l^-:^.-hD — The poet Campbell in Edinburgh — Lord Jeffrey at Craigcrook — Visit to Wordsworth at Rydal MounL II. THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY FIFTY YEAR5 AGO, AND AFTER, ..... 12-27 Changed exterior of the Muv.eurn — Its organisation — Sir Henry Ellis — Career and Ciiaiwciei of Panizzi — The la.te Rri*. Richard Gamett and his son, Ut. Richard (jzmeiX — Panizzi's two prolfs^h and their e'- • ^ " . • " ^ ' .. ••% — The New Catalogue and the N.' ; Parry — Thomas Watts — Superintendents of the .■ trjxjja: a contrast — Charles Edward Mudie : r - ■" '•' Library. ' III. CONCERNING THE ORGANISATION OF UTEVA- TURE, ..... 2?i-S4 Proem — Earl Stanhope, the — The Guild of Literature auu An : iH. ' ' — The French Institute— Fv"--- • -^ •'^- .■ compose it — What a Na: ■ - . be and do — In the governing body of the Bn" the germ of a Nat; " ' T . :e. IV. THE CARLYLE5 AliD A SEGMENT OF THEIR CIRCLE : RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLEC- TIONS, 55-272 ChAPTEK I. FiSST ACQt!AJJS7A^"CE WITH THE CAyiYLES, . 55"^> Early Study of Carlyle's writirLg^ — Letter to : ' Hit mystery of life — His reply — EfTc^rts to ; • • ' a candidate for the Chajr of History in I- • — Two Evenings in Cheynt Row — C Wordsworth, and Coleridge — .' Thirlwa]l— Jean p£-:l ?:■.:- •-- : viii Contents Chapter ii. The Cromwelliad, ... 70-78 Carlyle at work on his Cromwell — His troubles with the British Museum Catalogue — Some slender literary services rendered to him lead to an intimacy with him — Publication oiCroJuweirs Letters and Speeches — His mother's apprecia- tion of the portions of the work not Carlyle's — Its reception by the public — Verdict of Richard Monckton Milnes (after- wards the first Lord Houghton) and J. B. Mozley — The Carlyles on Milnes — Practical joke played by Milnes on Carlyle. Chapter hi. After the Cromwelliad, . . . 79-88 Carlyle on William the Conqueror — A second edition of his Crotfiwell soon called for — The Duke of Manchester in Cheyne Row— Carlyle's fireside : monologues and theory of government— His regard for Henry Cromwell, and discussion on his character with Lord Macaulay— Carlyle and the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum Library— His Memorial to the Trustees of the British Museum— Carlyle and the organisation of literature. Chapter iv. The Ashburtons, • . . . 89-102 Carlyle on the Repeal of the Corn Laws and Democracy— His hopes from Sir Robert Peel and the English aristocracy— His intimacy with INIr. Bingham Baring and Lady Harriet Baring (afterwards Lord and Lady Ashburton) — The Baring family : character of Lady Ashburton— Her literary circle— Tennyson at the Grange— Character and anecdote of Lord Ashburton— A fragment of his autobiography, and his address on educa- tion—His purchase of a picture of the Chelsea interior and Carlyle's 'snub' to the artist. Chapter v. Mazzini and the Carlyle Brotherhood, 103- 112 Mrs. Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Lady Ashburton as a hostess — Carlyle's consequent dissatisfaction with his wife — Lady Ashburton severely censurable— Mrs. Carlyle appeals to Mazzini for counsel— Mazzini's literary life in London and essay on Carlyle— Carlyle on Mazzini and the Austrians in Italy— Carlyle's three brothers : ' Alec ' his favourite— James Carlyle at Ecclefechan— Sketch of Dr. John Carlyle— .S^r^r Resartus and Wotton Remfried—T>x. Carlyle at Munich : Teufelsdrockh at Weissnichtwo. Contents ix PACE Chapter vi. John Forster, . . . 1 13-123 Carlyle introduces me to John Forster — Lady Bulwer on Forster — His intimacy with Dickens, and Dickens's sketch of him — Carlyle and a German translation of Burns — Carlyle converts Forster to his view of Cromwell's character— Carlyle's letters to Forster in the South Kensington Museum — Notices in them of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Justice Stephen, the second Lord Lytlon, and of Mr. Froude in the United States — Carlyle and the Countess of Derby — Carlyle and Forster on Strafford. Chapter vii. John Robertson, . . . 124-131 Robertson's early career and literary life in London — His intro- duction to Lord Melbourne — His intimacy with John Stuart Mill and his anecdotes of the first Lord Lytton — Becomes acting editor of the London and Westminster Review — Takes out of Carlyle's hands an article on Cromwell — Carlyle is then induced to write a book on Cromwell — Robertson's article the first attempt at a complete rehabilitation of Cromwell — Carlyle's contemptuous references to it and to Robertson — Robertson's later career undistinguished, but happy — Carlyle's monitions to me on entering the wilderness of litera- ture, and anecdote of Diderot. Chapter viii. Geraldine Jewsbury, . . 132-144 In Manchester — Introduction to Geraldine Jewsbury — Her appeal for spiritual advice to Carlyle — Her acquaintance with the Carlyles and friendship with Mrs. Carlyle — Her brother Frank — Her first novel Zoe less commonplace than Robert Elsmere — Visitors of the Jewsburys : William Edward Forster — Mr. Froude in Manchester : sketch of his career — Miss Jewsbury's intimacy with him — Her comments in the Westminster Review on the Nemesis of Faith— The two Miss Cushmans — The elder Miss Cushman's description of Mrs. Carlyle — Miss Jewsbury's second novel The Half- Sisters. Chapter ix. Carlvi.I'-, in Manchester, . . i45-'55 Carlyle's visit to the Jewsburys in the autumn of 1847 — He predicts the French Revolution of the succeeding year — He thinks of writing a life of Richard Arkwright — His visit to the late Sir Joseph Whitworth's works — Also to Mr. Jacob Bright at Rochdale — His colloquy with John Bright. Contents PAGE Chapter x. Emerson in England, .... 156-168 Arrival in Manchester — Emerson's visit to Carlyle in London — Emerson as a lecturer and in society — His estimate of Richard Cobden — His farewell dinner-party at Manchester — Emer- son in London — At the Carlyles' : ' The Alphabet ' — Emerson's first lecture in London — Carlyle's estimate of his lectures — Emerson in London society — Emerson and Carlyle the guests of Arthur Helps — Emerson's departure from Eng- land — Carlyle's verdict on him — Sends Indian corn from Concord to Carlyle — Carlyle, \ViFrascr'' s Magazine, on Indian meal. Chapter xi. Carlyle in 1848, .... 169-176 Carlyle's articles on the French Revolution of 1848 — On Ire- land — Thinks of starting an organ of his own — Carlyle and Young Ireland : Sir C. G. Duffy and John Mitchell — Ecker- mann's conversations with Goethe — Carlyle on Eckermann— Goethe on Carlyle — Goethe's discourse to Eckermann on sacred things. Chapter xii. The Organisation of Labour, . . 177-192 Carlyle's gigantic scheme for the reorganisation of our indus- trial system — Promulgation of it in the Latter-Day Pamphlets — Carlyle on Lord Shaftesbury and the Rectorship of Aber- deen University — Carlyle might have accepted office in order to carry on his Industrial scheme — His unpopularity with the Whigs and appeal to Sir Robert Peel— Carlyle a guest of Peel— Death of Peel and its effect on Carlyle — Carlyle's views of pauperism commented on — The Manciiester Society for the reproductive employment of paupers — Tlie Life of John Sterling — Carlyle's and Panizzi's long feud. Chapter xiii. Politics, Religion, Education, . . 193-203 Carlyle on Parliaments, on anarchy, despotism, and Louis Napoleon— His opinions on Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Gladstone — Carlyle on theology, the mystery of life, the Beautiful and the Good, the Irish priesthood, the Irish peasantry, the Church of England, Goethe versus Luther, and John Wesley — Carlyle and education — Goethe and 'Jamie' Simpson. Chapter xiv. Autobiographical, . . . . 204-211 • Carlyle's vivid talk — Mrs. Carlyle's conversational rivalry with her husband — Samuel Rogers on the Carlyles as talkers — Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of his professors at Contents xi PAGE Edinburgh University, of his study of the Principia, and of his attendance at a Scots law-class — His contributions to periodicals inserted as flavouring matter — The Specimens of German Romance, the French Revolulion, and Sartor Resartits — Carlyie's lectures and audiences— Mrs. Carlyle's \ ascription to Miss Martineau of his debut as a lecturer — \ Carlyle on his own writings. ' Chapter xv. Carlyle's Literary Table-Talk, . . 212-229 His dislike of poetry and fiction — .Eschylus and Wordsworth — i Wordsworth's sonnet on histories of the French Revolution — ! Carlyle's protests against verse-making to Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Her rejoinder — Carlyle on the first Lord Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Jane Austen — On Hallam, Macaulay, Ranke, and the early volumes of Mr. Froude's History — Carlyle's estimate of J. S. Mill's work on Political Economy — John Sterling and William Edward Forster — Diminution of Carlyle's enthusiasm for German literature — On Fichte, Kant, and Goethe — Mrs. Jameson on Goethe's son and daughter-in-law — Carlyle on Chateaubriand and George Sand — On the Times and journalists — On London publishers and the late H. G. Bohn's libraries — Carlyle's depreciation of classical scholarship — His verdict on Goldsmith as a man — His remarks on Johnson, Burke, Keats, Charles Lamb, and De Quincey — His desponding view of literature. Chapter xvi. Visitors of the Carlyles, . . 230-239 John Gibson Lockhart as Carlyle's host — Statistics of London hospitality — Carlyle's friends, Erasmus Darwin and John Chorley— Miss Bolte — The late Mr. Venables — The late Sir Arthur Helps and anecdote of his beneficence — The late Mr. Robert Farie and Goethe's Campaign in France — The late George Darley — French visitors of the Carlyles : Godefroi Cavaignac and Armand Marrast — Anecdote of Cavaignac and Louis Philippe. Chapter xvii. Some ok Carlyle's Friends, . . 240-263 Thomas Bailantyiie — He founds \.hc Statesman — Befriended by Carlyle and munificently aided by Lord Ashburton — Noticed by Lord Palnicrston — Edits the St. Jameses Chronicle for C. N. Newdeg.ite — Newdegate, Carlyle, and Ballantyne — William Maccall, his early life and Elements of Indivi- dualism — John .Sterling introduces him to Carlyle — Contri- I xii Contents PAGE butes to the Critic and, through Carlyle, to Fraser's Magazine and the GentlemaiCs Magazine — His lectures — Extracts from his character of J. S. Mill and from his review of Feuerhach's Essence of Christianity — James Dodds and his early struggle — His correspondence with Carlyle and Lays of the Scottish Covenanters — In London as a Parliamentary solicitor — His visit to the Carlyles and intimacy with Leigh Hunt — His lectures and the Fifty Years' Stnigg/e of the Scottish Cove- nanters — A zealous promoter of Scottish interests — Carlyle's amanuensis Frederic Martin — His Biographical Magazine and its anecdotes of Carlyle's father and uncles— Indignation of Carlyle — Martin's Statesman's Year-Book procures him a Civil List Pension from Disraeli. Chapter xviii. Carlyle at Home : Conclusion, . 264-272 Carlyle's daily life — His night-walks and night-thoughts — His Chelsea domicile — Tormented by bores, especially from the United States — Carlyle without amusements — Mrs. Carlyle a chess-player and a vocalist—Carlyle at the theatre — Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle as husband and wife — Two unpublished letters of Mrs. Carlyle. V. GEORGE HENRY LEWES AND GEORGE ELIOT, 273-300 Chapter i. Early Career of Lewes, . . . 273-282 His sketch of a philosophical club in Red Lion Square — His early writings and intellectual independence — Before knowing him George Eliot thinks him flippant — His two novels — I meet him in Cheyne Row — Carlyle on Goethe and Wilhelm Meister — Mrs. Carlyle and Lady Ashburton on Lewes's novel. Rose, Blajiche, and Violet — Lewes at first not much liked by the Carlyles, but in time finds favour in their eyes. Chapter n. Lewes in Manchester, .... 283-289 Twofold object of Lewes's first visit to Manchester — His Lectures : The Positive Philosophy — The Manchester Theatre- Royal ; he plays Shylock, and in his own drama, The Noble Heart — Lewes in Manchester Society — His con- tributions to the British Quarterly Review — Dr. Vaughan and Goethe's Fair Saint — Lewes's domestic relations — Lewes's second visit to Manchester, in order to raise capital for the Leader — Thornton Hunt — The ' promoters ' of the Leader and its original contributors. / Contents xiii ^ PAGE Chapter hi. Lewes in Later Years : George Eliot, . 290-300 Lewes as literary editor of the Leader— Wx'-, unfinished novel in the Leader, and his views on the marriage-tie — I lis domestic partnership with George Eliot — His life of Goethe and popular writings on natural science — His editorship of the Fortnightly Review — Its failure financially, and the moral thereof — Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind— De- li{ Histoire Generate et Philosophique, Guizot, Mignet, Michelet, Thiers, and Amedee Thierry ; — Schel- ling was, Lord Brougham and Leopold Ranke are, among its foreign members. It publishes copious Transactions ; and, since its resuscitation, various of its members have been commissioned by itself and by successive govern- ments to investigate, at home and abroad, the conditions of special sections of industrial populations. It was through this Academy that, in earlier years, Blanqui pro- secuted his remarkable inquiries into the state of the manufacturing populations of the Continent, and that, in 42 Literary Recollections recent years, M. Louis Reybaud (known to English readers chiefly as the author of the amusing Jerome Paturot) was stimulated to produce social monographs on the condition of the operatives employed in the silk and cotton manu- factures of France. It is seemingly from the State chiefly that the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques derives the funds to provide for its rather numerous prizes. These are given not so much to the authors of works already published, as in the case of the Academic Franqaise, but rather to the successful competitors in the composition of Essays on subjects proposed by the Academy. Dipping casually into the Comptes Rendus of the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques, I find that in one particular year the following were the subjects given out to the com- peting essayists: — in the section of 'Philosophy,' (i) a critical examination of the Scholastic Philosophy, (2) an investigation of the influence exercised on the morality of a nation by the progress and the love of material well- being ; in the section of * Legislation, Public Law, and Jurisprudence,' the Theory and Principles of Life Assur- ance, its History, and the useful applications of which it is susceptible ; in the section of ' Political Economy,' the Laws that ought to regulate the proportionate relations of note-circulation to a metallic currency, so that the State may enjoy all the advantages of credit without suffering from its abuses ; in the section of ' General and Philoso- phical History,' to show how the progress of Criminal Justice in the prosecution and punishment of offences against the person and property follows and marks the pro- gress of civilisation from the savage state to that of the best-governed nations. These are all subjects more or less interesting and important ; and the elucidation of Orga7iisatioii of Literatw'e 43 them is at least as profitable to society as the production of* sensation novels,' so abundantly encouraged, without prizes, on both sides of the Channel. The money-value of the prizes awarded to the successful competitors averages 1500 francs each. Small as is this amount, the adjudi- cating sections are very critical and not easily pleased. Sometimes, year after year, I observe, the same subject is declared still open to competition, the essays sent in having fallen short of the standard required by the adjudicators. This Academy publishes Transactions of considerable worth, consisting of disquisitions contributed by its eminent members. Its peculiar influence on the intellectual culture of France must be valuable. Should a British Academy ever be founded, certainly it would be well to combine in it the functions of both of these French Academies, the Acadanie Fratt^aise and the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques. In a practical country like ours, an Academy which included men of eminence in social, legislative, economical, and political science would have more weight and greater prospects of usefulness than one composed exclusively of poets, novelists, critics, and historians. But do these French Academies, then, embody in their constitution and functions principles generally applicable, true and valuable in England as in France? Surely yes. There is the principle that in the world of intellect differ- ences of capacity and power of labour exist, and that, when these are proved by their results, the upper and the under should be formally recognised and duly ranked. There is the principle that the young and aspiring deserve reward and encouragement when, through talent and toil, they have achieved success, and that none arc so well fitted as 44 Literary Recollections the more wise and more experienced of their own order to reward and to encourage. The literary and socio- economical criticism of the periodical and newspaper press does much ; but, from the very nature of the case, it must be hurried, or perfunctory, or limited. It would be some- thing to have, in one Academy in England, as France has in these two Academies, the men of the highest proved and realised intellect collected, and formed into a con- spicuous, honourable, and honoured body — after the heat of the battle and a victorious struggle, taking their seats in a House of Peers of their own. It would be something to have them, as in France, judging, rewarding, encourag- ing, guiding, their younger or less experienced brethren, when these did not disdain to be so subordinated. The proud and self-sufficing might hold aloof, while the modest yet aspiring would profit alike by encouragement and by discouragement. If it were thought desirable to copy the prize-systems of France, the small funds needful would not long be wanting, were the body once extant to which they could be safely intrusted. The wealthiest and most generous of nations has not less than France its Mon- thyons and Goberts, but it has no Institute to receive, to accumulate, and to apply their thoughtful bounty. Once let there exist a British Institute, comprising the most eminent men, as do the two French Academies which have been sketched — and with a guarantee in its constitution that only the distinguished can succeed the distinguished — all the rest will follow. There are even important national objects which such an Institute might subserve and which would make a wise Premier thankful for its existence and advice. It would be a body which he might consult in the disposal, for instance, of the Pension Fund ; ^ Orgaiiisation of Literature 45 and its counsel would preserve him from becoming the official patron of a Poet Close.^ The time must arrive, too, when our purely party-antagonisms will be dead, buried, and forgotten. Then Governments will be able, as well as willing, to prosecute, with concentrated energy the work of internal reform — social, legal, educational. Then will be undertaken extensive inquiries into the state of our population at home and throughout our vast empire, and into what can be learned from or suggested by foreign nations. For such a task, men of trained intelligence and the gift of clear and vivid expression will be needed ; and it may be that to a National Institute an English Govern- ment will turn to supply them, just as successive French Governments have so applied to the French Institute, and more particularly to the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Even as it is, compare a report by Mr. Tremenheere — brief, lucid, suggestive, conclusive — on a mining district or a baking trade with an average blue- book — rudis indigestaque moles — entombing the thousands upon thousands of questions and answers produced by a Select Committee of the House of Commons and the cloud of witnesses which it examines — the useful and the useless ' [This worthy was a Westmorland rhymer, of the semi-mendicant class, who producedaquantity of the most wretched doggerel. However, a memorial recommending him to the Royal bounty was good-naturedly signed by Lord Lonsdale and a number of Westmorland gentlemen. 'Merit 'was once de- fined by Lord Palmerston to be ' the opinion one man has of another,' and as a number of men, in Westmorland at least, had, or professed to have, a high opinion of the local bard, Lord Palmerston, who was then Prime Minister, gave ' the Poet Close ' a Civil List Pension of £'^0 a year. This act excited a great ferment of protest in the press, and was sharply criticised in the House of Commons. Lord Palmerston, who never forsook :s. protege, however unde- serving, defended himself by making the following extraordinary statement : The Poet Close, he said, had ' raised himself from a humble station, with very little education, to a distinguished position ! His poetical merits were not equal to Burns, but they deserved to be placed in the same category ' ! !] 46 Literary Recollections jumbled together in inextricable confusion, and yielding frequently no result of any kind — for how often is the committee's report rendered colourless and neutral by the disagreement of its members ? Tell me in what Parlia- mentary or official document or statement — and there have been very many tons of them printed — the relations between Europeans and natives in our Indian empire have received as much light and been made as clearly and generally intelligible as in the few letters which Mr. Wingrove Cook despatched from Bengal when returning home from his newspaper-mission to China/ or in the communications with which a ' Competition Wallah ' ^ at once entertains and instructs the readers of Mac- milla>ls Magazine? Such possible results, however, of the existence of a National Institute, recognised and honoured by the State, perhaps belong to a rather distant future. Perhaps, too, even although the suggestion of it comes from Lord Stan- hope, a British Institute will not be founded until after many years. Yet even now, and without the creation of any new body, the claims of eminent men of letters could be partly recognised by intrusting them with useful, honourable, and dignified functions, which might in time develop into a government and direction of their dis- 1 [They were republished in the volume, China and Lower Bengal, 5th edition, 1861.] 2 [The present Sir George Trevelyan, Secretary of State for Scotland. Those Macmillan-Y>^Y>^xs of his were republished in volume-form in 1864, with the title ' The Competition Wallah.'] 3 [The late Lord Houghton strove, for many years, but always unsuccess- fully, to become an Elected Trustee. Various reasons were given for his failure. Among them was not mentioned what perhaps was the strongest of all, his protest in the House of Commons (he was then Mr. Monckton Milnes and M.P. for Pontefract) against the elevation of a foreigner like Panizzi to the headship of the Museum Library.] Organisation of Literature 47 tinguished juniors. Some years ago an Edinburgh Reviewer, discussing the subject of an Order of Merit, for the reward and recognition of men eminent in literature and science, made the following remarks, which, from one point of view, have a certain truth and pertinence : ' An order created solely,' he said, ' for men of science and letters, as has been more than once suggested, would wholly fail in its object. There is no reason why they should be separated from others who deserve well of their country. On the contrary, it is to amalgamate them with their fellow-citizens in honours as in labours that we desire, and to suffer them to rank (when their reputation so entitles them) with whomsoever be the other claimants to social consideration. There is not a city knight who would not jest at an order consisting only of authors, to whose united rent-roll he would prefer even half-a-dozen railway debentures. If any practical honours ever be accorded to authors, philosophers, or artists, agreeably to the usual principles of our aristocratic monarchy, we fear, strange though it may appear to say, that they must be honours shared with dukes and earls, ambassadors and generals.' ^ Now, there is one body, fulfilling all the re- quirements of the Edinburgh Reviewer and to which eminent men of letters have belonged, do belong, and are entitled to belong in much more considerable numbers than at present. I mean the Board of so-called Trustees which governs our great national institution, the British Museum. The British Museum is supported wholly by the British nation, and the British Parliament possesses the right, rarely exercised hitherto, of supreme control over its 1 Edinburgh Review^ Iviii. 220 (July 1848, Art. ' Goldsmith.') 48 Literary Recollections affairs. The grant of money annually voted by Parlia- ment for the support of the Museum amounts to ^100,000 ; ^10,000 seems to be the amount of the ordinary annual grant for the department of printed books alone. The Parliamentary Grant and the whole affairs of the Museum are administered by the Board of Trustees, at present fifty in number, and in which there are four constituent elements. One section of them is hereditary, and consists of what are called ' Family Trustees,' representing the families of personages who have made magnificent be- quests of collections of various kinds to the Museum. These are the Sloane, Cotton, Harley, Townley, Elgin, and Knight families. The Family Trustees are nine in num- ber, and among them is the present Earl of Derby. One trustee, called the Royal Trustee, is appointed by the Sovereign, in recognition of George iv.'s gift of the Royal Library to the Museum and the nation. Then there are twenty-five Trustees who are members of the Board ex officio. These, called Official Trustees, include the chief dignitaries of the State and Church, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the First Lord of the Treasury to the Solicitor-General, while with them are associated the Presidents of the Royal Society, the College of Physicians, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Royal Academy. We have now thirty-five out of the fifty Trustees. The re- maining fifteen are called Elected Trustees, and are chosen by the thirty-five. The Elected Trustees are trustees for life, and, with one important exception, share all the rights and privileges of their colleagues. This im- portant exception is that, when a vacancy occurs in their own number, they have no voice or vote in filling it up. The choice of a new Elected Trustee is made by the thirty- Orj^anisaiiofi of Literature 49 five without the intervention of the Trustees already elected. In the existence of a body of Elected Trustees, we seem to have a provision for the recognition of some of the claims of men eminent in literature, archaeology, and science. The honour of a seat at the Board is one which they would share, as the Edinburgh Reviewer expressed it, 'with dukes and earls, ambassadors and generals.' Eminent men of letters, moreover, are precisely the per- sons best fitted to superintend the management of a vast library of books and manuscripts, kept up and augmented chiefly for the sake of the very class to which they belong : as elected trustees they would be called on to perform with advantage to the public, functions pleasant to them- selves. Accordingly, the elective trusteeship of the British Museum has been termed ' the Blue-Riband of Literature,' and as such it was bestowed on Hallam and on Macaulay.^ Let us note, however, the collective results of a system which throws the choice of the fifteen Elected Trustees exclusively into the hands of the nine Family Trustees, of the Royal Trustee, and of the thirty-five Official Trustees. 1 [The following is a list of the Elected Trustees in 1893. Italics mark the names of those who have achieved distinction in literature or science, in either or in both. The Prince of Wales, who is understood to be very dili- gent in his attendance at the meetings of the Trustees — Duke of- Argyll, Marquis of Bath, Earl of Crawford (President of the Camden Society, past President of the Astronomical Society), Earl of Rosehcry (biographer of the second William Pitt), Lord Walsingham, Lord Acton, Mr. Justice Bowen, translator of Virgil), Right Hon. Spencer Walpole, .S'?V- George Trcvelyan, Sir Henry Mawlinson, Sir John Lubbock, Professor Huxley, Sir John Evans (past President of the Camden Society, Treasurer of the Royal Society), and Mr. C. D. P:. Fortnum. Two at least of these, the Duke of Arg>ll and Lord Rosebery, would doubtless have been elected Trustees even if they had written nothing, nor does a translation of portions of Virgil appear, in the case of Mr. Justice Bowen, to be a sufficiently valid claim to ' the Blue Ril)and of Literature.') D ^o Literary Recollections It has been seen that out of the forty members of the French Academy, in 1862, at least twenty — one-half of the whole — were among the most eminent men of letters in France. Here is the list of the Elected Trustees of the British Museum as it stood at the beginning of 1863 : — The Marquis of Lansdowne, Sir David Dundas, Sir Philip Eeerton, the Duke of Somerset, Sir Roderick Miirchison, Demi Mitman, Earl Russell, Mr. Gladstone, Sir G. C. Lewis, Mr. Walpole, Lord Eversley, Mr. Grote, Lord Taunton, the Duke of Northumberland, and Sir Thomas Phillips. In this list the claims of literature and science are represented by one-fifth of the body — Sir Roderick Murchison, Dean Milman, and Mr. Grote. It may be said that Sir G. C. Lewis was an author, and that Earl Russell and Mr. Gladstone are authors of more or less note. But when it is observed that with them are associated as Elected Trustees, officials and ex-officials — the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Taunton, Lord Eversley, Mr. Wal- pole — who have no such pretensions, one is led to surmise that they would have been elected Trustees had Mr. Gladstone never written on Homer, Earl Russell on the History of Europe in the eighteenth century, or the late Sir G. C. Lewis on the Credibility of Early Roman History. The hardship is that official personages like th.e Duke of Somerset, Earl Russell, and Mr. Gladstone are at this mo- ment trustees in virtue of their respective offices, and that by sitting as Elected Trustees they simply displace men intel- lectually eminent, but without high political position. To such an extent has this accumulation of the same honours on the same head been carried, that from the evidence given before the Royal Commission, appointed in 1850 to inquire into the management of the Museum, the late Lord Organisation of Literature 51 Aberdeen, it appears, was once a Trustee in a threefold capacity. He was a Trustee as Secretary of State, a Trustee as President of the Society of Antiquaries, and he was also an Elected Trustee ! It is worth noting that Her Majesty has set the electing Trustees of the Museum an example which they might lay to heart. Until recently, the solitary Royal Trustee had always been one of the highest personages in the kingdom, generally a member of the Royal Family. The Royal Trusteeship was held by the late Duke of Cambridge at his death in 1850. Lately, however, it has been conferred by the Crown on Dr. Cureton, who is, at least, an eminent Syriac scholar, and who, having been formerly an officer of the Museum, has a practical acquaintance with the details of the estab- lishment which he is called upon to co-operate in governing.! The Royal Commission of 1850 saw the injustice and the evils of the present system, and recommended a sweeping change in the government of the Museum. According to the scheme of the Commission, the govern- ment of the Museum was to be intrusted to an Executive Council, consisting of a chairman and six members. The Trustees were to elect from their own body four members of the Board of Government; the Crown was to appoint the chairman, with the two remaining members of the Board — one of them to be distinguished for his literary attainments, the other for his attainments in natural history. No action has been taken upon this Report, and ' [As a Royal Trustee, the late Dr. Cureton was succeeded by Dr. Wellesley, the late Dean of Windsor. His successor was the late Duke of Alhmy, who manifested a great interest in the affairs of the Museum. The present Royal Trustee is the Bishop of Rochester (Dr. Randall Davidson) formerly Dean of Windsor.] 52 Literary Recollections the constitution and government of the Museum remain in 1863 much the same as they were in 1850. The leaders of the two great poHtical parties in the State have been adroitly conciliated and gained over by being chosen Elected Trustees, and no organic change will be pro- posed by them. It is to the House of Commons that we must look for a reform : and, strange to say, in the matter of the National Collections, literary, artistic, and scientific, the House of Commons has more than once of late years shown a singular independence, and re- fused to follow the advice of its accredited party leaders. It has rejected by large majorities the proposal, sup- ported by the leaders of parties on both sides of the House, to break up the Museum and scatter its collec- tions.2 It remains for the House of Commons to make amends for the inertia displayed by successive Govern- ments, whether Liberal or Conservative, in carrying into effect neither the spirit nor the letter of the recommenda- tions of the Royal Commission of 1850. The House of Commons could easily pass a resolution recommending that all vacancies among the Elected Trustees should be filled up from men eminent in literature, scholarship, archaeology, and science, and that the Elected Trustees should themselves have a voice in the election of their colleagues. As the whole constitution of the Museum depends on the will of the House of Commons, which votes the funds for its support, such a resolution, though merely recommendatory, would doubtless have the force ^ Mr. Disraeli has been lately elected a trustee. [The late Lord Beacons- field continued to be an elected trustee, after he became an official trustee in virtue of his Ministerial office.] ^ [Since then, however, the contents of the Museum have been broken up, by the formation of the National History Museum at South Kensington.] Organisation of Literattirc 53 of a command. Parliamentary and public opinion steadily operating, we should in course of time have in the Elected Trustees of the British Museum a British Institute, com- prehending the intellectual notabilities of the country, possessing the confidence of the nation, appealing success- fully for funds to Parliaments and Governments, and worthy to be appointed the executors of the British Monthyons and Goberts. They would find the objects of the Institution which they governed capable of being expanded and varied. Presiding over the State Paper and the Record Offices, the Master of the Rolls ^ has developed enterprises wider than the customary calendar- ing and cataloguing, useful and indispensable as they are. We owe to him, among other benefits conferred, the publi- cation, at an expense insignificant to the country, of the series of Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland diirijig the Middle Ages ; important contributions, which could or would never have been made by private publishing enterprise, to the political, ecclesiastical, social — nay, to the intellectual and scientific history of mediaeval England, for the series includes a careful edition of the works of Roger Bacon. Men of originality and intelli- gence, of experience and energy, placed at the head, or in the headship, of the Museum, with that vast library of books and manuscripts under their care, might soon find the example of the Master of the Rolls worthy of imitation, and Government as ready in their case as in his to give the needful preliminary aid. What ' Materials for English History' of the post-mediaeval ages lie buried in the ^ [The late Lord Romilly. Since his death, in 1874, the execution of the useful enterprise, initiated under his auspices, has been continued by his successors in the office of Master of the Rolls.] 54 Literary Recollections manuscript masses of the Museum that might be made to yield new gold to skilful ' prospectors ' wisely directed and suitably equipped ! As regards the reproduction of books, take but a single instance. If the student wishes to con- sult a collection of the memoirs illustrating the history of the great civil war of the seventeenth century, and edited with even a glimmer of modern light, he must betake himself to the twenty-six volumes of the French transla- tion of them, which Guizot published forty years ago ! Such a collection edited by competent Englishmen, would not only be a boon to the student, but would enrich the historic literature of the country, and claim the aid of a Parliamentary Grant surely not less strongly than the chronicles of mediaeval England. Many are the enter- prises of this kind, from which the ordinary publisher naturally holds aloof, that would reward the encourage- ment of the State, and if well managed — wisdom above directing intelligent industry below — would entail but slight, if any, pecuniary loss in the long-run. Thus a reform in the government of the Museum might be the precursor of an important step towards the solution of the hard problem with which this article started — the organ- isation of literature. IV. THE CARLYLES AND A SEGMENT OF THEIR CIRCLE: RECOLLEC- TIONS AND REFLECTIONS CHAPTER I FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE CARLYLES IT was in the year of Queen Victoria's accession that the words, ' By Thomas Carlyle,' first appeared on a title-page. The work was his French Revolutioji^ of which he once said to me, ' I put more of my life into that than into any of my books.' The times were not favourable to the success of the great prose epic. There was little seriousness in the literature of the day, and little demand for serious literature. The favourites of the reading public were Macaulay, with his brilliant common sense ; Bulwer, with his glittering sentimentalism ; and Dickens, with his genial drollery. 1837 was the year of the appearance of Macaulay's essay on Bacon and of Bulwer's Ernest Mal- travers ; it was the second year of the issue of Pickwick, which had suddenly leapt into boundless popularity. In politics the quasi-revolutionary excitement which carried the first Reform Bill seemed to have died out. Conserva- tism was rallying for its victory of a few years later over Lord Melbourne's dawdling Ministry. Whatever earnest- ness there was among cultivated Liberals was monopolised by those of the Radicals who called themselves 'philo- 66 56 Literary Recollections sophical/ and intent on translating Benthamism into legis- lation, for the most part turned away from the glow and gloom of Carlyle's vivid pictorialism. To the average Conservative his treatment of the great uprising of the French people seemed, of course, far too sympathetic. Then, the startling originality of the style repelled at the threshold many readers, and exasperated almost all the critics. In the most popular literary periodical of the day it was hinted that the author of The Fretich Revolution : a History, must have graduated in ' the University of Bedlam.'i There were readers, however, Conservative and Radical, high and humble, old and young, who were spellbound by the wonderful book, which, as Wordsworth has said of genuine poetry, created the taste by which it was enjoyed. Among them were two Edinburgh youths, friends from childhood, school-fellows and college-mates, daily asso- ciated in their studies, readings, rambles, and amusements. One of the effects produced on them by The French Revo- lution was an incitement to acquaint themselves, if possible, ' Of a very different kind was John Stuart Mill's article on The French Revolution [Londo7i and Westminster Review, July 1837), and Thackeray's in the Times (August 1837), both of which appeared soon after the pub- lication of the book. Although Mill's article was the first noticeable recognition of the greatness of the work, Carlyle nowhere makes any reference to it in his letters or journals, at least as they have been printed. The keynote of Mill's article is struck in the following, its opening sentence : ' This is not so much a history as an epic poem, and notwith- standing, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution and the poetry of it both in one, and, on the whole, no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been pro- duced in this country for many years. ' Thackeray naturally was staggered by what seemed to him the eccentric originality of the style of The French Revolution, but he too recognised its transcendent merits. 'After perusing,' he said, * the whole of this extraordinary work, we can allow, almost to their fullest extent, the high qualities with which Mr. Carlyle's idolaters endow him.' First Acquaintance with the Carlyles 57 with whatever else the author of such a book might have written. There had then been issued no collection of Carlyle's contributions to periodicals, and all of them were anonymous. Aided, however, by a few suggestions from seniors more or less conversant with his scattered writings, these young enthusiasts were fairly successful in tracking Carlyle through volume upon volume of reviews and magazines. One of them has never forgotten the joy with which, in a thumbed volume of Fraser's Magazine, he lighted on Sartor Resartns, and with what intensity of interest he followed the spiritual autobiography of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh — the Pilgrijn's Progress, it seemed to him, of the nineteenth century, from doubt and despair to ' blessedness ' and belief If Scotland was the country of John Knox, it was also that of David Hume, and to the teaching of the Westminster Assembly of Divines had been superadded a knowledge of the scoffing of Voltaire, whose works were in one's father's library, hidden away, but not inaccessible. Carlyle had in his own case recon- ciled reason with faith ; this, above all things, it was that attracted to him those two striplings. And he had indi- cated that for others this consummation so devoutly to be wished was attainable through a right study of German literature. What promise, what hope was there not in such a passage as this of his essay, * Characteristics ' ? ' A faith in religion has again become possible and inevitable for the scientific mind, and the word Free- thinker no longer means the Denier or Caviller, but the Believer or the Ready to believe. Nay, in the higher literature of Germany there already lies for him that can read it the beginning of a new revelation of the Godlike, as yet unrecognised by the mass of the world, but waiting 58 Literary Recollections there for recognition, and sure to find it when the fit hour comes.' With Hmited resources, to say nothing of Hmited abiHties, we had essayed to decipher this new revelation. But though the effort brought us much knowledge, its object still eluded us. Then, in an impatient mood, we indited a brief letter to Carlyle, in which something was said of what seemed to us his supreme position in contemporary English literature. We mentioned our slender studies in German philosophy, and, with the audacity of youth, an audacity which in the retrospect astonishes me, we asked him for a solution of the mystery of existence. To our surprise, as well as to our delight, there arrived before long an answer from Carlyle. Our foolish epistle had found him in a genial mood, and possibly he was a little pleased to receive, even from two unknown youths, that recognition of his intellectual supremacy which in all likelihood none of his coevals in the republic of letters would then have cheerfully conceded to him. Here is Carlyle's epistle, one which speaks for itself: — ' SCOTSBRIG, ECCLEFECHAN, ' August z'&tk, 1841. ' My Good Young Friends, — It is many years since I ceased reading German or any other metaphysics, and gradually came to discern that I had happily got done with that matter altogether. By what steps, series of books, and other influences, such result was brought about, it would now be extremely difficult to say. Few books stand prominently with me above the general dimness. My power to serve you in this matter is accordingly very small. I can only say that my curiosity was once as intense as yours ; my obstructions and obscurations perhaps greater than yours; that by studying of great thinkers (wheresoever met with, how- First Acquaintance with the Carlyles 59 soever named or rubricked), above all, by thinking and struggling earnestly myself, help and victory were certain for me, as they will be for you and for all that do the like. ' Those two little books of Fichte's and Schelling's ^ are bright in my memory beyond all others that I read on that subject. Perhaps there is not elsewhere, for a British student, as much of interest and novelty extant, in equal compression, in the whole literature of German philosophy. One other book I also favourably remember : The Life of Fichfe, by his Son, two moderate German volumes, of recent date comparatively, in which, I think, you will find some glimpses of the general field of German metaphysics, and indications for you of roads, towards whatever quarter you may be bound. It is easily read, too, which is an advantage. I may say further that after all the Fichteisms, Schellingisms, Hegelisms, I still understand Kant to be the grand novelty, the prime author of the new spiritual world, of whom all the others are but superficial, transient modifications. If you do decide to penetrate into this matter, what better can you do than vigorously set to the Kritik der reinen Vernunff, a very attainable book, and resolutely study it and re-study it till you understand it ? You will find it actually capable of being understood, rigorously sequent, like a book of mathematics; labour that pays itself; really one of the best metaphysical studies that I know of. Once master of Kant, you have attained what I reckon most precious, perhaps alone precious in that multifarious business of German philosophy : namely, deliverance from the fatal incubus of Scotch or French philosophy, with its mechanisms and its Atheisms, and be able perhaps to wend on your way leaving both of them behind you. In fine, if you prosecute the study, it will be well to consult Sir William Hamilton, your neighbour, probably your former teacher ; he of all men, British or foreign, is the best acquainted with the bibliography of German and other metaphysics, the ablest, therefore, to direct you towards books in any specific case. A Mr. Fcrrier of your city I believe to be likewise worth inquiring ' Fichte, Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten ; Schelling, Ueber die Methode des Academischen Siitdium, of whicli wc had made mention in our letter as having been reatl by us. 6o Literary Recollections of. On this business of metaphysics, I know not that I can safely counsel further. Go on, and prosper. ' For the rest, let it be no disappointment, if, after all study, you do not learn * what we are ; ' nay, if you discover that meta- physics cannot by possibility teach us such a result, or even that metaphysics is but a kind of disease, and the inquiry itself a kind of disease. We shall never know "what we are;" on the other hand, we can always partly know, what beautiful or noble things we are fit to do, and that is the grand inquiry for us. The Hebrew Psalmist said, " I am fearfully and wonderfully made ; " God so made me. No Kant or Hegel, as I take it, can do much more than say the like, in the wider, complicated dialect we now have. ' On the whole, we learn better what man is by seeing extensively what good or great things have come out of man ; I mean practically here : that the literature of Germany is perhaps likely to be a far greater possession for you than its metaphysics. The anatomical skeleton, — nay, we will call it the impalpable, unembodied soul ; contrast that with the living man, visible and audible there ! Your rule in reading for self-culture is to get acquainted with great men, and great thinkers, on what subject soever they may write ; it will be a htanane subject, or they will not deserve the name of great. Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul ! I will name these three to you. It seems to me there lies more in these men, and in men like them, than in all bodies of philosophy. He who has discerned the world as these men discerned it, — is not he educated to the highest point of vision human kind has yet attained to, an authentic man of this generation, with all past generations lying obedient under his feet, not a'/j-obedient round his legs, round his very throat ? ' Good young friends ! I have no time to write more. I bid you persist in the same noble temper. Through many difficulties and confusions, you need not doubt a good issue, if you have strength to endure honestly, manfully. Your help lies within yourself; your hindrance too lies there. Courage. Forward, forward ! ' Yours with true good wishes, ' T. Carlyle.' First Acquaintance ivii/i the Carlyles 6i A year or two afterwards an opportunity occurred for us to show, as we thought, our grateful devotion to the man whom we regarded as chief teacher in Israel. The chair of 'Civil History' in the University of Edinburgh became vacant. Knowing little or nothing of Carlyle apart from his writings, we resolved on attempting to get up a requisition from students of the University asking him to become a candidate. The patrons of the chair were the Edinburgh Town Council ; but, if I remember rightly, they had to select one of two names presented to them by the Faculty of Advocates. Mr. Froude's narrative of this little episode in Carlyle's career contains several inaccuracies and exaggerations. For instance, ' A History Chair,' he says, 'was about to be established.' On the contrary, it was established some hundred and twenty years before, and in Carlyle's own day and generation it had been filled (1821-37) by Sir William Hamilton. His class was always a very small one, because to attend it was not necessary for a degree or made compulsory on law or divinity students. Hamilton urged on the patrons the desirability of making attendance on his historical prelections necessary, at least for the M.A. degree, but he pleaded in vain. At last, when in 1833 the City of Edinburgh became bankrupt, the Town Council withdrew the modest stipend of ;^ 100 a year attached to the chair, and Hamilton gave up lecturing. The chief promoter of the students' requisition was the young friend who had joined me in inditing that letter, previously mentioned, of anxious inquiry to Carlyle, and whose name was Dunipace, not Duniface, as Mr. Froude prints it. My college days were over, and my share in the movement was that of a mere outsider, though a zealous one. There has been preserved (by others not by me) a contemporary 62 Literary Recollections transcript of the following communication, which was my handiwork, and in which the wish of his student-admirers to have him nominated as a candidate for the History- Chair was first formally notified to Carlyle : — ' A Memorial has been drawn up, and in the course of a few days subscribed by upwards of a hundred students attending Edinburgh College, requesting the Faculty of Advocates to nominate Mr. Thomas Carlyle as candidate for the Chair of Universal History at present vacant in their University. ' From a letter of Mr. Carlyle to Goethe, published in the poet's posthumous works,^ they concluded that he was not unwilling to accept an official literary situation of some kind, and they thought that this Professorship approxi- mated very nearly in extensiveness of subject to Herr Teu- felsdrockh's one of " Things in General," although unhappily sharing along with it the disadvantage of being wholly unendowed. They trust that this peculiar mode of testi- fying their respect will not be displeasing to Mr. Carlyle : he will remember, they hope, that their feelings towards him are also peculiar. 'Should Mr. Carlyle have no objection, the Memorial •^ No doubt, but it, or rather Goethe's German version of the letter from its original English, appeared during his lifetime, being printed in his introduc- tion to the German translation of Carlyle's Life of Schiller. It was first published in any English form in a translation of it, by me, from Goethe's German version. Goethe made Carlyle say, speaking of his home at Craigen- puttock : ' Hier wohnen wir in Ermangelung einer Lehr - oder - anderen offentlichen Stelle.' This I translated 'Professorial.' By a printer's error, 'Professorial' became 'professional,' which, besides being inaccurate, is nonsense, or something very near it. I was surprised to find the same error committed, in the printing of the original English letter, in the American Professor Norton's Correspondence between Goeihe and Carlyle (i^Sy), where Carlyle is represented as saying that he is ' settled down ' at Craigenputtock, ' in defect of any professional or other official appointment.' First Acquaintance with the Carlyles 63 will be sent without delay for presentation to the Faculty ; and perhaps he will have the kindness to address a few lines on this subject to Henry Dunipace, student, care of Messrs. McLachlan and Stewart, Booksellers, Edinburgh.' Carlyle naturally declined to become a candidate for a Chair as unendowed as his own Teufelsdrockh's in the University of Weissnichter. His cordial and touching reply to the requisitionists is given by Mr. Froude, accord- in"- to whom he wrote to some one at the time : ' I must take care the dogs do not print it in their newspapers.' Whether or not Carlyle sent a monition of the kind I do not remember, but ' the dogs ' did not print his reply in the newspapers. The Chair of History was accepted by James Ferrier {ante, p. 59), son-in-law of Professor Wilson (' Christopher North '), and afterwards a distinguished metaphysician, but then known only to a few by some contributions to Blackwood's Magazine ; among them the series of remarkable papers, ' An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness.' He held it, actively or passively, in all likelihood passively, for several years, until he became Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Settling in London a few years afterwards, I was taken one evening by a Scotch friend, an Edinburgh man, to the famous ' little house in Chelsea,' then No. 5 Cheyne Row. My friend occasionally visited there, and had answered some inquiry of Carlyle's respecting his two young Edin- burgh disciples. Carlyle, the servant said, was out of town, but Mrs. Carlyle was at home. Our cards were taken to her, and we were told that she would be with us soon. Wc were then ushered into that little front parlour in which so 64 Literary Recollections many distinguished (and undistinguished) visitors have held colloquy and commune with Carlyle, or listened to his vehement and often violent monologues. It was modestly furnished, the only object in it to attract the least attention being a shelf pendent on one of the walls, containing several books. One of them was a copy of the original edition of Carlyle's translation of Wilkelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a gift from him to the lady before their marriage, with the words, ' Von meinem liebsten Freunde,' in her handwriting on the fly-leaf of the first of the three volumes. Another was one of those copies of Sartor Resartus, which, when every London publisher of note refused to be at the cost of reprinting it from Fraser, had been formed by detaching from the magazine the sheets containing the successive instalments of the now famous book, and stitching them into volume-form. At the beginning of it was an inscription to ' my dear little Jane Carlyle,' describing it as ' another milestone in our desolate ' journey or other analogous sub- stantive. On a table in the back parlour, shut off from the front one by folding doors, there lay in those years a miniature portrait of Mrs. Carlyle in the bloom of youth and with flower-decked head, a striking contrast to the little lady, plain and rather sallow, but with beautiful dark eyes, and the most expressive of countenances, who, enter- ing the room, welcomed us to her tea-table. Conversation was soon in full flow, for she knew something of one's Edinburgh belongings, and this was never, in her husband's absence, a silent hostess. The first of her peculiarities which struck me was her Scotch accent. It was as marked as I afterwards found her husband's to be, and differed from it not in degree but in kind, as Haddingtonshire differs from Dumfriesshire. She talked of Edinburgh, and First Acquaintance with the Carlyles 65 listened with apparent interest to my account of a spectacle which I had witnessed there. It was the impressive wend- ing of a procession of some hundreds of ministers and elders of the Kirk through the streets of Edinburgh from their meeting-place at the old General Assembly to the Hall of a new one. Many of the ministers were old men, and all of them had given up their livings and homes for con- science' sake, to found a Free Kirk in which the accursed thing patronage should be unknown. Mrs. Carlyle declared that if she had been there she would have cried. Apropos of Edinburgh and of Scottish clericalism she gave us an amusing account of a recent visitor of hers. Bishop Terrot, a Scottish Episcopalian prelate who called himself Bishop of Edinburgh. Mrs. Carlyle laughingly described the com- placency with which he had dwelt on some sermon or other recently preached by him in London, to show Londoners what a Scotch bishop could do.^ If Carlyle had been there ^ This passage as it was published in the Booktnaii having been shown to Miss Terrot, daughter of the late Bishop Terrot, by my friend the Rev. W. H. Langhorne, who was quoting it in his 'Reminiscences' (1893), he received from her a communication, from which I extract the following : ' As regards your quotation from the Bookman, I daresay you do not know how my father came to know the Carlyles. He was located first at Haddington ; and one day Jennie Welsh, aged fourteen at that time, who was sliding on the Tyne, fell, and my father ran forward to help her up, and this was their first introduction. She kept up intercourse with him after her marriage, coming frequently to see him, and writing and being very friendly, but afterwards changed, probably through her husband's influence. Long years afterwards, in the early part of my father's illness, she wrote him a very beautiful letter expressive of much re- gard and sympathy, which was accidentally burnt soon after being received, though far better worth publishing than the smart letters edited by Froude.' Terrot is the ' Cuittikins,' of one of whose visits to her there is a contemptuous account in a letter of Mrs. Carlyle to her husband, and he is also the ' Bishop of ' in Carlyle's equally contemptuous prefatory note to that letter. Referring to the territorial title, which Mr. Froude has left in blank, Carlyle speaks of it as one which ' we used to think analogous to Great Mogul of London. ' E 66 Lite?