The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon
Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his
loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the
house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without
meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the
21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed
in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven
her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.
"For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him
without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his
mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his
wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing
had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times
been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his
misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him,
and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow-
creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after
his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of
papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of
her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to
read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased,
after Carlyle was dead.+

--
* This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's
Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under
his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version
has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now.
+ "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling,
about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the
very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and
contras there."--Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From
The Hill, Dumfries.
--

Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed
the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the
knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He
read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a
tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the
purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels
between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the
woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs.
Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it
would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events
his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and
that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his
offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it
was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he
had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most
considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be.
Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed
frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's
letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed
by himself.

Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it
rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards,
however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do
as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He
consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens,
a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents,
and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no
opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon
Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most
sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the
6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother
John as executors, contained the following passage:

"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh
Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though
of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and
indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write
farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript
my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude
(as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead.
To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and
elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do
his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There
is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to
this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the
text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really
rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John
Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the
manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to
this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour
and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality
along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine
can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay,
the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or
any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on
all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and
decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could
well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far
as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted
Froude.

Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the
letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to
publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in
tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt
of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more
letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without
much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they
were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to
undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned,
he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had
given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was
sure to be well received. His English in Ireland was approaching
completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light
on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in
many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and
would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the
best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son,
Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its
worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the
Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of
Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the
Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent
of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be
involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving
offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more
onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his
own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After
Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man
relied upon the younger as upon a son.

Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had
encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him.
He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did
venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with
evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from
Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of
Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a
Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing
on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole,
the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She
was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity
in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and
social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had
improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had
acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or
affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary
celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while
they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity
was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the
principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her
literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish
attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any)
were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for
weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine
benevolence as well as hospitality."*

--
* The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110.
--

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's
wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the
Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to
dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the
relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other
hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal,
romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton,
and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was
nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer
acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation
carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's
jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not
one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has
himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the
light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual
affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally
looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been
his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage
which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous
championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the
importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the
opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of
forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had
undertaken to discharge.

Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be
remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still
thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good
influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the
sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last
thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was
altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's
original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster.
Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November,
1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen,
the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being
added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's
knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request
he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought
him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had
wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle
expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen
years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly
paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the
memorials entrusted to Froude.

In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole
executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle
suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of
mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs.
Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her
uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle
speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care
and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these
my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should
think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five
hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular
request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further
inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have
destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the
will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not
clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however,
acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his
intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first
volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs.
Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the
fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to
publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of
Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this
separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November,
1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen
years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the
letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and
believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that
he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no
more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in
the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to
relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind,
to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance
that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be
told.

On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and
Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan,
where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered
Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried
among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best
understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared,
including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs.
Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which
came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future
trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight
after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had
a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of
her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all
parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had
promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle
had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less.
Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family
related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her
aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had
promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which
was never in fact realised.

In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out
the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were
eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by
all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit
into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of
drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James
Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck
himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened.
The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There
were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the
first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss.
But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a
suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It
is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has
not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received
much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude
should have published the memoir is a question which may be
discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a
pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release
him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course
least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate
matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary
point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the
Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more
sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks
in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more
omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal
passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless
admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry
Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much
annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and
her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early
and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself.
But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most
intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to
her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of
the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the
sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude
was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude
knew Carlyle, and the public did not.

--
* Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230.
--

Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the
publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he
returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which
contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to
do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following
rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it
would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these
words:

"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish
this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without
fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can
order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine-
tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.

"T. C. (Saturday, July 28th, 1866)."

