BOOKS.

MRS. CARLYLE'S LETTERS.* WITH a little suppression of the innumerable repetitions con- cerning bad nights, digestion, insect annoyances, and other

* Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Edited by James Anthony Fr oude. 3 voLs. London : Longmans and Co.

household matters, of which no one can expect the public to enjoy more than is needful to show the domestic ckaracter and capacity of the writer, these three volumes might be com- pressed into two of the most fascinating in the English language; but this compression they certainly require Mrs. Carlyle evidently wrote without a thought of her letters ever serving any purpose but that of telling her correspondents what she was thinking, feeling, suffering, or enjoying at the time, and letters so written by a woman continually em- ployed in the same class of tasks, and suffering from the same class of causes, could not but contain a vast amount of needless and even profuse repetition. Mr. Fronde might, we think, have added greatly to the charm of this book, without in any way detracting from its frankness, if he had abbreviated almost all those letters in which the various house- cleanings and the various headaches are minutely described, leaving one or two of each type to stand in full, but cutting down the rest. As it is, the reader at times forgets that Mrs. Carlyle is not responsible for all these egotisms, and imputes to her the sin of repetitions which are really the fault of the editor. Were all such redundancies of household and medical detail eliminated, there would remain in these volumes ample stores of vivacity, and brightness, and satire, and pathos, and patience, and impatience, and humour and wit; stores ample enough to constitute a lasting memorial to Mrs. Carlyle's memory, and nothing to incline any one to skip. As it is, the horrors of London four-posters and the details of sleepless nights are sometimes multiplied till the admirable vividness, sharpness, tenderness, and originality of the letters are a little hidden from view.

Mrs. Carlyle did not invent quite such remarkable phrases in describing the people whom she best knew, as her husband. But iu bringing their figures before our minds, she was hardly, if at all, his inferior. Take, for instance, this description of Mr. Carlyle's lady admirers, with the sly hit in conclusion at himself:—

"Let no woman who values peace of soul ever dream of marrying

an author ! That is to say, if he is an honest one, who makes a con- science of doing the thing he pretends to do. But this I observe to you in confidence; should I state such a sentiment openly, I might happen to get myself torn in pieces by the host of my husband's lady admirers, who already, I suspect, think me too happy in not knowing my happiness. You cannot fancy what way he is making with the fair intellects here ! There is Harriet Martineau presents him with her ear-trumpet with a pretty, blushing air of coquetry, which would almost convince me out of belief in her identity ! And Mrs. Pierce Butler bolts in upon his studies, out of the atmosphere, as it were, in riding-habit, cap and whip (but no shadow of a horse, only a carriage, the whip, I suppose, being to whip the cushions with, for the purpose of keeping her hand in practice)—my inexperienced Scotch domestic remaining entirely in a nonplus whether she had let in a leddy or a gentleman !' And then there is a young American beauty—such a beauty ! 'snow and rose-bloom' throughout, not as to clothes merely, but complexion also ; largo and soft, and without one idea, you would say, to rub upon another ! And this charming creature publicly declares herself his ardent admirer,' and I heard her with my own ears call out quite passionately at parting with him, Oh, Mr. Carlyle, I want to sec you to talk a long, long time about—" Sartor !"" Sartor,' of all things in this world ! What could such a young lady have got to say about Satter,' can you imagine ? And Mrs. Marsh, the moving authoress of the Old Man's

Tales,' reads Sartor ' when she is ill in bed ; from which one thing at least may be clearly inferred, that her illness is not of the head.

In short, my dear friend, the singular author of Sartor' appears to me at this moment to be in a perilous position, inasmuch as (with the innocence of a sucking dove to outward appearance) he is leading honourable women, not a few, entirely off their feet. And who can say that he will keep his own ? After all, in sober earnest, is it not curious that my husband's writings should be only completely under- stood and adequately appreciated by women and mad people ? I do not know very well what to infer from the fact."

Too much has certainly been made of Mrs. Carlyle's sufferings through her husband's indifference to her. That she suffered greatly at intervals for perhaps ten or twelve years, partly through Lady Ashburton's influence over her husband, partly from Carlyle's selfish absorption in the monster work of his life, the bile of Frederick the Great, is undeniable ; but it is clear enough that even during parts of this time she was at heart not only devoted to her husband, but conscious that nothing pleased him better than to hear how truly she was wrapped up in him. Take, for example, these two tender letters, both written during the middle and least happy period of their lives. The first was written in July, 1844, after she had just left home on a visit :—

" Tuiy 2.

