When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict seclusion, making repeated efforts at work on what he called 'the unexecutable book,'Frederick. In the spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death of Professor Wilson. Between them there had never been any cordial relation, says Froude. 'They had met in Edinburgh in the old days; on Carlyle's part there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he had been shy of Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, and now this April the news came that Wilson was gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. 'I knew his figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 29; 'remember well first seeing him in Princes Street on a bright April afternoon—probably 1814—exactly forty years ago.... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste towards some distant object, strode rapidly along, clearing the press to the left of us, close by the railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. Westward he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell whispered me, "That is Wilson of theIsle of Palms," which poem I had not read, being then quite mathematical, scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now see them to have been. The broad-shouldered statelybulk of the man struck me; his flashing eye, copious, dishevelled head of hair, and rapid, unconcerned progress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no more of him. It must have been fourteen years later before I once saw his figure again, and began to have some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better and more familiarly acquainted; but though I liked much in him, and he somewhat in me, it would not do. He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have a feeling I should—could—not become wholly his, in which he was right, and that on other terms he could not have me; so we let it so remain, and for many years—indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh—I had no acquaintance with him; occasionally got symptoms of his ill-humour with me—ink-spurts inBlackwood, read or heard of, which I, in a surly, silent manner, strove to considerflatteringrather.... So far as I can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely Bank, with a testimonial, poor fellow!), and I once in his, De Quincey, &c., a little while one afternoon.'[29]
On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his journal: '"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."' What a fearful word! I cannot find how to take up that miserable "Frederick,"or what on earth to do with it.' He worked hard at it, nevertheless, for eighteen months, and by the end of May 1858, the first instalment was all in type. Froude remarks that a fine critic once said to him that Carlyle's Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as Sterne's Tristram Shandy; certainly as distinct a personality as exists in English fiction. Carlyle made a second journey to Germany. Shortly after his return, the already finished volumes ofFrederickappeared, and they met with an immediate welcome. The success was great; 2000 copies were sold at the first issue, and a second 2000 were disposed of almost as rapidly, and a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle's health being unsatisfactory, Carlyle took a house for the summer at Humbie, near Aberdour in Fife. They returned to Cheyne Row in October, neither of them benefited by their holiday in the north.
While many of Carlyle's intimate friends were passing away, he formed Ruskin's acquaintance, which turned out mutually satisfactory. On the 23rd April 1861, Carlyle writes to his brother John: 'Friday last I was persuaded—in fact had unwarily compelled myself, as it were—to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The lecture was thought to "break down," and indeed it quite did "as a lecture"; but only did fromembarrasdes richesses—a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and, in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one.'[30]
Frederickwas progressing, though slowly, as he found the ore in the German material at his disposal "nowhere smelted out of it." The third volume was finished and published in the summer of 1862; the fourth volume was getting into type; and the fifth and last was finished in January 1865. 'It nearly killed me,' Carlyle writes in his journal, 'it, and my poor Jane's dreadful illness, now happily over. No sympathy could be found on earth for those horrid struggles of twelve years, nor happily was any needed. On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865) I walked out, with the multiplex feeling—joy not very prominent in it, but a kind of solemn thankfulness traceable, that I had written the last sentence of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many forebodings in bad hours, had actually got done with it for ever.'
In England it was at once admitted, says Froude, that a splendid addition had been made to the national literature. 'The book contained, if nothing else, a gallery of historical figures executed with a skill which placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters....No critic, after the completion ofFrederick, challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past or present.' The work was translated instantly into German, calling forth the warmest appreciation.
