: ■:■ : ■'■'-' ' :: THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE NEW LETTERS AND MEMORIALS OF JANE WELSH CARLYLE. Annotated by Thomas Carlyle, and Edited by Alexander Carlyle, with an Introduction by Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., with sixteen illustrations. In two volumes, demy 8vo., 2$s. net. SOME PRESS OPINIONS. The Daily Chronicle.— '"Let us turn with all gratitude to the new series of letters which the editor here gives. . . . Mrs. Carlyle has long ranked with Byron, Lamb, her husband, and one or two more, amongst the best letter-writers in our language." The Daily News. — "The publication of these volumes is not only the most important literary event of the year. It is an act of elementary justice." Westminster Gazette.—' 1 It is a pleasure under any circum- stances to have more of Mrs. Carlyle's letters. Few letters in the language have in such perfection the qualities which good letters should possess." TIu Times. — "About Mrs. Carlyle's conversation there has been only one difference of opinion among those who had the privilege of hearing it. Some put it just above her husband's, and some just below. But after reading her letters, we feel inclined to ask whether Jane was greater than Thomas, or Thomas greater than Jane." RE A D V I MM EDI A TEL Y. NEW LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Edited and Annotated by Alexander Carlyle. In two volumes, with illustrations. Uniform with "New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle." Demy 8vo., 2ls. net. O . W W H 13 3 o °0 ... " 00 £ IN 2 - Q ■A < X Pi < o o S I o e : j « .r: v-t (fl p 2.3 *, 2~* r- rt - c;. 3 £ g^ -^ «, °.S ^ U,? Ph — 1 «j fit - - • .9 f «J -H JC o S I" 5 *^ u n Ci u bX) ^ w u T- Is- (/I *^ given to the world had not the production of the m" New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," with the serious charges contained in the Introduction and Foot-notes, appeared to demand its publication. But the serious charges referred to, co although no doubt rendered more serious by the " fresh evidence in their support brought to light in -< the " New Letters and Memorials " — evidence which ^Mr. Froude had suppressed — were not in any case new charges, but the mere repetition of charges which were first made twenty years ago, and which are not really traversed by " My Relations with ^Carlyle." Mr. Froude attempts to explain his ^superabundant verbal inaccuracies, but has not a £ word to say in answer to the grave charges brought .against him, of giving garbled extracts of docu- 3 -ments and omitting of set purpose such portions of them as did not fit in with his own views, of contravening again and again the solemn injunc- tions imposed on him by Carlyle, of making claims to advantages to which he was not entitled, of VI PREFACE refusing to implement an unconditional promise, and generally of producing a Biography elaborated with the art of the practised romancer in which the true features of the subject can scarcely be recognised, but in which assertion and inference, unsupported by evidence, are palmed off for correct statement. On all these points he has allowed judgment to go by default. His defence consists in the accentuation of what he had already said derogatory of Carlyle, with the addition of fresh charges against him of a very odious description, which, had they been true, should in decency have been kept concealed, but which, being groundless, as we hope to prove, reflect discredit on those who have rashly, or in the spirit of retaliation, thrust them prominently forward. That Mr. Froude ever decided to keep silence on these charges we take leave to doubt. As early as 1881 Mr. Froude, in a letter which appeared in the Times of May 6th, alluded to reasons which he could not give " without entering on a subject on which it is better to be silent," and added that he would be sorry if the difficulty of his task was " increased by a demand for further explanations which I shall be very reluctant to give." He was at once challenged by Mrs. Alexander Carlyle in the Times, to satisfy the curiosity he had awakened by his reference to " hidden reasons and explanations." To this challenge he made no reply; but on the 20th of April, 1886, when he heard that Professor Charles Eliot Norton was about to publish the " Early Letters of Carlyle," [^u-u j frj cJ 2w W2; Jovh 4J ,u3 <*i£#w{< i<^^ u * ^i kvfc ^ CtA^iwtcr kvlM 4u/^^i ( ^jL OaJ tvt^uA £fy ^CJ W ^ ^^ Hfll &J <^ ***** i^J tW" » .... i ) J > • ' '■' THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE Mr. Froude's account of his relations with Carlyle, found written in pencil in a notebook after his death, was prepared while he was in Cuba in 1887, and he had not therefore, while writing it, access to the correspondence and documents bearing on the matters with which he dealt. One would have thought that in composing a vindication of him- self in connexion with his discharge of a trust which he was accused of having betrayed — a vindication which he bequeathed to his children that they might have something to rely on should his honour or good faith be assailed — he would have desired to consult authorities and to verify every statement he made ; but that was not Froude's way of going to work. It its obituary notice of him the Times said : "He was not a student, in the real sense of the term ; he had neither the desire to probe his authorities to the bottom nor the patience to do so. . . . It is said that at the time when Froude was busy on the part of his history where Burleigh plays a leading part he was invited to stay at Hatfield and make an examination of the masses of Cecil papers there preserved — at a time, it must be remembered, before the Historical Manuscripts Commission had published any of them — and that Froude went, and B 2 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE stayed one day. . . . Scholars who read his brilliant sketch of Caesar can see plainly that he had never properly read Cicero's letters, or not many of them. When he visited the West Indies, with a view to writing his ' English in the West Indies,' he pre- ferred to sit in the shade reading Dante rather than to see for himself the institutions of Jamaica, about which, he told his host, he knew enough already. And, most noteworthy of all, though he visited Simancas and stayed some time there, it is un- questionable that he learned comparatively little about the records there preserved." True to his usual method, in writing " My Relations with Car- lyle," Froude disdained the assistance of records or witnesses, but trusting entirely to his memory and imagination, in the intervals of his study of Dante and while absorbing the history and institutions of Cuba at the pores, produced an Apology which is itself in need of an apologetic. There is scarcely one line of Froude's pamphlet that does not require correction or qualification, and the general impression it creates is as wide of the truth as it is possible to be. A paragon of errors, Froude has never shown himself more inaccurate. Never has his treacherous memory more signally beguiled him or more in- dubitably proved itself to have been an organ, not for retention and reproduction, but for transformation. It did not, like other men's memories, yield up what it had appropriated, but a special secretion of its own. In Carlyle's case it was supplied with heart's blood and has given out bile. The honoured master, the old familiar friend has been converted into a THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 3 grotesque monster compounded of strength and weakness, dignity and deformity. The pamphlet is made up of the writhings of wounded egotism and of virulent attacks on the character and conduct of the man whom he had extolled as a great spiritual teacher. Having first assassinated the reputation of Carlyle, Froude now mutilates the remains. What- ever merits his Life of Carlyle possessed — and no one denies it some merits — are now destroyed by this posthumous pamphlet. Having drawn a por- trait of Carlyle possessing at least some more or less distant resemblance, he has deliberately thrown a pailful of liquid lampblack over it and rendered it irrecognisable as the portrait of anything human. It is to be regretted that Froude's paper, " My Relations with Carlyle," has not been published exactly as it was found in the despatch-box after his death. The first few pages have been withheld, because they are "of too intimate a nature to be given to the public ; " but that may be truly said of the whole essay, and it is clear that Froude himself had drawn no distinction of this kind, but had anticipated that all of what he had written would be published. It may be assumed that the omitted pages would not in any way have strengthened his case against Carlyle, but they might have supplied the means of testing the fidelity of his narrative in matters of great personal moment, in respect of which, even a recreant memory rarely goes astray. The epitome of some of the omitted matter given as an introduction to the essay undoubtedly suggests that, in the interests b 2 4 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE of veracity, omission was advisable. It is the object of this epitome to show that Froude could have no earthly motive to misrepresent Carlyle, to whom the crisis of his life was due and in sub- mission to whose teachings he had made great personal sacrifices. But the facts quoted in support of this contention will not bear critical examination. "He [Froude] had taken deacon's orders, and looked to the Church as his regular profession. So much as a doubt," he tell us, "had so far never crossed his mind, of the truth of the creed in which he had been brought up." " It was at this time," he says, " that Carlyle's books came in my way. They produced on me what Evangelicals call ' a conviction of sin.' . . . They taught me that the religion in which I had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of facts." It seems a pity to have to overthrow such a moving little bit of autobiography, but the tyranny of dates makes it untenable. It was in 1841, at Falmouth, that Carlyle's books first came in Froude's way, when they were brought to his notice by John Sterling, and at once arrested his attention, and it was not until 1844 that he took deacon's orders. He has himself told us in "The Nemesis of Faith," that it was the " French Revolution," which he read in 1 84 1, that first stirred his conscience, so the alterna- tives are these : either he is wrong in saying that it was Carlyle's books that undermined and overthrew his faith, or he took deacon's orders after his faith THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 5 was disintegrated, and went on assuming faith when he had it not, for he preached a funeral sermon in St. Mary's Church, Torquay, in 1847. For the purposes of " My Relations with Carlyle " Froude has clearly exaggerated Carlyle's early influence over him. He would have us believe that it was this influence which led him to give up his fellowship and abandon his orders, and which changed the whole current of his life, but it would not be difficult to show that many other influences contributed to shape his career. When he tells us now, that it was Carlyle's writings which first made him "realise the meaning of duty and the overpowering obligation to do it," we must remember that he wrote to Hallam, Lord Tennyson, " I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it." When he tells us now, that it was Carlyle's writings that deprived him of belief in the facts of his creed, we must remember that he has previously stated that it was his studies for the Life of St. Neot, which Newman had invited him to write, that put the breaking strain on his credulity. Goethe, Lessing, Neander, Schleiermacher, the Tractarians and the Evangelicals had all a hand in the making of Froude, whose views underwent a gradual development. Not till long after he had definitely left the Ark of tha Covenant, could he find a twig on which to settle. Carlyle's doctrine ultimately obtained the ascendency in his mind, but his personal influence was not brought to bear on him until 1849, when he was introduced by Spedding, not perhaps until i860 when he settled in 6 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE London and was admitted on friendly terms to the circle at Cheyne Row. In the first instance Froude, according to his own account, was repelled by Carlyle's objurgations and demeanour. "He denounced everybody and everything ! " and although Froude was of opinion, being then apparently in a damnatory mood, that this wholesale denunciation " was intensely true and right," he felt " that it would be impossible to live with him on equal terms." Carlyle, on the other hand, must have been powerfully attracted to Froude, for, contrary to what was ever known of him in any other case, he forced his acquaintance upon him : so Froude tells us. He called on him, wished to see more of him and invited him to be his companion in his walks and rides ; and as it would have been ungracious to reject such advances, Froude grasped the proffered hand and was placed on a friendly footing in Carlyle's home, where he seems to have begun at once to make those un- favourable observations which have dimmed and defaced his Biography of his host, and which are marshalled with relentless candour in his posthumous pamphlet. That Froude himself frequently begged to be admitted to the Cheyne Row household is certain. Mrs. Carlyle has placed a photograph of him in her album, and pasted underneath it a characteristic cutting from a letter in Froude's handwriting which reads, "May I come to tea on Friday?" Intro- duced into closer relations with the life at Cheyne Row he could not help becoming acquainted, he THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 7 tells us, with many things which he would rather not have known, but which he has carefully treasured up against the day of wrath. First of all it was borne in upon Froude that Carlyle had an ungovernable temper which caused