The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him. He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit …. She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any) were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine benevolence as well as hospitality."*

— * The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110. —

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal, romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton, and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had undertaken to discharge.

Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster. Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November, 1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen, the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the memorials entrusted to Froude.

In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however, acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs. Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November, 1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind, to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be told.

On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared, including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less. Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which was never in fact realised.

In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened. The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss. But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude should have published the memoir is a question which may be discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself. But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude knew Carlyle, and the public did not.

— * Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230. —

Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these words:

"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine- tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.