Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  And what an education he gave her! He corrected her translations of German, he set subjects on which they were both to write poems, he sent her books, he suggested others, they exchanged comments on their reading, he encouraged, criticised, cajoled. She must force herself to read more history, for which she had little inclination. Four hours of study every morning, held to regularly, would double her mental capacity within months. But Jane, who preferred the heroic cavalry charge to successful trench warfare, replied that four hours were not enough. She would do eight. Well, six, if she must, he countered, but no more than six. Regular application was the chief thing. Repeatedly, insistently, he urged her to set herself a large task of composition. Too much reading, too much research, too much intaking with no creative reconstruction was, he told her wisely, not a good thing. Write a play, write an essay on Madame de Staël, do a translation of Don Carlos. The subjects he chose were cannily suited to appeal to Jane and to make use of her talents, of which he gave her a shrewd assessment. He saw that she was a keen observer of human foibles and concluded that her talent was essentially dramatic. Why not, then, write a tragedy on the subject of Queen Boadicea? He outlined the structure, spelled out the conflicts implicit in the action, gave her what film people call a complete ‘treatment’ of the material, and you understand his hope that in this strong and high-spirited heroine of the British past his high-spirited friend would see a kindred soul.

  But Jane’s talent – which he rightly saw was dramatic, wrongly hoped would be tragic – was already expressing itself in the only form it would ever take and in a form which suited it perfectly – her letters. For Jane was not disposed to write a tragedy on Queen Boadicea. She did not seem disposed to write a tragedy at all. And much as she adored Madame de Staël, she did not think she could write an essay on her. In fact she doubted she could write anything, and it is on this subject – the obstacles to her writing – that Jane produces her best and most characteristic prose.

  I have neither genius taste nor commonsense – I have no courage no industry no perseverance – and how in the name of wonder can I write a tragedy – I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for – I begin to think that I was actually meant by nature to be a fine Lady – My friends that is my acquaintances have told me this all along but I would not believe them – For the last month however I have shown lamentable symptoms of a tendency that way – I have spent all my time in riding on horseback, dressing three times a day, singing Italian airs and playing at shuttlecock! Dear Sir what will cure me? I have just enough of reason left to perceive I am in a bad way – if another such month passes over me – I am a lost woman – even my ambition is expiring very fast. I am as proud of striking the shuttlecock two hundred times as if I had written two hundred admirable verses – … Oh dear me! I shall never hold a respectable place among literary ladies – but I know I can be a first rate fine Lady whenever I please – the temptation is strong; furnish me with an antidote if you can.15

  The writing is fast-paced, lively, riotously specific. Her equation of the two hundred strokes at shuttlecock with two hundred lines of poetry reduces both accomplishments to equal absurdity. With Jane, aspiration is a subject for comedy, not tragedy, and the comedy is dazzling. Spirit tries to soar and is plucked back to earth by dresses that must be changed, shuttlecocks that must be batted, tunes that must be sung. Another day: ‘I opened “Mary Stewart” after breakfast but Dr Fiffe interrupted me, and teased me to play at shuttlecock till I consented – When we had finished: I observed the Piano open and Lord Byron’s “fare thee well” (my favourite song) staring me in the face: I sat down and played and sung badly till dinner time. The evening I spent as I spend too many, at an odious tea party … Since my return I have read Atala, twelve lines of Mary Stewart; written two pages of two Novels and four lines of an ode to Whilhelmina and moreover I have darned two rents in my gown behold the fruit of my resolution – the sum total of my labours.’16 Her comedy works by juxtaposing intellectual concerns and domestic demands. Exasperation is her constant mode.

  Although his sense of humour could not be called playful, the author of Sartor Resartus was to prove no mean comic writer himself, and he fully appreciated the art of Jane Welsh’s letters. But however much he treasured them, he never considered her letters enough of a goal for her talents. He was a demanding teacher. She must not waste herself in trifles. She must write something serious and sustained. Carlyle bestowed upon her, in letter after letter, some of the best advice about starting to write that an aspiring writer has ever received. ‘You really magnify the matter too much: never think of the press or public when you are writing: … If you cannot think of any proper theme, cannot get in motion for whatever cause; then let the business rest for a week; cease to vex yourself about it, in time materials will come unsought.’17 But at last it occurred to him to wonder why Jane was having so much trouble getting down to business. Where was the difficulty? As he saw it, she had not only talent but a comfortable home and total freedom from the ‘heartbreaking isolation’ and the ‘thousand vulgar cares’ which oppress so many writers – that is to say, himself. He imagined her surrounded by friends and relations who loved her and gave her the emotional support he missed. In this, however, he was wrong. People sought her company, but none was a companion of the soul; no one – except him – urged her to achievement. She had gardened her mind for her father’s sake, but her father had died. ‘I am alone, and no one loves me better for my industry.’ Without constant reassurance, she succumbed to despair about her own talent. ‘I do fear I am fit for nothing – I wish I could refrain from teasing you with this incessant subject.’ And again, ‘I can feel but I cannot write; the more I try it the more I am convinced that nature has raised some insurmountable obstacle to my desires – it is very hard! for I am sure I have known more ignorant and more senseless people than myself that scribble away delightfully.’18 There was something dependent – something that had been made dependent – in Jane’s creativity. Letter writing was a congenial form for her, because in correspondence feedback comes quickly and the impulse to write for immediate response is wholly legitimate. Her need to be validated intellectually explains, too, why Carlyle was becoming more and more important to her, despite her infatuations and flirtations – none of which she concealed from him – with more eligible men.

