Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Carlyle received the good news in London, where he had been for many months overseeing the publication of his life of Schiller and beginning to establish himself in the literary world. He wrote that he would return to Scotland directly. That was January. It was April before they had their reunion. Between that encounter and the next, a visit Jane paid to the Carlyle family in Dumfriesshire, four months went by. Their eighteen-month engagement was every bit as epistolary as their prior acquaintanceship had been. The incidents of drama, too, were transacted by mail. Carlyle, for example, had scruples to deal with. He did not want it thought that he was marrying Jane for her money. He urged her to make over to her mother her inheritance, largely the property at Haddington and the farm of Craigenputtock, with its yearly rent of some £200. This, accordingly, Jane did in July 1825, leaving herself as penniless as her future husband.

  Mrs Welsh acted the good parent. By objecting to the marriage, she drove her daughter into the arms of her fiancé and solidified the young people’s commitment to each other. So long as Mrs Welsh had been the feeble, incompetent widow, Jane had been her protector. So long as she refrained from comment, Jane supplied her place and urged caution on her lover. But when Mrs Welsh objected to the marriage on the grounds of Thomas’s bad temper, Jane replied that she preferred to suffer from temper of her own choosing than from temper – like her mother’s – thrust upon her.

  No! my own Darling! we shall not be parted on this account. Your irritability is the very natural consequence of continual suffering; when you are well, and happy … you will be the best humoured man alive. And tho’ you should never be good-humoured, what then? Do we not love each other? And what is love if it cannot make all rough places smooth!27

  From which will be seen the extent to which Jane has lost her detachment, her irony, and much of her instinct for self-preservation in the process of scrambling from the maternal nest.

  Carlyle was more and more disposed to assert himself. This was evident during the next crisis, deciding where Mrs Welsh was to live after the wedding. Jane, concerned about her mother’s loneliness, no doubt feeling guilt about leaving her, suggested that she live with them. But Thomas objected strenuously. Mrs Welsh, as the older party, might think the household was hers to rule, whereas in fact, man was born to command and woman to obey. He could consent to live with Mrs Welsh only on condition that she thoroughly accept this.

  His metamorphosis from humble suitor to arrogant cock of the walk is distressing. His encouragement of Jane’s ambition ceases. No more talk of Madame de Staël. He assumes with cool majesty that taking care of him is a full-time affair. He imagines the duties of their household rigorously divided:

  Do you not think, that when you on one side of our household shall have faithfully gone thro your housewife duties, and I on the other shall have written my allotted pages, we shall meet over our frugal meal with far happier and prouder hearts than thousands that are not blessed with any duties, and whose agony is the bitterest of all, ‘the agony of a too easy bed?’ … I predict that we shall be the finest little pair imaginable! A true-hearted dainty lady-wife; a sick and sulky, but diligent, and not falsehearted or fundamentally unkind goodman: and these two fronting the hardships of life in faithful and eternal union.28

  If Jane was not to know the agony of a too easy bed, there is no saying that she was not warned. When his right to be sick and sulky but not fundamentally unkind is built into their understanding of the marriage, whereas she is only given leave to be true-hearted and dainty, how could her lot be too easy? Yet, so complete has Jane’s education been in the five years since her meeting with Carlyle, that she accepts this picture without a single wisecrack or splinter of elegant mockery. In fact Jane considered this the best-natured letter she had received from Thomas in some time.

  She was indeed his pupil, and the subject on which, above all, he had instructed her most eloquently – giving her a credo she proved ready to receive – was the superiority of intellectual power to any other kind of power and the superiority of glory achieved by writing to any other kind of glory. Years before, he had written to her:

  Kings & Potentates are a gaudy folk that flaunt about with plumes & ribbons to decorate them, and catch the coarse admiration of the many-headed monster, for a brief season – then sink into forgetfulness … but the Miltons, the de Staëls – these are the very salt of the Earth; they derive their ‘patents of Nobility direct from Almighty God’, and live in the bosoms of all true men to all ages.29