^aiy Recollections he would have been indignant, as he generally was, looking in his wonted fashion at the present in the light of the past, when that insignificant Scottish Episcopal Church was referred to. Trodden under foot by * the brutal hoof of tyranny and oppression ' was his summary description of Scotland when Episcopacy was dominant. But Carlyle was not there. He was visiting some simple-minded admirer in Wales, whose conversation, the lady told us in her frank way, he had spoken of in his last letter to her as ' verging on the inane.' My friend and I took our leave early, Mrs. Carlyle having given me the impression of a very clever and agreeable woman, with a vein in her both of satire and of sentiment. In course of time I received an invitation to revisit Cheyne Row, on a specified evening, when Carlyle would be at home. I remember that evening well. It was with no small awe that I found myself at last in the presence of the man whom, since boyhood, I had looked up to as the greatest of seers and the deepest of thinkers, who had solved, as far as they could be solved, the chief problems of existence. I found husband and wife in the upper chamber, which was Carlyle's workshop. His writing-table was there, and there was his library, not a very large one, prominent among its contents being the folios which he was consulting for his Cromwell — Rushworth, Thurloe, Whitelocke, and the rest. Mrs. Carlyle received me amiably, and I was placed at comparative ease by the not very appalling statement from the great man that he had found the streets ' rather sloppy.' The conversation, if conversation it can be called, since the youngest of the party naturally said little, and Mrs. Carlyle nothing, ranged over a great variety of topics. There were inquiries by First Acquaintaiice with the Carlyles 67 Carlyle respecting my occupations and studies. In the course of references to Scotland and the Scotch, Carlyle complained of the interest which his countrymen took in what to him were the merest trivialities of literature, and that, when he last visited his fatherland, he was pestered with questions as to who it was that wrote this, that, and the other thing in Punch. Emerson being mentioned, Carlyle said that it was wonderful how as a lecturer he ' insinu- ated ' himself into his hearers. He told laughingly an incident reported to him by a friend who had been visiting Emerson at Concord. The philosopher's little boy being very fretful and tearful, the optimistic parent took the urchin in his arms, and said, caressing him, ' I will love the devil out of him.' Carlyle evidently thought that for such an extrusion a sterner mode of treatment would have been more effective or appropriate. The triumvirate of Lake Poets coming under review, Carlyle declared that he had never given in to the worship of Wordsworth, whom, how- ever, he admitted to be a ' dignified preacher and teacher.' Southey's prose he called ' watery ; ' and spoke contemp- tuously of his ' coquettings with the Church.' He repeated with a certain glee Hazlitt's verdict on Coleridge as a reasoner, ' No premises, sir, and no conclusions.' In con- nection with Coleridge and his expositor, John A. Heraud, he told a story, amusing, though it may sound a little profane. Heraud, besides being the author of some grandiose epics — The Descent into Hell and The Judgme7it of the Flood, which had their admirers — was a German scholar at a time when German was little known, and he tried occasionally to popularise German metaphysics. Carlyle, before coming to London, had read some of Heraud's disquisitions, and after he came to London there 68 Literary Recollections seems to have been a kind of intimacy between the two. In any case, he was one of the audience to whom Heraud delivered a very eulogistic and rather high-flown funeral oration on Coleridge. Carlyle sat beside an obese, rubi- cund city man, who, when Heraud had ended, turned to Carlyle, and giving 'a great guff of port-wine' in his face, said, with due solemnity : ' Sir, one drop of the blood of Christ is worth it all ! ' Something that Brougham had said or done (I think in a Corn-Law controversy with John Bright) led Carlyle into a monologue on Brougham's vagaries after he became Chancellor, which he made the text for an emphatic deliverance on the dangers attending gratified ambition, and the duty of a man to remain con- tented with the position marked out for him, and not to strive for a higher one. It was not unusual for him to wind up a denunciation by discovering some good in the person or thing denounced. Brougham's promotion of Thirlwall would, he said, be placed to the credit side of his account, or words to that effect. Thirlwall had to resign his tutorship at Cambridge as the result of his plain- spoken pamphlet in support of the admission of Dissenters to the Universities. Whereupon Brougham, then Chan- cellor, presented him to a living in Yorkshire, which enabled him to finish his History of Greece. In the fulness of time he was made by Lord Melbourne Bishop of St. David's, to the great indignation of High and other ortho- dox Churchmen, to whom Broad-church Thirlwall, as co-translator of Niebuhr, translator, too (though before he took orders), of a quasi-heterodox essay of Schleiermacher's on St. Luke, was a man suspect. Of the movement of contemporary German literature, Carlyle said he knew little or nothing, and asked me what Uhland was about, First Acquaijitance with the Carlyles 69 to which I repHcd, if I remember rightly, that he was taking an active part in the debates of the Wlirtemberg Parliament. Carlyle spoke sympathetically of the then King of Prussia, Frederick William IV., as placed in a difficult position between the claims of his hereditary kingship and the demands of Prussian Liberalism. On the whole, he was doing the best that could be done under the circumstances, summoning to Berlin men of intellectual distinction ; by which, I suppose, Carlyle meant the King's patronage of Schelling, Tieck, and younger men of promise. In talk like this the evening passed very pleasantly for the junior of the party, who had lost the awe with which he entered that upper chamber. As I was leaving it, Mrs. Carlyle pointed out to me a portrait of Jean Paul Richter, which hung on one of its walls. ' His nose is put out of joint,' Carlyle remarked significantly. German literature, and a great deal else, was being effaced for him by the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ' the best fellow I have fallen in with,' I once heard him say. CHAPTER II THE CROMWELLIAD DURING the earlier period of my personal acquaint- ance with Carlyle he was verging on his fiftieth year, and his fame was approaching its zenith. The publi- cation, in 1837, of his French Revolution had been followed, in 1838, by that (in volume form, though still anonymously) of Sartor Resartus, which he compared to a stone thrown into a sheet of water : he saw the circle of its influence constantly widening. In the succeeding year, 1 839,appeared the first collective edition of his scattered essays. With 1840, he promulgated, in his thoughtful and eloquent Chartism, his first direct message to the governing classes of England, pointing out to them their duty at a seemingly perilous crisis. In the year after, 1841, he printed his lectures on Heroes and Hero- Worship, which had crowned his success as a lecturer, his audiences at them having included persons of high social as well as intellectual dis- tinction. Two years later, in 1843, during the revolt of the middle classes against the aristocracy, which as a body resisted the repeal of the corn-laws, appeared Past and Present, in its modern section full of what had become fierce and fiery protests against misgovernment and no- government alike. Meanwhile he was receiving consider- able social recognition from the great. Since his arrival in London he had been intimate with the best and foremost of his brother men of letters. But he had a thorn in 70 The Croinwelliad 71 the flesh — weak health. Headaches and insomnia were the ailments of which he most complained orally ; and for the headaches I have known him make a characteristic attempt to console himself by remembering that they had afflicted some of the greatest of the early German Reformers. Scotland never sent forth a stronger man, his medical brother John said of him ; but if he gained much in many ways by his migration to London — * literature written out of London,' he once said to me, ' has always a provin- cial look,' not to .speak of British Museum libraries and Public Record offices — he also suffered much by it. It was a trying exchange, that of the perfect stillness and pure air of his Dumfriesshire solitude, for our smoky and foggy Babylon, with its noises, to which he was morbidly sensitive, and its social excitements, which he could not altogether avoid, unless he was to remain in Chelsea, as at Craigen- puttock, a lonely hermit. ' 111 health has cast a funeral pall over my life,' he said to me soon after I made his personal acquaintance. With better health he might have been if not happy — one cannot well conceive Carlyle a happy man — at least not so irritable, with considerable benefit to himself and to others. Much in Carlyle and in what flowed from him was, as Goethe said of Schiller, * pathological.' At the period of which I am writing Carlyle was absorbed in the laborious task of editing and elucidating the letters and speeches of Cromwell. I had oppor- tunities for ob.serving the keenness and diligence of his research, seldom equalled by the most industrious of antiquaries engaged during a lifetime in the compo- sition of a county history. An Edinburgh gentleman of some antiquarian eminence sent him a fragment of 72 Literary Recollections manuscript, intimating, with a flourish of trumpets, that it contained what might prove to be an important contri- bution to CromweUian history. At the close of one of my occasional visits to the Chelsea household, Carlyle gave it me, saying that he could make nothing of it, and asking me, if so disposed, to endeavour to find out whether its contents could have any value for him. This was the first of a good many slight (and purely honorary) services which I was able to render him in connection with his Cromwell book. I was then so placed as to have somewhat peculiar facilities for such investigations. I found that the mys- terious fragment was simply a transcript of a passage in one of the perfectly accessible newspapers of the Common- wealth time, and had, moreover, no value whatsoever. The discovery pleased Carlyle, and thenceforth there came to me, pretty frequently, notes from him, with little historical and other queries. To answer them gave me no trouble that was not a pleasure, and saved him what was worse than trouble, loss of patience and of temper. For ordinary copying work at the British Museum and elsewhere he then employed an amanuensis, a forlorn-looking young Scotchman, whom he called a ' much-enduring man,' and whom, I observed, he treated with considerable delicacy. For something more than mere copying, how- ever, he had himself often to visit the old reading-room of the Museum, the overcrowding, bad ventilation, and general stuffiness of which had given rise to a malady which Carlyle called 'the Museum headache,' and had encouraged the propagation of a maleficent organism known to others as ' the Museum flea.' To these inconveniences was added a confused and almost chaotic catalogue (since superseded by one far superior to it), full of perplexing The Cromwelliad yi^ cross-references and of innumerable interlineations, made in an attempt to produce something like alphabetical sequence. It was painful to see Carlyle stooping as he groped, perplexed and irritated, in the confused and confusing catalogue trying to find out whether the book which he wanted was in it, and therefore in the library. If it was there, like every one else, he had next to write on a ticket the title of the work and the press-mark, given in the catalogue, indicating where it stood on the library shelves. The book was then, and not till then, procurable. With grim humour Carlyle called this indispensable ticket ' the talisman,' and bestowed anything but a benison on the framers of the regulation which made necessary this, to him, harassing preliminary quest, one, moreover, some- times altogether unsuccessful. He maintained that all that ought to be incumbent on the reader was to give the name of the book which he wanted, and that it was the duty of the librarian, without more ado, to find it for him. If you go, he argued, into a shop to purchase something, you are not expected to indicate to the shopman the whereabouts of the article to be purchased. What was faulty in this analogy and somewhat unreasonable in his complaint need scarcely be indicated. Thus, however, it came about that by saving him visits to the Museum and irksome hunts in quest of the talisman, my slender assist- ance was valued by him. Thus, too, and perhaps a little in other ways — I being, moreover, domiciled not far from him in Chelsea — there was formed for me the sort of intimacy with him that might under favourable auspices arise between an obscure, insignificant youth and a man of great literary distinction, whose presence was welcomed in some of the highest circles of English society. 74 Literary Recollections At last Cromwell' s Letters and Speeches, edited and elucidated, were in the printer's hands, to be issued in two bulky and rather costly volumes ; and with their appear- ance Carlyle's literary fame reached its zenith. It was to his own surprise, and still more to that of his publishers, that the success of his Cromwell proved to be so great. According to Mrs. Carlyle, if I understood her rightly, they undertook its publication with considerable reluctance, and only on the understanding that he would give them after- wards a complete biography of Cromwell. She herself expressed satisfaction at having no longer to breathe what she called 'the Cromwell atmosphere,' and thought the English a singular people in having received with com- parative indifference a book so interesting as Past and Present to bestow on the Cromwell such a cordial reception. By another member of Carlyle's family, who had not, like Mrs. Carlyle, been a daily and hourly witness of the toilsome effort which produced it, the book was welcomed more heartily than any of his previous writings. Carlyle spoke of the delight with which his pious Presbyterian mother read the large type of the Puritan hero's letters and speeches, neglecting her son's copious smaller type elucidations of them. She looked on Cromwell as on some good and great King of Judah, reappearing on earth in English guise. The financial result of the book to Carlyle was considerable. According to report, he received ;^iooo for this the first edition of it. One never heard him refer to the subject, though he spoke freely enough of the very different result, at one stage at least, of the first English edition of his French Revolution. In the first account rendered him by its publisher, the expenses of production so balanced the receipts from the sales as to leave the The Cromive Iliad 75 author for all his toil and trouble exactly nil ! The Cromwell he himself predicted would be ' the most lasting of all his books.' It was the only work of his of which one heard him say, or rather hint, that its execution did not fall far short of his ideal. Of course there were readers of the famous book who protested against Carlyle's presentation of Cromwell as from first to last the sincerest of men, inspired by the one desire that the Kingdom of his Father in heaven should come and His will be done on earth. On the other hand, there reached him numerous expressions of sympathetic approval of his estimate of Cromwell. Many of them were from ' Evangelicals ' of all communions, and Carlyle might then be heard declaring that among Evangelicals were to be found some of the best people in England. From High Churchmen he neither expected nor received any but an unfavourable verdict on Cromwell's character and career. Their view was to some extent shared even by his own familiar friend, Richard Monckton Milnes, the first Lord Houghton of after years. Milnes was professedly a Tory, though of a subdued type. ' He takes mildly to his Con- servatism,' Carlyle said of him about this time, ' and sees that it is a falling cause.' In his One Tract More (1841), written from the point of view of a philosophical Churchman (later on he called himself a ' Puseyite sceptic'), Milnes had delivered himself of an interesting apologia for the growing Tractarianism and germinating Ritualism of fifty years since. Nevertheless he was among the first to recognise and proclaim Carlyle's genius and that of Emer- son also. The year before the appearance of the first English edition of Emerson's Essays, with a commendatory preface by Carlyle, Milnes contributed to the London and 76 Literary Recollections WestDiinster Review an article on Emerson, which was the earliest recognition in any British periodical of the American philosopher's rare and peculiar merits. It appeared in the number of the Review for October 1839, immediately follow- ing that in which John Sterling gave a similar first and glowing recognition of Carlyle as a great and original teacher of men. ^ Milnes's was a finely appreciative estimate, yet he showed in it a certain intellectual conservatism by a friendly protest against Emerson's ' declaration of inde- pendence ' in the spiritual region, and proclamation of the right and duty of every man to think for himself about everything. In spite of his general breadth of view, Milnes could not bring himself to sympathise with Puritanism. Very soon after the publication of his Cromwell Carlyle called on him, and found him, as regarded the great Pro- tector, in substantial agreement with a really able as well ^ In a very striking passage of his Life of John Sterling Carlyle has recorded the effect produced on him by this article. Speaking of Sterling at Clifton Carlyle says : ' He wrote there and sent forth in this autumn of 1839, his most important contribution to John Mill's Review, the article on Carlyle, which stands also in Mr. Hare's collection. What its effect on the public was I knew not, and know not ; but remember well, and may here be permitted to acknowledge, the deep, silent joy, not of a weak or ignoble nature, which it gave to myself in my then mood and situation, as it well might. This first generous human recognition, expressed with heroic emphasis, and clear conviction visible amid its fiery exaggeration, that one's poor battle in this world is not quite a mad and futile, that it is perhaps a worthy and manful one, which will come to something yet : this fact is a memorable one in every history ; and for me Sterling, often enough the stiff gainsayer in our private communings, was the doer of this. The thought burnt in me like a lamp for several days ; lighting up into a kind of heroic splendour the sad volcanic wrecks, abysses, and convulsions of said poor battle, and secretly I was very grateful to my daring friend, and am still and ought to be. What the public might be thinking about him and his audaci- ties, and me in consequence, or whether it thought at all, I never learnt or much heeded to learn.' One, doubtless, of the effects of Sterling's article, aided by the appearance about the same time of the first collected edition of Carlyle's Essays, was to produce rather elaborate articles on Carlyle's writings and teaching in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. That in the TJie Cromzvelliad yy as elaborate article^ contributed to the Christian Remem- brancer (April 1849), by J. B. Mozley, in which Carlyle's character and estimate of Cromwell were strenuously im- pugned. Mozley was a prominent High Churchman of the time, whom Mr. Gladstone made a Canon, and finally Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. Carlyle was too proud a man, and perhaps knew too much of the idiosyn- crasy of his friend and junior to display any chagrin, although he would have been better pleased if Milnes had appreciated Cromwell more and Mozley on Cromwell less. Among the distinguished young men of high cultivation who admired him and courted his society, Milnes was a chief favourite. Carlyle appreciated his 'sunny humani- ties ' and cheerful contentment with a ' saloon celebrity ' as a poet, while Mrs. Carlyle, touching gently on what she styled his * ridicules,' praised his ' delightful little notes.' Carlyle, however, was sometimes nettled by what appears to have been Milnes's occasional fondness for contradicting him, or saying something unpalatable merely to produce an outburst of indignant protest. Carlyle took seriously whatever sounded like serious speech. I have heard him describe Milnes as ' going about talking the most palpable Edinburgh (for July 1840) was by Herman Merivale, who became Permanent Under Secretary of State for India. It was patronising in tone, but did jus- tice to the vivid picturesqueness of The French Revolution, with which mainly it dealt. Carlyle, strange to say, at first fancied that it was by Macaulay, to whose strongly-marked style it bears not the slightest resem- blance. The article in the Quarterly (September 1840) was by William Sewell, an Oxford Tractarian cleric, whose Christian Morals and other books aroused some attention in their day. It was Sewell who, as sub-rector and tutor of Exeter College, Oxford, indignantly flung Mr. Froude's Nemesis of Faith into the blazing college fire, and, poker in hand, zealously stimulated its cremation. Mr. Froude was a fellow of that college. In Sewell's article there is an exhibition of some sympathy with Carlyle as a denouncer of the materialism of the age, but Carlyle's religion of hero-worship was of course repugnant to a champion of Tractarian orthodoxy. ^ Reprinted in Essays by J. B. Mozley (i8b4). 78 Literary Recollections sophistry,' which doubtless amounted to nothing more than some persistent attempts to draw out Carlyle.^ He told me, quite good-humouredly, of a little practical joke which Milnes played on him. He received one day a visit from an American, who had been floating about rather exten- sively in London society. The visitor, who was homeward bound, stayed an unconscionable time. At last, when he was about to depart, he said that he could not return to the States without paying a farewell visit to Carlyle, who, Milnes had told him, 'was talking of him yesterday for two hours.' Carlyle had indeed been speaking of him for a considerable period on the previous day, but it was to denounce him as a bore of the first magnitude ! Once, when Carlyle was in a less serene mood, and I happened to say something, I know not in what connection, of his early intimacy with Milnes, 'Yes,' was the reply, 'he looked at you out of the boxes.' After his tardy victory over circumstances, Carlyle had not forgotten the contrast between his former poverty and the splendour and wealth of the great people who, regarding him during his painful struggle as ' a curious thing ' — his own expression in the Reminiscences — invited him to their banquets and recep- tions to be looked at and listened to — ' out of the boxes,' ^ In his Life of Lord Houghton Mr. T. W. Reid prints a letter written to a friend, in which W. E. Forster, afterwards the well-known statesman, thus describes Milnes teasing Carlyle when both were his guests at Rawdon, near Leeds : ' Monckton Milnes came yesterday, and left this morning — a pleasant, companionable little man, well-fed, and fattening, with some small remnant of poetry in his eyes, and nowhere else ; delighting in paradoxes, but good- humoured ones ; defending all manner of people and principles in order to provoke Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have succeeded to his heart's content, and for a time we had a most amusing evening; reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a fierce cat's tail back- wards, and, getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks, he managed to avoid the threatened scratches.' CHAPTER III AFTER THE CROMWELLIAD. HIS book on Cromwell finished, Carlyle found himself for the first time during many years without occu- pation. The dolce far niente of ordinary workers was never a boon to him, and he longed to be in harness again. Mr. Froude hints that a life of Frederick the Great was already suggesting itself to him. My impression was a very dif- ferent one. From Carlyle's conversation at this time, I inferred that he was looking for a theme to the England of the eleventh century rather than to the Germany of the eighteenth, and that William the Conqueror, not Frederick the Great, was to be his new hero. He came with his brother John to the Library of the British Museum, and carefully inspected there the engraved reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, chapters of Anglo-Norman history in needlework, once thought to have been the handiwork of Matilda, the Conqueror's spouse, and undoubtedly that of a contemporary of the Conquest. In the rude but genuine delineations of successive scenes and events, from Harold taking leave of the Confessor before starting for Normandy, onward to the fierce viclee of Saxons and Normans at the battle of Hastings, there was exactly that visuality in which Carlyle delighted. The quaint antique panorama would have furnished him with many a picturesque touch had he undertaken the task towards which his thoughts seemed to be tending, and which has since been performed by other 8o Literary Recollections and very different hands. He had long been impressed by the gigantic figure of the Conqueror looming through the mist of ages, and, as he thought, greatly distorted by the prepossessions and prejudices of modern historians. To begin with, under Harold, Carlyle thought, England would have lapsed into hopeless anarchy. The rebellion of Harold's own brother Tostig, supported by a Danish inva- sion, prefigured in all likelihood a series of rebellions and invasions by which England would have been harassed and harried but for the Norman Conquest. In the rule of the Conqueror Carlyle saw a great deal more than the ruthless- ness with which it was established, and he looked on William and his Normans as the true makers of the greatness of England. His keen interest in the Conqueror and the Conquest had apparently been first aroused by Thierry's well-known History. Carlyle could not believe that the England fashioned by William was the result of nothing better than the Norman cruelty and rapacity with pictures of which Thierry's pages teemed. Such a notion was entirely false, and had produced, he thought, practically mischievous conceptions of the course of human affairs. I heard him maintain in all seriousness that the acceptance of Thierry's theory of the Norman Conquest had contributed to produce the cruelties then recently perpetrated by the French in Algeria ! In the very year of the issue of Carlyle's Croimvcll there was a general outburst of indig- nation in England at the tidings of a terrible Algerian atrocity. A body of Arab fugitives had taken refuge in a cavern, and refused to surrender to their French pursuers. A fire of fagots was lighted at the entrance of the cavern, and when at last the French troops entered it, they found the corpses of some five hundred suffocated Arabs. The After the Cromivelliad 8 1 French officer in command was the Colonel Pelissier, who became twenty years later Commander-in-Chief of the French army before Sebastopol. Afterwards, as Marshal Duke of Malakhoff, and created a British G.C.B., he figured as French ambassador in London. Whatever Carlyle's intentions in regard to William the Conqueror — the study of whose history he resumed sub- sequently — he was suddenly summoned to complete a familiar task. Only a few months after the issue of Cromweir s Letters and Speeches, a second edition was de- manded. During the interval, so great had been the interest generally taken in the contents of the book, that many unpublished letters of Cromwell's and documents relating to him were disinterred from private repositories through- out the country, and forwarded to his zealous biographer. Among the contributors was the then Duke of Manchester, whose ancestor, an Earl of Manchester, was one of the Parliament's Generals early in the Civil War, having at one time for his Lieutenant-General Cromwell himself, who, however, got rid of him, through the famous self- denying ordinance, as suspected of lukewarmness in the cause. The Duke found among the Kimbolton papers unpublished letters of Cromwell ; and not caring to intrust them to the post, brought them on foot to Chelsea, and delivered them to the servant as if he were any ordinary messenger. I know not whether it was the disclosure of his Grace's rank that led, or helped to lead, the hand- maiden of the Chelsea household to an inference tentativ^ely communicated by her to her mistress, whom it amused, and who reported it with a certain satisfaction. One day, in an interval of business, she looked at Mrs. Carlyle, and said, in a tone of interrogation, ' Master, ma'am, is the F 82 Literary Recollections cleverest man as is ? ' the reply of her mistress being, ' We fondly hope so.' However this may have been, all letters undoubtedly Cromwell's were welcomed by Carlyle, and with elucidations wherever needful, were duly inserted in the new edition ; while, with a conscientious thoughtfulness too rare among successful editors, he printed the new letters and elucidations in a detached supplement for the benefit of possessors of the first edition. The labour required for an artistic fusion of the new matter with the old was considerable, but to Carlyle it was a labour of love. The demand for a second edition of one of his more elaborate works so soon after the appear- ance of the first, was unique in his experience. He prized his success no doubt for its own sake, but also because he attached great importance to his countrymen's adoption of his estimate of Cromwell. Once more his conversation, or his monologues, turned much on Cromwell, who for a long time coloured his thoughts and waking dreams. I can see him now, in an old brown dressing-gown, seated on a foot- stool on the hearthrug, close to the fireplace in the little parlour, sending most deftly up the chimney whiffs from a long clay pipe, so that the room might not be odorous of tobacco-smoke. I can hear him between the whiffs, which served as commas and colons (there was never a full stop), pouring forth in the strongest possible of Scotch accents, an oral Latter-Day Pamphlet, contrasting Cromwell and his Puritans with contemporary English politicians and the multitudes whom they were leading by the nose to the abyss. I see Mrs. Carlyle, with head bent and one hand covering her face, listening in silence. She had heard it all so often before, poor lady, and knew how little would come of it. I can hear her, when Carlyle's denunciations of the After the Crojnwe Iliad 83 present became terribly fierce, make the considerate appeal, * Don't be angry with Mr. Espinasse ; he is not to blame,' or, before the pipe had been substituted for the tea-cup, * My dear, your tea is getting quite cold ; that is the way with reformers.' Then perhaps the wild tempest of words would cease, and the Latter-Day Prophet break out into a hearty laugh at his own vehemence. Carlyle's theory of government was, as all the world knows, that in an age and country like ours the wisest man should rule. If you asked how the wisest was to be discovered, he replied that first of all we had to recognise the necessity for the supremacy of wisdom, together with the utter futility of our present method of choosing our governors by counting votes at the polling-booth. Once, when I ventured to hint that even were the wisest man discovered and chosen to rule over us he would not be immortal, and there might be 'a difficulty about the succession,' Carlyle replied in rather an irate tone, ' That is the sort of twaddle that used to be poured into me when I was young,' and proceeded to speak of the good government enjoyed by the world under those five great Roman Emperors of whom Nerva was the first and Marcus Aurelius the last, and who succeeded each other by adoption. Yet Marcus Aurelius, to say nothing of his persecution of the Christians, appointed as his successor his vile son Commodus ; and Carlyle had no great opinion of the ' wisdom ' embodied in the Meditations of the con- templative Emperor, though they furnished him with one of the epigraphs of his history of the French Revolution. On quite another occasion, when I spoke of the stoical grandeur of the Meditations, he cut me short with the contemptuous remark, ' The unrcading Germans came 84 Literary Recollections in and put an end to all that sentimentality.' In truth, it was this very matter of the succession which proved to be the weakness of the Protectorate instituted by Cromwell and his officers. In the latest form of the Protectoral constitution, Cromwell was authorised to nomi- nate his successor. It is not certain, but it is probable, that he nominated the incapable Richard, who did succeed him, and wrecked the Protectorate. In his book, following a tradition, Carlyle suggested that Fleetwood, Cromwell's son-in-law, was nominated his successor in 'the sealed piece of paper' in which Cromwell is supposed to have named one, and which could not be found when searched for at Hampton Court when Cromwell was dying. In conversation, Carlyle said that if Cromwell had nominated as his successor his capable younger son, Henry, who was governing Ireland for him when he died, the Protectorate might have been firmly established, and thus the pernicious restoration of the Stuarts been averted.^ Carlyle's opinion, of some ten years afterwards, on the interesting point, is given in his unpublished pencil jottings on the proof- sheets of an article on the Civil War and Cromwell, con- tributed to the Edinhirgh Review for January 1856, by his friend the late well-known John Forster. Forster sent ^ The late Mr. Venables gave {Fortnightly Review for May 1893) the following interesting account of a discussion, of which he was an ear-witness, between Carlyle and Macaulay on the character of Henry Cromwell : ' Almost the only occasion on which I remember to have heard Carlyle engaged in an elaborate defence of his opinions or assertions was at a breakfast party in London, against an opponent no less formidable than Lord Macaulay. The subject of dispute was the character of Henry Cromwell, whom Lord Macaulay described, in words quoted from Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs, as a "deboshed cavalier." Carlyle maintained not only that the charge was unjust, but that Henry Cromwell was an able and upright statesman. Both disputants were equally vigorous and voluble ; but, not pretending to have any independent opinions on the subject, I observed that Carlyle referred to many contem- After the Cromiue Iliad 85 the proof to Carlyle for corrections or suggestions, and Carlyle's comments pencilled on its margin, though few, are for the most part strikingly characteristic. The ground- work of Forster's article was Guizot's Histoire de la Repub- liqiie dAfigleterre, et de Cromwell (1854), a continuation of his former work, which closed with the execution of Charles I., and which Carlyle had praised in his Cromwell. The continuation came down to the death of Cromwell, and contained some really curious matter taken from the unpublished despatches of French ambassadors in England during the Commonwealth. But in the interval Louis Philippe had fallen, and his Prime Minister had become, for Carlyle, ' Sophist Guizot' More than once in these jottings Carlyle calls Guizot a 'galvanised dead dog,' pronouncing him incapable of understanding such a man as Cromwell, and calling his later book — in which Crom- well's religious fervour was represented as tempered by statecraft — 'a dirty French pamphlet' Forster having quoted a passage in which Guizot spoke of the Protector as desirous of founding a dynasty, Carlyle thus retorts on the fallen French statesman : ' It is false that he ever wanted to found a dynasty. His notion was (and that very loose) a dynasty like the Hebrew Judges.' In his porary authorities, while Lord Macaulay, at the end of every rhetorical period, invariably reverted to Mrs. Hutchinson and her " deboshed cavalier." " I have read," Carlyle once answered, not without impatience, "all that shrill female ever wrote, and I can assert that she knew nothing of Henry Cromwell. I have read every existing letter which she" {sic, a misprint surely for "he") ever wrote, "and all that is written about him, and know that he was not a deboshed cavalier." The only other speaker who intervened was Sir George Lewis, whose sceptical instinct never failed him. In answer to Carlyle's argument from the letters, he suggested that Henry Cromwell, when he was Lord Deputy in Ireland, probably saved himself the trouble of writing, by merely signing letters written by his secretary. I forget whether Lord Macaulay accepted the aid of his unexpected ally.' 86 ' Literary Recollections Editiburgh article, Forster not only adopted this theory, but broached it as his own. If Cromwell, in however 'loose' a fashion, did entertain such a notion, what a comment on it was the * Happy Restoration ' ! For the time being Carlyle was satisfied that he had done enough in the way of rehabilitating Cromwell, and was disposed to leave it to others to fill up his outline of the great English revolution of the seventeenth century. To aid those who might come after him, he bethought him of a little project suggested by his own experience. While editing and elucidating CroviwelVs Letters and Speeches^ he had consulted, and guided others to consult for him, the vast mass of so-called King's Pamphlets, in number between thirty and forty thousand, in the library of the British Museum. They cover the period between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the Restoration. The collector of them had purchased day by day and week by week whatever issued from the printing-press — newspapers, poli- tical pamphlets, sermons, plays, poems, and pasquinades. He had also formed a rough manuscript catalogue of them in several volumes (they still repose on one of the shelves of the Museum Reading Room), the titles being arranged in the chronological order of the issue of the publications themselves, of all arrangements the most useful for the serious historian. Carlyle thought that much of the unknown history of the eventful period lay buried in this mass of so-called pamphlets, and if extricated from it would be an invaluable aid towards the composition of a true Cromwelliad. The first step to be taken was to have the old manuscript catalogue printed, so that whoever wished to explore the collection would have before him a guide to and synopsis of its contents. I heard him say, with his After the Cromwelliad Zj usual emphasis, that the mere titles, often very quaint, of those old pamphlets would be more amusing than most of the books issued in our day and generation. Accord- ingly he drew up a Memorial, addressed to the Trustees, the governing body, of the British Museum, strongly urging them to have that catalogue printed. He showed me the Memorial, which has never been published, and which per- haps is still preserved somewhere in the Museum archives. I recollect little of it beyond its general purport. He indi- cated that a Cromwelliad worthy of its subject would in time be worked out by 'the genius of the English people.' He affirmed that the England of the Civil War and Commonwealth times might be restored to life by a proper exploration of the King's Pamphlets, and he added, I remember, 'even the age of Elizabeth is irrecoverable.' He said something at the close about 'the Michelets and Mignets ' being intrusted with the care of the French national archives ; by way, I suppose, of hinting that they managed these things better in France than in England. He told me at the time that to procure support for his Memorial he called on ' old Hallam,' the historian, who was one of the Trustees of the Museum. Neither from him nor from any one else did Carlyle receive the slightest encouragement, and his proposal fell to the ground. Some time afterwards, when he was again at leisure, I heard him talk, though rather vaguely, of forming a company of ' a few faithful men,' to conduct under his guidance an explora- tion of those pamphlets and of other neglected materials for the history of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, above all, of Cromwell's Protectorate. He lamented often the talent, undirected and misdirected, which was wasted on current literature, too frequently little better, he thought, 88 Literary Recollections than ' intellectual prostitution,' men ' blazing themselves out in newspapers,' as he phrased it, who, under proper guidance, might produce something noble, or at least con- tribute to its production. To that ' organisation of litera- ture' which he sometimes dreamt of, and which he desiderated above all things, the execution of this project of his might have been a contribution, small in itself, but important as a beginning. It never came to anything ; perhaps the * few faithful men ' were not forthcoming. This is one of the most original and interesting of all Carlyle's schemes of reconstruction in an age of revolution. The organisation of literature remains a dream which can be realised only in a very distant future. CHAPTER IV THE ASHBURTONS WHILE Carlyle was working at the second edition of his Cromwell the Corn Laws were being repealed. Though generally indifferent to the details of contemporary politics, he watched that operation with considerable interest. In Past and Present he had thun- dered against the Corn Laws, and denounced Sir Robert Peel as Sir Jabesh Windbag, emptying on him and his ' sliding scale ' a vial of contemptuous indignation. What was now happening, however, greatly altered for the better his opinion of the statesman who was carrying Corn Law repeal through Parliament, and Peel was to become for Carlyle an ' approximate hero.' As usual, he assigned to the ' hero ' all the merit of the great achievement, ignoring the other persons and events who and which co-operated to bring it about. With Sir Robert's conversion to Corn Law repeal his Cabinet was broken up, and he resigned the Premiership. He resumed it when Lord John Russell found himself, not very unwillingly, unable to form an Administration. * He has the courage of a lion,' Carlyle then said to me ; and declared his belief that Peel * would set up a permanent establishment in this country.' So little did he understand the working of our beautiful system of party government, or foresee that Peel's share in repeal- ing the Corn Laws was in a few weeks to extrude him from Downing Street, and exclude him from it for the few 90 Literary Recollections remaining years of his life ! But Carlyle did foresee that Corn Law repeal was the precursor of great political changes, nearer or more remote, in the direction of de- mocracy ; and the feeling with which he anticipated them was by no means one of unalloyed complacency. In his pessimistic forecast it was as if he had to live on and work in a decayed and tottering house, the fall of which was inevitable. The prospect of such a consummation did not seem altogether delightful to this one of the occupiers of the rickety tenement, as he considered it to be. In view of the ultimate downfall of ' great masses of humbug,' he said to me then : ' You may live to see it ; I hope that I shall not' One subordinate cause of the welcome which Carlyle gave to Corn Law repeal was his hope that it would preserve the aristocracy from a violent death, and allow its members breathing-time for reflection on their position and duties. No man ever spoke more plainly of the worthless- ness of the merely idle, pleasure-seeking, game-preserving aristocrat, but he cherished a high estimate of the possi- bilities for good which had fallen to the lot of the English aristocracy as a whole. His own personal experience of some of its members had indeed inspired him with a kindly feeling towards the order to which they belonged. For several years before the repeal of the Corn Laws he had enjoyed a close intimacy with Mr. Bingham Baring and his wife, Lady Harriet, afterwards the second Lord and Lad)- Ashburton, who appreciated his genius and conversation, and of whom he was often the welcome guest. This intimacy ripened into cordial friendship, and brought him into contact with many of their compeers, his fellow-guests in town and country, by whom he was treated with the The Ashhirtons 91 utmost courtesy and respect. Carlyle's lot had been very different from that of Macaulay, for instance, who was his junior, and made his appearance in Hterature about the same time as himself Early in life Macaulay attained literary and political distinction, speedily finding favour in the eyes of the Whig leaders, and obtaining a seat in Par- liament, with substantial official benefits, from his party, as soon as it was raised to power. Slowly and painfully, for more than twenty years after his adoption of a literary career, Carlyle had to ' cut his way,' as he phrased it, ' through the jungle of poverty and obscurity.' He would have been more than human if the Radical sternness of his youth had not relaxed a little when, having acquired a modest independence, he found his society welcomed by those whom he calls in his Reminiscences 'the selectest specimens of the English aristocracy.' Once, with the severe rigour of inexperienced youth, I expressed to him surprise at the great complacency with which a prominent democratic leader of those days, on platforms a vehement denouncer of all placed in authority over him, had been talking to me of some civil speech or other made to him by a Cabinet Minister. When I had finished, Carlyle ejacu- lated, in a tone expressive of no very strong condemnation of the delinquent ; ' Poor human nature ! Poor human nature ! ' A fraction of the winter holiday taken by Carlyle after finishing his Croinwell\i& passed with his wife in Hampshire, where they were the guests of Mr. and Lady Harriet Baring. After his return to London in the spring, to work at the second edition of the successful book, Mrs. Carlyle went again on a visit to the Barings, this time at Addis- combe, where they had another country-house, Carlyle 92 Literary Recollections generally joining her there for a day or two at the end of the week. As the guest, then, of these particular Barings, he was in the society of staunch adherents of Sir Robert Peel. From the formation of Peel's second Ministry in 1 84 1, Carlyle's host, Mr. Bingham Baring, had been the Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Control, until in 1845 he was appointed Paymaster-General of the Forces. This office had been held by Lord John Russell when charged with the conduct of the first Reform Bill, and Mr. Baring was succeeded in it by Macaulay. The work pro- bably was not very heavy, but, whatever its nature, the Carlyles reported, as something singular, that so long as Mr. Baring was in town ' he went to his office every day.* When Sir Robert, on declaring his conversion to Corn Law repeal, was deserted by many of the magnates of his Ministry and party, Mr. Bingham Baring adhered to him, and re- sumed his former office on his chief's restoration to the Premiership. If Peel had set up that 'permanent esta- blishment in this country ' which Carlyle fondly hoped for, or even if he had remained in office for a year or two more, it is possible that with such influential friends as the Barings, especially when they became Lord and Lady Ashburton, Carlyle might have been enabled to serve his country as a ' doer,' and not merely as a ' speaker.' ' Goethe,' he once said to me, ' was the most successful speaker of the century, but I would have been better pleased if he had done something ; ' and to ' do something, to do almost anything that was useful and honourable rather than spend his days in painfully writing books, which he felt too keenly to be an inadequate expression of himself, was so strong a desire of Carlyle's that, in the middle of his literary career, he actually thought of abandon- The Ashburtons 93 ing literature and becoming — a civil engineer ! Now that he was famous and successful he might well aspire to some higher practical work, and, without parading, he did not conceal his aspiration. There was no need for him to conceal it. His was not the vulgar ambition to be dubbed the ' Right Honourable Thomas,' with a salary of some thousands a year, paid quarterly, as had been the lot of Macaulay. Carlyle was ready to work, for the work's sake, with Herculean energy, at any of several highly useful public tasks. Dis aliter visum. Of Carlyle's two friendly Barings, Lady Harriet alone belonged to the hereditary aristocracy. She was the eldest daughter of the sixth Earl of Sandwich, and was doubtless none the less interesting to Carlyle because her ancestor, Edward Montagu, the first Earl, 'enlisted,' he told me, ' with Oliver when he was sixteen.' As an Admiral of the Fleet under the Protectorate, he fought with Blake against the Spaniard, but when the Commonwealth fell to pieces after Cromwell's death, he played a prominent part in bringing about the Restoration, and was rewarded with an earldom. The Barings were, in comparison with the Montagus, people of yesterday. German in origin, they traced their descent to the pastor, in the last century, of a Lutheran Church at Bremen, who migrated to London. His son John settled in England, and was a cloth manu- facturer near Exeter, The cloth manufacturer's son Francis, who in time was created a baronet, laid the foundations of the financial house of Baring, once so pre- eminently great, but somewhat eclipsed in these later days. Alexander, the second son of Sir Francis, ultimately became the head of his father's house of business, and amassed a colossal fortune, so much of which he sank in 94 Literary Recollections the purchase of land that Carlyle, who knew him and liked him, told me that ' he might be pricked for a sheriff in any county in England.' He was President of the Board of Trade in Peel's first Ministry of 1834-35, at the close of which he became the first Lord Ashburton of the modern creation, and during Sir Robert's second Administration of 1841-45, he negotiated the well-known Ashburton Treaty, which settled various boundary and other thorny differ- ences between the British and American Governments. The affairs of the financial house, known later as Baring Brothers, seem to have finally fallen into the hands of descendants of this first Lord Ashburton's elder brother. His eldest son, who, as second Lord Ashburton, succeeded him some two years later than the time of which I am writing, was Carlyle's kind and steadfast friend. Carlyle, Thackeray, Emerson when in England, for a time John Stuart Mill, Tennyson,^ Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Charles Kingsley, Jowett, Goldwin Smith, Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor, Tom Taylor, and Venables,^ who at his death was doyen of the Saturday Review^ and from whom his friend Thackeray borrowed the nobler traits in the character of George Warrington in Pen- dennis, figured as members, some intermittently, others •* In an unpublished letter of Carlyle's from the Hampshire seat of the Ashburtons, 'The Grange,' dated January 2nd, 1856, he writes thus of Tennyson as a fellow-guest : ' We are a fluctuating company, come like shadows, so depart. The agreeable phenomenon at present is Alfred Tenny- son. He has a big moustache, carefully cultivated, and with his new wide- awake looks flourishing. Good company to smoke with in the conservatory of the place, though he often loses his pipe, — more power to it ! ' ^ As he was not only an intimate friend of Carlyle, but saw much of him in the Ashburton circle to which both belonged, the admirable article of Venables, 'Carlyle in Society and at Home,' previously quoted (ante, p. 84), is, so far as it goes, a contribution of the greatest value to Carlyle's biography. The Ashbnrtons 95 permanently, of the literary circle which Mr. and Lady Harriet Baring gathered round them before and after they became Lord and Lady Ashburton. Yet, but for Lord Houghton's interesting sketch of both of them in the chapter, ' Lady Ashburton,' in his little-read volume, Monographs, not much would be known of the second Lord and Lady Ashburton, otherwise than through Mr. Froude's needlessly elaborate narrative of the mental dis- turbance occasioned to Mrs. Carlyle by the homage which her husband paid to the lady, and his desire that it should be also paid to her by his wife. Lord Houghton's Mono- graph is the main authority for what follows. Mr. Bingham Baring formed in early life a warm friendship with Charles Buller, who remained until his premature death a constant and favourite guest of Lord and Lady Ashburton, as they shall henceforth be called. Carlyle, as is well known, had been Charles Buller's tutor, and as long as both were alive, their intimacy survived this connection. It was through Buller apparently that Carlyle and Lord Ashburton be- came acquainted. Lord Ashburton was a man of superior intelligence, and felt strongly the responsibilities of his position. He was very shy and retiring, and, with all her efforts, his brilliant wife could not succeed in exciting in him a political ambition, which, if he had possessed it, could have been easily gratified. He was content to fulfil the duties of his station, to admire his gifted wife, and to enjoy the homage which every one rendered to her. It had been partly with the hope, Lord Houghton intimates, of advancing him in political life that she first gathered round her such a circle as had scarcely ever before been seen in London salon or English country-house — states- men, high officials, prominent politicians apd ecclesiastics, 96 Literary Recollections not a few men of purely intellectual and literary distinc- tion, of all schools and opinions, with a large and doubtless judicious admixture of people of mere rank and fashion. The Chatelaine herself was one of the cleverest and wittiest of women. The Princess Lieven said of her, qu'il vaudrait bicn sabouner pour enttndre causer cette femnie ; but even the amiable Lord Houghton speaks of her ' natural rudeness of temperament and despotism of dis- position.' She was satirical, and could be sarcastic. The parcere sicbjectis was much less congenial to her than the debellare superbos. ' Many who would not have cared for a quiet defeat shrank from the merriment of her victory.' ' I do not mind being knocked down,' moaned one of the victims of her wit, * but I can't stand being danced upon afterwards.' The impression made by all that one has read and heard of this famous lady is that she had a great deal more head than heart. She treated even her husband's family with a certain disdain. ' The Barings are every- where,' she said, 'and get everything.' 