After a round of holiday visits, including one to Annandale, the Carlyles settled down once more at Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865. 'The great outward event of Carlyle's own life,' observes Froude, 'Scotland's public recognition of him, was now lying close ahead. This his wife was to live to witness as her final happiness in this world.' Here is an eloquent passage from the same pen: 'I had been at Edinburgh,' writes Froude, 'and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there, on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do; the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street, when we left the building, was ringing with a prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there was not a man whose views on all subjects, in heaven and earth, less resembled Gladstone's than those ofthe man whom this same applauding multitude elected to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were ignorant how wide the contradiction was; but if they had been aware of it they need not have acted differently. Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had risen from among them—not by birth or favour, not on the ladder of any established profession, but only by the internal force that was in him—to the highest place as a modern man of letters. InFrederickhe had given the finish to his reputation; he stood now at the summit of his fame; and the Edinburgh students desired to mark their admiration in some signal way. He had been mentioned before, but he had declined to be nominated, for a party only were then in his favour. On this occasion, the students were unanimous, or nearly so. His own consent was all that was wanting.'[31]This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was chosen Rector of Edinburgh University. But the Address troubled him. He resolved, however, as his father used to say, to 'gar himself go through with the thing,' or at least to try. Froude says he was very miserable, but that Mrs Carlyle 'kept up his spirits, made fun of his fears, bantered him, encouraged him, herself at heart as much alarmed as he was, but conscious, too, of the ridiculous side of it.' She thought of accompanying him, but her health would not permit of the effort. Both Huxley and Tyndall were goingdown, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to take care of her husband.
On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866, Carlyle and his wife parted. 'The last I saw of her,' he said, 'was as she stood with her back to the parlour door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she me once, I her a second time.' They parted for ever.
Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what happened there had best be told by an eye-witness, Professor Masson. 'On the night following Carlyle's arrival in town,' he says, 'after he had settled himself in Mr Erskine of Linlathen's house, where he was to stay during his visit, he and his brother John came to my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they might have a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with me an hour or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as could be, talking most pleasantly, a little dubious, indeed, as to how he might get through his Address, but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself, when the old man stood up in the Music Hall before the assembled crowd, and threw off his Rectorial robes, and proceeded to speak, slowly, connectedly, and nobly raising his left hand at the end of each section or paragraph to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated what he was to say next, the crowd listening as they had never listened to a speaker before, and reverent even in those parts of the hall where he was least audible,—who that was present will ever forget thatsight? That day, and on the subsequent days of his stay, there were, of course, dinners and other gatherings in Carlyle's honour. One such dinner, followed by a larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then, too, he was in the best of possible spirits, courteous in manner and in speech to all, and throwing himself heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner-table, I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one or two of his humorous songs or recitatives, including his clever quiz called "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter," written to the tune of "Roy's wife of Aldivalloch." No one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle; and he surprised me by doing what I had never heard him do before,—actually joining with his own voice in the chorus. "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter," he chaunted laughingly along with Lord Neaves every time the chorus came round, beating time in the air emphatically with his fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch as the affair was more ceremonious and stately, at the dinner given to him in the Douglas Hotel by the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while dignified and serene, Carlyle was thoroughly sympathetic and convivial. Especially I remember how he relished and applauded the songs of our academic laureate and matchless chief in such things, Professor Douglas Maclagan, and how, before we broke up, heexpressly complimented Professor Maclagan on having "contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening."'[32]
The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as Lord Rector is that by Alexander Smith, the author of 'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,' &c., &c., whose lamented death took place a few months after that event. 'Curious stories,' he wrote, 'are told of the eagerness on every side manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast, dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a ticketwasreserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there, in the early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift-gestured,squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy, too, ... came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed these fifty years—an act of hero-worship for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble friendship—of the David and Jonathan of so many years agone—was the best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear. David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find."
'In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemenhad taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look, nor had it—as we soon learned—touched his Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful—the countenance of a man on whom "the burden of the unintelligible world" had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about Mr Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon—a man to set his mark on the world—a man on whom the world could not setitsmark.... The proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D. on Mr Erskine of Linlathen—an old friend of Mr Carlyle's—on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. Thatdone, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe—which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to him—advanced to the table, and began to speak in low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play-fellows must have been familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life could not impair, even in the slightest degree,that. The opening sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on: "Your enthusiasm towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching reminiscence and sigh over old graves—Father's and Mother's, Edward Irving's, John Sterling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time—and with its flash of melancholy scorn. "There are now fifty-six years gone, last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen—fifty-six years ago—to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what—with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to.... There is somethingtouching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up, and saying: Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." And thereafter, without aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared with speech, the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of taking care of one's health. "There is no kind of achievement you could make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions? The French financier said, 'Alas! why is there no sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by everybody? Appraise it as you please, it was a thingper se. Just as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, thereis no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock.'[33]
Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says: 'When Carlyle sat down there was an audible sound, as of breath long held, by all present; then a cry from the students, an exultation; they rose up, all arose, waving their arms excitedly; some pressed forward, as if wishing to embrace him, or to clasp his knees; others were weeping; what had been heard that day was more than could be reported; it was the ineffable spirit that went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the ages stored up in it, and deep answered unto deep.'
Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A perfect triumph.' That evening she dined at Forster's, where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They drank Carlyle's health, and to her it was 'a good joy.' It was Carlyle's intention to have returned at once to London, but he changed his mind, and went for a few quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the rectorial address from him, and was made perfectly happy about it.
Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs Carlyle, and for Saturday, April 21st, she had arranged a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote her daily letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out inher brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with her. When near Victoria Gate, Hyde Park, she put the dog out to run. 'A passing carriage,' says Froude, 'went over its foot.... She sprang out, caught the dog in her arms, took it with her into the brougham, and was never more seen alive. The coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and round again. Coming a second time near to the Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, he turned round, saw indistinctly that something was wrong, and asked a gentleman near to look into the carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take the lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards distant. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lapdead.'[34]
At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 'green solitudes and fresh spring breezes' of Annandale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, broke the news to him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday, and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It had a kind ofstunningeffect upon me. Not for above two days could Iestimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, "My poor little woman!" but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it ever? A stony "Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35]
On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1P.M.on Thursday the funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeedhers. Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to share his lot for weal or woe; andin that office what she has been to him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.' As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the 'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen, conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John.
One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character; her heart was as truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as herhusband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and better part?'[36]
On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and when domestic differences arose he abstained from paying those little attentions which a delicate and sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband who was so lavish of terms of endearment in the letters he wrote to her when away from her side. 'Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,' observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly composed of a silent sitting by the fireside of an evening in the old "houseplace," with a tranquillising pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative silence; and now and then, at meeting or parting, some pious and earnest words from the good soul to her son.'[37]And it never occurred to Carlyle to act differently with his wife, who was pining for his society. In additionto all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diagnosis of Carlyle's character. 'If,' he wrote, 'matters went well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.'
There was a strong element of selfishness in that phase of Carlyle's nature; and throughout his letters and journal he appears wholly wrapt up in himself and in his literary projects, without even a passing allusion to the courageous woman who had shared his lot. Now and again we alight upon a passage where special mention is made of her efforts, but these have all a direct or indirect bearing uponhiswork,hisplans,hiscomforts.[38]
Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been to him until she was suddenly snatched from his side. And this was his testimony: 'I say deliberately, herpart in the stern battle, and except myself none knows how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.' In one of those terrible moments of self-upbraiding the grief-stricken husband exclaims: 'Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and beautiful,when it is too late!'
In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have a pathetic picture of Carlyle in his lonely old age. A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a visit to this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle.
In conversation the grave-digger said: 'Mr Carlyle comes here from London now and then to see this grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind of old man, looking very old the last time he was here.' 'He is eighty-six now,' said I. 'Ay,' he repeated, 'eighty-six, and comes here to this grave all the way from London.' And I told him that Carlyle was a great man, the greatest man of the age in books, and that his name was known all over the world; but he thought there were other great men lying near at hand, though I told him their fame did not reach beyond the graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. 'Mr Carlyle himself,' said the gravedigger softly, 'is to be brought here to be buried with his wife. Ay, he comes here lonesome and alone,' continued the gravedigger, 'when he visits the wife's grave. His niecekeeps him company to the gate, but he leaves her there, and she stays there for him. The last time he was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed down under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that ruined wall of the old cathedral, and round there and in here by the gateway, and he tottered up here to this spot.' Softly spake the gravedigger, and paused. Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he proceeded:—"And he stood here awhile in the grass, and then he kneeled down and stayed on his knees at the grave; then he bent over and I saw him kiss the ground—ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and tottered out of the cathedral, and wandered through the graveyard to the gate, where his niece was waiting for him." This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle, and engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in the chancel of Haddington Church:—
'Here likewise now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, Spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London. She was born at Haddington, 14th July 1801, only daughter of the above John Welsh, and of Grace Welsh, Capelgill, Dumfriesshire, his wife. In her bright existence she had more sorrows than are common; but also a soft invincibility, a clearness of discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart which are rare. For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband, and, by act and word, unweariedly forwarded him as none else could, in all of worthy that he did or attempted. She died at London, 21st April 1866, suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.'
