MORE LETTERS OF MRS. CARLYLE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9452, 24 August 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

MORE LETTERS OF MRS. CARLYLE.

A book has just been published entitled "Early Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, together with some of Thomas Carlyle," edited by D. G. Ritchie, M.A. In a notice the Pall Mall Budget has the following : — FROM GRAVE TO GAT. Everyone who cares for this kind of literature at all has long ago read the "Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," published by Mr. Froude ; but those letters only begin with IS34 —the year in which the Carlvies settled in Cheyne Row. The letters in this volume were on the other hand, nearly all written before that date, and they possess therefore an clement of fresh interest in admitting us into Mrs. OarlyleV early years, her first meetings with her husband, and her married life at Craigenputtock. One of the deepest traits in Mrs. Carlyle's character was her affection for her father. In the first letter in this volumewritten when she was between eighteen and nineteen years of age—she speaks of his death, and says the only thing which she " can ever hope for in this world" is to be buried in the same grave with him. But her nature was too buoyant to continue in this mood ; and before long it is a fuller life and a wider stage for which she pines. " Here is no sojourn for me," she writes ; "I must dwell in the open world, live amid life ; .but here is no life, no motion, no variety. It. is the dimmest, deadest spot (I verily believe) in the Creator's universe. Alas, my native place ! the goddess of dulness has strewed it with all her poppies !" But brighter flowers soon sprang up in her path. The brilliant girl was surrounded with clover friends and ardent admirers. She hits off their oddities and describes her own feelings with equal dash.and candour. It is quite a mistake, by the way, to suppose that the herb of bitterness which flavours so many of the later letters of Mrs. Carlvle was of postmatrimonial origin. It had grown up from the first with her growth. Here is a passage from an early letter : — " Miss R is to be married on (he first of April. The unfortunate couple have shown the little sense they have in selecting that day. Poor girl ! she is apparently in a galloping consumption, and it will be a miracle if ever she set her foot on Indian ground ; but if her purse is safe, David will not vex himself about her lungs." carlyle's " fantastic awkwardness." But social pleasures and daily gossip were only one element in Jane Welsh's life. Carlyle had appeared on the scene, and the process which culminated, as she afterwards wittily said, in making her " a fraction of a philosopher," began with the diligent study of German. The references to her first impressions of Carlyle are among the most interesting things in the book :— " I have just had a letter (she writes) from Thomas Carlyle ; lie too speaks of coming. He is something liker to St. J'reux than George Crag is to Wolmar. He has his talents, his vast and cultivated mind, his vivid imagination, his independence of soul,' and his high-souled principles of honour. But then—ah, these buts !—St. Preux never kicked the fireirons, nor made pudding in his teacup. Want of elegance ! Want of • r; '.ranee, Rousseau says, is a defect which no woman can overlook." The ungainlincss of the lion is made the subject of another letter later on : — v "Mr. Carlyle was with us two days, during the greater part of which I read German with him. It is a noble language ! lam getting on famously. He scratched the fender dreadfully, i must have a pair of carpet shoes and handcuffs prepared for him next time. His tongue only should be left at liberty ; his other members are most fantastically awkward." THE POETRY OK ATT ITCHES AND " A PHOENIX 01' A FRIEND." Miss Welsh was, or pretended to be, sensitive to the poetry of attitudes, as the following record of another of her admirers will show :— "I am going to forget him immediately. I could have so done long ago, but for one little action, that has made a strange impression 011 my senses. My spur required to be shifted from my left foot to my right ; and you cannot think with what inimitable grace this small manceuvro was accomplished. Whenever this idea occurs to me, I fancy him with one knee on the earth, his horse's bridle flung across his arm, his hands employed in fastening the spur, and his eloquent eyes fixed assuredly not on what he was doing. Dear Bess, is it not very extraordinary that a philosopher, as I am or pretend to be, should be so taken with an attitude. However, I will forget him." But " the charm of an attitude" did not last. "Often at the end of the week," she goes on to say, "my spirits and my industry begin to flag; but- then comes one of Mr. Carlyle's brilliant letters, that inspires me with new resolution, and brightens all my