'The only check upon them,' she added, ' is that they are all members of the Church of England ; ' by which observation she meant presumably to hint that, had it been otherwise, a Baring might have sat in the chair of St. Peter ! Himself not always sparing of others with his tongue, Thackeray took such umbrage at some of her personal sallies, that for a time he declined her invitations, and said harsh things of her. He gave in, however, when, resentment on either side having cooled down with the lapse of months, he received from her a card of invitation to dinner. He returned it with a drawing on the back, ' representing himself kneel- ing at her feet with his hair all aflame from the hot coals she was energetically pouring on his head out of an orna- The Ashbiirtons 97 mental brazier.' The reconciliation was complete, and the after-friendship of the peeress and the novelist was thence- forth uninterrupted. This deference to intellect was the redeeming point in the great lady's character. ' Ask me to meet your printers ! ' a lady of fashion once said to her, the 'printers' being a scornful appellation for such dis- tinguished men of letters as have been already named. ' " My printers," as they call them, have become a sort of Order of the Garter,' Lord Houghton reports Lady Ash- burton as saying. ' I dare not talk to the Knights as I could do to fine ladies and gentlemen.' She could, however, be capricious to her 'Knights' ; and in a letter written home by Sir Henry Taylor when visiting her, with Tennyson as a fellow-guest, there are proofs that her caprices did not fail to provoke envyings and jealousies among the notable men who composed her little court. But it is admitted that her, like her husband's, regard for Carlyle never wavered, however imperious her manner to him might sometimes be. ' Coming back to the society of Carlyle,' she said once, 'after the dons at Oxford, is like returning from some conventional world to the human race.' According to Lord Houghton, '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 else- where.' Lord Ashburton is described by Lord Houghton as a nobleman with an ' unquenchable thirst for information, ' who loved to bring about him 'every special capacity.' Lady Ashburton delighted chiefly in the society of her ' printers.' To her husband it was due that among their guests were men of science like Lyon Playfair and Dr. G / 98 Literary Recollections William Carpenter, or such industrialists as the eminent mechanical engineer, the praises of whom being sung after his departure, Carlyle was content to say ' he seems to be a clean veracious smith.' But while others among her ' printers ' shared with Carlyle more or less, and fitfully or otherwise, the favour which Lady Ashburton always showed him, he appears to have been the only one of them whom her lord not only cherished as a friend but as a companion, taking the sage with him in journeyings often to Scotland and to France. Mr. Froude even says that he found among Carlyle's papers notes in which Lord Ashburton expressed sympathetic approval of those schemes of social reconstruction which were rejected by almost all of Carlyle's contemporaries. After Lord Ashburton's death, Lord Houghton spoke of him as ' the noblest and purest-minded man I have ever known ' — Lord Houghton had known nearly everybody who was worth knowing — and he adds, ' If he' (Lord Ashburton) 'had had powers and facility of expression he would have been a great one.' Of such s/ a nobleman more ought to have been than is recorded. Since these Carlyle papers were first printed, I have been able to collect a little information about Lord Ashburton which has not been published in any contribution to the enormous mass of Carlyle literature. One creditable anec- dote of his earlier manhood I lighted on in a very un- expected quarter.! It relates to the frightful agrarian outrages which marked the year 1830: Carlyle's Lord Ashburton, then Mr. Bingham Baring, was born in 1799. Bands of agricultural labourers went about destroying threshing machines as diminishing employment and 1 Charles Roach Smith, Retrospections: Social and Archceological (1883), ii. 44-8 and 244-6. The Ashbiu'tons 99 lowering wages, and threatening letters, demanding their disuse, were addressed to the farmers who had adopted them. Night after night incendiary fires destroyed corn- stacks, farm buildings, and live stock. Hampshire, where Mr. Baring's father, the first Lord Ashburton of that creation, had estates, was one of the areas visited by these outraees. The rioters were at their destructive work on a farm near the Grange, which afterwards became so famous as the scene of the second Lord and Lady Ash- burton's splendid and comprehensive hospitality. Mr. Bingham Baring, with a few servants and dependants, sallied forth to resist the rioters. In the niclee which ensued, a young fellow of the name of Cooke struck Mr. Baring with one of the sledge-hammers which the rioters used in destroying the obnoxious threshing machines. Mr. Baring was seriously injured, and the blow might have been fatal had it not been partly warded off by one of those who had accompanied him to the fray. Cooke was arrested, and, with a number of others, was tried before a special commission of judges at Winchester, early in 183 1. He was found guilty, and, under a statute since repealed, condemned to death. At the trial, Mr. Baring, on oath, distinctly declared his belief that Cooke did not strike him with malicious, far less with murderous, intent. After the sentence Mr. Baring and his family used all their considerable influence to procure a commutation of the death penalty. The judges appear to have refused to intervene, and Lord Melbourne, then Home Secretary, thought that an example had to be made. Through no fault of his Mr. Baring's amiable intention was defeated, and Cooke was executed. After Mr. Bingham Baring became Lord Ashburton he lOO Literary Recollections was twice President of the Royal Geographical Society, but specialists supplied the bulk of his one presidential address. I have, however, found in print a full report of what was probably the longest speech which Lord Ashburton ever made, an interesting speech, and delivered on an interesting occasion. It was an address to the elementary teachers of the diocese of Winchester (1855), in explanation of his establishment of a set of ' Ashburton prizes ' — money prizes, 'for the teaching of common things ' — rudimentary physics, physiology, domestic economy, and so much of political economy as related to work and wages ; for the speaker did not share the steady aversion from the 'dismal science,' felt and expressed by his guide, philo- sopher, and friend, Carlyle. In the course of the address Lord Ashburton let fall this little bit of autobiography : — 'Between Eton and Oxford I studied six months in the University of Geneva. I did not indeed learn much, but my eyes were opened to mark and understand what had before passed unheeded. Faculties were called into play which lay till then undeveloped, and I found my mind ripen more rapidly during those few months than in years previous ; and now, advancing in age, I still continue to add more and more to my knowledge by the application of the general principles of common things which I then learnt.' The following remarks on the teaching of science and its absence from the education of the higher as well as of the humbler classes were more striking then than they will appear to be now, though they still deserve to be laid to heart : — ' Remember that it is by the daily use of the powers of nature that man feeds and clothes and houses himself. He employs fire in a hundred ways for a hundred purposes ; The Ashburto7is loi why should he not be taught the doctrine of heat ? For some purposes he may learn to use it better ; he may learn to use it for more. ' Again, he passes the livelong day in the application of the mechanical powers ; why should he not be instructed in their principles also ? It is true that princes in this land are ignorant of them as well as peasants. In this pro- gressive country we neglect the knowledge in which there is progress, to devote ourselves to those branches in which we are scarcely, if at all, superior to our ancestors. In this practical country the knowledge which gives power over nature is left to be picked up by chance on a man's way through life. In this religious country the knowledge of God's works forms no part of the education of the people, no part even of the accomplishments of a gentle- man ; but this judicial blindness cannot much longer exist. If we wish to hold our rank among nations, if we intend to maintain that manufacturing ascendency which is the chief source of our national strength, we must carry this study of common things not only into the schools of the poor, but into our colleges and universities.' Then came some remarks, more original than these, but too long for quotation, in which Lord Ashburton developed the thesis that the labourer and the artisan would take a much greater interest in their work, if, instead of making it a matter of monotonous routine, they under- stood the principles on which their procedure was based. The whole address reads like the product of a thoughtful and even penetrating man, animated by a generous desire to increase the well-being and happiness of those socially beneath him. Lord Ashburton's attachment to Carlyle led him to I02 Literary Recollections welcome Carlyle's friends and to encourage and aid Carlyle's sXxu^'^\x\g proteges. Instances of his munificence to these will be given hereafter. Meanwhile, here is an amusing anecdote illustrating Lord Ashburton's generosity, when Carlyle was even indirectly concerned. An artist, who frequented the Carlyles, painted a picture of them as they looked in their little parlour where guests were gene- rally received, — Carlyle in his dressing-gown smoking a pipe by the fireside, the lady in an arm-chair sitting opposite him. The picture was hung at one of the Royal Academy's Exhibitions, but was by no means a striking work of art. So great, however, was Lord Ashburton's interest in the subject that he bought it for ;^500. The delighted artist hurried off to Chelsea, expecting congratu- lations on his own account, and some manifestation of pleasure on the part of the Carlyles at having such a value set on a delineation of themselves and their do- mestic interior. When he had delivered himself of what he fancied to be the glad tidings, all the response received by him from Carlyle was the by no means complimentary or complacent remark : ' Well, in my opinion, ;!^500 was just ;£^495 too much ! ' CHAPTER V MAZZINI AND THE CARLYLE BROTHERHOOD CARLYLE was still at work on the second edition of his Cromwell when there occurred the painful episode in his married life to which reference has been previously made. Mrs. Carlyle was dissatisfied with Lady Harriet Baring's demeanour to her as a guest, and was disinclined to reappear in that character. Though Carlyle thought her repugnance unreasonable, and allowed it to irritate him extremely, he deferred to it so far as even to think of dis- continuing his own visits to the Barings. He hinted as much to Lady Harriet, who received the intimation, he wrote to his wife, 'with fully more indifference than I expected,' a response characteristic of ' the high lady,' as Carlyle was wont to call her. Before very long matters were made up for a time at least, and Mrs. Carlyle resumed her visits to the Barings. From the dates given by Mr. Froude, I see that I was an occasional visitor to the Chelsea household when this unhappy disagreement arose. I observed at the time that Carlyle was more than usually irritable. ' Women are very silly creatures,' was one of the hasty generalisations in which he indulged, and he protested against his wife's then admiration of George Sand — ebullitions which she bore in silence. I knew nothing of what was doubtless the cause of Carlyle's irritation, and like the rest of the world, would have known nothing of it but for Mr. Froude's revelations. 103 104 Literary Recollections Indeed, it is very noticeable that when editing his wife's letters for possible publication, Carlyle omitted all those of them written when she left London for the North, a little later, in a very angry mood, and that when expressing penitence, in the Reminiscences, for his marital shortcomings, he forbore any mention of this Baring episode. But, if the episode is one which yields little or nothing in the way of ' Recollections,' it may well be suggestive of ' Reflections.' Strange irony of fate ! Mrs. Carlyle had worked unweariedly, and suffered uncomplain- ingly, for some twenty years, to forward her husband on his toilsome path to eminence, and now it was the very altitude, which in this intimacy with the Barings he had reached, that led to the first great breach between the two. Mr. Froude blames both of them impartially, Carlyle for not sufficiently considering the feelings of his wife, and Mrs. Carlyle for exaggerating her grievance. But surely there is a third person involved in this unhappy business who has escaped well-deserved censure — Lady Ashburton herself. Mr. Froude tells the very edifying story of an invitation from Lady Ashburton to Mrs. Carlyle, asking her to spend December at the Grange, the chief country-seat of the Ashburtons, while Carlyle was to re- main at home busy with one of his books, the motive of the invitation being that Mrs. Carlyle should help in amusing some of her hostess's guests. ' She did not wish to go,' Mr. Froude says, ' and yet she hardly dared say no. She consulted John Carlyle,' her husband's medical brother, and this is an extract from her letter to him : ' Heaven knows what is to be said from me individually. If I refuse this time she,' Lady Ashburton, ' will quarrel with me out- right. That is her way, and to quarrel with her involves Mazzini a7id the Carlyle Brotherhood 105 also quarrelling with Mr. Carlyle. It is not a thing to be done lightly.' Why should Lady Ashburton 'quarrel outright ' with Mrs. Carlyle for refusing to be dragged from home to spend December in amusing the great lady's guests? It was wrong of Carlyle to be ready to quarrel with his wife because Lady Ashburton quarrelled with her on that paltry ground. But the prime offender was the great lady, who showed so much selfishness and so little delicacy of feeling in trying to coerce the wife into becoming an unwilling guest, knowing doubtless very well that the husband's wrath would be the penalty of refusal. Mr. Froude has printed two replies of Mazzini to appeals made to him by Mrs. Carlyle for sympathy in the dire distress of mind which the Baring episode was causing her. Among her complaints was that of a profound feeling of loneliness ; another was that her life was an * empty ' one. Mazzini's consolations on the first of these laments point to previous conversations between the two on life and death, and on the commune of the living with the beloved dead — references to which may have surprised those who knew Mrs. Carlyle only as a brilliant and satirical hostess. To her complaint of leading an 'empty' life, Mazzini's admonitory response was naturally ' do good,' ' get up and work ' — advice more easily given than followed. Mrs. Carlyle had a kindly disposition, and often in an impul- sive way ' did good ' to a greater extent than she received credit for. But the objects of her kindness were those in whom she took a personal interest, and the comprehensive feminine philanthropy now so rife was not at all in her way. I asked her once why she did not write a book. She re- plied that her ' ideal was too high.' Otherwise, to judge from little pieces of hers in prose and verse printed since her io6 Literary Recollections death, composed with more deliberation than the letters which she dashed off in hot haste, and exhibiting keen insight and a peculiar delicacy of thought and feeling, she might have made some very interesting and striking contributions to modern literature. When Mrs. Carlyle made these appeals to Mazzini her intimacy with him and admiration for him were at their highest. He had been then nearly ten years an exile in England. While carrying on, under constant espionage, with ceaseless activity and marvellous dexterity and fertility of resource, his ' Young Italy ' propagandism, he supported himself partly by writing high-toned articles for magazines and reviews. Among these was the MontJily Chronicle, which was edited by Bulwer (afterwards the first Lord Lytton), then a Liberal and something more, and which came to grief, with the also long-defunct British and Foreign Review. This periodical was founded and munificently supported by a wealthy northern M.P., Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, an advanced Liberal and ardent anti-Russian, its editor being John Mitchell Kemble (a son of Charles), the 'J. M. K.' to whom Tennyson, his early friend, addressed a fine sonnet, but who, instead of becoming, as predicted by the poet, a ' latter Luther and a soldier-priest,' achieved distinction as an Anglo-Saxon scholar. To each of these periodicals Mazzini contributed an article on Carlyle, eloquent and highly appreciative, but containing a friendly and sorrowful protest against Carlyle's view of ' heroes ' as the all-important factors in the history of man, Mazzini opposing to it what he described as ' the great religious idea, the continuous development of humanity, according to an educational plan designed by Providence.' But in spite of all differences of opinion, theoretical and Mazzini and the Carlyle Brothei'hood 107 practical, Carlyle greatly admired the noble-minded Italian patriot. There is still remembered Carlyle's indignant protest against the opening, for the benefit of the Austrian Government, at the General Post Office, of Mazzini's letters by Sir James Graham, then Peel's Home Secretary, whom Carlyle defined to me as a ' border-reiver ' disguised as a Minister of State. In his protest, addressed to and pub- lished by the Times, Carlyle spoke of Mazzini as ' a man of genius and virtue, . . . one of those rare men numerable unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr-souls.' Years afterwards I heard Carlyle say, ' When I first met Mazzini I thought him the most beautiful creature I had ever seen — but entirely unpractical,' Mrs. Carlyle, by this time a little disenchanted, quietly adding, ' he twaddled.' This was just after the arrival of the news of the crushing defeat inflicted at Novara on Charles Albert and his Piedmontese army by Radetzky and his Austrians — another illustration, Carlyle said, of what ' Dutch bottom ' could do. Whatever material progress there had been in Italy, such as road-making, was due, he opined, to the Austrians. However, he wound up with the avowal, made, I thought, rather reluctantly, ' But I hope they ' (the Austrians) ' will be driven out' Next to his wife in devotion to Carlyle, but at a consider- able distance, was his brother John, ' Jack,' or ' The Doctor,' his junior by some six years. Of his three brothers, John was the only one who was enabled to adopt a profession, and that mainly through Carlyle's generosity to him, and at a time when he himself had a hard struggle to maintain. Carlyle's favourite brother, however, was, he told me, Alexander, ' Alec,' two years his junior, whose 'little white nieves' {Anglicc, fists) he could still sec io8 Literary Recollections gleaming in the summer evening dusk, raised in defence of his elder brother in boyish school or village-fights. Farming was Alec's vocation, but after several failures he migrated to Canada, and was the first of the brothers to die. Carlyle said he * wanted patience,' and spoke self-reproachingly of having done him no good by putting the Abbe Raynal's and other fiery books into his hands. The remaining and youngest brother James was, like Alec, a farmer, but ' he adapted himself,' Carlyle told me, ' to the new modes of farming,' and throve in his native district. James must have been the brother whom I once saw casually in his native village. During a walking tour, wending my way Edinburgh-wards from the English Lakes, I had to visit a friend who was temporarily sojourning in the neighbour- hood of Ecclefechan. I turned aside to see the hamlet in which my favourite sage was born and partly bred. One of his brothers, whom I took to have been James, kept there a little general shop. I entered and bought from the brother an ounce of snuff. He was a shock-headed common-looking Scotchman, the father apparently of some bare-footed children who were running in and out of the shop. James appears to have been far the least cultivated of the three — Carlyle called him a ' very inarticulate man.' He survived all his brothers. Dr. John Carlyle, at the time of which I write, had almost but not quite given up practising as a physi- cian, and, being an accomplished Italian scholar, was em- ploying his ample leisure in executing his well-known and excellent English prose translation of Dante's 'Inferno.' As travelling physician to the then Countess of Clare, and afterwards to the late Duke of Buccleuch, he had seen a great deal of the Continent, besides having in Mazzini and the Car lyle Brother Jiood 109 earlier years studied medicine in Germany. While attend- ing on Lady Clare he saw much of Italy and the Italians, and he spoke to me in praise of the dignified manners of the Italian aristocracy, intimacy with whom, he said, was seldom conceded to English tourists. In Italy, he acquired that thorough mastery of its language and know- ledge of its older literature which is conspicuous in his prose translation, with copious annotations, of Dante's ' Inferno.' He had that love of arguing which Benjamin Franklin discovered in ' all attorneys and men educated at Edinburgh,' where he took his M.D. degree. Carlyle has not too amiably described him as ' a logic-chopper from his infancy,' and, while recognising his excellent qualities, is found, in one of his notes to Mrs. Carlyle's letters, speaking of him as an element of disturbance in the Chelsea house- hold, though to me he appeared one of the quietest of men. While the poor Doctor was labouring hard at his translation of Dante, Carlyle rather pooh-poohed his zeal as expended on an ' obsolete ' theme. Mrs. Carlyle's liking for him was fitful. The good Doctor was indeed rather prosaic, and, according to his sister-in-law, ' looked on love as a disease of the nerves.' When he left London to settle for a time in Edinburgh she said, not too good-naturedly, ' John is somebody there, he is nobody here.' The Countess of Clare left him a pension sufficient for his modest wants. In later years he married an opulent widow, one of his very few remaining patients. When I first knew him he lived in lodgings not far from the Carlyles, of whom he was a constant visitor. He gave them medical advice when it was needed, was his brother's companion on many a London expedition, and was always ready to do for him anything in reason. ' I preach cheerfulness to him,' the Doctor told I lo Literary Recollections me ; he did not say with what result. He was very intel- ligent and well-informed, a harder, drier, more reticent Carlyle, I thought, with as little of his brother's irritability as of his genius. He admired that brother greatly, and had adopted some of his opinions, but he was much the more democratic of the two, and would sometimes meekly champion the elective principle in politics in opposition to his brother's scornful denunciations of franchise, ballot, and all the rest of it. He spoke to me with admiration of the mode in which official medical posts were filled in Paris by the suffrages of members of the profession who generally elected the most suitable men, whereas every- thing of that kind was settled in London by outside influence, canvassing, and so forth. Like his brother he loved thoroughness of knowledge and despised super- ficiality. One of his favourite amusements when he had an unfamiliar visitor who said that he knew such and such a language, was to test the pretender's knowledge by setting him to translate a passage in a book in that lan- guage. It was whispered that even the great Emerson's knowledge of German was thus tested by the Doctor, and that the Sage of Concord himself had been found wanting ! Dr. Carlyle contributed, though indirectly, to the pro- duction of Sartor Resartiis. It is evident that his brother's fragment of a novel, Wotton Reinfried, published for the first time in a contemporary periodical (and afterwards, 1892, in the volume with the surely inappropriate title, Last Words of Thomas Carlyle), was laid aside to make way and to furnish at least some material for the Life and Opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. Whole passages of the novel are transferred to Sartor, notably a very fine Mazzini and the Cmdyle BrotherJwod 1 1 1 one descriptive of mountain scenery, which in the later redaction the forlorn and footsore Teufelsdrockh is con- templating when the faithless Blumine and her husband are driven past him on their wedding tour in a barouche and four. In the novel, the first evening passed by the hero in the society of Jane Montagu, with whom he falls in love (Jane was Mrs. Carlyle's Christian name, and the Basil Montagus were among Carlyle's earliest friends in London), and their final parting are described in almost the same words as those of the analogous scenes in Sartor. When the conception of a Clothes philosophy flashed on Carlyle, as recorded by him in the Reminiscences, he needed a setting for it more appropriate and adequate than a Scottish fiction afforded.^ Dr. Carlyle supplied what was wanted. His early residence in Munich enabled him to furnish his brother with descriptions of the life, habits, and surround- ings of German Professors, from their philosophic beer- drinking in the Griine Gans to their transcendental musings in such a watch-tower as that of the Wahngasse. During a later visit of Dr. Carlyle's to Munich (in 1835) Carlyle writes to him (with a complimentary message to ' Herr Schelling,' then a Professor at Munich) : ' It seems to me always that you ought to meet Teufelsdrockh in some of the coffee-houses of Munich. Do they meet at that one yet ' — the Grime Gans — ' and drink beer ? ' Three years before he wrote thus, the British scenery and characters of Wotton Reinfried having been discarded, * These indications of the development of Wotton Reinfried into Sartor Resartus appeared in the Bookman months before a Mr. Strachey, in the Nineteenth Century for September 1892, indulged in the following liaseless taunt : ' It says little for the depth of Grub Street acquaintance with Carlyle's writings that criticism has not remarked that this story, IVotton Reinfried, is the protoplasm from which Sartor Resartus was afterwards evolved.' 1 1 2 Literary Recollections Sartor Resartus had begun to dawn on a reading public which knew not what to make of it, and it was dismissed by one Sir Oracle of literary opinion as 'clotted nonsense.' ' These London men,' Dr. Carlyle once said to me, with more feeling than he was wont to show, * tried to keep my brother down, but they couldn't' The book, which was to London publishers a stumbling-block and to London critics foolishness, has now its millions of readers, and is enrolled among the classics of the world. CHAPTER VI JOHN FORSTER GOETHE has said somewhere that the most trying situation for a man is to find himself in completely- altered circumstances without being mentally and otherwise in the least prepared for the change. One fine day this was my painful predicament. With goodwill towards me Carlyle harboured a strong dislike for the person to whom the perplexities of my position were mainly due, so that sympathy and antipathy combined to induce him to interest himself in my behalf ' You may lead,' he said to me, ' a wild Ishmaelitish life as a man of letters,' a vocation for which I felt little fitted. For a man of letters, he was of opinion in his then mood, ' historical research or to guide the people onward from day to day ' — through the press, of course — was the worthiest employment. Historical research was in my circumstances out of the question. When in regard to his other alternative I pleaded my ignorance of politics, he replied, ' Politics are the grandest of all things,' though it might be well for me to wait a little before meddling with them. These opinions of his on politics and the press he modified profoundly in the course of not many years. He offered, as what he could do best for me, to introduce me — and introduce me he did — to two friends of his, both of them connected with the newspaper press, John Forster and John Robertson. Forstcr was then one of the busiest of London journalists, and Carlyle's influence was needed to procure for an II 1 14 Literary Recollections obscure aspirant easy access to him. To begin with, he had only recently entered on the editorship of the Daily News, at that time a very troublesome post. Charles Dickens, having had some differences with his old allies of the Morning C/D'onicle, projected a new daily paper, which was to be more thoroughgoing than the Whig Chronicle, and to combine a strenuous support of Corn-Law Repeal with philanthropy of the familiar Dickens kind. The re- sult was the issue of the Daily News, with Dickens for its editor-in-chief He was soon disgusted with the uncon- genial and embarrassing task, for the performance of which few men of his miscellaneous literary experience were more unfitted. In a very few weeks he threw up the editorship, rather abruptly, but not before he had induced his faithful and loyal friend Forster to become his reluctant successor. Forster did not retain the post many months, but, while fulfilling its duties with his usual energy, he continued his work on the Examiner, of which he had been for many years the literary and dramatic critic, and which, partly through him, but still more through the pungent political articles of its proprietor and editor-in-chief, Albany Fon- blanque, had, after a period of decadence, regained the old position won for it by Leigh Hunt and his coadjutors. In his own department Forster had brought things so far that praise of a new book or a new play in the Exatniner was a feather in the cap of an ordinary author or dramatist. At this time he had not become the biographer of Gold- smith, and his only noticeable book was his Statesmen of the Commonwealth (produced, I was told at Chelsea, ' in eight months '), contributed to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclo- pcedia, and followed in the same series by his Life of Oliver Cromwell, of which more hereafter. It was as a critic that John Forster 1 1 5 he had become the friend of some of the most prominent men of letters of his time, especially of Bulwer and Dickens. His intimacy with and somewhat exuberant loyalty to Bulwer drew down on him the ire of Lady Bulwer after her separation from her husband. When reviling Bulwer in her once-famous novel, Cheveley ; or, the Man of Honour (which Carlyle owned to having read through at a sitting), she introduced his two journalistic intimates, Fonblanque and Forster, as Fonnoir and Fuzboz, hence the nickname of 'Fuz' by which Forster is designated by Carlyle in many of his letters to his wife. Of Lady Bulwer's two portraits, Forster's is far the most unflattering. ' Mr. Fonnoir, editor of The Investigator,' is admitted to be, with all his faults, ' about the most agreeable man in England ; ' but not a single good word is vouchsafed to poor Fuzboz. He is represented as ' a very ugly and noseless likeness of a great tragedian whom he tried to imitate . . . even to his handwriting, ... a .sort of lick-dust to Mr. Fonnoir and to Mr. Anybody and everybody else to whom he could gain access.' There just was a grain of truth in this decidedly spiteful caricature. Forster was a little of a tuft-hunter, and in view of the exuberant praise which he showered on any and every of Bulwer's performances, Carlyle, even when he came at last to have a very friendly feeling to- wards him, admitted that there was in Forster ' a certain laxity of mind.' It is also true that he imitated in every- day life the stage-mannerism of Macready, Lady Bulwer's ' great tragedian,' of whom he was the intimate friend. I remember being in this way rather overpowered at one of my first interviews with him. I called on him by appoint- ment, and he kept me a few minutes waiting. Then he strode into the room, and striking an attitude, exclaimed ii6 Literary Recollections in a tragic tone : ' It is with infinite regret that I have caused you this delay. Believe me,' and here he placed his hand upon his heart, ' I feel it sensibly.' He had as famulus and factotum a youth well known to all of Forster's friends as Henry, who amused them sometimes by a trick of identifying himself with his master. On another occa- sion Forster had made an appointment with me at one of the residences of his bachelor days, those chambers in 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he gave many a pleasant little dinner party, and where Dickens was wont to read to select audiences, which occasionally included Carlyle, his Christ- mas stories before their publication. Something came in the way, and he wrote, to put me off, a note which I did not receive in time. Punctually, therefore, at the appointed hour I knocked at his door. Henry opened it, and having surveyed me with an air of dignified surprise, said in a tone slightly reproachful : ' We wrote to you this morning ! ' Forster's foibles were a source of occasional merriment to his friends. His resolute and rather despotic disposition procured for him, however, a good deal of outward respect, especially as he could be, in and out of the Examiner, very useful and helpful to all whom he liked. It was credibly reported of Dickens that Forster was the only man of whom he stood a little in awe.^ On the whole, Forster's good qualities far outshone his faults. He was an honourable as well as an able man, diligent and painstaking in ^ There is a lifelike miniature sketch of Forster in his own biography of Dickens, and done by the latter. Mrs. Gamp is supposed to have resolved on accompanying Dickens and his troupe of amateur actors, bound for Man- chester and Liverpool, to perform ' Every Man in his Humour,' for the benefit of Leigh Hunt's exchequer. Forster was to play Master Kitely. Mrs. Gamp is standing on the platform, and an attache of Dickens's company points out to her its various members as they make their appearance to enter the train — Douglas Jerrold, Leech, etc. In her own inimitable style she is reporting, in a John Forster 117 business, and his friendship, when once won, was remark- ably steadfast. At first Carlyle did not like Forster, who, however, gained on him, he told me, by the exhibition of a resolute desire to ' improve himself Anything like intimacy began, I think, with Carlyle's efforts to establish the London Library, when he found Forster's energetic aid most valu- able. It was by Forster that he was introduced to the firm which for half a century until his death published all his books, and the head of which at one time was the ' hard-fisted bibliopole ' of the Reminiscences, converted by an amusing blunder of Mr. Froude's into a 'hard-fisted bibliophile,' a distinction with a difference. Up to the time of which I am writing, Carlyle had contributed only one article to the Examiner ; of his subsequent contributions to it more in a future chapter. He did not include that one article in any edition of his works, and it has escaped the notice not only of his biographers, but what is more remarkable, of his bibliographers. It was a pleasant little review ^ of Heintze's German translation of selected poems of Burns, from which, not then such a Prus- sophile as he became, Carlyle noted the absence of any version of ' A man's a man for a' that,' as a lay the sentiment of which would not be acceptable to certain persons in the Berlin of those days. He contributed to the revived Foreign Quarterly, which was edited for a year or two by Forster — very ably, Carlyle thought — his strik- letter to Mrs. Harris, what she saw and heard. When Forster arrives, ' this resolute gent,' she is told, 'a-coming along here as is aperrantly going to take the railways by storm— him with the tight legs, and his weskit very much but- toned, and his mouth very much shut, and his coat a-flying open, and his heels a-giving it to the platform, is a crikit and beeogruffer and our principal tragegian.* ' Printed in the Examiner of Sept. 27, 1S40. 1 1 8 Literary Recollections ing article on Dr. Francia, the Dictator of Paraguay, a country the history of which, after Francia's death, proved that a despotism possibly beneficent may become one posi- tively maleficent. But the strongest of the literary ties that united them was their common interest in the great Civil War of the seventeenth century, and the events that immediately preceded and succeeded it. Forster had fin- ished his Life of Cro7nwell when Carlyle was beginning his seventeenth century studies, and their unpublished corre- spondence is full of applications made at one time by Carlyle for the loan of books on the period, and of queries to be answered by Forster. In regard to Cromwell's later career there was then a vital difference between them ; Forster, as a decided Liberal, denouncing Cromwell's coup d'etat, the expulsion of the Long Parliament, and the sub- sequent establishment of the Protectorate, as a reprehen- sible destruction of a free Commonwealth and a pernicious usurpation of supreme authority ; while, as all the world knows, Carlyle bestowed the heartiest approval on Crom- well's conduct throughout. In time, Forster avowed his conversion to Carlyle's view, who was not a little pleased by it. But long before there had grown up the friendliest social intimacy between Forster and the Carlyles, from whose correspondence the somewhat contemptuous designa- tion ' Fuz ' disappears after a time. Forster was a frequent visitor of the Carlyles, and they were frequent guests of his at Lincoln's Inn Fields, always the more willingly on Carlyle's part when he was to meet Dickens, for whom in his notes to Forster he professed a genuine affection, though in conversation he was given to talk contemptuously of ' Dickens and his squad.' One short break in their friend- ship will be mentioned hereafter, but it may be said, I John Forster 119 think, that Carlyle grew to hke Forster most of all his London literary contemporaries, after beginning by liking him not at all. A very interesting memorial of their friendship lies all but unknown, and, so far as I am aware, thoroughly in- spected by no one save myself, in the manuscript and other matter relating to Carlyle bequeathed, with a great many other valuable things, a fine library among them, by John Forster to the South Kensington Museum. The Carlyliana of the collection include a long series of letters written to Forster by Carlyle, covering a period of some forty years, from the beginning of their acquaintance to the end, only with Forster's death, of what became their friendship. With the exception of his letters to members of his own family there are none so interesting and in- structive as these of Carlyle to Forster, and a well-edited selection from them would be an extremely valuable contribution to Carlyle's biography. This being the case, it is singular that Mr. Froude should have made no use of them in his four volumes on Carlyle. Such neglect is the more singular inasmuch as Carlyle's letters to Forster abound with interesting matter respecting some of those later years of Carlyle's life, Mr. Froude's account of which is extremely meagre, partly, but not wholly, because when compelled to cease writing with his own hand Carlyle no longer, of course, confided as previously his thoughts and feelings to his Journal. When age and infirmity prevented Carlyle from wielding a pen he employed an amanuensis, and, as it happens, such letters to Forster are ampler and more interesting than those which were written by his own hand. This is easily accounted for. As relatives and old friends sank one after another into the grave Carlyle 1 20 Literary Recollections clung more and more to Forster, his ally of forty years, who remained indefatigable in his attentions, and who, in his frequent, kindly, and thoughtful hospitality to the vete- ran, was aided by his ' dear little wife,' as Carlyle, in his letters, fondly calls Mrs. Forster. (She had been the wealthy widow of Henry Colburn, the once well-known publisher who made a fortune by vending loads of novels and compilation, much of them unmitigated trash.) Moreover, Forster continued to the last, as he had done for many years, to help Carlyle in his bargaining with his publishers, who, it appears from one of Carlyle's notes to Forster, origi- nally offered ^800 for the first two volumes of Frederick the Great, each of them to consist of 400 pages. It is no wonder if Carlyle had for Forster a grateful and very friendly regard, and gave it profuse and sincere expression, I doubt whether, at the end of any but letters to his own relatives, Carlyle ever subscribed himself as, in one to Forster, 'Yours very affectionately.' Those later letters of his to Forster abound in records of his varying moods, some of them mournful enough, but they are seldom marked by the bitterness which disfigures his Journal and still more his Reminiscences, and there is often a beautiful pathos in his wail not merely over himself, but over friends departing and departed, especially Dickens. There are sketches of Ruskin at home, of Browning's possible poetic future, of Mr. Justice Stephen as a com- panion of his walks, of a visit in old age to Kirkcaldy, where in youth he had been a schoolmaster, and they vie in interest with anything in the Reminiscences. One would not have thought Owen Meredith likely to prove attractive to Carlyle, but he tells Forster that not only has Mr. Froude fallen in love with the second Lord Lytton, but John Fo7'ster 1 2 1 that he himself has some thoughts of doing so also : the first Lord Lytton Carlyle never liked. Among other refer- ences to Mr. Froude is a censure on him for his wild-goose chase to the United States in search of an American verdict on the controversy between England and Ireland. Carlyle opined that Mr. Froude had better not have taken * our extremely dirty Irish linen ' to wash there, and ' call America to see.' Sometimes light is thrown on what Mr. Froude has left enigmatic and obscure. For instance, he prints a letter written to the then Countess of Derby in which Carlyle ascribes to her influence (perhaps wrongly) Lord Beaconsfield's offer to him of a pension and the dignity of G.C.B. There is no hint elsewhere in Mr. Froude's volumes of any intimacy between that lady and Carlyle. But, from Carlyle's letters to Forster, it appears that Lady Derby had a regard for him so great that she once insisted on himself and his niece taking up their abode at Lord Derby's Kentish seat, Keston Lodge. One of the most idyllic of his letters to Forster, breathing a spirit of serene and thankful repose, is an account of his sojourn there, and of his enjoyment of the beautiful adjacent region, which, by the way, teems with memories of the great Chatham and his famous son. In exploring Carlyle's many letters to Forster few things struck me more than Carlyle's mode of recommending to him the execution of a literary enterprise which Forster was well fitted to undertake. In 1855, Forster was appointed Secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners, of whom Barry Cornwall (he first introduced Carlyle to Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review) was one, and to him, I rather think, Forster owed the welcome appointment which made him independent of journalism and literature. Six years afterwards Forster 122 Literary Recollections was promoted to a Commissionership in Lunacy, with a salary raised from iJ'Soo to ;^i500 a year. On his appoint- ment to the former of these posts, he resigned the editor- ship of the Examiner (in which he was succeeded by Professor Henry Morley), and never afterwards contributed a Hne to the newspaper or periodical press. But though the offices which he held were very far from being sine- cures, he wrote, in the intervals of business, the best of his historical and biographical works. When at one time he was looking about him for a new subject, Carlyle advised him to undertake a life of Strafford. Forster had years before, in his Lives of British Statesmen, written a bio- graphy of Strafford, the amount of Browning's recently dis- covered participation in which has probably been greatly exaggerated. But since then, masses of new material for the history of the period had accumulated, and Forster's knowledge of it had greatly increased. There was, and there is, room for a new biography of Strafford. What is curious in the remarks with which Carlyle accompanied his recommendation was that he expressed himself as if he thought that, after two centuries of obloquy, Puritanism had had full justice done it, and it was now time to see what could be said for the Royalist side of the great con- troversy, and for by far the greatest man who had taken that side. For Strafford, even in his Cromwell — as in his French Revolution for Mirabeau, who, if he had lived a little longer, might have saved the French Monarchy — Carlyle had shown a certain admiration, and his recom- mendation of such a subject to be so treated is another proof of that love of his for absolutism, and dislike of democracy, both of which became more intense with his advancing years ; scornful references to ' the People's John Forstcr 1 2 f o William ' are frequent in his later letters to Forster. Forster acted on Carlyle's advice and began a life of Strafford. Some of the proof-sheets of it are among his papers at the South Kensington Museum, but, as in the case of his biography of Swift, death did not allow him to finish it. He died five years before Carlyle, who had appointed him one of his executors. After Forster's death Carlyle substituted Mr. Froude for him as an executor, the other being Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, afterwards Mr. Justice Stephen, who had become a most intimate friend of Carlyle in his later years. CHAPTER VII JOHN ROBERTSON AS the biographer of Goldsmith, Dickens, Walter Savage Landor, and as the author of what promised to be, when his death rendered it a fragment, our best life of Swift, to say nothing of his life of Sir John Eliot and other solid contributions, some of them already glanced at, to the history of England in the seventeenth century, or of his agreeable essays on Steele and Defoe, Foote and Churchill, John Forster may be long read and remembered. But probably very few of my readers know even the name of John Robertson, the other journalistic friend of Carlyle, to whom he gave me an introduction simultaneously with that to Forster, and who, though then in far from flourish- ing circumstances, showed me some active kindness. Mostly forgotten if he now be, Robertson was at one time a stirring man in the periodical and newspaper press of London. A Scotchman, and like Carlyle bred for the Scottish Church, he also like Carlyle broke loose from it, and found a fitful literary career in London. He was a vigorous and vivid writer and talker, and in time became a prominent political contributor to the great Whig organ of those days, the Morning Chronicle. From his ante- cedents he had a knowledge, rare among London journalists, of Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, and it proved useful to him at a time when the controversy which led to the disruption of the Kirk (and in which he strenuously 124 John Robertson 125 supported the anti-patronage cause) was growing very lively. On this account he was personally introduced to Lord Melbourne, then Prime Minister, who declared that his peace of mind was much less disturbed by the Chartist movement than by ' that d — d Scotch Kirk,' as he called it in his usual imprecatory fashion. Robertson's talents and political ardour procured him an intimacy with several distinguished literary Liberals, among them Bulwer (after- wards the first Lord Lytton) and John Stuart Mill, whose biographer intimates that Robertson's 'impetus and suggestiveness in conversation drew out Mill, who never talked better than he did with him.' Robertson had much to tell me of Bulwer, in whom he had discovered a good- ness of heart for which few of the famous novelist's literary contemporaries gave him credit. Among other and less commendable traits, which Robertson reported to me, was Bulwer's fondness for personal metamorphoses, so to speak. One day he would appear in black from top to toe, with a dark-complexioned visage to match. Another day he would be all brown, and on a third he would be all in white, with blonde hair and a fair complexion lighted up by rouge ! Robertson's intimacy with John Stuart Mill gained him a position which made him for a time a man of some im- portance in London literature, but of which circumstances had deprived him several years before my acquaintance with him. That munificent Radical and free-thinking baronet. Sir William Molesworth, having founded the London Review — of which Carlyle faintly and fruitlessly hoped to be made the editor — after a time bought the Westminster (for ;^iooo from General Perronet Thompson, once well known as the author of the Anti-Corn Law 126 Literary Recollections Catechism) and from his fusion of the two sprang the Londo7i and Westminster Review. In a few years Moles- worth grew weary of the steady drain upon his purse for the support of the unprofitable periodical. It was then that, as recorded in his Autobiography, Mill, to his cost, was induced to purchase the London and Westminster, ' mainly,' he says, ' in reliance on the representations of a young Scotchman of the name of Robertson, who had some ability and information, much industry, and an active, scheming head full of devices for making the Review more saleable.' Among the proofs of ability which Robertson had given were articles on Shakespeare and Bacon, con- tributed to Sir William Molesworth's London Review. Robertson was appointed acting editor. Mill's official connection with the India Office making him reluctant to be known as the actual editor. He retained, however, complete control over the Review, and had often to use the bridle-rein with the fiery young Scotchman, whom he is even found, more than once, reproving for writing slip-shod English. But Robertson continued to edit the Londott and Westminster, with vigour and ability, during the whole of Mill's proprietorship (1837-40), and boasted that he had reduced to ;^33 the loss from the London of ^100 on each number. Whatever his editorial merits, he appears to have become inflated by such authority as he was allowed to wield, and to have given a good deal of offence to con- tributors in esse and in posse. Carlyle, one of whose contributions to the London and Westminster was the well- known article on Sir Walter Scott (1838), writes at this time of the wane of his intimacy with Mill, whose ' editor,' he adds, ' one Robertson, a burly Aberdeen Scotchman of seven-and-twenty, full of laughter, vanity, pepticity, and John Robertson 127 hope, amuses me considerably more' than Mill himself. Robertson was very soon to yield Carlyle anything but amusement. According to Mr. Froude, in the December of 1838, Carlyle had agreed with Mill to write for the Review an article on Cromwell. Mill went abroad, and Robertson, who was left in undisputed command, informed Carlyle that he need not trouble himself to write about Cromwell, as he himself intended to 'do' Cromwell. Carlyle's indignation was great. He broke off at once his connection with the London and Westminster, and began to study Cromwell's life and times as the subject of a possible book. Robertson's article appeared in the London and Westminster for October 1839, in which was also published, perhaps to soothe Carlyle, John Sterling's glowing eulogium on him {ante, p. yG). What is very noticeable in Robertson's article, though neither Mr. Froude nor any one else has noticed it, is, that it was the first distinct and emphatic attempt made in the literature of that generation to vindicate Cromwell in all his doings, especially in his expulsion of the Long Parliament, which even Forster had strenuously protested against — and Robertson's Liberalism was quite as ' advanced ' as Forster's. Some seven years elapsed after the publication of Robertson's really able and eloquent article before the appearance of Carlyle's great work on Cromwell. To Robertson, therefore, belongs the merit, and he was not at all backward in claiming it, of being an earlier and thoroughgoing vindicator of Cromwell.^ ^ The following vigorous sketch of Cromwell's character in Wotton Rein- fried, supposed to be suggested by a portrait of him seems to show that at Craigenputtock, Carlyle had not got beyond the hero-hypocrite theory of the great Protector. 'This is the man whose words no one could interpret, but whose thoughts were clearest wisdom, who spoke in laborious folly, in volun- 128 Literary Recollections Ignorant of the genesis of Robertson's article, the story of which was first told by Mr. Froude, I unwittingly spoke in praise of it to Carlyle. ' I never read his trash,' Carlyle replied. ' I thought it very beautiful,' Mrs. Carlyle remarked — a verdict on Robertson's article much juster than her husband's, if his could be called a verdict on an article which he had not read. ' Robertson,' Carlyle rejoined, ' could not form a coherent image of anything.' The subject of Robertson being thus broached, Carlyle spoke of a letter which had appeared in some London newspaper, addressed to the then Duke of Buccleuch, and signed 'John Robertson, Reform Club.' In all likelihood it was an indignant effusion provoked by the Duke's refusal of a site for a projected Free Kirk on one of his Scottish estates. Carlyle gave a long, loud, and scornful laugh at the juxtaposition of the Duke of Buccleuch and ' John Robertson, Reform Club.' To my unsophisticated mind there seemed nothing to laugh at. The matter was one either of fact or of argument, and in neither case could its rights or its wrongs be in any way affected by the relative social positions of the many-acred Duke of Buccleuch and ' John Robertson,' who could only hail from the ' Reform Club.' During the first week of April 1848 — one of great excitement in London — I saw Robertson for the last time, as he was just stepping out of that Reform Club a particular parade of his membership of which had excited tary or involuntary enigmas, but saw and acted unerringly his fate. Confusion, ineptitude, dishonesty, are pictured on his countenance, but through these there shines a fiery strength, nay, a grandeur as of a true hero. You see there he was fearless, resolute as a Scanderbeg, yet cunning and double withal, like some paltry pettifogger. He is your true, enthusiastic hypocrite, at once crack-brained and inspired ; a knave and a demigod, in brief, old Noll as he looked and lived.' John Robertson 129 Carlyle's contemptuous merriment. He was on his way to attend a meeting of the Chartist Convention then in session, organising the 'demonstration' of the famous loth of April, the prospect of which, following as it did on the French Revolution of the preceding February, was viewed by the higher and middle classes with great and, as it proved, with needless apprehension. When I told Carlyle of my meeting with Robertson, he said, ' Robertson ought to go into the Chartist movement and make it respectable,' for Carlyle was then, though only for the time being, in a rather revolutionary mood, as will be told more amply in a future chapter. Robertson did 7iot go into the movement with that or any other result, and, without his aid, most of what was essential in the ' People's Charter ' has since been conceded, or is now being accepted, by Respectability in high places. Of Robertson subsequently little or nothing was seen or heard in public. Later in life he made, I believe, a good marriage, and ' lived happy ever after.' An interesting correspondence between him and Mill relating to the conduct of the London and Wesiniinster was published, with elucidations, by Robertson's daughter in the number of the Atlantic Monthly for the January of 1892.1 ^ Robertson's admiration for the fair sex was considerable, but not always disinterested. I knew one clever literary lady who was wooed, and might have been won, by him, had his behaviour not created a suspicion that he wished her for a wife chiefly to make her of use to him in his literary labours. His gallantry, with an eye to business, is amusingly brought out in the following vivacious letter of Mrs. Carlyle to her friend Miss Bolte (Last Words of Thomas Carlyle, p. 293) : — December 22,, 1843. * Your little friend, Miss Swanwick, called here the other day, looking ineffably sweet! almost too sweet for practical purposes ! That minds mo (as my Helen says) I received by post a little while since a letter in a handwriting not new to mc, but I could not tell, in the first minute, whose it was. I read the first words : " Oh those bright sweet eyes ! " I stop amazed " as in presence I 130 Literary Recollections While Carlyle, as has been told, practically aided me to start on my enforced journey into the wilderness, he bestowed on me several monitions. One of his most emphatic warnings was against literary vanity. ' In litera- ture a man can do nothing worth doing until he has killed his vanity.' As an illustration of literary magnanimity and superiority to personal feeling he told me at full length an anecdote of Diderot which is only very briefly referred to in his fine essay on that famous philosophe. Visited by one of the tribe of out-at-elbows authors whom his well- known good-nature brought about him, Diderot asked him if he had anything to show of his composition in print or manuscript. After a good deal of very natural hesitation the visitor produced from his pocket a manuscript which turned out to be a lampoon on Diderot himself Instead of being offended, the generous Diderot looked it over, corrected it, and wrote for it a dedication to the then Duke of Orleans (father of Egalite Orleans) who, as it happened, was devot, and therefore anything but friendly to pJiilosophes of the Infinite ! " What man has gone out of his wits ? In what year of grace was I ? What was it at all ? I looked for a signature, there was none ! I turned to the beginning again and read a few words more : "There is no escap- ing their bewitching influence ! " " Idiot," said I, " whoever you be," having now got up a due matronly rage ! I read on, however. " It is impossible those sweet eyes should be unaccompanied with a benevolent heart ; could you not then intercede with the possessor of them to do me a kindness? The time of young ladies is in general so uselessly employed that I should think you would really be benefiting (!) Miss Swanwick in persuading her to — translate for me those French Laws on Pawnbfoking." Now the riddle was satisfactorily solved. The "bright sweet eyes " were none of mine, but Miss Swanwick's ; and the writer of the letter was Robertson, who, you may remember, I told you raved about those same eyes to a weariness. My virtuous married-woman indignation blushes had been entirely thrown away ! It was too ridiculous ! But could you have conceived of such stupidity — even among authors — as this of beginning a letter to one woman with an apostrophe to the eyes of another?"' What a combination, bright sweet eyes, and the French Laws on Pawnbroking ! John Robertson 1 3 1 of Diderot's way of thinking. The result was the purchase of the manuscript by a bookseller, and 24 gold Louis in the pocket of the starveling scribbler thus unexpectedly befriended. More appropriate than warnings against indulgence in a vanity which, from the nature of the case could not then exist, was an admonition which doubtless he thought to be needed : ' Avoid hypochondria, pride, and gloom : they are a waste of faculty.' On anything like over-fastidiousness, in regard to the literary em- ployment offered to a beginner, he expressed himself forcibly : ' A man is an indestructible fragment of the universe, but, if he wishes to live, he must not be nice.' Of deeper import and more lasting value was the wise advice not to mistake ' the shriek of self-love ' for the voice of conscience. And so I sallied forth into the wide world, fortified by Carlyle's oral monitions, who added, among others, these written words of encouragement : ' The heart that remained true to itself never yet found this big universe finally faithless to it' CHAPTER VIII GERALDINE JEWSBURY THE scene now changes from London to Manchester, ' perhaps one of the best soils in this era/ so Carlyle wrote to me when I informed him that I found myself domiciled in the metropolis of the cotton manufacture. Among its then denizens was a very intimate lady-friend of Mrs. Carlyle, whose introduction of me to her procured me a cordial welcome. This was Miss Jewsbury, the ' Geraldine ' who figures so often and so prominently in Mrs. Carlyle's correspondence. Losing her mother at an early age, she was brought up by her elder sister, Maria Jane Jewsbury, a gifted and remarkable woman, whose prose and verse won for her the admiration and friendship of Wordsworth. He has left it on record that within the whole range of his acquaintance she had ' no equal ' as regards ' quickness in the motions of her mind.' In this respect Geraldine resembled her, but her mental develop- ment was very different from that of her sister. The elder Miss Jewsbury became deeply religious, and married a chaplain in the East India Company's service, with whom she proceeded to India, where she died, when her sister was in her twenty-first year. Geraldine fell under the influence, not of Wordsworth, but of Shelley, and with the result that was to be expected. She lost the faith of her childhood without gaining a new one, and for this she yearned. While harassed by what she afterwards half 182 Geraldine Jewsbnry 133 playfully, half sadly called * bother in her soul,' she lighted on some of Carlyle's earlier writings. She found in them indications that there was still possible a faith in the Supernal which harmonised with Reason. Like many others in her predicament in those days, she wrote to Carlyle and confided to him her spiritual perplexities. Both he and his wife were impressed by the tone and tenor of Miss Jewsbury's ingenuous and anxious inquiries, and she was asked to visit them. Personal knowledge heightened their previous favourable impression of her. She was verging on thirty when Carlyle wrote of her as ' one of the most interesting young women I have seen for years, clear deli- cate sense and courage looking out of her small sylph-like figure.' He objected strongly to what he soon discovered to be her enthusiasm for George Sand, but this was not thought an objection by his wife, who greatly admired the genius, while disapproving of the ethics, of the famous Frenchwoman. She and Miss Jewsbury soon contracted a warm friendship, which, with occasional intermissions, lasted for nearly half a century, and ended only with Mrs. Carlyle's death. At the time when, during the first of my sojourns in Manchester, I made Miss Jewsbury's acquaintance, she kept house for her brother Frank, who was in business there. He was a young man of quick observation and much intelligence, well read in some departments of literature, highly social, and, like the model bishop of the great apostle, ' given to hospitality.' They lived in Green- heyes, the suburb of Manchester in which Thomas De Quinccy was born. Their house looked pleasantly on the green fields in which is laid the scene of the opening chapter of Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, but which with the 134 Literary Recollections growth of Manchester since then have suffered an invasion of bricks and mortar. Here Mrs. Carlyle sometimes visited her Geraldine, on her way to or from Liverpool, where she had both friends and relatives. Her visits to both places were paid without her husband, the Carlyles having adopted the sensible practice of separating for at least a month in each year. Mrs. Carlyle was never happier than during these visits to the North. She could say and do what she liked, and was courted and caressed for her own sake, and not for her husband's. This pleased her not a little, proud though she was of him, and whether with him or away from him, always occupied with his interests and his comfort. Now and then, as will happen with clever and sensitive women, she and Miss Jewsbur}' had their differences. Mrs. Carlyle was nearly twelve years Miss Jewsbury's senior. She had seen much more of the world than her less experienced and more im- pulsive junior, whom at this and the other little crisis she sometimes lectured when sympathy rather than re- buke was expected. 