Chapter VIII: Froude and Carlyle (1)

When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection. Froude's Carlyle, like Boswell's Johnson, is a great man painted as he was. When the original head master of Uppingham described his school as Eton without its faults, there were those who felt for the first time that there was something to be said for the faults of Eton. Carlyle without his paradoxes and prejudices, his impetuous temper and his unbridled tongue would be only half himself. If he were known only through his books, the world would have missed acquaintance with letters of singular beauty, and with the most humourous talker of his age. He was one of two men, Newman being the other, whose influence Froude felt through life, and the influence of Newman was chiefly upon his style. Of Newman indeed he saw very little after he left Oxford, though his admiration and reverence for him never abated. It was not until he came to live in London after the death of his first wife that he grew really intimate with Carlyle. Up to that time he was no more than an occasional visitor in Cheyne Row with a profound belief in the philosophy of that incomparable poem in prose, The French Revolution. Carlyle helped him with his own history, the earlier volumes of which show clear traces of the master, and encouraged him in his literary work.

Mrs. Carlyle was scarcely less remarkable than her husband. Although she never wrote a line for publication, her private letters are among the best in the language, and all who knew her agree that she talked as well as she wrote. Froude thought her the most brilliant and interesting woman he had ever met. The attraction was purely intellectual. Mrs. Carlyle was no longer young, and Froude's temperament was not inflammable. But she liked clever men, and clever men liked her. She was an unhappy woman, without children, without religion, without any regular occupation except keeping house. Her husband she regarded as the greatest genius of his time, and his affection for her was the deepest feeling of his heart. He was at bottom a sincerely kind man, and his servants were devoted to him. But he was troublesome in small matters; irritable, nervous, and dyspeptic. His books harassed him like illnesses, and he groaned under the infliction. If he were disturbed when he was working, he lost all self-control, and his wife felt, she said, as if she were keeping a private mad-house. It was not quite so private as it might have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London without troubling himself to solve mysteries which did not concern him.

Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength and early training to be the wife of a poor man. She was too anxious a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles. Her father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the necessary servants. In Carlyle's home there were no servants at all. His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the family. Why should his wife be in a different position from his mother's? There was no reason, in the nature of things. But custom is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle's married life were a hard struggle against grinding poverty. Carlyle was grandly indifferent to material things. He wanted no luxuries, except tobacco and a horse. He would not have altered his message to mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies. What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as they thought proper. He never swerved from the path of integrity. He did not know his way to the house of Rimmon. The mere practical ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might have realised a fortune in business. Carlyle just made enough money to live in decent and wholesome comfort.

From the first Carlyle's conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled him. But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship, pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller. Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a rabbit. Herbert Spencer was "the most unending ass in Christendom." "Scribbling Sands and Eliots" were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle's shoe-strings. Editing Keats was "currying dead dog." Ruskin could only point out the correggiosity of Correggio. Political economy was the dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle's eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving, awe-compelling. They did not put his hearers at their ease, and Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.

-- * McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant --

In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he received a visit from the great author himself. Carlyle did not take to many people, but he took to Froude. Perhaps he was touched by the younger man's devotion. Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he relinquished it himself. At all events he expressed a wish to see him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home. Nothing could be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale, drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs. Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of Edinburgh.

Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation. "For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him, and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow- creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased, after Carlyle was dead.+

-- * This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now. + "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling, about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and contras there."--Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From The Hill, Dumfries. --

Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs. Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be. Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed by himself.

Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards, however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens, a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents, and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the 6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother John as executors, contained the following passage:

"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude (as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead. To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay, the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted Froude.

Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned, he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was sure to be well received. His English in Ireland was approaching completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son, Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man relied upon the younger as upon a son.

Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him. He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any) were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine benevolence as well as hospitality."*

-- * The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110. --

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal, romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton, and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had undertaken to discharge.

Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster. Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November, 1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen, the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the memorials entrusted to Froude.

In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however, acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs. Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November, 1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind, to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be told.

On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared, including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less. Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which was never in fact realised.

In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened. The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss. But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude should have published the memoir is a question which may be discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself. But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude knew Carlyle, and the public did not.

-- * Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230. --

Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these words:

"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine- tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.

"T. C. (Saturday, July 28th, 1866)."

Mary Carlyle at once wrote to The Times, and accused Froude of having violated her uncle's express directions. It would have been better if Froude had himself quoted this passage, and explained the subsequent events which made it obsolete. But he never suspected any one, and believed at the time of publication in the entire friendliness of the Carlyle family. His answer to the charge of betraying a trust was simple and satisfactory. Carlyle had changed his mind. This is clear from the fact that he gave Froude the memoir in 1871, five years after it was written, to do as he pleased with; and still clearer from the conversation in 1880, when Froude told him that he meant to publish, and Carlyle said "Very well." Moreover, the will, a formal and legal document, expressly gave Froude entire discretion in the matter. Froude replied at first with temper and judgment. But when Mrs. Carlyle persisted in her insinuations, and implied a doubt of his veracity, he gave way to a very natural resentment, and made a rash offer. He had, he said, brought out the memoir by Carlyle's own desire. He should do the same with Mrs. Carlyle's letters, for the same reason. "The remaining letters," he went on to say, "which I was directed to return to Mrs. Carlyle so soon as I had done with them, I will restore at once to any responsible person whom she will empower to receive them from me. I have reason to complain of the position in which I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They were sent to me at intervals without inventory or even a memorial list. I was told that the more I burnt of them the better, and they were for several years in my possession before I was aware that they were not my own. Happily I have destroyed none of them, and Mrs. Carlyle may have them all when she pleases." Froude can hardly have reflected upon the full significance of what he was saying. He had at this time been long engaged upon the biography of Carlyle, and a considerable part of it was finished. If he had then given back his materials, his labour would have been wasted, and Carlyle's own personal injunction would have been disobeyed. Carlyle's memory would also have suffered parable injury. It is said, and it squares with the facts, that Mary Carlyle and her friends, whose literary judgment was not quite equal to Carlyle's own, desired to substitute as his biographer some learned professor in Scotland.* If that were their object, they are to be congratulated upon their failure. For the offer was not carried out. As a bare promise without consideration it was not of course valid in law, and since no one had acted upon it, its withdrawal did no one any harm. There were also legal difficulties which made its fulfilment impossible. According to counsel's opinion, dated the 13th of May, 1881, Carlyle's request that the papers should be restored was "an attempted verbal testamentary disposition, which had no legal authority." The documents belonged not to Froude personally, but to himself and Fitz-james Stephen, as joint executors, and Stephen has left it on record that he would not have consented to their return until Froude's task was accomplished.

