The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

— * "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle, "with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide." —

I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.
A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes!
You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed:
His wife and himself had separate rooms.

Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all. Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.

Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything read that book. Southey read it six times. Dickens carried it about with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities. Thackeray wrote an enthusiastic review of it. Its wisdom and eloquence were a treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was. It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah. Such comparisons profit little or nothing. The French Revolution is an original book by a man who believed in God's judgment upon sin. The memoirs of Madame Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle's own heart and soul.

Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes. It remains one of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers, even the professors themselves. And yet, greater than the book itself is Carlyle's behaviour when the first volume had been lost by Mill. Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the author. He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to his wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us." Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small matters he could be very small.

The two personalities of Carlyle and his wife are so fascinating that there may be some excuse for regarding even their quarrels, which were chiefly on her side,* with interest. But Frederick the Great will survive these broils, and so long as Carlyle's books are read his biography will be read too, as his best extraneous memorial, just, eloquent, appreciative, sincere. Carlyle was no model of austere, colourless consistency. His reverent admiration of Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt of Gladstone, whom he did not know. Peel was a great parliamentary statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple. Both belonged equally to the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose to supreme power through the representative system that he especially abhorred. On no important point, while Peel was alive, did they differ. "On the whole," said Gladstone, "Peel was the greatest man I ever knew," and in finance he was always a Peelite. That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum. Carlyle seldom studied a political question thoroughly, and of public men with whom he was acquainted only through the newspapers he was no judge. Personal contact produced estimates which, though they might be harsh, hasty, and unfair, were always interesting, and sometimes marvellously accurate. Of Peel, for instance, though he saw him very seldom, he has left a finished portrait, not omitting the great Minister's humour, for any trace of which the Peel papers may be searched in vain.

— * "Both he and she were noble and generous, but his was the soft heart and hers the stern one."—-Carlyle's Life in London, vol. ii. p. 171. —

The same can be said of Thirlwall, barring the groundless insinuation that he was dishonest in accepting a bishopric. A very different sort of bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, Carlyle liked for his cleverness, though here too he could not help suggesting that on the foundation, or rather baselessness, of the Christian religion, "Sam" agreed with him. The great historian of the age he did not appreciate at all. But, then, he never met Macaulay. "Some little ape called Keble," is not a happy formula for the author of the Christian Year, and this is one of the phrases which I think Froude might well have omitted, as meaning no more than a casual execration. Yet how minute are these defects, when set beside the intrinsic grandeur of the central figure in the book. Carlyle mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of Annandale to the best intellectual society of London. He was always, or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor over-awed," standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting aside all props and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On pretence and affectation he had no mercy. Learning, intellect, character, humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem. As Froude says, and it is the final word, Carlyle's "extraordinary talents were devoted, with an equally extraordinary purity of purpose, to his Maker's service, so far as he could see and understand that Maker's will." He led "a life of single-minded effort to do right and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed."

That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket. For criticism of his own judgment he was prepared. He knew well that acute differences of opinion might arise. The dishonesty and malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the range of his ideas. He lived in a society where such things were not done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them. He had fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle's own injunctions, and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all others he most revered. He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his accusers. Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some even of his own friends looked coldly on him. He was a sensitive man, and he felt it deeply. He shrank from going out unless he knew exactly whom he was to meet. But his pride came to his rescue, and he preferred suffering injustice in silence to discussing in public, as though it admitted of doubt, the question whether he was an honest man. He did, however, invite the opinion of his co-executor, an English judge, a close friend of Carlyle, and a man whose personal integrity was above all suspicion. Although the calumnies which gave Froude so much distress have long sunk into an oblivion of contempt, and require no formal refutation, the conclusive verdict of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen may be fitly quoted here:

"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant companion of both of you [Carlyle and Froude], and never in my life did I see any one man so much devoted to any other as you were to him during the whole of that period of time. The most affectionate son could not have acted better to the most venerated father. You cared for him, soothed him, protected him, as a guide might protect a weak old man down a steep and painful path. The admiration you have habitually expressed for him was unqualified. You never said to me one ill-natured word about him down to this day. It is to me wholly incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth, learnt to a great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you to embody in your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and weaknesses which mixed with his great qualities."*