'Mrs. Carlyle pours oil into your wounds, but it is oil of vitriol,' Miss Jewsbury once remarked to me when she was smarting under some inflic- tion from her London friend's reproving pen. But these were mere brief episodes of a friendship during which Mrs. Carlyle did much to help Miss Jewsbury, both socially and in her literary career, and was repaid by her junior's affectionate sympathy and attentions of every kind. A year or two before my arrival in Manchester Miss Jewsbury had produced her first of several novels, one which Mrs. Carlyle, or through her, the ever-helpful John Forster, induced her husband's publishers to issue. This was Zoe, or the Two Lives, which, though mostly forgotten Geraldine Jewsbitry 1 3 5 now, was the precursor not only of Mr. Froude's Nemesis of FaitJi, published three years after it, but of Robert Elsniere, and the progeny to which it has given birth. The ' two lives ' were those of a hero and a heroine. The hero, belonging to a good English and Roman Catholic family, resolves, being full of enthusiastic piety, to enter the Romish priesthood, and goes to an ecclesiastical college at Rome to fit himself for it. He becomes a priest and a professor, and his abilities and fervid religious zeal being recognised by his superiors, he seems destined to rise to a very high position in the hierarchy of his Church. But reading and reflection lead him to doubt the truth not only of Romish but of all Christian theology, and doubt leads him gradually to denial. After a not unnatural struggle, he determines to sacrifice his position and prospects in the Church rather than hypocritically continue to profess a faith which his reason has forced him to reject. The long and painful conflict in his mind between old associations and the course which conscience dictates to him, the deso- late aspect of the universe and human life to a man so educated and trained, when the sun of faith has ceased to illumine them, are depicted with great power and vivid- ness. The wish to serve his fellow-men which had led him into the ancient Church and had been strengthened and developed in it survives his departure from it. He resolves to attempt to civilise and humanise, without the aid of dogmatic theology, in one of the wildest iron districts of South Wales, its half- savage population which has no ' idea of a God, except to swear by.' He takes up his abode among them, and finding that he can do nothing with the parents, however much he does for them by relieving the 136 Literary Recollections sick and the suffering, he founds schools for the children. At last his unwearied kindness is beginning to tell and to earn him a little gratitude. But just then, the time of the novel is the period preceding the first French Revolution, and Mirabeau in England is introduced making very fierce love to the heroine — the Methodist movement reaches the village in which the hero is settled. Very striking is the way in which the nullity of the cultivated philanthropic gentleman's teaching is contrasted with the fierce religious excitement produced by the preaching of a rude and ignor- ant Methodist orator. The hero begins to be distrusted for attaching more efficacy to good works than to faith, and at last he is driven, bitterly disappointed, from the village, amid a storm of obloquy, as an emissary of Satan. Thus the career of Miss Jewsbury's hero, after his abandonment of the orthodox faith is far less common- place than the sequel of Robert Elsmere's similar pro- ceeding, though, like that, it ends in premature death. So far as my acquaintance with modern English fiction extends, Zoe was the first novel in which the hero's career is made dependent on the victory of modern scepticism over ancient belief At home, or in society. Miss Jewsbury did not give one the impression of having grappled with the problems which Zoe showed to have been familiar to her. She was not in the least a blue-stocking, never speaking of her own books, and not very much of other people's. ' A cheerful, transparent little creature,' was Carlyle's later verdict on her, when she had got rid of ' bother in her soul,' and he had condoned her devotion to George Sand. Her conver- sation was full of wit and point. She was a most agreeable hostess, and never seemed happier than when witnessing Geraldine Jewsbury 137 the enjoyment of her brother's friends at his frequent symposia. To me one of the greatest charms of the Jews- bury circle was that poHtics, general and local, were eschewed by its members, so that its sociality was never disturbed by the party-spirit which then ran so high in Manchester. Of literary and artistic society there was not much during my first sojourn there, but Londoners of more or less intellectual note who visited Manchester generally found their way to the Jewsburys, and were welcomed by brother as well as by sister. One of them was Westland Marston, the dramatist, a polished, gentleman-like young man, author of The Patricians Daiighter (and afterwards father of the late Philip Bourke Marston), which had con- siderable success on the London stage ; he died only a few years ago, having been long before left stranded by the indifference of the public to the poetic drama, which he had fondly hoped to revive. Marston came to lecture at the Manchester Athenaeum. Another London visitor was Gallenga, then known by his noni de plume of Mariotti. He had written a book about Italy, his fatherland, from which he was a political exile, and in after-years was to become, under Delane, a travelling correspondent of the Times in several widely-separated regions of the globe. A clever, rather cynical Italian, he came to Manchester to lecture on Dante before a more select audience than that of the Athenaeum, thanks to the recommendation of his countryman, Gambardella, who had been painting portraits in Manchester, among them those of the family of one of its wealthiest German merchants. Mariotti, or Gallenga, found more than an audience for his lectures on Dante. He wooed and won a daughter of that ^wealthy German family, and the struggling Italian exile was a 138 Literacy Recollections made man for life. During my second and somewhat later sojourn in Manchester, Mr. Froude was for a time settled there under circumstances which seemed to preclude the possibility that he would ever become, as he not long ago became, a Professor at Oxford, of all places in the world. George Henry Lewes was also in Manchester about the same time, though he, compared with Mr. Froude, was a bird of passage. Both Mr. Froude and Lewes were frequent guests of the Jewsburys. Mr. Froude, who was then a little over thirty, had a year or so before come before the world as the author of the Nemesis of Faith. The book had the misfortune to be not only banned by the orthodox and burned by the sub-rector of Exeter College, Oxford {ante, p. 77), of which its author was a fellow, but was denounced by his friend that was to be, Carlyle himself, for its somewhat prurient sentimentality and parade of doubts which the doubter had better have kept to himself^ Under the in- fluence of his brother, Hurrell Froude, and John Henry Newman and Co., Mr. Froude had in his youth been a Trac- tarian, contributing to the Lives of the Saints, and taking Deacon's orders with a view to the Anglican priesthood. His theological opinions, of course, had been completely trans- formed when he wrote the Nemesis of Faith. In the storm of academic indignation which the book excited he resigned his fellowship and quitted Oxford, little thinking that more than forty years afterwards he was to return to it as its Regius Professor of History and thus successor of his persistent assailant the late Edward Freeman. On leaving Oxford he became Principal (I think) of some ^ In an unpublished letter to John Forster, written just after the publi- cation of the Nemesis of Faith, the book is denounced by Carlyle in language almost savage in its plain speaking. Geraldine Jezvsbury 1 3 9 university or college in an Australian colony, but the Nemesis of Faith followed him there and his appointment was cancelled. On this part of his history it may be per- missible to quote a passage from so well known a book as the Life of Lord Houghton, who wrote thus to one of his correspondents : ' A bomb has fallen into the midst of the religious world in the shape of a book called The Nemesis of Faith by the brother of Froude the dead Puseyite. It is a sort of religious anti-religious Wilhelm Meister, and balances itself between fact and fiction in an uncomfort- able manner, though with great ability, and has caused the poor man to lose his fellowship and a college in Van Diemen's Land ' — the Tasmania of to-day — ' and to fall into utter poverty.' After Mr. Froude's return from Aus- tralia he found a temporary home at Manchester as tutor to the sons of a wealthy and much respected Unitarian solicitor. There is an amusing record in a letter to Mrs. Carlyle of Miss Jewsbury's first acquaintance with Mr. Froude, of whose opinions when he came to Manchester, and of the drift of his Nemesis of Faith, she appeared to have been completely ignorant. ' I am going out to-night,' she writes, ' to meet the author of Nemesis of Faith, a very nice natural young man, though rather like " a lost sheep " at present. He has only been used to the Oxford part of the world, so that sectarianism and unbelievers (!) are strange to him.' Miss Jewsbuiy soon knew Mr. Froude's opinions very much better than when she penned those lines. They became fast friends. He was of some practical use to her after her brother's marriage and her own migration to London, and he was her frequent visitor during the lingering illness which, in her 69th year, proved fatal to her. 140 Literary Recollections Another of Miss Jewsbury's notable friends and occa- sional visitors, whose acquaintance she owed to the Carlyles, was William Edward Forster, the young, vigorous, and cultivated woollen manufacturer of Rawdon, near Leeds. He was then little known out of Yorkshire, but afterwards very well known as a statesman. In the company of Forster, early in 1848, Miss Jewsbury paid a visit to Paris, where Emerson and Arthur Clough were also sojourning. Some of her experiences there she utilised in what appears to me the most interesting of all her fugitive compositions, one written from the heart as well as the head. This is the article on ' Religious Faith and Scepticism ' which she contributed to the Westminster Review for January 1850. The books which served as basis for the article were, besides an anonymous work attributed to John Henry Newman, Mr. Froude's Nemesis of Faith, and a volume of politico-religious letters by Pere Enfantin who was the head of the St. Simonian Society at the time of its dissolution. Miss Jewsbury had seen him in Paris during her visit of 1848, and gave in her article some interesting particulars respecting him and his former St. Simonian followers. From being the chief of an organisation which was to reform society the Pere had become the engineer and manager of a French railway, but he still enlightened the world through the press. Miss Jewsbury had a special reason for being interested in St. Simonians. One of her dearest friends, whom she regarded with great affection and respect, was a St. Simonian Frenchman who, on the dis- solution of the Society, entered the service of the Pacha of Egypt, turned Mahometan (if I remember rightly) and was made a Bey. She looked up to him as a spiritual father (any Mahometanism of his could be only nominal). ■^■^■rfX^Mft fc Geraldine Jewsbiiry 141 and she corresponded with him while he was in Egypt. His were the letters ' from Cairo,' the arrival of which made her happy and their absence unhappy, as appears from sundr}^ references to them and him in her recently pub- lished letters to Mrs. Carlyle, references, like so much else in them, left unintelligible by the editress of the volume. The Bey, in full Oriental costume, paid a visit to her in Manchester while I was there, and I heard him on various occasions hold forth on politics, ethics, and religion. I remember Miss Jewsbury sitting literally at his feet, and, looking up to him reverently from her footstool say, interrogatively in her English-French : Mais inoi, j'e veiix connaitre qu'est-ce que c'est que la morale ! I took no note of what his answer was, if answer he gave. After a few weeks ' Geraldine's Bey,' as her friends used to call him, disappeared, and one never heard of him again. The most salient passages, however, in Miss Jewsbury's Westminster article, were those in which she dealt with Mr. Froudc's Nemesis of Faith, and it is very much to her credit, her intimacy with its author being remembered, that she expressed herself thus freely and frankly in regard to it: 'The Nemesis of Faith is a very powerful picture of the struggle of a religiously disposed sceptic ; the language is eloquent and powerful, and goes to the heart of the matter : it is "a voice of crying heard and loud lament," but nothing more ; there is no attempt to discover by what right this state of things exists. Doubt is treated as a painful phenomenon, and not as a legitimate phasis in the transi- tion of humanity from one condition to another : therefore the work is oppressive and painful ; it suggests nothing ; there is no outlet from it — not even into the wilderness, 142 Literary Recollections where one might at least breathe — for the author insists on setting his face towards the Past ; and yet his book is constructed Hke a town in which every street should be a cut de sac! Such a passage, too, as the following is worth quoting, for it is applicable to a class of books which have been distressingly numerous since Miss Jewsbury wrote these thoughtful and suggestive words : — ' While we desire that men should examine courageously, and " try all things " which they feel moved to try and examine, still, the more modesty and reserve men observe, during their periods of transition, the better. The fashion of writing sceptical books, full of sentimental regret and interesting struggle is highly to be deprecated. ... It is very difficult to lay down sympathy which has been over excited, and the danger is that the man who began his utterance in sincerity, may end by enjoying his sorrows and draping himself becomingly in his "doubts," "sorrows," ' positions," or whatever may chance to be the point in which the interest of society has been enlisted. . . . The more rigid the discipline of silence to which sceptics condemn themselves during their transition to some sort of solution, the better for themselves and the world : afterwards, as full a history of their spiritual progress as they feel (what Carlyle calls) " a healthy desire " to impart' Lewes was in Manchester when the article was written, and he sent it for Miss Jewsbury to the editor of the Westminster Review, naming ten pounds as the remunera- tion expected for it. The article was declined for one reason and another. Miss Jewsbury divined the real cause, and waived the remuneration. The article was then inserted. Geraldine Jewsbtcry 1 4 3 During my first sojourn in Manchester I saw something of Miss Jewsbury's very intimate friends the two Cushmans, American actresses, the elder of whom had astonished the Londoners by playing Romeo to her sister's Juliet. In due time she was introduced to Mrs. Carlyle, of whom in one at least of her social phases — and Mrs. Carlyle had several — Miss Cushman has given a brief but lifelike word- portrait in a letter printed by one of her American bio- graphers. 1 It was probably through the keen interest in the stage created in Miss Jewsbury by this intimacy with the Cushmans that she was led to make a gifted and en- thusiastic actress one of the heroines of her second novel, The Half Sisters. Like her subsequent fictions, it sus- tained without increasing the reputation as a novelist which Zoe had gained her. The proofs of Tlie Half Sisters were sent to Mrs. Carlyle to be corrected. But Carlyle, who had a contempt for novel-writing, and per- haps thought that Miss Jewsbury's new fiction was George Sandish, objected, rather crustily declaring, Mrs. Carlyle wrote to John Forster, ' I do not know bad grammar when I see it any better than she does,' and * if I had any faculty I might find better employment for it, etc., etc' Accord- ingly Mrs. Carlyle ' resigned.' Without telling me of the withdrawal of so distinguished a predecessor, Miss Jews- bury asked me to undertake the task of proof-correcting. I performed it with so much of youthful zeal that she ^ ' On Sunday who should come self-invited to meet me but Mrs. Carlyle? She came at one o'clock and stayed until eight. And such a day I have not known. Clever, witty, calm, cool, unsmiling, unsparing, a raconteur unpar- alleled, a manner inimitable, a behaviour scrupulous, and a power invincible — a combination rare and strange exists in that plain, keen, unattractive, yet unescapable woman ! Oh, I must tell you of that day for I cannot write it ! After she left, of course we talked her until the small hours of the morning.' 144 Literary Recollections thought me, I fancied, to have overshot the mark. How- ever, she thanked me for having, as she phrased it, ' set her sentences on their legs,' and indeed whatever she wrote, books or letters, had an irrepressible tendency to sprawl, her punctuation consisting mainly of dashes. Carlyle's interference to prevent his wife from becoming in this instance a correctress of the press was singular, since only a month before he had visited Manchester, where he was hospitably entertained by Miss Jewsbury and her brother, and had shown himself most amiably disposed towards her. But some account of his sayings and doings during that visit to Manchester must be reserved for another chapter. CHAPTER IX CARLYLE IN MANCHESTER CARLYLE'S Manchester visit, foreshadowed at the close of the preceding chapter, was paid mainly to a little group of friendly admirers which had recently formed itself there. He came to them from the neigh- bourhood of Leeds, where he had been the guest of William Edward Forster {ci'nte, p. 78), an ardent Liberal, but not at all of the Manchester and laissez-faire school, a diligent and appreciative student of Carlyle's writings and a great friend of Mrs. Carlyle. I found Carlyle newly arrived in the afternoon at a Manchester railway-station, grumbling at a decrepit porter who was not adjusting on his back with adequate symmetry the philosopher's luggage. In the evening I piloted him to Greenheyes and the Jewsburys, whose home was his, I think, during most of his stay in Manchester. On the way he talked much of France and the French, starting from the Praslin tragedy,^ which had been recently enacted in Paris and had moved him greatly. France was, moreover, in a state of unrest, longing for Parliamentary reform, indignant at Louis ^This domestic tragedy, mostly forgotten now, excited the utmost horror throughout Europe. In August 1847, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, the Duke de Praslin, a French peer of ancient descent, murdered his wife, who was the daughter of Marshal Sebastiani, formerly French ambassador in London. The cause of the crime was supposed to be the discovery by the Duchess, of an undue intimacy between her husband and the family-governess. Before he could be tried, the Duke committed suicide. K 146 Literary Recollectiojts Philippe's and Guizot's repressive policy at home and scandalous intrigues abroad in the matter of the Spanish marriages, and stirred to its depths by disclosures of infamous corruption in high places, military and civil, a Minister of Public Works having in consequence attempted to commit suicide. Before long there was good reason for me to remember what fell from Carlyle's lips while I con- voyed him that autumn evening through the streets of Manchester and its suburban byways. France, he said, was on the verge of another insurrectionary convulsion, and, with the French Revolution of the ensuing February, his prophecy came true indeed. Lancashire and its Industrialism had for years interested Carlyle. The reader of * Chartism ' will (if he has a good memory) remember that vivid apostrophe in it : ' Hast thou heard with sound ears the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock, the rushing off of its thousand mills, like the boom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times ten thousand spools and spindles all set humming there — it is perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara or more so.' Carlyle urged his friend John Chorley, a Lancashire man (of whom more hereafter), to write a history of Lancashire, than which, he said, ' there is not a bigger baby born of Time in these late centuries.' On the margins of the copy, in the London library, of Edward Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture^ I found pencil- jottings of Carlyle's which testified to the care and interest with which he had conned it. With Dr. Aikin's useful History of the Country 40 miles round Manchester, Carlyle showed considerable acquaintance. He bracketed Brindley with Arkwright as the two heroes of English industrialism in the eighteenth century, and declared the Carlyle in Manchester 147 Duke of Bridgewater, the founder of British canal-navi- gation, to be worth almost all the English Dukes put together whom recent centuries had produced. What surprised us more than this was the familiarity which he displayed with such a piece of rude humour, written in the homeliest Lancashire dialect, as ' Tim Bobbin ' (which he called a ' Schwank '), and with the biography of its author, John Collier. Carlyle dilated genially on Collier's speedy return to his little cottage and cheerful semi-idyllic poverty at Milnrow, after having been tempted away to Yorkshire to enter the well-paid service of some magnate of the woollen trade. Before visiting W. E. Forster in Yorkshire, Carlyle had spent a fortnight at Matlock, and inspected the neigh- bouring village of Cromford, as almost from the first, and thenceforward to the last, the headquarters of Richard Arkwright, and chief scene of those cotton-spinning opera- tions of his with which Lancashire Industrialism took the earliest of its gigantic strides. As many passages in Carlyle's writings testify, Arkwright was one of his heroes, and, notwithstanding occasional gibes at ' Plugson of Undershot,' he had pronounced the future of England to lie with such 'Captains of Industry' as Arkwright's Lancashire had produced : they, moreover, since he uttered that prediction, had conquered the English aristocracy and repealed the Corn Laws. Almost fresh from an exploration of Cromford, Carlyle in Manchester was full of Arkwright. In fact, he hinted to us that, having then no literary enterprise on hand, he thought of settling for a longer or shorter time in our neighbourhood, and writing a life of Arkwright with appropriate comments. It was an evanescent project and came to nothing. The first biography which Carlyle wrote 148 Literary Recollections after his Cromwell was one not of Arkwright, but of John Sterling, a very different person from the founder of the modern cotton manufacture. The late Mr. (afterwards Sir) Joseph Whitworth was a friend of Miss Jewsbury's, and, accompanied by her and by me, Carlyle visited and carefully inspected the great tool- making works of that eminent mechanician. Carlyle said of Whitworth personally that he put him in mind of (now the late) Thomas Watts of the British Museum, ' he had a face like a watch.' Of the many marvels of mechanical ingenuity disclosed to us during our visit, two specially interested Carlyle. One of them was a model of a knitting machine, newly invented by Whitworth (I know not whether it ever came into practical use), which imitated so exactly the movements of the feminine fingers, with their final jerk, when knitting stockings, that Carlyle, contem- plating it at work, burst into a hearty laugh. The other machine was one which could measure the millionth part of an inch, and a hair from each of the heads of the three visitors was subjected to its delicate admeasurement. That belonging to the junior male of the party was adjudged the finest. Miss Jewsbury's came next, while the Sage's was found to be the coarsest of the three. During an interval for refreshment, Carlyle thought fit to improve the occasion by giving Whitworth an account of Dr. Francia's Work- man's Gallows, on which the terrible Dictator hung negligent artificers, and with the sight of which he so frightened an unhappy shoemaker, who had brought him a pair of badly- made grenadier's belts that, within twelve hours, the culprit had turned out two of the best belts to be found in all Paraguay. This, with one exception, to be noted presently, was the only industrial establishment in visiting which Carlyle in Manchester 149 Carlyle was accompanied by the writer of these pages. But Carlyle inspected several others. Before he left us he expressed a doubt whether ' spinning clothes ' was a desirable employment for great masses of human beings, 'without,' he was careful to add, 'strong counteracting influences.' Years afterwards, looking back to what he had seen in Manchester and Lancashire, he came to the con- clusion thus expressed : ' They would do very well down there if the factory-inspectors did their duty,' as no doubt they have done, are doing, and will continue to do. Among the more noticeable episodes of Carlyle's Man- chester visit was his excursion to ' Brightdom,' as he called it, the Rochdale domain of the Brights. Before the excursion was talked of, Carlyle said to me, a propos of I know not what, ' there is good in Bright,' the famous John, of course. Carlyle's Rochdale visit was, however, not to him, but to his younger brother, Mr. Jacob Bright, now a well-known M.P. Among Carlyle's Manchester companions in the excursion there were friends of Mr. Jacob Bright, who, though not a Carlylian, was ready to welcome the distinguished author and denouncer of the Corn Laws. Carlyle's host for the day was then a bachelor, domiciled with brothers and sisters, while higher up the Rochdale acclivity on which he abode was the residence of his brother John, newly elected, for the first time, Member for Manchester, and he, as it happened, was then at home. A part of the afternoon was spent by Carlyle and his Man- chester companions in an inspection of a new, or newish, mill belonging to the Brights, and of the most modern and improved construction and equipment. The rest of the afternoon was passed at Mr. Jacob Bright's in general con- versation, accompanied by a considerable consumption of I 50 Literary Recollections tobacco in various forms, Carlyle, of course, taking an active part in both of these occupations. I was rather amused by the deference which, consciously or uncon- sciously, Carlyle paid to the genius loci. He launched into a fiscal disquisition full of facts and figures, the object of which was to show how unjustly the demands of the Im- perial Exchequer mulcted the poor, onwards from the old woman smoking her pipe of enormously taxed tobacco. The composition of the newly-elected Parliament coming under review, Carlyle expressed a grim satisfaction with the rejection of ' flowery rhetoricians,' by which he meant the defeat, at Edinburgh, of Macaulay, whose procedure in the Corn-Law controversy had brought him into great dis- favour with the Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers. He laughed heartily, and it seemed sympathetically, at the statement of one of the party that the extension of manufacturing industry in and round Rochdale had driven from it all but a solitary survivor of the once numerous squirearchy of the district, substituting the mill for the manor-house. A report of some sayings and doings of a local High Church cleric, I think, led Carlyle to say with considerable emphasis that if the Church of England went on quietly in the old ways it might last for a long time, but that it would soon be sent about its business if it asserted sacerdotal pretensions. Before and during the evening repast all went harmoni- ously. After it there was an adjournment to the drawing- room, where were Mr. and Mrs. John Bright. It was the first, and proved to be the last, meeting of the famous orator and the famous author. By some mischance the subject of negro-slavery was broached, and almost forth- with the two celebrities plunged into unpleasant controversy. Carlyle passionately defended the peculiar institution in Carlyle in Manchester 151 the strain with which his denunciations of Quashee made his readers afterwards famih'ar, asserting that negro emancipation had ruined the West Indies. John Bright as strenuously, but not as violently, denounced slavery, and averred that statistics showed the exports of produce from Jamaica to have increased, not diminished, since emanci- pation. The railway system was another bone of contention, John Bright, of course, expatiating on the benefits which it had conferred on trade and manufactures, while Carlyle contended vehemently that it had dislocated and dis- organised much of the quiet industry of the country, clinching his argument by describing the fate of some once prosperous Dumfriesshire watchmaker of his acquaintance, whom he had found adrift in the world, and who ascribed his ruin to a new railway by which his customers were allured to traffic with watchmakers at a distance ! An illustration this, by the way, of the Kleifistddtet-ei which Emerson said that he occasionally detected in Carlyle's conversation. Even in regard to the benefits of education the two disputants fell out, Carlyle opposing to his adversary's high estimate of them one of the sagacity and applicable knowledge of his own uneducated father, although the said father ' could not tell you of the bitter ale con- sumed in the City of Prophets.' This was a hit at Thackeray, who, in his entertaining record of Eastern travel (Mr. Michael Angclo Titmarsh's Journey from Cornhill to Cairo), had chronicled the joy which he felt when a camel- load of Hodson's pale ale arrived from Beyrout at Jerusalem during his visit to that ' City of Prophets ! ' When we had taken our leave, and were wending on our way towards Manchester, Carlyle spoke regretfully of his vehemence, and ascribed the painful scene to the introduc- 152 Literary Recollections tion, with malice prepense of controversial topics, seeming to blame for it a certain junior of the party, — which, however, was not among that junior's many sins. Mr. Froude, in his brief (and inaccurate) account of this visit of Carlyle's to Manchester, makes him ' talk with some of the leaders of the working men who were studying his works with passionate earnestness,' etc. As it happens there were no working men's leaders in the Manchester of that time. Mr. Froude was probably led into error by see- ing, in Carlyle's Journal of his Manchester visit, references, which he can scarcely have failed to make, to Samuel Bamford, the author of Passages in the Life of a Radical. He was a great admirer of Carlyle, and Carlyle had a great regard for Bamford, whom, in his unpublished correspon- dence with John Forster he calls 'the brave Bamford.' The two met more than once at the Jewsburys' during Carlyle's stay in Manchester, and had much friendly talk. Bamford, who was at one time a hand-loom weaver, had been at Peterloo, and, though there with the most peaceable intentions, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. But, while a genuine Radical and a zealous champion of the claims of labour, he was so far from being a leader of the working men that they looked askance at him, because all along, before, during, and after the Chartist agitation, he had steadily raised his voice against the use of physical force or recourse to violence of any kind. The geniality and good sense, combined with manliness and honesty, dis- played in the Passages, at once commended him to Carlyle. Soon after the appearance of the modest little book it was noticed very favourably in the Tory Quarterly Review itself, I have little doubt through Carlyle's recommenda- tion of it to Lockhart. I have still less doubt that to a Carlyle in Manchester 153 similar recommendation was due the kind present of i^ioo which Carlyle's Lord Ashburton spontaneously made to Bamford, who himself told me of it. At the little parties, which the hospitable Jewsburys gave in his honour to his friends and the friends of his friends, Carlyle was always genial, pleasantly conversible, never vehement. Miss Jewsbury, who was one of the acutest of observers, declared that during his Manchester visit there was a sort, to use her own phrase, of ' devil-may-care ' air about him which she had never seen him wear before. Among his new Manchester acquaintances, he seemed to be struck by an interesting member of the Greek colony established there. This was Stavros Dilberoglue, the Manchester representative of a Greek House in London, a very handsome and cultivated young man, of singular refinement of mind and manners. He was a friend of Miss Jewsbury's, and became through her one of Mrs. Carlyle's. He was the donor to Mrs. Carlyle of the pet dog Nero, so often and so fondly mentioned in her correspondence, her fondness for whom procured her from Lady Ashburton the appellation of Agrippina, one not redeeming by its wit a conspicuous absence of good taste and good feeling in the giver. It was to Dilberoglue that Carlyle, enjoining on him a ' due depth of silence,' intrusted the commission to procure, as a birthday present for his wife, a little machine for making those cigarettes in which at one time she liked to indulge. Among Dilberoglue's personal characteristics was a certain longitude of neck, and, seizing on this with his usual quickness of eye for physical peculiarities, Carlyle compared him to a crane that had alighted on our shores and would one day wing his way to his distant home. Dilberoglue, however, when he had 1 54 Literary Recollections made a fortune, settled in London, where, from his know- ledge of Lancashire, he proved a very useful member of the Mansion House Committee during the cotton-famine. A little more of him hereafter. Of Carlyle's table-talk during this Manchester visit there is not much to add to what has already been reported of it. A discussion in a company where he was, on the relative claims, then slightly agitating the literary world, of Sheridan Knowles and Leigh Hunt, to a pension, he cut short by saying ' Pension them both ! ' On another occasion one of the Jewsburys' Scottish guests sang very expressively to a plaintive air, a song by .an ill-fated Clydesdale poet, 'There's nae Covenant noo,' a lament over the passing away of the creed of the Scottish Covenanters. Doubtless he thought it a lyric that would please the champion of seventeenth-century British Puri- tanism. But when it was finished Carlyle shook his head, and hinted that the emotion expressed in the song had ceased to be genuine, and was in truth factitious. Of the advent of Emerson, which was expected in Manchester, he spoke without enthusiasm, calling him 'a flowing poetic man,' whose teaching he did not regard as of much impor- tance. He expressed himself very pleased with his Man- chester visit, and, when urged to remain a little longer, settled the matter in a way usual with him in such cases, tossing up a penny so as to leave the question of stay or departure to the arbitrament of heads or tails, and the result of the toss decided him to depart. Missing the first train by which he intended to travel northward, he was bitterly self- reproachful, and one could not help laughing inwardly to hear his plaintive exclamation, ' If my wife had been here, this would not have happened ! ' Mrs. Carlyle was at home, doubtless busily superintending the operations of Carlyle in Manchester 155 carpenters, house-painters, etc. Soon after arriving at his destination in his beloved Dumfriesshire, he wrote Miss Jewsbury one of those beautiful letters in the inditing of which none could equal him, encouraging her in her attempt to make the home over which she presided the socially intellectual centre so much needed in such a place as Manchester then was. A few weeks after Carlyle's departure from Manchester Emerson arrived there to begin a lecturing tour in England. Of Emerson in Manchester and in London much will be said in the next chapter. CHAPTER X EMERSON IN ENGLAND A LETTER, warmly inviting Emerson to proceed to Chelsea immediately on arriving in England, had been sent by Carlyle to Manchester. I went with it to Liverpool to place it in Emerson's hands as soon as he should touch the soil of England. But the packet-ship which had borne him across the Atlantic did not arrive until two days after it was due, so I returned with the letter to Manchester. It was posted to Emerson at Liver- pool, and reached him when he landed. On receiving it he came to Manchester only for an hour or two, and then went straight to the Carlyles at Chelsea. It was just after that visit, and on his return to Manchester, that I saw him in private for the first time. His commune with Carlyle at this their second meeting had not been quite so satis- factory as at their first one some fourteen years before, when Emerson made that well-remembered pilgrimage to Craigenputtock. To say nothing of other differences, Carlyle, still full of Cromwell, resented with needless heat Emerson's refusal to fall down and worship the Puritan hero. There was just a trace of irritation, the only one which I ever perceived in Emerson, in his first references to his Chelsea visit ; but it soon disappeared, never to reappear. Sorrowing admiration was expressed in the remark made to one of us early during Jtiis stay in Man- chester : ' Carlyle's heart is as large as the world, but he is 156 Enter S071 in England 157 growing morbid.' Emerson was lost in wonder at the vividness of Carlyle's conversation, which he compared to * sculpture,' and pronounced to be even more marvellous than his books. Emerson made Manchester his headquarters for several months, not only lecturing there, but returning to it every now and then from his lecturing tours in the manufacturing districts, and as far north as Edinburgh. He delivered two courses of lectures in Manchester, one of them at the Athenaeum, the other, intended to be of a homelier kind, at the Mechanics' Institution. Those at the Athenaeum belonged mainly to the series so well known afterwards under the title of ' Representative Men.' Emerson's manner in the lecture-room, like that which distinguished him in private, was one of perfect serenity. For any emotion that he displayed, there might have been no audience before him. He always read his lectures, and in a grave monotone for the most part, with rarely any emphasis. Much in them must have been ' caviare to the general,' but ever and anon some striking thought, strik- ingly expressed, produced a ripple of response from the audience, and the close of his finely discriminating lecture on Napoleon was followed by several rounds of applause, all this confirming what he once said to me, that such lectur- ing triumphs as fell to him were achieved by ' hits.' To the public success or failure of his lectures he appeared to be profoundly indifferent, a mood to which his experiences in American lecture-rooms had habituated him. He told me, with perfect equanimity, that at home he was accustomed to sec hearers, after listening to him a little, walk out of the room, as much as to say that they had had enough of him. At his Manchester lectures the audiences were numerous 158 Literary Recollections and attentive. Whatever they might fail to understand, they evidently felt that this was a man of genius and of high and pure mind. Out of the lecture-room Emerson's only public appear- ance in Manchester was at the annual soiree of the Manchester Athenatum, the late Sir Archibald ^then plain Mr.) Alison in the chair. Emerson delivered on the occasion an effective little speech, unusually complimentar\- for him, since he made in it laudator}- references to the Tory chairman's History of Europe, to Dickens, who had sent a letter of apology for non-attendance, and even to Pioich. Better than this, it contained a noble passage on the greatness of the English character, afterwards expanded and minutely illustrated in the Englisli Traits, of all Emerson's books the most interesting to English readers. As a silent auditor Emerson was present at a great * demonstration ' in the Free Trade Hall to celebrate the victory of the Anti - Com - Law League. Among the speakers was Cobden, who had not long before returned to England, flushed with the success of his triumphal progress through the Continent after the repeal of the Com Laws. Cobden was then beginning what proved to be a rather futile crusade against our military and naval expenditure. But in his speech he announced his new programme in such guarded language that, as Emerson told me, Cobden impressed him as 'the embodiment of English discre- tiorL' However, I see that Emerson spoke more exuber- antly and enthusiastically of Cobden in a letter which he wrote at the time to his friend Thoreau at Concord, and which is printed in the Atlantic MontJily for June 1892. Emerson's associates in Manchester were chiefly mem.bers of the little circle which had welcomed Carlyle to the Emerson in England 159 cotton city some weeks before. He honoured my domicile with several visits. Coming on one occasion to breakfast, he brought with him photographs of his wife and children, saying a propos of that of Mrs. Emerson, ' If any of our family are saved, it will be through her merits.' On the same occasion he took up The Christian Year, which was lying about, and I was a little surprised to find so ethnic a philosopher point admiringly to the opening stanza, ' Hues of the rich unfolding morn,' etc. As an evening guest, among a circle of his juniors not given to silence, Emerson was very reticent but very amiable, listening patiently, with a benignant smile, to the argumentation and other talk going on. If he did broach a comment or an opinion it was generally, I observed, to cite something said by a thought- ful friend at home. In private conversation he told me that Carlyle had advised him to try some historical subject, his reply being that he had no genius for history. Referring to Carlyle's vehement denunciations of authorship, he said, ' If Mr. Carlyle can show me any better employment than literature, I shall be happy to betake myself to it.' Before finally quitting Manchester, Emerson gave a dinner-party to his Manchester friends and others from the northern and midland counties, with some of whom he had corre- sponded from Concord on high or deep spiritual matters. The guests were a strange collection of mystics, poets, prose -rhapsodists, editors, schoolmasters, ex -Unitarian ministers, and cultivated manufacturers, the only bond of union among them being a common regard and respect for Emerson. One of the guests (he still survives) was a vegetarian, for whom a dinner of herbs had been consider- ately prepared. He was then a young man and had writ- ten a mystical book, which Emerson admired and which i6o Literary Recollections made him hopeful of its writer's future. It is a little char- acteristic of the difference between the Sage of Concord and the Sage of Chelsea, — that Carlyle's only comment on this and another mystical book by the same writer, was a contemptuous expression of wonder that ' a lad in a pro- vincial town ' should have presumed to handle such themes as he had dealt with. After the prandial and post-prandial babblement, to which our host as usual contributed nothing, he gave a serene close to the evening by reading to us his lecture on Plato. He had omitted it, probably as above the heads of an ordinary audience, from his series (jf lectures at the Manchester Athenaeum on Representative Men, of which it now forms part. Soon afterwards I pitched my tent in London again, and saw something of Emerson there, at the Carlyles' and else- where. 'The seraphic man,' as Carlyle called him, was, like most other visitors at Chelsea, silent when Carlyle held forth. However, it was at the Carlyles' that I listened to the most copious utterance which in private I ever heard come from Emerson's lips — and it was not very copious. I can give only a very imperfect report of it. It may have been a deliverance of Emerson's own, but, as was not un- common with him, he professed to be only repeating what had been said to him by a friend who complained of the far too general and exclusive domination of 'the alpha- bet' In the course of his European travels this friend had been struck with the much that had been said and was known about men who had had to do with ' the alphabet,' that is, who had written anything, compared with the obscurity which had been left to enshroud great workers and doers from the first architect of Cologne Cathedral, Erwin of Steinbach onwards. A catalogue of illustrative Emerson hi England i6i contrasts followed. This apparent depreciation of literature from one vvho"^prized it so highly as Emerson did seem to me singular, but was, of course, echoed sympathetically by Carlyle. On another evening the conversation turn- ing on lectures and lecturing, Carlyle good-humouredly bantered Emerson on the easiness of his platform-tasks, reading ' from a paper before him,' and its contrast with his own difficulties, those of ' a poor fellow, set up to hold forth without any paper ' to help him. Emerson said nothing. In such very little private conversation as I had with him in London he laid great stress on the scholarship of England, especially its Oriental scholarship. Really the Englishman in whom Emerson seemed to me as much interested as in any other"was that strange being Thomas Taylor, the Platonist and Neo-pagan whom some visitor once found in an attitude of worship before a silver shrine of Mercury ! Taylor lived in Walworth, whither Emerson told me that he made a pilgrimage — the only literary pil- grimage which I knew him make in London — in search of memorials of this reviver of the worship of the gods of antiquity. Between Carlyle and Bancroft, the historian of the United States and then American minister in London, Emerson was introduced everywhere, his reputation as a thinker of course powerfully aiding, and both in the aristo- cratic and intellectual circles of London society he saw everybody whom he could have cared to see, Carlyle re- porting (what ought to have pleased that great apostle of silence) the complaint of 'the high people 'that (unlike himself) Emerson had little to say to them. One of the effects on Emerson of the brilliancy of the society in which he found himself lionised for the first time was to make L i62 Literary Recollections him very reluctant to lecture in London. To overcome this reluctance, resort was had to a device of which I heard no whisper at the time, and which, either through modesty or pride, Emerson seems never to have mentioned even in his letters to relatives and friends at home. It came to my knowledge only recently, when exploring the paper-masses left behind him by the late John Forster, Among them is the original, with the signatories' autographs attached, of a memorial addressed to Emerson, respectfully requesting him to deliver a course of lectures in London, signed by Bulwer Lytton, Carlyle, Procter (Barry Cornwall), Charles Dickens, and the inevitable Forster himself Two courses of lectures by Emerson in London did come off, the earlier of them (on the ' Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century ') being delivered to a guinea-paying audience in a hall in Edward Street, Portman Square. On the first day the audience was numerous, aristocratic as well as in- tellectual, two daughters of the then Duchess of Suther- land (who had been Emerson's hostess at Stafford House) being seated on the platform by the Lecturer's side. I had a long talk with Carlyle about one of these Edward Street lectures. When I spoke of the high ethical ideal which Emerson held up to us, Carlyle replied that Emerson's ethics consisted chiefly of ' prohibitions.' In a striking passage of the lecture, Emerson, whom again I report very imperfectly, had compared man's life on earth to a bird alighting on a rock, resting for a while, and then flying away into infinite space. I made some reference to this similitude, and Carlyle rejoined * Merchant ! you figure well.' On asking for some explanation of this enigmatic deliverance, Carlyle told me the story of an impecunious Dumfriesshire man, to whom, on entering a shop, a Emerson in England 163 tradesman (in old days every Scotch shopkeeper was called a merchant) had tendered an account. The debtor had no money with which to settle the bill, but after carefully in- specting its caligraphy and arithmetic he said to his credi- tor in a mournfully complimentary tone : ' Merchant ! you figure well.' The bearing of this anecdote on Emerson's similitude, I leave it to the reader to discover. Mrs. Carlyle was more dissatisfied than her husband with Emerson's ethics. Dilating in his high-flown optimistic way on the ultimate triumph of good over evil, the lecturer went the length of saying that even when in a certain haunt of sensual vice, unmentionable to ears polite (though Emer- son called it by its plain English name), man is still tending upwards, or words to that effect. Mrs. Carlyle's moral in- dignation at this statement knew no bounds, and for some time she could scarcely speak of Emerson with patience. I now and then fancied that after Emerson had been ban- queted and welcomed by so many great and distinguished people in London, she viewed him, with a certain wife-like jealou.sy, as a sort of rival of her husband. Emerson's admiration for her abated visibly, till at last he was heard to say that the society of 'the lady ' (Mrs. Carlyle made no pretension to profundity) was worth cultivating, mainly because she was the person who could tell you most about the husband. Very soon after the delivery of the first lecture I accompanied Carlyle to Emerson's domicile, a visit apparently intended to be one of congratulation on his lecturing success. Emerson was at home, and Carlyle seemed to find the process of congratulation rather em- barrassing. He could get out little more than that the lecture was 'very Emersonian,' which, considering that Emerson had been the lecturer, was not striking 164 Literary Recollections or enthusiastic praise. Then the subject was swiftly dismissed and succeeded by a conversation on a common friend, a propos of whom Carlyle, who was one of the keen- est-sighted of physiognomists, laid it down as an ascer- tained physiognomico-spiritual fact that a long upper lip denoted in its possessor ' a certain resonance to the noble,' and the brief visit ended. Elsewhere than in Emerson's presence, ' Moonshine ' pithily expressed Carlyle's opinion on his London lectures. But, before Emerson left Eng- land for home a few weeks afterwards, Carlyle spoke more kindly of his friend's lectures as ' intellectual sonatas,' and of the friend himself as 'a beautiful figure among those talking Yankees,' and the ideal of an American gentleman. In his English Traits Emerson has given an agreeable description of an excursion which he made with Carlyle to see Stonehenge, and of their subsequent visit to the Hamp- shire county house of ' A. H.' ' A. H.' was no other a person than the late amiable Arthur (afterwards Sir Arthur) Helps, who was an old friend of Carlyle's, and whom Emerson had met in London. Speaking some time sub- sequently to a friend of mine about this welcome visit of the two Sages, Helps said that, when taking his walks abroad with them, he was surprised by their display of a very minute knowledge of — grasses ! It would have been well if their conversation had never turned on more danger- ous and controversial themes. It was during this visit that Emerson startled his host and fellow-guest by propounding the doctrine of non-resistance in its extremest form. As far as I was able at the time to make out, Emerson's theory was that the wise man should have such perfect confidence in the ongoings of the universe, the development of the human race included, as to refrain from fighting with pen or Emerson in England 165 tongue, not less than with sword, for the good and against the bad, and should regard even the best government and legisla- tion as superfluous interferences with the ordained economy of things. I saw Carlyle immediately after his return from the Stonehenge expedition, and he was full of indignant protest against Emerson's doctrine of limitless laissez-faire, which if acted on would, he said, prevent a man from so much as ' rooting out a thistle.' At any time, even during that memorable and pleasant early visit of Emerson's to Craigenputtock where Carlyle was quietly thinking and studying, his vigorous, not to say vehement, nature would have led him to reject Emerson's spiritual Quakerism. Much more must it have been repugnant to Carlyle during that tumultuous revolutionary year 1848, when he was boiling over with an almost insurrectionary indignation against things in general. It was most unfortunate for the renewed intercourse between the two Sages that it should have taken place at such a time. Considering the deep material obligations under which Carlyle was to Emerson he might, however, I think, have treated Emerson more tenderly than he did, but his then stormy mood of mind is a sort of palliation of his conduct to his brother- Sage, and some compensation was made for it in his correspondence with Concord after Emerson's return home. When the war between North and South broke out, Emerson, it may be noted, flung to the winds his cherished doctrine of non-resistance. Not one (so far as I know) of Carlyle's biographers and bibliographers has noticed a slight but interesting literary memorial of his intimacy with Emerson, and of their friendly correspondence after Emerson's return to Concord. This is an article on ' Indian Meal ' in Frascr's Magazine 1 66 Literary Recollections for May 1849, signed ' C.,' Carlyle's authorship of which is undoubted, though he did not include it in any collective edition of his writings. Cobbett had endeavoured unsuc- cessfully to persuade the English farmer to raise Indian corn, and Carlyle wished, in those days of potato-disease, to see Indian meal an article of general consumption. He found that the Indian meal then in use among us, whether ground in the exporting country, or at home from imported Indian corn, was tainted by a bitterness which made even the starving Irish pauper turn against it. Moreover, English millstones being generally too soft for that kind of grain there was found a considerable admixture of sand in the meal which they turned out, and this did not at all improve matters. He corresponded on the subject with Emerson at Concord, who sent him from his own barn a barrel of Indian corn in its natural state, which had not been subjected to the process of kiln-drying, and to this process, Emerson reported, was said to be due the amari aliqidd in the meal as then consumed in England and Ireland. At Carlyle's instance, his friend Lord Ashburton had Emerson's sample ground by a miller of his own, and prepared for the table by his own French cook. The result, according to Carlyle in Eraser, was ' meal which was sweet among the sweetest ; with an excellent rich taste some- thing like that of nuts, indeed it seemed to me, perhaps from novelty in part, decidedly sweeter than wheat or any other grain I have ever tasted. So that, it would appear, all our experiments hitherto in Indian meal have been vitiated to the heart by a deadly original sin or funda- mental falsity to start with — as if in experimenting on Westphalian ham, all the ham presented to us hitherto for trial had been in a rancid state. . . Ground by a reason- Emerson in England 1 6 7 able miller, who grinds only it and not his millstones along with it, this grain, I can already promise, will make excellent, cleanly, wholesome, and palatable eating ; and be fit for the cook's art under all manner of conditions, ready to combine with whatever judicious condiment, and reward well whatever wise treatment he applies to it : and indeed, on the whole, I should say, a more promising article could not well be submitted to him, if his art is really a useful one.' On it, Carlyle continued, 'a grown man could be supported wholesomely, and even agreeably, at the rate of little more than a penny a day, which surely is cheap enough. Neither, as the article is not grown at home, and can be procured only by commerce, need political econo- mists dread new " Irish difficulties" from the cheapness of it. Nor is there danger, for unlimited periods yet, of it becoming dearer : it grows, in the warm latitudes of the earth, profusely with the whole impulse of the sun ; can grow over huge tracts and continents lying vacant hitherto, festering hitherto as pestiferous jungles, yielding only rattle-snakes and yellow-fever : it is probable, if we were driven to it, the planet Earth, sown where fit with Indian corn, might produce a million times as much food as it now does or has ever done. To the disconsolate Malthusian this grain ought to be a sovereign comfort.' In the single valley of the Mississippi alone, ' were the rest of the earth all lying fallow, there could Indian corn enough be given to support the whole posterity of Adam now alive.' Announcing these good tidings, Carlyle bade ' the discon- solate Malthusian fling his " geometrical series " into the corner, assist wisely in the Free Trade movement, and dry up his tears.' Carlyle told me that he sent his article, in the first instance, to the editor of the Times, who rejected 1 68 Lite7'ary Recollections and returned it.