Mary Carlyle at once wrote to The Times, and accused Froude of
having violated her uncle's express directions. It would have been
better if Froude had himself quoted this passage, and explained the
subsequent events which made it obsolete. But he never suspected any
one, and believed at the time of publication in the entire
friendliness of the Carlyle family. His answer to the charge of
betraying a trust was simple and satisfactory. Carlyle had changed
his mind. This is clear from the fact that he gave Froude the memoir
in 1871, five years after it was written, to do as he pleased with;
and still clearer from the conversation in 1880, when Froude told
him that he meant to publish, and Carlyle said "Very well."
Moreover, the will, a formal and legal document, expressly gave
Froude entire discretion in the matter. Froude replied at first with
temper and judgment. But when Mrs. Carlyle persisted in her
insinuations, and implied a doubt of his veracity, he gave way to a
very natural resentment, and made a rash offer. He had, he said,
brought out the memoir by Carlyle's own desire. He should do the
same with Mrs. Carlyle's letters, for the same reason. "The
remaining letters," he went on to say, "which I was directed to
return to Mrs. Carlyle so soon as I had done with them, I will
restore at once to any responsible person whom she will empower to
receive them from me. I have reason to complain of the position in
which I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They were sent
to me at intervals without inventory or even a memorial list. I was
told that the more I burnt of them the better, and they were for
several years in my possession before I was aware that they were not
my own. Happily I have destroyed none of them, and Mrs. Carlyle may
have them all when she pleases." Froude can hardly have reflected
upon the full significance of what he was saying. He had at this
time been long engaged upon the biography of Carlyle, and a
considerable part of it was finished. If he had then given back his
materials, his labour would have been wasted, and Carlyle's own
personal injunction would have been disobeyed. Carlyle's memory
would also have suffered parable injury. It is said, and it squares
with the facts, that Mary Carlyle and her friends, whose literary
judgment was not quite equal to Carlyle's own, desired to substitute
as his biographer some learned professor in Scotland.* If that were
their object, they are to be congratulated upon their failure. For
the offer was not carried out. As a bare promise without
consideration it was not of course valid in law, and since no one
had acted upon it, its withdrawal did no one any harm. There were
also legal difficulties which made its fulfilment impossible.
According to counsel's opinion, dated the 13th of May, 1881,
Carlyle's request that the papers should be restored was "an
attempted verbal testamentary disposition, which had no legal
authority." The documents belonged not to Froude personally, but to
himself and Fitz-james Stephen, as joint executors, and Stephen has
left it on record that he would not have consented to their return
until Froude's task was accomplished.

--
* David Masson, the editor of Milton, I have been told, but I do not know.
--

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's view was not shared by other and older
members of her uncle's family. During the summer of 1881 Froude
received from Carlyle's surviving brother, James, and his surviving
sister, Mrs. Austin, a letter dated the 8th of August, and written
from Ecclefechan, in which he was implored not to give up his task
of writing the Life, and assured of their perfect reliance upon him.
This assurance is the more significant because it was given after
the publication of the Reminiscences. It was renewed on James
Carlyle' s part through his son after the appearance of Mrs.
Carlyle's letters in 1883, and by Mrs. Austin through her daughter
upon receiving the final volumes of the biography in 1884. Miss
Austin wrote at her mother's request on the 25th of October, 1884,
"My uncle at all times placed implicit confidence in you, and that
confidence has not, I am sure, in any way been abused. He always
spoke of you as his best and truest friend." Time has amply
vindicated Carlyle's opinion, and his discretion in the choice of a
biographer.

As Mrs. Alexander Carlyle considered the publication of the memoir,
which is by far the most interesting part of the Reminiscences, to
be an impropriety, and a breach of faith, it might have been
supposed that she would repudiate the idea of deriving any profit
from the book. On the contrary, she attempted to secure the whole,
and refused to take a part, declaring that Froude had promised to
give her all. Froude's recollection was that, thinking Carlyle's
provision for his niece insufficient,* he had promised her the
American income, which he had been told would be large, though it
turned out to be very small indeed, in acknowledgment of her
services as a copyist. Ultimately he made her the generous offer of
fifteen hundred pounds, retaining only three for himself. She
accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift. In the
opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than
hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the
circumstances a moral obligation. But Mary Carlyle put forward
another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in
June, 1881. She then said that in 1875, six years before his death,
her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the
keys of the receptacles which contained them.

--
* The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however,
materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received
the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died
before her uncle Thomas.
--

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