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The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous. For the bulk of
the papers had been in Froude's possession since the end of 1873, or
at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or
boxes which the keys would have opened. On the strength of her own
statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was
inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle's will leaving his
manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude
should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete
it. He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who
successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with
Carlyle's clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had
done with them. In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed
for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with
natural pride, "It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law-
suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative
question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing
Mr. Carlyle's life, and I am happy to say I succeeded." The public
will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living
except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that
could have produced such a book as his. Of the Reminiscences Froude
wrote to Skelton, "To me in no one of his writings does he appear in
a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all
mankind eventually think."

His own frame of mind at this period is vividly expressed in a
letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881. After some
references to Goethe's letters, and German copyright, he continues:

"So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters
that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I
undertook the business. I had intended, when I finished my English
history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend
the rest of my life on him. I might have been half through by this
time, and the world all in good humour with me. My ill star was
uppermost when I laid this aside. There are objections to every
course which I can follow. The arguments for and against were so
many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to
be done, and left it to me. He could see all sides of the question.
Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another,
whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of
people will blame me. Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would
blame me. What have I done that I should be in such a strait? But I
am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all."

The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of
Carlyle's life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835,
appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub. The public had got on a
false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme. Carlyle was in
truth one of the noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on
the surface. His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of
our being. For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn
too deep for words. He never sought, and he did not greatly value,
the praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in which he
profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short
of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak. Contemporaries
without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business,
attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high.
Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his
own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams. His
generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected
thanks. He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters,
whenever he had time to think. Courage and truth made him indifferent
to fashion and popularity. Popularity was not his aim. His aim was to
tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or
whether they would forbear. Froude had so much confidence in the
essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him
as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling
character and a lofty genius. Therefore his portrait lives, and will
live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have
been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.

Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle
himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the
vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English
biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for
"personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private
life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer
should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and
no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes
Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit.
For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had
done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him,"
he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems
incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam,
have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that
a similar view should have been taken of the relations between
Froude and Carlyle.

It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this
respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as
faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved
him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous
and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was
not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came,
and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has
made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a
splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most
miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There
could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life
and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated
by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in
Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero
wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those
disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many
small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence.
Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and
repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said,
half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating
a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very
important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with
Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as
a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment,
and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that
had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of
them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition,
Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him-
and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was
the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her
health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could
not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen,"
said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of
humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.
If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and
he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque
rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far
characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his
own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not
always being killed."+

--
* Life, i. 302.
+ Life, i. 209.
--

That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own
Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly
enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June,
1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's
Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very
faults that were attributed to himself, with the following
sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life,
and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of
his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to
know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person
who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been
universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently
denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must
have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.

If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that
his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the
result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood
before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who
can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling
the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first
forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had
not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against
poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by
any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it
seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid
exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle
was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he
had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's
Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826
Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to
explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any
public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his
father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man
left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters.
His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist
him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring
books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating
Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English
book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands
than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it
was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and
himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the
character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his
mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner
judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by
writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they
read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His
isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him.
Nobody could help him.

--
* I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection
with Fraser.
--

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not
hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would
admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in
a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort
with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco.
Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a
millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most
humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the
under side of things," to quote his own definition of the
undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read
all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a
talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in
London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers
of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the
generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly
struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own
conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than
injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people,
for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him,
is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those
passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a
lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one
to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his
diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men
who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would
be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude,
faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of
this book is that it introduced the British and American public to
some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the
language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any
language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her
husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she
surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in
terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes,
as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at
Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power
is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for
half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters
appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her
husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as
rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best,
the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he
was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light
it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two
remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her
relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the
trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied
without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the
letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the
immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.
Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead
wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought
that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and
apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the
bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down-
trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some
few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded
animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.
Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself,
and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have
been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household
details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others
published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their
permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.

--
* "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."*

--
* My Relations with Carlyle, p. 62.
--

Calling witnesses to the character of such a man as Froude is itself
almost an insult. But there is one judgment so valuable and so
emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it. The fifteenth Earl of
Derby held such a high position in the political world that his
literary attainments have been comparatively neglected. He was in
truth an omnivorous reader and a cool, sagacious critic, who was not
led astray by enthusiasm, and never said more than he felt. Writing
to Froude on the 20th of October, 1884, Lord Derby described the
Life of Carlyle as the most interesting biography in the English
language, and added, "I think you have finally silenced the foolish
talk about indiscretion, and treachery to a friend's memory. It is
clear that you have done only, and exactly, what Carlyle wished
done: and to me it is also apparent that he and you were right: that
his character could not have been understood without a full
disclosure of what was least attractive in it: and that those
defects--the product mainly of morbid physical conditions--do not
really take away from his greatness, while they explain much that
was dark, at least to me, in his writings." Lord Derby's opinions
were not lightly formed, and he was as much guided by pure reason as
mortal man can be.

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