^ In the collective editions of his writings, from which Carlyle excluded it, there are surely things more trivial and less interesting than the striking piece in which the Sage of Chelsea, aided by the Sage of Concord, sought to indicate how every son of Adam could live on little more than a penny a day ! ^ In a letter to Emerson (19th April 1849), after describing what had been done with the Indian Corn sent from Concord, Carlyle goes on to say : ' I, on my side, have already drawn up a fit proclamation of the excellencies of this invaluable corn, and admonitions as to the benighted state of English eaters in regard to it, to appear in Fraser's Magazine, or I know not where, very soon.' The article being on a subject of general importance, Carlyle sent it, in the first instance, to the Times, if published in which it would have a far greater number of readers than the magazine could ensure it. CHAPTER XI CARLYLE IN I 848 AN insurrectionary movement in France had, as pre- viously reported, been predicted by Carlyle in the autumn of 1847. The Revolution of February 1848 gave him therefore more satisfaction than surprise, though even he had scarcely looked for the ' beautiful radiancy,' as he called it to me, which the French displayed in flinging out Louis Philippe. ' It will be a long time,' Carlyle said to me, ' before another man has such a chance as Louis Philippe had,' for, like the rest of the world, he little foresaw the sudden rise of Louis Napoleon. Since the publication of his Cromwell, Carlyle's pen had been lying idle, though his mind was seething with literary projects. Suddenly the French Revolution blazed forth amid what he had described to me as ' this vile murk of things,' and seemed to offer a stirring and pregnant theme, a text for much prophetic utterance. While its results were undeveloped, his new and very un-Burke-like * Reflections on the French Revolu- tion ' were less suited for a book than for ' articles,' and the startling phenomenon in Paris led to Carlyle's first appearance in political journalism. He was encouraged to make the attempt all the more because his intimate friend and warm admirer, John Forster, had become editor of the Examiner, in succession to Albany Fonblanque, whom the Whigs, on their return to power after the repeal of the Corn Laws, appointed chief of the Statistical Department 109 170 Literary Recollections of the Board of Trade. Carlyle's first essay in political journalism was an anonymous contribution to the leading columns of the Examiner, a most vivid and vigorous article on 'Louis Philippe,' whose downfall he greeted with 'a stern, almost sacred joy.' This and his few other news- paper articles he himself never cared to reprint, so that they are unknown to the great mass of the readers of his works. Moreover, there has remained until now quite unnoticed a second article on French affairs, which was written by him for the Examiner, which was set up in type, and of which he corrected the proof, yet which was never published in that or any other journal, and lies buried in the multifarious paper-masses left by the late John Forster. The piece is curious as testifying, rather unexpectedly, to Carlyle's impetuous enthusiasm for the Second French Republic, to celebrate the birth of which it was written. He went the length of declaring that if the Czar with his 'Scythians' attempted to crush the nascent republic, it would be the duty of England to fight by the side of France in resistance to Russia ! It is little to be wondered at that the prudent Forster withdrew from publication in what had become a Whig organ an article written in this spirit. In the course of years there was formed an Anglo- French alliance against Russia, but it was one which, in the altered circumstances, was fiercely denounced by Carlyle. Carlyle's enthusiasm for the Second French Republic died out as this lapsed into anarchy and bloodshed, and he thoroughly detested the ' Saviour of Society,' Louis Napoleon, whom he had known in England and whom the French, still dazzled by the Napoleonic legend, preferred as President of the Republic to the upright General Cavaignac, father of the Cavaignac now a prominent French politician Carlyle in 1848 171 and brother of Godefroi Cavaignac, a great friend of Carlyle's, as will be more fully noted hereafter. In the earlier history of the Second French Republic there occurred an episode which was trifling in itself, but which struck me at the time as illustrating Carlyle's far too great liability to have his judgments affected by his personal preposses- sions, or, as in this case, prejudices. When a new National Assembly was convoked, there appeared an address to the electors which caused a considerable sensation. It advised them to give their suffrages to none but plain honest men who would make all the better deputies if they were unedu- cated, or had very little to do with 'the alphabet,' as Emerson's friend, previously cited, might have phrased it. Carlyle warmly approved of the tone and tenor of this address, but some time afterwards, when it turned out that it was the handiwork of George Sand, by which time, it is true, the prospects of the French Republic were growing decidedly dubious, he just as warmly condemned it. On hearing of the Revolution of February 1 848, George Sand had rushed off to Paris to fling herself into the political melee, and Mazzini, in his Italian-English, complained to Mrs. Carlyle, as she herself told me, that Madame Dude- vant was then 'living on credits!' With the collapse of Carlyle's hopes from France, he made Ireland the subject of his few remaining contributions to the newspaper press. Two were published by Forster, one of them a very powerful protest against ' The Repeal of the Union,' and then Carlyle's connection with the Examiner ceased. Like his other articles, they were written in the purest Carlylese, little to the taste of readers of the Exaviiner, whom Fonblanque had fed on nothing stronger than illustrations of contemporary politics drawn from Molicre's plays and 1 7 2 Literary Recollections Fielding's novels. Forster himself told me that, ' splendid ' as he admitted Carlyle's papers to be, he had received pro- tests against them from subscribers, and doubtless Carlyle's indignant criticisms on Ministerial legislation and no- legislation for Ireland had given offence in quarters where Forster was anxious that offence should not be taken. But these were considerations to which Carlyle in his then mood paid no heed. He was nettled at the stop put to his earnest disquisitions by his own familiar friend. He was chagrined to see his passionate denunciations of a futile policy in famine-stricken Ireland and his daringly original suggestions of a new one superseded by the common- places of Whiggism. Forster, I heard him say, 'will write the Exmniner down.' The result was that he cooled consider- ably towards Forster. But the coolness did not last long. Forster was too devoted and useful, and Carlyle had too much sense for that — their friendship was soon as cordial as ever. From Forster and the Examiner Carlyle turned to the hard-headed Rintoul and the Spectator, busy on the editorial staff of which was Thornton Hunt, the eldest son of his old friend Leigh Hunt, and himself a great admirer of Carlyle. Rintoul failed to tolerate more than two articles of Carlyle's, those in which he propounded his scheme of ' Irish regiments of the New Era.' The famine-stricken peasantry of Ireland, instead of being fed in eleemosynary fashion out of rates and Parliamentary Grants, were to earn their own living through spade husbandry, organised by the Government, which was to support them until they could be supported by the fruits of their industry. The Irishman, according to Carlyle, had a special talent for that kind of husbandry, and was known to be when drilled one of the bravest of soldiers. ' Digging,' said Carlyle, ' can be regi- Carlyle in 1848 173 merited as well as fighting,' and so forth. This was enough — too much — for Rintoul. Carlyle was now convinced that he could not find in British journalism as then constituted a pulpit from which to preach to the governing classes. He began to talk of starting an organ of his own, which (following Cobbett) he spoke of as ' Twopenny Trash.' The project, like so many others of his, went no further than talk, and a year and a half passed away before the world was startled by the thunder and lightning of the Latter-Day PampJilets. Meanwhile, Carlyle's friends and admirers of the Young Ireland party had been arrested, and were being tried for the violence of their inflammatory language. Carlyle, who had all along sorrowfully reprobated their insurrectionary schemes, showed himself full of pitying sympathy with them in the time of their adversity. Of his friendship with the 'Irish Rebel' of 1848, now 'Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, K.C.M.G.,' that much-experienced veteran has given the world an interesting memorial in his ' Conversations with Carlyle.' For the most violent of the Young Ireland party, John Mitchell, who adopted some of Carlyle's heretical notions, those on slavery for instance, Carlyle had a very strong liking. Indeed, his knowledge of, and personal com- mune with, these young Irishmen and their friends appears to have opened his eyes to something good in the national character of a people of whose faults alone he had been formerly cognisant. ' The English,' he was heard to say, 'are torpid, and the Scotch are harsh, but the Irish are affectionate.' He told me that once, when taking a walk with Mitchell in London, he asked whether the Young Irelander, who was denouncing and threatening the Saxon, thought that he had much chance in a conflict with a 174 Literary Recollections nation to whose strength and resources such a capital as London bore testimony. Mitchell's answer was that he would 'try.' When Mitchell was suffering a felon's doom, in the ' still-vexed Bermoothes,' he wrote to Carlyle, who in his reply, he informed me, endeavoured to console Mitchell by telling him that ' this was still the country of Shakespeare and Milton,' — a consolation, it seemed to me, which would have been more suitably addressed to a depressed poet than to a banished, imprisoned, and exasperated 'rebel.' A mild literary phenomenon, presenting a striking con- trast to the tumultuous revolutionism of that annus mirabilis, claims mention through its connection with Carlyle. In the spring of 1848 Eckermann sent him from Weimar the final instalment of the Conversations with Goethe. A letter accompanied it, Carlyle told me, in which the then recent French Revolution was treated by Ecker- mann as 'ein anderer Beweis der menschlichen Schwacheit' (' another proof of the weakness of man '), Carlyle laughing heartily at the calmly contemptuous way in which Goethe's Boswell spoke of an event of such importance to Europe. Eckermann, he said, was 'a beautiful mirror-soul ; he doesn't know how clever he is.' He was, Carlyle added, ' miserably poor,' and had once sent him the autograph manuscript of one of Goethe's dramas to be offered for sale to the authorities of the British Museum. Carlyle went with it to the late Sir Frederick Madden, then at the head of the Manuscript Department of the Museum, and met with a courteous refusal. A similar refusal would not be given now. In Eckermann's new volume there was a genial letter from Sir Walter Scott to Goethe, giving some account of himself and his family. Lockhart and his Carlyle //^ 1848 175 devotion to Goethe were mentioned in it, and Goethe expressed to Eckermann his surprise that Sir Walter said nothing of Carlyle, who had done so much to diffuse in Great Britain a knowledge of German literature. It was on this occasion that Goethe spoke to Eckermann of Carlyle as ' a moral force of great significance,' as ' having in him much for the future,' and as a man concerning whom 'it was difficult to conceive all that he might produce and effect.' Carlyle made no remark on this, but laughed a little at Sir Walter's truly Scott-like mention in the letter to Goethe of ' my friend Sir John Hope of Pinkie,' and spoke in his usual depreciatory tone of ' Wattie ' as having ' turned the history of his country into an opera.' Towards the close of the book, Eckermann reported a remarkable discourse by Goethe on sacred things. It was a discourse, full of serene wisdom, on religion, natural and revealed, on the Protestant Church's relation to it, on the inestimable value, for ethical culture, of the Gospels, on the debt which we ow^e to Luther and the Reformation, and on the life beyond the grave. At any time the thoughts of a Goethe on such themes as these would have been impres- sive, but their impressiveness was greatly enhanced by the fact that they were uttered only some ten days before the death of the venerable poet-sage. Speaking of the Founder of Christianity, Goethe said, ' Ich beuge mich vor Ihm' — ' I bow down before him.' ^ Carlyle gave me the volume 'I give the whole of the passage, in the late John Oxenford's translation. After some judicial remarks on the controversy respecting the authenticity of the Gospels, Goethe vk^ent on to say : ' Nevertheless, I look upon all the four Gospels as thoroughly genuine ; for there is in them the reflection of a greatness which emanates from the person of Jesus and which is of as divine a kind as ever was seen upon earth. If I am asked whether it is in my nature to pay Him devout reverence I say "certainly." I bow before Ilim as the divine manifestation of the highest principle of morality.' Let there be 176 Literary Recollections to review, and I observed that he had underlined the Ich of the foregoing sentence, and pencilled opposite to it an emphatic note of exclamation, one among the slightest but not the least expressive and significant of his innumerable Marginalia. quoted, too, the same translator's version of the closing passage of Goethe's discourse : ' God did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation, but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits.' A theory of Evolution without an Evolver would have been banned by Goethe. CHAPTER XII THE ORGANISATION OF LABOUR CARLYLE'S pupil in earlier and friend in later years, Charles Buller, died towards the close of 1848, and Carlyle wrote a kindly obituary notice of him, which ap- peared in the Examiner. Buller had been President of the Poor-Law Board since the return of the Whigs to office, after the Repeal of the Corn Laws. With all his affection for the man, Carlyle spoke to me rather slightingly of him as an administrator, approaching, * with kid gloves on, that grimy phenomenon,' pauperism. This meant nothing more than that Buller managed his department as his predecessors in office had done, and as his successors were to do. The connection with Poor-Law Administration of so old and intimate a friend had led Carlyle to look a little into the unsatisfactory statistics of English pauperism — the magnitude of Irish pauperism was glaring — and, as was seen in the last chapter, Carlyle had promulgated a scheme for its reproductive employment. By degrees he formed a gigantic and far-reaching scheme of the same kind, embrac- ing English as well as Irish pauperism. A statement of it, made with immense emphasis, was to be thrown here and there into those Latter-Day Pamphlets which, with their tumultuous vehemence of protest against everything under heaven, have become, in spite of the enormous literary power displayed in them, wearisome in their monotony. They are now probably the least read of all Carlyle's M 178 Literary Recollections writings, and possess mainly a biographical and psycho- logical interest. It was unfortunate that Carlyle's project of social reconstruction should have been communicated through that turbid, that tempestuous medium. The Latter-Day Pamphlets provoked a howling storm of wrath- ful criticism. Furious at Carlyle's assaults on the popular idols and dominant ideas of their time, the great majority of his critics were in no mood to examine his one solitary proposal of a practical, I am far from saying of a practic- able, kind, for the gradual abolition of the social anarchy which he denounced with a terrible earnestness almost unknown in the world's literature since the record of Hebrew prophecy was closed. No. I. of the Latter-Day Pamphlets (ist February 1850) contained Carlyle's scheme, in its rudimentary form, of ' Industrial Regiments,' British as well as Irish. Poor- Law Relief of any kind was to be sternly refused to all paupers capable of working. Work was to be offered them by the State. If they shirked it, they were to be flogged ; and if, after this operation, they remained disobedient, they were to be shot, an unnecessary exhibition of the harshness which, rightly or wrongly, Carlyle, the reader has seen, considered a characteristic of his countrymen north of the Tweed. Great numbers of convicted criminals were in Carlyle's day — as they are in ours — kept at work — some- times very hard work — without either flogging or shooting. No. V. of the Pamphlets expanded the original scheme. The Industrial Regiments were no longer to consist of paupers solely. Enlistment in them was to be open to any worker who was dissatisfied with the conditions of his actual employment. The sweated might thus escape from the sweater, the underpaid and overtasked in any depart- The Organisatio7i of Labotir 179 ment of labour would find work under rigorous but just and wholesome conditions in Carlyle's Industrial Regiments. Thus, Carlyle thought, the ordinary employer of labour would have to concede to his workers equally just and wholesome conditions, or he would find them deserting him and enlisting in the State's Industrial Army. This was Carlyle's solution of the ' Labour Question,' which is always with us. That in those days of triumphant laissez- faire Carlyle's scheme should have received no approval, and only a slight contemptuous attention from statesmen and politicians, is not to be wondered at. It is more wonderful that it should have been utterly neglected by the most prominent and vociferous of Carlyle's enthusiastic disciples. Mr. Froude, the Elisha of that Elijah, is never weary of proclaiming his belief that Carlyle was the wisest as well as the noblest man of his generation, and that only in following Carlyle's precepts is political and social salva- tion to be found. Yet nowhere in Mr. Froude's writings is there to be found any reference to the Industrial Regiments. When, in the course of his elaborate biography of Carlyle, he comes to the Latter-Day Pamphlets, he has a good deal to say about almost everything in them except the one thing which can chiefly preserve them from neglect. He ignores altogether the scheme on which Carlyle based his hopes of national regeneration, his one noticeable reply to the reproach with which he was frequently assailed, that he could only denounce social evils and had no remedy to propose for them, that he was wholly aggressive and not in the least constructive. Having been absent a second time from London, I returned to it soon after the appearance of No. i. of the Latter-Day Pamphlets. I found Carlyle in one of his i8o Literary Recollections sternest moods. So unwelcome to him were visitors that ' nobody comes to the house now,' Mrs. Carlyle said, not at all complacently, 'but a few followers of mine.' A single gleam of humour did for a moment lighten the gloom of his denunciations of idle pauperism, Poor-Law Relief, charitable dole-giving, and all the rest of it. He illustrated his attitude towards them by citing what he spoke of as ' one of the drollest things that ever came from Dickens.' When on the occasion of Mr. Dombey's second marriage he enters the church in which it is to be solem- nised, attired in a new blue coat, fawn-coloured pantaloons and lilac waistcoat, Mr. Toots, surveying the scene from the gallery, informs in an undertone his neighbour and friend The Chicken that this gorgeous personage is the bride- groom. The confident pugilist hoarsely whispers in reply that Mr. Dombey is ' as stiff a cove as ever he see, but that it is within the resources of science to double him up, with one blow in the waistcoat' Carlyle, with grim glee, boasted (rashly, it has turned out) that fashionable and complacent as was the Philanthropy of the day, it was within the resources of his science to 'double it up' ! In this anti-philanthropic temper of mind, he spoke with some impatience even of Factory Legislation, — an improvement in which was then being mooted, — and of Lord Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury that was to be, whom he had praised in Past mid Present. ' Why,' he said, ' can't the operatives make their own bargains with the mill-owners ? ' though he admitted that Factory Legislation was indis- pensable for the protection of women and children. When I asked him whether he did not think that Lord Ashley was sincere, he would only reply, ' He is not consciously insincere;' and added, 'what he is doing will come out in a The Orgatiisation of Labour i8i way which he little expects.' One small episode in Carlyle's biography at this time is worth noting. Some of the Aberdeen students started him, not successfully, as a candidate for their Lord Rectorship against, I think, the Duke of Argyll. ' I suppose,' he said to me, ' the young fellows look on me as an embodiment of German neology. Of the Rectorship, he said : ' It is nothing in itself, but it is thought to be something here.' There were reasons, quite unconnected with personal vanity (of which few distin- guished men had less than Carlyle), why he should wish just then to receive what would be regarded as ' something ' in London. There was, indeed, no doubt in my mind that in those days Carlyle would have cheerfully accepted an office under Government which might have enabled him to carry out, to some extent, his scheme for the reproductive employment of pauperism. But the Whigs of 1847-50 (with the exception, perhaps, of Earl Grey, and his distrust of Lord Palmerston's policy had prevented him from joining the Ministry) did not love Carlyle, nor was there love lost between him and them. The Presidency of the Poor-Law Board, vacant through the death of Charles Buller, was given to a ' safe ' Whig lawyer, who and whose newspaper connections were useful to the party. The Permanent (as distinct from the Parliamentary) Secretary- ship of the same Board became vacant not long afterwards. From some faint indications at the time, I half-surmised that Carlyle had an eye on it, but it was given to the son of a considerable Whig earl. Carlyle did not spare the Whigs in the Latter-Day Pamphlets, and some sarcasms in them on Lord John Russell drew from his lordship, speak- ing in the House of Commons, an unmistakable reference 1 82 Literary Recollections to Carlyle as ' a clever but whimsical writer.' A great Whig brother-man-of-letters — Macaulay — was an ardent adherent of laissez-faire, and he, it was said, made merry over a slight linguistic error committed by Carlyle (but corrected afterwards), who in the first of the Pamphlets had written Wvoi, instead of I6vt) ! Carlyle turned his face towards Peel, whom he had met occasionally at Lord Ashburton's, and for whom, since the Repeal of the Corn Laws, he had a considerable regard. The Peelites having bought the Morning Chronicle, there began to appear in it, towards the close of 1849, a striking series of articles on Labour and the Poor, in London and elsewhere. At the be- ginning of 1850 there were even faint rumours that some of the leading Peelites were in favour of a determined attempt to grapple with the Labour question. However this may have been, in the Latter-Day Pamphlet on ' The New Downing Street,' which was to set the pauper to work and to do a great deal else, Carlyle called on Peel to under- take the Premiership, as if in such a case the will were equivalent to the way. That pamphlet appeared on the 15th of April (1850), and within a month Carlyle was invited by Peel to the dinner-party, Carlyle's graphic account of which and of his host has been printed by Mr. Froude. Some six weeks afterwards Sir Robert Peel was in his grave. With his death there vanished Carlyle's never confident hope of being given an opportunity to realise his dream of social reform. I still remember the tone of sadness, blended with resignation, in which at that time he said to me : ' The world is a poor slave, and will always be governed in a low way.' The fundamental idea of Carlyle's scheme for the recon- struction of society, as originally conceived by him, was The Organisation of Labour 183 that paupers having been defeated, as it were, in the battle of life they should be made slaves of, just as the Greeks and Romans made slaves of those whom they conquered and took captive in warfare. This notion he derived from Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, whose works he was studying in those years, Fletcher having proposed that the beggars and sturdy vagabonds by whom the Scotland of his day was infested should be seized and reduced to servitude. Carlyle's original conception was a little mitigated when, instead of enslaving them, he proposed the compulsory enlistment of all paupers in an industrial army, the volun- tary enlistment in which of all workers, outside pauperism, discontented with the condition of their employment, was not merely permitted but invited. An organisation like that of a modern army became Carlyle's social ideal. Speaking of what could be, and was done by military drill, he said to me, ' it is beautiful to see that men have such a faculty left ' as that of being drilled. In his industrial army there were to be the same implicit obedience to authority, and the same punishments for disobedience, as in the army which conquered at Waterloo. No democratic element was to be admitted into its constitution ; it was to be controlled despotically from above. Herein lay a great difference between Carlyle's scheme and such continental state-socialism as that, for instance, of Louis Blanc, in whom, however, he recognised * something chivalrous.' In his Organisation du Travail, Louis Blanc proposed that the soldiers of any one of his Industrial Regiments should elect their own officers, a project to which Carlyle would not listen for a moment. Carlyle did not appear to me to know much about the working of the Poor-Law legislation which he wished to 184 Literary Recollections \ revolutionise, or to have more than glanced at the statistics of pauperism. Henry Fielding's well-meant and even | practical, but rather out of date, proposals for the repression j of mendicancy and crime in London lay on Carlyle's table, but not a single Blue Book or Parliamentary Return was visible there. He said vaguely that the amount of the j poor-rate levied annually in England and Wales was i approaching that levied in the days of the old and wasteful poor-law. But he did not take into account the increase of population during the interval, or the fact that considerable portions of the poor-rate under the new law, were expended on purposes only indirectly connected with pauper-relief. He seemed to have a notion that if a man was once a pauper, he was always a pauper, infecting his neighbour- hood with pauperism. He never deigned to look into the fluctuations of pauperism, and its decrease or increase varying with the state of trade. He did not even gauge the amount of that adult able-bodied pauperism with which he proposed to deal so stringently. Ifyou spoke to him of any of these things, he made some impatient reply about not wishing to be pestered with ' details,' as if it was not the adjustment of these very details that made the difference between a Utopian and a practicable scheme. When all was over, or at least when no statesman or prominent politician was found taking any notice of his scheme, and the death of Sir Robert Peel extinguished some hopes that have been hinted at, Carlyle surveyed the situation more calmly than when he was in the volcanic state which produced the Latter-Day Pamphlets. ' It ' — the execution of his scheme — ' would,' he avowed, ' have been very difficult' ' I would have called together,' he said, ' the Boards of Guardians throughout the country.' In fact The Organisation of Labour 185 he would have instituted, on a large scale, inquiries which surely he ought to have instituted, on however small a scale, before he broached his grandiose project. What seemed to me another omission on his part was his neglect to inquire into the history of the various attempts, by no means insignificant in number, during the eighteenth century, to employ paupers reproductively, or at least to make the English work-house really a house of work. Some of these attempts, notably one in the Isle of Wight, were persevered in to a comparatively recent period. They all failed or were abandoned, and the causes which produced that disappointing consummation might have been profit- ably studied by Carlyle when he was advocating a scheme involving the renewal of undoubtedly unsuccessful experi- ments. Carlyle spent ungrudgingly any quantity of time in fixing a date, or discovering all that could be discovered respecting the places and persons, often unimportant, which and who happened to be mentioned in a letter of Oliver Cromwell's. But it surprised me much to see that he would not take the slightest pains to master the details necessary for the execution of a scheme which involved nothing less than a reconstruction of the social system of his country. He had perhaps become a little conscious of the importance of this neglect when he said the last word that I heard from him on the subject : ' I don't wish to do anything, I only wish to say my say ! ' One result, though it was evanescent, of Carlyle's pro- mulgation of his pauper-scheme claims a passing notice. It was in obedience to the impulse given by him in the Latter-Day Pamphlets thaX there was formed at Manchester a Society the object of which was to promote the repro- ductive employment of paupers. The originator of the 1 86 Literary Recollections movement was Archibald Stark, a clever young man who during the famine-time had visited the south of Ireland, as a newspaper correspondent, I fancy, and found in the Cork Union Workhouse, strange to say, Carlyle's notions partly realised. Stark associated to himself in his difficult enterprise another clever young man, Thomas Worthington Barlow, who had a good reputation as a diligent Cheshire and Lancashire antiquary. After great exertion Stark formed his Poor- Law Association, and succeeded in obtain- ing for it as Vice-Presidents a number of persons chiefly of 'position:' Carlyle was one of them. With him were conjoined the then Bishop of Ripon, and the good Dr. Hook of Leeds, afterwards Dean of Chichester. The list of vice- Presidents contained also a sprinkling of baronets and M.P.'s. None of the M.P.'s were politically important, but among them was the late Henry Thomas Hope, to whom Disraeli dedicated Coningsby, it having been written in the ' shades ' of Deepdene, the beautiful Surrey seat which Hope inherited from his father, the author of Anastasius. Through Stark's energy the Association was got under weigh, and public meetings in support of it were held. When it seemed coming to something Carlyle encouraged it in a long letter, never reprinted from the newspapers in which it appeared, and much more temperate than his deliverances on pauperism in the Latter-Day Pamphlets. But the leading men of Manchester held aloof from the movement. It threatened to empty that reservoir of unemployed labour on which employers can draw when it suits their purpose, and in fact it tended to make labour, to a certain extent, independent of capital. In the course of time the movement died out for want of adequately active support. There had been some talk of forming a The Organisation of Labom- 187 London committee, but Carlyle, who was beginning to occupy himself with Frederick the Great, did not care to put his shoulder to the wheel. Stark migrated to London, to become for a short time editor of the Daily Telegraph in its prehistoric days (it was then owned, I think, by a Colonel Sleigh), and at a salary less, I suppose, than a thirtieth of that received by the present editor. Afterwards he went to Calcutta to engage in Anglo-Indian Journalism, and, since then, I have heard nothing of him. Barlow obtained a legal appointment on the West Coast of Africa, and, before long, died in due course at Sierra Leone. Thus it is that * Society ' rewards those who aspire to benefit it, without appealing to the passions and prejudices of parties, sects, and classes. The seed, however, sown by Carlyle has not been altogether unproductive. Here and there in England there are now more human and profitable methods of employing paupers than the stone-breaking and oakum- picking of the days of yore. General Booth's In Darkest England contains, in support of its thesis, several quotations from Carlyle on the organisation of labour, and the results of the General's scheme appear to have proved that private enterprise is inadequate for the success of what he under- took. It remains to be seen whether Carlyle's idea will be partly realised in those Municipal Workshops — the establishment of which is now being fitfully demanded. When the Latter-Day Pamphlets were finished Carlyle spoke of them as a kind of ' drain ' carrying off the peccant humours which had accumulated in him. But this was only a temporary deliverance from them. Disheartened by the death of Sir Robert Peel, and by the reception of his scheme for the organisation of labour, above all with nothing to do, he soon relapsed into a mournful mood. 1 88 Literary Recollections One day at that time I was chatting with Mrs. Carlyle while he sat by himself, grumbling occasionally and looking very gloomy. Mrs. Carlyle, seeing how the land lay, suddenly turned round and said to him, ' You ought to write a book.' ' I can't write as I used to do ' was Carlyle's sorrowful reply. How strangely he had under-estimated the opulence of literary power that remained in him was proved by what followed, — whether as the result of Mrs. Carlyle's suggestion, I cannot say. Before many months were over there was written and published his Life of fohn Sterling, which both in matter and manner is perhaps the most agreeable, though, of course, far from being the greatest, of all his books. It was the first of them, moreover, in which there was anything about himself as he lived, moved, and had his being in the London of the middle of the nineteenth century. Previously he had been to the majority of his readers and admirers a mysterious voice vaguely understood to be issuing from somewhere in Chelsea. His Life of Sterling showed him a living, breath- ing, flesh-and-blood man, consorting freely and socially with his fellows, among them the distinguished members of the Sterling Club, and himself endeared by friendly guidance and advice to its gifted founder and sponsor, whose early recognition of him {ante, p. jG) he never forgot. The delightful biography of Sterling is one of Carlyle's minor works, and several more important literary projects flitted before him during the years which elapsed between the issue of the last of the Latter-Day Pamphlets and his decision to grapple with the history of Frederick the Great. Some account of those projects — none of them came to anything — has been given by Mr. Froude, presumably deriving his knowledge of them from Carlyle's journals. The Organisation of Labour 189 One passage in Mr. Froude's record claims attention and explanation. After reciting various non-historical themes which Carlyle thought transiently of handling, Mr. Froude says : There were, too, the Conqueror, ' Simon de Montfort,' ' the battle of Towton.' ' But what ' (Mr. Froude con- tinues), he asked himself, 'could be done with a British Museum under fat pedants ? ' etc., etc. It was one ' fat pedant ' whose want of helpfulness and whose obstructive- ness Carlyle had in his eye. This was Panizzi, then Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, that is, head of its vast library, whose story has been already partly told in the chapter on the British Museum Library, as it was fifty years ago. In the same chapter the administrative organi- sation of that library was explained, and it was pointed out that the officer styled Principal Librarian was at the head of the whole establishment, and had nothing specifically to do with the library. As was also stated, Sir Henry Ellis, a well-known antiquary, was at the time the Principal Librarian of the Museum. With Sir Henry Ellis, Carlyle (as he told me) had once a passage of arms which did not tend to make him regard with a favourable eye the officialism of the British Museum. Carlyle, according to the usual practice, had recommended to Sir Henry Ellis some friend or acquaintance as a proper person to receive the ticket required for admission to the reading-room of the Museum Library. Sir Henry replied, somewhat super- ciliously, that he did not know who ' Mr. Thomas Carlyle ' was. 'Mr. Thomas Carlyle' rejoined, in a tone easily imaginable, that Sir Henry Ellis had better acquire forth- with the knowledge in which he avowed himself deficient. The suggestion appears to have been acted on, and the ticket to have been procured. This was a passage-at-arms pretty 190 Literary Recollections quickly over, but the antagonism between Carlyle and Panizzi lasted during their joint lives. As has been seen, Carlyle allowed it, according to Mr. Froude, to prevent him from writing a book of English history which might have been more interesting to his countrymen than his biography of the Prussian Frederick, perhaps the most marvellous, but certainly not the most attractive, of his works. The long- continued antagonism between Carlyle and Panizzi, which had a negative result so important, was a mystery to those of their contemporaries who took any interest in it. An explanation of its origin may not be out of place. Years after Carlyle dubbed Panizzi a fat pedant, the highest office in the Museum, the so-called Principal Libra- rianship, fell vacant. Two names were submitted to the Queen from which to select one for the post, those of Panizzi and the accomplished Anglo-Saxon scholar, John Mitchell Kemble {ante, p. 106). Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, and, through his correspondence with Cavour and other Italian statesmen, Panizzi had been serviceable to him and Lord Clarendon. Doubtless, it was at the instance of Lord Palmerston that the Queen appointed Panizzi to the most important literary office in the gift of the Crown, far more important than the Laureateship. The origin and progress of the controversy between Panizzi and Carlyle were the following : — While Carlyle was writing his history of the French Revolution, he contributed to the Westminster Review an article ('Histories of the French Revolution') on the materials accessible for the composition of a book on that great theme, with some trenchant criticisms on such of his predecessors in the attempt as Thiers and Mignet. In the course of the article he mentioned the existence in Paris of The Organisation of Labottr 191 a vast collection of the pamphlets, newspapers, broad-sheets, and even street placards which were issued in the French capital day by day, as the Revolution evolved itself. Then he subjoined the following note : ' It is generally known that a similar collection, perhaps still larger and more curious, lies buried in the British Museum here, inaccessible for want of a proper catalogue. Some fifteen months ago the respectable Sub-librarian seemed to be working on such a thing. By respectful application to him you could gain access to his room, and have the satis- faction of mounting on ladders and reading the outside titles of his books, which,' the satirical Carlyle added, ' was a great help.' After 'weary months of waiting' for greater help than this, Carlyle gave up dancing attendance on Panizzi as, he wrote, ' a game not worth the candle.' Panizzi never forgave Carlyle this caustic comment on his procedure. It was offensive enough to find himself represented as in his official capacity at the head of the National Library, obstructing the progress of a great his- torical work. But still more offensive, in his eyes, was in all probability the designation of 'respectable Sub-librarian,' applied to the high and mighty Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, a man who dined at Holland House, who was intimate with Macaulay and Brougham, with the leading Whig statesmen of the day, ' and Mr. Panizzi, etc.,' closing the lists, in the Morning Post, of guests at numbers of aristocratic receptions in London. Panizzi resented ever afterwards that sarcastic note in the Westminster Review, as Carlyle found to his cost. When he came to write his Cromwell he would fain have con- sulted somewhere, in the quiet interior recesses of the Museum Library, the unique collection which it contains of 192 Literary Recollections pamphlets and so forth issued in London from day to day during the great English Civil War of the seventeenth cen- tury and the Protectorate which followed it {ante, p. 86). The ' respectable Sub-librarian ' would not hear of such a concession, and Carlyle was left, with what assistance he could command, to do his best in the crowded and incommodious reading-room of those days, his sufferings in which have been already described {ante, p. 73). Carlyle detailed his grievance when giving evidence — very interest- ing and instructive, sometimes even entertaining — before the Royal Commission subsequently appointed to inquire into the affairs of the British Museum, and he mentioned as one of his reasons for wishing to escape from the reading-room into the interior of the library that he was ' thin-skinned.' Panizzi retorted in his evidence that he ' did not feel readers' skins.' Years afterwards, and deep in the composition of Frederick, Carlyle renewed his application, in a letter to Panizzi, which was for him not only calm but conciliatory. All the return which he received was a reply from the vindictive Italian so insolent that Panizzi's bio- grapher and panegyrist refrained from printing it. The great Lady Ashburton herself was applied to exert, on behalf of Carlyle's application, her influence with Panizzi whom she knew, but the appearance on the scene of even this Dea ex machind was fruitless. Carlyle in his journal might call Panizzi a fat pedant, and in conversation ' an Italian language-master ' as contemptuously as Dr. Johnson may have spoken of Mrs. Thrale's Mr. Piozzi. Clothed in a little brief authority, and having completely gained the ear of the working members of the Museum's Board of Trustees, the fat pedant and Italian language-master proved more than a match for the Scottish man of genius. CHAPTER XIII rOLITICS, RELIGION, EDUCATION CARLYLE'S political opinions and theories, up to a late period of his life, are pretty well known to the students of his writings. He confronted with a tyranno- mania, so to speak, what he scoffed at as the eleuthero- mania of his age, and his ideal Government was a bene- ficent despotism. England, he said to me, was governed by a ' miserable bureaucracy.' Parliament he regarded for some years, after the appearance of his Cromwell, with a detestation that was fanatical, and his favourite episode in English history was Cromwell's forcible ejection of the Long Parliament. Once, but at least in my hearing once only, when speaking of the futility of Parliament, he exclaimed ' the Protectionists might do it,' that is, send the Free Trade House of Commons about its business. This was at a time (I think) when an audacious agriculturist, a Mr. Chowler, enraged at the repeal of the Corn Laws, talked of the horses of the country being in the hands of the farmers, and threatened a march of amateur mounted yeomanry upon London, or rather upon Westminster ! Once, but again only once, he spoke of going into Parliament to tell it his mind, but his wife immediately raised the formidable objection that he would have in that case to keep late hours, and he never recurred to the subject. On one occasion, when he was declaiming, in his usual style, on the wretched kind of men whom, in his opinion, we had N 194 Literary Recollections for governors, the late Professor Craik — he was making a call at Chelsea — asked who were the men that he would put in their place. ' I am one,' Carlyle replied, 'you are one, and he,' pointing to another of the persons present, 'he is one,' adding something in a tone of unforgetable bitterness about being 'crushed down here.' When he found Governments and Par- liaments, in spite of his passionate appeals, going on in the old routine jog-trot, he sometimes expressed a desire for universal suffrage, and the anarchy which he thought would be its inevitable result, as in that event possibly despotism would follow. Carlyle, however, had from the first no love for that 'Saviour of Society,' Napoleon III., although he did deal summarily with a Parliament. When I spoke to Carlyle of the coup d'etat, as a feat likely to commend itself to Cromwell's biographer, he replied that Louis Napoleon had ' done some very ugly things,' but also that amongst things not ugly which he had done was ' the putting down of newspapers.' This last sally reminded me, though I did not venture to tell him so, of his sarcastic reference to the German Tory nobleman, the Count von Zahdarm, of Professor Teufelsdrockh's famous epitaph, whose one cherished wish was ' die auszurottende Journalistik ! ' Not long after the coup d'etat, Carlyle talked much of Louis Napoleon's aggressive designs, and, being myself of French extraction, I was rather indignant when he declared that France, if she did not take care, would be partitioned one of these days. Events have unhappily led to at least a partial fulfilment of his prediction. For leading English statesmen, after the death of Sir Robert Peel, Carlyle expressed great contempt. Lord John Russell ' thought of nothing but his quarter's salary.' Lord Palmerston was ' the ugliest man he had ever seen,' Politics, Re/igion, Education 195 Disraeli's Coningsby Carlyle had saluted with the cry: ' Ou' Clo,' and the last chapters of Tancred convinced him, he said, that its author was a thorough quack. But Carlyle's judgments on public men, and indeed on other men, were liable to revision when he became personally acquainted with them. After he had seen Lord John Russell at Lord Ashburton's, I myself heard Carlyle speak of him in quite an altered tone, as ' having something of the old English gentleman about him,' and the late Mr. Venables, who moved in the Ashburton circle, saw Carlyle, at Bath House, chatting gaily with Lord Palmerston himself, and judged from their laughter that the two were on the best of terms. Soon after the repeal of the Corn Laws, Carlyle said to me of Mr. Gladstone, ' he has no convictions, but he is a long-headed fellow.' When there was a vacancy through death, in the Librarianship of the London Library, Mr. Gladstone called on Carlyle (so I understood him to say) in order to urge the claims, real or supposed, which some one of his Italian or Hellenic proteges had, he opined, to the post. Carlyle told me that he spoke to him very plainly on the inadmissibility of the proposal. The post, Carlyle said, ought to be given to an Englishman, and given to an Englishman it was. Mr. Venables has also recorded that when, with great difficulty, Carlyle was induced to meet Disraeli at dinner, and the two had some conversation, the man of letters at parting said, that, if he had met the statesman earlier, his opinion of his fellow- guest would have been different. But such personal inter- course as he had with Mr. Gladstone never induced Carlyle to abate his dislike for Disraeli's rival, and for that rival's general policy. A man at once so meditative, and so ready to unbosom 196 Literary Recollections himself as Carlyle was, could not fail to speak of religion and of the great problems involved in it, though these were not topics to which he cared often to advert, or long to dwell on. His rejection of the popular theology is well known, and he used to say that he never felt^piritually at ease until he left the Church and the Churches behind him, and went out into the ' bare desert ' where was a temple not made with hands. At the same time, and in spite of all the harsh things that he wrote concerning the creed of orthodoxy, he recognised its hold on human nature, and said to me once, * it will be a long time before they give it up.' He was fond of repeating the alleged reply of Con- fucius to some anxious Chinese inquirer, ' You ask me what death is, I know not what life is ; you ask me what heaven is, I know not what earth is,' and so on. I was foolish enough, early in my acquaintance with Carlyle, to inflict on him a vague notion of mine that a man's fate in the other world might depend on the state in which he was when he arrived in it from this world. It is a rude and crude form of a notion of this kind, I have been told, which leads a modern Chinaman to die for another at the hands of the executioner in return for a few dollars to be paid to his widow or other heirs. Just before execu- tion, having been dressed in fine garments and fed sumptuously, he goes cheerfully to death believing that he will find himself in the other world as comfortable as when he left this. Carlyle gave me and my theory of a future life no encouragement, silencing me at once with the con- cise and emphatic rejoinder, ' We know nothing about it ! ' Keen as was his moral sense and rigorous, I do believe, his practice of self-examination, ' I never troubled myself,' he told me, ' about my faults, it was only not struggling Politics, Religion, Education 197 enough.' As to Hell, ' every man,' he said to me, ' must feel that he is a damned scoundrel,' and therefore deserves it. Quoting a gibe of Leigh Hunt's at the Glasgow people, as ' so stingy that they would not subscribe to put down hell,' Carlyle opined that it would scarcely be desirable to have that operation completely performed. A young relative of mine, belonging to the softer sex, was sitting by us when Carlyle delivered this opinion, but, being a little deaf, she did not catch what he said. I turned to her and said, ' F., do you think we could get on without hell ? ' ' Hell ? ' she repeated with a shudder. ' Ah ! ' said Carlyle encourag- ingly, * she hasn't turned that over in her mind yet ! ' Carlyle desired the retention of hell, of course, because it might be a terror to evil-doers. But I fancied I caught an echo from the faith of his young years when I heard him once repeat, with seeming awe, one of Oliver Cromwell's exclamations on his death-bed, the verse of Scripture : ' It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.' In a serener mood Carlyle asked, 'What are we?' and replied to his own question, ' A thought shot down from yon blue sky,' which is, I opine, a saying of Emerson's. Then again, speaking of the darkness in which the destiny of man is shrouded, he said, ' It would never do for us to know the plan of the campaign.' ' Walking itself,' he has written somewhere, ' is a series of falls,' and I heard him say, in the same spirit and jubilantly trustful, ' Defeat is victory.' In a strain, rather unusual for him, he talked to me, but only once, of the ultimate supremacy of the beautiful which, he has al.so written somewhere, ' is higher than the good.' He illustrated his meaning by saying that, in describing their celestial visions, the mediaeval saints dwelt chiefly on the beauty and splendour of the heaven thus revealed to them. 1 98 Literary Recollections In time, he prophesied, beauty would be all-in-all. (I can give the thought, but not the words, in which he clothed it. 'For the few?' I said interrogatively. 'No!' he replied, ' for the many.' Popery and the Papacy Carlyle held in an abhorrence, already recorded and familiar to all readers of his writings. He thought that the misfortunes of the Irish were in great part clearly traceable to their rejection of the Reformation. The Irish peasant, he said, if left to commune with his own soul, would feel that murder was a damnable crime, but he knows that the priest will give him absolution for it, and so he thinks little of it. Yet Carlyle felt compelled to add the qualifying admission (Young Ireland was in prison at the time) that the Irish priests alone stood up persistently for the Irish people. When I referred to a revival of the old scheme for a State endowment of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy he replied, that if it were to be done at all, ' it would have to be done by statesmen of a much higher morality than any we have at present,' a deliverance somewhat enigmatic, but in which reflection may discover considerable meaning. For the Church of England as an institution, and apart from its theology, Carlyle had a certain toleration, but, when Lord John Russell created a see of Manchester, Carlyle thought the phenomenon so incongruous that he applied to the first Bishop of the new diocese, officially not personally, epithets which will not bear reproduction. For English dis- sent he expressed contempt, and great as was his apprecia- tion of the old Puritan faith, he spoke of the ' rubbishing Puritanism ' of the present as a thing to be attacked and destroyed wherever found. Unitarianism he regarded as a hollow compromise, though he admitted that many clever and worthy people were Unitarians. ' There,' he said to me Politics, Religion, Education 199 once, ' are two young men,' naming the late William Mac- call and another common friend, still living, ' who took up with it,' Unitarianism, ' and are now completely stranded.' With the Broad Church movement, among the promoters of which were such personal friends as Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley, he had only a moderate sympathy. The utmost he would predict of their efforts — and that in a half-contemptuous tone — was : ' They will get up something' as a substitute for the Thirty-Nine Articles and all the rest of it. The Founder of Christianity he called ' a beautiful moral phenomenon,' and the Jewish history, as told in the Old and New Testaments, ' a grand symbol, if one could take up with it. ' But Carlyle, as his wife once said to me, was ' not one man, but many men ; ' and many accordingly were his moods, his expressed opinions often varying with them. There came a time when he thought of writing a book or pamphlet proclaiming the necessity for an * Exodus from Houndsditch,' and wrote to Emerson that he was almost disposed to echo the exclamation attributed, perhaps wrongly, to the dying Voltaire, ' Ne me paries plus de cet homme-la ! ^ This was his frame of mind when I was the sole listener to a dia- logue between him and Professor Blackie who was paying him a visit at Chelsea. The conversation turned at one time on Goethe, in whom the Professor, otherwise a pro- found admirer of the great German, said that he discovered a lack of sympathy with earnest men, Luther for instance. To this Carlyle gave the rather striking reply that it could not well have been otherwise, since Luther was ' a savage ' ! and Goethe anything but that. The conversation, having taken this turn, continued on our adjournment — it was a fine summer or autumn evening — to the little flagged space 200 Literary Recollections between the house and the back garden, where, when the temperature and the elements favoured the occupation, Carlyle was wont to smoke a pipe, or several pipes. Pro- fessor Blackie happening to say something eulogistic of John Wesley, Carlyle burst forth with a ' d n Wesley for bringing in a ; ' but, no ! the conclusion of the sentence is unprintable. Seeing something like astonish- ment painted on the Professor's face — the youngest of the party was too much accustomed to Carlyle's strong sayings to be surprised at anything that fell from him — Carlyle graciously added, ' Well, I withdraw the d n ! ' Of Professor Blackie he said afterwards that there was ' some- thing of the old scholar about him.' ' Universal Education and general emigration ' were, when Carlyle wrote ' Chartism,' two remedies which he proposed to apply as at least partial cures for what was diseased in the body-politic. While he was enthusiastic about emigration he told Earl Grey, then Secretary of State for the Colonies (who ' blushed,' he said, on being introduced to him) that he would do in a single year all that needed to be done for emigration, though officialism pronounced it impossible of performance in any number of years. But he cooled very considerably on emigration when and after he framed his scheme for the reproductive employment of pauperism. He was far more faithful to the cause of education than to that of emigration, though I heard him once at least speak doubtfully of the value of an extension of education if it enabled the multitude to indulge more freely than before in the products of what he wittily called ' Eliza Cookery.' Eliza Cook was a popular poetess and editress of the day who conducted a cheap periodical in which ' social progress ' was advocated in the Politics, Religion, Education 201 most sentimental, sugary, and flowery style. But this depreciation of education was only a transient ebullition. When the Lancashire Public School Association was formed, with the object of establishing throughout that county undenominational schools which were to be supported by local rates, and locally administered, — an anticipation, in fact, of the Board Schools created by William Edward Forster's Act of 1870, — Carlyle wrote a letter of earnest encouragement to the promoters of the scheme. ' No man,' he said in it, * no generation of men, has a right to pass through this world, and leave his children in a state of ignorance which could have been avoided ; and if many generations among us English have already too much done so, it is a sadder case for England now, and the more pressing is the call for this generation of Englishmen. In all times and places it is man's solemn duty whether done or not, and, if in any time or place, I should say it was in Lancashire, in England, in these years that are now passing over us.' Soon after this letter was despatched I became Secretary of the Association, and was domiciled for a second time in Manchester, its head- quarters. More of my Secretaryship hereafter, — now be said only enough, in connection with it, to explain what follows. After a struggle against great opposition the Association promised to come to something. Accordingly there was to be held in the Free Trade Hall, which once resounded with the oratory of the Anti - Corn - Law League, a ' great ' public meeting, or ' demonstration ' to further the Association's object. Invitations to attend the meeting and to address it were issued to men of eminence and note, supposed to approve generally of the programme of the Association. Among those so invited was Carlyle. 