much domestic unhappiness. " Rumour said, that she [Mrs. Carlyle] and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could easily believe it," he added, "from occa- sional expressions about him which fell from her." Farther on he states explicitly that they quarrelled fiercely and violently, and by various allusions throughout his paper he seeks to convey the idea that they lived a cat and dog life, owing mainly to Carlyle's fractious, impatient and selfish disposition. "In Carlyle's catalogue of his own duties self-restraint seemed to be forgotten." But Froude and rumour cannot on this question stand against the phalanx of witnesses on the other side. Almost without exception, the other intimates of the household at Cheyne Row, who had as good opportunities of judging as Froude and perhaps more discernment than he, take a directly opposite view and testify to the generally amiable terms on which Carlyle and his wife jogged along together. Moncure Conway observed that " when Carlyle's mood was stormiest, her voice could in an instant allay it : the lion was led as by a little child." " In the conversa- tion which went on in the old drawing-room at Chelsea, there was no suggestion of things secret or reserved ; people with sensitive toes had no careful provision made for them, and had best keep away ; free, frank and simple speech and inter- 8 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE course were the unwritten but ever-present law. Mrs. Carlyle's wit and humour were overflowing, and she told anecdotes about her husband under which he sat with a patient look of repudiation, until the loud laugh broke out and led the chorus." Emerson wrote in his Diary, " Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging and in her book-case all his books are inscribed to her as they come from year to year, each with some significant lines." Professor Masson placed on record that, " One of the pleasantest sights in the Cheyne Row household, on a winter evening, was Carlyle himself, seated in a chair by the fire, or reclining on the hearth-rug, pipe in mouth, listening benignantly and admiringly to those caricatures of his ways, and illustrations of his recent misbehaviours, from his beloved Jane's lips. Insufficient appreciation of the amount of consciously humorous, and mutu- ally admiring give-and-take of this kind in the married life of the extraordinary pair, both of them so sensitively organised, has had much to do, it seems to me, with that elaborately studied contrast of them which Mr. Froude has succeeded in impressing on the public." " The notion of Carlyle," says Masson, referring to Froude's portrait of him, "as in any sense a misanthrope, a hard-hearted man, a mere raging or railing egotist, is one of those absurdities, those perversions of the actual truth into its very opposite, which arise not from mere insufficiency of knowledge, but from a moral incapacity of understanding anything unusually com- plex in character, and a malevolent predetermination THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 9 to resist evidence." And yet, once at any rate, Froude himself seems to have had some inkling of the truth which Masson insists on, for in one place in the " Life of Carlyle " he speaks of Mrs. Carlyle " telling stories at her husband's expense, at which he laughed himself as heartily as we did," — a be- haviour on her part somewhat difficult to reconcile with her condition as depicted in " My Relations with Carlyle," as a poor, dejected, down-trodden woman, whose " pale, drawn, suffering face " haunted Froude in his dreams. It was "exquisitely pain- ful," he says, to see this bewitching woman suffering through her husband's neglect and violence. Amongst others who have borne generous testimony to the cordial and affectionate terms on which the Carlyles lived may be named Tennyson, G. S. Venables, Mrs. Oliphant, John Tyndall, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and A. J. Symington ; but their testimony, strong and weighty as it is, and that of a host of other responsible witnesses who might be summoned, cannot elucidate the true conjugal relations of Carlyle and his wife half as clearly and convincingly as the letters which they wrote to each other, during the forty years of their wedded life. Enough of these have been already published to put it beyond a shadow of a doubt that, from their first acquaintance to the end of their days, they were united by almost unbroken trust and love which only deepened as the end drew near. Conscious that these letters, if referred to, must reveal the hollow mockery of the grim Cheyne Row tragedy he had set himself to compose, Froude attempts to io THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE discredit them, by quoting Mrs. Carlyle as saying that her husband's letters were written for his biographer. Where did she say so ? Not in her replies to these letters, which are full of grateful acknowledgment and sympathetic response. The remark, it is to be suggested, must have been made in one of Froude's imaginary conversations with her, or if it did actually fall from her lips, it must have been ironical, for the letters, as she well knew, came from the fulness of the writer's heart, and were meant for no eye but hers. We have Froude's authority for it, that until long after his wife's death Carlyle was resolved that no express biography of him should be written ; and here we have the man who tells us that the task of biography was ulti- mately confided to him, insinuating that Carlyle in his familiar correspondence with his wife, while denouncing " the brute of a world," was posing for future generations. But Mrs. Carlyle's letters, the sincerity and spontaneity of which Froude would be the last to impugn, even more strikingly than her husband's, bring out that their matrimonial pathway, if not all strewn with flowers and free from rough places, was on the whole felicitous, and that they never parted hands while journeying along it. They had their little differences and misunder- standings and sometimes their sharp encounters. What married pair has not ? What man of genius and his wife ever escaped them ? Who has proposed a competition for the Dunmow Flitch after forty years of wedlock ? Mrs. Carlyle was prone to take offence and could speak daggers. Carlyle, as he THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE n said of his wife's grandfather, had a hot impatient temper, breaking out into fierce flashes as of light- ning, if you touched him the wrong way, but they were flashes only, never bolts. But on the whole they were happy and contented with each other, and it is impossible now to determine which was more to blame for any disagreements that varied the monotony of their existence. Carlyle has chivalrously taken most of the blame for these on himself, but hear what Jane says referring to one little quarrel that occurred on one occasion between them. " Nothing less than a devil (I am sure) could have tempted me to torment you and myself as I did that unblessed day. Woe to me, then, if I had had any other than the most constant and generous of mortal men to deal with. Blessings on your equanimity and magnanimity." Even the idolatrous Miss Jewsbury admits that Jane was provoking ; and this is certain, that she was very well able to take care of herself, and that Froude's vision of her as the sweet, forlorn, submissive spouse of an irritable, inconsiderate and violent husband, is either the illusion of an exuberant imagination or the creation of a malicious caricaturist. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says : " I used often of a Sunday to go and talk with the late Mrs. Forster, who was a shrewd and very observant lady. She met all her husband's many friends and knew a great deal. I remember her talking much of the Carlyles and their manage, and once I said — albeit a friend and admirer of Thomas — that she must have had a rough time. Mrs. Forster smiled, and said, ' Don't 12 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE you believe all that ! She was rather an actress, and liked to pose as a martyr, talking of her suffer- ings and getting sympathy. I assure you he was the great sufferer. ' " Lady Eastlake wrote in her " Letters and Memorials," " Mrs. Carlyle interested me ; she is lively and clever, and evidently very happy." In view of what Froude tells us as to the " Niagaras of scorn and vituperation " which Carlyle poured out for hours together in his wife's presence, one would have thought that it would have been a relief to her to be left alone and that she must have thanked Heaven when her husband shut himself up in his sound-proof room. But not at all. Froude will not have it so. This was an additional grievance. " She was very much alone." Carlyle, whom Froude is now, with tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice, unveiling to us as the thoroughly bad man he was, was not only violent to his wife but neglectful of her. He was engrossed in his own pursuits, " she rarely saw him, except at meal-times. She sat by herself in her drawing- room, either reading or entertaining visitors who bored her and of whom she dared not ask him to relieve her." She was a sad, solitary, stricken woman ; the glaring absurdity of all which may perhaps be best demonstrated by recounting the ordinary routine of daily life at Cheyne Row. Carlyle rose at 7.30, had his bath and went out for a short walk. He breakfasted about 9, and after smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper (when he took one in, which was not always), and-convers- THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 13 ing with his wife, he retired to his study. When he was engaged in writing anything, he worked steadily till 1 or 1.30, when he had his luncheon while Mrs. Carlyle dined, his luncheon being light and consisting generally of a cup of beef-tea or a biscuit and a glass of sherry. Then he went out walking, accompanied by his wife when she was able to walk. When he had a horse, he rode for two hours in the afternoon, getting in an hour before dinner which was generally at 5 or 6, but the hour was frequently changed. Before dinner he was joined by Mrs. Carlyle, who talked to him and told him the news of the day while he was dining and while he lay on the sofa, when the meal was over. After dinner, when they were not invited out, they spent the whole evening together, reading or chatting with any guests who chanced to call. This was the general routine, but when he was not engaged in any special task, Carlyle rarely retired to his study, but read beside his wife. And sometimes even when he was writing she was his companion. He says : " Wife and I sat together in the library-room, as the warmest, all the time I was writing ' Scott.' " Now, is it not apparent that Froude has again attempted to mislead his readers in representing Mrs. Carlyle as being left much alone by a callous husband, careful about his own interests and nought else, and that as a matter of fact she had more of her husband's society than married ladies of a certain age generally have ? Beyond the riding exercise, which he took with a view to the main- i 4 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE tenance of his working power, on which his bread depended, Carlyle had no pursuits or amusements apart from his home. He was not a club-man or sportsman or billiard-player. He spent his leisure at his own fireside with his wife and friends, and it was his wife's own choice if she did not accompany him on his very occasional excursions into society at Bath House or Addiscombe. His visits to Scot- land were made that he might see his kindred or recover his health, and during them he wrote to his wife daily, not laconic notes, but richly effusive letters, which she so hungered for, that she had an hysterical attack if the post failed to bring one. What modern husband does as much ? How many twentieth-century wives can boast of as much uxorial devotion ? Mrs. Carlyle was no Mariana in a Moated Grange, dreary and deserted, but a highly appre- ciated wife, whose complaint was that she had too much and not too little society. " So long as I am in what the French call ' my room of reception,' ' she says, " it never occurs to me to feel lonely." "It is odd," she remarks, in another place, "what notions men have of the scantiness of a woman's resources. They do not find it anything out of nature that they should exist by themselves, but a woman must always be borne about on some- body's shoulders, and dandled or chirped to, or it is supposed she will fall into the blackest melancholy ! " " I have as much society as I like, but I prefer none when I am ill." But Mrs. Carlyle had other interests and enjoy- THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 15 ments beyond those which society afforded. She keenly relished the management of her little house- hold and the conquest of those practical problems which, for many years, their limited means made difficult of solution. She had been brought up to take part in household work ; she revelled in economic contrivances, and even her "earthquakes" or annual cleanings brought her a grim satisfaction. But here again the lugubrious Froude shakes his head. She was " a household drudge," quoth he, and in saying that in " My Relations with Carlyle " he is merely disinterring those old misinterpretations of his which were killed and buried long ago. It was in connection with the life at Craigen- puttock that Froude first made this charge. He depicted that as one round of menial drudgery for Mrs. Carlyle, unsolaced by more than an occasional word of encouragement, sympathy, or compassion from her husband. " Every household duty fell upon her, either directly, or in supplying the shortcomings of a Scotch maid-of-all-work She had to cook, to sew, to scour, to clean ; to gallop down alone to Dumfries if anything was wanted ; to keep the house, and even on occasions to milk the cows." The story of the hard time this poor woman had to pass at Craigenputtock, Froude derived from Miss Geraldine Jewsbury's recollection, and he had the effrontery to adhere to it and to introduce it into the " Early Life " after he had himself published Carlyle's denial of it, generally and in detail. 