No More Learning

Scott believed that Swift was physically incapacitated for
marriage, and that he needed feminine sympathy, which he took where he
could get it, without feeling bound to give anything in return.

If Scott's explanation be the true one, it still leaves Swift exposed to
ignominy as a monster of ingratitude. Therefore, many of his biographers
have sought other explanations. No one can palliate his conduct toward
Vanessa; but Sir Leslie Stephen makes a plea for him with reference
to Stella. Sir Leslie points out that until Swift became dean of St.
Patrick's his income was far too small to marry on, and that after his
brilliant but disappointing three years in London, when his prospects of
advancement were ruined, he felt himself a broken man.

Furthermore, his health was always precarious, since he suffered from a
distressing illness which attacked him at intervals, rendering him both
deaf and giddy. The disease is now known as Meniere's disease, from its
classification by the French physician, Meniere, in 1861. Swift felt
that he lived in constant danger of some sudden stroke that would
deprive him either of life or reason; and his ultimate insanity makes it
appear that his forebodings were not wholly futile. Therefore, though he
married Stella, he kept the marriage secret, thus leaving her free, in
case of his demise, to marry as a maiden, and not to be regarded as a
widow.

Sir Leslie offers the further plea that, after all, Stella's life was
what she chose to make it. She enjoyed Swift's friendship, which she
preferred to the love of any other man.

Another view is that of Dr. Richard Garnett, who has discussed the
question with some subtlety. "Swift," says Dr. Garnett, "was by nature
devoid of passion. He was fully capable of friendship, but not of love.
The spiritual realm, whether of divine or earthly things, was a region
closed to him, where he never set foot. " On the side of friendship
he must greatly have preferred Stella to Vanessa, and yet the latter
assailed him on his weakest side--on the side of his love of imperious
domination.

Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely submitted. Flattered
to excess by her surrender, yet conscious of his obligations and his
real preference, he could neither discard the one beauty nor desert the
other.

Therefore, he temporized with both of them, and when the choice was
forced upon him he madly struck down the woman for whom he cared the
less.

One may accept Dr. Garnett's theory with a somewhat altered conclusion.
It is not true, as a matter of recorded fact, that Swift was incapable
of passion, for when a boy at college he was sought out by various young
women, and he sought them out in turn. His fiery letter to Miss Waring
points to the same conclusion. When Esther Johnson began to love him he
was heart-free, yet unable, because of his straitened means, to marry.
But Esther Johnson always appealed more to his reason, his friendship,
and his comfort, than to his love, using the word in its material,
physical sense. This love was stirred in him by Vanessa. Yet when he
met Vanessa he had already gone too far with Esther Johnson to break the
bond which had so long united them, nor could he think of a life without
her, for she was to him his other self.

At the same time, his more romantic association with Vanessa roused
those instincts which he had scarcely known himself to be possessed of.
His position was, therefore, most embarrassing. He hoped to end it when
he left London and returned to Ireland; but fate was unkind to him in
this, because Vanessa followed him. He lacked the will to be frank
with her, and thus he stood a wretched, halting victim of his own dual
nature.

He was a clergyman, and at heart religious. He had also a sense of
honor, and both of these traits compelled him to remain true to Esther
Johnson. The terrible outbreak which brought about Vanessa's death was
probably the wild frenzy of a tortured soul. It recalls the picture of
some fierce animal brought at last to bay, and venting its own anguish
upon any object that is within reach of its fangs and claws.

No matter how the story may be told, it makes one shiver, for it is a
tragedy in which the three participants all meet their doom--one crushed
by a lightning-bolt of unreasoning anger, the other wasting away through
hope deferred; while the man whom the world will always hold responsible
was himself destined to end his years blind and sleepless, bequeathing
his fortune to a madhouse, and saying, with his last muttered breath:

"I am a fool! "





PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN


A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage; and,
in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing. Young men
and young women who have no special gift of imagination, and who have
practically reached their full mental development at twenty-one or
twenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may marry safely; because
they are already what they will be. They are not going to experience any
growth upward and outward. Passing years simply bring them more closely
together, until they have settled down into a sort of domestic unity,
by which they think alike, act alike, and even gradually come to look
alike.

