But poor Jeannie had long been desperately sick and disheartened without attracting the smallest help from Carlyle. As fast as the solitude became irksome his views of duty became clear. 66 Quarrel not with deliberate feeling that this wilderness is no wholesome abode for me; that it is my duty to strive, with all industry, energy, and cheerful determination, to change it for one less solitary." Presently, duty was merged into desperation. "Nothing but the wretchedest, forsaken, discontented existence here, where almost your whole energy is spent in keeping yourself from flying out into exasperation. Why not bolt out of all these sooty despicabilities and lying draggle-tails of byre-women and peat-moss and isolation and confusion and go at once to London? Yes, we must try it. Life here is but a kind of life in death, or rather one might say, a not being born; one sits as in the belly of some Trojan horse, weather-screened, but pining, inactive, neck and heels crushed together. Let us burst it in the name of God!" He had forgotten that when he was-is it too colloquial ? it is certainly not too strong, and it certainly is Carlylesque, to say-hell-bent on going to the Craig. He had written, persuading his wife: "Oh! Jeannie, how happy shall we be in this Craig o' Putta. We shall sit under our bramble and our saugh-tree, and none to make us afraid; and my little wife will be there forever beside me, and I shall be well and blessed, and the 'latter end of that man will be better than the beginning.'" And so this great genius, after seven years of failure and exasperation and the ruin of his wife's health and spirits, had labored along to the same conclusion at which his wife, with all the frivolity, dollhood, and imbecility of her sex, had arrived in one moment. But he had had his way. He had carried out his great governing principle, his "eternal axiom, the law of nature, which no mortal departs from unpunished-that the man should bear rule in the house, and not the woman." If he could have seen himself as he was, he would have seen this native sovereign, man, descending the Craig of Putta in a much more draggle-tail suit than the byre-women from whom he fled. It seems incredible, yet signs are not wanting that Carlyle was unconsciously jealous of the superior social position of his wife, and was resolved to reduce her to the level of his mother and sisters. He made her bake and sweep and scrub, like any byre-woman of them all, till he could announce that "Jane is almost stronger in anti-fine-ladyism than myself"; but when a fine lady who was not his wife came by and beckoned to him, he left wife and work to follow her without betraying the smallest symptom of "anti-fine-ladyism." When Jeffrey had tried to lighten the poor wife's burden by securing a place for John Carlyle with a fine Lady Clare, Carlyle was pleased to write : "I must also esteem it no small felicity you naturally have: that of associating with a thoroughly courteous, society-cultivated woman. No higher piece of art is there in the world. The weak, lovely one will be loved, honored, and protected. Is not, in truth, a noble woman (noblewoman or not) worth reverencing?" Just such a piece of high art, just such a weak, lovely one, just such a courteous and society-cultivated woman was associated with Thomas Carlyle, and he had loved, honored, protected, and reverenced her with his old boots, with his acrid ails, with his violent words and vicious temper and long neglect, till heart and hope died out of her. "Of course, I am sad at times, at all times sad as death, but that I am used to, and don't mind." Did he give no heed to the words? Did no wonder haunt him as to the process which had rendered the radiant, highhearted girl "at all times sad as death"? He gives no sign. He had degraded a bright spirit to base uses, and he did not know it. She recognized while accepting her fate. "You may be better without me," she wrote him, "so far as my company goes. I make myself no illusions on that head; my company, I know, is generally worse than none; and you cannot suffer more from the fact than I do from the consciousness of it. God knows how gladly I would be sweet-tempered and cheerful-hearted for your single sake, if my temper were not soured and my heart saddened beyond my own power to mend them." Could a man with a heart in his bosom fail to give some tender, re-assuring words to such a pitiful appeal? Carlyle did so fail. "The comfort," she writes in her next letter, "is the greatest part of the grievance for my irrational mind. I am not consoled but aggravated by reflecting that, in point of fact, you will prefer finding 'perfect solitude' in your own house, and that if I were to do as nature prompts me to do, and start off home by the next train, I should take more from your comfort on one side than I should add to it on another." And he did not contradict her! His intense selfishness Mrs. Carlyle, in true wifely fashion, tried to generalize, and so ward off from him individual condemnation. "Mr. Carlyle, being a man, cannot understand to exact the least bit less attendance, when we are reduced to one servant again, than he had accustomed himself to exact from the two. So I have all the valeting, and needle-womaning, and running up and down to the study for books, etc., to do myself." But it was not his gender that made him use his wife for a beast of burden. It was his own specific and gigantic selfishness. 