-- * David Masson, the editor of Milton, I have been told, but I do not know. --

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's view was not shared by other and older members of her uncle's family. During the summer of 1881 Froude received from Carlyle's surviving brother, James, and his surviving sister, Mrs. Austin, a letter dated the 8th of August, and written from Ecclefechan, in which he was implored not to give up his task of writing the Life, and assured of their perfect reliance upon him. This assurance is the more significant because it was given after the publication of the Reminiscences. It was renewed on James Carlyle' s part through his son after the appearance of Mrs. Carlyle's letters in 1883, and by Mrs. Austin through her daughter upon receiving the final volumes of the biography in 1884. Miss Austin wrote at her mother's request on the 25th of October, 1884, "My uncle at all times placed implicit confidence in you, and that confidence has not, I am sure, in any way been abused. He always spoke of you as his best and truest friend." Time has amply vindicated Carlyle's opinion, and his discretion in the choice of a biographer.

As Mrs. Alexander Carlyle considered the publication of the memoir, which is by far the most interesting part of the Reminiscences, to be an impropriety, and a breach of faith, it might have been supposed that she would repudiate the idea of deriving any profit from the book. On the contrary, she attempted to secure the whole, and refused to take a part, declaring that Froude had promised to give her all. Froude's recollection was that, thinking Carlyle's provision for his niece insufficient,* he had promised her the American income, which he had been told would be large, though it turned out to be very small indeed, in acknowledgment of her services as a copyist. Ultimately he made her the generous offer of fifteen hundred pounds, retaining only three for himself. She accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift. In the opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the circumstances a moral obligation. But Mary Carlyle put forward another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in June, 1881. She then said that in 1875, six years before his death, her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the keys of the receptacles which contained them.

-- * The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however, materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died before her uncle Thomas. --

Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous. For the bulk of the papers had been in Froude's possession since the end of 1873, or at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or boxes which the keys would have opened. On the strength of her own statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle's will leaving his manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete it. He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with Carlyle's clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had done with them. In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with natural pride, "It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law- suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing Mr. Carlyle's life, and I am happy to say I succeeded." The public will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that could have produced such a book as his. Of the Reminiscences Froude wrote to Skelton, "To me in no one of his writings does he appear in a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all mankind eventually think."

His own frame of mind at this period is vividly expressed in a letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881. After some references to Goethe's letters, and German copyright, he continues:

"So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I undertook the business. I had intended, when I finished my English history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend the rest of my life on him. I might have been half through by this time, and the world all in good humour with me. My ill star was uppermost when I laid this aside. There are objections to every course which I can follow. The arguments for and against were so many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to be done, and left it to me. He could see all sides of the question. Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another, whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of people will blame me. Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would blame me. What have I done that I should be in such a strait? But I am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all."

The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of Carlyle's life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835, appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub. The public had got on a false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme. Carlyle was in truth one of the noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on the surface. His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of our being. For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn too deep for words. He never sought, and he did not greatly value, the praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in which he profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak. Contemporaries without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business, attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high. Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams. His generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected thanks. He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters, whenever he had time to think. Courage and truth made him indifferent to fashion and popularity. Popularity was not his aim. His aim was to tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or whether they would forbear. Froude had so much confidence in the essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling character and a lofty genius. Therefore his portrait lives, and will live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.

Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for "personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit. For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him," he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam, have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that a similar view should have been taken of the relations between Froude and Carlyle.

It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came, and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence. Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said, half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment, and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him- and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen," said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible. If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not always being killed."+

-- * Life, i. 302. + Life, i. 209. --

That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June, 1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very faults that were attributed to himself, with the following sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life, and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.

If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826 Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters. His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him. Nobody could help him.

-- * I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection with Fraser. --

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco. Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the under side of things," to quote his own definition of the undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people, for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude, faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of this book is that it introduced the British and American public to some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes, as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best, the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire. Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down- trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted. Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself, and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.

-- * "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle, "with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide." --

I doubt if he bathed before he dressed. A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes! You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed: His wife and himself had separate rooms.

Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all. Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.

Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything read that book. Southey read it six times. Dickens carried it about with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities. Thackeray wrote an enthusiastic review of it. Its wisdom and eloquence were a treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was. It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah. Such comparisons profit little or nothing. The French Revolution is an original book by a man who believed in God's judgment upon sin. The memoirs of Madame Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle's own heart and soul.

Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes. It remains one of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers, even the professors themselves. And yet, greater than the book itself is Carlyle's behaviour when the first volume had been lost by Mill. Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the author. He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to his wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us." Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small matters he could be very small.