But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of genius. In
their teens they have only begun to grow. What they will be ten years
hence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate so early in life is
to insure almost certain storm and stress, and, in the end, domestic
wreckage.

As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false step;
because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still very young.
If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and unresponsive nature to
match his own, it is he who is bound in the course of time to learn his
great mistake. When the splendid eagle shall have got his growth,
and shall begin to soar up into the vault of heaven, the poor little
barn-yard fowl that he once believed to be his equal seems very far away
in everything. He discovers that she is quite unable to follow him in
his towering flights.

The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The circumstances
of his early marriage were strange. The breaking of his marriage-bond
was also strange. Shelley himself was an extraordinary creature. He was
blamed a great deal in his lifetime for what he did, and since then some
have echoed the reproach. Yet it would seem as if, at the very beginning
of his life, he was put into a false position against his will. Because
of this he was misunderstood until the end of his brief and brilliant
and erratic career.

SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN

In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris stormed
the Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon to await his
execution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their gauntlet of defiance
into the face of Europe. In this tremendous year was born young Shelley;
and perhaps his nature represented the spirit of the time.

Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he derive
that perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt which
blazed out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father, Mr. Timothy
Shelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic English squire. His
mother--a woman of much beauty, but of no exceptional traits--was the
daughter of another squire, and at the time of her marriage was simply
one of ten thousand fresh-faced, pleasant-spoken English country girls.
If we look for a strain of the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, we
shall have to find it in the person of his grandfather, who was a very
remarkable and powerful character.

This person, Bysshe Shelley by name, had in his youth been associated
with some mystery. He was not born in England, but in America--and
in those days the name "America" meant almost anything indefinite and
peculiar. However this might be, Bysshe Shelley, though a scion of
a good old English family, had wandered in strange lands, and it was
whispered that he had seen strange sights and done strange things.
According to one legend, he had been married in America, though no one
knew whether his wife was white or black, or how he had got rid of her.

He might have remained in America all his life, had not a small
inheritance fallen to his share. This brought him back to England, and
he soon found that England was in reality the place to make his fortune.
He was a man of magnificent physique. His rovings had given him ease
and grace, and the power which comes from a wide experience of life. He
could be extremely pleasing when he chose; and he soon won his way into
the good graces of a rich heiress, whom he married.

With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted with
gentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself particularly to
the Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he was made a baronet.
When his rich wife died, Shelley married a still richer bride; and so
this man, who started out as a mere adventurer without a shilling to his
name, died in 1813, leaving more than a million dollars in cash, with
lands whose rent-roll yielded a hundred thousand dollars every year.

If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter
of heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and
magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English
squire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native
sturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to be
English at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic sports.
He was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about abstractions
with which most schoolboys never concern themselves at all.

Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he became
a sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-system. He
spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked anything that he
was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into whatever was forbidden.

Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke
all bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality on
all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow student,
who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a name that seems
rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got himself expelled from
the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel character
called "A Defense of Atheism. "

His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It probably
disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him some satisfaction
to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He went to London with his
friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He read omnivorously--Hogg says
as much as sixteen hours a day. He would walk through the most crowded
streets poring over a volume, while holding another under one arm.

His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward called
"his passion for reforming everything. " He despised most of the laws of
England. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He hated its religion. He
was particularly opposed to marriage. This last fact gives some point to
the circumstances which almost immediately confronted him.

Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most English
boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still in the
hobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was quite far from
boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little more than a mere
child. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the ways of men and women.
He had no visible means of existence except a small allowance from
his father. His four sisters, who were at a boarding-school on Clapham
Common, used to save their pin-money and send it to their gifted brother
so that he might not actually starve. These sisters he used to call
upon from time to time, and through them he made the acquaintance of a
sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Westbrook.

Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a
coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly because of
his complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what he
had made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had sent his younger
daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's sisters studied.

Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any girl
of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature than a
youth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might have been
Shelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that she fell in love
with him; but, having done so, she by no means acted in the shy and
timid way that would have been most natural to a very young girl in her
first love-affair. Having decided that she wanted him, she made up her
mind to get Mm at any cost, and her audacity was equaled only by his
simplicity. She was rather attractive in appearance, with abundant hair,
a plump figure, and a pink-and-white complexion. This description makes
of her a rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort to
attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that beauty and
charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and infinitely superior to it.