'Here likewise now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, Spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London. She was born at Haddington, 14th July 1801, only daughter of the above John Welsh, and of Grace Welsh, Capelgill, Dumfriesshire, his wife. In her bright existence she had more sorrows than are common; but also a soft invincibility, a clearness of discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart which are rare. For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband, and, by act and word, unweariedly forwarded him as none else could, in all of worthy that he did or attempted. She died at London, 21st April 1866, suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.'
In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales the old man's blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, was anxious that they should live together, but it was otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and on his return to London he wrote, 'My home is very gaunt and lonesome; but such is my allotment henceforth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.'
Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereavement was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest against Governor Eyre's recall. 'Poor Eyre!' he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am heartily sorry for him, and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from £6000 a year into almost zero, and has a large familyand needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.'
Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with the Ashburtons at Mentone, and on the 22nd of December he started thither with Professor Tyndall. He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals made some progress with hisReminiscences. He returned to London in March, and on the 4th of April 1867 he writes in his journal: 'Idle! Idle! My employments mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling on the days that culminated on the 21st of last year.' About this time his thoughts were directed to the estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became absolute owner at his wife's death. All her relations on the father's side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it ought not to lapse to his own family, he determined to leave it to the University of Edinburgh, 'the rents of it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious students there, under the title of "the John Welsh Bursaries." Her name he could not give, because she had taken his own. Therefore he gave her father's.'
On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: 'Finished off on Thursday last, at three p.m. 20th of June, my poorbequestof Craigenputtock to Edinburgh University for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and Froude as witnesses; the good Professor Masson, who had taken endless pains, alike friendly and wise, beingat the very last objected to in the character of "witness," as "a party interested," said the Edinburgh lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance; so I think did Masson secretly. He read us the deed with sonorous emphasis, bringing every word and note of it home to us. Then I signed; then they two—Masson witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply moved, as I well might be, but held my peace and shed no tears.TearsI think I have done with; never, except for moments together, have I wept for that catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of weeping would have been in other times a blessed relief.... This is my poor "Sweetheart Abbey," "Cor Dulce," or New Abbey, a sacred casket andtombfor the sweetest "heart" which, in this bad, bitter world, was all my own. Darling, darling! and in a little while we shallbothbe at rest, and the Great God will have done with us what was His will.'[39]
When the Tories were preparing to 'dish the Whigs' over the Reform Bill, Carlyle felt impelled to write a pamphlet, which he calledShooting Niagara, and After. It was his final utterance on British politics. Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of his works engrossed his attention for some time. He went annually to Scotland, and devoted a great deal of time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and annotating of his wife's letters.
Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster Deanery: 'The Queen,' Carlyle said, 'was really very gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose greatly in my esteem by everything that happened; did not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very mournful to me; the one point of real interest, a sombre thought: "Alas! how would it have cheered her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been there!"'
When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, he—in June 1871—brought to Mr Froude's house a large parcel of papers. 'He put it in my hands,' says Froude. 'He told me to take it simply and absolutely as my own, without reference to any other person or persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that it was an account of his wife's history, that it was incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion whether it ought to be published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish it, the whole, or part—or else destroy it all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to do.'[40]
Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his ownand his wife's private papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents. 'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, 'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here.
In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, thenPremier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both.
Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter of three or four lines to theTimes, which he explains to his brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through theTimesa small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy, it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new war for the Turk against all mankind; and this letter hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest speculations on that side.'
Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the Bible, 'the significance of which' he found 'deep and wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.' The Bible and Shakespeare remained 'the best books' to him that were ever written.
The death of his brother John was a severe shock to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage poor students. 'These two brothers,' Froude remarks,'born in a peasant's home in Annandale, owing little themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland's chief University what Scotland's peers and merchants, with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour, had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.'
In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; in January he was visibly sinking; and on the 5th of February 1881, he passed away in his eighty-fifth year. In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own people.
