III
The volumes before us, as we have hinted, were expected, not without excitement, by those people for whose benefit we are about to review them. It must be confessed that they have not wholly escaped the fate that is apt to befall the progeny of parturient mountains. Not that they are precisely what Horace would have expected them to be: they are anything but small; yet, about the contents there is something mousey—the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are disappointing. The letters they contain—a bare third of which are by Jane Welsh—were all written between the middle of 1821 and the end of 1826—that is to say, before either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves. At his best, Carlyle was not a letter-writer; he was a clever man who wrote letters. These have sometimes the personal quality of a good essay, never the charm of familiar correspondence. In these early days his mind is as undeveloped as his style; he is crude, awkward, over-emphatic; apter at catching the faults than the excellences of the eighteenth-century prose writers. That one should write to please rather than to improve one's correspondent was an idea which seems hardly to have occurred to him:
"When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite great quantities of nonsense, which even my own judgment condemns—when too late for being mended."
That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions to his future wife:
"I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own conceptions. We amass ideas, it is true; but at the same time we proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of culture," etc.
Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages. Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one passage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss Welsh just what he thought of it:
"[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the manière d'être of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately titillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places where they sleep and dress; they live in cafés and promenades and theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."
Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Mérimée, Mme. de Sévigné, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural. Yet, under all her pert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please two people—her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore, to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming. Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises, and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals—the head and the heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G—— is, in its way, a little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter specimen of her style:
"Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amusement within doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without. 'Cœlebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I strongly suspect) on Cœleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle—just for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair; and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people retain their faculties in rainy weather!"
We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs. Carlyle will no doubt discover what it is that they both possess and Carlyle lacks. We would say, if permitted once again to trot out the weary and well-fired hack, that you may think of Carlyle writing his "Frederick" in a tail-coat, or whatever costume you prefer, and feel sure, if your mind be not too literal, that his letters were written in the same full dress. Far pleasanter to imagine Jane Welsh, coming home from a rout, slipping a gay dressing-gown over a satin petticoat, and gossiping till the fire burnt low. What is more, before she had the privilege of "doing for" a great man with a Scotch sense of economy and a peasant's notion of wifely duties, she may often have so gossiped. The fact is, Carlyle, in his most playful moments, kept one eye on "the eternities," and Jane, in her most solemn, never lost sight of the comic spirit.
The volumes before us are well printed on good paper, and without are embellished by a device—two hearts, stamped in gold, linked with a golden ring, and supported by a plump little cupid; the same device is repeated on the title-page in mauve. Trifles may be significant; whether this symbol was suggested by the editor, or whether the editor was influenced by it, are questions deserving thought. Turning to matters less subtle, we wish that Mr. Alexander Carlyle had not found it necessary to rake up the ashes which reticence had allowed to grow cold. Also, we wish that he had adopted some other policy towards Jane Welsh; the pin, even between deft fingers, is an ignoble and unattractive weapon. In his notes he contrives a small and unpleasant sensation (vol. i, p. 319) which would be more effective were it supported by anything better than a piece of gossip, for which no authority is given, and the doubtful interpretation of one passage in a letter. We are grateful to him, however, for translating all the Latin, French, German, Italian, and Scotch words, and for several touches of unconscious humour, of which the following is a pleasant example:
"Pen (from Penfillan, home of Miss Welsh's paternal grandfather) was her pet name used to distinguish her from the Welshes of her maternal grandfather's household, especially from her mother's younger sister, whose name was also Jeannie Welsh. Conscious of procrastinating too long in writing, Miss Welsh here sportively enlarges Pen not into Penfillan, but into Penelope, the name of Ulysses' faithful wife, who put off so long the hateful task of choosing a husband from the wasteful and riotous horde of suitors assembled in her house during Ulysses' protracted absence. See Homer's 'Odyssey.'"