"Indeed, dear, you look to be almost unhappy enough already ! I do not want you to suffer physically, only morally, you understand, and to hear of your having to take coffee at night and all that gives me no wicked satisfaction, but makes me quite unhappy. It is curious bow much more uncomfortable I feel without you, when it is I who am going away from you, and not, as it used to be, you gone away from me. I am always wondering since I came here how I can, even in my angriest mood, talk about leaving you for good and all ; for to be sure, if I were to leave you to-day on that principle, I should need absolutely to go back to-morrow to see how you were taking it."

And the following was written in July, 1846, when Carlyle had apparently forgotten to write to her on her birthday, the truth being that the letter was waiting for her, but that the post- mistress had made some mistake :—

"Seaforth, Tuesday, July 14, 1846.

" Oh ! my dear husband, fortune has played me such a cruel trick this day ! and I do not even feel any resentment against fortune, for the suffocating misery of the last two hours. I know always, when I seem to you most exacting, that whatever happens to me is nothing like so bad as I deserve. But you shall hear how it was. Not a line from you on my birthday, the post-mistress averred ! I did not burst out crying, did not faint—did not do anything absurd, so far as I know; but I walked back again without speaking a word ; and with such a tumult of wretchedness in my heart as you, who know me, can conceive. And then I shut myself in my own room to fancy everything that was most tormenting. Were you, finally, so out of patience with me that you had resolved to write to me no more at all ? Had you gone to Addiscombe, and found no leisure there to remember my existence ? Were you taken ill, so ill that you could not write ? That last idea made me mad to get off to the railway, and back to London. Oh, mercy ! what a two hours I had of it ! And just when I was at my wits' end, I heard Julia crying out through the house : `Mrs. Carlyle, Mrs. Carlyle! Are you there ? Here is a letter for you.' And so there was after all! The post- mistress had overlooked it, and had given it to Robert, when he went afterwards, not knowino.b that we had been. I wonder what love- letter was ever received with such thankfulness ! Oh, my dear ! I am not fit for living in the world with this organisation. I am as much broken to pieces by that little accident as if I had come through an attack of cholera or typhus fever. I cannot even steady my hand to write decently. But I felt an irresistible need of thank- ing you, by return of post. Yes, I have kissed the dear little card- case ; and now I will lie down awhile, and try and get some sleep. At least, to quiet myself, I will try to believe—oh, why cannot I believe it, once for all—that with all my faults and follies, I am dearer to you than any earthly creature' I will be better for Geraldine here ; she is become very quiet and nice ; and as affectionate for me as even—Your own J. C.

These letters will give an adequate idea of the tenderness and passion of which Mrs. Carlyle was capable, and which, had Carlyle been other than he was, she would, no doubt, have lavished freely on her husband. But we do not in the least mean to convey that all the shortcoming was on his side. Many of her letters,—and still more her diaries,—show the hardness, pride, and tauntingness with which she met what she regarded as his neglect, and of course, this did not tend to restore the confidence between them. As somebody said, there was too much of the diamond on the surface of each of them to make life together quite easy, and though in her the tenderness was deep beneath, it was by no means always get-at-able, for she loved to play the man when she found her husband not recognising the woman in her. That Carlyle himself was hard, the ease with which he threw off even intimate friends like John Stuart Mill seems to show. Speaking of the appearance of his own screamy and foolish little pam- phlet, " Occasional Thoughts on the Nigger Question," Carlyle says, quite coolly, that it produced " execrative shrieks from several people, J. S. Mill for one, who, indeed, had personally quite parted from me a year or two before, I know not why, nor indeed very much inquired, since it was his silly pleasure, poor Mill !" Mrs. Carlyle evidently- felt the estrangement much more deeply. When she got a cold note from Mr. J. S. Mill in reply to a cordial message from herself, she speaks of having had something like a trembling fit, from the pain it gave her. But when Mrs. Carlyle met with hardness from one she loved, though it wounded her deeply, she always strove to affect a hardness she did not feel, and which she would have done much better not to put on. She admits that on the few occasions when she gave way to a natural burst of feeling, Carlyle was not in any way indifferent to her distress. Mrs.

Carlyle calls the long ten years or so while Frederick the Great was being written,—" the valley of the shadow of Frederick the Great," and truly it was to her much worse than the valley of the shadow of death, especially as during a part of it, Lady Ashburton contrived to cast on her lot a shadow at least as chilling as the departed Frederick himself. But even in this period, though her letters get a bitterer tone, there is no falling off in their brilliancy. Nothing can be more amusing, for instance, than her account of Count d'Orsay, and her con- trast between him and Lord Jeffrey :—

" April 13, 1845.

