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 1 P.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 indeed hers. 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; and in 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 her husband. 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 addition to 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 upon his work, his plans, his comforts.[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, her part 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 niece keeps 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.'