In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious manner
and talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad listener;
and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his rhapsodies about
chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity, the national debt, and
human liberty, all of which he jumbled up without much knowledge, but in
a lyric strain of impassioned eagerness which would probably have made
the multiplication-table thrilling.

For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination, both
then and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do him justice,
because they cannot convey that singular appeal which the man himself
made to almost every one who met him.

The eminent painter, Mulready, once said that Shelley was too beautiful
for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear
this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as
to make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite
disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his
long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a
thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and
mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, and
when Shelley felt deeply moved they seemed luminous with a wonderful
and almost unearthly light. His mouth was finely chiseled, and might be
regarded as representing perfection.

One great defect he had, and this might well have overbalanced his
attractive face. The defect in question was his voice. One would have
expected to hear from him melodious sounds, and vocal tones both rich
and penetrating; but, as a matter of fact, his voice was shrill at the
very best, and became actually discordant and peacock-like in moments of
emotion.

Such, then, was Shelley, star-eyed, with the delicate complexion of a
girl, wonderfully mobile in his features, yet speaking in a voice high
pitched and almost raucous. For the rest, he arrayed himself with care
and in expensive clothing, even though he took no thought of neatness,
so that his garments were almost always rumpled and wrinkled from his
frequent writhings on couches and on the floor. Shelley had a strange
and almost primitive habit of rolling on the earth, and another of
thrusting his tousled head close up to the hottest fire in the house,
or of lying in the glaring sun when out of doors. It is related that he
composed one of his finest poems--"The Cenci"--in Italy, while stretched
out with face upturned to an almost tropical sun.

But such as he was, and though he was not yet famous, Harriet Westbrook,
the rosy-faced schoolgirl, fell in love with him, and rather plainly
let him know that she had done so. There are a thousand ways in which
a woman can convey this information without doing anything un-maidenly;
and of all these little arts Miss Westbrook was instinctively a
mistress.

She played upon Shelley's feelings by telling him that her father was
cruel to her, and that he contemplated actions still more cruel. There
is something absurdly comical about the grievance which she brought to
Shelley; but it is much more comical to note the tremendous seriousness
with which he took it. He wrote to his friend Hogg:

Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by endeavoring
to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the
answer. At the same time I essayed to mollify Mr. Westbrook, in vain! I
advised her to resist. She wrote to say that resistance was useless, but
that she would fly with me and throw herself on my protection.

Some letters that have recently come to light show that there was a
dramatic scene between Harriet Westbrook and Shelley--a scene in the
course of which she threw her arms about his neck and wept upon his
shoulder. Here was a curious situation. Shelley was not at all in love
with her. He had explicitly declared this only a short time before. Yet
here was a pretty girl about to suffer the "horrible persecution" of
being sent to school, and finding no alternative save to "throw herself
on his protection"--in other words, to let him treat her as he would,
and to become his mistress.

The absurdity of the situation makes one smile. Common sense should have
led some one to box Harriet's ears and send her off to school without a
moment's hesitation; while as for Shelley, he should have been told how
ludicrous was the whole affair. But he was only nineteen, and she was
only sixteen, and the crisis seemed portentous. Nothing could be more
flattering to a young man's vanity than to have this girl cast herself
upon him for protection. It did not really matter that he had not
loved her hitherto, and that he was already half engaged to another
Harriet--his cousin, Miss Grove. He could not stop and reason with
himself. He must like a true knight rescue lovely girlhood from the
horrors of a school!

It is not unlikely that this whole affair was partly managed or
manipulated by the girl's father. Jew Westbrook knew that Shelley was
related to rich and titled people, and that he was certain, if he lived,
to become Sir Percy, and to be the heir of his grandfather's estates.
Hence it may be that Harriet's queer conduct was not wholly of her own
prompting.

In any case, however, it proved to be successful. Shelley's ardent and
impulsive nature could not bear to see a girl in tears and appealing
for his help. Hence, though in his heart she was very little to him, his
romantic nature gave up for her sake the affection that he had felt for
his cousin, his own disbelief in marriage, and finally the common sense
which ought to have told him not to marry any one on two hundred pounds
a year.

