The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength and early training to be the wife of a poor man. She was too anxious a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles. Her father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the necessary servants. In Carlyle's home there were no servants at all. His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the family. Why should his wife be in a different position from his mother's? There was no reason, in the nature of things. But custom is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle's married life were a hard struggle against grinding poverty. Carlyle was grandly indifferent to material things. He wanted no luxuries, except tobacco and a horse. He would not have altered his message to mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies. What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as they thought proper. He never swerved from the path of integrity. He did not know his way to the house of Rimmon. The mere practical ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might have realised a fortune in business. Carlyle just made enough money to live in decent and wholesome comfort.

From the first Carlyle's conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled him. But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship, pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller. Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a rabbit. Herbert Spencer was "the most unending ass in Christendom." "Scribbling Sands and Eliots" were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle's shoe-strings. Editing Keats was "currying dead dog." Ruskin could only point out the correggiosity of Correggio. Political economy was the dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle's eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving, awe-compelling. They did not put his hearers at their ease, and Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.

— * McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant —

In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he received a visit from the great author himself. Carlyle did not take to many people, but he took to Froude. Perhaps he was touched by the younger man's devotion. Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he relinquished it himself. At all events he expressed a wish to see him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home. Nothing could be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale, drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs. Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of Edinburgh.

Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation. "For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him, and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow- creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased, after Carlyle was dead.+

— * This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now. + "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling, about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and contras there."—Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From The Hill, Dumfries. —

Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs. Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be. Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed by himself.

Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards, however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens, a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents, and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the 6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother John as executors, contained the following passage:

"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude (as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead. To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay, the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted Froude.

Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned, he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was sure to be well received. His English in Ireland was approaching completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son, Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man relied upon the younger as upon a son.