BOOKS.

MRS. CARLYLE.*

IT is impossible to read afresh the now well-known story of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle's life together, with anything approaching to weariness. They tormented each other,

and to some extent they torment the reader, by their captiousness and seemingly wilful miseries ; but whatever torment they might inflict on each other or those who would willingly have seen them happy, they had it not in them to be dull, and even in Mrs. Alexander Ireland's narrative, which we cannot say that we greatly admire, the tragedy of their sufferings interests us as deeply as ever. Mrs. Ireland is much too emotional for our taste. She admires too much, she commiserates too much, she is altogether too self- conscious concerning her own delight in Mrs. Carlyle, and the intensity of the pangs with which she contemplates the sufferings of her heroine. We have too much of this sort of thing :—.

"She did not fear poverty—if she were rich in love ; but what constituted that most precious treasure was imperfectly under- stood by Carlyle. And in all marriage the human element must ever be important, it cannot be overlooked. It is still there when the white-haired venerable pair sit on either side of the hearth, watching their great-grandchild playing on the rug ; or, if no such link carries them forward, it is still there when they recall golden days of youth, and the flush tints their faded cheeks, as they recount some fragments of the tale of their springtime, of no meaning to any one but themselves."

After describing one of their most unhappy episodes, Mrs.

Ireland says :—" It only remains to say: Oh the pity of it ! the pity of it !' " That seems to us just what did not remain to say, what it would have been far better to leave the reader to think, and not to say. There is a disposition to gloat over the tragedy of Mrs. Carlyle's unhappiness, which to some extent hardens the reader's heart, and renders him indisposed to permit himself as much sympathy as he would otherwise have been compelled to give. Mrs. Ireland is always interspersing her narrative with passages like the following :—

"And yet we fear that, as Mr. Fronde says, his was the soft heart, and hers the stern one.' I sternness born of repressed tenderness is very stern indeed, and, in this sense perhaps, it was so—to all appearance. That fiery heart, in its unseen fetters, could not always be amiable —but like poor Brutus—with himself at war, forgot the shows of love to other men.'"

Mrs. Ireland flutters too much over the subject of Mrs. Carlyle's forlornness. When she repeats her heroine's name in full,—Jane Welsh Carlyle,—as she often does, especially if she is to be termed " brave " or "dauntless," a rhetorical effect is evidently intended, and the reader feels that he is expected to sigh a good deal more profoundly than he would be expected to sigh if she were only called Mrs. Carlyle. Carlyle himself sometimes indulged in the same rather cheap rhetoric. Refer- ring to Mrs. Montagu's kind offer to help Mrs. Carlyle with

money, he says :—" Jane Welsh Carlyle a taker of money in this era of the gigmen ' P—ninmer and nimmermehr." That rhetori- cal use of the three names is not very impressive ; and still less is.

it impressive when repeatedly used for the purpose of heighten- ing the agony by Mrs. Ireland, in her wish to express the emotion with which she is overwhelmed when she contemplates. her heroine's sufferings. It is better to be unobtrusive, and not roll out the three names with the same sort of emphasis

with which Macaulay in rhetorical passages substitutes "Charles, Earl Grey," for the modest Lord Grey of less.

rhetorical essayists.

Apart from the rather sentimental excesses of Mrs. Ireland's pity and pathos, and the too elaborate recitals of Mrs. Carlyle's miseries and illnesses, many of which might be suppressed with very good effect,—it is a pity to refer to them at all except when Mrs. Carlyle is allowed to tell the fall story in her own very graphic fashion,—the book is interesting enough, and can never be called tedious. Mrs. Ireland fully appreciates the vivacity and irony and sardonic*

Life ef Jane Welsh Carlyle, By Mn, Alexander Ireland. London : Chan* and W haus.

power of her heroine, and is very judicious in quoting the whole of the very happy budget of afemme ineomprise, and of the clever little dialogue between the canary and the watch. It would have been well, indeed, to quote all the more remarkable letters at length, and to say nothing at all of those various other small miseries and illnesses and ill-humours where it was not in- tended to illustrate them fully by Mrs. Carlyle's own lively

-pen. The only quality that makes these matters in any sense significant is Mrs. Carlyle's great literary faculty for de-

lineating her own and her husband's state of mind. When that is not delineated to us, it is no use telling us succinctly that she was wretched, and that her biographer in the vivacity of her sympathies is disposed to wring her hands over her sad fate.