So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary and most
uncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish capital, they
were married by the Scottish law. Their money was all gone; but their
landlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance, let them have a room, and
treated them to a rather promiscuous wedding-banquet, in which every one
in the house participated.

Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen with a
girl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his own better
judgment and in the absence of any actual love.

The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little thing.
She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be a real
companion to him. But what could one expect from such a union? Shelley's
father withdrew the income which he had previously given. Jew Westbrook
refused to contribute anything, hoping, probably, that this course would
bring the Shelleys to the rescue. But as it was, the young pair drifted
about from place to place, getting very precarious supplies, running
deeper into debt each day, and finding less and less to admire in each
other.

Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies, which
she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only puzzle her
small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant traits of the
class to which she belonged. In this her sister Eliza--a hard and
grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She set Harriet against her
husband, and made life less endurable for both. She was so much older
than the pair that she came in and ruled their household like a typical
stepmother.

A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a second
form of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but by this
time there was little hope of righting things again. Shelley was much
offended because Harriet would not nurse the child. He believed her hard
because she saw without emotion an operation performed upon the infant.

Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of money,
Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything except the
spending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and display. In
time--that is to say, in three years after their marriage--Harriet
left her husband and went to London and to Bath, prompted by her elder
sister.

This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was brought
to Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him. He, on his
side, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic correspondence with a
schoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But until now his life had been
one great mistake--a life of restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of a
desire that had no name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting with
the one whom he should have met before.

Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer and
radical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one. There was
Fanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring of Gilbert
Imlay, an American merchant, and of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin had
subsequently married. There was also a singularly striking girl who
then styled herself Mary Jane Clairmont, and who was afterward known
as Claire Clairmont, she and her brother being the early children of
Godwin's second wife.

One day in 1814, Shelley called on Godwin, and found there a beautiful
young girl in her seventeenth year, "with shapely golden head, a
face very pale and pure, a great forehead, earnest hazel eyes, and an
expression at once of sensibility and firmness about her delicately
curved lips. " This was Mary Godwin--one who had inherited her mother's
power of mind and likewise her grace and sweetness.

From the very moment of their meeting Shelley and this girl were fated
to be joined together, and both of them were well aware of it. Each felt
the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each listened eagerly
to what the other said. Each thought of nothing, and each cared for
nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great compelling elemental
force which drove the two together and bound them fast. Beside this
marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful and paltry seemed the
affectations of Harriet Westbrook!

In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting,
Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin's house at four
o 'clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to Calais.
They
wandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating black bread and
the coarsest fare, walking on the highways when they could not afford to
ride, and putting up with every possible inconvenience. Yet it is worth
noting that neither then nor at any other time did either Shelley or
Mary regret what they had done. To the very end of the poet's brief
career they were inseparable.

Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid
disposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said, because
of grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay, Mary's sister,
likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not care for her, but
this has also been disproved. There was really nothing to mar the inner
happiness of the poet and the woman who, at the very end, became his
wife. Living, as they did, in Italy and Switzerland, they saw much of
their own countrymen, such as Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose
fascinations poor Miss Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the
little girl Allegra.

But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's with
the woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his love-life, far
more than in his poetry, that he attained completeness. When he died
by drowning, in 1822, and his body was burned in the presence of Lord
Byron, he was truly mourned by the one whom he had only lately made his
wife. As a poet he never reached the same perfection; for his genius was
fitful and uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with that
which disappoints.

As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to wish.
In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will always be
that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings against
the void in vain. "





THE STORY OF THE CARLYLES


To most persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure. His homes in
the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth had a dignified seclusion about them
which was very appropriate to so great a poet, and invested him with a
certain awe through which the multitude rarely penetrated. As a matter
of fact, however, he was an excellent companion, a ready talker, and
gifted with so much wit that it is a pity that more of his sayings have
not been preserved to us.

One of the best known is that which was drawn from him after he and a
number of friends had been spending an hour in company with Mr. and Mrs.
Carlyle. The two Carlyles were unfortunately at their worst, and gave a
superb specimen of domestic "nagging. " Each caught up whatever the other
said, and either turned it into ridicule, or tried to make the author of
it an object of contempt.

