Chapter XXXV: Carlyle and His Wife

In 1826 occurred what Saintsbury calls the most important event in the life of Carlyle,--his marriage with Jane Welsh, a young woman who traced her ancestry back to John Knox, the rugged Scotch reformer. Jane was a keen, active, high-strung, sensitive soul. There has arisen a formidable mass of literature discussing the relationship between Thomas and Jane. Were they happy or were they miserable?

Jane Welsh was a Scotch lady whose family was socially superior to that of Carlyle's. Her father had been a physician, while Carlyle's was but a rude stone-mason,--and yet a great man. It is said she married Thomas because she was ambitious and wanted to be the wife of a famous man, and she had discovered in the unknown Thomas the marks of genius. In after years she is reported to have said: "I married for ambition. Carlyle had exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined for him; _and I am miserable_."

Jeannie had what she had bargained for and yet she was unhappy,--why?

Carlyle was a big-hearted, hard-working, gruff, but kind-hearted individual. I have not a doubt that he loved his Jeannie. But he took no pains to show his love in those tender though trivial devotions that mean so much to the sensitive wife.

During the first few years of their married life, they lived in a lonely place and had but a scant income. We have a very interesting picture of their life at Craigenputtock. Thomas could not eat bakers' bread, so Jeannie baked. The one servant they had was not competent. It may have been this same servant that was responsible for Thomas' finding, altogether unexpectedly, of course, a dead mouse at the bottom of his dish of oatmeal. As to the bread-baking Jean has given us a very graphic account:

"Further we were very poor, and further and worst, being an only child, and brought up to 'great prospects,' I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar, and very fair mathematician! It behooved me in these astonishing circumstances to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons, and I was expected 'to look to all that;' also it behooved me to learn to _cook_! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my difficulties dreadfully. The bread, above all, bought at Dumfries, 'soured on his stomach' (Oh heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's _Cottage Economy_, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But knowing nothing about the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought to have been put into bed; and I remained the only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then two, and then three, and still I was sitting there in an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a sense of forlornness and _degradation_. That I who had been so petted at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, and who had never been required to _do_ anything, but _cultivate my mind_, should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching _a loaf of bread_, which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud. It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing that one's hand has found to do?' ... If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would have come out more fitly in a _good_ loaf of bread.

"I cannot express what consolation this germ of an idea spread over my uncongenial life during the years we lived at that savage place, where my two immediate predecessors had gone _mad_, and the third had taken to drink."

While enjoying the description which Mrs. Carlyle has painted in such an entertaining manner, it is well to observe that she does not blame her husband. She seems to be writing the account while she is silently laughing at the absurd preparation her life had had for the duties of the wife of a poor man. But Mr. T.P. O'Connor, who writes in 1895, is outspoken:

"I do not want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle, but in spirit it is somewhat hard to keep one's hand off him, as we reconstruct those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock. There is a little detail in one scene which adds a deeper horror. I have said that Mrs. Carlyle had to scrub the floors, and as she scrubbed them Carlyle would look on smoking--drawing in from tobacco pleasant comfortableness and easy dreams--while his poor drudge panted and sighed over the hard work, which she had never done before. Do you not feel that you would like to break the pipe in his mouth, and shake him off the chair, and pitch him on to the floor, to take a share of the physical burden which his shoulders were so much more able to bear?"

Another anecdote is that at a dinner while Carlyle was monopolizing the conversation, talking as only he could talk, he, the irritable, turned upon his wife with "Jeanie, don't breathe so hard!" And still again, we hear it said that Tennyson once remarked it was well the Carlyles had married each other for if each had married another there would have been _four_ instead of _two_ unhappy people. But I think the truer remark was made when Tennyson said to his son, Hallam: "Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoy life together, or else they would not have chaffed one another so heartily."

The _Century_ of some years ago contained this witty skit from the pen of Bessie Chandler:

And I sit here, thinking, thinking,
How your life was one long winking
At Thomas' faults and failings, and his undue share of bile!
Won't you own, dear, just between us,
That this living with a genius
Isn't, after all, so pleasant,--is it, Jeannie Welsh Carlyle?

However, with all that may be said to the contrary, I do not think we dare say that the marriage of Thomas and Jeannie was an unhappy one. After reading fifteen hundred pages of biography and hundreds of letters passing to and fro, I am of the belief of Mr. Tennyson, that on the whole their union was a happy one.

Shortly after Carlyle had been elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, Jean died suddenly. While out driving one afternoon by Hyde Park, she jumped out to pick up her little dog, over whose foot a carriage had passed. She was never again seen alive. In her carriage she was found dead with her hands folded on her lap. When Carlyle heard of it he was away at Scotsbrig. Later in describing his feelings he wrote: "It had a kind of _stunning_ effect on me. Not for above two days could I estimate the immeasurable depth of it, or the infinite sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and a moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin." And Froude tells us that in Carlyle's old age--he lived to be eighty-five--he often broke forth in these passionate words of Burns:

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.