed, with their hasty account of her domestic vexations of body and mind, their revelation of her little necessary social hypocrisies, and even the heart-burnings that she entrusted only to her diary. Her husband, it is true, prepared the letters for publication ; he was led to do so by a wish to honor her, and also by a feeling of remorse and a desire to do penance for his ill-treatment; but he left the decision in the matter to Froude, on whom the responsibility lies. It is useless to lament the indiscretion and obtuseness of this editor; the hero has found his valet, and the preacher of silence is to have as many words made about him and his as possible; it is only left to the public to be thankful that the house, which is now lighted up and thrown open from kitchen to bedroom, had no worse secrets for disclosure.

The letters, being written by an unsuspecting woman who was unusually genuine, frank, original, audacious in word and act, and unconventional to a fault, and being, moreover, seasoned with entertaining literary and social gossip, are, of course, full of interest. Vivacity is the marked trait of the writer; but the continual reference to her happy girlhood and its scenes, growing more pathetic year after year, and the continual lament of Carlyle in his notes, — like a Greek chorus, giving a kind of artistic unity to the series, — lend an effect of sadness to the whole. The life of the heroine — she deserves the name — was impressive ; amid the ignoble trivialities that fell to her daily lot, she kept to the high purposes involved in them with great courage and self-control, and with unremitting devotion. An only child, reared in a wealthy and refined home, the favorite of all who knew her, with many rich and intelligent suitors about her, she had chosen to wed the poor and obscure man in whose genius she alone believed, and, against the advice of her friends, had married him, and gone to the lonely Scotch farm to be practically his household servant ; there she had spent six toilsome years, and now they had come to London, to the house that was to be her home until death. These letters cover this latter period, of the household affairs of which they contain a complete account. Her work was less menial, since they kept a servant, so that she no longer had to mop up her own floors; but the tasks set her were difficult and exhausting. To provide meals that Carlyle could eat without too violent storming, — for, as she said in Mazzini’s phrase, Carlyle “ loved silence somewhat platonically ; ” to shield him from the annoyances of visitors and bad servants ; to rid the neighborhood, by ingenious diplomacy, of the nuisances of ever-reappearing parrots, dogs, cocks, and the like enemies of sleep and meditation, her own as well as his; to buy his clothes, see lawyers and agents, even to protest against his high taxes before the commissioners, and, in all possible ways, to save his money at the expense of her own tastes and even of her health ; to attend to refittings of the house by carpenters, painters, and masons, while he was away on his summer vacations ; in brief, to spare him all the ills of the outer world, to make the conditions of his work favorable, and himself as comfortable as it was possible for a morose dyspeptic to be, and at the same time to prevent his seeing how much trouble and anxiety it cost her, — such was the duty prescribed to herself and done faithfully for years without complaint, amid illnesses not light nor few, which were “ not without their good uses,” she wrote, because she arose from them “ with new heart for the battle of existence, — what a woman means by new heart, not new brute force, as you men understand it, but new power of loving and enduring.” In this effective practical life she tried to repress some portion of her womanly nature, for she agreed, verbally at least, with Carlyle’s disapproval of “ moods,” “ feelings,” " sentiments,” and similar phases of emotion not resulting in work done ; but her nature, being pathetically susceptible to these forbidden experiences, often overruled her philosophy, and brought the knowledge of her solitude home to her ; for she had no direct share in her husband’s work, no marks of tenderness from him, and few words or deeds in recognition of her sacrifices for him. She succeeded only too well in blinding him to her own pain, which was, indeed, the easiest of her tasks. Her words on Carlyle’s sending her a birthday present just after her mother’s death are significant of much that is unsaid, and contain the explanation she gave to herself of his earlier neglect. “ I cannot tell you,” she writes, “how wae his little gift made me, as well as glad ; it was the first thing of the kind he ever gave to me in his life. In great matters he is always kind and considerate; but these little attentions, which we women attach so much importance to, he was never in the habit of rendering to any one ; his up-bringing and the severe turn of mind he has from nature had alike indisposed him toward them. And now the desire to replace to me the irreplaceable makes him as good in little things as he used to be in great.” This was in the sixteenth year after marriage. the affair in a very sensible note. She says that any other wife would have laughed at Carlyle’s bewitchment, but this one, seeing Lady Ashburton admired for sayings and doings for which she was snubbed, and contrasting the former’s grand-dame manners with her own homely endeavors to help her husband and serve him through years of hardship, became more abidingly and intensely miserable than words can utter; her inmost life was solitary, without tenderness, caresses, or loving words from him, and she felt that her love and life were laid waste. All this she willingly endured while he neglected her for his work ; but when this excuse could no longer be made for him, the strain told on her, and, without faltering from her purpose of helping and shielding him, she became warped. Such is Miss Jewsbury’s account, nearly in her own words. There is no need to apportion the blame between the pair. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle suffered, and that, for some time after she became aware of her own real feeling, her letters are less confidingly affectionate in regard to her husband, and contain more or less open discontent of a very justifiable kind. After Lady Ashburton’s death, she writes to him as follows : “ I have neither the strength and spirits to bear up against your discontent, nor the obtuseness to be indifferent to it. You have not the least notion what a killing thought it is to have put into one’s heart, gnawing there day and night, that one ought to be dead, since one can no longer make the same exertions as formerly ; ” and there is more to the same effect, to which Carlyle affixes his note, “Alas! alas! sinner that I am ! ” Notwithstanding such plain words, which are indeed infrequent, Mrs. Carlyle still guarded her husband, standing between him and the objects of his wrath, “imitating, in a small, humble way, the Roman soldier who gathered his arms full of the enemy’s spears, and received them all into his own breast,” on which sentence Carlyle again comments, “ Oh heavens, the comparison! it was too true.” As time went on they drew together more closely. The second Lady Ashburton appeared, who became very dear to Mrs. Carlyle, and was even advised by her to “ send a kiss ” to the now aging philosopher. Carlyle himself understood better his wife’s moods and needs, though still imperfectly, and he was more kind in word and more thoughtful in act than of old. Thus, at last, the letters conclude as pleasantly as they began, with Mrs. Carlyle’s elation over the Edinburgh triumph, from which her husband returned to find her dead.