At his death Carlyle's fame was at its zenith. A revulsion of feeling was caused by the publication of Froude'sLife of Carlyleand theReminiscences. In regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was created by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by Froude. Was Froude justified in presenting to the public Carlyle in all grim realism? The answer to this depends upon one's notions of literary ethics. The view of the average biographer is that he must suppress faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is that the majority of biographies are simply expanded funeral sermons; instead of a life-like portrait we have a glorified mummy. Boswell'sJohnsonstands at the head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the conventional method, his book would long since have passed into obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froudehas not overdone the sombre elements in Carlyle's life. Readers of Professor Masson's little book, which shows Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good reason to suspect that Froude has given too much emphasis to the Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle's life. In the main, however, Froude's conception of biography was more correct than that of his critics. In dealing with the reputation of a great man it is not enough to consider the feelings of contemporaries; regard should be had to the rights of posterity. In his usual forcible manner Johnson goes to the heart of this question when he says in theRambler:—'If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyric and not to be known from one another, but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. If we have regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.' When Johnson's own biography came to be written, Boswell, in spite of the expostulation of friends, resolved to be guided closely by the literary ethics of his great hero. In reply to HannahMore who begged that he would mitigate some of the asperities of Johnson, Boswell said, 'he would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody.'
Some critics have insinuated that Froude took a curious kind of pleasure in smirching the idol. The insinuation is as unworthy as it is false. Froude had resolved to paint Carlyle as he was, warts and all, and all that can be said is that in his anxiety to avoid the charge of idealism he has given the warts undue prominence.
In his essay on Carlyle, Mr John Morley utters a protest against the habit of labelling great men with names. After making every allowance for the waywardness of the men of intuitive and poetic insight, it remains true that between the speculative and the practical sides of a great thinker's mind there is a potent, though subtle, connection. For those who take the trouble of searching, there is discoverable such a connection between the speculative ideas of Carlyle and his practical outlook upon civilisation. Given a thinker who lays stress upon the emotional side of progress, and we have a thinker who will take for heroes men of mystical tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a thinker who will value progress not by the increase of worldly comfort, but by the increase in the number of magnetic, epoch-making personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle remark that the history of the world is at bottom the history of its great men.
Carlyle's fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told banefully upon his work in sociology. Trusting to hisinner light, to what we might call Mystical Quakerism, Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of progress. Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of the patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose emotions find outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like the prophets of old, Carlyle tends towards Pessimism. His golden age is in the past. WhenPast and Presentappeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the style and spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social reformer. As an attempt to solve the social problem,Past and Presentis not a success. Carlyle could do no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of the feudal period, when the people were led by the aristocracy. It showed considerable audacity on Carlyle's part to come to the interpretation of history with no theory of progress, no message to the world beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations will be turned into hell which forget God. Of what value is such writing as this, taken from the introduction to hisCromwell?:—'Here of our own land and lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once more, who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring laid to heart that an Almighty Justice does verily rule this world, that it is good to fight on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side! The essence of all heroism and veracities that have been or will be.' This is simply a reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas; indeed, except for the details, Carlyle might as readilyhave written a life of Moses as of Cromwell. In the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to Bunyan, a kind of pilgrim's progress; only in the Carlylean creed it is all battle and no victory, all Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain. Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action, where individual reason is depreciated, progress is associated with the rise of abnormal individualities, men of strong wills like Cromwell and Frederick. With Rousseau, Carlyle appears to look upon civilisation as a disease. In one of his essays,Characteristics, he goes near the Roussean idea when he declaims against self-consciousness, and deliberately gives a preference to instinct. The uses of great men are to lead humanity away from introspection back to energetic, rude, instinctive action. When humanity will not listen to the voice of the prophets, it must be treated to whip and scorpion. It never dawned upon Carlyle that the highest life, individual and collective, has roots in physical laws, that politico-economic forces must be reckoned with before social harmony can be reached.
Just as Carlyle's Idealism drove him into opposition to the utilitarian theory of morals, so it drove him into opposition to the utilitarian theory of society. Out of his idealistic way of looking upon life there flowed a curious result. As early asSartor Resartuswe find Carlyle anticipating the evolutionary conception ofsociety. Spencer has familiarised us with the idea that society is an organism. The idea which he received from the Germans that Nature is not a mere mechanical collection of atoms, but the materialised expression of a spiritual unity—that idea Carlyle extended to society. As he puts it inSartor Resartus: 'Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature were not.... Noteworthy also, and serviceable for the progress of this same individual, wilt thou find his subdivisions into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind; Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has made, the Son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards.... Find mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower; the Phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with her music; or as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.'