On the whole, we think that Mrs. Ireland gives us a very fair and impartial conception of Mrs. Carlyle's character, though

she seems to demand a good deal more admiration than we can give. We cannot agree with her that Mrs. Carlyle -was "eminently feminine to the heart's core ; " but then,

we do not think that any one who reads this book care- fully would be at all disposed to echo that judgment. Her prowess with her fist at school was hardly "feminine to the heart's core." The vehement, self-conscious, almost

bold, way in which she speaks of her early and evidently trifling love-affairs, is certainly not "eminently feminine,"—

rather unblushingly masculine. And again, her most re- markable characteristic,—pride,—is not eminently feminine, but remarkably masculine. No doubt the moment her pity and gratitude are excited, she is as true a woman as you could find anywhere. But then, it is not so often that her pity and gratitude are excited. At least, we often see her tenderness petrified into indignant scorn, and her wrath at the deficient gratitude of others drowning the grateful emotions of her own heart. In fact, Mrs. Carlyle was, on the whole, a very mascu- line woman, with many of the qualities of the man ready at a moment's notice to start up and throw into eclipse the tender- ness of the woman. What we like least in her is her readiness to confide her unhappy experience of married life even to mere strangers. Carlyle himself would never, we think, have done 'this; at all events, we know no instance in which he betrayed to others, as Mrs. Carlyle continually did, the unhappy aspects of his home life. No doubt he was much more to blame for this unhappiness than she was. Absorbed in himself with a magni- ficent share of the vanity of genius, he hardly knew the purga- tory in which she lived, and he took no pains to know it. But none the less he was far more faithful to her than she was to him, in his attitude towards the outside world. Many of her letters, sometimes to mere strangers, are in effect indictments against Mr. Carlyle, which can have had but one meaning for her correspondents,—letters which she ought to have been

ashamed to write. We are aware that Carlyle was much the more selfish of the two, but also much the more scrupulous -in screening her from anything like blame. Indeed, on this head she was not scrupulous at all. All we can say for this, on the whole, unhappy marriage, is that both Carlyle and his

wife improved greatly before the end,—that they came out of it better than they went into it; and this is no doubt so very large an exception to its unhappiness, that we must hesitate to call it unhappy in its issue. We cannot help thinking that the hardness and wilfulness of both their natures, and the almost exclusively imaginative character of their religion, was in a great measure the cause of their troubles. This comment -on a letter from Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, is a key to a good -deal of Mrs. Carlyle's misery :—

" Thomas Erskine of Linlathen had been writing to Mrs. Carlyle that he loved her much, and wished he could see what God intended her for ! ' Her answer, as quoted by herself to Carlyle, is a sad one. I answered his letter (she says), begging him to tell me "what God intended me for," since he knew and I didn't. It would be a satisfaction even to know it. It is surely .a kind of impiety to speak of God as if He, too, were "with the best intentions always unfortunate." Either I am just what God intended me for, or God cannot "carry out" His intentions, it would seem. And in that case I, for "one solitary individual," .can't worship Him the least in the world."

Yet even in this respect Mrs. Carlyle softened greatly towards the end. The reader is cheered by coming upon this passage of by no means unjust self-reproach towards the end of Mrs. Carlyle's long illness :—

"September 28th I thank God I got some little sleep

last night, for I had been going from bad to worse Oh, this relapse is a severe disappointment to me—and, God knows, not

altogether a selfish disappointment ! I had looked forward to going back to you so much improved, as to be, if not of any use and comfort to you, at least no trouble to you and no burden on

your spirits. And now, God knows how it will be Oh, dear, you cannot help ins, though you would. Nobody can help me, only God ; and can I wonder if God take so little heed of me, when all my life I have taken so little heed of Him P"

We may remark parenthetically, that we can hardly imagine that Mr. Larkin and Mrs. Alexander Ireland can be justified

in attributing to Mrs. Carlyle so very poor and unmeaning a practical joke (and that, too, indulged in at the age of fifty-

seven) as they attribute to her in the following passage, which seems to us quite inconsistent with the rest of this bio- graphy :— "An amusing incident is given by Mr. Larkin as to this home- coming of Mrs. Carlyle. She had written to him from Thornhifl a most urgent note to meet her, on her arrival at Mutton, and given all particulars. But Mr. Larkin met the train and saw no trace of her, waited and carefully kept a sharp look-out—no Mrs. Carlyle appeared ! So, in some anxiety, he returned home, and called next day at 5 Cheyne Row to find her innocently wondering why he had not met her! That it was a well-meant trick,' Mr. Larkin never doubted; nor, on consideration, do we."

There mast be some mistake here. The trick could hardly have been "well-meant." It must have been sheer schoolboy

mischief; and that in a broken down invalid of fifty-seven is hardly conceivable.

Mrs. Ireland expresses her belief that if Carlyle had not loomed so big, and not only so big but so oppressive, as one may say, in his own house, and could have shared his intellectual life more freely with his wife, she might herself have been a very considerable author. Perhaps so. We cannot say that she would not. What she does write is full of ingenuity, and sometimes of real imagination ; but it is obvious that her interests were not nearly so much literary as practical,—or rather, we should say that her literary power was shown almost wholly in her insight into the life immediately before her. We have hardly a single keen criticism on any great writer from the beginning to the end of her correspondence. But we have plenty of this sort of vividness :—" I am wearied and sad and cross, and feel as if death had been dissolved into a liquid, and I had drunk of it till I was full." That Mrs. Carlyle had a fine literary faculty, no one will deny. That she could have used it in writing a " book " to anything like as good purpose as she used it in her daily correspondence, must remain a matter of considerable doubt. But we admit that the obtrusive shadow of Carlyle was not the happy shade in which any such faculty would grow.