hopes and prospects with the golden hues of his own imagination. He is a very Phoenix of a friend." MR. AND MRS. CARLYLE AT HOME. Mr. Froude has created the impression that the golden hues lost much of their brightness when the friend became the husband. He has been specially eloquent on the misery of Mrs. Carlyle's early married life at Craigenputtock. In these letters, however, Mrs. Carlyle herself gives a more cheerful picture. The}' are full of the pleasure she took in high thinking and plain living. " Indeed," she says, "Craigenputtock is no such frightful place as the people call it. The solitude is not so irksome as one might think. If we are cut oil from good society, we are also delivered from bad ; the roads are less pleasant to walk on than the pavement of Princes-street, but we have horses to ride, and instead of shopping and making calls, I have bread to bake and chickens to hatch. I read and work, and talk with my husband, and never weary." "On the whole," she writes again in answer to a question how she is getting on, "I was never more contented in my life ; one enjoys such freedom and quietude here." "My husband," she wrote many years later, " is, on the whole, the cleverest man I meet with still, and the truest." Of course such descriptions as these, in letters to a friend to whom Mrs. Carlyle would naturally be anxious to present the better side of things, does not dispose of Mr. Fronde's facts to the contrary ; but they show at any rate that there was another side. SO " FRIGHTFULLY SENSIBLE." It would, however, be untrue to say that a note of sadness is absent even from these letters of Mrs. Carlyle to her friend. Mrs. Carlyle was a bundle of nerves, and Carlyle did not exactly possess the secret of soothing them. Everyone will remember his remark to his wife when she was suffering from face-ache : "Jane, you will find yourself in a more compact and pious frame of mind if you keep your mouth shut." It was Mrs. Carlyle who told this story; and in one of these letters there is another not unlike it: "I have been very ill," she writes, " for two days ; on Thursday night the pain in my head was so intense that I fainted entirely under it." Upon which Carlyle is reported as having said, " It will not be permanent-" "As if," adds his wife bitterly, "I could fancy it would be permanent without instantly cutting my throat." Often too there is the same note of disappointment which sounds in so many of her previously published letters. "I married for ambition," she once said in bitterness of soul, "and I am not happy." The intellectual set in which she found herself in London often gave her pleasure. But at times she longed for something less clever, but more human. "Here I must always be so sensible," she says, "it is really quite frightful." But for whatever sorrow or disappointment there was in her life, sho here at any rate puts most of the blame upon herself. First) there was her constitution. "lam more and more persuaded," she writes to her friend, " that there is no complote misery in the world that docs nob emanate from the bowels." Then there is the natural' disillusionment r>l age. "The people here," she writes in 153(5, "are good*people, and with many noble gifts in them, and to me they have been quite incomprehensibly kind, so that I ought nob to feel discontent with them, because the magic of the imagination in me has gob impaired by years, and no spectacles thab reason can invent does anything at making the world so green and glorious for me as it once was." "NO SUNSHINE WITHOUT SHADOW."

But then, as Mrs. Carlyle says in another letter, " there is no sunshine in this world without shadow." Wo will conclude our extracts from her letters with one in which

she describes her earliest lesson in that hard truth

" I remember, as if it were yesterday, travelling all night in a post-chaise with my mother and an old East Lothian farmer, who was going to meet my father at Craigenputtock, and advise about drains. My mother and I were to be dropped at my grandfather's. I was mad with joy to go on my first journey, but oh, so sick in a close carriage always ! One minute I was chattering Hkea magpie, the next vomiting out of the 'window. In the course of the night I lay down at the bottom of the chaise, my head on my mother's knees, and whimpered and moaned. The old farmer got tired of me—naturally—and said, with a certain sharpne?s, words that cut into my small heart with a sudden, mysterious horror, "Little girl," he said, "don't you know there is no pleasure to be had in this world without pain ?" No, I didn't know it. But it was dreadful to hear ; for, somehow, I thought he who was old must be speaking truth, and I believed him, although shrinking from him as a sort of cruel ogre ! That was my initiation into the dark side of life. What was yours?" The East Lothian farmer was a believer, it is clear, likeCarlyle, in the "bracing" treatment of women's woes.