" To-day, oddly enough, while I was engaged in re-reading Carlyle'e Philosophy of Clothes, Count d'Orsay walked in. I had not seen him for four or five years. Last time he was as gay in his colours as a humming-bird—blue satin cravat, blue velvet waistcoat, cream, coloured coat, lined with velvet of the same hue, trousers also of a bright colour, I forget what ; white French gloves, two glorious breast-pins attached by a chain, and length enough of gold watch- guard to have hanged himself in. To-day, in compliment to his five more years, he was all in black and brown—a blank satin cravat, a brown velvet waistcoat, a brown coat, some shades darker than the waistcoat, lined with velvet of its own shade, and almost black trousers, one breast-pin, a large pear.shaped pearl set into a little cup of diamonds, and only one fold of gold chain round his neck-, tucked together right on the centre of his spacious breast with one magnificent turquoise. Well ! that man understood his trade; if it be but that of dandy, nobody can deny that he is a perfect master of it, that he dresses himself with consummate skill ! A bungler would have made no allowance for five more years at his time of life ; bat he had the fine sense to perceive how much better his dress of to-day sets off his slightly-enlarged figure and slightly-worn complexion, than the humming-bird colours of five years back would have done. Poor D'Orsay ! he was born to have been something better than even the king of dandies. He did not say nearly so many clever things this time as on the last occasion. His wit, I suppose, is of the sort that belongs more to animal spirits than to real genius, and his animal spirits seem to have fallen many degrees. The only thing that fell from him to-day worth remembering was his account of a mask he had seen of Charles Fox, `all punched and flattened as if he had slept in a book.' Lord Jeffery came, unexpected, while the Count was here. What a difference ! the prince of critics and the prince of dandies. How washed out the beautiful dandiacal face looked beside that little clever old man's ! The large blue dandiacal eyes, you would have said, had never contemplated anything more interesting than the reflection of the handsome personage they pertained to in a looking-glass ; while the dark penetrating ones of the other had been taking note of most things in God's universe, even seeing a good way into millstones."

Again, take the witty account of the way in which each of the- two doctors who attended Mrs. Carlyle ignored the particular- ailment for which she had consulted the,pther one. "Mr. Barnes," she says," regards my leg as his patient and my arm as Dr. Quain's patient, which he has nothing to do with ; and he is rather glad_ to be irresponsible for it, seeing nothing to be done." Nor could anything be more powerful, in its way, than this reproach against her husband, sent to her intimate friend, Mrs. Russell :—

" 5 Cheyne Row : December 15, 1862.

" I should not be at all afraid that after a few weeks my new maid would do well enough if it wern't for Mr. C.'s frightful im- patience with any new servant untrained to his ways, which would drive a woman out of the house with her hair on end if allowed to, act directly upon her! So that I have to stand between them, and imitate in a small, humble way the Roman soldier who gathered his- arms full of the enemy's spears, and received them all into his own. breast.* It is this which makes a change of servants, even when for the better, a terror to me in prospect, and an agony in realisation— for a time."

• Nobs by Mr. Carlyle.—"Oh heavens, the comparison it was too true."

But if Mrs. Carlyle had been a little more reticent with her friends and a little less reticent with her husband, he would, doubtless, have made her a better husband, and she would' certainly have made him a better wife.

Nothing strikes us as more remarkable than the complete way in which a woman of so much genius as Mrs. Carlyle,—a woman whose observation and style are her own, and never become in any way Carlylese,—assimilated, without ever questioning them apparently, all Carlyle's crude ideas ; his notion that the only true religion consists in imaginative- wonder and impatience of shams,—his scorn for science when- ever it touches the borderland of religion,—his cruel contempt for the sufferings of the less dignified races of men like the negroes, or what he was pleased to think the scam of our British population,—his belief that men were "mostly fools," and his strange notion that men could discern by a sort of second-sight who were the rulers to whom they ought to submit themselves. These crude ideas never filled either Mrs. Carlyle's mind or her heart. That she was miserable in part for want of a better faith is clear throughout these letters, and yet she assumes all through that Carlyle is possessed of the only truth in the world that is of any real significance, and that all men who are worth anything should come over to his creed. For example, she tells frankly a Liverpool Unitarian minister of eminence that he ought at once to abandon his half-and-half position, and come over to Carlyle's. And yet this book is curiously fall- of evidence that neither Carlyle nor his wife had any creed which subdued their hearts and minds, or gave them guidance and peace in time of trouble. It contains the letters of a brilliant woman without any inward source of rest at all, or anything that she herself mistook for it. Nevertheless she is apparently as proud of her intellectual position and of her spiritual vacuum as if the one had given her a complete key to human weaknesses, and the other a constant spring of human strength.