202 Literary Recollections He was evidently not disinclined to come, when he wrote to me asking what I thought of the matter. Probably, from over-fastidiousness on his account, I did not think that his appearance on such a stage with such a company of performers as had been secured would be desirable for him. On the other hand, it would have been a clear dereliction of duty on my part to advise him not to come. So I carried out his favourite doctrine of silence : never did man less practise what he preached than Carlyle in this matter of speech and silence. I left his letter unanswered. Whether /r(9/)/^;- Jioc he never hinted, nor is it for me to surmise, but certainly post hoc, he wrote to decline attendance at our meeting, saying that his specula- tions as to the visit had been ' cut short by a cold.' I refer to the matter because, so far as I know, this was the only occasion on which Carlyle ever hinted at an intention of addressing a ' great ' public meeting on an important public question. The programme and proceedings of the Associa- tion revived his interest in the education of the people. When my Secretaryship terminated, and I returned to London, I heard him descant on the scheme of education finely and symbolically unfolded in Wilheljn Meister's Wanderjahre. He went the length of announcing his intention, but he never carried it out, of having reprinted, in a separate form, the pages devoted by Goethe to that scheme in his otherwise disappointing book, and of scatter- ing them broadcast. People, Carlyle complained, neglected Goethe on education, and ' ran after Jamie Simpson.' It appeared to me singular that Carlyle, and in such a connection, too, could remember what everybody else had forgotten. ' Jamie Simpson ' was an Edinburgh advocate of very ordinary intelligence, but he had somehow been Politics, Religion, Edtication 203 seized by an enthusiasm for the cause of National Educa- tion. Many years before Carlyle made this reference to him, 'Jamie' had appeared in London and delivered on his favourite theme some lectures or addresses, which, probably owing to influence exerted on his behalf by Brougham and other leading friends of popular education, appear to have been well attended. He and his lectures had been forgotten by everybody except Carlyle, whose indignation was doubtless aroused at the time by the hearing vouchsafed to Simpson, and he still spoke of it with that old indignation. If 'Jamie' be not consigned to utter oblivion, he will owe his escape to an Edinburgh incident in his biography, not to his London lectures on National Education. He was one of the vainest of men. In my younger days, it was still remembered in Edinburgh that Sir Walter Scott and he entering the boxes of the theatre there simultaneously, and the audience cheering heartily, 'Jamie' advanced to the front of his box, and, fancying that the applause was meant for him, duly and gratefully bowed his acknowledgments ! CHAPTER XIV AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL THE opulent originality, vigour, and picturesqueness of Carlyle's talk astonished all who heard it. What he said might be wise, or only half-wise, or, as sometimes happened, wholly unwise, but it was always striking, never commonplace. It is true that both as a host and as a guest he was too fond of engrossing the conversation, that with him dialogue too often became monologue, that his prophet-like denunciations of the present, in season and out of season, were occasionally wearisome in their monotonous vehemence and iteration and reiteration long- drawn-out. But it was not always thus with him. In the society of two or three friends, if he could not help being emphatic, he could be calm and reasonable, take as well as give, and listen patiently to the expression of opinions opposite to his own. It was in such a gathering that he was most satisfactory, if not most astonishing. There was, moreover, one gift, that of oral narration, which he possessed in a more remarkable degree than any man of his generation, and his exhibition of it was always acceptable, combining as it did epic detail with lyrical emotion. I have heard of a distinguished company at a dinner-party suspending, at an early stage of the meal, the process of deglutition, to listen with rapt attention while Carlyle, starting from some chance remark by a fellow- guest, gave a vivid account of John Sobieski's defence of 201 Autobiographical 205 Vienna against the Turk. Never surely was there an eminent man of letters — not Macaulay himself, for even he had his brilliant flashes of silence — to whom, as to this Apostle of Silence, it seemed in so great a degree a necessity of his nature to be always either speaking or writing. If Carlyle read, it was pencil in hand, to indite comments, grave or gay, and often pregnant, on the margin of the book. The volumes which he borrowed from the London Library might alone furnish a diligent and admiring student and collector with a mass of interesting margin- alia. After a day spent in writing or in talking, in either or in both, he would often, before going to bed, seize his pen and soliloquize in his Journal. If you came upon him, when he was taking his walks abroad, you saw his lips moving, and knew that he was muttering to himself. Sometimes at home, when he thought the company dull or unsympathetic, he would, rather than be silent, recite, in impressive monotone, a favourite passage of an English poet, notably Milton's touching and noble lines on his blindness in the third book of Paradise Lost' Once at the beginning of his acquaintance with me, when he had exhausted the monitions which he thought suited to my youthful mind, he entertained and instructed me with an account of the evolution of the Arabic numerals 2, 3, etc., up to 9, by the addition of strokes and curves to the per- pendicular straight line which denotes the primitive numeral i. Mrs. Carlyle did not, like her husband, write books, but in her own way she was, to use a favourite expression of his, as ' articulate ' as her husband. She was too bright and clever a talker not to enjoy practising her gift. Naturally she shone more in conversation when her husband was absent than when he was present. Some- 2o6 Literary Recollections times, when the company in the little house at Chelsea was miscellaneous, the claims of the hostess to be heard conflicted with those of the host, and there was between her and one or other of their guests a cross-fire of conver- sation which sadly irritated Carlyle. It was better, at least if they were at home, when they talked successively rather than simultaneously, but her husband did not always allow her that alternative. She once repeated to me, with quiet glee, a remark dropped by Samuel Rogers at one of his breakfast-parties at which Carlyle and she were among the guests. When Carlyle's thunder had been followed by his wife's sparkle, their sardonic host said in a half-soliloquy which was intended to be audible : ' As soon as that man's tongue stops, that woman's begins ! ' Finally, be it noted, that though Carlyle's accent was the broadest Dumfriesshire, he always, like David Hume, whose accent was the broadest Berwickshire, spoke perfectly pure, if often colloquial English, never Scotch, unless he was quoting what had been said by others in that expressive dialect. The ' I dinna's,' ' I canna's,' and so forth, some- times put into his mouth, are due to the forgetfulness or the inventiveness of the reporters, real or pretended. Carlyle showed no reluctance to talk about himself. Indeed his conversation abounded with little autobiogra- phical episodes and reminiscences. He was specially fond of reverting to odd persons whom he had known, and to phrases current, in his native Dumfriesshire which had been more or less his home until he was in his fortieth year, for it was at that comparatively late age that he quitted Scotland to settle in London. Of his father he often cited traits, some of them absent from the fine monograph on 'James Carlyle' in the Roniniscenccs. A 2itobiographical 207 Speaking of his own boyhood, ' when my father frowned the universe was darkened for me,' I have heard him say ; but also that the same stern father ' behaved to me with princely generosity when I decided on giving up the Church.' His mother he pronounced, in his own exaggera- tive way, 'the last of the Christians.' Of his brothers something has been already said. He spoke contemp- tuously of the teaching of his alma mater, Edinburgh University. Leslie was the only one of his professors for whom he retained a regard. He was a favourite pupil of Leslie's, and while Carlyle was an Edinburgh student, dependent on the small allowance which was all that his father could afford, Leslie aided him outside the college- walls by recommending him successfully as a private teacher of mathematics to ' an old gentleman in Prince's Street,' among others. Science, to which he was devoted in his youth, in later years he called ' cold.' He was given to quizzing the worthy Professor of Natural History of his student time, who, 'after quoting Dante and other odd fellows,' would say, by an abrupt transition, ' And now, gentlemen, we will proceed with the order direst But he spoke with something faintly resembling enthusiasm of the effect produced on him by certain extra-mural lectures on chemistry which he attended, and of chemistry itself — though he does not appear to have prosecuted a study of it — as the most brilliant and fascinating of the physical sciences. The happiest time of his earlier years was, he told me, when, the labours of the day being over, evening after evening, in his solitary lodging, he worked his way through the Principia as edited by some Jesuits. This was, doubtless, the redaction of Newton's great book, the Jesuit editors of which, I have read somewhere, were 2o8 Literary Recollections induced, by a fear of their superiors, to contradict in hypocritical notes, otherwise valuable, those scientific truths embodied in the text which were banned as heretical by the heads of their Church and their order. If so, thus early did Carlyle, by personal experience, come to know something of both the good and the bad done in the world by the followers of Loyola. At one time when Carlyle thought, though not for long, of going to the Scottish bar, he attended the Scots-law class of Baron Hume (as he afterwards became), the great David's nephew. Much in this Professor's prelections repelled Carlyle from the study of law, and his disgust was completed, he said, when one of them included an elaborate disquisition on the number of taps which the Scottish analogue of the English bailiff had to administer to the door before he could legally enter a debtor's domicile as the representative of the Scottish Themis ! ' On the whole,' to use one of Carlyle's very favourite phrases, the chief result, according to his own account, of the years which he spent at the University of Edinburgh, was to throw him into an attitude of defiant protest against its teachers and their teaching. Yet in old age, after the Edinburgh students had elected him their Lord Rector, Carlyle's heart softened towards his alma mater, and he bequeathed to it the rents of the little Dumfriesshire estate, which on his wife's death came to him through her, and while residing on which he had written Sartor Resartus. On his literary career, earlier and later, Carlyle was far from uncommunicative. When he thought of embracing it, after resolving to become neither a minister of the Kirk nor an Edinburgh advocate, he read, he told me, some fifty volumes of the Edinburgh Review, little fancying, I Autobiographical 209 daresay, that he was to become one of its most illustrious contributors. Of anonymous reviewing, when he had ceased to be in any way dependent on it, he spoke disparag- ingly, the most that he would admit of it being that ' You get a sort of reputation at last' He complained of Jeffrey's interpolations of his EdinburgJi Review articles, such as ' It is but fair to say,' and other qualifying phrases, thrust in by the adroit editor, when, I suppose, Carlyle had been saying something too severe or trenchant about some- body. The dealings with him of editors in general he compared, in my hearing, to a practice prevalent among the poor people in certain parts of his beloved Dumfries- shire. In the hope of bestowing a little flavour on the miserably thin and insipid pottage, which was all that their poverty allowed them, they were glad to insert in it, each family in turn, a ham-bone — I forget the quaint Scotch name given it in this connection — which was sent round from cottage to cottage from I know what duly-appointed custodian. Carlyle said, with a touch of vanity rare in him, that a contribution from him was to British editors and their dull periodicals what that ham-bone was to the Dumfriesshire cottagers and their tasteless pottage ! His performance of one of his earliest literary tasks, the Specimens of German Romance^ he described to me as a very pleasant occupation for him, an unusual admission, though, it is true, his work was one of translation mainly, not except in fractions, that of original composition, which was always painful to him. ' Those were among my happiest hours,' he said, * spent in the company of poetic, genial men.' Of Sartor Resartus he said that it had been like a stone thrown into a sheet of water ; he saw the circle produced by it widening every day. Of his French O 2IO Litermy Recollections Revolution he said, besides what I have already recorded, and conscious, doubtless, of the startling originality of the style, that it was a case of 'hit or miss.' Of his lectures generally, he said that the attention of his hearers was keenest when he touched on the career and personal char- acter of the man of whom he happened to be speaking, and flagged when he went off into disquisition or literary criticism. His modest description of what he thought to be the impression produced by him on his audiences was, that he was ' a wild man, but with a certain Scotch coher- ency in him.' The Lectures on Heroes were the only series published during his lifetime. He delivered them, as usual, extempore, or with the aid only of a few notes ; but, when they were to be published, he wrote them off with the utmost rapidity. Mrs. Carlyle told me that his lectur- ing was first suggested by Miss Martineau, who, having as a frequent visitor listened to his marvellous talk, thought that it deserved a wider circle of hearers, and ' you know,' Mrs. Carlyle added with pathetic simplicity, 'something had to be done if we were to keep body and soul together.' The pain of gestation, when he was delivering a course of lectures, and his denunciations of lecturing as a trade, he has recorded vividly in his letters and journals. Yet when I told him that Leigh Hunt, according to report, had been invited by some persons of distinction to set up a sort of pulpit, and preach from it on Sundays his gospel of cheer- ful optimism, Carlyle replied, I fancied almost in a regret- ful tone, ' Ah ! I could have cultivated myself into that very well.' To what has been said of his Cromwell I have nothing to add, and of the Latter-Day Pamphlets very little. Mr. Froude's remarks concerning them have produced an erroneous impression, that not only did their tone and Autobiographical 2 1 1 tenor provoke the hostility of the critics, but that a falling off in their circulation led Carlyle to issue only eight of them instead of the twelve which he had planned at the outset. On the contrary, when soon after the appearance of the last of them I dined with Carlyle, having Mr. David (now Professor) Masson for my fellow-guest, our host told us that the sale of the Latter-Day PampJikts had been very brisk, and that his publisher wished him to issue more of them. It was, I fancy, the death of Sir Robert Peel {mite, p. 182), that led him to discontinue them. From his remark previously reported, on the view which, he thought, editors of periodicals took of his contributions, it will have been seen that Carlyle did not affect to be ignorant of at least the relative value of what he wrote. I have also heard him say that he had endeavoured to make his literature somewhat different from ' the ordinary school- boy scrawl.' But he spoke modestly of the absolute value of his writings. At a time when it was often complained that the high price at which his works were published pre- vented book-buyers of moderate means from purchasing them, I asked him if he did not attach importance to the issue of cheap popular editions of them. His only reply was that he regarded his books as ' contemptible perform- ances compared with the idea which inspired them.' CHAPTER XV carlyle's literary table-talk CARLYLE'S estimates of the British men of letters who were his contemporaries did not, it is well known, err on the side of over-appreciation. Some of the most famous or popular of them were poets and novelists, and against metre and fiction he waged perpetual war, although Goethe had been a poet, dramatist, and novelist, Schiller a poet and dramatist much more than a historian, and Jean Paul, from first to last a writer of fiction chiefly. Mainly, perhaps, this aversion from poetry and fiction was due not merely to Carlyle's love of reality, but to his own comparative failure in both. However this may have been, he was ever admonishing poets to write in prose, and novelists to write history or biography, as if there were not an infinite charm in the music of true verse as in the song of birds and the voices of the ocean, as if innumerable things worth saying could not be said better in verse than in prose, as if one of the greatest intellectual pleasures of life would not be lost if there were to be no novels, but only histories and biographies. So far did Carlyle carry his preference of prose to metre that I found him one day grumbling terribly because the pleasure which he had ex- pected to derive from an English translation of some Indian drama, by ' a man of strong Hindoo genius,' had been spoilt through the rendering being in verse and not in prose. 212 Carlyles Literary Table- Talk 2 1 3 Wordsworth as a poet, whatever may have been his opi- nion of him otherwise, Carlyle did not estimate very highly. ' Put i^schylus among those hills,' he exclaimed, ' and he will say something worth listening to ! ' I thought, though it was merely a surmise of mine, and not founded on any- thing ever said or hinted at by Carlyle, that, in his general depreciation of Wordsworth, he was a little influenced by one of the poet's sonnets ^ evidently directed against him- self and his French Revolution, — for, great as was Carlyle's intellectual integrity, his estimates of his contemporaries, literary and unliterary, were often in a perceptible degree coloured by personal feeling. But certainly no adverse feeling of that Kind influenced him if he did not form an adequate estimate of the value of Tennyson's exquisite verse. For Tennyson, the man, Carlyle had a considerable affection, though he liked him as a companion chiefly be- cause, he told me, he found ' Alfred ' — thus he always spoke of him — ' an intelligent listener.' Of course he recognised Tennyson's poetic genius, but he thought it largely wasted on that which profiteth not. Of the lovely ' Princess,' ' ' In Allusion to various Recent Histories and Notices of the French Revolution. ' ' Portentous change ! when History can appear As the cool Advocate of foul device ; Reckless audacity extol, and jeer At consciences perplexed with scruples nice. They who bewail not, must abhor, the sneer Born of Conceit, Power's blind Idolater ; Or haply sprung from vaunting Cowardice, Betrayed by mockery of holy fear. Hath it not long been said the wrath of Man Works not the righteousness of God ? Oh bend, Bend, ye Perverse ! to judgments from on High, Laws that lay under Heaven's perpetual ban All (irinciples of action that transcend The sacred limits of humanity.' 2 14 Literary Recollections Carlyle said curtly, at its first appearance, that it 'had everything but common-sense.' I found him one forenoon deep in the Acta Sanctorum, and full of the story of the dealings of an early Christian missionary with some Scan- dinavian and heathen potentate. 'Alfred,' he declared, ' would be much better employed in making such an episode interesting and beautiful than in cobbling his odes,' the occupation in which, when visiting him some time before, Carlyle had found him engaged, and with the futility of which he had then and there reproached him. I asked Carlyle if the late Laureate did not ' stand up ' for his liter- ary procedure. ' No ! he lay down for it,' Carlyle replied, doubtless with a reference to ' Alfred's ' careless, indolent ways. At that time Tennyson was not so averse, as he became in later years, from being looked at, and positively enjoyed, Carlyle averred, the abundant lionising bestowed on him during his occasional visits to London. Mrs. Barrett Browning, the poetess, did not take as quietly as Tennyson the protest against verse-making and the advice to betake herself to prose, received by her in a letter from Carlyle, to whom she had sent some of her poems. She wrote him so touching a rejoinder that ' I had,' Carlyle confessed, ' to draw in my horns.' Of the novel, as a kind of attempt to delineate the real, or the possible, and at least written in prose, Carlyle, though the translator of the two Meisters and of the Specimens of German Romance, was but slightly more tolerant than of the poem. ' On the whole,' to write a novel was, with him, ' to screw one's-self up one's big toe ; ' but he owned that there were some very clever men among the novelists, and that if he ' were to be hanged ' he could not imitate their successes. Always since, Carlyles Literary Table-Talk 215 in Sartor Resartus, he had derided the dandiacal Pelham, he spoke with contempt of its author, who was one of his friend John Forster's most be-worshipped idols. For Carlylc the first Lord Lytton was ' a poor fribble,' and Mrs. Carlyle, who had espoused the cause of the novelist's wife, and championed her grievances, was still more plain- spoken, calling him * a lanthorn-jawed quack ! ' She told me that Carlyle had refused I know not how many invita- tions to dine with him. For Charles Dickens Carlyle had a personal liking, and thought it worth while to report to me that he had seen him give a ' little bob,' when intro- duced to Lord Holland, of a kind intended to mean that he did not much plume himself on making his Lordship's ac- quaintance. Of Dickens he often said that he was the only man of his time in whose writings genuine cheerfulness was to be found. Of Thackeray's earlier performances Carlyle said that they showed ' something Hogarthian ' to be in him, but that his books were ' wretched.' Of course this was before the appearance of Vanity Fair, the immense talent displayed in which Carlyle fully recog- nised, pronouncing Thackeray ' a man of much more judg- ment than Dickens.' Yet, when Vanity Fair in its yellow cover was being issued contemporaneously with Dombey and Son in its green ditto, Carlyle spoke of the relief which he found on turning from Thackeray's terrible cynicism to the cheerful geniality of Dickens. The highest praise bestowed by him on Thackeray's lectures was that they were ' ingenious.' Personally Carlyle preferred Dickens, who always treated him with deference, to Thackeray, who often opposed to his inopportune denunciations of men and things at miscellaneous dinner-parties some of that persiflage which was more disconcerting to Carlylc than 2i6 Literaiy Recollections direct contradiction. It was a startling parallel between two surely most dissimilar men which was drawn by Carlyle, when he once said to me, * Thackeray is like Wilson of Edinburgh' (Christopher North), 'he has no convictions.' Possibly this was said after Carlyle had been more than usually irritated by Thackeray's persiflage. Alton Locke Carlyle had read, and evidently appreciated, but he spoke of it with reserve, probably from the references in it to himself and his teaching. He bestowed some slight praise on Mrs. Gaskell for having in her first novel, Mary Barton, discovered romance in the prosaic life of cotton-spinning Manchester. Anthony Trollope's novels he compared to * alum,' and Jane Austen's, so bepraised by Macaulay, he summarily dismissed as mere * dish-washings ! ' For his brother historians Carlyle had scant reverence. With him Hallam was only a ' Dryasdust,' and he laughed heartily, I remember, at some critic — Philarete Chasles, I think — who, in the Reviie des Deux Mondes, reproached him with having spoken of ^ le respectable Hallam ' as ' sec comme poussicre ! ' With Macaulay, as a Whig of the Whigs and zealous champion of laissez-faire, he had prandial and post-prandial battles, and Carlyle harboured a dislike for him which seemed to me to have something personal in it. Once, when I ventured to praise Macaulay's history, Carlyle turned on me rather fiercely, averring that Macaulay had never said anything that was ' not entirely commonplace ; ' but, he had the grace to add 'he is a very brilliant fellow. Flow on, thou shining river!' Carlyle might have remembered that while he was, according to his own confession (as will appear presently), increasing the general intellectual confusion by translating Wilhelm Meister and proclaiming the tran- Carlyle s Literary Table-Talk 217 scendent importance of German literature, Macaulay, in his fine essay on Milton, was rehabilitating those Puritans, to have cleared the memory of the greatest of whom, Oliver Cromwell, did not become, until twenty years or so later, the chief glory of Carlyle's career of authorship. Further, it is very probable that Carlyle was first attracted to Frederick the Great, as the subject for a book, by Macaulay's bril- liant essay in the Edinburgh Revieiv, in which he ' left half told the story' of that singular hero, promising to finish it some time or other. He did not keep the promise, for to keep it was conditional on the completion of the compilation on Frederick the Great and his times, which was ushered into the world by the poet Campbell as its editor, — he died two years afterwards, — and the book, which came down only to the commencement of the Seven Years' War, was left a fragment. The impetus thus given to Carlyle in his choice of Frederick as a subject was doubt- less increased by the appearance of Ranke's elaborate, but inadequate, iW«« BiicJier Preussischer Geschichte {i^^y-/i\S). Carlyle pronounced it to me a ' complete failure,' and made respecting its author a curiously characteristic remark. He had seen and conversed with Ranke, who was in London at the time, working among the manuscripts of the British Museum and the Record Office. As is well known Carlyle was one of the most vigilant and keen-sighted of physiognomists, delighting to discover a connection between a man's intellect and character, on the one hand, and his facial or even his bodily aspects and peculiarities on the other. It happened, at least this was Carlyle's statement to me, that something cither congenital, or the result of external injury, was so much the matter with an upper section of Ranke's dorsal region that he had to link 2i8 Literary Recollections the peccant parts together with an iron hook. Carlyle accordingly called him a 'broken-backed man,' and dis- covered analogies between Ranke's book and that physical calamity ! Carlyle's oral criticism on the earliest volumes of Mr. Froude's History was brief and abrupt: 'Meritori- ous, but too much raw material.' On the publication of John Stuart Mill's Elements of Political Economy, he sent a presentation-copy of it to Carlyle, his intimacy with whom, though there was no actual breach between them, had ceased for some years. Contemptuous though he was of the ' dismal science,' Carlyle called Mill's a ' very clever book,' while comparing its complex treatment of his sub- ject to the operation of ' extracting the cube root in Roman numerals.' ' It could be done, but was not worth doing,' a rather striking Carlylian comment; whether it was a just one is another matter. Carlyle, in those days at least, always spoke of Mill with a certain regard, his expression of which seemed to indicate a regret that their active friendship had come to an end. His chief criticism on Mill as a com- panion was that he insisted on ' having everything demon- strated.' Mill might have replied that demonstration was sometimes more trustworthy and practically useful than Carlyle's favourite intuition, which experience proved to be by no means an infallible guide either to himself or to others. Mill, he said, used at one time to come to him every Sunday for a walk. On one point, he added, they were agreed. It was that if the Bible could be buried for a generation and then dug up again, it would in that case be rightly enjoyed. Of another friend, also a John, whose intimacy with the Carlyles ceased only at his death, John Sterling, Carlyle said that he was 'a beautiful figure in our literature,' but that 'he has never done anything,' Carlyle's Literary Table- Talk 219 meaning that he had never in fact written a substantial book. This reminds me of the story of the prolific, popular, and prosperous Scotch novelist, whose sketches of Scottish life and scenery having attracted Carlyle's notice he was invited to Chelsea. There, instead of being praised, as might under the circumstances be expected, for what he had done, the only encouragement he received from Carlyle was to have the question rather gruffly put to him, ' But when are you going to do something ? ' novels count- ing for nothing in the Sage's estimation at that late period of life. I asked Carlyle if Sterling was not ambitious, and received the frank reply, ' he had his ambition as we all have,' Carlyle adding, ' Sterling liked to be in the van, like Forster of Rawdon,' the William Edward in later years well known to fame. This was another of Carlyle's odd parallels, since John Sterling's 'van' was altogether different from Forster's. On the same occasion Mrs. Carlyle said of John Sterling, in her incisive way, that he ' wanted back-bone.' ' I saw that the French Revolution and German Litera- ture were the cardinal phenomena of the century,' Carlyle once said in my presence, when speaking of his earlier literary aspirations and endeavours. Again, ' if it had not been for the French Revolution, I should never have had any hope,' he said to mc during the first years of m}- acquaintance with him. His hopes of great results to mankind from the First French Revolution survived, though somewhat abated, those which he had founded on the extension of a knowledge and appreciation of German literature. When, about the middle of the century, the Grand Duke of Weimar of the time visited him at Chelsea (driving down in a kind of state which startled the inhabi- 2 20 Literary Recollections tants of modest Cheyne Row), his Serene Highness asked him why German Hterature was not more studied in England. ' I told him,' Carlyle informed me, ' that this was due to our sulky Radical temper.' Carlyle's own indignant broodings over the ' condition of England ques- tion,' his later Cromwell-worship, his conception of a project for the reorganisation of our industrial system through the reproductive employment of pauperism, led him by degrees far away from the ethereal region in which the literature of Goethe and Schiller had been evolved. Yet I was greatly surprised, not to say disappointed, by some- thing that fell from him at the time when he was busy with the Latter-Day Pamphlets. Happening to refer to his efforts to make German literature known in England, I received for rejoinder the abrupt and chilling reply : ' It only increased the confusion.' This, then, was the end of that ' beginning of a new revelation of the Godlike,' which once he had told the world {ante, p. 57) was to be discerned in ' the higher literature of Germany ! ' Of Fichte he had at that time written in language of transcendent admiration as * a colossal and adamantine spirit standing erect and clear like a Cato Major among degenerate men, fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discovered beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe.' Yet when some twenty years later he had been reading a new volume in the series of translations from Fichte's works, executed by an Edinburgh man, he pronounced, to my great astonishment, the lauded Fichte of earlier years to be 'a thick-skinned fellow!' — a verdict, the grounds for which he did not explain, but which was too obviously contemptuous. Still, however, his appreciation of, and gratitude to, Kant remained compara- tively unimpaired. ' Kant,' he said, ' taught me that I had Carlyles Literary Table-Talk 221 a soul as well as a body.' To much of Humboldt's Kosmos he applied the expressive Scotch epithet ' dreigh ; ' but, on the whole, he thought Humboldt had done very fairly in ' his own sentimental-atheistic way,' which, Carlyle thought, would astonish future generations. Speaking of his sojourn at Berlin, during his first visit to Germany in quest of material for his Frederick, he said that the man of letters whose society he most enjoyed was ' old Tieck,' whom he had helped to introduce to the reading public of England in the Specimens of German Romance. Even in his once idolised Goethe — formerly called by him in conversation 'a colossal man who oversees everything ' — Carlyle found latterly something to criticise pretty severely. He complained, in my hearing, that Goethe was too much given to what Carlyle rather scornfully called ' peering into nature.' He was referring to those optical and biological studies to which Goethe devoted much time and thought, and which he considered, especially the optical, so important that he said to Eckermann : ' As Napoleon fell heir to the French Revolution, so have I fallen heir to the Newtonian theory of colours,' one denounced by him with what was for him quite unusual vehemence. And although the main theory propounded in the Farbcnlclive has been rejected by British men of science, both here and on the Continent Goethe is recognised by the highest authorities as the author of ' epoch-making ' discoveries in the domain of morphology and comparative anatomy. But Carlyle, who admitted that he never could read a line of Charles Darwin, cared for none of these things. In later life, with an eye directed to the possible-practical, he spoke of Goethe chiefly in connection with the poetic and 2 22 Literary Recollections symbolic scheme of education which was unfolded in WilJielm Meisters Wanderjahre {ante, p. 202). Some other references to Goethe made by Carlyle in conversation may as well be given now. In earlier years Carlyle had been attracted towards the St. Simonians. A more or less sympathetic mention of them, in his letters to Goethe, drew from the wise old German the emphatic monition : ' Von der St. Simonischen Gesellschaft, bitte Sie, halten Sich fern ' ! (' From the St. Simonian Society, I beg of you, keep yourself far apart.') When translating and interpreting Goethe's mysterious piece Das Mahrchen (which belongs to what De Quincey called Goethe's ' conun- drums '), Carlyle thought that he discovered in it a number of allusions to the political and intellectual history of modern Europe, and he asked Goethe whether his surmises were correct. In Goethe's ambiguous, not to say unsatisfactory reply, he neither denied nor admitted the correctness of Carlyle's ingenious glosses, but contented himself with saying, Carlyle told me that different people interpreted these things in different ways. Of Goethe's marriage Carlyle said that Schiller, speaking of him as ein alte Hagestolz (an old bachelor), predicted that he would be entrapped by some artful woman, and when allusion was made to the aged Goethe's attachment to a very young lady, an attachment so passionate that he wished to marry her, Carlyle a little irreverently ejaculated ' poor fellow ! ' In the course of his correspondence with Carlyle Goethe addressed some very pretty complimentary verses to Mrs. Carlyle, who, however, did not speak of him with enthusiasm, and declared that it would have been much bet- ter for him if he had been capable of giving a good hearty laugh. She had been told, she said, by Mrs. Jameson Carlyles Literary Table-Talk 2 2 '^ that, when visiting Goethe at Weimar, she heard his daughter-in-law Ottilic screaming in another room, while her husband August, Goethe's only son, and indeed his only child, was beating her. This was probably the little lady's exaggeration of something milder that Mrs. Jameson may have hinted at. It was Ottilie von Goethe who said of Balzac's novels that each of them ' seemed dug out of the heart of a suffering woman.' If only a little was true of what Mrs. Carlyle reported of the Weimar household, on Mrs. Jameson's authority, Ottilie must have indeed known what it was to be a ' suffering woman.' But she did not suffer long. Her husband, who died before his father, had a sad ending for the son whom Goethe loved, and some traits of whose young years he introduced in his delinea- tion of Wilhelm Meister's Felix. Carlyle read few modern French books, and spoke con- temptuously of modern French literature. But he recog- nised in Chateaubriand ' a man of real sensibility.' One of the impressions given him by Thiers's French Revolution was that its author was 'a man without a conscience.' George Sand (with whom he conjoined Balzac in one and the same condemnation), it is well known to all readers of Carlyle, he could not away with, looking at, or at least generally speaking of, her books as distinguished by nothing better than a lax treatment of the sexual relation. The only civil thing that I ever heard him say of the Pope and his obsolete creed was, that they might be a sort of barrier against something worse than themselves, George Sandism to wit. Yet when brought face to face, as it were, with her genius, and placing himself on the judgment-.scat to deliver a deliberate verdict on her, he could not help recognising the gifts of that extraordinary woman. George 2 24 Literary Recollectioiis Henry Lewes told me that he once found Carlyle with some of George Sand's books spread out before him, and confessing that he had broken down in an attempt to indite a scathing invective against her and them. ' There is something Goethian about the woman,' he said to Lewes as an excuse for his failure. I was rather surprised when Carlyle spoke to me of her as ' a shrewd woman.' Shrewd she was undoubtedly, but that was hardly the characteristic of her to which one expected prominence to be given by Carlyle. And then, as if to neutralise even this faint praise, he repeated the scornful line from the Venetian epigrams — ' Ach ! die zartlichen Herzen ! Ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu riihren.' An exclamation of Goethe's, be it noted, introduced by him in a poetic apology for that devotion of his to science, which Carlyle, as formerly mentioned {ante, p. 221), spoke of contemptuously as ' peering into nature.' ^ Apart from the enormous mass of books through which Carlyle had to plod his way, or which he had to consult, when writing his historical works, he was a considerable reader. He eschewed indeed the daily newspaper, being content with his weekly Examiner, which at one time he exchanged for the Leader. The Times he took in only for a brief period after the French Revolution of 1848 broke out. He expected from it, he told me, cleverer writing than he found in it, speaking, moreover, of the style of its article as Johnsonian (which seemed to me an inaccurate statement), and pronouncing the sentences to be all 1 ' Mit Botanik giebst du dich ab ? Mit Optik ? Was thu.'st du ? 1st es nicht schoner Gewinn riihren ein ziirtliches Herz? Ach ! die zartlichen Herzen ! Ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu riihren ; Sei es mein einziges GUick, dich zu beriihren, Natur ! ' Carlyles Literary Table-Talk 225 ' properly balanced,' as if that were something astonishing in a ' leading journal.' His former conception of the jour- nalist as one who guided the people forward from day to day had vanished by this time, and a harsh one was substituted for it. Referring to the clever gentlemen who enlighten the world through the daily press he asked me, ' What are these fellows doing ? They only serve to can- cel one another.' I replied that they were like barristers who put the cases of their clients more neatly and concisely than their clients themselves could, the clients of the journalist being the political party which his newspaper supported, and which supported his newspaper. In a general way, the little that Carlyle cared to know about public affairs, beyond what he chanced to read of them in his weekly newspaper, he gathered from conversation, while in such circles as that of the Ashburtons, he met, heard, and talked with men who were ' making history.' Current literature he professed to contemn, maintaining that a man was much better employed smoking his pipe, even he was pleased to concede (he himself being, for his stomach's sake and his often infirmities, mainly a water-drinker) with the addition of ' a moderate glass of beer,' than in reading ' such books as come out now.' Nevertheless, he read in, if not through, many of the books of the day which were recom- mended to him as possessing merit, and he dipped into most of the books and pamphlets which in considerable numbers were presented to him by their authors. Mrs. Carlyle occasionally read a novel aloud to him. I found her once thus occupied with a wild weird story of Emily Bronte's, which naturally was not much to her husband's taste. It was in old books that Carlyle chiefly delighted, and indeed altogether he lived very much in the past Of p 2 26 Literary Recollections the London publishers as a class he spoke with a harshness scarcely mitigated by the doubtful compliment that, ' con- sidering what was behind, it was well to have in them such a dead wall of dulness.' One bibliopolic phenomenon of his own time, however, he greeted with rare cordiality— the late Mr. Bohn's issue of the Standard Library, especially the Antiquarian and Classical Sections thereof I had heard Carlyle protest retrospectively against the mode of proceeding adopted by Lord Brougham's preten- tious and once famous but now almost forgotten, as well as long-extinct, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which had books of various kinds written to order for publication under its auspices. 'They treated literature,' Carlyle said, ' as if it were a tabula vasal whereas good books already existed in abundance, but needing to be brought serially or systematically within the reach of readers of moderate means. This was done by Bohn, and Carlyle declared that, if he were Chancellor of the Ex- chequer, he would propose a Parliamentary Grant to him in aid of his useful enterprise. One of the earliest volumes of Bohn's Classical Library was Gary's English translation of Herodotus. Carlyle read it with delight, pronouncing, in his familiar fashion, the Father of History 'a beautiful old fellow.' In a general way Carlyle cared little about the classics, and never read them in the originals, his know- ledge of Homer himself being derived chiefly, I fancied, from Voss's admirable German version. As might be expected, he protested strenuously against the time devoted in our modern systems of education to Latin and Greek, and did not estimate very highly the importance of classical scholarship. It was not, he would say, by studying Egyptian that the Greeks themselves came to produce Carlyles Literary Table-Talk 227 their literature. There was Goethe, he added, who was not a profound classical scholar, but ' he knew better than all your pedants what a Roman or Greek man thought and felt' I never heard Carlyle speak of Pope, Swift, and the other Queen Anne men, nor of Fielding, nor even of Sterne, for whom he had an early love. But he called the day on which he first read Roderick Random one of the sunniest of his life (!), and a good biography of Smollett, he thought, was among the few things of the kind which then remained to be done. Of the harshest saying that I ever heard fall from his lips about a man of genius. Goldsmith was the subject. When the biography of Goldsmith, by Carlyle's friend John Forster, appeared, he told me that he had written Forster a letter commending the book, but objecting to Goldsmith being made the central figure of a group composed of some of the most distinguished men of his time. Goldsmith, Carlyle continued, was 'an Irish black- guard' (how different from Dr. Johnson's verdict, 'great moralist' though he was!); but he had the grace to add, ' he wrote some of the most elegant things in the English language.' It was Johnson, Carlyle always insisted in conversation, — as he had asserted in his famous essay on Boswell's Life, — who kept England so loyal to the old that the French Revolution of 1789 was not followed by a similar phenomenon on this side the Channel. To me it appeared that Burke's Reflections had been far more effec- tive in that way than anything or all that Johnson wrote. Carlyle's admiration of Burke, indeed, was of the scantiest. He admitted that there were 'gleams of insight' in Burke's speeches and writings, but thought that, instead of de- nouncing the French Revolution and all its works, Burke 2 28 Literary Recollections had better have promoted reform at home. To reform alike in Church and State (except, perhaps, in the case of adminis- trative economy), Burke was generally opposed. As regards post-Johnsonian literature, Carlyle's opinions, expressed in private, on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, have already been referred to. I heard him say, what he said to many others, that the life of Keats by his friend Richard Monckton Milnes (the first Lord Houghton) was ' fricassee of dead dog.' To me he added that the account, in the book of Keats's last days and death in Rome, was as painful as anything he had ever read. Byron, he predicted, would be ' forgotten in fifty years.' Some decades have elapsed since Carlyle emitted the prophecy, and, according to present appearances, it will remain unfulfilled. The harsh and hasty judgment on Charles Lamb, in the Reminiscences, has been much and naturally censured, but I heard Carlyle say of Lamb, that he did very well with ' that little mouse- trap of his.' Concerning De Quincey Carlyle made the really pregnant remark, ' he sees into the fibres of a thing.' When I first knew Carlyle, he took a melancholy view of literature as of most things. Writing, which was not commonplace, would not find an audience. ' There are no people of any culture in England.' ' No man in England can get himself developed.' Literature was ' dying out,' or being ' ground down into penny journals,' — by which he did not mean penny newspapers ; they were a growth of after-years. Of ordinary London litterateurs, journalists, or what not, many of them, in those days, haunters of taverns, while few of them had any aspiration beyond satisfying the needs of the passing hour, he said : ' They have no homes,' and still worse, 'they have no faith.' Young men of talent, possessing any earnestness, were Ca7'lyle's Literary Table-Talk 229 being driven into Radicalism. ' I hope that they will go on rebelling until they get something to do,' from the State he meant, of course. After the success of Cromwell, he took a more hopeful view of the prospects of serious litera- ture like his own. 'You get,' he said, 'an audience at last' CHAPTER XVI I VISITORS OF THE CARLYLES ] IN spite of his dyspepsia, and though dining out, he declared, deranged him, Carlyle was generally ready, i when in average health, to be a dinner-guest if he liked the j host. One host, among Amphitryons far higher in the j social scale, was John Gibson Lockhart, who became a 1 great friend of his, although Carlyle always maintained (I i cannot help thinking him mistaken) that it was Lockhart's j verdict on Sartor Resartiis which had led John Murray j of Albemarle Street to decline it. I mention Lockhart among those of whose hospitality Carlyle partook, because I Mrs. Carlyle said that, when her husband dined with Lock- i hart, he always came home full of too piquant anecdotes (a thing rare with him), chiefly of Edinburgh, a city with the men and manners of which host and guest had been ; from of old familiar. Carlyle might have dined out per- i petually had he so chosen, but he did not choose. He told me of a curious computation, after a survey of London \ hospitality, which had been made by himself and Erasmus \ Darwin, a brother of the Origin of Species. It was that there were in town on any day during the London season, three thousand families at whose dinner-tables a man of any i note would be welcome ! Erasmus Darwin was a tall i and very courteous gentleman of the old school, the kind I of friend much affected by the Carlyles, with whom he was a great favourite. One peculiarity of his which, besides his j 230 Visitors of the Car lyles. 231 personal qualities, commended him to intimate visitors of the Carlyles was that he had at all hours a cab in attend- ance, in which he was ready and willing to have any such visitor of theirs driven to his destination in town, a mode of conveyance more certain, definite, expeditious, than the omnibus, and, of course, more economical than a cab hired by one's-self Carlyle liked the company of distinguished people, in whatever department of activity their distinction had been won, and if any one, whether distinguished or undistin- guished, had special knowledge of a subject, even of an out-of-the-way subject, he could be silent, becoming the most attentive of listeners, and interpolating an occasional question, only to listen the more attentively. I remember to have seen him at one of the soirees given by John Chapman, then a publisher in the Strand (and in a house which was for a time George Eliot's domicile), listening during the best part of an hour, to what the late Dr. Elliot- son had to say on Animal Magnetism, for his devotion to the propagation of which he sacrificed a fine medical practice. But Carlyle's most intimate friends were men like Erasmus Darwin, who was not at all what the world calls distinguished, but whom he prized for quiet intelli- gence, refinement of manners, and purity of life. One of these, whom it seemed to me Carlyle liked as much as he then liked anybody, was John Chorley, a brother of the once well-known AtJiencBum-(Z\\ox\&y . Chorley had been .secretary, with a considerable salary, to some large railway company, but gave up the post, it was said, from a fastidious sense of honour, which was offended by I know not what in the proceedings of the board whose official organ he was. This endeared him additionally to 232 Literary Recollectio7is Carlyle, who much preferred an over-sensitive conscience to none at all. Chorley was a quiet, shy, proud, studious man, whose chief recreation, according to Carlyle, was solitary performance on the bassoon. The Chorleys were Lancashire men, and, as has been previously recorded {ante, p. 146), Carlyle recommended John Chorley to write a history of Lancashire. The suggestion was fruitless. Chorley's studies lay in a very different direction, Spanish literature, and especially the Spanish drama, of which he had an unrivalled knowledge, and of the products of which he had formed a unique collection, A book about the Spanish drama, Carlyle, too, advised him to write. But Chorley was too fastidious even for that, and, as in the case of so many men that one has come across, much accumulated and unique knowledge, which ought to have borne fruit, perished with him. Another speciality of John Chorley, far away from Spanish or any other literature, was a singular conversancy with the navy in all its branches. This was a topic on which Carlyle, whose admiration of the British navy was considerable, delighted to hear him dilate. I remember passing a pleasant hour listening to Chorley while he described to Carlyle the hardships and privations endured in the Polar regions by the officers and men of a Government Arctic Expedition, and the devices by which the officers endeavoured to keep up the spirits of the men. Carlyle long survived Chorley, who left him a legacy of some thousands of pounds. Carlyle did not need it, and thought of sending to the Literary Fund, as a donation, the whole of the money thus bequeathed him. Whether he carried out this intention I know not. It is another illustration of the magnetism which Carlyle exer- Visitors of the Carlyles 233 cised on his friends that Chorley, a man very well to do, not only left him this legacy, but transcribed for him into clear manuscript the fragments of that history of James I. which Carlyle began as an introduction to his projected Cromwelliad — fragments which, perhaps, might still be worth publishing. John Chorley's vast collection of Spanish plays, with his own MS. annotations, he gave to the Library of the British Museum. His only published book contained a weird drama to which was appended some stray poems of no great value. He contributed to the AthencEum at a time when his brother Henry was a prominent member of its staff, but that employment of his leisure hours, was, I take it, unknown, or little known to Carlyle. Among the books which fell to Chorley to be reviewed was a German one, by a clever German lady (Jewess, I think), a Miss Bolte, whose death abroad I saw chronicled not long ago in the newspapers, and who came a good deal about the Carlyles. Her correspondence with Mrs. Carlyle has been already noted, and a letter of Mrs. Carlyle's to her been quoted {ante, p. 129). In Berlin she had been a friend of Rahel, and remained a friend of Rahel's husband, Varnhagen von Ense (' a solid man ' Carlyle called him), letters from whom, some of them containing, I remember, protests against ' John-Bullismus,' she used to bring with her and read aloud at Chelsea. Governessing was her main occupation, but she wrote among other things novels, chiefly sentimental, which appear to have had some vogue in Germany. Carlyle tolerated her as a correspondent of Varnhagen, and Mrs. Carlyle befriended her as a clever lone woman in a foreign land, and was successful in getting her situations. Several of them were in families of 2 34 Literary Recollections some social distinction, — she was for a time with a section of the Buller family, — and, seeing thus a little of the ways of the fashionable world, she took it into her head to write, from slender experience, sketches of high life in London, and these contained noticeable exaggerations and blunders. The volume was handled rather severely in the A thenceuni. One evening I heard her complain to the Carlyles of this criticism of her book. ' Oh,' said Carlyle consolingly, ' the man who wrote the article is probably in debt to his landlady, and with very forlorn outlooks.' The reviewer, as was soon known to Mrs. Carlyle at least, was no other than the opulent Chorley ! I, too, reviewed the same book somewhere or other, and my review was, I daresay, more favourable than Chorley's. Not long afterwards Miss Bolte, John Chorley, and I, found ourselves together at the Carlyles', and Mrs. Carlyle, in a laughing aside to me, remarked how odd it was that the lady should be in the company of two of her reviewers. Among the visitors of more or less note whom I saw cursorily at the Carlyles' was Mr. Venables (ante, p. 94), a very pleasant man, then rising at the Parliamentary bar. His chief literary distinction at that time was his con- tribution of an article on Miss Martineau's Deerbrook to the Edinbwgh Review. Mrs. Carlyle called him ' rather dandiacal,' but he was a favourite both with husband and wife. Another of their welcome visitors was that clever, agreeable, amiable man, the late Arthur Helps. Carlyle liked him, even speaking favourably of his books, though, as regarded his dealings with the Spanish conquests in America, Carlyle told him that he had lent too favourable an ear to the glowing accounts given by some of the Spanish chroniclers of the material splendours which Visitors of the Carlyles 235 the conquerors were described as having found among their conquered victims. A Life and Correspondence of Arthur Helps is among our biographical desiderata, since few men of his generation had communed with as many distinguished persons, from the Sovereign downwards. Let me record one instance, which came under my own notice, of the thoughtful and wide beneficence of this kindly gentleman. A cultivated young Scottish friend of mine, well connected, came to London to study for the bar. After being called, no clients made their appearance, and, by degrees, his little patrimony melted away. He had a scholarly equipment, but not of the peculiar kind needed for the literary struggle. He was in great straits when he bethought him of offering, without an introduction, his services to Helps, who was then busy chronicling the early doings of the Spaniards in America. Helps saw at once from my friend's letter that his correspondent was a scholar and a gentleman. He invited him to his country-house, and employed him for a considerable time in making transcripts and researches. Still more generously, when he could not honestly find work for my friend, who returned to London, he arranged with him to call every week on his factotum in town, and receive a weekly stipend sufficient to keep the wolf from the door, until at last he found employment which enabled him to dispense with Helps's delicately-rendered assistance. Among their visitors of minor note, the late Mr. Robert Farie was a favourite of the Carlyles, and specially intimate with ' Brother John.' Farie was a young amiable, thoughtful, and gentlemanlike Scotchman of good family, well-off, and without visible occupation. He was a great admirer of Mrs. Carlylc, to whom, when she said that she 236 Literary Recollections did not take horse-exercise because she had no riding- habit, he offered to present one — an offer, the acceptance of which was peremptorily vetoed by her husband, if indeed it would have been accepted by the wife. Early in my acquaintance with Carlyle I told him that I thought of translating an interesting, but very little known, work of Goethe's, the Campaign in France. He replied, looking at the project from a purely business point of view, ' Transla- tions seldom answer.' It mattered little to Farie whether a translation answered or not, and he undertook, by way of intellectual amusement, the task which I had abandoned. His translation was duly published, but did not excite the attention which it deserved. The book is mainly a narrative of what Goethe, who accompanied the Weimar contingent, saw during that campaign of the allies in their invasion of France in 1792, which was undertaken to ex- tinguish the French Revolution, but which ended in their own ignominious repulse. ' Guai a chi la tocca,' it is dangerous to meddle with France, I have heard Carlyle say, when otherwise depreciating, as not infrequently happened, France and the French. In his French Revolution he thought it worth while to quote from the Campaign in France, Goethe's account, from personal experience, of the 'cannon-fever,' an attack of which he voluntarily courted, from sheer curiosity, during a brush between the French and the allies. Goethe's little book is rememberable, were it only because it records the striking prophecy which he delivered on the evening of the battle of Valmy, at which Dumouriez drove back with great loss the Prussians and their allies, a defeat from which, in that campaign, they never recovered. After nightfall when some of Goethe's Prussian military friends, Visitors of the Carlyles 237 seated with him round a camp-fire, were talking over the incidents of the disastrous day, the keen-sighted and reflective poet uttered the memorable prediction : ' With this day begins a new epoch in the world's history, and you can say that you were present at its opening.' There are noticeable things in the book besides details of the epoch-making campaign. Carlyle's knowledge of it had been refreshed by Farie's translation, and he laughed heartily and characteristically at the passage in it, which describes Goethe when crossing a stream, fascinated by the sight of a piece of crockery in the water, and glittering in the sunbeams with effects of light and colour, which confirmed for him some optical theory of his afterwards expounded in the FarbenleJire. Far more important than this illustration of Goethe's fondness for 'peering into nature' {ante, p. 221) is the very interesting account of the visit paid by the kindly poet to a young German corre- spondent who had laid bare to him the sorrows and sufferings of a mind afflicted with grave spiritual hypo- chondriasis. The remedies for it, which Goethe suggested to the patient, are as applicable now as they were then to victims of that distressing psychical malady. I may note here that German having been, for obvious reasons, introduced into the curriculum of state-education in France since the Franco-German War of 1S70, the favourite German school-book is this of Goethe's, no doubt because in it a great German tells the story of a crowning triumph of French patriotism and valour over the hated Prussians. Of