'To his genius chiefly his wife was, by good fortune, able to lay his appalling sins. Her beast was a lion, king of beasts, and by that token she was able to bear and upbear his beastliness. She mentions his enormous domestic crimes with a frankness which could not otherwise have existed. Her pride recounts what any other pride would have hidden. "When one has married a man of genius, one must take the consequences," was her prevailing plea. "My man of genius," was her constant characterization. But Carlyle himself had set up another standard wherewithal he should be judged in his Day of Judgment. "What is genius," he had written to Miss Welsh, "but the last perfection of true manhood-the pure reflection of a spirit in union with itself, discharging all common duties with more than common excellence?" Let us set our minds and habitudes in order, and grow under the peaceful sunshine of nature, that whatever fruit or flowers have been misplanted in our spirits may ripen wholesomely and be distributed in due season. And in pursuance of this principle he had neglected every common duty, had defied every common obligation, had imposed them all upon his wife, had stamped down every flower and fruit of her gentle nature, and demanded of her the service and forced upon her the position of a household drudge. It is idle to plead that Mrs. Carlyle was too like her husband; that she irritated him with domestic details; that she was overjealous, capricious, hysterical, petty. They understand neither the human heart nor the English language, who say it. It is not a question of opinion, but of fact. The records of her life disprove the charge. She was strong, discerning, positive, effective, as well as poetic and affectionate. In her head was thought, in her eyes was sight, in her mind was judgment, from her lips flashed wit. All her ways were winsome. She was a beauty and a belle. Was it not of her that Leigh Hunt wrote? "Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Say that health and wealth have missed me ; Jenny kissed me." Poets do not write such verses of a mere drudge. Tennyson would not come from afar to have a long, quiet chat with a dull woman; although it is in exact accordance with the way of the world that Carlyle's big brutish brother should roll in from his kitchen pipe to babble, and another friendly bore should maunder in the parlor, and the two together stay out Tennyson, while the two who wanted to see each other and nobody else "got scarcely any speech" together. Darwin frequented her house, drove her about with mock submission, admired her achievements with the needle and satirized her husband's indifference to it. Brewster and De Quincey and Sir William Hamilton frequented her, won by the peculiar personal grace which was her inalienable charm. Mazzini confided in her. Cavaignac ate her hash and claimed her for a French woman. Jeffrey was fascinated. Few passages in the life of men have more vital interest than the ardent friendship of Lord Jeffrey for Mrs. Carlyle, and never a man appeared in a more amiable and honorable light. He admired her intelligence; he yielded to her womanliness; he was appalled, enraged by her situation. The passion of a lover, the compassion of a father, met in the affection which at once delighted and embittered him. It is not to Carlyle's credit that he never shows the slightest uneasiness at Jeffrey's attitude toward his wife. It was not the nobility of trust but the stolidity of indifference. His own insensibility regarding her was attended by an utter insensibility to the feelings of other men regarding her. He seems to have had no curiosity, even, about her inward life. Her relation with Edward Irving made no more impression upon him than the ogling of a turtledove. Most men would have raved at Jeffrey's interference, but Carlyle did not heed it. Jeffrey's bearing and course show forever how blameless and pure may be the friendship of a high-minded man for a high-minded woman. Never was there the smallest occasion for vulgar jealousy; but if Carlyle had been a man, instead of a stone, he would have died of despair at seeing how differently from a stone a man bears himself toward a woman. Being a stone, he never saw that Jeffrey was a man. The man resented with keen but impotent bitterness Carlyle's insensibility to the jewel he wore in his breast. He implored Carlyle to be good to his wife! "Take care," he wrote, "of the fair creature who has trusted herself so entirely to you,whose great heart and willing martyrdom will make the sacrifice more agonizing in the end." A dull resentment does seem to have awakened sluggishly in Carlyle's mind toward Jeffrey, but it was rather because Jeffrey did not sufficiently advance his fortunes than because Jeffrey loved his wife. Nothing can exceed the patience and delicacy with which Jeffrey strove to assist Carlyle-even with money, when all else failed. It was noble in Carlyle to refuse Jeffrey's money, but he did not refuse it nobly. Jeffrey never appeared better or Carlyle worse than in this transaction. There is no mistake. We have the written words of both, which show Jeffrey therein to be of heaven and Carlyle earthborn. Carlyle came to look upon Jeffrey with scant respect; but Jeffrey was indisputably, so far as appears in these books, the greater man. Carlyle complained that Jeffrey intellectually considered the great business of a man to be happy. But this was a better theory than Carlyle's, who considered the great business of a man to be miserable. Jeffrey never took half the pains to be happy that Carlyle took to be wretched. Jeffrey never sacrificed to innocent pleasure a tithe of what Carlyle sacrificed to wicked, because needless, pain. Carlyle consoled and cajoled himself with thinking that "Jeffrey dwells in the glitter of saloon chandeliers, walking in the vain show of parliamenteering and gigmanity, which, also, he feels to be vain; we, in the whirlwind and wild-piping battle of fate, which, nevertheless, by God's grace, we feel to be not vain and a show, but true and a reality." But the whirlwind and the piping were Carlyle's own breath, which he mistook for the voice of God, who, as of old, was not in the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the fire,-which Carlyle was forever stirring up,-but in the still, small voice of Jeffrey's gentle sympathy and succor. And when Carlyle had tooted himself out of breath on the top of Craigenputtoch, he was as eager to come down into the glitter of saloon chandeliers |