11 Geraldine's Craigenputtock stories," Carlyle wrote, " are more mythical than any of the rest. 16 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE Each consists of two or three in confused exaggerated state rolled with new confusion into one," and then he goes on to show that his wife's participation in any of the menial occupations enumerated by Froude must have had a spice of frolic or adventure in it, as there were a servant and milk-maid and farm men at call, zealous to help the young couple. He states explicitly that the happiest and whole- somest days of their married life were these seven years spent at Craigenputtock, where his helpmate made the desert blossom and converted into a fairy palace " the wild moorland home of the poor man." And in all this he is fully borne out by the testimony of that helpmate herself. Her letters, dated from Craigenputtock, are bright as the unpolluted sun- light on the mountain, breezy as the atmosphere that undulated around her ; lucent and hopefully babbling like the streams that hurried to the valley below. And more than that, they teem with expressions of joyous satisfaction with her lot, and contain direct contradictions of every one of Froude's allegations. To " this dreariest spot in all the British dominions," as Froude, with pitiable topographical insensibility, described it, she was glad to return from Edinburgh and from Templand when visiting her mother ; and from it, after four years' experience of it, she wrote to Miss Eliza Miles, " For my part I am very content. I have everything here my heart desires that I could have anywhere else, except society, and even that deprivation is not wholly an evil. . . . My husband is as good com- pany as reasonable mortal could desire. Every fair THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 17 morning we ride on horseback for an hour before breakfast. . . . Then we eat such a surprising breakfast of home-baked bread and eggs, etc., etc., as might incite anyone that had breakfasted so long in London to write a pastoral. Then Carlyle takes to his writing, while I, like Eve, 'studious of house- hold good,' inspect my house, my garden, my live stock, gather flowers for my drawing-room, and lapfuls of eggs and finally betake myself also to writing, or reading, or mending, or whatever work seems fittest. After dinner, and only then, I lie on the sofa, and (to my shame be it spoken) sometimes sleep, but oftenest dream waking. ... In the evening I walk on the moor and read. Such is my life." And one is tempted to ask what was wrong with it, in the case of a young Scotchwoman, reared in the frugal home of a country doctor, whose husband was earning his living by his pen, and, as she even then knew, laying the foundation of a great reputation ? To Miss Stodart Mrs. Carlyle wrote : " Indeed, Craigenputtock is no such frightful place as the people call it. ... I read and work and talk with my husband and am never weary. I ride over to Templand [to see her mother]. Grace Macdonald [that is Froude's Scotch maid-of-all-work with her short-comings] is turning out a most excellent servant, and seems the carefullest, honestest creature living." ..." The fact is I have no delight in cows, and have happily no concern with them," and so on. Every statement that Froude made about the Craigenputtock life has been specifically traversed 18 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE by Mrs. Carlyle herself, and yet, knowing this, he ventured to put them forward, and although his attention was called to their incorrectness he never had the grace to withdraw them. As was her manner, Mrs. Carlyle often dilates with mock and merry consternation on her housewife difficulties, and amplifies into haystacks the molehills that obstructed her path, but no one with a milligram of humour could take these sallies seriously. Looking back on these old times when she was ill and depressed, the far slanting shadows may have darkened them and caused her to speak of them with repugnance and gloom, but the chronicles she has left of them prove that they were full of healthful activity and tranquil happiness. Froude does not refer to the Craigenputtock stories in " My Relations with Carlyle," but he still represents Mrs. Carlyle as a household drudge in London, thus repeating a thrice-refuted fallacy. The care and direction of her small establishment was no heavy burden to her, and to have attempted to relieve her of it would have been to give her pain. " Perfection of housekeeping was," said Carlyle, " her clear and speedy attainment," and as a woman takes pride in doing that which she can do well, Mrs. Carlyle gloried in her marketings, and mendings, and lustrations, and recounts, with exquisite burlesque, her experiences of her domestic servants. That she had for many years only one servant was her own choice ; her husband urged her to have two, but she long resisted his entreaties, and when at last she yielded to them she was miser- THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 19 able until the second servant was got out of the house. " So I am now mistress of two servants," she wrote, " and ready to hang myself. Seriously the change is nearly intolerable to me, though both these women are good servants, as servants go. But the twoness ! The much ado about nothing!" In all domestic affairs it was she and not her husband who restricted expenditure. " With great diffi- culty," he writes, " I had got her induced, persuaded, commanded to take two weekly drives in a hired brougham (more difficulty in persuading you to go into any expense than other men have to persuade their wives to keep out of it)." Instead of being "a household drudge," she had often not enough to do, and it might have been an advantage to her if, in the absence of children, she had taken up some definite employment. For serious literary work she had not sufficient persistence. The letters were brilliant spurts, but a continuous flow she could not maintain, although her husband gave her every encouragement. In 1842 he wrote to her: "My prayer is and has always been that you would rouse up the fine faculties that are yours, into some course of real true work which you felt to be worthy of them and of you. ... I will never give up the hope to see you adequately busy with your whole mind, discovering, as all human beings may do, that even in the grimmest rocky wilderness of existence there are blessed well-springs, there is an ever- lasting guiding star. Courage, my poor little Jeannie." In July of the same year he wrote to his brother Alick : "Jane is still altogether weakly, c 2 20 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE but she grows better ; time alone can alleviate that kind of sorrow [the loss of her mother]. She is left very lonely in this world now ; her kindred mostly gone ; very few of the people vaguely called ' friends ' worth much to her! It would be better for her also if she had more imperative employment to follow : a small portion of the day suffices for all her obligatory work, and the rest, when she cannot seek work for herself, is apt to be spent in sorrowful reflexions." Having shown to his own satisfaction that Mrs. Carlyle was on the one hand bullied by her husband and on the other neglected, Froude next proceeds to assure us that she was sarcastic when she spoke of him, " a curious blending of pity, contempt, and other feelings." And no wonder, if Froude is right ; but in a matter like this we cannot entirely depend on his ipse dixit, and, until some one can point out a single utterance in any one of Mrs. Carlyle's writings betokening pity or contempt of her husband, we shall believe that Froude is once more indulging in one of his imaginary conversations. She had a sharp tongue : angry words about her husband sometimes escaped her. He and she now and then no doubt exchanged taunts in private, and in company they chaffed and quizzed each other unmercifully, but that she ever expressed pity and contempt for him, to one of his professing friends, behind his back, is unbelievable. Why, pride in him was the mainstay of her life. " Thanks, Darling," writes Carlyle, " for your shining words and acts, which were continual in my eyes, and in no other THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 21 mortal's. Worthless I was your divinity ; wrapt in your perpetual love of me and pride in me, in defiance of all men and things." " She had from an early period," wrote her sorrowing husband, " formed her own little opinion of me (what an Eldorado to me blind, ungrateful, condemnable, and heavy-laden, and crushed down into blindness by great misery, as I oftenest was), and she never flinched from it for an instant, I think, or cared or counted what the world said to the contrary (very brave, magnanimous, and noble truly she was in all this), but to have the world confirm her in it was always a sensible pleasure which she took no pains to hide especially from me." She was an honourable woman and a faithful wife, and could not have been guilty of the treach- ery that Froude ascribes to her. In 1846, after twenty years of married life, when all her husband's faults and weaknesses must have been known to her, she wrote to him : "I have grown to love you the longer, the more, till now you are grown to be the whole universe, God, everything to me, but in pro- portion as I have got to know all your importance to me, I have been losing faith in my importance to you." Is this pity and contempt ? It was necessary to show some ground for Mrs. Carlyle's alleged pity and contempt of her husband, and so Froude reduces him to the rank of a miserable egotist and valetudinarian. He suffered, he admits, from dyspepsia and want of sleep, but whereas his wife " was expected to bear her trouble in patience, and received hints on the duty of submission if she spoke impatiently, he was never 22 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE more eloquent than in speaking of his own crosses." He himself, Froude opines, " had really a vigorous constitution. He never had a day's serious illness. He used to ride and walk in the wildest weather." Carlyle was therefore in point of fact a malingerer, or a robust invalid, selfishly and querulously vexing those around him by his unmanly appeals for sympathy in his purely imaginary ailments. Hypo- chondria in Froude's eyes is a sort of sick-robe, put on for toilet purposes, and that can be laid aside at pleasure. He never himself suffered from it, but he ought to have remembered, even in his eagerness to prove Carlyle an impostor, that many other men of genius have suffered in exactly the same way. Hypochondria is, indeed, a frequent accompaniment of great intellectual activity. That Carlyle had naturally a fine constitution may be inferred from the age to which he lived, but length of days is not incompatible with a suffering existence. The active exercise he took was essential to alleviate the irritability of the nervous system, which his strenuous work induced, and he was, from first to last, one of those workers to whom production was not facile but arduous and exhausting. Hypochondria is a terribly real disease ; often, as all medical men know, involving more distress than graver and more mortal maladies. Dyspepsia and insomnia com- bined, as literary men do not require to be told, may prove afflictive and incapacitating to an extra- ordinary degree. They have driven many a man of rare ability and promise to madness and suicide, and that Carlyle did not succumb to them, in the THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 23 concentrated form and inveterate type, in which they attacked him, is evidence of his fortitude and will power. From his twenty-fourth year until his work was laid aside they never left him alone, and there can be no question that they often caused him what he called torture and purgatorial pains. The dyspepsia was set up by the ill-cooked and somewhat scanty food supplied to him when he was living in lodgings in Edinburgh on 15^. a week, and in Kirkcaldy on £60 a year, out of which he helped his family, and bravely working his way, and the insomnia followed in its train, when he began to overtax his brain. Froude makes light of Carlyle's sufferings, and in order to bring him into contempt hints that he roared loudly when little hurt. The many doctors he consulted did not think so, nor did his wife, who best knew what he endured, and was unflagging in her sympathy and efforts to devise alleviations. He grasped at all feasible remedies, and even for some years gave up smoking, his chief solace, in the hope of obtaining relief. But while Carlyle was in Froude's view sham- ming, Mrs. Carlyle was really suffering poignantly from the effects of his cruel and inconsiderate treat- ment of her. " In 1862," says Froude, "her health finally broke down, and there came on that strange illness which doctors failed to understand, or if they understood it, they did not venture to speak plainly " — a sentence which includes two erroneous state- ments and an unwarrantable reflexion on Mrs. Carlyle's medical advisers. The final breakdown in her health occurred not in 1862, but in 1863, 24 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE and was the immediate result of shock and injury sustained in a serious street accident in the City. Her illness was not at all strange, and was well understood by her doctors as the culmination of a nervous affection, the seeds of which were born with her, fostered by her bringing up, and brought to full growth and fruition by the cir- cumstances of her life. Her doctors would not have hesitated to speak plainly had they agreed with Froude that it was her husband's " wild irritability " that had shattered her nerves ; and how utterly reckless Froude's assertions are may be realised when we read a few lines further on in his pamphlet that these doctors whom he had