  So, when she finally brought herself around to the resolution of marrying Carlyle, she knew well enough how to defend her choice. She knew that people would think the match unequal, with all the advantages on her side. She knew they would say that he was poor and not well born and not even good-looking, tending towards the rough. ‘But a hundred chances to one, they would not tell you he is among the cleverest men of his day; and not the cleverest only but the most enlightened! that he possesses all the qualities I deem essential in my husband – a warm true heart to love me, a towering intellect to command me and a spirit of fire to be the guiding starlight of my life … Such then is this future husband of mine; not a great man according to the most common sense of the word, but truly great in its natural, proper sense – a scholar, a poet, a philosopher, a wise and noble man, one who holds his patent of nobility from Almighty God and whose high stature of manhood is not to be measured by the inch-rule of Lilliputs! – Will you like him? no matter whether you do or not – since I like him in the deepest part of my soul.’30

  This letter, sent to her uncle’s wife in 1826, at the time of their wedding, made its way after Jane’s death forty years later to Carlyle, who used it, along with the rest of their correspondence, as fodder for his monumental remorse.

  NOTES

  1The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders, Kenneth Fielding et al., Duke-Edinburgh Edition, 9 vols. to date (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970-), 2:196. Henceforth referred to in the notes as Duke-Edinburgh. The most recently published volume of this magnificent edition covers material to 1837 only, and Carlyle lived to 1881. I calculate that more than two dozen volumes will be needed to complete this epic task.

  2.Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. James Anthony Froude (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 327–28. This story was originally told by Geraldine Jewsbury in the brief biography which formed the basis of Carlyle’s reminiscence about Jane.

  3.Ibid., 346.

  4.Ibid., 363–64.

  5.Duke-Edinburgh 1:363.

  6.Ibid., 366.

  7.Ibid., 420.

  8.Roughly, ‘All for glory and her!’ Carlyle is intending to quote from Schiller’s Thirty Years’ War in which Duke Christian of Braunschweig goes into battle with a motto on his standard alluding to his passion for the countess of the Palatinate, a great king’s daughter from whom he wished to win a tribute to his courage. But Christian’s motto was ‘Alles für Gott und Sie’; he fought for her and God, not for glory. Moreover, the great translator of German thought is guilty here of a grammatical error. The German preposition für takes the accusative, sie and not the dative, ihr. Duke-Edinburgh 2:15; see also 2:26 and note.

  9.Duke-Edinburgh 2:20.

  10.Ibid., 26.

  11.Ibid., 38.

  12.Ibid., 17.

  13.Ibid., 18.

  14.Ibid., 38.

  15.Ibid., 108.

  16.Ibid., 114.

  17.Ibid., 251–52.

  18.Ibid., 197, 286, 321.

  19.Ibid., 317, 416, 420.

  20.Ibid., 427–28.

  21.Duke-Edinburgh 3:250.

  22.Ibid.

  23.Ibid., 264.

  24.Duke-Edinburgh 2:313–14.

  25.Duke-Edinburgh 3:266.

  26.Ibid., 281.

  27.Ibid., 394.

  28.Duke-Edinburgh 4:102–3.

  29.Duke-Edinburgh 2:132.

  30.Duke-Edinburgh 4:141.

  EFFIE GRAY


  and

  JOHN RUSKIN

  1848–1854

  prelude: carlyle and the gentleman from paisley

  The day was, for different reasons, a significant one – as famous in English history as July 4 is to Americans – for April 10 in that revolutionary year of 1848, when monarchies disappeared all over Europe, was the day of the Chartist demonstration, the day that revolution did not take place in England. Two hundred thousand people were to march through the streets of London for a rally at Kennington Common, then back to the House of Commons to present en masse a petition for various democratic reforms endorsed with five million signatures. The streets of London were deserted in anticipation of violence; the government had called upon the old Duke of Wellington to arrange the guarding of the Custom House, the Bank, the Exchange, the Post Office and all other important public buildings. Downing Street was barricaded and the gates of the Admiralty closed. Soldiers and mounted Guardsmen were posted at Kennington Common and in strategic places throughout the city. But no force was needed to keep the demonstrators in order. On April 10, 1848, it rained.1

