The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for "personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit. For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him," he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam, have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that a similar view should have been taken of the relations between Froude and Carlyle.

It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came, and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence. Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said, half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment, and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him- and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen," said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible. If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not always being killed."+

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* Life, i. 302.
+ Life, i. 209.
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That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June, 1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very faults that were attributed to himself, with the following sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life, and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.

If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826 Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters. His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him. Nobody could help him.

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* I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection
with Fraser.
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Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco. Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the under side of things," to quote his own definition of the undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people, for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude, faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of this book is that it introduced the British and American public to some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes, as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best, the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire. Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down- trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted. Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself, and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.