just accused of poltroonery " insisted as a first necessity on her separation from him [her husband], the constant agitation of his presence and the equally constant provocation which his forgetfulness and preoccupation made incessant in spite of efforts, taking away all hope of amendment while the cause remained " — a statement which is equally erroneous with all the rest. The doctors never insisted on Mrs. Carlyle's separation from her husband, and never attributed her condition to his irri- tability. " By everybody it had been agreed," wrote Carlyle, "that a change of scene (as usual when all else has failed) was the thing to be looked to : St. Leonard's as soon as the weather will permit, said Dr. Quain and everybody, especially Dr. Blakiston ; " and it is remarkable that if the doctors regarded separation from her husband " as a first necessity," she was not removed to St. THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 25 Leonard's until March, 1864, although her illness began in October, 1863. That Mrs. Carlyle did not regard separation from her husband as either necessary or healing may be gathered from her ten- derly affectionate letters to him from St. Leonard's. No sooner had she arrived there than she wrote to him, " Oh, I would like you beside me ! I am so terribly alone / " " She had been again and again given up," says Froude, blundering on ; but nobody ever gave her up, and she died ultimately, not from the nervous malady from which she was suffering in 1863, but from heart failure. She was, of course, despondent about herself, but that was an inevitable part of her illness, and the anxiety of her doctors was connected more with her mental than with her physical state. She said of herself, "The actual suffering if cleared of the aggravations of the Imagination would be nothing to make a fuss about." " Suddenly, as if from the grave," exclaims Froude, " she came back ; " but the recovery which began in July, 1864, was very gradual, and was not complete until October of that year, if then. " She still mocked to me," goes on Froude, "about him [Carlyle], and the old resentment was there, though it showed itself less." If she did so, she must have been the most deceitful of women, for at this very time she was writing to her friends pouring forth her gratitude to her husband for his solicitous care of her. " I cannot tell you," she wrote to Mrs. Austin, " how kind and good Mr. Carlyle is ! " " The injury had gone too deep," proceeds the sepulchral Froude. . . . "Her nerves had been so shaken by 26 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE her many years of suffering that some singular disease had developed itself, I believe, in her spine." But Mrs. Carlyle never had anything the matter with her spine, her nervous disease was in no degree singular, and had in it in its later stages a large element of hysteria, and she died, as we have said, of heart failure, from which she had suffered at intervals for many years. No one can, we think, read Froude's account of Mrs. Carlyle's illness in the light of the expla- nations now given, without feeling that it was throughout calculated to create prejudice against her husband, whom he almost accuses of having caused her death. No one can read it and realise that it is typical of Froude's treatment of Carlyle in other matters, without understanding the indig- nation that his elaborate fabrications have induced amongst Carlyle's friends. Froude set himself, in writing " My Relations with Carlyle," to improve on the mixed picture of the Life and to exhibit him as a hard, heartless man with no redeeming traits of character. " He made little of other people's sufferings," he says. But is this true ? " Miss Martineau," says Professor Masson, " in her description of Carlyle from her own knowledge, actually singled out for special note, as that in his character which distinguished him most from all other men she had seen, his enormous power of sympathy. It was a most correct observation. No one who knew Carlyle but must have noted how instantaneously he was affected or even agitated by any case of difficulty THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 27 or distress in which he was consulted or that was casually brought to his cognisance, and with what restless curiosity and exactitude he would inquire into all the particulars, till he had conceived the case thoroughly, and, as it were, taken the whole pain of it into himself. The practical procedure, if any was possible, was sure to follow." This very Froude, who declares that Carlyle made little of other people's sufferings, had written elsewhere — he must have forgotten it — " I had not expected so much detailed compassion in little things. I found that personal sympathy with suffering lay at the root of all his thoughts ; and that attention to little things was as characteristic of his conduct as it was of his intellect." In another place he wrote — " No one, however, can read these letters [his letters to his wife] or ten thousand like them with- out recognising the affectionate tenderness which lay at the bottom of his nature." No one can recall the incidents of Carlyle's career, his contributions to one brother's education and to another's farming, when he was still poor and struggling, his frequent little gifts to his father and mother, his never- forgotten birthday presents to his wife, his exertions on behalf of the Misses Lowes, and scores of like acts, without recognising that he was a thoughtful, sympathetic and large-hearted man, and that Froude has cruelly maligned him. How did this man, who was, Froude tells us, in the habit of " bursting into violence at the smallest and absurdest provoca- tions," comport himself at that terrible juncture when John Stuart Mill came to announce the burn- 28 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE ing of the first volume of the manuscript of the 11 French Revolution " ? He never lost his com- posure, and the first words he spoke to his wife when Mill was gone were, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is very miserable. We must try to keep from him how serious the loss is to us." But not only, Froude would have us believe, did Carlyle shatter his wife's nerves and shorten her days, he also made cruel shipwreck of her faith. " She had accepted," he writes, " the destructive part of his opinions like so many others, but he had failed to satisfy her that he knew where positive truth lay. He had taken from her, as she mourn- fully said [when did she say it or where ? save in one of Froude's imaginary conversations], the creed in which she had been bred, but he had been unable to put anything in place of it. She believed nothing. On the spiritual side of things her mind was a per- fect blank ; she looked into her own heart and into the world beyond her, and it was all void and desert ; there was no word of consolation, no word of hope." It is strange that these teachings of Carlyle, which produced on Froude what he calls " a conviction of sin," which taught him the intense seriousness of life, and awakened him to the mean- ing of duty and the overpowering obligation to do it, and " saved him from atheism," as he has in- formed us, thus enlarging and bracing his existence, should have had such an opposite effect on Mrs. Carlyle, rendering her hopeless and void. One would have supposed that this thoughtful woman, the most brilliant and interesting Froude had ever THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 29 fallen in with, would have been influenced by Carlyle's doctrine very much as Froude himself was. But not so. What was his meat was her poison. Froude was redeemed, Mrs. Carlyle was cast into outer darkness. Long before her marriage, Miss Jane Welsh had emancipated herself from the creed in which she was brought up. When she was still a school-girl at Haddington, so Froude tells us, " her tutor intro- duced her to ' Virgil,' and the effect of ' Virgil ' and her other Latin studies was to change her religion and make her into a sort of Pagan." And a sort of Pagan she ever afterwards remained. Her words were as follows : " That my Latin studies pursued far too closely and strenuously for so young a girl had changed my religion, if I could be said to have one, is strictly true, and it wasn't my religion only that they influenced, my whole being was imbued with them." In giving this passage Froude has omitted, surely, we are entitled to say, has curiously omitted, the words, " if I could be said to have one," i.e., a religion. The letter which she wrote to her grand- mother, on the occasion of her father's death when she was eighteen years old, is a clear proof that she had then parted company with revealed truth, as taught in the Church of Scotland. She bows to the chastisement of the Divine Power, and acknow- ledges that the ways of the Almighty are mysterious ; but there is not, in that letter, one ray of Christian faith or hope. No believing Scottish girl of the period could possibly have written such a letter under such circumstances. 30 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE That Miss Welsh had shed whatever faith she once possessed and had developed some of the unlovely traits of character which so often accom- pany that disrobement in a woman, long before she fell under the influence of Carlyle, is abundantly clear. In 1821, that is to say in the year in which Carlyle was introduced to her, we find Edward Irving expressing serious anxiety as to her spiritual state. He had laboured with all his energies to lead his pupil to think of Christianity as he did himself, but he had serious misgivings respecting her. " She contemplates," he wrote to Carlyle, " the inferiority of others rather from the point of ridicule and contempt than from that of commiseration and relief ; and by so doing she not only leaves objects in distress and loses the luxury of doing good, but she contracts in her own mind a degree of coldness and bitterness which suits ill with my conception of female character and a female's station in society. ... I could like to see her surrounded with a more sober set of companions than Rousseau and Byron and such like ... I fear Jane has already dipped too deep into that spring, so that unless some more solid food be afforded I fear she will escape alto- gether out of the region of my sympathies and the sympathies of honest home-bred men. In these feelings I know you will join me." In 1822, Irving wrote to Miss Welsh herself, " Now it does give me great hope that God will yet be pleased to open your mind to the highest of all knowledge, the knowledge of his Blessed Son, and give therewith the highest of all delights, of being like his Son in THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 31 character and in destiny, when I see you not alienated from men of genius by their being men of religion, but attracted to them I think rather the more. I could wish indeed — and forgive me when I make free to suggest it — that your mind were less anxious for the distinction of being enrolled amongst those whom this world has crowned with their admiration, than among those whom God has crowned with his approval. . . . Oh, how few I find, my dear Jane, hardly have I found a single one, who can stand the intoxication of high talents or resist presuming to lord it over others." In Carlyle's numerous letters to Miss Welsh, from his introduction to her in 1821 till their marriage in 1826, there is not a sentence calculated to inspire doubt, while there is much that ought to have exalted her moral nature, and after marriage his creed might have saved her from blank scepticism had she chosen to accept it. But she was a worldly little woman, and her Godlessness, until she was by severe illness brough back to some semblance of piety, was perhaps a rather disenchanting element in her character. Froude would have us believe that in relation to his wife Carlyle was an icono- clast and a faith wrecker, an atheist of the most blatant type. But what are the facts — the facts of things — as Carlyle would have had it ? He was a fervid Theist, proclaiming the existence of God with as much earnestness and insistence as the inspired camel-driver of Arabia. He was an intensely religious man, who, while rejecting theologic dogmas and formulas, accepted Chris- %2 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE o tianity in its ethical aspects, and was never tired of preaching truth, honesty, temperance, mercy, humility and God-fearing. He had the deepest reverence for the life and character of Christ as represented in the Gospels. He retained a con- viction of the efficacy of prayer, and had a lurking belief in a Particular Providence, and a clinging hope of the immortality of the soul. When stricken in years he found that expression was best given to his spiritual needs in Pope's verses in the " Universal Prayer " — " Father of all ! in every age, In every clime, adored, By saint, by savage and by sage Jehovah Jove or Lord ! Thou Great First-Cause, least understood, Who all my sense confined To know but this, that Thou art good, And that myself am blind." " Not a word of that," he wrote in 1868, " requires change for me at this time, if words are to be used at all." Carlyle's creed might have given some support to Jane Welsh and filled up the blank in her mind had she been able to grasp it and believe that the Maker of all things will do right ; but, as clever, self-sufficient women are apt to do when they have thrown away faith, she went to the extreme of scepticism. Perhaps if she had read " The Nemesis of Faith " she might have been cured of her doubts. That she was what she was, was no fault of Carlyle's. Had she remained in the fold in THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 33 which she was brought up, he would never have called her out of it, for he recognised that spiritual truth may have many different vestments. After his own re-birth we find him writing to his aged mother thus : " Often, my dear mother, in solitary pensive moments, does it come across me like the