  Increasingly, the correspondence with Carlyle was the only thing of intellectual substance in her life. Often at the end of the week, she wrote to her cousin, her spirits and industry would start to flag, but then one of Mr Carlyle’s brilliant letters would arrive to inspire her with new resolution, to brighten all her prospects and hopes with ‘the golden hue of his own imagination’.

  To Carlyle himself, her expressions of affection and appreciation grew ever warmer. ‘I owe you so much! feelings and sentiments that ennoble my character, that give dignity interest and enjoyment to my life – in return, I can only love you, and that I do, from the bottom of my heart.’ Understandably, Thomas interpreted this as the declaration of love he so long had hoped for, and he responded with exuberance, symphonic delight, dark notes about the peril they faced and a rich resolution: ‘If your happiness be shipwrecked by my means, then woe, woe is to me without end! But it will not: no, you will yet be blessed yourself in making me more blessed than man has right to look for being upon Earth.’19

  Jane panicked. She had been misunderstood. The love she bore him was a sisterly love, deep, delightful, but not impassioned enough to reconcile her to the existence of a married woman, the cares and occupations of which were her disgust. Was it possible that he, too, thought her an ordinary female, incapable of feeling strong affection for a man her own age without having as its object their union for life? She would be his truest friend while she breathed the breath of life, but she would never marry him. ‘Never, never! Not though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet shall be.’20 Carlyle replied with patient compliance. He was content to continue their
friendship just as it had been. So long as she had charity to listen, he would pour out his affections and his plans. If she married, he would cease writing to her, but not loving her. And so the flurry of anxiety on her part, of hope on his, subsided. But I think this ‘misunderstanding’ was a turning point in their relationship, for the words love and marriage had been spoken between them. She might reject the idea of marrying him, but she had conceived it, and it seems that no matter how impossible a thing appears, if it can be imagined, it can be enacted.

  We should remember at this point the extent to which the Carlyles’ courtship was conducted by correspondence. They were rarely in each other’s physical presence. After the disastrous visit of February 1822, a full year went by before Jane and Thomas saw each other again, a year in which Jane waited for the capricious Mrs Welsh, who had taken an immense dislike to Carlyle, to veer around with another wind and wonder why Thomas Carlyle never came out to visit any more. Even after they were engaged, an entire year passed in which they did not see each other once. Clearly, this was no union of sensualists, but of people who create with words their own experience. Indeed, one fascination of this epistolary courtship is that, with such a mass of material, with so many bulletins on the state of the soul, it is possible to see how change occurs, how language is eventually found to describe what has been felt, how with the finding of the language the feelings begin to change again.

  For a year and a half (April 1823 to January 1825) the correspondence continues at the same pitch of heightened platonism. Love on both sides is fervently expressed but is understood not to be the sort of love that leads to marriage. Thomas imagines their idyll will end when Jane agrees to marry someone else. He has said that their correspondence must cease upon her marriage. Jane cannot imagine herself giving up their correspondence, which has become her chief pleasure, but she also cannot imagine marrying Carlyle. Nothing seems likely to change. And then something changes. Because of a joke.

  Thomas had long cherished the idea of abandoning the haunts of men and establishing for himself a kind of hermitage in a wild and desolate part of the country. In his heart of hearts, he hoped that Jane would accompany him, making the hermitage more like the Garden of Eden. By the end of 1824, his fantasy had crystallised into a semi-rational plan to support himself by farming, so that, in country quiet, he could write his books and improve his health. When he mentioned his plan to Jane, she offhandedly – jestingly, as it turned out – suggested that he farm her estate of Craigenputtock, which was just then in need of a tenant. To Thomas, this was no joke but a hint that Jane might be persuaded to involve herself in his fantasy. He wrote back immediately, in a letter too rife with purpose to waste time on sentiment, proposing that they marry and live at Craigenputtock together.

  Now Jane’s father had gone to considerable trouble to escape from the southern Scottish moorlands. Farming had been his family heritage; he left it and turned himself into a physician and a town man. Jane was, like him, sociable and urban in her tastes, and Craigenputtock, an hour by horse from the nearest town, set among treeless hills, a house completely isolated in a countryside which seems fitter for cows and sheep than for people, was truly one of the most desolate spots in the British Isles. Jane insisted that she had been joking and begged Thomas to think of a plan more promising than farming the most barren spot in Dumfriesshire. ‘What a thing that would be to be sure! you and I keeping house at Craigenputtock! … I would not spend a month on it with an Angel.’21 They were to spend six years there.