  Thomas Carlyle, who walked out to see the revolution, hoping to describe it for his wife, in the country for her health, saw very little before the rain and fiercely cold wind forced him to take shelter in the Burlington Arcade. He struck up a conversation with a gentleman from Paisley who was able to inform him that the Chartist leaders had asked the crowd to disperse and return home peacefully, without marching to the Houses of Parliament. And so, cold and disappointed, the author of Chartism, the prophet of destruction to sham forms of government, took the omnibus back to his house in Chelsea and wrote a letter to his wife about the day’s events. Later he would learn that the crowd on Kennington Common had been closer to twenty thousand than the two hundred thousand predicted and that the famous petition bore closer to two than five million signatures, many of them – such as the signatures of the Queen and the prince consort – obviously fake.

  newlyweds

  The Chartist demonstration prevented John James Ruskin, prosperous importer of sherry and his wife, Margaret, from travelling to Scotland for the wedding of their son, already famous as the author of the first two volumes of Modern Painters. At any rate, the shutdown of London and the fear of violence provided an acceptable excuse for Mr and Mrs Ruskin’s absence. In fact, they had never planned to attend their son’s wedding in Perth. Scottish by birth and upbringing, both Mr and Mrs Ruskin hated Scotland and she, in particular, dreaded going there. In earlier days, when she was just a poor relation in the Ruskin household, her future husband’s father had killed himself by cutting his throat and it was Margaret who discovered him and held the throat together with her hands while screaming for help. In later years, the closer she got to the site of Mr Ruskin’s suicide, the greater was her dread, the greater her reluctance to proceed. She crossed the Scottish border unwillingly, entered the city of Perth even more so, and drew the line absolutely at the threshold of Bowerswell, even after it was sold to their distant relations, the Grays, even after the old house was torn down and another with the same name erected on the same land. As for Mr Ruskin, who travelled widely throughout England on business and the continent for pleasure, he claimed to be unable to sleep anywhere but under his own roof. In other words, the Ruskins had many and excellent reasons for avoiding the wedding of their only child, none of which had anything to do with disappointment that John had not married more spectacularly – had not secured, for example, Charlotte Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s granddaughter – and was allying himself merely with Effie Gray, of the Bowerswell Grays, whose father was a lawyer and whose grandfather, though a decent man, was not Sir Walter Scott.

  So, without the immediate blessing of the senior Ruskins, who were not only their twenty-nine-year-old son’s sole source of financial support but also his most intimate friends, John Ruskin was married to nineteen-year-old Euphemia Gray, in the drawing room of the bride’s parents’ home at four in the afternoon of April 10, 1848. The Reverend Mr John Edward Touch, minister of Kinnoull, presided. The bride’s cousin, Eliza Jameson and two little sisters, Sophie and Alice Gray, served as bridesmaids. The bride and groom ‘bore up with the greatest firmness throughout the trying ceremony’,2 as the bride’s mother reported to the absent mother of the groom, and immediately departed for their honeymoon while the rest of the wedding party sat down to dinner, in the course of which many toasts were offered and compliments spoken in honour of the newly married pair and those most dear to them.

  Night had fallen when, after a tiring journey of several hours by carriage, the new Mr and Mrs Ruskin reached Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands, their place to stop for the night before journeying to the Lake District. Both of them were far from relaxed. Like any large social ceremony, the wedding had been a strain. In the months preceding it, an even more serious cause of distress had been Effie’s father’s finances. Mr Gray had lost a great deal of money in railway shares (the revolution in France having made his stock in the Boulogne railway almost worthless) and seemed on the brink of bankruptcy. He was unable to give Effie the customary dowry. Mr Ruskin took up the slack by bestowing upon the couple the sum of £10,000, on the income of which they could live comfortably. He also promised to provide them with an additional allowance and subsidies for travel, which he saw as essential to his son’s work. Money was not the problem. Mr Ruskin could afford to be generous, and he did not mind being generous – but only to the members of his narrowly defined family group, his wife, his son and now, grudgingly, his son’s wife. But not her father, who had been so foolish as to speculate in railway shares. The young couple were caught in the middle, each loyal to his or her parents, and their loyalties directly in conflict. Effie, an affectionate eldest child, accustomed to helping her parents with their large family, shared their worry and longed to help them, but the only way she could do so was through the Ruskins. And John, who understood his father’s feelings about self-sufficiency – understood that requests for help would only produce irritation – resented Effie’s pressure to intercede on her father’s behalf.

  The revolution of 1848, which played so large a part in Mr Gray’s financial downfall, had provokingly upset the wedding plans in other ways. When John had proposed to Effie by letter in the fall of 1847 and been accepted, he imagined them spending their honeymoon in the Alps, which he was in the habit of visiting annually with his parents. He expected that the elder Ruskins would join them on their honeymoon. But now travel in France was impossible and he was journeying away from the mountains of his soul’s home and away from his parents in the company of a woman he hardly knew to whom he was joined for life.

  Ruskin had spent his lonely childhood making much out of meagre materials. Allowed almost no toys, he fastened his eyes on patterns on the floor, wall and ceiling of his room and satisfied himself with imaginative games. Allowed almost no playmates, because his status-conscious parents wanted neither to be guilty of social climbing nor to have their son play with children of families beneath them, he reacted strongly to the few who got by his parents’ screen. As an adolescent, he fell passionately in love with one of the daughters of his father’s partner, Pedro Domecq, and became ill with frustration at losing her. He had known Effie from the time she was a child (a fairy tale, later published as The King of the Golden River, was written for her when she was twelve) but did not see her often. She sometimes stayed at the Ruskins’ house in Denmark Hill on her way back to Scotland from school in England, and it was on one such visit, in 1846, that John developed a fancy for her. That the fancy developed into a passion suggests the depth of his need for a companion and the activity of his imagination. It had little to do with a deepening knowledge of vivacious, sociable, practical and worldly Effie Gray. His letters to her during their engagement, in contrast with Carlyle’s to Jane, recorded fantasies:

  You are like a sweet forest of pleasant glades and whispering branches – where people wander on and on in its playing shadows they
know not how far – and when they come near the centre of it, it is all cold and impenetrable … You are like the bright – soft – swelling – lovely fields of a high glacier covered with fresh morning snow – which is lovely to the eye – and soft and winning on the foot – but beneath, there are winding clefts and dark places in its cold – cold ice – where men fall and rise not again.3

  From which we may conclude that he loved Effie (a point later disputed), that his love was more for mythic woman than a particular Miss Gray, and that his passion for this woman was compounded with a terror of female sexuality so transparently revealed it is almost embarrassing to mention it.

  Both John and Effie Ruskin were virgins, and as they sat in their carriage on the way to Blair Atholl, glaringly alone, their greatest source of anxiety was possibly the scene of intimacy that lay before them. Of course they did not discuss the matter at this point – such discussion would have been highly indelicate – yet both expected to consummate their marriage that night. Effie, having been told almost nothing about sex by her mother, expected in this adventure to follow her husband’s lead, and John, having married a beautiful woman he had wanted very much, had fought with his parents in order to marry, and had written to passionately, fully intended in the Victorian phrase to ‘make her his wife’. But as he rode in the carriage, as they arrived at their hotel and dined and started getting ready for bed, he found himself strangely uneager. His state was nervous and anxious rather than ardent. He wished somehow he did not have to endure the scene he saw no way to avoid. And when the time came, when they were alone in their room, when they had changed into their night clothes and John had slipped Effie’s dress from her shoulders, the great event did not take place. They embraced and fell asleep chastely in the same bed, as they were to do for the rest of their married life, giving no indication, even to those closest to them, that their relationship was in any way unusual.