Books: Grains of Gold

JANE WELSH CARLYLE: A NEW SELECTION OF HER LETTERS (355 pp.)—Arranged by Trudy Bliss—Macmillan ($3).

Dolorous Alfred, Lord Tennyson, always felt “dreadfully embarrassed” when he found himself alone with a woman. But when he paid a visit one day to dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle and found only Mrs. Carlyle at home, he was so promptly disembarrassed by her poise and charm that he stuffed a pipe brimful with stinking shag and harangued her happily for three solid hours, “exactly as if he were talking with a clever man.” And Charles Dickens—to say nothing of Thackeray and John Stuart Mill—felt much the same way about Jane Carlyle. “None of the writing women,” said Dickens, “came near her at all.”

Letters to Posterity. In the sense of producing stories or poetry, Jane Carlyle was no “writing woman.” But to posterity she bequeathed a host of letters in which her life and times are portrayed as brilliantly as if her pen had been dipped (as her proud husband put it) in “grains as of gold.” She achieved this perfection of correspondence while suffering from periodic bouts of sleeplessness, racking headaches, and the cares of looking after dour, excessively difficult Thomas—a combination of circumstances that at one period brought her to the very verge of lunacy.

When husband Carlyle demanded a soundproof room in which to do his writing, it was Jane who directed its construction. When he was exhausted with overwork, it was Jane who laid him tenderly on the sofa and hushed his sonorous Scots groans by sitting down to the piano and playing “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon.” When he spent one vacation savoring the simple pleasures of lying under a tree, Jane could not help reminding a friend that there was a very large tree in their own backyard—”but it were too easy to repose under that.”

Painful Twinges. For the 40 years of their married life, Jane Carlyle shared every painful twinge of a genius to whom all literary creation was such incessant agony that he thought nothing of saying: “Well! They may twaddle as they like about the miseries of a bad conscience: but I should like to know whether Judas Iscariot was more miserable than Thomas Carlyle who never did anything criminal, so far as he remembers!”

Her role was made the more arduous by the fact that Thomas could think of nothing but whatever book he happened to be writing at the time, and that his massive projects took years to finish. “I begin to be seriously afraid,” wrote Jane, “that his Life of Cromwell is going to have the same strange fate as the child of a certain French marchioness that I once read of, which never could get itself born, tho’ carried about in her for 20 years. . . A wit is said to have once asked this poor woman if ‘Madame was not thinking of swallowing a tutor for her son?’ So one might ask Carlyle if he is not thinking of swallowing a publisher for his book?”

“Large Elderly Men.” This new selection of Jane’s letters not only sketches such tender, mocking pen portraits of husband Carlyle. Through Jane’s matchless eyes, latter-day readers can also watch such scenes as Dickens marvelously playing the role of conjurer at a children’s party, or Tennyson taking Jane’s hand and “forgetting to let it go again,” while murmuring in the trancelike voice of a lotus-eater: “I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.”

And on every page there are little examples of the discernment and wit that Jane poured into epigrams, maxims and observations on everyday life. A minor classic is her description of the waiters at an Oxford hotel—”all large elderly men [whose] sort of ‘mazed abstractedness and sad gravity . . . gave one a notion they must have some time or other been unsuccessful graduates.”

Wrote observant Jane: “Women, they say, will always give a varnish of duty to their inclinations. I wonder whether men are any better in always giving to their disinclinations a varnish of justice?”