cold shadow of death that we two must part in the course of time. I shudder at the thought, and find no refuge except in humbly trusting that the great God will surely appoint us a meeting in that far country to which we are tending. May He bless you for ever, my dear mother, and keep up in your heart the sublime hopes which at present serve as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to guide our footsteps through the wilderness of life. We are in His hands. He will not utterly forsake us. Let us trust in Him." Two years before her death, when his wife was visiting Dr. Russell at Thornhill amidst the scenes of her girlhood, Carlyle wrote to her : " What strange old days (sunk like old ages) you look out upon from your windows there, my poor heavy- laden little woman. Yes ; but it is for ever true ' The Eternal rules above us ' and in us and around us ; and this is not Hell or Hades but the ' Place of Hope ' — the Place where what is right will be fulfilled. And you know that, too, in your way, my own little Jeannie — and you will not and must not forget it ; forgetting it one would go mad." But all this was hypocrisy, Froude suggests. " I suppose," he remarks of Carlyle, " that his own inconsistencies interfered with the effect of his D 34 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE teaching. He ' recked not his own rede,' and those whose practice falls short of their theories do not seem to believe really in their theories themselves." So Mrs. Carlyle knew her husband for an impostor, and laughed in her sleeve at his invocations of the Silences, the Eternities, etc. And yet of this very man, whom Froude thus estimates, in 1887, he had written to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle in 1880: "I have been reading over the letters to his mother and brothers. They are so admirable, and give so full a picture of his inner life — so consistent from first to last, that I think, when the ' Reminiscences ' are published, these letters ought to form an accompanying volume. No life could be written which would furnish so complete a conception of him — of his own nature and of the circumstances under which he had to work." We have thus far followed Froude in his pamphlet, " My Relations with Carlyle," and have found it really an exposition of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle's relations with each other. If we ask what the impression left by this exposition is, the answer must surely be that Carlyle, if Froude is to be believed, was a bully and a brute, selfish and vaporish, incessantly wrangling with his unhappy wife whom he neglected, ill-treated, compelled to engage in menial offices and alienated from religion, thus undermining her health and hastening her death. Fine phrases are all very well, but they cannot obscure the " facts of things," if they are facts, and when Froude tells us that he did not allow his reverence and admiration for Carlyle's THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 35 intellect and high moral greatness to be interfered with by what he saw and heard, we can only marvel at his moral obtuseness and his heed- lessness in writing down his own condemnation. Nay, it must be said that if his tale is true, there was more than moral obtuseness in Froude's conduct ; there was cowardly acquiescence in a flagrant wrong. For six years, by his own account, he stood by, consenting to the slow martyrdom of a woman whom he has described as bright and sparkling and tender and uttered no word of remon- strance or protest. He saw her involved in a perpetual blizzard and did nothing to shelter her. He witnessed at Cheyne Row the enactment of " a tragedy as stern and real as the story of CEdipus," but it was no business of his. It was enough for him to be admitted to the Cheyne Row tea parties and enjoy the brilliancy of the conversation. Froude's representatives must ultimately feel grate- ful to us for showing that he was not altogether as callous as he has endeavoured to prove himself to have been. For what we have heard hitherto about Carlyle from Froude, Froude is himself responsible. For the general description of the life at Cheyne Row and of Carlyle's treatment of his wife, he has, in " My Relations with Carlyle," drawn entirely on his own reminiscences. We are expected to receive with faith his recollections of what he noticed and of the gossip he heard when admitted to Carlyle's family circle, which, with an unparalleled abuse of hospitality, he has made use of to sully d 2 36 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE the good name of his host. No particular instance is recalled ; no confirmatory evidence is quoted ; no documentary corroboration is referred to. The charges rest on the unsupported testimony of an habitual blunderer. But besides the general charges against Carlyle in connection with his treatment of his wife, which Froude has made, he has three specific charges to bring forward, and for these, while he has adopted and published them, he does not make himself directly answerable. They are grave charges. One impugns Carlyle's conduct in connection with his friendship with Lady Ashburton. Another traces the unhappiness of his married life to a physical defect under which, it is alleged, he laboured, and which made his marriage no marriage. A third accuses him of using personal violence to his wife. Each of these three charges rests exclusively upon the evidence of one witness, and in each case that witness is the same person, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury. The whole edifice of imputation which Froude has with so much ingenuity and apparent ingenuousness erected, rests solely on confidential communications made to him by this lady, and the first and most essential point to determine is her credibility. Froude did not, of course, fail to realise this. He perceived that it was of paramount importance to his case that Miss Jewsbury should be believed, and he has therefore taken pains to show that she had the best opportunities of knowing what she spoke about, and was a faithful, guileless creature ; and in doing this he has resorted to methods which THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 37 are certainly not characterised by an excess of scru- pulosity. Mrs. Carlyle, he tells us, spoke and wrote of Geraldine Jewsbury as her Consuelo ; but if she did so, she must have used the appellation in an ironical sense, for their correspondence proves that she never took any bit of advice Miss Jewsbury offered, snubbed her peremptorily whenever she ventured to express an opinion, and looked upon her more as an exasperator than as a com- forter. That they were often on terms of close intimacy is true. Miss Jewsbury was a gifted woman who had introduced herself to Carlyle by writing to him as one of his ardent worshippers and became a hanger-on of the Cheyne Row household. But her intimacy with Mrs. Carlyle was not of the sort which Froude would have us believe and which he indicates by the incorrect statement that Miss Jewsbury "was about Mrs. Carlyle's own age": the truth being that there were eleven years between them — Mrs. Carlyle having been born in 1801, and Miss Jewsbury in 18 12. Miss Jewsbury was never admitted to the penetralia of Mrs. Carlyle's thoughts and feelings, but was kept waiting and serving in the courts without, and there was always an element of patronage and protection in Mrs. Carlyle's attitude towards her. Mrs. Carlyle was flattered by the worship she offered, and was grateful for the many delicate attentions she bestowed ; but from first to last she treated her as a weak and wayward being, destitute of discretion and good sense, and it is surely a significant fact that Froude deliberately suppressed every letter of Mrs. Carlyle's in which IS*. 38 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE her candid opinion of her friend is set forth. In the " Letters and Memorials " that Froude selected and edited, there is nothing reflecting unfavourably on Miss Jewsbury, whereas in the " New Letters and Memorials " may be found abundant proofs of the light esteem in which Mrs. Carlyle held her. She described her as a fussy, romantic, hysterical woman, a considerable fool, with her head packed full of nonsense, and nick-named her " Miss Gooseberry." " It is her besetting sin," she said, " and her trade of novelist has aggravated it — the desire of feeling and pro- ducing violent emotions." Miss Jewsbury's intrigues and love affairs are often contemptuously alluded to by Mrs. Carlyle. " Geraldine," she wrote, " has one besetting weakness. She is never happy unless she has a grande passion on hand, and as unmarried men take fright at her impulsive and demonstrative ways, her grandes pissions for these thirty years have been all expended on married men." In another place she mentions that she was " openly making the craziest love to a man " who was engaged to be married, and in another that she was " in a frenzy over a letter from her declared lover, an Egyptian," who had one wife already, and in still another that she had herself allowed that she had "absolutely no sense of decency." And beyond all this Miss Jewsbury's feelings towards Mrs. Carlyle herself, which were well-known to Froude, were of a nature that should have made him pause before listening to her revelations on ticklish topics. They were highly extra va- THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 39 gant, and in some degree perverted. The mani- festation by Mrs. Carlyle of some preference or supposed preference for another woman led on one occasion to a wild outburst of what Miss Jewsbury herself called " tiger jealousy," which, says Mrs. Carlyle, " on the part of one woman towards another it had never entered my head to conceive. I am not at all sure she is not going mad." Other instances of violent emotional perturbations over Mrs. Carlyle are recorded, and the language of Miss Jewsbury's letters to Mrs. Carlyle, preserved by Mrs. Ireland, is often highly charged and erotic. It is not customary for a woman of thirty-two years of age to write to her female friend, eleven years her senior, in such terms as these : " You are never out of my thoughts one hour together ; " "I think of you much more than if you were my lover ; " "I cannot express my feelings even to you — vague undefined yearnings to be yours in some way." Of delicate, nervous, highly-strung constitution, Miss Jewsbury became a morbid, unstable, excitable woman, constantly com- plaining of headaches and other ailments, and suffering from mental depression, for she chronicles of herself: "For two years I lived only in short respites from this blackness of despair. It is not sorrow ; one could endure that. Oh, it is too frightful to talk about ! The depression which falls upon one in a moment, enveloping one body and soul for hours or days, as it may be, and the horrid, lucid interval which we spend in dread of its return, knowing full well that it will come." All the 4 o THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE biographical details of Miss Jewsbury which we possess, and they are ample, establish that, notwith- standing her interesting personality, her brilliant conversational powers and fine literary talent, she was unreliable and erratic, or, as Carlyle summed her up, " a flimsy tatter of a creature." In order to show that Carlyle placed some confidence in Miss Jewsbury, we are told by Froude that he " had requested Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, who had been his wife's most intimate friend, to tell him any biographical anecdotes which she could remember to have heard from Mrs. Carlyle's lips," and that after reading these he wrote, " Few or none of these narratives are correct in details, but there is a certain mythical truth in all or most of them." This in the original is as follows, being a letter to Miss Jewsbury: "Dear Geral- dine, — Few or none of these Narratives are correct in all the details ; some of them, in almost all the details are incorrect. I have not read care- fully beyond a certain point which is marked on the margin. Your recognition of the character is generally true and faithful ; little of portraiture in it that satisfies me. On the whole, all tends to the mythical; it is very strange how much of mythical there already here is ! As Lady Lothian set you on writing, it seems hard that she should not see what you have written : but I wish you to take her word of honour that no one else shall ; and my earnest request to you is that, directly from her Ladyship, you will bring the Book to me and consign it to my keeping. No need THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 41 that an idle-gazing world should know my lost Darling's History, or mine ; — nor will they ever ; — they may depend upon it ! One fit service, and one only, they can do to Her or to Me : cease speaking of us through all eternity, as soon as they conve- niently can." The words, "There is a certain mythical truth," etc., are transferred and altered by Mr. Froude from a subsequent passage, and Miss Jewsbury's Narratives, which nobody but Lady Lothian was to see, were of course published in full by Froude. Of Miss Jewsbury's Narratives of his wife, Carlyle said that her accounts of her childhood were substantially correct, but as regards the rest " few or none are correct in all the details, some of them in almost all the details are incorrect." He subsequently refers to the Narratives as a " Book of Myths," and declares that they grow more and more mythical as they go on. " Geraldine's account of Comley Bank and life at Edinbugh is extremely mythic." "Geraldine's Craigenputtock stories are more mythical than any of the rest ; " and it is upon these Craigenputtock stories, mythical of the mythic, that Froude based his primary indictment against Carlyle for his treatment, or rather maltreatment, of his wife. And this Geraldine, this weaver of myths, this hysterical and irresponsible woman, is the sole witness he has to call in support of his serious charges against Carlyle, two of which