  But for now Jane gave various reasons – some good, some silly – for refusing to marry him. She denied aspiring to marry a rich man but she would not marry someone who would force her to live more meanly than she was accustomed to; the sacrifice would make her resent him. Besides, Providence had assigned her to a certain station, and she could not abandon it without the approval of her ‘judgment’. Beneath these prudential considerations, one senses that Jane is unsure of her feelings. Carlyle still does not quite measure up to Saint-Preux. And then too, though Julie gave herself sexually to Saint-Preux (a matter that seems by no means at issue between Jane and Thomas), she never would consent to marry him. So let Thomas apply himself to improving his circumstances, let him use his talents to make up for the inequality in their births, and then they would talk of marrying. ‘If all this were realised I think I should have good sense enough to abate something of my romantic ideal, and to content myself with stopping short on this side idolatry.’22

  She tried to highlight the inadequacies of his circumstances out of tact, to avoid mentioning his inadequacies of person, but Carlyle, by accusing her of following the vulgar counsels of prudence, forced her to speak even more frankly about her reservations of feeling.

  I am prudent, I fear, only because I am not strongly tempted to be otherwise – My heart is capable (I feel it is) of a love to which no deprivation would be a sacrifice – a love which … would bear down all the restraints which duty and expediency might throw in the way, … But the all-perfect Mortal, who could inspire me with a love so extravagant, is nowhere to be found – exists nowhere but in the Romance of my own imagination! … In the mean time, I should be very mad, were I to act as if from the influence of such a passion, while my affections are in a state of perfect tranquillity.23

  Jane was trying wholeheartedly to understand herself, but language was failing her: she loved Carlyle, but she was not in love with him; her sentiments were such as one would feel for a brother but not for a husband. She could not imagine marrying anyone else, she could not imagine life without him, but was this strong attachment to him ‘passion’? There are certain experiences to which language gives names – ‘being in love’ is perhaps the most interesting – which are never precisely described. Worldly wisdom says you will know when it happens, but worldly wisdom is often wrong. Jane, sensibly if dangerously, made behaviour a test of experience. Passionate love was the kind of love that would move her to ignore the demands of duty and expediency. Her formulation is sensible, because it is easier to describe and consequently to understand behaviour than it is to describe experience, easier to say what you did for a man than what you felt for him. Her formulation is dangerous, because, if a person can bring herself to behave in the way defined, then she can deduce the feeling that inspired it – that is, if Jane could make herself agree to marry Thomas, then she must, according to her emotional syllogism, be in love with him. Perhaps more ‘being in love’ is of this kind – deduced – than we might care to admit. The calm, delightful affection one has enjoyed without being made untranquil, suddenly seems deeper, more turbulent, after certain words are uttered. Commitment grows when you begin to use the language of commitment.

  A further stumbling block was the institution of marriage itself. To Jane it had always presented itself as a pitiful waste of her talents, a squandering of genius on the ordinary. In this she had been encouraged by Thomas, who imagined her – until very late – marrying someone else. In the common world, he told her, the great object of a woman’s existence was to ‘get a rich husband and a fine house and give dinners, just as it is the great object of ravens to find carrion’. To him it appeared ‘more enviable to be a sister of Madame de Staël’s for half a year, than “to suckle fools and chronicle small beer” for half a century’.24 But vulgar marriage with a common rich man was one thing, marriage with Carlyle, a heroic spiritual undertaking, quite another. Jane’s imagination finally rose to the challenge, although it was perhaps the hardest part of her education, as it is for many ambitious young women, to acknowledge that the traditional institution of marriage could apply to her, too; that even capacious spirits could submit to that ancient containment. But this common, vulgar custom, so shockingly interruptive of her plans, was her only way out of an intolerable situation – perpetual childhood, perpetual life with her mother, perpetual inability to pursue her own plans – even if it led to another equally draining. In late January of 1825 she wrote to Thomas, ‘Not many months ago,
I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife; at present I consider this the most probable destiny for me; and in a year or so, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one.’25

  She over-estimated the time. The big step, as I have said, is between not conceiving something at all and conceiving it to be impossible. Once you have conceived it as impossible, it is but a short step to finding it possible – probable – certain. And so, without being wholly in control of the process at the last, Jane found herself after this flurry of letters, somewhat to her own surprise, ‘half engaged’. ‘I who have such a natural horror at engagements! it gives me asthma every time I think of it.’26 She did not know, she said, how his spirit had gained such a mastery over hers, in spite of her pride and stubbornness, but so it was. Looking backward, we can say that the stronger, more resolute imagination was bound to prevail, but it is also true that social reality left her few alternatives. How long could she go on playing shuttlecocks and being unable to read when there were visitors in the house? And how could she live, except as the technical dependant of her mother or of some man?