those friends of Carlyle during his early life in London who had departed to the other world before I knew him, John Sterling was the chief: to the oral verdict of the 238 Literary Recollections Carlyles on him reference has been made already {ante, p. 219). Respecting a still earlier friend, Edward Irving, the only remark not in the Renmiisceiices, which I heard fall from Carlyle, was that Irving had given him the best piece of advice in the matter of reading which he ever received : it was ' always to read history with the map ' beside you. Of the late George Darley, in some of whose poems there appears to have been of late a revival of interest, Carlyle spoke with great friendliness ; occasionally imitating — Carlyle was more given to mimicry than suc- cessful in it — the stutter with which Darley, like Charles Lamb, a stammerer, said his pointed things. He described Darley as wasting his talents on attempts to produce a Shakespearian drama, and as condemned to earn a living in the to him distasteful occupation of art critic. Besides Mazzini and his Italian friends there came about the Carlyles, during the earlier years of their residence in London, sundry French exiles, driven from their country for their republican zeal by the Governments of Louis Philippe. Carlyle had a great regard for one of them, Godefroi Cavaignac ; he sometimes brought with him to Chelsea Armand Marrast, afterwards a member of the Provisional Government of February 1848, whom Carlyle remembered as having sung to him rustic songs in vogue among the French peasantry, but a man otherwise not much to his taste. Godefroi Cavaignac was a son of the Cavaignac, one of the members of the French Convention who voted for the execution of Louis XVI., and a conspicuous man in the stormy days of the First French Republic. Godefroi's brother was the zealously republican General Cavaignac {ante, p. 170), one of the few contemporary Frenchmen admired by Carlyle. Godefroi himself had been very Visitors of the Carlyles 239 active and prominent in the movement which produced the French Revolution of 1830. From a report of it given by him Carlyle described to me an interview, just when that revolution w^as being consummated, between Cavaignac and Louis Philippe, then Duke of Orleans, in some ' big, gloomy room of the Palais Royal.' Cavaignac pleaded for the establishment of a republic. Louis Philippe, while raising objections, made some reference to his father Egalite Orleans. ^Altesse!' was Cavaignac's reply, ^ vous finires couime lui,' a prophecy which was far from being completely fulfilled. While I write, a son of General Cavaignac, and nephew of Godefroi, after having been Minister of Marine in one of the Governments of the Third French Republic, is spoken of as its probable future President. CHAPTER XVII SOME OF CARLYLE'S FRIENDS ONE New Year's Eve, Carlyle jotted in his Journal : ' On Christmas-day Ballantyne, Maccall, and John Welsh were with us at dinner.' John Welsh, a stranger to me, was doubtless a relative of Mrs. Carlyle, but with his fellow-guests I was intimate, and as they were at that time esteemed by Carlyle, something may be said of both. Ballantyne's had been rather an interesting career. Origi- nally he was a weaver in Paisley, a town which has been, and for aught I know is still, prolific of poets of humble life. He was of a reading, and even a studious turn, conn- ing many a volume, as well as crooning many a Scottish song, while he plied the shuttle. Exchanging the shuttle for the pen, and the loom for the press, he worked his way up, I forget exactly how and by what steps, to be the editor of a Bolton newspaper. He became early, and remained to the end, an enthusiastic admirer of Carlyle's writings. The admiration which he felt for them he wished others to feel, and this he attempted to effect by giving in his paper frequent extracts from them. In this way he really did a great deal to make Carlyle's genius and name known in the manufacturing districts, where at that time literary novel- ties were in very slight demand. He opened up a corre- spondence with Carlyle, who was doubtless both surprised and pleased to find an effective journalistic admirer in a hotbed of manufacturing Radicalism, and that, too, when he 240 So7ne of Carlylc s Friends 241 himself was either slighted or ignored by the London press. More important to Ballantyne than his Carlylolatry, he edited the Bolton paper at a time when the Anti-Corn-Law League was beginning its Seven Years' War against Pro- tection. Ballantyne had a turn for stati.stics, and, though never wielding a vigorous pen, wrote lucidly and logically on what he understood. He mastered thoroughly the details of the Corn-Law controversy, and his articles against the Corn Laws attracted the attention of Cobden, who prized lucidity and logic more than rhetoric, and who, according to Ballantyne's own account, often consulted him during the struggle of the League. In the success of that struggle Carlyle took a considerable interest, whatever his opinions in later years on Free Trade, when it was proclaimed to be the be-all and end-all of social progress. Ballantyne sent Carlyle regularly newspapers and private letters containing reports of anything specially interesting in the proceedings and progress of the League, and Carlyle responded sympa- thetically. From his editorship of the Bolton paper Bal- lantyne migrated to the staff of the Manchester Guardian, which was then Whig. Next he became the editor of the Manchester Examiner, when it was founded by John Bright and others to be the organ of a Liberalism more advanced than the Gnardiati's. At the time when he ate with William Maccall his Christmas dinner at the Carlyles' he was on the editorial staff of the Leader. Carlyle liked him for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, and for his own. He was then one of the cheeriest, hopefullest, and what is more, kindliest of men, — when a Scotchman is kindly he is very kindly, — and, however depressed his circumstances became, he was always eager to help any one as unfortunate as himself He was argumentative and positive to a degree, Q 242 Literary Recollections and had withal an inexhaustible store of plausible projects, and singular powers of persuasiveness, which with persons of a higher rank, profoundly ignorant of the element in which he lived, moved, and had his being, sometimes stood him in wonderfully good stead. When he left the Leader Ballantyne became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News, with the late Dr. Charles Mackay for his chief The duties of the post were, if he had only known it, precisely those which suited him best, since he had a lynx-like eye for the salient and the interesting in any mass of matter that came before him. Indications of his great talent in this way, apart from its exercise on transitory journalism, survive in his Essays in Mosaic and his selection of Passages from Carlyle's Writings. But Ballantyne was ambitious. Like so many Scotchmen of literary proclivities, he thought journalism the greatest of human occupations, and pined for the editorial chair which he had not filled since leaving Lancashire. Some changes in the financial arrangements of the Illustrated London News being proposed, Ballantyne kicked against the traces, imprudently resigned his sub-editorship, and late in life entered on a new career of painful vicissi- tude. He resolved on starting a weekly newspaper of his own, with the ambitious title of the Statesman, as an organ of Palmerstonian Liberalism. The chief political contribu- tor was Thornton Hunt, who had become a perfect leading- article machine, turning out daily and weekly I know not how many yards or miles of disquisition, of very fair quality, moreover, considering its quantity. The sub-editor was Frederic Martin, Carlyle's amanuensis or literary factotum : of him more hereafter. William Maccall, an old ally of Ballantyne's, was among the general contributors, as was Sovie of Carlyle s Friends 24'' o the writer of these pages, to whom also the literary depart- ment was intrusted. Ballantyne had not a farthing of capital of his own, and the Statesman was started and carried on, during its hand-to-mouth life of not many months, with money borrowed, or rather given. In the extremity to which he was now reduced, Ballantyne had come to look on the moneyed classes, especially the moneyed aristocracy, as bound to support a journalist and a journal in difficul- ties, and that was the predicament in which the Statesman and its proprietor-editor soon found themselves. I remem- ber him telling me, with exultation, of his discovery, that Leigh Hunt had received from Shelley donations amounting to £\ypoo. What Macaulay's famous cheque of i^20,ooo had been to many a literary aspirant, that i^ 17,000 (if it was really ever given) became to Ballantyne, who forgot that he was not a Leigh Hunt, and that, if he had been one, men of Shelley's peculiar beneficence and generosity are rare. Into the financial secrets of the Statesman I never cared to inquire, but several disclosures which Ballantyne volun- teered to me threw some light on them, and one of them is interesting in connection with Carlyle, who befriended him from first to last. Carefully watching his opportunity, when Mrs. Carlyle was out of town, Ballantyne asked Carlyle for the loan of £^0. Carlyle good-naturedly assented, but stipulated for a little delay, as his surplus moneys were in the Annan branch of the old-established Scottish bank, the British Linen Company, so faithfully, even in finance, did he cling to his native region. On a day appointed by the lender, the borrower appeared in Cheyne Row and found spread out on the table an elaborate deed recording the transaction, and reciting Ballantyne's liability for the sum to be lent. This document having been duly signed 244 Literary Recollections and sealed, he received the money. On returning to town, and learning, of course, what had happened in her absence, Mrs. Carlyle reproached Ballantyne bitterly for his strata- gem (I tell the story as he told it to me), and dilated on the losses w^hich her husband had suffered by lending to impecunious friends. Loss, as it turned out, however, there was none to Carlyle, but a still greater gain to Ballantyne. By a further stretch of good-nature, Carlyle gave Ballan- tyne one of his visiting-cards as an introduction to his staunch and very wealthy friend Lord Ashburton. Carlyle's name operated as an ' open sesame ' at the portals of Bath House, and procured the transmitter a courteous and even cordial reception from Lord Ashburton. What was thus begun by Ballantyne, was completed by his persuasive- ness and declarations of his adhesion to the faith as it was in Carlyle, in whom Lord Ashburton was a firm believer. Before long Ballantyne was telling Lord Ashburton of Carlyle's loan, and lamenting that a man of such genius should be a loser by his beneficence. I don't remember whether he also told Lord Ashburton the amount of the sum which he had borrowed. In any case, the generous and trustful peer forthwith presented Ballantyne with a cheque for ^^500. From this Ballantyne repaid Carlyle the borrowed £^0, and remained by the transaction a gainer of £^"^0, much of which went, I do not doubt, to help to keep the Statesman in paper, print, and con- tributions. Lord Ashburton did more for Ballantyne than give him the ^500, if, indeed, this sum was the only pecuniary benefaction which he received from the munificent peer. Lord Ashburton introduced him to several of the great Whig leaders. I rather think that there was even a Some of Carlylc s Friends 245 dinner-party given at Bath House to allow Ballantync to expound his political programme to Lord Palmerston, Lord Clarendon, and Lord John Russell among others. In return he expected money to keep himself and the Statesman afloat. Perhaps he got some, but certainly not from Lord John Russell. He himself described to me an unsatisfactory interview which he had with that statesman. During it Lord John stood with his back to the fireplace, looking exceedingly supercilious. When Ballantyne had ended his flowing appeal for financial aid to the Statesman, his Lordship replied curtly and frigidly that he never had anything to do with subsidising the press, or words to that effect. Ballantyne did find some favour in the eyes of Lord Clarendon, but it was with Lord Palmerston that he was most successful, personally at least ; whether financially or not I neither knew nor cared to inquire. Lord Palmerston was given to patronising strange journalistic adventurers, such, for instance, as Michele, an editor of the Morning Post, whom, in gratitude for his newspaper support, and perhaps for other reasons, he appointed Consul-General at St. Petersburg, but to whom, for the very reasons which pro- cured him the appointment, the Czar Nicholas refused the exequatur needed for the discharge of his Consular functions. Lord Palmerston invited Ballantyne to Broadlands, and there, as at the time he told me with glee, he took Lady Palmerston in to dinner, afterwards enlightening her on the merits of Burns. In spite of patronage of this kind, the funds of the Statesman dwindled away. Ballantync's last effort to replenish his exchequer was, I believe, to work on the fears of coming democracy, which harassed the mind of the once well-known Frances, Countess Waldegrave (a daughter of Braham, the Hebrew vocalist), who aspired to 246 Literary Recollections a feminine political leadership, and, probably supported by her bounty, the Statesman dragged out a little longer an existence which ended in death by starvation. After its decease, Ballantyne went to Manchester, where he per- suaded a wealthy local notable to supply him with money to start a short-lived weekly journal in which he waged war against John Bright and the Manchester party, who, he thought, had behaved badly to him as editor of the MancJiester Examiner. On the speedy failure of this new venture, Ballantyne tried Edinburgh, where he made the acquaintance of the shrewd and not unkindly John Black- wood, then at the head of the well-known publishing firm which issued and issues Blackwood's Magazine. John Blackwood told me that, during their first conversation, Ballantyne broached to him in half-an-hour some thirty or forty literary projects, 'all of them,' he added, 'clever,' though he did not adopt any of them, while admitting into his magazine, at least one article of Ballantyne's. What was more important, he gave Ballantyne an introduction to the late C. N. Newdegate, so long, in and out of the House of Commons, the zealous champion of Protestantism and vehement denouncer of all British statesmanship and legislation which seemed in his ever-wakeful eyes to favour in the least the Scarlet Lady. Newdegate had bought, or was buying, a journal of eighteenth century fame, but then in the last stage of senile decrepitude, the St. James's Chronicle, in order to convert it into an ultra-Protestant organ. He had a great respect for the opinion of John Blackwood as the editor of a magazine which then supported an old- fashioned Toryism in Church and State. Ballantyne's con- versation aided the effect of Blackwood's introduction, and he was appointed editor of the St. James's Chronicle. He Some of Carlyles Friends 247 compiled its news columns admirably, but former failures and vicissitudes had told on his intellect, and indeed, for political and general writing on the topics of the day, he had never any great aptitude. In course of time, New- degate wearied of him, and announced that there must be a change in the editorship. In his extremity Ballantyne invoked the intervention of Carlyle, and he good-naturedly said that he would be happy to receive a visit from Newdegate, whom, as a champion of Protestantism in a degenerate age of universal toleration, he was perhaps a little anxious to know. The tall, rigid-looking Newdegate, nothing loth to become acquainted with the prose laureate of seventeenth century Puritanism, duly made his appear- ance in Cheyne Row. At every pause in the conver- sation Carlyle, according to Ballantyne, put in a good word for his old and most loyal ally, but it was evident that Newdegate had ' come to certain conclusions,' as Carlyle phrased it, which made intervention useless. Ballantyne did not long survive his supercession in the editorship of the St. James's Chronicle by Samuel Kydd, in his earlier years a strenuous Chartist — such are the changes which fleeting time procureth. One of Carlyle's last benefactions to Ballantyne was the gift of the manuscript and copyright of Re^niniscences of viy Irish Journey in 1847. The recipient sold it for what it would fetch, and it was published in 1882 with a preface by Mr. Froude. A striking contrast in every way to the brisk, cheery, light-hearted little Ballantyne of Carlyle's Christmas dinner-party was presented by his fellow-guest, William Maccall. This was a tall, erect man, with a military bearing, who must have looked the very ideal of a cavalry soldier when he mounted his charger, after enlisting in a 248 Litei^ary Recollections regiment of dragoons — as he told me he once did — at Jock's Lodge, near Edinburgh, only, however, to be soon bought off. He was an Ayrshire man, and was sent to the University of Glasgow to qualify himself for the Secession Ministry, the communion to which his parents belonged. Doubts as to the truth of Calvinism invaded his mind and were not to be ejected from it. A per- suasive Glasgow Unitarian minister induced him to take up his abode in that half-way house between Belief and Denial — Unitarianism. As a Unitarian he ministered for a year to a small congregation at Greenock. How it came about I never heard him explain, but he then went for two years to the Theological Seminary at Geneva, the city which, though once dominated by the founder and sponsor of Calvinism had lapsed into Socinianism. There he learned and studied much and became a fervent admirer of another ' citizen of Geneva,' a very different man from Calvin, Jean Jacques Rousseau. On leaving Geneva he was for several years a Unitarian minister at Bolton (where he made the acquaintance of Thomas Ballantyne) and afterwards at Crediton in Devonshire. By this time he was a man of thirty, and had sketched out the system which he expounded in lectures to his little congregation of rustic Crediton folk, and which was afterwards embodied in his earliest and best-known book, the Elements of Individualism. His doctrine was propounded in it with a comparative modesty and reasonableness too often wanting in his later teachings and preachings. Maccall, a pro- foundly devout man, though not of^ the orthodox type, maintained that whereas all other religions insisted on the necessity of adding the Divine to the Human, in his system the Human was held to include the Divine, and Some of Car lyles Friends 249 the more Human you became, the more Divine you were. ' I believe,' thus ran one of the many articles of his elaborate credo, ' I believe that the revelations of God arc perpetual, and that every Individual, while a fresh revelation of God and of the Universe, is the highest of all revelations to himself Maccall was a man of passionate, glowing, sensitive, and, unfortunately, of exceedingly aggressive nature, simple-minded and unworldly to a degree. What- ever his circumstances might have been, some of these qualities, especially his aggressiveness, directed as it was too often against persons, and not, as in Carlyle's case, against principles and society in general, would have made success in literature and in life very difficult. But Maccall found himself in extremely depressed circumstances when, after he published the Elements of Individualisin, he threw himself on the world and on literature. No one of heart and insight who knew him or read his book could doubt his spirituality and noble-mindedness, but these are charac- teristics prized only by the few, and it is on the many, or on publishers and editors who court the suffrages of the many, that a British man of letters, without fortune, has to depend for his subsistence. How he impressed per- sonally a stranger to his writings, but one of gifts and sympathies, he told me himself He travelled once a longish journey in a stage-coach with John Sterling, acci- dentally. They were quite unknown to each other when, thus finding themselves together, they entered into con- versation. Sterling afterwards declared that Maccall was the most interesting man whom he had ever met with, and introduced him to Carlyle, who, having read or looked into his books, and on personal acquaintance with him, saw that this was a man far above the common. ' I have a great 250 Literary Recollections regard for poor Maccall,' Carlyle said to me ; ' there never was a man who went about with any dignity on so little money,' adding that, though every one needed something of that individuality which Maccall preached, it was not to be ' perked up ' into a doctrine for the guidance of a man's conduct through life. It was Carlyle who introduced me to Maccall at one of the soirees then given frequently by John Chapman the publisher {ante, p. 231), and thus began our long intimacy. On the same evening, Maccall afterwards told me, Carlyle bade him * come out like an athlete,' in what arena the philosopher did not suggest. It was a monition very well suited to Maccall's character and temperament, but not at all to his then circumstances. Later on, however, Carlyle did a good deal more for Maccall than give him this inopportune advice. When I first became acquainted with him, Maccall had contributed a little to the Spectator, but he was not adapted for that sailing close to the wind which is required from the political journalist, and his connection with it soon ceased. He depended chiefly on a meagre pittance derived from the Critic, then struggling painfully for existence, its contents being ' supported by voluntary contributions,' unpaid, and of great dulness, among which Maccall's shone with a certain radiancy. Of his connection with the Critic more hereafter. He was married and a father. His poverty was great, and so was his frugality. By and by, Carlyle introduced him to John Parker, the publisher in the Strand, who, for a time, both issued and edited Fraser's Magazine before it passed on his death, with the rest of his literary property, into the hands of the Messrs. Longman. Maccall contributed to it a striking article on Joseph de Maistre, that singular prophet of the reaction against the Some of Car lyles Friends 251 First French Revolution.^ This he followed up by sending an article on some book by the late Dr. Vaughan the Non- conformist. The article was in type, but was so virulent that it was withdrawn before publication, and his connection with that series o{ Eraser's Magazine also ceased. He was more successful with the Gentleman's Magazine when edited by the late John Bruce, the eminent antiquary, a very pleasant as well as accomplished man, and with Eraser's Magazine after it came to be edited by Mr. Froude, — to both of them he was introduced by Carlyle. As his contributions to these two magazines were chiefly in the sphere of foreign literature and biography, his aggressiveness was not so objectionable as when he was attacking living English men of letters and their writings, an occupation in which he took a savage delight. For a contemporary English author to have a literary reputa- tion, was, except in a few cases, Carlyle and John Wilson among them, to expose himself to be tomahawked by Maccall, if he was allowed an opportunity ; indeed he seemed to regard as a criminal offence the mere writing of an English book. These and similar manifestations of the 'Individuality of the Individual' did not contri- bute to make Maccall popular with editors. His connec- tion, too, with those of them who had a friendly feeling towards him, came, in the course of nature, to an end. The Gentleman's Magazine passed into other hands and changed its character. The Critic died. In Eraser s Magazine, before its extinction, Mr. Froude was succeeded by an ^ Carlyle wrote of Maccall to Parker : ' He is clearly a man of much worth, of many energies and talents, which ought to bear good fruit in the world one day.' And again, ' Maccall's De Maistre was very well ; sincere and penetrating, though harsh. You might do something useful with Maccall, by a little faith, hope, charity, and prudence, four excellent virtues.' 252 Literary Recollections editor, the late William Allingham, who knew not or cared not for Maccall. He threw himself into lecturing, in which for years he had been fitfully engaged. One of his earliest courses of lectures in London, delivered in a hall near Oxford Street, was, I remember, attended, at least once, by Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) and other friends of the Carlyles, but the lectures were both abstruse and virulent, and had no sequel. Maccall sank to far more plebeian audiences, but violent though he was, his violence was not plebeian, and with his new associates, Bradlaugh and others of that genus, he was soon at feud. He never forgot himself in his subject, and his self-assertion was not always attractive. I remember attending one of his later lectures. His theme was Genius under some aspect, which I forget, and the hall in which he delivered it was well filled with an audience somewhat above the working- class. It was the most painful lecture to which I ever listened. The biography of genius affords material for any number of lectures or of volumes. But this discourse was, though he never named himself or directly referred to himself, a dismal version of the autobiography of William Maccall. It was little more than a catalogue of his own strug- gles, disappointments, failures, baffled aspirations, physical miseries, and spiritual agonies, all generalised so as to represent the sufferings of genius in the abstract. For one solitary listener to it, who understood the meaning of it all, it had a melancholy interest, but to the mass of his hearers it was so uninteresting and so unintelligible that a most (to me) pathetic passage was interrupted by a voice from one of the audience who shouted ' Tell us about Chatterton, Mr. Maccall,' and the lecture was soon brought to an abrupt conclusion. His last years were spent in a perpetual and Some of Car lyles Friends 253 painful struggle with the direst poverty. But he never lost his manly bearing. In truth, William Maccall was one of the most honest and honourable of men, with noble qualities of head and heart. Even the intellectual arrogance and self-will, which barred his way to success, sprang from what was but an exaggeration, though a noxious one, of a profound spiritual truth. One saying of his survives and occasionally crops up in current literature. Maccall is ' the satirical friend of mine ' whom Carlyle, in the first chapter of his Frederick, quotes as saying (it was of George Gilfillan that he said it) : ' You may paint with a very big brush and yet not be a great painter ! ' I cannot refrain from giving one or two specimens of the style and way of thinking of a man whom Carlyle esteemed very highly, but who is all but unknown to the present generation. The extracts which follow are from one of Maccall's later Tractates, The Newest Materialism: sundry papers on the books of Mill, Comte, Bain, Spencer, Atkin- son, and Feuerbach. This is how Maccall regarded John Stuart Mill and his teaching, a propos of his once famous treatise on Liberty : ' Mr. Mill is a student : a student not of rich mind, but of fine intellect over-cultivated, not of warm and generous nature, but of a Rousseau sentimentality, which seldom aims to be pathetic without growing silly. Mr. Mill is a student, and he has the student's worst prejudices. He views Society as a kind of debating club for the reception or rejection of new ideas after boundless babblement. The two primordial facts in the past are for him, the Platonic Dialectics and the Dialectics of the School- men ; for the Almighty created the universe not as a theatre of life, but for the sake of fair discussion, and you are fulfilling your mission as a Divine soul, not by achieving Divine victories, but by studying your neighbour's side of the question as well as your own. 254 Literary Recollections ' Verily, my brothers and sisters, crushed by tragic sin, cruci- fied by tragic sorrow, yearning for regeneration, for consolation, and for effulgent, valiant martyr deeds, after the sharp hour of tribulation, — this is rather a shabby outlook. If ye cannot take your turn at dialectical fencing, ye had better bundle out of existence with convenient promptitude, seeing that earth has no existence, except as a dialectical fencing academy. We now know well what we were made for, and that is something — if, indeed, Mr. Mill, as a fanatical Malthusian, will allow that we ought to have been made at all. That little babies are a nuisance, and that big babies should spend all their time in what the Scotch call arglebargling, seems to be Mr. Mill's compendious creed. To be choked in your infancy, if some one has committed the crime of being your father, or if Rhadamanthine Malthus- ianism permits you to live, to chatter evermore about progress and liberty — such is the pleasant alternative offered you.' This is one-sided but clever, and there is a grain of truth in it. Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity was trans- lated into English by George Eliot, and her version of it is noted as the only literary performance of hers which appeared with her real name, ' Marion Evans,' on the title- page. By the way, there is in one of her letters (printed in Mr. Cross's biography) the following reference to Maccall in the early days of her editorship of the West- minster Review : ' You will be surprised at the notice of the Westminster, in TJie People, when you know that Maccall himself wrote it. I have not seen it, but have been told of its ill-nature. However, he is too good a man to write otherwise than sincerely, and our opinion of a book often depends on the state of the liver.' What now follows is Maccall's verdict on Feuerbach's philosophy, in a sketch of it suggested by George Eliot's translation of the Essence of Chvistimiity. Some of Carlyle s Friends 255 'The cardinal principle of the book, which is iterated and reiterated without one touch of feeling or glow of imagination, and is mere arid dogmatic statement, is that there is no theology except what is based on anthropology, and that there is no god except each man's notion of a god. But if God is phantasmal, still more must everything else be so, and all things being phantasmal, we have no career before us saving that of imposture, if we have a single grain of common-sense left. Phantasms ourselves in the midst of phantasms, we must clutch what we can with the insatiate greed of a ferocious egoism. If born with an impulse to whatever is noble, our most loving and chivalrous deeds will be but wealth wasted, power insanely directed. We know that the instincts of mankind are more potent than these gigantic cobwebs spun by the brazen impudence of crazy meta- physicians. We know that there cannot cease to be virtue and faith among men ; those affections opulent as ocean ; those martyr heroisms that gird and garland our globe with sacredness ; those grand organic agencies which blend families into tribes, and blend tribes into nations ; that adoring gladness, the gladder for the awe wherewith it bows down to the everlasting immuta- bilities, which are pinnacled high as the firmaments and the archangels, and pillared in the deepest depths ; and the clinging in life, and in death to God, to prayer, and to immortality. Still, is any of us enough of a philosopher to behold these impious extravagances of a pestilential philosophy without abhorrence and indignation ? ' 'to- Vigorous writing certainly. James Dodds was another Scotchman who for years found considerable favour in Carlyle's eyes. Dodds had a singularly varied career. He was a Roxburghshire man, and his people appear to have belonged to the peasant- class. But the Scottish peasant was, perhaps still is, dis- tinguished among all others by his intelligence and love of knowledge, and Dodds owed something to the humble associates of his early years. Long afterwards, when he 256 Literary Recollections had attained, at least in Scotland, a certain distinction, he told a Scottish audience that the first copy of Milton which fell into his hands came from the book-shelf of a common blacksmith ; that he was introduced to Don Quixote by a ploughman in a lonely valley at the foot of the Cheviots ; and that he heard of Goethe for the first time when a forester's wife asked him to read to her the Sorrows of Werther ! The factor of the Duke of Roxburgh, on whose estate Dodds's grandfather lived, took an interest in the promising boy, and sent him to Edinburgh University. When in after-years I became acquainted with Dodds, he seemed to me a striking, but very rough embodiment of the national per/ervidum iiigenitivi,2Lnd in his earlier career it led him into tumultuous courses. He rebelled against his Pro- fessors, and for this he was reprimanded by his benefactor. Dodds would no longer accept his bounty, and flying in dudgeon from Edinburgh, started with three shillings in his pocket to walk to Newcastle, which he reached half- starved. Here he joined a company of strolling players, and the future historian of the Covenant and laureate of the Covenanters enlisted with these vagrant Bohemians as their low comedian. From the wretched life of penury and semi-famine which he thus led for some time, he was res- cued by old friends, and he is next heard of as teacher of a small adventure-school in his native region. He quitted this emjDloyment to be apprenticed for five years to a country ' writer ' (a species of Scotch attorney) near Melrose, with some dim hope of working his way to the Scottish bar. Meanwhile he cultivated public speaking, for which he had a considerable natural gift, at political meetings of local Liberals, and composed an essay on Shakespeare. A kind clerical cousin wrote about him to Some of Carlyle s Friends 257 Carlyle, and in such a way as to interest him. A glowing essay in MS. on his French Revolution increased Carlylc's interest in his young countryman. A correspondence between the two ensued, much more copious on the part of the junior than of the senior. His country apprenticeshijj over, Dodds migrated to Edinburgh, where he became clerk to a solicitor, and, still with an eye to the Bar, attended the University law-classes, and joined a College debating- society, of which I too was a member. Thus my acquaint- ance with Dodds began. He seemed to me a man with a bursting heart, loud, exaggeratively emphatic, but of indis- putable talent and sincerity. Socially, as well as intellec- tually, he was thoroughly fearless and independent, caring not a jot for the contemptuous wonderment with which many of his fellow-students contemplated the eccentric oddity of his careless rustic costume. Precisely how I know not, but he came to be looked on very favourabl}- by the late John Hunter, who belonged to the highest class of Edinburgh solicitors. Hunter was a very amiable and cultivated man, a friend both of Carlyle and Leigh Hunt. His home was Craigcrook, famous as the beautifull}- situated residence of Lord Jeffrey, whom Hunter .succeeded in its occupancy. Here he entertained literary visitors to Edinburgh, and Dodds was a frequent guest. Hunter's liking for him proved of great value. While working hard in Edinburgh to perfect himself in the theory and practice of Scottish law, Dodds contributed to Scottish periodicals his stirring and often touching Lays of the Scottish Cove- nanters. They were suggested, no doubt, by W. E. Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, to which, of course, in tone as in theme, they were in striking contrast. To many Scotchmen the memory of tht- mart>'r heroes and R 258 Literary Recollections heroines of the Covenant was far dearer than that of their ruthless persecutors, some of whom were glorified by Aytoun. But Dodds, unlike Aytoun, was an unknown young man, and, indeed, his Lays of the Covenanters were not collected until after his death, when they were republished by the kind clerical cousin, with the same name and surname as his own, who had first brought him under the notice of Carlyle, several interesting letters from whom are printed in the memoir of Dodds, prefixed to the volume by its editor. Carlyle's original interest in Dodds was deepened when he saw that his young admirer's soaring spiritual and literary aspirations did not interfere with diligent industry in his vocation ; his letters to Dodds are kindly encouraging, as well as wisely monitory. So thoroughly did Dodds master a knowledge of his profession that, with Hunter's aid, he was enabled to settle in London as a Parliamentary solicitor. He was soon in considerable practice, chiefly in the promotion of Scotch railway bills and in the conduct of Scotch appeals. In London he was an occasional visitor of Carlyle's, and generally a silent one. Since we were at college together our roads had lain far apart, and I had seen and heard nothing of him until one evening I found myself seated with him, and his amiable Edinburgh friend John Hunter, at Mrs. Carlyle's tea-table. Her husband was away, and perhaps on that account Dodds, suddenly breaking into the quiet conversation that was going on, startled his hostess and his fellow-visitors by a tirade in favour of the insurgent Hungarians, which was violent in language, and delivered in a tone of voice far louder than was generally heard in that establishment, unless when Carlyle himself was the speaker. Dodds's vehement championship of ' civil and religious liberty all over the Some of Car lyle s Friends 259 world ' gradually withdrew him from cultivating the society of Carlylc, of whom, however, he ahvays spoke with respect. He found in himself a greater affinity with Leigh Hunt than with Carlyle, and he became not only a close personal friend of Hunt's, but his confidant and honorary adviser in Hunt's continual pecuniary embarrassments, making arrangements with creditors, and so forth. Dodds had considerable literary ability, but his high-flown enthusiasm and glowing style were not suited to the newspaper and periodical press of London, with which he never endeavoured to form a connection. But he contributed to sundry Scotch newspapers very vigorous and telling sketches of notable contemporaries, which, in his indifference to literary fame, he never collected. Lecturing he much preferred to writing, and occasionally lectured very successfully in London. But Scotland was his favourite hunting-ground as a lec- turer, and not long before his death he entertained me with a programme of a lecturing expedition which he had arranged, and which embraced an astonishing number of Scottish towns. The only book by which he was known in his lifetime, The Fifty Years' Struggle of the Scottish Covenanters, 1638-88, was originally a course of lectures, which he enlarged considerably before they appeared in volume-form. Dodds had studied for years the history of that struggle, and had visited the localities made memor- able by its most .striking incidents and episodes of heroism and martyrdom. His book, in its combination of com- pactness, accuracy, and enthusiasm, remains one of the best on the subject. It contains a series of word-por- traits of heroes and martyrs of tlie Covenant unrivalled in their way, anrl the volume was successful, as it deserved to be, going through .several editions with very little 26o Literary Recollections pecuniary profit to its author. No Scotchman as success- ful as Dodds was in London ever remained more faithful to the interests and memories of his fatherland. He was, of course, aided in his exhibition of this fidelity by the character of his professional occupations, which kept him continually in contact, as it were, with Scotland. Many are the useful branch-railways in Scotland which would not have existed but for Dodds, and several of the monuments erected at spots consecrated by the Covenanting heroism of which they are enduring memorials, owed much to his enthusiasm. When the Duke of Athole drove a party of naturalists from Glen Tilt, and the Scotch Court of Session sustained his claim thus to do what he liked with his own, it was Dodds who urged the appeal, which proved success- ful, to the House of Lords, and he threw himself into its conduct with a zeal which was far more patriotic than pro- fessional. His death, during a visit to his beloved Scotland, was startling in its suddenness. Any sketch of the Carlyle entourage, however slight, must include the curious figure of a man, who for a con- siderable period drudged as the famulus and factotum of Carlyle, when toiling at his history of Frederick. Frederic Martin was a Sclavonic Jew of I forget what nationality, with a peculiarly serv^ile demeanour, who played Wagner to Carlyle's Faust. He represented himself as having been .secretary to Heine — possibly he had been the amanuensis of ' Blackguard Heine,' so Carlyle harshly called him, and as having seen a great deal of the Parisian Bohemia. Coming to England, he became an usher in some provin- cial Dotheboys Hall. In the hope of escaping from a miserable existence of this kind, he wrote offering his services to Carlyle as literary assistant. Carlyle tried him, Some of Carlyles Friends 2 6 1 and found him useful. He was an excellent German scholar, intelligent, even clever, and very industrious. He transcribed, translated, fetched and carried, for Carlyle, on what he described as an extremely small weekly stipend, out of which, he complained, he had to pay for writing- paper, omnibus-fares on journeys made for Carlyle, and for I know not what beside. Carlyle was not a hero to this famulus of his, nor was the famulus, however useful, entirely admirable in the eyes of Carlyle. If the master was always bewailing his lot, so also was the servant, and Carlyle, who had little pity for any grievances but his own, compared Martin, with his perpetual lamentations over himself, to the ' peaseweep ' of Scotland, a bird with a peculiarly wailing note. On leaving Carlyle, his connec- tion with whom was in itself a sort of recommendation, he was seldom without literary employment, as newspaper sub-editor, compiler, and .so forth. He had rather a turn for statistics, and it was in this department that he made a considerable 'hit,' by the production of the well-known Statesman's Year Book, which proved successful, and an annual issue of which he edited until the end of his days. In his later years Martin came into painful collision with the earliest and most distinguished of his English literary employers. He started a jicriodical, The Biographical Magazine, which was to contain sketches of living celebri- ties. The first article in No. I. was headed, ' Thomas Carlyle: a biography, with autobiographical notes. Chapter I.' There were illustration.?, too, among them drawings of the hou.ses successively occupied by Carlyle's father, with one of the very small bedroom in which Carlyle himself was born at ICcclcfechan. His parading 'autobiographical notes' was decidedly deceptive, aiul miglit wx^ll irritate 262 Literary Recollectio7is Carlyle, as seeming to promise not only his sanction but his co-operation. They consisted wholly of a translation by Martin of the German places and persons in Teufels- drockh's early autobiography into the supposed Scottish originals — James Carlyle for Father Andreas ; Ecclefechan for Entepfuhl ; Annan Academy for Hinterschlag Gym- nasium, and so on. Martin, moreover, had gone to Eccle- fechan and picked up from oldest inhabitants sundry anecdotes and traits of the boy Carlyle and his progenitors, some of which Carlyle could not have relished. For instance, Carlyle's father, James, and his four uncles on the father's side, all of them stone-masons, were said by Martin to have been known as ' the fighting masons of Eccle- fechan,' and as ' among the best drinkers and best head- splitters at the annual fairs of the village.' Nor were matters improved when Martin thus reported in half-Anglicised Scotch, what had been told him by an Ecclefechan nona- genarian, who as a boy had been apprenticed to Carlyle's father : ' You want to know about the Carlyles ? Weel, they were a curious sample of folks. There was not the like o' them. Pithy, bitter-speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters. Thomas and Frank' — two of Carlyle's uncles — ' were plagues to fight ; they were always fighting and trying to get up disturbances. Old James, that is, you must know, the father of the great Thomas Carlyle, the book-author, liked a fight too, but not quite so much. He enjoyed a fight, but mostly kept out of it himself But all the others went at it terribly ; they hurt the fairs with their fighting.' To this simple and unadorned recital Martin added in his own person : ' The look of old William Easton,' the nonagenarian narrator, 'his radiant countenance, while going back in memory to these glorious (!) scenes of Sojne of Caj'lyle's Friends 263 his early life, was something to be remembered.' ' Some- thing to be remembered ' may also have been the aspect of Carlyle's countenance when he read this account of the ' glorious scenes ' in which his kinsmen were made to figure. The scathing protest which he wrote to Martin, Martin kept to himself Suffice it to say that No. II. of the Biographical Magazine never appeared, and that Martin's biography of Carlyle never went beyond Chapter i. This disappoint- ment was followed by the reception of an unexpected boon. Disraeli, struck by the conception and execution of The Statesman's Year-Book, conferred on its compiler a pension, if I remember rightly, of i^ 100 a year. Martin did not, however, live to enjoy it long. CHAPTER XVIII CARLYLE AT HOME: CONCLUSION CARLYLE'S daily life, especially if he were writing a book, was, when I first knew him, simplicity, not to say monotony, itself He worked till three in the after- noon, with intermissions, occasional in the case of visitors, either familiar friends, or strangers who came properly in- troduced — frequent when he felt, which was often, the want of a pipe. At three, weather permitting, he sallied forth to walk (if he did not ride) till five, well pleased if he had a more or less intelligent companion of his pedestrianism to talk to, after what had generally been for him a long spell of silence. Then, Mrs. Carlyle presiding, he took his seat at the tea-table, where there seldom failed to be a guest or two. In summer there was usually, after tea, an adjourn- ment of Carlyle and any smokers to the fireless kitchen, where was an abundant supply of churchwarden pipes and York River tobacco, with tumblers and a jug of fair water, though for dinner-guests (who were not very frequent) there was provided a bottle of excellent port (from Leith), with a post-prandial glass of brandy and water. The feast of reason and the flow of soul finished at ten, when Carlyle started for another walk, to 'purchase a sleep,' as he phrased it. He stepped out swiftly in those years, follow- ing the King's Road, and then turning up that * long, un- lovely ' Sloane Street, at the top of which any companion 264 Carlylc at Home : Conclusion 265 he may have had was bidden Good-night, Carlyle retracing his steps to home, and, I beh'eve, a supper of porridge, made of the best oat-meal, sent specially for him from Scotland. It was when accompanying him occasionalh' on these nocturnal walks that I found him readiest to afford glimpses of his innermost being. During one of them he spoke of his feeling towards his fellow-men as ' abhorrence mingled with pity' Such a declaration from one's guide, philosopher, and friend was not of a kind to induce a dis- ciple to take genial views of mankind. Emerson noted as ' depressing ' any spiritual influence that Carlyle exerted on those who sat at his feet. Carlyle talked .sometimes of leaving Chelsea for a home in the country, not too far from town, but this intention, like many others, he never carried out. In spite of its fogs and noises, London, he said, possessed in his eyes ' an epic grandeur ' all its own, and for comfort he knew no place like it. Nevertheless he admired Paris, compared with which the vaunted beauty of Edinburgh he deemed insignificant, and he lapsed into something like enthusiasm when speak- ing of the view of the French capital to be had from the heights of Montmartre. Of his own Chelsea domicile he said that he ' hated it less ' than others. He made some attempts to buy it, which, had they proved effectual, might have prevented it from becoming, as after his death it did become, the abode of mediums, resonant with the raps and taps of Sludge's spirits, and noi.some with animal realities almost as objectionable. It was well for Carlyle, and still better for his wife, that he did not leave London. Her sociality was undisguised, and in the country she would have been dreadfully dull. Carlyle professed a love of soli- tude, and grumbled at the want of genuine conversation in 266 Literary Recollections London ; but he would have languished if he had had no- body to talk to, though he was more fastidious in the choice of his auditors than Coleridge. Of him Mrs. Carlyle told me, in her satirical way, that when he was staying with the Basil Montagus, and was alone in his room, they would send to him any stray child who happened to be at hand, and then the philosopher would harangue the little urchin or the little damsel quite contentedly ! Bores indeed, in an unusual proportion, Carlyle was troubled with, partly owing to his prophetic character. ' One great thing about London is that here no man is to bore another,' he said. But this maxim was ignored in Carlyle's own case by inquirers after truth, and to such a degree by Americans as to lead him to write in a splenetic mood that famous sentence, afterwards regretted, about the millions of trans- atlantic bores who had been brought into the world with unexampled rapidity. One American cleric, I remember, half-forced his way into the house to insist on Carlyle explaining to him difficulties which had occurred to him in studying ' the moral character of Goorty,' — such, according to Carlyle, was his pronunciation of Goethe's name. All he got out of Carlyle was a recommendation to restudy, in 'Goorty's' own writings, the 'moral character' the anomalies of which had perplexed him. Carlyle had no amusements. Smoking and riding were his only relaxations : otherwise he was reading or writing or talking. Mrs. Grote, I think it is, who tells of a whist- party in which the players were Macaulay, the late Earl Stanhope, Grote, and Hallam, four grave historians joining in an innocent rubber. One cannot fancy Carlyle asking ' what are trumps ? ' and defending himself from the charge of not returning his partner's lead ! Mrs. Carlyle, but never Carlyle at Home : Conclusion 26t her husband, played at chess. 1 found her a very fair player, and I have seen her pitted at that game and holding her own against William Edward Forster. In the London season, when Carlyle was ' hipped,' his wife would some- times drive about with him to concerts, but except, in the rare case of a Chopin, he cared little for them, or for any music that was not Scotch and wedded to Scotch ballads. Mrs. Carlyle played and sang them very expressively, but I remember early in our acquaintance, the emphasis, it seemed afterwards a little significant, with which she refused a request from me to sing ' Auld Robin Gray.' As long as Macready, a great friend of the Carlyles, remained on the London stage, Carlyle went occasionally to the theatre, and I remember him telling me of his presence at the first performance of Richelieu, which Bulwer-Lytton wrote for Macready. The Queen and everybody else was there, and Carlyle declared that he felt quite sorry for her, condemned to sit and see a King made as wicked, weak, and con- temptible as Louis XIII. in Bulwer-Lytton's play. With Macready's withdrawal from the stage, Carlyle seldom or never visited the theatre, though his wife was rather fond of it. I remember him only once there. It was when Dickens and his friends played The Merry Wives of Windsor for the benefit of the veteran Leigh Hunt. I was in the boxes, and seeing the Carlyles in a private box went to it, and found them there accompanied by Captain Sterling, John Sterling's military brother. When the curtain fell, Carlyle said ' a poor play,' but cried ' plau- dite,plaiidite!' Mrs. Carlyle took a good deal of interest in Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke (she played Mrs. Quickly), whom she saw for the first time, and about whom, being questioned by her, I told the little that I knew. 268 Literary Recollections On the relations between Carlyle and his wife, so abun- dantly discussed by others, I have very little, either in the way of recollections or reflections, to add to what has been said in previous pages. One thing is certain, if their married life was not throughout as happy as it might have been, this did not arise from any exaggerated estimate of what husbands and wives should expect from each other. How often have I heard each of them speak of the absurdity of supposing that a husband was to find in a wife, or a wife in a husband, 'another self!' 1 have heard Mrs. Carlyle say more than once that a wife could not expect from a husband the same attention after marriage as before it, and this was a theme on which she was rather fond of dilating. Another and more pregnant remark which she once let drop was, *I can't bear to be thought of as only Mr. Carlyle's wife.' Of course too much is not to be made of a casual remark like this, but its evident sincerity explained several things in her procedure : her self-assertion, her constant intervention in conversation while Carlyle was leading it, and her readiness to tell, ' before company,' anecdotes of Carlyle which made him appear ever so slightly ridiculous. Nothing can exceed the quickness with which clever women pounce upon inconsistency in their husbands, especially when their husbands give themselves airs of superiority. Carlyle was full of inconsistencies, especially in the contrast between his doctrine of the sacredness of silence and his own incessant talk. This gave Mrs. Carlyle a handle of which, when irritated, she was not slow to avail herself for comment on the difference between her husband's preachment and practice. Once when he was declaiming against the love of perpetual locomotion, and insisting on the duty of staying where you are, the Carlyle at Home : Conclusion 269 little lady bowled him out very neatly by citing two lines from his own translation of a distich in WilJielin Meisters WanderjaJire — ' To g-jve room for wandering is it That the world was made so wide.' Carlyle was silenced at once. Another cause of dissidence was a difference of temperament. With gipsy blood in her veins, Mrs. Carlyle was, in no offensive sense, somewhat Bohemian, Carlyle not in the least, and her little vivacities of speech and conduct, which would have amused many another husband, made him sometimes turn rather roughly on her. Much that was faulty in Carlyle's behaviour has been so amply told, and remorsefully repented of by himself, that there is no need to enlarge on it. But he was quite conscious of all that he owed to her, and has been heard to say : ' Had it not been for my dear little wife, I should never have had any hope.' Two faded-looking letters, out of several written to me by Mrs. Carlyle, lie before me, having survived by some accident the lapse of decades. As they are characteristic of her in her best and most amiable mood, I shall print them here, and thus finish off these multifarious and discursive jottings on the Carlyles and some of tho.se who were known to them. Both of her letters refer more or less directly to a little periodical paper, The Inspector, which in younger and foolish years I started at Manchester, and which, in spite of the kind efforts of Mrs. Carlyle and others to keep it alive, came, as it deserved, to an untimcl}- end. Here is No. i of her amiable epistles — '■New Year's Eve. ' My dear Mr. Espinasse, — I shall not be able to .sleep in my grave, never to lay {sic) in my bed, if I let the year go oflf with- 270 Literacy Recollections out discharging my conscience of its business with you. I have to communicate the names, and also the is. 6d.'s, of two more sub- scribers to your dear httle paper. The names are Mr. Neuberg, 25 Church Row, Hampstead, and Miss Wilhams Wynn, 20 Grafton Street. The is. and 6d.'s are, along with Captain Sterling's and Mr. Donne's in my pocket, waiting till the sum becomes worth getting a Post Ofifice Order for. But here you have it, under my own hand, that I owe you six shillings. ' Good luck to you, our excellent " young friend," or whatever you like to call yourself, it is deuced hard if a man mayn't call himself what he pleases — and ' Good luck to The Inspector — make Geraldine write more in it. The people here said they would "give twopence a paper more for her articles." ' I will write you a letter some day, but just now I am a little 7nad with the tear and wear of details from which I cannot escape — I cannot even write to Geraldine, although she and I are "all right " now. 'New year's wishes to you if you care for them. All these horrid "I wish you etc's." make me quite mad and even suicidal. — Yours ever affectionately, 'Jane Carlyle.' ' My angel of a dog sends his kind regards.' The first mentioned of the four subscribers procured by Mrs. Carlyle for the ill-fated Inspector, ' Mr. Neuberg,' is well known to the readers of Mr. Froude's Biography of Carlyle, and of Carlyle's own Reminiscences. For this reason, and also because there is a monograph on him and his connection with Carlyle in Macmillan's Magazine (vol. 50, 1884), I have left him unnoticed in these Recollections. To Miss Williams Wynn, of the family of ' the King of Wales,' a very amiable and refined lady, there are also many references in the biographical and epistolary literature of the Carlyles. The late Mr. Donne, then Chief Librarian Carlyle at Home : Conclusion 271 of the London Library, afterwards Deputy Examiner of Plays, is known by several contributions to literature, among them Monographs on Tacitus and Euripides in the Ancient Classics for English readers. ' Captain,' since Colonel, 'Sterling' is John Sterling's brother, 'Geraldine' is, of course, Miss Jewsbury, who contributed a paper to No. I of The Inspector. Mrs. Carlyle's second surviving letter will explain itself, with the exception, perhaps, of the reference to ' Mr. Blomfield Rush.' Rush was a noted murderer of those days, who had fired a series of shots at the inmates of Stanfield, Hull, near Norwich, killing two of them and severely wounding two more. Nobody but Mrs. Carlyle would have thought of associat- ing his homicidal persistence with the perseverance of Bruce's spider. To proceed, however, with her letter — ' Wednesday. 