There is, of course, a great deal of mutual admiration of each other's work, very genuine, ever pleasant to hear about, expressed in the warmest language,—even in those superlatives which Emerson derided.
There are also lovely bits of home life upon both sides,—faultless interiors over which the mind will linger with delight in times far away from these, when the students of another age strive to make to themselves a picture of what sort of men these the great of the nineteenth century really were. There is nothing told in these volumes that will detract from the fame of either, but much that will add to the kindly impression which they have made upon their time. One cannot but think, as the letters grow more infrequent, and are written with greater labor, of how old age was a weariness to these great men as to others,—how the very grasshopper became a burden, and how inexpressibly sad was the decay of their great powers. Emerson begins to lag first, although a few years younger than Carlyle, and Carlyle implores him, almost piteously, to write. There is an interval of one, two, and even three years in the correspondence toward the end; and after Emerson's last visit to England they wrote no more. Carlyle's gentleness and tenderness show themselves very beautifully in these last letters to his one best friend. When he finds that it has become hard for Emerson to write, he begs at first that he be not forsaken, but after a little says in effect: Never mind, my friend, if it wearies you to write, write to me no more. I will still write to you, and thus our friendship shall not lack for a voice. When the sweet bells had become a little jangled in Emerson's brain, when memory had left him or played him false, and there was a weakening of all his powers,—he sat still in his own home among his friends and kindred, his household intact, and surrounded by the fondest care and affection; while his old friend over the seas—the broken giant, the god of thunder, now grown silent—sat in utter desolation in the home he had reared after infinite struggle and endeavor, and wrapped in a solitude so utter and so black that the heart which can look upon it without pity must be a heart of stone. Carlyle died on the 5th of April, 1881, being eighty-five years old. Emerson died on the 27th of April, 1882, at the age of seventy-nine. In death they were not long divided.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Carlyle is one of the many great men who have suffered severely at the hands of their biographers, and from the pen clan in general. When the world knew him alone or chiefly through the lurid splendors of "The French Revolution,"—that book which, as he himself would have expressed it, was a truth, though a truth written in hell-fire,—or through the uncanny labyrinths of "Sartor Resartus," or the subtle analysis of the "Hero-Worship," or the more pleasing pages of his "Burns," or "Milton," or the "Characteristics," it would stand aloof in wonder, in admiration, almost in awe. But when with his own hand—for he was primarily the cause of all—he stripped away the privacy which he had guarded so jealously through life, and through the "Reminiscences" and his wife's letters, which he prepared for publication, took, as we may say, the roof off from the house, that all the world might look in, then indeed he fell from his lofty pedestal and became like one of us. Hero-worship was no longer possible, but loud abuse and recrimination, or apology and a cry for charitable construction, became the order of the day. We may say that he had only himself to thank for it; but who can help regretting that the man in his old age should so have destroyed the fair fabric of his own fame? We are not so rich in heroes that we can afford to lose even the least of the kingly band; and we have felt that we have sustained an irreparable loss ever since the luckless day when we took up the first of the intensely interesting but most painful books relating to this great life.
Let us look a little at this hero's domestic life. What was its foundation, what its outcome? That there was something wrong at the foundation seems to be clear. And it was not so much the fact that neither party married the first choice of the heart,—though it is true that Jane Welsh loved with all the ardor of her nature Edward Irving first, and that Carlyle undoubtedly would have married his first love, the fair and amiable Margaret Gordon, the original of Blumine in "Sartor Resartus," had not poverty prevented,—but rather was it their unsuitability to each other. She was a lady, delicately reared, and with a taste for society and the refinements of life; with a love for admiration, too, and a wish to shine in her little sphere. He was a peasant, coarsely bred, and scorning the amenities of life to which he was unaccustomed,—scorning, too, the chivalric feeling with which better bred men look upon women and treat their wives. He told her this, bluntly and brutally, before marriage. They two were to be one, and he that one. He had the peasant idea of being master, and to the end of his days held fast to it. They were never, to his mind, equals, but he was the chief and she the subject. This was what put her down intellectually. In her youth she had literary tastes and ambitions, and doubtless much ability; but after marriage we hear no more of that. Even in the seven years at Craigenputtoch, when one would think that out of sheer weariness and want of occupation she would have written or studied, we hear nothing of any such attempts. Her married life seems to have quenched all this utterly.
Then all the domestic drudgery, which to her seemed such a burden, and appears to have afflicted her to the end of life, seemed to him to be the natural and proper thing for a woman. He had all his life been accustomed to see his mother and sisters at their tasks, naturally and uncomplainingly, and he could never understand why all women should not feel in the same way. Then he was fond of solitude, and looked upon a visitor as an emissary of the devil; and he failed to see that a gay, pleasure-loving, volatile, sparkling girl could not share his feelings. So he shut her up remorselessly,—never dreaming that he was cruel. That she was fond of admiration was nothing to him, though he was fond of it himself in his own grim way; he was the central figure of this household, and if she was deprived of a natural enjoyment it seemed a trifle to him. In short, their whole philosophy of life was different, their characters unsuited to each other, and their tempers of the order described as "difficult." It is not necessary to blame one or the other entirely for what followed. He saw everything in one light, she in another; what but disappointment and unrest could ensue?