This was, of course, exceedingly uncomfortable for such strangers as
were present, and it certainly gave no pleasure to their friends. On
leaving the house, some one said to Tennyson:

"Isn't it a pity that such a couple ever married? "

"No, no," said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough beard.
"It's much better that two people should be made unhappy than four. "

The world has pretty nearly come around to the verdict of the poet
laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made any
woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have made any
man happy as her husband.

This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr. Froude,
in the early eighties, given his story about the Carlyles to the world.
Carlyle went to his grave, an old man, highly honored, and with no
trail of gossip behind him. His wife had died some sixteen years before,
leaving a brilliant memory. The books of Mr. Froude seemed for a moment
to have desecrated the grave, and to have shed a sudden and sinister
light upon those who could not make the least defense for themselves.

For a moment, Carlyle seemed to have been a monster of harshness,
cruelty, and almost brutish feeling. On the other side, his wife took
on the color of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew, who tormented the
life of her husband, and allowed herself to be possessed by some demon
of unrest and discontent, such as few women of her station are ever
known to suffer from.

Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and unhappy
with each other. There were hints and innuendos which looked toward some
hidden cause for this unhappiness, and which aroused the curiosity of
every one. That they might be clearer, Froude afterward wrote a book,
bringing out more plainly--indeed, too plainly--his explanation of the
Carlyle family skeleton. A multitude of documents then came from every
quarter, and from almost every one who had known either of the Carlyles.
Perhaps the result to-day has been more injurious to Froude than to the
two Carlyles.

Many persons unjustly speak of Froude as having violated the confidence
of his friends in publishing the letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. They
take no heed of the fact that in doing this he was obeying Carlyle's
express wishes, left behind in writing, and often urged on Froude while
Carlyle was still alive. Whether or not Froude ought to have accepted
such a trust, one may perhaps hesitate to decide. That he did so is
probably because he felt that if he refused, Carlyle might commit the
same duty to another, who would discharge it with less delicacy and less
discretion.

As it is, the blame, if it rests upon any one, should rest upon Carlyle.
He collected the letters. He wrote the lines which burn and scorch with
self-reproach. It is he who pressed upon the reluctant Froude the duty
of printing and publishing a series of documents which, for the most
part, should never have been published at all, and which have done equal
harm to Carlyle, to his wife, and to Froude himself.

Now that everything has been written that is likely to be written by
those claiming to possess personal knowledge of the subject, let us
take up the volumes, and likewise the scattered fragments, and seek to
penetrate the mystery of the most ill-assorted couple known to modern
literature.

It is not necessary to bring to light, and in regular order, the
external history of Thomas Carlyle, or of Jane Baillie Welsh, who
married him. There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful gossip
about this marriage, and about the three persons who had to do with it.

Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlyle. His life until that
time had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary country-man.
Many persons represent him as a peasant; but he was descended from the
ancient lords of a Scottish manor. There was something in his eye, and
in the dominance of his nature, that made his lordly nature felt. Mr.
Froude notes that Carlyle's hand was very small and unusually well
shaped. Nor had his earliest appearance as a young man been commonplace,
in spite of the fact that his parents were illiterate, so that his
mother learned to read only after her sons had gone away to Edinburgh,
in order that she might be able to enjoy their letters.

At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, in each family the
son who had the most notable "pairts" was sent to the university that
he might become a clergyman. If there were a second son, he became an
advocate or a doctor of medicine, while the sons of less distinction
seldom went beyond the parish school, but settled down as farmers,
horse-dealers, or whatever might happen to come their way.

In the case of Thomas Carlyle, nature marked him out for something
brilliant, whatever that might be. His quick sensibility, the way in
which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic, and,
withal, his swift, unerring gift of language, made it certain from the
very first that he must be sent to the university as soon as he had
finished school, and could afford to go.

At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he
astonished every one by the enormous extent of his reading, and by
the firm hold he kept upon it. One hesitates to credit these so-called
reminiscences which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek and immense
quantities of political economy and history and sociology and various
forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is bound to do. That he read all
night is a common story told of many a Scottish lad at college. We may
believe, however, that Carlyle studied and read as most of his fellow
students did, but far beyond them, in extent.