Philosophies of civilisation have a tendency to beget Fatalism. Bent upon watching the resistless play of general laws, philosophers, in their admiration of the products, are apt to ignore the frightful suffering andwaste involved in the process. Society being an organism, a thing of development, the duty of thinkers is to demonstrate the nature of sociological laws, and allow them free scope for operation. To this is due much of the apparent hardness of Eighteenth Century political speculation, which, beginning with the French Physiocratic School, culminated in the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and the two Mills. With those thinkers, the one palpable lesson of the past was the duty of abstaining from interference with the general process of social development. Give man liberty, said the Utilitarian Radicals, and he will work out his own salvation: from the play of individual self-interest, social harmony will result.
Carlyle is frequently thought of as a Conservative force in politics. In some respects he was more Radical than the Benthams and the Mills. His deeper ideal conception of society intensified his dissatisfaction with society as it existed. In fact, to Carlyle's attack upon those institutions, beliefs and ceremonies which had no better basis than mere unreasoning authority, most of the Radicalism of the early 'forties' was due. Conceive what effect language like this must have had upon thoughtful, high-souled young men: 'Call ye that a Society, where there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common overcrowded Lodging-house? Where each,isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries "Mine!" and calls it Peace because, in the cut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has become an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has no tongue but for plate-licking; and your high Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed:Laissez faire; leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than darkness; eat your wages and sleep. Thus, too, must an observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spectacle: the Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork; the Rich, still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth. The Highest in rank, at length, without honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with a little mouth-honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in the bill. Once sacred Symbols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereof men grudge even the expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken into a Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!'
It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle's Idealistic Radicalism parted company with UtilitarianRadicalism. Failing to see that society was in a transition period, a period so well described by Herbert Spencer as the movement from Militarism to Industrialism, in which there was a severe conflict of ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought for the remedy in a return to a form of society which had been outgrown. There was surely something pathetically absurd in the spectacle of a great teacher endeavouring to cure social and political diseases by preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time when the intellect of the day was parting company with theocratic conceptions. Equally absurd was it to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism of ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering from the effects of previous despotism. Equally irrelevant was the attempt inPast and Presentto get reformers to model modern institutions on those of the Middle Ages. Carlyle's remedy for the evils of liberty was a return to the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle, in fact, forgot his conception of society as a developing organism; he endeavoured to arrest progress at the autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws of progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic ideas. Still, the value of Carlyle's political writings should not be overlooked. The Utilitarian Radicals laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual superstition. They worshipped human nature as a fetish. Lacking clear views of social evolution, theyoverlooked the relativity of political terms. Ignorant of the conception of human nature to which Spencer has accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as a constant quantity which only needed liberty for its proper development. In their eagerness to discard theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity which finds expression in the creed of the Churches. We have changed all that. We now realise the fact that political institutions are good or bad, not as they stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or conflict with existing phases of human nature.
If in the sphere of industrialism Carlyle as a guide is untrustworthy, great is his merit as an inspirer. His influence was needed to counteract the cold prosaic narrowness of the Utilitarian teaching. He called attention to an aspect of the economic question which the Utilitarian Radicals ignored, namely, the inadequacy of self-interest as a social bond. To Carlyle is largely due the higher ethical conceptions and quickened sympathies which now exist in the spheres of social and industrial relationships. Unhappily his implicit faith in intuitionalism led him to deride political economy and everything pertaining to man's material life. Much there was in the writings of the economists to call for severe criticism, and if Carlyle had treated the subject with discrimination he would have been a power for good; but he chose to pour the vials of hiscontempt upon political economy as a science, and upon modern industrial arrangements, with the result that many of the most intelligent students of sociology have been repelled from his writings. In this respect he contrasts very unfavourably with Mill, who, notwithstanding the temptations to intellectual arrogance from his one-sided training, with quite a chivalrous regard for truth, was ever ready to accept light and leading from thinkers who differed from him in temperament and methods. There may be conflicting opinions as to which of the two men was intellectually the greater, but there can be no doubt that Mill dwelt in an atmosphere of intellectual serenity and nobility far removed from the foggy turbulence in which Carlyle lived, moved, and had his being. Between the saintly apostle of Progress and the barbaric representative of Reaction there was a great gulf fixed.