are now for the first time brought to light. It was in what may be called the " Ashburton 42 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE Affair " that Froude first invoked Miss Jewsbury s aid — an affair in connexion with which the injustice he has done Carlyle may be made clearly apparent. His first knowledge of it — for he was never himself admitted to the Ashburton circle — came to him, he states, in 1871, more probably in 1873, when a' large parcel of papers, including the Memoir of Mrs. Carlyle and her Letters, handed to him by Carlyle, led him to place himself in communication with John Forster, who told him a singular story. He told him, he says, " that Lady Ashburton had fallen deeply in love with Carlyle, that Carlyle had behaved nobly, and that Lord Ashburton had thanked him." Those who knew John Forster — a generous, straightforward man, trained and even sworn, as a Commissioner in Lunacy, to silence as to family secrets — will be chary in believing that, even had he been certain of all this, he would have communicated it to Froude, whose reputation for literary indiscretion was already established, and thus have compromised the reputation of a woman of high rank and brilliant ability, of whose hospitality he had often partaken. But as it turns out that he had and could have had no foundation for the defamatory statement, it may be taken as certain that he never made it. Familiar as he was with the usages of society, knowing as he did the terms of close intimacy on which the-Ashburtons and Carlyles remained after her ladyship's alleged indiscretion and Carlyle's noble conduct, it is impossible that he could have harboured such a suspicion. His alleged communication to Froude on the subject, of which THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 43 no shred of corroboration can be adduced, may be set down therefore as one of Froude's imaginary conversations. But even if John Forster had told Froude what he repeats, the introduction of the little bit of scandal into Froude's narrative is gratuitous and inexcusable. It was, he assures us, wholly untrue. Then why cause annoyance to Lady Ashburton's family and friends by referring to it at all ? Merely to secure an antithetical effect. The story was not only untrue, but the opposite of the truth. It was not, Froude now informs us, Lady Ashburton who was deeply in love with Carlyle, but Carlyle who was deeply in love with Lady Ashburton. And here let us mark in passing an illustration of the unblushing inconsistency of our informant. " That Carlyle should have behaved nobly," he writes, "under such circumstances [that is in rejecting Lady Ashburton's advances] seemed extremely likely to me," and in the next paragraph but one he represents Carlyle as behaving with detestable meanness in making love to his friend's wife at the very time when he was accepting favours at that friend's hand. This is indeed characteristic of Froude's handling of Carlyle. He presents him to us as a bundle of contrarieties and incompatabilities and mutually destructive elements such as never lodged together in one human body. It was not until 1871, according to Froude (or 1873, as we shall hereafter show), when he read Mrs. Carlyle's Journal, that the true inwardness of the Ashburton affair dawned on him. There, 44 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE he says, was the explanation of much of the bitter- ness that appeared in her letters ; but writing in Cuba in 1887 he seems to have forgotten what he wrote in London in 1883, for then he unequivocally stated, in his note to the Journal, that he did not understand it and submitted it to Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, who supplied him with the version of the Ashburton affair, which he now adopts and sets forth as his own. Froude had no personal knowledge of the Ash- burton affair. Mrs. Carlyle's Journal remained dark to him. He invited Miss Jewsbury to let in the light on it, and she burned magnesium and strontium with dazzling and blinding effect. He unhesitatingly accepted this variety artist's interpretation of what was cryptic in the Journal, and in " My Relations with Carlyle " he presents it as his own without even mentioning Miss Jewsbury's name, and con- veys the idea that it was in the papers placed in his hands that he himself found the solution of the Ashburton mystery. There he discovered, he would have us believe, that " Carlyle had sate at the feet of the fine lady, adoring and worshipping, had made himself the plaything of her caprices, had made Lady Ashburton the object of the same idolatrous homage which he had once paid to herself" [his wife]. That is a grave charge to bring against " a great spiritual teacher," and on the face of it somewhat improbable as brought against a man between fifty and sixty years of age, and of such a constitution that according to Froude he ought THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 45 never to have married. But let Froude call his witnesses. He has but one. Miss Geraldine Jews- bury steps into the box. " This flimsy tatter of a creature," as Carlyle called her, this hysterical woman, this practised romancer, this volume of " exaggerations and affectations and got-up feelings," is the sole prop of Froude's case. And how did he take her evidence ? Not by asking her what she knew of the affair, but by sending her Mrs. Carlyle's private Journal, which she had kept locked up and never meant human eye to see, and asking her to read for him between the lines of the obscure passages. The task was no doubt a congenial one to Miss Jewsbury. She gave wings to her fancy. She had never been admitted to the real confidence of that sensible and discreet woman Mrs. Carlyle, but she had no hesitation in imagining that she had been behind the scenes and had seen the actors in undress. She accused Carlyle of having lingered " in the primrose path of dalliance " and of being " a philosopher in chains " to a great and capricious lady, and so subjecting his poor wife to " sufferings real, intense, and at times too grievous to be borne " Froude instantly and implicitly accepted Miss Jewsbury's key to the Ashburton cypher. Forster's alleged story had to be put aside, and here, again, crops up Froude's inaccuracy. " What," he asks, "was the meaning of Forster's story? He died soon after, and I had no opportunity of asking him." But Miss Jewsbury supplied her key to the Ash- burton cypher either in 1871 or 1873, and Forster died in 1876, and was vigorous to the last, and yet 46 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE in three or four years Froude could not find an opportunity of asking him to explain an entirely erroneous story, for which he had made himself responsible, and to clear up a point vitally affecting the character of the great man whose life he (Froude) had undertaken to write, and to write, as he is always assuring us, with such scrupulous fidelity. Was the penny post suspended ? Could he not walk a mile, or spare a quarter of an hour ? The truth is Miss Jewsbury's theory suited him exactly, being in harmony with his preconceived opinion, and he did not think it necessary to submit it to any close scrutiny. Carlyle lived for seven years after Froude was put in possession of it, and surely, in common justice, he ought to have been asked to confirm or contradict it. " I tried once," says Froude, " to approach the subject with Carlyle him- self, but he shrank from it with such signs of distress that I could not speak to him about it again." Strange conduct this on the part of a man who during four years never walked out with Froude — and they walked out together twice weekly — with- out drifting back, so Froude tells us, into a pathetic cry of sorrow over things that were irreparable, and giving expression to a repentance that was deep and passionate. One would have thought that it would have been a relief to him to have made a clean breast of it to his father confessor. A repent- ance that consists of pharisaical generalities, and does not condescend to particulars, is not of the noble type which Froude affirms Carlyle's to have been ; and it seems probable, therefore, that Froude's THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 47 approach to Carlyle on the Ashburton affair must be put down amongst the imaginary conversations, more especially as with others, Carlyle never in his declining years manifested the slightest|disinclina- tion to talk about his friendship with the Ashburtons. Never did Carlyle, in conversation or in his writings, even in the gloomiest hours of his bereavement, express the least sorrow or contrition, or blame him- self in connection with his intimacy with Lady Ashburton. He always refers to it with pride ; and there is, as Venables had justly remarked, " a total unconsciousness of any questionable conduct or feeling" on his own part. " Least of all, does he regret the long-continued friendship which at one time caused her [Mrs. Carlyle] so much discontent." No one can read Carlyle's moving note on the death of Lady Ashburton, without perceiving that he looked back on his friendship with her with no qualms of conscience : — " Monday, 4th May, 4^ p.m., at Paris, died Lady Ashburton : a great and irre- parable sorrow to me ; yet with some beautiful consolations in it, too." In annotating his wife's letters after her death, when in the full flood of his grief, and when remorse for any wrong done to her, if, as Froude affirms, it visited him, must have been tormenting his soul, he could thus write of the woman whom Froude points to as her rival in his affections: "The most queen-like woman I had ever known or seen. The honour of her constant regard had, for ten years back, been amongst my proudest and most valued possessions — lost now ; gone — for ever gone ! ... In no society, English or other, 48 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE had I seen the equal or the second of this great lady that has gone ; by nature and by culture facile princeps, she, I think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." In Mrs. Carlyle, a great change took place in her view of Lady Ashburton after that lady's death. She was then, in 1857, recovering in some measure from the morbid melancholy which was at its acme in 1856, and the scales fell from her eyes. Regarding Lady Ashburton's funeral, which Carlyle attended, she wrote, " All the men who used to compose a sort of Court for her were there in tears." As to her first visit to the Grange after Lady Ashburton's death, she wrote : " The same household of visitors ; the same elaborate apparatus for living ; and the life of the whole thing gone out of it ! Acting a sort of Play of the Past, with the principal Part suppressed, obliterated by the stern hand of Death." She actually accepted from Lord Ashburton some of the belongings of his late wife, which she could scarcely have done had her feelings towards her continued as they were in 1856. " I wish you would thank Lord Ashburton for me," she wrote to her husband from Haddington ; " I couldn't say anything about his kindness in giving me those things which she had been in the habit of wearing ; I felt so sick and so like to cry, that I am afraid I seemed quite stupid and ungrateful to him." But if Froude hesitated to sound Carlyle on the Ashburton affair and could not in three years find time to interrogate Forster, there were, at the time Miss Jewsbury's version of it was communicated to THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 49 him, various other ways of getting at the truth. Miss Mary Aitken, whom he at that time addressed in his letters as " My dear Mary," was living with her uncle, and had access to all his papers and could have helped him. Dr. John Carlyle, who knew more than any one else of what the married life of his brother and sister-in-law had been, was alive and could have settled the point. The second Lady Ashburton was alive, and could have resolved his difficulties. To not one of these did he apply. Not one of them is he able to quote. To none of Mrs. Carlyle's friends at the time of the Ashburton affair, save Miss Jewsbury, did he apply for en- lightenment. He buttoned up in his breast that lady's precious disclosure and reserved it for post- mortem application. True, he says, " there are in existence, or there were, masses of extravagant letters of Carlyle's to the great lady as ecstatic as Don Quixote's to Dulcinea," but he does not say that he has ever seen these letters, or has derived his knowledge of their nature, from any one who has seen them. It ought to be a sufficient answer to Froude's statement to recall the fact that these letters passed, on Lady Ashburton's death, into the hands of her husband who read them, and cannot have thought them offensive in any way, as he continued one of Carlyle's warmest friends until his life's end, that on his death they were read by his widow Louisa, Lady Ashburton, who also main- tained an uninterrupted friendship with the writer. A little while before Carlyle's death, Louisa, Lady Ashburton, told Mrs. Alexander Carlyle that she E 5 o THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE had burnt, or was going to burn, the letters, that they were friendly intimate letters, expressive of admiration, but in no way transgressing proper bounds. If in one of these letters, as Froude declares, Carlyle asked Lady Ashburton not to tell his wife of some visit he paid her, the circumstance is susceptible not merely of an innocent but of a laudable explanation, for during part of the Ash- burton friendship, his wife was in her morbid jealousy, feverishly counting his visits to Bath House, and it might have been humane to conceal from her that he had dined there. But if Carlyle's letters to Lady Ashburton have been destroyed, Lady Ashburton's replies to them have been preserved. Carlyle said they were " dry as sticks," but they read now as simple, friendly, kindly epistles. In not one of them is there any chidinof of the Ouixotic exuberance of the corre- spondent, which Froude has affirmed ; in not