When he had completed about half of his divinity course, he assured
himself that he was not intended for the life of a clergyman. One who
reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be a clever string of jeers
directed against religion, might well think that Carlyle was throughout
his life an atheist, or an agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did
not believe in the Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that he
ever would so believe.

Moreover, Carlyle had done something which was unusual at that time.
He had taught in several local schools; but presently he came back to
Edinburgh and openly made literature his profession. It was a daring
thing to do; but Carlyle had unbounded confidence in himself--the
confidence of a giant, striding forth into a forest, certain that he can
make his way by sheer strength through the tangled meshes and the
knotty branches that he knows will meet him and try to beat him back.
Furthermore, he knew how to live on very little; he was unmarried; and
he felt a certain ardor which beseemed his age and gifts.

Through the kindness of friends, he received some commissions to write
in various books of reference; and in 1824, when he was twenty-nine
years of age, he published a translation of Legendre's Geometry. In the
same year he published, in the London Magazine, his Life of Schiller,
and also his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. This successful
attack upon the London periodicals and reviews led to a certain
complication with the other two characters in this story. It takes us to
Jane Welsh, and also to Edward Irving.

Irving was three years older than Carlyle. The two men were friends, and
both of them had been teaching in country schools, where both of them
had come to know Miss Welsh. Irving's seniority gave him a certain
prestige with the younger men, and naturally with Miss Welsh. He had
won honors at the university, and now, as assistant to the famous Dr.
Chalmers, he carried his silk robes in the jaunty fashion of one who has
just ceased to be an undergraduate. While studying, he met Miss Welsh at
Haddington, and there became her private instructor.

This girl was regarded in her native town as something of a personage.
To read what has been written of her, one might suppose that she was
almost a miracle of birth and breeding, and of intellect as well. As a
matter of fact, in the little town of Haddington she was simply prima
inter pares. Her father was the local doctor, and while she had a
comfortable home, and doubtless a chaise at her disposal, she was
very far from the "opulence" which Carlyle, looking up at her from his
lowlier surroundings, was accustomed to ascribe to her. She was, no
doubt, a very clever girl; and, judging from the portraits taken of her
at about this time, she was an exceedingly pretty one, with beautiful
eyes and an abundance of dark glossy hair.

Even then, however, Miss Welsh had traits which might have made it
certain that she would be much more agreeable as a friend than as a
wife. She had become an intellectuelle quite prematurely--at an age, in
fact, when she might better have been thinking of other things than the
inwardness of her soul, or the folly of religious belief.

Even as a young girl, she was beset by a desire to criticize and to
ridicule almost everything and every one that she encountered. It was
only when she met with something that she could not understand, or
some one who could do what she could not, that she became comparatively
humble. Unconsciously, her chief ambition was to be herself
distinguished, and to marry some one who could be more distinguished
still.

When she first met Edward Irving, she looked up to him as her superior
in many ways. He was a striking figure in her small world. He was known
in Edinburgh as likely to be a man of mark; and, of course, he had had
a careful training in many subjects of which she, as yet, knew very
little. Therefore, insensibly, she fell into a sort of admiration
for Irving--an admiration which might have been transmuted into love.
Irving, on his side, was taken by the young girl's beauty, her vivacity,
and the keenness of her intellect. That he did not at once become her
suitor is probably due to the fact that he had already engaged himself
to a Miss Martin, of whom not much is known.

It was about this time, however, that Carlyle became acquainted with
Miss Welsh. His abundant knowledge, his original and striking manner of
commenting on it, his almost gigantic intellectual power, came to her
as a revelation. Her studies with Irving were now interwoven with her
admiration for Carlyle.

Since Irving was a clergyman, and Miss Welsh had not the slightest
belief in any form of theology, there was comparatively little that
they had in common. On the other hand, when she saw the profundities of
Carlyle, she at once half feared, and was half fascinated. Let her speak
to him on any subject, and he would at once thunder forth some striking
truth, or it might be some puzzling paradox; but what he said could
never fail to interest her and to make her think. He had, too, an
infinite sense of humor, often whimsical and shot through with sarcasm.