As was natural, theLatter-day Pamphletswere treated as a series of political ravings. For that estimate Carlyle himself was largely responsible. He deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers by the violence of his invective and the lack of discrimination in his abuse. Much of what Carlyle said is to be found in Mill'sRepresentative Government, said, too, in a quiet, rational style, which commands attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle, was a believer in mob rule. He did not think thatthe highest wisdom was to be had by the counting of heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not deem it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies. They suggested remedies on the lines of these tendencies. They did not try to put back the hands on the clock of time; they sought to remove perturbing influences. Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by political methods what should not be done by these methods. Carlyle's idea that Government should do this, that, and the other thing has wrought mischief, inasmuch as it has led to an undue belief in the virtues of Government interference. His writings are largely responsible for the evils he predicted.
It is curious to notice how, with all his belief in individualism, Carlyle, in political matters, was unconsciously driven in the direction of socialism. Get your great man, worship him, and render him obedience—such was the Carlylean recipe for modern diseases. Suppose the great man found, how is he to proceed? In these democratic days, he can only proceed by ruling despotically with the popular consent; in other words, there will follow a regime of paternalism and fraternalism, the practical outcome of which would be Socialism. Carlyle himself never suspected how childish was his conception of national life. He wrote of his Great Man theory as if it was a discovery, whereas the most advanced races had long since passed through it, and those which were not advanced were preciselythose which had not been able to shake themselves free of paternal despotism. On this point the criticism of the late Professor Minto goes to the heart of the matter: 'Carlyle's doctrines are the first suggestions of an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity. As a rule, with no exception, that is worth naming, they take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for the wisdom and experience of others to submit to be corrected: opposition rather confirmed him in his own opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already been made before, and judged impracticable upon grounds which he could not, or would not, understand. His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were in full operation under the despotism of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which means in practice an accidentally good and able man in a series of indifferent or bad despots, had been more frequently tried than any other political system; Asia at this moment contains no government that is not despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge are also chiefly determined by the strength of his unreasoning impulses.'
In his interestingRecollectionsMr Espinasse states that during the time that Carlyle was writing on the labour question, not a single blue-book was visible on his table! To Carlyle's influence must be traced much of the sentimental treatment of social and industrialquestions which has followed the unpopularity of political economy. It is only fair to Carlyle to note, that at times he had qualms as to the superiority of his paternal theory of government over Laissez Faire. In one place he admits that even Frederick could not have superintended the great emigration movement to such good effect as was done by the spontaneous efforts of nature. In the social sphere Carlyle was false to his doctrine of spontaneity. In his early essays he was perpetually condemning mechanical interference with society, and contending that free play should be given to the dynamic agencies. Untrue to himself and his creed, Carlyle in his later books was constantly denouncing Government for neglecting to apply mechanical remedies for social diseases. In his view, the duty of a ruler was not to work in harmony with social impulses, but to cut and carve institutions in harmony with the ideas of great men. Puritanism under Cromwell failed because it was forgotten that society is an organism, not a piece of clay, to be moulded according to the notions of heroic potters. Strictly speaking,FrederickandCromwellshould be classed with theLatter Day Pamphlets. In thePamphletsCarlyle declaims against democratic methods, and inFrederickandCromwellwe are presented with incarnations of autocratic methods.
Of all the critics of Carlyle, no one has surpassed Mr Morley in indicating the mischievous effects whichflow from the elevation of mere will power and emotional force into guides in social and political questions. As Mr Morley says: 'The dictates of a kind heart are of superior force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse. All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes hard sentiment, above reason and method. In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right, and an eager desire for social activity, has, with deliberate contempt, thrust away from him the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that our social action is effective. A born poet, only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual self-possession to have added another name to the illustrious band of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an imaginative and highly emotional manner.'
Had Carlyle confined himself to description of social, industrial, and political diseases, he would have had an unsullied reputation in the sphere of spiritual dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of hisremedies were too vague to be of use; where they were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be useless. His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism never imposed on any sensible man on this side of cloud-land.
It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As the present writer has elsewhere said:—Carlyle has been called a prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God,Nature, Man, Death, etc.—mysteries, however, which only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it: