by Phyllis Rose
Imagine then Carlyle’s feelings when, after Jane’s death, he picked up her journal and read this entry:
That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand miles Mr C. has walked between there and here, putting it all together; setting up always another milestone and another betwixt himself and me. Oh, good gracious! When I first noticed that heavy yellow house without knowing, or caring to know, who it belonged to, how far I was from dreaming that through years and years I should carry every stone’s weight of it on my heart.9
She writes of walking and walking with no goal but to tire herself. Life is a kaleidoscope with a few things of different colours – mostly black – which fate shakes into new combinations; but the few things, pre-eminently her inner torment, remain always the same. She writes with irritation of having to turn down an invitation she would have accepted if she had only herself to consider, and with irritation at having to spend the evening mending Mr C.’s trousers. She, an only child! She is constantly galled by what she has given up.
Alone this evening. Lady A. in town again; Mr C. of course at Bath House.
When I think of what I is
And what I used to was,
I gin to think I’ve sold myself
For very little cas.10
Folk ditties haunt her imagination, giving her sorrow a lineage.
Oh little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in,
The death I was to dee.
Rarely romantic, Jane in this mood had no patience whatever with great passions and offered a gloss on another Scottish song:
Oh waly, waly, love is bonnie
A little while when it is new;
But when it’s auld
It waxeth cauld,
And melts away like morning dew.
‘Beautiful verse, sweet and sad,’ she said, ‘like barley sugar dissolved in tears. About the morning dew, however! I should rather say, “Goes out like candle snuff” would be a truer simile.’11 Carlyle, reading all this after Jane’s death, was appalled.
The journal, which she kept from October 1855 to July 1856, is not unrelievedly a record of complaint, but even incidents which do not directly touch upon Lady Ashburton and Mr Carlyle tend to sound the theme of sacrifice, inviting a comparison between what life might have been and what it has become. One day, for example, Carlyle, walking in Piccadilly, was stopped by a man who got out of a carriage to talk to him, ‘an iron-grey man with a bitter smile’. It was George Rennie, the one of Jane’s Haddington beaux who had gone on to become governor of the Falkland Islands. The day after his chance meeting with Carlyle, Rennie came to call on Jane, who sprang into his arms and kissed him a great many times. ‘Oh, it has done me so much good this meeting! My bright, whole hearted, impulsive youth seemed conjured back by his hearty embrace. For certain, my late deadly weakness was conjured away! A spell on my nerves it had been, which dissolved in the unwonted feeling of gladness. I am a different woman this evening. I am well!’12 She was so excited she was afraid she wouldn’t sleep (sleeping was always a problem for Jane), but the unwonted joy made her sleep better than ever.
It must be noted, however, if only for its incidental human interest, that this reunion with a former lover turned out little better for Jane than Dickens’s reunion with his sweetheart from the past. The Rennies invited the Carlyles to dinner before a soirée at Bath House. Jane had been fretting over the need to buy a new dress for the Bath House affair, but now she bought it happily. George Rennie would see that the smart girl of his province had not become a ‘dowdy among London women of “a certain age”.’ But ‘like everything looked forward to with pleasure,’ their dinner with the Rennies was a complete failure. They had all become established adults, behaving properly at a dinner party. ‘The Past stood aloof, looking mournfully down on me…. It was a London dinner Party, voilà tout!’ For a change, it was a relief to go to Bath House. She felt more at home there than she did with this rigidified relic of a past passion, who had the nerve to discuss such unromantic subjects as the possibilities of war with America.13
The diary generally recorded things at once too trivial and too significant to write in letters to friends, returning over and over to Lady Harriet.
April 11. I called on ‘my lady’ come to town for the season. She was perfectly civil, for a wonder.14
18 June. On the 7th we went to Addiscombe and staid till the 11th. The place in full bloom and her ladyship affable. Why? What is in the wind now? As usual in that beautiful place, I couldn’t sleep.15
She writes – but in French – about the unfairness of marriage laws: how women may lose their families for committing misconduct but men may drive them to the misconduct through hardness and disdain and not be punished for it in any way. Sometimes harsh treatment and difficulties of character in her husband drive a woman not precisely to misconduct but ‘to something, and something not to his advantage, any more than to hers’, Jane said darkly.16 She and her friend Mr Barlow followed with great fascination the trial of a man named Palmer accused and convicted of poisoning his wife for her life insurance. ‘Mr Barlow says “nine-tenths of the misery of human life proceeds, according to his observation, from the Institution of Marriage!” He should say from the demoralization, the desecration, of the Institution of Marriage and then I should cordially agree with him.’17
Jane’s problem was largely solved in May 1857 by the sudden death of Lady Harriet Ashburton. By July 1857, Jane’s mood had changed completely. The gloom lifted. She resolved to stop giving voice to despondent thoughts. ‘It is not a natural voice of mine, that sort of egotistical babblement, but has been fostered in me by the patience and sympathy shown me in my late long illness. I can very easily leave it off, as I did smoking, when I see it to be getting a bad habit.’18 She did leave it off. She began to encourage Mr Carlyle again about the writing of Frederick the Great, although she seems never to have read beyond the second volume. She could lift herself out of her own misery enough to be horrified by the massacre of Englishwomen at Cawnpore, to think that all other problems shrink to nothing beside their dreadful fate and to wonder what sort of God rules a world in which it could happen. ‘It isn’t much like a world ruled by Love, this.’19
The question is, for whom was the diary written? Was it an outlet for her sorrow, written for herself only? Or was it in some way intended to be read? Parts of it seem to have no rhetorical purpose: the practising of witticisms, for example. But the way that most of the journal is shaped to emphasise a theme – Carlyle’s neglect of her, his galling attentions to Lady Harriet – suggest that Jane was trying to tell her side of the story to the world, and particularly to one person in it, Mr C. himself. He had hurt her; she wanted to hurt him back. Only her method (the diary) and not her strategy (revenge through guilt) was peculiar to Jane. Usually women make their wounds known to their husbands in other ways: minor sickness, complaint, anger, coldness and sexual unavailability. Thomas Carlyle was impervious to any of these tactics and it required a written statement of Jane’s wrongs, read after her death, to put him into the appropriate state of guilt. But guilt is woman’s revenge on man for the liabilities of marriage.
Few women in history – or even literature – were more successful at making their husbands feel guilty than Jane Carlyle. Paulina and Hermione together hardly did better with Leontes. Carlyle saw the story of her life as she had laid it out for him in her letters and journals to be found after her death, a story of great promise, great gifts, great advantages sacrificed for a man who ultimately neglected her, and he swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. It transformed his life. No more obsessions with train whistles. Now he was morbidly obsessed with regret, tuned in to the high-pitched wail of past disharmony.
Jane Carlyle died in London suddenly, of a stroke or heart attack, on April 21, 1866, while Carlyle was in Scotland being lionised. ‘How pungent is remorse,’ he wrote, ‘when it turns upon the loved dead, who can
not pardon us, cannot hear us now! Two plain precepts there are. Dost thou intend a kindness to thy beloved one? Do it straightway, while the fateful Future is not yet here. Has thy heart’s friend carelessly or cruelly stabbed in thy heart? Oh, forgive him! Think how, when thou art dead, he will punish himself.’20 Froude reports that Carlyle spoke about Jane constantly after her death, and always in the same remorseful tone, always with bitter self-reproach. ‘He had never properly understood till her death how much she had suffered, and how much he had himself to answer for.’21
As expiation, he conceived the idea of making her genius and his own unworthiness known to the world. Shortly after her death he wrote his reminiscence of her and after that he began the long and extremely painful task of preparing her letters and ‘memorials’ – including even the de profundis diary – for publication: arranging, annotating and commenting. Reminiscences, for one, records Carlyle’s guilt as much as it records Jane’s life.
I doubt, candidly, if I ever saw a nobler human soul than this which (alas, alas, never rightly valued till now!) accompanied all my steps for forty years. Blind and deaf that we are: oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle dissonances of the moment and all be at last so mournfully clear and beautiful when it is too late!
She had from an early period formed her own little opinion about me (what an Eldorado to me, ungrateful being, blind, ungrateful, condemnable and heavy laden, and crushed down into blindness by great misery as I oftenest was!), and she never flinched from it an instant, I think, or cared, or counted, what the world said to the contrary.
Ah me! she never knew fully, nor could I show her in my heavyladen miserable life, how much I had at all times regarded, loved and admired her. No telling of her now. ‘Five minutes more of your dear company in this world. Oh that I had you yet for but five minutes, to tell you all!’ This is often my thought since April 21.22
Ending the reminiscence, Carlyle called it his ‘sacred shrine and religious city of refuge from the bitterness of these sorrows’, a kind of ‘devotional thing’.23 But in re-reading her letters, he got the idea of creating more than a personal monument to her. He would let the world know the quality of her gifts, let them appreciate how much she had sacrificed to him. ‘As to “talent”, epistolary and other, these letters, I perceive, equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist in that kind…. Not all the Sands and Eliots and babbling cohue of “celebrated scribbling women” that have strutted over the world in my time could, it seems to me, if all boiled down and distilled to essence, make one such woman.’24
The preparation of Jane’s letters for publication took Carlyle some eleven months’ work in 1868–69, ‘sad and strange as a pilgrimage through Hades’.25 ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘this mournful, but pious, and ever interesting task, escorted by such miseries, night after night and month after month – perhaps all this may be wholesome punishment, purification and monition.’26 Jane’s letters did not make Carlyle look good, especially when encased in his remorseful annotations, which emphasised her misery and his own guilt and ignored her joyous, playful deployment of her great comic complaint. At the cost of his own reputation, he would build a monument to the literary talent she had sacrificed for him, emphasising the faults in himself which had made her life, as he thought, wretched. Froude calls it a ‘beautiful’ gesture, ‘unexampled in the history of literature’, the most heroic act of a heroic life, typical of Carlyle in its humility and truthfulness,27 and I agree that Carlyle’s determination to publish Jane’s writings should be seen for the courageous and imaginative act it was. But it is also true that Carlyle, by means of this gesture, may have triumphed in the end, had the last nip in their private cockfight. As it stands, her genius, her sacrifice and her suffering are his creation, a literary artifice based on her raw materials, surely, and sculpted according to her directions, but willed into permanent existence by him.
After Carlyle’s death, with the publication of Froude’s biography and the Reminiscences and Jane’s letters, the domestic life of the Carlyles entered the public domain, as Carlyle intended it should. Like Hamlet asking Horatio to absent himself from felicity awhile to tell his tale, Carlyle had entrusted Froude with the telling of his story – and Jane’s. Froude understood that the Letters and Memorials were to be published separately, as a monument to Jane’s literary talent, but he was also given permission to use the Carlyles’ intimate papers in whatever way he saw fit in the writing of his biography.
It is a magnificent, compassionate work, portraying a genius whose very strength and breadth of thought unfit him for the small negotiations of daily life. Because his vision is essentially tragic, Froude does not blame Carlyle for making his wife wretched any more than one would blame Othello for mistreating Desdemona. Nevertheless, his work is structured on an ironic (and implicitly critical) principle: Carlyle sees to the heart of society but not into the mind of his partner for life. He is a great man, a great thinker, but a pathetic human being. He hurts Jane without knowing it, and he is lonely and wretched at the same time. Froude basically adopts Jane’s view of the marriage as suggested by the 1855–56 diary – an heiress debased to a servant and neglected in her middle age for a more glamorous woman, her serious illnesses not understood or sufficiently sympathised with. And I have no doubt that that is how Carlyle, seeking punishment and expiation, would have wanted the story told.
When Froude’s biography appeared in 1882, it created a sensation. Froude’s complex portrait, with its large and tolerant understanding of human nature, was debased to a simple one – the great Carlyle, the sage and prophet, had been a terrible, a cruel, husband. The idol had feet of clay. Some people were appalled not only by Carlyle’s behaviour to Jane but by what they recognised to be possibilities within themselves. Was this marriage so different from their own? Others, reading Froude’s biography more stupidly, saw it as an attack on the great man’s character, which they hastened to defend. The ‘anti-Froudians’ tried in every possible way to place Carlyle back on his pedestal, and most of these attempts involved personal attacks on Froude, or Geraldine Jewsbury (Jane’s close friend, upon whom Froude had relied for intimate details) or Jane herself. In their view, the great man was guilty of nothing. If he spent a lot of time with Lady Harriet Ashburton, it was out of a perfectly understandable fondness for an unusual lady. Jane was jealous because she realised that Lady Harriet did better than she did the sort of thing she aspired to. She projected her own self-hatred onto her husband. In other words, if this was a bad marriage, it was Jane’s fault. She was the guilty party, a ‘highly neurotic woman’ and no wonder – since she’d grown up knowing Latin like a boy, reading Virgil at nine, doing maths at ten and writing a tragedy when she was fourteen.28
A hundred years have gone by since the controversy over Froude’s portrait of the Carlyles’ domestic life. Is it possible to view the matter any differently now? Is it possible to discard the fiction of ‘fault’? to bypass blame? even tragic limitation, the ironies of greatness? If so, we might well begin by denying that this was an exceptionally wretched marriage. There is a joke which congratulates the world that the Carlyles married each other: that way only two people were miserable, not four. But what strikes me is the singular economy of their union. Any alliance which lasts as long as theirs is bound to have moments – even months or years – of divergence of paths, failures of attention or sympathy on one side or the other, boredom, resentment, as it is equally bound to have moments of joy and intimacy resulting from nothing other than the occasional awareness of a shared past, a shared future – moments of gratuitous sweetness as well as moments inevitably sour. In the long view, the Carlyles seem uniquely compatible. She gave him the stability and affection he needed to work; he gave her the frustration and annoyance she required to thrive. The strains in the Carlyles’ marriage which began to appear in the late 1840s and brought it close to the breaking point in the mid-1850s –
strains associated with Lady Harriet Ashburton’s role in Carlyle’s life – seem to me generated by the structure of traditional marriage, of which theirs, for all its peculiarities, is a classic example. The strains do not seem to result from the individual characters of these two people, nor are they usefully seen as ‘his fault’ or ‘hers’. Carlyle had set a machine in motion, she on her side of the room and he on his, he writing and she running the household – a seemingly symmetrical and balanced structure. In time, however, flaws emerged. The woman felt she had paid too high a price. Thomas Carlyle required a written statement, chronicling his offences. But he got the point – that he had wounded his wife. And he felt guilty, as she had intended he would. That was her revenge, as inflicting guilt will always be a revenge of the less powerful, whether male or female.
The Carlyles’ was a particularly deep conflict.29 To say that they clashed in many ways and in many ways disappointed each other is to say no more than that they were married, and for a long time. They acted out the possibilities of the form. Together, they created their individual uniqueness. He created himself with her help and support, and she created herself, in service, in mockery, in resistance. Perhaps they lived sexless and childless, perhaps they were not happy, but they were certainly a couple, and by writing about it, they made of their marriage a spectacle we in later days can witness, with tensions and resolutions we can participate in vicariously.