It is no wonder that Miss Welsh was more and more infatuated with the
nature of Carlyle. If it was her conscious wish to marry a man whom she
could reverence as a master, where should she find him--in Irving or in
Carlyle?

Irving was a dreamer, a man who, she came to see, was thoroughly
one-sided, and whose interests lay in a different sphere from hers.
Carlyle, on the other hand, had already reached out beyond the little
Scottish capital, and had made his mark in the great world of London,
where men like De Quincey and Jeffrey thought it worth their while to
run a tilt with him. Then, too, there was the fascination of his talk,
in which Jane Welsh found a perpetual source of interest:

The English have never had an artist, except in poetry; no musician; no
painter. Purcell and Hogarth are not exceptions, or only such as confirm
the rule.

Is the true Scotchman the peasant and yeoman--chiefly the former?

Every living man is a visible mystery; he walks between two eternities
and two infinitudes. Were we not blind as molea we should value
our humanity at infinity, and our rank, influence and so forth--the
trappings of our humanity--at nothing. Say I am a man, and you say all.
Whether king or tinker is a mere appendix.

Understanding is to reason as the talent of a beaver--which can build
houses, and uses its tail for a trowel--to the genius of a prophet and
poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age; it can never be altogether
extinguished.

The devil has his elect.

Is anything more wonderful than another, if you consider it maturely?
I have seen no men rise from the dead; I have seen some thousands rise
from nothing. I have not force to fly into the sun, but I have force to
lift my hand, which is equally strange.

Is not every thought properly an inspiration? Or how is one thing more
inspired than another?

Examine by logic the import of thy life, and of all lives. What is it?
A making of meal into manure, and of manure into meal. To the cui bono
there is no answer from logic.

In many ways Jane Welsh found the difference of range between Carlyle
and Irving. At one time, she asked Irving about some German works, and
he was obliged to send her to Carlyle to solve her difficulties. Carlyle
knew German almost as well as if he had been born in Dresden; and
the full and almost overflowing way in which he answered her gave her
another impression of his potency. Thus she weighed the two men who
might become her lovers, and little by little she came to think of
Irving as partly shallow and partly narrow-minded, while Carlyle loomed
up more of a giant than before.

It is not probable that she was a woman who could love profoundly.
She thought too much about herself. She was too critical. She had too
intense an ambition for "showing off. " I can imagine that in the end
she made her choice quite coolly. She was flattered by Carlyle's strong
preference for her. She was perhaps repelled by Irving's engagement to
another woman; yet at the time few persons thought that she had chosen
well.

Irving had now gone to London, and had become the pastor of the
Caledonian chapel in Hatton Garden. Within a year, by the extraordinary
power of his eloquence, which, was in a style peculiar to himself, he
had transformed an obscure little chapel into one which was crowded
by the rich and fashionable. His congregation built for him a handsome
edifice on Regent Square, and he became the leader of a new cult, which
looked to a second personal advent of Christ. He cared nothing for
the charges of heresy which were brought against him; and when he was
deposed his congregation followed him, and developed a new Christian
order, known as Irvingism.

Jane Welsh, in her musings, might rightfully have compared the two men
and the future which each could give her. Did she marry Irving, she was
certain of a life of ease in London, and an association with men and
women of fashion and celebrity, among whom she could show herself to be
the gifted woman that she was. Did she marry Carlyle, she must go with
him to a desolate, wind-beaten cottage, far away from any of the things
she cared for, working almost as a housemaid, having no company save
that of her husband, who was already a dyspeptic, and who was wont to
speak of feeling as if a rat were tearing out his stomach.

Who would have said that in going with Carlyle she had made the better
choice? Any one would have said it who knew the three--Irving, Carlyle,
and Jane Welsh.

She had the penetration to be certain that whatever Irving might possess
at present, it would be nothing in comparison to what Carlyle would have
in the coming future. She understood the limitations of Irving, but to
her keen mind the genius of Carlyle was unlimited; and she foresaw that,
after he had toiled and striven, he would come into his great reward,
which she would share. Irving might be the leader of a petty sect,
but Carlyle would be a man whose name must become known throughout the
world.