There was a limit, however, to Mrs. Carlyle’s power of self-sacrifice. Her proud, spirited, sensitive nature was ever reasserting itself, persistently refusing to be lost in her husband’s individuality. She thirsted both for expressed recognition and for expressed affection. In an early letter to Sterling she writes thus: “In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ety or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and, alas ! self-seeking me. Little Felix in the Wanderjahre, when, in the midst of an animated scene between Wilhelm and Theresa, he pulls Theresa’s gown and calls out, ‘ Mama Theresa, I, too, am here ! ’ only speaks out with the charming trustfulness of a little child what I am perpetually feeling, though too sophisticated to pull people s skirts, or exclaim, in so many words, ’ Mr. Sterling, I, too, am here ! ’ ” The recognition which she desired was abundantly given by the men who gath ered about Carlyle, many of whom were more attached to her than to him ; and the despised “feelings” found an outlet in brightening various miserable lives, poor exiles of all nations, unfortunate maidens, lost children, and, in general, all people in affliction, who were attracted to her, she said, as straw to amber. Notwithstanding the affection and devotion of her many friends, she seems to have remained lonely at heart; but she kept on with the old routine, while the French Revolution and Cromwell were being written, and she found comfort, if not contentment, in the sense of fulfilled duty and the knowledge that she had materially helped her husband in her silent way. The whisper of fame grew loud, the doors of the great flew open; but when her faith in Carlyle’s genius was at last justified and her hopes for him realized, something happened that had not entered into her calculations. Carlyle was finding the sweetest reward in the society of another woman. This was the first Lady Ashburton, who was “ the cleverest woman out of sight” that Mrs. Carlyle ever saw, and at whose home, a centre of intellectual society, both she and her husband often visited ; but it seems that in London the wives of men of genius, like the wives of bishops, do not take the social rank of their husbands; so Froude assures us, and Lady Ashburton made the fact plain to Mrs. Carlyle. The result was, that, toward the close of a ten years’ acquaintance, the latter grew so jealous of the former’s fascination as to make herself very wretched. Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, her most intimate friend, explains

On the whole, we think that, in spite of appearances, the married life here laid bare was not an exceptionally unhappy one ; nor does it seem to us that Carlyle’s neglect of his wife sprang from any moral fault, but merely from his native insensibility, his absorption in his work, and that unconscious selfishness which is ordinarily induced in even the best men by persistent silent sacrifice on their behalf. He simply did not see, did not know, did not understand his wife’s trials and nature ; but that he had deep tenderness in his heart is plain, both from his works, where it is shown imaginatively, and from many things recorded of his own acts in these volumes and elsewhere. That his love was single and his loyalty entire these pitiful notes amply and painfully prove. But independently of him altogether, Mrs. Carlyle deserves remembrance for her own sake, not merely for the work done by her as a true wife, nor for the heroic spirit shown in the doing it, but for an intrinsically refined and gentle nature, the history of which leaves the impression that, although it always remained noble and attractive, it was injured by the circumstances amid which she was placed. The total effect of her letters, so far as they relate to herself, goes to confirm Miss Jewsbury’s summary, that “ the lines in which her character was laid down were very grand, but the result was blurred and distorted and confused.”