The valley of the shadow of marriage
Peter Quennell
JANE WELSH CARLYLE by Virginia Surtees
Michael Russell, £12.95
If a historic debate were ever held on the advantages and disadvantages, the pleas- ures and the pains of marriage, Jane and Thomas Carlyle, whose long, uneasy union lasted from 1826 until 1866, would both provide important evidence; each had so much to say, and said it with such zest and candour. Marriage, Jane told John Forster midway through her married life, was an `extremely disagreeable institution', and later, writing to a young, unwedded cousin, she called it 'the Valley of the Shadow', while Carlyle himself, after Jane's death, when he had begun to idolise her memory, still referred to the years they had spent together as their 'sore life- pilgrimage', a path they had patiently, bravely trodden, but that neither he nor she could pretend they had whole- heartedly enjoyed.
Yet their relationship had had a much more positive aspect. They were not com- pletely unsuited. Both had well-equipped Minds, were keen observers of the contem- porary world, and possessed a rare gift of translating their observations into memor- able phrases. Jane, of course, though she Often ridiculed his private oddities, felt a deep respect for her sombre husband's creative and prophetic talents; and Carlyle admired not only her courage and skill no one else could have so loyally protected him against obstreperous neighbours, slat- ternly servants and aggressive tax- collectors — but her charm, should she care to exercise it, her flow of entertaining conversation and her beguiling social graces.
All the same, if joint happiness be among the primary aims of marriage, their alliance lamentably failed; and the long series of memorable letters that Jane wrote her friends and relations form a detailed record of almost continuous domestic strife. What its origins were she never entirely explains — Victorian women were used to keeping secrets; and Froude's announcement that Carlyle had suffered from life-long impotence may perhaps have over-simplified their problem. True, at Cheyne Row they always slept apart; but, before they reached London, their correspondence had often a tenderly affec- tionate, even an unmistakeably uxorious tone.
Carlyle's worst short-comings, as he grew older, appear to have been emotional rather than simply physical. 'He found it difficult to express his deepest and warmest feelings, or escape from the prison of his self-tormenting ego; and Jane unfortunate- ly was almost as self-centred and, in her later years, when her health declined and her nervous condition worsened, just as prone to self-pity. She remains, however, one of the most interesting and, at the same time most accomplished female letter-writers of her age; and Virginia Surtees' book, the first full-length study of Jane alone to be published for over three decades — elsewhere Carlyle has tended to monopolise the biographer's attention — contains a shrewd and nicely balanced portrait.
Although she loved and admired Car- lyle, despite the flashes of sharp resent- ment his behaviour repeatedly provoked, it seems clear enough that at no period of their joint existence had she ever been 'in love' with him. Her strongest and perhaps her only great passion, which had sprung up while she was still hesitating to marry the rough-edged Scottish scholar, — 'Your Friend I will be . . . but your wife! Never, never!' she had once declared — was for his close friend Edward Irving, the brilliant young revivalist preacher, who in London would afterwards create so tremendous a devotional furore that his congregations uttered prophesies and 'spoke with ton- gues', amid a 'hooting and hooing' and falling into swoons, that Carlyle, Irving's old supporter though he was, considered utterly 'deplorable'.
Such was the handsome enthusiast Jane might very well have married had he not already contracted an engagement that he felt he could not break off. So she present- ly admitted to Carlyle once she had accepted his hand:
My own conduct . . . makes me unworthy ever to see you, or to be clasped to your true heart again . . . till I have made the confes- sion . . . Let me tell it then out at once; I have deceived you, I whose truth and frank- ness you have so often praised have deceived my bosom friend! I told you I did not care for Edward Irving . . . It was false; I loved him — must I say it — once passionately loved him — Would to heaven this were all . . . but I have concealed and disguised the truth . .
Thus, Jane Carlyle, the 'ex-spoilt child', blue stocking and small-town Scottish beauty, no less proud, it was said, of her Latin than of her eye-lashes, entered her adult emotional life with a pang of dis- appointment and a nostalgic sense of what `might have been', that followed her along `The Valley of the Shadow of Marriage'. In some ways it is a sad story, further dark- ened by the fact that she and Carlyle alike were incorrigible hypochondriacs, troubled by dyspepsia, insomnia and even more mysterious ailments which they did their best to hold at bay, both by 'blue pills' — a powerful Victorian laxative -- and Jane by sleeping-draughts of a particularly danger- ous kind.
Yet, as her biographer shows, the tragic aspect of the Carlyles' joint existence was very far from 'unrelieved. Although the atmosphere of Cheyne Row may now and then have been dark and oppressive, it was very seldom dull; and its occupants seem to have led busier, more various and, indeed, more entertaining lives than many modern intellectuals. Carlyle's devotees constantly amused his wife — Gerald Jewsbury, the ambitious young novelist lying on the hearth-rug at his feet; Harriet Martineau, the famous female economist, who hap- pened to be stone-deaf, holding out her ear-trumpet towards him 'with a pretty blushing air of coquetry'; Ruskin arriving to embrace Carlyle as he lay upon the sofa; or a visitant from the London world of fashion, the famous Count d'Orsay, thundering up to their door in a sky-blue- and-silver chariot, clad himself in tight blue pantaloons and generally 'glittering like a diamond beetle'.
Certain of their guests, moreover, appeared for their hostess' own sake. Two distinguished exiles, Mazzini and Godefroi Cavaignac, became devoted courtiers and made Cheyne Row their second home; while Dickens, besides appreciating her wit, her company and the fantastic tales she told him about the 'House of Myster- ies' next door, was clearly conscious of her feminine attraction. Although her juvenile charm had quickly faded, she had not yet lost her power to please. In their friendship, John Forster noted, there was a little more than mere affection; there was `something', he believed 'beyond, beyond'.
Virginia Surtees has woven all the com- plex details of her subject into a lucid and highly readable narrative, and discusses its strangest episode — the wildly romantic but platonic infatuation that Carlyle, at the age of almost 50, when Jane was 43, conceived for the unbeautiful but fascinat- ing Lady Harriet Baring, afterwards Lady Ashburton, a queen of patrician London — with sympathy and commonsense. Her heroine's defects, on the other hand, she does not attempt to disguise. There were moments, I suspect, when, as she wrote, she began to find her irritating; and here a reader may at times agree. Jane indulging in retrospective self-pity, talking of her past happiness and hinting at the opportu- nities she had forfeited by entering 'The Valley of the Shadow' must have occa- sionally been difficult to bear.
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