And so, in 1826, she had made her choice, and had become the bride of
the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the world with
nothing but his creative brain and his stubborn independence. She had
put aside all immediate thought of London and its lures; she was going
to cast in her lot with Carlyle's, largely as a matter of calculation,
and believing that she had made the better choice.

She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief
residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock. Froude has
described this place as the dreariest spot in the British dominions:

The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it; the elevation, seven
hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden
produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the
scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape
is unredeemed by grace or grandeur--mere undulating hills of grass and
heather, with peat bogs in the hollows between them.

Froude's grim description has been questioned by some; yet the actual
pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years make it
look bare, desolate, and uninviting. Mrs. Carlyle, who owned it as an
inheritance from her father, saw the place for the first time in March,
1828. She settled there in May; but May, in the Scottish hills, is
almost as repellent as winter. She herself shrank from the adventure
which she had proposed. It was her husband's notion, and her own, that
they should live there in practical solitude. He was to think and write,
and make for himself a beginning of real fame; while she was to hover
over him and watch his minor comforts.

It seemed to many of their friends that the project was quixotic to a
degree. Mrs. Carlyle delicate health, her weak chest, and the beginning
of a nervous disorder, made them think that she was unfit to dwell in
so wild and bleak a solitude. They felt, too, that Carlyle was too
much absorbed with his own thought to be trusted with the charge of a
high-spirited woman.

However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple went
to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household goods and
those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a cottage near by.
These were the two redeeming features of their lonely home--the presence
of Alexander Carlyle, and the fact that, although they had no servants
in the ordinary sense, there were several farmhands and a dairy-maid.

Before long there came a period of trouble, which is easily explained
by what has been already said. Carlyle, thinking and writing some of
the most beautiful things that he ever thought or wrote, could not make
allowance for his wife's high spirit and physical weakness. She, on her
side--nervous, fitful, and hard to please--thought herself a slave,
the servant of a harsh and brutal master. She screamed at him when her
nerves were too unstrung; and then, with a natural reaction, she called
herself "a devil who could never be good enough for him. " But most of
her letters were harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his
conduct to her was at times no better than her own.

But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm the
road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his own
dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was here that
he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic essays, which were
published by the leading reviews of England and Scotland. Here, too, he
began to teach his countrymen the value of German literature.

The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work entitled
Sartor Resartus (1834), an extraordinary mixture of the sublime and the
grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic pathos, with inward
agonies, with solemn aspirations, and with riotous humor.

In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to
London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from
fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could be more
readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote what must
seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History of the French
Revolution. For this he had read and thought for many years; parts of
it he had written in essays, and parts of it he had jotted down in
journals. But now it came forth, as some one has said, "a truth clad in
hell-fire," swirling amid clouds and flames and mist, a most wonderful
picture of the accumulated social and political falsehoods which
preceded the revolution, and which were swept away by a nemesis that was
the righteous judgment of God.

Carlyle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his middle
style, having passed the clarity of his early writings, and not having
yet reached the thunderous, strange-mouthed German expletives which
marred his later work. In the French Revolution he bursts forth, here
and there, into furious Gallic oaths and Gargantuan epithets; yet this
apocalypse of France seems more true than his hero-worshiping of old
Frederick of Prussia, or even of English Cromwell.

All these days Thomas Carlyle lived a life which was partly one
of seclusion and partly one of pleasure. At all times he and his
dark-haired wife had their own sets, and mingled with their own friends.
Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would have been
happier with Irving; for Irving died while she was still digging
potatoes and complaining of her lot at Craigenputtock.

However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an existence that
was full of unhappiness and rancor. Jane Carlyle became an invalid, and
sought to allay her nervous sufferings with strong tea and tobacco and
morphin. When a nervous woman takes to morphin, it almost always means
that she becomes intensely jealous; and so it was with Jane Carlyle.

A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity, she took it
into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady Ashburton, or
that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him. She took to spying on them,
and at times, when her nerves were all a jangle, she would lie back
in her armchair and yell with paroxysms of anger. On the other hand,
Carlyle, eager to enjoy the world, sought relief from his household
cares, and sometimes stole away after a fashion that was hardly
guileless. He would leave false addresses at his house, and would dine
at other places than he had announced.