'Dear Mr. Espinasse, — What on earth has taken The Inspector., which we were hoping would go far in " the career open to talent"? Pray, when you have half an hour's leisure tell us the meaning of this sudden stop, and especially what you mean by "a sulky mob" — both Mr. C. and I being puzzled with the phrase. ' For the rest there is no harm done — the clever honest head remaining on your shoulders all the same, to do work with some other instrument, if not with this one first tried. Bless your heart ! think of Bruce's spider and of Mr. Blomfield Rush, and of himdreds of other historical characters who have made even more than seven trials before they got their thread to take hold. Think, above all, of Mr. Thomas Carlyle (my husband and author of various well-known works) who offered his Sartor to all the booksellers in London, one after another, and the best answer he got was from Fraser that he would print it on being payed {sic) a hundred pounds ! My "young friend" you are young, you must remember (if tempted to fall back on misanthropy), and therein 2/2 Liter a7y Recollectio7is you have an immense advantage over some of us ! It is absurd to hear a man of your years talk of people's good wishes for you having proved "unavailing." There has not been time yet for their availing. I suppose 7io man of talent — real talent, I mean — ever jumped into the right place for him until after a terrible deal of trying and struggling, if even then ; but, if he has the talent, he may still "thank God and write to his friends" (as we used to say at Haddington). Talent is talent, and " singular in itself there is nothing to compare with it — singular in itself there is nothing to equal it " [see the Duke of Buccleuch's speech on Sir Walter Scott]. So don't you be getting sour and bitter, and "all that sort of thing," which would please the Devil very much indeed, and very much vex your sincere friend, 'Jane Carlyle.' Unknown then to Mrs. Carlyle, something more disagree- able than the trivial collapse of The Inspector had thrown me into the despondent mood which she thus endeavoured to cheer. But enough of those ' Old unhappy far-off things And battles lonj;- ajro.' V. GEORGE HENRY LEWES AND GEORGE ELIOT CHAPTER I EARLY CAREER OF LEWES w HEN I first knew George Henry Lewes he was becoming a noticeable figure among London men of letters. Some years previously he had entered on what was to prove a long literary career. He began with an ample and varied stock-in-trade, so to speak, possessed by few professional authors of that generation. To a fami- liarity with the great writers of his own country he added a knowledge, more or less profound, of the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, — he told me once that he read Greek for three hours every day, — of France and Germany, of Italy and Spain. An early love of physi- ology and kindred sciences allured him to medical studies, and recollections of his aspirations to become a biological discoverer possibly enrich the sketch of Lydgate's youth given in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Not long after he emerged from boyhood, he conjoined a strong taste for the drama with an eager desire to sound the depths of meta- physical speculation. He wrote plays, he took part in private theatricals (his grandfather, Charles Lee Lcvves, s 2 74 Lite7'ary Recollections had been a comedian of considerable note),i and at nine- teen he was one of a club of young tradesmen and others who met in the now dingy precincts of Red Lion Square, one of the subjects of their discussions being Spinoza and Spinozism.2 What Lewes knew, and already he knew 1 This grandfather was of Welsh origin, which may account for the Celtic- looking vivacity of the grandson. In none of the biographical notices of G. H. Lewes is there any mention made of his father. According to a memoir, prefixed to the Comic Sketches of his grandfather, the second wife of Charles Lee Lewes the actor was the daughter of ' a respectable innkeeper at Liverpool.' 'There are,' it is added, 'two sons alive who inherit from their mother a very considerable property. ' One of these sons was probably G. H. Lewes's father, and certainly edited the Memoirs of the grandfather, subscribing himself, at the end of the preface, 'John Lee Lewes, Liverpool, 1805.' From G. H. Lewes's reference, in the note which follows this, to the ' social persecution ' which in youth he suffered from his rejection of 'accepted creeds,' it may be inferred that he and his father were not then on good terms. Lewes's early life was varied. He was at school in London, in Jersey, and in Brittany before being sent to Dr. Burney's once famous seminary at Green- wich. School-years over he was successively in a notary's office and a Russia merchant's counting-house, before, having walked the London hospitals for a time, he threw himself into London literature. ^ When Lewes had become a prosperous and noted man, he was not ashamed of his early humble associates, and in an article on Spinoza, contri- buted to the Fortnightly Review, which he was editing, he gave an interesting account of this club, formed apparently a little before the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. 'About thirty years ago,' thus wrote Lewes in 1866, 'a small club of students held weekly meetings in the parlour of a tavern in Red Lion Square, Holborn, where the varied questions of philosophy were discussed with earnestness, if not with insight. The club was extremely simple in its rules and quite informal in its proceedings. The members were men whose sole point of junction was the Saturday meeting, and whose sole object was the amicable collision of contending views on subjects which at one time or other perplex and stimulate all reflecting minds. On every other day in the week their paths were widely divergent. One kept a second-hand bookstall, rich in free-thinking literature ; another was a journeyman watch- maker ; a third lived on a moderate income ; a fourth was a bootmaker ; a fifth "penned a stanza when he should engross ; " a sixth ' — doubtless Lewes himself — ' studied anatomy and many other things, with vast aspirations and no very definite career before him. Although thus widely separated, those divergent paths converged every Saturday towards the little parlour in Red Lion Square, and the chimes of midnight were drowned in the pleasant noises of argument and laughter : argument sometimes loud and angry, but on Early Career of Lewes 275 much, he could communicate in a lucid, flowing, and agree- able style. His industry was unflagging, and no discour- agement daunted him. The criticisms and suggestions of the most exacting of editors he accepted not only with equanimity but with cheerfulness, and he once boasted to these occasions always terminating in laughter which cleared the air with its explosions. Seated round the fire smoking their cigars and pipes, and drink- ing coffee, grog, or ale, without chairman or president, without fixed form of debate, and with a general tendency to talk all at once when the discussion grew animated, these philosophers did really strike out sparks which illuminated each other's minds ; they permitted no displays of rhetoric such as generally make debating societies intolerable ; they came for phiiosophic talk, and they talked.' Lewes mentions by name two only of the members of this club, then probably unique in London. One was James Pierrepoint Greaves, who became noted in certain circles as a mystic very far gone in theosophy. He came seldom and was ultimately driven away from it by a general explosion of laughter, which saluted his reply to an inquiry what he meant by speaking of himself as ' phenomenised,' a mysterious condition of which he was given to boasting. ' I am what I am,' quoth Greaves, 'and it is out of my "lamity" that I am phenomenised.' Solvuntur risii tabula. A more fruitful person was one Cohn, or Kohn, a German Jew, to whom some permanent interest attaches since he is understood to have been the original Mordecai of Daniel Deronda. He was a member 'whom,' Lewes wrote, ' we all admired as a man of astonishing subtlety and logical force, no less than of great personal worth. He remains in my memory as a type of philosophic dignity. A calm, meditative, amiable man, by trade a journeyman watchmaker, very poor, with weak eyes and chest ; grave and gentle in demeanour ; incorruptible, even by the seductions of vanity. I habitually think of him in connection with Spinoza, almost as much on account of his personal characteristics as because to him I owe my first acquaintance with the Hebrew thinker. My admiration for him was of that enthusiastic temper which in youth we feel for our intellectual leaders. I loved his weak eyes and low voice : I venerated his great calm intellect. He was the only man I did not contradict in the impatience of argument. An immense pity and a fervid indignation filled me as I came away from his attic in one of the Holborn Courts, where I had seen him in the pinching poverty of his home, with his German wife and two little black-eyed children: indignantly I railed against society, which could allow so great an intellect to withdraw itself from nobler work and waste the precious hours in mending watches. But he was wiser in his resignation than I in my young indignation. Life was hard to him as to all of us ; but he was content to earn a miserable pittance by handicraft and keep his soul serene. I learned to understand him better when I learned the story of Spinoza's life.' One day Cohn 276 Literary Recollections me that there was scarcely any editor whom he wished to cultivate to whom he could not supply just the article that was wanted. To say nothing of journalism, his work, before he was thirty, was to be found almost everywhere in the higher periodical literature of the day, in the Edinburgh, the London and Westminster, the British and Foreign, and the Foreign Quarterly Reviews. Later, and at a time when of serious and solid periodicals appearing at intervals of three months there were several more than now, he told me, with not unnatural glee, that he had an article in every one of them, 'except the d — d old Quarterly! The subjects which he dealt with covered an extensive area. His earlier articles in the Edinburgh Review alone ranged from criticism on the mise en scene of the London theatres to disquisitions on Arabian philosophy. Of course, writing thus much and on such a great variety of themes, Lewes was not always effective. All along, indeed, he contributed more to ' the literature of knowledge ' ('Cohen'?) picked up at a book-stall a German work in which Spinoza's system was expounded, and from time to time as he mastered, during intervals of business, its leading doctrines, he retailed them to the club. 'It was,' Lewes says, ' the more interesting to me because I happened to be hungering for some knowledge of this theological pariah— partly, no doubt, because he was an outcast, for as I was then suffering the social persecution which embitters all departure from accepted creeds, I had a rebellious sympathy with all outcasts, and partly because I had casually met with a passage, quoted for reprobation, in which Spinoza maintained the subjective nature of evil, a passage which, to my mind, lighted up that perplexed question.' At last Lewes lighted, in an old book-shop, on a small crown quarto, SpinozcB opera posthuma, and mastered at first-hand the system the rudiments of which he had learned from Cohn. In 1843 (^cvtat 29) Lewes made Spinoza the subject of an article which was the earliest modern attempt in England to rehabilitate that profound and original thinker, whose system even David Hume spoke of as ' infamous. ' Soon after this acquaintance with Spinoza, and doubtless to study German philosophy in the land of its birth, he went to Germany, acquiring a perfect knowledge of its language. His early residence in Brittany had made him a master of French. Early Career of Lewes 277 than to ' the literature of power.' But whatever he wrote displayed a certain originality of view. Whether he was dealing with literature, philosophy, or science, he was never an echo of his predecessors or contemporaries. Lewes was no worshipper of great names, and had in a singular degree the courage of his opinions. In his Biographical History of Philosophy, the earliest of his books which attracted notice, it was interesting to see the boldness of its young author's trenchant criticism of the systems of the most renowned sages, and the confidence with which he announced that the positive results of philosophy (in its restricted sense of metaphysical and ontological specula- tion) from Thales to Hegel amounted to absolutely nothing. Lewes had a great contempt for cant of all kinds, especially the cant of literary idolatry. Naturally in his conversation, even more than in his writings, he said right out what he thought and felt. The expression of his con- tempt for cant, had he been cynical, would have been bitter, but in his case it took the form of levity, and thus exposed him, with serious people, to the charge of flippancy. After meeting him, for the first time, Margaret Fuller described him as 'a witty French flippant sort of man.' It was not until she had known him for more than a year that George Eliot herself wrote of Lewes, ' he has quite won my regard after having had a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems. A man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy.' Among the many and varied results of Lewes's early literary ambition was the production of a work of fiction. At twenty-five he wrote a novel, Ranthorpe, for which at thirty he found a publisher. It was a crude [performance. 278 Lite7^ary Recollections but, so far as I know, was one of the first, if not the very first, of those novels, since so plentiful, which are mainly pictures of modern literary life in London : its struggles, failures, and triumphs. Though undeniably clever, Rajithorpe was not a success. The indefatigable Lewes set to work again, and, amid other and more pressing avocations, produced a three-volume novel, Rose, Blanche, and Violet: a history of the varied fortunes of three sisters. He had taken con- siderable pains with it ; but, for a book of Lewes's, it appeared to me absolutely tedious (though it has been praised by critics more competent than I can pretend to be), and was received with indifference by the public. It was one of the very slight results of the publication of this novel that through it indirectly I made the acquaintance of its author. Mrs. Carlyle being on a visit to the Barings at Addis- combe, I was sitting alone with Carlyle one evening in the second week of April, 1 848. I had given him an account of the scene presented by Kennington Common on the once famous loth of April, a day or two before. Partly from ' professional ' zeal, partly from a spirit of adventure, I had taken my seat, with other brethren of the press, in the roomy car which bore Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist delegates to the Common, where were assembled many thousands of his dupes, whom he dis- appointed by directing them, while he himself shook with terror, to disperse quietly. Carlyle was beginning to com- pute how many persons in the vast assembly could have heard the orator's voice, when Lewes entered the room. After George Eliot saw Lewes for the first time, she described him as ' a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appear- ance.' As in Mirabeau's case, the ugliness and the Early Career of Lewes 279 remains of the ravages of the smallpox were undoubtedly there, but Lewes had a fine eye and an expressive coun- tenance, which when lighted up by a smile was far from disagreeable. However it was Lewes's plainness of visage that led the Carlyles, as will be seen further on, to speak of him, though only for a time, as ' The Ape.' Lewes was a man of no concealments, and the object of his visit was soon apparent. He had sent Carlyle a copy of Rose, Blanche, and Violet, just published, and he came not to talk about the then absorbing topic of Chartism and Kennington Common, but to find out what Carlyle thought of his novel. Carlyle had read it, but the adven- tures of Mesdemoiselles Rose, Blanche, and Violet were not, as chronicled by Lewes, of a kind to interest him, yet here was the author bent on discovering his opinion of it ! It was amusing, at least to me, to see how Carlyle fenced with the anxious inquirer. The author could extract little more from the reluctant critic than that Rose, Blanche, and Violet, showed ' more breadth ' than its predecessor, Ranthorpe. However, by way of soothing his visitor, Carlyle added that Mrs. Carlyle had taken the book with her to the country, to be read not only by herself, but by ' a very high lady,' the Lady Harriet Baring, who became soon afterwards Lady Ashburton. Carlyle commenting in a depreciatory way on the amount of love- making in modern novels, Lewes retorted by referring to the amatory episodes in Wilhelni Meister. Carlyle rejoined that there was no more of that sort of thing in Meister \!^zx\ ' the flirtation which goes on in ordinary life,' a very different verdict from Wordsworth's and De Quincey's. ' I would rather have written that book,' Carlyle said, ' than a cartload of others,' and he went on to speak of Goethe's 2 8o Literary Recollections ' Olympian silence ' and other transcendent qualities. With admirable persistence Lewes took advantage of a pause to ask if some gaming-house scenes in Rose, Blanche, and Violet were not to be commended. Instead of answering the question, Carlyle launched into a descrip- tion of a gaming-house in Paris, to pay a visit of curiosity to which he had been taken, by the late Sir J. Emerson- Tennent, I think, and said that he remembered the faces of the players at the gaming-table so vividly that if he were a painter he could reproduce them even after that long lapse of years. Abandoning his fruitless quest, Lewes spoke of a life of Robespierre, which, as well as his life of Goethe, he had then on the anvil. Seeing that I was surprised at the conjunction of two such tasks, Carlyle said genially : ' Lewes is not afraid of any amount of work.' My fellow-visitor and I walked together part of the way towards our respective homes. The junior asked the senior whom did he consider to be at the head of our litera- ture, and received for reply, ' Macaulay, undoubtedly.' Lewes talked to me, as an aspirant, of the difficulties of a literary career, laying stress on the loss of several hundreds a year which he had sustained by the discontinuance of the British and Foreign Review, which, as formerly recorded [ante, p. io6) was munificently supported for several years by the late Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, the wealthy M.P. Meanwhile Carlyle had sat down and, at eleven o'clock p.m., indited to his wife a half-plaintive, half-indignant epistle, beginning, ' Oh, my dear, be sorry for me ! I am nearly out of my wits. From three o'clock till now I have been in a tempest of twaddle.' After some uncomplimentary remarks on previous visitors, of whose names Mr. Froude prints only the initials, Carlyle proceeds : ' In the evening Early Career of Lewes 281 came in ' — the writer of these pages — * and shortly after the Ape' — Lewes, to wit. ' May the devil confound it ! I feel as if I had got enough for one day. No wonder I am surly at people.' (There was no trace of surliness in his manner that evening.) ' The wonder is rather I do not shoot them. You wretched people ! You cannot help me, you can only hinder me. Of you I must for ever petition in vain that you would simply not mind me at all, but fancy in your hearts I was a grey stone, and so leave me.' ^ In her reply, which, fortunately for Lewes's feelings, was not printed until after his death, Mrs. Carlyle tells what both she and the 'very high lady' thought of Rose, Blanche, and Violet : ' Execrable that is. I could not have suspected even the Ape of writing anything so silly. Lady H. read it all the way down, and decided it was " too vulgar to go on with." I myself should have also laid it aside in the first half volume if I had not felt a pitying interest in the man ' — struggling industriously to support with his pen a wife and expanding family — ' that makes me read on in the hope of coming to something a little better. Your marginal notes are the only real amusement I have got out of it hitherto.' Evidently Lewes was not then a favourite of the Carlyles, though there is, in this extract from Mrs. Carlyle's letter, a touch of womanly sympathy with him. The truth, I take it, was that Lewes, who was no respecter of persons, sometimes made Carlyle wince — and Carlyle was more than twenty years his senior — by ^ At the close of his letter Carlyle did me the honour thus to report to his wife my account of the Kcnnington Common fiasco : ' E. was in the car with Feargus O'Connor and the other Chartists. Never,' he says, 'in the world was there a more total irremediably ludicrous failure than that opera- tion ; seldom a viler cowardly scoundrel (according to E. ) than tliat same Feargus as E. there read him.' 282 Liter a7y Recollections laughing at his prophetics when they were dining out together in cheerful society. To this were added some literary sins. For instance, Lewes at one time did not write nearly so appreciatively and respectfully of Goethe as on becoming his biographer. Almost ' Philistine ' in tone an admirer of Lewes has called the article on Goethe, which early in his career he contributed to the British and Foreigti Review (it was however translated at the time into French and German), and of which Carlyle said to me that it was ' wide of the mark.' There was an attack on Niebuhr, too, and before I met Lewes, Carlyle spoke of him to me as an assailant of ' established reputations.' Carlyle had not then read the BiograpJiy of Philosophy. ' I didn't think,' he said, ' that I could learn anything about philosophy from that body Lewes ' — a Scottish expression of contempt. All this altered in the course of time, especially with the appearance of Lewes's Life of Goethe, the undeniable merits of which Carlyle appreciated none the less because it was dedicated to himself in language of cordial admiration. After the catastrophe which separated him from his wife, ' the Ape ' of former years became with Mrs. Carlyle ' poor dear Lewes,' and, after the establish- ment of the Leader, Carlyle pronounced ' that body Lewes ' to be ' the Prince of Journalists.' I met Lewes occasionally during the first year of my acquaintance with him, but I saw much more of him in the succeeding year, during which he visited Manchester, where I was then residing. But of Lewes's visits to Manchester and of the establishment of the Leader, which followed on them, something will fall to be said in another chapter. CHAPTER II LEWES IN MANCHESTER EARLY in the year after my first meeting with Lewes he paid a visit of some duration to Manchester, of which city I was then for the second time a denizen. One of the objects which brought him thither was the dehvery of a course of lectures on the history of specula- tive philosophy. Lcwes's expositions were lucid and lively, his manner was animated, and his audiences, though not large, were distinctly appreciative. His contemptuous treatment of metaphysics and his exaltation of science were not unsuited to the inquiring intellects of that utilitarian city. It was pleasant to be told that though you had never troubled yourself about ' the problems of life and mind,' you were just as wise as any of the long series of sages who had wended their toilsome way on the * high priori road,' which, according to Lewes, led nowhere. A new era, he proclaimed, had dawned on mankind with Comte's promulgation of the Positive philosophy. Of Lewes's hearers, among whom I was one, many, I doubt not, went home content to know nothing which could not be ' verified by experience,' since beyond that, the clever and erudite gentleman from London assured us, there was really nothing to be knowm. But it was not merely to discourse on the fulilit)- of metaphysics and to glorify Auguste Comte that Lewes 283 284 Literary Recollections came to Manchester. He wished to make a figure on the stage as well as on the platform. It was the revival of a wish which had animated him in his earlier years ; the histrionic and dramatic efforts of his youth have been already mentioned. Since then he had written a serious drama. The Noble Hearty which remained unacted. On the public stage he had played Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when performed by the amateur company of men of letters and artists which, under the management of Charles Dickens, went ' on tour ' for the benefit of the veteran Leigh Hunt. Some vague aspiration to become both a successful dramatist and a successful actor flitted through Lewes's mind, and he had resolved to try his wings at Manchester in both these flights. Just when he was finishing his lectures on philosophy the advertisements of the * Theatre Royal, Manchester,' announced that ' This evening Mr. G. H. Lewes, the popular author, will make his debut in The Merchant of Venice, one of the plays,' the Manchester impresario actually deemed it desirable to add, ' selected by her Majesty at Windsor Castle. Shy- lock, Mr. G. H. Lewes ; ' Barry Sullivan playing Bassanio. There was originality in Lewes's conception of Shylock, whom he endeavoured to represent as the champion and avenger of a persecuted race, and his gabardine and three- pointed beard were praised as accurate reproductions of old reality. Sooth to say, however, Lewes's personation of the Jew that Shakespeare drew was palpably ineffective, and his best friends were obliged to admit that Nature had not intended him to be an actor. He tried another part, that of the elderly hero, in his own drama, The Noble Heart, a play in blank verse, with Elizabethan touches. But his personation of a Spanish hidalgo was as wanting in Lewes in Manchester 285 dignity as that of the Venetian Jew had been in power. The Noble Heart was performed in London afterwards, but with indifferent success. Lewes gave up all serious pretensions to be a dramatist, and pretensions of any kind to be an actor. His one dramatic hit, The Game of Speculation, was merely an adaptation (said to have been executed in twenty-four hours), though a very clever one, of Balzac's Mercadet le Faiseiir. He was for the most part content to be a dramatic critic, and one of great acumen, as his little volume On Actors and Acting abundantly testifies. In Manchester, Lewes went a good deal into society, was a frequent guest of the Jewsburys, and made himself generally agreeable. He was eminently sociable and con- vivial, and an admirable racojtteur, especially of French anecdotes gathered in Paris, where he had been recentl)- in quest of material for his life of Robespierre. His anecdotes were often of a kind that would not now bear reproduction. One of the least unpresentable of them was a significant story of a Paris editor, to whom a serious- minded aspirant brought for publication an elaborate essay on the existence of a deity. ' Dieu,' was the businesslike editor's polite but disappointing reply, ' Dieu — c'est bien, trcs bien — mais, mon cher Monsieur, la question de Dieu n'est pas une actualite ! ' At a jovial Manchester supper- party, I heard Lewes give the imaginary account, not printed until years afterwards, of the different ways in which a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German, might respond to an invitation to describe the camel ; the Frenchman, after an hour at the Jardin des Plantes, presenting a sketch of the ship of the desert, lively and admirably written, though very superficial ; the English- man proceeding to the East, and after long investigation 286 Literary Recollections returning with a great budget of valuable but undigested facts ; while the German, retiring to his study, constructed the idea of a camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. This clever, and a good deal more than clever,y y6 Literary Recollections the ill-fated Falconer, the poet of the Shipwreck. Great, very great was the amount of time and labour which I spent on that comparatively thankless task. The result was as elaborate and exhaustive a history as the most diligent and persevering research could make it. Its quantity — it is not for me to speak of its quality — was considerable ; if printed in the same type as that on which the reader's eye is now resting, it would fill a space not far short of a hundred pages such as those contained in this volume. This history of the House of Murray excited a good deal of attention in and out of what are called ' literary circles.' Many years subsequently it was resolved in Albemarle Street to carry out the suggestion with which my history of the House of Murray closed. ' If it be true,' I wrote, ' as Mr. Carlyle has said, that a good history of booksellers would be much more valuable than most histories of kings, then there are monarchs with whose elaborate biographies we would cheerfully dispense to receive in exchange a Life and Correspondence of the late John Murray of Albemarle Street.' The necessary materials were hunted up in the archives of the House and placed in the competent hands of Dr. Smiles, Thirty years after my suggestion was printed appeared Dr. Smiles's history of the House of Murray, A PublisJier and his Friends, the second John Murray, with an account of his father the Lieutenant of Marines. It was some satisfac- tion to me to learn that, when Dr. Smiles received the commission, my history of the House of Murray, which had been carefully preserved in Albemarle Street, was placed in his hands as an excellent ground-plan for him in the composition of his work. The Critic : Histories of Publishing Hotises 377 Before the publication of Dr. Smiles's volumes I became a second time the historian of the House of Murray, and this time not only at the instance of the late Mr. Murray, but to some extent with his co- operation. More than twenty years after my elaborate history of the House of Murray appeared, and I had quite forgotten that I had ever written it, I received one morning a note in which a correspondent, whose name was unknown to me, asked if I had any objec- tion to write a history of that publishing house. It turned out that the note came from the London representative of the New York publishing firm of Harper, whose Harpers Magazine is as well known in this country as many of our native periodicals. The origin of the inquiry made to me, on the part of the Messrs. Harper, was the following : A scion of the House of Murray, visiting New York, had received from the House of Harper a hospitable welcome, and when a scion of the House of Harper afterwards visited London, he in his turn received a hospitable welcome from the House of Murray. The American visitor was shown, among other things, the famous drawing-room in Albemarle Street, redolent of the memories of many literary celebrities. There Sir Walter Scott held his first colloquy with Lord Byron. The cremation of Byron's memoirs, bequeathed to and surrendered by ' Tom ' Moore, was performed in the fireplace of that room. On its walls arc the portraits for which, to be presented by them to the second John Murray, sat Byron, Moore, Campbell, Southey, Gifford, Hallam, Lockhart, Washing- ton Irving, and Mrs. Somerville among others. Survey- ing them, as he stood in the middle of the room, the scion 378 Literary Recollections of the House of Harper exclaimed, ' What a capital , subject for an article ! ' The late Mr. Murray consented ! to allow copies to be taken of the portraits in his posses- ' sion, and drawings to be made illustrative of the history , of his House, for reproduction in Harper's Magazine. But who was to write the letter-press accompanying the illustrations ? Mr. Murray bethought him of the writer of these pages, who twenty years or so before had | been the historian of his house. A common friend | furnished him with my address ; hence the unexpected | question put to me by the London representative of the Messrs. Harper. They offered me most liberal terms for ] an article to produce which, with my former history of the house before me (Mr. Murray lent me his copy, I had ] none of my own) was comparatively an easy task. It ; had only to be condensed and briefly continued ' up to date.' While engaged on this second history I had j occasional consultations with the late Mr. Murray,^ and j with his partner, the late Mr. John Cook (a descendant i of the founder of the house. Lieutenant McMurray), a genial old gentleman, but afflicted with a deafness which rather obstructed conversation. Murray went carefully over my first history of his House, suggesting a {q.v^ emendations and additions, and giving me some hints ' for continuing the account of the publishing operations in ^ The perpetuation of 'John ' as the Christian name of the successive heads of the publishing house of Murray may confuse the reader. The chronology of the Murrays is the following : The first John Murray, previously Lieutenant McMurray, founded the house in 1768, and died in 1793. He was succeeded by his son, the second John Murray, the publisher and friend of Lord Byron and founder of the Quarterly Review, who died in 1843. His son and successor, the third John Murray, spoken of in the text as ' the late Mr. Murray,' died in 1892, and was succeeded by his son the present Mr. John Murray, fourth of the name. The Critic : Histories of Publishing Houses 379 Albemarle Street down to the time at which I was writing. The only at once noticeable and novel information which I received from him was rather curious and interesting. He unearthed and presented to me, in its original grey pasteboard binding, a thin octavo volume the title of which ran thus : ' The Life of Paul Jones, from original documents in the possession of John Henry Sherburne, Esq., Registrar of the United States. London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1825.' 1825 was both the year of the appearance of the first instalment of Viviaii Grey, and the year preceding that of the appearance of the ill-fated Representative, of which, and of Disraeli's connection with it, more hereafter in the section of this volume entitled ' Lord Beaconsfield and his Minor Biographer.' That life of Paul Jones was seen 'through the press, and furnished with a preface by no other a person than the young Benjamin Disraeli, who had not then attained his majority, and in his preface, especially if you know beforehand who was its author, there may seem to be discoverable here and there Disraelitish touches. In due course the article appeared, copiously illustrated, in Harpers Magazine, and, though I wished it to be anonymous, with my name attached to it. On the other hand, — I take this opportunity of publicly acknow- ledging it, — the Messrs. Harper behaved to me with a liberality even exceeding that of their original proposal. I had contracted to write a certain number of pages — I forget the exact number — at a very handsome rate of remuneration per page. With such ample material at my command I supplied something like twice the number of pages agreed on. I wrote to the Messrs. Harper to say, as it was only right to say, that if they •'So Literary Recollections o chose to print the overplus, I should expect no more remuneration than that which they had promised for the smaller number of pages contracted for. I was then given to understand that the editor of Harper hoped to print all the * copy ' which I had sent. Exigencies of space forbade the fulfilment of this hope, and the article, as it was printed in Harper, contained only about half of the matter which the firm had originally asked for. Not only, however, did they pay me for the number of pages which they had asked me to write, — this, I suppose, they were bound in honour to do, — but they paid me spon- taneously, and much to my surprise, no trifling addi- tional sum, in consideration of the superfluous pages which they had not contracted for, which of course they did not use, and which neither in honour, nor on any other ground, were they in the slightest degree bound to pay for. When I hear American publishers reviled for their alleged ill-treatment of cis- Atlantic authors, I always cite, in illustration of a very different mode of proceeding, the conduct of the Messrs. Harper to myself. The proprietor of the Critic gave receptions and dinner- parties at his house in Russell Square. At one of these receptions, I remember meeting John Martin, the painter of the grandiose works which were once conspicuous in the world of art, and which, especially Belshazzar's Feast, were so acutely criticised by Charles Lamb. Martin was a quiet rather nervous little man who talked less of art than of his soaring schemes for the sanitary and other improvement of London. Of the dinner-parties, I recollect one among the guests at which were some notable people, for instance, Eothen-Kinglake, Robert Chambers, his son- in-law, W. H. Wills, the working editor of Dickens's The Critic : Histories of Publishing Houses 381 Household Words, a very acute gentleman ; Charles Knight, the publisher, genial and rather dignified ; and that professional diner-out, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had rubbed shoulders with a good many distinguished people, had been intimate with Wordsworth, accompany- ing him on a Continental tour, and had read 'Samson Agonistes ' with Goethe at Weimar. Robinson's posthu- mous Diary, with its generally vapid and inane gossip, had some vogue at the time of its publication. There was very little general conversation. Eothen-Kinglake was reputed to be a vivid talker, but, if he spoke at all, it was to his immediate neighbours. I had a little chat about Shakespeare with Charles Knight, and was surprised to find that so accomplished a Shakespearian editor knew nothing of Ludwig Tieck's interesting novel, the Dichter- leben, in which he introduced Shakespeare himself with Marlowe, Greene, and others of their contemporaries. The post-prandial talk was monopolised by Crabb Robin- son almost altogether. His monologue consisted mainly of anecdotes of small German poets, the Dii minimarum gentiwn of Teutonic literature, and was not only uninter- esting but wearisome. He knew Carlyle in early days (since then their acquaintance had long ceased), and I asked him whether the Sage of Chelsea was modest when he was young. ' Well, you know,' was the reply, ' Mr. Carlyle could never have been modest.' I told this to Carlyle, who laughed heartily, and gave an account of his meeting, at Crabb Robinson's, a Mr. Sothern, who was a contributor to the IVesfmifister Review, and afterwards held a diplomatic appointment in South America. Carlyle must have been on that occasion in an even more than usually contradictory mood. He o 82 Litermy Recollections told me as a good joke that, when next Sothern met 'Crabb,' he complained of the snubbing which he had received from Carlyle, adding with a certain pathetic modesty, 'Why, I couldn't have been always in the wrong ! ' Of the acquaintances whom I made through my connection with the Critic, only two figure in my memory, Alexander Gilchrist and Charles WycHfife Good- win. During the later years of the Critic s existence, the art department was assigned to Gilchrist, who had already acquired a reputation by his Life of William Etty. The story of Gilchrist's father is a singular one. Originally a pastor in a dissenting communion, the General Baptists, in time he began to doubt the truth of the doctrines which he was preaching. He wrestled with his doubts, but the doubts gained the day. Thereupon he resigned his pastorate and betook himself to what was for him, after such a career, one of the strangest of all possible occupations. He rented a picturesque old flour-mill, em- bosomed in rich foliage, at Mapledurham, on the Thames (near Reading), famous in our poetic annals as the seat of the Blounts and associated with memorable passages in the biography of Pope. In the midst of some of the prettiest scenery on the banks of the Thames, the young Gilchrist imbibed a love of the beautiful in nature, and developed a taste for poetry and art. The mill, as may be easily imagined, proved a failure in the hands of the ex-dissenting pastor, who was removed to another and a better world, when his son was a boy. Somehow, through the generosity of relatives, I suppose, the young Gilchrist received a fair education at University College School, and was even enabled to be called to the bar. But The Critic: Histories of Publishing Houses ^s^^) making no way as a barrister, he began contributing art criticism and miscellaneous literary matter to the Eclectic Review and other periodicals. At last his Life of Etty procured him a reputation. The biographical workmanship and knowledge of art displayed in it were far above the average, and it attracted the favourable notice of Carlyle, on whose Life of fohn Sterling Indeed it appeared to me to have been considerably modelled. With position, or at least prospects, improved by the success of the Life of Etty, Gilchrist married a very amiable and clever lady, who herself became reputably known in literature, and an interesting biography of whom has had many readers. The first time I dined with Gilchrist, he made some reference to his desertion of the bar, on which I remarked, of course jocularly, 'you ought to have married a solicitor's daughter.' ' That,' Gilchrist replied, looking at his wife, *is exactly what I did.' Mr, and Mrs. Gilchrist became intimate with the Carlyles, next door to whom in Cheyne Row they were ultimately domiciled, and by whom they were welcomed not only as agreeable and intelligent, but as quiet neighbours, averse from permitting any of those noises of cock-crowing, dog-barking, and the like, so dreaded by the Sage, and so painful to his shattered nerves. In the biography of Mrs. Gilchrist there are several interesting notices of the Carlyles, with letters from Mrs. Carlyle and reports of the Sage's Table-Talk. Gilchrist was a middle-sized, good-looking man, with a florid com- plexion, a face beaming with good-nature, as well as intelligence, a pleasant companion, and with always a touch of the aesthetic in his costume. He made a very decided hit by the first instalment of his life of William lilakc, with illustrations from his pictures and drawings and 384 Literary Recollections selections from his poems and prose writings. Blake, as a painter and a poet, was neglected in his own day and generation, so that he was styled Pictor Ignotus on the title-page of Gilchrist's book. Since its appearance, the mystical painter has been notiis and even notissimiis to the present generation. Just as Gilchrist had become a pro- minent man, he died, at the early age of thirty-three, of a fever, which had attacked his children, and which he caught while nursing them. His unfinished biography of Blake was very ably completed by his accomplished widow since deceased. As the joint author of what is known as the Thomas-Gilchrist and 'basic' process for the dephosphorisation of molten iron, one of their sons, Mr. Herbert Gilchrist, has reaped fame and fortune in a department of things very different from that in which his father won his reputation. The father of my friend, the late Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, was the head of a very eminent firm of solici- tors at King's Lynn, Norfolk. One of his sons, an elder brother of Charles, took orders, and as Dr. Harvey Goodwin preceded, in the see of Carlisle, the present Bishop. Bishop Harvey Goodwin was a prolific author. Many of his volumes of sermons and other devotional works were very popular. He was also a copious con- tributor to periodicals, in which, though he was what might be called a Broad Churchman, he delighted to impugn the Darwinian theory of evolution. Charles, too, when entered at Catherine Hall, Cambridge, of which, in time he became a fellow, was intended for the Church. But his spiritual development and that of his brother, the late Bishop, were as different as in the case of the brothers John Henry and Francis Newman, and The Critic: Histories of PublisJiing Houses 385 of two other noted brothers, Hurrell and James Anthony Froude. In point of fact, Charles Goodwin became an agnostic. His was a fellowship which, after a fixed number of years, he could retain only by taking orders. His views on religious matters having been transformed, when the time came for him either to resign his fellow- ship, or to take orders, he honourably chose the first of these alternatives. The act was the more honourable, since some misconduct, on the part of a member of the King's Lynn firm, had effected the impoverishment of his father and of Charles himself Only a very moderate income was left him, and this he eked out occasionally by his pen. He was called to the Bar, but that was an uncongenial vocation. He never practised. The chief result of his legal studies was that he edited a law-book or two for the proprietor of the Critic, and this con- nection procured me an acquaintance with Goodwin which in time became friendship. Later in his career he edited the PartJienon, the short-lived offspring of the Literary Gazette which had been resuscitated under Shirley Brooks to be a competitor of the AtJienceuni, and had, if I remember rightly, Mr. John Morley for its last editor. In spite of Goodwin's scholarly editorship, the Parthcfioti, like the revived Literary Gazette, added another to the failures of attempts to shake the supremacy of the Atlicn- CBuvi. Goodwin also contributed remarkable papers on Egyptological subjects to Fraser^s Magazine, to the Cam- bridge Essays, and to the transactions of learned societies. But the one literary achievement, which brought him con- spicuously before the reading world, was his contribution of a paper on the ' Mosaic Cosmogony ' to the once famous Essays a^id Reviews, the seven contributors to which were 2 I? 386 Literary Recollections dubbed by some orthodox assailant the Septem contra Christum, although among them was the present Bishop of London, then the Rev. Frederick Temple, Head Master of Rugby.^ Goodwin, being quite estranged from the Church of England, was the only layman among the Essayists and Reviewers, and, having no ecclesiastical pains and penalties to fear, he spoke out very freely the truth as it was in him. He not only assailed very effectively the cosmogony ascribed to Moses, but all those questionably ingenious theories broached by Dr. Chalmers, Dean Buckland, and other champions of orthodoxy, to re- concile things so irreconcilable as the facts of science and the letter of the Bible. Goodwin's essay produced a con- siderable sensation, and educed from angry orthodoxy a number of replies, to none of which did he deign to make any rejoinder. His erudition was as extensive as it was deep, in proof of which it may suffice to say that besides : being a good classical, Hebrew, and German scholar, he ; was both one of the most accomplished Anglo-Saxon ] scholars, and one of the profoundest Egyptologists of his I time. When I knew him he was devoted to Egyptology, j which, in his case, included a thorough knowledge of ; I ( 1 Bishop Temple was the first member of the Broad Church party whom Mr. Gladstone elevated to the Episcopate. I^is appointment to 1 the see of Exeter was, however, it may be surmised, mainly due to his . having harangued the townsmen of Rugby in favour of Mr. Gladstone's , successful scheme for the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church, j Since he has been seated on the Episcopal Bench, Bishop Temple has , once, at least, spoken his mind freely on some delicate and much-debated ! matters. He was Bishop of Exeter when he delivered, in 1884, the Bampton j Lectures, taking for his subject 'The Relations between Religion and 1 Science.' In one of these lectures he spoke of ' the allegory of the garden I of Eden,' while in another he declared that he cheerfully accepted the ; Darwinian theory of evolution as redounding more to the glory of God, ; than di.d the old theory of special creations. i The Critic : Histo7'ies of Piiblishiiig Houses 387 Coptic. Of the origin of his Egyptological studies more hereafter. Though not at all unsocial, he lived a secluded bachelor-life as a tenant of chambers in the Temple, where his only companion was a favourite cat, the plumpness of which testified to its owner's fond care of it. His chief relaxation was music ; he played on more than one instrument, and was, I believe, for several years musical critic of the Guardiaji. Surrounded by his books, con- spicuous among them volumes full of reproductions of hieroglyphics and hieratic papyri, he would talk to me by the hour on the results of the latest Egyptological researches, and the influence exerted by Egypt on the earliest intellectual development of ancient Greece : a theme on which he delighted to dilate. Although an agnostic, he contributed to the Speaker's Bible some notes on the presence of Egyptian words in the Pentateuch, which, with others from Egyptological experts, were regarded by the editor as strongly militating against one modern theory, that the books ascribed to Moses were wholly composed at a very much later time than his. With all his learning, Goodwin was one of the most unpretending and modest of men, and, though fortune had not thus far smiled on him, he was always contented and cheerful. Absorbed in those abstruse and beloved studies of his, Goodwin seemed to me a very happy man. What a contrast between his tranquil and studious existence in the Temple and the rackety tavcrn-lifc of those London Bohemians, Hannay's genial descriptions of which and whom have been previously quoted! But Goodwin, too, had his ambition. It was to obtain some consular or other official appointment in Egypt, which would enable him to prosecute his o 88 Literary Recollections researches in the land the ancient literary monuments and memorials of which formed the principal subject of his studies. Lord John Russell, with whom Goodwin's friends had some influence, could, or would not, do this for him. He was offered, however, and he accepted, an assistant-judgeship in the newly-created Supreme Court of China and Japan. Marrying before he left England to enter on his duties at Shanghai, he sailed quite con- tentedly for China, taking with him the monumental work of Lepsius, the Denkmdler Egyptiens, which had been sent him from the then German Emperor, grandfather of the present one. During the one holiday-visit which he paid to England, I saw him, and found him well pleased with his position at Shanghai, and with the society of the cultivated and agreeable members of the English colony there. Soon afterwards I heard of his death, which was very much regretted by all who knew him at home and abroad. I wrote the memoir of Goodwin for the Dictionary of National Biography. A trifling incident in its preparation is worth chronicling, as showing how in literary matters, when the memory alone is relied on, the testimony of a man of the highest character, and the most unimpeach- able integrity and truthfulness, may be found not quite flawless. In writing of Goodwin's early life before I made his acquaintance, I naturally made use of an obituary notice of him, which his brother Bishop Harvey Goodwin had contributed to a literary periodical. In his fraternally sympathetic memoir, the Bishop ascribed his brother's early-developed love of Egyptology to having read, when very young, an article on the subject in the Quarterly Review, on one of the pages of which, Dr. Harvey The Critic : Histories of Publishing Houses 389 Goodwin added, a number of hieroglyphics were reproduced. I searched the volumes of the Quarterly, of the dates suggested by the Bishop's statement, but could find no article that answered his description. But I found one that exactly coincided with it in a number of the Edinburgh Review, the date of which was satisfactory for my purpose, and the article contains just such a page of repro- duced hieroglyphics as those mentioned by the Bishop. When sending to the Bishop a proof of my memoir of his brother, I hinted to him that he must have been mistaken, and that he had assigned to an article in the Quarterly Review, an effect on the mind of Charles, which was due to an article in the Edinburgh. In the correspondence which ensued, the good bishop firmly, and even emphati- cally, asserted the accuracy of his original statement. He could not, he said, have been mistaken. His remem- brance of the incident was perfect, and to clench the matter, he said that the Edinburgh Review never entered his father's house. Before, however, the proof was returned to the editor of the Dictio7iary of National Biography, the bishop came to town, and, having consulted and searched the volumes of the two reviews, he wrote to me admitting that he was in the wrong, and that I was in the right. Upon this I offered — while putting the matter correctly in the proof — to avoid a reference to his authorship of the error. In a final letter to me, that of a Christian and a gentleman, the excellent bishop declined my offer, requesting me to indicate him as the author of the mistake, and winding up with the familiar declaration : Magna est Veritas et pncvalcbit ! X. LATER EDINBURGH MEMORIES DURING the closing years of James Hannay's editor- ship of the Edinburgh Courant, I contributed to it regularly from London, and on his resignation {ante, p. 315) I became his successor. It was pleasant to return after the lapse of decades to one's native country and native city as the editor of the oldest newspaper in both. The finances of the Courant were in a deplorable state when I was appointed its editor. But with its finances I had from first to last neither right nor wish to interfere, and thus I was free to devote my time and attention to my editorial duties. During the whole period of my editor- ship, Hannay contributed to the Courant regularly from London, for the most part in a generally quieter style than when he wielded the editorial tomahawk in Edin- burgh. The managers of the Courant left me very much to my own devices, and I was enabled to attempt to do some- thing for two deserving classes of the Scottish community and for one unfortunate section of the population of Edin- burgh. In the Courant were championed the claims of the Scottish schoolmasters, the Jedediah Cleishbothams of a new generation, to an increase of their too often scanty incomes. The columns of the paper were thrown open to the ministers of the Established Church for a statement of S90 Later Edinburgh Memories 39 1 the grievances of those of them whose stipends, at that time, were sadly inadequate. As regarded my native city I seconded to the best of my abiHty the much-needed suggestions for the improvement of its sanitary condition put forth by its excellent and zealous Medical Officer of Health. Last not least, I instituted a not unfruitful in- quiry into the condition of the j^oor of Edinburgh. A representative of the Couraiit was sent into the closes and wynds of the Old Town to report on the economics of the poorest of its inhabitants, and the structural and sanitary shortcomings of their over-crowded dwelling.s. From time to time there were published in the Courant his disclosures of the misery and pestiferous squalor which he had seen in the course of his peregrinations, misery often due to mis- fortune not to misconduct, and squalor caused not merely by extreme poverty but by the sordid neglect of too many of the owners of the lowest class of tenements, who wrung exorbitant rents from their tenants, and who, keenly alive to the rights of property, seemed to know nothing of its duties. These revelations produced a very great impres- sion on the more favoured denizens of Edinburgh, and a result very creditable to many of them, especially to those of the gentler sex. Money, to an amount which surprised me, poured in, unsolicited, to the Courant Office, to be applied in the relief both of general destitution and of specific cases of distress which had been pointed out in the columns of the paper. The Scotch Poor Law was very much harsher than that of England, though it was not quite so bad as when its provisions were pithily sum- marised in the words, ' Take nothing from the rich, and give that to the poor.' The effect of these revelations in the Courant lasted beyond the time during which they 392 Literary Recollections were set forth in type.^ Subsequently there were Con- ferences of Ministers of Religion, and some sort of philanthropic organisation was established to supplement the utterly insufficient resources provided by the Scotch Poor Law for the relief of destitution. A permanent Courant fund was instituted, and ceased to be usefully operative only with the death of the Courant. For my own part I saw all along that, admirable in itself and in its results as was the charity evoked by the disclosures in the Courant, the relief thus given was a mere anodyne, the administration of which, however imperatively called for, was not a cure for the wide-spread and deep-seated evil. But prompt and ample as was the munificence with which Edinburgh gave money to be applied in relieving distress and destitution, a deaf ear was turned to all and any editorial attempts to convince the philanthropic that the one permanently effective remedy for the social malady was the reproductive and adequate employment, municipal or other, of the wholly unemployed, and of the already employed, but at starvation wages. The Courant was jogging on satisfactorily, when Lord Derby and Mr, Disraeli found themselves, after a consider- able interval, once more in office. Stimulated by this unex- pected triumph, sundry wealthy and zealous members of the Conservative party in Scotland were encouraged to put their hands into their pockets, with the hope of enabling the Courant to compete in the London-news department with the Scotsman^ which, having a 'special wire' at its ^ The substance of these articles was published in volume-form, with a dedication to the Ladies of the Modern Athens in a tiny tome, entitled The Poor of Edinburgh and their Homes, by William Anderson, reporter of the Courant ; with a prefatory letter by the Rev. Dr. Guthrie. Later Eduihirgh Memories 393 command, gave every morning full reports of the Parlia- mentary proceedings, and other metropolitan intelligence of the preceding day. The concern, moreover, freed from debt, was to be placed in the hands of a new proprietor, who, on his installation, was to be started with a considerable sum ' down ' provided by the muni- ficence of Scottish Conservatism. Certain faint, very faint, overtures were made to me to conjoin the financial with the editorial control of the Courant, but for such twofold responsibility I felt myself utterly unfitted. As will be seen further on, the one Scotchman best fitted to undertake the general administration of the Courant fought shy of the enterprise. There were other Scotch- men, however, on both [sides of the Border, competent to undertake it. But, before these persons could be inquired for, a Southron appeared upon the scene, to whose over- tures, unfortunately for themselves, and for their purses, the Scottish Conservatives lent too favourable an ear. This was the IMayor or ex-Mayor of a town in the west of England who had become prominent in his district by a display of local electioneering zeal for the Conservative cause. Ambitious of shining in a more extensive sphere he had bought the old-established London evening paper, the Globe, long a staunch Liberal organ, and he turned it into a staunch Conservative organ. The Scottish Conservatives thought that they had made a lucky hit when the new proprietor of the Globe became the new proprietor of the Cotirant. But they had mis- taken their man. He brought with him {} 'n--jt-m^-± RCCEiVhD By I TWTSl^ CIRCUUTJON DEPT, LD 21A-60m-10,'65 (F77638l0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley r J, > ' '■ t' ' ' \'i'" I'T. £'" ■■'■:■'$■ ■-■ - -'■;# •H^. '* ''^ ■ •V^.^V- ...:•*. '(■• Vv ' Y:'' :.'':J^^I^