one is there a trace of the imperious mistress to whom Carlyle was a passing amusement and a slave, as Froude has phrased it, going far beyond even the transcendental Miss Jewsbury, who is obliged to admit that any other wife than Mrs. Carlyle " would have laughed at Mr. Carlyle's bewitchment with Lady Ashburton." Froude insinuated that Carlyle was extravagantly deluded, and having drawn the con- trast that Lady Ashburton was a great lady of the world, while " Carlyle with all his genius had the manners to the last of an Annandale peasant," he recalls an instance of a peasant of genius who was weak enough to believe that a great lady who had THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 51 taken an admiring interest in him, under analagous circumstances, wanted to marry him. All this is designed to bring censure and derision on Carlyle, and all is wide of the mark. Carlyle was proud to call himself a peasant's son, but at the same time he had some good Scottish blood in his veins. Froude said, and he must have forgotten he had said it, " There was reason to believe that his own father was the actual representative of the Lords of Torthorwald ; and though he laughed, when he spoke of it, he was clearly not displeased to know that he had noble blood in him. Rustic as he was in habits, dress and complexion, he had a knightly, chivalrous temperament, and fine natural courtesy ; another sure sign of good breeding was his hand, which was small, perfectly shaped with long fine fingers and aristocratic finger nails." Venables, too, had said, " Notwithstanding his humble birth and rustic training, he was keenly sensible to refinement of character and manner, and his own demeanour, tho' not conventional, was gracious and on fit occasions courtly." " My recollections of him are of almost uniform geniality and unfailing courtesy, tho' his cheerfulness might not be always undisturbed." Carlyle's manners of an Annandale peasant did not exclude him from the highest circles of London Society, and were assuredly no barrier to the friendship of that great Lady, Lady Ashburton, which was the utmost that, in her case, he ever aspired to. Stripped of the bedizenments that Froude and Miss Jewsbury have decked it in, the Ashburton e 2 52 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE affair is innocent and intelligible enough. It was Mrs. Carlyle who made the acquaintance of Lady Ashburton in the first instance, when she formed a high opinion of her merits, describing her as the cleverest woman she had ever met, full of energy and sincerity, and with an excellent heart ; and it was she who urged Carlyle to accept the invitations which Lord Ashburton, then Mr. Baring, gave him to his town and country houses, realising the advan- tages which might accrue from the acquaintance of the distinguished people that he met in these places. Carlyle was reserved and fastidious, and, had he declined the hand which the Ashburtons held out, London Society of the better sort might long have remained closed to him. As the Ashburtons' guest, he met on equal terms men of rank and letters. Until the death of Sir Robert Peel, he probably entertained some hope of entering public or official life, and it was therefore desirable that he should become known to the leading politicians of the period. He took pleasure, too, legitimate pleasure, in the society of the brilliant and ambitious woman, so full of intellectual gaiety and satirical caprice, who presided over the Ashburton circle ; but that he was not, as Froude suggests, an interloper in that circle, paying clandestine homage to its mistress, let Lord Houghton, writing when both Lady Ashburton and Carlyle were dead, attest : " There could," he says, "be no better guarantee of these qualities (a joyous sincerity that no conventionalities, high or low, could restrain — a festive nature flower- ing through the artificial soil of elevated life) than THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 53 the constant friendship that existed between Lady Ashburton and Carlyle— on her part one of filial respect and duteous admiration. The frequent presence of the great moralist of itself gave to the life of Bath House and The Grange a reality that made the most ordinary worldly component parts of it more human and worthy than elsewhere." That the friendship between Carlyle and Lady Ashburton never, on either side, drifted into ex- travagance, the character and conduct of Lord Ashburton are a sufficient Guarantee. He had been engaged in vast monetary transactions in various parts of the world ; he had, as Mr. Bingham Baring, formed part of the Administration of Sir Robert Peel in 1835. He was a man of the noblest and purest purpose, with an entirely un- selfish and truthful disposition, who, while mani- festing lover-like delight and intellectual wonder in the display of his wife's genius and gaiety, main- tained, we are told, a quiet authority over her in all the serious affairs of life. Is it likely that such a man would tolerate the slightest indiscretion on the part of his wife or of Carlyle, or permit, under his roof, anything calculated to cause just pain and anger to Mrs. Carlyle, for whom he felt the highest regard ? In the early days the Ashburton friendship was a source of unalloyed pleasure to Mrs. Carlyle. The invitations to Bath House or Addiscombe invariably included her — unless in the case of a gentlemen's dinner-party — and she many times went alone, leaving her husband at home. But, as time 54 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE went on, a certain jealousy of Lady Ashburton took possession of her mind. Lady Ashburton was as clever a conversationalist as she, and had social prestige which gave her an advantage, and Mrs. Carlyle could not bear to be outshone. She first grudged Lady Ashburton the attention and admira- tion she commanded in the general circle, she then grudged specifically the attention and admiration that Carlyle openly gave her, and finally she got it into her head that Carlyle had transferred to her the attention and admiration he once surrendered to his wife, and was in love with her. Then it was that in pathetic, sometimes in bitter accents, she gave utterance to the morbid jealousy that consumed her — " Oh, waly, waly, love is bonnie A little while when it is new; But when it's auld It waxeth cauld, And melts away like morning dew." " Beautiful verse, sweet and sad, like barley- sugar dissolved in tears. About the morning dew, however ! I would say, ' Goes out like candle snuff' would be a truer simile ; only that would not suit the rhyme." This last phase, however, morbid jealousy, only came when Mrs. Carlyle's health had given way, and was indeed but a sign of mental disorder. It may be laid down as axiomatic in medical psy- chology, that when a highly neurotic and childless woman, at a critical period of life, takes to morphia, morbid jealousy will develop itself. Mrs. Carlyle THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 55 was highly neurotic and childless, and at a critical period of life she became addicted to morphia and other drugs, and ultimately developed morbid jealousy of her husband. No medical man can look carefully into her case without being convinced that she suffered from neurasthenia and climacteric melancholia, and that the piteous outcries of the Journal, which Froude, guided by Miss Jewsbury, accepted as proofs of her husband's perfidy and cruelty, were really but the empty ejaculations of her disordered feelings. Only the husband who has gone through the ordeal of living for years with a wife emotionally deranged, but intellectually clear as Mrs. Carlyle was, can realise what Carlyle must have endured, at a time, too, when he was struggling" and almost sinking under a heavy task. His sympathetic gentleness and forbearance are beyond all praise. Froude having thrown off all constraints now declares that Mrs. Carlyle was " ashamed and indignant at the unworthy position in which her husband was placing himself. Rinaldo in the bower of Armida or Hercules spinning silks for Omphale." It must have escaped his memory that he had formerly written " Carlyle's letters during all this period [the Asburton affair period] are uniformly tender and affectionate, and in them was his true self, if she could but have allowed herself to see it." The Ashburton affair was truly, as Froude remarks, the cause of much heartburning and misery at Cheyne Row, but it was so only because Mrs. Carlyle's diseased fancies fastened upon it, as they would have fastened on something else had 56 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE Carlyle broken with the Ashburtons altogether. Froude has wholly misunderstood it, has published abroad the midnight mutterings of a sick woman, and has based on them discreditable reflections on her long-suffering husband. That Carlyle took the correct view of his wife's condition is clear, for looking back on it in 1866, he ascribed the dispiritment and unhappiness of his wife "chiefly to the deeper downbreak of her own poor health, which from this time [1856, the date of the Journal], as I now see better, continued its advance upon the citadel or nervous system." But bad as in Froude's sight the Ashburton affair was, something worse remained behind. Carlyle " had said in his Journal that there was a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends," and without a knowledge of which no true biography was possible; and so, when selected as his biographer, Froude set himself to find out this secret, which if unearthed must necessarily influ- ence him in all he might say. He had no doubt from the first that it was connected with some moral delinquency, and how wildly awry he went in his reading of Carlyle's papers may be best shown by quoting the passage in the Journal, and the only passage, in which the so-called secret is referred to. It is dated 29th December, 1848, and runs as follows : " Darwin said to Jane, the other day in his quizzing-serious manner, ' Who will write Carlyle's < Life ' ? The word reported to me, set me thinking how impossible it was and would for ever remain, for any creature to write THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 57 my ' Life ' ; the chief elements of my little destiny have all along lain deep below view or surmise, and never will or can be known to any son of Adam. I would say to my biographer, if any fool undertook such a task, ' Forbear, poor fool ; let no life of me be written ; let me and my bewildered wrestlings lie buried here, and be forgotten swiftly of all the world. If thou write, it will be mere delu- sions and hallucinations. The confused world never understood, nor will understand, me and my poor affairs ; not even the persons nearest me could guess at them ; — nor was it found indispensable ; nor is it now, for any but an idle purpose, profitable, were it even possible. Silence, and go thy ways elsewhither.' " To the common man, to say nothing of the student of Carlyle's writings, but one inter- pretation of this is possible. It refers not to one secret but to many — to the bewildered wrestlings of the writer's soul with the mysteries of being, to those incommunicable stirrings that agitate the depths of every human heart. It is but a variant of what Carlyle has said many times in his books about the sacramental nature of life, and the barrier that must always shut out one human being from another. But that would not do for Froude ; he detected a personal secret in this passage, and determined to ferret it out. And help came to him in that daughter of Eve, Miss Jewsbury, who at once detected what Carlyle had said no son of Adam could find out, and made patent what he had thought not even the persons nearest him — therefore not even his wife — could guess at. Purely 58 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE in the interests of the frank biography, Miss Jews- bury, hearing that Froude was to write Carlyle's life, hurried to him and disclosed that " Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never to have married," and, like a flower that perishes in the blossoming, Froude tells us, she died soon after. But of course, Froude is wrong, for, as a matter of fact, she survived seven years after her revelation. This unmarried lady went to Froude, who was not a medical man, and soiled the memory of the man towards whom she had professed undying gratitude, and Froude is not ashamed to say that she entered on " curious details." We need not suppose that in doing so she suffered from maidenly embarrassment, or was suffused with blushes, for we have it on Mrs. Carlyle's authority that she had herself allowed that she had " absolutely no sense of decency," and that her tendency towards " the unmentionable " was too strong to be stayed. She informed Froude that Carlyle's extraordinary temper, which as he grew older and more famous became more violent and overbearing, was a consequence of his organisa- tion, that Mrs. Carlyle never forgave the injury done her in her marriage, and that her disappointed longing for children had been at the bottom of all their quarrels and unhappiness. " I have never been curious about family secrets," says Froude, " and have always as a rule of my life declined to listen to communications which were no business of mine," and yet he seems to have opened his ears widely to Miss Jewsbury's unpleasant family communication. That communi- THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 59 cation was made to him in 1873, and must have been always present to his mind while writing " The Life of Carlyle," and yet in that life he says, " I for myself concluded, though not till after long hesitation, that there should be no reserve, and therefore I have practised none." . . . . " To have been reticent would have implied that there was something to hide, and taking Carlyle all in all, there never was a man, I at least never knew one, whose conduct in life would better bear the fiercest light that could be thrown upon it." .... "There ought to be no mystery about Carlyle, and there