That her spirits were entirely gone and her whole vivacious nature changed at the end of the Craigenputtoch period is proved by sentences from her letters, To his mother she writes:—
"It is my husband's worst fault with me that I will not or cannot speak. Often when he has talked to me for an hour without answer, he will beg for some sign of life on my part, and all that I can give him is a little kiss."
And she was a woman who loved to talk, and he the best and most brilliant talker of his day. Surely, this is pitiful. But after they went up to London this aspect of things was improved for her, and had it not been that thereafter she suffered from constant ill-health she would doubtless have been quite comfortable. But her health was bad, and in the ignorance of the day the dosing was bad; and when we read of the medicine which she took as she took her daily bread, we only wonder that she lived to tell the tale. It speaks a great deal for her Scotch constitution that she survived her remedies.
Carlyle was soon in the zenith of his fame, and the great men of the day sat at his feet, figuratively speaking, and would literally have done so had not his growl been so fierce that it kept them at bay. Of those who did "beard the lion in his den, the Douglas in his hall," many were immolated in his diary; and we see them, now that it has been published, like so many flies with pins stuck through them, fastened to the paper. Poor Charles Lamb stands there, bloodless, fleshless; but we think scarcely the less of gentle Elia as we look upon him, but far less of the cruel perpetrator of the atrocity. Leigh Hunt, too, has a pin quite through his warm heart; and Stuart Mill, and many others. One wonders sometimes if Froude himself escaped, or if he were there too, like a giant bluebottle, desiccated as the rest; and was that the reason why he did not suppress all the damaging letters and recollections, but maliciously gave them to the world?
Mrs. Carlyle's pen could be dipped in acid also, as has been proved in her comments upon the men and women of her time. These, to be sure, are very brief and fragmentary, and it has been a source of much wonder that, knowing intimately as she did many of the notable persons of her time, she has not left behind in any single letter a valuable portrait or even sketch of any of these great people. What priceless words of Darwin she might have gathered up, which all the world would have eagerly read; what characteristic anecdotes she could have told of Tennyson,—what an insight she might have given into the man behind the poet; what noble things she must have known of Stuart Mill; what inimitable facetiæ concerning the Hunts; what spirited stories she could have told of Jeffrey; what a light she could have cast over dark places in the life of Edward Irving! Why did she not do this, we wonder. Did the dread of assassination hover over her? For Charles Buller, Carlyle's friend, had just made his plea for the man who killed his wife for keeping a diary: "What else could a poor fellow do with a wife who kept a diary, but murder her?"
We cannot but regret that the sketches were not written. They would have been immortal; for her power in this line has been unequalled by any one who has written in these later days. As it is, she has, unconsciously to herself, left a picture of the greatest of all the men she knew—Carlyle himself—which can never be blotted out. The portrait is full-length, full of Rembrandt-like light and shadow, and remorselessly faithful. Painted not for the public eye, but sketched in a thousand little parts, in matter-of-fact every-day letters to humble friends, with no remotest thought that other eyes would ever see them,—it is this by which Carlyle as a man will be known to all coming time. Not a hero, not a monster, as some have claimed, but a faulty man, with the defects of his qualities, described by a woman faulty like himself. A constitutional growler, with a warm heart withal, and infinite capacities for tenderness; selfish it may be, but inexorably just; cold to all the outside world, but warm-hearted and generous and magnificently loyal to his family, throughout all his distinguished career. No trace of snobbery or false shame in him. Not liking the reformers of his own day, but almost deifying the reformers of the past, and himself making it his mission, from earliest youth to hoary age, to reform the world in his own particular Carlylean way; fiercely assailing much that passed for religion, but being always deeply and truly religious at heart. What a vast contradictory Titan he seems in it all! If a lovely wind-flower, fresh and fragrant as the breath of morning, was crushed in the arms of this god of thunder, what shall we say? Shall we reject the god of thunder, who gave us the "Heroes," and the "Cromwell," and the "Frederick," and wish that he might have been a gentle poet singing to a lute; or shall we thank God for him, even as he was, though we give a tear to the wind-flower?
