Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/236

226 little incident of bis daily life, is liable even now to misconstruction, or to interpretation out of its just proportions.

"Take for example Mr. Froude's story of Carlyle's behavior in the first days of bis wife's severe illness in 1864, from the effects of a cab accident in the streets of London, 'The nerves and muscles,' says Mr. Fronde, 'were completely disabled on the side on which she had fallen, and one effect was that the under-jaw had dropped and that she could not close it. Carlyle always disliked an open mouth; he thought it a sign of foolishness. One morning, when the pain was at its worst, he came into her room, and stood looking at her, leaning on the mantelpiece. 'Jane,' he said presently, 'ye had better shut your mouth.' She tried to tell him that she could not. 'Jane,' he began again, 'ye'll find yourself in a more compact and pious frame of mind if ye shut your mouth,' This story Mr. Froude received, he tells us, from Mrs, Carlyle herself; and there is no doubt as to its authenticity. What I am sure of is that Mr. Froude treats it too gravely, or might lead his readers to treat it too gravely, by missing that sense of the pure fun of the thing which was present in Mrs. Carlyle's mind when she remembered it afterward, however provoking it may have been at the moment.

"Insufficient appreciation of the amount of consciously humorous, and mutually admiring, give-and-take of this kind in the married life of the extraordinary pair, both of them so sensitively organized, has had much to do, it seems to me, with that elaborately studied contrast of them and too painful picture of their relations which Mr. Froude has succeeded in impressing upon the public. There were, it is true, passages of discord between them, of temporary jealousy and a sense of injury on one side at least, from causes too deep to be reached by this explanation; but it rubs away many a superficial roughness; and, if Mr. Froude had been more susceptible of humorous suggestions from his subject, he would not, I believe, have found this married life of Carlyle and Jane Welsh so exceptionally a tragedy throughout in comparison with other married lives, and would not have kept up such a uniform strain of dolefulness in his own performance of the part of the chorus. The immense seriousness of Carlyle's own mind and views of things, the apparent prevalence of the dark and dismal in his own action and monologue through the drama, even required, I should say, an unusual power of lightsomeness in the chorus, and this not as mere trick for literary relief, but actually for insight, correction, and compensation."

The lecture from which this passage is taken is full of acute insight into the personality of Carlyle, and is extremely interesting as a study in the interpretation of character; but the second lecture on "Carlyle's Literary Life and his Creed" will have such a special interest for the readers of the "Monthly" that we propose to make copious quotations from it.