is no occasion for mystery." And the man who penned these sentences in 1883 is he who wrote in 1887, "The worst of these faults [Carlyle's faults] I have concealed hitherto," and who then and there placed on record, evidently with a view of its being ultimately uncovered to the public gaze, a mystery, which he had concealed, but which he believed had dominated and clouded the life of the man whose entirely candid biographer he professed himself to have been. Delicacy forbids that we should here discuss Froude's mystery or Miss Jewsbury's communi- cation. They have been fully examined in the pages of a medical journal, where alone they could be properly considered, and we believe we may say they have been proved to have been the offspring of a prurient imagination. There is no truth in them. The evidence of their falsity is absolutely conclusive. The use made of them by Froude and his representa- tives must be regarded as deplorable and a stain on 6o THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE English literature. There was no corroboration of Miss Jewsbury's statement. Not one line or word could she point to in all her confidential corre- spondence with Mrs. Carlyle, extending over a quarter of a century, or in Mrs. Carlyle's secret Journal and most retired communings with herself, when her bitterness against her husband was at its height, giving the faintest colour to the disclosure. It depended entirely on her recollection of alleged conversations with Mrs. Carlyle, to support which she could produce no collateral evidence; and yet without the smallest confirmation Froude accepted her wild and whirling words. He did not think it necessary to apply any tests, although he regarded the statement, not as a bit of idle talk, but as of vital moment, and allowed it to tincture and control his whole biography of Carlyle. The substance of it has been concealed until now, but emanations from it have been for years floating about. Rumour has given currency to Miss Jewsbury's slander, for slander it must be called ; as, rightly or wrongly, a certain degree of opprobrium does attach to the organisation Miss Jewsbury ascribed to Carlyle, with which certain intellectual disabilities are often associated. All readers of Carlyle must allow that his writings are characterised by splendid virility, and that he was every inch a man. The Carlyles lived on a higher plane than Froude conceived. Their married life of forty years' duration was essentially beautiful. It was not blessed with offspring. It was chequered, as all married lives are, with cares, anxieties and sorrows, it was ruffled by angry THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 61 breezes, it was shadowed by sickness, which at one time gathered into a thunder-cloud, but it was irradiated throughout by the pure white light of wholesome human love. It seems almost a profanation to quote from the letters which passed between Carlyle and Jane Welsh during their courtship, and between Carlyle and his wife during the early years of their married life, but it is to be remembered that these are already on record, having been published by Froude, and they certainly throw a pleasing light on the relations which subsisted between them. During their engagement Jane Welsh wrote to Carlyle, after a visit to Hoddam Hill, " I love you, tenderly, devotedly." " I am yours, oh ! that you knew how wholly yours," in response to some ardent expression of Carlyle's, whose anticipations of matrimony were normal enough. " Here," he wrote from Scotsbrig, "are two swallows in the corner of my window, that have taken a house this summer ; and in spite of drought and bad crops are bringing up a family together with the highest contentment and unity of soul. Surely, surely Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle here as they stand have in them conjunctly the wisdom of many swallows. Let them exercise it then, in God's name, and live happy as these birds of passage are doing." Mrs. Carlyle's letters after the marriage, and indeed at every period of their married life, bear no trace of disappointment. Six weeks after her marriage she wrote to her mother-in-law, " We are really very happy ; and when he falls upon some work we 62 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE shall be still happier. Indeed, I should be very- stupid or very thankless, if I did not congratulate myself every hour of the day on the lot which it has pleased Providence to assign to me. My husband is 'so kind, so, in all respects, after my own heart ! " During one of her first separations from him, when visiting her mother at Templand, she addresses him, " Kindest and dearest of husbands, Are you thinking you are never to see my sweet face any more ? . . . I wish I were back to see it and to give you a kiss for every minute I have been absent. . . . Dearest, I do love you. God bless you, my Darling. — Ever ! ever your true Wife." Again she wrote from Templand within two years of their marriage, " Goody, Goody, dear Goody. You said you would weary, and I do hope in my heart you are wearying. It will be so sweet to make it all up to you in kisses when I return. You will take me and hear all my bits of experiences, and your heart will beat when you find how I have longed to return to you." Are these the utterances of an amatively disappointed and mortified wife ? Carlyle's letters to his wife are not less tenderly and naturally affectionate than hers to him. His first letter to her, when they were parted for the first time since their marriage, is dated 16th April, 1827, and begins thus: "Dearest Wife, — What strange magic is in that word, now that for the first time I write it to you. I promised that I would think of you sometimes ; which truly I have done many times, or rather all times, with a singular feeling of THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 63 astonishment, as if a new light had risen on me since we parted, as if, until now, I had never known how precious my own dearest little Goody was to me, and what a real an^el of a creature she was. I could bet a sovereign that you love me twice as well as ever you did ; for experience in this matter has given me insight. Would I were back to you, and my own Jane's heart would beat against her husband's." Froude prints Mrs. Carlyle's reply to the foregoing, but with characteristic alterations. He puts a cold "you" where Mrs. Carlyle has written " Darling ; " he puts " my husband " where Mrs. Carlyle has written " my dearest husband ; " and he omits the amatory ending, "God keep you, my dear good husband. Write and love me. Your own Goody." Another letter in early wedlock runs thus : " Not unlike what the drop of water from Lazarus's finger might have been to Dives in the flame was my dearest Goody's letter to her Husband yesterday afternoon. . . . No, I do not love you in the least ; only a little sympathy and admiration, and a certain esteem, nothing more ! — O my dear, best wee woman ! — But I will not say a word of all this till I whisper it in your ear with my arms round you." Is this the language of an impotent man addressing the woman to whom he has done a grievous wrong which she is bitterly resenting ? Miss Ann Carlyle Aitken and Miss Margaret Carlyle Aitken, now living in Dumfries, recall that, twice whilst at Craigenputtock, Mrs. Carlyle con- sulted their mother, the late Mrs. Aitken, about 64 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE her maternal hopes, which alas ! came to nought ; and the late Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, when, on her aunt's death, she became her uncle's com- panion, was much touched to find in a drawer at Cheyne Row a little bundle of baby clothes made by Mrs. Carlyle's own hands. This reminds us of Carlyle's pathetic and significant allusion in the " Reminiscences" to the child's chair which his wife had herself used when young, and kept in her house with feelings no woman can fail to understand. " Her little bit of a first chair, its wee, wee arms, etc., visible to me in the closet at this moment, is still here and always was ; I have looked at it hundreds of times, from of old with many thoughts. No daughter or son of hers was to sit there ; so it had been appointed us, my Darling. I have no Book thousandth-part so beautiful as Thou; but these were our only ' Children,' — and in a true sense they were verily ours ; and will perhaps live some time in the world, after we are both gone ; — and be of no damage to the poor brute chaos of a world, let us hope ! The Will of the Supreme shall be accomplished. Amen" In the epitaph in Haddington Churchyard Jane Welsh is described, not as the faithful companion, but as "the spouse of Thomas Carlyle," "for forty years the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband." Carlyle was a true man, no hypocrite or slave to convention, and he would not have used these words had Jane Welsh never been his spouse in any true sense, but his ill-used thrall who had been often on the point of leaving him. THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 65 To any one with a spark of knowledge of human nature, Carlyle's long and passionate mourning for his wife, his lonesome visits to her grave, where he knelt down and reverently kissed the green mound, must betoken a tenderer tie than mere platonic fellowship. A word may be said on one or two of the deductions drawn by Froude from Miss Jewsbury's extraordinary statement. We are assured that it was Mrs. Carlyle's disappointed longing for children that was at the bottom of all the domestic unhappiness and quarrels at Cheyne Row. How much exagger- ated by Froude that unhappiness and these quarrels were has been already shown. How little Mrs. Carlyle's unfulfilled maternal hopes had to do with any asperities that did exist, may now be indicated merely to illustrate Froude's incomprehension of Mrs. Carlyle's character. A child at Cheyne Row would have been an unspeakable boon and blessing, but Mrs. Carlyle had probably during the greater part of her life there no very strong desire for its arrival. In the early days at Craigenputtock " she had the passions of her kind," and longed for a child, but it was only when they made up their minds that there was not likely to be a family, that the Carlyles determined to remove to London, and there Mrs. Carlyle soon became involved in ambi- tious projects, with the fulfilment of which the claims of the nursery must have interfered. Like some of the fashionable women of the day, she became more alive to the drawbacks than to the pleasures of motherhood. She had no great liking 66 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE for children, and there is not to be found in her writings a single affectionate reference to them. She calls them "wersh gorbs " and "insipid offspring," and, writing to Mrs. Russell, she exclaimed, " Gra- cious ! what a luck I had no daughters to guide." There is no reason to suppose that the want of children seriously ruffled Mrs. Carlyle's equanimity at Cheyne Row. Three times over Froude informs us that Mrs. Carlyle had resolved to leave her husband. '■ One had heard that she had often thought of leaving Carlyle, and as if she had a right to leave him if she pleased." "She had often resolved to leave Car- lyle. He, of course, always admitted that she was at liberty to go if she pleased." " She had definitely made up her mind to go away, and even to marry another person." But, in order to marry another person, she would have had to divorce Carlyle, or obtain a decree of nullity of marriage ; and with his inimitable inconsistency, a little further on, Froude says, " She would not make a scandal by revealing the truth and dissolving the marriage, but once, at least, she had resolved to put herself out of the way altogether." Which is it to be, desertion, divorce or suicide ? Froude cannot be allowed to juggle with all three. Mrs. Carlyle contemplated suicide even before her marriage, and many times after it, but that she had ever, as is alleged by Froude, made up her mind to go to Scotland by sea and drop off the stern of the steamer cannot be believed. It is one of Geraldine Jewsbury's stories, and is, of course, apocryphal. Mrs. Carlyle had plenty of THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 67 morphia and henbane and prussic acid and chloro- form, and could have made away with herself, without going to sea, of which she had always a horror. It was Froude's lack of humour, a saving quality — the essence of which is sensibility ; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence — of which he was entirely destitute, that led him into the ridiculous canard about Mrs. Carlyle running away and marrying another person ; the sole discoverable origin of it being this passage in one of her letters to Mrs. Russell, " Do be so good as to give Mr. Dobbie an emphatic kiss from me, for if Mr. C. become unendurable with his eternal Frederick, I intend running away with Mr. Dobbie to the backwoods, or wherever he likes." If Froude had made a little inquiry, he would have discovered that Mr. Dobbie was Mrs. Russell's father, a reverend gentleman then in his eightieth year. It was probably confusion of ideas that betrayed Froude into his accusation against Carlyle of cruelty, in retorting to his wife, when she told him how near leaving him she had been, " Well, I do not know that I should have missed you ; I was very busy just then with my Cromwell," words which hurt her, he says, more than any others she had ever heard from him. But if we are to believe all Froude has told us, these words were mild, compared with his many savage onslaughts on her, and the truth seems to be that Froude has applied to Carlyle and his wife a story which Carlyle used to tell, and at which his wife laughed merrily. It was the story of a North of England farmer, whose wife, with whom he had f 2 68 THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE had a tiff, left him and went back to her parents, but soon tired of the separation and returned home. Meeting her husband, she addressed him thus :